Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

Good, Nice, Professional

Published January 17, 2016 by centaur

One of the things they tell you in the writing community is “Good, nice, professional: you need to be at least two of the three.”

What this means is, the writing community is filled good writers, nice people, and competent workers, but it’s also filled with crappy writers, genuine assholes, and flakey losers. You can get away with being one of the bad things: you can be a so-so writer, but be nice to people and turn things in on time, or you can be an asshole but produce great work in a timely fashion, or you can be good and nice but fail to deliver, and people will forgive most of those things and you will proceed, and succeed.

Douglas Adams is perhaps the best known "flakey, but good and nice” guy. The world’s oldest angry young man, the hardworking Harlan Ellison, was known as “asshole, but good and professional” until he gaffed the Last Dangerous Visions anthology project. I won’t disparage another writer’s work, but as a publisher and anthology editor, I can tell you that I’m much more likely to accommodate an author who I know will deliver than an awesome one I can’t count on - and I can tell you that I’ve heard the same from other publishers of anthologies.

This came up because I just had to essentially back out of a project. You need to roll with the punches on an editor’s comments, but what I just received was a request for a spec rewrite more than four months after the article had been approved, and that after a fairly intensive editorial round. That made me mad - but in a broader sense, I understand how it happened: the editor got feedback on another project and wanted to forestall that happening to my article. But I’d moved on from the project, and am neck deep in edits in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which was supposed to be out last year.

I swallowed my anger, thought carefully about the overall problem, and realized that despite what I perceived as an irregularity of process the editor is just trying to do the best job they can the best way they know how. I further realized the primary reason I couldn’t respond was simply my lack of time. If the request had landed in a dead zone, I’d have gladly have given it a shot.

So I wrote the editor what I hoped was a polite but firm note, emphasizing the problem was essentially my other committments. The editor got back to me promptly and was accommodating. I also discussed the problem with one of my fellow authors, who stepped up with suggestions, and we may bring him on board as a co-author so he can take this article the rest of the way.

I’m always angry, and I easily could have blown my stack and really ticked the editor off. But being nice, and being professional, I helped solve a problem, rather than creating a new one. As to whether my article was good … eh, if it ever gets released, be it authored, co-authored, or just salsa on this blog if rejected ... I’ll let you be the judge.

-the Centaur

Customer Service

Published January 15, 2016 by centaur

SO, my primary job is working for this big software conglomerate and I want to make sure that I’m doing a good job so a frequent thing that I do is work later on some evenings “just a little bit harder than I want to” but I’ve found that if you do that too long you can burn out and so — GASP --- you need a way to stop yourself from doing too much.

My preferred technique, in recent years, is the OpenTable reservation. Later in the day, when I have SOME idea of when I might leave, I log in to OpenTable, set a reservation for one of my favorite restaurants, or a new restaurant, just late enough in the evening to still hit a coffeehouse and get some writing done. I know a few places which are open to 11, so if I can eat by 7:45, I can still get a couple hours of writing in. At worst, even at 8:30, I can get an hour of focus at a coffeehouse — assuming, of course, since I use that dinnertime to do my print reading, an hour for dinner.

Assuming an hour.

So tonight, I tried a new restaurant, Bird Dog in Palo Alto, and showed up 15 minutes early for my 8pm reservation (since I’d not been there before, and wanted a little buffer, and I’d finished my work anyway). They weren’t ready for me, so I sat in the bar, had a daiquiri, and read a chapter out of Peter Higgins’ NUMBERS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION while listening to a very entertaining conversation between some very, very uppercrust ladies who just might have been minor celebrities. At a little after 8:10, the maître d’ came by to tell me a table would be ready soon. I finished the chapter, then pulled out THE EMOTION THESAURUS and started reading it.

At 8:30, I suddenly realized I’d been there three quarters of an hour and had not yet even been seated.

Shoot. Well, that happens. I packed my books up and asked the bartender for the check. He offered to comp me the drink, but I declined (since I was already running way late and thought I could probably get a quick slice at Pizza My Heart to get back on schedule). The waiter asked me to hang on a bit so he could check in at the host stand, and in moments, the maître d’ had arrived to show me to my table.

They comped my drink. They brought me roasted avocado and flatbread, pictured above. And all of the staff came by and apologized. But neither the comping, nor the apologies, were really needed, or were the deciding factor: when a problem was detected, they fixed it. Now, basically they gave me free appetizers and drinks, but I still had an expensive meal, and I’m likely to come back at least once, or to recommend it, or perhaps even blog about it --- how meta — so they’ll make their money back.

But what strikes me is that property of noticing a problem and expending a small amount of personal and financial capital to right it had far greater payoffs. They didn’t ignore the problem, or just toss stuff at me to paper it over; they fixed it, they acted sincere, and they delivered the rest of their normal service at high quality. I tried to be super nice in response, and I hope we all had a great meal. Their efforts to provide great customer service changed my attitude about the problem, and built a bond.

