I said to a new writing friend “I’m young, particularly given that anyone under the age of 40 in the science fiction community is considered ‘a young writer.'” Which is, more or less true (on both counts,) and brought on a couple of trains of thought that I’d like to explore in a bit more depth:

1. The “youth” of a writer is long, indeed much longer than one would expect.

2. I’ve found a community of science fiction writers. Admittedly I’m new and very much on the outside, but I find it delightful that all of the “things I do,” are part of communities one sort or another: Sacred Harp singing, Morris Dancing (in the Midwest, particularly,) Contra Dancing (on the East Cost, particularly,) Free/Open Source software, blogging, and apparently Science Fiction writing.¹

The Portrait of the Author During Youth

I’ve written here before about the challenges and inherent problems of “being a writer:” the work we do is potentially hard to understand, good writing is more than the sum of its parts, and because writing is a sign of education for most people, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out (even those of us who “are writers”) to figure out what’s “writing,” and what’s just throwing words together.

Now to be fair, I’m not complaining that the period of “youth” as a writer is so long. This standard seems wrapped up in the idea that a large component of being a “real writer,” is having lived long enough to have enjoyed a great deal of unique experiences (which can inform your work,) and also to have had enough time writing “crap” to be able to have the (learned) skill of being able to construct quality texts.

It’s really hard to tell people, epically the young, that they need to “wait until they’re older.” But I think once we (I) get done with the pouting, there’s a pretty strong silver lining: the extended adolescence of the writer provides a longer window to read, to experiment, to apprentice to other writers, and to grow as a writer. Additionally, if the “youth” of a science fiction writer is longer than it is for writers in other fields (and I suspect it is, slightly,) the science fiction community has created a way to compensate for the exclusion of science fiction from most academic writing programs. These are all largely good things, to my mind.

Community Discourses

I think communities are fascinating, and I’m delighted to touch so many different and interesting communities. It seems to me that the formation of communities is very much not a project for youth. As young people, our communities are local, and based on where we go to school, where we live, even where we work. The communities I’m thinking about there are, in turn based on what we’re interested in and what we love to do. Although there’s a potential for insularity and self-selecting qualities, there’s also a great potential for diversity. There are a lot of different kinds of science fiction writers, sacred harp singers, folk dancers, open source hackers, and so forth.

There’s another interesting set of common factors for these communities: they’re all built around shared experiences and activities in the “real world” (as it is,) but the members of these communities tend to be scattered across a given geographic area. Though I don’t have much to compare this to, personally, but I think the ways that these communities are supported and connected through the Internet. As much as Facebook irritates me on a technological level, its done it’s job.

The principals under which communities function and adhere are not something I have a terribly firm grasp of, I must confess, but I know what I find myself in one, it’s a good thing indeed.

A few years ago, highly citational, link/youtube video blogs came back into style again. This time rather than calling them blogs, we called them “tumblelogs.” I never really got into it, though I tried, and even my original inspiration for starting tychoish.com was to do a more “tumblelog-esque” blog.It never quite worked out. Then I read this post by Michael Coté which inspired a few things:

First, it got the following title to stick in my head and refuse to get out. Second, it left me with the idea that, although successful, sites like tumblr and to a different extent posterous basically ruined the tumblelogging revival.

Here’s the thing about tumblelogs: they worked and worked so well because they were efficient, because the people creating tumblogs were doing something unique and had unique voices, because you could keep your pulse on most of a single discourse by watching only a few sites/rss feeds. And then it became, very suddenly, trivial to make a tumble log. And so everyone had a tumblelog, and it was like blogging was new again, except things “meme’d out” at an epic pace and it became difficult to track what anyone was saying. It was like a distributed denial of service attack on our attention spans.

And as the dust settled, tumblelogs, at least as far as I could see, became less about a sort of delightful amalgamation of interesting content and more about templates, about piping in a fire hose of content from delicious/twitter/etc. So not only were there too many tumblelogs, but the style had devolved somewhat into this weird unedited, awkwardly template-ed mass of “crap” that is (in my opinion) quite hard to read or derive value from.

