“Oblique Strategies, how can I make headway on my book tonight?”
“Don’t avoid what is easy.”
“That’s what I like to hear! Don’t give me some mystical bullshit!”
(Actually, I like the mystical bullshit too.)
(Comments directly on the blog, please.)
Category Archives: writing
Weekend Writing Warriors, first visit
Found another group with whom to write in silence and solidarity. The Weekend Writing Warriors meet at Uptown Espresso in West Seattle on Sunday mornings. They are less social than the other group I attend, Waywords, which I rather appreciate.
Uptown Espresso is a good place to come write about imaginary games. The walls are lined with real ones. It’s like working inside the BoardGameGeek server cluster. Lots of copies of Cosmic Encounter here, whether opened for play, or for sale. A good sign, or “sign”.
What are the writing exercises like? Apparently writing for 10 minutes to a prompt at the very start of the session. I came late. No big deal.
We’re supposed to pick a goal for the quarter. My goal is to break 50,000 words by the solstice and keep going. After the session, I’m at 46,900 precisely. About 3,000 to go.
(Comments on the blog, please, not on Twitter or F*c*b**k.)
Brainstormbringer, Eater of Black Moods
First, let me say that if I were a good Stoic I’d be blaming the workman and not his – my – tools. That said, I’ve been trying to finish writing my third book (a book of fictional reviews of the board games, video games, and sports of a parallel Earth). I’ve been working in Emacs, and although I love many things about the program, I’ve come to think it’s not ideal. In fact, it’s too good.
I’ve gone through a couple of periods of creative block, and one of my initial home remedies was a browser add-on to prevent me from viewing my favorite websites during certain hours every day. It kept me from visiting those sites, all right – but I could still visit most of my bookmarked sites (I literally have 28,835 bookmarks at present) and I could engage in non-writing, offline computer interests such as interactive fiction (lately I’ve been fascinated by The Gostak).
Moreover, the Emacs editor itself has been too interesting – too tempting to tinker with and learn about – for me to write much in it directly. Now, the AlphaSmart Neo, on the other hand, is a limited-capability keyboard with a tiny screen they gave to children in schoolrooms ten years ago. What could be duller? It’s great.
To recap, the tragic flaw of Emacs is that it’s highly hackable and therefore intrinsically cool. That’s bad. You don’t want a writing tool that’s an end in itself.1 Your tools must be invisible enough, unattractive enough, not to draw you away from your work, or, Muse forbid, become your work. Emacs, like the slightly demonic mystery in “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits, will find you a job. It is a job.
That’s why tonight, after weeks of drought while trying to write in the excessively excellent Emacs, I completely shut down my Ubuntu laptop for several hours, broke out my Neo again (Marty has dubbed it Brainstormbringer, a much more exciting moniker than it deserves), and extended my manuscript substantially.2
What would you think of an auto mechanic you hired to fix your car but instead billed you for merely putting her toolbox in order? I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with Emacs, FunnelWeb, and Pandoc in my attempts to just write. This is the opposite of the “Fuck it! Ship it!” philosophy of Markdown I started with.
In conclusion, I frankly don’t care whether you fuck it. Just ship it, by any means at hand.
Footnotes:
1
WordStar is also powerful, and that’s why it has both plenty of fans (for retrocomputing software) and people saying they still get work done on it (as distinct from fans). It might also help explain why there’s a WordPerfect mode for Emacs. On the other hand, Emacs probably has Morse code and pizza-ordering modes too, so I shouldn’t find it remarkable it can emulate WordPerfect.
2
I used to get a lot done with boring old Gedit too – the Linux equivalent of Notepad.
What do you think? And hey, how about leaving comments on this blog, rather than on Twitter or F*c*b**k or wherever else you found this? Thanks.
Photo by João Pimentel Ferreira (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Job security nightmare
I became gradually conscious I was doing some prolonged writing that amounted to repetitive text entry, and that I was strenuously arguing with someone. “Come on,” I was saying. “I can script this! No? At least let me set up a keyboard macro!” and so on.
