Topic: Writing

I’m working on laying the seed content for a new wiki that I hope to launch in a few weeks. I want the wiki to be a free text/open source, and I have been giving some thought to the best way to accomplish this. This is, as it turns out, is pretty hard to accomplish: open source software licences are designed (not surprisingly) for software, and while Creative Commons Licences are great, I don’t think they support community authorship in a way that matches with my ideals/gaols.

The brilliance of the GPL (to my mind) is the way that it equalizes the relationship between all contributors (big and small) and between the “authors” and the “users.” While in a lot of open source projects these groups/interests overlap, they don’t sometimes and those cases where those interests might obstruct the freedom of the work, the GPL equalizes it.

There are two mechanisms in the GPL (to my mind) that make this possible: first, the requirement that source code be made available (and reproducible) with any distribution means that you don’t get anything extra because you were/are the original author of the code. The second, is the “viral” or “share alike” provisions where you can trust that anything released under the GPL will stay under the GPL.

While these mechanisms increase freedom and equity in situations where there are a select group of contributors and one legal author¹ the freedoms are most powerful when the boundaries between contributor and author and user are blurred.

This is all very basic stuff in the area of software freedom after all. The truth is that, as near as I understand there aren’t terms that can be used to get a similar effect with non-code projects (exactly.) There are a couple of copy left licenses, issued by Creative Commons and even the Free Software Foundation, but there are problems with both of these strategies. Here are the issues as I see them:

The GNU FDL is designed, primarily for software manuals and documentation in support of free software, and is strategically designed for this kind of text. It, as a result, lacks a certain… grace and elegance for dealing with other kinds of text, particularly when dealing with derivative and physical reproductions of a work.

In contrast, the Creative Commons Licenses² (CC) don’t have a concept of “source,” so that while they provide the same sorts of rights regarding distribution of work (and thereby equalize some of the rights between distributor/user), they don’t facilitate derivative work in the same way that open source licenses do.

I’m mostly worried about the following scenario. Say I release a piece of audio-art in a lossless (high quality; source) format (eg. FLAC/WAV) as well as MP3/OGG file (lower quality; compiled) under a CC license that permits derivative work under a viral/share alike terms. Then you turn around, re-equalize, and mix my audio-art with some other similarly licensed audio, and release it as a derivative work. That’s cool. But the derivative work needed be in the higher quality format, because CC doesn’t have a concept of source. Not having a concept of source doesn’t effect the possibility of derivative works, but it does mean that derivative works are second-class citizens, as it were. CC doesn’t equalize this relationship.

If I’m wrong about this interpretation, I’d love to be corrected, for the record.

For works where there’s a single author, having derivative works as second-class citizens isn’t a bad thing, and I can imagine that it would be seen as a feature in some cases. In cases where a text/work is authored by a community this is a major flaw.

I hear that there’s a project to Simplify the GFDL (or provide a way to use the GPL for documents/texts) that might remedy these problems (haven’t dug through it yet). In the mean time, I’m wondering what folks think on the subject.

My inclination is to just use the GPL with the specification that “source” would be some sort of plain text (ASCII/UTF-8/UTF-16) compatible file. That achieves the goal required, without too much fuss or concocting a new license that would prove incompatible down the road. I think mandating a particular format (markdown/org-mode/xhtml/LaTeX) is a bit too strict, but I’d hate to see a document developed in the open, released as a PDF derivative without making (say) LaTeX sources available.

Though I’ll be the first to acknowledge the irony that for non-software works, the “source” isn’t “human readable source code” but rather “machine readable data source.”

The only real practical concern is that if the FSF releases a 2.0 of the FDL (or a SFDL) that becomes the a standard for free/open source non-software/text projects then going with the GPL might make that a difficult/bothersome transition on that. So the question, seems to be would providing the option to upgrade to the GNU FDL make sense (eg. this work is licensed under the GPL [with an understanding of what the source is] version 3 or (at your choice) a later version [or a later version of the GFDL]).

Anyway, back to writing.

I wrote a lot yesterday. I write a lot most days to be honest. Though I’m not often successful at this, my usual plan of attack is to spend a chunk of time in the morning writing on fiction projects, (after some sort of warm up like a blog post or a few email) before I graduate onto other projects. Often this doesn’t work: I have other commitments in the morning, I get sucked into emacs or website hacking, “the best laid plans of mice and men,” as it were.

Yesterday, something similar happened: I got up and had something to do that took up morning, and I tried to do a little bit of writing, but I fell into another project, where I wrote a lot of content, but none of it was fiction. And then, at about 8pm, I said “crap, I need to write fiction.”

