– There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

The timeline project was done on a whim, because Laura tossed out the challenge that something like this would be neat and because I can’t turn down a good challenge.  In the end, it was a great opportunity to stretch my skills.

I have to take a moment to thank my good friend Brennen Bearnes, who pointed me to the Simile timeline widget in the first place and who checked my code for craptacularity. He also made some nice, elegant CSS adjustments that took my timeline page from Minimalist Ugly to Minimalist Clean.  He’s perhaps more certifiable than me, but he’s definitely more of a web genius.

Anyway, it’s nice to have you. If you decide to stay, or if you just want to leave me a nice or nasty comment, feel free.  Thanks to Laura Conaway and Caitlin Kenney of NPR’s Planet Money for giving me the chance to do this.  It was a blast.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.