I didn’t write a novel last month.

I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian about NaNoWriMo, the project where writers and people who don’t think of themselves as writers attempt a novel writing sprint during the month of November. Well, it’s a 50,000 word “novel,” which is in the end a bit short for a novel and a bit too long for a novella, but we’ll call it a novel for the sake of simplicity.

My basic gripe is that NaNoWriMo is a fun gimmick for people who aren’t used to turning out huge volumes of writing every day anyway, it doesn’t do a lot to really ensure or guarantee success. At it’s heart NaNo has a very democratizing idea: anyone can write a novel, I fear that it does more to impede success than encourage it.

My reasoning:

• November is the worst month, with the holidays and the time change, potentially. November also tends to be bad for people who are in school or who teach school, as the semester draws to an end. December might be even worse in these respects. Here are some arguments for other months: February or March, (in the northern hemisphere) are cold months where you just want to stay at home, and what better time to write a novel? May is upbeat and fresh. June has no major holidays and rides a wave of Summer euphoria. Defenders of NaNo say “There’s no good month, so we might as well use November.” I reject this logic. Picking a bad month of the year can do a lot for the success rate of the people who attempt the project, I figure.
• The novel is too short. While it would probably also decrease success rate to make the NaNo Novel a publishable length (60-80k or so), I think having people end up with a piece that’s sort of unusable in the “real world” can be discouraging as well. If they get something they like from NaNo, and they want to publish it, they have to write at least another ten thousand words and possibly as much as 50 thousand words. Digital distribution helps these things a bit, but the size is an issue.
• What “real writers” do, is write every single day. The trick to being able to be a writer isn’t the ability to turn out a quantity of prose on demand. It’s the ability to sustainably work on projects all year round. To turn off the internal editor long enough that you get something on the paper, and then turn it back on so that “something” doesn’t suck. They’re able to take experiences and turn them into texts.
• I’m not sure that the fetishization of the novel form is particularly productive. I think there’s a lot of power and future in shorter forms. For learning how to be a writer, writing shorter works is probably a more effective way to learn to tell stories and create characters anyway.

Having said that, congrats to the people who did NaNo. Keep writing. You’ve probably found a few extra hours in your day that you didn’t know you had. Keep writing and doing awesome things with that time. And if you’re a huge fan of NaNo, don’t worry too much about me, I’m just an ornery guy with too many opinions.

It’s true: I’ve been working on a Novel for more than a year, and while I’m closing in on the end of the draft. Its now done yet. Soon, perhaps. Also, I think I should probably do some blogging here about learning to write, and teaching writing given that I got here by way of a strange path and feel so strongly about these things.

There’s an issue in tiling window managers, that I think a lot folks who are used to floating window managers never expect. I wrote a post to the Awesome listserv a while back explaining this to someone, and it seems to have struck a chord (I saw the post linked to last week). I thought I’d write a brief post here to explain what’s going on in a more clear and general way.

The Problem

When tiled, windows don’t seem to take up all the space that’s available to them. This creates weird “gaps” between windows. But only some windows: Firefox is immune to this problem, while terminal emulators like xterm, and urxvt, and gVim, and emacs get all funky.

What’s Happening

The application that are affected by this draw their windows based upon a number of fixed width columns. We’ll note that terminal emulators, as well as GUI versions of programmer’s text editors like vim and emacs, all used fixed-width fonts and often allow you to set window sizes based on the number of columns (of characters).

As a result, these applications are only able to use space on the screen in increments of full characters. Most of the time, in floating window managers, we never really notice this limitation.

In tiling window managers you do notice, because the window manager forces the windows to use all available space, except in some windows it leaves these weird gaps at the bottom and right of the window. Sometimes the gaps end up in the window, as unusable buffers, and sometimes they end up between windows. It looks funny, pretty much no matter how you slice it.

What You Can Do About It

The truth? Not much.

The Awesome Window Manager, by default shows the gaps between the windows. I always found this to be the “more ugly” option. You can alter this behavior by searching your configuration file for size_hints_honor and making the line look like this:

c.size_hints_honor = false

This tells Awesome to ignore windows (client’s) when they say “I want to have these dimensions.” It doesn’t fix the problem but it does get rid of the gaps.

