Saalon Muyo

Starting work on a new novel right now and I’m finding myself stuck in a familiar ditch.  At some point early in everything I write I end up here and, as frustrating as it is, it’s not something I can avoid.

Structure, you are my master.

There are things you do early into a story that are very hard to unwind later.  If you write half of your book with short chapters all from the same character’s point of view before realizing one character’s POV isn’t enough, you can’t unwind that by dropping new chapters in-between the others.  At least, I can’t unwind it like that without stressing myself into tossing the book aside for a couple of weeks.

I do the same thing when I program. I spend a lot of time figuring out how I want to name things, how I want to structure my classes and methods so that it all makes sense in the larger scheme of the project.  This doesn’t put me behind schedule, and in fact it usually pays of at some point, but it can feel like a lot of spinning your wheels while it’s going on.

So while a part of me wants to just start slinging words onto the page, I’m keeping the parking break on.  Because I know that at some point in the future of every project I’ll hit a point when taking the time to make elegant changes is no longer an option.  This is the point in programming when someone dumps some unmentioned critical business process onto your desk and needs it in by go-live.  Your only option is to race madly through everything you’ve already done and patch the hell out of your work.  There’s no time to think about how it should best be structured, not anymore.  It’s fire and motion and crossed fingers.

And when that happens, when I hit some point in the story and realize the ending will only work if I add in some unthought of plot threat, I have to hope that the structure of the story is sturdy enough to support a little extra weight.  When you get into the rhythm of something – a story, an application, whatever – you kind of get an instinct for how it all fits together.  That instinct is all you have to guide you when you need to start patching your work midway through.

At times like this, all you can do is hope that you’ll fit the pieces together quickly.  There’s a price to pay for jumping the gun, and that price is a third of an unfinished novel that you hate too much to think about.  It’s hard enough finishing these things. I don’t need to give myself any more reasons than I already have.

Yeah, yeah, it took me long enough, but I finally got Pretty Girl, my latest short film, up on Vimeo.  By “most recent” I mean “first shown in January” but let’s not get nitpicky, shall we?

Enjoy.

(That was a command and not a request.)

(Oh, and also check out “Tomorrow”, my last short film, if you’d like.)

Pretty Girl from DSP Films on Vimeo.

So NPR’s Planet Money podcast challenged its listeners last week: Write a haiku inspired by the recession.  A challenge like that is not one I can pass up.   Especially since haiku is just about the only kind of verse I can write without making babies cry and grown men rend their robes in despair.

Just over 200 people responded with their entries, and of those, about a dozen were read on the podcast that Friday.  Mine was one of them, read by none other than one of my favorite This American Life contributors: Alex Blumberg. Even more than the thrill of hearing it on the podcast, having Alex read something I wrote was just awesome.

And then today? They picked 5 of the haiku and read them nationally, on NPR’s Morning Edition. Including mine.

If you’re interested, you should stop in to that link and listen. The story’s a 4 minute piece by Chana Jaffe-Walt on poetry publication woes in this crappy economy.  At the end they read the haiku.  I think mine is second, but so you know what you’re listening for, here’s the haiku:

thirty winters gone

mills still empty by the shore

some things won’t return

Yes, so awesome your heart is singing.  Whatever. It’s haiku, cut me some slack. Anyway, it was read by Alex Frakking Blumberg on NPR, so that’s gotta make it a little better, right?

I get into arguments a lot. This is not shock to any of you, I know.

Monday morning, as I sit waiting for the dryer repair man to show up and tell me he’ll just need to come back with a different part the next week, I saw that the good folks at Planet Money had posted a link about President Obama’s plan to expand Pell Grant funding.  Without delay, me and my Recession Club friend JL got into a running firefight over it.  It’s what we do.  It’s fun.

Apparently, Laura Conoway at Planet Money found our debate amusing. So amusing, that she gave us a challenge: write a 500 word essay each defending our sides.  Do that, she said, and they’d post our debate on their blog.

How could I turn something like that down.

Today, the debate went live.  JL’s essay can be found here, and my essay can be found here.  Enjoy, if you dare.

After a weekend in my undisclosed writing bunker, I emerged with about 70% of a novella and 1/3 less of a bottle of scotch than I began with.  Neither was quite my goal (I wanted 0% scotch and 100% novella) but all in all, not too bad.

The novella should be done this weekend.  The scotch?

