Robin Sloan

Love and quantum physics

In the very first scene of Annabel Scheme, we meet Scheme’s new client, a skinny dude name Ryan Kelly. He’s a musi­cian, and he’s con­cerned about some strange tracks that are mak­ing the rounds. They’re tracks with long-​​dead voices on them. Tracks from beyond the grave. Or… something.

These tracks and their ori­gins are cen­tral to the first big chunk of the story; it all cul­mi­nates in a strange dance party in a grave­yard for genet­ics exper­i­ments gone wrong. Naturally.

So, just as Emily Cooper ren­dered Scheme’s San Fran­cisco, now Matt Ryd, another remix project win­ner, has com­posed a Pam-​​n-​​Ryan track.

Pause for emphasis: !!!

Here’s the acoustic version:

Matt Ryd — I’ll Never Under­stand (Love and Quan­tum Physics)

You can also play it here, on Matt’s site, and you can read about his writ­ing process, too. Here’s a gem:

The first thing that popped into my mind (both upon read­ing Robin’s words and the Thinkquest arti­cle [on quan­tum physi­cis]) was that I do not under­stand this con­cept. Then I thought to myself: “Hey, you know what else you totally don’t under­stand? Love!”

And there’s more on the way:

A YouTube video (fea­tur­ing Joan Hoede­man!) will be forth­com­ing with a mul­ti­tracked electropop-​​meets-​​Casiocore final ver­sion, but I wanted to get this out into the pub­lic as quickly as possible.

Electropop-​​meets-​​Casiocore!

I know I’ve said this sev­eral times, and maybe it’s like, okay, we get it, but once more: it is so cool, and so almost, like, dizziness-​​inducing, to see and hear these arti­facts from the page out in the real world.

Awe­some work, Matt. I can’t wait to see and hear the video.

Volcano fiction

Very belat­edly I’m see­ing this won­der­ful post by James Bri­dle about “vol­cano fic­tions and col­lec­tive expe­ri­ences.” It’s lovely to look at and lovely to read. And it’s really above all a won­der­ful bit of cura­tion. I mean, how great is this bit?

I am sorry that I only thought last night to go to Heathrow, to see the empty check-​​in desks and halls, and to try to stand on the run­way itself. Alain de Bot­ton, recently writer in res­i­dence at Heathrow, described this expe­ri­ence as “a sub­lime thrill, like touch­ing a dis­con­nected high-​​voltage cable, run­ning one’s fin­gers along the teeth of an shark or wash­ing in a dictator’s bath­room.” The thought of miss­ing this expe­ri­ence is painful; the moment has passed.

Ooh. Just: ooh.

Week 1577

It’s May now, and I am simul­ta­ne­ously filled with awe at the full­ness of the year so far… and shock that it’s so far gone. But this sea­son is always like this; too slip­pery. The April-​​May-​​June cabal is not to be trusted.

Pin­nebog (the iPad project) is plot­ted out, but I haven’t really put any sen­tences or func­tions together yet. I’m telling myself it’s because I don’t have my iPad yet (it’s a 3G, and should arrive this week) but really I’ve just been lazy/​busy.

I have another project brew­ing, too—an audio col­lab­o­ra­tion. In fact I have the intro and call-​​out drafted, but held off on post­ing it this week­end because I don’t think I have it quite right yet. This medium is not native ground for me, so I’m a lit­tle less reck­lessly con­fi­dent than usual. But let’s go ahead and give it a name: Trap Rock.

And there’s another sonic sur­prise com­ing soon, as well! Remem­ber the Remix Project? Remem­ber the win­ners? Yes indeed.

This is going to be an intense, trun­cated week, because on Thurs­day I’m fly­ing up to Alaska, where I’ll stay through the week­end to a) address the Alaska Press Club, and b) com­pose a con­tri­bu­tion to 48 Hour Mag­a­zine.

Two weeks after that, I’m fly­ing to Qatar.

See what I mean about a slip­pery season?

Coming soon: the strange tale of Voit McGrath

Rob Greco’s reca­pit­u­la­tion of, and reflec­tion on, Shell­drake is archive-​​worthy. Make some tea and read the tale. This is how stuff works in 2010!

I loved read­ing the TCS stu­dents’ reflec­tions on the project, too. (They’re linked at the bot­tom of Rob’s post.) This graf from Anthony Albright made me grin. For con­text: I’d advised the class a cou­ple weeks ahead of time to start pay­ing atten­tion to lit­tle details around them—names, places, scraps of language—because we’d need it as raw mate­r­ial for our story. Anthony writes:

In the cou­ple of weeks that I was pay­ing atten­tion to words and names on the city streets, I came up with some of the most inter­est­ing names I’ve ever heard, like Voit McGrath, Avery Roche and Alfred Fairchild, for exam­ple. Just hear­ing these names inspires me to write some­thing great.

