Robin Sloan

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.

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 Great Christmas Monkey Hunt

[Rough scrap from a story to be writ­ten at some point in the future.]

Annie, age six, saw it first. She squealed, tiny hands pressed flat against the win­dow that looked out across the back yard, and cried: “An elf! AN ELF!”

I darted over, pushed my nose against the glass above her, and a chill ran through me—the chill of a strange sil­hou­ette in your king­dom. Annie was right: there, at the far end of the yard, was the shape of a lit­tle bent-​​over man strug­gling through the snow-​​drifts. But it wasn’t actu­ally a man, and it wasn’t a child, either. The shape was truly tiny. Miniature.

My brain was primed from watch­ing Planet Earth in school this year, and I rec­og­nized the shape: It was a mon­key. (In the next moment, a flash of won­der: I’d actu­ally used some­thing I learned in school.)

“Holy shit,” said Uncle Mike, lean­ing over my shoul­der. From the out­side, he and Annie and I must have made a Truman-​​family totem pole. “That’s a macaque.”

The lit­tle mon­key kept its pace, stum­bling step-​​by-​​step. It really did look like a lit­tle old man with long, lanky arms. It even had the sug­ges­tion of a bushy gray beard. Then the wind rose and gusted for a stretch of sec­onds, pulling a scrim of white across the win­dow, and when it fell, the mon­key was gone, dis­ap­peared over the bound­ary into the next yard.

There were many ques­tions. Where had this macaque come from? What was it doing in Min­neapo­lis? Had it been brought here and given as a gift? Who would give a mon­key as a Christ­mas present? How did it escape?

Was it dan­ger­ous? (Mom.) Could we keep it? (Annie.) How did Uncle Mike know any­thing about mon­keys, any­way? (Me.)

Tru­mans were suit­ing up: Dad pulling on his thick black boots. Cousin Mike Jr. paus­ing his video game and instruct­ing Annie in loud, mono­spaced syl­la­bles: “Don’t. touch. this. Okay? Don’t. touch. it.” Uncle Mike rum­mag­ing in the closet for ski goggles.

And me, beg­ging to come along. Dad agreed, I think because he hadn’t seen the macaque him­self and wasn’t quite con­vinced it was real. Also because he knew I would be annoy­ing to Mom and Aunt Ron­nie if he left me behind.

Uncle Mike cracked the back door and it was like open­ing an air­lock; the warmth was sucked out of the room, out into the sil­very swirl. I felt like Mas­ter Chief in my lay­ers of snow-gear—thick and sturdy and a lit­tle stiff. We all tromped out onto the porch, and Mom sealed the ship behind us and waved farewell through the glass.

I fol­lowed behind Dad, hop­ping to place my steps in the craters he made with his black boots. We were going back across the yard, straight to where we’d seen the macaque last. I nar­rowed my eyes and made a tough expres­sion under my scarf. There might be macaques everywhere.

The Great Christ­mas Mon­key Hunt had begun.

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.

Exit polls

Right now at this very moment, in a secret sec­tion of this very web­site, Annabel Scheme back­ers are vot­ing to allo­cate the $1000 remix fund. I’m watch­ing the votes stream live into a Google Docs spread­sheet. I can­not tear myself away!

The Friday night club

Psst. Work­ing on a new thing. Think­ing about post­ing it next week. But I’d love to get some more feed­back first—on both the text and the format.

It’s a story about curios­ity, obses­sion, and one of the great­est cover-​​ups of all time. Also, Greek gods. And it includes pic­tures and sound.

Hit me at robinsloan at robinsloan dot com if you’re game and I’ll send you a link!

Digital d’Aulaire’s

Mega glitch while scan­ning some­thing for a new story…

…but kinda nice, no?

(That’s an illus­tra­tion from d’Aulaire’s hid­ing in there.)

