The Online World

A** Over Teakettle

June 11, 2010 by John 7 Comments

As a reminder — not that you doubted! — I’ll be intensely preoccupied tomorrow, for the 2010 edition of the New York Writers Coalition’s Write Your A** Off Day.

I’ve mentioned before that this year, they’re sponsoring an online “write-a-thon.” Participants are urged to take the 3K Challenge: to shoot for a goal of 3,000 words’ output on the day. With a certain number and/or volume of qualms, I’m in.

I say “qualms” there because, as I’ve also mentioned, I’ve been in a cavernous creative slump for weeks.

Nonetheless, I’ll play along. I don’t expect to work on Seems to Fit, though. (I feel especially tender and protective about my putative work-in-progress; if my slough of despond drowns it, I’ll really be ready to hang up my keyboard and LaserJet.) Instead, over the course of the last few days I laid the groundwork for a new story; it’s got a fairly interesting plot hook, which I’d like to believe will propel me across the 3K mark at some point tomorrow.

We’ll see. In the meantime, if you catch me frolicking in your neighborhood or elsewhere around the Internet tomorrow, feel free to shy something* at me, and/or yell (à la many a childhood neighbor) something like, “Hey you — get the hell off the playground and get back to work!”

___________________

* Shy me a brickbat, please. I’d love to know what a brickbat looks like. Especially one that’s been shied.

___________________

Update, 2010-06-12, 2:55(ish) p.m.: So I crossed the 3K word mark at around 12:30. The current word count, after some tidying up, is 3,123 words. I’ll post what I got done today in a subsequent entry. This is just my placeholder announcement for anyone who stumbles in and wonders what the heck happened.

Woodchips and Sawdust

June 8, 2010 by John 5 Comments

Before getting into anything else: yes, as previously reported (or implied!) I will be trying my damnedest to Write My A** Off this Saturday, June 12.

And wow, I’ve gotta say — it’s way overdue for me. This has been one of the longest dry spells of writing I’ve gone through in almost three years. Blog posts aside (so yes, technically I have been writing…), over the last two months or so I think I’ve written no more than a couple-three hundred words on any single day. And that’s been very scattered, un- or utterly misdirected, fitful. I’m determined to turn that around, though. This morning I did a little over 500 words, simply by forcing myself to start typing, and maybe I’ll be able to get something crankin’ by Saturday. I sure hope so. This has made me miserable — literally, beyond words.

In the meantime, a couple of minor things:

We got back from New Orleans fairly late Sunday night. Although I was able to at least visit my favorite blogs over the weekend, via Blackberry, I’m lamentably behind on reading for real, let alone commenting. I’ll get back into that rhythm soon too, I hope.
In a weekend comment on a post here, Froog reported that Running After My Hat had been loading painfully slowly for him. I’d noticed it too, frankly, although I thought it might have something to do with other network problems. Froog’s comment led me to poke around in a couple of suspiciously soft spots in the infrastructure. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think I’ve traced the problem to that Google Buzz thingumabob I mentioned in an aside a couple of posts ago. So I disabled that thing — I don’t care how cool or interesting a feature is, if it cripples a site’s basic functionality it’s not worth including. Do let me know if any of you are experiencing other (or the same!) problems.

If You Can Believe It (or Even If You Can’t)

June 4, 2010 by John 7 Comments

[Image: backglass from a new(ish) pinball game by Stern,
currently available from Premier Amusements]

From whiskey river‘s archive (a/k/a the commonplace book):

A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance.

“Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?” he asks.

“No,” replies the colleague, “but I’ve been told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

(Niels Bohr)

…and:

Strangers

A man and a woman happened to sit next to one another on a train. The woman took out a book and began reading. The train stopped at a half dozen stations, but she never looked up once.

The man watched her for awhile, then asked, “What are you reading?”

“It’s a ghost story,” she said. “It’s very good, very spooky.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “There are ghosts everywhere.”

“I don’t believe in them,” he said. “It’s just a lot of superstition. In all my years I’ve never seen a ghost, not one.”

