Topic: Posts

Ok, I have to post this little interstitial post because, mostly there’s this item on my “blogging todo list” that I keep ignoring, that I really want to mention, and I think if I weren’t so damn verbose, I would have gotten to it at some point in my last post about cosmic scale plots and story structure.

I think part of the thing at play, at least for me, is that great big, cosmic stories, even if they don’t take too long to tell are sort of the stories of my heart. I love these sort of big picture stories, where we see whole epochs shift, and watch while characters rise and fall.

Think about the epic SF written in response to the cold war that was the core of the SF canon (and largely still is, though I think their influence has wained in the last 15 years): Dune, Foundation, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc.

Anyway. I think another result of being too tuned into the larger story, to being too enamored of the epic, is that it becomes very very easy to start your stories too soon. Rather than start at the beginning, as far as I can tell, it’s usually better to start when things start happening. The space between the provoking instance and the sequence events that make up the store is part of what creates mystery and intrigue in a novel. It seems to me.

This is of course compounded that novels, when we read them almost always have a prologue of some sort, and really successful epics often eventually have prequels. But we’ll note a couple of things, 1) These are written after the original story, 2) they almost always suck, particularly in comparison to the original story.

Also, if people wrote better hooks, I think I might have an easier time turning off the internal editor when I’m reading stories for my crit group. Because I really want to say “just chop off the beginning, nothing else matters as much.” But I don’t, and as a result end up sending fewer critiques.

Not that I’m particularly good at this, yet, but it’s all about learning these things, isn’t it?

Onward and Upward!

I was listening today to the Strange Horizon’s Podcast Interview with Tim Pratt and he said something about his writing that was quite interesting to me.

He was talking about his novels and some the early stories and I think he called them “fiercely linear,” that they took place over the course of a week or a couple of weeks, and that the path of the story was very straightforward, but that he was trying to go beyond his comfort zone and write stories that were less linear, that took longer in “story time.”

While the whole interview was really nice, this line struck a particular chord in my mind. This is exactly the kind of thing that I’ve been trying to do for a long time, and something that I just have trouble groking.

Another Round, the story that is now Station Keeping, started out as a novel project built around a very non-linear story. Or, it was linear, but in a very stretched sort of way. Station Keeping (and AR) is all about this place--a sort of cultural battle ground--at a key moment in the development of human civilization. And the larger story takes several years to happen, because the conflict isn’t between characters, but rather between big ideologies.¹

Now there are a lot of reasons why I couldn’t hold the plot Another Round together four years ago (it works better as a serial, the character’s weren’t developed enough, or central enough), but a big reason was that I think I’m fiercely linear or something. I did really well with Circle Games², which--not counting an epilogue--took like 3 weeks of story time, and the Mars story takes place over the course of about a year, if you account for travel time, but the narration covers maybe two weeks worth of story. It’s less linear, but the scope is probably similar.

Breakout, kind of like Another Round, is a story on a much more cosmic scale. While it’s not nearly as politically angst ridden, the story is still pretty layered, and thats really complicated. Some day I’ll be up to the challenge of writing novels like that. Right now--particularly since I’m more interested in getting work out on the internet, I’m writing this hypertext, but some day, maybe, I’ll write stories like these.

In the mean time, I think I’ll work on devising stories with more concentrated plots, stretching the bounds of the “comfort zone of linearity” rather than attempting to break it without mercy at every opportunity.

One of these days I’ll learn something. I swear.

Onward and Upward!

Because I promised another post, and I must admit that I don’t have very much to talk about, here comes a list.

