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This is How I Get It Done: Making a quick ebook with Jutoh

Oct 14th, 2010
by Doyce.
6 comments

This one’s going to be short, because I’ve kind of been looking at this screen all day.

A few days ago, I asked if anyone would be interested in getting all of my NaNoWriMo advice posts pulled together into some kind of epub format.

The answer was “yes.”

I kind of ignored that for a bit, because frankly I didn’t know where to start with creating something like that, beyond a PDF; all the stuff I used a few years ago is abandonware.

But today someone sent me an ebook they’d ‘just slapped together’ in eCub, so I went and looked at that.

It seemed fine, but I did notice this bit:

eCub does not do WYSIWYG or syntax-highlighted editing.

Hmm. I may be reading that wrong, but it sounds like it doesn’t do something like “highlight that word and hit ctrl-I for italics.” So… may a little simpler than I wanted.

But then I read:

You may like to consider the Jutoh ebook editor for easier, WYSIWYG editing, more sophisticated import, and greater configurability. Jutoh also handles footnotes, index entries and other aspects.

Well, that certainly seemed a lot closer to what I was looking for.

So I grabbed it, installed it, and got to work. First, I saved copies of all the individual posts as html files, then I pointed Jutoh at that directory full of a mess of html files, images, links, and… you know, stuff, and said “Do something with that, wouldja?”

Here is the result — This is How I Get It Done – Daily Kicks in the Ass for NaNoWriMo Authors, in:

It took me longer to get a decent picture of a composition notebook cover than it did to format the first chapter.

Now… it wasn’t THAT easy — I spent most of the afternoon cleaning out text I didn’t need, and dropping some (but not all — or even most) of the comments from the posts. And I had to recenter pictures and format the captions and…

Okay, yeah, it took awhile, but it was a piece of cake.

The end result (at least for the .mobi – I can’t check the others) is a document that Kate can read on her Kindle and I can read on my phone. The text formating is clean, the pictures are totally legible, the table of contents works perfectly, and all the links to other people’s websites (the commenters, for example) are live and do exactly what they should. I’d love to hear how it works for you guys on your readers of choice.

Unavoidable Snark: A whoooooole afternoon to format a clean, readable, twenty-three thousand word ebook with pictures and an extended reading list that reaches out to the rest of the internet. Yeah. Wow. I can totally see why publishers are charging as much for ebooks as hardbacks. Totally. Yeah.

Finally, for those folks who just want it in their browser, here’s the complete collection of the original posts.

Transmedia: Dirty Commie Creativity

Oct 12th, 2010
by Doyce.
5 comments

A few weeks ago, I finally caved in and picked up StarCraft 2, motivated in no way by the promised playability or fun of the game (which it delivers), but by a heartfelt desire to blow up some internet-friends (still an unrealized goal).

(Has anyone munged “internet friends” into some kind of cool portmanteau yet? Something like frenemies? Frienternets? Interiends? Podbudsters? Hmm.)

Anyway, playing Starcraft again (it feels a lot more like ‘again’, rather than ‘a whole new game’) produced an interesting effect about four or five evenings in.

It made both me and Kate start up Mass Effect 2.

Now, I was going to write about Mass Effect 2 a little bit, but I’ve done that before, more than a few times.

And anyway, I got distracted by some folks on twitter (Tweeps. Why isn’t there a generic-internet version of “tweeps”?) talking about transmedia.

This happens fairly regularly. Every few months, someone who is metallurgically balanced so as to ping my radar will throw out some thoughts on transmedia and stir that particular brain-turtle up. I’m going to take the opportunity to write about the subject while said turtle is still awake and munching on lettuce.

Trasmediwhat?

So: transmedia and transmedia storytelling. The idea is that the gestalt product of a creative project (hereafter, “the content”) grows into some kind of all-permeating thing that sort of wraps up, envelopes, soaks into, saturates, and generally penetrates the content audience’s lifestyle from multiple directions and via multiple media platforms. There are some pornography analogies I could draw, but that specific image isn’t really the goal of a transmedia product (unless a corporation gets hold of it); and I don’t think transmedia creators actually want to engender some kind of unhealthy obsession with their content beyond what one might see from the typical Whedonite or a Beiber fan.

