I was thinking about sound the other day. Sound is fascinating and our sense of hearing doubly so. If you reduce sound to its most elemental level, it's nothing but a series of higher- or lower-pressure waves that stimulate a specific nerve in our auditory canal. But given those very basic impulses, we can discern many different sources of sound. The sound of me typing on my keyboard differs not only from the sound of my son playing the piano, but also from the sound of typing on a slightly different keyboard.
And for some reason this has always annoyed me. If you look at a visual representation of an audio file, you'll see the overall outline of the waveform, and it seems impossible that such a primitive shape could contain music with voices and instruments and beauty.
I'm (re-) writing Pacifica on Campfire Writing. I've been looking for a good way to collaborate on projects like this, and they're getting increasingly common. Campfire has a few rough edges to be sure, but I like it overall.
Anyway, if you want to follow along with what's going on with Pacifica in its re-write phase, you can check it out on Campfire's “Explore” site, which very handily lets me keep certain pieces of information back in case of spoilers.
I've been doing NaNoWriMo for years now. As in 14 of them. I enjoy it; but perhaps it's time to move on. The problem is unsurprising: I've started a whole bunch of novels, but I haven't finished any of them. So I've got a whole lot of books or ideas sitting out there in an incomplete state, waiting for me to come back to them. I kind of hate that. There's a sense of psychic baggage inherent in carrying these started projects around.
Not all of them; some were just for fun, and I have no real need to go back to them. That's okay too. But there are a few that still tug at me, still seem to “want” me to finish them.
So I'm declaring FebruaryMarch “NaNoFinMo”, which works well for me, because it's Nate's Novel Finishing Month.
The goal is simple: I'm going to take one of my books, and actually write the rest of it. I have no idea how many words that is going to be. I am going to actually write the part that I've been struggling with, draft after draft, so that my poor characters can have some closure.
After that... we'll see. I might publish the dang thing, even if it's just self published on Amazon or somewhere. Although I'll probably find a service that also seeds it to the Kobo store, since I'm more of a Kobo fan these days.
The Buried Lede
But none of that is really the important part. The important part is: which book?
I've decided on Pacifica. I've been writing and re-writing Pacifica for years now, and I think I'm close enough that I can dedicate a month to ironing out wrinkles and finally tackling that soft spot in the plot around the end of the second act.
I'm thinking of a way to share it as I work on it, Stay tuned as I noodle over that part of the equation.
This is an article that I'm writing for me, but I'm using the second person “you” to make myself feel better. Just so you know. If you find this useful as well, great!
Okay, listen up. You need to actually get things out there. You need to really finish things. So here's what you're going to do:
Go to an online retailer of the thing you are trying to make. In my case, that's books. So go to some online bookstore. Don't bother with the best sellers, not right now. Right now go down the list a few pages, to the people who are all clearly self-publishing.
Find someone whose book you just can. not. Stand. Revel in how much you hate this book, in how much better you are at writing than this person. Then remind yourself of the following fact:
As of right now, this minute, that person is winning. Their book is up for sale, and people have purchased it. Yours is still in your head or in some rough draft form, and people have not. You are “losing” to that person because they have accomplished your dream, and you haven't yet. You know you are better than them. You know you “deserve” to have your book out in the world where people can see it more than they do, you know your book is better than theirs.
Okay, this is an ugly side of yourself, and you'll never reveal it to anyone else. It's understandable that you're a little ashamed of yourself for thinking this way about a fellow practitioner of your craft. But now it's time to take that shame, that anger, and that (self-)righteous indignation that they are “winning” and you are “losing” and turn it into motivation. Yes, your book still has that one chapter that isn't quite right, and that one section that could use some fine tuning. But look at their book! Their book is all weak parts! And they are selling it! People are reading it and posting positive comments about it! Don't worry about taking on the giants of your craft yet, that will come with time. For now set your sights on getting your book higher up the sales charts than that book. By getting it on the sales charts in the first place.
And when your book starts selling, when you finally get onto the list, quietly buy a copy or two of that book, as silent recompense for using that author as the scapegoat you needed to goad you into action. Put all those negative emotions behind you, they are unworthy of you. You've taken this step. Now you can take the next.
My first day of high school I walked into Latin class. I had chosen Latin for my mandatory foreign language because I'm a stereotypical Gen-X guy: I didn't want to be in a popular class. I (rightly) guessed that there wouldn't be all that many people in Latin, they'd mostly choose “mainstream” foreign language credits like Spanish or French.
