Not My Carbon

Logitech lied to me. I asked to be put on a waiting list to be notified when the G413 Carbon is back in stock. I recently received the notification and was all set to buy up my backup. When I clicked the link, however, I found it was only the G413 silver version. Similarly, they've made another G413 called the SE, which splits the difference between the silver and the Carbon in the worst possible way. 

The silver is the same keyboard as the Carbon under the bonnet, only with an aluminum faceplate and white backlighting. By no means an ugly keyboard, just not what I'm looking for. Also, I refuse to believe more people prefer white-lit keys to red. 

The SE is black like the Carbon, but uses white backlighting. There's also a TKL version that's still white-lit. As I said, I can't believe some people would prefer white to red when it comes to ambient lighting on their desktops. 

I only wish I could turn the LEDs on the Mac mini and SpaceMouse red. Guess I'm going for that 8BitDo keyboard sooner rather than later. That's not backlit at all, nor is there a number pad, but it will give my setup more of a vintage vibe rather than a Batmobile interior sort of look. I'll consider that a fair trade. 

I've never participated in NaNoWriMo. At least not in any official capacity. Frankly, the workload terrifies me. I once used it as a jumping off point for a shorter novella project I wrote some years ago from October until around mid December. It was released as an eBook for the exorbitant price of a whole dollar. I later made it free and even posted the first chapter to my DeviantART. It's probably aged far better than anything else I've written, though I'm sure if I took a good, long look at it, I'd end up sitting down and rewriting it from page one. 

There is another story of mine I thought of a few weeks ago that I might want to take another swing at. It was about someone checking themselves into triage by way of a robotic receptionist. It didn't have much meat on it in narrative terms, a quick jab at the bureaucracy of the healthcare system, the dehumanization of automation, and a cozy, wholesome interaction between a nurse and a patient. Now, years later, I want to make it a horror story, the robot now going haywire and posing a threat to everyone in the wing. I doubt I'll go through with it. My days of writing about monsters tearing people apart left me in around the end of middle school. We were learning a writing technique called "sensory imagery" which is best described as "Tell, don't show." Being the age I was, this meant an awful lot of gore and bizarre creature designs. 

Although November is now 2 days behind us, I do hope some of you consider continuing work on whatever writing projects you were thinking about during National Novel Writers' Month, even if it's only al sort of catch-and-release approach and it never moves far beyond a file on your desktop. 

A Full 280

Well, it finally happened. Twitter, my favorite social media site of all time, at long last has finally addressed the incessant whining over character limits and literally doubled their SMS-based 140 limit to 280. 

This comes after kicking around a few ideas such as a 10,000-character footnote, which ultimately got put into their Direct Messaging feature. In a way, this kind of came to be already with the way replies were restructured. It used to be when you messaged someone, it was simply (at)username followed by the message. There wasn't an especially good way to follow the dialogue, to say nothing of more voices jumping into the fray. As time went on, Twitter adopted a sort of nesting (ha) format that no longer required the username to take up part of the message. Now, not only could you follow the conversation, but you could expand your own monologue as needed into bite-sized 140-character chunks. Other niceties include the shortening of URLs, the embedding of certain shared content such as photos and videos, and account authentication for other sites. Taken as a whole, the Twitter of yesteryear, when T9 was the new hotness and smartphones looked like glorified graphing calculators, is completely unrecognizable against today. Twitter bears a stronger resemblance to Facebook than its old self, which is somewhat ironic given that Twitter essentially took the status update part of Facebook's layout and said, "This is our entire site."

My point is that while many may see this move to 280 characters as a drastic paradigm shift, it actually isn't when compared to the bigger picture. I still have my reservations about it, but it's not simply because I fear change. Saying that 280 characters goes against the simplicity of Twitter would require me to throw reply threading out the same window. I have problems with that change as well, but from Twitter's perspective, it only makes sense for them to try to be all-encompassing rather than a companion site to one's YouTube or Wordpress or what-have-you. The more versatile your site can be, the longer people will stay. 

