I’m going to write my book, Presence of Mind (working title), on a wiki with as much input from others as possible. I’m also starting a mailing list to discuss online presence and related topics (extending from closely related matters such as identity, reputation, attention, privacy and so on, out to the full array of social web design patterns).
If you’re interested in joining this conversation, let me know and I’ll invite you when the list is set up.
![[writing image stolen from an online zine]](http://xianlandia.com/pix/writing.jpg)
I’m feeling a bit under the weather, fighting off some kind of bug. That’s my first excuse. I woke up on time today after going to be really early last night. I was exhausted. I got up, put the coffee on, and sat down to fold some laundry. The cat was still asleep, which is unusual.
Got my stuff together, poured the coffee and it looked like I had fifteen minutes to start working on my novel for National Novel Writing Month this year. With a blank mind I sat down and started writing, had an idea, then a sentence. One followed after another. By the time I had to head out for work I had about 600 words. Not bad. Not sure where it’s going but that’s the idea.
On the bus I tried to add some more. Put another 400 or so words down, but now I don’t like the way it’s going. I’m having second thoughts. I start thinking: Is this really a good time to be starting a new novel? Don’t I have a nonfiction book on presence to write? a fulltime a job? a novel in the can that needs revision? a memoir I stopped working on to write my last nonfiction book that needs attention now? This blog? A life?
Should I pull the plug?
In the shower at the gym I thought maybe the problem was the second scene. It nailed things down too far in a direction I wasn’t liking. Maybe through that away, go back to the first ambiguous scene. Keep it and add from there. Maybe go to another perspective, another point in time.
On IM, B suggested maybe instead of a novel I write a bunch of short stories. For that matter, I could spend the time working on the memoir. It’s at least a third done and 30 days of solid work might put it over the hump.
I’m going to have to play it by ear. I kind of wish the people who were reading my previous novel draft for me would give me some feedback so I could decided where I’m going with that one. Things are piling up.
So I guess I’ll keep working at it for now. We’ll see.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing National Novel Writing Month two years running now it’s that not only is it possible to write a (big chunk of a) novel in a month, but that - for me, at least - it’s nearly impossible to do it any other way.
So, yes, I plan to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. What am I going to write? I have no idea! That’s the best thing about it. On the first of November I will sit down and start writing something and start discovering what it is I need to be writing right now.
Anyone else care to join me?
If Apple can sell electronic downloads of songs with no packaging for 99c a pop why can’t Amazon sell short little chapbooks electronically, download only, for 49c? The answer is they can, of course.
A writer on a mailing list I’m on recently alerted me to this feature (no idea how long Amazon has been at it), mentioning his eleven-page piece called Letters from Resistant Editors. In his own words, “Like almost all writers, I’m well acquainted with rejection and I learned long ago to keep faring forward when I get a rejection slip or letter. But one such letter started my mind tinkering with letters that some editors might write. Here is the result: letters of rejection that might have been written to some well-known authors. If you are a writer of children’s stories, or a reader of them, how would you like to get letters like these?
“It looks interesting and for less than half a buck, why not take a look? Amazon describes its Shorts this way:
About Amazon Shorts:
- Amazon Shorts are available exclusively at Amazon.com; you will not find them anywhere else.
- Amazon Shorts are delivered electronically; there are no printed editions.
- Amazon Shorts are yours forever – after purchase, you can read them anytime at Amazon.com. (They’ll be stored forever in Your Media Library in PDF, HTML, and text e-mail formats.)
- You are free to print Amazon Shorts to read in hard copy form at your convenience.
For me, this is déjà vu all over again. Back around 1988 I was packaging short “e-books” for a startup called Mightywords that had spun off from Fatbrain. They had detected this exact market: items shorter than a book but still worth publishing. Something like free-floating magazine articles. They were pricing them too high (typically $5 or more) and they were targetting technical subjects, and mainly they were burning through a bunch of VC cash (which I did my best to spread around to the various starving writers I knew). It was too early, the business model was wrong, and so on, but that idea really wasn’t a bad one.
I’ll be watching this Amazon experiment to see how it pans out.
Back when I wrote The Power of Many I blogged about blogging a book in progress and since then I’ve noticed a number of other authors blogging about the same subject. (Contrast this with William Gibson’s decision to stop his blogging when he started his next book.)
Now it looks like Forrester analyst Charlene Li and her collaborator are using a full suite of “living web” tools to write their book, Groundswell (why does that name sound familiar?): Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog): 7 ways the Web makes writing a book better & faster:
Collaboration with a wiki. Charlene and I have put as much as we can into a SocialText wiki. It’s contains research interviews, title ideas, the latest table of contents, the elements of the proposal that got us here, everything. I just added a page which tracks all the chapters as they move through various writing, editing, and review stages. We don’t generally use the Wiki to write the chapters — the drafts still move back and forth by email, partly since SocialText can’t quite handle all the formatting flexibility that MS Word can — but copies of the chapters do live there. A bicoastal collaboration needs a wiki. We also share it with other interested parties including my boss, Charlene’s boss, and our editor at HBS Press.
This blog for testing ideas. I can’t count the ways that a blog helps. When we think we have a good idea, it goes up here. For example, the five goals of a company for social computing, which became the core of the book. We put our outline up here for your review. That post became extremely useful, because I reference it in every email I send to people I’m trying to influence or interview. People doing interesting things contact us because of the blog. And I’m not even getting to the uses of the blog for promotion, which will start after the book is written, but well before it’s published.