Basically, a transmedia project (theoretically) develops its story across multiple media platforms in order to provide different entry points into the story. For example, one transmedia project might include books, blogs, ‘in-fiction’ twitter feeds, movies, youtube videos from fan-turned-creators, interactive text adventures, RPGs, and shared-author stuff like the Mongoliad or a storyball. Each one of these entry-points (and each piece of content within a particular platform) has a role in the big picture of the whole project, and a set ‘lifespan’ in which it is allowed to affect the big picture.

Did you pick up on the fact that some of those content-affecting inputs would be ‘fan’-created? I hoped you might — it’s an exciting and interesting concept, because if Twitter has taught us anything at all, it’s that all writers are also readers, and most readers are also writers, and everyone’s a fan/geek/nerd about something, so why not harness that awesome creative power and make it into something bigger than any one person? Coordinated storytelling across multiple platforms (even assuming that ninety percent of it is crap) cannot help but make the whole story more compelling.

The “coordinated” part is important, obviously; hence the need for set lifespans in which different elements can affect the core content.

Is this even a new thing?

It’s a fair question. When you talk about transmedia, you quickly start talking about activities that fall under the (shiny, new, plastic) umbrella of “transmedial play”, which. . . well, let’s just quote wikipedia on this one.

The viewer/user/player (VUP) transforms the story via his or her own abilities, and enables the Artwork to surpass the medium. It is in transmedial play that the ultimate story agency and decentralized authorship can be realized. Thus the VUP becomes the true producer of the Artwork. The Artist-authored transmedia elements act a story guide for the inherently narratological nature of the human mind to become thought, both conscious and subconscious, in the imagination of the VUP.

To which I respond “Oh. RPGs. But fancy.”

And what about Harry Potter?

It’s easy to look at a lot of the big-paycheck intellectual properties and think “but seriously: this is already being done.” Harry Potter is out there in books, movies, video games, slashfiction, web comics, youtube parodies, fan created vignettes, and hundreds of other things I’d probably rather not know about.

But that’s not really what this transmedia thing is aiming for.

To which you say: “What?”

See, an example like Harry Potter isn’t (as the jargon surrounding this discussion dictates) transmedia, it’s “crossmedia” — in crossmedia, the IP crosses over to new media platforms only to spread out the original content as far as it can — the stuff beyond the books isn’t delivering new content or growing the ‘canon content’, they’re just new delivery vectors for the original content, and as for the other stuff? The slashfic and youtube fanvids aren’t acknowledged at any point in the cycle as being a ‘real’ part of of the Harry Potter collective creative product in the first place. Conversely, transmedia is designed for multi-platform multi-author hacking.

And again, that’s some pretty heady stuff — there’s no more fertile ground for innovation than a diversity of experience.

But… no one’s really doing this yet?

Here’s the thing: I think it’s being done by accident right now, and largely by people who don’t realize they’re doing it.

To take Mass Effect 2 as a (bad) example, even as I play the game I’m making up stories about the characters or other background elements in my head, because as much as there is going on in that game already (dozens of stories above and beyond the main arc), there’s tons of stuff that only gets alluded to, and those are places my mind likes to go play. I’m also wearing an N7 sweatshirt when the house gets a little chilly in the evening, and I’ve read or at least considered reading the novels/comics/whatever set in the ME2 universe that have nothing at all to do with the storyline of the games, but which add more depth and meaning to the game by thier inclusion in the net product. I’m saturated. Permeated.

But as I said, that’s not a great example. None of my head-stories have an access point by which they can be incorporated into the creative whole. I’m saturated in this content only insofar as I want to become so (heck, even when I wear the sweatshirt, it’s at least somewhat ironically).

Dragon Age (also by Bioware) gets closer in this regard simply because you’ve got the game, the extra content for the game, the flash-based spin-offs, the expansions, novels and comics that provide some intertextual depth to the setting without rehashing anything from the game itself, AND a tabletop RPG (and supporting forum) that lets you play around in the setting sandbox and create your own stories and hacks and narrative, then share it with your fellow fans in that context.