The real solution is to tweak text sizes, fonts, and any buffering elements (like a status bar, mode line, or widget box), and window borders so that the windows aren’t left with extra space that they don’t know how to cope with.

By real solution, I really mean “only option:” it’s really impossible to get all of your fixed width applications to have exactly the right number of pixels. You can get close in a lot of situations, and I’ve always found this to be much less annoying than using floating window managers.

The Original Post

Just for giggles, I’ve included a quoted portion of what I posted original to the listserv on the topic.

The one big of information that might be important: The urxvt terminal emulator, when not “honoring size hints,” is unable to really properly draw the “extra space” with the proper background. I suspect this is a bug with the pseudo-transparency system they use. As a result there are often a few pixels with the background in an inverted color scheme. Same problem as above, but it looks funny if you’re not used to it.

What’s happening is that urxvt (like many terminal emulators) can only draw windows of some specific sizes based on the size of the characters (eg. x number of rows, and y number of columns.) So while you may have larger and the equivalent of say 80.4x20.1, urxvt can’t do anything with this extra space.

If you honor size hints, the windows will end wherever they can, and use as much space as they can, but leave gaps between windows if the total space isn’t properly divisible. If you don’t honor size hints, the windows themselves take up the extra room (but they can’t do anything with the extra room, so they just leave it blank, and sometimes the transparency is a bit wonky in those “buffers”).

So there you have it. I hope this helps!

A while back, lets say, in August or so¹, I redid the design of this site and added a new subtitle: “Dialectical Futurism.” The dweeby, philosophy geek in me really enjoys this, just as an idea. As it’s sat at the top of the page, I’ve also thought more and more that the subtitle is actually a pretty good summary of what I’m trying to accomplish here. This post is an attempt to do two things:

1. Concisely summarize my “blogging project” and thus explain what dialectical futurism means.

2. To do a bit of a status update on the blog, as a sort of “self report,” of what I think seems to be working and what doesn’t.

Part One: What “Dialectical Futurism” Meas In Practice.

It’s always risky, I think for a self-claimed “Science Fiction” writer, to declare themselves a “Futurist” of any sort. Because of the genre’s link to the future, I think there the danger that people might think that we’re putting forth our stories as works of prediction.

While I think my interest in futurism comes from a similar place as the interests that drive my fiction, the practice of futurism (in the form of this blog) and the practice of fiction are very different. Ultimately, both are historical endeavors and futurism is tends to be much more tightly focused on the recent history. At least for me.

Dialectical futurism, is about a conversation between me, and the past, and me and the possible future, it’s an attempt to synthesize a pragmatic view of what will happen, with an optimistic view of what I would like to happen. It’s about putting all of the topics I blog about like Open Source, Free Software, Cooperative structure, Economics, and the “New Media” in conversation with each other and seeing what kind of cool innovative things happen.

Part Two: The Status of the Project

The project of being a writer is one of constant self improvement, I think. One thing that I didn’t mention in that post is that no matter how awesome you are as a writer, you’re always trying to get better at writing. There’s always some improvement to make, some short-falling in your ability to communicate that you’re working at improving.

I have the sense that I am getting better, if that’s a meaningful judgment. One improves as a writer, I’m convinced, by writing, and writing a lot, and as I write a bunch for this site and a bunch for work, and a bunch for other projects, I think I’m starting to get better. Also, I get a lot of feedback from coworkers on my writing, which I think has been helpful. Editors are a good thing indeed.

I think I’ve gotten better at figuring out how to write good blog entries--it still takes time, but I get into the grove more quickly. I’m getting better feedback, and I’m reasonably happy with where the traffic is. I mean, there’s always room for improvement, but things are headed in the right direction.

My short term goals are two fold:

1. To focus my energies on reading and improving my background knowledge in a number of areas. I want to be more contextually grounded in existing conversations regarding economics, anthropology, and cyborg-related materials.
2. To spend a lot more time on fiction writing. This means developing new habits, adjusting priorities, and spending some serious time making fiction projects work. So there.