Well, we’ll see.  It is some very good scotch, and I don’t intend to drive much this weekend.

After much deliberation over the suggestions of my peers, I have settled on the following beverage for my weekend writing retreat.

If I could write on a typewriter without wanting to shoot myself, I’d bring my worst white tank top and a pack of cigarettes and do it like a good Depression era writer did it.  Instead, it’ll be me, a laptop and a Robotech t-shirt.

I’ll see you all on the other side.

Everyone in the Pittsburgh Area!

This weekend, from Wednesday, January 21 to Sunday, January 25, I will have a short film running in my friend’s show The Body Beautiful.  The show will be at 8 P.M every day except Sunday, when it will be a 3 P.M. matinee.

My film’s short, but it came out OK considering I shot it on 3 hours of sleep.  I’d love if you could come out and see it, but don’t kill yourself if you can’t.  I’ll put it online once the show is closed.

In case you’re interested, it’s called “Pretty Girl” and is my second short film in a row centered around a dead body.  What’s wrong with me?

As a writer and a programmer, one of the most difficult things to which I’ve come to terms is this: The people who inspire us in our craft can disappoint and infuriate us when they discuss any other topic.  A novelist whose books idealize everything you want to be as a writer can open his mouth, talk about politics or race and drive you insane.  This is the person who I respected?  This is what they really believe?

This has happened over and over again, and I suspect the rise of the Internet has only made this problem worse.  Fifty years ago, for a novelist’s private thoughts to be published, someone needed to believe they would make them money.  Now, all it takes is a one-click install of Wordpress and anyone can sound off with the whole world watching.  Orson Scott Card can write close-minded, reactionary tracts about homosexuality; Dan Simmons can write time-travel psuedo-essays; Eric S. Raymond can say ugly, racist things.  Can I go back to their writings that I love, that changed me as an artist or as a programmer and still respect them?

I came to the decision that I had to separate out the things I loved from the people who wrote them.  The worth of Ender’s Game is not related to how much I want to talk to Orson Scott Card; it’s that when I read it, it meant something specific and important to me.   It might change how I see their future novels, now that I’m seeing the subtext of their writing differently, but what they did that mattered still matters.

That said.

I’d feel better if, as my heroes demolished themselves before me that they would leave alone their seminal works.  I listened today to the EconTalk podcast, which had Eric S. Raymond on as a guest.  EconTalk is, as you may have guessed, an economics podcast, and for this episode had Raymond discussing The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I was concerned as soon as I saw the pairing.

Russell Roberts, the George Mason University economics professor who hosts EconTalk, has shown himself to be  a smarmy, intemperate ideologue.  He spends more time bashing liberals, the government and Keynes than he does presenting actual evidence in support of his  supply-side Chicago/Austrian economic theories.  I’m still unsure how he keeps getting time on Planet Money.  And as for Raymond, it wasn’t long after I read and loved The Art of Unix Programming that Brennen directed me to his disappointing, extremist political blog posts.  I did not want to see The Cathedral and the Bazaar get dragged into the middle of our country’s complicated economic debate as proof of anything at all.

Thankfully it never devolved into the free-market = open source software praisefest I was afraid it would become, but that didn’t stop them from scooting over to the issue when they could, including the end when Roberts decided to talk about the fiscal stimulus proposal as if it has anything to do with software development at all.  It’s a perfect example of the danger of having worthy and important thoughts in one field and trying to apply them to another field about which you are more passionate than knowledgeable.  Their brief digressions into analogies between open source organizations and the way the free market organizes itself were unwelcome and unsupported.  The model for open source software relates to scientific peer review of theory, not to macroeconomic policy.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is useful in understanding the quality of software in relation to how it was designed and developed,  not the saleability of that software, nor of the economic forces that affect the industry as a whole.  Raymond just sounded silly when suggesting that The GIMP was not developed because Photoshop was too expensive, but because the developers thought it would be fun to develop a photo application.  I’m not saying they didn’t think it would be fun, but are we supposed to ignore The GIMP’s similarities to Photoshop in this? If Photoshop cost $30, would The GIMP’s user base be as large?  Would it have been worked on to the level of polish that it has been by the development community?

