I don’t normally post things like this here, but I believe it’s well worth watching.

Sunday was an anniversary for me, seven years since I had to say goodbye to my dog, Tasha. She was my best friend for 14 years, and as is true for more dogs than you may realize, she was a poet. This is one of her poems.

DOG SONG

My song begins at sundown
when the twilight wind comes up.
A cold wind, brushing
my hair and my tail.

Butterfly light is shining.
Butterflies lift me at nightfall,
and nothing hurts me now.
Look, the light is brighter than …

See the little dogs come running!
See the bigger dogs come running!
See the kitties and dogs come together,
and all the animals singing.

Tasha
January 2004
based on a Pima Indian song

(For me, at least.)

I’ve been thinking about my next phone. Maybe it should be a smart one. I have time because my new phone date is in December. So, I’m watching the discussions on iPhones and Androids. But now maybe there’s another option: keep using little pocket phones and get a Nexus 7 Android tablet instead of a smart phone. Here’s my thinking.

My communications toolbox currently includes desktop, laptop, and cell phone. Not a smartphone, just a little phone that fits nicely in a small pocket.

My current phone has all the phone features of an iPhone or a Droid. You can talk to people and tell them they’re breaking up, then call them back when the call gets dropped. Your odds are better with a landline on the other end. But I don’t know of anybody using any mobile phone who has a better experience than that.

This is because the technology for adding abounding features to phones moved very fast. Nobody in the mobile phone business had much time to get the call quality working well before the phones became cameras, personal organizers, and computers. So they didn’t bother. In terms of talking, cell phones work just a little better than they did 10 years ago, right? … Can you &@$%+! hear me now?

The reality as I see it is that smartphones are great little computers. But they’re a little too big to be phones. They’re a little too small to be useful computers. And they are not superior for voice calls.

Using a smartphone makes your cellular bill go up. You have to pay for data. And right now, there’s a lot of chaos in the wind because cell companies are changing their pricing and forcing people into data plans they don’t want. The costs are going up, especially for single people like me. Check out a CNET article and short video here.

So I’ve been thinking, what I really want is a tablet, like an iPad, not a new phone. But the iPad is expensive (roughly $400 – $700, depending on version and options) and maybe it’s a little too big. I already have a full size 17” laptop. Maybe I want something smaller – in between the smartphone and the iPad. And less expensive.

There are other 7” and 10” tablets on the market and I’ll probably check out more before I make a choice. But Google’s Nexus 7 is, by all reports so far, an awesome little computer. Bigger than a smartphone, smaller than a tablet, about the size of a Kindle. At $200, it’s ⅓ the price of an iPad. It’s doesn’t require a data plan because it’s not a phone. It connects via WiFi. So why not have a Nexus 7 for mobile computing, and keep using the kind of phone I’ve got? It’s a win win solution, right?

Check out the Nexus 7 in this video.

Share your thoughts using the reply function below, or just email me if you prefer.

A 32 year old filmmaker found a 20 year old video tape of himself at age 12, and decided it was time to sit down and have a talk. Amazing, poignant, and funny.

Listen to my reading of this flash fiction piece:

It’s a long walk, so he likes to get an early start. Gets up about seven, showers, and has a breakfast of dried cheese, poached eggs, and cold water. It’s quiet. After he turns off the faucet, he can hear the last of the water in the pipe falling away from the house.

The road falls away from the house, past his neighbors’ homes, toward a field of baby’s breath standing fallow under a crisp October sky. He carries a bunch of flowers. Crows in the city’s dull generic trees caw at him as he goes by. His shoes crunch in the gravel. He is simply glad to be out in the light.

He doesn’t care for darkness. He used to wish he could make his bedroom darker, shield himself from the streetlights he believes are a pollution of modern life. But he has grown accustomed to a long and shallow dusk. Now he’s almost afraid of the dark.

Without a dog by the bed to reach down and pet, without a woman in it to feel moving and breathing, and without his father’s snoring – which comforted his fearful childhood – he feels adrift in the night. Like a small boat cut loose and gone on an outgoing tide. He adds another quilt to hold his body down, and prays his soul returns by dawn.