No: that’s not a perfect realization of the ideal, but I believe it’s moving in the right direction; it has a lot of the ingredients in the bowl. And if it’s not right (not yet), that’s not the point — even the failure has value. I don’t think lightning is suddenly going to strike and someone will magically produce a perfect transmedia product/template. Most great ideas don’t come as flashes of insight following brilliant successes — they come after a series of epic fuck-ups and spectacularly useless failures.

(Like, say, Google Wave; the ultimate solution-in-search-of-a-problem. Ten years from now, someone will turn that “wasted” software development and make something pretty goddamn amazing out of it. You watch.)

Why do you keep using examples from gaming?

Lots of people who get excited about Transmedia seem to want to start from books and work out from there. Those same people ask things like “how can publishers take on the author’s work to help it become truly transmedia?”

I think that’s… adorable. Also? Woefully myopic. How is a publisher supposed to help someone writing books expand their creative content into an arena neither they nor (presumably) the author knows anything about? What the fuck does Knopf know about creating a flash-based game or ARG meant to share a linearly independent story spun off from the Book they just put out in hardback?

Jesus, most of them can’t even get their heads around ebooks with anything better than 1996 cognition, and those are kind of the same thing (for now).

No, if you want to jump platforms, you need people who get that OTHER platform as well as you get the platform you’re starting with.

(And there should also be people keeping an eye out for new platforms that don’t currently look like platforms. Some of the best ‘inventions’ come from people repurposing something in a smart way. (GPS technology was originally created to help us bomb the fuck out of other people, for example.))

My point: all the platforms need to be treated with equal care, and if all the platforms are equally important, than it doesn’t matter which one you start on. Gaming (in my opinion) has always done a lot more stuff related to multi-platform creative content and “audience as author” creation, so I tend to start there (but I can be wrong, too).

Again, there’s that chime: audience as author. Author as audience. Innovation via a diverse group of creators.

I’ve been reading Where Good Ideas Come From on my Droid, and there’s a lot in there about co-mutual creation that touches on the potential power of transmedia — the creative output of many people, provided that all those people have access to the “stuff” — the gears and parts that make up a transmedia product. Leave all that stuff lying around, mix in interested and excited people with different experience, give them a reliable means to share good ideas or good notions or even half-baked half-ideas, and let it all simmer someplace that doesn’t punish failed experiments or cockblock anyone messing with the Holy Writ of the Original Content Creator, and you might get something pretty damned special.

Someplace. Someplayce.

Play. Excited, energized creation-as-play.

Now ask again why I keep using gaming examples.

Working Like a Rockstar (The October Forecast)

Oct 11th, 2010
by Doyce.
3 comments

My short-term contract job came to an unhappy/happy end on Friday. And while you might assume ‘unhappy for me’, I’d have to say that the real unhappiness was felt by my now-ex-employers, who really wanted me to stay and really liked me; they just ran out of budget.

They liked me so much that my boss basically wrote the new update to my resume, bragging me up even more than I usually do myself. Contract jobs are actually pretty good in that way — you can come in like a superhero, smash the crap out of problems, gird yourself in accolades, and leave before office politics sully your fancy spandex costume.

The big trick is making sure you’ve got somewhere to land when you leap over the next tall building in a single bound. (Freelance writers will find this kind of thing very familiar; it’s a kind of rockstar lifestyle, assuming one reads that to mean “striving to see the difference between homelessness and living out of a tour van.”)

I may have a new gig lined up pretty soon — another -opolis that needs saving from an Atomic Menance — but to be perfectly honest I’ll be happy if there’s a bit of a lag before the next corporate thing.

I am ready to do some other things.

Let’s review what’s on the to-do list.

New cub.

There’s a new kid on the way to the Casa, so there are more than a few home projects going on. The kid’s room is actually pretty much ready to go, but in the meantime we’ve been working on other rooms in the house.

We’ve painted our bedroom and the front greatroom, and of course Kaylee’s new bedroom needs to be framed in and painted and carpeted and all that cool stuff, but we’re letting some professionals handle that, even though I’m pretty sure I could nail (heh) the framing part.

