Tag Archives: writing

Tech Raising pt 3

May 10, 2012 By in hypertext, Lithomobilus, writing Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I handed off my documents Friday night – about a dozen nodes of text, a spreadsheet showing how they all interrelated, a text description of the expected functionality, a PowerPoint presentation showing all the functionality I wanted to have in the reader.

I felt like I lucked out in the group of folks who worked on my app. First, I had written all of my nodes with the programming interface in mind, writing them all as text files and tagging each one with the relevant character names and locations. I had used a spreadsheet with linked documents to organize my writing, so the programmers knew exactly how everything fit together. The logic was there, it just needed to be programmed into an interface. After the talks we had and the questions they had asked, I felt like they knew exactly what direction I was headed.

Saturday, I hung out at the Cruzio co-working space and answered questions and nibbled on snacks. I hovered around the guys working on my project, but every once in a while, I heard other people in other places mention the name of my project. It’s like being at a party and hearing your name from across the room being mentioned by people you don’t know – that thrill of curiosity, that hope that the mention is something good.

There was plenty of talk Saturday about what folks were working on and how the work was going. I met with a guy who would do the UI design, I talked with the engineers, it was exciting. I had to cut out early to make it to the opening night of Faust, and that was nice too.

The Big Day

Sunday was a little more involved. I got there early-ish and fielded questions from the team. Both Saturday and Sunday were a process of whittling down the number of expected features for the demo. It was important that we have a complete feature set for the demo, but that everyone involved have a good time. While I waited, Douglas Crets from Microsoft BizSpark interviewed me for his blog. Finally, my team handed me a demo already loaded with my text and, as an amazing bonus, the text of Hamlet so that we could demonstrate the ability to import existing text and manually index it for education purposes.

I gave my demo, and was told several things by the panel of judges:

  1. My hair is fascinating.
  2. I have good shoes, too.
  3. The idea of non-linear literature is brilliant.
  4. Because this is a new invention, I should be patient if people are slow to get it. People are always slow to recognize a fundamental shift in thinking.

On my way back to my seat, people high-fived and fist-bumped me. Chris Neklason, Cruzio founder who gave a lovely little talk before the presentations Sunday, told me I had nailed it.

Looking back on the whole experience, the value I got out of it wasn’t what I thought it would be. I thought that the value would be in having my idea turned into a reality and getting to show it off to people. That was certainly nice, and the first step in what will be a long process of turning this idea into a full-scale usable product, but it wasn’t the very most valuable thing. The very most valuable thing was what I did the very first night: getting up in front of everyone and asking them to confirm that this idea I had was worth something. The very best part was not just having people nod and say “Yes, I think that’s a swell idea,” but having people like it enough to spend time working to make it a reality, wanting to hang around and talk about its applications and possibilities, thinking about how to make it a reality and what all the buttons and knobs should look like.

As I go through the process of finishing what I started, I feel that the experience of having this group of smart, talented people telling me that they thought my idea was great will help carry me through the hard work ahead.

 

Raising Tech pt 1

April 29, 2012 By in hypertext Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Now that TechRaising is over, I’ve been asked about four million times just what happened and what I was doing. It seems like every time I try to explain exactly what happened this weekend, I end up telling a slightly different version of the story. The weekend was so full of action and emotion that it would be hard to tell the whole thing, and I’m always focusing on different parts of it and re-thinking them.

The Back Story

Back in December when I did my first grad school residency, I came up with the idea of writing a non-linear novel. In the strictest sense, any literature that involves more than one character is non-linear because every author talks about what this group of characters is doing, and then backs up in time to fill in what other characters were doing at the same time. As readers, we understand how this works and are able to follow along. We live our own lives that way, doing our own thing all day, then getting together with our friends or family and getting filled in on what they were doing when we weren’t around.