So I did. And I yanked out about 500 words (which is about my current daily fiction writing goal,) and then I was done. And I felt good. One of the reasons I’m so intent upon writing fiction despite my utter lack of training, and dubious skill is that in aggregate writing fiction makes me very happy. This example demonstrates--as if we needed more examples--that while it’s important to get in the habit of writing, ritualizing the habit is probably counter productive.

When I finished doing school the last time, I thought, “yes! no more homework,” except that this writing experience (from a procedural point of view) was a lot like homework (“ugg time I should do this”). Surprisingly this isn’t such a bad thing: writing makes me happy, and truth be told I’m pretty good at doing homework.

Anyway. Enjoy your day, and write something if you’re inclined thusly.

I’ve had “write post about writing/read sexuality” on my todo list for too long and I wanted to make the general note before it got too stale. In a lot of way’s this is in response to Nora’s post on magic district and I think something else that I can’t trace down the reference to.

Basically I saw a couple of things where non-normative sexualities (more promiscuous, more casual, more queer) were underplayed or criticized fiction because of concerns (real or other wise) that the non-norm sexuality would be distracting or feel “Ham handed.”

And I sort of gawk. Not because I think that this is incorrect. Writing about queer sexualities in fictional contexts is distracting, and something of a big deal, relative to non-queer sexualities in fiction. I also think it’s a bit distracting in real life, that the discomfort/distracting experience that many people get isn’t the result of ham handed political message insertion into writing, but rather, a fairly reasonable depiction of what it’s like to have your embodied experience politicized, to be (nearly constantly) reminded of the cultural dissonance you have.

Sure, it’s possible to under-represent queer lives in fiction, it’s possible to write queerness inappropriately, or to over-normalize it. But if your readers are distracted, if they’re made uncomfortable, you probably did something right.

I posted a new story on Critical Futures today. It’s another one from the Knowing Mars novella that I wrote a year ago and that I had been posting previously. After a much too long break from posting fiction, I’ve decided that I have enough brain space to work through some projects there and bring it back to life. While I think my first six months was an unparalleled learning experience, I think a different strategy is in order.

My goal/intention is to slip into a Monday/Thursday schedule, of posting 400-600 words rather than the every work-day of 200-400 words. The word counts are mostly for my own thoughts and less of a hard guideline. It’s also helpful, because I think, that even if I run out of my backlog, which seems pretty likely to happen pretty soon. I feel like I could probably write the requisite 800-1200 words on Saturday/Sunday morning along with my non-fiction essays, no matter what my life is looking like. I’m not sure what the future will hold, or what exactly is going to happen with my fiction, but it’s going to be there.

One of my background projects, however (and I’ll write about the theory here in an essay,) is generate a few “curatorial” pages for critical futures (and I suppose for tychoish as well). Basically I want to give people an easier “in” to the stories that I post on the web. This includes more creative templates and some hand-compiled guide pages, and as websites become home to more and more information my thought is that curation is the only real solution to this, and that, in that, it’s really the next big thing for content. But that’s another thought for another time…

Check out the new Critical Futures story, “Knowing Mars, http://criticalfutures.com/2009/03/”

Thanks for reading, and do tell your friends/submit fiction if that’s your thing.

I read something a few weeks ago (the problem with being slow to process things from blogs that post regularly), about digital ebook readers and the future of digital books.

I guess my thoughts are best summed up in a couple of points, basically that electronic texts will succeed as they: develop unique and presentation methods (hardware and software), and as the commerce/distribution models become more transparent.

1. Words on screens don’t work like words on paper. They just don’t, and we need to develop new ways of reading/writing that engage the medium better. We got prose out of the transition to bound-books, novels out of printing press (loosely;) the success of ebooks, I think will require some sort of new way of writing/reading/interacting with text, and no ebook implementation has gone there.

2. The potential for profit of digital goods is immense: distribution/production costs are much lower than their material counterparts, because printing, delivery, etc. aren’t factors for digital things. There is, however, value and work that goes into publishing texts, and we need some way of supporting creators. I’m not sure that the existing publishing/content industry’s models make a good example to follow, and “micropayments” (the stock alternate response) don’t seem to really work. I tend to think that fellowships funded by a subscription model/tax on connectivity is more the way to go. But that’s me.

At the risk of sounding vague (or overly polite) I had the chance to read/hear a few writers describe the mechanics of their work recently. To clarify, by writers I mean “fiction writers,” and by mechanics, I mean how the story happens (character, plot, narrative, conflict, development) rather than things about process (how writing happens) or business (how to live/publish). This was, as you might imagine, kind of awkward because the people who write the stories aren’t the best judges of what actually happens.