Then there’s painting the house itself. The outside. We must — absolutely must — paint the whole thing before winter, or we’ll need to replace all the siding next summer, and if I’ve got some time before the next gig, I’ll probably be doing that myself and saving us mumble-hundreds of dollars.

The main problem with this cunning plan is that there are three spots where the siding needs to be replaced, and of course the problem spots aren’t anywhere a mook like me could handle it — they’re complicated places like where the chimney meets the house, right under the eaves.

By the way: if you’re in the market for a house, or planning to build one? Fuck chimneys. I don’t care how much you want a fireplace; don’t do it. Embed a firepit in your deck or something. Chimneys are to houses what a bad smoking habit is to an otherwise healthy person.

Anyway. I am pretty much ready to go with the painting thing, but we’re going to have to wait until we can get these sections fixed by someone competent experienced.

Why isn't it ever simple?

NaNoWriMo is on the horizon, and the prepatory murmurs are audible even at this great distance. Some folks have asked if I’m ‘doing’ it again this year which… c’mon. Of course.

But I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do first. A publisher handed me some revision requests which — damn them — are actually really good, so I want to get those done and handed back to my awesome agent before October is dead and gone.

What will I be writing?

Actually, I have a story to finish that needs at least another 50k (well, two, actually, but I’m picking one over the other), so I’ll be getting it down. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to do that with NaNoWriMo, but at this point, I think I’ve done it legit often enough to pfff those kinds of restrictions.

But that’s just me; if you’re trying to finish NaNoWriMo for the first time, BY ALL MEANS OBSERVE THE RULES. Doing it my way (picking up an unfinished story) is actually making the whole thing harder; I’m just stupid self-challenging that way.

What would I write if I weren’t working on something extant? I dunno.

I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t suggest, though: steampunk.

I love the stuff currently lumped in under the heading of ‘steampunk’. Love it. But steampunk is kind of like vampires right now; something people mix in because it’s cool, not because the elements are being used in any kind of meaningful way. I’m getting sick of it.

You want to use the trappings? Fine. Call it whatever it really is, though — zeppelin fantasy, gogglerotica, or whatever.

Punk anything requires class struggle, the social effects of technological revolution, and people with no influence and power rebelling against a monolithic Authority.

Slapping goggles on your protagonist doesn’t make it steampunk.

Ahem. Anyway. Rant over. There’s my advice for NaNoWriMo. At least for today.

Hey, that reminds me.

Last year, I wrote a bunch of NaNoWriMo advice, broken down for day-by-day consumption. People seemed to dig it (and I’ll probably repost them to twitter as appropriate), but would there be any interest in seeing all those posts brought together into some kind of ebook-like thing prior to the start of the madness?

Not to buy, obviously — I’m not wondering if there’s money in it — I’m wondering if there’s enough interest to justify the work of putting it together before 11.01.10.

Is that it? I think that’s it. Damn but I’m out of practice writing these things — this post was all over the place — I’ve got blog-rust all over the keyboard now. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Nothing like being blocked from your own site during the day for the last two months to make you really pine to get some blogging done.

All Stuff is Nerd Stuff to Somebody

Aug 15th, 2010
by Doyce.
4 comments

Yesterday, I had the very great pleasure of attending the wedding of two friends of mine.

I also got kind of shanghai’d (in a good way) into live-Tweeting the ceremony, because live-Tweeting something automatically takes the Nerd level of an event and doubles it, and this thing was going to be pretty Nerdy.

Super-nerdy. Full-frontal Nerdity.

It was so nerdy that there were whole sections of the evening that referenced nerd stuff I knew nothing about, and I think it’s fair to say I keep up to date on such things. Until yesterday morning, talking with MJ, I had no idea who Parry Gripp was (aside from the guy who wrote the awesome processional for the wedding). I quoted the “shark week” vow in my live-tweets, but I didn’t know it was originally a bit from 30 Rock. I didn’t recognize the recessional music, because I don’t watch Venture Brothers. Most of the boutonnieres at the wedding were made by Paula; I didn’t even know Paula could knit.

