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Prereading note: this is being written as a way to generate my fiction for the week. As a result, the first draft (potentially the only draft I post) will be very rambly and disjointed. I will pick up and discard ideas like small pebbles or shells on a wave-swept beach, sifting to find the one that speaks to me.

This is my third week in a row musing about what I want to write for Flash Fiction Friday.¹ This week’s theme is “A form of distraction.”

Form of distraction could mean kind of distraction. Form can also be like the shape of an object, such as form over function. What shape does distraction take?

Ok that’s maybe too far into the weeds, but we’ll put a pin in that and maybe come back.

The obvious meaning² is something we do to redirect our attention away from something we don’t want to deal with. Form here modifies distraction in the sense of a shape that distraction can be forced into.

If we instead make distraction the agent, and we the object³, we end up with a form of distraction being a way that distraction takes over us.

I haven’t been writing as much these past few days as I would normally like, so I suppose that it’s only natural that my mind goes to writing as the actual center of this story. A form of distraction here could refer to the ways that my attention are pulled from the writing and craft I’ve been dedicated to. Ok I also want to try using the writing advice that I read about recently. Since I don’t want to have to keep going to the musing about it and searching through the rambled prose, the rules are:

If I stick to those three rules, there’s also an implication that I’m in either first person or third person omniscient, since third limited, in my experience, at least, explicitly calls out the thoughts that a character has. Maybe that’s just because the writing I read is bad according to this method, but I don’t think so.⁴

Ok so I think that I want to have something about the form of distraction in writing. I need to have characters, plural, but I don’t know if I really want that. The two desires are clashing. I’m going to take a minute⁵ and try to form the fiction, seeing what I produce.

Quick note: even before starting to write, i realize that I don’t really want dialogue in this fiction. I write a lot of fiction in everything else that I do, and I think that this site being a place where I minimize dialogue in fiction might be a good idea for me. Maybe not. Ultimately, though, I’m writing this for fun, and it’s completely uncoupled from all the other writing I do, even more than the rest of it is fairly atomized. I’m going to write the first draft as free association and see what comes out.

Two lines in, I’m realizing that I want this to be poetry? I think that there could be something fun with a mixture between poetry and prose. Maybe the first half is poetry⁶ and then it shifts to prose, reflecting a distraction at a meta level. Is that too edgy for the sake of being different? Maybe! Bu we’ll get to find out, and that’s really the nature of doing short writing. At worst, it doesn’t work and I spent a few minutes doing some writing that didn’t end up working how I thought it might.

Ok, so I don’t really hate what I’ve written. I think that it’s a really strong start, for all that I ended where I think that I want the actual story to start. I guess the question is how blatant I want to be. The writer I cite for writing advice says that starting with the declarative kills the suspense of the other writing. I think that I’ll try leaving the reveal to the end, for all that I know that I’ll need to put the reveal somewhere that makes it better. What I’ve drafted so far, though, is probably good enough for me to start working on the other two and a half writing assignments I have for the day.⁷

Having now finished one of the writing assignments,⁸ it is now time, I suppose to try revising the FFF. Honestly, though, given that I’m spending time with my family, I don’t know what my motivation level really is. We’re all doing something else while watching a movie,. Then again, I should keep writing, if only because I want to increase my word count for the day. Maybe I’ll try my second assignment for the day.⁹

Well, I think that I honestly am pretty happy with the way this latest draft came out. I’m not sure if I quite want to post it, if only because I feel like there’s merit in writing things solely for my own sake. Now, I suppose, the question is whether I want to rewrite this draft or start writing the final thing I have to write today.

Let’s make a quick pro contra for each. Pros of redrafting this: it’s easy, and I think that it could be fun to reflect about what I wrote in a slightly more coherent manner. Cons of redrafting this: redrafting is really just code for rewriting wholesale, and I don’t know if I really want to do that. Pros of writing Jeb: I get further ahead of the writing that I give to my readers, and I have less stress about doing it in the future. Cons of writing Jeb: I have to figure out where I want the plot¹⁰ to go.

I think that it might be worth, if nothing else, trying to figure out where I want to take the book in the next few chapters. For all that it feels like I kind of have too many words to fill, the number of chapters I have left to tell my story is rapidly shrinking.

Honestly, drafting the book did a lot to help me start to feel ready for writing. I only got halfway through plotting the rest of this book, but I realized that there’s actually a very limited number of things that I need¹¹ to have happen in the rest of this arc, but I started working backwards. Unfortunately, that means that I still have the rest of the intermediate content to do, including the chapters I need to write right now.¹² Anyways, good job with writing today me.