There are lots of reasons for this: readers are complex and contextually constrained (as are authours), and creators are too close to the story and the characters to really see have a productive perspective on what we’re writing. We can talk about what we meant to write, how we intended for a story to work, but while short measures of this kind of analysis aren’t harmful, longer amounts of this kind of talking is pretty unproductive because it detracts from the reader’s freedom and the ability of the text to stand on its own.

This isn’t to say that I’m opposed to writers talking about their work, but I think there are some kinds of discussion that work better. The first is your critical focus: it’s great when people talk about the ideas that linger in their minds when they’re writing the story. These are the big issues that your characters represent/grapple with, but stated in more concrete terms in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books, this would include nationalism, interstellar colonization, the challenges of a massively overgrown population, the problem of survival on a different world. In Cory Doctorow’s latest (Little Brother) the list of critical issues includes: political action, post-9/11 police powers, law enforcement statistics, youth identity. There’s lots of stuff to talk about, without talking about the character or plot development process.

The second kind of conversation is about process. Fiction writers aren’t the only people who write, and are certainly not the only kind of information workers in the contemporary world. As a result how we work, how we are able to summon creativity, how we manage both creation and business are all things that have a broad appeal, and a lot of my writing about productivity and process here falls into this layout. While there’s such thing as too much process talk, there’s a way to write about work and process that empowers and encourages lots of other people who do similar work. Where as talking about critical issues provides the opportunity to engage the content of the story, talking about process gives you the chance to communicate your experience of telling the story, without needing to offer analysis' of the text itself.

Maybe my response is my way of dealing with both “being a writer,” and believing in idea that “the author is dead.” Maybe this is sound advice, just because: I’m not sure.

Interestingly these two areas also represent the areas that writers often find work talking about/writing columns about. The best non-fiction writing that I’ve read from fiction writers are often essays that they write about what they interested in (and also write fiction about,) and while I don’t have experience at fiction writing workshops process of one sort or another is a big part of what happens at workshops, I’d expect.

I think part of the issue is that the mechanics of stories, is something that we both know a lot about intellectually, and something that we have to do very instinctively. I know what makes characters work, what holds plots together, I can talk a lot about how to make stories and characters better, but when I’m “creating,” it’s all gut instinct and I have to go back and edit (even outlines) into shape. My current goal, is not to “learn more about writing,” but “hone my instincts” (or “feel better”) about writing. Maybe the instinctive writing approach means that (at least of our own writing) our ability to explain what’s happening becomes a bit…

I’m not sure. All very interesting. Onward and Upward!

I watched the last episode of Battlestar Galatica, (I’d been behind several weeks) today, because I was tired of everyone else talking about it and staying away from reading things on the Internet because of it. This is a story that I’ve been quite fond of for quite a long time, and I was impressed with how well they wrapped it up. Really impressed. Good work indeed.

I’ve also--and I haven’t talked about this very much here, yet--been writing more seriously on my projects than I have in a good long while. It’s good to be back, and I’m often surprised at how important writing on my own projects (particularly fiction) is at keeping my spirits afloat.

Now that the novel is on track again, I feel less overwhelmed at knocking through other projects. My knitting is in better shape, I’m blogging better, I worked on an academic project, and so forth. There’s still outstanding work, and I’m getting back into it, and that’s a good thing indeed.

I’m busy, as always, and there’s too much to really go through it here, but, but! I feel inspired rather than daunted at the prospect. I hope you all have a good week as well.

I saw a meme, I from lesboprof, that listed 25 authors that were influential to her. It was fun for me to read, because there was some overlap with what my list would be and because she’s (presumably) a feminist-studies type as well. I thought I’d give it a stab, though in typical tychoish fashion, this is going to be really eclectic. Also, because it’s a meme, please feel free to comment and join in.

1. Samuel R. Delany - Delany was probably the single most cited author during my college career, and was my root back into science fiction after college. Good stuff, because it combines feminist/queer/race theory interests with science fiction.

2. Kim Stanley Robinson - My “intro to college” class was built around Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy.” While I put the books out of mind for many years, I’ve recently come back to them, and am surprised how much my own “Mars stories” draw on Robinson’s influence to varying degrees. His work is Masterful and I quite enjoy it.

3. Gayle S. Rubin - Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex,” really defined my interest in queer studies and queer theory, and remains terribly important to my world view.

4. Melissa Scott - I read the “Silence Leigh” trillogy when I was in high school (twice!), and it rocked my world, seriously rocked my world. I’ve read two of her other books more recently, and was similarly influenced by them. Good stuff.