Later at Coupa Cafe, one of my favorite coffeehouses, I struck up a conversation with one of the staff, and they recommended a new drink I could try. When I got it, the spectacular presentation of my personally recommended drink again reminded how great customer service doesn’t just have immediate benefits for the business; it creates relationships and attachments which are a perennial source of not just profit to the business --- which it does — but of connection in human lives.

And that’s what really makes it all worthwhile. That, and time to work on your books.

-the Centaur

Excuse Me, I Ordered the Large Cat

Published January 14, 2016 by centaur

Busy catching up on writing today, trying to get Chapter 1 of the rewrite of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE done, plus various small press tasks, plus writing documentation at work, plus getting new tires for my car … aaaa! So here’s a picture of a cat. Also, apropos, of a tire … but that made me think. I used to take a lot of notes - I still do, but I used to too - but a lot of the time a quick snapshot of something with your cell phone can do you one better.

I took a few pictures of tires and of the label on the inside of my door without having to write down any numbers. I then went back to my desk, found some highly rated tires on a web site, found a local tire store online, found the models they had in stock, looked up the old tires I bought for the car to confirm the numbers made sense, and made an appointment. Bam. No paper involved.

It’s amazing to me what can be done with storing information in the cloud, as much as I am a skeptic about it. (And even my complaints about how hard it is to take notes on computers are getting addressed - a fellow author just got a Windows 10 book and claims he now prefers its tablet mode for editing because he can use it like real paper).

But it amazes me even more that when I showed up early for my tire appointment, they fit me in so quickly I had my car and was on my way to work at essentially the time I would have normally have gotten in. As a colleague said, "how many times does THAT happen?" My answer? “ONCE. Just today.” America’s Tire, Mountain View, California. Go check them out.

-the Centaur

Unexpected Acts of Kindness

Published January 13, 2016 by centaur

For those of us who are hermits, it’s sometimes good to get a reminder of the great things that can happen via social support. At the recent Write to the End meeting, I stepped up as facilitator when Keiko O’Leary was delayed on a plane flight - but when she showed up, after an offhanded comment by one of the members, we all decided to pretended that she was new to the group! We asked her to introduce herself, welcomed her warmly, and explained everything as we went, which she found hilarious - and comforting, since she didn’t have to do any work handing out prompts or monitoring the time. It was a great writing session for all, and couldn’t have happened without the happy synergy of all the different people working together.

I had a similar experience at lunch at work recently - I’m a loner, and normally go off on my own to read or write my books, but I do try to join the team a few times a week. At the lunch table, thinking of one of my problems, I said: “Wouldn’t it be neat if we could apply X technology to Y”? Suddenly, EVERYONE was chiming in: one TL scoped out the problem, another coworker had great suggestions, and after twenty minutes of discussion I offered to go write it up. But I didn’t have time before I had to interview a candidate, so when I came back I found a one-pager written by a coworker. I sat down to expand it, realized my coworker had a key insight, and ended up producing a half-dozen page design doc. I may have been the first person to utter “apply X to Y” but the final idea was very much a joint product of every person at the table - and could NOT have been done alone.

As an on-again, off-again follower of Ayn Rand, I guess this is exposes one of the many flaws of traditional Objectivist thinking: its black and white nature, particularly with regards to committees. Several of Ayn Rand’s books lambast the work produced by committees, and I indeed have seen horrors produced by them - but call a committee a “brainstorming session”, and you can literally produce things which no-one could have produced alone. Of course, a single person or small group must then refine and focus the ideas so they can be implemented, or everyone will go driving in different directions - but even that seeming aimless search can be a success if you’ve got a large technology space to explore and a diverse group of committed, dedicated engineers to explore it.

But the possibility of brainstorming is not really what I want to focus on: it’s the great things that come out of treating your fellow people right. Being nice to each other greases the wheel, sharing your ideas and being open to theirs improves intellectual debate, and treating one person as special on a special occasion can really lift their day - whether it’s a thank you card and gift to a former manager, a day off for the facilitator of a group, or just giving a friend who’s into centaurs a centaur statuette that you happened to pick up two of by accident. These little things don’t just brighten our day - they change it, making the world a better place, one small act of kindness at a time.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a gift of a friend, via a friend, the first of whom professionally collects genre materials and ended up with two of the same statuette, and the second of whom brought it to the writing group for me because she knew I liked centaurs.

Shamelessly Meta

Published January 13, 2016 by centaur

It occurred to me that I could get a cheap blog post by commenting on my process of trying to do blogposts, so here goes. What I’ve found so far is that it’s hard to keep up the “write two blog posts a day” regimen - which is why you see my buffer dropping to almost zero yesterday (2016/01/11, as of this writing) when I skipped my blog posting because I ended up having long coffeehouse conversations. Conversely, once you get started again, it’s easy to get started - this post is my second blog post written on January 12th, so I’ve got a tiny little buffer again - this post, one more finished post, and one I plan on typing in which is in my notebook.

It’s hard to stay ahead. But even one or two days of buffer enable me to get up to speed quickly, so the payoff for getting ahead is huge. Conversely, the payoff for letting things pile up is … well …

Let’s just say I need to keep up with things a bit more beyond blogging too. This isn’t the half of it.

