At the linkspace Mrs. Diamonte in The Dumpster, after following Danny and Mike, everything feels clean. The reader is prepared.
The link “asleep” has narrative meaning. But does everything depend on Mr. Diamonte’s and Mike’s fear?
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My Work
Digital Ecology
June 27, 2009 – 1:47 pm
The notion of digital ecology seems a mess. It seems more simple than the complication of “virtual.” Digital tools and data pervade the environment and they’re works in progress, unfinished apparatus.
Digital ecology appears to suggest perpetual critical questions. How should we publish? How should we share? How should we interact? What are the important questions?
Story Plotting
June 26, 2009 – 6:12 am
Here’s today’s story plotting by word length in Tinderbox, using this bit of code as a rule: $Pattern=”plot($WordCount)”.
Considering length hasn’t been much of an issue, as the internal questions about plot and character have taken precedence. Day to day writing prohibits length, but the upper parameter of length hasn’t been much more than a thousand. The longest story is The Champion at 1203 words. At 238, The Children works out as the shortest. Average length works out to about 650.
Creative Moments
June 22, 2009 – 6:15 am
My wife sent me this article (perhaps sensing story struggle). In any event, there are some interesting conclusions and contexts:
In today’s innovation economy, engineers, economists and policy makers are eager to foster creative thinking among knowledge workers. Until recently, these sorts of revelations were too elusive for serious scientific study. Scholars suspect the story of Archimedes isn’t even entirely true. Lately, though, researchers have been able to document the brain’s behavior during Eureka moments by recording brain-wave patterns and imaging the neural circuits that become active as volunteers struggle to solve anagrams, riddles and other brain teasers.
and
To be sure, we’ve all had our “Aha” moments. They materialize without warning, often through an unconscious shift in mental perspective that can abruptly alter how we perceive a problem. “An ‘aha’ moment is any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light,” says psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “It could be the solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke; or suddenly recognizing a face. It could be realizing that a friend of yours is not really a friend.”
These sudden insights, they found, are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically. “Your brain is really working quite hard before this moment of insight,” says psychologist Mark Wheeler at the University of Pittsburgh. “There is a lot going on behind the scenes.”
Repost on Associations
June 19, 2009 – 6:34 am
Here’s something I’d written about a year ago on units of meaning. It’s fresh in the mind again:
Kafka’s The Trial never grows stale. The Kafkan, however, as a descriptive modifier, has become a cliche. The Borgesian suffers similar potential for emptiness, while the fictions live on with every encounter. And what political commentator hasn’t used Yeats to describe the current state of affairs? In my view, Victory Garden must not “prove” anything. There is something implicit in the voice and feel of interactive fiction, something impressive in its often powerful imagery and relationships, something impressive in its infinite possibility of forms, and, finally, something in its ideas that can be expressed in no other form, something that will “create afresh the associations.”
Flake on the Cantor set sent me back.
Lunch Time
June 16, 2009 – 7:27 pm
I’ve been writing in the mornings, gardening, and working on reports and courses for the fall. Usually, I’ll eat a baloney sandwich and watch MSNBC or CNN with it. This has become an unhealthy habit, and the baloney’s not much good for me either.
Afternoon TV news is all commercials and random goodies I have no interest in, so I should have lunch in silence. But there’s a related issue. Apparently, some statewide policy prohibits pizza parties and other “unhealthy” snacks at school, which is slogging into late June along with spring season, as the projections have all the way up to Tuesdays yet in the low seventies.
I went searching for the policy and was unable to find it on the DoE site, which is of poor design and looks like a neglected front stoop and not really designed for assisting people who might want to find something specific. The D of Higher Ed site is simpler but still looks like something built for Mosaic. It’s a little depressing, as State webpages should be designed as human destinations and should reflect the place that owns it, if indeed that place wants to make a good impression. I’m sure there are lots of design and IT people out looking for work who’d be glad to take on the project. What is it about government web sites and information tonnage?
Anyway, later we saw a report on texting and my wife and I, while in agreement, went at the problem from two different directions, as the example on the news was, I thought, a poor illustration of several issues in American telecommunications infrastructure. A family may indeed pay hundreds of dollars in texting usage or they could pay the going rate for another sort of plan which limits the rate but encourages the usage, or simply limit their texting. Texting is kind of interesting, though, so the ten extra dollars on top of an already too expensive plan isn’t all that bad. But the plans are too expensive to start, which is a real concern. The fact that people pay for regular cable and mobile service is just plain odd. Unfortunately, real competition is simply impossible at the moment given the way cable is delivered into the house, as the company owns the line in and probably wont give it away to a competitor.
