Category Archives: writing

the bends

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Something in that recent interview of Dave Eggers caught my attention.

“Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down.”


Isn’t that the truth? Deeper and deeper and deeper on down. It’s like self-hypnosis too. But I like the diving metaphor. Except that sometimes you step off the boat and find the water has turned solid, concrete molded with ripples and waves and painted blue and green. 

You smack it with your hands, bang on it with the shovel, but the briny deep is solid rock. Then what? Lie down with your back against a swell and wait for it to soften up. Reading helps. 

pink noise

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Your Computer Really Is A Part of You.

“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”

So long as the results of our interaction with everyday tools are as expected, we are atoned – symbiotic – with them. When the results are not, we are not. We become aware of the disconnect between us and the tools.

Believe it? Read the short article linked above; otherwise, you’ll never know what pink noise is.

zen and the art of

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Here's something that's been bugging the stuffing out of me for a while. People need to stop using Zen And The Art Of … in the title of every misbegotten how to spew that their half-baked muse strikes them to hack up.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values was a great book by Robert M. Pirsig. It was published in 1974, 36 years ago this spring. I read it in about 1981, and could not put it down. That was back when I had an attention span.

Since then, countless people have ripped off that title. Zen And The Art Of Poker, Zen And The Art Of Rhubarb Furniture, Zen And The Art Of Vampires, Zen And The Art Of Chicken n Dumplins, Zen And The Art Of Zen, Zen And The Art Of Leather Pants, Zen And The Art Of Getting Rich, Zen And The Art Of The Banana Sandwich. Then there's the one that set me off, Zen and the art of serial-drama maintenance.

Huh? Knock it off! It was fresh once, over a third of a century ago, when Pirsig did it, and that was that. He got there first, nailed it down, done. Get over it. Shoot for a original thought, for cryin' out loud. 

You can't just come along and write For Whom The Bell Rings, A Clean Well-Lighted House, or The Sound and the Funny, and expect to get away with it. What If I spewed up a poem about walking a dog at night, hearing her rabies tags jingling, and called it Stopping By Woods On A Chilly Evening? I'd be dragged to the withered bracken!

Am I serious? No, not really. I made up half those titles in the third paragraph. Can you guess which? But it does seem like a pretty easy way to scratch the itch to find a title, and nobody respects taking the easy way out. I can stop ranting now, and we can just feel sorry for those so lacking in imagination. They wouldn't know Zen if it ran up and bit them, and they don't understand that repetition is the death of something, as somebody already said.  

cool stuff

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web sites of 2 artists

Public Gallery | Aaron Ristau

Glenray Tutor – Photorealist

Both are great. But the latter, espeically, spins memory back into childhood.

I remember staring into the depths of a marble and I wish I had a handful now.

I have noticed that many successful technical innovators have toys in their workspace. 

Since I’m writing a novel about 2 kids, maybe I need to scatter a few toys around in here. Maybe I’m using one now.

on revision

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A nice little interview with a writer/editor, about revising work.

What aspect of revision do you embrace or even look forward to?

I love looking at every sentence and trying to sharpen its meaning, to say it in fewer words, to infuse it with action, to take out the clutter, to find the rhythm as one sentence joins with another. I like to try to end every paragraph with an image or a mood or a surprise. That’s sheer joy for me, just playing with language.

word by word

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I have been watching an interview with Anne Lamott on youtube. It’s good. I hoped something like that might help me shake my monkey mind loose from The Grip, or Writer’s Clog, or whatever is keeping me from moving forward with the chapter I’ve been trying to write. I don’t believe in Writer’s Block, but I believe in these phenomena, and in The Swamp Which Must Be Drained.

The problem is worse than that. I’m trying to write about a guy who is stuck in his life. I should say that his life is stuck in place. Writing about being stuck and unable to manifest positive change in your life, without feeling The Grip of entropy’s centrifugal force, is like writing about depression and trying to stay in a cheerful mood.

I suppose the trick is just to write the next right word, and the one after that. 