5. Anne Lamott - Contemporary/mainstream fiction isn’t often my thing, nor are (particularly) memoirs; however, I find Anne Lamont’s fiction (and non-fiction) quite powerful. Someone got me Bird by Bird as a gift, and I ate it up (again, during high school). I’ve since read more of her work, and I’m particularly fond of All New People.

6. Issac Asimov - I read the Foundation series twice in high school and it was amazing. There’s so much more Asimov out there, and while I’m not on a huge project to “read the SF canon,” every time I come across an Asimov story it often succeeds at being really awesome.

7. Robert Heinlein - In high school I took a class where I had to read Like 12 books in 4 months (sophomore year.) It was intense and I swear the only book I finished reading for that class was Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s good. I’m not a particular Heinlein fanboy, and a lot of his material creeps me out, but

8. Cherie Moraga - I have a copy of Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years next to my desk and it’s a book that I find incredibly powerful. Many, I think remember and cite Moraga’s work with Gloria Anzaldúa (This Bridge Called My Back) which is indeed powerful stuff, but her creative work hit me a couple of times during college, and I think I’m better for it

9. Elizabeth Zimmerman - I knit the way I do because of Elizabeth, and I think about my knitting seriously because of Elizabeth.

10. Meg Swansen - See above only more so.

11. Paul Connerton - I read this little book called How Societies Remember, in this nifty seminar I took durring my last semester on historiography, which was one of the very few classes I took in college “just cause I wanted to,” and it was a great thing indeed. This book was a collecting point for a lot of the cultural identity, cultural memory ideas that guided my thinking durring the first two attempts at graduate school (long story), and much to my surprise continue to affect my thoughts

12. Orson Scott Card - I listened to an interview with OSC last week and he said that he recomended the “Speaker for the Dead” (post-Ender’s Game trillogy) for people over age 18. I was certianly much younger than that when I plowed through all of the (at the time) existing Ender Books. I think I was 14 or so when I read all of them. In any case, big effect.

13. James Tiptree, Jr. - I named my cat (Kip) after a character in Brightness falls from the Air. I don’t think I need to say much more than that.

14. Cory Doctorow - A huge force in contemporary science fiction, and despite the fact that I think our politics are at least mildly divergent (and as a result I find a lot of his more political fiction frustrating), he’s a great influence.

15. Barbara Kingsolver - I’ve not read the complete bibliography, for sure, but I read a couple of her books in high school, and do quite enjoy her writing on a stylistic level.

16. Nancy Kress - Amazing. Kress was on my radar before college, but I’ve really started to read her work since my return to SF. I quite enjoy her blog, and I learn something about writing short fiction every time I read one of her stories.

17. Arthur C. Clarke - I worried about picking too many canon names. It’d be like a theatre type saying “I’m really into Anouilh, Shakespeare and Johnson.” Frankly, however, I think it’s true that a lot of the--particularly science fiction--that really influenced me on this list were things that I read when I was in high school. I think it’s something more to do with “that stage,” but Clarke’s good stuff.

18. Armisted Maupin - The Tales of the City books are an amazing thing. I spent a week one summer, sitting in a chair, where I’d get a bottle of water, some crackers, and I’d just read book after book.

19. Irving Yalom - I have of course mentioned on this site that I majored in psychology in college. Throughout most of this period, I wasn’t particularly interested in clinical work, despite the fact that all of my classmates were. In any case, the last semester I took a class on a clinical/treatment topic, and while all of my classmates who so wanted to help other people gave reports on depression, and anxiety, and personality disorders; I gave a report on Death, Dying, and Grief, through which I discovered Yalom, and I think as a result gave one of the more uplifting reports in the class. Changed my world.

20. Judith Butler - Not much to say, except I spent a lot of time with Butler’s work in college, and like so much of the feminist and queer stuff that I read then, has really shaped my thinking. Butter, had a great impact for better or for worse on a lot of people, an I’m one of them.

21. David Eddings - I seem to have a thing for “books I read in high school,” particularly long series. I read one of Edding’s major sagas and it was delightful. I also enjoyed one of his non-fantasy books as well, somewhat later. I’m not a big fantasy lover, and but I do like saga’s and Eddings tells a damn good story.

22. Ken Macleod - If I’m only half as cool as Ken Macleod when I grow up, I’ll be one happy camper.

23. F. Scott Fitzgerald - Ok, I must confess, I read The Great Gatsby once in high school, and I’m convinced that this is the Great American Novel.

24. Theodor Holm Nelson - He wrote a book on hypertext that you probably haven’t heard about called Literary Machines, but it’s hugely inspiring in both it’s scope and vision.

25. Lionel Bacon - He collected dance notes and music for Morris dancing. While it’s not the kind of thing that you read, it is the kind of thing that my team has at every practice just in case we need some sort of arbiter.