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Posts tagged as “Dragon Writers”

“Stranded” back from the editor!

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"Stranded," my young adult space pirates story set in the Library of Dresan universe, has been provisionally accepted by Bell Bridge Books and I'm responding to the edits now. It's set in a distant future where humanity has spread through the galaxy in two groups - one, the Dresanians, citizens of the grand and sparkling intergalactic civilization known as the Dresan-Murran Alliance, a mammoth polyglot alien culture of which humanity is the tiniest part, and the other, the Frontiersmen, humans who fled the Allied takeover of Earth to found their own civilization at the edge of the deeps --- but at least it's human.

What happens when these two groups collide?

Serendipity snapped her fingers. The map of the Alliance collapsed into the tiny glowing sphere, which leapt from the tree and flew into her hand. Tianyu scampered up onto her shoulder and rubbed her cheek, and Serendipity rubbed him back as the farstaff chimed.

“Let’s go on an adventure,” Serendipity said—and in a twinkle of light, they disappeared.

An adventure she wants? An adventure she'll get.

If the editor and I can beat the story into shape, it will come out later this year in an anthology called STRANDED, and later my space pirate sequence of stories will be collected into a novel called MAROONED. The alien child pictured above, Norylan, is actually from the sequel to "Stranded", "Conflicted", which will form part 2 of MAROONED. Got that? Good.

All coming Real Soon Now to a bookstore or ereader near you!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Norylan, a child (sort of) of the Andiathar, the dominant species of the Alliance, drawn by yours truly while working through story notes, photographed by my phone (you can even see the shadow of my hand in the original shot below), and colored (also by me) in Photoshop as an experiment for doing "quick" (ha) art for a blog post. There's a lot I'd like to do to fix this piece of art, but then that would fail my intent of making this a quick experiment.


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The Science of Airships at Clockwork Alchemy

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I'll be giving a presentation on The Science of Airships at the Clockwork Alchemy steampunk conference on Sunday, May 27th at noon. UPDATE: The panel description is now up:

Science of Airships Anthony Francis Steampunk isn't just brown, boots and buttons - our adventurers need glorious flying machines! This panel will unpack the science of lift, the innovations of Count Zeppelin, how airships went down in flames and how we might still have cruise liners of the air if things had gone a bit differently.

I started researching this topic for THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE and it's fascinating! Come one, come all and find out how much each of you are buoyant!


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-the Centaur

P.S. The first diagram was generated in Mathematica using the following code:

sphere = SphericalPlot3D[1, th, phi, PlotPoints -> 5][[1]];
Zeppelin =
Function[{length, width},
   Scale[Rotate[sphere, 90 Degree, {0, 1, 0}], {length/2, width/2,
   width/2}]];
Graphics3D[Translate[{
   {LightGray, Opacity[0.6], Zeppelin[7, 1]},
   {Yellow,
Table[Sphere[{i, 0, 0}, 0.2 + (2 - Abs[i])/20], {i, -2.7, 2.5, 1.0}]},
   }, {{2.5, 0, 0}}], Ticks -> Automatic, Axes -> True,
Epilog ->
Inset[Framed[Style["Zeppelin", 20], Background -> LightYellow], {Right,
Bottom}, {Right, Bottom}], ImageSize -> {800, 600},
ViewAngle -> 4 °]

The second diagram was generated in Adobe Illustrator based on calculations done in Microsoft Excel.

P.P.S. And yes I know that it's a bit weird to do calculations in Excel when I have Mathematica, but (a) I didn't have Mathematica when I started working on this problem, but someone donated me a free copy of Mathematica Cookbook and that convinced me to give Mathematica a try for some of my diagrams, and (b) after having worked with Mathematica's notebooks and with Microsoft Excel I'm still using both, each for different things, and have come to the conclusion that an Excel spreadsheet model powered by Mathematica's symbolic reasoning engine would be thirty-one flavors of awesome!

One day.

DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME

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Don't you wish you could get an extra hour in the day? Well, what if you could?

