Jul 4, 2008
10:37 pm »
Fourth of July
I spent a chunk of the day over at ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
tugrik’s, doing 4th of July BBQ things and re-meeting a bunch of folks I see too sporadically—Frang, smackjackal, tilton, higginsdragon, Baron, smudge_dragon and more. A good thing, overall. I may have a few conversations to follow up on specifically, even—but what I’d mostly like to do is just keep in actual (gasp) face-to-face contact more than I have been in general. I’ll see how that goes. (If I sound skeptical, it’s of me holding up my end of that, to be clear!)
I got back to Foster City in time to run down to the park where the fireworks were at and attempt to take photos. No idea how they turned out—I have no real clue how to take shots of fireworks, so if they’re not just all blurs and/or complete blackness, I’ll be happy.
And I am now celebrating with what I’m arbitrarily dubbing the Coyote Cadillac Margarita, inaugurating a new bottle of tequila along the way. The recipe:
- ¼ oz. simple syrup
- ¾ oz. fresh lime juice
- 1 oz. Gran Gala orange liqueur
- ¼ oz. curacao
- 1¾ oz. Partida Blanco tequila
Yes, it looks kinda complicated, but I have a 2 oz. measuring cup in ¼-oz. gradiations—add the simple syrup and fill it up to the 1 oz. line with the lime juice, and do the curacao and tequila the same way. (My normal version leaves out the curacao and just has 1½ ounces of tequila. You can of course change the alcohol types, but don’t use cheap-ass triple sec, do use fresh-squeezed lime juice, and remember that any tequila with the word “gold” in its name sucks. You don’t have to get an ultra-premium one, but you want one that says it’s 100% agave, either “blanco” or “reposado.”)
Jul 2, 2008
8:11 am »
Life on Mars, or at least Foster City
The last few weeks I’ve been reminded that yes, I am working for a Silicon Valley startup. We’ll just say things have been busy, and on weekends I’m usually inclined to be doing something that either doesn’t involve being in front of the computer or at least requires no thought. (Standard plug: one can follow me on Twitter or FriendFeed as “chipotlecoyote.” I’ve seen utilities that let you echo Twitter messages to your LiveJournal, which I hereby solemnly swear to never use.)
There’s many things I like about living in the San Mateo area. I like San Jose, but in terms of “urban cool,” the Peninsula wins. Mountain View, Palo Alto, Burlingame, San Mateo itself—and of course now BART is just about 10 minutes away, which opens up a huge chunk of the rest of the Bay Area. I’ve regularly gone not only into San Francisco but to Berkeley and Walnut Creek via rail.
What’s not so cool, though, is that it’s been somewhat isolating. Most of the people I know are in the South Bay. While 25 miles isn’t that far to travel, I’m no longer quite a “local.” I don’t get together with folks very often. I don’t think to call people (or IM or SMS or whatever) to ask what’s up when movies open or guests are in town, which means I’m often reading about get-togethers after they happen. While this can lead to a certain sense of paranoia, I’m pretty lousy at initiating contact myself. Some of that’s longstanding social paralysis; most of it is, I fear, that out of sight, out of mind works both ways. “Oh yeah, I should get together with $X” flits through my mind occasionally, but all too often keeps right on flitting.
So as a general thought: hey, if you’re a friend in the local area, I should get together with you more often. (If you’re a friend in a long-distance area, I should probably get together with you more often, too, but that’s trickier.)
Jun 22, 2008
7:38 pm »
No novels
For whatever reason, today I’m finding my head filled with abandoned novels. My abandoned novels, that is.
There’s three I can think of off-hand. One is (in)famous in small circles, a science fiction novel called In Our Image. Another is an untitled fantasy story in a world of dragons and humans, started during National Novel Writing Month a few years ago. The third is yet another science fiction novel, set more in the far future, whose only public face so far has been a short piece for “Rabbit Hole Day” (also a few years back).
Actually, I could count other even more dimly remembered ones from my far past. The short story “Only With Thine Eyes” was originally intended to lead into a novel. (At times I suspect it, Image and the far future one referenced above are all failed attempts at grappling with the same theme, but I’m not positive of that.) All the way back in high school I was working on a dreadful fantasy novel which I think might be my longest incomplete work to date: I think it hit around 40,000 words. And I suspect I’m missing a couple other ones in there that never got past scribbled notes. If so, the chances are good they’re no longer with me at all—I don’t think I have any word processing files that go back earlier than the mid-’90s, when I was using Nota Bene (whose file format is thankfully just marked-up ASCII, not too dissimilar from HTML).
I’ve long wondered at my inability to actually pull off novel-length pieces. I’m comfortable enough with the novella length; my recent stories of 3-5,000 words are unusually short for me. Yet actually developing a full novel has never worked out for me.
