The Linux switch continues pretty well. There’s not a lot new to report, except that I’ve not really used my mac very much in a week, and while I could easily set things back up and roll right along with it, there’d be a lot of stuff to sync with when I get back to it, and I don’t have any really compelling reason to do that for day-to-day tasks. Lets go through and see how things have shaken out:

RSS Reading

I’ve basically just given in and started using Google Reader. I don’t think this is the final resolution to this problem, but it works quite well and I’m happy with it for the time being. I think newsbeuter works with bloglines, and that might be the best solution but I haven’t made the jump yet. After years of syncing with the newsgator service and NetNewsWire on my mac, downloading on my own seems much less ideal. But google isn’t evil… yet, and so I’m very glad for reader.

TextMate and Text Editing

This was one of my largest concerns when I thought about switching. I was really attached to TextMate, and it was comfortable and very mac-y. While I had some trouble when I was using vim the, TextMate to emacs transition is pretty smooth, though I have a lot of emacs-ground to cover, all of my basic text-editing tasks are taken care of.

What I learned in this process, is that my text-editing requirements, which I thought were pretty intense, are actually reasonably simplistic. I’ve not yet mastered really powerful find-and-replaces in emacs (I tend to use vim for this, though I’m sure I’ll be able to give this up at some point), or multiple file find-and-replaces (my gut says that I should be able to use sed but, I’ve never had much luck with sed.

Learning this about my process has been helpful, and I think I’m able to concentrate better in my Linux environment than I am in OS X any more. Powerful lessons.

IM Clients

Interestingly, the more I used Pidgin, the more I realized that the inconsistencies in the way the buddy list was maintained, and that I didn’t like in Pidgin existed in Adium as well. I just hadn’t noticed them: this is a great testament to the UI design of Adium. In the end, Pidgin works pretty well and I’m reasonably pleased with it. As near as I can tell I don’t have a lot of options because I need the kind of multi-account/multi-protocol support that libpurple-based IM clients have.

I’ve tried running BitlBee locally, but I found the buddylist/roster hard to track in irssi (my IRC client of choice), who knows. If I ever switch from Pidgin, something like mcabber (if I can convince enough of my friends to reliably be accessible via XMPP), or BitlBee. But for the moment, I’m reasonably happy about this.

Web Development

Right after I got my Linux machine, I started work on a new web-development project for a friend, and I realized that all the things I was used to using (FTP clients, etc) weren’t setup on the linux machine. And my web developent style tends to be pretty chaotic/frenzied and “test driven” (ie: “hey, lets see what this does! (pause) crap! what about this? (pause) crap! etc.”) so I thought it would be a royal mess.

Turns out it wasn’t. I started using gFTP which is nice. For my own servers I use some SCP based shortcuts I’ve written up for myself and I SSH into the server and edit things directly there, but for some things on this project having something graphical was a very good thing. It seemed to work. I’m not complaining.

Blog Posting

So I haven’t found a really good XML-RPC client for blog posting on Linux to make up for the TextMate blogging bundle and MarsEdit options. While I’m thinking about trying out some of the blog posting software for gnome (to revive the “coda” sub-blog). I’ve switched to posting using the web interface.

This is good, because I can automate blog posting much easier, and it means my work schedule in the morning doesn’t revolve around getting things posted. And the truth is that the WordPress interface is pretty good. So in someways maybe it’s good that I’m doing things this way.

Music Syncing

Yeah, I’m still doing this on the mac, such as I sync my iPod mostly I just listen to music on my ipod, and tend to sync about every other time I go out of town. I’m thinking about switching to listening to Podcasts on my phone, and if I do that it wouldn’t be a huge issue to move the music to the Linux box after the initial import. But I’m in no particular rush, given how often I sync my iPod, so this might linger for a while.

Does this mean that I’m an ex-mac user?

Onward and Upward!