“Haven’t you?” the woman said, and disappeared.

(Alvin Schwartz)

…and (plus the last sentence):

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

(Lewis Carroll [source])

[Read more…]

Review: Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde

June 1, 2010 by John 3 Comments

My review of Jasper Fforde’s newest novel, Shades of Grey, is online over at The Book Book blog.

Maybe I’m just lucky to have read and savored everything else which Fforde has written. His work is without peer, I think — not necessarily in the sense of “none better,” more in the vein of “nothing else like it.” He’s endlessly inventive, does not take himself too seriously, always takes the story seriously, and somehow — despite his literally fantastic plots and alternate-universe settings and characters — escapes categorization as a writer of fantasy and/or science fiction. He probably belongs the “Pantheon” list in the right sidebar here. I desperately want his job.

In any event: Shades of Grey is highly recommended for readers who don’t mind being challenged by strange, even slightly loopy ideas, and who can recognize tongue-in-cheekery when they see it.

For more on the plot and so on, check the Book Book review. And of course, feel free to ask questions here (or over there) if you’d like.

______________________________

On another note…

You may notice signs of some construction here for a little while. From time to time I think about messing with the overall “look” of the blog, but that’s not likely to happen; I’ve invested too much time in customizing what I’ve already got.

So far, two changes:

I replaced the ever-expanding list of month-by-month archives, in the left sidebar, with a little calendar doo-dad which lets you move around among the stacks here. Once you’ve got a particular month displayed, you can see the titles of posts from that month by clicking on the little «-» link below the calendar proper.
At the bottom of the left sidebar, there’s now a list of my five most recent Google Buzz entries. I keep finding these little Webly tidbits which are hard for me to justify turning over to a whole blog post, but which I think might be interesting to what passes as my “readership” at Running After My Hat. At the same time, this obviates the need for you to “follow my Buzz!” or whatever the hell cheerful thing Google is calling it in Gmail.

Not sure what else I might fool with. The list of categories bugs me a little, but I haven’t really given much thought what (if anything) to do with it. In the meantime, as someone or other has been saying around the Web since the early 1990s, I’ll try to keep the sawdust to a minimum.

Don’t Panic — But Happy Towel Day!

May 25, 2010 by John 6 Comments

May 25, as of course you already know, is celebrated worldwide as Towel Day*. Whatever you do, do not forget your towel today. If you cannot be properly entoweled, you might consider alternatives… carrying somewhere on your person folded-up paper towels purloined from the restroom, say.

The point is, do not go about unprepared. Because, well, you never know.

Per Wikipedia, here’s the passage in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy encouraging towelage:

A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Note: The image at the top of this post is but one of thousands of Flickr images tagged “towelday.” (Edit to add: …to say nothing of YouTube videos.) The photographer, one per_p, helpfully reminds us that inanimate objects, too, deserve protection. Especially sentient inanimate objects.

________________________

* Or, as it is known in Colombia, Dia de la Toalla.

Be Careful What You Wish For: Signing in the Waldenbooks

May 23, 2010 by John 2 Comments

[Hat tip to Miriam over at Dancing with Dragons Is Hard On Your Shoes.]

_______________________________

P.S. And belated auto-congratulations to Running After My Hat for the missed anniversary: the most recent whiskey river Fridays post was #500 here. Is there a cake? How can there not be a cake?!?

Take It Eeeeeeeeasy (Chorus of Strangers Edition)

May 19, 2010 by John Leave a Comment

From Ze Frank (part of his “Songs You Already Know” series):

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:51 long.]

[audio:chillout_zefrank.mp3|titles=’Chill Out’|artists=Ze Frank]

…and the story behind it, which begins:

I received an email from a woman named Laura, who had recently moved to a new city for a new job.

She was overwhelmed with anxiety and asked me to write her a song to help her calm down.

Cool, eh?