The teacher got up and said, “You're never going to need to speak Latin.”
Which...I mean, we all knew that.
“Not because Latin is dead, but because it's only used by a very few people in its original form. But what you are learning here is the why behind so many other languages. Learning Latin will make you a better speaker of English. And if you decide to learn French, or Spanish, or Portuguese, or Italian, you'll have an easier time with those languages as well.”
I spent three years studying Latin. My third year there were only two of us in the course, so we met at the same time as the Latin II students. I'm eternally grateful that our teacher had us teach them from time to time.
Fast forward to the early 2000s when I was a sole developer at a bookstore. The management team discovered that they suddenly had a software developer, and one of my first projects out of the gate saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars in manual computation time. So they more or less let me do my own thing, leaving me as the goose that laid golden eggs. I used that freedom to teach myself...well, lots of things. Since nobody else knew what I should be doing, I wrote apps in every language I wanted to learn. I wrote Ruby on Rails apps. I wrote an app or two in Adobe AIR (it seemed like a good idea at the time, okay?) I wrote a bunch of PHP and thus paved the way for a number of future jobs.
When I was young my father rented the '80's David Lynch version of Dune, you know, the one with Sting. I fell asleep a couple of times during the movie, and every time I woke up I would say something like, “is this movie still going?“
I'd already read the novel, and enjoyed it. I even read the second one and...it was okay.
And somehow that version of the movie didn't ruin the book for me, nor did the sequels. Dune is an excellent novel. There are themes from that book that have stuck with me, that have shaped the way I think.
So I wasn't happy to hear they were making a new adaptation. I'm a little tired of the entire '80's being strip mined for nostalgia sequels.
So I was really resistant when one of my friends—who had never read Dune—told me it was a really good movie. How could it be?
Well, she was right.
Ironically the new movie is longer than the old one, and is only half of the story. But I found that I agreed with their adaptation. I loved the actors they chose for the roles. I re-read the book after watching the movie, looking for what they changed. And to be sure, the new movie changes a lot from the book. But overall, I find that I agree with their changes. They were in the service of making a good movie and didn't really ruin the thread or feel.
So yes. Turns out that you can make a good Dune movie. I'm excited for the second half as well.
My employer recently planned (and cancelled) a few “white elephant” gift parties. I was casting around, trying to decide on what I might have in the house to give away when I realized something:
I don't love this particular filament, so I'm not too broken up about using a bit more of it on these experimental print projects. I added a base to the “Vornoi” elephant using OpenSCAD because I couldn't get it to print correctly without one.
But now I have a go-to for any white elephant gift exchanges!
I'm a middle age cis-gender white male. the odds of someone mis-gendering me are low. If someone used they/them/theirs pronouns in reference to me I would not be hurt. If they used “she/her/hers” I would be a little confused, but not hurt. I haven't spent time and effort and frustration and pain establishing or defending my gender identity.
And that's why I list pronouns. Because it's a tacit acknowledgement that if you list your preferred pronouns I will take it seriously. I acknowledge that I haven't had people disrespect me by misgendering me, and I want anyone who is fighting that fight to know that they don't have to fight around me; I'm on their side. Be who you are and I will support you.
I was a big fan of Opera back before there was a Firefox browser, back when it was all Internet Explorer as far as the eye could see. Opera was an interesting thing, and was also a source of real and sustained innovation. Tabbed browsing was their idea, as was mouse gestures and a few other fancy things.
Opera as a company has gone weird since then, but a few of the original people have splintered off and created Vivaldi , and I kind of love it. it's a deeply nerd-centric browser. Right now I'm writing this post in a sidebar, which lets me browse sites I'm wanting to reference in the main window. Add in things like “tab stacking” and a command palette, and —a signature Opera feature— a built in mail client, and you have a delightfully non-mainstream browser that I have fallen in love with more than once.
I tend to fall out of love with it because of compatibility issues with some of the sites I have to use for work, but hopefully as Vivaldi advances, and as web masters within my organization update their sites, that will be less of a problem.
I was reading the wikipedia entry for the adage Festina Lente (as one does) and found this:
Slowly make haste, and without losing courage;
Twenty times redo your work;
Polish and re-polish endlessly,
And sometimes add, but often take away.
—Nicolas Boileau, The Art of Poetry
And this is so perfect. I just wanted to share it.