Do users of mobile service or cable really know why plans are rated as they are? Does the company use a λ algorithm to determine it? And, by the way, why do we all assume that the inside of a plastic bag is clean?
This is the sort of day it’s been, when everything just seems sloppy, lazy, and built and delivered half-assed.
Day 25 Reflection
June 15, 2009 – 7:42 pm
We’ve hit the 25th day of 100 Days, which has been relentless work. I’m curious to know how other people are working, what they’re working with, how they’re working through problems, and what their “workbenches” look like.
Day 25 for me saw a return to Computer Leon, who persists for me as a fun and comedic character. He could get into all kinds of interesting problems. One of the items I’ve realized is that I don’t want to leave Pelgram and The Rabbit stories alone for long. But returning to these characters and their narrative implications requires distance as they really don’t taste of serialization.
I still have a lot to think about with experiments. But a major insight I’ve had about my own writing is that 1) I work with internal voices in two ways: I listen for narrators and for how characters sound and 2) following 1) I listen for how structure and plot emerges from the language and 3) I try to feel out action and event from the ideas I’m interested in.
Stylistically, I’m aiming for story language that conveys as much with as little as possible but, hopefully, doesn’t restrict for restrictions own sake, a language that keeps cutting away at the slab, the stone, or digging at the dirt for that unlikely or unknown nugget. That might be key, and is something I look for in my colleagues’ work. I’ve discovered a number of things: Leon, Pelgram, and all the other hes and shes that have emerged, and would never have emerged, without these stories. This is significant: withal, I’ve uncovered new voices, new places, new people, more ideas to consider.
For example, Cruz in The Mirror was a nice find for me, but he didn’t become a find until Maricela ends the story with a statement about Cruz: “The Cruz that not even I, and you, can escape.” The story progressed in fairly linear fashion. Cruz gets an idea about mirrors, Maricela just happens to be his girlfriend, and he follows his line to a point and the notion is closed by Maricela. But she throws an idea into the mix that made me think about future issues with Cruz, who sounds somewhat focused/obsessed and interested in mysteries. Maricela, who is the same Maricela of Weeping Bird, can’t escape Cruz. What does this mean? And how did Maricela get from an island in danger of attack, and out of a TV program, to Cruz? Cruz must be pretty interesting to attract an ex-special forces, bisexual bird-woman.
I could spend the next 75 days following each of the characters in these stories. I could also write the next 75 stories in one of several rooms or with a hat on or with a ribbon tied around my pinky finger. The point is not to plan on anything. For example, at this moment, I’m thinking about the Oedipus myth and how that might be fun to play with. And what if Computer Leon decides to reprogram his mobile phone? Is Pelgram in Shantou? Or is he that smoker smoking in the dark near a coffee shop on Carlisle?
More Government
June 15, 2009 – 6:08 pm
If minority leader, Senator McConnell believes this
“We can make incredible improvements in American health care, but I don’t think having more government — in effect putting Washington between you and your doctor — is the way to go.”
then how can he, again, accept FEHBP as an asset and a good?
Critters
June 12, 2009 – 1:47 pm
A few pictures of geese, bees, and ticks.
Saw these at the Barkhamsted Reservoir.
Bees are hard to catch. But a little patience and a large salvia worked here. This one may be a queen. Really big.
Another.
No critter set would work without a tick. Thanks dog.
Healthcare
June 11, 2009 – 11:00 am
As storytelling is in the bones at the moment, I haven’t been keeping up with news. But, I do wonder why any Congress person could argue an ideological position against a subsidized system. I think we have a pretty good handle on cost benefit. But why the politics? How can one enjoy a meal and at the same time rail against the chef?
Lyric Rat
June 10, 2009 – 6:49 pm
Lyric Rat is an interesting application of Twitter that takes the service further into interface land, search, and info farming.
Lyric Rat could just as well be Poetry Rat.
Moral Agents
June 9, 2009 – 8:09 pm
Wallach and Allen’s Moral Machines was an interesting read. There are a few principle conclusions: that ethics questions must be considered in tandem with systems, from the ground up; that some framework must be developed to guide the future of AI systems in technical, cultural, legal, and operational contexts, but that the nature of this work is somewhat ambiguous; and that what systems do and how they behave or might behave tells us a lot about the values of designers, although on this final point I do have questions when this applies to decision-making agents (because I’d hesitate to call them moral agents, as I have problems disentangling this metaphor). I still wonder if, without self-awareness, an entity can make an actual ethical step that isn’t just a function fire even when that fire comes in the form of a check, reference, or complex calculation.