So what’s Marty – my protagonist – going to do next? The sumbitch won’t tell me. He’s sitting at the kitchen table. He can’t stay there and hope to inherit the land, or the wind, much less to move the ponderous plot.

Maybe he’ll go back to bed. If he does, I’m landing an airliner on his stupid old house.

draft 5 is in the box

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Draft 5 Completed

Today I finished Draft 5 of the epic novel that will not die. All 34 existing chapters are up to draft specs, tidied up and nicely formatted. And yes, that matters. There is art in them details. So … whew.

Here are the current statistics on the manuscript.

Of course, none of that means a bloody thing unless Draft 6 is better than Draft 5, and unless the whole process moves forward toward a finished book. So I have the outline and notes for the next draft all set to go.

Technical Decisions

In the process, I’ve made a couple of decisions. First, I’m staying with MS Word as my word-processing software. And it’s going to be Word 2003. The new Beta of Word 2010 is cool, sure, but I like the old application better. No accounting for taste.

I’m going to continue experimenting with Skydrive and Live Workspace for backup and work-in-process storage, but not relying on them. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the Internet isn’t ready for working in the cloud yet. It’s too hard to maintain consistent connectivity when I’m away from my hermitage.

Finally, I’m sticking with iTunes with harman/kardon speakers, and an iPod, to provide vital distraction from the miserable hoopleheads who can’t get in and out of their cars with honking their stupid horns. Assclowns.

What I learned today

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In my last post, I mentioned that I need to learn to do something new every day. I sort of implied that it’s a new years resolution or something. It’s not. I actually believe that I do learn something new every day, even after almost a half century spinning around on our little blue pixel in space.

Sometimes I incorporate what I learn into my life. More rarely, I am still conscious of what it was by the end of the day. So my new years resolution is to try to keep track of the things I learn. One thing every day.

Have you ever checked out OddTodd? It’s a fun site. He does a thing called his Daily Fact I Learned From The TV. It’s cool. And in the spirit of ripping off that premise, I propose to offer you – my indefatigable Reader – a daily what I learned today. Except I probably won’t post it every day. Maybe I’ll keep a list and post them once a week.

Assuming I succeed at all. I’m taking odds.

The odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Here’s my first episode of What I Learned Today and it’s a double for your money. 

… And by the way, I didn’t say these were going to be funny. I’m just a writer. I’m not OddTodd or Ze Frank.

Quick Tip for Showing/Hiding Mark-up (reviewing elements) in MS Word 2003.

When I’m working on a document, I often insert comments using the reviewing functions in Word. Sometimes I use Track Changes, so that all my editing markups appear conditionally until I finish the editing job.

There is an option to have the comments and tracked changes appear as balloons in the right column, or not. It’s nice to be able to turn the comments balloons on and off, so they’re not always in your way, right?

It’s always been my habit to go to the Reviewing Toolbar, click Show then scroll down to Balloons. A slow method.


Yesterday I learned that if you go to View > Markup, you can easily hide all the balloons, and the changes. This shows you the document without comments, and with the changes that you have made but not yet finalized. In other words, the final document without markups.That’s faster.

Today I learned that on the Reviewing Toolbar, there’s an option to select how you want to view the document. You can see the Final Showing Markups, the Final, the Original Showing Markups, or the Original. That’s a lot faster, and easier.

(Click to Enlarge)

Sweet!

Well, let’s see what I’ve learned in a week or so, right? Maybe I’ll learn how I’ve been using Word for 15 years without knowing those obvious functions were there.

the chapbook tradition

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“In these straitened times, how about taking a leaf out of the Victorians’ book and presenting friends and family with pamphlets of our own literary endeavours during the festive season?”

— Books | guardian.co.uk.

This article points out the long and storied tradition of giving handmade chapbooks as Christmas gifts. Is it seeing a modern resurgence? Perhaps. Part of me hopes so. What’s nicer than getting several hours of peace, alone with words and your imagination? Especially in winter. A cup of tea, a little escape from the world, a psychic connection to someone else.

