Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
... we're over 30 posts in a month now. Mission accomplished, and without even using fake fill-me-up posts like this one.
There are a few topics left, but they can wait till June.
I can has novel writing now?
-the Centaur
... so do I blog or work on my next novel?
Sorry guys. Work calls.
-the Centaur
You're a tiger.
You hide
in the tall grass.
You're a tiger!
You hide
in the tall grass.
I scritch behind your ear
and you fidget for me
Can't I see
you have important work to do?
Go now,
defend our home
from the flitting birds
and the tiny lizard
tailless marauder
you bring home again and again
held delicately in your jaws.
-the Centaur
But papers are hybrid beasts: they report data and argue about what we can conclude from it. Since I write papers by core dumping my data then refining the argument, what I'm subjecting myself to when I edit my paper is a poorly argued jumble based on a quasi-random collection of facts. It's not all bad - I do work from an outline and plan - but an outline is not an argument.
This hit home to me recently when I was working on a paper on some until-now unreported work on robot pets I did about ten years ago. Early drafts of the paper had a solid abstract and extensive outline from our paper proposal, and into this outline I poured a number of technical reports and partially finished papers. The result? Virtual migraine!
But after I got about 90% of the paper done, I had a brainflash about a better abstract, which in turn suggested a new outline. My colleagues agreed, so I replaced the abstract and reorganized the paper. Now the paper was organized around our core argument, rather than around the subject areas we were reporting on, which involved lots of reshuffling but little rewriting.
The result? Full of win. The paper's not done, not by a long shot, but the first half reads much more smoothly, and, more importantly, I can clearly look at all the later sections and decide what parts of the paper need to stay, what parts need to go, and what parts need to be moved and/or merged with other sections. There are a few weak spots, but I'm betting if I take the time to sit down and think about our argument and let that drive the paper that I will be able to clean it up right quick.
Hopefully this will help, going forward. Here goes...
-the Centaur
So my friends are reading Frost Moon and giving me feedback, which I'm letting pile up while I get other work done (and so my committment to what I just wrote can evaporate to the point I can read it objectively). But I've already started the sequel, Blood Rock. I wrote a lot of Frost Moon in the Barnes and Noble Writing Group at Steven's Creek, but I've avoided reading Blood Rock there because I thought it might be a spoiler for my alpha readers who were still reading Frost Moon.
Now I know holding the new chapters back was a good idea.
My mother-in-law just finished Frost Moon and said "I can't wait for more!". So I sent her the first chapter of Blood Rock, which she immediately printed out intending to read it. But Sandi's dad got to it first. He's read part of Frost Moon, but had stopped and was waiting for his wife to record it on tape so he can listen to it on his long over-the-road trips. But he sees Blood Rock lying around, picks it up, and BAM! page one, gets a huge spoiler for the ending of Frost Moon.
There are obvious spoilers in the first chapter of Blood Rock: the central character of the series is still alive, as are other people whose fate was in doubt. I was worried that people would find that out, but in all truth you could guess that from the fact that it's a book in a 'genre' series and not a 'literary' one-shot novel. It's going to be a story about someone's continuing adventures, not about the unfortunate events leading up to someone's untimely death.
But there are also NON-obvious spoilers: who the main villain was, what he was doing, and what happened to him. I won't go into any more details, but suffice it to say these are MUCHO spoilers if you haven't finished the first book. I hadn't been worried about that, but in hindsight this is blindingly obvious. So I am very glad I didn't read this at the writing group!
As my mother-in-law and father-in-law both pointed out, it's rare for a book in a series to give away the ending of another book in the series. And so I need to be careful about how I refer to the past. While I can't hide the end of Frost Moon - it's integral to the plot of Blood Rock - I can instead hold these revelations back to the last possible minute. And now that I think of doing that, it seems like it will make the point when I refer to it even more of a shock. Nice.
I've never had this problem before. It's a nice problem to have... :-)
-Anthony
... to keep up the pace of daily blogging when you have Real Life to do! I'm working on a scientific paper (and several novels and stories and a comic) and already this month have come up with three blog posts - Delusionaries, Biblical Spam and the Joy of Xi - which are too complex to just dash off, so they've been languishing. If I get a chance I'll tackle one of them tomorrow after the next draft of the paper is done. Until then ... post! And let the chips fall where they may.
-the Centaur
... does not constitute true "blogging," unless you really have something new to say about the topic. Same goes for the tip you just found on Lifehacker. Perhaps, the curmudgeon in me says, keep the "me too"s and "+1"s to yourselves?
But, I'm a hypocrite; half the tricks I learn and shiny sparklies I find, I only get because some other blogger has read it (out of the dozens of other blogs I don't subscribe to), decided it was good, and regurgitated it into my waiting Google Reader. So keep it coming ... I guess. But I still need something more than "check out what I saw on Slashdot."
-the Centaur
If you're going to blog once a day for a month, it's important not to get overly ambitious about the articles you're going to write each day. I started off with the idea I'd finish all the waiting blog posts I had sitting around, write down my definitive thoughts on several key topics, et cetera.
The outcome of this bright idea? Well, sitting "right next" to this article in Qumana is a blog entry on "delusionaries" which proved too big to chew in a couple of small bites. So I'm going to spit this one out, cut it up into smaller bits, and try again. Stay tuned.
-Anthony
Not even the first week and I skipped a blog entry. Shame on me - and I was even online yesterday.