-the Centaur

Welp, we missed it, but that’s OK

Published January 12, 2016 by centaur

One way to make yourself feel overwhelmed is to take on too many projects; the other is to take on too many responsibilities; the best way is to do the same thing at the same time. We missed our blogpost for yesterday; file it under (a) “you need to work a little bit harder than you want to” and (b) “best laid plans sometimes need to be set aside” again, as I ended up (a) trying to finish a bit of documentation, succeeding, but leaving work an hour late, and (b) having an hour and a half of conversations at the local coffeehouse, with only thirty minutes work time. Add to this a weekend mostly spent trying to solve my wife’s Audible problem and working on small press stuff, and I am so far behind on my writing.

The good news is, I got the first of my puzzles done for my proposed Cinnamon Frost puzzle book. The bad news is, that’s about eight projects deep on the stack of things I should be working on now. Hm, is that an accurate estimate? There’s the revised CLOCKWORK opener, the SPECTRAL IRON revision, the HEX CODE revision, the THIRTY DAYS LATER publishing tasks, edits for the 24HCD Survival Guide, first draft of PHANTOM SILVER, first draft of BOT NET first draft, and the rough draft of FAERY NUMBERS, plus the math groundwork for FAERY NUMBERS, not to mention a whole host of other small writing tasks we’ll lump into one, plus blogging - so I’m working on a pointer to something twelve items deep in my stack.

A proper computer scientist would be appalled, as might my editor for CLOCKWORK (it’s progressing, I promise! but it’s got to be awesome). But the good news is that I got a start on a wholly new project, seizing the inspiration before it evaporated.

And that’s how you catch lightning in a bottle. That and lots of caffeine.

-the Centaur

It’s an Anger Problem, Not an Anger Management Problem

Published January 10, 2016 by centaur

Periodically I say something like this to my wife: “Excuse me, I’m going to go take this piece of electronic equipment outside and smash it with the baseball bat.” I say it politely, generally with a piece of already-broken electronic equipment in my hand, right after I’ve spent a couple of hours trying to make it work and definitively failing, and right before I grab the baseball bat, head out the front door, and smash the thing to blithereens on our driveway.

Because what I have is an anger problem, not an anger management problem.

I get really angry. A lot. I regularly scream into the dashboard of my car as my hands clench or beat the steering wheel, raging about the crazy of the day. Sometimes I get hoarse doing that, even hurt my voice. But other than occasionally hurting my voice, I never take it out on people - not anymore. My wife actually says she finds it hard to believe that I have an anger problem, because I so rarely show it. And to me that’s the difference between an anger problem and an anger management problem - whether you take it out on others or not.

Personally, I’d rather not get angry, and I think the degree to which I do get angry is the problem - like David Banner says, that’s my secret: I’m always angry. But I’ve also grown to think about anger like Stephen Covey - anger is an alarm, a signal that something’s wrong, and the first thing you do with an alarm is to turn it off and deal with the problem.

I didn’t used to have that resource available to me. I’ve knocked pieces from a chessboard, stormed out of a Risk game, yelled at people, gotten into fights, even smashed important computer equipment. When playing the raconteur I always like to exaggerate, to tell the true story about punching one of my best friends in the face - twice - and now I can add to that kicking another friend in the face - but the problem with all of those is that they were accidents, so they don’t tell the truth as much as, say, mentioning that I’ve ripped off my Android watch three times in the last year because it was so annoying.

But even that’s a part of the management, not the problem. The Android watch-toss generally happens when I’m driving, when it’s firing some alert and won’t stop, and I need to pay attention to the road - so I toss it off so I can focus on driving, not dying. One day, if it gets too annoying when I’m driving, I may tear it off and toss it out the window, but if so, I won’t look back - because as much as that’s an expression of anger, it’s also something that I’ve calculated in advance, a deliberate choice that if this little widget distracts me too much when I’m driving a ton of car at three times the speed human beings were designed for, it’s time for the widget to go.

So the anger is still there, but under control. I no longer smash cordless phones or toss cell phones, unless I’ve determined the device is actually a loss, and then, heck, I’ll give it a go, or pull out the baseball bat. Supposedly the cathartic theory of anger isn’t any good, that screaming or smashing plates will, rather than releasing your anger, actually make it worse; however, it certainly does feel good to just get that anger out and to move on.

But I had to spend fifteen minutes fixing a bent pin in my watch after the last watch-toss, and I really don’t like the pain in my throat after yelling in the car - and I still remember smashing those pieces from the chessboard, thirty-five years later, with a little bit of shame. So I know I have an anger problem - but one thing I’ve committed to is making sure I manage it.