Del.icio.us for gathering research documents. Every story, vendor, YouTube video, and anything else on the Web gets tossed into the del.icio.us bucket. I rarely used to bookmark things — now I bookmark everything. These sites are even classified with our own proprietary set of tags that indicate what chapter they relate to. (We’ll share this when the book is closer to done — right now it’s proprietary.) I don’t believe we could have written this book without del.icio.us.
Email for everything — but highly personalized. Every single contact in this book — and there will be hundreds and hundreds — will have been made by email. I’m sure you’re not surprised that I email Charlene 10 times a day and do a few IM conversations, but I’m talking about making introductions by email. If I need to introduce myself to somebody, I send a personalized email describing the book in one sentence, linking to the blog post about the book, and telling them what I want and making it clear I have researched them and know what they are about — and I frequently get a response the same day. This email might take 15 minutes to write, but it’s worth it — it’s the opposite of mass emailings, highly personal and personalized. (I recently invited a CEO to speak at our Forum in October and got an affirmative response within two hours — astounding our events team.) Where do I get the email addresses? Forrester has a database that may or may not help. Easier is finding the PR email address on a company’s site. Often somebody I know, knows it. Sometimes I use Zoominfo’s PowerSearch. And sometimes, if I know the email address of somebody else at the company, I guess based on that format. That actually works — recently got the CEO of an Italian company to get back to me that way.
At first I had big spreadsheets full of contacts I was pursuing on Google docs but I’ve found a better way. I just flag all incoming and outcoming mail that relates to contacts. The yellow flag means I’ve pinged somebody and need them to get back to me. Then I just check all those flags when I’m in followup mode. It’s not ACT, but it works for me!A big monitor in a quiet office. When I am ensconced in my home office with my high-speed Internet, VOIP phone line, home network, and big flat monitor, I am highly productive. The big monitor has made a big difference — I no longer feel cramped and squeezed by my laptop screen, and I frequently have one thing up on the laptop (like a Web site, or edits I need to address, or an interview) while I write on the big monitor. When I’m not at home, my productivity goes down. My home office, while it’s in the basement, also has a window out onto my lawn, a fireplace, a hardwood floor, big whiteboards filled with the stuff I’m working on and my kids’ artwork, and quick access to the kitchen and my family when I need to decompress. Makes all the hours possible.
A phone line that follows me anywhere. Forrester has an Avaya phone system with a cool little feature — an Internet app I can run on my laptop that turns any phone into my office phone. At my home office, I can call Japan using Forrester’s phone system, conference people together, transfer them to other Forrester extensions — everything I can do at my desk. And if I go anywhere else, I can do this with any phone line — my mobile, Forrester’s Foster City office, or my parents’ house. People see my caller ID as if I were calling from Forrester, and my voicemail is one click away. I find this far better than giving everyone my mobile phone number.
Firefox and Netvibes. I use Firefox for everything possible, because the tabbed browsing and the bookmarklets make it very efficient for me. I cannot survive without tabbed browsing since I am typically browsing 4 or 8 things at once to build a chapter. (I know IE has tabbed browsing now but it’s too late, I’m happy with Firefox.) I use Netvibes to track a surprisingly small number of blogs including Micropersuasion, The Church Of The Customer, The Long Tail, Blog Maverick, and Seth Godin. I also have up TechCrunch, GigaOm, TechMeme, and TechDirt, but they post so frequently that I don’t read them unless something catches my eye.
(via allaboutgeorge)
I am curating a series of articles at the venerable information architecture (and user experience) web magazine Boxes and Arrows, based on the panel I moderated on the same topic at this year’s IA Summit.
The first article in the series is Joe Lamantia’s It Seemed Like the Thing to Do at the Time: The Power of State Mind. Joe looks at the big picture, literally, comparing business failure ot catastrophic societal failure, using the Easter Island culture as a case study (as well as his own experience with a startup).
I’m really glad to see this article published because we had limited time on the panel and I wanted to hear more of Joe’s thoughts about these scenarios.
Fascinating stuff and more to come.
My first article at a new music blogzine called Stuck Between Stations went live today. It’s called Goodbye, Ruby Grapefruit. Joe Bob says check it out.
I’ve been following the upsetting story of how Kathy Sierra, creator of the Head First book series, author of the Creating Passionate Users weblog, and noted speaker on the web / technology circuit was frightened into cancelling her scheduled appearance at eTech by a series of escalating threats to her personal safety in the form of email messages sent directly to her by readers and posts to several community blogs, now defunct, oriented toward taking pot shots at the more famous and popular bloggers.
Bloggers, her readers, and people learning about the story from news and blog sources have generally rallied to support Sierra. The long comment thread at the end of her post announcing the cancellation and detailing the communications that terrorized her attests to that. A number of people have quibbled with her interpretation of the messages, told her “man up” and to stop being hysterical, or have accused her of manufacturing her response as a public relations / marketing ploy.
Myself, I’ve been known to be verbally mean at time, to pick on people, to be saracstic and snarky when it suits me, but the two sites (“Mean Kids” and “Bob’s Yer Uncle”), ostensibly designed to encourage freewheeling, humorous, creative criticism, puncturing the puffed up much like certain gossip blogs do for the true celebrities in our culture, somehow gave free rein to a much more virulent form of attack: unbridled misogyny edging into images of sexual violence and horror.