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With Trisha Wooldridge, I'm co-editing a new short story anthology titled DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME forthcoming from Spencer Hill Press. From the call for submissions:

http://www.site.spencerhillpress.com/Doorways_to_Extra_Time.html

In our busy world of meetings and microwaves, car radios and cellphones, people always wish they could get an extra hour in the day. But what if they could? Doorways to Extra Time is an anthology that explores ways to get extra time (be it an hour, a day, or a decade) and the impact it would have (whether upon a single life, a family or an entire world). We’re looking for stories with a touch of the fantastic--whether mystical, magical, mechanical, or just plain mysterious--but they can be set in any time or any genre: contemporary or historical, science fiction or fantasy, horror or magic realism. We could even find a place for a nonfiction essay if it was truly exceptional. In short, show us something showstopping, and we’ll make time for you.

Suggested Length: full stories (from 3,000 to 7,000 words) and flash fiction (preferred under 1,000 words). We will accept good stories up to 10,000 words but longer lengths are a harder sell.

Due Date: October 15th, 2012  

Be sure to click through to the Spencer Hill site for the details on how to submit, and for all the legal boring bits. (And as a side note, this isn't likely to be the cover; this is just a cover I whipped up for this blog post).

The anthology came out of an offhand conversation at the Write to the End writing group about how the way to get more time is to make time - a tweak of a line from the Merovingian in the Matrix Reloaded, but something I find to be very true. But my thoughts in fiction always turn to the fantastic and the supernatural, so I asked ... what if you really could make time?

And it really does seem to be true. Already this idea has sparked two or three short stories among my very busy collaborators, even before the call to submissions was fully complete. Now that Spencer Hill has put it on its schedule, it's time for all the rest of you to get cracking on your own stories about finding extra time ... by October 15th.

On my end ... wow. October 15th. It seems so close. Fortunately ... I have THE DOORWAY...

-the Centaur


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Prevail, Victoriana!

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Today I finished the first hundred pages to the screenplay to JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, officially winning Script Frenzy 2012! Prevail, Victoriana!

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I'm super happy about this, of course, but this has been a very interesting experience. Even though I've left out much of the story and many of the nuances, the script is coming in massively long - 100 pages translating to about 150 of a 450 page book, probably resulting in a 300 page script with a four-hour running time.

I'm learning new techniques to cut things out - breaking things into self-contained scenes which could be deleted wholesale, streamlining conversations, recasting thought as action that illustrates the same point. I probably could easily cut this script down from 100 pages to 70 or even 50 ... but then I wouldn't have succeeded at Script Frenzy.

I believe that you can't really tell what to cut out until you FINISH YOUR WORK (a philosophy shared by many in my writing group). Writing is not editing, and often you can't tell what a story really needs until you finish it. (If you're an expert author and have passed this stage in your development, bully for you; above, I'm talking to the not-finishers). For example, can this scene be cut? It might disappear, it might become one offhand line ... or it could be expanded to a fullblown argument, if we need to highlight the tension between our heroes:

Jeremiah leans back, her eyes narrowing at her companions.

JEREMIAH

Let me guess. He lied.

GEORGIANA

(nods)

I do love dear Albert, Jeremiah, but the reason I stole your mark was to make a personal appeal.

PATRICK

Einstein was about to rediscover the weapon that ended the Civil War. In the Victoriana, the Peerage suppressed that knowledge.

GEORGIANA

The point of the mission was not to steal Austrian secrets, but to convince him to keep them secret.

Jeremiah scowls, looking at the both of them.

JEREMIAH

And you kept this from me.

GEORGIANA

The mission was ... Need to know.

JEREMIAH

What kind of mad dictator came up with that rule?

(points at Patrick)

And why did he get---

PATRICK

To confirm what he was up to. The Lady Georgiana had to train me to operate the Crookes counter.

Jeremiah is glaring daggers at the two of them...

At my stage in scriptwriting, it's going to be far easier to tell what to leave out after I've put it all in. So, even though I'm going to shift gears back to Dakota Frost #3, LIQUID FIRE and the Science of Airships panel at Clockwork Alchemy, my plan is to finish THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE script in its entirety. Then I'm going to cut it mercilessly until it hits a 2 hour (ish) running time. Then I'm going to hold a reading where a group of friends will read the script aloud so I can see how it sounds (a trick I learned from my friend the playwright Jim Davies). And then I'm going to cut it again.

