So what’s the answer to all this operating system and hardware driver angst?

I’m going to make the argument that the answer, insofar as there is one is probably virtualization.

But wait, tycho, this virtualization stuff all about servers. Right?

Heretofore, virtualization technology--the stuff that lets us take a single very powerful piece of hardware, and run multiple instances of an operating system that, in most ways “think of themselves” as being an actual physical computer--has been used in the server way, as a way of “consolidating” and utilizing the potential of given hardware. This is largely because hardware has become so powerful that it’s hard to write software that really leverages this effectively, and there are some other benefits that make managing physical servers “virtually” a generally good thing, and there aren’t a lot of people who would be skeptical of this assertion I think.

But on desktops? On servers where users access the computer over a network connection, it makes sense to put a number of “logical machines” on a physical machine. On a desktop machine this doesn’t make a lot of sense, after all, we generally interact with the physicality of the machine; so having multiple, concurrently running, operating systems on your desk (or in your lap!) doesn’t seem to provide a great benefit. I’d suggest the following two possibilities:

• Hypervisors (i.e. the technology that talks to the hardware and the operating system instances running on the hardware,) abstract away the driver problem. The hypervisors real job is to talk to the actual hardware, and provide a hardware-like-interface to the “guest operating systems.” Turns out this technology is 80-90% of where it needs to be for desktop usage. This makes the driver problem a little easier to solve.
• Application specific operating systems. One of the problems with desktop usability in recent years is that we’ve been building interfaces that have needed to do everything, as people use computers for everything. This makes operating systems and stacks difficult to design and support, and there is all sorts of unforeseen interactions between all of the different things that we do, which doesn’t help things. So desktop virtualization might allow us to develop very slim operating systems that are exceedingly reliable and portable, but also very limited in what they can accomplish. Which is ok, because we could have any number of them on a given computer.

I only need one instance of an operating system on my computer, why do you want me to have more?

See above for a couple of “ways desktop hypervisors may promote the growth of technology.” But there are a number of other features that desktop virtualization would convey to users, but it mostly boils down to “Easier management and backup.”

If the “machine” is running in a container on top of a hypervisor, its relatively easy to move it to a different machine (the worst thing that could happen is the virtual machine would have to be rebooted, and even then, not always.) It’s easy to snapshot known working states. It’s easy to redeploy a base image of an operating system in moments. These are all things that are, when we live “on the metal,” quite difficult at the moment.

For the record, I don’t think anyone is ever really going have more than five (or so) instances running on their machine, but it seems like there’s a lot of room for some useful applications around five machines.

And lets face it, TCP/IPA is the mode of inter-process communication these days, so I don’t think application architectures would likely change all that much.

Won’t desktop hypervisors have the same sorts of problems that “conventional operating systems,” have today. You’re just moving the problem around.

If you’re talking about the drivers problem discussed earlier, then in a manner of speaking, yes. Hypervisors would need to be able to support all kinds of hardware that (in many cases) they don’t already support. The argument for “giving this” to hypervisor developers is that largely, they’re already working very closely with the “metal” (a great deal of hardware today has some support for virtualization baked in,) and hypervisors are in total much simpler projects.

Its true that I’m mostly suggesting that we move things around a bit, and that isn’t something that’s guaranteed to fix a specific problem, but I think there’s some benefit in rearranging our efforts in this space. As it were

Don’t some of the leading hypervisors, like KVM and others, use the parts or all of the Linux Kernel, so wouldn’t this just recreate all of the problems of contemporary Linux anew?

I’ll confess that I’m a huge fan of the Xen hypervisor which takes a much more “thin” approach to the hypervisor problem, because I’m worried about this very problem. And I think Xen is more parsimonious. KVM might be able to offer some slight edge in some contexts in the next few years, like the ability to more intelligently operate inside of the guest operating system, but that’s a ways down the road and subject to the same problems that Linux has today.

So there you have it. Thoughts?

So I went to this “Podcamp” in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. I’m a huge fan of getting together with geeks outside of the Internet (in real life!) to talk about the technology, communities, and practices (let alone skills and ticks). Indeed meeting people in the real world, is often a great way to advance and promote whatever it is you’re doing on the Internet, but beyond I often find the experience of having “really geeky” conversations with people in real life to be rather refreshing. So much of the geeky things we (I?) do are pretty solitary tasks, and it’s fun to have space and time with other people who get it.

