About a week ago, by your reading, I finished writing a short story. The fact that I was writing a short story when I should have been working on the novel is perhaps a bit distressing, but I’ve taken the opinion that any work on short fiction--particularly short fiction where I’m excited about the project and reasonably happy with the results--is worth what ever attention and love I can spare for it.

So I took a break from my novel to write a short story. Most of my attempts at short fiction are so abortive that I was hesitant to even talk about it on the blog lest I jinx myself in some way.

But nevertheless, I got to a first draft. A first draft, that has an ending which doesn’t suck. This is a major accomplishment.

I’m not going to talk too much about it now, as it still has to pass muster with my reviewers and get edited into something a bit less rambling, but for right now I’ve chosen to take pleasure in the acomplishment.

I will, however, say that the story is basically a compression of a lot of the ideas in the novel I’m writing. The short story is set about 10-15 years before the story, but it has many of the same core characters, and--I guess--reformulates the core issues in the novel’s story in a different context.

Oh, and it’s a pretty cool space-adventure at the same time.

Because that’s how I swing.

I write this post as I am (theoretically) putting the finishing touches on a short story that I’ve written.

“But shouldn’t you be working on a novel?” You ask.

Well yes. But this short story is related to the novel, and any time I have the overwhelming urge to write a short story, I’m prone to take it, because I’m not much of a short story writer by temperament and I think it’s a good practice/skill to encourage.

Anyway, so I’m writing this short story. And it’s cruising in right around the 6,500-7,500 is word length for the first draft, which isn’t bad. Actually the whole thing isn’t terribly wretched, which is kinda awesome.

In any case, I wanted to explain one part of my challenge in writing and thinking about writing short form.

You see, for a long time, for some reason, I thought that “short stories” were all around 2,000 words, and that longer things were really novellas, or novelettes at the very least.

Which is totally false the shortest (non-flash) short stories are at least 2,000 words (typically) and novelettes start (according to SFWA) at 7,500 words. This was so embeded in my brain, that I would read (or listen) to stories that were clearly 5,000-10,000 words and think to myself “isn’t it amazing how they fit that much story into 2,000 words?”

sigh

And while I’m not sure having a realistic notion of short story length has made me a better writer of short forms, it’s made it possible to write shorter forms.

And that, my friends, is a start.

[Edit: I totally finished the short story and twittered about it yesterday morning, as I’m posting this, I’ll post about that later. Anyway, impeding big news, that I think I’ll be ready to talk about on Monday or so. Stay tuned and have a good weekend.]

As, I’m sure many of you know, language and “what we call things” in the free software/open source world is a huge thing. Some people will probably get mad for my use of the slash in the previous sentence. This post, is mostly for my own good, as an experiment (and for future reference) to see where I stand on various word-choice questions in this area. I’m going to organize the post as a series of (brief) reflections a couple of key words.

Free Software

I think free software, addresses and represents the core of what this whole mess is about. Free software--as an idea--addresses the communities, the “hacking spirit,” the ideological goals, the political and philosophical elements of the community.

It’s also horribly confusing in English, and no matter how often we say “free as in speech” or “free as in freedom,” it’s not really going to get better. I think, also, “libre” is a poor use of the English language, and I cringe a lot when I read it. I’ve taken, when possible to refer to “ideas about software freedom” and “the movement for software freedom,” which works as long as you don’t need to refer to a specific piece of software.

In those cases, I often cave and say “open source software” because it open source is a more clear adjective. I also think that open source describes “the thing” and the “process” more clearly, and that’s an advantage. I dislike that open source, means “not scary to big businesses,” and disregards the fact that this (free/open source) software is better/more valuable than proprietary/closed software because it is free and open source not simply because it happens to be better in quality.

GNU/Linux

I tend to say GNU/Linux, because--at least in my use cases--the kernel isn’t nearly as important to how I think about my operating system as all the tools that surround them, and if the next big thing in the Unix-like (open source) operating system was a Debian or Arch-like system with GNU parts around the FreeBSD kernel or the Solaris kernel, I’m there.

I switched from OS X to GNU/Linux mostly because I wanted: better package management and (oddly enough) to be able to run an X11 desktop. The truth was, I was basically running a GNU(ish) system around Darwin (OS X’s kernel), anyway.

With all luck, I’ll have most of a draft of the short story I’ve been working on done by the time this goes live, but if not certainly rather soon there after. This is an exciting announcement in and of itself, but perhaps the more interesting thing is that in the process of doing this I sank into writing this story in org mode.