-the Centaur

Postscript: Since this was written, I sat down with my wife to fix a problem with her Audible account after she moved to a new computer. During this process, we found out that Audible employees had NOT, as they had previously claimed, successfully fixed a problem that we’d had with her books when she accidentally got a second account - to the tune of a lost $500 in books - and THEN we found out that Audible employees had lied to her about whether she actually owned the books she downloaded, to the tune of $17,000 dollars in books encumbered with DRM that makes them effectively a rental, not ownership. My wife got so angry about this she had to take a walk. Me? I got angry because I spent two and half hours trying to resolve a problem which should have taken fifteen minutes, so angry at the end, when a error in Google’s interface repeatedly thwarted me trying to execute a simple search, that I wanted to smash my hand against the glass desk. My wife raised her hand to stop me, but I just said, “Don’t,” and then lowered my hands to the desk, took a deep breath, switched to Bing to resolve the problem. I then spent the next half hour calming my wife down about the horrible state of DRM in this country and how Audible employees lied to fuck her over. (And I was in on the call; they did lie - as my wife put it, they said whatever they had to to get her to enter her credit card number). In the end, I had calmed my wife down, I had found a solution for her problem, and I had not put my hand through a desk made of glass.

Scorecard: anger, zero; anger management, one.

Pictured: My first 3D printed model. It didn’t turn out so well. I did not, in fact, smash it, despite several hours of frustration.

Excuse Me, I Ordered the Large Box

Published January 9, 2016 by centaur

So what you see is a gift, a gift from my wife and myself’s, our gift to her sister and her husband, a gift given on the occasion of their 20th anniversary, a gift, by necessity, wrapped in a very, very large box. I think this is the largest single item that either of us have ever had to ship, other than perhaps a car - and other people did that for us. What is this gift? It’s “Petrified Coral”:

petrified coral2.jpg

For scale, it’s the artwork you see on this wall:

This “Petrified Coral” piece is one of a series that Sandi’s done - one I own:

Sandi worked on a third one, but it didn’t work out the way she wanted, so she mutated it into another piece.

With art this large, normal market forces start to break down. Regardless of what YOU want to pay for it, there’s a certain minimum amount that it costs to ship it, even to store it, so if you’re not willing to pay for it, you can’t play. Worse, Sandi likes working in this scale, but getting good at this scale requires working in this scale, so she’s got to store a lot of large pieces.

We’re happy to give "Petrified Coral 2” to Sandi’s sister, but we’re also taking this as an exercise in finding out how to ship these large pieces efficiently. The normal USPS or FedEx route seems too expensive, and not even Greyhound could fit it (yes, they ship). But people solve this problem, so we’re doing the research now.
If successful, then I’m sure Sandi would be happy to ship a large artwork to YOU.

(But not Petrified Coral 1. That one’s MINE.)
-the Centaur

That Sock Drawer

Published January 8, 2016 by centaur

Sock Drawer 2016-01-07.png

What to do with the stories in your sock drawer?

For those of you who don’t know, the “sock drawer” is where short stories go to die, named after the place you file manuscripts away after you’ve exhausted your efforts to sell, edit, or burn them. Stories go through a life cycle:

You Get the Idea: Sometimes, this is no more than a title. Most people stop here.
You Start the Draft: You actually start writing! Most people never get here.
You Finish the Draft! Most people who get to Stage 2 never get to Stage 3. Believe it or not, this is the hardest part.
You Edit the Draft! Some people get stuck forever here, or skip this entirely, like bloggers. :-)
You Let Other People See It! I call this the ”beta” stage because I generally don’t let people see stuff until I’ve edited it.
You Send It Out! You send the story or novel out for publication.
It’s Accepted Right Away! Editors ALWAYS accept stories, right?
???
Profit!

Actually, MOST of the time markets don’t accept what you send them. From what you see above, it seems like I’ve got a pretty good acceptance rate, but that’s actually counting by stories. If we instead look at how many times I sent them out:

Story Acceptances 2016-01-07.png

Yeah. And even that’s a bit exaggerated, since I get invited to write a lot of stories, so if i was to tease the data apart to look at my cold-call rejection rate, I would get very depressed. So really there are a few more stages which can happen after you send things out:

You Keep Circulating Your Work: If first you don’t succeed, try the next magazine or site on the list.
You Revise Your Work: A clever editor’s comment, or more insight, leads you to rework your story. Go back to Step 4.
You Get Stuck: You don’t know how to fix your work, but aren’t ready to give up yet. You’re essentially at Step 3.
You Give Up: You convince yourself the work can’t be fixed … and dump it in your sock drawer.

As you saw from the first diagram, I’ve got a small handful of stories in my sock drawer … not that I’ll never think of going back to them, but if so, it will probably be a ground-up rewrite harvesting the manuscript for whatever good ideas I’ve got. But I also have a larger tranche of stories I haven’t quite given up on yet, ones I think I can salvage, but which aren’t as important as my novels.

But if I’m not working on them, are they in the sock drawer, or not? Some of those stories went out to a dozen or more places and got as many rejections. Others I sent to one or two places, or nowhere. And if I read them again, what would I think? Is it worth going back to them? If it’s a choice between working on Dakota Frost, Cinnamon Frost, Jeremiah Willstone, or Serendipity the Centaur, I’m going to choose one of them over a short story I wrote back in 2001.

So why am I digging back at the boundary of Stalled and the Sock Drawer?

