Saalon Muyo

There are things out there that move us deeply.  Films and books and poetry and music that stick with us longer than all the others.  Some of them are considered classics by almost everyone, and some are so obscure that we feel a rush when someone else has even heard of them.  We all have our own reasons for why something matters to us.  It may be because of how it made us feel,  it may be because of what it meant to an art form that we loved, or it could be a mix of both.

I want to talk about the things that matter to me.  Art is a very special illusion, created both by the author and by the audience.  They show, and we take what they’ve given us and translate it as best we can.  Sometimes we fail to figure out what the artist is trying to show us, but occasionally their work becomes larger and more important because how we, personally, view it.

This is a space for me to discuss the illusions that matter most to me.  If I’m lucky, maybe I can show you something new, or maybe show you something old through new eyes.  But mostly, I’ll get to revisit those grand illusions that make me who I am.  That would be enough.

Let’s take stock of my creative situation, shall we?

Broken Magic is done, and has begun its rounds of the publishing industry. It’s hard to have done so much work only to have to sit and wait and hope, facing the real possibility that your work was in vain. Writing the thing is supposed to be the hard part, but once you get to the end, there’s still so far to travel.

That leaves me with time to kill, so before I kill all of my time playing Warcraft I should start working on something else. I am, too. I think. I’ve been juggling ideas and I may have even settled on one. As tough as it was to write the first novel, there’s this intense fear that I’m feeling on the second. It’s a different fear than I’ve felt before, but it’s once I’ve been waiting for.

Creative people - writers, painters, musicians - put a lot of work into their early projects. There’s a fire and a passion that goes into them that’s easy to find. You’ve been carrying that passion around your entire life, so it just forces those first stories onto you. Then you get that out, put it on a page, and a danger arises. The danger that the next project you choose will be…well, arbitrary.

You’ll like it. Sure you will. It will even seem cool. You can talk it up, you can get excited about it and you can write it. But when it makes the rounds, it’s obvious that this work isn’t the same as the last one. It lacks the fire and the conviction. It’s just good when the last one was you.

I’m not saying Broken Magic is a work of stunning genius. But it is a very personal piece of writing that came out very close to the way I wanted. Now that it’s done, I’m afraid of choosing a story just because I like it. It needs to be more than that. It needs to have everything behind it, just like the last one. Eventually - soon, maybe - I can write things just because I like the idea. If I’m writing four things at once, three of them can be larks. But now, right this second, I don’t want that book that I look at and say, “Well, it was OK.”

Does this one have everything behind it? I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of work to do before I know that. Work that needs to start now. The only question is: How much time will I waste along the way?

We live in a society just begging to lose every scrap of data to its name. The internet - our entire computer culture, in fact - is becoming the sole warehouse of more and more writing, poetry and knowledge every day. A disk drive is cheaper to store and easier to access than a hundred thousand books, but it’s vulnerable to catastrophic data loss in a way that scares me.

Spill a glass of wine on a page of your book and you lose that page. Delete the wrong 100kb of data on a hard drive and lose access to the entire thing. Forever. All it takes is a few corrupt sectors due to a head crash or a magnet or a partitioning-gone-wrong and you’ve lost everything on the drive. Everything. On a small scale, it’s nothing. But when you think how fragile our storage devices have become, it makes you wonder how much of what we’ve created is going to be left after the next big disaster. What will future historians make of our blank, unreadable magnetic platters?

What got me thinking this? Why, a catastrophic data loss, of course. Sometime last week our server company went to increase the size of our BSD jail at our request. At our invoices and paid for request. The operation went bad. The jail was corrupted. No backup had been made, either by us or by the company whose box our VPS sat on. Just like that, 3 gigabytes of data were gone.

We lost everything. The last backup we had was from over a year ago. Data recovery operations are ongoing by the server company, but it look bleak. Most likely, everything we had stored on that server is gone forever. For me, that means about a year of blogging posts, some web designs I was working on and a lot of time to rebuild. For the others the loss was a little more significant.

I decided that if I was going to lose some, I would lose it all. Rather than lament the loss of a year, I would just start anew. That way, I feel like I gain some power back over my loss. It’s an illusion, but it helps. A clean slate. Shin Saalon Muyo! is born.

What this new start will mean is unlcear. I can change things up a lot if I want to, but I’m not sure what I should change. Any ideas? Anything you think should be done here? Format changes? Some new blogging topics? More photographs? Fiction? Naked skiball?

The future is wide open. Meaning I’ll probably do exactly what I did before, just without the last 3 years of posts in the archives. Welcome to my own personal Dark Age. Now with 100% less sword fighting, and 99.9% less posts.

Well, things suck in webland for now. I’ll give a full update when I’m more awake. But, you know…this is to prove I’m still alive.