And then Script Frenzy will probably roll around again, as I'll have to squeeze all the above in around regular work and writing. But if I keep at it, after a few years of writing scripts I'll probably have something pretty tight, something that might actually be salable. Not that I won't try to sell THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but I won't let failure to sell the first script I've written in twenty years stop me.

I'm in this for the duration.

Prevail, Victoriana!

-the Centaur

UPDATE: I forgot to mention SCRIVENER. Scrivener, Scrivener, Scrivener: without you I wouldn't have finished THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE on time. I don't know if you'll replace Microsoft Word -- I've been using THAT for almost a quarter century --- but you made the process of producing a script effortless. Thank you.


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Back on Track

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We made it to "back on track". 94 pages, which is just enough to finish up by Monday if I do 3 pages per day. I'd rather "finish" Script Frenzy tonight, so I can relax a bit tomorrow and get back to LIQUID FIRE. Let's see what we can do to do that.

Oh, right, excerpts. I can't do latest excerpts as we've moved past the first twist of the story. Here's a bit from a bit further back:

Jeremiah arrives moments after Georgiana, who's wearing a slit-front traveling dress over boots and pants and has a leather satchel. She's discreetly checking a deranger.

GEORGIANA

Well, Jeremiah, have you everything you need?

She dry-fires the deranger, while Jeremiah checks a first aid kit she keeps in her left pocket.

JEREMIAH

Whether I'm to stab or be stabbed for the queen, I'm ready.

GEORGIANA

Is that a literal or metaphorical stabbing you're hoping for?

Patrick arrives wearing an aerograph pack, not unlike a cross between a television and a World War II field radio.

PATRICK

Oh, gentlewomen, please.

(notes blunderblast)

You've quite taken to that. I should give it to you.

JEREMIAH

(smiles)

Yes, you should. Check your pack?

Check your pack, wind your braces, buckle your chin-strap.

Prevail, Victoriana!

-the Centaur

UPDATE: Taking a break at 96 pages. That should be enough for tonight, and I've just about closed down the Coffee Society ... but if I get more beans and vinegar, who knows?


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Aaalmost there…

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19 pages so far today. 1 and a half pages to go to put me back on the track I should have been all month.

Stay on target.

-the Centaur

Stay on Target

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Eighty-five pages in. There's so much I would want to do to this script; so much I want to cut out, to streamline. But now's not the time to do that. Now's Script Frenzy, it's only 7pm, and I'm just 8 pages shy of being back on track, back on the REAL track, the 3-a-day-to-finish track. Let's see if we can do it. Latest excerpt:

Jeremiah looks back at her companions, mouth hanging open. Patrick is struggling with the straps of his aerograph.

PATRICK

Why am I lugging this? I should just polish up a sliver of obsidian and pack it with magic---

JEREMIAH

Settle down. That wasn't magic. We need to establish our location---

GEORGIANA

Oh, I know where we are.

(staring overhead)

But that's less of an answer than a new conundrum.

Jeremiah and Patrick turn to follow her eyes. Fifty feet away, a weathered archway over a wide road says...

That says ... what? You'll have to wait and see. (Though people who've read "Steampunk Fairy Chick" can probably guess.)

-the Centaur

Today’s the Day

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Today's the day I can get back on track. Already 5 pages in to today's quota, it's barely past noon, and I'm not scheduled to do anything today except write. No birthday parties, no trips to the park, no ferrying people about the whole Bay Area and Pacific Coast Highway. Just writing. Latest excerpt:

Harbinger motions to an aeronaut to take his place at the console. Jeremiah leaps down into the navigation trench, art deco glass crunching under her boots. She peers about.

JEREMIAH

Lower us over the shorter tower at our five o'clock. It looks to have a flat roof and a fire escape.

BIRMINGHAM

(looks in telescopes)

We're on it, Commander.

JEREMIAH

Doubly capital.

She leaps up the stairs and joins Patrick, who is extending his hand to Georgiana --- but with his eyes on Jeremiah.

PATRICK

Just like old times.

Georgiana, as oblivious as Jeremiah, takes his hand and rises, and the three of them are together again.

GEORGIANA

Just like Austria.

JEREMIAH

Let's hope not, you stole from me all the best men.

PATRICK

There are other fish in the sea.

The three of them walk together from the bridge.

