Whither NaNoWriMo?

It’s almost November, which means that, yes, it’s time for National Novel Writing Month to take over my life for thirty days. I’ve never tried to win the challenge having already prepared an outline before—even though the outline I have isn’t all that fleshed out; this is something I’ll have to work on for the rest of this week—and I think it might help me meet the goal of having written 50,000 words at the end of the month of November.

It’s really hard to do, you know. There’s a reason that most of the people who attempt it fail, and it doesn’t have as much to do with the fact that most of the participants are lonely, nerdy high school students pretending they’re Robert E. Howard or writing about the inane details of the artificial lives of their favorite anime characters as one would expect it to, and that reason is this: it is incredibly difficult to write that much in that short of a period of time. Fifty thousand words in November averages out to 1,667 words a day for thirty consecutive days, or about eight pages of double-spaced Times New Roman 12 with one inch margins. Unlike college, although Courier New does, in fact, increase the page count, it is of no help in meeting the goal of the event.

I’ve tried to “win” Nanowrimo every year since 2004, and I completed it once in 2005 with A Highway of Diamonds, which, as you may already know if you’ve been playing along at home, I regard as unequivocally the worst literary novel ever created by anyone over the age of fifteen. Not exactly a sterling record of success. This year, however, my approach is different. I do, obviously, want to reach the word count goal, but I’m really using the event as a means to force myself to start working in earnest on a draft of a novel idea I’ve been working on in fits and starts for the last year and a half. This is the one I’ve always said I was working on, and the one of which I’ve written two just-under-a-hundred-word abortive drafts, both of which aren’t even on my hard drive anymore.

I really like the idea, but I’m scared that if I don’t ever sit down and write the thing out, no matter how horrible and unreadable and confusing and stupid it is, I’ll be a one-booker, the guy who has one good idea and is never able to really move past it. I don’t want to be Harper Lee, writing one awe-inspiring novel and never publishing again—taking nothing away from To Kill a Mockingbird, mind you… I just want to be more productive than that.

All of this is to say, I’m participating in NaNoWriMo and I think you should too, and I’m doing it because I want to get this book out of me so I can start thinking about other ideas, other novels yet unplotted, uncharted, and unwritten.

code.klipe.org

Is now live. There’s still not a whole lot of stuff there, but the basic skeleton of the site is up and running and eventually I’ll flesh it out with pages about all the random half-finished abandoned tech projects I’ve gotten myself into.

Especially fun are the Atari games, which I haven’t even found my old source files for yet—be on the lookout for Super Killer Space Llamas.

Let’s Make Them Shiny!

I have to be honest: as much as I think the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are awesome—and they are, definitely—I also hate them. There are two reasons for this.

The first reason is the screen. If you haven’t noticed, the new MacBooks look a whole heck of a lot like the HP 2113 MiniNote netbook, which I happen to own and love. Here’s what the MiniNote looks like:

hp-mininote,6-0-98712-15.jpg

Now, in case you’re forgetting, here’s the new MacBook:

Picture 1.png

Look familiar? The MiniNote is, also, encased in aluminum, albeit not a single piece. Here’s the reason the similarity is a bad thing: I really don’t like the screen on the MiniNote—it’s behind a sheet of clear plexiglass, and it’s impossible to use outside, or inside if the lighting is wrong. I don’t just mean difficult—I mean close to impossible.

The MacBooks look like they’re just as bad—and why wouldn’t they be? They’re almost exactly the same design, just bigger.

Here’s the second reason I’m not so crazy about them: No FireWire on the MacBook. I would love to get one of the new MacBooks as a replacement for my MacBook Pro when it eventually (someday) heads south—but I’m not going to do that if they don’t have a FireWire port. I would really like the smaller size, but I’m definitely not buying a new external hard drive, and I use an old iPod with Rockbox that doesn’t really work via USB, and I need to be able to transfer applications and files and such to my iBook via Target Disk Mode. Doing away with Target Disk Mode is a huge, huge, massive mistake, especially when there’s nothing to replace it with—to me, this is the equivalent of putting out the iPhone and saying “Well, there’s always web apps!”.

Great idea, poor execution. Typical late-period Apple, in my book.

Rockboxed

I’ve really started liking Rockbox a whole lot, running on my 4th-generation 20GB iPod.