Then someone told me they were actually crocheted. Cuz there’s a difference between the two.

Then they explained the difference.

In detail.

That’s actually what I remember most fondly about the dinner after the wedding; the pure nerd-grade enthusiasm I saw over and over again from the people at the party. I passed one table where people discussed the various reasons an Aboleth Slime Mage would ultimately destroy (or subjugate) the (far more impressive looking) Cyclops Warlord that decorated another table. Elsewhere, folks were working out the recipe for a delicious curry soup we were having — reverse-engineering the recipe from scratch.

The thing you love may frighten others.

Kate gave one of our friends a crash course in SLR terminology and some advice on aperture and ISO settings as the afternoon light changed, and a few hours later jumped into a discussion with me and the best man discussing the relative strengths of various MMOs and the fact that Bioware could pretty much take a monthly tithe from our paychecks and just ship us whatever game they released, and we’d be happy.

Maybe this is your nerd thing.

Nerds get categorized and pigeonholed and stereotyped and – broadly speaking – limited by the perceptions of others, but here’s the truth of the matter:

Almost everyone is a nerd about something; passionate, intelligent, enthusiastic, and more than willing to share all that with anyone who asks.

Let me tell you about the Battle of Five Armies, and why it mattered so much to the success of the War of the Ring...

Heck yeah, we’re nerds. Of course we are. We care about stuff.

Like this thing...

Are you nerding out about the idea of a walking/rolling post-apoc town, or the idea of building something that cool in Lego?

Does it matter?

And anyway, those are just the easy-to-define nerd things — the archetypes (or sterotypes).

There’s so much more stuff out there; so much more passion.

“All stuff is Nerd Stuff to Somebody.” — me

Maybe it's this...

There's this...

Or this.

That...

Or one of these.

What I meant by that quote is just that you can find someone who’s passionate and excited about virtually any topic you can think of.

And that’s excellent.

Yesterday, I watched two of my friends get married — vow to always try to be passionate and excited and ready to share — to add one more thing to the list of Stuff they’re Total Nerds about: each other.

I cannot think of a finer promise to make another person, and I am unaccountably blessed to have been a part of it.

Thanks guys.

Now let’s go play some games.

Photo by Chuck Wendig.

Constraints: Tie me up, Tie me down

Jul 26th, 2010
by Doyce.
1 comment

You may find yourself in a situation where someone you’re working with just doesn’t want to be constrained with guidelines on their creative output. Maybe you’re that person. Maybe it’s deadlines. Maybe it’s a specific word count you need to hit, or can’t go over. Maybe it’s some topic for a short story anthology you’re working on.

“What? I have to write something about a kid without any parents? So we’re going to have a book full of orphan stories? What kind of stupid requirement is that? And it’s a paranormal collection? Paranormal is so last year. What’s the point?”

Okay, precious, let’s talk about constraints.

These are for your own good.

“The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way.”

We’ve probably all heard (or thought) that a blank sheet of paper is terrifying – the point being, too much freedom is just that: too much. Artists love to wax rhapsodic about complete creative freedom, but a lot of the time, having total freedom to do or create anything at all tends to paralyze. I don’t have time to be an artist; craftsmen need guidelines.

“Write whatever you want — anything you do will be great.” That’s a terrible set of instructions, right there. It’ll take me months to get you anything, assuming I ever get you anything.

“I’m going to need something presentable in two weeks.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

“I need it in two weeks and it needs to involve two bishops from Papau New Guinea and their pet llama.” Excellent. Man, I can work with that.

But oh the horror — these constraints have taken things away from me! They’ve robbed me of choices! What if I wanted monks instead of bishops, and a surly binturong instead of a llama? How can my life as an arteest go on?

Surly Binturong is very Hurt that you have excluded him as an option.

Okay… yes, every detail and requirement that is added to a set of guidelines takes away options, but having obstacles to deal with means you’re more likely to take some path you might never have otherwise explored. Obstacles are a gift. The biggest secret to being a creative and productive person is embracing constraints instead of running from them. Small spaces lead to cool innovations. Walls in your way just mean you have something to grab when you need to climb higher.