I literally woke up in a sweat. I have had technical writing gigs where I had just this argument with management. Sometimes I lost the argument and was condemned to trudgery. Sometimes I won and automated myself out of a job.
There are other possible outcomes, but of the two, I usually prefer the latter. It’s more honest, and more fun.
Photo “Space-cadet keyboard” by Dave Fischer, Retro-Computing Society of RI (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Industry standard manuscript word counts under Linux
Last night I did a word count on my book in progress within Emacs, my text editor of choice. I was astonished that it had apparently gained 2,000 words with only a few edits – from about 43,500 words to about 45,500 words.
I had been using the Linux command-line utility wc to count my words before that, and it had been returning the lower number. I also tested Gedit (results on the high end), and LibreOffice Writer (on the low end).
I wondered on Twitter which I should trust, and a writer friend advised that LibreOffice would probably be closest to Microsoft Word, the standard among professional editors and publishers, so I should stick to the former. However, I ran a word count under my wife Marty’s copy of Word, and it was both highest of all and furthest from LibreOffice. Emacs was closest! Here are the numbers, from high to low:
Microsoft Word 2010 = 45,653
GNU Emacs 24.2 = 45,466
Gedit 3.10.4 = 45,309
wc = 43,855
LibreOffice Writer 4.2.7.2 = 43,726
Moral: M-x count-words in Emacs comes closest to the industry standard – a little low, in fact, which is better than a little high. Gedit is not bad. Stay away from wc and LibreOffice Writer for counting words if you are writing professionally.
Breaking news from my friend: With a much longer manuscript (around 190,000 words), he’s seeing a spread closer to 4,000 words than 2,000, but otherwise his results are quite similar.
A further postscript: A couple of days later, my word count dropped again by about 1,000 words for no discernible reason. I grabbed an older copy of the document from Dropbox and diffed it with the most recent version. I finally understood that I had turned section numbering off in recent versions, and those section numbers had been counted as words, sometimes more than one. For example, section 4.3.2.1 would count as four words. Multiply that by a couple of hundred sections, plus their appearances in the table of contents, and you’ve got a thousand words that can evaporate invisibly.
Work proceeds. Play proceeds.
Work proceeds, slowly, on the “imaginary games book”. I was aiming for a word count of around 50,000, and I currently have about 43,000. I have about 75 game writeups in mixed states of completion — more complete than not, but always ready to take a higher polish, and there’s the rub.
Why has it taken me years to write 50,000 words (fewer), the length of a short novel? First, I’m a slow writer. To quote Thomas Mann, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
Second, it’s slow subject matter. To say I’ve been writing 75 notional reviews of imaginary games for the past couple of years is to say I’ve been halfway designing 75 games during that time. The term of art is design fiction — in this case, game design fiction.
Third, it’s the slow subject matter multiplied by my slow writing. They’re not merely additive.
The parallel world is called Counter now, not Glob or Lila or Loka. The little Roman penal colony that started all the trouble on Counter is called Victoriæ, home of the Caïssan Mysteries, and if you don’t know who Caïssa is, I politely suggest you look Her up.
And reviews of imaginary games?
My wife Marty pointed me to this snippet from the Discworld series last night:
The Library of Ephebe was – before it burned down – the second biggest on the Disc.
Not as big as the library in Unseen University, of course, but that library had one or two advantages on account of its magical nature. No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books – books that would have been written if the author hadn’t been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotters’ guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen …
–Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1992)
See my other posts related to the parallel world of Loka.
Somebody hand me a water bottle
I just crossed the 25,000-word line in the marathon to complete my little book about the highly ludic planet Loka and the games they play there. Note to the cheering multitudes of onlookers: 25,000 words is half a short novel. Although my book is not a novel, 50,000 words is what I’ve been aiming for — but I won’t beat myself up if I overshoot that milestone by a few thousands or tens of thousands of words.