When I talked to my husband about it, he offered to figure out the programming necessary to make it happen, but I turned him down. My husband is a genius of a software engineer, but IOS programming (I had my heart set on an iPad app) isn’t his power alley, and it would take him a while to get up to speed. In the meantime, he just started a new job and he’s still working hard at being a competitive bagpiper. Those were some of the reasons I gave him for letting him off the hook, but the real reason is that I’ve been a project manager for a long time, and my way of getting things done is to be demanding and unreasonable (although in the nicest possible way). These are great when you’re cracking the whip over guys who would otherwise spend all day sending each other links to xkcd cartoons, but less great when you’re working with someone that you have to sit across the dinner table from.

 

What Dreams May Come

April 19, 2012 By in personal Tags: , , , Leave a comment

“You’ve certainly been scarce lately,” you say.

“Sorry. I plead a medical exemption.”

“You’ve been sick?”

That’s a good question. I’ve been on SSRI inhibitors for a few months now, and it’s been a bit of a struggle. The first ones made me both groggy and bitchy (exactly the opposite of how they affect most people). The second ones made me so sleepy I couldn’t tell whether my mood had improved or not. We’ve been fiddling with the dosage, and I’m now at a dosage where my symptoms are manageable, but the side effects are apparent.

I’m always thirsty. I get headaches often. I procrastinate more than I used to, because I just don’t worry about the consequences of not getting things done. None of those things is great, but they’re not fatal.

The worst is that I just don’t have the urge to create anymore. I don’t care so much about writing. I haven’t written anything new in quite a while, and I can’t seem to motivate myself to get started. It doesn’t help that my most potent source of story material seems to have dried up.

I’m not dreaming anymore.

If you don’t know me, you don’t know that my dream life is almost as important to me as my waking life. Google “virtual bank line” (with the quotes), and the first few results will be me talking about my dreams which are action-packed, specific, and detailed. It would be easy for me to believe that this life where I’m sitting in a coffee shop and typing at a computer is my dream life, and that the other one is my real life, it’s that detailed.

Without dreams, it feels like my days are incomplete. Like I’m missing half of my life. All those things I do in my dreams feel like they’re going undone. Like somewhere, there’s a world where I have a job to do and I’m not doing it.

I discussed this with my therapist, and his response was “There’s no free fucking lunch.” (He’s that kind of therapist.) He’s not kidding – not only are my dreams gone, but I’m paying for the privilege of having them taken away.

I feel now that if I’m going to keep taking these meds, I have to figure out how to rebuild my life, including the dream life. I’m not sure it’s worth it to let that go.

ReWrite, ReVise, ReThink

March 26, 2012 By in writing Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

It’s the end of the month, and I’m in the same dilemma that I find myself in pretty often. I’m working on re-writes to a piece that I’m pretty excited about. I can see its possibilities, I can see it taking shape as I peel away the stuff that’s been bogging it down, fix the stuff that was a little bit broken, polish up the chrome and supercharge the…um…fraculator….you get it.

At the same time, I’ve got another piece that I’m equally excited about. This is a piece that I’m still creating. I’m only just starting to make mistakes on it. I’m still exploring, seeing what it has to offer, getting to know the lay of the land, meeting the locals. It’s a nonstop party in this new place, and I hate to leave a party! Okay. That’s an utter lie. Everyone that knows me knows that after two drinks, I’m standing by the door tapping my watch and saying that my dogs are getting lonely without me, but this is a fictional party where I’m always having a lovely time dancing and telling hilarious jokes and my hair never goes weird and my mascara never starts to run.

And at the same time that I’m supercharging my fraculator and charming everyone at the fictional party, there’s this other piece. Like most writers, I have a whole file of stuff that I’ve started writing and then sort of abandoned, half finished, or quasi-finished, or one-sentenced, in drawers and files and all over the place, and every once in a while, I dig those things up and think to myself “Holy mambo – that is GENIUS!” And I push everything else off my desk to make room for this amazing perfect idea that I can’t believe I discarded in a moment of folly.