Recently, a friend told me about a short story submission deadline that was closing fast. I looked at my list of stories I’ve sent out to find one to send … but I’ve gotten much better at sending out my work, so, surprisingly, I didn’t have anything to send. So I had a choice: let the deadline pass … or find my best unpublished story and send it out.

I actually do have 2 or 3 stories on my shortlist of “this story is really good, but it never made it” but I want to edit these before I send them out again, so I thought about letting the deadline pass. Then I realized that if I never go back to those stories, I might as well consider them dead. I always mean to revise them - I have a folder of comments and notes on them - but somehow I never get around to it. So I needed to commit: lob the lot into the sock drawer, or take action.

I found the best of these that fit within the word count limits of the magazine. Then I reformatted it according to William Shunn’s manuscript guidelines, to give it the best chance for success. The very act of reformatting it gave me a new eye on the story … and I realized that inside that 10,000 word manuscript was a great 8,000 word story screaming to get out.

I didn’t have time to make those changes before the deadline. I did a quick edit, I fixed a few minor warts … and I sent it out.

If they like it, hopefully by the time they get back to me, I’ll have a great edit ready.

If not … I’ll have a great edit ready for someone else.

In the meantime, I added a tick to the count of Circulating Stories in the following graph...

Submissions 2016-01-07.png

… and blogging about it added a tick to this graph:

Building Inventory 2.png

Since I’ve seen, and done the alternative … sitting on stories forever ... I think this is was the “write" thing to do.

-the Centaur

Play on Words San Jose

Published January 7, 2016 by centaur

Play on Words is a great event which features short fiction performed by actors in front of a live audience. I’ve attended a couple of them since several of my fellows in Thinking Ink Press and the Write to the End group got their works performed at Play on Words.

Wednesday night, the Play on Words troupe performed short fiction by Keiko O’Leary, Betsy Miller and Marilyn Horn-Fahey; if you have a time machine, set the wayback to 7pm at Cafe Stritch (which incidentally has great jambalaya!), or, if your navigation circuit’s knackered, check out the live stream provided courtesy of South Bay Pulse magazine.

If you don’t have a time machine, there’s always YouTube! Find the link here.

And check it out! Next one is about three months out.

-the Centaur

Best Laid Plans Sometimes Must Be Set Aside

Published January 5, 2016 by centaur

So I started off this year with all sorts of big plans - blogging every day, hitting the ground running at work - and it’s kind of funny to stumble so close to the starting gate. I missed blogging yesterday, and I missed today at work entirely due to bleah.

But things happen for a reason, I think; the world looks deterministic and impersonal down at the level of the laws of physics, but there’s a structure to it at a higher level which, if not real, is at least something we can take advantage of.

Case in point one: I’ve been pushing hard to finish a revision to the first chapters of my novel, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but it’s slow going as I’ve had to rethink my whole approach to the book. Digging through my other Jeremiah material for inspiration, I found an almost-finished novella, which my obssessive-compulsive tendencies sucked me into trying to finish. (Procrastinating on one project with another project is worth further discussion, I think, but that’s another blogpost for another time, if I haven’t already blogged on it, that is). But I made myself stop after I took a pass, and tried to tackle my daily blogpost.

At which point a friend dropped by to talk. I was at Coupa Cafe, a hot spot for great Venezuelan coffee and Silicon Valley’s startup culture, which isn’t just about startups, but is actually a hotbed for intellectual discussion. In thirty short minutes, my buddy and I dove far into the intricacies of deep learning, something which affects me a lot at work - and just as that was winding down, one of his other friends dropped in, and started quizzing me about the mathematics in my urban fantasy novels. Turns out he’s an expert in precisely the same areas of mathematics that my young protagonist Cinnamon Frost is - so I see more conversations in our future.

Definitively, that conversation was worth more than the schedule of my blogposts, so it was the right thing to do to fully engage with the human beings right in front of me rather than sticking mechanically to my plan. It’s really important to take advantage of these opportunities and to capitalize on them when they happen. That’s what this world is structured for.

Now, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to capitalize on catching my wife’s flu and waking up feeling like someone pummeled me with a half ton of bricks, but I’m sure there’s some lesson or opportunity in there. At least I … uh, dunno, got to drop off my dry cleaning on my way to the local restaurant for some hot chicken soup? Not sure what’s the lesson in there. (Though it’s probably a sign that I need to sit down with my laptop and catch up on writing documentation, which I can easily do from home).

-the Centaur

Building Inventory

Published January 3, 2016 by centaur

Building Inventory.png

I’m taking on a new writing project - posting once a day on this blog this year - and, naturally, the first thing I open when i start a writing project - after Word or Ecto, to write the text - is Microsoft Excel, to track what I’m doing. Maybe that’s a sign of my so-called “left brain analytical tendencies” (NOTE: the left brained / right brained nonsense is a MYTH, used here for entertainment value only); after all, Quentin Tarantino once said “you can’t write poetry on a computer” and I doubt he spins up Excel on his yellow notepads. But a lot of successful cartoonists I know, like Bill Holbrook of Kevin and Kell, got their start on their most successful projects by getting an inventory - a month or two of backlog that they could use to prevent themselves from getting behind, and the only way I know to get that far ahead is to actually track what you’re doing.