Is that too much? Alright. Imagine you’re not reading this, not sitting in that chair that’s never quite as comfy as it ought to be. Imagine your eyes are not tired, that you haven’t had too much coffee or too little, that your back does not itch between your shoulder blades.

Imagine you are lying in the grass on a summer evening of your childhood. There’s a soft glow from the house, but you can see a billion stars. And since it’s early in August, the fiery Perseids have come to fling themselves to death, so you can make a wish.

Speaking of shooting stars, he has reached the graveyard, finally. Everything is green, as after a rain. The leaves are raked, and the dead flowers cleared from the flat and unoffending stones. He sits on a dew damp marble bench by the gate to rest, and reads the little verse it bears:

If tears could build a stairway
And memories a lane,
I’d walk right up to Heaven
And bring you home again.

This is as good a place as any to leave the flowers, though she’s not buried here. He sifted her cremated bones on the ocean, on the most happy, conscious, talkative part of it, the very edge. He stood with his pants rolled up to his knees and waited for the most perfect, compassionate little wave to come and break, then ebb and carry her away. Then he sang Old Shep and turned, and went for lunch.

Now from time to time, he leaves the car at home and comes, as in a pilgrimage. Because the sea is good for doing what it does, for cleaning up and washing all away. But the graveyard accepts and is patient, keeping watch, letting the years pass slowly in silence and in light. So he comes on foot, and now he stands and goes from stone to stone, and finds the name of a child, a girl with a name like a shadow or a dream, and he leaves the flowers there.

Download the PDF.

A Shadow Or A Dream by Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I like Google Docs. I’m using it to write this post. Even though I write almost entirely on my own computers, use Dropbox, and have plenty of options for word processing and text editing, I just like it. It makes sense. I’ve been using it for as long as the public has been able to; in fact, I used Writely a little before Google bought it out.

The text editor is great for short, simple documents, especially if you’re collaborating. The spreadsheet is just an awesome alternative to Excel. And who doesn’t like not having to Save?

All that being said, there are problems with G-Docs document writer. It’s not fully compatible with MS Word. And sooner or later, most of my documents get exported to Word for advanced formatting before publication.

G-Docs exports OK in rtf and odt, but not in doc. If you export to doc, the spelling checker in Word won’t work. I’ve tried it in Win7 and XP, using Chrome and Firefox (not that the browser should matter.)

There must be an artifact in the G-Docs document template which conflicts with MS Word. The spellcheck won’t work, even if I copy-paste into Word from Google or open a new Word file and paste in from the original Word export. 

By the way, I’m using Word in MS Office 2003 Pro.

There are 3 workarounds. Paste into Notepad, then into Word (and lose all your formatting); export to rtf then open in Word; or export to odt, open in LibreOffice or OpenOffice, then save as doc.

I’ve noticed other problems with line and paragraph breaks, and paragraph formatting, when exporting to Word. And when I pasted this blog text from G-Docs into my blogging software for upload, the text was one big glob, no line breaks. So I pasted into Notepad first, and that worked fine.

The release of Drive has revealed more glitches, such as the way folders created in the desktop app may never show up online. But it seems to be fine to create folders online, then use them on the desktop.

I know, this has to be the epitome of a First World Problem. But geek is as geek blogs. And there’s a sentence that my Grandfather wouldn’t recognize as English.

Google docs – Drive – is surpassingly cool. I hope in time Google will iron out the kinks, so that it grows into a platform worthy of trust and respect, not just admiration.

Thoughts? Leave ‘em in the comments. But if you tell me you’re using the same software and you don’t have the glitch, you’ll hear me scream from whatever continent you’re on.

In the video linked below (called On Being A Science Fiction Writer, but more widely applicable), Cory Doctorow talks about the writing process, and makes the point that writing is a partly unconscious act. But the conscious mind gets involved and tries to force rationality and structure on the process.