But then something happens. Someone reminds me that I owe them revisions, or the next chunk of something, and I realize that I have to buckle down and finish something. I have to make a choice. Hobson’s choice. Sophie’s choice. Which is like Hobson’s choice, only way better-looking. Speaking of which, there’s a place called Hobson’s Choice Cleaners in my new neighborhood in San Francisco. My mother and I figure that it means that they give you the choice between putting stains in your shirts or ripping the buttons off. But I digress.

What I really wish is that I had more time, or that I had more of me, or that I were less creative. But I don’t have any of those things. I have my own Hobson’s choice to make. My own metaphorical buttons to rip off, my own metaphorical shirts to stain. And sitting here, writing this blog ain’t gonna get it done, is it?

What Is Revealed/What Is Hidden

February 7, 2012 By in personal, writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

There are facts about my life that everyone knows. My parents divorced when I was very young. My mother was a single parent for most of my life. Only one of the four of us siblings didn’t finish college. My extended family is close emotionally, although not geographically. Those facts are generic, bland, and could be said of millions of other people. They don’t challenge anyone, they don’t embarrass anyone, they wouldn’t hurt anyone if they came out in public.

I’ve been talking to a few people about parts of my life that are not so well known. The things about my life that aren’t well known aren’t historical facts (sure, our family has its share of illegitimate babies, extramarital affairs and homosexuals, but everyone knows about them and nobody cares). Mostly, they’re about my own opinions of the things that happened to me as a kid.

From the time I was very small, my family has classified me as “dramatic,” their way of saying that I’ve always blown things out of proportion. My childhood was a really awful time that I was lucky to survive. I don’t recall it as being happy, and while I have a hard time remembering things like birthday parties or family outings, I recall in stark clarity childhood slights, fights and wounds. I contrast my view of my own childhood with my younger sister’s view of hers. She once claimed that she “raised herself,” but she may have amended that view now that she’s older. She was outgoing, popular, always the center of attention. When it was just my sister and me living with my father and stepmother, it was crystal clear that they liked her and had no idea what to do with me.

I’ve told people stories about my childhood, about things that I’ve been through, and they all say “You should write a book!” That’s true. I should write a book, but the book I should write is fictional and has nothing to do with the things that I’ve lived through. I can’t write those things, because I don’t have the courage to say thing things I know about my family to the rest of the world. Mostly, it’s because I know terrible things about the people I love, and yet I love them. Truly, deeply, in a give-my-life-for-them kind of way. I love my family in a way I feel as a physical sensation in my chest. It’s the stillness between heartbeats and the peak and trough of every breath. And yet, I know these awful things.

But there’s the flip side of this knowledge. A while back, I recounted something to my younger sister from our childhood, and she told me that she didn’t believe it had ever happened. I could have pulled rank on her and said “You’re three and a half years younger than me, you don’t remember,” but she’s the sort of self-confident person who wouldn’t believe me. I don’t think that the thing I recounted was anything of consequence. I could never tell her anything of consequence because of the fear that she would tell me it had never happened. I can’t stand the thought of having the defining moments of my life denied, because it would be too much like having my own pain denied.

Maybe if I put my family in a room, like they do at the end of television mysteries, and went around the room saying “YOU threw spoons at me when we were little,” and “YOU sided with your friends against me,” and “YOU told Mom and Dad that I’d done stuff that I hadn’t so I’d get into trouble,” pointing my finger in their faces as I paced around the room, the other hand held behind my back, maybe if I did that, we could all talk about it and what it meant to me. Maybe they would understand that the things they experienced as good-natured teasing hurt me deeply. That their labels for me – “lazy,” “weird” – defined in a negative way how I saw myself for most of my childhood.

So in the meantime, I write fiction. I don’t make my characters autobiographical, and I don’t base them on anyone in my family. If you want to dissect my fiction for clues into my early life, I will tell you not to bother. The truth you’re looking for is both more and less than you think it might be.

 

Who Do You Believe?