It’s a dirty little secret of our world that hierarchies are sometimes enforced, under the cover of darkness, by sexualized threats of violence and domineering acts of humiliation. It’s more visible in lockerrooms, prisons, and other sealed male enclaves, but it may stem from primate behaviors that predate our humanity and it carries on to this day inside families and, at least in symbolic form, in public communication.
What struck me about this situation is how the worst attacks - revenge fantasies described in cartoonish pornographic terms, tend to have come from people writing under the cloak of anonymity, or deniability (for example, it’s still not clear if the posts associated with Alan “Head Lemur” Herrel cited in Sierra’s blog entry are actually by the man who goes by the nickname).
On Slashdot, no haven of civilized discourse, a poster who refuses to register and adopt a consistent persona is given the default name “Anonymous Coward.” Throughout the generally supportive comments flooding into Sierra’s blog post are peppered juvenile hit-and-run posts attacking her or making random racist and sexist comments. These comments are inevitable posted anonymously and associated with made-up email addresses or urls.
In the political blogosphere, where this sort of situation is less uncommon, there is an ongoing debate about the role of pseudonymity in blogs. A number of Sierra’s readers were sent there via the conservative blog, Protein Wisdom, whose author experienced a similar verbal attack from a commenter featuring vile “hypothetical” threats of sexualized violence (in that case targetting children, if I recall correctly). At the same time, the author of Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein, is often criticized in the sort of left-wing blogs I frequent for engaging in threats to “out” pseudonymous bloggers while at the same time claiming to stand for civiility and sponsoring a set of ethical guidelines for bloggers.
Defenders of pseudonymous blogging make the point that not everyone is free to speak in public about political and social matters without fear of retaliation. Further, they argue that it is the persistence and consistency their assumed identity to which their reputation attaches, and that a perosn posting day in, day out, for years, as Sifu Tweety or Atrios is every bit as accountable for his (or her) words as someone signing their posts with a “real” name.
In Sierra’s explanatory post she called on several bloggers by name, blaming them for instigating the climate that incubated these attacks and for allowing them to escalate. She also cited a few less well known identities: one calling himself Siftee, who sent her a threatening email message, and another signing his posts Joey, who wrote apparently about a fictional character named Kat in misogynistic terms in the vicinity of posts attacking Kathy Sierra.
Of the contributors to Mean Kids, only Frank Paynter has come forward to apologize, without reservation, for his role, however inadvertant, in the development of this situation. I consider Frank a friend based solely on a shared history of reading each other’s bloggings, occasionally linking to each other, and even more rarely exchanging brief notes. I’m connected to Frank through Twitter and older social network environments and I admire his forthrightness in this situation.
Jeneane Sessums and Chris “RageBoy” Locke have been less willing to apologize or to own any responsibility for what happened. Sessums disclaimed any involvement at all with the sites although others seem to believe she was involved with the Mean Kids project. She has also refused to discuss the topic further in public. Locke argued that he did not write any of the sexually crude scenarios or send any threats and that hence Sierra invoked his name only to drive attention and embroil him in her controversy.
I feel that both of these people could have made an apology and still attempted to clarify their own culpability while distancing themselves from the statements they wish to disown.
Finally, “Joey” and a fellow named Paul Ritchie have mounted a more aggressive defense of themselves and the Mean Kids and Bob’s websites, arguing the Sierra is deliberately grandstanding and deluding her readers in order to form a lynch mob online, drive more sales to her books and increase her speaking fees.
I do not find these arguments compelling and I am not sympathetic partly because neither of them seems willing to repudiate the grossly indecent verbal attacks on Sierra (nor the violently misogynistic fantasies involving imaginary stock female figures).
What I will grant is that all of the people I just mentioned have to some extent been willing to go on the record and produce themselves in public in the aftermath of Sierra’s accusations, cancellation, and self-enforced seclusion.
Thus far I have not seen a public statement from Alan Herrel either claiming or disowning the misogynistic entries Sierra included in her blog post, which were posted under the name “Rev ED” on the Bob’s site using his familiar avatar
Both Paynter and Locke cited a motto from the Well known as “You own your own words” or “YOYOW,” and I find this interesting. Paynter referred to it when discussing how the two snark sites did not censor their contributors, saying “Misogynistic postings at MeanKids.org led me to try to moderate, but indeed the group there was of the ‘You Own Your Own Words’ tradition, so moderating or central editorial control wouldn’t work. I tore the site down.”
Locke likewise cited YOYOW in his defense of himself on his own blog:
I was a conference host on the Well 15 years ago where the core ethos was acronymized to YOYOW — You Own Your Own Words. This has remained a guiding principle for me ever since. I will not take responsibility for what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote. However, it was clear that Sierra was upset, so it seemed the best course to make the whole site go away.
(I know Locke only by reputation but have exchanged email with him in the past.)
What struck me about this is that I think they both may be missing some of the key elements of that philosophy. On the Well, while contributors may adopt pseudonyms at any time, their real names are always discoverable and each user is allowed only one single identity. This has long been considered a key reason why so many Well conferences manage to stay on topic and avoid the sort of flame wars that tend to eventually ravage utterly free-wheeling online discussions.
Furthermore, Well conferences are hosted, and hosts are given a handful of moderation tools and guidelines for how to use them to manage situations that are spinning out of control and contributors who are causing grief. These tools range from verbal warnings to the ability to hide or scribble offending posts to the power to ban members from the conference entirely (usually for a limited three-day cooling-off period).
