Robin Sloan

Unstartled; unsnared

Unstar­tled, like a lion at sounds.
Unsnared, like the wind in a net.

—A Rhi­noc­eros Horn

Scorecard

The lit­tle par­al­lel struc­ture “ways in which we are trapped; ways in which we are made free” poked into my brain as I was walk­ing down Clement Street just now. Okay then:

Ways in which we are trapped:

• inside our own minds
• inside our language(s)
• on this planet (for now?)
• by our spa­tial scale (e.g. we can’t chill with these guys or these guys—not really)
• by our tem­po­ral scale (i.e. 10,000 years is about all we can muster, and that’s a real stretch)

Ways in which we are made free:

• through language(s)—tricky!
• by tools—especially the ones that aug­ment senses and skills
• by envoys: books, songs, descen­dents, space probes (maybe?)
• through non-​​attachment (maybe?)
• through imag­i­na­tion

Just keep­ing score!

The pale blue fuzz of readership

Sooo here’s what read­ing looks like:

That’s a graph of read­ers’ paths through The Truth About the East Wind. The x-​​axis is elapsed read­ing time, in min­utes. The y-​​axis is progress through the story; the higher you get on the graph, the closer you are to the end of the page.

So if you’re some­one who scrolled through the story… you’re in there! One of those ghostly blue ten­drils is you. The page is rigged up with a very sim­ple (and totally anony­mous) scroll-​​tracker that dis­patches data points to Sim­pleDB at reg­u­lar inter­vals. It’s a book that phones home.

If you’ve ever talked to me about the Kin­dle, you know this is some­thing I’m totally obsessed with; call it instru­mented read­ing. This post at Snark­mar­ket sketches it out in a sci-​​fi way (and, P.S., has one of my favorite titles of any Snark­mar­ket post ever). So, after talk­ing about it for a looong time, I decided to actu­ally col­lect the data. And you know what?

I have no idea what to do with it.

The aggre­gate behav­ior isn’t very sur­pris­ing. “Yup. Peo­ple scroll down the page.” If any­thing, the sur­prise is sim­ply that a lot of peo­ple spent 10 or more min­utes with this story—which is pretty awesome.

It’s the indi­vid­ual graphs that are interesting:

I feel like that graph tells a lit­tle story. What hap­pened around min­utes 10 and 12? Did this reader go back to savor an image—or to double-​​check a con­fus­ing name?

Seri­ously, these graphs are almost like lit­tle nar­ra­tives themselves:

And this one? No idea:

So sure, these are kinda fun to look at, but they don’t really deliver any­thing action­able. And I don’t think the aggre­gate graph up above does, either. I mean, is there any­thing I can change about the story, or about its pre­sen­ta­tion, based on what I see there? Not really. Not yet.

But this is just a first step. Like the story itself, it’s a pro­to­type—a proof-​​of-​​concept. I’ve got my hands on a cool tool here… and I think I’m prob­a­bly mea­sur­ing the wrong thing.

So what should I mea­sure instead?

Nerd notes: The data gets piped to Sim­pleDB via a lit­tle wrap­per built with Sina­tra, a Ruby frame­work that is the best thing I’ve yet dis­cov­ered for mak­ing super-​​simple tools like this. It’s just fan­tas­tic. The graphs were plot­ted with gchartrb and the Google Chart API. Does every­body already know about this? It’s like magic. What a wacky, won­der­ful ser­vice from Google.

The new book tour

Stephen Elliott reflects on his DIY book tour. This is, like, cosmic:

The peo­ple who showed up for these events had usu­ally never heard of me. They came because it was a party at their friend’s house and the friend promised to make those cup­cakes they like or was call­ing in a favor. Nobody wants to give a bad party, and tour­ing this way ensured there would be at least one per­son other than myself who would be embar­rassed if no one showed up.

The read­ings mostly went very long, over an hour with ques­tions, and peo­ple didn’t leave. We were often up dis­cussing until 1 in the morn­ing. An impor­tant part of the book is my trou­bled rela­tion­ship with my father and what I took to be his con­fes­sion to mur­der in an unpub­lished mem­oir. (I inves­ti­gated and found no evi­dence of any such killing; my father refuses to con­firm or deny it.) Fol­low­ing the read­ing, over a glass of wine or slice of cake or noth­ing at all, peo­ple told me about their own dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ships with fam­ily mem­bers, peo­ple they couldn’t for­give or who wouldn’t for­give them. In a weird way the read­ings began to feel like an exten­sion of the book.

Seems to me that the very first line and the very last line of that block­quote both encap­su­late very impor­tant ideas. Maybe break­through ideas.

Story shadows

(Cross-​​posted to Snark­mar­ket, where there’s a ter­rific con­ver­sa­tion brew­ing. Just wanted to have it on record here, too.)

The meta-​​inspiration for The Dance Party on Jef­fer­son Avenue was an idea that Geoff at BLDGBLOG threw out a while ago. It went some­thing like this: How about fic­tion com­mis­sioned specif­i­cally for a new build­ing? Imag­ine it: There’s a swank new apart­ment tower going up, and the devel­op­ers pay a writer to com­pose a book of short sto­ries about it. (It would be great arbi­trage: a for­tune in writer-​​terms is a pit­tance in developer-​​terms.) When you move in, there’s a crisp, limited-​​edition copy of that book wait­ing on your polished-​​concrete kitchen counter. The action is all set in and around the build­ing: char­ac­ters move in and out of spaces you rec­og­nize. They walk down your street, shop at your gro­cery store. They have the same view out their win­dow that you do!

Why do I like this? Well, one of the things writ­ers need des­per­ately, I think—especially writ­ers of short fiction—is new venues, new con­texts. General-​​interest mag­a­zines used to pro­vide one (I guess?); the inter­net sort of pro­vides one now, but hon­estly, a short story on the inter­net can be pretty ran­dom. The most vital venue for short fic­tion today is prob­a­bly, uh, school. Which is fine if you’re in the 7th grade, but what about the rest of us? How do you ground a story and—here’s the crux of it—give peo­ple a rea­son to read? (And, option­ally, how do you sup­port the cre­ation of new fic­tion? Where does the money come from?)

So, as one of many pos­si­ble solu­tions, I really love this idea of hook­ing a story to some­thing in the real world, whether it’s a new build­ing or (in this case) a pair of pants. Imag­ine that you took this a step fur­ther, and the story actu­ally came with the pants. You open the trade­mark blue-​​paisley Bono­bos box that just arrived in the mail and there, folded neatly atop your new khakis: a short story to get you started, to fire up your imagination.

What if every prod­uct shipped with a story?

Read on…

Cock rock spirit flow ape macro one sage emo

Quickly, just for fun:

I take a lot of notes—words or phrases I see and like, things I over­hear, quarter-​​baked ideas. I have a giant folder of these in Gmail and, if you looked through it, you would prob­a­bly think I was a crazy per­son. But it’s super-​​valuable. For instance, it’s where I squir­reled away the Smith­son­ian fac­toids that found their way, months later, into The Wrong Plane.

Now, the iPhone has been a rev­o­lu­tion in note-​​taking affairs. Before that, I would sort of inef­fec­tu­ally text notes to myself. And before that, I would use mnemon­ics.

The eas­i­est way to explain what I mean is just to share the one I used this morn­ing. I for­got my phone at home while I was out for cof­fee, and for what­ever rea­son, dur­ing the walk my brain was really per­co­lat­ing with things I wanted to remem­ber. So, for each one, I chose a tag; these formed a grow­ing string in my head, up and down the street.

This mnemonic trick is like magic. As long as you can remem­ber the string, it’s easy to “decom­press” it back into words and phrases, ideas and bits of weird­ness when you’re finally in front of a computer.

So, the string was: cock rock spirit flow ape macro one sage emo. Let’s unpack it:

Read on…