January 28, 2012 By in practical advice, writing Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

I’m currently at Borderlands Press Boot Camp, and today is the day that we met with the folks running the group and got small-group feedback. Last night, a staffer read our separately-submitted two-page excerpts (we were requested to send in two pages from a current work in progress) out loud. We were instructed to raise a hand when we felt that we had heard enough to make a decision about the book, either yes or no. The group was brutal. They completely trashed nearly everyone’s submission, and by the time they got to mine (the last one), they were just shrugging their shoulders and asking each other “what the hell is this” and laughing in a not-kind way.

Mr. A, the man furthest to the left, said that it was a mess – he couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be happening. Mr. B, the man in the center, just laughed derisively. He shouted out “Muffin-faced? What does that even mean?” (I find this slightly funny because I stole that term from Paul Theroux, who used it to describe Queen Elizabeth in an article in Vanity Fair.) Mr. C, the man furthest to the right, seemed to want to hear more. He was willing to forgive its obvious deficiencies because he wanted to hear the end.

I was expecting the small-group feedback to look a lot the same – that everyone would trash me and I’d feel like an idiot. Imagine my shock, then, when Mr. A pronounced it “nearly perfect,” and observed that “either you’ve been writing for a very long time, or you’re gifted.” In the next session, Mr. B’s written notes said “I confess: I loved this.” Mr. C, the man I was sure would hale me as a genius, made some very discouraging remarks. He did say that it worked, that I had managed to walk a very fine line between horror and hilarity. I feel like he was tough on everybody, and that perhaps I got off a little easier than some, but it was still much tougher than I was expecting.

Here’s my dilemma, and I know that this has happened to everyone: On Friday night, I sat and listened to Messrs. A, B and C. I listened to how they presented themselves, how they put their thoughts together, the points they made, etc. I decided that Mr. A was a waste of time. I didn’t agree with his ideas or opinions and thought that he was a little full of himself. I wasn’t entirely sold on Mr. B either. He laughed at his own jokes and parroted the words of the other two men constantly. Mr. C seemed the most well-prepared, the most articulate, the most mentally together of the three. I had already decided that I would listen more carefully to his advice than to Mr. A’s or Mr. B’s.

But now that I’ve gotten their advice, I can’t help but feel that perhaps Mr. A and Mr. B are smarter than I had given them credit for. Obviously, they’re smart enough to see what a “perfect,” “gifted,” lovable writer I am. And perhaps Mr. C isn’t quite as bright as I wanted to think he was.

It’s tempting to believe the people who flattered me, but I’m going to go home and look at the dozens of copies of this same 25 pages I’ve now had critiqued and handed back, and I’m going to try the suggestions that Mr. C gave me. I’m not going to rest on my A and B laurels.

You Have to Give to Get

January 25, 2012 By in practical advice, writing Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Tomorrow morning, I leave at just after 6:00am for Baltimore to be part of the Borderlands Press Boot Camp. Each of the participants had to read and critique 15 other participants’ stories, up to 25 pages. Does this sound familiar?

I think that as a writer, my most valuable asset is having a group of people whose opinions I respect, to look over my work and give me feedback. But, like any valuable asset, it doesn’t come free.

In addition to the not-inconsiderable financial cost of grad school, I have upwards of 50 books to read each semester – that’s ~2 per week, 10-15 of which require annotations. I also have to write something like 100 pages of new work each semester. I have to read, critique and be prepared to discuss in detail the work of 5-6 of my fellow students per semester. For Borderlands Press Boot Camp, I had to pay to attend, but I also have to read and critique the work of the 15 other participants and be prepared to discuss it in detail. For the critique group I’ve been part of on and off for the past 4 years, I have to read, critique and discuss in depth an entire novel (not just the first 20 pages) every couple of months.

I’ve learned so much from all the people who have taken the time to critique my work, and when I critique theirs, I think hard about what I could do to make their work the best thing it can be. But I also want to point out to everyone who has ever said to me “You’re a writer. Could you just look at this thing that I wrote and tell me what you think?” that no, I can’t. I don’t feel that it would be fair to the dozens of other people who have made some real sacrifices and put in a lot of time to help me make my writing the best it can be.