On this premise I went to this podcamp thing. I went to a BarCamp last year that I enjoyed a great deal but I was somewhat intimidated by the flock of staff members from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (ok, so there were only two. or three. In a small room. Oh, and a guy who signed the Agile Manifesto. Right.) And while it was great, and I learned a ton of stuff… I’m a writer, and an a critic, and not exactly a programmer, and while I write about programmers and technology a lot I think it might be useful--sometimes--to have separate conversations.

Right? That sounds reasonable.

So here’s the thing about Podcamp. Well the things:

• New media isn’t anymore. Sure its still a useful distinction given that the “old media” (e.g. book publishing, magazines, newspapers, network television, and radio) are still around. Indeed they remain an incredibly relevant component of the “media ecosystem” both globally but also online. Having said that “new media” like social media, podcasts, and the like have been around for 4-5 years at this point, and it’s mostly mainstream now: old media like NPR consistently tops the iTunes podcast charts, CNN is on twitter. and so forth. And lets not even get started about blogging.

• On the frontier of any new media, anyone who is stubborn enough and the first person to stake out a claim to a niche has a pretty good chance of finding success. Four years later or more, success is something that’s much more difficult to parse or assure.

• The Search engine marketing *thing*, hasn’t, as I would have hoped, died in a fiery and epic death. This shit is all over the place, and everyone seems to be talking about pay-per-click advertising and not the fact that what really matters is word-of-mouth. I’m so incredibly frustrated by all the crap that gets generated both in sport of “SEO” and in service of it as well.

  I can tell when you write articles that are designed to get voted up on reddit and digg, and I throw up in my mouth a little when I see them.

  I got through a day of that, and I couldn’t cope with any more.

• Everyone was talking about how to promote a venture, and how to do marketing in “this brave new world we’re in,” but no one was really talking about how to develop and make something online that works. The marketing thing takes works and there are a couple of non-obvious aspects of the marketing effort, but it’s not rocket science. Sometimes, figuring out what is likely to work online and how to present things in an effective way is by far the largest challenge.

• I’m not sure that hybrid-un/conferences work. And I’m pretty sure that the space didn’t work. Unconferneces are great: they let you get what you want out of a meeting, like the Internet they help deconstruct the boundaries between presenter and audience. Here’s what didn’t work for me with the format at this podcamp:

• The talks were all in these rooms, and the door was at the front of the room. So unless you sat by the door, you had to walk between the speaker to get in and out of the room in the middle of the talk. Which you’re supposed to be able to do. Awkward.

• The opening session was entirely self-congratulatory, and a general waste of time. Better, I think to have let presenters in the morning sessions talk for a few seconds about their session. There weren’t that many sessions.

• I’m not wed to the idea that people have to determine the programing on the spot in the morning of a camp, and sometimes preparation is a good thing, but if you’re going to have multiple parallel “tracks” there should be some sort of thematic unity for a given track, and some organization around that. Randomized conference schedules don’t provide attendees value.

• In an effort to provide hyper-accessible content for people, there were a number of topics that I’d consider to be “hot” like, free network services, content curration, microformats and semantic web stuff, the real time web, and so on and so forth. Instead there was a lot of “get a facebook account and sign up for google analytics.”

  So yeah. I hear there’s a BarCamp in philly in november. We’ll see how I’m faring, but it might be cool to talk with people about Sygn at that.

I made a quip the other day about the UNIX Epoch problem (unix time stamps, are measured in seconds since Jan 1, 1970, and displayed in a 10 digit number. Sometime in 2038, there will need to be 11 digits, and there’s no really good way to fix that.) Someone responded “whatever, we won’t be using UNIX in thirty years!”

Famous last words.

People were saying this about UNIX itself years ago. Indeed before Linux had even begun to be a “thing,” Bell Labs had moved on to “Plan 9” which was to be the successor to UNIX. It wasn’t. Unix came back. Hell, in the late eighties and early nineties we even thought that the “monolithic kernel” as a model of operating system design was dead, and here we are. Funny that.

While it’s probably the case that we’re not going to be using the same technology in thirty years that we are today (i.e. UNIX and GNU/Linux,) it’s probably also true that UNIX as we’ve come to know it, is not going to disappear given UNIX’s stubborn history in this space. More interesting, I think, is to contemplate the ways that UNIX and Linux will resonate in the future. This post is an exploration of one of these possibilities.