We’ll see how this goes, and thanks as always for reading and putting up with me.

I, rather innocently, posted something to identi.ca / twitter / Facebook. The canonical text is:

signs you’ve spent too much time in the upper midwest: sometimes when stressed, you impulse buy cheese

I spent three years in Wisconsin--southern Wisconsin--for college. Ever since then I’ve related to cheese differently.

So here’s what happened:

I was shopping, Mostly minding my own business when I passed the cheese display. Not the fancy cheese display, you know, but the one next to the designer coffee creamers, and the pre-made baking doughs.

And, pretty much before I realized what had happened, I scooped up a half pound of store-brand mozzarella. I don’t think I even stopped the cart.

In the parking lot, I realized what had happened. I had cheese at home. A half pound of Munster--and pretty nice Munster I thought, though I’ve not met a Munster I didn’t like--waited for me in the fridge at home. The reason why I got it? Easy:

A few weeks ago, I was in Philadelphia staying with a friend who grew up in the Twin Cities and we had the most amazing mozzarella for dinner. I looked up after my second slice and said. “Wow, we’re so Midwestern.” It was undeniably true. A friend from the east cost, immediately confirmed for us that she thought we were weird. But it was amazing cheese. And we didn’t

As for my little block of cheese: it too was amazing. Not quite as good, I suppose, but it was refreshing and in a weird way it reminded me of home.

The people on Facebook also responded with a rather active little thread. Morris dancers from Minnesota. Contra Dancers from St. Louis. Classmates from College. Perhaps my experience wasn’t uncommon.

Cheese. Who would have thought it.

I was talking to my grandmother (Hi!) last week, as I do most weeks, and we discussed the blog. She’s been a regular reader of the site for many years, and lately, we’ve enjoyed digging a little deeper into some of the things that I’ve written about here. She said, I think of the Owning Bits, and I agree, that it sort of seemed that I was building something… more.

But of course.

I don’t know that I’ve connected all of the dots, either in my head or on the blog, but I think that the things I’ve been blogging about for the last year or so are all conected, interwoven, and illuminate incredibly interesting features of each other when considered as a whole. There is “something building” here. To recap, so that we’re on the same page, the nexus of subjects that I’ve been milling over are:

• Free Software and Open Source Software Development.

I’m interested in how communities form around these projects, how work is accomplished, both technically, and organizationally. I’m interested in how innovation happens or is stifled. How the communities are maintained, started, and lead. From a social and economic perspective there’s something fundamentally unique happening in this domain, and I’d like to learn a lot more about what those things are.

This topic and area of thought have taken a backseat to other questions more recently, but I think it’s fundamentally the core question that I’m trying to address at the moment. I think that I’m going to be making a larger point of addressing open source methodologies in the coming weeks and months as part of an attempt to pull things back together. I think.

• The Information Technology Industry.

I started writing about the IT industry because I found itreally difficult to think about Free Software without really knowing about the context of free software. One really needs to understand the entire ecosystem in order to really make sense of what open source means (and doesn’t mean.) Particularly in this day and age. Initially I was particularly interested in the Oracle/Sun Merger, and the flap around the ownership of MySQL; but since then, I think I’ve branched out a little bit more.

I’ve tried very hard to not frame the discussion about the IT industry and open source as a “community” versus “enterprise” discussion, or as being “free” versus “non-free,” or worse “free” versus “commercial.” These are unhelpful lenses, as Free Software and Open Source are incredibly commercial, and incredibly enterprise-centric phenomena, once you get past the initial “what do you mean there’s no cost or company behind this thing.”

• The Cyborg “Moment,” or the way people actually use computers and technology, and the ways that people *might* use technology in the future.

In the same way that thinking about the IT Industry provides much needed context for properly understanding why “open source communities” exist and persist: thinking about how we actually use technology, how we relate to techno-social phenomena, and how these relationships, interfaces, and work-flows are changing. Both in changing response to technology, and changing the technology itself. It’s all important, and I think the very small observations are as useful as the very large observations.

