Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

/. of the day: The Disposable Computer - the comments are in rare form.

My typing is only getting worse, despite the best advice no money can buy. To reassure myself that it’s all worthwhile, I’ve been reading random Dvorak pages. I even found one with up-to-date switching info.

You know what they say: those who can’t write, edit. So despite the late start, I’ve decided to do NaNoEdMo. I do like my NaNoNovel and the theme (a society fracturing over irreconcilable differences) seems even more timely than it did in November. Paper and pencil sounds good right now.

Just as an aside, never try to use Earthlink’s chat support option. The people at the other end (India?) are useless, and it spontaneously disconnects in Safari (FireFox is fine).

Quote of the day: It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. –Thomas Jefferson

I’m still typing slowly on the Dvorak keyboard, but I did have one breakthrough. My text editor emacs uses lots of control characters which moved around with the rest of my scrambled keys and are now harder to reach. I could just use the standard mac keys instead, but the command key isn’t all that well-placed, either.

Oh for the days when I had my own (abandoned) sun sparc with the control key where the caps lock usually is! There’s a useless key taking up far too much real estate on non-Suns. SHOUTING IS NEVER NECESSARY.

But then I remembed that all things are possible to those who use macs. The answer to misplaced control keys is uControl. My keyboard is now optimally configured; it’s just the typist who’s behind the times.

[P.S.] I ended up doing the mac keys as well, and they’re very convenient. Finally, command-C and command-V in emacs, not to mention command-W and command-Z! The full instructions are at webweavertech.

Contest of the month: the ASC Awards

On Mike’s advice I read Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block. I think I’ve read them all now, because none of his advice sounded new or intriguing. Since the book is a collection of Writer’s Digest columns, it didn’t exactly flow or cohere like other writing books I’ve read (not that there have been that many). It’s definitely a genre-writing sort of a book - not that there’s anything wrong with that - by an author who openly confesses to cranking out pulp erotica for the money. I think it covered all the bases, but the overall tone of the book, IMHO, was one of Orson Scott Card as played by Polonius.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve heard all the advice before, so it’s hard for me to imagine how other writers can be surprised by, for example, the usual and customary advice against overuse of adjectives and adverbs.

Conspiracy theory of the day: There is no Moon!

I found another worthwhile writing book, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner (the author of Grendel). Though the book starts out appropriately artsy for something written by a Real Serious Writer, he does get down to useful advice eventually, and without ever wallowing in the mud of commas and contractions.

Early on he mentions that Real Artists don’t do things just for practice: Everything’s for keeps, nothing’s just for exercise. Even Robert Frost agrees: “I never write exercises, but sometimes I write poems which fail and then I call them exercises.” But then the last chapter is filled with exercises - consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds, I suppose.

Gardner has some interesting things to say about literature beyond his writing advice - for example, that great literature comes about mainly through genre-busting (as we call it these days), or in his words, the crossing of literary conventions. To give a genre example (not his), The Lord of the Rings came about through, say, the crossing of the English fantastical novel and the Norse epic tradition. Tolkien’s imitators don’t rise to his level because you need to cross a new pair (or group) of genres to get a new masterpiece.

He also talks about the primacy of plot - that you cannot write a great story unless you write a story, and an enjoyable one at that. Though he makes allowances for allegory and other metafiction, his heart doesn’t seem to be in it, and he’s back to plotting in no time.

Gardner also spends some time on prose rhythm and the dangers of unintentional rhyme. I suppose that advice might come in handy, though you’re far better off if you can play it by ear. He also warns against frigidity in fiction, when:

…the author reveals by some slip or self-regarding intrusion that he is less concerned about his characters than he ought to be - less concerned, that is, than any decent human being observing the situation would naturally be. […] The writer lacks the kind of passion all true artists possess. He lacks the nobility of spirit that enables a real writer to enter deeply into the feelings of imaginary characters (as he enters deeply into the feelings of real people). In a word, the writer is frigid.
Strictly speaking, frigidity characterizes the writer who presents serious material, then fails to carry through - fails to treat it with the attention and seriousness it deserves. I would extend the term to mean a further cold-heartedness as well, the given writer’s inability to recognize the seriousness of things in the first place, the writer who turns away from real feeling, or sees only the superficialities in a conflict of wills, or knows no more about love, beauty, or sorrow than one might learn from a Hallmark card. With the meaning thus extended, frigidity seems one of the salient faults in contemporary literature and art.

That’s also a good sample of Gardner’s tone, which can get in the way of the underlying message unless you enjoy that sort of thing. But it’s a good book nonetheless.

Harangue of the day: (from Writers Who Don’t)
If you’re not writing (for whatever reason), you’re not a writer. If you’re not selling work professionally, you’re not a writer.

Get over it.
Don’t get caught up in the details, folks. I’m talking profession here, not rudimentary activity. I play basketball every fall, yet I am not a basketball player. Michael Jordan is a basketball player.