Today I had a possible insight, as I was going back over Image and yet again lamenting my problems with telling Tara’s story. The problem may be that I’m not following the advice I give others about storytelling: stop world-building.
This is difficult to follow for people who’ve grown up with science fiction and fantasy, especially if you played a lot of role-playing games, which are often all about the world-building. If you played D&D in the ’80s, the chances are you knew at least knew one Dungeon Master who had hundreds of pages of maps and histories and ethnographic studies and political analyses of his own fantasy world. (Maybe you were that Dungeon Master.) You wanted to have a rich and “complete” world for the players to explore, and that meant knowing lots and lots and lots of crap that probably they’d only scratch the surface of unless the adventuring in that world went on for decades.
RPGs condition us to think of authors as Game Masters—there are even RPGs that refer to GMs as “Storytellers,” right? But the thing is, storytelling doesn’t actually work that way, because you know where the characters are going. You actually only need the part of the world built that they’re in. If the characters are never going to that fantastic trade city on the other side of the continent, you only need to know as much about it as affects the story. That might be as little as the city’s name. It might be as little as, well, nothing at all.
I understand that writing about the histories of these lands may be a whole lot of fun. They can be really cool! But if they don’t even ephemerally influence the story about your characters, they’re not relevant. This is, like it or not, an inescapable truth. I have met more than a few writers in various fandoms over the years who never actually write the novel they’re creating their great universe for. They know everything about that universe, let me tell you.
Except a good story to tell in it.
So. I think the problem I’ve had with more than one of these is that I don’t really know the story that I want to tell. In Our Image is Tara’s story, at least at first, but does it stay Tara’s story? The implications are clearly that her story will have a profound influence on the whole society around her, but how wide-angle a lens do I want on that, and where does the story actually end? (I’ve been accused of “not writing endings” on occasion, usually by people who, I suspect, are upset that there’s clearly more that could be told past where I stopped. Yet there’s always more that could be told past where one stops.) The dragon novel set up a few interesting characters—both dragon and human—but ultimately I really didn’t have much idea why the characters were in conflict, what the stakes were. And the far future novel with the bioengineered wolf girl? Holy crap. I got thousands of words of notes about the setting and about sweeping political conflicts, but I’m not sure I even know the main character’s name, much less what her motivations are or just what she’s embroiled in besides, uh, something involving those sweeping political conflicts.
Does knowing this problem—assuming my analysis is correct—help me solve it? I’m not sure about it. Frankly, I shouldn’t try to solve it quite yet anyway; I have to resume work on A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood version 2 before seeing if any of these are resurrectable. But I think if I do go back to any of them—or, God help me, get another idea for a novel-length work—I’m going to try to keep the scope pretty tightly focused on the main characters, and try to avoid learning things about their world that ultimately aren’t going to help me tell their stories.
Jun 13, 2008
6:14 pm »
Random quick updates
In no particular order…
Work is kicking my ass recently. It’s been an interesting experience, in the oh, yes, I am at a startup, aren’t I? sort of sense. It’s made writing difficult and driven out enthusiasm for personal coding, though, and also rather cut down on my time online.
On a not entirely unrelated note, I’m about ready to throw in the towel with the Excursion Society MUCK. I’ve had little time for it over the last year and honestly not all that much enthusiasm, even though I appreciate the diehards who’ve stuck with it; it’s mostly still around just because of them. I may think more on other systems to do in the future, like an MU* set in Ranea. (After I get my other programming projects back on track. After I’m willing to do programming on my own time again.)
I keep starting and stopping other blogs around the web, because I’m just like that. It occurred to me that if there’s any topic I really should be writing about somewhere, it’s not politics or programming or even fiction writing, it’s cocktails. If this thought goes anywhere, I’ll let you know.
I contemplated the “blog like it’s the end of the world” zombie thing that’s going on today, but ya know, it seemed like it would be too much effort for today. (And besides, I already wrote an apocalyptic plague story recently.)
Speaking of cocktails, I’m really tempted to go to Elixir tonight or the weekend, but probably won’t. Probably.
May 24, 2008
9:33 am »
Eurofurence
As a quick note, it looks like they publicly announced this so I can go ahead and mention it myself. I've mentioned I'm planning to attend Eurofurence this year; actually, I'm going as a guest of honor, along with Steve Gallacci. I'm pretty excited about it, although at the moment I'm off on vacation and coming down with a cold at the same time, it seems, so now that I've shared this I go back to being miserable while looking like I'm having a good time!May 21, 2008
10:31 pm »
Lack of updates
I realize it’s become something of a cycle for me to go several weeks without posting here and then make a post which mostly consists of an apology about how little I’m posting. I’m going to try to stop doing that. Which is not to say I’m going to make an immediately-to-be-broken vow to post more; I’m just going to try to stop apologizing for it.