But as a writer, I caution against it, unless you’re one of those rare people who can give and let go, without investment in feedback. (I’m getting there, slowly.)

Or maybe you just have to be a better writer than I am. You see, I tried this myself a couple of years ago, and never heard back – for good or ill – from anyone. I had forgotten the old maxim that a writer’s family and close friends are not necessarily his/her audience.

So if you enjoy sitting by the tree on Christmas morn and hearing loved ones exclaim, “Oh wonderful! It’s just what I wanted!” then you’re best off getting them just what they want. Or at least something that makes that coveted response a little easier to affect. … Like socks.

That being said, if you have received such a gift from a creative giver this Christmas, read it soon, for crying in the dirt. Then give them a call. Writing is a labor of love and it’s hard to do; at least as hard as shopping.

invisible ink

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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

    -Vladimir Nabokov


So how was your weekend? Didja get your Christmas cards done? Watch some football? Watch the rain or the snow or the small animals out foraging for noms (goodies)? It’s all good.

I was just surfing around some Google results a moment ago and saw this: “Atheists who will take in your pets after The Rapture.” Wow. I didn’t follow the link, because I’d rather just ponder that for a minute.

First of all, every pet I’ve ever had was a better Christian than I am, so I’m not buying the premise of them getting left behind. Next metaphysical speedbump please.

I had a pretty good weekend I guess. Saturday was rainy, which was wonderful. I got a lot done over the 2 days. Christmas lights are up on the condo.


OK, that was last year, but not as far as you know.

I played around with some software over the weekend, which is a lot of fun. This time it was mostly MS Word. Sure I’ve been using it for years, professionally. But it’s one of those programs that’s so layered and intense that you can always learn something new, or find some things you want to tinker with.

Went to the gym twice. We have a nice gym here in Carpinteria. Just the right size for the town, and today it was practically deserted, which is always nice.

I did some writing and totally reorganized the files for my novel. Draft 5 now has 33 chapters and over 100,000 words, all nice and orderly. Then I started a story for children. First effort in that genre. It’s called Jasper’s Rainy Day, and it’s about a little dog who accidentally escapes from his yard on a blustery day, and the adventures he has. It’s pretty fun writing, because it really makes you focus on simple declarative sentences.

 Jasper doesn’t mind the rain, because he has his own little raincoat. It is blue with a white stripe down the side. His mommy puts it on Jasper before he goes outside. It keeps him dry. It keeps his fluffy fuzzy white hair clean.


See? … See ya.

office live workspace and other tools

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“So what is Office Live Workspace? Essentially, it’s a SharePoint-based online storage service designed for users of Microsoft Office that provides anywhere/anytime access to important documents and sharing and collaboration facilities that so small teams of people can work together on documents and projects.”
—Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Office Live Workspace Review.

I’m currently checking this out for myself, and thought you might like to as well. It’s pretty cool. I like the idea of being able to access my documents from anywhere, do some writing, and put them away without having to update other computers. So for the past several months, I’ve been using Windows Live Sync, which syncs files and folders between my 2 computers. It works OK.

Office Live Workspace lets you keep your whole project in The Cloud, open it on any computer with Office installed, save it back to the Cloud, and go on with your happy day. No syncing needed, is my point. 

I’ve also been test driving OpenOffice.org for a while now, with an eye toward replacing MS Office with an office suite that’s free and updates for free, automatically. It’s excellent, but not quite all that MS Office is. Essentially, it will do everything Word will do, but doesn’t exactly integrate with other programs as well. Plus, there’s nothing in the suite to replace MS Publisher, which I use to build web sites.

I really like Google Docs, for drafts, lists, spreadsheets, etc. But no way is it up to the task of handling my big projects. Here’s a word count I ran on my biggest project today:

It’s a big dude, by my standards.

So just in case you’re wondering, I’m sticking with MS Word 2003 for my word processor. I like OpenOffice.org’s Writer pretty well, and will keep using it sometimes, to keep in practice. But it’s not replacing Word yet.