geardrops [blog]

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m currently working towards my master’s degree in computer engineering. This is among other things which consume my time, such as the working, the boy, the writing, the baking, the video games, the fire stuff, the pretending I’m normal so my family doesn’t cut me from the will. I am spinning many plates on sticks. Good thing most of it is Corningware.

Algorithms has taught me many debatably useful things. Such as:

– patience (I will not walk out of this class to get ice cream, yes it is boring and ice cream is delicious but I must not fail this course)

– restraint (don’t throw pens at the back of that one guy’s head despite how irritating he is, despite how useless his blurted-out and incorrect responses are, despite how obnoxiously nasal his voice is, seriously guy, can you talk through your mouth, or is it just a sound-shaping peripheral?)

– and which foods not to eat in closed spaces (cafeteria chili)

But in thinking about it, many things I learned in algorithms apply to writing, so I’ve decided to list them. Don’t worry if you’re not technical, everything is explained.

Fun aside: Writing really shares many parallels with coding. For instance, style. There are some writers whose styles are so distinct that you can be handed an unlabeled page of fiction and name the author. There are programmers on my team at work whose programming styles are so unique, I can instantly pick out who wrote what.

(1) “Brute Force will be your first answer. It should not be your only answer.”

You will find a Solution to a problem. And it will be quite good and efficient, in your eyes. This will be your first Solution. But then you look further and say, well, perhaps a vector was not my best choice. And oh, look, I can actually run these two operations simultaneously. And wouldn’t it be better if I could spawn this off as a separate process and let the rest of the app continue working. Et cetera. This will be your first Solution. It better not be your only solution.

You will compose a Story. And it will be quite good and lovely, in your eyes. (Or perhaps not, depending on your particular mental configuration.) This will be your first solution to the problem of writing down your Story. But even though you really wanted a specific character to play a specific role in the ending, maybe it’s not his job. Maybe it’s her job. Maybe it’s their job together. Maybe you have to cut him entirely from the story. This is your first solution. It better not be your only. No matter how lovely you think it is, it can be more lovely.

(2) “The problem will be NP-Hard, but not too hard.”

There is a vast, gaping difference between describing a problem and solving it. Certain problems are very easy to describe. For example, the Travelling Salesman problem. You have a salesman. He is, as the name denotes, travelling. He has to fly to a bunch of cities the area he’s covering, and each city is connected by a flight, and each flight has a cost. What is the cheapest way to fly to every city, stopping at each city only once?

Sounds easy, non? If you find the solution, please let me know. I’d love to get in on that sweet multi-million-dollar action. (No, seriously. There’s heavy money on the line if you solve that in under O(n²) time.)

This is not unlike a good book. The IDEA is easy (”It’s AS I LAY DYING as a comedy set in space!”). But writing? Well that’s where the work really comes in. And the right execution will make or break it.

(3) “One problem can have infinite solutions.”

There’s the oft-said adage that there are only ten sitcom plots, and somehow these manage to get recycled into twenty seasons of the Simpsons, eleven seasons of Married With Children, and far too many seasons of Friends, seriously people, it took far too long to stop paying them. And though we’ve figured this out, it still seems fresh to viewers.

This is because while there are ten plots, or “problems” to solve, there are infinite variations on the parameters entering, and on the specific ways you can treat them to still come to the same conclusion. And if there wasn’t, we’d all have the ancient Greek plays memorized by now.

(4) “Divide and conquer.”

One of the methods of attacking a problem is to divide it into smaller, related problems. For instance, say you want to sort a list of names. One method might be to pick a random name in the list and sort the list so if the name comes before your picked name, you put it before your picked name, and if it goes after, sort it after. Then sort each remaining chunk in the same way, on and on and on, until you have a sorted list. (AKA quicksort)

Treat your novel like this. Writing a novel is a big problem. Having a huge plot is a difficult thing. So break it down into smaller bits. Your main character has to get the MacGuffin at the end and destroy it. Divide it into sub-problems: How does he find out about the MacGuffin? Who’s hiding it? How must he destroy it? Is he going to hurt anyone in the process? Divide each of those into smaller problems.