It feels to me like I’m posting a lot, but that’s one of the combined virtues and vices of Twitter. While I’m tempted to engage in a defense of Twitter, those who want to read a much better one than I could muster can read Rands’ “We Travel in Tribes”:
Via the LazyWeb convention, I expect reasonable, informed, and quick answers to most any question. Where I used to use Google, I now use Twitter for questions, because not only do I get the answer, I also get the opinion. And sometimes I get my world rocked with random, psychic, off-the-cuff, tangential information that Google will never give me because Google doesn’t know who I am.
My own use of Twitter is more prosaic, granted. I’ve had conversations on it, I’ve asked questions (and gotten responses), and I’ve learned a few interesting things. Mostly, though, it’s where the minutiae of my life ends up going these days: stuff that I’d like to share but not enough to write a journal post about.
This does leave me wondering what to actually write about here. I’ve done essays on occasion and I suspect I still will. I’ve sometimes tried to start other blogs elsewhere—a link blog, a tech blog, a political blog (twice)—and all of them have been false starts. I may try to resurrect the link blog, but, y’know, I may not. Tech stuff might as well go here. Political stuff I tend to be reticent to get into. I’m interested in discussing politics but not so much arguing politics; attempts to merely talk about current events a few years back left me feeling rather singed. Besides, looking for things to be outraged about has decidedly limited appeal.
At any rate, I’d like to commit to writing something weekly, but I’m not going to—not yet, at least.
What’s been going on? Work, mostly, and mostly office work. I haven’t gotten appreciably farther on Gift of Fire, nor on the new Claw & Quill software. At the beginning of the month I visited shaterri, quarrel and ladyperegrine in Seattle, which was a wonderful if slightly whirlwind visit. (I have a photo album of that you can visit if you’re so inclined: “Seattle” is the main one, with a food porn type one of the visit to The Herbfarm taken on the iPhone.) Starting tomorrow evening, my mother will be in town to visit for the long weekend; we’ll be staying in Emeryville for no specific reason other than availability and the likelihood of exploring some of the Oakland area, which actually has a lot of interesting there there.
May 1, 2008
2:32 pm »
Travel plans
In about 30 hours, I’ll be leaving for a whirlwind trip to Seattle to visit a couple friends. To friends also in that area I haven’t gotten in touch with yet, which is a fairly large number, I do apologize: I’m not kidding about the whirlwind part. I’ll be driving to the airport directly from the office tomorrow, and driving directly from the airport to the office on Monday morning, and Saturday and Sunday plans are pretty much being put together by others. If I can, I’ll come back to the Seattle area sometime for a week, or at least a long weekend.
The reason for this whirlwind-ness is the cloud to the silver lining of gainful employment: fewer vacation days, unless I’m allowed to just take some off without pay. As I’m planning a trip to Eurofurence (insert glance in cheetah_spotty’s direction), that’s going to be five or six days chewed off right there; given other smaller trips I’m planning, I’m likely to bump into my 10-day holiday allotment as it is.
This does bring up another issue: this is likely to be the first Anthrocon since 1998’s that I’ve missed. Boo hiss! I don’t think it can be helped, though. I’m hanging onto my AC hotel reservation for the nonce and keeping a search on plane tickets running in case a Really Good Deal (ha!) happens, but between travel costs and travel time I suspect I’m going to have to table plans this year. As they say: more info as it develops.
Apr 29, 2008
6:22 pm »
Brief observation
So I'm tweaking the horror story and thinking I've got to make this suck more. And it occurred to me that this is about the only genre where that's a positive thing....Of course, I mean "make this suck more for the characters," but it's still sort of perversely amusing to be looking critically at the text and thinking how do I maximize the gut punch effect without increasing the word count?
(N.B.: thanks to
shaterri the story's tentative title is "Carrier.")
Apr 22, 2008
2:01 pm »
Virtual Host Testing on OS X
John Gruber of Daring Fireball wondered if there were any “testbed virtual hosting utilities” for OS X like Headdress and VirtualHostX. I only knew of the first, but I stopped using it when I realized how easy doing this actually was. ( Warning: geekery ahead. )
Apr 21, 2008
8:04 am »
Something else Six Apart learned from LiveJournal?
From TechCrunch:
Six Apart is launching an advertising network for blogs and will begin offering professional services (design, implementation, development, optimization) after acquiring New York-based creative agency Apperceptive.
The company is now competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, the upcoming Technorati ad network and a number of others to get bloggers to join their network. Six Apart has long sold advertising for itself on its network of free blogs on LiveJournal (before it was sold) and Vox. CEO Chris Alden says they have significant experience in grouping like-blogs and selling to large advertisers.