Exactly! Exaaactly!

This setup from Tati also made me laugh:

The inspi­ra­tion for project Shell­drake was orig­i­nated from read­ing short sto­ries. We were inter­ested in get­ting in con­tact with one of the authors. We elim­i­nated the authors that were dead (obvi­ously) or very famous and decided upon author Robin Sloan.

Ah haha­ha­haha. I feel like I want to change the header on the site now.

“Robin Sloan: Not very famous. Not dead.”

What a delight, all around. Thanks, Lead Team.

The Citadel of Titania

I wanted to give some of these photo-​​manipulations from Nor­mal Heights a bit more time in the spot­light here, because they’re just so terrific:

From @ToastyKen.

From @flyjetalone.

From @faketv.

And how bril­liant is this one?

From @reidab.

Lots more in the full set.

Behold, an agent of Oberon

Kovet Moire has been spot­ted. (I love this.)

The new utility belt

New and per­haps note­wor­thy at Snark­mar­ket: my pitch for the three tools that tur­bocharge real-​​time cre­ative collaboration.

It’s based, of course, on my expe­ri­ences with Last Beau­ti­ful and Nor­mal Heights, nee Shell­drake.

Week 1576

Whew—I’m glad to have a quick respite after sev­eral unquiet week­ends in a row. This after­noon, I am relax­ing and scheming.

So my next project—still part of the Cold­wa­ter stream of quick wins—is going to be an iPad app. I’m call­ing this Pin­nebog. (I pro­nounce it PIN-​​eh-​​bog. I won­der if that’s right?)

This was a tough deci­sion. On one hand, an iPad app is a ter­ri­ble idea: not that many peo­ple have iPads yet; it’s a more dif­fi­cult plat­form to make media for than the web; and at some point in the process, I’ll have to wait on Apple’s approval. Bleh.

But on the other hand, the moment is just so ripe to put a stake in the ground.

This morn­ing, I started read­ing Ken Auletta’s New Yorker piece about the Kin­dle, the iPad, and big book pub­lish­ers but couldn’t fin­ish it because it was just so unin­ter­est­ing. The head­line claims it’s about “the future of books,” but Auletta and the big publishers—and Ama­zon and Apple for that matter—really don’t have much to say about that at all. At least not in the book­fu­tur­ist sense. Not in the under­wear sense.

Not when there’s stuff like this trick­ling out.

Now, the real chal­lenge here is to design a project min­i­mal enough that I can do it very quickly: in weeks, not months. I’m tak­ing The Truth About the East Wind as a sort of start­ing point. Pin­nebog will also use images and sound to tell a tale, but my inten­tion is to up my game con­sid­er­ably: richer images, deeper inte­gra­tion into the text, and clev­erer inter­ac­tions along the way. And in order to make that fea­si­ble, it’s going to have to be very, very short. Just a wee slip of a story.

I fore­see offer­ing it up for free, of course.

Okay: now I’m off to scheme a bit more about how this will look, and what tools I’ll use to cre­ate it. I decided on this next project about ten min­utes ago—so you could not be more up-​​to-​​date.

Do go check out Nor­mal Heights if you haven’t seen it yet.

Week 1575

For this week’s wee­knote, I sub­mit Nor­mal Heights. Woo!

The Seal of Oberon

Sil­ver Team has hit the ground run­ning. Today, while Lead Team and I were out maraud­ing (look­ing for bits of story among space-​​ship libraries in San Diego) Sil­ver Team was remix­ing source mate­r­ial that we scanned this morn­ing here at the school library.

The chal­lenge? Design a Seal of Oberon: an insignia for the shad­owy inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion that pays Kovet Moire’s salary.

(If you’d like to give it a try, @-reply or email me and I’ll invite you to the Drop­box folder with the source material!)

Here’s a Seal from Reid Beels:

Here’s Nick Ciske’s:

Read on…

Calling all editors… and manipulators

Okay! Gold Team has formed and their work is under­way: Kovet Moire is on the move. His des­ti­na­tion and pur­pose are unknown; his veloc­ity is unbe­liev­able. But when he gets there—wherever “there” is—things are gonna get craaazy. And we’re going to need another team.

For Sil­ver Team, I need vol­un­teers who are game to do one of two things this Fri­day and Saturday:

• Pro­vide feed­back and edit­ing on early, poten­tially dis­con­nected drafts of this col­lab­o­ra­tive story; and/​or
• manip­u­late pho­tos using Pho­to­shop or Aviary. I’ll pro­vide source mate­r­ial; you’ll pro­vide basic image-​​editing skills… and imagination.

