Umm... yeah.

I went to Barry Longyear's "How to Write Good" lecture/workshop. For the most part, it didn't do much for me. I'm already doing, or have tried everything that anyone mentioned. Like I said, what I really need to do is to put into play everything that I've learned. For me, this is much harder than it sounds. However, Barry did say something which has really hit home now that I'm going through this week's Critters stories looking for something to critique. Again, I don't think it's anything that I haven't heard before, but hearing it again, I think it's starting to sink in.

He warned us of the danger of workshops. Basically, we should be careful not to end up writing to the order of the workshop. Your story is ultimately your story. Your judgement should prevail. Again, I don't think this is something I didn't know. (Note that knowing has never stopped me from walking straight into any pitfall before.) He went on the say that a good story is not one which does nothing wrong. A good story is one which does some things right. It may, in fact, do some things wrong. But what's right about it outweighs all of its flaws.

This is really hitting home with me right now looking at this week's Critters stories. There are a bunch where the authors don't do anything wrong. The spelling and grammar are fine. The writing is the clean and neat. The author has clearly paid attention to all the rules for clear writing. The story dutifully clues us into the world. It builds up the characters. It reveals the plot. The main character makes some sort of crucial character changing choice that somehow resolves the dilemma revealed by the plot.

But you know what? They're all really boring. They don't do anything wrong, but they don't do anything right either. They read as if they're so concerned with adhering to the proscriptions against bad writing, that they've forgotten to be interesting. I lose interest in every one of them about 4 paragraphs in. Now, I know no one sets out to write a boring story and to be interesting is difficult. But I'm desperately searching for a sign of life and I'm not finding one.

[BTW, this is not to say anything bad about Critters or anyone who submits to Critters. I think you can see this in any random pile of slush or stories submitted for an amateur workshop.]

So my lesson here is that I have to keep everything I've learned in mind, while I simultaneously let go off everything I've learned so I don't train all of my energy on not getting it wrong, as opposed to getting it right.

Hmm... I'm clearly missing something here. Is writing a good story supposed to be an act of contradiction?

Like I've said, the portable computing device that I'm currently ogling right now is the OQO Model 02. Doing the web search, there is this very weird dust up over whether it is pocketable or not. Its dimensions are approximately a double thick moleskine pocket notebook. This takes into account that you can't really get two moleskin notebooks flush against each other. The binding expands. The dimensiions are 5.5x3.5x1in more or less

The dust up is weird because there have been several video blogs where the blogger demonstrates putting the device into his pocket. You can see a clear outline, the way you would when someone puts a wallet into his front pocket. (I avoid the thick wallet by using a thin billfold made of spinnaker. However, I also carry a moleskin pocket notebook in the same pocket.) I think it's questionable whether you'd be able to pull it out of your front pocket while you're sitting. However, if you really wanted your computer with you at all times, carrying it in your pocket looks like a possibility, if you're willing to make a couple compromises.

This hasn't stopped people, who have seen the videos, from proclaiming that the OQO Model 02 is not pocketable. One even goes so far as to declare that no UMPC will ever be pocketable. Given that computers used to take up whole rooms, I'm not so quick to discount miniaturization. The people that do this are extremely insistent. They carry the banner at every possible chance (presumably as an antidote for the gulled masses or something.)

This really confused me until I realized that we're dealing with two different definitions of the word "pocketable." I had been reading it as "able to be placed in a pocket." In that case, the video blogs should have settled the dispute. It fits in a pant pocket, albeit snugly. The reason for the dust up is that people actually mean "to be such that one would want to place it in a pocket." So, for example, an unwrapped Hershey's Kiss is not pocketable.

I've run into this before with the word "hummable." That is, the old canard that Stephen Sondheim's music is "unhummable." The traditional retort is "well, if it can be sung, it can be hummed." Of course, people who say that Sondheim's music is "unhummable" do not mean that they are literally unable to hum the music. What they mean is that Sondheim's music is such that they would not want to hum it.

I like the literal definitions better. I mean, is there any other use for the other definitions besides to express your opinions in factual sounding declarative statements? (e.g., "Sondheim's music isn't hummable." Not "I don't find Sondheim's music attractive enough to hum." "The OQO Model 02 is not pocketable." Not "The OQO Model 02 fits too snugly for me to carry in my pocket practically.")

Are flammable objects things that you want to burn? (i.e., if you don't want to burn them, they cease to be flammable.)

So is the OQO Model 02 pocketable? Yes. Would you want to? Well, that's up to you. Would I want to? I have no idea. (Keeping it in pocket may work better in theory than in practice.) I just find how we define -able words interesting.