JEREMIAH

We'll keep an eye out for you---

PATRICK

Oi---


Here goes nothing. Onward into the seas of time!

-the Centaur

At 73 Pages…

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... 27 left to finish by Monday night. That is all.

-the Centaur

Excellent Progress is Not Enough

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I've done 6 pages of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE today, double the needed Script Frenzy rate.

If only I wasn't already 40+ pages behind!

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I don't think I've ever been this far behind on a National Novel Writing Month-like challenge, or with so much else to do in my life.

Time to step up my game.

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New late-night coffeehouse detected, spouse alerted, necessary emails sent, distractions out of the way. 3 pages to go to get back on target; a magical 4 pages will put me ahead for the day - a pace that can only lead to victory! What would Jeremiah say?

GEORGIANA

Oh, dear God, I'm right.

The murmuring now becomes an open free for all. All the characters start speaking over each other.

PATRICK

Hang it all, it's not possible for him to undo history---

NATASHA

Fine for you, you're a man, you've a place in the world he wants---

BIRMINGHAM

So we've found him. Excellent. Any similarity to this speculation is surely simple coincidence---

SIR ALICE

Coincidence? We've never gotten a demagnetizer past the Confederates antenna arrays before---

Jeremiah calmly draws her sole working Kathodenstrahl and fires a blast straight up. The unlit chandelier beneath the apex of the dome flickers with lightning and light.

JEREMIAH

Do I have your attention?

(glances around)

Gentlemen and gentlewomen. The Lady Georgiana has identified an a threat to our very existence, and Sir Alice has just confirmed it.

She holsters her weapon, then looks at the spectroscope.

JEREMIAH

Sir Alice, I must recommend extreme boldness.

Extreme boldness, indeed.

Prevail, Victoriana!

-the Centaur

Stay on Target

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31 pages in. Stay on target. Latest excerpt:

INSET: she turns her pliers, exposing five distinct sets of wheels with settings at the heart of the navigear.

... perhaps five, though the last might be an imaginary residue---

SIR ALICE

An imaginary residue, leaving us with a time machine, like Wells's aerograph romances? Lady Georgiana, you've fallen too much in love with young Einstein for your own good!

GEORGIANA

(flustered)

Be that as it may, the Machine is gone from a sealed hangar, and Commander Willstone, Lieutenant Harbinger, Sargeant Natasha and twenty of her Falconers saw it disappear with their own eyes accompanied by the distinctive ripples I think would be generated by this device---

BIRMINGHAM

But why would he even do such a thing? Tomorrow comes whether you want it to or not---

GEORGIANA

But yesterday doesn't. If you could travel to the past, there's a good chance you could change it.

SIR ALICE

Good God. What would a reactionary like Lord Christopherson do with our history?

NATASHA

Amass an army.

BIRMINGHAM

Overthrow the crown?

JEREMIAH

I know. The blackguard told me. He's gone to undo Liberation.

Onward...

-the Centaur

Making Progress…

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Yerk. Still amazingly behind ... 23 pages in, need 77 more to go. Need to write 8 pages a day to get back on track. Can you say AAAAAAA! I can. People stare at me when I do. But I can. Here's a bit more about the script from the Script Frenzy site:

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Latest excerpt:

Green crackling fire envelops the whole machine, tinged by a growing blue glow of Cerenkov radiation. The air around the machine ripples, like the machine is dipped in water.

Images begin appearing in the rippling miasma: Jeremiah and Patrick, Natasha raising her weapon, a footman falling. It's clear these are a jumble of events, past and future.

JEREMIAH

(tilting her head)

That's more than an air craft.

START FLASHBACK

Jeremiah, in a ridiculous dress, half undone, lounges in a punt. She waves at the shore, where Patrick walks with Georgiana, who glares jealously on.

Jeremiah plucks a bit of cheese from a basket, strong hands push a pole, and the camera pans back to a young Albert Einstein, similarly disheveled, pushing the punt.

JEREMIAH

I wish we had more time.

EINSTEIN

(smiling sadly)

What is time, but another kind of space? Ripples in one move us along the axis of the other.

Jeremiah looks aside, where a dragonfly alights on a leaf. Water churns around the pole, an eddy catches the leaf, and it is whipped back around the pole as it moves forward.