I just upgraded tychoish today to the new, “WordPress 2.7” which has a great new user interface that I really like. We’re finally getting back to b2/cafelog and wordpress 1.5 ground. Heh. Anyway. I’m going to be reviving this little mini-blog on the right hand side of the site. The rule this time? All posts written off the cuff and nothing with paragraph breaks. Sounds like a plan? I thought so.

Things change. People change. Societies change. You might not be able to get social scientists and cultural theorists to agree on very much, but the fact that change happens is pretty easy to stomach. The difficulty come in when we start to think about how things change. What follows is a review of the competing approaches to what I’m calling “theories of change,” I hope this helps me (and you!) organize some thoughts.

There are, near as I can tell, three major schools of thought that attempt to explain “how things change:” evolution, complexity/emergence (chaos), and development. In turn:

Evolution

Derived of course from biology, there’s a great deal of evidence that biological systems have evolved and continue to evolve. Evolution is predicated on the assumption that the most adaptive variations in a given population will propagate themselves more than less adaptive variations, which will propagate themselves less. Evolution is a very “big picture” process, and--at least in the biological sense--refers to change and adaption on the scale of the population on the whole.

There are a few things that more casual applications of the theory seem to forget that I think are key:

• Evolution values adaptability and diversity over just about everything else, adaptable individuals and diverse populations are more resilient to shorter term changes in the environment, so evolutionary analysis that’s grounded in survivability in a particular situation are relatively week.
• Evolution takes a long time. Many generations. Many many generations. So many that it’s really hard to think about evolution “happening” given the way that we think about time. In many ways, its easier to think about continents moving around than it is to think about the way populations evolve.
• There’s little good evidence that evolution occurs in non-biological systems. We use evolution as an analogy for many change-processes, but as a mechanism, outside of biology its limited.

Complexity

I really like complexity or emergence theory, but I’m not a math guy, and I don’t have a very good grasp of it. The basic idea is that in the right conditions, systems of independent “actors” that interact with each other will given time develop some sort of organization, and that these “systems” (as actors) combine to form higher level systems. And so forth.

So for example, humanity can be seen as an example of emergent complexity: our bodies are made up of molecules that interact with each other to form sub-cellular structures and cells (actors), which make up tissues and then organs (systems), which make up our bodies. Our bodies (and selves) are actors in social systems… and so forth. I’ve left a lot out. Obviously evolution is an example of a complexity theory, but complexity theories have been used (successfully, I’d argue) to explain how systems work and form in non-population scale biological systems and non-biological systems, and also on time scales that are shorter than anything evolution could work with.

The organization of photographs in tags on flickr is largely emergent (as are google’s search results), and intelligence is often described as being emergent. There are more, and I’m sorry if I don’t have really good examples of this.

Development

I use the idea of development to help describe smaller scale adaptations and adjustments over time. I studied a lot of Developmental Psychology for a while in there, and I think a concept of development is really important to thinking about the ways people change, and grow. Just as we know that evolution happens to populations over time, we know that humans (and other animals) are continuously developing throughout their existences.

Human development has two major divisions: the intrinsic biological processes and the process of adapting to different contexts. The biological stuff is pretty limited: it’s impossible to walk or develop speech before a certain age because the vocal/skeletal musculature isn’t developed enough. Stuff on that scale. These sorts of biological/physical limitations are developmentally relevant mostly because they limit the possibility for external experience.

The adaptation to context part of development is grounded in learning theory (cognitive/behavioral psychology), and helps explain how individuals interact and change with regard to their world, and it all depends on experience. What language a child learns depends on what language they’re exposed to. Our sensitivity to heat and cold, is largely dependent on where we live. The way we cope with stress depends on the outcomes of past stressful experiences, and how we witness other people cope with stress.

Development describes how individuals (actors/systems) are shaped and changed by experience. It’s something that happens over time, at varying rates and is dependent on context. Non living things can be thought of as “developing.” Institutions, intellectual projects, science and technologies, and so forth.