The first draft of "alttrust" went pretty easily... too easily. It pretty much wrote itself. I finished it before I realized it. (Part of this is because the story ended in a different place than I had expected.) However, there were clearly stuff I needed to fix with it before I could let anyone see it. No problem, right? I then proceeded to spend the next week or so spinning my wheels. I think I've written three different openings to the story. None of them are actually an improvement to what I had in my completed first draft.

So, I'm backing out. I'm going back to my complete first draft and trying again. I thought it needed major surgery. Apparently, it just needed some polishing. (Oh, and also lots of copy editing for consistency. Contents shifted during transport.) I can write the story I had intended to write later.

There's probably a Valuable Life Lesson here somewhere. (I'm hoping it also means that my first drafts are getting better.)

Call this an extreme delayed reaction. I was walking out of my house a few days ago, thinking about one of my works-in-progress, and, suddenly, part of Uncle Jim's VP lecture Made Sense to me. (Please note the Capitalization of Significance. It gives you a +2 to your Pretentiousness Check.) Of course, the proof of this will be in the writing. (There's also the whole issue of understanding the lesson and applying it. I mean, I thought I understood it at the time. Nope. The whole metaphor with the boundaries of the model house makes much more sense to me now in terms of how one actually applies it to writing fiction.)

Along those lines, am I the only person who horribly overwrites his first draft? I just cut 1000 words (out of 8500) while adding text. Apparently, what I learned from VP was how to cut ~10% of text from my first draft while adding telling details which build the world, advance plot and develop characterization. I didn't used to be able to do this. But I've been doing this pretty regularly since late last year. The funny thing is that I don't remember learning how to do this.

Oh, one more thing about writing process, my Newton actually works surprisingly well as electronic notebook. I jotted down a few paragraphs of a WIP on it. I realized how a story should start. I was nowhere near my computer, but I had my Newton with me. It all pretty much worked as I hoped it would work (including the bit where I transfer the text to my computer). However, having now done some web browsing with it, I can say that 10 year old technology deals with modern web sites really slowly. So using it as a general laptop replacement might be a tad optimistic.

Besides, aside from web browsing, I use my laptop for two programs: GIB (which plays Bridge) and Wenlin (which I use as a Chinese-English dictionary). This, unfortunately, keeps me tied to, at least, x86 and almost certainly M$. (Wenlin supposedly partially works under WINE. Wenlinux has been under development since 2002. There is also a Mac (PowerPC) version. There is an x86 Linux version of GIB. GIB is no longer under development, AFAIK.) So anything which truly replaces my current laptop either needs to be x86 based (or fast enough to emulate an x86). I'd also like for it to fit in my pocket. It's supposed to be my electronic notebook. So, ideally, it goes where my moleskine currently goes, in my pant pocket. (Note: Newton doesn't fit there, obviously.)

The interesting thing is that, thanks to M$, we're starting to see computers in the Newton (or sub-Newton) form factor again. The UMPC is essentially the latest incarnation of Newton as designed by M$ and its partners. (So, sadly, it runs XP or Vista rather than something more suited to the form factor.) Of particular interest to me is that we're starting to see pocket computers again (as opposed to PDAs). The flavor of the moment is the OQO Model 02. (It's about the same area as a pocket-size moleskine notebook but twice as thick.)

Now, for me, I can't replace its OS with Linux because I need to use it as a tablet. Its thumb-board based input is biased against left-handers. (That's ok. I'm biased against thumb-boards.) Linux doesn't do very well in the tablet arena. Also, it's supposed to be my electronic notebook (which also runs GIB and Wenlin) and I don't know of a viable handwriting recognizer for Linux. Also, I'd like a Chinese handwriting recognizer. So I'm stuck with XP or Vista. My experience with English handwriting recognition in XP has been lackluster. Certainly, I couldn't compose text with the XP recognizer like I have with the Newton one. (In Chinese, it's actually been not bad. It's not without its moments of frustration, but it's usable. Or maybe I'm just happy when it misrecognizes my mistakes and comes up with the characters I meant to write rather than the characters I wrote.)