My general M.O. for writing for the last several years has just been to write and store the files in markdown and use whatever text editor I fancy. I write the blog this way, I write papers this way. Everything seems to work fine, there are converters for LaTeX, HTML, and the plain text format is absolutely and completely readable to people who aren’t as obsessive about text files as I am.

While I’m a huge org-mode proponent, I don’t tend to think that org-mode makes a particularly good writing environment (or haven’t, heretofore) because unless you use org-mode org files are sometimes a bit ugly, and the syntax is enough different from markdown to confuse me, and…

The general consensus, that I’ve seen is that while org-mode is indeed a great boon to the intensive-emacs user, that it’s not an ideal production editing environment. muse-mode, or my favored markdown-mode might be better if you’re actually writing text.

And then, as I got into the writing of this story, I realized that I was flipping rather seriously (and annoyingly) between my notes for the story and the story I was writing. Also, when I’m writing book-length (or conceptually book-length) work, I tend to break up the text into more manageable chapter-length or scene-length files, which is conceptually useful for me.

In a short story, it didn’t seem to make sense to break things up into more than one file, and after I’d written a couple thousand words, I realized that something needed to be done. I created a file, with some header meta-data (using the yaml form that jekyll), an org-mode statement to define custom-status words that seem relevant to the writing/editing process, and then first level headers define key scenes or breaks in the story. I’ve never written (or read, to the best of my memory) a story that required more than one level of organization (but ymmv), and then--and this is the clever part as far as I’m concerned--property drawers for notes about what happens in the scene.

Property drawers stay folded by default, and are intended to store a collection of key-value pairs, but they don’t get exported by default, and so are a good way to keep your notes and your writing together and then export, as needed when drafting is done.

Also, I’ve recently added the following to my key-binding list, which adds a property drawer to the current heading, which is indeed a good thing:

(global-set-key "\M-p" 'org-insert-property-drawer)

I’ve posted a copy of my template file for your review and edification.

Comments?

In the last several days, I’ve spent a lot of time writing and working on this new novel that seems to be capturing too much of my attention. It’s a nifty story, definitely the best piece of fiction that I’ve written henceforth, despite all my worry, dread, and seemingly limitless self-doubt in relation to the project. Despite the gremlins on my shoulder saying “why aren’t you working on short fiction; why aren’t your characters having more sex; do you really think you can float such a disjointed/complex narrative; do you have a clue where this is going? …and so forth,” I’ve learned a few rather interesting things from this story this past week.

It’s a time travel story, stupid!

Yeah, I’m well into the 7th chapter (of about 12?) and I finally figured out that I was, at it’s core telling a time travel story. No, it’s not a case of getting several tens of thousands of words on paper and realizing that you’re writing the wrong story, but rather that I’ve always thought of it as a quirky space opera, and just this week I realized that what makes it quirky is that it’s fundamentally a time travel story.

Right.

My goal in this project was to write about history and how “history” emerges from “a collection of things that happen” to something more coherent and recognizable as such.

In a weird way, my fiction (since I started writing again in early 2007, at least) have always addressed the issues at the very kernel of my academic/scholarly interest. I’m interested in how communities form, and how people negotiate individual identities amongst groups of people. Open source software, cyberculture in general, and hackers are one way of looking at this that is very much the center of how I’m looking at these questions. Queerness is another. Same kernel.

In any case, history--however defined or used--is a key part of this community-identity-individual loop. Can you participate in the emacs/emacs-lisp community without knowing about the history of the XEmacs fork? Linux without knowing a little about the early days with Minix and UNIX? Git without knowing a little about CVS and the bitkeeper story? If you can, not for very long. There are other more mainstream culture examples as well, Americans and the great depression (particularly Roosevelt’s fireside chats, say?). Queers and stonewall? Etc.

This stuff is, to my mind, an incredibly important factor in “who we are” and how we all exist in our communities and the world at large. And because I’m who I am, I’m writing a story about this.

The science fictional effect, at play is relativity--lacking fantastic super-liminal (FTL; faster than light) space-drives--our characters must endure some pretty intense time dilation during transit: it takes them t weeks to get from planet A to planet B but meanwhile, it’s t years later on both of the planets who more or less share a common time line.

Now I don’t do the math right, for it to work out as being sub-light speeds (exigencies of plot; interstellar spaces are really big), but the time dilation is a huge feature of the story and of (many) main characters place in the world, particularly in contrast to each other.

And thus, in a manner of speaking, it’s a time travel story. Albeit where the time travel is one way (future bound,) linear, based on Einsteinian principals, and common place.