When people can post whatever they like without having to accept any impact on their own reputation or identity, when they don’t establish and main tain a consistent finable presence online then they are not in fact owning their own words. I don’t think the YOYOW ethos is intended as an excuse for moderator to avoid managing the tenor of their discussion forums, and I find it interesting that the people involved who have at least engaged Sierra’s complaints are all, except for Joey, people writing under their real names or who have at least established longstanding records of their thoughts online under their chosen handles. (Sessum specifically points to her blog archives as a character witness.)
One last point about owning your own words: To varying degrees Joey, Ritchie, and Locke have argued that Sierra is victimizing them by associating them with words they did not write or by painting them as part of an organized conspiracy when anarchy and permissiveness are all they actually engaged in. Here I think owning your own words again comes into play. If you gleefully call yourself a mean kid and stand on the sidelines egging on bullies, don’t cry foul when the bullies’ victims fight back and you find yourself tarred with the same brush.
UPDATE: I see that Doc Searls has posted an email message from Alan Herrel denying authorship of the post that used his avatar and saying that this scandal has effectively destroyed his online presence. Reading his words I feel sympathy for him, particularly if his systems are being attacked as he describes and if he is being harassed off the net, but I still find myself wondering whether he distanced himself from the person who had assumed his image when the inflammatory comments were originally published.
While I’ve been neglecting this and many other of my Mediajunkie blogs in the past year and a half (excuse: full-time work, baybee), I have actually been blogging. While at Extractable I launched a spearheaded a user-experience focused blog called Extra! Extra! and wrote something for it nearly every workday for about a year.
Actually, my commitment was to make sure something was written in it every day, and about 10 to 15% of the time other Extractable folks wrote great content for the blog as well. I just backed it up and made sure there was always something fresh.
Anyway, I am making a job change now. I am currently taking a week off and next week I will start a new job, more about which in due time, so yesterday I used Eric Pierce’s WPexport plugin for WordPress tp expprt all the entries, remove the ones that weren’t mine and then export them into this here blog (wake up!).
I added that link just now because all of this is context-dependent. For example, this entry will be echoes at X-POLLEN (aka xian’s running monolog) and then when it says “this here blog” it will actually be lying (well, sort of, because recent imported entries will also show up there). I mention that because as I imported the entries I noticed that many of them are written from a “we’re here at Extractable” perspective that will probably sound funny in this blog. In fact I removed the posts bragging about site launches - most of which were written by others anyway - and a few other entries that were really company-specific.
I thought about whether the posts belong here or elsewhere (say, at RFB or The Power of Many) or even whether I should launch a new web/user-experience related blog, but that way lies madness. As I’ve written recently, I am now on the consolidation tip and I am going to start either retiring blogs and/or folding their content into this one, so people will know where to point to me and look for my latest stuff, etc.
So I just created a new master “user rexperience” category here and then replicated all the Extra! Extra! categories under it, though I think the exporter lost multiple categories and assigned only one to each entry, but oh well. So this blog is going to become less of a personal journal and more of an omnibus of whatever I’m currently thinking about. I may not need the monolog anymore, either. Have to think that through. My brain hurts. And this is supposed to be my day off.
The novel isn’t done. Well, the month isn’t over until midnight tonight, and I haven’t hit “The End” yet but am aiming to do so sometime today. But I crossed the finish line from the National Novel Writing Month perspective last night when I exceeded 50,000 words written in November. w00t!
It only took my two nanos and just over a year to write the entire first draft of For You, The Stars and I did it without ever looking back or re-reading, so I have no doubt there are continuity problems, crutch words, hemming and hawing, rambling, extaneous scenes, too many characters, pointless digressions, and so on.
I expect I will take a little vacation from this story in December and then in the new year actually read the novel myself for the first time. After that I expect to embark on a revision process. I’ll reorganize the chapters, fix the timeline issues, probably reduce the number of characters and possibly combine some. I may also have to write some new material. Who knows?
If I can get a coherent second draft written, ideally by the early spring of next year, then that’s when I’ll send it around to trusted friends and colleagues for their feedback. If that works, I’ll do a third revision and then the goal would be to send that out to a few agents and editors, possibly sometime next year.
We’ll see. Right now I’m just glad to have the final page in sight.
Last year I did National Novel Writing Month and managed to bang out 30,000 words of my novel For You, The Stars.
I wrote nearly every day of the month and averaged slightly more than 1000 words a day, short of the 50,000 word target for NaNoWriMo participants but still a heckuva lot more fiction writin’ than I usually do.
In fact, in the elevent months since I’ve added just one or two thousand word installments to the pile. So this year I’m going to do it again. I estimate that the first draft of this novel needs to be about 80-100,000 words, so if I keep up the pace I managed last year I’ll have the draft 2/3rds done by the end of the month.
For those hooked readers who occasionally send me “what happened next?” comments, thanks! Your encouragement - while not sufficient to drive me to the keyboard much since January - has definitely contributed to my desire to keep writing this occasionally very dirty novel.
Last night I had one of those long elaborate dreams with several movements in it. Near the end, though, just before I woke up, I was in a big bed after a long night and Oprah Winfrey showed up in my hotel room I think it was. She was going to get in bed with me and I remember thinking to myself, “This probably won’t hurt my career.”
“Enough with the Grateful Dead already,” writes so-called Bill. “What happened to Cecilia?”
Well, I didn’t get into the 50,000-words-in-November winners circle. (Some people hit that number in the first week! I on the other hand, have a life.) I did, however, hit my personal goal of 30,000 words by Nov 29 and I took yesterday off, partly out of exhaustion. Ironically, I still have not reached the scene that inspired the title of my novel.