Yeah, so my text editor tells me I’m at 25,195 words. Today I wrote a couple of new games called X-Ray Replay and Double or Fuck Me (not nearly as dirty as they sound), both of which are connected with the much more dry-sounding (but actually quite interesting) real-life philosophical school of Object-Oriented Ontology, which asks, “What does your TV really think of you?” (And remember, you can’t have dirty without dry.)
I also added material to a couple of other fictional games, Mars Shot and High Bluff. I’ll be reading some “game reviews” aloud tomorrow and requesting feedback from EGGS, Experimental Game Genesis of Seattle, a local game design group I helped found (if I can squeeze into the schedule). Who better to give feedback on fictional games than real game designers and playtesters?
Finally, I’m writing partially for charity. I’d be writing anyway, but people who’d like to encourage me — and it really does encourage me — can sponsor me in the Write-a-thon for Clarion West, a venerable science fiction writing workshop here in Seattle that has given many successful SF writers a solid start. Note that I’m not attending Clarion West; I’m writing like mad and gesturing at those cheering multitudes to throw money at Clarion as I pass.
You don’t have to wait until the six weeks of the Write-a-thon are over. You can pay right now. So please do.
Rubberducking with Benjamin Franklin
As an early birthday present, my wife Marty got me a Benjamin Franklin action figure, which I have been using for rubber duck debugging my writing.
Turns out ol’ Ben is a good listener. Has a lot of good advice too. “Wise sayings,” he calls ’em. Just complaining and explaining to Ben that I don’t have a complete top-down structure for my book yet focused my wobbly gray matter to the point that I was able to generate two pages of notes on the topic.
I prefer Ben Franklin to a rubber duck for such exercises. My reasons are manifold. I have fond childhood memories of the episodes of Bewitched where they brought Ben into the Twentieth Century. In fact, during his life he said he wanted to be kept in a cask and awoken every hundred years or so after his death to be shown all the new stuff that had happened. Thus, I feel that as a magical time traveling proto-transhumanist, he would appreciate some of the games I’m writing about.
I need to find the time to create a page for this hack on the Mentat Wiki. Or you go ahead.
Outtake from my “game design fiction” book in progress
The following is an outtake from the book I’m currently writing, The Best of Games.fun: Reviews, State-of-the-Articles, and Other Information to Get You Through Your Gaming Day on Planet Glob.
Glob (pronounced “globe”) is a parallel Earth very like ours, but whose people are more neotenous, and therefore more curious, more neophilic, and more playful than the humans on our planet. They love games, especially new and novel ones. The book is essentially design fiction, specifically game design fiction, with each chapter of 50 being a 1000-word “review” of an original imaginary game. That is, I’m making the games up, not writing about games other people have already devised, such as Calvinball or Quidditch.
Games.fun is the imaginary Global website from which the reviews come, like BoardGameGeek in the real world. (Yes, the Globals love games so much, they have their own top-level domain for them. They have no .biz, though.)
Please understand that what follows is a never-to-be-finished draft. It was one of the earlier fake reviews in my book. I’m jettisoning it for three reasons:
- It has proven offensive to some people in workshops, who don’t understand I’m satirizing the DSM, the main psychiatric diagnostic manual in the United States, not people who are mentally ill. No other entry in the book has proven this offensive to anyone else, nor do I wish any to.
- My sister Pamela, who is a psychotherapist, has told me that therapists in training really do play a version of this game in grad school.
- The National Institute for Mental Health announced a few days ago that they’re ditching the DSM and starting over, just as the DSM-V is about to be published, too. Mocking the DSM is now shooting a dead horse in a barrel.
I hope that my book’s loss in word count is your gain, enabling you to read this would-be excerpt well ahead of the book’s publication and get an idea of what I’m aiming at. It’s not all about psychiatry. There are four-dimensional video game systems, roleplaying games based on thought experiments, game design reality shows, and more.
DSM Charades
Publication Date: February 2008
Authors: uncredited
Publisher: Boxful o’ Nuts
Format: boxed party game
In this party game, one player picks a random disorder out of the official psychiatric handbook Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (currently in its DSM-VIII edition), pretends to have the disorder, and tries to convey it in conversation to teammates, who are supposed to be a panel of psychiatrists who must “diagnose” the player during a timed game round. The patient must vehemently deny she has the illness, but the psychiatric panel gets one final crack at diagnosing the disorder at the end of the round, during which the patient must tell the truth. All else being equal, at the end of the game, the team with the most correct diagnoses wins the game.