AFAIK, there are two after-market recognizers for XP and Vista: PenOffice and ritePen. Both claim to be the progeny of the Newton recognizer. I tried both of them. PenOffice, I couldn't get to work right. It refused to adjust for screen orientation which makes it a non-starter right there. When I used it in its preferred screen orientation, it wasn't all that accurate and I found it hard to use. (It sounds terrific in theory though. Maybe my XP Tablet install is messed up. I can't imagine they'd ship a handwriting recognizer that works in only one screen orientation.)

ritePen, OTOH, recognizes really well. It claims to run both its and M$ recognizer in parallel and picks the most likely result. However, when it's wrong, it can be really wrong. Worse, correcting recognition errors is like playing a video game. Whenever it recognizes something, a box fades into view with its main choice and a set of alternatives. If you don't tap the box before it fades back out again, you've missed your chance to pick an alternate recognition. (There is a gesture you can draw to bring it back up again, but it only brings up the most recent one. This is invariably not the one I wanted.) This recognizer might be more accurate than the Newton one, but correcting its errors is more exasperating. Vista is supposed to have better correction facilities. So a combination of the ritePen recognizer and Vista's correction facilities might be workable.

Anyways, as a test, I wrote a few more paragraphs of the same WIP that I wrote on the Newton on my tablet using ritePen. The process is definitely workable. I could compose text far more fluently and accurately than I could with the XP recognizer. (Correcting errors was annoying, but I did start getting the hang of playing "tap the box before it goes away.")

I think the OQO model 02 could actually work for me as an electronic notebook which fully replaces my laptop. (Keep in mind that this is possible because, apparently, I don't ask my laptops to do very much.) Of course, it also costs just under $2000. It has a fan which makes a high pitched whine whenever the processor gets stressed. It's not yet shipping in quantity, and I'm not in the market for a laptop. I only ask my current one to do two things and it does them fine. The only reason to replace it is to do the electronic notebook in my pocket thing. (The Newton fits fine in my jacket pocket, so the only times when I can't use it to jot something down is when I'm without my jacket. i.e., the summer.)

Since it's been three years since my last laptop, I'm supposed to be shopping for a new one. But I think I've just decided that my next laptop should be about the size of my moleskine. So I'd like to see if there will be more competition in this form factor first. Most of the current entries target the Newton form factor (but with more screen area). I don't find them that appealing because, while they can actually replace my laptop, they won't be any more convenient than my Newton. (Actually, they may be less since the Newton still does a better job at the primary function: electronic notebook.) It's interesting that every 10 years or so, the "VHS tape" size form factor pops up again. Does anyone remember the Atari Portfolio? (Or ~10 years before that, the Radio Shack PC-1? Ok, this wasn't VHS tape sized. One of it's successors, the PC-3 was even actually pocket sized. They all had a one line displays though.)

Also, historically, it takes M$ three tries to get to something adequate. Now, Vista has taken so long to come out that this may actually be its third try. But I'd rather wait to find out. Maybe, in the meantime, a solution I can get more excited about will pop up. e.g., a better OS, a computer where the premium for the form factor isn't quite that high. Actually, it's much more likely that said solution will show up after I've committed to an existing one. *sigh*

So I end exactly where I started. There's probably a lesson there too, but that one hasn't popped yet.

(On the plus side, I got ~600 words of a promising short story out of this experiment. Yeah, it's probably only really 500 words. :-))

One of my goals this year is to catch up on my short fiction reading. (Last year, I made the possibly dubious choice of subscribing to all of the big 3 SF magazines, then promptly fell behind.) Anyways, I'm finally at the point where I'm reading issues that correspond to the actual calendar month. Of course, in magazine time, this isn't May. This is actually July. The July issues of Asimov's and Analog arrived weeks ago. F&SF, though, stayed resolutely in May.

So, I was kind of excited yesterday morning when I got to the May issue of F&SF. I was reading my last issue of F&SF. I've cleared the backlog, right? Wrong. Yesterday afternoon, the June issue showed up. This afternoon, the July issue showed up. *sigh*

I'm waiting to see if the August issue arrives tomorrow. If this pace keeps up, maybe I'll read the story I will, one day, publish in F&SF before I will have written it!

I saw Hendrix Clarifies "Scab"-rous Remarks on Web Publishing via matociquala who saw it via james_nicoll.

If I read it correctly, he essentially agrees what people have been saying about him. e.g., he calls himself a Luddite and he actually uses the expression "why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?" It's unfortunate that he doesn't offer any rational for why he thinks his warnings are valid. It would have been better if he told us why he thinks distributing fiction on the net will disenfranchise authors. I suspect it involves some specious argument which assumes all creative works are fungible. Or to use his analogy, the only possible use for a cow is the milk. All milks are interchangeable as are all cows. I honestly don't think this is the case for creative works. Creative works are not interchangeable and they have multiple uses. However, all he says here is that it's bad because he feels it's bad.

He also says that buried the lede. i.e., he actually meant his post to be about the evils of the net. If running SFWA is as tedious as he says it is, I don't really think you can blame the net for that any more than you can blame a telephone or the post office. However, I've never run SFWA or any comparable organization, so what do I know?