• Sleep readjustment is going well, and I’m pretty pleased. I think I need to push myself a little bit more. I have the waking at 7/7:30 thing down pretty well, but I have been rolling over at 4:30 and going back to bed when I should really just get up then.
• I’m doing better with the stress level, distraction helps. All I can do is wait after all
• I haven’t really been knitting much. I need to change that, but I feel like there are more important things to do, so I’m doing them
• I’ve switched to a book bag that almost always makes my spine feel (though not actually) feel like it’s falling apaprt after a week. I really like the bag, but it doesn’t like me. This is usually a sign that I need a new book bag. I know what I want, and it’s been about a year since I’ve gotten a new bag. I’m going to start trolling ebay,.
• The weather in homeCity is very schizoid it was in the 50s when I left for work, the low 40s when I got to work, and in the teens or below when I got home. I just want it to be nice and cold, and consistent.
• I’ve been stewing over this for a while, but I’m thinking that I’ll start to post little snippits of the breakout hypertext from time to time on tychoish. I have one or two that I think would work, but I need to work with them a little bit. Progress is slow because I’m mostly focusing on doing what amounts to editing the older stuff.
• I’m failing at my reading program, but as I get better at sleeping correctly, my hope is that I’ll be able to write and work from 5-6 until whenever I have to leave the house, and then I’ll use the evening to read, spin and knit.
• I think we’re going to be placing the order for my new spinning wheel. I’ve decided that I’m going to be ordering a number of extra ratios as well Sqee!
• For a morning getting this wordpress mu thing to work was pretty good.
• I’ll be able to do everything that I wanted to do and more using MU. It needs some work, and I have to set up the new sites, of course, but I like the possibilities that are opening up. This also makes doing things like podcasting will be really really straightforward once it happens.
• At some point tychoish will move back in with tealart, (and I hope as will chris’ site, though that’s up to him,) nothing, would, I think, actually change from your perspective, but it makes me happy to be able to use one true system to run them all.

I’d hate to see a list when I actually did have something to say. sigh

Onward and Upward!

Good Morning Friends.

I’d like to be able to say that I got a lot of things done yesterday, and while I think I had, on the whole, a really good day, I do think that it was not nearly as productive as I might have liked. Alas. But things need to get done, and they don’t do themselves.

I did, yesterday, finally get a real keyboard for use at my desk. My hands like this new set up a lot, its nice when the keys go down all the way. It has lead to a number of quick realizations: - The arrow keys are too far away. I finally understand the vim convention to use “h-j-k-l” keys as directional keys in command mode. - I use command enter as a personal command trigger, and it makes little sense on “real” keybaords. - Always, but particularly now, If I’m going to learn and use vim I need to find a good way to map the escape key to something closer. I was think F3 or F4, mostly because my caps-lock key is already “control.” Sigh. I’m a dweeb. - Actually I think I rarely use the right-shift key, I wonder if that could become escape? Key re-mapers, be in touch with me.

I finished the first new scene for Breakout and did some more structural work. I have a system established for the missing part, and it’s going better. My task for the moment is to work on editing and going through what I’ve already written and try to integrate it into the hypertext. While I feel uncomfortable writing short works that stand on their own, I like writing the small bits. So progress here is good.

I think that at some point in the next couple of weeks, I’ll begin posting little bits, here and there, of what I’m working on for Breakout. Just because I can.

I’ve been giving some thought to the development of my Internet projects. While I really like drupal, and I do want to do something new with TealArt, and I think that I’ve made some important progress, it’s going pretty slowly, and I’m starting to realize (finally) that there’s too much recreation of the wheel.

The other thing that I realized in the past few days is that, since I started tychoish.com in June I’ve been averaging about 20,000 words a month. I don’t know, I think that’s rather a lot of words. While I really like writing these entries, and I think there’s something that I’m doing differently this time around, I think it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if I spent my 20k of blogging words a month writing things that were less drivel-y. Still blogging about the same, but if I blogged actual fiction or something…

So I’m actually leaning towards ditching the drupal project and cooking something up using wordpress and the instance tychoish.com as the “home” of my sites. I’ll need to stew on that for a whilew, but I think it might be able to resolve the conflict of these last three paragraphs with one solution, but we’ll see, of course.

Ok, I think I’ve blathered enough here. Have a great day, and I’ll catch you on the flip-side.

Onward and Upward!

Update: I totally take this entire post back, I said, “oh, let me try this little thing out, and see what happens, and broke the whole thing, in a way that will take me awhile to fix, but will avoid running thousands of instances of wordpress. Sorry about this. Cheers, tycho”

Second Update: Ok, I have a working installation of WordPress MU installed on tealart, and everything seems to work pretty well. In fact, really quite well. Including the site that I talked about in this post. Redirects are in place but, check it out at http://tychoish.com/micro/, which is a good place for it.

So after much hemming and hawing about Drupal, I finally gave up on the sort of grandiose plan that I had been laboring under and just installed a new clean instance of wordpress, the same software that I used before, and continue to use on tychoish.com

What changed? This “Prologue” Theme from some of the makers of wordpress.