Shipping is part of the story

Peo­ple are get­ting their Annabel Scheme books (and post­ing pic­tures!) but they’re arriv­ing in waves, and it’s frus­trat­ing for those who don’t have them yet to watch every­body else hoot and holler with excite­ment. Two thoughts:

• It makes me appre­ci­ate the mega-​​logistics of a big media release (e.g. one of the Harry Pot­ter books) a lot more. Mov­ing that much stuff in sync is no joke. But it mat­ters that, if you really really want a copy, you can get one at the same time as every­body else.
• The super-​​fast (really near-​​magical) ship­ping expe­ri­ence that you get from Ama­zon, Zap­pos, Newegg and oth­ers set the bar high for every­body. And I really think indie operations—even solo cre­ators like me—need to try to meet that standard.

Both points relate to a larger idea. Espe­cially for a media prod­uct on or near its release date, the get­ting of the prod­uct is part of the prod­uct. Hon­estly, I think it’s just as impor­tant as things like the cover and, you know, the first sen­tence. It’s all part of the same experience.

So, I’m going to try to get bet­ter at this. Obvi­ously Ama­zon has an advan­tage, because they ship thou­sands of things every day—every hour. But there are ways to har­ness those economies of scale for indie pur­poses, too. Next time.

Outlining: an unnatural act

I am outlining.

My first con­scious mem­ory of out­lin­ing comes circa sec­ond or third grade. Assign­ment: research paper. Sub­ject: THE SHIPS OF THE WORLD.

It was night, dark out­side; I had my mate­ri­als spread before me on the dining-​​room table, books big and small from the Wat­tles Ele­men­tary School library; and I was par­a­lyzed. I’d pored through the books, looked at the pic­tures and picked my favorites, but I had no idea what to do with that knowl­edge, or what to do next, or how to do any­thing.

My mother approached. “Well,” she said, “why don’t you make an out­line?” And then she explained what an out­line was.

Later, I would scan images of Viking long­boats into our Mac Plus, paste them into my short Word (1.0?) doc­u­ment, and then print it all out on a screech­ing ImageWriter. No one in my class had seen any­thing like it.

Real-​​time writing and Facebook memorials

A lit­tle writ­ing exper­i­ment here. I was so taken with this new Face­book fea­ture today—the abil­ity to turn a pro­file into a memo­r­ial after some­one dies, and the info that Face­book asks for in the process—that I just felt 100% com­pelled to write some­thing. No time to do a full story, so I dashed off a quick scene, a setup.

(You can skip straight to it if these process notes don’t inter­est you.)

The fun part is that I asked peo­ple for some quick feed­back on Twit­ter and wow—they deliv­ered! Using this form, I got six­teen really thought­ful responses in a mat­ter of min­utes. (I’d show them to you, but I never indi­cated to my on-​​demand review­ers that their responses would be made pub­lic, so I’m going to honor the assump­tion of pri­vacy. Seri­ously, though: so thoughtful.)

None of the feed­back said “meh” or “blech” so I decided to spend just a bit more time on it and address some of the prob­lems that peo­ple iden­ti­fied. I am not assum­ing that any­one will actu­ally want to com­pare these, but just for the sake of shar­ing the process: here’s v1 in Google Docs, the result of about 40 min­utes of rushed typ­ing; and here’s v2, with about another 40 min­utes of work put into it.

Any­way, I’m not sug­gest­ing this is great lit­er­a­ture, but I had fun with the process, and I actu­ally think there’s some­thing inter­est­ing about being able to “metab­o­lize” stuff that’s very in-​​the-​​moment and make a story (or story-​​stub) out of it. And that really means being able to ask for feed­back, and get it, in near-​​real-​​time.

I wish I could keep writ­ing this story—I’m curi­ous to know what hap­pens next—but I’ve got to fin­ish this book and I’ve already spent an irre­spon­si­bly large amount of time on this today.

Any­way! Enough meta-​​discussion. On to the story-​​stub.

Read on…

Naming characters with Google AdWords

Here’s a new trick.

In this book, I’m try­ing to craft a cen­tral char­ac­ter with some of that same iconic strange­ness that makes Sher­lock Holmes so appeal­ing. There’s a lot that goes into that, but for now, focus on the name. Sher­lock Holmes. It leaves an indeli­ble mark on the brain.

So, I have a name in mind for this char­ac­ter, and I was look­ing for a mean­ing­ful way to test it out—without giv­ing it away.

That’s where AdWords comes in.

Read on…