What Made Tumblelogs Work Originally

• The systems that powered them were kludgy but they made it very possible to post content easily. That’s a good thing.
• They used a unique sort of web design where design elements (tables/grids/CSS magic,) reflected and accented the content type.
• They were largely editorial functions. People followed tumblelogs because their authors were able to filter though content with exceptional speed and grace, and in the process of filtering provide real value.
• They were multimedia, and incorporated many different kinds of content. Not just links, not just embedded youtube videos, but snippets of IM and IRC conversations, song lyrics, pictures from flickr, and so forth.
• projectionist one of the first and best, was a group effort: when group blogs work, they really work. The tumblelog, seems like an ideal platform for group blogging.

How We Can Make Tumblelogs Work Again

• We use publishing systems and tools that are unique and that stretch and bend the form. A tumblelog theme for Wordpress, will probably always reek like wordpress. Same with other popular content management systems. Tumblelogs work because they’re not just blogs, they need to distinguish themselves both visually, and in terms of how their authors write the content.
• We undertake tumblogs as a collaborative effort. Group projects complicate things, of course, but they also create great possibilities.
• Vary content, intentionally, post quotes, chat excerpts, links, videos, lyrics, etc. Make sure that there’s a great deal of diversity of content. This is perhaps a problem to be solved in software, at least in port.
• Emphasize and cultivate editorial voice, and create an interface that forces authors and editors to touch the data.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

ETA: I’ve started to work on this wiki page outlining a “tumble manager” tool. I also did a bit of textual refactoring on February 27, 2010

I suppose I should apologize for the awful relationship between the title and what I’m about to write about. Titles, particularly for blog posts should be functional and descriptive: google won’t enjoy or take pleasure in your puns. Nevertheless…

I’ve been working on something of binge of blog posts to prevent this from happening again any time soon, and I’ve noticed something: my posts aren’t nearly as epic as they used to be. Nothing that I have in my drafts folder is longer than 750 words, and most of the posts are under 650.

This probably calls for some sort of celebration.

I’m notoriously long-winded, and although I’ve been a really bad practitioner of “keep your blog posts short, concise, and clear,” I really do think that there’s a sweet spot for website-based content around around 600 words that’s really easy to read and comprehend on a computer screen. Even if most of my posts are a bit over this mark.

So what gives? why have I finally been able to figure out how to say what I want to say in fewer words? Here are the current theories:

• The writing I do for the day job is teaching me (slowly) to be a bit more concise.
• My self imposed schedule is forcing me to be a bit more granular in the topics I choose to attack in a single blog post.
• I’m getting to the point quicker. I don’t feel like I’m spending as much time running around my arguments attempting to explain the premise.
• I’ve become more of a textual stylist than I ever used to be before. While I don’t think I’m a stunning prose stylist, I’m much more aware of how my paragraphs come together these days, and I think that leads to more clear prose.
• I’m getting better at using unordered lists to organize information rather than as a rhetorical crutch. (Most reflexive bullet point ever.)

I’ve written about this before. I had a class in college, where the professor assigned these short (250 words,) “journal” entries that were due on a weekly basis. They didn’t have a topic, and most people reflected on the readings. I reflected on my other classes and how they related to the topic of the class I was taking. Half way through my roomate (who was also in the class,) commented that I hadn’t actually written about the readings for the class.

“The journal entries don’t have topics. And I’m writing about the core material of the class,” I said.

“You have to admit that it’s a bit absurd,” she said.¹ She was right.

I wrote the professor who was apparently fine with my eclectic interpretation of the assignment. The pieces were mostly technical exercises in being clear and concise, and she thought my entries were fine, if a bit esoteric. (I think the exact words were something along the lines of “delightful and widely synthetic.") And so I kept writing those kinds of pieces.

A year later I started really getting into blogging. The rest is history. When I first started at this, I enjoyed the freedom being able to write about whatever I wanted. Now I cherish the structure more than anything.

Its funny how things change, sometimes.

I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Martians, on my Kindle the other day (the short review: It was great, I don’t know how I felt about the poetry at the end, but I liked the collection.) and promptly began reading this month’s Asimov’s. The first story is an alternate history/fantastic history/I-think-there’s-science-fiction-coming-but-it’s-not-here-yet, piece and I can’t bring myself to really read get into it. It’s well written, and I even find myself delighting at the text (in a technical sense.) I think the issue that I’m running into is that I don’t really get the alternate history thing.

Which is, you know, weird. I should break out and say that my fiction tends to be very historically concerned. I’m fascinated by history and there are a lot of historiographical themes and ideas in the stories I write. But they’re all set in the future, and try as I might, I don’t really have much interest in writing stories set in the past of our world. Alternate or otherwise.