It’s a really cool idea. Basically, it’s a self-hosted twitter kind of site, except the posts can be a little longer, there are comments, and you can do it more as a performance piece with a group of other people.

Usually I’m not much of a fan of the people who try and get software like wordpress to do things that it really wasn’t designed for. But for some reason I rather like this particular usage, and don’t mind the fact that what’s happening behind the scenes is semi-kludgy.

Actually what’s happening behind the scenes is even more kludgey because even the version hosted on wordpress.com doesn’t have a loop in it. Loops are the wordpress way of getting the template to run a number of times so that you get a web log of posts. What this means is, I cannot for devil, on stock version, get the template to show more than one post.

Thankfully I’m a WP genius in the real world and I was able to hack something together that works. For those of you who are playing around at home, it seems like the whole design is based on nested unordered lists. Which is kind of maddening for those of us who love using bulleted lists in our blog posts, but no matter.

Anyway, so yes. There’s a new TealArt. It’s not “for real yet” as I need to find people who want to do this with me. I’m looking at you: vaugish, subjunctus, composerscott, and of course Chris and Dave). Anyone else who wants in and thinks they could post, should just leave a comment and a way for me to get a hold of you and I’ll get you set up. It’ll be fun. No really, it will.

The downside of this is that while my old plan for TA revision hinged around having a site that “did it all,” and would serve as a home for Station Keeping (which is still mostly homeless) and some knitting projects and patterns (which I can run out of what’s already around on tychoish.com pretty effectively.)

My thought for station-keeping at the moment is that I’ll throw another instance of Wordpress on tealart.com, probably at tealart.com/serial, and throw redirections site/duplications up at /hanm and /station-keeping. I need to stew on this for a little while.

This is a really lame journal entry, so I’ll try and post again. But there are things to be done.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Onward and Upward!

I had a good chat with a friend from school last night. It was good, C. was a person who I talked with pretty regularly and we knew each others friends okay, but we traveled in different circles and I don’t think we ever took a class together.

That’s not true. We were in one class together for about 3 weeks until I realized that as philosophically minded as I was (and am), I didn’t really have the time, or wherewithal to take a philosophy class. Particularly an upper level philosophy class when I had no background in the kind of writing or other work that would be required. No, it’s a good thing I dropped that class, but it did mean that C. and I never took a class together. Nevermind, this digression is totally not relevant to any point I’m making.

She asked me, “how are you doing tychoish¹?”

I said: “Stressed, and I’m not sublimating it well.”

Which is true, if a little awkward. I think that’s what graduate school applications are all about. I think it’s probably amazing that I haven’t been more symptomatic earlier.

I have no control over this process, there’s nothing I can do except read more, and wait. For like three weeks, while I slowly become unhinged waiting for something to give.

Usual stress, if you’re on top of things can become inspiration to do other things: knit obsessively, write, and so forth. When you’re buried under coursework, even productive procrastination helps to assuage your sanity, say. But, this graduate school thing? Nothing.

Doing other things mostly just underscores how extremely uncertain the future really is.

On the upside, between meetings and readings today, I have time to write. I also have two episodes of Torchwood to watch. Squee

Onward and Upward!

So I’ve been thinking that I want to take pictures again, at least on a somewhat limited scale for the blog. I don’t have my own digital camera and don’t particularly want to get one at this point.

I do have a really sweet old, manual everything, Nikon that I’m thinking about using. This brings up the following question that I’d like to ask the crowd…

Does anyone know of a good mail order photo processing service that will:

• Develop film and send my negatives back to me.
• Scan the negatives and send me a digital copies of the images, either via the Internet, or by post on CD-ROM.
• Not send me prints, or make me pay for prints.
• I’m looking for digital scans of really high quality. I mean this is film we’re copying off of, and scanning technology is good and bits are cheap. So I think 10 megapixel+ images are pretty reasonable. TIFF or some other uncompressed file format is pretty much required.
• Do this for a competitive price. Service should provide mailers, and I think the total cost should be 5 bucks or less, I think 3-4 is the sweet spot.
• If there was a company that could do this with either black and white or color film, that would be amazing, but I suppose not strictly required. I’ve discovered that my favorite B&W film of yore has been discontinued (Agfapan Pro/APX-100,) so it’s of minimal importance.

