I had a sickening thought the other day: I don’t think writing about the things I enjoy writing about is enough to qualify me as a writer. (I’m even getting sick of writing so much about writers, but that’s another story…)
This thought of mine is a machine. The way a paper airplane or a flow chart is a machine. So please don’t see the worst. Please don’t indict me for being defeatist. Understand how this sickening thought of mine has more in common with a road map than a verdict.
Writing for enjoyment is the easy way out. Writers are the people who write on assignment. About things they may not really care about. We all did it in school, some more than others. Just as the worker doesn’t get to decide what automobile he wants to assemble today, or what ditch he wants to dig, or what latte to make, a working writer doesn’t get to decide what he wants to write. And get paid for it. But okay, there is a difference of degree here. It’s not so black and white. Writers have more freedom than manual laborers. But all writers live in the shadow world of Art: Making only the art you prefer could lead to starvation before success.
I noticed - and I hope you can identify with this - that when I already know a story, I don’t have a lot of trouble telling it. If I have to invent from scratch, I have more trouble. So I could just take the trouble-free route and hope that will pay the bills. How long do you think that is going to work?
In school, we got a lot of assignments that boiled down to this: Tell a story. Get up in front of a bunch of people, project a slide show, and explain it all. This always drove me crazy because it could never be about anything I already understood. I can lecture for hours on many subjects. Given an hour or two to prepare, I could even give those lectures structure. But I fell for a reasonable sounding trap: School is about learning, so I should be learning something I don’t know. More recently, I was involved in group projects with people who didn’t know either. For some reason, they didn’t have the same trouble making stuff up in front of a crowd. To me this is anathema. I probably have the skill to do it, but I am allergic to bullshit. I seize up in front of a crowd if I don’t believe in what I have to say. I have begged these ‘teammates’ to explain, and they won’t do it. They sat there producing computer documents that were meaningless - that didn’t tell a story. I wondered if I was cut out for that life: All sizzle and no steak.
How could I talk about what wasn’t real to me yet? Imagine all the times I was ready to blow the cover off and rant that it was all a farce - we hadn’t learned anything, and I was even more confused than when we started. The effect of the team was peer pressure. I kept my mouth shut because I was afraid to say something to that effect. And that pained look on my face made it even harder to spout out breezy platitudes.
Growth is dependent on exploring new territory. To rely on what I already know is a slow death. I have to be able to fail. A lot. And I’m not so excited about the collateral damage. I could just feel my brain atrophy.
So like I said… I wouldn’t be much of a writer if I wrote only when I felt like it, or wrote only about subjects that interest me. As with bodybuilding, with no pain, no gain.
Posted in writing-craft, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:50:00 GMT
I must be a writer, because I own so many books about writing. That is how it works, isn’t it??? Oh, and I write a lot too…
As a Writer - if it’s even true that I can claim it - I am upset. I have become territorial about my language, and like the Doberman in his front yard, I am here to tell you that the Mailman is about to make his delivery.
Ahem… Excuse me - I got a metaphor caught in my throat there. I have joined the very real ranks of the Word People. And we get a bit huffy when somebody comes a long to devalue what we do by screwing it up. Of course, just like my metaphorical Doberman, be are an independent bunch. We get upset over a different mix of offenses.
I picked up my copy of Arthur Plotnik’s “The Elements of Expression”. I’ve had it since it came out in paperback, which is almost twelve years ago. The first time I read it, I didn’t identify to the same extent when I came across the words “People of the Word”. I was always one of those people, it just didn’t mean as much to me back then. Maybe in another twelve years it will mean even more. I wonder what that will be like.
It seems like everywhere you look these days, someone is trying to destroy my language. I expect languages to evolve - I’m not talking about that. Something else is happening here: Too many Ulterior Motives. What you might call “Unfelicitous Utterances”.
I hate to say it, but I think this is a result of too much expression. This is a painful thought, but language is straining under increased volume of communication the same way computer viruses flourish in an Internet world. Language is the preferred means where people need to communicate an idea. That’s a wide variety of circumstances.
I’m going to take a radical position for the sheer excitement of being contrary: People are writing too much for work. They should do me a favor and cut it out.