The firmware is more powerful, able to play more file formats than I really thought I would need (which has come in handy when I wanted to listen to some of my Beach Boys bootlegs in FLAC format), able to tweak even the most minute settings of how I want my music played back, and—amazingly—able to play Doom.

If you have an old iPod or Archos or other mp3-player-type-thing, and it’s a little old, you would like Rockbox. Besides, it’s free.

Abandoning a Novel

I’ve written before (albeit not very well) about novels that I’ve started writing and given up on. It’s something that’s a bit of a hobby of mine, from the looks of things—I never seem to be able to finish plowing through the pain and suffering of the first draft and come out with a complete, if terrible, manuscript.

I’ve thought about this a lot recently, in part because I’m looking National Novel Writing Month dead in the face, but also because I take my writing pretty seriously—it’s something I love doing—and would sincerely like to fix whatever it is about my writing habits that leads me to 10,000- and 15,000-word drafts that never go anywhere. This is a problem, one that, for lack of a better word, I’ll call “novel-draft paralysis.”

Novel-Draft Paralysis

It’s a very distinctive disorder, N.D.P. You (addressing anyone who’s done the same thing I have) get way, way into a draft, and suddenly you realize that you have no idea where any of the story is going, you don’t understand your characters and/or their motivations, you can’t possibly conceive of a way to keep your forward momentum going, and there simply isn’t a single word that is appearing in your head that you can put down on the page next. You’re absolutely, completely frozen, unable to continue from this point.

Generally what happens next is this: the writer gives up for the moment, goes and gets a cup of coffee or has a cigarette or, I don’t know, shoots up some heroin or something ridiculous (looking at you, William Burroughs) and takes a break. He or she sits around, wondering what to do next, wondering what is wrong with him or her, wondering why there isn’t any of the inspiration that has been pushing the story forward, that vast untapped reservoir of ideas, of story, of language suddenly seemingly bone-dry or, worse, hypersaline and inhospitable like Mono Lake. This is not a good feeling.

The next step is for the writer to sit back down at the desk/computer/table/wherever-it-is-they’re-writing, and try to plod through the current narrative thread, end it as quickly and as tidily and as abruptly as is possible, and get on to something else—some new character, another subplot, another work, even. Anything but the current idea, the current conversation—a complete and overwhelming desire to get away from the current situation. This is the “fight-or-flight” instinct, and when Novel-Draft Paralysis sets in, “fight” simply isn’t an option anymore—the whole problem is that the writer has been in “fight” mode for a while now, maybe without realizing it, and simply can’t keep that momentum up anymore. Continuing to fight leads to this, an actual quote from one of my actual (yep, abandoned) novel drafts—not in the notes but actually in the draft of the novel:

This narrative thread, as you can tell, has rapidly run out of steam, and there is nothing interesting left to write about here—obviously her father and mother aren’t going to have a clue what’s going to happen when they get upstairs. Of course it’s going to piss them off, and of course they don’t understand their daughter. Why did you think this would be interesting? It’s not.

This is a visible manifestation of what I’m talking about here—and surely I’m not the only person it’s happened to.

Now What?

Once everything has gone to hell in a hand-basket, there aren’t a whole lot of remaining options for the writer. You can:

  1. Keep slogging through the draft.
  2. Give up and watch television for several hours, all the while beating yourself up about not being able to finish the story you’re working on.
  3. Jump from the top of the Empire State Building (Editor’s Note: This option is highly discouraged.)
  4. Regroup and try to think about where you’re headed, not where you’ve been, and start work on another part of the story.

I’ve already established that sometimes 1., which is the conventional wisdom you read in all kinds of writing books, good ones and bad ones—even excellent ones, and even terrible ones, simply isn’t an option. If you keep going in the draft, you’re only going to end up writing another section of your self-abusive diatribe, a long work in progress anyway if you’re a writer, and things are only going to get worse. There may, eventually, be some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, but you’re still going to be frustrated at the failure of your current narrative thread, and it’ll eat away at you.

Option 2. is not exclusive—you can follow option 2. and still choose later to take another option. Just don’t let 2. be your permanent choice, and try not to watch too much Cops, and everything will be okay. Maybe. The third option, of course, has already been addressed by the editor.

Option 4. seems to be the reasonable one, right? The one that will make everything turn out all sunshine and smiley faces and Lucky Charms in a big cauldron at the end of a rainbow? Well—here’s the thing. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t; it’s really a crapshoot. Sometimes it really is what you need to do, and when you come back, all calm, cool, and collected, you’ll be able to continue where you left off and everything will start to make sense, layers peeling off of the onion that is your concept of the narrative. Sometimes that little regrouping session is a live-saver, and allows you to steer the heretofore rudderless ship of your novel back into the shipping lanes.