If such a service exists that pictures are about 20 cents each, including film, which doesn’t seem too bad. Though you pay a lot for a digital camera up front, and given that I’m largely not interested in producing hard copies of photos, but I enjoy the experience of shooting to film, I think the economy is pretty much the same. Particularly since I have such an awesome camera already. Figure a good 10mp digital camera is several hundred dollars, I’d have to take 1500-2000 pictures before the price of the new camera would really outweigh the cost of processing. Which would take me several years, given my level of involvement. And then you have to figure and you have to figure that like all such technology, after a few years you (or I) might start thinking about an upgrade, which means that price might be a non-issue in the end.

If such a service exists.

Some thoughts on the writing project.

So I’ve begun working on the Breakout hypertext, and I think all of my tedious regular expressions work actually made this work out pretty well. I’m really happy with the software, which is something--particularly given the digital nature of this project--that shouldn’t be ignored. Technology and I need to be working with each other not against each other. And I think that’s the case.

What I’m thinking about/working through at this point is a structural concern. My hope is that the sort of “first layer” of the document will be very encyclopedic, in a sort of lighthearted and friendly parody of wikipedia way. That structure, organized mostly around the ships, years/time periods, and characters is all set up and fairly straightforward. (Note, I’m mostly just thinking about the naming schemes at this point.)

Another layer of this project are what I’m thinking of as supporting documents, things written in character’s own voices, or other things that are “in-world” texts. These are all associated with an encyclopedic article, and numbered sequentially, by order of creation. So I have an article for one of the key characters named “frank” and a supporting document named “frank001”¹.

The next layer, that I don’t have figured out is the “fictionalized” story that I’m writing. I want the document to have a lot of little scenes linked into the supporting documents and to the encyclopedic “articles.” I don’t have any notion of how to name these things. Here are my concerns:

• If I associate them with characters, how do I decide that X scene with 2 or 3 characters is associated with a particular character? Particularly, in a way that will make sense to me in 6 weeks and 6 years.
• If this is the case, how do I distinguish in the namespace between supporting documents and fictionalized narratives?
• How do I give short meaningful names that are distinct and thus identify scenes but that have some sort of systematic scheme. Furthermore how maintain some sort of order without forcing them into a sequential order. Again, using the namespace. So we can’t have scene001, scene002, and so forth.
• While I don’t need the pages to be strictly ordered to reflect the linear story lines, there needs to be some way to organize/grep through the page titles. I’m thinking using the location titles as a way to organize that and then use hidden dotfiles to keep track of the story and the files for my own notes, and then integrate links to the scenes from other pages, using my notes, once I have more meat, as it were, lying around to work with, and there’s a little bit of a Catch-22 here: you need data to play around and get a structure that makes sense, and it’s also hard to write without that structure.

I might have answered my question this is the problem of being an extrovert and a blogger: If you start a question for the crowd, by the end of your post you’ve probably answered it. I would still like input if you have it ;).

Here’s a basic report for today, with a more detailed list to follow:

Today was a weird day. I spent my morning doing some programing/computer things. (Kludge firmly planted in fist), and then I helped a friend do some moving (more tomorrow.) I got a little bit of writing in and then there’s a dinner party and probably some knitting, and then bed. Sweater class tomorrow.