JEREMIAH

If ripples are time and space, what's flow? Can we get more time?

EINSTEIN

(winks at her)

Must I give up all my secrets?

JEREMIAH

(crooks her finger)

If you want to make more ripples.

The dragonfly alights ... and Jeremiah takes his hand.

Poor Albert! Jeremiah will only break your heart. Onward!

-the Centaur

Script Frenzy 2012: THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE

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I'm so busy I can't see straight, so that must mean it's time to take on another project. I'm doing Script Frenzy this month, a challenge to write 100 pages of a script in 30 days, much like National Novel Writing Month, only for film.

I'm adapting my recently completed novel JEREMIAH WILLSTONE THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE to film. I'm using Scrivener. It's great. Here's a sample of the screenplay:

EXT. NEWFOUNDLAND - CONSERVATORY. NIGHT

A mammoth complex looms in the night, an airship hangar made of glass attached to a hulking Victorian palace.

Lightning reflects off the glass of the hangar --- then flashes of light appear inside the windows of the palace.

INT. STAIRCASE. NIGHT

More flashes illuminate a long, narrow Victorian staircase with wainscoting and elaborate rails. A figure hurls herself backwards down the stairs, firing electric pistols from both hands as she bumps down the steps on her rear, sliding on her tailcoat.

JEREMIAH slams into the base of the stair, gritting her teeth, keeping both guns trained back the way she came. She wears a long tailcoat, an black corset vest filigreed with gold wire, and a pair of airman's goggles on her forehead.

At the top of the stairs, crackling green foxfire ripples over the metal bands of the stout wooden door. Holes are blasted in it, and light shifts behind them, but JEREMIAH has no clear shot.

She sees sparks coming from her left gun, and tosses it aside with a curse. She glances at her right gun, seeing the indicator bead hover between three and four notches. A creak upstairs refocuses her attention. Jeremiah murmurs to herself as she focuses on the holes in the door.

JEREMIAH

Very well, sir, show yourself. Three shots? I'll get you in one.

Here I mumble "J Michael Straczynski's the Complete Book of Scriptwriting," "The Empire Strikes Back Fascimile Script," "other writing resources I'm too tired to mention". What? I'm only 9 pages in when I should be around 33. Back to work!

That is all.

-the Centaur

What Are You Working On?

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There's an open call for comments at a post on Write to the End for people to list the current creative projects you are working on. My entry:

Hey, I’m Anthony Francis, and I’m a writer of urban fantasy, steampunk and science fiction. My day job involves the Search Engine That Starts With A “G” and my background is in artificial intelligence and emotional robotics.

I’m working on a steampunk novel called JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which is aaalllmost ready to send to beta readers. I’m also working on an interactive fiction and a screenplay in the same universe. I’ll be participating in Script Frenzy this April to get the screenplay done.

I’m almost done with the rough draft of LIQUID FIRE, the third urban fantasy novel in my Skindancer series featuring magical tattooist Dakota Frost. I’m excited about this one and hope to have it out to beta readers this summer. The first two novels in the series, FROST MOON and BLOOD ROCK, are doing very well.

I’m halfway done with the rough draft of HEX CODE, the spinoff YA series in the Skindancer universe featuring weretiger and math prodigy Cinnamon Frost. I’m also excited about this one which is going in an interesting new direction.

I’ve got the first third of a YA space novel called MAROONED out to the editor. We’re breaking it into 3 novellas and the first one, called “Stranded” we hope will come out this year. This will hopefully be a seven book series.

I’ve got a stalled webcomic called f@nu fiku I’m trying to restart, but while that’s going on I’m working with Nathan Vargas on BlitzComics.com, a project to help blocked comic writers and artists make progress on their dreams.

I’m writing a monthly column on writing on Write to the End called “The Centaur’s Pen” and I’m working on another column for my own website called “Getting Traction”, both as a part of trying to get into nonfiction writing.

I have many more projects in partial states of completion: novels, comics, artworks, webworks, computer programming investigations, games, and so on. But I’m comfortable not making a lot of progress on my side projects, because I’ve got enough main projects to keep me gobstackingly busy.

Just how I like it.

-the Centaur

Just how I like it, indeed. Do I agree with myself? Yes, I agree with myself. I am large, I contain multitudes, but we get along.