Right and?

That’s what I have. It’s really easy to just say “evolve” when we mean change, and similarly easy to recognize “stuff changes,” when the really interesting and powerful part is to understand the mechanisms that produce change. The processes of change differ depending on what is changing, which is only fitting. I’m going to try and get a little bit clearer on complexity theory, and I’ll probably follow this post up in the coming future.

Lets start with the facts: I got a blackberry at the end of last week. It’s one of the new “BlackBerry Bold” devices. Which means GSM/HSDPA/etc from ATT. Which is a great improvement from the sucky (but surprisingly functional) flip phone that I’ve had for the last 2.5-3 years from Sprint. This is the first phone that I’ve had that has: an Internet connection, a messaging plan, and a reliable connection (sorry sprint). Though it’s not the first time that I’ve had a PDA-class device. There’s a story…

When I was in high school I did some writing for the interent on mobile technology (PDAs and so forth) right before “smartphones” came on the scene. I had a couple of the earliest PocketPCs and a PalmOS device, and I did some writing for a number of websites that covered this sort of thing. Because it seemed like the thing to do, and even back then (when I was still using Windows, egad) I was a pretty simplistic “read things and write things” kind of computer user, so these kinds of things made more sense than a laptop (given the state of technology, circa 2000-2002). Laptops got better and cheaper, I discovered Apple computers, and PDAs moved into cellphones, and I always had nice enough cellphones, but not particularly flashy cellphones. They did their job, and I was happy.

But then I got a job that requires me to be on the phone a fair piece, and reachable in a way that I haven’t previously needed to be. And cellphones and data technology have improved and gotten a lot more reasonable and ubiquitous. And so there I was, looking at “smartphones” with only a little deja vu. I’ve written here about the iphone, and how I was leaning away from it. The near-completeness of my switch to Linux made an iPhone an even less attractive option, and so here I am with a blackberry. My response: incredibly positive. Let me go over (in list format) what I’ve done, and how my “system” works:

• I’m using a lot of these web 2.0 apps in a way that I hadn’t previously. Google Calendar¹ and Gmail-contacts sync with my phone via the Google BlackBerry Sync, which works great.
• My email arrives on the BlackBerry via one of two means: someone sends something to my work email (which Blackberry accesses via IMAP) or someone sends me a message through one of my personal addresses and said message passes through a rather complex gmail-filter. I’m still tweaking the gmail filter every now and then, but it’s it works.
• The blackberry got me really using Remember the Milk, in concert with BBrtm and Tasque on the desktop (which is in Ubuntu Intrepid). The blackberry app is sub par, but functional. I hear the official blackberry app is less functional, and you have to pay for pro-service (25 bucks a year) which I’m not opposed to, but I’ll need to think about it. Having the offline apps make this a really great service, and I’m a huge fan now.
• I of course, have AIM and Gtalk, set up though I haven’t used it much. And I have various SMS and MMS-based services set up (you tube uploading, twitter, identi.ca) set up, though I haven’t turned on the “getting messages” part of that yet.
• I have the opera mini web browser installed and like it a great deal, but I haven’t done a lot of browsing yet, but that’s not surprising: I don’t browse the internet much on my desktop.
• I have various other things that seem logical to get installed: google maps, the facebook app, flickr upload tool, the google search tool, the gmail app, but haven’t dug into that very much. But I suspect these things will be nice to have.
• For writing and note taking in the wild I have a secret email address that routes itself into a “notes” folder (I’ve used it before with Jott and I’m just sending myself emails and that seems to work just fine.

