Topic: Posts

• Agile Authoring: Collaborative Writing with SVN It’s a good introduction to SVN that I think I’ll probably pass on to the first person that wants to write a paper with me. Also, it has the most clear description of how merging/conflict resolution happens. I think if I were collaborating with people and I’d want to use git, though.
• unphotographable There’s something about this site, pictures that didn’t get taken are described in 150-300 words, that strikes me as so very Internet circa late 1990s in an endearing sort of way. Poet friends might be entertained or horrified. Cant decide which.
• feminist sf blog - I’m going to start blogging every now and then to this group blog on feminist science fiction. I’ve been reading it for many many months, and I really like what this blog does, and I’m looking forward to contributing. It also means that that I won’t post quite so obsessively here, but then you never know.
• tealArt micro - the microblogging thing that I wrote about a few days ago, is almost ironed out for prime time in the new system. Now I just need to get the rest of the site setup.

Late Breaking news: Positive feedback from a graduate school program that I’m pretty excited about. Nothing definitive. More news as it develops (slowly.)

I described what I’m doing with Breakout at the moment, as an attempt to write an “object oriented novel.” Which sounds a lot like some sort of quest in search of some mcguffin ring or orb or something, but in fact I’m trying to draw a connection to the object oriented mode of computer programing.

“Ah? What’s that?” You ask?

Well as I understand it, object orientation encourages programers to write and deal with code as a series of objects (and classes and methods, etc, but lets just call it a bunch of units objects), that each do something, or are something. So rather than writing a program that tells the computer to do a list of things (procedurally) you set up an environment and allow the computer to respond to things that the user does. Generally speaking. Does anyone with actual coding experience want to clarify this explanation? Because I’m not going to act like I’m some sort of authority on computer science, I’m just fascinated by different ways of thinking and problem solving.

Anyway, why is object orientation good? It means that code is more modular and easier to find and reference particular things. Because rather than have to search/grep through a long list of ordered directions (that probably has a lot of overlap, because there are certain procedures that you’re likely to have to perform more than once in non-OO code…) the objects are all sorted and ready to be referenced later when you need them.

Ok, so lets extend the metaphor to the novel and to fiction.

Our classic form is basically a long, ordered list of information which is processed linearly. Thousands of paragraphs, dozens of chapters, and an ass load of words. It’s great, when it works, it’s easy to screw up, and there are some stories that work really great in this format and some that do not.

While you can write novels in a more modular sense, it’s my sense that even if people jump around a lot in a story. They pretty much write from beginning to end in at least a loose sense anyway. There are of course exceptions. But the end product is very linear (people don’t really read book-length fiction out of order even if they were written out of order.)

My definition of a fiction-object is pretty loose, basically a unit of story/narrative/fiction-essay that conveys a piece of meaning in the context of the story. Objects¹ tend to be between about 250 and 1250 words, with the sweet spot being about 750 words, which is conveniently, the perfect length for my average scene, and the attention span of most users of the Internet for reading (where this project will be read).

What will make this a novel rather than a bunch of vinegettes/scenes/chunks, is the hyperlinking and inclusions that the html and a bit of PHP will allow, with a very thin layer of “guide” material to make the pages easy to navigate. I think I’ve mentioned this before on this blog, but the basic idea is that most of the document will be stories and “writings” by the characters, but there’ll also be a little content written as parody in an encyclopedic style that will help connect things.

And what’s better is that this pace is really sort of ideal. I get to spread out editing and drafting because editing is what leads to the creation of new content (“If I fix this up, I’ll need to continue this plot, linked to this phrase”) and as readers of this blog know, I’m really good at 500-800 word pieces, so it’s a comfortable length, as long as I’m not expected to tell self contained stories within those bounds: and you don’t want any chunk to be self contained, because once it is totally encapsulated, people stop reading. I suppose this is where the analogy breaks down.

But it’s a good idea. I’ll get a chunk out to you all in a few days, I hope.

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!