It's a surprisingly useful exercise to remind yourself of all that you're doing. So drop in on Write to the End and tell everyone what you're up to!

-the Centaur

Too Many Projects … or an External Memory?

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Anyone who knows me in detail knows I'm a pile person. You can see the all the windows open above, but that's not the half of it: I had 14 tabs open in Firefox, 3 windows with 17, 13, and 3 tabs open in Chrome, and ten windows open in Finder, Mac OS X's file browser. I hammer my operating systems, loading them with as many windows, programs, files and fonts they can take.

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But it's not just operating systems. I've got a huge folder of todos in my jacket pocket, a pile of books in my bookbag, on the table, in my car. My library, office, spare office and even kitchen table are filled with piles, as is my desk at work.

On the one hand, this could simply be because I'm a hoarder and need to learn to clean up more, and maybe I do. But most of the piles are thematically organized: in the shot above you can see (slightly overlapping) piles for a young adult and urban fantasy series, an art pile, a pile of bills, CDs being organized, and so on.

Some of this is, again, a product of mess, but the rest of it is a deliberate strategy. A collection of books on a topic serves as an external memory that augments the goo we have in our heads. This is part of the theory of situated cognition, which posits that our memories are elaborated through interaction with the external world.

William Clancey, one of the founders of situated cognition, puts it this way: his knowledge of what to take on a fishing trip isn't in his internal memory: it's in his fully stocked tacklebox, which represents the stored wisdom of many, many fishing trips; if he was to lose that tacklebox, he'd lose a portion of his memory, and become less effective.

My toiletry bag for flying serves the same role. Its contents have been refined over dozens, maybe even hundreds of trips. It doesn't just have a toothbrush and toothpaste, contact lens solution and hairspray, it has soap, shampoo, cough drops, nail clippers, bandaids and more. If I forget it, and try to recreate the toiletries that I need for a trip on the fly, I almost always have to go back to the store.

Situated cognition has been challenged, and I couldn't find the perfect reference that summarized what Clancey said in the Cognitive Science Brownbag talk I attended at Georgia Tech so many years ago. But I know how I work, and I know how it's influenced by that framework.

When I'm tackling a project, I build a pile. It might be a pile of tabs in a browser, folders of links in my bookmarks, files in a directory, books from my mammoth library. These serve as references I use to generate the text, the material I use to generate my writing, but they also serve as something more. They serve as a pointer to return me to an old mental state.

If I have to close my browser, reboot my machine, put a project aside, switch to another book, I can keep the pile. I have mammoth collections of files and bookmarks, and a mammoth library with something like 30 bookcases (that's cases, not shelves). And when I'm ready to reopen the project, I can start work on it again.

I've done that recently, restarting both my work on the "Watch on a Tangled Chain" interactive fiction and an exploration of programming languages - one project I hadn't worked on for a year, and one maybe for several years. But when I found the files, I was able to resume my work almost effortlessly. With physical piles of books, the process is even more joyful, as it involves reading snippets from half a dozen or so books until I'm back into the mindset.

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So thank you, my poor processor, my crowded browser, my packed library. You make me more than I am on my own.

-the Centaur

The Rules Disease at Write to The End

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I've a new essay on writing at the Write to the End blog, called "The Rules Disease." A preview:

Anyone who seriously tackles the craft of writing is likely to have encountered a writing­ rule, like “Show, Don’t Tell,” or “Never Begin a Sentence with a Conjunction.” “Don’t Split Infinitives” and “Never Head Hop” are also popular. The granddaddy of all of them, “Omit Needless Words,” is deliciously self-explanatory … but the ever baffling “Murder Your Darlings” is a rule so confusing it deserves its own essay.

This is part of my ongoing column The Centaur's Pen.