Everything else seems a bit borring. Left on my list of phone-related things that I’d like to see happen or have left to do:

• Come to some peace about my RSS reading habits, so I can catch up on things on the phone.
• Some sort of e-text reading software would be great. Particularly if there were a good way to get PDFs to appear right on the device. The screen’s is very readable, and it just makes sense.
• Even though one of my reasons for getting this and not and iphone was that I already had an iPod that I liked a lot, I have the perverse desire to listen to podcasts and maybe music on this thing. But I need to declare bankruptcy on podcast listening first and find some way to clean up the pieces there. In that direction, I think the Jabra bluetooth headset/controler looks like something worthwhile. As would a buttload of MicroSD storage space.
• I’m using the stock leather holster at the moment for a case, and it’s quite good, but I imagine that something else might be good.
• I need to spend some time getting, making, and customizing ring tones, which is something that I’ve never done before, but I feel needs to be accomplished.

That’s all the news that’s fit to sing….

Onward and Upward!

I’m knitting again!

I seem to do these posts every now and then. In any case, one of my mom’s friends from knitting camp came for a post-thanksgiving visit, and really kick started my winter knitting projects. I’d been lagging on some older projects for far too long, and having an excuse to sit around and knit was a really good thing. I got to the end of the first sleeve avove the cuff of the latvian dreaming sweater, and started a new sweater. That new sweater is what I’m here to talk about today. I’ll cover the other knitting progress in the coming weeks.

So I, uh, started a new sweater. With cables.

I should point out here that I’ve never made a cabled sweater before. Rather than design something simple, I flipped through some knitting patterns, and chose of all things, “Irish Moss” from Alice Starmore’s Aran Knitting.

For those non-knitters out there, this is a pretty rare book, long out of print and very highly valued. The designs, though a bit dated, are very easy to adapt into classic masterpieces, and they’re not exactly “entry level sweaters.”

Typical.

I’ve knit several Starmores before, but thusfar I’ve only done colorwork sweaters from her.

I also changed a few things about this sweater.

Also typical.

My modifications, I think are pretty straightforward, but none the less significant. They are:

• I’m knitting it in the round when the pattern called for a sweater knit in pieces.
• I omitted the ribbing, as the entire sweater is knit in a twisted stitch-ribbing (with cables) basically. So the ribbing was only decorative, and I like the way it looks when cable patterns start at the very bottom edge of the sweater.
• I’ve decided to knock off most of the filer stitches at the sides of the sweater, because I’m going for a 38-40 inch sweater not a 42-46 inch sweater. I think knocking off 18 stitches from the front and back was a little much (which is what I did at the bottom edge.) but I think a sweater with a little bit of tapering will be a good thing, so I’ll begin to increase after I have 2 inches completed, once I have a good idea of actual gage.
• I’m going to slit the neck open, and set in the sleeve to about shoulder width, but that depends on how many stitches I increase on the sides, and how the pattern looks. If I don’t increase enough to make it work, I’ll just make a gusset.
• I’ll slit the neck open to mid-chest, as I do on most of my sweaters so that the crew neck isn’t as restricting. The pattern seems like it will support this.
• I’ll knit the sleeves and saddles from the shoulder/collar down. That always seems to work well. Again, that’s in a while.

And so forth. I’m semi-weened from the cable needle, but I keep it around just in case.

And that’s about it. Unless you want the technical specs.

Yarn: Schoolhouse Press Quebecois

Needles: Addi Lace 3.0mm (US Size 2/2.5)

Color: Grey

Gauge: About 6 stitches to the inch in St. St. Or something close, I didn’t check closely, but it looks to be about right. There are ~238 stitches at the moment, so that seems to be about right given everything.

Ok that’s it, for real. More later. I might actually take pictures of this one. Imagine that.

We tend to tell (and think of) our histories as progress narratives. That is “things sucked, we changed them and now they’re getting better.” Taken to the next level, progress narratives force us to think about the future in terms of “how much better things are going to be,” as a required part of the progress narrative itself. On the one hand, there have been a number of rather dark moments in our past; on the other, in a lot of ways the present is really as much of an elaboration on the past as it is a progression. Because the present isn’t particularly rosy.