I blame mass communication. It is the Mailman in my Doberman metaphor. When you consider how much junk mail I get, the Mailman is apt. Too many words are being used like camouflage, the same way malicious computer programs have to masquerade as productive members of society. Language is being used more often than not as a cover for hidden meanings. And - I’ll be as plain as I can - Psychological Warfare. So many carefully chosen words intended to backfire and make a game out of meaning. A system of trust being perverted by bullies.
Posted in writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:28:00 GMT
Friends of mine were very excited when Sunshine hit the theaters, but I missed my chance to go see it with them. That’s too bad… I probably consoled myself with skepticism, or maybe sour grapes, but I was reasonably sure of what I had missed. Couple that with my general lack of motivation to pay money for a movie in a theater, and that brings us right up to the other day, standing in Olsson’s looking at the DVD new releases. I can hardly keep track of all the good movies worth paying to see on the big screen, so many of them slip past me.
I’ll start with a sour note: I think the premise of the film is absurd. If our sun was dying, I doubt very much we would be able to diagnose it. Now, given that premise, the story is told really well. My only complaint about this movie is that it is more ‘mechanical’ that I would like: Scenes fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces to establish very specific results. I envy the ability to craft it, but I’m still not completely fulfilled when I watch.
Okay, so I’m putting too much weight on the premise. A lot of movies must have the same problem. Reality gets in the way of telling a good story, so you ignore it out of spite. And, it all comes off rather non-chalant. Ignorance is bliss. There are a couple little problems with the astrophysics, which won’t bother many people, even if they can spot it. The most golden moment for me during this thought process was when I realized the story is like a theorem: Elegantly constructed out of parts that may never come into play. The result may never in fact be obtained, but the working out of the consequences is still genius.
But here’s a film that looks extremely beautiful. Their spaceship has an elegant structure, the interiors are much better looking than you might expect. Even the computer readouts have style. The bomb itself is nearly platonic in its perfection. And when they gather on the observation deck to watch a transit of Mercury (once again, physics that doesn’t make sense for the timeline), I was floored by the look of it. It may have been digital, but the way the ball of Mercury interrupted the roiling surface of the sun had such depth.
So I’m left with a better impression of the laws of Drama. As entertainment, science fiction usually fudges a lot of (what I consider) important stuff. And the fact that a few cranks would complain - they orbit Mercury very soon after watching it pass by the sun, they talk about getting a ‘slingshot’ off Mercury to send them closer to the sun, but the computer plots them orbiting the planet several times first, which might be necessary, but isn’t explained - doesn’t mean the story is not well constructed. Several standard suspense movie tropes come into play in conspicuous ways - the source of my ‘mechanical’ complaint. In other words, “This scene has to have happened later, so here it is. What, did you think that was just an accident?”.
And one last thing: The music. There was a lot of care put into that score. I love good examples of carefully deployed electronic music. There is still the standard orchestral stuff, but the score just underlined the sense of futurism for me.
Posted in film-and-TV, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:43:00 GMT
You might not know it to look at this blog, but writing is very addictive for me. I don’t always have an idea to write about, but when I do, the need to write it down is obsessive. Both Writing and Not-Writing are self-reinforcing conditions… I can’t just have an idea, make a note of it, and move on: an idea, once I have it, nags at me to get it down and any experiences I have in the meantime are like sleepwalking. Any appointment or responsibility gets in the way of the ‘thing that must be written’, and the quality of my life suffers.
I had ideas first thing in the morning, still lying in bed. Under the covers is the purest place to work - the only distractions are my memories. I can spin out an idea to my heart’s content - but then I can’t record it until I get up. And getting up breaks the spell. I cannot crawl out of bed without an immediate awareness that there are other things that need to be done.
Why I Can’t Write Fiction
I’m not trying to be self-defeatist here, but I haven’t developed the ability to write fiction. I have a naive relationship to honesty, and this makes it hard to juggle ideas that I know are not true. This means I am always more comfortable attempting to find answers in reality.
Fiction is an interesting subject all its own, though… Because it’s not ‘lies’ exactly - I needn’t feel dishonest writing fiction, but I still have trouble maintaining a commitment to ‘facts’ I have no reason to believe in. I’ve started to think that this explains a lot about me. (You see - always ready to drop out of the fantasy and look for the real answers.) Objective truth creates a solid foundation for my thoughts. I can’t always see the truth, but I believe is resides ‘out there’ and sometimes that fuels my determination when nothing else will.
