Website: *explodes*
Me: …the hell?
Website: What?
Me: You just exploded.
Website: Nuh uh.
Me: Yes. You did. You are still exploded, in fact.
Website: Well…
Me: What?
Website: At least you noticed me.
Me: …
Website: Sorry.
Me: I’ve had a lot on my –
Website: I know. I know. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Here… I’ll unexplode for you. Gratis.
Me: You don’t have to –
Website: It’s fine. It’s fine. Really. Just… it’s fine. You should finish up your job aps and the new coursework. I know it’s how you spend your mornings right now.
Me: Actually…
Website: *sigh* What?
Me: Well, the apps are in, the course is done — I’m writing this morning.
Website: Oh, on Adrift? I thought I saw something about that on your other site.
Me: My other…
Website: You know. The Twitter.
Me: The Twitter?
Website: Shut up.
Me: The Twitter? Who are you, Betty White?
Website: Maybe I am.
Me: What? What does that even mean?
Website: Nevermind. Shut up.
Me: Listen. *sigh* The reason I noticed you exploded is because I was going to write something with you.
Website: Pff. Sure.
Me: Really. Look, I got some pictures to go along with it.
Website: *glances sidelong* That’s a pretty random collection.
Me: It’s kind of a potpourri post.
Website: … thus marking the one and only time that “potpourri” will show up on your website.
Me: Well, two, now.
Website: Whatever. *rubs scalp with fingers* Grab-bag post, huh?
Me: If you like. I don’t have to if you –
Website: Just get over here and type.

Why Hello There

Hello?

Yes, it’s been pretty quiet around here, but that’s only because it’s been really noisy everywhere else, and while I love me some oversharing, there’s a point at which the day to day slog of doing contract instructional design and job hunting gets a little banal, and that point is somewhere just before I ever start talking about it on the blog. I’ve been working out my schedule (which keeps changing), and the points during the day when I would normally write here have been swallowed by writing for other stuff.

That picture, by the way? That’s totally me — lots of tappity tappity tap, lots of phone calls, and a growing feeling that I’m having two conversations at once, all the time. I’m hoping that’ll pass.

Let’s see what else is going on…

The death of the paper book! Again!

There’s been a lot of very intelligent talking about books and writing and piracy lately, and while I’ve been keeping my eye on all of it, I haven’t jumped in because my feelings haven’t really changed, which means the music I’d be adding to those jam sessions isn’t substantively different than the stuff I’ve played before, and everyone’s already heard that.

Print is dead, long live print.

I’ll tell you this for free: I agree with Konrath — the changes that are coming to publishing will, in the end, come from the rainmakers (the writers), not the people manufacturing buckets (huge props to Rob Donoghue for that analogy). I look around at our greatest living shamans today — the mightiest rainmakers — and I examine what they’re doing, and it looks a lot like someone marking a trail for others to follow. That Steven King dude? He’s training a LOT of readers to like ebooks. I’m just sayin’.

There’s a lot more to this conversation than just paper vs. plastic, but it is one of the sides to the dodecahedron, and I truly feel that electronic (self-?) publishing will be the thing that melts traditional publishing down to its composite goo, remoulds it, and forges it into something new in the next two decades.

It’s important.

I’m Done with Facebook

Yeah, I'm done.

It’s not that I’m a particularly private person. It’s not that I think anything I post on facebook is that inherently valuable.

But it bothers the fuck out of me when someone takes any portion of me — any fraction of my anima — and sells it off like erection-inducing rhino horn powder to the nearest advertising megacorp. No. Not me. Not anymore.

Facebook. Initially welcoming. Ultimately crap.

Arizona

Nuff said.

The Beard

It comes and goes, oscillating between “sea captain” and “gruff grandfather”. At some point in there, Kaylee decides that Daddy Don’t Get No More Lovin’ til the thing comes off, so off it comes. Wail, my brothers, but know that I will soon be with you again.

Someday, I will be a super-wizard.

Gaming stuff

Hoping for a little tabletop Dragon Age this weekend, maybe even next weekend — two weeks in a row. That’ll be fun.

Still playing the FATE-based Diaspora, and it’s good. It’s probably the best FATE iteration I’ve played, but I suspect that’s only because I haven’t played Dresden Files yet. It’s good – don’t get me wrong, it’s damn good – but it’s good in the way that reading Ekaterina Sedia is good: you simply cannot shake the sense that the authors are not communicating with you in their mother tongue. The Diaspora guys speak FATE fluently, but one gets the sense that they’ll never be wholly comfortable within it.

Games overwhelm me at times.

On the computer front, Kate and I are still really enjoying, of all things, Wizard 101. Enough so that we’re playing when we don’t “have to” with Kaylee, and have a pair that we’ve taken well ahead of the trio we play with our youngest gaming partner. It’s good times, and frankly it’s a good game. I even like the dueling arena, which gets back to the game’s MtG/Pokemon deck-dueling roots in a way that I find very satisfying, even when I’m getting my ass kicked.

Also? Teaming up to play a game with my daughter? Awesome.