In some respects, certainly insofar as I’ve formulated the Cyborg Institute, the “cyborg” moment can really be seen as the framing domain, but that doesn’t strike me a distinction that is particularly worth making.

• Corporate Law and Structure and Cooperative Economics.

Interestingly, my discussion of cooperatives and corporate organization began as a “pro-queer rejection of gay marriage,” but I’ve used it as an opportunity to think about the health care issue, as a starting point in my thinking regarding EconomyFail-2008/09. The economics of open source and Free Software are fascinating, and very real and quite important, and I found myself saying about six months ago that I wished I knew more about economics. Economics was one of those overly quantitative things in college that I just totally avoided because I was a hippie (basically.)

While it could be that my roots are showing, more recently I’ve come to believe that it’s really difficult to understand any social or political phenomena without thinking about the underlying economics. While clearly I have opinions, and I’m not a consummate economic social scientist, I do think that thinking about the economics of a situation is incredibly important.

• New Media and the Publishing Industry.

I’ve been blogging for a long time. And I’m a writer. And I want to write and publish fiction as a part of my “career,” such as it is. As you might imagine these factors make me incredibly interested in the future of publishing of “content,” and of the entire nexus of issues that relate to the notion of “new media.”

Creative Commons shows us that there has been some crossover between ideas that originated in the “open source” world with “content” (writ large.) The future of publishing and media is a cyborg issue, an ultimately techno-social phenomena, and thinking about the technology. that underpins the new media is really important. And of course, understanding the economic context of the industry that’s built around content is crucial.

So what’s this all building to? Should I write some sort of monograph on the subject? Is there anyone out there who might want to fund a grad student on to do research on these subjects in a few years?

The problem my work here so far--to my mind--is that while I’m pretty interested in the analysis that I’ve been able to construct, I’m not terribly satisfied with my background, and with the way that I’ve been largely unable to cite my intellectual heritage for my ideas and thoughts. I never studied this stuff in school, I have a number of books of criticism, potentially relevant philosophy, and important books in Anthropology (which seems to fit my interests and perspectives pretty well.) I’m pretty good at figuring things out, but I’m acutely aware of a lacking in my work of reference, methodology, and structure. As well as of any sort of empirical practice.

So maybe that’s my project for the next year, or the next few months at any rate: increase rigor, read more, consider new texts, pay more attention to citations, and develop some system for doing more empirical work.

We’ll see how this goes. I’d certainly appreciate feedback here. Thanks!

It’s a weird thing, this “being a writer” stuff. I’m sure I’ve written about this here to some extent. As a kid, I think--at least I tell myself now--that I wanted to be a writer. There was something about writing that mystified me and challenged me and had me totally entranced. I had a hell of a time with writing in high school, enough that I really shied away from formal training as a writer in college in almost entirely. I took two English classes in college, sort of (they were cross listed as something else), and I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to be a writer.

Right.

And then I got out of school, and something clicked. Actually, the revival of my blogging efforts that stuck hit during my final semester of college. And one thing lead to another and, here I am. I write this blog, that’s you know… fairly prolific. I have job where I write things day in and day out. I write fiction a fair piece, though not as much as I might like.

One might think--I certainly did--that getting a job as a writer would put to bed all of my insecurities and doubts about being a writer. But it doesn’t. I’m not complaining, mind you, but it’s still weird.

Fundamentally, writers have a peculiar way of being in the world that is always a bit unsettling and alienating. Certainly we’re all different, and the experience of being a poet is different than the experience of being a technical writer is different from being a science fiction, but I’m convinced that there are some common features.

Writing, at least for me, is sort of about turning experiences into words. This isn’t some wishy washy practices of translating the feeling of moments into words; but rather a pretty simple observation about practices. No matter if I’m writing science fiction stories or systems administration documentation, my ability to write is always dependent upon doing things in the world and gathering experience. Without this, I run out of stored experiences, of “mojo” and my writing becomes flat and painful, if I can manage to write anything at all.

Now the writing part, after a while becomes pretty straightforward: Sit down. Figure out where you need to go in a given text and about how long you have to get there plus a few other variables, like voice and audience. And then you just sort of let the “experience,” part flow out onto the page¹ as you sort of mold the thoughts into the path you need to follow.

