this IS my blog

published weekdays

  • back story

    At the end of October, in less than a month as of writing this, I’ll mark the one year anniversary of starting work on the novel I’ve been scratching out into countless sheets of digital parchment.

    And for the last couple months, the book—the story, the wordcount, the everything—has been stuck at a perpetual eighty percent complete (as I tell anyone who asks.)

    My problem in just wrapping up the damn thing has a few little problems, and one big one. The big one: backstory.

    I had a great idea. I started plotting it out. I mapped out over one hundred waypoints. I wrote. I fleshed out characters. I wove the plot into a coherent story and built it up to a climactic setup. And then—

    See, some of those waypoints were markers on a path but they didn’t really elaborate on the nunace of the trail. Which was fine when I was plotting, planning and packing my bags for this year-long trip. But now that I reached this point in the journey the “figure it out later” part turned into a more immediate problem.

    So, I’ve set up camp on the trail and I’ve been writing stuff that—well—isn’t the novel, but is still part of the story. Rather, it’s back story, side story, character profiles, and history of everything and everyone connected with the world. It’s worldbuilding, really, but worldbuilding taking place kinda, sorta, actually half way (well, eighty percent way) into the process.

    Vital, yeah. Stalling, a bit. Inevitable, of course.

  • measuring up

    Capitalism has done great things, sure, but it has also forced us all to weigh our worth against a single accounting ledger.

    That is to say, of all the ways to measure a human being, tallys of the good and bad parts of ourselves set against a moral backdrop or a social yardstick or an artistic canvas, the dominant one of western culture of the year 2024 seems to be monetary value.

    Morality is mistaken for poiltical persuasion. Social worth is too often singularly measured in online engagement clickthroughs. The value of expression, music and art is flawed in its tracking merey by record sales or performance revenue or delivered commissions.

    All of it loops right back to money. 

    Of course, the counterpoint ledgers by which could alternatively judge our success are less quantifiable, less fungible, less ready to be assigned a number. How do you put happiness on a scale that has objective value for all? Is there a stock market equivalent for intellectual enlightenment ourside of acedemia? How many hamburgers does musical expression of the soul buy?  We don’t track any of these things, at least not with the bank-balance, black-red precision of our monetary worth, yet each of our lives are affected by the surplus or debtor status of these invisible ledgers.

    Money can’t buy happiness, they say—yet it seems to come from somewhere and vanish again into the mists of life—so perhaps we should each of us figure out what does buy a smile and a warm feeling and all those other things by which we can measure our worth.

  • log-jammed

    My brain may be feeling a little log-jammed these days when it comes to the final writing push on my novel, but it is the truth of the work-a-day writer that the words cannot stop flowing just because the heart is struggling. 

    As an alternative to cranking out more chapters to my paranormal fiction efforts, I have instead created a collection of documents in my word processing software that are begging for fresh keystrokes and luring me into the mentality of “just write something” on a routine. 

    It is, after all, ineffective and self-defeating to plunk down at a keyboard and either write nothing or write words that leave one unsatisfied with their ultimate purpose.

    That is to say, I feel it is important to write, but writing junk for the sake of hitting a daily word count strikes me as counterproductive.

    In an effort to achieve that aforemention word count, I instead find myself nudging the metaphorical boulder of my novel up the hill a only just few modest steps each day but then gazing across the landscape of the dozens of other boulders I’ve been nudging and wandering off a for some quality time nudging each of those a little bit, too. 

    The result has been that I have both continued my daily efforts to put digital words onto digital paper and also succeeded in creating a few thousands of words of other writing on projects like podcast scripts, short stories, character sheets, blog posts, and essay collections—and the novel inches stepwise ever closer to a conclusion.

  • hammer meet nail

    Creativity is sometimes, to borrow a turn of phrase, a hammer looking for a nail.

    Inside every creative soul there can be this latent urge to make something, anything, and despite the tools sitting on shelves or the technology idling on the desk, all of it patiently waiting for inspiration to strike, the creative hammer can sometimes be lacking a nail to strike.

    Motivation without a project to constuct.

    That’s not to say there isn’t always something worth pounding away at, a loose fence board or a wobbly bench that needs a few good thwacks, but constucting something brand new, whole cloth, fresh and crisp and exciting—therein life can sometimes leave the creative soul wanting for such inspiration.

    Thus leaves the poor sap with a perfectly good hammer in his hand to walk from place to place, examining every nook and cranny of his own backyard for a bit of mending to be done or maintenance upon which to direct his energy. He may even fall into the trap of picking through a pile of scrap wood and with a bag of nails in hand feel as though there is something worth constructing from the leftover bits of other projects.

    And sure, interesting artifacts may tumble out of such efforts. It is more soothing for the creative soul, however, to have a blueprint, even if it exists only in his mind, with a fresh purpose and a meaningful objective, to build something out of purposely acquired supply and to create with intent.

  • coder thoughts

    Coding is an iterative space in which I live.

    I build something that some would call a minimum viable product. It is little more than a toy that does something simple and basic and imperfect, yet it is functional. Once that utility reaches a certain point it is not unheard of for me to abandon such projects out of boredom or lack of direction, but on occasion the iterative mind steps in.

    I will think of this minimum viable product that with a few more hours of work it can perhaps do more things that would build off the simplicity and basic functionality. So I write more code and launch more tweaks. 

    This goes on and on in waves, sometimes for years, and after a long while composed of stints of development, revising, improving, removing, and refining I find myself with something that is no longer a minimum viable product, but rather something much more complex and interesting.

    This iterative thought about a wouldn’t-it-be-neat-if project has manifested by stepwise effort into a small but effective little code base that moves data around and renders web pages and sends emails and validates users and whatever other clever little algorithmic functionality that I have been poking away at making work.

    Sure, I could have sat down and mapped out a project in its entirety and worked tirelessly to make it all at once, but there is something organic and curious about my method, curious about this space in which I choose to call myself a coder.