This is, you might think, an odd perspective for a science fiction writer. SF is supposed to be forward looking, and optomistic, right? Well, maybe that’s the “critical” part in “critical futures.”

With that in mind, I’m very wary and hesitant to accept progress narratives as being particularly indicative of an actual developmental process. But they’re all around us, history, political development, medical advancement, and particularly technology are all formed as progress narratives. While there’s nothing wrong per se with this approach, it constrains imagination about the future and the past. That’s not a good thing.

Since information technology/computers are a relatively recent development in history, and are in such a rapid state of development, it’s particularly hard to avoid the technological progress narrative. And it’s true, from one perspective that technology is getting faster and more powerful with every passing year. On the other, with OS X and Ubuntu gaining at least a little bit of the operating system market (let alone the linuxen in mobile devices and netbooks), it looks like we’re headed towards a greater adoption of Unix-like systems. Which despite an ongoing evolution, are remarkably similar to the kinds of systems that were the height of new technology 40 years ago. And indeed a great deal of the ongoing evolution in Unix-like systems is in response to new kinds of hardware (wireless, cameras, etc.) rather than anything paradigmatic.

Another issue in technology is the possible confusion of development with progress. It’s very true that processors are getting faster, hard drives are getting bigger, and everything is getting cheaper. But is this progress?

While faster processors are better, when I bought my desktop computer about a month ago I opted to save a hundred dollars by going with a slightly slower processor. I haven’t noticed, and while I’m not doing anything that might require extra performance (video editing, or even sound editing, say) most people aren’t either. Same story with storage: the only real way to fill up a 500 GB or 1 TB drive is to take a lot of high-res pictures or collect video (which is hard to do legally). Even Vista--noted by some for its bloat--only takes up 15 or so gigs. The biggest technological issue for storage is power-consumption and redundancy, which aren’t exactly the makings for a good progress narrative.

Netbooks also represent the failure of the technological progress narrative as they aren’t so much bigger/better/faster as they are a recomercialized version of the very best of laptop technology circa 1998. This isn’t to say that the march of technology hasn’t made netbooks possible, because that’s a terribly flawed perspective. Rather, the fact that many people have realized that a good deal of their computing tasks need not be accomplished by the bigger/better/faster hardware. In my case, editing text files is never going to get more difficult, or take more resources.

My past, and even pretty recent attempts at thinking about technology, focused on “what’s next,” but I think right now that’s largely irrelevant. What’s happening now is by far much more interesting, don’t you think?

Onward and (ironically) Upward!

I’ve been using my new computer a fair piece yesterday and today, and I’ve even gotten my dad using the computer recently (long story) and it’s going really well, and the speed that I’ve been able to get it setup and adjusted has been really amazing. (Is there anyone else in St. Louis MO, USA who wants to switch to linux and needs a little bit of encouragement?)

I’m also remarkably close to getting all the way switched to linux. I still haven’t messed with my RSS feeds (still mac only on that, but that’s a user-issue as much as a technological one) and I need to bite the bullet and get XAMPP set up on my desktop, and get something set up to be able to share files on the network.

But I digress, this post is really about the whole “tablet computer” thing, which was supposedly going to be “the next new thing” five or so years ago. Clearly this was not the case. First of all tablets (especially convertible tablets) are hard to get right from an engineering perspective: more stress points and screens with digitizers don’t often look right. Secondly, there’s not a lot that tablets are better for than conventional laptops.

We’re still better at typing than we are at writing long hand, and applications and user interfaces aren’t really designed around a tablet-like interaction metaphor. It took apple designing a phone in 2007 for people to realize that we might need an interaction paradigm where you would have more than one pointer at a time (so called “multi-touch”).