(To under­score that sec­ond part: if you know Pho­to­shop or Aviary, I really need your help. This is going to be like a much sim­pler ver­sion of those Worth1000 con­tests, except instead of a bunch of crazy dis­con­nected images, the result will be a big part of this new story.)

Okay, so, edi­tors and photo-​​manipulators alike: sign up here!

Weeknote 1574

Cra­zi­est week ever! Late wee­knote. Short weeknote.

You should be fol­low­ing Kovet Moire if you’re not already. He will be the key to every­thing. See you Friday.

No seri­ously, that’s it.

Last Beautiful feedback and the new process

I’m a bit late with this, but I did want to share some snip­pets of the feed­back I got on the first draft of Last Beau­ti­ful. To recap: this was one of those sit­u­a­tions where I tweeted a request for review­ers and got about two dozen impromptu edi­tors to cruise through and give me feedback—some struc­tured, some open-ended—via a Google Form, all in the span of about two hours. (There’s some­thing actu­ally pretty thrilling about walk­ing down the street to get a cof­fee with the knowl­edge that, at that very moment, peo­ple are read­ing your half-​​baked story and a Google doc is going pop-​​pop-​​pop with their ideas.)

So: wow, the feed­back was all really good. I’m not going to quote any­thing at extreme length, because I didn’t actu­ally spec­ify that I was going to share any of it. (Need to remem­ber to do that next time! I’ll include a lit­tle “it’s okay to make this feed­back pub­lic” checkbox.)

Note that, except in cases where peo­ple iden­tify them­selves, I never know who the feed­back is com­ing from. I actu­ally really like that: it forces me to judge it based on qual­ity of artic­u­la­tion and force of argu­ment. (And I do judge it! This is not slav­ish crowd-​​fiction. Very often I’ll read a block of com­men­tary and go: Huh. Inter­est­ing, but I dis­agree.)

So here are some bits of feed­back that I found par­tic­u­larly use­ful (with an occa­sional com­ment from me in bold):

• “Nar­ra­tive engine… it really isn’t there. Espe­cially towards the end when it becomes clear this really is all going to be com­pletely diary-​​esque and noth­ing is going to hap­pen with Kate, he is just going to phi­los­o­phize a bit about life. That said, the hunt for her keeps you read­ing right up to the end, so there is a for­ward motion, it just isn’t so action based. One pos­si­bil­ity is that you give us a lit­tle more Kate inter­ac­tion, sure they made out twice, when, why was it so good, some­thing more there.”
• “I don’t think you need a cli­mate chang­ing ship. Story would work just being a mys­tery of why the sun went away. […] Some bet­ter words about what pre fog Kate means would be a major coup as well.”
• “I wanted either more about Kate or more about the disaster—personally, I’d pre­fer more about Kate (not nec­es­sar­ily tra­di­tional characterization—could be more along the lines of the belly image) and hav­ing the ship dis­as­ter a lit­tle more obscure (see Nabokov and the ban­ning of elec­tric­ity in ‘Time and Ebb’ and ‘Ada’).”
• “I didn’t need the boat. I mostly liked the Kate story, the feel­ing that you made an error and missed some­thing, not that you found some­thing else. The drama of it being ‘the last day’ was too much for such a sim­ple, per­sonal story.” (I got a lot of this kind of feedback—“less sci­ence, more girl”—and I made some changes based on it… but I couldn’t bring myself to drop the ship entirely.)
• “The con­cept, while lim­ited at this stage, was unique. One of the things that struck me was how pow­er­ful your descrip­tions of places are (ocean beach in par­tic­u­lar). I’ve never even been to SF but you made me feel the tragedy of los­ing its sun­shine. In fact I still feel a bit melancholy.”
• “The descrip­tion of the protagonist’s photo col­lage project was a bit muddy. Might want to sharpen the descrip­tion of what it actu­ally is.” (Describ­ing com­puter inter­ac­tions is going to be an ongo­ing chal­lenge. I think they’re increas­ingly impor­tant, both nar­ra­tively and emo­tion­ally… but also really dif­fi­cult to write about.)
• “Maybe this is what you are going for, but your nar­ra­tor sounds like a giant, sorry wuss. But if you want to cast Michael Cera as the pro­tag­o­nist, then go ahead.” (Ha ha. Love this. Ouch. It’s a good hurt.)
• “More of a ques­tion. Is the point of this story that we make our own beau­ti­ful days? And, did you start with this con­cept in mind or do you just spon­ta­neously gen­er­ate exis­ten­tial lit?” (The first line came to me while—wait for it—riding my bike to the beach on a beau­ti­ful day. It all unspooled in my head from there for the rest of the afternoon.)
• “The pace really kicks up when the pro­tag­o­nist decides to cre­ate the Last Beau­ti­ful Day project. If you can estab­lish the inter­nal ennui of the first part of the piece more quickly and get to the project faster, you’ll prob­a­bly increase read­ers’ com­ple­tion rate. That may be the mag­a­zine edi­tor in me (‘com­press the lede, move the nut graf up!’) but my enjoy­ment level spiked where the project starts.” (“Read­ers’ com­ple­tion rate”—you’re talkin’ my language!)
• “But this idea [of the last beau­ti­ful day] […] I think needs to rely on frag­ments. It’s about absence—or its potential—and it needs to make the reader ache. The ‘band of belly’—perfect. Cou­pled with that hazy yel­low light, and it evokes that sense of desire etc. w/​out being las­civ­i­ous or obvi­ous, and does so with the most tiny of ges­tures. I guess that’s the direc­tion I per­son­ally feel this needs to go in.”