Screenshot 2016-01-03 15.24.54.png

It’s been a useful exercise so far. I found about half dozen old blog posts that never got posted (some quite stale now) and found many other ideas popping to mind just by writing them down. I also realized the limits of my Excel-fu, as the nice diagrams I generate for my Nanowrimo progress are actually the outcome of a lot of careful tweaking which I can’t easily replicate quickly.

Screenshot 2016-01-03 15.25.17.png

But the exercise is really helpful. Just like all the other things in my life I’ve gotten more disciplined about tracking - my Nanowrimo progress, my word count, my short stories, my TODOs, my office piles - I’ve found great benefits come quickly, and it brings clarity, focus … and a great feeling of relief when you hit Save and are one more unit ahead of the onrushing wolf.

-the Centaur

Welcome to 2016

Published January 1, 2016 by centaur

Hi, I’m Anthony! I love to write books and eat food, activities that I power by fiddling with computers. Welcome to 2016! It’s a year. I hope it’s a good one, but hope is not a strategy, so here’s what I’m going to do to make 2016 better for you.

First, I’m writing books. I’ve got a nearly-complete manuscript of a steampunk novel JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE which I’m wrangling with the very excellent editor Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books. God willing, you’ll see this come out this year. Jeremiah appears in a lot of short stories in the anthologies UnCONventional, 12 HOURS LATER, and 30 DAYS LATER - more on that one in a bit.

I also have completed drafts of the urban fantasy novels SPECTRAL IRON and HEX CODE, starring Dakota Frost and her adopted daughter Cinnamon Frost, respectively. If you like magical tattoos, precocious weretigers, and the trouble they can get into, look for these books coming soon - or check out FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE, the first three Dakota books. (They’re all still on sale, by the way).

Second, I’m publishing books. I and some author/artist friends in the Bay Area founded Thinking Ink Press, and we are publishing the steampunk anthology 30 DAYS LATER edited by Belinda Sikes, AJ Sikes and Dover Whitecliff. We’re hoping to also re-release their earlier anthology 12 HOURS LATER; both of these were done for the Clockwork Alchemy conference, and we’re proud to have them.

We’re also publishing a lot more - FlashCards and InstantBooks and SnapBooks and possibly even a reprint of a novel which recently went out of print. Go to Thinking Ink Press for more news; for things I’m an editor/author on I’ll also announce them here.

Third, I’m doing more computing. Cinnamon Frost is supposed to be a mathematical genius, so to simulate her thought process I write computer programs (no joke). I’ve written up some few articles on this for publication on this blog, and hope to do more over the year to come.

Fourth, I’m going to keep doing art. Most of my art is done in preparation for either book frontispieces or for 24-Hour Comics Day, but I’m going to step that up a bit this year - I have to, if I’m going to get (ulp) three frontispieces done over the next year. Must draw faster!

Finally, I’m going to blog more. I’m already doing it, right now, but one way I’m trying to get ahead is to write two blog posts at a time, publishing one and saving one in reserve. This way I can keep getting ahead, but if I fall behind I’ve got some backlog to fall back on. I feel hounded by all the ideas in my head, so I’m going to loose them on all of you.

As for New Year’s Resolutions? Fah. I could say “exercise more, blog every day, and clean up the piles of papers” but we all know New Year’s Resolution’s are a joke, unless your name is Jim Davies, in which case they’re performance art.

SO ANYWAY, 2016. It’s going to be a year. I hope we can make it a great one!

-the Centaur

Pictured: The bookshelves of Cafe Intermezzo in the Atlanta airport, one place where I like to write books and eat food.

Some Years Are Better Than Others, Aren’t They?

Published December 31, 2015 by centaur

1995 was one of the best years of my life: I got engaged, I published my first scientific paper, and I published my first short story. All that gave me a great feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment, but that happiness was short lived: that engagement ultimately disintegrated, my PhD dragged on, and I didn’t publish another short story for years.

Now, there were great sparks in there - successive internships at CMU in Pittsburgh in 1996, SRI in the Bay Area in 1997 and Yamaha in Japan in 1998 - but I didn’t really start feeling great until 1999, when my thesis advisor started an internet startup with me and one of his graduate students - Enkia, my first taste of the inside of a healthy startup.

But the dotcom crash happened and everything got acrimonious (as things do when external factors turn sour, since people are no longer glossing over problems that didn’t bother them before) and my father grew gravely ill and we all agreed it was better to part ways, so that happy time evaporated too. I don’t even really have good pictures of this time, not digital ones.

The pattern repeats - ups and downs, good times and bad, a few really so-so jobs with really nice people, meeting my wonderful fiancee and having a terrible-post wedding experience with my mother, and so on, and so on. It’s really easy to focus on the bad, sometimes, to think of all the things that have gone wrong.

This year was no different: loss of the family matriarch, extreme disruption at work (I lost 2 SVPs, 2 directors, 2 bosses and 2 teams in the last year to other-than-normal churn) and the delay of my latest novel, the CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. But at the same time, I had a great novel published - LIQUID FIRE - found a wonderful new team, and had a great time with friends and family.