At least this time he compared himself to Eisenhower rather than Ted Kaczynski. The difference is that Eisenhower, in his farewell address, did not resort to name calling but he did explain the rationale behind his warnings. So he may have aspired to Eisenhower. I'm not sure he reached Eisenhower.

BTW, I have to say that Dr. Hendrix's post is an exceptionally savvy bit of self-promotion via the internet. I hadn't heard of him before this. So I certainly wouldn't have looked him up otherwise. But now, his name and the name of his books are all over the internet. Unfortunately, none of his book blurbs grabbed me. (I'm not saying they're bad, just that they're not my cup of tea.) Obviously, I wouldn't expect him to have his novels up on the net. His publisher might have put something up. I'm not motivated enough to check.

After a thought chain and a series of actions too banal to recount, I now own a Newton MP2000U. (i.e., effectively identical to the last model Apple released before leaving the PDA market.) I can't help but wonder what the PDA market would be like now if the Newton had been even remotely popular and Apple had stayed in the market.

The thing is the size of a VHS tape. Also, the software architecture is different enough from everything else on the planet that getting data on and off the thing is not the easiest thing to do. To be fair, one could make the same argument about the Palm. But Palm became popular enough that companies wrote conduits to move data on and off the thing. The Newton, in part because of its size, and in part because the handwriting recognition didn't work well enough right off the bat, really didn't have a chance.

In a way, that's a shame. In its final incarnation, at least, the handwriting recognition is quite good. Out of the box (i.e., I gave it a full reset), my first impression is that its handwriting recognition is better than that of my Tablet PC. It gets words more accurately. (e.g. I don't have to worry about making the letter 'o' just exactly right, so that the recognizer doesn't think it's the letter 's'.) When it doesn't, the recovery mechanism is far more fluent and faster than that of Windows XP Tablet. The Tablet is given to inexplicable pauses whenever I start up the recognizer, or ask it for alternatives. Now, the Tablet PC I have is not state of the art. However, it has to be at least a magnitude or two more power than the Newton. So that the Newton seems to do a better job of handwriting recognition, I don't know if I should be happy or sad.

(Unlike XP Tablet, the Newton's recognizer is both highly configurable and adaptable. I haven't tailored the recognizer to my handwriting yet, nor have I turned on the "adapt to my handwriting" feature. So, presumably, the recognition gets better from here.)

If Apple had continued to develop it over the past 10 years, presumably it would have gotten smaller. The handwriting recognition might have gotten even better. (I don't know how well Inkwell works on the Mac.) Apple actually had, what I've been told, is a great Chinese handwriting recognizer for MacOS 9. That might have found its way to the Newton. The end result though might have been something that's not quite the iPhone.

(I"m not surprised that Jobs didn't like the Newton. The physical design, by Jobs's standards, is a little clunky. The GUI, complete with sound effects, is a bit cute. It's hard to believe they were targeting it at business people. I mean, when you delete something, you see the piece of paper crumple and it disappears into the trash can with a puff of smoke.

I have to say though, for me, the phone part of the iPhone is its least compelling feature. I'd be happier with something that I could install my own programs on, and perhaps used Inkwell. i.e., more Newton-like, but with the better industrial design.)

Interestingly, there is still a small, but active Newton community. There are also a few companies still selling software for it. They're not doing active development. I think it just doesn't cost them anything to keep 10 year old binaries around. No warehousing costs.

I looked into getting one because I wanted something vaguely pocket sized with decent handwriting recognition. And I think that's exactly what I got. So now I get to see how well it works as a notebook. (I have to say though that it's really cool that the Newton is self-hosting. I think, just on general principle, I have to see whether it's actually practical to develop Newton software on the Newton.)

I've been stuck on "trust" for a while. So I've been re-editing "Running and Falling." I can take anything I've written, trim it by ~10% while adding content at the same time. (I don't know if I can do this for anyone else's work.) I don't think this is scalable. Otherwise, all of my stories will eventually be one word long. (But that word will be so evocative!) Unfortunately, I think I need to let the story sit still for a while before I can do that.

Anyways, there are fewer wasted words. I think this latest attempt at a hook works better. Of course, the beginning of a story is supposed to teach you how to read the story. One of the main problems I've had with this one is to figure out what you need to know right away and what, frankly, can wait. I usually avoid great globs of backstory at the start of a story. More often, I go in the other direction and no one has a clue what's happening. I think I've fixed that. In any case, exposition is tricky.