I expect I will keep writing about 1000 words a day throughout December, maybe with slightly more frequent gaps, with a goal of reaching 50 or 60,000 by the end of the year.
We’ll see what happens after that.
Warning... adult content.
So far, so good. B and I went away for the weekend to celebrate my birthday but I've posted two installments of my daily NaNoWriMo effort today to make up for it. There's a lot to be said for writing fast without fear or favor.
I took the plunge this year and signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I'll be "doing it" over at A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read.
I also have a profile page over at the nanowrimo site. The novel I'm working on is called For You, The Stars
Wish me luck!
One thing about starting my first online journal on my birthday back in 1997 is it makes it pretty easy to keep my blogiversary straight.
Next Tuesday night (October 18th), Cecil aka Dan aka Cecil will be reading various poems and poem-like shtick at C'era Una Volta, located in the heart of The Island City (aka Alameda).
Says Dan^H^H^HCecil:
They're even being nice enough to provide free appetizers, for reasons I can't quite figure out. So maybe I just dreamt that.
Starts at 7. I think it'll be wrapped by 8:30 or so. John Wright, a good pal of mine and an outstanding musician, will start the night off with some fab guitar.
If it happens to fit in with your schedule, we would love to see ya there. I will say this: if you're only going to hear me read poetry once in your life, this is probably the best time to do it. Because they'll have free appetizers.
Unless I dreamt that.
Thanks!
- Dan (aka Cecil [aka Dan] )
Date and time: Tuesday, October 18th, 7 pm
Place: C'era Una Volta
Address: 1332 Park St., Alameda (510.769.4828)
Admission: Free as the day is long. And the day is long.
Mr. Sun: Humor on the Web - what I've learned and where I've learned it is an online version of Mr. Sun's presentation from this past week's SXSW.
All of the advice is good, but the last point must become your mantra:
My new motto is
What would Philip K. Dick Do?
Yes, that's me, originating the part of Guy Forcips in Bill Cassel's delightful radioteleplay now current in rotation at Monkey Vortex Radio Theater: Everybody Loves Money
Available in plain, and peanut.
It's too early to celebrate but I just resubmitted Chapter 9, the final chapter of my book, the recursive, regressive one about media and publishing and information and knowledge and journalism and books and this book itself. That leaves one chapter left to rewrite. Of course it's the politics chapter, the biggest mother in the whole book, but it's about time I revisited it. (I wrote the first draft when everybody thought Howard Dean was a shoo-in for Democratic nominee.)
There's also a glossary. And then six or so of the chapters need to be redone one more time after the copyeditor and my peer reviewer have had a crack at it. So I'm not there yet, but I still feel like letting one a mini- war whoop because this has not been easy.
I don't know whether to eat something now or take a nap.
Even the fugitive has to do it. I print out chapters six and five, prepare to mark them up in pen while wolfing down a bagel and whtefish sandwhich after buying some lox for the flight on southwest tomorrow. (bagels out, po'boys back, that's our motto).
On return (from lunch, not n'awlins), I will key in updates and submit at least one of the he two chapters and then finish the other before getting on my plane tomorrow morning.
In the meantime, I also need good pens, triple-A batteries, and cash. Plus I need to call Veteran's Cab for a ride to the airport tomorrow morning early.
UPDATE: Got everything, still need to call the cab. Chapter 6 nearly ready to upload, yippee.
My last few Macs have had their hard drives named after Irish or Celtic literary takes on mythology. The last one was Tir-na n'Og and the current one is At Swim-to-Birds. Phil Gyford republishes Donald Barthelme's reading list and while DB claims it is in no particular order, of course it is in an order and the first book listed is my 'puter's namesake by Flann O'Brien (and the inspiration, at least in part, for No Bird but an Invisible Thing):
Phil Gyford: Writing: Donald Barthelme's reading list
At one point, I used to blind cc my agent any email I sent that might lead to a book deal.
There was a time I used to blind cc my academic deadhead friend every fascinating bit of music information or dialogue or culture i saw online. That was a form of blogging. If Nicholas has saved that old email archive, i bet it's publishable.
I wonder what would happen if I put a few people on a permanent bcc list and then permitted myself to forget that they were listening in? It might be the closest I could get (in the scientific sense of modeling and approximation) to an autobiography in this medium yet.
It consists mostly of names, people I've spoken to or will email or have chatted with or plan to, many of whom I plan to quote, have interviewed already, or are being featured in some other way. There's also the web and radio marketing plans to think through. TV would be good too. People have been very forthcoming so far and generous with their time. This is my favorite form of research. Interviews sprout stories. Writing this book has been an intense and in some way methodical process so far, somehow exhilarating. Marketing the book should be even more fun. When the writing's in the can, that's when you can really start dining out on a book.
When we run out of stuff at home, when we remember, we write it up on the whiteboard magnetically attached to the fridge, so next time I go shopping, if I remember to check the whiteboard, I can remember to get whatever it is we've run out of, on top of the usual stuff I always get, like half 'n' half and juice oranges and cat fud.
So we ran out of laundry soap, I guess, a week or so ago, and B wrote it up on the fridge. Out of the corner of my eye I could have sworn it read "Cranky Soup."
Will you be having a cup or a bowl, sir?
When I get around to writing a novel loosely based on this period of my life (but not legally actionable), I may want to call it South Lake. I like the name for some reason. I try to name all my novels, even the ones that are still just a glimmer in my eye. Having a name puts them on my short list of what to work on when I'm stuck on whatever I'm supposed to be working on. Currently, by the way, that's Johnny Come Lately (a working title), my memoir of growing up in New York centered roughly on 1974 - 1976.