Speaking of having more to write...

November always puts me in the mood for writing, which more than likely started with learning about NaNoWriMo from a friend. I've written many an entry about how I've never formally participated, but always admired the spirit of the event. Like Inktober, it's got less to do with the results and more to do with the process and the learning experience it entails. Even if I don't go along with the requisite 6,000-ish words per day to reach the full length goal, I typically have some sort of small-scale writing project in the works. I don't really have anything for this year, apart from some old scraps I haven't touched in some time. I don't feel like picking any of them up, but I also feel rather burned out on drawing from Inktober apart from a few daily doodles and warm-ups. 

Still, between NaNoWriMo and Twitter's new 280 happening within earshot of each other (Coincidence? Probably.) I'd be curious to see more examples of Twitter fiction. While we've had some solid examples from Clare Bell and Matt Stewart, along with some quasi-epistolary works that even take a more multimedia-embellished approach to narrative, I feel there's still a lot of untapped potential to be had on the platform. While I may not partake in the newfound potential of this particular medium's quiet expansion, I'd be curious to see what others make of it, what examples they may set, how much they'll invest in the execution, and what potential it may hold for them in regards to future works. 

NaNoWriMo Non-Project Begin

Well, National Novel Writer's Month begins today. On the whole, I've always had mixed feelings about the project. On the one end of the spectrum, some people turn it into a kind of pledge drive that's meant for charity yet they can't stop talking about how the money will help them personally and how big a cut they will take. That's an extreme example, mind, and it's a trend I have seen diminish more recently. I'm never one to shame self-starters, but one of the great things about writing compared to other art forms is that your startup cost is ultimately nothing. If you need financial incentive for that, you're participating in NaNoWriMo for the wrong reason.
There's also the more practical notion that, given you're hammering out in a month what some writers devote years of their lives to, your end result is most likely not going to be of significant quality. Sure, some people can't probably take full advantage of that breakneck pace to draw on a creative wellspring that's otherwise throttled by a lack of a deadline. Time makes people do incredible things.
That brings me to what I've found to be the best approach to NaNoWriMo: it's not about the final product, it's about the process. In short, if you're an especially goal-oriented person, this is not for you. What this event is, more than anything, is a kind of bootcamp for writers. Some people are extremely casual about their writing projects, to the point that a paragraph can be the result of years of off-and-on tinkering. Usually, in those cases, the writing is purely recreational, self-indulgent. I don't begrudge those people; art is for the artist, a sundae, everyone else is whipped cream and a cherry.
The only trouble with the whole casual approach is that it tends to make people lax, and worse, easily-discouraged. Creativity is a fickle thing, fragile even. Too hot, it melts. Too cold, it shatters. Too much time, it gets bored. Too little time, it collapses from the stress. It's rather like a kid, you've got to push and challenge them, but you don't want them feeling pressured.
Basically what I'm saying is that this event is a learning experience in every sense of the term. It's meant to be a kind of litmus test to see just what your creativity is made of, because it's easy to let it slip away from you going the "whenever" route. It's a rigid structure (X number of words/day to meet goal) and a seemingly daunting task, but as the saying goes, you won't know until you try. Sure, you may fail in the end and not produce your novel, but you've either given yourself a great headstart or gotte into a good groove to work on something else.
As for me, I won't be participating per se. I wrote a novella years ago, and it took me from about the start of October to the first weeks of January. During that time, with very few exceptions, I would come home from work in the afternoon and stay at my computer until I went to bed, which was about 6 hours later. Apart from meals and bathroom breaks, I did not get up. Some days I belted out whole chapters, while others I'd struggle to get one sentence to come out right. So, I feel like I paid my debt to the creative work ethic gods on that front.
I do, however, have to small short stories, one I've been working on for a few months off-and-on as part of a Meetup group I started hanging out with, and another I've barely begun taking notes on. I intend to work on both of them this month, up from my one last  year.
The former story, called Echidna, is one I haven't decided on a publication method for. It's erotica, and fairly crass at that. I kind of started that project with the mindset of, "Take it all the way, damn the inhibitions." as well as the naive idea that I'd have it bashed out in a night. That was at least two months ago... dammit.
The latter story, called The Loneliness of Amy Bryce, is a little more sober, ultimately the result of watching the entire series of Twin Peaks (working on snatching up a copy of Fire Walk With Me) while trying my hand at a more Lovecraftian sort of horror. It's less Cthulhu/Kadath and more Terrible Old Man/The Outsider to give a better yardstick of exactly what strata of Lovecraft I'll be exploring.
Best of luck to all of you, whatever your goal may be.