a friend pointed out that FFFXYZ for X,Y,Z as single digit integers means that you end up with a hex code in the yellow. That’s kind of fun, especially since that means every Flash Fiction Friday is technically a shade of yellow↩
to me writing right now↩
man I love the rare linguistics classes I took to give me the words to discuss some of the metacognition I need↩
I mean, a lot of the writing I read is unquestionably unskilled, at the very least. However, it seems as though the writing I read that is better, at least nominally, still uses think. I guess it’s like the analogy of vibrato and ketchup (early musicians tend to say that vibrato is like ketchup. It’s fine and good, but if you put it on everything, everything will taste like ketchup).↩
the colloquial meaning of the word, not the definitional one based on the decay of cesium↩
sonnet form right now, so getting at least through the first stanza, probably two stanzas would be best↩
NaNo, Jeb, and that’s about it. I guess this counts as the third, but I’ve (clearly) already started on it. I guess the question is if I should go straight through NaNo like I’ve done basically every day this month, or if I should take some breaks in the middle. Last night, despite the fact that I said I was not going to finish, I somehow did, which was really great and cool.↩
NaNo, the only one that I actually feel obligated to do in a given day↩
Hmm, I wonder if looking at jeb as an assignment, rather than a hobby, makes me want to do it less. Hmmm, that’s probably something that’s worth interrogating myself about↩
admittedly minimal as it is↩
need is such a weird word in fiction. This book does not need to exist↩
I know that some authors do not write strictly chronologically, which doesn’t really make sense to me. I don’t really know how to think about the end of the book without thinking about each step before it. Learning to write better prose might help with that.↩

Thanksgiving Ahome

Draft 1

I often feel like even when I reflect on a day, the hours pass by in a blur and I have no clue what I’ve done with any of them. I don’t really want that to be the case, especially today. So, as much as possible, I’m planning to treat today as a “day in the life” log.

Let’s start where my morning started. At seven am, my alarms went off. I groaned and kept my eyes closed for a few minutes, too tired to stand up. By the time I managed to remind myself that I was about to go make bagels, an activity I’m excited for, it was closer to seven fifteen.

Downstairs, I found that the bagel dough had risen a lot overnight. It was an incredibly soft and supple dough, which I was grateful for. I felt called to make larger bagels than we have in the past.

I suppose I should explain. My family has a tradition that’s around 8 years old now of making bagels on Thanksgiving morning. If I remember correctly, it began because I was a little sad that my family didn’t really have any fun traditions, and we were also planning to bring a bunch of friends over for Thanksgiving. I also was in a trend of baking bread at that point, and I wanted some way to feel connected to my grandmother. The combination of all of those meant that I thought it could be really fun to make bagels on Thanksgiving morning.

The book we first made the bagels out of said that a single recipe would make two dozen.¹ However, bagels have clearly grown much larger since the book was written, because each of the two dozen bagels was far, far smaller than what I could get at any bagel store. This year, since I did not measure anything, I decided to make bagels that felt closer in size to what I’m familiar with in the rest of my life.

Somehow, this meant that instead of the 30 or so bagels I expected to make, I had 18. That did mean that the boiling and baking went much more quickly, because my family’s oven can easily hold two trays of bagels. The pot was barely too small for six of the bagels at the size I made them, but it worked out fine.

After shaping and boiling,², my father came down. We chatted as I put the bagels into the oven, and we cleaned up from the mess.³ As the bagel finished, we threw a butter braid into the oven, because we all wanted something sweet in addition to bagels.

My mother came down, and we chatted for a bit over coffee and bagels. I delivered a few to a friend of the family, which is another long running part of the tradition. Since the first year we’ve made thanksgiving bagels, we’ve also delivered them to people around the community. In years where we made a few hundred, we gave out far more. Nowadays, the list of deliveries is far shorter, which is a relief.

Coming home, I helped arrange the table and then chatted with my family. At around ten fifteen, I started thinking about writing. I did a few typing exercises, since I would like to be faster at typing.⁴ I planned out the work I want to do today.⁵ I know for certain that writing my to do list on paper is more effective for me, if only because I tend to ramble and journal around my to do list when I do it virtually. However, the journalling is a nice way to reflect on my thoughts, and it’s far less coherent than I ever want to put out into the world, so it is what it is.

At that point, it was time for me to start writing this blog. I sign off for now at twenty to eleven, because the rest of the family is up and about and we’re going to start chatting and planning the cooking for the day. We’re more or less unscheduled until 1300, at which point I’ll need to spatchcock turkeys and start cooking This year, we’re shooting for a 5 pm eat time.

Well, I’m signing back on at 2100 or so. I chatted with my family, which was fun, and ended up spatchcocking the turkeys at close to half twelve. Due to some confusion with spices⁶, it took a while to get them ready to bake Since my hands were covered in turkey juice and, quite frankly, turkey, I did not weigh in. Given that we were still well ahead of time, I didn’t worry about it.

The internet assured us that it should take about eighty minutes to cook the turkey. We didn’t believe that, and assumed two to two and a half hours. However, as it turned out, we only needed ninety minutes, if only that. I have strong memories of this being true in past years as well, at least since we’ve started spatchcocking. However, despite the fact that the turkey is fairly overcooked, by traditional standards, at least, the breast meat remains juicy.⁷

While the turkey started to cook, we quickly browned the giblets, neck, and backbones.⁸ Once they had a little bit of color, we added them to a pot of chicken stock we’d made⁹ and started simmering the two together. The stock ended up getting used for stuffing¹⁰ and gravy.

After that, we started making cranberry sauce and other such dishes. We finished everything about an hour ahead of schedule, at which point we did some cleanup and had dinner. After dinner, we finished cleaning, hung out for a while, and had dessert. At some point during the day, someone came to visit.

I’m sure other events happened throughout the night, but I cannot remember them. Right now, part of the family has gone to bed, and the rest of us are all watching a dumb Christmas movie.¹¹ That feels like as good of a place to sign this off as any!