I'm at the point where I should put the working titles in chronological order based on the period inspired or portrayed in them. I've got nothing for high school or college 'cause those still feel like really hackneyed times to me. More fun to end JCL with me preadolescent with the Studio 54-era coming on. I remember people in 5th grade repeating lines from the first season of SNL: "Ouch, my penis sure hurts when I urinate!" and stuff like that. Fairly radical for 10- and 11-year olds.
For the period of the late '80s - early '90s in San Francisco (all pre-dotcom), I've got History of Utah (a novel in the form of a bunch of Camper Van Beethoven bootlegs, some mixed tapes, and commentaries), and For You, the Stars a set of short stories, at least one per girl.
Only Way Free stalled out with about 100 pages happens in the mid-90s, eventually including email. It deals with hack writing and fidelity and is stuck on a context-shift metanovel thing that's kind of embarassing.
Wellspring is my dotcom novel, mostly a sketch, pretty theoretical, and possibly not worth doing but when I took the stock options, I promised myself I'd take notes and capture some of the best scenes, and it does have three natural acts. It's just a story that we all know too well right now. And how boring on the Internet, especially if you were here before, during, and after the bubblee. Still, again, witnessing is worth doing and maybe it will mutate to another context. Maybe I'll set it in Texas in the '80s.
A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read is a hyperlinked writing sandbox with pretensions of someday spilling out at least one good story, possibly the one about Rafe.
Not set in period / hard to classify: Blurt is a hypertext that currently exists only on my Palm and which consists or many very short interlinked blurbs written for specific words.
I'd also like to take the a text like the neverending sentence a make every word a link. Maybe like a wiki so that some of the links went to form pages where anyone could define the word or write about it or reweave the slub back into the woof, or maybe more authorial, more auctorial than that. Still, the Mola Project has always made me want to write (or contribute to) a densely linked and nonetheless coherent hypertext story, one where literally every word (or almost every word?) links somewhere, but that's another story.
I also wrote about two paragraphs of something called Wodeneye that might be about my dad. I'm not sure.
There, I've named them. Now I just have to finish, write, or start them and we'll be all set.
These are the days of our lives. Today I reached the 100% submission milestone on one of the most difficult writing projects of my life. I kept getting "nearly" done and then I'd be stuck again rolling a rock up a hill. This last piece, an appendix, took me at least three or four weeks more than it should of. Some of these deadlines were originally set for March!
I still have to review galleys for a bunch of chapters, and replace some illustrations now that the software the book is about has stabilized. Plus, there are endless postponed responsibilities that will come flooding into the open space, as well as long-neglected other writing projects, email that needs answering, stuff I meant to post about in this or that weblog that has probably already expired conceptually, an IRS audit for my 2001 tax returns (I think I didn't issue all the 1099s I needed to for my subcontractors, so I'm hoping one that's resolved there will be no other problems, but still who wants to go through that?!), a few consulting projects that seem like they might be about to start, some political activism I've been meaning to do, the cleaning up of my own web properties and some half-completed personal content-management projects, and oh the list goes on and on.
But right now I get to feel good about (finally) hitting that 100% mark. Plus it means they owe me my final advance check, and I can stop walking around with that guilty look on my face.
One thing I've learned is that if it's going to be geeky technical stuff or web-related, I'd rather be consulting or training or teaching a class - there's more human interaction and frankly it pays better than your typical technical book deal. I'd like to reserve my pure writing efforts, and especially any monumental book-length ordeals, to more humane topics, matters that engage a more full range of my senses and sensibilities.
You, gentle reader, probably did not notice my most recent experience of nanofame, a weekend flirting with the top of the weblog charts on the strength of a weak little song parody I call Blogistan Pie.
Now, I'm already conflicted about Radio Free Blogistan. It's a good outlet for my writing, memoir, and publishing interests and you can't argue with success (it gets ten times more traffic than any other project), or can you? The smart money on weblogging in the long run says it will be a great medium for certain things, but that blogging-about-blogging is a dead end. There aren't many TV shows about TiVo.
So for now I keep doing what I'm doing and wait for the great refactoring in the future (was just talking to my semantic web guru and I can envision a unified web spanning No Bird, Enterzone, X-POLLEN, Blogistan, and more - maybe that's what Telegraph will be...).
I finished my slideshow-handout for the weblogs seminar I'm teaching at the Seybold conference in San Francisco this September, so I guess I should be promoting that now too. I'm such a content guy. All my slides, or 90% of them anyway, are plain black text on a white background.
Anyway, a few weeks ago in a fit of obsession with obscure technical politics in the world of content syndication standards (for, among other things, weblogs) and anxiety related to that evening's meeting of a number of the heavyweights in this microcosm, I played off my moods by writing. I think the word Pie somehow stirred up the American Pie lyrics I memorized as a teenager, awakening their slumber like a balrog beneath Moria, and I dashed off
A long, long time ago
I can still remember
How that blogging used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
I could make the people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
So the next part came easy
September always made me shiver
My aggregator would deliver
Bad news in my newsfeed
I couldn't take one more read
Eh, not great but OK. A recent pregnancy announcement made me want to play the next few lines for positive emotions instead of the negative in the original
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his pregnant bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the blogging died
I needed a chorus. Well the upstart project in the syndication standards competition was codenamed Pie and then Echo and the (briefly) nEcho, and then Atom, and each name was subsequently rejected, usually because of intellectual property conflcits (a bottomless pit). Tired of referring to the project by a different name each week (and worried that people researching it later might find my entires on Atom but not on nEcho, or whatever), I decided to use Pie until a new name emerged. So I came up with the somewhat syncopated
Bye bye wiki necho atom pie
Took my standard to a body
But the body had died
And good ol' boys drinking kool-aid and lies
Singing this is the day blogging died.