And this leaves the walking through the world part. It’s reflexive and feels normal, until you realize that you are instinctively collecting images, snippets of speech, moments, situations, little stories, and other bits of miscellany, in some master database in your head. Every conversation becomes an experiment in expressing an idea or a theory. It’s not so overt that it makes “living” difficult, or conversations awkward (though it does sometimes), but I sometimes have to remind myself that what’s going on in my head isn’t what’s going on in everyone’s head. No really.

Another problem with being a writer is that, everyone writes, or knows how to, at least in the abstract. Some folks don’t like it, and some folks aren’t particularly “skilled written communicators,” but we all know how to do it. This isn’t the case for a lot of professions, disciplines, or even hobbies. Not everyone can write a computer program, not everyone can knit a sweater, or cook a meal, or analyze great amounts of data, engineer more advanced agricultural technologies and crops, and so forth.

This creates some tension: since so many people know how to write, and yet most people don’t as a matter of course, there is some mystification around what writing requires. “What are you doing this weekend,” they’ll ask. “I was thinking of staying home and writing, and maybe going for a walk or two,” I say gleefully. “That sounds dull, and don’t you " they say. “Well, yes, but it sounds amazing. I wonder if I have enough food to get me through the weekend,” I say. Welcome to my life.

Despite all this I nearly always feel like a cheat and a fake. My fiction is totally unpublished, and I’m not sure I’m writing in the correct direction, or doing the right things to be able to really have an active fiction writing career in the next 7-10 years. I’m constantly unsure about the success of the blog: it’s self published, sometimes it feels like I don’t have any reviewers outside of friends and readers-who-have-become-friends. And while I’m quite pleased and proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish at work, and I think that We/I’ve been able to be pretty successful, I’m really part of a team and what I write is so terribly niche.

I think that’s the other part of being a writer that’s so strange. No matter how much of it you do, no matter how much of your income is the direct result of the way you commit words to paper (or emacs buffer): you’re still just another hacker.

But maybe this is true for everyone. I can accept that. I hope you all have a good day.

Thought I’ve gotten away from it a bit in recent months, tychoish has a long history of being an outlook of lists of various things. While I’m not sure I want to post all of my lists for everyone to point and laugh at, the following might be worth exploring.

This is a list of things I need to get worked out with my new computer, with technology in general. I post it both because I need an excuse to do a little brainstorming, and because it might be nice to get a little feedback from you all. Without further ado:

• Get USB Mounting/Auto-mounting to work more smoothly.

I use USB mass storage devices so rarely that I’m totally oblivious as to how I should go about setting this up with Arch Linux.

• Reformat and server-ify my desktop.

Since I’m basically not using my desktop as a desktop anymore… and there are some things that just don’t work… and there are no files left on it that I don’t have backed up elsewhere… I think it’s time to do a system wipe. I want to put Arch on it. I had thought about putting Xen on it and using virtual machines, but I’m now in a place where the increased management burden of that would outweigh the benefits of that. So I think I’m just going to set it up like a server, (but I suppose setting up a lightweight desktop wouldn’t be a big stress). Mostly I think having a server at home will be useful for testing, development, and othersuch projects. In any case, it’s not terribly useful as it is.

• Reorganize my music collection (now on laptop).

I copied over my music collection and while I’ve had a bunch of luck with mpd, I need to spend some time reorganizing the music. It’s on the list, and I shall do it.

• Straighten out the situation with my external hard drive.

Yeah, no clue here. I hope it’s alright. I’m going to try and use the Mac at work to see if I can’t make it work better. I may crack the enclosure and put it in my desktop once that’s in better working order.

• Acquire accessories:

There’s stuff I’ve had on my shopping list for a while. In no particular order:

• A more suitable laptop sleeve.

As it turns out, I have this backpack that’s great for lugging stuff around, but it’s bigger than I need most of the time, and the laptop padding could handle my 15.4" PowerBook back in the day. Current laptop is quite small, so it’s sort of overkill. This is lower priority.

• Additional power adapters.