The other big benefit of constraints is that they focus your energy into a smaller space. A completely blank sheet of paper is like an open, featureless plain — it doesn’t matter how much you have, there’s very little chance you’re going to be able to fill that vast space up with energy. The best thing you can possibly do is compress your energy into a smaller space. Any amount of energy delivers more power when it is controlled, compressed, and directed. Start with an open plain, then keep pressing inward until you’ve squeezed all that down into the smallest package possible. A building. A room. A box. A bullet.

Boom.

Maybe you’re floundering with your current project. See if there’s a way you can make the scope smaller. Compress it. Constrain it.

Think inside the box. See what happens.

Mowing the lawn in your brain

Jul 21st, 2010
by Doyce.
2 comments

I was doing some yard work today (why do I always wait until the hottest part of the day?) and thinking about the hows and the whats and the whys of it. My house sits on a corner lot in and older part of one of Denver’s more grand suburbs (if it sounds like I’m bragging, you’ve never lived in a grand suburb), which means it’s a pretty good sized patch of earth. Moreover, I’ve done a lot of landscaping work over the years, so there’s a fair bit more to deal with than just mowing.

But mowing’s a big part of it.

I’ve got a process for those days when I need to get out and clean things up. Having a process is really helpful and, more to the point, it’s kind of appealing. I mentioned not too long ago that there are days when I’d rather mow the lawn in 100 degree weather than sit in a comfy chair and write, and maybe part of that (albeit rare) preference is the fact that I always know what I’m going to be doing out there, whereas the writing can be kind of a smoky, treacherous canyon full of quicksand and brain syphilis.

Where was I?

Right. Process.

Anyway, while I was poking around, letting the sun boil my brain, I identified a few parts of THAT task that might be useful for… oh, I dunno… some other task.

1. Yah Gotta Do It

It’s readily apparent that my approach to landscaping is a lot less “topiary sculpture” and a lot more “I think there should be some more flowers and stuff kind of over that way.” I put plant beds in where the the grass won’t grow, and if that doesn’t work, I plant a tree, and if that doesn’t work, I find some pretty rocks to stack there. It’s perhaps a little less apparent that I kind of like it when the grass gets longer and kind of shaggy. It looks better. Healthier. Greener. Maybe I’m compensating for my own nigh-mandatory buzzcut of a head-lawn, but the fact of the matter is I’d be perfectly happy surrounded by shaggy fecundity.

Until it finally got so bad that my kid came back into the house covered in grass ticks. That’s less desirable, so you gotta get out there and keep things in check.

There’s a guy I knew back in high school who still lives in my home town. He’s all grown up now with a couple kids of his own and, within the boundaries of our home town, he’s well-known for mowing his lawn regularly.

(Just… pause for a second and ponder the hotbed of intrigue in which a man can become well known for mowing his yard. Then wonder why I moved. Anyway.)

What do I mean, “regularly”? I mean the guy mows his lawn every two days.

When asked (by my mom, because she’s curious about such things and has no internal filter) why he mowed so often, he explained that it was simply because he didn’t like — hated, in fact — bagging the grass clippings, and the only way he’d ever found to avoid having to do that extra bit of work was to mow often enough that the lawn didn’t require it.

So: yah gotta do the work, if only to keep your kid free of blood-sucking parasites, and the job’s a hell of a lot easier if you do it often and regularly.

Check.

2. It helps to have an external force demanding your compliance

Since I live in a grand suburb, I get to experience the joy of regular interaction with a Home Owner’s Association. As much as I’ve tangled with them in the past (and continue to bitch about them and organizations like them), I do appreciate the way in which they generally keep the neighborhood looking like a place I want to live — no old beater vehicles up on blocks in the driveway or on the street, no old rusted appliances lining the side of the house… you know, obvious things like that.

They’re also quite… enthusiastic about sending out angrygrams reminding people to keep their lawns trimmed and — you know — alive. I know this because I’ve gotten a few in the past. Not a LOT, by any means, but a few here and there. (I recall more-than-two the summer Kaylee was born, for example; it’s possible that it’s the only thing I remember clearly from that whole bleary, sleep-deprived period.)