“Every time I’ve actually bowed to that, the story has died. Because I think you can’t be cognitive and metacognitive at the same time. You can’t be thinking about something and thinking about what you’re thinking about at the same time. You can’t revise and create in the same moment. You’ve got to do one and then the other.”

The conundrum of being cognitive and metacognitive strikes a solid chord with me. It reminds me of what Stegner described as being, “infected with consciousness and the consciousness of consciousness, doomed to death and the awareness of death.” That’s existential and makes for all sorts of literary fun. But in creative writing, it’s a real problem. Worse than Facebook. The hardest thing about trying to create anything is overcoming the temptation to criticize it before it has a chance to live.

And it’s only getting worse, I think, with the metastasis of technology. I used to write poems with the idea that I might show them to someone in a couple of months, at a workshop, perhaps, after a few more drafts. Now I’m thinking it’s been a few days or a week since I posted anything on my blog, so I really ought to try to cough something up. Today or tonight, but soon.

I guess that’s always been the way it is for journalists. You’ve got to fill the column inches between the ads with something. And maybe I’ve digressed.

How is it possible to keep the conscious mind from getting in the way and mucking things up? Well, Doctorow seems to say that he faces this challenge by focusing on the tension imperative to driving his plot.

“Plots run on tension, and there are lots of ways to make tension and lots of ways to diffuse it. But the one kind of iron-clad, always works way to make tension is to have a person in a place with a problem. The person tries to solve the problem, the person fails, and things get worse.”

OK, that’s one excellent kind of tension. I have to say it’s not the kind of tension that drives the things I write, unless I take a fairly broad view of what constitutes a problem. My tension tends to be more emotional, more existential than the problem I think Doctorow is talking about.

It seems to me that often it’s not just the problem and the search for a solution that builds the tension, but the greater awareness of the self in the context of the problem.

Here are two paragraphs from my novel in process, in which my central character states his problem:

I hated that the night had gone by so fast and I had to confront my consciousness again, my life and its anxiety, and the fog-soaked dripping valley still sleeping around me. I needed more time to think, to sort things out. I woke up in a vague melancholy, a general discomfort with damn near every facet of my life. Papa was sick and maybe dying, this old house sighed under the weight of the rain and fog. And I didn’t have a clue how to move forward with my life. …”

I laid in my bed and saw that almost thirty years had stood, been glimpsed, and died away since I was eleven years old. I laid here in my lumpy old bed and tried to believe in Papa moving on, maybe soon, in Dad following, and in the whole world going on without me. Can the world really go on spinning when all of us are gone? It seems to have that intention precisely. I thought the world should have something wise to say about all this,  some bland apology to make. But it only rained more ardently, as though it would not stop for days.

OK, so I’m not writing To Kill A Mockingbird. Now there was a plot with tension. I won’t even defile it by restating the problems Atticus Finch faced, and his children. But I think you’ll agree my guy has a problem. He doesn’t particularly care for the way the universe is built. And I suppose under Doctorow’s thesis, my task is to generate tension by making you watch me – I mean my character – try to solve it.

This should be interesting. And more interesting, here’s the video of the interview with Cory Doctorow.

Coming soon: An update on my favorite geeky writing tools for getting stuff written, while staying organized and keeping the bad wolf of premature editing off your tasty bits.

On Google+, one’s public posts form a stream which is, in essence, a blog. (See Google+ in the menu above.) In my case, that blog is more active and eclectic than Metaphor, which is reserved for what I hope are thoughtful occasional posts on writing.

Now, thanks to a dubious minor miracle or some serious geekery, you can subscribe to my public posts on Google+, even if you’re not a Google+ user yourself.

This is not a service offered by Google, it’s something I learned to do out of school. It was fun. If you would like to learn to syndicate a feed of your Google+ posts, here’s an article to teach you how: http://www.sybersquad.com/my-daily-links-newsletter-experiment/.

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Oops, I posted that on the wrong blog. But that’s OK, it’s off topic but cool.