I did finally get my iPad—and it’s glorious. I have a very simple shell for Pinnebog (that’s the code-name for my iPad-specific story) up and running; even without any bells and whistles, it’s a wonder to see words and pictures presented inside this frame. Long-term, I think this is going to have to be my medium.

I’m faced with a bit of a fork in the road now. The two months of Coldwater are coming to an end. What a good run: the last seven weeks kicked out Last Beautiful, Normal Heights, and a short piece in the amazing 48 Hour Magazine. (See also.)

And now I have two clear options:

• Return to Pilgrim as planned. (For the uninitiated: that’s the book-length expansion/explosion of Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store.) The good news is that Coldwater had the intended effect: I am now hungry to get back to the book. I’m bursting with new ideas; I feel sort of “re-pressurized,” if that makes any sense. The time is right for a story like this, and I’ve just got to sit down and write it.
• Keep jamming on the iPad and get Pinnebog released ASAP. This is appealing because the iPad is simply so enchanting, and so ripe. I feel like there’s buzz to be had for fiction that really takes advantage of its canvas—maybe even a kind of first-mover advantage? All the pieces are in place for me to grab this.

But on balance, I have to pick Pilgrim. The iPad’s not going anywhere; in fact, it’ll be even more attractive in another three months, with even more users and an even better OS. But I really believe this book is pegged pretty firmly to the moment we find ourselves in—the fact that I’m faced with this sort of decision underscores the point!—and if I want it to be a real book on real shelves in real stores (and I do) I gotta get cracking.

I’m going to be crisp about this: starting next week, it’s 100% Pilgrim again. Pinnebog goes on the shelf, to be resumed sometime later in the summer. In the meantime, I’ll paw my iPad fondly and imagine all the cool things to come.

I need to set some new milestones for the book; look for those in the next weeknote.

We’re actually closing in on the story’s one-year anniversary—how cool is that? It feels right to be working on it again now. The surprising success of Mr. Penumbra is really what launched all of this, after all. It’s time to get back into the Twenty-Four Hour Book Store—and find out what’s beyond it, too.

Here’s a cryptic clue: Mátyás Hunyadi, the Raven King.

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1. Week 1576
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As expected.

See you next week!

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Working in a cafe helps me understand the difference. While the program is still loading, I am of course totally interested in my surroundings—faces and book-jackets and conversations overheard. But after hour two? I become, to my delight, the weird person in the room: oblivious to everything around me, lost in the screen, mouth moving silently. (Just a little bit.)

The point is: I managed several four-hour (and longer) writing sessions this week and they were hugely productive. What a joy.

(I don’t want to make it sound like ooh magical writing. It’s still mostly just banging things out and writing “[[X]]” when I can’t think of the right word or “[[SOMETHING]]” when I can’t think of the right… something. [You’ve never seen my roughest drafts; they’re full of these placeholders, like variables.] It’s just that, in the third hour and beyond, it all picks up speed dramatically—like I’ve finally escaped some gravity well.)

In other news.

I added a new tool this week: a simple logbook, not intended for idea-capture (that’s the iPhone) or reflection (that’s this) but rather the very basics: what I did and what I ate.

It is cheap and tiny (3″ × 5″) and entirely un-precious. All data, no poetry.

This week I fired up Xcode twice, vaguely intending to fiddle with the new iPad stuff, and then forced myself to shut it down immediately both times. Focus. There will be time for that later.

I start at Twitter on Tuesday! Hmm: how many four-hour writing sessions do you think I can pack in between now and then?

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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.

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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?

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This week started with a strong push on Project Penumbra, but then got side-tracked by The Truth About the East Wind. Is it getting side-tracked if you’re trying to close off the track? To tidy up the room and shut the door? Either way: I realized that just a little push could get East Wind done, or done enough—out of my brain and into the world. Exorcised.

So I got it into rough shape and shared it with some beta testers on Friday night, then spent a bit of today working their feedback—which was nuanced and revelatory—back into it.

I also spent a bit of today monkeying with code. Part of East Wind’s presentation makes use of a Flash class that connects Flash to Javascript, and I just could not get it to do what I wanted. The solution turned out to be simple, but the point here is not to tell you about ExternalInterface—blearghhh—it is to tell you that I’m torn. I oscillate between thinking that spending so much time with code is dilettanteish and defocusing… and thinking that it’s a competitive advantage. I’m ultimately more inclined to believe the latter—as evidenced by the fact that I keep at it—but sometimes I wonder: If it’s really a competitive advantage, why aren’t I better at it?

Like a skilled musician saying that his competitive advantage is the pies he loves to bake. But the pies, they’re really not that great, you know?

Also this week: I signed on to do a very cool project with a very cool company! This is going to involve a lot of writing (and maybe a bit of design, too) over the course of the next four weeks. We’ll call this Project… hmm. I really need a database of content-less code-names. Okay, how about this: I’ll use Wikipedia’s list of rivers in Michigan. So this project will be Gogomain. I’ve done some outlining and sketching, but the first real day of Gogomain work will be tomorrow.

I’m really excited that Gogomain is primarily a content creation project—so it’s not just dishing out advice, or devising a plan for others to follow, but actually (simply) (concretely) making something.

“Actually.” That makes me think of the French word for news, which is my favorite: actualités! Also of Battlestar Galactica, and Commander Adama’s terse greeting: “Galactica actual.” He is the ship. Brrr; shiver of delight.

And actually, I’m going to rechristen Project Penumbra, because this new convention is way cooler. So now that’s Pilgrim.

Bits and pieces. I plan to post The Truth About the East Wind (sad that it never got a cool riverine code-name) sometime next week. Also next week: Remix Fund voting. A few more copies of the book need to go out. What else? It would not be a bad thing to devote a day to rethinking, reorganizing, and reprovisioning my office. It’s still reeling from Annabel Scheme warehouse duty. There are rubber bands and static-shield bags everywhere.

Gogomain. Pilgrim. Those are my twin foci right now; roughly speaking, the first gets the day and the second gets the night.

First weeknote complete! That wasn’t so hard.

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• The first is a full-length novel! It takes Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store as a seed-crystal starting point and builds it into a much larger mystery and a much larger world. I’m working with a wonderful agent on this, and aiming to have a (VERY) rough draft by SXSW—March 12. That’s fast, but I’m emboldened by my experience with Annabel Scheme, especially near the end; turns out if you just get over yourself, you can crank the words out pretty quickly. So this is Project Penumbra.
• The other part is not so monolithic: I’m going to keep experimenting with new methods and new formats. First up is a story called The Truth About the East Wind, presented in (what I think is) a cool format; I’ll be posting that soon. My notion is to produce at least one story prototype every month, and to try something very new with each one. This effort does not have a cool code-name. Yet.

Two more things:

• One, I’m going to start keeping weeknotes, inspired by Matt Webb’s at BERG. (The first will come at the end of this first week of twenty-ten.)
• Two, I’m going to add a bit of A/V to the mix—either an intermittent very short podcastlet or an INTERNET VIDEO SERIES. I think I’ll experiment with both formats before making a decision.

That’s the plan. I’ve had a Scrivener doc bursting with notes for Project Penumbra for a while, but the first lines of a first draft hit the screen today. It felt good!