I love old cookbooks, which never assume that you’re cooking for anything less than an extended family↩︎
while finishing up an audiobook↩︎
read: he did most of the cleaning, which I appreciated↩︎
at this point, I’m honestly limited more by my ability to key stroke than my ability to conjure up words to stroke onto the page↩︎
even though it’s a holiday, I enjoy most of the things that I do, and I want to stay in the habit of doing things like blogging and writing the books I’m writing↩︎
there was an argument about what spices to use and how to grind them and how to add them to butter↩︎
the fact that we put about a pound of butter between the skin and turkey breast probably doesn’t do anything to help that.↩︎
we cooked two turkeys↩︎
read: our fantastic extended family made and brought↩︎
dressing, if we’re being technical, since we didn’t stuff it into anything (well, other than ourselves and the leftovers into their containers)↩︎
while doing different activities as well. I’m working on this blog, my little brother is editing all of my self published writing,↩︎
at least, I don’t have anything when I search for a blog post starting with the term bagel. It’s possible that I have, instead, something starting with recipe. Eh, that’s something to learn another time↩︎
and editing my writing, because my little brother has finished↩︎

Bagels!

Draft 1 (22 Nov)

I’m writing this post tonight, but I know that I won’t get around to posting it until the morning. On the bright side, that means that I can write a second draft of it. Today, for the first time since starting the family tradition of Thanksgiving bagels, I made the dough before the morning of. I don’t know if that will end up being a good idea, but I’m glad that I no longer have to start waking up at 3 in the morning to begin all the prep work for the morning, especially since Thanksgiving is always a long day.

This year’s attempt at bagels included potato starch, bread flour, and vital gluten, which made for a very springy dough. I’m excited to see what it becomes.

there is something interesting in the fact that a reader looking back has no real way to know when, exactly, a post was written or even published. Artifice on artifice↩︎

Something I’m Calling Carbonara Recipe

Draft 1

I’ve mused a few times in the past few days that, although I write a post a day and averaged out, come up with about a post a day, I almost never have a single idea in a day. Unfortunately, on days that I do not have any ideas, I also tend to forget the ideas that I’ve come up with on previous days

I had been considering writing about music, specifically writing music, but couldn’t find a post with that exact title. Searching through early posts on my blog, I remembered that one series I had was recipes I wanted to be able to remember, reference, and rely on in the future.¹ Although most of my food exploration has been slowed in the past few months,² I have at least one recipe that was a mainstay for me for a few weeks.

There are some important contexts to the story of the dish I’m going to describe. First, although I’m going to call it carbonara³, I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet get very mad at calling anything that isn’t exactly what their grandmother⁴ made carbonara. This is not, in any meaningful sense, a traditional carbonara recipe. However, of the pasta sauces I know names for, carbonara is the closest to describing what I cook.

The astute among you may notice that there are no specific ingredient amounts here. That is for a very basic reason: I only believe in measurements by the heart these days.

That being said, there are some constants in most iterations of the recipe. I almost always use a single, whole lemon. I tend to use two or three whole large eggs.⁸

Now, there’s a very valid argument to be made that this is not carbonara in any real sense. There’s no pork of any kind, at a bare minimum. Arguably, calling the sauce you make here mayonnaise is not too far off base, since it’s primarily an emulsion of oil and egg.

Taste wise, however, I have no complaints. The lemon zest and juice make what would otherwise be an incredibly heavy meal into something almost refreshing.

Oh, I realize I forgot to discuss the reasons that I started making this dish. Chief among them is the fact that I started keeping lemons in my home. The curious among my readers might ask why I started keeping lemons in my home.¹⁴ The long and short of it is that I had a friend who seemed appalled that I used lemon juice for all of my cooking needs. He argued that fresh lemons are just objectively better in every regard.

Truthfully, I cannot say that I disagree with that take, having now started to use them. Other than that, the main consideration was that I really just wanted pasta al burro¹⁵ every night for dinner, but knew that wasn’t healthy for me. This still scratched the itch, and had the benefit of a number of other macro and micro nutrients. However, I stopped eating as many lemons, and also wanted to eat more different foods, so I haven’t made this dish as much recently. Maybe I’ll start doing so again. We’ll see, I suppose.

I love rules of three, and couldn’t think of a better third r word right now↩
not because I do not cook (though lately that’s been more of that), but because I’ve started cooking more wildly and less regimented. Even though I still go through trends where I want to cook the same dish over and over, I find that what I cook tends to be a variation on “put everything that I feel about in the pot and maybe water if I want it to be soupier”, rather than the regimented recipes of my past↩
as, I realize, you the reader saw when opening the page, despite the fact that I write the title last when doing any of my musings↩
allegedly↩
I watched an interesting video where they seemed to suggest that more expensive pasta, which is often described as better, is mostly just better because it releases more starch into the cooking water. Regardless of how true that is, I do find that starchier water makes this dish go better. At worst, just use less water than you’re used to, and there will be a higher starch to water ratio from that (agitating the pasta while cooking also helps release starch)↩
I don’t remember when I stopped using preground black pepper, but I think it was just about the exact moment that I started buying groceries for myself. To the best of my knowledge, it isn’t markedly more expensive, and it’s certainly better tasting. If you don’t fresh grind your own pepper, please consider this your call to↩
more or less as long as it’s hard and grates into powder you’re probably fine.↩
well, whole when I begin the process. I don’t use the shell, for I hope obvious reasons↩
note: as you make this recipe more times, you will likely find that the optimal amount of water is less and the optimal amount of salt is more. The less water you add, the faster you get food, because the less time it takes to heat the water to boiling↩
measure with your stomach. I tend to go for about half a pound when making a full meal out of it, but you can go for what feels appropriate to you↩
I generally recommend thin but sliced, not diced, because I like large surface area mushroom chunks↩
depending on how hungry you are and how much sauce you want. These are generally correlated but not always. Sometimes there’s also a voice in my head which suggests more protein would be healthy for me, and that tends to be a three egg and extra cheese kind of day↩
I tend to like mine browned on the outside and raw on the inside, but I recognize that I have less than common taste↩
depending on the reader, either questioning why started, or why I haven’t always kept lemons↩
the fancy (read: Italian) way to say buttered noodles↩