• I didn’t sleep enough last night; I was too wired from the drive, I had that low level awareness that you need for drives, but I was bodily exhausted. So sleeping was hard.
• I decided on my trip, as I mentioned last night, that I have a new vision for Breakout, I have a Kludgey solution that will make this technically possible, and I’m looking forward to it.
• Basically I’m going to do Breakout as a hypertext thingy. I guess in a way this means that there will never be a Breakout novel. Which is ok. It frees some energies up because I think I want to play with shorter forms for a while. I think I’d like to write another novella/novelette, and this will give me the chance to do that.
• The hypertext will let me write this story without having to fight it. I think a lot of fiction writing, in the traditional mode, is all about making that thing in your head get to other people in a common format. To use a computer metaphor, the Novel is like being restricted to communicate the content of your mind via the WiFi standard: you have to transmit your radio signal in a very precise sort of way. This hypertext, I hope, will be more like speaking, in contrast.
• My coding/programing thing, was just to make sure that I could script the deployment of this system in a way that I was comfortable scaling as the project grew from a few thousand words to several tens of thousands of words, and from a couple of dozen pages to many dozens of pages. Someday, I’ll write about that, because I think getting the content to work the way I want it, is probably actually pretty easy, and it might be good for other people to have this information.
• I’m not going to have any sort of release for a long time, I should disclaim, but I’m working on it in a new way.
• I haven’t done any work on the new TealArt site. And Breakout would probably be out at both TealArt and tychoish, in the end.
• I haven’t knit anything. I made a mistake, as I might have mentioned the other day, and haven’t brought myself to deal with it yet. My sock bag is still in the car, so I don’t really have anything else to work on, so with luck I’ll have fixed it by the end of the evening.
• Randal Schwartz, one of the hosts behind the open source podcast (FLOSS “Weekly”) I mentioned yesterday, saw the google juice and commented (woot! auto-notifiers, I suppose; not linking to it in this post for that reason I guess.) It’s not actually a weekly, which is fine by me, because I am all sorts of behind on my podcast listening.

Ok, this entry is cooked, and so is, I think dinner. So I’m going to jet! Have a good weekend. I’ll be back tomorrow…

Onward and Upward!

So I’m trying really hard to get back into the novel I’ve been working on, off and on for a few months. I’m not really “getting into it,” and I’m just not into it. While I’ve spent a lot of time developing it and a bit of time working on it, it’s been a morning and afternoon here and there. I’d like for something to happen with this project, but I need to take a step back and think about it. This entry is part of this “step back.”

One of my issues, is that this project deals with how histories are remembered. How do we think about what has happened before now, and how does this affect our development in the future. This is a key part of my academic interests, and I thought that it would be fun to--in my interim year--explore this idea from a fiction stand point.

The issue that I’m having--and I think that processing this will help as I move into graduate school--is that I’m not sure, exactly what I think about this. The story I’m trying to tell, or that I thought I was trying to tell, incorporates three distinct generations. The second happens 40 years after the first, and the third happens about 200 years after the second. There are different casts of characters in each period, clearly. What I’m hoping is that this set up will let us explore these memories in a controlled way that simply can’t be done in the laboratory.

I should note that I’m being pretty open with this story, because the story isn’t built on suspense, in the way that say the Novella is. There are crises that the characters have to deal with, and I’m not going to talk about that, but in a lot of ways tychoish is my personal notebook, and this is an entry where I’m using it as such.

One of the problems that using fiction as a way to get around the constraints of the lab is that you have to have a notion of what would happen in the lab. And this is perhaps part of the reason why I need to be a researcher as well: I’m not really sure what would happen. I know that somethings happening, but I’m interested in an area that’s pretty unexplored and I take a vaguely quantitative/grounded theory kind of tact. And I guess I could come up with pretty specific predictions about the outcomes of a given situation if needed; but I’m not sure that this kind of knowing/theorizing is right for building a story.

So I think that I need to go back over what I’ve written and my outline for this project and make it more teleological and theoretically specific in a connected point of view. Thus far, I’ve been more concerned with making sure that the plot gets from A to B and less concerned with the embellishment (which is important during some stages of the planning, I think, as long as it’s balanced.) I also I had a compulsive motif thus far which I either need to punch up a lot, or change, because it’s too subtle and doesn’t hang “right” at the moment.

The other problem--and this is the same problem that I had with Another Round--the abortive attempt at a second novel that I started right after I finished my oft-mentioned and supremely horrible first novel--is that I had a large story about a huge number of characters who weren’t in a position to really cary a plot on their own. AR became Station Keeping, which I think does work on some level in part because it’s not a novel, and in part because we’ve been able to correct some of the problems since it’s a total re-imagination, not a reprocessing of the original story (All of station keeping has been written for station keeping, even if there’s an old doc file on my computer that tells a similar story with similarly named characters.)

Now, Breakout isn’t the same mistake. There are characters that can cary the story, the problem is that I think the story is still too cosmic in a lot of ways, so while taking a step back to think about where I am, in a lot of ways I need to get closer to the story and the characters, and while I need to have a better concept of the bigger picture, I need to focus less on the bigger picture.

I think I have writing to do.

Onward and Upward!