Back in Middle Earth

We’re not spending a ton of time in Lord of the Rings Online at the moment, due to our Wizard 101 binge…

You're Tolkein my language.

… but I’m getting my fix all the same.

Kaylee and I are reading The Hobbit. By my best reckoning, this marks the realization of a personal dream probably 20 years in the making, and I am very very happy about it.

The dwarves are stuck in the barrels now, floating down to Laketown. Bilbo has a cold.

Kaylee keeps telling me that none of this would have happened if they’d stayed on the path, like Gandalf said.

Sooth, child. You speak sooth.

In the Meantime

I write. I’m coming to the tail-end of my contract work, and I’m taking the opportunity to let go of my job-search stress and use the time to find out what I can do when I’m not cramming my writing time in wherever it will fit, like mortar between boredom bricks. It’s a bit scary, and more than a little stressful, but the words keep moving from my fingers to the screen, and some of them really make me happy, and there are so many many worse things than that.

I have all the direction I need.

I’ll talk to you soon.

With a couple new character to voice, once of which is giving me some heartache. Suffice it to say that Mak (the human, not the squirrel) sounds a lot more like Badger in my head than he does in my mouth. Ahh well.

I suppose that the problem arises from that end-of-the-month, oh-my-god-it’s-over-lets-celebrate release:

• You take a day off.
• The day after that, a new game release comes out.
• The day after that, you need to hit the gym to work off some Thanksgiving goodness.

… and whenever you think about the WIP, your mind automatically associates it with the binge-writing you sometimes had to do during November.  That’s not an association that makes you want to sit back down.

I approach this downshift by easing into what is (for me) a more sustainable, remember-I-have-a-day-job-that-is-also-writing pattern: one solid scene a day, or a couple pages, whichever’s less.

If I write more than that, fine; it’s the pattern I’m after, not the picture. I owe it to myself — in part because I really think this Adrift thing has some serious legs.

How about you guys? I wanna hear about what you’re working on.

Discuss.

Fiiiiine.

Just for you (yes, you), I used my infinite internet powers and commanded Tweetbook to grab the whole “part one” one of the Adrift story and munge it into a single, somewhat ugly PDF. (Said document will, I should point out, effectively act as my outline for my NaNoWriMo project this year.)

The page numbering is screwed up, and it ain’t pretty, but it’s all in one place, all one story, in all it’s original Twitter-formatted glory, for your leisure scanning.

Adrift: Tweet-Book. Assume the CC license for this version is NC-SA-Attribution. Don’t be a dick.

Enjoy.

Anyway, all that chitter chatter got me thinking about it a little earlier than I might otherwise. (Read: before October 30th.) So, here’s what I’m planning:

• I’m doing it. Obviously. Duh.
• I believe I’m going to be working from an outline.
  • Kinda.
  • I’m actually going to take the twitter-posts for “Chapter 1″ of Adrift, and write that as a full-blown story with, like, dialogue and stuff.
  • Interspersed with the action from Adrift, there will be a Princess Fairy Tale, I think.
  • This will let me flesh out a lot of stuff, and write some things that are going on my head with the story that I simply don’t have space to write out in once-a-day Twitter posts.
  • I avoids me wasting several hours every day figuring out what I should be writing that day.
  • If I write all of 500 words for each of the twitter posts that comprise Adrift Chapter One, that’s about 100k words.

• I’m probably going to write it in WriteMonkey, because WriteMonkey is awesome.
• I’ll be backing it up using Dropbox, so I can work on it pretty much anywhere.  Might do weekly exports from WriteMonkey into OpenOffice as well, which is differently awesome.

• I don’t know how/when/where I’ll be sharing this out for people to partake in during the month.
  • ONE idea I have it to read the daily output aloud and post said reading as a podcasty thing here on the blog.  I’d like thoughts on that.
• That’s about it.

I might add jetpacks.

I’m not a little excited by the whole thing.

Which is probably why I’m talking about it early.

Reading:
It’s been a very good month for me as far as new reading experiences go; first there was Terry Pratchett’s Nation, then Neil Gaiman’s wonderful Graveyard Book, and I had the pleasure of catching up with all the cool kids and read The Lies of Locke Lamora on the Philly trip. Great book. Just enough ‘new’ in the fantasy world, with great characterization and plotting. Capers are capered, swashes are buckled, and a great many skulls are duggeried. I came fairly close to sleeping on the couch a couple times, thanks to interrupting Kate’s own reading with chortling, out-of-context excerpts. Recommended (as are the others I mentioned – highly).

Writing:
The “Adrift” story continues, in which Finnras seems to be engaging in some kind of Cunning Plan. We’ll see if he’s as good at such things as Locke Lamora. Odds are not good.

Habit the First – Tracking what I Eat
This went very well in the first week – I even dropped a few pounds. (Actually, according to the website on which I track such things, I dropped too much in one week, and now they want to me to eat more this week — as in… a lot more… “I can’t afford a whole cow!” more — it’s confusing.

I have regained control of my eating patterns by keeping meticulous records.