Dungeons and Dragons Again

Draft 1

As I said last week, I need to make a new character. Time passing, as it tends to, far too quickly, means that I did not get the new character made at all during the intervening hours. As I start this musing, I have less than 7 hours until the character is introduced to the group, which means that it’s time to generate character which rolls more dice.

I’m level four and get a bonus first level feat, which should help. Let’s start with Race, since I doubt that anything will really change too much. Other than a few racial feats, this is fairly self contained. I think my goal for a race is easier time criticalling, since crits double dice.

Unsurprisingly, there are not too many options, especially given how many classes there are. Now I get to go through every feat available at or before fourth level to see how they balance, since I think that’ll be more impactful than backgrounds, and the two together should let me figure out my Class more effectively.

Ok wow that’s a lot of options. Best options are those that do not limit the times I can use them explicitly, and come in the category of giving more places where I can attack and making attacks have more dice.

Ok so I think that it’s better for me to do more dice rather than roll more often. I feel like I generally use reactions and bonus actions, so the second category is probably better Aw shucks, Vital Sacrifice explicitly says I can’t reduce the damage I would take in gaining the boon, which is a shame, but does make sense because otherwise I build something with immunity to necrotic damage.

Most likely backgrounds won’t matter, and I’m very quickly running out of hours to figure this out. I think, at least at the level we are, Fighter makes the most sense. Champion at third level doubles my chances of a critical, and that’s really my only goal right now. For all that Great Weapon Fighting is considered subpar, it does increase the number of dice I get to roll.⁴

I absolutely want Vital Sacrifice, and then I have to choose between Half Orc, elf, and Kor. If I choose Elf, I take Elven accuracy, which lets me reroll when I have advantage. If I take Half Orc, I get an extra damage die when I crit. If I take Kor, 1 on attacks become not one.

Ok so 1 will always miss, which means I roll no attacks. Kor feels better for that reason.

So I take Kor, Champion Fighter, and Vital Sacrifice. I still have my 4th level feat or raise statistics, point buy, and background to set up. There are far too many backgrounds but here we go:

I think Giant Foundling is the one to go for, especially because it works thematically. Now the question is whether it’s worth losing a level in Fighter for a level in rogue, which gives me access to sneak attack. I’m leaning towards probably not, because next level I get an extra attack. After that, though, might be worth switching over so I get extra dice.

Now time to generate stats and pick a weapon. I want something two handed so I benefit from great weapon master. Maul is the only two handed weapon other than double bladed scimitar, so I’ll take that. Mauls don’t do piercing damage, so that feat is out.

I’m going to do the nice sweet “dump dexterity, max out strength and constitution,” build. Assuming I’m allowed to take variant ability score increases, I’ll have

From there, at fourth level I want a feat that increases my con by one, and then ideally adds hit points. Something that adds ac would also be nice. Vigor of Hill Giants seems like the choice, because I restore Con and Prof extra hit points every short rest. Since I know that I’ll be taking some damage from my feat, that’s a good idea I think. Oh, I wear chainmail, so Dex doesn’t matter, which is nice. Welp, sixteen hundred words later I now have my initial build for a creature. This took far more time than I thought it would, but in retrospect, I’ve never really read through all the options before. I’m sure that there will come a point where rogue will allow me more dice to roll, I just don’t really know when that would be.

Having now finished the session, things went well. I realized upon arriving that, even though I knew the mechanics of the character, I did not know such relevant information as name and appearance. I looked up Kor, and they’re apparently very washed out elf looking people. Alfred was the only name that I could think of, so that’s what he was named, and I decided that since he was also a giant foundling, he and Goob knew each other.

Anyways, we did not have any combat this session, which means that the only d6 I rolled were to inflict damage on myself with the hope that I might be able to use it next session. It was a fun time!

as tempting as it is to use NPC races, I’ll have some restraint↩
here defined as lets me roll clicky clackies on an attack roll↩
ignoring the prerequisite of campaign↩
because I reroll 1↩

Reflections on Today’s Gospel

Draft 1

Today’s Gospel parable is the parable of the talents. It’s a parable I’ve always struggled with, for a few reasons.

The primary reason I’ve always struggled with it is that it doesn’t account for failure. The two options presented are either making more from what you are given, or not doing that. There is no fourth servant who attempted to trade his master’s property and failed.