OK, I'm not going to narrate the writing of the whole thing, but needless to say, many revision ensued of just that first verse and chorus before I posted it. The first improvement (which probably caught Hylton's eye at Corante) was to change the first verse to say "I knew if I had my chance, I could make the Googledance/And maybe Technorati for awhile." The Googledance is a name for Google's monthly rejiggering of its page rankings. Technorati is a trendspotting, link-tracking service for webloggers and other consumers of syndicated feeds. It's fundamentally about egosurfing.
Much later, I changed the "if I cried/" part to "when he cut me from his blogroll side" since de-listing is such a big deal to some people, especially in the warblog world. It's a political act. Ho hum. Greater minds than yours have cut me from their blogrolls. We don't all need to read each other every day. I don't need to be read by everyone ever day. That's crazy!
By the way, you know what the secret of blogging is? You just put a stake in the sand and the next thing you know you've got a tent there. People come by. Few return but some keep coming back. By now you have created a coherent place in the swirl of life. Even the people who don't read you daily find it reassuring to check in with you again the way you might watch the occasional soap opera and quickly get swept up in the quickly paced plotting. It almost doesn't matter what accumulated around that first planting. It's all you, baby, and you're beautiful! Oh, plus the endorphins.
OK, so that first verse and chorus went out there and this Aussie blogspotting publication, The Blog Herald started a contest offering $20 American to the best sung and web-distributed version of my lyrics. Wow. How funny. I had invited people to contribute more verses, but no one did, and I became obsessed. I looked up the original lyrics to remind myself of the cadences and the narratives and all the silly supposed subtexts (was the Jester Bob Dylan?). Quickly I started writing another verse. It's all very geeky and insidery ("Do you believe in XML?/And do you have faith in Jon Udell?" was one early version.
I posted the second verse and felt more enthused. By now I had copied the original lyrics off the web and had them open in BB Edit all the time so I could tinker and try things out. I tried to get the syllables and emphases to fit or I echoed sounds ("Pyra" for "fire," "Lessig" for "Lennon," and so on). And sure, sometimes I just went silly and crammed in words that didn't really fit, but I think that the craftiness paid off, because near the end of last week when a lot of people started posting links to the song, I noticed that each person seemed to pull out and quote a different segment of the song. It was tickling a lot of funny bones (and rubbing a few people the wrong apparently, but the record there is murky).
Eventually I had it all ready but I spaced out the posting of new verses and kept tinkering. (I kept a dated changelog at the bottom of the file for people who were playing along at home.) After it was all there for a few days (maybe even a week), I added the final ingredient: I found good links for most of the references, obscure or not. Anyone who followed the links would have some idea of what the word referred or what concept I was evoking. This lead to people saying you could actually learn about blogs or the syndication kerfluffle from studying the song, which is funny, but kind of true because I poured a lot into it and sometimes art (even doggerel) says more than dry reportage.
OK, now here's the really cool part. People have been entering the contest. Pete Hoskins recorded the first version. TDavid has a good chunk of the song done. Shannon "Pet Rock Star" Campbell says she's totally doing it.
When I listened to Pete's version there were times when I laughed with glee. Eventually I had tears in my eyes. His rendition is very good, I think, warts and all. There was something magical and delightful about hearing the voice of a person I've corresponded with but never met, singing a song I wrote just a few weeks ago. It's that collaborative thing where something happens that you could not have done all by yourself.
I wonder if the $20 prize, token and funny as it is in its smallness (I consider a twenty-dollar bill to be the one dollar bill of today), actually spurred people to take the contest seriously and expend the effort (it's a long freaking song!) required, not to mention the breath, to record it? Especially when considering that, when all is said and done, it's a nerd in-joke that your parents probably won't get. I doubt most of my friends would get enough of the references to make the song worth spending much time on. But a nanocosm within the blog microcosm has been so obsessed with these issues and stories lately as have I been that when they read this song it was like a gloss on a shared experience.
So, new principle? What else can we get people to do for $20?
Today marks the tenth anniversary of my first post to Usenet (May 11, 1993). I actually posted four times that day, all to rec.music.gdead. None of the posts are especially memorable (though one gives a fair idea of my other favorite bands of that time), but I still find it noteworthy to mark the passing of ten years of writing in public on the Internet.
There's a little break after that (anyone who cares can search Google groups for my email address at the time, xian@netcom.com, now defunct) before I started posting in earnest. Other groups I frequented then included alt.history.what-if, alt.mythology, and alt.sex.masturbation (where I posted what I think is my first amusing post, a joke about a common misspelling). I was also doing a lot of lurking in rec.music.bluenote and rec.music.beatles.
Oh, and then there's my first flame.
Back when we started Enterzone, a "hyper web text media zine art" project, the goal was not just to produce a kind of 'zine without paper or distribution costs but also to take advantage of the new internetworked medium to publish writing and art that simply couldn't be represented fairly or at all on paper. To some extent we succeeded at that, and one of my longterm projects is still to drag out and highlight some of the more memorable works from the archive while reconceiving ezone in a more episodic, less magazinelike vein.