 

 

Getting Closer…

January 13, 2012 By in hypertext, writing Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

I’m in the middle of writing a hypertext novel – I think I’ve told you about it. And at the time, I told you that I was chewing over the programmatic difficulties just to get out of doing the writing, because I’m the most procrastinating monkey ever. But, as often happens, by letting the problem stew in the back of my mind, I’ve made some decisions.

First, the whole point of this hypertext novel is to invite the reader to take a more active role in the text. There are decisions to make – whose point of view do you want to read? Is there a location that interests you? So, I realize that I need to write both a list of the dramatis personae and the settings.

The first thing that a reader will see is an interface introducing them to the players and asking them who they want to hear from. Alternatively, they could pick any of the three settings and say that they’d like to hear the entire story in that setting. If that’s the mode they choose, they will be directed to the character with the earliest entry in that node. When you’re in a page, it should have some kind of background image that tells you which character you’re seeing – perhaps a light wash of color and a graphic. There will be a next button and a previous button. The next button will take you to the next node in the timeline of the current character, the previous button will take you to the previous node for that character, even if the node you came from was a different character. Along the bottom will be icons for any other available characters for that node. Along the top will be icons for the other settings, and when you mouse over the icon, it’ll give you the choice of any characters with nodes at that point in the timeline.

I get that this post is about as exciting as a detailed description of my breakfast oatmeal, but trust me on this one. Anyone reading this: this is something brand new and cool that we’re inventing here. When it’s done, it’ll be revolutionary. The important thing is this: the next TechRaising event is in May, and I’m hoping to pitch this project to a team who will, in one weekend, create the UI. Are you ready? I’m totally ready.

Annotation Nation

January 11, 2012 By in grad school, writing Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

This, my friends, is Annotation Nation: a collection of book annotations done by a small group of authors. “What’s an annotation?” you ask. I certainly did.

An annotation is just a 1-2 page synopsis of your own thoughts and feelings about the craft of the book you’ve read. As part of the project period work for my MFA, I’m required to do ~10 of these per semester. Annotations are subjective, don’t necessarily include a plot synopsis and may be positive about a work even though it wasn’t a great read, provided that the author did something specific that the person writing the annotation found valuable. The purpose of doing these annotations is to get us to pay attention to the craft involved in the works we’re reading – to dissect and drill down on those things that worked and on those things that didn’t.

Annotations are useful to other writers when they give another writer who’s struggling with some aspect of their writing a reference to another author who is successfully managing that aspect.

Remember, as writers, it doesn’t do us any good to read if we’re not reading critically, with an eye toward what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s worth stealing.

Monkey on the Radio

January 9, 2012 By in appearances, writing Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I could do a post wrapping up the end of the cruise, but to be honest, our last day at sea was largely spent packing and sitting by the pool. Now that we were back up north (having shoved off from Cabo at ~2pm the day before), it was really cold and windy out by the pool and most people were wearing jackets and hats. We did take that towel animal class, though.

1 bath towel + 1 hand towel = 1 elephant

The secret to a good elephant is a really tight trunk roll. Once you've mastered that, you're in the big leagues.

So…if you visit my house and use the guest bath, you are likely to see either an adorable fresh towel elephant, bear or monkey. Either that, or a slighly damp towel amoeba.

So, packing sleeping, disembarking, driving, unpacking, laundering, catching up on email/phone calls/mail…and now we’re at Wednesday. One of the things I did while on the boat was to put together this year’s reading for Ann Arbor’s show “Unbedtime Stories” on KFJC. I’ve done this every year, and it’s something I always enjoy. Without further ado, here is my 2012 radio appearance.

[audio http://junglemonkeydotcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/chronomobilus-reading.mp3

As always, big thanks to Ann Arbor for her generosity in inviting me back year after year to read on Unbedtime Stories. If you’d like to hear me reading something by someone else, I’ll be at Felton Library’s Readathon, tentatively scheduled for February 8. But don’t worry. I’ll remind you.

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