It seems like a lot, but if you tackle them one by one, you’ll have a story at the end.

(5) “Sometimes, brute force is the answer.”

You can have a lot of tricks to help you get through a problem, fun things to try, paths to go down. But at the end of the day, sometimes you have to set your ass down and just write, even though it isn’t working, even though you hate what’s on the page.

Because writers write, especially when it’s hard.

Isaac Espriu has gone and made a sale to Electric Velocipede. He was taking bets on how many rejections it would take for him to sell. The end result? Forty-one.

I like the contest idea. It take an otherwise tough thing and gives it a little more excitement. Double thumbs-up for Isaac, one for making the sale (and to such a solid market, no less), and one for being just so awesome about the path.

Saturday I saw Gene Yang at Books Inc in downtown Mountain View, CA. He did the usual spiel about his latest publication, his career, et cetera, and was really rather nice and charming about the whole thing.

What I loved, though, was in the last fifteen or so minutes, we the audience made a comic with him. At the start, I thought it was a cute exercise, and I like seeing into someone’s creative process, even if it’s just a fly-by view of it.

Through the process he stated some obvious things (make sure the reader can tell your characters apart, your story needs an arc) but the end point was what I liked. It was something I had an intuitive idea of, but more on the prose side than on the comics side, and never really put into words.

The story is split in two parts: internal and external. Displaying the story is split in two parts: art and words. And those two pieces have to each carry half the story. Meaning you can have (1) art carry the internal and words carry the external or (2) art carry the external and words carry the internal.

We made a three-panel comic, one where the art carried the internal and words carried the external, and one the opposite. After, we got into a (brief) discussion about which is better. (I ruined it by saying my opinion, which made Gene say “Yeah, that’s the point I was going to get to, after hopefully some discussion.” Whoops :( ) (Oh, and my opinion was you need both, you need a balance, pick which best suits the specific scene, and you really need to keep changing it up to keep the reader from getting bored/tired.)

As I said, I’ve had an intuitive grasp of this, in prose. But I never had it explicitly stated and I thought it was useful noob advice. And it’s advice that goes beyond comics.

Now, I know for many of you this will probably be pretty obvious. But having it laid (lain?) out so explicitly was really awesome.

(Also if Gene Yang happens to stumble on this, hi, I was one of the three at the end who took the comic we generated. Specifically, I was the Warren Ellis fan :) ).

Mme Harker wrote a brief and fun Christmas story, which she has graciously shared on her blog. I will share it back at you all.

“Captain Mollytibbles, we have a situation.”

I looked over the mounds of paper on my desk at Lieutenant Twinkle standing in the doorway. The bells on her red-and-white-striped uniform jingled merrily, but worry made her green face lime, and her pointy ears quivered above her red hair.

I swallowed a sigh. I was hours behind on the days’ lists already, and it was still morning. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

“We lost half the crop in field seventeen last night.”

I leaped to my feet in shock. “The teddy bears?” Not the bears! They were only two days from harvest.

Full text here.

Something I have been wibbling over in my novel. Clothes.

I have a very distinct vision in my mind of what the outfits elite guard (around which the novel takes place) look like. The coat in particular. The coat is key, you understand.

The problem is what I call it.

I want to call it a frock coat. Most everybody knows the term. It’s smaller than a greatcoat, lighter, worn when jaunting about town.

In my mind’s eye, it is a morning coat. Cloth not being in front of the knees creates greater freedom, as well as allowing the waistcoat worn underneath to be visible. The waistcoat is important, see, because the colors denote certain ranks. Also, I rather like the plunging neckline, and it allows me to have one large brass button in the center bearing the nation’s coat of arms.

I could always call it a cutaway coat, but I’m not sure if that helps the situation at all.