For Sale: Bumper Pool Table, Overused

The title is a joke, partly-based on the purported Hemingway story, and also a nod to my friend Oogle's most recent DeviantART journal being posted in haste to bump a larger journal off her front page. 

While working on a larger, triptych form of When They Fold Space, as well as a version after that which will be a somewhat even longer form, I was looking up Twitter novels. I'd stumbled upon them a long time ago while looking up an author I'd almost forgotten about whom I'd first heard of thanks to a paperback hand-me-down. 

Clare Bell had written a book called Tomorrow's Sphinx, a very interesting book about a cheetah with weird markings that, sadly, I never got around to delving into past the first half-chapter. Eventually, the book was lost in one of several moves, possibly sold off in an oversight, and forgotten. Many years later, I'm looking through Pokemon fan art while compiling a Top 5 list for my Tumblr, and happen upon Umbreon, which has a notably Egyptian styling in terms of color and markings. It made me think of that book. It led me to wonder just what happened to Mrs. Bell. I'd never seen her name elsewhere apart from that one book; it made me wonder if she was a one-hit wonder. 

For starters and to her credit, she's not a one-hit wonder; there's a whole series of books apparently more well-known and much-loved by her fans than Tomorrow's Sphinx. While it's true her activity in literary fields has dwindled a bit, it's not for the sake of resting on laurels. Not only is she building electric cars, but whole solar and hydroelectric systems for green living, and she's been doing that since before the term "green" was in vogue. More interestingly, she embraced Twitter as a way to connect with her amazingly patient fanbase by giving them a new installment in the Ratha series via tweets. 

Some of you may be laughing at that idea, especially if you've spent any real time on Twitter (and I love the service, flaws and all). It's true, the 140 character-at-a-time structure can be a little hard to work with. It probably reminds some of you of old videogames, where a sentence leaves you hanging only to reveal there was only one word left, with a long and awkward pause before it. It's really something you paradoxically have to plan meticulously in advance for yet be extremely malleable about. It seems like something poets would be better equipped to approach, except that poetry is all about syllables, and 140 characters doesn't give nearly as much leeway in establishing rhythm and flow as you might think. Despite a fair amount of good tips out there on how to approach it, as well as a few good examples of making it work, this may be a medium not suitable for the English language. It makes me think of Tommy Tiernan's remark about how the English language doesn't suit his soul, like it's this giant wall between him and his audience, with profanity as his chisel. 

The people who seem to get the most out of Twitter as a new form of modern literature, on the whole, are the Japanese. I remember hearing a story on NPR about people in Japan tweeting reactions and thoughts to the recent earthquake. At one point, the interviewer interrupted the recitation to confirm it was actually a tweet, not only because of how eloquent it was, but how long it seemed. The reader retorted, rather cleverly, that while 140 characters can be fairly limiting for English or Spanish or French, it's no problem for a language like Japanese where most words and even some phrases can be expressed in a single character, a Kanji. 

It's also worth noting that many Kanji, being borrowed from Chinese, have double-meanings. 

Think about it.