[Hat tip to Mark Hurst of the Good Experience newsletter]

Official 2010 Write Your A** Off Day (Pt 2)

May 15, 2010 by John 7 Comments

I mentioned a “contest” of sorts in my post the other day about the New York Writers Coalition’s June 12 event: write 3,000 words on that one day, they said, and you could enter a drawing. Winner of the drawing would receive a free consultation with author Jennifer Belle. But I added:

…other than this email [from a NYWC publicist], I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.

Now I’ve got some of those details (thanks, Adaeze!):

First, sign up for the online “write-a-thon” here. You have to register, but it’s free.

Note: New registrations do not take effect automatically, but are human-moderated. This means you should expect a time lag before being able to do much of anything at the site. Do not wait until June 12 to register!

On June 12th, they’ll use the honor system. (My correspondent says, “We’re relying on them to be honest with themselves” — and I’ll wag my own index finger in your direction on this point. I mean, come on: it’s not like they’re requiring 3,000 tightly written words, right?)
When you’ve met the basic word-count requirement, you’ll post a comment on a write-a-thon thread they’ll open at the site.
At the end of the day, they’ll close the comment thread and draw a winner, announcing it at the site.
And then, finally, they’ll provide details to the winner about the logistics of claiming his/her consultation with Jennifer Belle.

If I learn anything else about the rules, or The Day itself, or Jennifer Belle, or… oh, hell: if I learn anything else about anything vaguely relevant, I’ll post the information here at RAMH. In the meantime, if you feel ready to take the challenge, hie thee to the NYWC discussion board and sign up.

Official 2010 Write Your A** Off Day

May 12, 2010 by John 16 Comments

You may remember from a few months ago that Moonrat, that charmingly impetuous rodent, instigated an early “Take 2” of the Write Your A** Off Day which I myself pretty much ripped off last year, from the New York Writers Coalition.

As expected, the official 2010 version of Write Your A** Off Day will occur somewhat later. I’ve recently heard from a Coalition publicity official, who tells me that this year’s date is set for June 12. As before, if you will be in the New York City area on that date, the Coalition has all sorts of activities planned for you.

But my correspondent also tells me that they’ve put an additional twist on this year’s commitment to devote a day to your writing:

We’ve created the challenge of writing 3,000 words (about 10 pages) in one day, and we know you can do it!… In addition, everyone who completes the challenge and writes 3,000 words on June 12 will have the chance to enter a drawing to win a free private phone consultation about your writing project with Jennifer Belle!

Three thousand words in one day. You can do that, right?

(True, NaNoWriMo demands only an average of one thousand words a day. But this is a Saturday! Still a month away! Plenty of time to outline what you’re going to write, stock up on food and beverages, purchase tickets to send family members out of town…!)

Now, one caveat: other than this email, I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.

Update, 2010-05-15: I’ve got more information. See this more recent post on the 3K-word challenge.

In the meantime, what say? Give it a try? Launch yourself into a summer of big writing with one big day?

Review: Enlightenment, by Maureen Freely

April 27, 2010 by John Leave a Comment

My review of this novel is now online, over at The Book Book blog.

I don’t normally write reviews of books which I don’t recommend. I don’t even like to. It’s possible to have fun with a writing a bad review, yes, a sort of malicious glee. But the fun is diminished — especially in reviewing a debut novel, like Enlightenment — by knowing what the author often had to go through for his or her book to see the light of day. So many good books await our attention, after all: why beat up on one that didn’t succeed for me?

Enlightenment was a special case. I began it with — and was for a while sustained by — high hopes. The exotic, almost completely unfamiliar setting (contemporary Turkey); the tangled web of international relationships both during the Cold War and post-9/11; the jacket copy description; even the cover — it all said that the book would appeal to me, a thought-provoking relief from my usual fare.

But wow, I didn’t like Enlightenment much at all.

And I was disturbed that I didn’t like it. When I finished it I checked up on the bona fides of the jacket blurbs — maybe they’d just been highly selective, y’know? Not only did it receive high critical praise, but reviewers often praised it for elements which I thought to be missing, or at best unconvincing.

So I don’t know. Maybe I was just in a weird psychological place for the first quarter of the year. Whatever the reason, frankly, I’m not even convinced by my own review — so do read it skeptically.