The other problem I typically run into is with line of direction. (Note: If you don't read matociquala's LiveJournal, and you write, consider starting.) One of the things that VPX pointed out was that I definitely have problems sustaining a thought over the course of a sentence (much less a paragraph). This surprises no one who knows me. So, an edit with that in mind is always a good thing.

This takes the story just under 5000 words, so I'm sending it off to Strange Horizons rather than Asimovs. Yes, SH says they take up to 9000 words. However, most of the stories they publish are no where near that length. Also, I want to send "Resistance" off to Asimov's.

As for actual writing, after much flogging about and writing of text (some of which I might even keep), I finally figured out why "trust" isn't going anywhere. The main character has no reason to do anything besides keep the current situation stalemated. *smites forehead* Must think of a reason why the current situation can not hold...

(Edited to fix markup.)

I was going to blog about the LED displays intended to plug Aqua Teen Hunger Force that have been in place in 10 cities for over two weeks now, but have caused a crisis only in Boston. However, Uncle Jim at Making Light has already done a good job of pointing out how stupid this is.

Ok, perhaps someone got overanxious and called it into the police. The police have to treat it seriously when they first get word. That's understandable. However, once the police determine that it's not a threat, I don't understand why they can't just stand down. As near as I can tell, what happened was they figured these things were not bombs and then proceeded to treat them as if they were and as if there were a viable terrorist threat anyways. I totally fail to see how this is helpful.

They determined the boxes had no explosives in them, and then blew them up anyways. Actually, I'm not sure that they determined the boxes had no explosives in them first. But that's screwy either way. If they knew there were no explosives, why blow them up? If they didn't know, wouldn't they have figured it out rather quickly?

If WBUR quoted the authorities correctly, they were reduced to saying that these boxes "had elements in common with improvised explosive devices." This is sort of like saying, "Terrorists breath air. Human beings breath air. Ohmigod! We have to treat all human beings as terrorists!" Actually, now that I've put it this way, I guess they're actually being consistent (even if the logic is faulty).

We seem terminally incapable of saying that this was a false alarm and there is nothing to worry about. Even after Turner made its press release, the police seemed unwilling to admit that there was no nefarious plot involved and Mayor Menino was still threatening jail time for those involved with this "hoax." This is an awful lot of tough talk for a bunch of signs which displayed cartoon characters with LEDs.

And that's the other thing that bugs me looking at the news coverage. It's now a meme that this incident was some sort of "hoax." This is not a hoax. A hoax requires deception. There was no deception here. If those who placed those boxes claimed they were bombs or if the boxes did bomb-like things, then this would be a hoax. As it is, the only people who thought these might be bombs were the people who found them and discovered they weren't. Just because they jumped to a wrong initial conclusion does not mean some outside agent deceived them. They deceived themselves. That's not a hoax. That's a somewhat embarrassing valuable life lesson which we should all learn from.

Update: OMG, they've arrested someone. At least Fox News is calling it a "marketing ploy" rather than a "hoax." The negative connotation is still there but at least they're no longer implying that anyone wanted anyone to think the LED displays were bombs. I'm still a bit sad that they're still calling those displays "suspicious devices." One would have thought they would have stopped being suspicious once everyone knew exactly what they did.

OTOH, we're talking about people who determined there was no threat and then shut down the transportation infrastructure anyways, just in case. It's sad to see our leader lead with the same reasoning that causes people to propagate chain letters and urban legends.

I spent the past few days doing work-related travel. (I haven't had to do any work-related travel in years. The thing that struck me this time was the amount of thought I gave to remember to collect receipts.) The trip itself was relatively uneventful. On the way out, my direct, one-stop flight turned into a transfer while I was in the air. On the way back, we encountered a little turbulence which made me glad I hadn't had anything to eat. But that's about it. It was all as civilized as possible under the circumstances.

I got to spend some time with vortexae in the course of the trip which was lots of fun.

I'm giving the story that I've been working on with the five characters and the interlinked relationships the code name "trust." I find it, otherwise, impossible to talk about. (This is the one with the 6000 word first draft where I've seriously microwaved the souffle.) It's still sprawling because I'm determined to write the story that interests me rather than fixing the 6000 word draft. At some point, in the midst of all this text, I'll find the story and write another draft. (i.e., it's about 10500 words and still not a complete draft yet.)

My F&SF rejection for "Running and Falling" arrived while I was on the road. Unfortunately, it was the dreaded "didn't grab my interest" rejection. (It's only "dreaded" because the word is that JJA sends form rejections which allow for rejectomancy.) OTOH, I have no where to go but up from there. As for this story, it now goes to Asimov's.