I suppose my title has forced me to tip my hand slightly, but lets ignore that for a moment, and instead present the leading problem with personal computing technology today: hardware drivers.

“Operating System geeks,” of which we all know one or two, love to discuss the various merits of Windows/OS X/Linux “such and such works better than everything else,” “such and such is more stable than this,” “suck and such feels bloated compared to that,” and so on and so forth. The truth is that if we take a step back, we can see that the core problem for all of these operating systems is pretty simple: it’s the drivers, stupid.

Lets take Desktop Linux as an example. I’d argue that there are two large barriers to it’s widespread adoption. First it’s not immediately familiar to people who are used to using Windows. This is pretty easily addressed with some training, and I think Microsoft’s willingness to change their interface in the last few years (i.e. the Office “Ribbon,” and so forth,) is a great testimony to the adaptability of the user base. The second, and slightly more thorny issue is about hardware drivers: which are the part of any operating system that allow the software to talk to hardware like video, sound, and networking (including, of course, wireless) adapters. The Kernel has gotten much better in this regard in the past few years (probably by adding support for devices without requiring their drivers be open source), but the leading cause of an “install just not working,” is almost always something related to the drivers.

“Linux People,” avoid this problem by buying hardware that they know is well supported. In my world that means, “Intel everything particularly if you want wireless to work, and Nvidia graphics if you need something peppy, which I never really do,” but I know people who take other approaches.

In a weird way this “geek’s approach to linux” is pretty much the same way that Apple responds to the driver problem in OS X. By constraining their Operating System to run only on a very limited selection of hardware, they’re able to make sure that the drivers work. Try and add a third party wireless card to OS X. It’s not pretty.

Windows is probably the largest victim to the driver problem: they have to support every piece of consumer hardware and their hands are more or less tied. The famous Blue Screen of Death? Driver errors. System bloat (really for all operating systems) tends to be about device drivers. Random lockups? Drivers. Could Microsoft build better solutions for these driver problems, or push equipment manufacturers to use hardware that had “good drivers,” probably; but as much as it pains me, I don’t really think that it would make a whole lot of business sense for them to do that, at the moment.

More on this tomorrow…

I really don’t want to use the web anymore. This should come as no great surprise to most of you, but I think it’s worth pondering a bit, particularly because like all “breaking ups,” it’s a bit difficult. To recap, the reasons for the break up:

• The software we use to browse the web is awkward and difficult to use efficiently. I’m talking here about things like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. While “webkit” generation browsers are better than everything that’s come before (even if their lack of comparability with the Firefox Platform makes them useable,) every browser I’ve interacted with is a huge program that just feels unwieldy.
• There are two many distractions in the browser. I’ve managed to find ways to assimilate and interact with nearly all of the information that comes at me in the course of a day or a week in a sane, balanced, and efficient way. Except for the browser. Where I find myself refreshing Facebook or twitter endlessly. I don’t even like facebook and the twitter website all that much.
• The web is too sensitive to the availability of data connectivity. While I have an Internet connection nearly all of the time that I’m in front of a connection, I don’t really like to rely on this to do my work. I don’t want to use applications that rely on connectivity, and I hate situations where I have a few moments to do something, and I have a computer with me, and I get started and then I have to check a fact, or read a little bit about {{something}} on wikipedia, and I can’t because I don’t have a connection.
• I don’t like that the presentation layer of the web provides so much flexibility to make websites so unreadable and difficult to comprehend. Web browsers interfaces like emacs-w3m improve this somewhat, but even that is somewhat lacking. This isn’t a problem with software, but rather it’s a problem with designers, design, and the “way the web works.”

So to end on a somewhat positive note. Here’s what I think we really need in the next generation of digitally connected applications.

• Some sort of very smart predictive caching software that would run locally. We have the hard-drive space in contemporary machines that we could dedicate--as much as 100 gigabytes to a cache of network data and never really feel a space crunch. In some cases even more. I think most people’s digital music collections tend to top out in the 75-100 gig range, and “small” desktop hard drives have at least 500 gigs. Nothing else--well videos--takes up space. This would make the offline web a much more realistic proposition, it would speed things up and we could work on ways of only sending diffs between the cache and the servers, and it would rock.

