After the Fall (term) ...

Traditionally (well, for a year at least), I try to assess how things went during the fall semester. It was a hectic term, where I taught three classes for a time, as well as “running” the writing workshop for the Windycon local sf convention, as well as a writers group made up mostly of my former short story writing students. Add to that writing a couple of book columns for a science fiction magazine. I did a lot of reading and wasn’t able to get my own fiction-writing projects, the frustration over which I am still trying to cope with. 

Not only that, but the courses I taught at the college level were not exactly my “home turf.” Fantasy writing is in the neighborhood of science fiction, but not quite the same thing – otherwise, why call one “fantasy” and the other “science fiction”? I didn’t feel at home, and for good reason: I wasn’t. Not in the way I feel at home with science fiction. 

It wasn’t that I felt unfamiliar with the forms and conventions of fantasy, it’s just there are so many, and so many forms differ from one another. The gamut runs from Franz Kafka to Brandon Sanderson, from Lord Dunsany to J. K. Rowling. My predecessor set up her class to teach fantasy writing as a publishing category in popular fiction. Up until then, that’s what I believed her students wanted. I believed they wanted to be the next Patrick Rothfuss, or Tomi Adeyemi, or Django Wexler, or Kelly Link. Or something. 

Instead, I found that many of my students don’t even know who these writers are. And whatever it is they want to write isn’t necessarily geared to what is currently selling in the publishing world. Frankly, half the class seemed to have trouble identifying what fantasy literature is, exactly (or even approximately). A number of them told me their reading of fantasy was drawn from the worlds of manga, graphic stories, and gaming. And a couple of students seemed to have little familiarity with any kind of fantasy beyond the oldest and dustiest examples; they were of a “literary” bent, and were taking this class to explore what they might possibly do in the form. 

I don’t wish to disparage manga, or graphic stories, or gaming, or literary writers. Except for the latter, I don’t feel comfortably familiar enough with any of the forms to express any opinions one way or another. Luckily, I don’t have to, but for a while I wasn’t sure of that. The role of a teacher somehow gets inexorably muddled with the role of an “authority.” After all these years teaching science fiction, and short fiction too for that matter, I should have known better, but it didn’t occur to me soon enough. 

In fact, it occurred to me to me only after I lay in bed one early morning before class, worrying about what I was going to do, what I should do, and what I thought I was expected to do. I worried and worried and couldn’t get to sleep until a clear, sharp, direct little voice sounded in my head: “Hey, this isn’t your class. It’s your students’ class. You’ve got sixteen other minds at work on these same problems. Now, some of them are just trying to figure out how to get through this class with a passing grade and the least amount of effort, but the best of your group not only are here to learn something, but to contribute something to the conversation you started in the very first session: What is this kind of literature we call fantasy?” 

What I can’t teach them, they can teach me.
I felt incredibly relieved. 

Of course, it’s never as easy as that sounds. On the contrary, it’s total chaos and madness, but I get to share in the process. But that process, of necessity, includes trial and error, and getting things wrong. 

This was also true for the Fiction Writing Workshop: Beginning I taught. Trial and error. Getting things wrong. True, I managed to do a number of things right, and I believe that with a few notable exceptions my students did their best. They were a great group, too. I had at least three students who were already capable of work that could be seriously considered for publication; two more who were very close to putting out publishable work. The one thing I never have to worry about at Columbia is having enough good students for a class. Yes, there are plenty of students who aren’t uniformly great at every facet of the creative process, but still, so many of these students are extraordinarily gifted. Even an academic bumbler like me can look like a good teacher. 

But I wouldn’t want to be judged so on my performance this term. If anything, right now, I feel less than competent.  

But I know, I think, what I can do better next time. 

The learning process extends to me. If I’m to learn anything at this gig, I have to allow for my own mistakes. I have to allow that I can learn from them. And allow that I can do better next time. 

For the Fiction Writing Workshop, I give myself a B-. For the Fantasy Writing Workshop, a C+. Short Story Writing is a non-credit continuing ed class, Pass/Fail … I think I pass, but after 28 years, I should be able to get it right.  

Mostly, at least. 

If I teach these classes next year, I’ll be going for As. 