Sometimes, however, it makes things worse.

Face to Face With Collapse

There comes a point, in an abandoned novel project, where you realize that everything is falling in on itself. For me, on, oh for instance Visions of Johanna, that 103-page disaster, I realized that when I suddenly, out of nowhere, in a novel about God talking to people and a fundamentalist group trying to track those people down, had an ex-Soviet military type trying to drag a nuclear warhead down a muddy road in Belarus with a Yugo. In 1994. Ten years before the other 98 pages of story had taken place. I looked up from the draft and realized that I’d been adding characters and adding plots and adding subplots and insinuations, and adding and adding and adding them, and had nowhere else to go—I’d painted myself into a corner, being that I’m not Pynchon and can’t keep all of that in my head at once.

When you’re staring into the Abyss of having to give up on a work that you’ve poured that much effort, that much of yourself into, there are a lot of lessons you can take from it, but here’s what I would say is the primary one: You don’t have to finish it if you can’t. If it’s going to kill you, or at least leave you clinically depressed and/or insane, just let it go and start working on other things. Maybe someday the kernel of the story will come through in a different way. You may never get back to it—but you wrote. And that’s a win, isn’t it?

I’ve given up on a lot of ideas for novels, but they’re all, in some way, better than the one that preceded them. Every time I’ve wiped the slate clean and started over on another project, I’ve felt better about my writing and myself. I’ve even carved as many as four short stories and novellas from the big stinking carcass of a failed, awful novel. Any writing is productive writing.

Starting Anew

In sum, it’s a part of the writing process. I guarantee that every major, important, good writer has given up on projects, and those abandoned projects are just as important to that writer as the ones that got published—they’re fertile ground. They can be looked at as object lessons, and they may even have sections that are very good and can stand on their own.

It’s not the end of the world. Don’t delete those Word documents. You may have planted a seed, and when you return to that file, that stack of typewritten paper, that legal pad ten years from now, it may have grown into a tree. On ne saît jamais.

King and Civil Disobedience

This morning on Boing Boing there’s a post about a very rare sermon given by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1967, on the topic of civil disobedience.

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.

Sometimes I wonder what this country and this world would look like if King himself hadn’t been killed doing just what he was imploring the rest of us to do—take a stand for what’s right, even if it kills us.

It’s not a pleasant subject, doing something that you know is right and dying for it. It’s something that, as Americans, we talk about a lot—something we idolize in our movies about World War II and the Civil War and something that’s deeply a part of our ethos. We like to think that Americans everywhere are always sacrificing of themselves for the good of everyone—and no doubt, a lot of them are, but here’s the thing: the ones telling us that’s who Americans are are not the ones making those same self-sacrifices.

Sometimes it seems like we’ve bought into a big lie that we’re Americans and civil disobedience runs in our blood; that our political culture, our national heritage is one of doing what needs to be done whether anyone agrees or not—where it’s safe to voice your opinions or not. Maybe it was true at one point—I haven’t been around long enough to say.

What I’m getting at is if people really took King’s words here to heart, really and truly made an attempt to live by them, to be willing to stand up for right, for truth, for justice, even when it can get you killed, this country and this world would be a better place. It would be an honorable place. It would be a place with fewer needless wars and greatly diminished human suffering.

I think you should listen to the sermon, anyway. Here it is.

Mark Hoekstra, R.I.P.

I was shocked to read over on the MAKE: Blog that Mark Hoekstra, the Dutch author of Geek Technique, passed away today from a heart attack at the age of 34. I know not a lot of you out there read his stuff, but I’ve been reading Geek Technique since I was 14 or 15, and knew Mark when he was markie over at the 68kMLA forums, and his site was hosted from his LC 475 in his bedroom.

He was definitely a geek, and some of his hardware hacking projects were super nerdy (like this one) and some of them were useful (like this one) and some of them were just flat-out cool looking—case in point, the black iPhone.

Anyway, I was saddened to hear that Mark had died, and when you read his site, you’ll see why it sucks that he’s not going to be around anymore. This has been a pretty rough week for the world, huh?