I’m a little worried that people who know me will read the fiction I write and correctly assume that it isn’t fictional at all. This triggered memories of Jack Kerouac - that “On The Road” was just thinly veiled tales of his actual wanderings - And, their might be an occasional point where he makes an attempt at screwing up the story so that it was not exactly how it happened. The main problem with that approach seems to be that your heart isn’t really in it: You’re practically dooming yourself to failure in my eyes, because I know I would have trouble abandoning fidelity after telling a real story for so long. But of course, just because I can’t imagine doing it myself doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Posted in ontology, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:28:00 GMT
One great irony with Television is that somebody writes it. The actors or presenters speak those words, and then my ability to analyze and track those words is confounded. With effort I could transcribe the words, but not for every channel. The rushing waterfall - the words going over the edge as they are spoken - can never be called back efficiently. Most likely, the writers and the organizations paying them consider those words to be property, so anything to facilitate me in manipulating them is forbidden - even if I only want to assess their meanings with certainty. Perhaps such close scrutiny frightens them. What horrible thing have I stumbled onto here?
For me, part of the irony is that the words are ever written at all. Unscripted forms have evolved, such as political analysis talk shows, or the dreaded ‘Reality TV’. But most of the work takes place on the editing desk anyway. On the surface, Television is meant to seem natural - as if the speakers know what they mean to say. But the most informative voices we encounter are typically just reading from a prompter. Can you imagine what it would be like if newscasters were only allowed to explain what they knew about a story - and were therefore forced to learn it well. Nobody would ever allow such a thing to happen. I sometimes forget - how shocking! - that writing is usually done to fix action - therefore the script. I tend to think writing is more about exploration.
I was thinking along these lines when I read in “The Sound Bite Society” where Scheuer says:
An obvious [discontinuity between television and direct experience] is TV’s linearity: in reading or conversation, one can pause, double back, refocus, sift, edit, and evaluate as one goes along; but TV offers an unarrestable stream of images, usually in the form of a coherent narrative, a forced march of consciousness.
“Unarrestable”. That’s often what I wish I could do to what I see on television: arrest it; hold up a moment portrayed and regard it until I’m satisfied. Look at the words they say, written down until I can vouch for them - believe what they purport to say. Instead, it is as if I am constantly pursued - I have no choice but to ‘drop it and keep moving’. At some later time perhaps I’ll be able to pick up one of those moments and regard it, but there will be quite a scattering of them that I won’t have the patience.
Posted in books, film-and-TV, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:07:00 GMT
Okay, don’t get me started on the problem of time travel in fictional narratives. If robots from the future can come back to hunt you down, then help you change the future… (Well, it all depends on what you mean by “the”, I guess.)
“Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” was a fun romp. I particularly enjoyed the strange looks the robots gave each other - the visual cue to the audience that they are spending a half-second waiting for the SQL query to return a result set.
SELECT *
from tblTerminators
WHERE fldAppearance LOOKS LIKE Actor('Summer Glau')
ORDER BY fldAssKickingAbility DESC;
1 records returned, taking 0.41 seconds!
I mean - holy crap! - the one electrocutes the other (I’ll bet the BX cable in this building doesn’t blow sparks like some Star Trek plasma conduit!), then she says it will take 120 seconds for him to “reboot”(!) I’m disappointed that robots from the future will be based on a vintage 1981 IBM PC.
While we’re at it, one of the big challenges to fantasy writing is working around reality instead of tossing it in the garbage. Big points were scored last night with the bank vault scene, where “some engineer” had deposited the components of a super weapon and a time machine. They honored the conceit from the first Terminator movie (Is it now officially “T1”?) that the time machine only transports your body - we did get to see Arnie naked in that one. Of course we’re neglecting the difficulties involved in cyborg constitution: If your metal alloy skeleton will transport, will your earrings also transport? How does the machine know that your clothes are not some sort of “cloth exoskeleton”? Or that your car is not an essential prosthesis - this is supposed to be Los Angeles, after all. Hey - it might not be completely believable, but they did follow their own rule.
The relevant quote from the IMDB page:
“This movie embraced the mythology instead of trying to change it.”