Now, I’m never happy about getting such letters, but I recognize that they’re a good kick in the pants reminder telling me that I need to keep my play area clean. Sometimes, I need that reminder.

As it pertains to other non-lawn related projects, I’m slowly coming around to the opinion that having some external entity that’s waiting not-so-patiently for your output is generally a good thing. I’m particularly bad about self-imposed deadlines, frankly, but I flat out refuse to under-perform for someone else. Therefore, having a “someone else” that I’m producing for makes me work more betterer.

3. Leave the Weeds Alone until they are Big Enough to Kill

My mom has a huge lawn. Huge. At least an acre, and probably more. She also has a pretty easygoing opinion about weeds, summed up fairly well as “Once you mow everything down to the same height, it all looks green to the folks driving by.”

I am not so sanguine.

I may leave my yard alone for most of the week, but when I get out there to do some work I pretty much want nothing left in the yard except for what I put there in the first place.

The problem is, sometimes I’ll spot the barest stub of a new weed coming up, and try to get that thing out.

Can’t be done. Try as I might, all I’m going to do is waste time sweating over something no one but me is going to see right now, and probably just snap the fucking thing off at ground level, which gives it time to get its roots in nice and deep before it pokes up where I can see it again.

Best thing? Leave it be. Next week (or the next), the cocky little bastard will be nice and big and bushy and, more to the point, easy to pull up and throw away — since I didn’t screw with it in the first place, the roots are usually shallow and useless — it’s all show and no hold, and I can get rid of it so much more easily now that I have a good place to get a grip.

Also, since it’s so obvious, other people (like my daughter) are really helpful about pointing it out.

4. Not Everything You Plant Gets to Stay

A couple years ago, I put some some daisies out in the yard. They looked nice, and I’d heard they were pretty hardy and well-suited to the climate.

They’ve done pretty well.

By “pretty well”, I mean to say that the original cluster of daisies is now five clusters located in militarily valuable areas of the yard, each one about three feet across, each flower coming up to somewhere around the middle of my chest. In the evening, you can hear them whispering and giggling to themselves, telling stories about the inevitable fall of mankind and the rise of the Petal Throne. It’s a bit out of hand.

Much as I like them, there’s going to be a Culling this fall, and it’s going to be a blood on the sand kind of event for the daisies. Them’s the breaks; sometimes you have to rip out the pretty stuff you put in yourself, especially when it’s overwhelming other stuff you that you like just as much (if not more).

5. Wear Sunscreen

Yeah… I’ve got no witty writing corollary here. Sunburns aren’t cool. Wear sunscreen or your face is going to look like a catcher’s mitt.

Suspicious Hoboman is Suspicious

That’s it for my musing. Back to work.

How do I make “What works for me” work for me?

Jun 23rd, 2010
by Doyce.
8 comments

or…

Why I’d Rather Mow the Lawn than Write

(In which the author raises – rather than answers – a question.)

I’m an extrovert.

Most people hear “extrovert” and think “friendly and outgoing” — let me dissuade you of that notion. Basically, an extrovert is a person who is energized by being around other people.

Extroverts tend to fade when alone. Extroverts tend to think as they speak, and think best while they are communicating the thing they’re thinking about. Ideas just don’t seem real unless they can talk about them; reflecting often isn’t enough. There’s a necessary feedback loop as well: talking to yourself (like masturbation) is a temporary substitute at best and tends to hamper you in the long run, if overused between sessions of the Real Thing. (Now there’s an example I didn’t plan on using today.)

So anyway: extroverts. Extrovert. Me. Feeds on feedback. Got it? Good.

The Problem

I write. I’m a writer. Assembling words in an order best suited to enter the eye or ear and, thence, to stick your brain meat is basically what I get paid to do.

In most examples of this kind of work, the feedback loop is slow. Feedback on commercial work is Pretty Darn Slow. Freelance stuff or writing for Big-P publication varies, but tends to range from Fucking Slow to Publishing Industry Slow, with “Glacially Slow” sitting at what’s generally agreed to be the arithmetic mean.