And it took me half the book or more to recognize the story as such, which will--if nothing else--allow me to explain the story a bit better.

In the future Project Xanadu Worked

I’ll probably touch on this later, but I realized (and this might not be particularly unique to my story) but that my characters were interacting with “the database” in the world. An internet-like system, only more structured, and more distributed, easier to search, easier to operate locally.

Which was basically Project Xanadu, on an interstellar scale. The features that my characters take advantage of:

• Distribution and federation of copies: I have ansible technology in the story, but even so, given the trajectories of data storage technology it makes more sense to store local copies of “the database” than it does, to route requests to the source of the data, or even your nearest peer for records. Assume massive storage capability, advanced rsync (a contemporary tool synching huge blobs of data across a network), and periods of, potentially, years when various ships, outposts, and systems would be out of contact with each-other. Nah, store stuff locally.
• Versioning Having a data store that stores data along a temporal axis (versions across time) is handy when you’re working on your computer and you accidentally delete something you didn’t mean to. It’s absolutely essential if you have lots of nodes that aren’t always in constant contact. It means you don’t loose data after merges, it solves some concurrency problems, interstellar data would require this.
• Structure: The contemporary world wide web (The Web) is able to function without any real structure, because we’ve imported data visualization from (more) analog formats (pamphlet layout/design; pages; index-like links, desktop metaphors), and we’ve developed some effective ad-hoc organizations (google, tags, microformats) which help ameliorate the disorganization, but the truth is that the web--as a data organization and storage tool--is a mess. My shtick about curation addresses this concern in one way. Creating a “new web” that had very strict page-structure requirements would be another. In the novel, their database grew out of the second option.

The future is here folks, but you knew that.

Sorry for the puny title. I was thinking about the value of writing, and of “literature,” in our world. Lets call it another post in my sporadic ongoing series of amateur theoretical economics posts. Or something.

The overriding theme of this series has centered on thinking about ways to build business models in a way that represents an authentic (and sustainable) concept of the generation of wealth. Basically, to recognize that wealth is created through the exchange of goods and services which themselves have physical costs, rather than through the exchange of money. Business models which are primarily profitable because they’re designed to cause money to pass through someones hands (who can charge interest on it,) seem flawed from beginning to end. Business models that seem to increase wealth without creating something or doing something in the world, seem fraught with problems.

So then, writing.

Writing is, I thing (inspite/because of my obvious bias) something valuable, and something that has worth, but I don’t think the source of its worth is particularly clear. A lot of literary types are convinced of writing’s power to effect change in the world. Aside from rhetoric (essays, etc.), fiction is a powerful vehicle for cultural critique, and for stimulating thought and wonder in any of a number of areas. Writing provides groups of people with shared experience (“Did you read that book? What did you think?") and which is certainly socially productive.

But that’s not business, or at least that doesn’t suggest some sort of sustainable business model. Long term social value doesn’t translate into a publishing industry that can sustainably fund the efforts/lives of writers. In a larger frame of reference, we should be able to fund and support the lives and efforts of artists without much trouble. In a sustainable way.

I’ve been thinking about trying to tie some sort of notion of sustainability into this evolving economic theory. In one respect economies which value worth, are necessarily sustainable. On the other hand, I totally recognize the logical inconsistencies with saying “art has abstract worth, so we should value it; investment banking has abstract worth, so we should abandon it.”

Also in this nexus of ideas, I’ve been playing with another concept (in a story, of course) regarding how much (and what kind) of work is required to keep a society fed/clothed/healthy decreases with regards to effort and time. Technology is a powerful thing, and it means, fewer people have to farm (per acre) to grow enough food to feed everyone, better/more efficient refrigeration means less food gets wasted. Better shipping technology means we can centralize tasks. All this filters into “less energy spent on survival” and thus more energy spent on more… abstract… endeavors. Supporting writers, hell supporting everyone, is an increasingly logistical problem.

I’m not sure that this translates, very well, into some understanding of busiess models for folks who do work in more “abstract” markets. I do know, (and have talked at some length here) several things about the business model for writers today: It turns out that bloggers are most successful (it seems) when their “blog” functions as advertising for “actual” work in some other arenas. That’s not a bad thing, and really I think “real writers” have a similar gig. From everything I can gather, “Authors” make money from speaking engagements, book signings, academic contracts, and the like. Just as a blog serves to create a market; a book contract serves to create authority. The business model works for a certain class of writing people, but I don’t know how generalizable or future looking this might be.