Habit the Second — Getting up an Hour Earlier

This one isn’t going as well. Yes, I’m getting up earlier, but I never have to use an alarm clock normally, and I for damn sure have to right now. Also, I’m dragging through large portions of the day, short on energy and long on nap-tropism.

I think part of the problem is that I haven’t set up any kind of reward for when I succeed at this each day (the other part of the problem is that I have no personal desire or investment in this – it’s wholly external) — so I need some help with that: what kind of reward should I be giving myself for getting up at the crack of dawn every day?

Suggestions need to be something concrete: that early in the morning I don’t think highly enough of my fellow humans for “a sense of moral superiority” to mean anything. Gimme some ideas in the comments.

• Adrift » February.
• Adrift » March.

The posts are organized in chronological, top to bottom order, so you can read the story in something like ‘typical book format’.

The interview went on for a bit, so it had to be broken into a couple parts, but part one is over here: Twitter As A New Medium In Authorship.

Because it went on a while (and because I’m unforgivably verbose when I get going) some bits had to be left on the cutting room floor, but I’m really happy with the thing as a whole, even if the transitions from one question to the next are a little herky-jerky, due to the necessities of editing.

One piece that makes me sound nearly intelligent:

I think it’s long past time that writers look at new mediums for their work. Paper is just a medium, and as our world (and the smaller publishing world within it) changes, it makes sense for writers to take a look at the tools around us and see if there aren’t some that we overlooked. Artists and sculptors do this sort of thing all the time; “Maybe I can paint on this building, maybe I can make something out of this old car… wait, even better: maybe I can paint on this building with this old car! Genius!” Tom Waits likes to go into hardware stores with a mallet and see what kind of sounds he can find.

What do storytellers use? Spoken words… and paper. That’s it. Very recently, people have considered the still hotly-contested idea of taking the-thing-that’s-on-the-paper and reproducing that exact same thing electronically, and that’s fine, but that isn’t storytelling intrinsically designed for the electronic medium – I mean so intrinsically designed for that medium that it doesn’t actually translate well back to paper or spoken words.

Maybe this story about Finnras is that kind of non-transferable thing – if so, I’m comfortable with that. It’s fun for me and for the people reading it.

The following sentence, which was cut for good reasons, but which I like: “People are trying to take things that were built in/for an electronic medium and force it ‘back’ into a paper format. I’m starting to think ‘maybe you can’t always do that, and maybe that’s okay.’”
Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and got me thinking about things which, frankly, I usually don’t. Parts 2 and 3 go up next week.

Changed

• My ‘main’ blog, which was at www.doycetesterman.com/journal.html, is now right at doycetesterman.com. It also has a new design, which is apparently different enough that people thought it was a mistake.  The newsfeed for this blog has also changed — the new feed can be had simply by clicking on the big orange button in the top right corner of the page.
• Random Average is no longer just a blog, but a blog, a forum, a scheduling calendar, and a PONY!  You can get to it via the same ol’ http://random-average.com, but the newsfeed has changed: there’s one for the forums and a different one for the blog.  They’re all linked off the front page of THAT site, top left.
• Adrift didn’t move, but the news feed is different than it was, and the look is different.  Easiest thing to do in that case is to just go to http://doycetesterman.com/adrift/ and get new links.
• With all this done, I’m completely ‘off’ of Movable Type — the only thing left up are the eight years of archived posts from both Average-bear (which didn’t make the jump to doycetesterman.com in the first place) and eight years of Random-Average gaming stuff.  The Random Average archives are linked off the new Ning-based R-A site (top left),  and the Average-bear archives are… exactly where they are… which is where you’ll find them if you know where to look.  Ahem.

Not changed:

• FireflyWiki, RandomWiki, Storyball, doyceandkate — all safe as houses and very unlikely to change. (All those sites are built with PmWiki which, unlike Movable Type, has actually made updating and maintaining them easier, rather than harder.)

It’s a bit like writing one or two comic panels a day. It’s a bit like haiku. It’s an exercise in saying more with less, and trying to make the thing interesting each day, as well as overall.

It’s actually pretty fun.

I’m collecting the whole thing on a blog. If you want to view it that way, visit the website (Newsreader people can subscribe here.)

Alternately, you can twitter-follow @Finnras to read it in it’s raw, immediate form. There’s also an RSS feed there, which I have no doubt you can locate on your own.

How long will this madness continue?
I have a pretty good idea of what happens for quite some time ahead of where we are at this point in the story. Getting through all that 140 characters at a time will take quite awhile, by which point I might have even more ideas about what happens next.

What I’m saying is this could go on for awhile.

Where did you get such a cool/crazy/stupid idea?
I was inspired by the tales of one Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer and Professional Hero. There’s lots more out there on the internet about twittering short fiction, and that’s all cool, but none of it provided inspiration for this beyond Othar… and a character (Finnras) I invented a few years back and never really got a chance to hang out with.

The setting? Some of the broadest brush strokes within the setting come from the “skeletal setting” provided in Matt Wilson’s Galactic RPG.