Maybe it has something to do with my view of history. I tend to take a big picture approach to history and I tend to think that single events and single individuals rarely really affect history. If you called me a determinist I’d probably gnash my teeth for a few moments and then agree. Which makes constructing alternate histories sort of difficult. Add to that the fact that quasi-deterministic big pictures, though probably accurate and helpful, don’t lend themselves to good stories. When you don’t feel like your characters--any of them--have agency, it doesn’t make for terribly interesting story telling.

At least for me. I think other people can pull it off.

This whole “I want my science fiction to be set in the future,” thing isn’t something I can rationalize or support very well. Clearly I don’t find the past to be a very good “escape.” The future is fun, vast, and full of possibilities and enables the sorts of things that I enjoy most in science fiction: the ability to engage in a critique of the present, high energy stories with adventure, and for lack of a better term, stories that impart a “sense of wonder.” There’s more out there, I just can’t seem to muster the interest.

This isn’t to say that I don’t sometimes find myself enchanted by non-futuristic stories, it’s just not a terribly frequent or predictable sort of experience. I should also be clear, I’m not of the opinion that when science fiction stories talk about the future and are set in a future, that they are about anything except the present at all.

And I’m not terribly proud of this. I suppose we all have our things.

I worry that my tastes aren’t sophisticated enough, that I enjoy stories for the wrong reasons, or that I get too caught up in the scenery and forget to pay attention to what really matters. Despite this whole “writer thing,” that I have going on these days I don’t have very much formal training in literature. It’s sort of awkward to say “I feel like I’m not a very good reader,” that’s definitely something that I battle with.

For those of you who are part of the larger community of science fiction/fantasy/genre fiction readers (which I think necessarily includes writers,) I’d be very interested to learn your thoughts on this subject: how do you relate to the future in the stories that you write and read? The past? Alternate histories? Is there some connection that I’ve mostly failed to see? Am I not alone in this?

Thank you (preemptively) for your feedback.

The Context

• git writing on wikish.
• haikus in git
• writing like a programer
• git thoughts

git is this version control system that’s designed to be used in a distributed manner, and supports a very divers and non-linear workflow. While it’s designed to support the work of software developers--particularly in large projects like the linux kernel--at the core, git is just a file system layer that has an awareness of time and iteration. It also does its magic on any kind of text files… code or writing. I use git to manage a lot of my writing--indeed, most of my digital life, which is a bit weird admittedly; and as a result people on the Internet, not to mention my coworkers,come to me with git questions from time. This post is a response to a more recent change.

How I Work

I have two kinds of repositories: general repositories which store a bunch of different kinds of files that I need to work: the general repositories that store files that I always need to get things done, and specific project-only repositories that only have the text (and possibly notes) for a very specific project. I also have a “writing” repository where I do drafting for the blog, and start writing projects that I’d like to version, but are too small yet for their own project repositories. The brief overview:

• garen is like my home directory within my home directory, and it has config files, scripts. and other daily essentials.
• org stores my org-mode files.
• fiction projects: I have five repositories in ~/ that store fiction projects, that I’m theoretically working on in some capacity, though I haven’t touched most of them regularly.
• writing holds blog drafting, and a couple of not-exactly-fiction, projects that I’m not quite ready to admit exist.
• website content: wikish, tychoish.com, cyborginstitute.com, the cyborg institute wiki and a few other website projects that I’m involved with have repositories to store their content.

The lesson here, about repository organization, is that git wants you to have distinct repositories for different projects. Its possible to merge repositories together (really!) and also to separate the histories of specific directories into their own repositories if you’re so inclined.

I write in emacs almost exclusively, I sometimes use magit, which is a delightful interface to git that works within emacs in a very emacs-centric way. If you use dired, magit will be familiar. Having said that, I mostly just add files, make commits and push repositories. Although I’ve been very interested in flashbake for some time, I’ve never really used it: it seems designed for people who aren’t used to version control or git, and the fact that I am means that it feels cumbersome to me. I suppose I should take this as a challenge, and attempt to hack it into something more usable from my perspective, but I’ve not felt the urge yet.

I use gitosis (but it’s in the debian repositories) on foucault (my server) to manage the publication of my git repositories. I push regularly, both to make sure that all of my machines are up to date, and also as a way of keeping my systems backed up. While I don’t take snapshots of my systems, I’ve been able to set up systems and been up and running inside of ninety minutes after reimaging a laptop without loosing a single bit. Although unorthodox, git is my backup strategy, and the restores work fine. I strongly recommend having your own git hosting set up. It’s not difficult, and while I think git hub is awesome on it’s own terms, independence and self sufficiency is really important here.

