a blog about stuff.

  • I’ve been writing. A lot.

    That’s a good thing. The novel writing month of November, the NaNoWriMo challenge, came and went and I “won” which simply means I wrote a lot of coherent words that totalled fifty-thousand before the end of the month—and then I kept on writing.

    As of this morning my book, of which I am nearly done the first part, is totalling about sixty-five thousand words, give or take.

    I’ve been doing some light editing.

    I’ve been adding to it with some regularity (the last couple days being a sad exception for various reasons which I won’t get into here).

    And I’ve been thinking how good it feels to crank out about a thousand words virtually every day.

    Which could be bad news. Or good. Depends on your perspective.

    It’s the middle of December, and it’s about this time of year when I start thinking of all the things I should be “resolving” to do in the new year. Like. Should I write more? Like. What would it look like if I resolved to write more? Like. How could I make myself write every single day of the three hundred and sixty-six (it’s a leap years) days in 2024? Like. Could I have a “write every day” resolution and see how well it sticks?

    I almost fell into the trap of making a new website for this, but then—

    I’m just gonna do it.

    1000 x 366 in 2024. Stay tuned.

  • I’ve been reluctant to fall into the trap of new-hobby-dabbling while on my sabbatical. The goal here was, yes, to find some space for reinvention but also and probably more importantly, focus on the long list of things I’ve been meaning to go deeper on for years but have neglected due to my goldfish-like attention span.

    There is an inherent contradiction there, I realize, as if I am trying to actually find a new purpose in life then digging my ruts even deeper may not be the ideal way of approaching this problem. Yet, simultaneously, I do contend that the ruts I needed to abandon were those of an unfulfilling job and a career path that I’d tripped over my shoelaces into, not the creative exponential lifestyle that I had been unsuccessfully and largely-causally pursuing in my dwindling free time.

    So, all that said, I have given myself some vague guidelines around (a) being more completionist and focussed on existing hobbies and interests and working on honing those to a finer point, but also (b) understanding that distractions happen and while I should not chase every one of them, reinvention sometimes comes from exploration and following paths presented by the universe.

    Thus my reluctance to follow distractions is more of a reluctance to chase new ideas in themselves. Not, say, browsing the stacks at the library or the aisles at the art store and then picking up the shiniest object to dig into, but rather tracing a natural curve along the related disciplines of my existing endeavors.

    This post is not randomly timed.

    I’ve spent the last couple days following one of those curves and I come here seeking justification for myself and the future.

    While in California a couple months ago we went to a farmers market and there I found a stall selling notebooks. This might seem like a no-big-deal revelation, but the vendor had handmade these notebooks and had used traditional bookbinding techniques to create beautiful writing tomes that had for their covers recycled covers from all manner of novels, famous and otherwise. The effect was that of a kind of one-off unique book purged of its fiction pages and replaced with blanks, not as a means of censorship or literary destruction but more of as a second life for these books likely bound for the trash following a useful first life as a novel.

    I didn’t buy one. Not because I am cheap (though the price tag combined with the exchange rate combined with my current lack of income didn’t help) but rather because I was more in the market for a blank-paged sketchbook than a ruled diary.

    That little craftwork idea has been lurking in my head.

    I should learn bookbinding and make my own, I thought, then filed it away in the back of my head for a future day.

    A chance social media post took me down a instructionary rabbit hole yesterday morning and before I knew it I was doing a bunch of rough math and pinging through google to find if the hobby was economical enough that I could dabble in a beginner tutorial without buying a kitchen drawer full of supplies.

    Paper. Glue. String. Cardboard. Fabic.

    Check. Check. Check. Check. Check.

    I did a quick swing through the local shopping complex, hitting up a Staples and a Walmart for the cheapest “good” supplies I could buy, spending about fifty bucks though most of that was on a ream of the best, heaviest paper I could find because why spend all that time binding together shitty copy paper when I might end up with something usable. To put a cap on that though, the result was me buying 120gram laser printer paper which turned out to be silky smooth and just about perfect for ink drawing and very nice sketching paper no matter if I bind it or otherwise.

    I did bind it. About twenty of my five hundred sheets found their way into two different miniature sketchbooks, each about 4 inches square, as per two runs through of the tutorial I found. Simple covers made from failed watercolour paintings turned them into unique and actually-quite-functional little sketchbooks.

    And this morning I started on a third, roughly 4×6 inches and (if you’re following the thread here) about the right size to fit between a pair of recycled covers from a mediocre science fiction novel with a cool retro cover design that I picked up at the used book store last year and which was soon destined for the pulp mill soon as it was quite dated and should probably never be read again by anyone. Not censorship. Just opinion. Go read whatever the hell garbage you want.

    And to bring this story back around this bookbinding investigation was not a distraction from my art as much as an expansion into the value chain of the whole process. As I explore my personal style maybe that style includes filling up handmade sketchbooks with interesting drawings and journaling that becomes a whole piece. Maybe I could bind smaller signatures and sets together to create one-off-works. Maybe the art becomes part of the book which becomes the art itself in a great big circular deconstructed exploration of artistic weirdness.

    Or maybe it’s just a good way to get a lot of reasonably priced sketchbooks to practice in.

    I’m thinking it’s gonna be that last one for a while.

    But then reinvention is a sometimes a blind path.

  • It’s only been a couple years since I finished my initial read through of the (English) trade paperback edition of The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin, but I’ve been working my way back along the thread of the trilogy in audiobook format again this year and early this morning over coffee I completed the second book (for the second time.)

    For those unfamiliar with the trilogy, Liu Cixin is a Chinese author of hard science fiction novels who has become somewhat famous and revered in North America (and maybe Europe, too, I’m not there) thanks to his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, an epic series of novels that trace the story of humanity’s encounter with a neighbouring race of extraterrestrials known as the Trisolarans.

    In the novel, the Trisolarans are in search of a replacement home world because of the instability of their three-sun (trisolar) origin world, and what ensues as first contact is made across a handful of lightyears is the slow motion strategic battle for the Earth that plays out over hundreds of years as the aliens launch their fleet towards Earth from Trisolaris, a journey that takes place through the centuries because this is hard science fiction and there is no faster than light warp speed shenanigans here. Instead, speculative fiction is invoked as the fringes of physics and intergalactic military strategy plays out with a veil of realism and plausibility.

    In the second book, spoilers lightly avoided here, the alien fleet is roughly half way to Earth and the sociology of humanity is contrasted against the sociology of the intergalactic community as a kind of meditation on the notion that there are vast extremes in the human condition that would need to be explored (deliberately and incidentally) as a result of an encounter with a species that outclassed us in most every way related to scientific advancement. It is the story of humanity’s colonial past played out on a galactic scale where explorers arrive on a ship from afar with technology beyond the comprehension of the locals.

    I chose an audiobook format for my second time through for the very simple reason that I’m not Chinese. The author, rightly so, gives many of his main (Chinese) characters Chinese names, and reading this made for a comprehension stumbling block for me as I found my brain tripped over these “words” as new vocabulary rather than as the anchors that character names should be for a reader. This is not a critique. It’s my own shortcoming, but I found that listening to the first book rather than reading it on paper or screen, I was almost 100% able to get through this block. The narrator did the heavy lifting of pronouncing the names leaving me to enjoy the plot more thoroughly.

    If you have never encountered these books and are a science fiction nerd like me I would first ask you what rock you’ve been hiding under but second recommend that you hunt them down and read them. In my humble opinion they are one of those once-in-a-decade monumental works of science fiction and fantasy that will someday likely sit alongside Herbert, Asimov, Tolkien, and others.

  • As far as writing tactics go, my advice could be anything but it’s certainly not from a professional. I’m just a guy. Dabbling. But that said, I’ve been writing a lot lately and reading a lot lately and thinking about writing a lot lately, and those things add up to some inquisitive experimentation in the realm of writing tactics, so here goes.

    I’m sorry to report that, as it turns out, my writing is quite functional.

    That is, I’ve been rereading my manuscript from about three years back, the one that’s been sitting (a) in a file on my desktop and (b) in a stack of printed papers on my bookshelf.

    “You should be editing that sucker.” I hear you say, and you’re not wrong.

    I should be.

    In fact, I’ve plunked it right into my novel software and have been, for the first time in three years, looking it over, re-reading it, pondering the story, and…

    It’s functional.

    There’s a good story there. All the beats. Reasonable characters. Interesting ideas. A whole wrapped up neatly with a bow and everything plot.

    But the writing is functional.

    And I can’t blame myself because I wrote it during NaNoWriMo 2020 and (a) there was a pandemic on and (b) I wrote fifty thousand words and a full novel in (less than) thirty days, so you know, you get what you pay for, right?

    Functional.

    But as I said, I’ve been thinking about writing tactics and thinking about writing tactics lends to thinking about editing tactics and then actually applying some of those editing tactics and, voila!

    I have been editing and I’ve found the path that leads me to clear away some of the raw functionality of my writing: I call it the blabbermouths.

    See, writing a story is tough. You need to think about a lot of stuff. And unless you are an experienced writer thinking about more than one or two of those lots of things is a tricky balancing act. My writing comes across as so-called functional because the thing I neglected to do well — I mean, I did it, but just not well — was write compelling dialog.

    The characters have conversations.

    The characters express their concerns.

    The characters chat and talk and explain and do all the things that characters do, but they do it in a way that is (and I’m going to write this word at least a few more times) functional.

    “Would you like a cup of coffee?” She asked.

    He nodded. “Alright. Just black, please.”

    It gets the point across and maybe even is all that really needs to be said, stripped down, bare, raw, and good enough.

    But it’s functional. And a whole novel (yeah, really) of functional conversation is… well, functional and bland and a whole list of other adjectives that I’ll leave you to your own to look up.

    A blabbermouth tactic would be to rewrite that with a focus on just the dialog, revisiting the text of the novel, leaving the plot as is for now, and making every conversation bubble over with everything and anything, at least for the next draft.

    “I was going to ask you if you wanted a cup of coffee. I’ve got some ready. I mean, there’s still some left from when I made it an hour ago and I think it’s still hot enough to drink. Nothing special, of course, so if you want some , I can…” She glanced towards the kitchen. “I buy the cheap stuff. In the big red can. Everyone thinks they like expensive coffee but when you go out to a restaurant or even a Starbucks the coffee they’re serving isn’t anything special, you know. They wouldn’t make any money serving you expensive coffee and for all it matters most people can’t taste the difference anyhow. But like I said, I’ve got some if you want it. It’s no bother. Really. Do you want a cup?” She asked.

    “I don’t mind the cheap stuff. If you looked at my cupboards you’d be surprised how much shitty food and off-brand ingredients I eat.” He shrugged. “Half the time I just reheat a cup from yesterday’s pot anyhow, so whatever you’ve got left, providing it’s a bit warm still, I’ll take some. Black, please.”

    The plot doesn’t change, but the text and the story and the dialog all become just a bit less… functional. Every bit of text gets a blabbermouth makeover, letting every character spill every thought they have in their head without filter or pause. Another round of editing will be needed to smooth it over and even it out and even shuffle some of the bits into a different kind of flow, like:

    “I was going to ask you if you wanted a cup of coffee. I’ve got some ready. I mean, there’s still some left from when I made it an hour ago and I think it’s still hot enough to drink. Nothing special, of course, so if you want some , I can…” She glanced towards the kitchen.

    “I don’t mind the cheap stuff. If you looked at my cupboards you’d be surprised how much shitty food and off-brand ingredients I eat.” He shrugged.

    “I buy the cheap stuff. In the big red can. Everyone thinks they like expensive coffee but when you go out to a restaurant or even a Starbucks the coffee they’re serving isn’t anything special, you know. They wouldn’t make any money serving you expensive coffee and for all it matters most people can’t taste the difference anyhow. But like I said, I’ve got some if you want it.

    “Half the time I just reheat a cup from yesterday’s pot anyhow, so whatever you’ve got left —

    It’s no bother. Really. Do you want a cup?” She asked.

    “Providing it’s a bit warm still, I’ll take some. Black, please.”

    And, there you go. A bit less functional.

    I’ve got some work to do now, digging back into those fifty thousand words and probably adding another fifty thousand in blabbermouth dialog. It sounds excessive, and it is… deliberately so, but it’s easier to cull and cut than it is to smooth over huge (yeah) functional gaps in the flow of the writing. So, I’m gonna go in there a fill in every crack in the dialog as best I can, and on the other side… well, we’ll sort that part out in a couple months.

  • I had this dream a while back, a couple years ago in fact, to code a content management system for novelists.

    No, not a web publishing platform, but it could be that too I suppose, though rather more of an online tool for someone who was inclined to sit down at a keyboard and try to pen some fiction and needed a tool to help them.

    There are a couple solid applications out there that do this specifically, and of course a million other ways to turn thoughts into words ranging from pen and paper through modern word processors.

    My tool was meant to be something like those, but a little different. It was meant to be a way to work on a story in a non-linear fashion, collecting all the bits together as you went, and then massage those bits into a story that made sense.

    Linear writing has too often failed me. I know some people can plot something out or come up with a couple characters and just write, but I tend to be far more scattered than that. I would take notes and write the middle bits then jump around more until I had a scattered collection of words that struggled to find purpose.

    I also tend to rush things. Sometimes rushing is good: letting the reader fill in the spaces where you’ve blurred through can be a positive technique for eloquent and concise prose. But rushing can also leave gaps that are tougher to fill. It’s a bit like drywalling, I think. You want to hang the sheets so that they align and you can mud in the gaps and the painter can come along later to create a seamless wall. But if the gaps are too big, there is too much to fill in and you’re going to see the seams in the final result. Okay, so not the best analogy. But I was leaving a lot more gaps than I should have in my rush to tell the story.

    So I’ve been writing this content management software for about four months now and refining, tweaking, improving all the way along as I use it to start working on my story. Truth be told I spend more time coding than writing, but I’m also running out of big features to build so that should reverse as winter creeps up on me and I can write more.

    I like to think of the software as kind of like sitting at a table with pens and stack of loose leaf paper, sticky notes, and paper clips. Across from you is an inquisitive eight year old. You start writing stuff on the notes and the paper and the eight year old looks it over and asks “but why?” or “who’s this guy?” a dozen times and so you write more notes and add more plot and stick more bits together and clip that bit to this bit until your whole table is covered with notes and paper and crayon marks from the kid and some kind of order begins to emerge from the chaos.

    That’s what I’ve built, but you can use it on a web browser and on your phone.

    I can open up a new blank page and write while I’m sitting somewhere, from my phone or on the laptop. I can go down a rabbit hole of fleshing out characters or worldbuilding my set pieces. I can set up the big picture plot or fill in the tiny details of story. I can ask for a prompt and fill pages with scratchpad-like notes about something that might happen or might not without committing it to the story. And I can keep track of how much work I actually did with daily counts and overall word tallies.

    I’ve been iteratively adding a lot of features and it’s getting closer to that dream I had envisioned years ago.

    Now I just need to actually use it all to write something worth reading.

iteratively improving
stay tuned