I’m seeking more technical depth than what the authors provide: system examples, actual code, and application frameworks, but Wallach and Allen taught me a lot about the difficulty of synthesizing ideas into physical architecture and delivered on the complexity of even simple choices.
The issues are many: the extent to which ethics can be synthesized into processing; how to calculate decision-making; how to avoid being guided by the wrong metaphors; what do processing agents actually do and why should we call them “moral”; how much autonomy can a non-human system handle, technically speaking, without choking?
The author’s do a pretty good job striking a difference between conjecture and reality in the book, making distinctions between the fantastic, the theoretically possible, and actuality in the lab, and thus the book will be useful for ethical, legal, epistemological, ecological and scientific frames of reference.
This area of research and study is incredibly interesting.
Raw Thirst
June 8, 2009 – 7:23 pm
From J Nathan Matias
I had forgotten what it’s like to be around people who read, write, and think about ideas out of raw thirst.
Voices
June 8, 2009 – 6:46 pm
The Image, a story I wrote a few days ago for the 100 Days Project, is a breakthrough story. It’s hard to express why. After I finished the story, it became somewhat of a struggle to generate ideas for the following days as Part two and The Wisdomgivers have somewhat weak concepts, and weak concepts are hard to write through. You’d think that after a breakthrough, things would fly, but that hasn’t been the case, as after The Image I suddenly became too serious, thinking, “Hey, The Image is a breakthrough. This must mean something profound.” Not necessarily.
It’s difficult to express why The Image got me excited. The explanation probably won’t make a lot of sense. But it has to do with voice. Voice in writing is one of those sloppy ideas, too ofen promoted. It can point to any number of meanings: the distinct tone of a piece of writing; a sense of authorial style which distinguishes one author from another; the presence of a speaker in a reader’s head; semantic or dictive uniqueness. I mean it in another sense, that is, the voice the author hears as her or she lays material out on paper. In The Image I heard a voice I’d never heard expressed in my own process.
In my ear, the voice appears somewhere here (just one example):
But it also promotes a likelihood of futures. Because the image may want the viewer to consider what the woman will do as a response to “I eat raw animal intestine” or “I never want to see you again” or “I just don’t like cats and never will” or “I hate Italian food” or “I have an untreatable disease.”
It begins with “But it also promotes” and ends with “disease,” and draws from the paragraph prior as lead in. The voice has a certain beat or cadence and served to listen for required edits. In going back, I could listen for the beat and remove phrasings that either didn’t matter or supplied useless information.
However, the voice didn’t serve me in The Robbers, which was an experiment in developing two references from The Image.
So, here are a series of questions: does every successful story develop its own sense of voice sensed by the author? How much does authorial voice influence character growth/nurture? Is voice too heavy of a concept to bother with much? Can a particular story voice or character flavor influence other unrelated stories? If voice is tied to one particular work, is it unnecessary thereafter for others, or simply untappable? Does this make short short stories or flash fictions less durable as a form than the longer, more sustained sounds in longer narrative works? Does this notion of voice disrupt lexia development in hypertext, heighten the importance of rhythmic and sound qualities in hypertext, or assist in developing narrative from links and link or semantic relationships?
On Writing Muscles
June 4, 2009 – 8:22 pm
100 Days is progressing. We have 86 more days to go. On my I end, I wonder what I’m learning after fourteen consecutive pieces of work, some of which have floated to the surface out of a swirl of ideas. Each has been different and with each I’ve tried to introduce something new.
There are a few rules. Each has to be a “story.” Each should be constructed in a day, which is somewhat of a task. Last year, I wrote a poem following Carianne’s work, and we’d talked about flipping the scenario as a follow-up project. Now that the scenario has been flipped I’ve been able to consider the differences between the poems and following Carianne and writing stories as a kick off to the day and then, throughout the day, considering how John’s, Jessica’s and other artists work influence my thinking.
Writing a story a day is not “the” task. Last year I was able to write several poems a day. When Carianne posted her work, I was ready to write something unique. But writing stories takes different muscles. While I write several ideas a day, and maybe even a few stories, I find myself moving into the next day sooner because I can’t let the ideas sit.
The first consideration is time before, time during, and time after. Warm up, work out, and cool down are pretty much usable metaphors. These periods are different for every story. Let’s say we need to get Hank onto the beach where he finds a body washed onto the sand (maybe it’s someone he knew, maybe someone who’d threatened him.) It may be that Hank isn’t at the beach. He’s at Harold’s place. Or he is at the beach and the “maybes” take center stage. (It me just a few moments to write this–time spent).
. . . and there you have it. Each thought breeds another and the writer is stuck with Hank until his issue has been dealt with. In my case, image drives the poetry, but character demands different questions, as do the other works being created by John and Co.
