It was a good week for making memes. Stock and flow got wacky-incredible traction over at Snarkmarket and my post on instrumented reading made the rounds in the data viz world.

And if I’m right about stock and flow (who knows?) then some small fraction of those swarms got curious and made their way over to meet my stock—maybe Penumbra, maybe Scheme, maybe something else. Maybe one of those people is out there flipping through Scheme this very moment. It’s a delight to think so.

Another delight: it felt so good to put together that post on instrumented reading. I have been thinking about that idea, and imagining that very graph, for a year entire. Whew. Done. Exorcised.

I announced the Remix Fund winners this week and made the initial payouts. I like the feel of money flowing, even in small amounts. It feels healthy. Almost… metabolic. It’s a sign of life.

About 2000 words added to Pilgrim this week, which is less than thrilling, but whoah I will totally take it!

This week I started and finished Jumbo, and I’m very happy with the result. It’ll be published on February 3—I’ll give another heads-up when that happens, of course—and there’s reason for Annabel Scheme fans in particular to take note.

There’s something wonderful about a chunk of work that size. (Jumbo was less than 500 words.) I’ve been thinking about how I might construct larger stories out of such chunks. Could you come up with a framework in which they maintained their, er, chunkiness—their small scope and lack of dependencies—but also added up in a really significant way? Some webcomics do this pretty well; they’re these long, complicated sagas metered out in day-sized bursts of effort. But that’s not quite what I’m going for—not just straight serialization.

What would a narrative Lego set look like? Alternate analogies: a box of narrative toys; a narrative train set; a narrative Settlers of Catan.

Over at Snarkmarket, Tim’s post on James Patterson (profiled in the NYT Magazine) has got me thinking, too. The basic takeaway is that James Patterson sells an insane number of books, in part because he simply produces an insane number of books, in part because he divvies the writing up among a whole coterie of co-authors.

So in a comment on the post, I wrote…

I won­der if there’s a way to take some of that spirit—the notion that author­ship is not one-size-fits-all, that there are lots and lots of ways to orga­nize peo­ple around the pro­duc­tion of creative work—and apply it to the objec­tive of actu­ally mak­ing stuff that’s great… not just mak­ing lots of stuff.

…which is totally rhetorical, because obviously the answer is, yes, there is a way to do that. So the question is actually: How do you want that organization to look? And what are you trying to make?

You’ll detect some Remix Fund thinking in there. But I think it goes way beyond that. Or it could.

Okay, to tell you the truth, everything in this weeknote is really a sideshow; there was big news this week that I can’t share yet. Watch this space.

I like this guy a lot right now.

Related posts:

1. Week 1561
2. Week 1562
3. Week 1566

Though I didn’t give Gogomain the time it needed earlier this week, I made up for it on Friday and Saturday, and it’s on track for a full rough draft by tomorrow. My rough drafts are truly rough—not like those fake rough drafts that have been polished up for inspection. Over the years I’ve become pretty comfortable sharing stuff that still sucks, and at this point I think it’s a true strength. (See: Ed Catmull on sharing stuff that sucks at Pixar.)

Pilgrim abides. Did I mention I released something this week?

I have a wee story-let—a contribution to a larger project that you might have heard of—due on Wednesday. I haven’t really started it. Let’s call that Jumbo. (You can tell I’m as excited about the code-names as I am about the projects.)

I had another story-let assignment back in December—it actually paid shockingly well—and I have to say, I love writing stuff that’s very short under very specific constraints. It’s not that it’s easy; I mean, we are talking 250–500 words here, so you have to choose each one very carefully. It’s that it’s easy to begin: You can see the whole shape of it, and you know that if you start typing right now you’ll have a whole rough draft in, like, fifteen minutes, max. There will be many, many revisions after that… but that’s no problem. The draft is the thing.

I read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist all the way through on Friday and absolutely loved it. It’s a book about constraints—specifically the constraint of rhyme in poetry, but I think this applies to a lot of things:

All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It’s like chain-smoking—you light one line with the glowing ember of the last. You set up a call, and you want a response. You posit a pling, and you want a fring. You propose a plong, and you want a frong. You’re in suspense. You are solving a puzzle.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough; it works on every level, from the tiny cutting-cucumbers-in-the-kitchen micro to the huge meaning-of-life macro.

Makes me think of Yosa Buson’s poem, too:

    Lighting one candle
with another candle—
    spring evening.

So anyway. East Wind was a prototype in the truest sense: much more a proof-of-concept than an actual product. I like the way it turned out, but I don’t think the story is particularly earth-shattering or the images particularly coherent. (With one exception! The part of the story where the pendulous white moon comes rumbling into view is, I think, one of the best moments I’ve ever engineered.) I was just supremely anxious to try the format—and I think the format was a success. Already I can see the toolkit coming together: the arrangements of words and images that might reliably deliver a certain effect.

The grammar of the long-ass scroll!

So now I’m thinking hard about where to take it next. Someone made the comment that East Wind “feels lonely” because it’s the only story of its kind—certainly in my world, and maybe in the larger world, too. (Even its inspiration, the long scrolling essays of Maira Kalman, are really something else entirely.) So that makes me wonder about a series: a story told in chapters, each one a long scroll like this. Or maybe it’s a bunch of stand-alone stories that all orbit around some central point. One prerequisite would be greater coherence: in the language, in the images, in the overall design. Or maybe I go in the opposite direction entirely and enlist other writers and designers with wildly diverse styles! You can tell this is quite unsettled in my mind. I tested the prototype; now I want to make something that kicks ass.

I had a lot of fun doing the sound for East Wind, so I think my first A/V project is going to be sonic. What would you think of a fairy tale done in the cut-up, hyper-modern style of Radiolab?

In any case, I will not be releasing anything this week, so it will have to be really truly productive. There’s more Gogomain; there’s time allocated daily to Pilgrim, no matter how little (because it’s such an easy thing to neglect; it makes not a peep when I ignore it); there’s a sprint on Jumbo (on Monday); and, early on, there’s the results from the Remix Fund.

I’m also going to share some semi-interesting findings from East Wind’s first week in the wild. Here’s a preview:

Can you guess what’s being depicted?

Related posts:

1. Week 1561
2. Week 1565
3. Week 1567