This spring, I’m scheduled to teach Foundations in Creative Writing, which I’ve never taught before. I expect to make more miscalculations, but I already have a batch of ideas that will at least be fun to try. 

My science fiction writing class was canceled because not enough students signed up for it. So it goes. I guess most students don’t think science fiction has anything to teach them anymore. A science fiction writer like me should feel a little bummed out – and I did. It took me a while to remember that one of the most important aspects of my view of what science fiction is – is really – rests on sf’s ability to subvert the norms of any system or culture it finds itself in. Here at CCC, that means cultural, literary, and academic. 

If you’re a science fiction writer, or even just a science fiction thinker, you don’t shed that viewpoint when you leave the science fiction cave, so to speak, and venture out into all the little elsewheres available. 

Wherever I go, I take my science fiction with me. 

If the students won’t come to science fiction, I’ll simply have to take science fiction to them.  

It may not be much, but it’s what I do.

Style Isn’t Story

Sometimes, not too often, but still often enough, I get a student who believes that what you say in a work is less important than the way you say it.

“It’s all style, man! Who cares what it’s about?”

Yes, dear friends. These poor unfortunates are still with us.

Stories, if they’re to be considered at all, are just excuses to exercise one’s style – or should I put quotes around that word? Because what “style,” as these students practice it, consists of, for the most part, are certain distinctive traits of other authors placed in other contexts by the students emulating them. They insist they’re being “themselves,” but they’re really trying on stuff, experimenting, exercising – trying to figure out not who they are, but who they want to be – which is perfectly okay. That’s how you do it. That’s how you find out who you are: as a person, as a writer – as a person who is a writer. They don’t know it yet, but they will eventually.

How do I know?

I used to be one of them.

Back in the 1970s, when there were so many styles to choose from, like so many different hats to try on. And the “literary” side of the street had grown bored with telling stories. More so: they believed it was all in the technique, that the pyrotechnics was the show, and to settle on telling a compelling story to an audience was to lower yourself as an artist. It was like designing a chair that someone might actually enjoy sitting in. How dull! How utilitarian!

The artists above, the rabble below.

Usually, I shrink back from using terms like “elitist,” because they’re usually engaged in political forums and take on political taints that can’t be rinsed off. But one cannot view aesthetics that distinguish “highbrow” from middlebrow, to lowbrow, to no-brow, without feeling a sort of tyranny of exclusivity. “Don’t try this at home, kids. This is high art we’re talking here. Go back to your comic books.”

Well, move over, literati! I was going to show them what real art was all about.

Yeah, right.

Let’s put it this way: I didn’t have a mind that was particularly attuned to nuance. It wouldn’t surprise me if I wasn’t alone in that, back then, for kids my age, with overactive imaginations and a great yearning to be nearly anywhere except where they were. I wanted spectacle and pyrotechnics and just about anything that blew a hole through the status quo.

I liked the nouvelle vague movies and experimental films that were all quick cutting and filters and effects and jumping around in the narrative, and interminglings of fantasy and brutal realism. I liked the dynamic perspectives of Jim Steranko comics and the surrealism of Steve Ditko (I was more in love with his work on Dr. Strange than anything he did with Spiderman). When I discovered New Wave science fiction, I was all for it. The less I understood of what I read, the better I thought it must have been.

“Wow! This is totally incomprehensible! It must be a work of genius!”

I wanted literature to be a huge ladle dipped into the unbridled unconscious, spread out on the page without benefit of organization or interpretation. The stranger the better. In music, I was thrilled by Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, The Stooges. I was looking for new languages and new grammar in visual expression, in sounds, in written works. No boundaries. No horizons. No walls. No “end” title.

Problem was, I didn’t know what I was rejecting, or if I was rejecting anything by embracing all these apparent manifestations of “the new” (And some of it, in spite of my generalizations, really were brilliant and wonderful; on an instinctual level, I was pretty good; on an intellectual or aesthetic level, I was a complete idiot).

I learned the history of literature backwards – of culture in general. I started with experimental writers and worked my way, years later, back to Chaucer and Beowulf.

Problem was, I didn’t know shit. I didn’t care, either.

But the further my interests went, the further I wanted – needed – to know more of that history.

One of the insights I picked up, as I increased my knowledge and experience, was that much of what I thought of as innovative had roots that went back to the very origins (or as far back as we could find) of the forms that interested me. For example, no postmodernist impressed me more than Sterne, Fielding and Cervantes.