But if I call it a morning coat, it doesn’t sound very military. Nor does it sound particularly distinct. Unless someone knows such clothing at a certain depth, they might think it’s a robe or something. There’s also the problem that morning coats were worn in, well, the morning.

For visual reference…

Morning Coat

Frock Coat

God bless search and replace. I can press on with writing (25% complete on rewrites) without letting this malarkey slow me down.

Photos here.

Day One - October 31

Spent the bulk of the evening around drinks with Shweta, Emily*, Jeff, and Ann*. Conversation was mainly of the speculative variety, from loved fiction to their Clarion experiences to politics, though we mostly grazed that latter topic with frustrated fists and let it be. I have not had a “Clarion Experience” myself, but I enjoyed being a fly on the wall for this one. And as long as I didn’t mention my lack of Clarion, I remained unnoticed by Emily and Shweta and their odd desire to see me go to Clarion.

It’s likely to not happen, though I appreciate the sentiment.

I tried to subtly snipe a photo of Nathaniel from Abney Park. Ninja I am not. He cornered me over whiskey and tea and we discussed everything and nothing.

Met a lovely group of people and drank Black Bush. The topic of the day for this and many conversations was how wonderful the steampunk community is. Which, truly, it is. But more on this later.

Met more lovely people who apparently were Platform One. Had a lovely discussion about music and general creativity, and did my best to explain steampunk to someone who demanded more punk and less steam. But our punk comes not from our willingness to destroy but our willingness to create and reclaim that which has been lost. We say no-thank-you to the society that demands we drink and party every night, that rampant and tawdry consumerism is a sign of being confident in one’s self, and that maybe, just maybe, sitting in your room with a soldering iron and a cup of tea is an okay way to spend your Saturday night.

Moreover, unlike regular punk, steampunk owns the fact that the visual aesthetic is a big part of the identity. But this is perhaps an essay topic for later.

Day Two - November 1

It took me a day, but I discovered the game Damnation, demo of which resided in the lobby just by the vittles stand. I spent far too much time here, waxing about this game. I, by history, am a gamer, and this is a good game. I’ll likely make a post exclusively about the game once it’s released. It’s got a steampunk look to it, though I can’t speak to the steampunk feel from the demo. It was standard shooter goodness, with a bit of magic powers, and some acrobatic platform-jumping. If you’re a fan of things like Resident Evil 4, Bioshock, or HalfLife, as far as gameplay goes, you might enjoy this one.

The VanderMeers held a panel, solo (duo?), though I believe they were supposed to have others with them. Which led to them interviewing one another, not having rehearsed the questions beforehand. The highlight of the whole thing was when Ann embarrassed the living hell out of Jeff. She opened the interview session with, and I’m paraphrasing: “Now, Jeff doesn’t know I’m about to say this, but we’ve done this before, asking one another interview questions. But we’ve always done it naked. So this will be the first time we interview one another with clothes on.” I’m not exactly certain, but I think Jeff turned purple at one point.

What I took away from that panel was the five awesome things of steampunk, which Ann claimed to have bogarted from someone else: one, it’s something the genders can share; two, fantastic visual aesthetic; three, it’s goth’s nicer cousin; four, it bridges the subgenre gaps; and five, it goes back to the “promise” of science, of a glorious future-that-could-be. The last could be another essay topic all on its own.

The VonSlatt keynote was wonderful, and I won’t do you the disservice of summarizing it. Instead, I’ll link it. I particularly enjoyed his discussing tinkering with respect to open source projects; I feel too many stare at a computer as a terrifying black box with a shaman inside, and I work to demystify the thing to my friends.

Then came the Party at the Center of the Earth. Mme Cavalaxis had the wonderful and decidedly drunken idea to dance. I followed, as did a few others. I decided our party was too small, and there were questing eyes in the audience, the longing look of, “I want to dance but none of the boys want to dance with me.” I pulled hands and we danced around the room until the floors were flooded.