• Databases need to mostly move off of the server and onto local boxes. Extension of point above. Content doesn’t change that much, local machines are now fast and smart enough to really be able to handle this. This is in HTML5, but having said that, I worry a bit. Because I’m me.

• We can import a lot of the “intelligence” of computing onto clients. There’s moves toward this already, with Adobe AIR and it’s competitors, but this seems to be all about adding “bling” to the web experience, and use the cross-platform nature of web technologies, even the proprietary ones like Flash, to reinvent desktop application development. I think we can go even further with this. Lets think about the next generation of desktop RSS clients. Offline wiki/wikipedia software.

  I’m not trying to buck the “software in the 21st century is social and connected” trend that we’re in the middle of, but rather seriously rethink the interface and work-flow paradigms of the web.

• I hope that the next generation of web-document standards (of which I think sygn is an example) will focus on structure and organization and a much more limited set of “features” (less is more) that will let content creators make content more useful rather than better looking.

  Take design out of the content, and put all of the display logic (aside from headings and meta-data) on the client. Don’t like how a site displays? Use a different client. And so forth.

Anyone with me?

I said to my office mate this week, “I’m switching to zsh,” and I believe he said something to the effect of “oh dear, what’s next.”

I should back up. I’m something of an odd duck when it comes to the way I use computers. I’m a geek, even in the context of my coworkers who are (also) huge geeks. I’m the only one who uses emacs. We’re an OS X shop (for the desktop, at least) but I run Arch Linux inside of a virtual machine. Because I’m like that. And now, I’m switching away from the by-now unix standard “bash” shell to “zsh.” I’m a bit weird. I’m ok with this.

So zsh. Why should you care? Well…

I’m not expert, having only really used it for a few days but there are a few things that have won me over:

• It’s mostly backwards compatible with bash. So, except for the stuff that configured my prompt, I was able to copy over my old .bashrc file pretty much as is. There’s been no real “brain adjustment” from all my old bash habits.
• It’s faster. You know, this is the kind of thing taht you don’t believe, “my terminal is faster than your terminal” is kinda lame because bash is pretty peppy compared to GUI stuff. I mean what, bash is a 300-400 kb, how slow can it be? The answer is, zsh just feels faster. This seems to be a quasi universal experience.
• It does tab-completion within commands. This is seriously amazing, because while command completion and path completion is awesome in bash, you still have to remember all of the sub-commands. This is particularly rough for big commands like “git” and “apt-get” or “apt-cache”. Very awesome.

Getting up the courage to switch and to rewrite my prompt was something that took a little bit of doing, but now I’m happy, and I strongly recommend it. If you like me live in the terminal, or have thought about using the command line more, give zsh a try, it’s good stuff.

The other thing, almost certain to provoke an “Oh dear” reaction on the part of my geeky friends is the fact that I’m strongly considering switching from the Awesome Window Manager to the Stump Window Manager, or more practically StumpWM or just Stump. Here’s some background on my adventures with tiling window managers:

When I started using Awesome every thing I did with the computer lived in it’s own little window. I was coming from the mac, so I lived with ten or fifteen open TextMate windows, a like number of open tabs in my terminal emulator, and a browser with a gazillion open tabs. I thought that this was sort of “the way I worked,” and so I replicated this kind of workflow in Awesome.

And here’s the thing. Awesome is great for managing a huge number of windows. With 9 workspaces/tags (or more!) it was possible to keep twenty or thirty windows afloat… a few browsers, a few chat windows, a dozen terminals, a few emacs frames, and the like all happening at once. And the window manager made it possible for me to only have to look at 2 or three windows at a time.

Then I progressed. With emacs' server/daemon mode, I only have one instance of emacs and 20 or so buffers, and in an extreme moment I sometimes have as many as 4 frames open at once, but more often I just have 2 or three (org-mode, writing, and a spare for something.) And terminals? I’ve taken to using screen which multiplexes an untabbed terminal, so I typically have a single screen session with 8 screen-windows, and I keep a couple of instances of that open at once for different contexts, so lets say another three windows. I have a remote screen session for IM and chat now that I connect to, and a single web browser.

Frankly, it’s sort of gotten to the point where I don’t really need to manage very many windows, and I probably never use more than 4-5 tags/workspaces. My needs for a window manager changed, and one of the core problems that problem that Awesome solves, is one that I’ve solved by using multiplexed applications. And that leads me to Stump.