Every age is an age of innovation and discovery. Some of these eras get more attention than others, and the attention varies from subsequent era to era. One period of the past speaks, or reflects, or echoes, a later age more directly than others. That’s when an author, or a whole era of literature is “rediscovered.”

Eventually, it became clear to me what had probably been clear to most of my contemporaries all along: innovations and experimentations in art forms are a means and not an end. The most successful explorations of “style” are the product of necessities driven by other needs. Something we want to say or tell can’t be told any other way.

We do what we have to do to make the work of art we want to make. While we’re doing it, we call it, “getting the job done.” Afterward, we may call it “style,” but rarely before. Style is something someone else calls your writing. You just call it “work.”

Simple enough, but it took me about thirty-one years to get there.

Now, it becomes my job to guide students away from the excesses in which I indulged, and produced reams and reams of unreadable drivel.

Can I do it? Maybe with some students. With others, no.

This is both good and bad. Good because the itinerant student in question has the intrinsic stubbornness that makes for a good writer. But that only works when the writer is, well, right. If not, the writer will spend a long, long time (like me) finding out that the hill chosen to die upon is actually two hills over.

We all live and learn. Some faster than others, but we learn. If you ever stop, it’s almost as if you’ve stopped being a writer. You’re just going through the motions.

Never sacrifice clarity to style. Style should enhance clarity, otherwise it’s holding you back.

Never sacrifice story to style, otherwise you’re just putting fancy wrapping paper around an empty package.

So I think: what the hell do I know? I’m just a guy who stumbled into a teaching job, and what I know about writing should be considered suspect at best. What does someone who really knows about writing have to say?

The nearest book on writing at hand is Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold. I open it up at random and the gods of serendipity smile upon me.

Page 234:

You have to know what you want to say.

If you have no clear goal, then you’re just fumbling around, smearing paint on canvas, pounding randomly on the piano keys, and throwing yourself about on the stage in semblance of a performance. If you don’t really know what you’re evoking, then all the exercises of style and form and tense and person will not disguise it.

On the previous page (233), in describing the New Wave sf writers:

In the breakaway from traditional form, what had also occurred was a disinheritance of the storytelling structure. Much of this experimentation was necessary, creating an important expansion of the range of ideas and treatments available to authors, yet it also gave comfort to the idea that traditional forms were worthless and should be discarded. The result, for a while, was a nihilistic abandonment of story.

Fortunately, this trend didn’t last long –

That’s the word from David Gerrold, and he does, without dispute, know a thing or two about writing.

So – do what you have to do. And may the light shine upon you sooner rather than later.

Doing It Right, Maybe

Science fiction, if you’re doing it right, is reality in tight focus.

That’s the only sentence left from my first draft of this post, which for me was getting on a soapbox and complaining. (Okay, so I threw in a few more sentences once I got rolling, but I really did want to change the tone from a grumpy tirade to something more.) I looked it over and decided that complaining will get me (and you, and everybody else) nowhere. I want to do more. I want to actually understand what’s going on.

In the past couple of years, I’ve had a number of students who’ve wanted to indulge in the accoutrements of science fiction without really taking advantage of what can, potentially, be at the heart of this form. They want the smell of the burger, but not the meat – or, when it comes to science fiction, they want the rockets, ray guns and robots, but not the who, what, when, where, and why. They want to play in the dirt, but they don’t want to tell you what’s in the dirt, or where it came from, or why anyone would want to play in it in the first place. It’s a game. It’s a joke. It’s an evasion.

Escape literature is one thing. It helps define what we’re escaping from. Evasion literature is another. It altogether denies the thing we’re escaping from.

So … why? Why go for the easy stuff, other than that it’s easy? The problem I have with a literature of evasion is that it always travels on the same tracks, stops at all the same stations. It moves right on schedule. The changes are superficial. Red shirts become blue shirts. Desert planets become ocean planets. Robots become scary aliens, and vice versa. But it’s always the same trip taking us to same place. So what?

So bloody what?