I backed into this tablet thing. I realized that ThinkPad hardware was probably the best laptop hardware for linuxification, and I knew they had a 12 inch tablet. Since I’d been jonesing for a 12 inch laptop, more or less since I gave up my 12 inch ibook 5 years ago, the x41/x61 tablet seemed like the coolest thing around. When I found a great deal on one of the x41t’s, the rest is history.

What’s most surprising is how much I like it.

I got the digitizer working in pretty short order and xournal not long after that. I’m struck by a few things. First, the “writing” experience is quite good. I’m sort of prissy about writing long hand, and have been using fountain pens and moleskines for years, so this is no small endorsement. Secondly, for somethings like reading PDFs and some note taking, this could in time totally replace my use of paper notebooks. Aside from the whole “needing power” issue.

Would I get another tablet? Probably, though I wouldn’t be inclined to pay a great “tax” for this feature, and the fact that this is a tablet is really nice, but not in the top few reasons why I like this computer (size, and lightness, the lack of a touch pad, and it’s linux-compatibility.) So go figure.

It’s nifty, but I don’t expect things to rush towards tablets quite yet.

Onward and Upward!

I’ve written here a little about the problems I have with the options for user interfaces in linux, and while for me Awesome goes a long way toward s fixing these issues, particularly/even on smaller screens, but I continue to think that paying more attention to user interface issues will be a very good thing for the platform. This new laptop is the second linux install I’ve done recently (third if you count the VM on my mac, and fourth if you count the multiple attempts it took me to get my desktop to working order) and the expereince has--I hoped granted me some useful perspective on some UI concerns. And since this is my blog… I bet you can see where this is going.

While I think as far as non-tiling window managers go, OS X/quartz/aqua still is the leader of the pack, I’m not longer as appaled by everything that is GNOME, but it took me a while to realize this (which is a huge barrier for new users, and a big problem, but not a problem I’m quite equipt to suggest.) If you’re new to gnome, and geeling a little offput by it’s “clunkyness,” here are some suggestions to make things a little less painful (espically if you’re the Awesome type).

• Tweak and change the system fonts. As near as I can tell sub-pixel rendering is turnned off in GNOME by default (it’s on in KDE), which is what makes fonts look smooth and pretty. Turning this on, and making the fonts smaller, made a world of difference for me. Adding in good fonts for screen reading (like the forbidden MS Verdana font, and the Google Andriod Fonts) really added something to the experience. I think it’s easy to forget how much a really good, really readable font can affect the way we interact with a computer. First order of business.
• Do something about the GNOME panel. The GNOME pannel (that would be all the status bars and such) by default takes a huge amount of screen space (particularly on smaller screens). For starters, I turn off “auto-expand” and move the top panel into the right or left corner, though there might be some advantage to moving it to the bottom left-or right corners, as we tend to have more horizontal space on our screens than vertical, but that depends a lot on your personal prefrence. My second move is to ditch the bottom pannel, and move things like the “multi-desktop” chooser, and a drop down list of open windows to the top pannel. Move things that you use every day to the pannel and take away things that you don’t need to see. One of the reasons that I like OS X so much is that it does a pretty good job of focusing the UI on “content” inside the window, rather than the UI of the window/system itself. GNOME can do this too, but it doesn’t automatically.
• This is an elaboration of the earlier too points, but tweak the theme settings, which--at least in Ubunut--are cartoonish by default. I’ve found that the “Mist” interface buttons tend to take up a little less room, but try your hand at desiging something new. My M.O. of late has revolved around “making everything smaller” because I don’t like UI bloat, but no matter what your goals are, I think everyone needs to spend some time customizing the finer aspects of their UI.

It’s a start in the right dirrection at any rate.

Onward and Upward!

This is a post that reflects on international character of the community around the `Awesome Window Manager <http://awesome.naquadah.org>`_, though it takes a while to get to that. There’s this theory of blog post writing that says you should write like newspaper articles and front load your arguments. Save this editorial note, this post is an epic failure at this formula. Apologies.