I was reminded that I never saw “T3”. I wonder if I can borrow that one from work… Of course, it doesn’t matter if I watch it or not, because unlike a typical sequel, this TV series forks off from T2, which I saw. Maybe more movies in the future will be ‘branched semi-sequels’, a bit like the changing future hinted at in this franchise. That’s a great idea for a culture with too many ideas, who were raised on the ostensibly illegal practice of music sampling in rap music. If I remember correctly, I wanted more from the Matrix movies, too: More stories from the time before the first movie - searching for ‘The One’ and not finding him. But, this expands the possibilities even further: Not fiction is not restricted to describing a single fantastic world - complicated as it might be - it can explore the potential branching of timelines within that world, abandoning any objective sense of ‘what actually happened’.
But wait! We’re only half the way through our TV show. The second hour of the premiere runs tonight at nine. Maybe I’ll have more to say about it tomorrow…
Posted in film-and-TV, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:48:00 GMT
After resolving to write more, I did - for a few days. When you rely on inspiration as much as I do, there will be days when you are out of luck. One thing is different about writing for the fun of it: Nobody is forcing me to do it. The whole premise is that I enjoy doing it. And, confronted with the real possibility that the things I am thinking about will appear in writing to be very dull, some days I would just rather not. I make notes elsewhere, because this is not supposed to be a notebook.
Today I got more corroborating evidence that the phone system will only allow me to take one incoming phone call at a time. People say they got a busy signal. What’s the point of having a PBX (Private Branch eXchange) if it doesn’t even allow you to pull off call-waiting? It’s just one more thing about this place that doesn’t quite make sense. So far I haven’t heard any complaints from the staff that they couldn’t reach me with a tech-support problem. And I’ve been hanging out all day (on and off the clock) giving them the opportunity. Which they haven’t taken. So I guess everything must be alright. Or something like that.
I forget what time it starts, and I could easily look it up, but I am planning to check out the new Terminator series on Fox tonight, and I want to get home in reasonable time, so off I go for now…
Posted in ontology, olssons, film-and-TV, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:03:00 GMT
I’m still reading “Technology Matters”, even though it is short. My big plan for yesterday was to get a lot of reading done. Well, I didn’t quite do that…
I woke up late, got groceries and a coffee across the street, and took a trip uptown to shop at Container Store. I got a wire mesh Hanging File Crate. It matches one of my other file crates, a stack of letter trays and two DVD holders. I have accumulated enough paperwork now to require that much file storage. At the rate I’m going, my loose sheets of writing are going to swamp the lot, but for now its dominated by old utility bills and articles I printed out off the Internet. Add to that a few miscellaneous things like special grids I printed out and xeroxed for practicing my Japanese(/Chinese) characters. The bill collection won’t get any bigger, since I only want to keep so much history, I don’t add much to the printed stuff anymore since I feel more confident of my ability to connect to the Internet and manage things online, and I fully expect to write even more than before.
My system of bound notebooks has broken down - I don’t write everything into those things like I used to, and conversely, I never used to write much on loose paper before. At some point I started getting frustrated with that collection. (Wait… which collection was I talking about? Let’s say both - but at different times. So now I have two explanations to provide…)
Microstory: Carina the bartender had a drumstick for some reason. I never got the story on that, but she wasn’t drumming at the bar, so she wrote ‘More Beer’ on a napkin, affixed that to the drumstick and loaned it out to the people at the table in the alcove at Asylum. It made sense to me, but they were all like ‘why do we need a flag?’, and Carina repeated the line I’ve heard her use many times before: “I’m a very visual person”.
A Very Visual Person: I don’t usually think of myself in those terms, but people that know me would probably agree that I am one. For years I was fascinated with the pop psychology of Left Brain vs. Right Brain. Being in the Left-Handed minority makes it that much more interesting. For instance, one theory I heard was that Right handed people had a much stronger and specialized Left brain hemisphere (dem wires, dey cross over mon), whereas Left handed people had a more even balance. What the hell does it even mean? Remind me to spill what I know about neuroscience at a later date - today we’re going to stick to the ontology of it: What it’s like to be this way.
Some days I’m like the baby playing ‘peek-a-boo’. I do have some memory for what gets hidden, but a lot of my memory goes away and comes back at some later, inconvenient time. So I will be at work doing something particularly boring when I will remember that seven months ago I left a tape measure behind the cardboard box of CDs on top of my dresser, instead of on the low shelf in my living room. But, more importantly, I will stand in the room forgetting what I am actually looking for, think of something else to do, and then it doesn’t come up again until later. I still haven’t found the cable release for my Minolta. It is in a bin or on a bookshelf. Maybe it fell behind something. I desperately want to keep everything important visible, but that’s not feasible.