A word about safety: whether this is sensationalistic or not, you can decide, but the game comes with a warning in large, nasty letters on the side: WARNING! DO NOT PLAY IN OR NEAR MENTAL HOSPITALS! The back of the box claims that unspecified persons have, while playing the game in the presence of psychiatrists, been mistakenly diagnosed as having the disorder they were only pretending to have, and been institutionalized.
There is reason to believe this might be true. As the game rules explain,
In the 1973 Rosenhan experiment, psychologist David Rosenhan and eight healthy confederates, or “pseudopatients,” made appointments at mental hospitals, claiming to hear voices saying variously, “empty,” “hollow,” or “thud,” but displaying no other symptoms. All of them were admitted and diagnosed with psychoses, mostly schizophrenia. Their average stay in the hospital was 19 days, with the longest being 52 days.
Nevertheless, DSM-C plays mental illness for laughs. In fact, one of the diagnostic categories on the game’s cards is “pseudopatient.” If you draw this card, you will find yourself in the bizarre (simulated) existential position of having to convince your teammates that you are only pretending to have a mental illness you are only pretending to have. Depending on the difficulty of the disorder you are simulating as a pseudopatient (bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, catatonic, etc.), if you get this across, you may score anywhere from double points to an automatic win.
At a recent game night, my friend Jim was pretending to have a mysterious disorder for the benefit of his “psychiatric board,” his teammates me, my wife Lonnie, and our friend Tim. Lonnie and her sister Lois were regretfully (jeeringly) placed on opposite teams; they are never allowed on the same team during word or party games, because they know each other far too well.
The other side is permitted to ask questions they hope will lead the diagnosis in the wrong direction, except for opposing team members the patient has enlisted as actors in his own charade–obviously, it would be hard to use your own “psychiatrists” as “family members” and so on–so, a nice touch by the game authors, I thought.
Jim had brought Lois into this scenario as his child. He felt her forehead and asked “Honey,” (we all snickered; Jim is past child-rearing age and has never addressed anyone as “honey” in our company), “would you like something to drink?” Lois nodded yes, so Jim went off to our host Anton’s kitchen, where another guest had left a rack of soft drinks. Suddenly, there was a crash, and a couple of players leapt up. “Jim? Are you OK?” I called.
“I’m fine. I’m just getting some soda. Don’t mind me,” he said. More crashes. Breaking glass?
“Jim?” But Jim was already emerging into the living room bearing two glasses. He visibly engaged in an elaborate deliberation worthy of a Bond villain or Vizzini in The Princess Bride, scrutinizing invisible marks on the glasses, before he handed over one drink to his “daughter” Lois. She drank. “There, do you feel any better, honey?”
Lois had already seen Jim’s card and knew what disorder he was supposed to have, so she said, “No, Mom,” (snickers all around), “I feel worse. I feel like my stomach is burning.”
“Well, we’d better get you to the hospital then.” And so Jim did, where he protested at great length that he wasn’t the “sick one,” his daughter was.
The timer went off, but we had seen enough. In short order, the psychiatric board came to the conclusion that Jim was suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy, and poisoning his daughter in an attempt to get attention. (Two of us had also just seen The Sixth Sense.) Jim told us we were correct, so our team scored one point, and we kept the card with the diagnosis on it to track our score (otherwise, it would have gone to our opponents).
It may seem simple enough (and it is fun), especially if you’ve had any psychological training, but I’ve been told by friends who are psychiatric residents that at truly high levels of play, the game can become not only riotously funny, but also eerie, even scary. Ah, but they’re violating the warning: DO NOT PLAY IN OR NEAR MENTAL HOSPITALS!
7 July 2013: Note that the planet Glob has been renamed to Loka.
Odds & Entities 