It will come as a surprise to no one that I am not only an avid user of open source software but also a keen observer of the open source community. Communities, particularly digital communities, seem to be my thing, and participating and watching various parts of the open source community has reminded me a lot about what I liked most about the Internet back when I started my travels in cyberspace and (slightly) more recently when I started blogging.

I’m yet sure if the argument that “open source is qualitatively different from other sorts of cyberspace communities” holds water. Unlike the communities that form around collees (eg. facebook), special interests (eg. blogs, podcasts, and discussion forums), or around established “real world” connections (eg. email, instant messaging) open source communities form in order to produce something reasonably concrete and specific. But other communites online form around shared goals (eg. many communities on livejournal), and certianly open source hackers weren’t the first to use technology to collaborate. And open source communites use all the same internet technologies (IRC, listservs, newsgroups) that we’ve been using for years, so there’s nothing particularly novel about the communities.

But I digress.

While the Internet is techincally world wide, and does allow for information to be exchanged globally, communities on the internet are often pretty localized. Even if a community isn’t rooted in real-world connections (and many are, more than we might initally expect) they’re often constrained by language and time-zones to a great degree.

The community around the Awesome Window Manager provides a great counter example to this. JD, the original/primary author/leader is in France, and I’ve interacted with people in the Awesome list and chat room are from all over the world. While I know of a few Awesome users in the United States my impression is that the core of the user base isn’t particularly American, though some further research into this might be in order. Interestingly most of the conversations and documentation happens in English.

I don’t have a lot of idea about why this is the case exactly. My current working theory is that the kind of advanced user that Awesome attracts, is more likely to use Linux/BSD outside of the US (Apple being less prevelent outside of the US, and interntaionalization and what not driving people to Linux in the non-english speaking world.) But that’s just one idea.

Ok, so I know it isn’t November anymore, and I should shut up about writing already, but it’s a good change of pace, and I have one little point to make/explore that makes sense to talk about post-nano. It’s about the habit of writing. And I think it can be applied to all sorts of creative work.

A lot of people think that NaNo is all about “a big push,” and getting past the internal editor and so forth, but even more importantly it teaches a valuable lesson about the power of momentum. The begging is the hardest part. Writing the first 10-20 thousand words, is really hard work and takes time to get used to the characters and the situations and what it takes to sit down every damn day and write a lot of fiction. Once you learn what it feels like, once you’re situated, things get easier. It’s easier to figure out what’s going to happen next, and it’s easier to sit down and write.

Ultimately, knowing how to push yourself and get in the habit is the best part of NaNo, and other than the rhetorical objectives, it’s probably my only real “writing hack” and gives me the feeling that means that I say “I’m a writer” when someone asks me what I do.

While I don’t want to endorse procrastination, I’m of the opinion that the “writing habit” is something that needs a lot of nurturing and help. Having something like a blog that can help you “warm up,” or a journal, or a lively email correspondence, can sometimes help get things moving, and though it seems counter productive really help fill in the gaps between larger projects. There’s such thing as “too much” odds and ends writing, but if you can get your mind moving and used to writing two to three thousand words a day, it becomes easier and easer for a greater and greater portion of these words to end up being on a fiction project.

A while back my motto was that the key to creative success, if it exists, lays somewhere in the confluence of “persistence” and “experimentation.” Basically you have to try lots of different things, and keep trying lots of things because eventually something will stick. While I still think it’s true on the level of “careers” on a developmental scale, I now think that’s its also true on a day to day level with regards to the process of creation. Writing good content (or knitting good sweaters, or recording good audio) isn’t dependent on a ritual or a specific setting, or divine inspiration; but it is dependent on writing lots of content (good and bad.)

NaNo’s over. Congratulations to those who attempted and those who won. I hope you have something that you’re proud of and that you learned from. I’d also encourage you to not stop yet. Edit what you have, get a good sample together. Start a new project. Keep writing.

Onward and Upward!