It’s funny to think about how much this story changed not only between the rough draft, which these review­ers read, and the first pub­lic ver­sion, but even between that ver­sion and the ver­sion you can read today.

But my emerg­ing process hinges on this notion: a piece of fic­tion is like a lump of clay, and my pref­er­ence is to put it out in pub­lic before it fin­ishes dry­ing. It does dry even­tu­ally: it would feel really strange to go back and make edits to, say, The Writer & the Witch at this point. Even Last Beau­ti­ful feels mostly baked. But did I open it up and smooth out a sen­tence just now? I sure did.

My friend Andrew accused me recently of being “addicted to real-​​time feed­back.” I had to admit that I was; I find this process just totally, irre­sistibly fun and use­ful. And rather than wring my hands over whether it’s the best path to pro­duc­ing great work—longer sto­ries, bet­ter sto­ries, deeper stories—I’m going to just keep devel­op­ing it, improv­ing it, until it gets me there. As I said up top, and as I’m sure you’ve sensed: this isn’t slav­ish crowd-​​fiction. There is a pur­pose to all this, and the pur­pose is to make some­thing great.

Wel­come to the new process.

The style hive-​​mind

Last week I posed a few ques­tions to Twit­ter re: tai­lors, shirts, and ties. Total suc­cess! I got all the advice I needed—and so I thought I’d reca­pit­u­late what I learned:

• For tai­lor­ing, go to San Fran­cisco Tai­lors, next to Neiman Mar­cus on Geary (thx @EC) or David’s in the Flood Build­ing (thx @hollybrick).
• Mul­ti­ple strong rec­om­men­da­tions for Ted Baker across the board: suits, shirts, ties.
• Sev­eral men­tions of Barney’s Co-op—notable to me because I did not know Barney’s Co-​​op was, like, a thing. Nice ties.
• Sev­eral peo­ple also rec­om­mended Thomas Pink for ties.
• Also, pos­si­bly the oppo­site of Thomas Pink: Cyberop­tix Tie Lab on Etsy. (Thx, @LauraGlu and @mthomps.)
• Black­bird Bal­lard is inter­est­ing. (Thx @kenbaumann.)
• Was also reminded of Jeremy’s, the place at the mouth of South Park here in San Fran­cisco that I have always found com­pletely baf­fling. I just can never fig­ure out exactly what it is. But: appar­ently they’ve often got great shirts and ties. (Thx again @EC.)
• Indochino looks pretty inter­est­ing. (Thx @mthomps.)
• Reiss got a super-​​strong rec­om­men­da­tion from one of the best-​​dressed peo­ple I know. There’s one in the West­field Center.

In par­tic­u­lar I was glad to be reminded that Jeremy’s exists, as it is a) sort of a weird hid­den gem, b) close to my office, and c) not a huge depart­ment store. Prob­a­bly bears swoop­ing through every cou­ple of months.

Gathering the teams

So for Project Shelldrake—a new story, and a bit more than a story—I’m going to need some co-​​conspirators, orga­nized into a few teams. Here’s the first one:

GOLD TEAM. I need peo­ple in far-​​off places with the abil­ity to post a geo­t­agged tweet. Any phone, any app: as long as you can geo­tag. (Though I will note that an app that can han­dle mul­ti­ple accounts, like Tweetie, is ideal.)

If you’re thusly equipped, and if you live any­where out­side the U.S. and Canada: I need your help. This will involve a bit of cre­ative input and a very sim­ple task. Oh, and just a dash of punctuality.

Project Shell­drake hap­pens April 16–19, but Gold Team’s work pre­cedes that. In fact, it starts this week­end. If you’d like to be part of it, drop me a line at robinsloan at robinsloan dot com and I’ll first a) swear you to secrecy, then b) fill you in on the details. You’ll love it.

Two more teams TBA.