I suppose that’s probably mostly just because it would muddy the story. The priest in today’s homily pointed out that a talent is around 100 pounds of precious metal. There’s certainly something to be said about the fact that the rich man trusted even his lowest servant with so much money, and it does do a lot to explain why the servant was so sure he would be able to find it after burying it.

There’s something else in the parable that sticks out to me right now, though. Even though at first the parable appears as a straightforward endorsement of capitalism, there are limits.

The first servant doubles his five talents to ten. That’s a 100 percent increase. However, he stops at that single doubling.

Some might argue that the market forces¹ would not support someone creating so much more than five talents of wealth. Ten talents might exhaust the field, creating a monopoly. The second servant, however, starts with two.

When he doubles his starting value, he has nearly as much as the first servant was given. If the message of the parable is that more is always better, then he should absolutely have doubled his investment again. And yet, he didn’t.

In the context of what I assume we’re supposed to read the parable as, treating talents in the modern sense, rather than as a concept of wealth, it is a relieving distinction. Whatever gifts we are given are not needed to expand exponentially forever. As someone who finds that they’re constantly disappointed in lack of progress, that is a relieving proposition.

Of course, I mentioned at the beginning of this post that it bothers me that there is never an unsuccessful servant. Within the context of the parable, that does not necessarily hold. Those who try do not always succeed.

However, this is one of the places that⁴ the fact that the story is a parable answers the question.⁵ If our work is to use our talents for the building of the Kingdom, then there is no way for our work not to prosper.

They say that the road to hell is paved in good intentions. That may be true, but intentions are not action. To strive earnestly for a better world, with an open heart and mind, is to make the world a better place. Even if we do not see the ways in which our work helps those around us, we can be assured that there is no good we do which does not multiply to infinity.

As much as I want to go and read the reflections of great thinkers of the Church on this parable, I know that I need to take the advice I said above and not push for the sake of pushing. There are more upcoming hours in the day, and I hope that I will have the energy I need to do that reflection, but I will not count on it.

Update: I had my weekly bible study. This week, not all of the students were available, so we joined with another group. It is really interesting to see how much quieter my students are when surrounded by strangers. Even on the first day, when we were just meeting for the first time, they seemed much more willing to speak up than they were today.

I really hope that the same is not true for the other class’s students. I would hate to think that my being there made them uncomfortable sharing what they thought. Still, what little that each of the students said remained very well thought out.

I’m taking a completely non-religious view of the parable, trusting only the market↩︎
wow the more that I accept that sometimes I just know an answer and so don’t have to justify how we get to it the happier I am. It’s absolutely a dangerous trend that I need to make sure doesn’t go to far. After all, examining why things are true is often valuable, and especially when trying to self reflect. However, in cases like this, it’s nice to be able to skip the whole “but won’t someone think of the poor conglomerate?”↩︎
arguably the modern political ideal of capitalism, where not everyone has their basic needs met is bad on its own, even without the modifier of unbridled. I’m using the classicalish take that it’s the whole “individuals get to own things and set the value for their labor”↩︎
assuming my interpretation is correct, which I am generally unwilling to do. In this specific case, however, I will, if only because I want to also see interpretations from real theologians, and I know that will permanently affect the way that I read the parable. For all that I mused yesterday about how the way to judge a work is based on what it meant to do, not what it did, I do think that there’s value in knowing what I think independently of what great minds think↩︎
I am sure that it happens often, but most of the time the metaphor gets harder I find↩︎

Twelfth Night Review

Draft 1

Tonight I saw the same version of Twelfth Night that I saw just over five years ago. Of course, the cast and location were completely different. I didn’t think that I remembered any part of the show, but every time I heard one of the¹ musical numbers, it was like I was transported back to my time in London. The sense of deja vu was almost overwhelming at times.

Much like my musings in those days, I find that it’s late enough I have nothing else to say. Tomorrow I’ll do a comparative review, but tonight I must sleep.

Flash Fiction Friday

Draft 2: 18 November 2023

I find that I’m struggling to begin this second draft. On the one hand, I want to simply reflect on what I wrote last night. On the other, a reflection is its own post, not a new draft of a post. So, let’s rewrite my very scattered thoughts from last night into something a little more coherent, and then reflect?¹

As I mentioned last Friday, there is a weekly writing event called Flash Fiction Friday. I really like it as a concept, especially since they limit submissions to 100-1000 words. There’s something really nice about having to tell my narrative in such a tight format.

This week is apparently the 227th that they’ve put out a prompt. The prompt was “sands of time.” My mind immediately leapt between a number of ways that I could respond to the prompt, and I think it could be interesting to reflect on some of how my creative process works, if only to see if it helps me to construct narratives better in the future.

I do not think that I am alone in first thinking about an hourglass when thinking about the sands of time. There are so many ways that the concept is used in fiction that I’ve loved. Right now,² the first usage that popped into my head was Death in Discworld.³

I’ve taken to rejecting the first idea that pops in my head reflexively. The second idea that pops into my head, by contrast, gets an inordinate amount of consideration. Yesterday, my second thought was how glass and sand relate.

As most people know, when you melt sand down, you get glass. As a person who has taken some coursework in material science, though, I am fascinated by the way that they two substances are so fundamentally different. Sand is crystalline, which in some circles of the world means that it is solid.⁴ However, in bulk, sand behaves like a liquid. You can pour it, and it does not hold together without something to bind it.