For someone like me, that’s a pretty hard row to hoe. Usually, I can find a work around that gets me by, but I’m struggling right now.

One of the reasons that I like twitter as much as I do is the immediate feedback. Positive or negative, if I put some energy out there, I’ll probably get some energy back. It may not be the response I’m looking for, but something happened. Same’s generally true for blogging or forums or whatever. Feedback. Energy. I recently wrapped up a contract gig that involved me creating coursework for a company. The work cycle was three days of me making something, one day for feedback, two days for implementing feedback, and repeat. Tight cycle of energy transferral is what I’m saying, even though I was working remotely and never saw the client face to face for the twelve week duration.  In that time, I created 14 polished hours worth of online courses.

Then there’s long-form writing. Months of getting that first draft out. Then maybe two people read it. Then a rewrite. Then maybe six more people read it. Sweet Fancy Moses with Bows On, it’s slow. (It’s likely the reason I’m at my best levels of productivity during NaNoWriMo; even if I’m not sharing the actual stuff I’m writing, there’s a lot of loose energy bouncing around.) Using #amwriting tags on Twitter and dipping into that stream only goes so far, and lacks both immediacy and often a sense of connection — it’s not getting the job done.

It gets to the point where, in the midst of the worst mid-afternoon heat, the pull to go mow the lawn is stronger than the pull of the keyboard, because at least with the lawn, someone will point out I missed a spot. Interaction. Feedback. Energy. I’m a junkie.

So what do I need? I dunno. A writer’s group with weekly deadlines? An MFA program? Fucked if I know — I said at the outset that this isn’t a post with answers, just questions. I welcome your input. In the meantime, this is about all the whiny navel-gazing I budgeted for 2010, so I need to get back to work.

The one where he was kind of a dick about Twitter

Jun 11th, 2010
by Doyce.
6 comments

“How about some follow-back love, bro?” - some guy on Twitter

Let me explain what I think Twitter is for. Hmm.

Let me explain what I don’t think Twitter is for. Hmmm. No.

Let me explain why I’m not following you on Twitter? Yes.

It’s not personal.

No, I don’t mean that as some kind of reassurance; that’s my explanation: “it’s not personal.” Let me explain.

Dig around on the internet and you’ll find some kind of data analysis that says that most of the traffic on Twitter is generated by about 10% of the users. In my own experience, about 90% of that traffic looks something like this:

Wait, what?

By which I mean it’s noise: “inspirational” retweets, links to websites without any kind of context, and (on a good day) maybe something like “heading out for the day, it’s been a tough one!”

I don’t hate stuff like that; it doesn’t rate that kind of emotional response — I just don’t care. I don’t want to read some dead guy’s famous quote unless I also get to see why it matters to you; I don’t want to click on a link without reading why you think it’s cool; and I don’t want to know what you’re doing.

I want to know what you’re thinking. If you want to tell me what you’re thinking about what you’re doing, though, that’s fine. Telepathy, people: that’s what twitter is for.

I have X followers on twitter. In turn, I follow X – Y people, where Y = the number of people who give me no indication of who they are when I go and look at their twitter feed, or who seem more like a cheap plastic bullhorn than a person.

X – Y = Z, the people I ‘know’ on twitter (or whom I feel like I can get to know, thanks to the way they use twitter).

I like Neil Gaiman as an author — I dig his books. I also follow him on Twitter, but the one doesn’t really have anything to do with the other — if his twitter feed was nothing but links to his next public appearance and the release dates for his next project? Unfollow.

Conversely, I may not agree with everything Roger Ebert has to say, but I feel so connected to the guy — to the sense that, after years of reading pages and pages of his movie reviews, I finally have a true sense of who he is as a person — that I cut him some slack when he gets wound up about some subject on which we don’t see eye-to-eye.

I don’t agree 100% with ANYONE, but I am extremely forgiving of any differences between myself and my friends.

And yeah, these twitterfolken count as friends (insofar as it would matter to them) — I afford them tremendous leniency because they have been willing to share some real and tangible portion of themselves with me; they act like people.

That is what people do.

That is what – to me – Twitter is for.

#this

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