Abney Park and Platform One put on good sets.

Day Three - November 2

My first event, after getting a Jamba and hiding the fact that my hair was in need of a deep cleansing, I went to a panel on Researching and Writing Steampunk, with Ryan Galiotto*, Gail Carriger, Mike Perschon, and Jeff VanderMeer, moderated by Ann VanderMeer. What I liked about the panel was the opening question, about entry points into steampunk. The answers varied from the clothing (Gail) to having a story idea and being told it’s steampunk (Mike) to comics (Ryan). It really does emphasize the all-inclusive nature of steampunk.

Gail did a very good, detailed writeup for this panel, over here.

So, that’s my redux of the con. Hope you enjoyed reading.

* If you have a link and spot this, let me know, so I can link you properly in the text.

Lad, I don’t know where you’ve been, but I see you’ve won first prize.

I’ve been flipping out about my story lacking plot. The fact that I’m losing my mind can likely be attributed to having clocked too many hours at work on too little sleep, but it’s compounded by a messy new house and concerns about finances (byproduct of aforementioned messy new house). Nonetheless, this is a novel I started back in March and am now rewriting due to… well, it needed it.

So when you’re about 20K in what looks like it’ll amount to a 60K novel, concerns start to arise. Am I doing this all wrong? Is the plot craptastic? Is the plot decent but I take too long to get to it? Am I confusing plot for story? Is this story going to captivate anyone or am I a brain in a vat and nothing matters?

When you start to edge into solipsism, it’s time to talk to someone else.

Normally, when I write, if I ever show anybody else, it’s as finished a product as I can make it. But my “finished products” rarely crested 30K, and tended to fall around the 10K region. When you’ve hit mid-story at twenty pages, perspectives are a little different.

This is my first excursion into novel-land. I’ve never written for this long without either (a) finishing or (b) getting feedback. I wrote a fic that took me a year to get done, but I posted each chapter as I went (every two weeks, with a hiccough here and there) and got feedback. I’ve been writing since March, and have shown next to nothing to anybody.

Both Mme Harker and Sarah stand in the wings as betas. As do others, but I didn’t want to show any of them rough work for a variety of reasons (and they should count themselves blessed). Plus I’ve been chatting with those two since I started this novel, so they’ve been there for the bulk of my whining.

I finally asked for a glance-over of my first three chapters, for content only. Of course I wanted to hear praise. Who doesn’t? I longed to receive comments along the lines of: “Your writing, c’est magnifique! You possess the writing talent of Bradbury, and will be as famous as Rowling with the longevity of Lucas!”

If you’re going to dream, dream big.

What I anticipated, with 100% honesty, was to hear the following: “You’ve got decent writing, though it certainly needs some thorough line-by editing, and your story is developing far too slowly. No action, no tension, nothing.” In anticipation of this, I told them to stop the second they got bored, and tell me where and, if possible, why.

The responses I received have buoyed my spirits hardcore. I am really grateful for the patience of those two gals, and their willingness to put up with my freaking out and running around in circles. (Carla even twittered about it! I’m still reeling.)

But even if they had come out with what I expected to hear, I still would have been happy. Less happy, certainly. But I would be equipped with the ability to address major plot slowness a quarter into the work instead of at completion. I felt, while outlining, that things were solid. But as the word count progressed and all I had on my HDD amounted to a series of conversations (and a nabbing of a runaway, and a black eye)… well, I began to grow nervous. Nobody was blasting out of docking bay 94 to escape the Imperials, nobody was driving madly in a blue VW Bug dodging flaming tar, nobody was making the old stones of a cathedral speak.

I have been appeased. My initial instincts were correct. The plot is good, and I just need to finish writing the book. But without running it past a beta, I would have been trapped in my own head forever.

Moral of the story: Know when you need to bounce something off someone. Then do it. Could save your story, as well as your sanity.