Glass, by contrast, is definitionally a glass material.⁵ It behaves, on incredibly long timescales, almost as though a liquid. This is because⁶ it is completely amorphous.

An interesting consequence of this fact is that glass, even when ground down to particles the same size as the sand it was initially formed from, does not return to being sand. Instead, the tiny beads of glass remain completely amorphous. Now, I’m certain that over some time scale they eventually reconvert to crystalline, if only because I know a priori that a lot of the sand is, in fact, crystalline.⁷

With that fact in mind, I started to think about what the metaphor becomes with sand and glass. Sand is a collection of completely discrete and stable particles. Glass is something solid and yet not static at all.

From there, my mind immediately moved to glass as memory. Memories feel and seem stable, but there countless studies that show how intrinsically fluid they are. At that point, I had sand as moments of time, and glass as the meaning someone constructs.

I tried framing the story in a few ways, though I ultimately ended up with something that felt more like literature or philosophy than a short work of fiction.⁸ I ended my musing by saying both that I would read the post in the morning, and that I thought I would dislike it.

The friend I’m writing with this morning and early afternoon read my post and asked me to expound on my claim that “here is no genuine way to express something complex.” So, let’s go through the post and see what we think.

I feel like it’s a really rough post. As I said, there was not really a narrative. Reading it today, it really feels like what I have is the bones of a story, rather than the story itself. That being said, I don’t find it pretentious, which is a nice change.

Alright, let’s explore why I feel like expressing complexity inherently relies on artifice. I find that I’m immediately drawn to a conversation I had with a friend on Wednesday. As it turns out, this friend has a degree in poetry⁹, and he told me about an experience he had in one of his upper level classes.

One of his classmates refused to rewrite any poem. The classmate tried to justify it by saying that the poem expressed what it tried to express. To edit a poem was to compromise the artistic vision.

That anecdote came as we discussed the way that learning to revise is such a difficult skill. Separating the created work from the inspiration of creation is a difficult endeavor, especially as the creator.

I’m struggling to articulate how that prior sentence connects to my feeling of artifice. I think that, at first, everything is black and white, at least to me.¹⁰ To add nuance is to explicitly reject the initial impression.

I suppose that takes us to the question of what genuine means. Is my most genuine reaction the first impulse I have, or is it what I decide to believe when I have the chance to explore the consequences of each belief? I don’t have a good answer, for all that I have some more ways of musing about the difficulty of being genuine and nuanced.

I’ll use an example from my own life. When I write these posts, I often start by using identifying information about the people in my life. However, I do not want to harm them in the real world, and I know that there is a chance that anything I say here, regardless of how innocuous it feels at the time, could later come back to haunt one of the two of us. With that in mind, I scrub the identifying information as best as I can, until I’m sure that sometimes I’ve referenced people in a way that they would not even recognize as themselves if they were to read my blog.

As I keep writing each post, though, I fall into the mindset of anonymizing information. By the end of each draft, I instinctively write about others in a way that makes them faceless beings who exist solely in the context of the narrative I’m telling.¹¹

Which register of my writing is the real me? Is it the one who uses friend’s names, or the one who writes this blog?

I find that my gut reaction is to say, here, at least, the way that I construct the narrative as I write it is the genuine article. At the beginning of the post, the real me refers to friends by names. By the end of the post, the real me refers to friends only in how they intersect the story.

When I go back to add nuance, however, I have to choose which register to use for the entirety of the post. Since I made the conscious decision long ago to have this blog not name others explicitly, that is the register I shift things to. Given that I write each musing with the understanding that it will be posted, there’s an easy argument to be made that what I meant to construct from the beginning was something that did not refer to people by name.

Abstracting back to the general question of what it means to be genuine, there is a tension between what is created and the vision. Naively, the creation feels like the most genuine version of an act of creation. After all, there is no way to perfectly recreate the conditions that lead to every decision we make. No man can cross the same river twice, and everything we effect affects us.¹²

However, like most naive conceptions, that idea does not hold up perfectly to scrutiny. If I write a song about love, I almost always want there to be rhyme, because I feel like the sing songy nature of rhyming couplets fits well with my conception of what a love song should be. If I end my first line with something difficult to rhyme, though, it does not compromise the idea to change that word.

After rambling far further than I meant to for a revised and trimmed draft, I think I do believe it’s possible to discuss something complex in a genuine fashion. I think that it requires a separation of intent from creation, though, which feels artificial in a lot of contexts.

Draft 1

It’s another Friday, which means that it’s time for another musing about the Flash Fiction I’m planning to write today. It’s far later than I’d like to be starting this musing, but I don’t regret the time that I spent doing other things today.¹³ The prompt today is “sands of time.”

Probably because I have thought about sand for the book I’m writing¹⁴, I immediately thought about the fact that sand is crystalline, while glass is amorphous. While walking home, I considered a little more in depth how I could use that to a narrative.

I think that there’s something to the idea of each individual grain of sand being an explicit passage of time. Regardless of how we feel about it, there exists an objective way to measure the time displacement that occurs on earth. What’s more meaningful by far, though, is the way that we turn these objective passings into a narrative. I’m not entirely sure how to make fire or heat into the metaphor, but maybe there’s something about lightning which forms fulgerites.