The battery on this puppy is amazing. Having said that it’s nice to have a power adapter that can just live in my bag so I don’t have to fuss with repacking the power adapter every time I leave somewhere. I think one at my desk at work, one for home, and one for my bag is my usual complement and Lenovo power adapters are a lot cheaper than mac ones…

• Wireless access point for home.

Somehow I don’t have one. Oversight. Must procure soon. The thing is that I have an ancient 100 foot Ethernet cable that seems to do the job pretty well.

• Sort out Sleep/Wake Cycle

I think I mostly have this one sorted out. Basically, I had problems with the new laptop freezing when waking up from suspend/sleep when the network state upon return was different than when the laptop went into suspend. A little tweak to the ACPI event script, and everything seems to be in order.

• Write Network Management Triggers

I’m using the preferred network manager suite for Arch Linux (e.g. “netcfg”) and it works great, except it’s sometimes a bit bothersome to mange things, when I think it ought to just work. So I think I have a solution: create shortcuts and triggers in the window manager to get network stuff working a bit more smoothly. Now I just have to make it work.

• Tinker with StumpWM contrib packages

Once I got Stump WM working and set up, I mostly abandoned it. There’s all sorts of cool lisp things in the contrib/ directory that I haven’t tinkered with. Well, except for mpd.lisp, and even then not terribly much. I think I’d get something out of playing with those and so it’s on the list.

• Figure out what to do with the x41.

I’m not sure. The old laptop works, and I feel like I should do something with it… But what?

I’ve been thinking about publishing and the publishing industry of late. I’m sure some of it is related to my wanting of a kindle and my resulting thoughts on consolidation, and maybe some small measure of it has to do with the fact that sometimes it easier to think about publishing and the future of publishing than it is to think about ones own creative projects. So be it.

First, “what is there to think about?” you ask? Well, lots of things: I’ve written about wanting a kindle, and some thoughts about consolidation, and finally some thoughts on digital publishing More recently I’ve been thinking more about the “work” of publishing and content creation, apart from the changing business models and technological context.

Publishers (of any kind, and their editorial departments), by contemporary convention are responsible for reading through the slush and figuring what’s good and what not. Ideally publishers are the stewards of taste, and the people who figure out whats “good” and what people want to read. On some fundamental level, publishers are curators. The second main function of publishers are as the provider and organizer around services. Publishers contract with copy editors, with design and layout people, they get the cover art, they do promotional work, and the million other things it takes to turn a manuscript into a book.

As the traditional publishing model has… deteriorated, I think a lot of people have been interested in figuring out “what happens next?” myself as much as anyone. Having said that, the way in which the traditional publishing model has deteriorated has shaped how we think about what comes next. This makes sense of course, but I want to challenge myself to think about things more broadly (and you, dear friends as well, but I’m sure you’ve already figured this one out.)

I mean, it’s not like the old media died in a day. The blogging phenomena started, and writers/etc. were able to promote their work directly in ways that they hadn’t managed to before. Margins on book sales went down, which has cut into promotional budgets (as much as anything). Also, thanks to developments in technology the size of most first runs is much smaller than it used to be. This is probably a good thing, but it also means that the capital investment on new authors and books is much less than it used to be. …and the end result of this is that we’re prone to seeing publishing companies as “Authors Services” companies.

As a model for “what comes next,” services for authors is a huge part of what we need from the publishing companies. Centralizing and connecting authors with people who can provide big-picture editing, with people who do copy editing and proof reading, with people who do the cover art and layout of the book itself, and with people who can do the promotional work, getting the book plugged into the distribution channels. These are real needs, that aren’t going to evaporate any time soon.

But what about the editorial and curatorial roles of publishers? What about the branding associated with publishing houses? I think there’s probably some future for critical discourse in blogs and in digital forums, which will provide some of these functions, but that’s not the full answer, and I’m not sure what the full answer is.

As I wrote, earlier, I think figuring out some sort of subscription system to support content creation and distribution. I think having the economic superstructure in place, or at least worked out conceptually is really important before we start working on new technologies, like ebook readers, and digital content distribution channels.

It’s an interesting time to be around, that’s for sure.