I don’t really take advantage of any branching and merging in git, though I’ve played with it enough to know how it works. I do have a branch in the repository for the novel I’m writing for an editor to be able to edit the novel as I write on it without needing to see their changes and comments until I get to that point.

And that’s sort of it. I use jekyll (or an old personal fork) and soon to be cyblog) as well as ikiwiki to publish content, but other than that, I just write stuff.

In any case, if you have thoughts on the subject I’d love to see your input on the wikish git writing page.

Write on!

Alternate Title: “How to start a collaborative writing project or die trying,”

Step 1: Lock yourself in your office, fire up Emacs, and write an initial draft from beginning to end yourself.

Step 2: Post it on the Internet.

Step 3: Encourage contributions and hands on feedback from your collaborators. Have a piece of cake.

You may thing that I’m kidding, but it’s true. I think there’s a misconception that the way to write something with other people follows a path that might look like: having a meeting to establish the common goals and an outline of what needs to get said, and then another meeting to divide up who is going to write want, and then people go back and write their little parts, and then you mash them all up and everyone rewrites their part till it meshes with the other parts, and then you pray it says what you need it to say, and doesn’t need further revising--except it sort of dose, so you repeat the whole process over again, to revise the text, except with editing instead of writing. And because each stage requires endless conversation, when you don’t have the benefit of face-to-face meetings, things can take a long time: so long, in fact, that most people will have probably lost interest long before something has been written. The short of it is that this method, though very democratic and open seeming, isn’t.

I think there’s a fear, that when a single person puts a lot of individual energy into a text (or any kind of project, really,) and doesn’t consult with collaborators at every turn that it somehow becomes not a collaboration. This is emphatically not true. There is significant difference between endless group process and the collection of meaningful feedback; a real distinction between a text created with a process that involves many people, and a text that many people can agree represents their interest, purposes, and needs.

I think, though I’m not certain, that one could replace the words “writing” and “text” in the above, with “programing” and “code” but I don’t know for sure.

At work, I have a moto: “you can’t edit it if it doesn’t exist yet.” The more interesting thing, I think, in every context is when you go off into your own office, fire up the emacs, write something, and then say “so how does this look?” People sometimes say, “nice, but you used ‘setup’ as a verb in the third paragraph,” or “ok, but you left out a section about flux capacitors in section two, and I think that’s crucial for understanding most of section three,” but these are problems that are fairly easily addressed.

Now it could be the case that I’m just that awesome (unlikely), but I think it boils down to the fact that most people don’t understand how to make texts. I also think that a lot of “group process,” can be obsoleted by an individual who can produce something, and has a good sense of the group’s desires, and who knows how to check in with various group members at the right moments. While these skills can be listed quite effectively, and it’s true that there is no rocket science involved: some things are easier said than done.

Not every collaboration works, and there are a lot of variables at play in any situation where a group of people must come together to make something, but in nearly every situation beginning with “hey, I want make something with you, look at this draft,” is better than “I was thinking about making something with you but I wanted to get your feedback first.”

Just sayin'…

“Being a writer,” is a strange thing. I’ve written about this before, but there’s more here. I had a conversation with Caroline about what it means to be a writer and I thought some of the things we came up with were pretty good. I hope I’ve done a sufficient job of capturing what we talked about.

One of the things that we emphatically agreed upon was the fact that writing, despite being something that we’re all taught to do in school, as part of being “an educated person” is not something that everyone is particularly capable of.¹ Not that that’s a bad thing. Having said that, because everyone reads at least in some capacity, and most people know how to write, when you tell someone “I’m a writer,” or you say something like “I’ve been working on this novel for about 16 months,” you’ll get funny looks. Guaranteed.

There are, I think, a few major issues at play here:

1. Because reading is an automatic facility for most people, I’m convinced that laypeople are very prone to misunderstanding the amount of work that any given text represents.

I might even go so far as to say, writing is not something that people automatically think of as “work.” I’m going to sit down and spend some time talking to imaginary people in my head who live on a spaceship a thousand years hence, in an attempt and hope that I can productively explore the post-colonial condition in a new and different way, doesn’t sound like it should be hard. But it is, and I think much more difficult than the kind of writing that I do professionally.