So, let’s reconstruct the narrative from there. A fulgerite is a place where lightning has melted and reformed the sand into an interesting shape. Sand, as sort of given in the prompt, is the passing of time. Lightning is a person constructing meaning out of a series of events. The result is a memory.

This feels like something that might be better expressed as a poem, for all that I refuse to do this as anything but prose.¹⁵

Ok, let’s go through the same sets of questions I asked myself last week. My FFF question set apparently is:

Alright, time to try writing this. I think that I’ll let it be more poetic in phrasing than I tend to emphasize, in large part because I find that I wax poetic the later at night it is.¹⁸

Well, I wrote it, and redrafted it at least four times. I switched between first and third person accounts of the narrative as I went through the different drafts, which I think did a lot to help me tell the story that I wanted. In my author’s note, I admitted that I don’t know if what I wrote really counts as prose or poetry, but I am as happy with it as I think I will be. I’m sure that in the morning I’ll read what I wrote and feel like it was too pretentious or trying too hard to be deep.¹⁹

It’s now well past time for sleep, so I’ll do my questions and head. Daily Reflection:

that feels like a reasonable ordering↩
and I think yesterday too,↩
Wow I really need to reread Discworld soon. Now that I’m in the part of my life where I want to focus on craft, the fact that Pratchett manages to tell such deep, complex, and interesting stories in such a small number of pages. Given that the majority of what I’m reading these days is serialized fiction, which, much like Dickens, uses hundreds of words where a single could suffice, I think it will be interesting to focus on how to tell a tighter story. Anyways, back to the musing↩
there are places where solid and crystalline are definitionally the same. I hate that as a concept, for all that I recognize the use of describing things like that.↩
it bothers me more than I can express right now that the material science term for the entire phase of matter that melted sand becomes is glass. Like I get it, the vast supermajority of the cases where we use that phase of matter are when we’re dealing with actual glass, but it still bothers me.↩
I think, don’t quote me. Most of this information comes from vague recollections of the polymer class that I took the semester I started this blog.↩
the rant about a priori knowledge having value is going to come at some point, as soon as I can figure out how to make it cogent.↩
the line between the three is incredibly hazy, I’ll happily admit. It just feels like there’s something to the fact that there was only implicit story in my writing, rather than the explicit narrative that I shoot for normally. Actually, as I think about it, that tends to separate the prose and poetry I write from a lot of what I think of when i think of literature or philosophy. There tends to be explicit change in the writing I do, a way in which the world the story or poem is placed has changed as a result of the story being told. (That phrasing works with my apparent goal for FFF, which is trying to find a way to describe the fact that the action of assigning meaning is, itself, meaningful.)↩
on some level, I didn’t really ask exactly what the degree was, but I know that the friend wrote a senior thesis of poetry (I wonder if there’s something inherently dehumanizing about the way that I try to anonymize everyone else that I refer to in these musings. It certainly does something to remind me that this posting is, on some level, artificial (shoot that belongs outside of the footnote. Will bring up to explore))↩
there are essays about how that phrase is problematic, and I’ve considered how I feel about it. At this point, I don’t know that I have a phrase which works better, and I find that policing language with the explicit goal of never saying anything even potentially harmful is itself a way to harm. Shoot, that also belongs in the main text↩
hmm I wonder if that tendency is part of why people have commented so much on the characterization in my books.↩
ooh I love that ending phrase, for all that I also know I would hate having to read it↩
more or less from 4:30 on tonight I’ve been celebrating a close friend’s birthday, and that seems more important to me than an arbitrary writing goal. I’m sure that there’s something to be said about finding a balance for writing where it can be the main thing that I do, but still takes a backseat to the important parts of my life. I should reflect on that further, and this footnote feels like as good of a place as any to do so. (I don’t want the main content of this blog post to be my reflection on writing, because I decided arbitrarily that it would be planning for the flash fiction (as you might have seen from the opening line))

I do very much appreciate the fact that I write. I love looking back at the content I’ve read, and there’s a part of me that beams whenever someone tells me they’ve enjoyed anything I’ve written. I can look at the writing I’ve done through the years and see a clear upward trend in quality, or at least quality per unit time. I feel like, at a general level, at least, the second draft of anything non fiction I write is about twice as good as the first draft, and it often takes far less time. However, all the content that goes into the first draft is important.

Last week’s musing on the readings is a great example. Before I had written the very long reflection, I don’t think that I would have gotten to the musing that I had. The second draft is strong, in large part, because the first draft is willing to take so many detours.

So, how do I square that reality with the fact that I find my writing improving? There are two ways. First, I find that the rabbit holes my mind explores are generally better the more I’ve written and read in my life. I continue to grow as a person, and continue to find better ways to express a truth that I see or feel or believe. Second, I get through each diversion more quickly. For all that I am willing to ramble through these musings, I strongly prefer being able to do them in a single sitting. The composite reality that the more I write, the more comfortable I am with spending a continuous amount of time writing and the fact that the more I write the physically faster I write means that I get through a lot more content in a first draft of a rambling musing. There’s the part I’m not addressing here which is that the quality of my first drafts is also increasing a fair amount, simply because my mind is getting better at plotting how a small narrative will end from a beginning.