You know what? Crap happens. But wonderful things happen to. And the way that we choose to take things affects what we get out of them. If you focus on all the bad stuff, you may end up feeling like your life is in the shitter. But if you take the time out to appreciate the good things as they happen, to share them with friends and family, and to remember them …

… you might find everything really did turn out all right.

-the Centaur

How to Be a Better Writer (the Short Version)

Published December 9, 2015 by centaur

Recently a colleague asked me if I had any advice on being a better writer. I thought I’d posted about that, but it appears that I hadn’t, so I tried writing up my thoughts. That was too much, so I summarized. That was too much, so I summarized it AGAIN. And then it was short enough to share with you:

The super short version is to be a better writer, just write!

I often recommend morning pages - writing three pages about random topics at the start of your day, even "bla bla bla" if you have to - you'll get tired of writing “bla bla bla" quickly, and this will help cure you of the feeling you need to wait for your muse.

This advice comes from the book The Artist's Way, which is a great course to take; I also recommend Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and Brooks Landon's Building Great Sentences on grammar and style, Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction and The Art of Nonfiction on writing and structure, and The Elements of Editing and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers on editing.

I also recommend that you read a lot more than you write, especially writing of the kind you want to emulate; take a look at it and see what makes it tick.

For fiction and other similar writing I recommend finding a writing group first, not a critique group; there are several good ones in the Bay Area including Write to the End and Shut Up and Write.

For the kind of internal communications you're talking about, you might try looking at marketing and documentation literature or the great writers internally that you admire - also popular writers, technical and nontechnical, in the computer field.

As for blogging, my recommendation is to just blog - try to do it regularly, at least once a week or so, about whatever comes to your mind, so that you create both a growing store of content - and again, a habit that helps you just write.

I’ll try to expand on these recommendations, but if I had to boil it down even further, I’d say: just write!

-the Centaur

Eight Hundred Fifty Thousand Words

Published December 1, 2015 by centaur

Nanowrimo 2015-11-30a.png

So another Nanowrimo draws to a close. The title says HEX CODE, but today’s writing was finishing out a few details in scenes in BOT NET (the second part of the Spellpunk trilogy manuscript I’m working on) and then a new beginning for ROOT USER (book 3). That new beginning, which played out a scene I’ve had in my head a long time, was very easy to write.

“That’s a damn shame,” says a distant voice, “so large an animal, in so small a cage.”

Muzzily, I grogs awake. What the fuck? Can’t they see I’m sleepin’? But then the words they’ve spoken starts to set in, balls in a Pachinko machine, rattlin’ in through the Pascal’s Triangle patterns in my brain to rack up a score of maximum annoyance.

The cage, you see, is large, for its type—a safety cage. Eight by thirty, made of elaborate wrought-iron vines, fashioned special from a welder we knows in Little Five Points, the safety cage is the largest and nicest I’ve ever been in—and the largest we could fit on our front porch.

The porch is big, and Southern, in front of a house big, and Southern, a third of the way down Fairview from Moreland, not three blocks from L5P. Pretty big even by Atlanta standards, but county code sez leave the front door unblocked, so thirty feet wide is was the cage limit.

Not that it feels limiting; there’s lamps and books and ferns and an ahw-SOOOME sectional sofa we found at an outdoor patio store, which stretches almost from the porch door on the left to the <regulation width with code #> stair down to my den.

It’s a full fourteen feet of sofa, fully twelve feet of it usable—which is a good thing, because stretched over it right now, covering just about its full length this very instant, is the enormous animal that the annoying interpopers have named.

Me.

That’s why the last day of Nano has that spike: let your inspiration flow!

Nanowrimo 2015-11-30b.png

That brought me to over 65,000 words, the most I’ve done in Nano, as far as I know, ever:

Nanowrimo 2015-11-30c.png

SO I have a new record to beat. But I also cracked 700,000 words on my spreadsheet … which means, since I’ve done Nano at least three times before, my total Nano total is 850,000 words.

Nanowrimo 2015-11-30d.png

I feel pretty happy about that. Nano has brought so many creative ideas to the table, I can’t even begin to describe it. Easily a half dozen completely new ideas came to me this month - one even within the final writing session just before midnight tonight. I have to credit Nano for giving me this inspiration.

Now, onward to the next round of edits on THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE … and the 50,000 other projects I’ve been putting off, like my library … though I *might* take out a little time to play a video game, or, perhaps, read a book … you never know ...

-the Centaur

Giving Thanks for a Post-Nano Surge

Published November 27, 2015 by centaur

Nanowrimo 2015-11-27.png

I normally take off the week of Thanksgiving to finish Nanowrimo, and if you look at the stack of seven hundred thousand words that I’ve written in Nanowrimos, you can see the surge there clearly. (I bet it would be even more clear if I only counted the November Nanos, but I’m doing this graph in Excel, not Mathematica or Processing or R, so sue me for laziness).