It's very easy to "fall off the wagon" - to decide to change how we want to live our lives, but then let our day-to-day habits, plans, and interactions carry us through a course of actions that contradicts that. A Christian theologian would make some noise about the fallibility of man; a cognitive scientist would natter on about automatized behaviors, capture errors and the illusion of conscious will. But the long and the short of it is that we're really bad at this.
I can point to a number of wagons I've fallen off repeatedly: regular exercise, martial arts training, doing the physical therapy exercises for my knee, calling all my friends at the beginning of the month, taking the laundry out of the dryer as soon as it beeps. But other wagons I hang on to tenaciously: feeding the cats twice daily, watering the lawn, attending the weekly and monthly writing groups.
At first blush this is the diference between things that have immediate feedback (mewing cats, wilted plants, written stories) and those that don't (it can take months to notice changes in your waistline). But I find that this even applies to things that don't have immediate feedback - like writing my "weekly snippets" at the Search Engine That Starts With a G, a performance tool that I regularly use even though I'm the only one that apparently reads them. True, if you don't send snippets you get reminders about it; but most people ignore them, just like I ignore many, many other automated reminders I get. So that's not it either.
So some wagons are easy to fall off of and others are easy to hang on to. Why is that? I could go off and do a typical blogger speculation, but let's leave it at this for a moment: why are there some things that are so easy to decide to do (or not to do) regularly, while other habits are so hard to make or break that it seems nearly impossible?
'jes wonderin,
-the Centaur
As long as I have an Internet connection, every change I make is saved to the cloud. When I lose my connection, I sacrifice some features, but I can still access my documents (for this initial release, you can view and edit word processing documents; right now we don't support offline access to presentations or spreadsheets - see our help center for details). Everything I need is saved locally. And I do everything through my web browser, even when I'm offline (the goodness that Google Gears provides). When my connection comes back, my documents sync up again with the server. It's all pretty seamless: I don't have to remember to save my documents locally before packing my laptop for a trip. I don't have to remember to save my changes as soon as I get back online. And I don't have to switch applications based on network connectivity. With the extra peace of mind, I can more fully rely on this tool for my important documents.
If you don't see an Offline link in your Google Docs account, don't worry, it's coming. We're releasing this feature on a rolling basis. You should see be able to enable the offline feature for Google Docs soon.
The first thing you need to run a web application offline is the ability to start it without an Internet connection. This is the purpose of the LocalServer module ... Applications that are more than just static files have data that is typically stored on the server. For the application to be useful offline, this data must be accessible locally. The Database module provides a relational database for storing data ... When synchronizing large amounts of data, you may find that the database operations begin to affect the responsiveness of the browser. The WorkerPool allows you to move your database operations to the background to keep the browser responsive.Very interesting...
 | Frost MoonI first started wearing a Mohawk to repel low-lifes — barflies, vampires, Republicans, and so on — but when I found my true profession it turned into an ad. People’s eyes are drawn by my hair — no longer a true Mohawk, but a big, unruly “deathhawk,” a stripe of feathered black, purple and white streaks climbing down the center of my head — but they linger on the tattoos, which start as tribalesque vines in the shaved spaces on either side of the ’hawk and then cascade down my throat to my shoulders, flowering into roses and jewels and butterflies. Their colors are so vivid, their details so sharp many people mistake them for body paint, or assume that they can’t have been done in the States. Yes, they’re real; no, they’re not Japanese — they’re all, with a few exceptions, done by my own hand, right here in Atlanta at the Rogue Unicorn in Little Five Points. Drop by — I’ll ink you. Ask for Dakota Frost. To retain the more … perceptive … eye, I started wearing an ankle-length leather vest that shows off the intricate designs on my arms, and a cutoff top and lowrider jeans that that show off a tribal yin-yang on my midriff. Throughout it all you can see the curving black tail of some thing big, beginning on the left side of my neck, looping around the yin-yang on my midriff, and arcing through the leaves on my right shoulder. Most people think it’s a dragon, and they wouldn’t be wrong; in case anyone misses the point, I even have the design sewn into the back of a few of my vests. But those who live on the edge might see a little more: magical runes woven in the tribal designs, working charms woven into the flowers, and, if you look real close at the tail of the dragon, the slow movement of a symbolic familiar. Yes, it did move; and yes, that’s real magic. Drop by the Rogue Unicorn — you’re still asking for the one and only Dakota Frost, the best magical tattooist in the Southeast. The downside to being a walking ad, of course, is that some of the folks you want to attract start to see you as a scary low-life. We all know that vampires can turn out to be quite decent folk, but so can cleancut young Republicans looking for their first tattoo to impress their tree-hugger girlfriends. As for barflies, well, they’re still barflies; but unfortunately I find the more tats I show the greater the chance that the cops will throw me into the back of the van too if a barfight breaks out. So I couldn’t help being nervous as two officers marched me into City Hall East... |
Continuing the translation of "articles" to modern blog entries... Part III of Article 30 from December 31, 2003.
Last in the series "Centaurs in Space", with text drawn from my short story "Death Wish" and images drawn from my sequential adaptation of the same story.
...then the remains of the shuttle slammed into the black surface of the asteroid.
Porsche flinched at the impact, then glared as the sparking hulk of the kyore carrier tumbled past the jagged scarp that had caught the shuttle and impacted the far end.
The edges of the black expanse seemed to shiver, and glowing bits of kyore scattered across the far end of the dumbbell like pretty little fireworks...
