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]

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.

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.)

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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.

[1]	Apologies to H.S. for the liberties I've taken with her words.

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.

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!

[1]	I'm aware this sentence ended in a preposition. Piss off.

[2]

I had the longest run of "highest-possible C" grades on my papers in high school English, and while I think I might have managed to average out to a B, mostly, that always felt like an accomplishment. In a lot of ways, my failure to achieve in high school English is probably mostly responsible for the fact that I avoided writing almost entirely in college.

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.