At the time I was involved in a correspondence with writer and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who was publishing one of the earliest online diaries. He responded to Enterzone as if it were one great coherent hyperlinked work of art. In a sense he got what we were shooting for even when I felt that we hadn't fully accomplished those goals.
In time, the burden of publishing a flat-file magazine out of handcoded HTML grew exceedingly tedious, and we petered out of active production somewhere in the middle of episode 16. Since then I've kept Enterzone online so that it is still well indexed and pageranked (our contributors sometimes complain or find it amusing that ego-searches on their own names generally find their Enterzone contributions at the top of the results), and occasionally posted new material in branches of the domain, such as photo essays, an arts-news blog, and yet another literary experiment. A revamped home page for Enterzone could point to such new postings and cool offline stuff and voila! we'd be back in business with version 2.0.
Sometime last year or maybe a little earlier, though, I stumbled on an incredible one-man (mainly) literary project called Ftrain, written and coded by Paul Ford. Reading through some of the rationales for the site, I realized that he had singlehandedly anticipated and then executed on many of the same ideas I'd been toying with now for almost a decade. Most specifically, he is creating a new literary form, a series of stories and other generally short-form writings that are hyperlinked and structured both chronologically and hierarchically, working toward a kind of neural net of exposed thoughts and storytellings not unlike the way we create our own conscious selves out of constantly retold memories in the forms of stories of our lives.
I was stunned, impressed, envious, flattened. It is almost too easy to lose yourself in Ftrain, reading from node to node. This must have been what Hunter experienced at Enterzone but at an entirely higher level of coherence. I was always proud that Ezone was a collaborative project, but herding the cats was one of the elements that made it grind to a halt of its own inertia and friction, and with the advent of blogging it appears that self-directed single-responsibility independent-content websites are orders of magnitude easier to maintain and cultivate than collaborative media project (notwithstanding the noteworthy successes of sites such as Slashdot, kuro5hin, and Metafilter, among others).
Ford has earned his large audience by steady diligence and by the sparkling, poignant prose he spins out day after day. I believe he is one of the great writers of his generation. We may still live in a time where he will have to write a novel and have it pressed between flattened tree-matter, or gain a gig winking at the talk of town, to garner the full recognition he so amply deserves, but maybe not. Maybe this is just the time for a new literature to come into its own and be recognized for what it is: a daring and in many ways more accurate rendering of the fragmented but nonetheless rich experiences of life in a multilevel culture of bombardment and introspection.
And while I realize that there is something a bit silly about relatively underpaid and underrecognized writer-geeks pushing small amounts of money around among themselves, an economy of patronage for the arts has to start somewhere, so a month or so ago, I used PayPal to send Ford a token of my esteem for his impressive work. It was a pittance in the larger scheme of things: more than the price of a hardcover book, less than the royalties earned on the short print-run of a typical book of poetry.
Somehow I felt that putting a little money where my mouth was might be a stronger way of introducing myself than the usual "longtime reader, first time e-mailer" fan mail I am sometimes wont to dash off, and I stroked my own ego knowing that Ford acknowledges his sponsors with a link back to their own work. In that sense I was like any advertiser, renting the eyeballs of Ford's cultivated audience (not terribly unlike the way someone might have bid on eBay for a link from Tony Pierce 's busblog).
Last week Ford listed me as a sponsor for one of his pieces and included a very generous plug for my experimental writing space (A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read - or just Infinite Work, or A.S.S. if your prefer, for short), linking directly to one of my entries there and praising my opening line, an above-and-beyond reward from a writer I truly respect. This made me immediately scramble to improve the site's design over its at-the-time generic out-of-the-box MT look and feel. It's not much better now, but at least it's not as boring. Ironically, it looks a tad like Ftrain. Total coincidence, I assure you.
I also added a new entry so that readers would find something fresh to read. To do so, I grabbed a note file off my desktop called "new short short story," read it, remembered the incident it was about and dashed it off. A reader kindly pointed out that I published it chockful of typos. Considering the fact that Ftrain sent over 100 readers to my site that day and nearly as many the next few days, I wonder how many read my semiliterate screed before I polished it up a bit?
My bottom line here is that one good link deserves another, and anyone who reads this post (either at its source or when it's mirrored at RFB) who has never seen Ftrain (or hasn't been by recently) should head straight over there and take a deep drink from the well.
Since I started Radio Free Blogistan last July I'd managed to post at least one entry every day, until yesterday. Since I use RFB to aggregate blog posts to a number of different sites, this means that RFB had a continuous calendar running back to its first day. I was kinda proud of this although for sure there must have been some days with just a single post of indifferent quality. Finally, yesterday, life caught up with me. Besides suffering from a particularly nasty flu, I also had a meeting at a client's office, grocery shopping, and ultimately picking up B at the airport last weekend on her return from an environmental conference in Baltimore. Plenty to post about but no time to do it.
So now my unbroken streak is broken, but that relieves some of the pressure to always have something to say every day. I think daily blogging is a good practice for me. As a writer it means that I write something every day. Sure, there's always email, notebooks, etc. I doubt a day has gone by for several decades when I didn't write something, but with blogging the writing is explicitly for public consumption, which imposes its own kind of discipline.
I guess the goal now is to extend a new streak for longer than the approximately nine month of one that just ended.
If there's any blogger out there who deserves a decent-paying column gig, it's Ken Layne. He's got the writing chops, the journalism dues paid, and the blog cred. What more is required?
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