A literature allegedly devoted to wonder and awe cannot run on schedule. It cannot rely on conventions. It should not settle for competency and mediocrity, even if that’s what sells. This is not to say there should be no schedules, no conventions, no competency. But somewhere, somehow, someone’s got to mess with the rules, switch the tracks, surprise us without getting us all killed. Someone has to write more than a variation to a theme, perhaps change the theme altogether. And when that theme becomes a convention, subvert that one as well.

Then again – we’re talking about young writers here. And I have to remember what was important for me as a young writer. In honesty, I have to say that nothing mattered to me more than what was called at the time “emotional expression.” I think that’s what we still call it. We want feelings to guide every element of storytelling we take on: character, setting, motivation, conflict and complications, resolution. In one sense, we’re right. Feelings are what we have to return to when we’ve labored at everything else. And labor we must, because none of this easy, especially for writers whose main influences are graphic stories, TV, and – dare I say it? – popular fiction.

I don’t want to denigrate “popular” fiction categorically. The best of what sells is usually something that transcends category, and in doing so creates its own niche. But it also narrows one’s perception as to what can be done in the field of written prose, not to mention science fiction in particular. There are books in the “unpopular” category that can do as much to widen a young writer’s perspectives as anything sitting in the racks at the airport concourse newsstand.

The problem with young writers relying so greatly on “feelings” alone is that young writers, in general, have a blurry, indistinct notion of what those feelings are. They are too busy “feeling” them to successfully render them on a page. It’s like trying to render a self-portrait without the aid of a mirror, and more – while one is in the process of doing something else, like running, or operating heavy machinery, or making a salad, or playing a video game.

It’s the process of writing, the actual work of putting the thing together word by word, that helps makes sense (every way in which that term can be used) of the raw feelings we feel so desperate to convey in our work.

When we’re young, we don’t know so much about writing – no mystery in that. We learn by doing, and the more we do, the more we learn. Or so we hope.

The truth that gets forgotten or overlooked is that when we’re young, we don’t know much about feelings, either. We know we have them, and that they shape us and direct us, but that’s not saying a lot. We can fly as passengers in a plane and know nothing of the basics of aerodynamics, either. We still get to places, though we don’t know how.

Writing is a place we can learn more about our feelings. We can examine them, test them, put them to work. We may not be conscious that this is what we’re doing, but we do it. We write to learn, whether we’re aware of it or not.

And one of the things that has most intrigued me about science fiction in particular, apart from the process of fiction-making at any level, is its natural tendency to put what we know to the test. When Philip K. Dick tried to “explain” science fiction in his speech, “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” included in the collection I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, he boiled it down to two questions: 1.) What is Reality? and 2.) “What constitutes an authentic human being?” – this second I place in quotes because Dick’s wording is important. Dick has perhaps oversimplified the issue and defined what science fiction is for him, though not for everyone else, but a truth hovers over his assessment. Science fiction does – or at least can – include as much metaphysics as physics, but is not necessarily about the metaphysics. It’s about us. It’s about what we believe and what we desire – and what we feel. It’s about all the things we look for and often discover when we read what’s often referred to as “realistic” fiction, but then takes that and applies an even sharper lens to this “reality.” It allows for alternatives to the status quo. It allows for glimpses into what we cannot know – the future – through what we do know, or think we know.

At its best, science fiction can do this.

Would that we do it more often, especially now, when “status quo” and conventions have become the objects of constant struggles – when science and technology may play an even more important role in shaping a world culture than even money and power. Science fiction need not be a limitation, not a simplification, of human experience, but an opportunity to expand our experience and comprehension of it.

And our feelings toward it.

If we do it right.

When We Were Respectable

A few years ago now, I attended a convention where, on several occasions and within several different contexts, I was assured that science fiction had become “respectable.” On only one occasion, though, did someone explain to me why they thought so.

“Because it makes so much money.”

Like an innocent lad from the farmlands who just fallen off the turnip truck, I found myself asking, “Really? Is that all it takes to become respectable?”

Reply: a shrug. As if to say, “And what’s wrong with money? You want a Nobel Prize or something?”

For the moment, let’s forget that I do want a Nobel Prize. That can wait. What I did was try to add up what I just heard, except that it didn’t add up.

I’m a writer, which in most places means that, by definition and demonstration, I have no money. In fact, I’m convinced (without research, so sue me) that in many languages the word “writer” can be literally defined “One who has no money.”

But … but … I write science fiction!

Where, then, is my respectability?

Has it gotten lost in the mails? Was it transferred to the wrong PayPal account? Did one of my neighbors pick it up by mistake?

And … this loss is not mine alone. I look around at my peers, and if any of them have any money, not to mention “so much” money, it’s because they’ve been doing something other than writing, much less writing science fiction.

We’re eating watered-down porridge from hand-carved wooden bowls.

One would think respectability would have a little more flavor.

But wait, there’s more.

I also teach science fiction writing. Isn’t it proof enough that if an accredited institution with an impeccable reputation would pay for an instructor in science fiction writing, science fiction has earned a degree of respectability in an austere and – dare I say it? – respectable corner of our great culture?

Wrong again.

Within the confines of the Ivory Tower, science fiction is at best the poor relation. The “help.” We’re used to attract the rubes (and their money). It can be pointed to, if needed, for “cultural relevance” (“See? We’re not trying to make you write reams of involuted gibberish with abstractions instead of characters and inventories instead of plots! See, we have classes in science fiction! We’re … we’re almost cool!”).

But if enrollments go down and money grows scarce, science fiction is shown the door. Science fiction, then, is just a “frill.”

And science fiction classes may not be attracting as many students as they have in previous years. Students today know what science fiction is: it’s rockets and rayguns and robots (the “Three Rs” of science fiction). It’s shit blowing up other shit. Who needs to take a class in that?

“You were here as an embellishment. You’re not essential to the core of our highly-esteemed program. You do not display the necessary academic rigor to remain here. We’ll call you when we need you again.”

When you hear the word “rigor,” you know “mortis” will follow almost immediately.

The great academic ship in the harbor has painted over the name “Higher Education” on its sides and stern, replacing it with “Pequod.” And, thanks to a liberal application of academic rigor, we know how that story ends.

If this is what respectability feels like, I’d never have thought to pursue it.

Wait a minute – I haven’t pursued it!

When it comes to education, there are many things more important than respectability. Like, well – like … education, maybe, for a start.

When it comes to writing fiction, especially science fiction, on the list of things I most need to pay attention to, respectability is near the bottom.

Why the hell should I care about respectability?

The obvious conclusion that links science fiction with “so much money” is – media. Big budget superhero movies. Franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek. TV series via cable or Netflix. Big money there. But I can’t help feeling that “so much money” is all about the media, not the message.

And science fiction is more about message than media. Or can be. Or should be. Sometimes it is. But again, I don’t feel comfortable in my seat. I keep fidgeting, even squirming.

So, let’s say science fiction is respected because it makes so much money. What kind of respect is that? It is the respect of a merchant toward another merchant – a more successful merchant. It’s a respect based on commerce, not creativity. Respect based upon the contents of our wallets, not the content of our character, much less the character of our content. It is concession to power via money. It is an approbation of the status quo.

This is not to say I wouldn’t be happier with a few more bucks in the bank, or more than a few. I am not denying the attributes of financial success. I just don’t want the two confused – success and respectability.

Science fiction does not require respectability as either a necessary or sufficient cause for its existence any more than it requires financial success – though I wouldn’t mind if the latter came along for the ride.

“Respect” is one thing. “Respectability” is another. Of the two, I’ll take the former, if and when it is offered. The latter, far as I’m concerned, can go hang.

The Semester Ends

(more notes toward more stuff, and the term that never ends)

It’s all over but the grades.

Wait a second – okay, that too.

I had a good semester. Maybe not my best, but my students did well. They always surprise me. And I always come away from my classes feeling like I’ve learned more from the experience.

I’d love to expand upon that, but what I’m left with at the end of this term is not so much about my students as about the folks who are now my bosses.

You see, when I started teaching at Columbia, I worked for a Fiction Writing department, a rare species in an academic world. For all its rarity, it proved a popular program. In fact, one of the largest in the country.

A few years later, the Fiction Writing department was forced to merge with the MFA programs in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction, which belonged to the English Department. We were now the Creative Writing department, or to be more formal, the Department of Creative Writing.

This year, another merger has me now working for the English/Creative Writing department. So we’re one big, happy family.

Happy families are all the same.

I wonder where I heard that one before.

Years ago, back when I was in grad school, I wanted to work for an English department. I really did. Creative writing was all fine and well, but students needed a solid grounding in language (at least one) and literature. You can’t go anywhere until you know where you’ve been.

To some extent, I still believe all of that, but I no longer think that the “solid grounding” is sole territory of the English department. It may be a gross generalization, but a generalization with a foundation of fact: English departments in most American institutions of higher learning, are bureaucracies. And the main objective of any bureaucracy is self-preservation. Everything else is at best secondary – like students, like education.

I’m aware that most of my colleagues teaching creative writing work for English departments, and some of them may grimace sourly as I enter their domain. To get my attention, they’ll rattle the bars of their cells with an empty soup can they use as a water cup. And they’ll mutter, “Welcome to the club.”

It’s true. All true. I was fortunate enough to work in a department that was an aberration and, apparently, an abomination, before the eyes of the MLA, the NCTE and the AWP. In my old department, we worked for the students. We shared experience. Adjuncts and tenured profs were allowed to commingle in plain sight. Academically, we were Babylon. We were Gomorrah.

Well, now that nonsense has been fixed. We are safe under the heavenly dome of the English department – the way it was, the way it has been, and the way it should always be.

Adjuncts! Renounce your ways and repent! Accept your anonymity and lowly place in the hierarchy. Wear your shame like a mendicant’s robe. And to those who teach creative writing, admit even further to your degradation! You are merely the shills and entertainers hired to lure the unwary into this holy grove. We the anointed will take over from there.

And to those lower still – those who teach writing in “popular” forms, sometimes thought of as “writing that people actually want to read” – the dishes are stacked in the sink. Make sure they’re all clean and dried before you leave tonight.

Resistance is futile.

So, here I am. A Babylonian in the City of God (or so-named; God cleared out of here eons ago). Unrepentant. Proud of my degradation, even proud of my shame.

I’m a science fiction writer – you can’t cast me into a dungeon lower than that! I accept my lot with pride, even as you lower another stack of dishes into the sink. Even from the dungeon, I can see your hierarchy for the shallow, sick skeleton it is.

I’m a science fiction writer – the kind who believes that what we do is subvert the status quo. We examine the quotidian, and insist that there are other ways. Tomorrow can be different.

We may be absorbed into the host (i.e. the English department), but we’re viral. Those who hope to change us will find themselves changed in the process.

Let us hope the change will be for the better.

The Semester Commences

(more notes toward more stuff I’ve been thinking about sf and teaching and maybe even living)

I have a truly fine class this term. They haven’t read much in the field, which would infuriate some of my colleagues, but several of my students have answered that complaint very well already.

“I haven’t read a lot of science fiction but … that’s why I’m here.”

Students are students. That’s what they do.

And I know, in some instinctual way, they won’t let me down. Which puts the burden on me, but that’s okay. I’m looking forward to the challenge. If I’m lucky, every class teaches me something new, and I’m looking forward to what I’ll learn this time.

I ran across a posting on Facebook, from another teacher, who was trying to work out a comprehensive definition of “speculative fiction.”

Speculative fiction is what you call science fiction when you’re taking it to meet your parents for dinner. Yes, I’m being facetious, but you know what I mean.

I never define speculative/science fiction. I let my students do that in the first session. Then I check with them at the end of the term and see if their definitions have changed.

Science fiction, contrary to its strongest defenders, is a living form. It changes and reshapes itself as the world changes and reshapes itself. If one can successfully define it in a way that makes all other definitions superfluous, call the undertaker. We’re outta here.

In the meantime, I’m rolling a number of things around in my head, juggling them around to see what comes up.

What we want from life is magic.

What we want from science is magic.

If we want to figure out where we’re going, and write about it, look for what we want, and what it will do to us.

If you want to write about future science and technology, look for magic. Look for mystery and miracles.

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” – Sir Arthur C. Clarke

“I am only really interested in a fiction of miracles.” – Flannery O’Connor

All great stories are love stories.

All great stories are about loneliness.

The two sentences above do not exclude each other.

A good story is a good story, whether it is based upon objective reality or a subjective interpretation of reality. A good story, however, does not necessarily result in a good reality. Fiction remains fiction, no matter how many people believe in it.

But if you have to believe in a fiction, at least pick a good one.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled programming …