The Weekly — Overruns in Software Development, The Iron Dragon’s Mother

If you’d like some sense of how the pandemic affected me, consider the following. A Houston friend called me out of the blue this week to ask if l’d be willing to drive him from New Orleans to an undisclosed location in Mississippi. Prior to the pandemic, I might have hemmed and hawed before weaseling out, but here I did my best Fear and Loathing Benicio Del Toro and agreed to drive him. Likewise, when The Long Lost Sister asked about getting lunch in Baton Rouge in the middle of the work week, my only response was, “I can make time, fam.” ( A white lie as I can most assuredly not fabricate time.) I don’t know how long this state of affairs will last, but for the time being a surefire way to turn me out for something is to invoke the Pact of the Pandemic.

In other news...

Overruns in Software Development and Life

An area I continue to struggle professionally is in creating accurate estimates of the time it will take to complete a given task. Let me correct myself though because this is actually an area l struggle with in every part of my life and I don’t feel like that was always the case, so why is this increasingly at issue? I get the sense a lot of people can relate so let’s consider a few factors.

Bliind Optimism: Time sounds so expansive when you describe it. A day is 24 whole hours long and when you consider how interminably long an hour in traffic or a poorly planned meeting lasts, it’s easy to imagine that a day is long enough to conquer the world if you set your mind to it. Perhaps compounding that effect, I still remember those perfect summer days of childhood where I could power through multiple books in a single day as part of a mind-blowing orgy of adventure fiction. Admittedly, I now see that as more reflective of living in an isolated unenriched environment, but the memories still exist deep in the substrata of my perception and what I consider achievable.

Split Efforts: Even if the day were as long as I want to imagine, I’m trying to slice the pie into ever more slices even though, and this bears repeating, I cannot manufacture more time. Those childhood days consisted of waking up, reading, eating, and occasionally shitting. Perhaps not a Humanist standard-bearer but a truly epic culmination of sloth for a species chat once had to learn useful things in childhood.

Contrast with today when the typical schedule for the day now includes meditation, writing, 8+ hours of non-stop mental labor, the gym, cooking, and whatever fragment of socialicing l can squeeze in. God only knows what adding a child into the mix would do.

Every new split also adds extra overhead as you try to track it, switch between activities, monitor and manage your stress levels and try not to reach complete exhaustion of the executive function which perhaps explains why many of my Saturdays find me in a light fugue state where I willfully refuse to do anything that requires real planning.

There are other factors to be considered but I think a fundamental tension that I and many of my cohort are dealing with is the need to balance career, health and fulfillment in satisfying ways. We all have lessons from the adults of our childhood on the dangers of being monomaniacs and try to live the opposite by working obsessively to be well-rounded as our humanities-centered educations exhort us to be, but that model of Renaissance Man generalist was always the province of the wealthy elite and achieving it without great personal resources will always be infinitely more challenging.

Travelogues and The Iron Dragon’s Mother

I finished The Iron Dragon’s Mother recently and I have a few thoughts. I’d never read Michael Swanwick and written him off as a member of the Tolkien Syndicate that once threatened to drown the genre, but there was so much buzz around this book over the last year that I had to check it out.

The Iron Dragon’s Mother is set in a very contemporary Faerie featuring both fae and Gilmore Girls, ancient prophecies and bureaucratic offices with secretarial pools, fire elementals and high speed rail, and, of course, an airforce of enslaved dragon cyborgs.

All I can say of the plot of the book is that it exists and the story generally remembers to circle back to it, but this isn’t a book for people who get especially invested in things like plot or character development. The protagonist is a dragon pilot framed for being unchaste and forced to run to clear her name. There’s probably something interesting in there about the insistence on sexual purity for women who fly weapons of mass destruction on raids to steal souls from human babies, but it’s the third volume in the set and everything else is secondary to the goal of exploring a hyperaware world where “Trickster” is an actual taxonomic classification.

I’m most reminded of travelogues like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun or Josiah Bancroft’s Senlin Ascends and fans of the style will find plenty to enjoy here. My problem with the travelogue as a form is that it so rarely becomes more than the sum of its parts. The author lays out a scene, rushes us through it—pay special attention to the light fixtures in this room, I’ve prepared some patter about their history which will never again impact the story— and then we’re on to the next set piece. It can be fun for a while but when nothing builds on anything else it becomes increasingly exhausting to wade through a whole novel that effectively reads, "More alarums sound!" for 300 pages.