I see that I probably need to spend a little more time talking about this tiling window manager stuff again. Stay tuned!

Today’s installment in the interview series is Scott Farquhar. Rather than spend a long time blathering about it, let me just get on with it. Shall we?

• Who are you? What do you?

  Who are any of us, really? Right now I don’t seem to be doing much but working at my old house and getting it ready to rent. But what I hope to go back to doing after I’m done is the main project of my Royalty Free Music podcast. The break away has been good in some ways. Once I get enough music to produce a commercial CD, I will probably lay that project aside and move on to the next shiny object.

• Jet Packs or Hovercars?

  As exciting and thrilling as the Jet Pack might be, I think I’d have to go with the Hovercar so I could carry more stuff with me.

• Lets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what’s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?

  I think I have to hold up my digital orchestra package as the niftiest piece of technology that I have in my personal arsenal. It essentially let’s me have access to creating music with actual sampled orchestral instruments. If I want to write something for 5 violas, timpani, bass trombone, and english horn, I can… and relatively quickly have an accurate idea of what it will sound like without having to look for and pay those 8 musicians and get them all together to record. The frustrating aspect is that the music created is grounded in equal temperament, so it’s got that flat, slightly out-of-tune sound that just doesn’t sound quite right. Perhaps it is a good frustration, since it’s clear that no matter how good technology will get, live musicians (and by extension into other areas of technology… people in general) just can’t be replaced.

• Favorite Star Trek Series?

  The original series. As neat and slick as the newer stuff has been, there’s just something about the original.

• The single scariest thing about the future?

  At the risk of sounding like a complete bastard… It seems like it’s mostly the stupid (rude/inconsiderate/narrow-minded) people who are breeding. |soapbox| Humans are overpopulating this planet, with an ever increasing percentage of the overall population also contributing less and less. I honestly feel like my lifetime will see the beginnings of major strains on more basic resources like water and food, much less the fossil fuels more people are worried about right now. |/soapbox|

• Favorite Website?

  Working with the idea of “favorite” being some nifty thing to share with other people (like favorite ice cream, etc.) then I’ll have to pick NetFlix. I may visit other sites more often right now, but this is one I think other folks should check out, even though I think most people have probably already heard about it.

• What do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?

  In a world context, I’ll have to say what I will call “The Rise of the Internet”… Sure, one can trace origins back as early as the 60s even, but it really was about 15 years ago that it started to become what it is today. In a personal context, it was buying a home… ‘cause it started to make me feel like I’d finally grown up.

• One thing that you wish you could learn?

  I’ve always wanted to learn how to tap dance. Perhaps, one day…

• Cats vs. Dogs

  I do like dogs, and live with one. But I am really very much a cat person. They suit my personality much better.

• Where can we find more about you/your projects?

  • Personal Website
  • Music Website
  • The Clams of Wisdom

  Oh, and I am “composerscott” on facebook, livejournal, and twitter.

I got a Blackberry last December. I blogged about it then, but I haven’t really talked much about it. There’s been a bunch of hubbub recently about the iPhone finally getting Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) support, and this has spurned some thought on my part about smartphones and mobile technology, and all that jazz. It’s a big space in the technology world, and most of the time I just ignore all of it, because I don’t much care about it. I’m a “big computing,” kind of guy, and I don’t much like the whole “talking on the phone thing,” but this doesn’t--you’re surely not surprised to learn--mean that I don’t have opinions on the subject.

Despite my disdain for telephones, I really like the whole Blackberry thing. The physical keyboard means I’m way faster at typing up messages and notes than I would be otherwise, and that’s incredibly useful. Blackberries aren’t, “sexy” as smartphones go, and frankly the software is sort of insane with regards to how it all works, but in comparison to how other phones work, I’m pretty happy with the way things are. Here are the Pros:

• I like that I can run applications in the background on the Blackberry. Being able to get alerts when emails come in. Being able to leave a message that I’m writing, and go respond to another message, or make a call, or get an instant message or twiddle with Google maps, is really great.
• I enjoy that the phone is messaging centric. Furthermore, I really like that all messaging: Blackberry Messaging (IM), GoogleTalk (jabber), SMS Texting, and email all appear in one great queue. There’s one big list of things, to check and that’s it. The key to making this work is good filtering, but that’s another point.
• I really enjoy the ecosystem of applications available for the phone. Blackberries like many smartphones (including the Android platform, after a fashion) use the J2ME (java) platform, which means and the platform is rather established. Sure the sexy things that people do with iPhones aren’t there for my phone, and there are applications that I wish I had (better SSH, a text editor, some sort of file synching ability,) but the apps I have all work well, are stable, and integrate well with the system (ie. the messaging thing.)
• There are host of little things that are great. The charging cradle is an awesome thing. The fact that it’s “smart” enough to alter its behavior based on if it’s in the case or not in the case, so that if it’s on your belt it does something different than if it’s laying on your desk. It also has a “bedside” mode which I think is similarly brilliant. Not a huge feature, but exceedingly useful.
• So Google does this thing with their Sync Tools where your contacts from Gmail end up on your phone, and the sync is pretty seamless. No more futzing around with adding people by hand, no more worrying about backing up your database. I’m not thrilled about this reliance on Google, but it just works, and that is an intensely good thing. I do kind of wish that more things on the phone were like this.

What I don’t like?

• The twitter apps don’t integrate well into the messaging, and I can’t think of a sane way to use twitter with my phone.
• There is no real XMPP/Jabber application aside from Google Talk that I’ve found to be useable. (Though I’d love to be proven wrong.) It would be nice to be able to connect to my general use XMPP account under a different resource and go from there.
• I think, as an interaction modality the trackball is a horrible idea, and I think something more joystick-like would be a much more useful and quick. Even, perhaps something that used the keyboard more effectively. As it is, all navigation and system operation uses the trackball, and that’s kind of annoying. It’s done as well as it could, but I think it could be better.
• Email filtering is non-intuitive and difficult. Possible, certainly, but difficult. I’d like an interface to be able to exclude and block various senders on the phone itself.
• Configuration options are Byzantine and difficult to navigate. There are so many options particularly around the various noises that the phone will make that I’ve not bothered to really modify any of them. I might load up the beginning of “Thick as A Brick” for my ring tone (and part two for the alarm clock?), but for the most part there are too many chirps and chatters that the damn thing does, that it’s hard to really modify it in any real way. It makes it interesting to be in close proximity to other Blackberry users for any length of time, because those noises get embedded in your consciousness.
• The Blackberry is pretty unfriendly to Free Software stuff, which is a shame, partly because of the whole lack of freedom issue, but almost more because everything else I do with technology uses free software stuff, that it’s annoying that my existing stuff doesn’t work right on the phone.

Would I get another Blackberry? Probably. Though the lack of a good SSH client is a bother, and I’d like something that did a bit better with things like PDF/electronic-text reading, but all in all I’m pretty happy.

The interesting thing is that at this point I can’t fathom going back to some sort of “non-smartphone:” this just seems, to me, to be “the way a phone should work.” That’s a pretty strong endorsement, I’d say.

Onward and Upward!

I’ve been, perhaps without good reason, trying to establish a tie between the (for lack of a better term) critical writings I’ve been doing here, and the kinds of things I try to accomplish in my creative work. I think my contact with and involvement in the Outer Alliance is probably responsible for this bit of introspection, but blame isn’t really required.

I’m a very political kinda of guy, right? I mean, I think about things very politically, I think there’s a lot of worth in thinking about how class, economics, and power dynamics (probably in that orders of priority.) I think that talking to people about political ideas, about how to change the world, and share these ideas with people is really a rather huge core of what I’m doing with this blog, and related projects.

When talking with OA people, I’ve realized how, at least superficially, my writing isn’t terribly political. I think I’m bold about addressing some of the intellectual ideas that I think are important, and there are ways in which the stories I tell are political on some level, but for the most part, I think

This gets me into all sorts of “art is apolitical” and “art transcends politics,” trouble, and I don’t think that’s exactly what I mean. Of course art is political, even my stories--which can’t omit to having overly complex political thoughts during the writing of the texts--are quite political. But I think the politics is the kind of thing that happens to a story when people read it, not during the moment of writing. When I’m writing, my experience is usually much more along the lines of “how do I get this character out of, or through, this scene,” and not how do I resolve this political crisis. As it were.

I think a few OA folks probably read this from time to time, and I’d be interested in hearing what they think about the juncture of “politics” and “writing fiction.” Thoughts?

Onwards, and Upward!