This world enfolds. Books are a perfect example. Maps, too. All that information can’t stay spread out, it has to be folded up and hidden away to make room for other information. But any good library has its own map. A Meta-Map. Something to lead you to the information in its compact form. All of this is quite normal to me. I don’t really question it. But when you’re a baby playing ‘peek-a-boo’, all that stuff is effectively missing. I have to forget a lot of stuff just to find something I’m looking for. I think I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.
So I am in a tense relationship with storage technologies. And, using computer interfaces has exacerbated the problem tremendously. On a computer it feels like I ought to be able to see where everything is at a glance. This must go back to the GUI pioneers - the decisions about how to show and how to hide. Well, maybe they made poor choices for my situation. Maybe I’m going to go back and fix it. And, maybe nobody else shares my difficulty - or just a few do and would be very interested to see what I’ve come up with.
We are all aware of things that we cannot see. Imagine for a minute what it would be like not to be aware of anything that you can’t see. I realized that memory does not require awareness. Animals instinctively do what ‘comes natural’, and deep down we retain a lot of that mental equipment. Somewhere I read that most animals have an awareness strictly limited to the present, and that we experience a much wider window - a ‘scene’ that stretches both into the past and the future. I’m in territory from the book now: Technology (Tools) had to exist long before writing. Tools and language had a symbiotic relationship - a kind of arms race inside the head that had real consequences for survival, and drove us to have bigger and bigger brains. We just wouldn’t be human without that long history of tool use. Both our new capabilities and the capabilities we lost (Think of the city kid who can’t start a campfire - but you got yours started, didn’t you Vanessa?) are integral to the development of our stuff.
Ever get caught up in the war between ‘Natural’ and ‘Artificial’? It’s the wrong dichotomy. It masks something else we should be more concerned with. To prefer the natural over the artificial at all times is just not human. I don’t know what to call it, exactly. It stems from insecurity. It reflects the very real worry that we’re on our way to becoming cyborgs, and we’re not sure we have a real choice in the matter.
I bet it would look very strange to people if I could really set up my life the way I want it. To leverage the visible, so that I encounter constant reminders of what I need to be aware of. I could even develop an exercise where I see only cryptic reminders and have to mentally inventory the things that are hidden. The lists, the collections, the structures, and the agendas.
Posted in ontology, computer-interface, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 05 Jan 2008 15:01:00 GMT
Boing Boing tipped me off to a racy SF blog called “io9”. I like it for the futuristic visual stimuli - lots of art and ideas for discussion. The posts move fast, so I can’t hope to keep pace with it.
I have to think for a minute about this phenomenon… Predicting the future well requires a pair of contradictory drives: You have to know a lot about some very diverse areas of knowledge, and you have to have a down-to-earth common sense. Of course, you can always fall back on the ‘fiction/fantasy’ aspect: There is no requirement that SF be right about the future. (Even though we still want bragging rights for the visionary who gets it right…)
Hey, it’s funny how I read the following sentence from thier manifesto:
And it’s why we’re chuffed about movies like Gattaca and TV series Firefly, which don’t rely on tired franchise tropes to build their compelling dystopian worlds.
…and I overreacted to “chuffed” - which sounded really negative - being applied to two SF visions I really liked. It took a couple readings to decide that “chuffed” was a positive thing, and it will continue to sound wrong to me.
[More Later, hopefully…]
Categories Note:
I was telling my sister that my blog category ‘writing-craft’ was intended for sorting out my fiction writing from my regular reports. I was mistaken about that. ‘Writing-craft’ was actually going to be my meta-writing category - for all the times I want to write about how much trouble I’m having writing, or I want to indulge in writer’s shop-talk or technique. Look down the list of ‘writing-craft’ posts, and you’ll see it’s mostly reflective. It’s whenever I read a book about writing, or ponder what sort of things I write, etc.
I’m going to go back and sort this out. Wherever I have attempted to be even partly fictional, or twist the truth of what really happened in my daily life - that’s now going to go in my new category ‘fantastic’. Hopefully that will make more sense.