First, let me start with a horror story that mathematicians tell. These airy masters of infinity say that no student should be taught category theory because it’s too hard. Because it’s too hard, it will break a student’s mind and scar him for life; he will drop out of university and become a computer programmer or night watchman or technical writer. Category theory, they say, should be reserved for professors of mathematics, who are the only people mature enough to handle it. Category theory is the smut of the mathematical world.

Now it would be a whole other blog entry to explain why I don’t believe in protecting the children from smut or the math students from category theory. To be brief, I don’t think that anything is good for one set of people and bad for another. Besides which, children have the same natural defenses against cooties that students have against category theory: disinterest and disgust.

Some writers, for their part, have an analogous defense against flash fiction (stories up to 1,000 or 1,500 words in length). They’re welcome to their disgust, but that doesn’t make flash fiction bad, or impossibly difficult, or a danger to the minds of young writers. It just means some people don’t like drabbles.

I’ve written 56 drabbles (100-word stories) in the past year, 50 of them in the last six months. Before that, I’d written two drabbles and one 25-word challenge in three years, but one of those two drabbles was the first story I finished. I admit that until the drabble bug bit me hard, I disliked drabbles as much as the next BOFQ. The most I’d gotten out of them was a few painful puns.

So why did I do it? Well, there was this Empty Shell challenge on ASC, but I didn’t have the time or energy for a serious response. What’s the shortest possible story you can write? Yes, a drabble. When in doubt, drabble. So I wrote a drabble series. A couple of months later when I started watching Stargate, I wanted to write something that would help me remember what had struck me about a particular episode. People write long, melodramatic episode additions if they watch an episode a week, but I couldn’t do that on an episode-a-day schedule. When in doubt, drabble. So now I have a series of drabble episode codas for several seasons of Stargate.

I’m a filker, so I’m used to not only fitting a story into a fixed size, but also getting it to rhyme and scan. Counting up to 100 words is simple by comparison. Drabbles, like filk, are harder than they look, but they’re not orders of magnitude harder than writing a normal story. In fact I find both filking and drabbling easier than most other kinds of writing, but then I wrote some poetry before I started writing fiction. I like fitting words in.

Seema doesn’t like drabbles, and she got Minisinoo going against flash fiction, but I haven’t heard an argument against them that doesn’t apply to all other fanfiction or all other genres. So drabbles are usually bad and incoherent - so is fanfic. So they’re often lazy and annoying - so is fanfic. So they’re frequently short and low on content - so is fanfic.

So writing flash fiction isn’t easy - neither are novels. Neither are novellas, or novelettes, or short stories. So they require skills the new writer may not have - so do novels, novellas, etc., etc. So most people can’t cram a beginning, middle, and end into 1,000 words - most people can’t do it in 10,000 or 100,000 words, either.

If a brand spanking new writer wants to write a flash story, it won’t kill her. You don’t have to save the newbies from themselves - any kind of writing is good practice, and nobody’s forcing you to read it. Writing flash fiction isn’t any more dangerous than writing schmoop and getting into bad schmoop habits. If the writer wants to get over that someday, she can. Take my word for it - I wrote a drabble three and half years ago, and I’m still here.

Research link of the day: Ancient Scripts. (T’Other Liz recommends OmniGlot.)

St. Ignatius didn’t give me as much help as I wanted, so I decided to try storyboarding. You’d think there’d be more links about it on the net, but I haven’t found all that many useful ones. Here’s the short list:

• Storyboarding by Crawford Kilian is actually about plotting fiction, not storyboarding it
• Storyboarding books (for film)
• Storyboarding with Ian McCaig (also film)

The net didn’t help much, but the basic concept seemed clear enough - storyboarding is making quick sketches of scenes from your story to visualize them for the camera (or for the writer with visualization problems). You don’t have to be able to draw (though I can) as long as you know what the squiggles represent. It’s a lot like going through the Writing Exercises, except of course without taste or smell.

So I dug out my old contè crayons and nupastels (this involved a search of the entire apartment and the basement storage area), and popped down to The Art Store for paper and pencils, and now I have some small sketches for the off-world gate scene in the Stargate novel I’ve been wanting to write for a while now. Of course I should be thinking about other things, but while I was editing Colony I started wondering whether I could convert it into a Stargate novel with Jack, Sam and Daniel taking the places of Chakotay, Torres and Janeway - and why I was slaving away at an old, unsuccessful novel when a new, promising idea was eating away at the muse. But I persevered and got a bit done on the ancient albatross…

Fatality of the day: a Bostonian finds himself unexpectedly deceased, but recovers quickly.

Well, as advised by the writers at rasfc, I’ve given The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola a good skimming. I’m not quite hallucinating on demand yet. I’ve spared you the effort of reading him yourself by making excerpts - here’s some prime visualization advice:

THE
FIFTH CONTEMPLATION [of the first day of the second week]
WILL
BE TO BRING THE FIVE SENSES ON THE FIRST AND SECOND CONTEMPLATION
Prayer. After the Preparatory Prayer and the three Preludes, it is
helpful to pass the five senses of the imagination through the first and second
Contemplation, in the following way:
First Point. The first Point is to see the persons with the sight of the
imagination, meditating and contemplating in particular the details about them
and drawing some profit from the sight.
Second Point. The second, to hear with the hearing what they are, or
might be, talking about and, reflecting on oneself, to draw some profit from
it.
Third Point. The third, to smell and to taste with the smell and the
taste the infinite fragrance and sweetness of the Divinity, of the soul, and of
its virtues, and of all, according to the person who is being contemplated;
reflecting on oneself and drawing profit from it.
Fourth Point. The fourth, to touch with the touch, as for instance, to
embrace and kiss the places where such persons put their feet and sit, always
seeing to my drawing profit from it.

Most of the time, though, he isn’t quite so general, although the following advice can be extrapolated to any road, cave, garden, etc.

The second [prelude to the second contemplation for the first day of the second week is], a composition, seeing the place. It will be here to see with the sight of the imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem; considering the length and the breadth, and whether such road is level or through valleys or over hills; likewise looking at the place or cave of the Nativity, how large, how small, how low, how high, and how it was prepared.

The second [prelude to contemplation of the second contemplation in the morning of the second day of the third week] is to see the place. It will be here to consider the road from Mount Sion to the Valley of Josaphat, and likewise the Garden, whether wide, whether large, whether of one kind, whether of another.

Most of the text, however, is so explicit as to be actual Spiritual Exercises rather than writing exercises - for example, this contemplation of Lucifer (second week, fourth day):

First Point. The first Point is to imagine as if the chief of all the enemy seated himself in that great field of Babylon, as in a great chair of fire and smoke, in shape horrible and terrifying.
Second Point. The second, to consider how he issues a summons to
innumerable demons and how he scatters them, some to one city and others to
another, and so through all the world, not omitting any provinces, places,
states, nor any persons in particular.
Third Point. The third, to consider the discourse which he makes them,
and how he tells them to cast out nets and chains; that they have first to
tempt with a longing for riches — as he is accustomed to do in most cases — that men may more easily come to vain honor of the world, and then to vast pride. So that the first step shall be that of riches; the second, that of honor; the third, that of pride; and from these three steps he draws on to all the other vices.

Is anyone else picturing Morgoth?

Geek fad of the day: CSS in RSS
Beagle news of the day: the foxhole theory

I was thinking of storyboarding my stories to help with my description problems. (Description is one of those skills fanfic doesn’t give you.) I probably got the idea from the storyboard extra feature on the Sixth Sense DVD. However, I found an entirely different approach to the visualization problem on rasfc (rec.arts.sf.composition) - read St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises for tips on rolling your own hallucinations.

Technically his advice is for visualizing the Passion, but apparently it works just as well for visualizing alien worlds and bloody space battles. (I don’t believe in space battles, but that’s a whole other issue.) I’ll have to try to spiritually exercise my brain for my next story.

Writing link of the day: Tell ‘em You’re A Writer!
Trek obituary of the day: the actress who played Marla McGivers in “Space Seed”

I wasn’t going to mention this, but I was a semifinalist in the Writers of the Future this year. I get a nice certificate (it’s in the mail) and also a critique of my entry. The critique said my main character just observed everything and didn’t have much of a stake in the outcome - though the science was good. I just have to abuse the main character more next time.

The reason I mention it is that I’m taking it as a sign I should stop futzing around with fanfic and get serious about my writing. Like the man says, No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Thus, I’m retiring from writing Trek. I won’t take down the site, stop working on FicML, or otherwise flake out on my few fandom commitments. I can understand people thinking that I would, but I’ve never been the social butterfly fandom type so I don’t think a complete flounce is called for. But no new fic for you!

The truth is, my fanfic output started declining when I first started writing original fiction back in 2001. The end of Voyager and the failure of Enterprise to impress were only contributing factors. Stargate is fair game since it’s still on the air and it rarely takes up more than 100 words of my time, but I don’t expect to ever get back to the fic output I had when it was just me and VOY.

And I don’t want to. Fanfic hasn’t been the same fun since I started serving the other master. There’s always that feeling that I’m wasting time and ideas that would be better spent on my own universe. There’s a fic-stopping perfectionism that I didn’t have back in my J/C fluff days. And finally, there’s the fact that writing is no longer just a hobby. I don’t want to work at writing and then turn around and play at fanfic - that’s just too much typing. I want a hobby that’s just a hobby, like needlework, so I can rest my weary muse.

Word count: 3323

I can’t believe I wrote the whole thing! Many thanks to Jerie for listening to my whining yesterday, and to Seema for writing companionship during the two or three days it took her to write her novel.