-the Centaur

Scientific Citations in Popular Literature

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Lightly edited from a recent email:
Here's the revised version. Rather than just including linked references [in that middle section as you suggested], I actually expanded that section so that it was clear who I was citing and what I was claiming they said. Citations work for science types but I want to learn (create? promote?) a new way of including references for popular literature in which, rather than saying something like, "Scientists think it's OK to start sentences with a conjunction [Wolfram 2002]." I instead want to say things like, "In the foreword of his mammoth tome A New Kind of Science, computer scientist Stephen Wolfram defends starting sentences with conjunctions, arguing forcefully that it makes long, complex arguments easier to read." Yes, it's longer, but it's more honest, and the [cite] style was aimed at scientific papers with enormously compressed length requirements. Tell me what you think.
What do you think about the use of citations in non-scientific literature? I think we can do better. I'm just not sure what it is yet. Textbooks have generally solved this problem with "info boxes," but that's not always appropriate. -the Centaur

How Crazy is Comic-Con?

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How crazy is Comic-Con registration? I logged on at 8:00am this morning to get in the waiting list and by the time I cleared the "waiting room" for the signup page (at 9:10ish) it was completely sold out. This is what I saw when it finally "let me in" to register: I hate to do it, but I have to lay the blame squarely on Gmail. Comic-Con sent me a registration form, I clicked on the link at 8:00am, just like they told me to ...
The wait is over! Comic-Con 2012 badges will go on sale at 8:00 a.m. PST on Saturday March 3rd, 2012. To access the EPIC online registration website, click the following link: (link deleted for security reasons)
. The link kept timing out, as one might expect from an overloaded system, but after 5 or so minutes of click ... timeout, click ... timeout, I started to get suspicious. But the problem wasn't in the site ... it was in something Gmail was doing to the URL. Clicking on it didn't work; copying the link location didn't work. Copying just the text and pasting it ... got me in at 9:10AM. Too late. Ah, Gmail, can't live without you, but every once in a while... BANG! ZOOM! To the moon. Oh well, here's hoping I get in as a professional like I did the last two years ... this year I have even more claim, I guess, as I have a second book out, appear in two more books, and am involved with Blitz Comics. Crossing my fingers! -the Centaur Pictured: Lots of stuff. Fair use and whatnot ... parody, informative commentary, transformative and educational uses, and so forth.

Five Favorite Noises

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My friend Keiko started a meme over at Write to The End: what are your five favorite noises? The rules:

Don’t take too long on it. I’d say post your list within 24 hours. And don’t worry about trying to get your absolute top 5 favorite sounds ever. When you’ve collected 5 sounds you love, just post the list. We know this is just for fun, and we won’t hold you to any of your stated favorites. (And if you think of 5 more, you can post those, too!)

My favorite noises are:

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Gabby's Purr

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Dad's Whistle

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The Enterprise Going to Warp

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The Sound of a Lightsaber

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The Engines of the TARDIS

Runner up goes to the weird noise I can make in my throat.

-the Centaur

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternally Inspiring Tome

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This is the book that got me started on artificial intelligence ... and now has inspired me again to attack my craft with greater vigor. I was writing an essay for The Centaur's Pen column for the Write to The End site and realized it depended on a concept - true, but unprovable theorems - which isn't in wide circulation. So I've started an essay on that topic for this site, and decided to go reread Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book which introduced me to the concept.

At the writing group, the topic of the essay and Gödel, Escher, Bach came up, and we all started discussing how intricate, how rewarding, and how friendly Hofstadter's immense tome is. It's a work of genius that continues to stagger me to this day. And then my writing friends told me that in the new edition there's a foreward with the entire back story of how the book came to be.

I picked it up last night, and reading the new intro I was gratified to learn that I understood his basic thesis - that conscious intelligence arises from bare matter by grounding its symbols in correspondence to reality, then inexorably turning that grounding inward into a spiral of self-reference with no end. Hofstadter and I might disagree about what's sufficient to produce conscious intelligence, but we'd just be quibbling about details, because I think he nailed a necessary component.

But after the intro of the foreword, when I began to read the story of how this 750 page long Pulitzer Prize winning book started its life as a 20 page letter that Hofstadter decided needed to be turned into a pamphlet, I was stunned.

He wrote it in 5 years.

Well, it actually took 6 to complete, because he typeset it himself---through a happy-but-not-at-the-time accident, twice---producing an amazing work that was polished far beyond his original intention. But he wrote it while in graduate school, while teaching classes, while traveling cross-country. He put it down for a bit finishing his PhD thesis itself, but basically the book's a white hot blaze of inspiration polished to pure excellence.

I'm inspired, all over again.

-the Centaur