Politics as Usual

Here’s Richard Cohen from the Washington post, talking about John McCain’s recent appearance on The View:

Karl Marx got one thing right—what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

Link (Via John Gruber on Twitter.)

Here’s to the Crazy Ones.

Stephen used to be my boss at the Apple Store here in Memphis, and he recently left his position as Lead Genius, and—now that he’s free from Apple’s ridiculous confidentiality restraints—has made a pretty succinct, concise post about why he left. Having been in the same store with the same management, and having worked for the same company, I feel compelled to comment on his post—it’s definitely a subject that I’ve wanted to write about, although my work situation at Apple was decidedly different.

That said, there are things about Apple that I feel like I have to talk about—things that Stephen mentioned in his post, and things that I’ve been thinking for a long time now.

One thing that really resonated with me—and saddened me, as well—was the section where Stephen talks about the shift from Mac to iPhone that’s happening at Apple right now, a shift that’s a lot more evident—and I would say a lot more wrenching—from within the company.

Then a year later, the simultaneous launch of iPhone 3G, the App Store and MobileMe ended up being a massive failure. I worked the launch, I can tell you first-hand that it was a train wreck. Activations failed. The EasyPay (Apple’s mobile cash-wraps) system failed, but the “classic” POS systems are unable to process iPhone transactions. AT&T blamed Apple, and vice-versa all day long. Weeks later, Apple owned up with an email from Steve… and even then, the apology was just over MobileMe and ignored the thousands of customres that spent hours outside in lines that weren’t moving.

We all know how the launch went for Apple—it was talked about, written about, mentioned in every possible media outlet for the entire second half of July. Things didn’t go well. But what I think is more important, and more damning for the company, is that even with the world caving in around them, they didn’t once break the stark white shining public face of Apple, that antiseptic Berlin Wall surrounding the company, standing miles high between the company and its customers. All they had to do was start talking to people.

They couldn’t do this, because the New Apple—Apple, rather than Apple Computer—can’t have a friendly public face anymore. Can you imagine Woz working for this company? Can you imagine Jef Raskin or Andy Hertzfeld or Burrell Smith working for this company? No. You can’t. No genuinely brilliant, innovative thinker, no visionary, wants to go work at a company that used to fly a pirate flag, but gave up on that a long time ago in the name of being cool and controlling. I certainly won’t ever do it again, and I’m not half as smart as any of those guys.

I think that’s ridiculous. Obviously the company and its corporate culture have to evolve over time, or they wouldn’t have been able to stay in business this long. They’ve almost been out of business. The difference here, is that in the Good Old Days—and this is especially apparent if you read Folklore.org—there were people working on revolutionary products who, knowing what direction the product needed to go and knowing Steve Jobs was wrong, just did what needed to be done and let Steve find out about it later.

They’re the reason the Macintosh worked at all. Steve Jobs, enabler he was, wasn’t the brain behind the Mac—that was Raskin. Jobs was busy trying to build a Smalltalk workstation with the Lisa—check out the FLOSS Weekly’s interview with Dan Ingalls. Steve Jobs fought the Mac team tooth-and-nail over doubling the RAM from 64k to 128k, even though the Mac was a dog even with 128k. There are lots of documented cases where Steve has been flat-out wrong, and everyone knows it, save for the man himself.

The entire problem with Apple right now is that since Steve Jobs is the savior—and he is, even if Gil Amelio started the iMac project and the Newton was starting to gain traction, those things are irrelevant in the face of Jobs’ accomplishments since 1997—there’s nothing he can’t do, and he’s always right. There is no one at that company that will stand up to him. There’s a reason all of these revolutionary new products are crippled in some way and there’s a reason that Apple behaves like a mistreated stepchild, almost resentful of the people who have made it a viable computing platform: customers, developers, hell, Apple Store employees, dealers who have sold Apple products since the late 1970’s, everyone. “Think Different” apparently didn’t apply to any of those people, wasn’t meant for them.

That reason is this: Steve Jobs is out of control, with no one there to yell at him every now and then. That’s all Apple needs to get back into the innovation game, rather than the “cool” game, the sleek-and-sexy-and-who-cares-if-it’s-broken game. The latter game will run the company into the ground, and may already be starting to.

Oh, Sarah.

She keeps digging herself a deeper hole, and no one will call her on it.

While meeting with black leaders concerning the absence of any African-Americans on her staff, Gov. Palin responded that she doesn’t have to hire any blacks and was not intending to hire any.

Found that one here.