And maybe that’s part of the worth of fiction, of writing in general, and of my work in general: if we have any chance to explore these sorts of ideas, theories, and potentials, it’s going to be with the help of researchers who write about their findings, essayists who synthesize information in novel ways, and the fiction/literary writers who explore the implications and possibilities.

Onward and Upward!

If you ask a science fiction writer about the future, about what they think is going to be the next big cultural or technological breakthrough they all say something like, “science fiction is about the present, dontchaknow the future just makes it easier to talk about the present without getting in trouble.”

While this is true, it always sounds (to me) like an attempt to force the “mainstream” to take science fiction more seriously. It’s harder to be dismissive of people who define their work in terms to which you’re sympathetic.

I’m of the opinion that when disciplines and genres get really defensive and insistent in making arguments for their own relevancy, it usually reflects some significant doubt.

Science fiction reflects the present, comments on the present, this is quite true (and key to the genre), but it’s also about the future. And that’s ok. Thinking about the future, about possibilities, more than the opportunity for critique is (part) of what makes this genre so powerful and culturally useful. To deny this, is to draw attention away from imaginations of the future sacrifice distracts what probably makes the genre so important.

I wrote a series of articles nearly two years ago to rethink the GTD system, which I think is worth revisiting again. Not the essays, which were from when I called the website “TealArt” (don’t ask) and were before I really discovered free software and open source in a big way; but rather, I think two years out from my original article and even further out from the heart of the GTD fad, I think that it’s worthwhile to explore GTD again.

For those of you playing along at home, GTD (Getting Things Done) is really a “personal productive methodology” designed by David Allen that swept the geek community a few years ago. It’s good stuff, and while it’s certianly not a one-size-fits-all miricle cure for umproductive and overwhelmed folk; it promotes (to my mind) a number of goals that I think are quite admirable:

• Have a single system, that integrates across all aspects of your life. One place where systems can fail is if you’re using different “databases” (in the non-technical sense) to store information and tasks, and you have a piece of information that might fit in either system: when you go to look for it later (or need to be notified by it later) the chance of you missing the task because it’s on the wrong list is much higher if you have more than one place where lists might be.
• Think about tasks and projects being broken into “actionable items,” and have actions be the unit of currency in your system. As you assimilate information be sure to record anything that needs doing and keep it in your system
• Attach two pieces of metadata to your action: project (what larger goal does the action help you acomplish; you’ll likely have a list of these projects), and “contexts” (where do you have to be in order to do the action, things like “phone” “office” “erands”) are helpful for focusing and making it easier to move your projects forward.
• Do regular reviews of the information on your todolists, and spend (an hour?) once a week making sure you’re not foregetting things and that you’ve checked off all the actions that you’ve actually done and so forth.

There are other details, precise methods which GTD people focus on, talk about, and provide in their software applications. Frankly I’ve not read the book and I’m by no means an expert on the subject. I continue to have objections to the system: it assumes large tasks and quickly and easily be broken down into smaller tasks (which isn’t always true), and that projects follow linear and predicatable sequences, which I find to be almost universally false. While the reviews help counteract these sorts of assumptions about projects, I have always tended to find GTD a poor solution to the productivity problem:¹ both for myself and in my observations of how other people work.

At the same time, I think the notion of a single system that comes to the mainstream via GTD and of weekly/regular reviews, another artifact of GTD, are both really helpful and powerful concepts for organizing ourselves. The other aforementioned “features” are helpful for many, but I feel that very often organinzing the “GTD list,” and our lives to fit ino a GTD list is often too much of a burden and gets in the way of doing things.

I’m interesting in finding out how people these days are talking and thinking about GTD these days. I think the fad has died down, and I’m interested in seeing what we’ve as a geeky community have learned from the experience.

Interestingly, I’m probably doing something much closer to what GTD recomended these days than I ever have before. org-mode is (among many other things) a capiable GTD tool. I think it’s successful not simply because it supports GTD, and the task-management features seem to have grown out of an emacs/writing writing platform rather than a calendar platform. The end result is that I’ve found the GTD way to be quite effective, though its largely unintentional.

I’m interested in hearing where your own systems are, and how you feel about GTD these days:

• Do you use GTD or GTD based methodologies for your personal organization?
• If you only use some which, and why?
• If you don’t use GTD, what system if any do you use?
• If you once used GTD but stopped, or have considered using GTD and then didn’t, I’m particularly interested to learn why you came to these conclusions?
• What current factors influence the way that you organize your work?

I hope that covers everyone. I’m particularly interested by how creative folks work, but i think in the right light that covers most of us. I look forward to hearing from you?

Cheers, sam