2. Because most writing education focuses on grammar and extensive reading (which are great things,) the gulf between “people who write” and “people who don’t,” is often not about writing technically solid prose or not (despite the fact that in primary and secondary education, this is the major p).² Rather, the ability to understand something (a process, event, or story) in enough detail to describe with an awareness of an audience is the real challenge.

Indeed when successful, all of the “work” of writing is entirely opaque to the reader.

3. Writing a text (an article, essay, or story, as opposed to a memo or message,) is not something that an individual can--or should be expected--to accomplish independently. You can’t tell a writer “go write this story, and when you get back we’ll print it.” Editors, from the person who says “I need you to write this,” to the people who give you feedback as you progress on a project, to the people who prepare a text for publication. You can’t do it alone: there are too many conflicting interests at play in the writing of any text that make it challenging for a single person to write alone.

I don’t bring these up to complain. Nor do I think the solution to these problems is to “just give writers a bit more respect.” Knowing these things about writing, I think we could, quite productively, change the way we educate students to write. It might also, I think lead to some productive reorganizations of how writers and editors organize themselves to get “content” produced.

After a while of talking through these ideas, the conversation produced the following gem, which I simply must share with you:

caroline: you know how everyone has a memoir now?

tycho: yeah…

caroline: you know what I don’t care about?

caroline: most people’s memoirs

Onward and Upward!

I remember having this epic fight conversation with a poet-friend from college about aesthetics and art and literature. I’m not sure exactly what brought it on, or particularly why I thought my side of the argument was in any way defensible, but it came back to me recently. So as I’m wont to do, here’s a post in review of these thoughts.

Act One: Poems are Just Words

I think in the first iteration of the argument, I took the opinion that poems existed (mostly) to transcend the experience of the written word on the page. That the project of poetry was about getting past words and constructing some sort of image or transcendent experience, or something.

Did I mention that I wasn’t a poet? I’m not. Not at all. I’m not even particularly good at reading poetry. I’ve sometimes written poems, and even I am a good enough reader to tell that they’re crap.

In any-case, H.S.’s argument was that poems were just words on paper (or screens)¹ and that’s it. That writing itself is an act of putting words together, and experimenting with how words come together in (quasi) fixed mediums. And nothing more.

I don’t really know what my beef in this argument was. This was certainly before I started writing again. I guess my argument was that writing was simply an imperfect means of conveying an idea, and the real work and creativity of “being a writer” was really in coming up with good ideas and practical logic that illustrates your arguments.

And while that’s true, from one perspective if you squint at things the right way, I don’t think it’s really true about writing as a whole, and certainly not creative projects. It might be true that that’s a pretty good summary of academic writing, particularly entry level academic writing, but I’m not sure.

When I find writing that I’m impressed with, I keep coming back to the idea that it’s just “words on the page,” and somehow that makes. My skill--insofar as I have one--and the asset that makes me employable (I think) is the fact that I can turn ideas and thoughts (which are thick on the ground) into something useful and understandable by normal folk.

Act Two: Rethinking William Gibson

So, ok, lets be honest. I don’t really like William Gibson’s work very much. I thought Neuromancer expressed a social commentary that was totally obvious almost instantly, and it hadn’t stood the test of time particularly well, and I felt it sort of read like the rehab journal of an addict who hadn’t quite cleaned up entirely. This was just my reaction on reading it, and not a particularly well reasoned critique.

I mean I will acknowledge the book’s impact, and I think I read it too late which probably accounts for my reaction. And although I responded so poorly to it, I don’t really have a lot of a problem with literature that is of its time. In any case, I was thinking about Gibson recently, and casually comparing him to some other writers, and I found myself saying (of another writer of the cyberpunk ilk), pretty much without realizing it:

…which is fine, except [they] didn’t have Gibson’s literary chops. I mean Gibson’s work is incredibly frustrating but his writing is superb.

And I sort of realized after I’d said the above, that I had inadvertently conceded the argument from Act One, years later. Sure there’s a lot of idealism in writing, but writers aren’t differentiated on the basis of how awesome their ideas are. It all comes down to how they put the words together.

The side effect of this transposition is that, somehow, I’ve started to be able to read (and enjoy) short stories more than I ever was before. And much to my surprise, I’ve been writing the end of this (damned) novel as a sequence of short stories. At least in how I’ve been thinking of it. I could go on with more and additional examples, but I think I better leave it at that for now. Thoughts? Anyone?