Nanowrimo 2015-11-27b.png

But even so, it’s easy to see (if you are me) that I’m perilously close to beating my all time record for November, set in 2010 with THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE with 60,164 words. And there ARE four days of Nano left, so I just may keep pushing on. My record per day that I’ve kept records is over 7000 words (almost certainly the mad scramble to finish LIQUID FIRE in 2009 after getting edits on BLOOD ROCK early in the month), so that’s easily doable. And my average for these four days is close to 4000 words. One year I even made 5300 words today, on the 27th, so keep your fingers crossed.

But as much as I like to take this week off - as much as antisocial me doesn’t want to accumulate obligations on my time, which I freely admit made the first half of this week miserable from the temporal anticipation - I really do enjoy hanging out with my friends and family, and even though I don’t get the chance to fly home to see my blood family over this holiday, I loved having the chance to get together at the house of my “brother from another mother” and his wife and to join them on their Thanksgiving.

Family, friends, and good times aren’t the only important things in life. But they sure do make life a lot better.

-the Centaur

Soon

Published November 15, 2015 by centaur

Soon I will update the Library of Dresan WordPress code. This is in preparation for a site overhaul, but before I get there, I’m trying to radically improve how I do my backups, which involves seriously upgrading the WordPress code.

In preparation for that, I’m backing the site up several different ways, making sure I have the files AND the database securely downloaded and safe. However, something always can go wrong, so keep your fingers crossed.

And if the site mysteriously disappears for a few days, well, you heard why, here, first.

-the Centaur

The Sweet Smell of Renewal

Published November 14, 2015 by centaur

One of the things that I've been surprised by during this Return to my Library is how much I missed my own ideas. I knew, intuitively, that I used this external collection to help maintain my internal memories, but it wasn't until now, when a random album came up while I was preparing to go grab some food, that I realized it. The Matrix Revolution started playing, and I was not just reminded of the f@nu fiku series that the Matrix serves as a soundtrack to, but also an older project, DELIVERANCE, a novel set in the Library of Dresan universe. So many things have happened since then - a move to California, a theft in my car, a loss of my notebooks, a fortuitous sale of a new novel series, an ill-considered anthology, and a new project at work - that I had almost lost the mental context of all of that creative enterprise. Tonight, doing a little random cleanup, in the place which I'd prepared for myself, but somehow forgotten, it all came flooding back. Maybe all this effort to prepare a great space really is worth it. Off to get my wordcount on. L8r. -the Centaur P.S. Yes, it might seem a bit strange to go out to dinner right when I'm celebrating my Library, but if you think that, you have no idea how much of a foodie I am. :-D

Getting it together

Published November 13, 2015 by centaur

What you see there is my "working stack" at home ... the piles of books for my most active projects. These include Dakota Frost (shelves to the left and right that you can't quite see), Cinnamon Frost (middle shelf on the right, middle center shelf and others below), robotics at work (top shelf on the right), Thinking Ink Press (bottom visible shelf on the right and middle center shelf), Lovecraft studies (middle center shelf and top shelf on the left you can't quite see), and general writing (above, below, all around).

I accumulate lots and lots of books - too many, some people think - but there's a careful method to this madness, as most of these books are not recreational, but topical, filling out a library around things I'm trying to accomplish. This means that when I'm working on a problem on, say, a Cinnamon Frost novel, and get stumped, I can have the pleasant experience I had last night of glaring at a Wolfram MathWorld article, not finding all the info I needed, peering through the references ... and finding that the references pointed to a book I had on the topic, right in the Cinnamon shelf (pictured above).

For a long time I was terrified of my own library. Well, not terrified, but I'd piled up and accumulated so much stuff that I couldn't effectively use it. This has been accumulating since the days of my condo in Atlanta, which was approaching near gravitational collapse, but I've made two major pushes to clean up the library since I moved to California, which organized it usefully, as I've reported on previously, and since then two major pushes to clean up the files. I've still got a lot go go - you can see more piles below - but now I've got a better system for organizing paper, I am starting to develop a system to get things out of the library and back to used bookstores (slowly, grudgingly, occasionally) and ... I actually find myself wanting to go in here again.

The piles are still scary, but now I've got a nice reading area set up, which I can lean back and be cozy in...

My current reading pile and art projects are intimidating, but now organized and useful and even attractive ...

My cognitive science section has developed a cozy, hallowed feel, that makes me want to dig in more ...

... and at last I once again have a workspace which makes me want to sit down and work, or write:

I can't tell you how healthy that feels. I need to stay on top of that. But for now ... time to get back to it.

-the Centaur P.S. Yes, I do actually use all those computers and monitors, though the one on the far right is slowly getting replaced by the floating hoverboard of an iMac that is now struggling to supplant my MacBook Air as my primary computer (good luck, you'll need it). For reference, there's my ancient MacBook Pro on the left, which formerly served as my home server; the iMac that's replacing it, hovering over the desk, a MacBook Air which is my primary computer, and the secondary keyboard and monitor for my old Linux workstation, which is about to be replaced because it's not beefy enough for my experiments with ROS.