Journal

Yesterday my partner read Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight and picked up a bunch of mistakes i’d missed, plus added a few notes about a point where the story offended her knowledge of science. This proved to be fortuitous, as fixing the problem gave me a new line of dialogue with a little more metaphorical punch than the original. 

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Over on RPG.net, Capellan noted that the ending of Winged, with Sharp Teeth worked better the more he processed it, which is one of those reviews that makes me exceptionally happy. The “Lab” part of of the Short Fiction Lab isn’t just a nifty marketing gimmick–these stories are often places where I’m attempting to achieve certain things, and this time around I was deliberately experimenting with what Nick Mamamatas has referred to “leaving the ragged edge at the end” in his essay How To End A Story (via his criminally underrated writing book, Starve Better).

Mamamatas argues against the neat ending, suggesting its a literary convention of another time, serving the political economy of a magazine industry driven by advertising–an industry where disposable product is valued so the physical artefact can be passed around more easily and expose the ads to more people.

In contrast, these days:

…the popular magazines no longer carry fiction and content is all going online. That means that the “pass around” is dead; modern audiences need to be “pulled” toward content, they cannot have it “pushed” at them. Thus, a story has to have such an effect on a reader as to make him or her want to share that experience by sending the story to friends, or by broadcasting it via links on a blog, email, Twitter, etc.

Starve Better, Nick Mamatas. Loc 1087

You should really go read Starve Better. It’s really, truly great stuff if you’re interested in writing.

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You should also go download Winged, With Sharp Teeth from Amazon while it’s still free. The story will go up to its regular price on Sunday, US time (late Monday for those of us in Australia.

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Our lives involve an extraordinary amounts of passwords and logins these days, and I’ve been interested in the logic behind various choices for a while. It appears the current trend requiring mixed capitalisation and special characters may be an act of security theatre. 

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And with that, I must create a to-do list for the day and start moving boxes of books into my car. What are you up to this weekend?

I’m currently riding shotgun to an old laptop as I work, monitoring the transfer of 10,000 odd fils onto the shared hard-drive I set up last year. This is one of those tasks that’s been on my to-do list for a while, but always gets delayed because completing that one step (itself time-consuming and irritating) unlocks a whole bunch of new work that I don’t particularly want to do.

The files on the laptop represent my entire digital life from approximately 2006 to 2017, the data dutifully copied from computer to USB drive, from USB drive to new computer, from computer to back-up drive. Usually, when I start a new PC, I create a dump-filed label DMZ and park everything from the old computer there, then start with a new file architecture based upon whatever is top of my mind at the time. This laptop was my primary work PC for the better part of three years, and it’s the last to get uploaded for that reason.

Part of my hesitation has always been the sheer level of redundancy that’s going to be involved–multiple copies of files from different years, folders that serve the same purpose but have been named something different. I set up inefficient systems and allowed them to replicate, as we tend to do when we think of computers as permanent things rather than nodes in an overarching network of devices.

This was perfectly natural thinking as recently as three years ago. Now, it represents a problem to be a solved, and solved in a way that it only needs to be solved once (if possible), with the same file architecture being deployed on new devices as they come online.

At time of writing the process if 5% done. It’s been running for twelve hours, and just barely getting through the archive of projects I’ve started in scrivener and barely thought about once I shifted over to the MacBook as my primary work PC. It’s like wandering through a graveyeard of half-finished work, pondering what might of been (and will be, eventually–I’m working my way through the list of unfinished projects, slowly and religiously). 

I figure it will take me the better part of a year to get it all sorted, working my way through folders for ten or fifteen minutes a day. Assigning things to active project folders, consigning it to the archive file, or simply deleting things that are no longer necessary.