There are interesting economic anaologies to draw between The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the way the market functions, but it has very little to do with Central Planning vs. unregulated free markets, or whether or not the government should spend money on things.  If the financial system was software, the privately owned credit rating agencies would be closed source software, in contrast to an open, peer reviewed system of corporate accounting practices and financial balance sheets.  Or, in examining the problems of government actions in the market, consider this: is it that the market is analogous to Linux?   Or that the lack of public transparency and democratic control over our government’s actions is depressingly similar to the closed source software we are often forced to purchase if we wish to get our jobs done?

At least this phenomenon of good writers going crazy isn’t new.  After all, once Martin Luther was through reforming Christianity, he decided he had some ill advised things to say about Jewish people. In comparison, Dan Simmons pretending a time traveler came to tell him that Muslims are evil seems almost quaint.

I’m trying something new.  A friend of mine is putting up a show in a next week at Your Inner Vagabond called “The Body Beautiful” of which yours truly will play a part.  One thing I’ll be doing is premiering a short film, but that’s not the new thing.   That’s just a little extra shameless promotion there.

The new thing is that I’m filming something unfictional.  Something downright truthy.  This week I’m filming interviews with the cast and crew of “The Body Beautiful” to talk about the way they view the body as a work of art, and how they see their own body in that context.  The intent isn’t to make a coherent documentary out of it. Instead it’s going to be a bit of video art that will play both before the show and over the intermission.

Usually at plays you have soundtrack playing to set the mood.  Instead, we’ll run pieces of these interviews, giving the audience a peek at the people who made the show happen, and how the themes of the show are personal to them.

I’ve never shot anything that wasn’t a piece of narrative fiction before, so it’s an odd experience.  I like doing the interviews; it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never had a project that merited it. Now it’s in front of me and it’s totally different from shooting a film.  It’s personal and intimate, a private conversation, but one that’s meant to be shown to as many other people as possible.

There’s a bit of fantasy fulfillment in it, I think.  When I was a kid, I imagined myself flying an X-Wing.  Now I imagine myself doing a piece for This American Life.  Oh how we grow up.

If you’re in the area next weekend, come out and take a look.  There will be plays and films and exhibited art and photography.  Should be a good time.   Shows run Wed Jan 21 8pm – Wed Jan 21 10:30pm (Daily at 8pm until Sat Jan 24 8pm).  Tickets are $12.

I am shocked to discover I am not a real writer.  So says some guy I’ve never heard of who has proclaimed himself a more serious writer than me because I participated in NaNoWriMo and he did not.  Ok, he wasn’t talking about me specifically, but he cast a nice wide net in which I am caught.

Technically this podcast is from last month, but since I found it today it gets nominated for an award I made up on the spot.  It’s basically a 6 minute rant in which Jeffrey R. DeRego lays out that NaNoWriMo cannot possibly be good, under any circumstances, for any writer.  Either you’re a “typist” who’s just cranking out words, or your failure to make it to 50k in 30 days will discourage you so badly you’ll give up on writing.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  Like everyone else on the Internet, DeRego has decided that his personal preferences are universal law.  Congrats!

Let me offer you some advice in the spirit of your podcast: STFU.  Your one story writing credit listed on the Writing Show is published on a site that still has the default Wordpress text on its about page and you write horror reviews under the pseudonym “Big McLargeHuge”.  Exactly what moral high ground are you claiming on those credentials?  Who deputized you into the Writing Technique Sheriff’s department?

I’m not one to write posts solely criticize people for where and what they write.  If you publish your Harry Potter slash on your Geocities website, more power to you.  Writing is hard, and however you find the time and energy to do it I respect that.  I may not like the work, and I can’t promise that I don’t say inappropriately mean things to my friends after I’ve read them, but as I rule I don’t go around bashing writing outlets.  In fact, I apologize right now for any slight I gave to the Escape Pod.  All I’m saying is that DeRego’s publisher is hardly Harper Collins and is little justification to consider himself a superior writing professional.

I”ve read a bit of DeRego’s work, but I won’t comment on it.  The quality of his writing is irrelevant.  He could be a fantastic writer, winning Pulitzers and Hugos and Nebulas and he’d still be a giant a-hole for his podcast.  And he’d still be wrong.

As for The Writing Show, a site whose tagline claims it is a place of information and inspiration for writers, good job on staffing up with people who dismiss entire groups of writers as nothing more than “typists.”  I’m officially inspired.

p.s. Writing 1,600 words a day – the goal for NaNo – is hardly that enormous.  I’ve written 1,100 words for this blog alone in the last 4 hours.  Or was I just typing? Damn.