I have some very wonderful friends. Thank you both!

Balls to this. I’m going to write about writing. I don’t care that I’m a noob. I don’t care that I’m unpublished. I don’t care that as a result my opinions are worth scant little. I’ve been doing this whole “writing” thing for coming on 16 years now and damn if I don’t feel like I might know a little something about the topic!

Ahem. Sorry about that.

I’m going to start with a brief exhalation on what I’ve spent the past year doing (which has been the first year I’ve finished work since 2004). I’ve got one short story that is shopping around, another that I need to fix the ending of (Mme Harker is correct in that the endin’ needs fixin’), and a novel currently being rewritten (25% complete). If this seems rather paltry bear in mind: one, the novel is beingrewritten, which implies it has been written once, and clocks in at over 60,000 words; and two, I work a very demanding full-time job.

And besides, deciding to be published is a recent thing. Hard to call me on it when I’ve received a grand total of two rejections in my life (and one was very kind).

So that’s just the start of it. This is going to get ugly. You have all been warned.

Good Lord, a personal triumph.

This is the first work I’ve finished in four years. Three years of writer’s block finally yielded in 2006, and I finally landed with something complete here, at the end of 2007. Death in the Family, which stands at a meager 4800 words, is complete.

“Son, I think it’s time you learned the business.”

“I’m not your son. And don’t spin your scythe like that, it bothers me.”

Death stopped playing with his weapon and shielded his face against the glaring sun. Why he needed the scythe was beyond me. Moreover, it always made me antsy when my godfather played with that thing. He never dropped it, not since I’ve known him, but you can’t be too careful. He’s been known to get a little clumsy after a few glasses of cider.

He expected big things from me. My father probably did too, but then he went and named me Mortimer. I haven’t really forgiven him for that one.

It technically needed to be 5000 to enter into this competition. If it gains enough bulk while editing, I’ll submit it. If not… well, either I’ll keep it for myself or I’ll send it out. It would be shiny to find out if my writing is worth dollars to some people.

EDIT:

To address Elver’s comment: I wrote a retelling of the Grimm Fairytale “Godfather Death.” Take this as you will.

Over the past weekend I read half of Fragile Things, and I was surprised by something. There was a story in there that I could have sworn I’d heard before. Then I remembered that yes, indeed, I had.

Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire. The story is, as one can assume, a satire on Gothic, Poe-driven writing.

The first few words had me set the book down and consult a friend. I handed him the book. “Does this sound familiar to you?”

“Holy hell, yeah. Didn’t Neil Gaiman read this at that thing we went to?”

“At San Jose State, yeah. I think this was it.”

My memory keeps that night, sometime in 2003 I think, as a cloud of vapors. Maybe it was 2004. I remember wearing short sleeves, so it had to be warm. We ate at Pizza My Heart. A friend who couldn’t hold a camera failed to take my picture with Gaiman. I don’t need photographic evidence of that day. I know it happened. What I need evidence of is something that I was almost certain he said, prior to reading this story to an auditorium full of lit-hags and Vasquez-wannabes.

I think he said this was one of the first stories he shopped around. It got rejected. And not a kind rejection. A “Never Show This To Anyone If You Have A Soul, Lock This In Your Most Secret Place” rejection.

I’m sure he’s polished up the story since then, as it did indeed get published. Even if the writing was horrible (doubtful, but well, could be), the crux of the story had to be there, and it was fantastic. He was kind enough - or forgetful enough - not to name the particular entity that critiqued his writing. But the story had an auditorium full of people on the floor laughing, and even before I got a hold of Fragile Things, that story and Crazy Hair stuck firmly in my mind. The book didn’t remind me what I had seen; it confirmed that it wasn’t a dream.

It’s another one of those “Famous Author Faced Rejection, You Can Too!” stories. But I watched it happen. I don’t care for the success story. Those are a dime a dozen. I love that brief connection I felt.

I love when people are human.