In addition to tagging the content of what I already wrote, categories provide me with a quick look at what sort of things I have been neglecting to write about. Perhaps that will encourage me to stretch out and not fall into the same old ruts.
Posted in web-craft, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:15:00 GMT
Since I wasn’t out late partying on New Year’s Eve, this was the first thing I saw outside my apartment this year. A vivid reminder of a new day dawning, (metaphorically I can hope). I was just a bit later than I usually am on a weekday, but not by much. Otherwise the sky would not have looked like this when I opened the door to leave for work. I suppose I could have slept in and missed it - there was no compelling reason to be at work so early, and I was done with my predictable work in short order (then I fixed the Perl script that was bugging me.)
This view is different from a year ago: A big tree is gone, which makes the alley more sterile than it was. (It improves the sunrise, though…) The new vinyl siding on two houses doesn’t help much either. One of the new vinyl places has that cool roof deck - but how much fun is it to hear parties I’m not invited to?
Don’t you just love that moment when the sun is so close to the horizon that it shines UP at the bottom of a cloud bank? Because that’s one of my favorite things. A camera hardly does it justice. (But Photoshop can suggest a few improvements…)
I don’t have any New Year’s Resolutions. Well… they are the same damned resolutions I’ve had for years, the only difference is in emphasis: Keep reading a lot, maybe more. Write much more and find a way to get paid for writing (you see… I don’t think I’m very good at it yet). Extend those two to include foreign languages - Japanese and Spanish (don’t think I’m going to try for any new ones). I didn’t ride my bicycle enough last year - if it were up to me I’d ride more.
Digital photography is fun, but I don’t want to abandon film altogether - I still have two marvelous film cameras. I can get my color developed and scanned, but what’s the difference? Black & White I can develop myself, but making prints is a royal pain where I live now. Everything new I could do with photography is going to cost big bucks, which is serious discouragement.
The music I play has fallen to the level of mere noodling. I need to play all of my instruments more, and I need to compose.
Have you noticed yet how it’s all “More Of The Same”? There’s a reason for that. I already do the things I want to do, but I’m not happy. I’m not happy because I’m not doing enough of any of it to be happy. Hear the director call out “Again, but with More Intensity!”
Clearly, I need to be more specific, but the Master Resolution is this: I will tell you what I resolve as I resolve it. I will talk about the things that interest me as a matter of course, and those things will be visible here. I don’t particularly enjoy writing bland journal entries about what I did during the day - I intend to write essays about actual topics, flexing my expository muscles. (That’s why I mentioned Reading & Writing first - they are at the center of it all.) Of course, I don’t intend to abandon that accounting for my time - the three people who I know read this are keeping tabs on me because I don’t communicate much off-line. That probably makes me a bad Brother/Son/Friend, but here we are.
Hold the presses… I was looking at New Years Resolutions - An Engineering Approach on Slashdot right before I left work, and I suspect they are probably right about:
“Many clients make broad resolutions, but I advise them to focus the goals so that they are not overwhelmed”
So I’ll suggest a couple after all. I don’t want to go off the deep end. Let’s start with my “Master Resolution” - I should average one essay per day, and one photo set per week. The admin page shows the last fifteen posts - that’s a solid two weeks at one per day - I can look at the fifteenth post down the list and see how many days ago it was posted. I could endeavor to keep that number below fifteen days at all times. One other easy benchmark is volume: when I type a post into a full screen window of Firefox on my laptop, the preview pane should match or exceed the window height. This post has exceeded it. According to MS Word, I just passed 767 words before as I started this sentence. That makes 500 a good minimum post. It doesn’t sound all that impressive. I might have to ramble a bit to do it some days. The longer I’ve used this blog interface, the more comfortable I’ve gotten with it - and, that’s nice, but - I still find it easier to compose my words online. It doesn’t make any sense to me: It should not matter in which program I write these words, but it does. So the real work is in making myself ‘platform-independent’. It’s strange to think that I write best in this clunky little corner of the screen. It should not matter where I write. Often how the output looks is a factor in my judgment of its worth. That goes against everything I believe! (Whoops, too melodramatic…) Nevertheless, it bothers me that I am making those mindless dismissals of my writing when it is on paper or in a full screen editor. What does that suggest for a resolution? Play more with the cosmetic look of my writing so I stop seeing it in my preferred way?
Posted in ontology, photos, writing-craft | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT
