Robin Sloan

Make a tool

William Faulkner, media inven­tor:

“I think that nobody can say, ‘I’m going to use stream-​​of-​​consciousness as my method for writ­ing.’ That’s—that’s wrong. He’d get into trou­ble. He must use that sim­ply as a tool, only when noth­ing else will do the work. It’s much bet­ter to show the char­ac­ter in famil­iar terms of—of action, of speech, but some­times that’s not suf­fi­cient. Then you have to use another tool, just as at times the car­pen­ter real­izes that his famil­iar tool is not quite enough to do what he wants to do, so he’s got to stop and make some­thing, make a tool…”

Via Tim.

See also: Haruki Ryu Murakami’s iPad app!

Completely myself

When I am, as it were, com­pletely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, trav­el­ing in a car­riage or walk­ing after a good meal or dur­ing the night when I can­not sleep–it is on such occa­sions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.

Yes. (That’s Mozart, via Frank Chimero.)

Vicarious immortality

I don’t really know much about Samuel But­ler. I feel that I need to learn more. Here’s a son­net of his, new to me:

Not on sad Sty­gian shore, nor in clear sheen
Of far Elysian plain, shall we meet those
Among the dead whose pupils we have been,
Nor those great shades whom we have held as foes;
No meadow of aspho­del our feet shall tread,
Nor shall we look each other in the face
To love or hate each other being dead,
Hop­ing some praise, or fear­ing some dis­grace.
We shall not argue say­ing “‘Twas thus” or “Thus,”
Our argument’s whole drift we shall for­get;
Who’s right, who’s wrong, ‘twill be all one to us;
We shall not even know that we have met.
    Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again
    Where dead men meet, on lips of liv­ing men.

Whoah! Yes! And this was like a whole line of inquiry for him. I love it.

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…