All this to say, I think that the healthiest thing for me is to have writing be an important part of my life, but a part that is always able to be superseded by a friend or other social event. I know myself well enough to know that I am healthier when I spend more time with friends.↩
Jeb not NaNo↩
entirely because I want to practice prose this month, and not at all because of any legitimate reason↩
the clock is rapidly ticking down to the end of the day, or I would be more tempted to do so now↩
fourth in the sense of like “one can imagine”↩
whether that’s something intrinsic in me or the fact that I have spent more than a few months writing a poem as the last thing I do before sleeping is another conversation for me to have with myself.↩
Then again, that’s almost always true for me. There’s a part of me that does really believe that to express something well is to express it ingenuinely. Or, at least, that part believes there is no genuine way to express something complex. I don’t think that’s universally true. Certainly when I read a book of theology, for instance, the depth of thought there feels more genuine. I think that I don’t trust myself enough to let myself make that, though. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll love the post tomorrow.↩
if only slightly↩
I’ll be seeing a show with friends that I think I saw in London, so I’m excited to rereview it!↩

Ib Thesis Prep

Draft 1

his morning, after my more or less daily writing session for NaNoWriMo¹, I realized that I had no clue what I wanted to write about tonight. It was suggested that I could muse on fan fiction, generally as a concept, and that seemed like a strongly potential idea.

However, my day ended up being far more eventful than I had expected. I’ll go through the particularly notable events as a series of vignettes, before seeing if I have something I can find a title for as a musing. If not, hopefully I’ll be inspired to find something to muse about from my journaling here.²

While walking to work, I realized that I haven’t updated my yearly goals, which is a big oopsie. It’s a little late for that³, but I put it on my to do list for tomorrow, so hopefully I remember to do it. Anyways, among the exciting things of the day was reading a really interesting old paper.

The paper itself was fun, but it cited a few textbooks for explanations of derivations. As it turns out, the textbooks were simply early quantum texts, and just framed how the Born Oppenheimer approximation⁴ is justified. I realized how much I really appreciate older textbooks. There are absolutely a number of reasons for that. One major one, I realized today, is due to the limits of the system.

I read recently about how absolutely weird it really is that we can have so many images in all of our scientific papers these days. In earlier times, it was a massive pain to get images into books, especially if you didn’t want to dedicate an entire page to them. As a result, rather than simply being able to go “as you can see from the graphs,” authors had to consider how to best⁵ communicate information without visuals.

I think that there’s also an element of novelty that modern textbook authors miss. The textbook I read today, for instance, explained that it is clear that there is an optimal location for all the nuclei in a molecule that is neither totally compressed⁶ nor infinitely separated⁷. I said that to my group mates, and most of them rolled their eyes and said it was obvious. It is obvious, to me, who has now taken three semesters of explicitly quantum chemistry and had the concept implicitly taught in any other number of courses. If it was my first semester in quantum, though, I think that framing would be helpful. That is, we know that there is an optimal structure, and we can constrain it slightly.

Honestly, I kind of just want to go into my rant right now, but I said I’d do a few vignettes, so we’ll rush through them. Probably because of the way I loved the textbook, a few group members started to joke about how long my thesis will be. One phrase that came up more than once is “you should really be getting a degree in philosophy”, which makes me kind of sad. The degree that I’m going for is explicitly a doctorate of philosophy. Just because the modern world has moved past the idea that a Ph. D. is meant to represent philosophical reflections on the field, I don’t see why I need to.

Anyways, I realized that there are a number of ways that I could write an absurdly long thesis, if I felt so called.⁸ There are a few ways that I could pad the length, which I will discuss after finishing vignettes.

I then found out that my choir rehearsal was cancelled for the night. Almost immediately after that, someone in the choir asked if I wanted to sign up for a date auction with them. I had no reason to say no, said yes, and then went to a young adult social night, which was really fun.

I also went to a cool seminar and got lunch with the seminar speaker today. I think that’s most of the vignettes. Onto the meat of today’s post: my path to an infinite thesis.

There are really two paths that can increase the length of my thesis: going deeper and going wider. To go wider is easy, I just have to make a wider claim of what I did that is relevant to my degree. Since I have given talks as part of my degree on a variety of subjects, there is an argument to be made that I should⁹ dedicate some space to them. Of course, a long discourse on tuning theory may feel slightly off tone in a chemistry dissertation, which is where going deeper goes.

Going deeper can mean a lot of different things. Especially since I’m doing a fairly heavy computational project, I feel like having a description of how we can start at a molecule and get to rotational numbers would not be bad. However, since I like to take things to an extreme level, there are other ways we can frame it.

One joking idea was the history of the universe as seen through the lens of rotational spectroscopy.¹⁰ In the beginning, there was the big bang. There were no molecules, so it’s not interesting.

The first stars formed. They also didn’t have any molecules with dipoles, at most having diatomic hydrogen, so are also not interesting.¹¹

As much as I think that could be a fun thing to do, and may try as a creative writing exercise, that is not quite as academic as many might want for a thesis.¹³ However, there’s another way to go deeper. As I said, I could go through how we go from a molecular structure to rotational constants.

There’s no reason that I need to stop at molecular structure, though. We could go one layer deeper, to how atoms create molecules. Now, if I were a particle physicist, I could go the step lower to how atoms are constructed, but, again, the degree is philosophy. Especially since the conception of an atom is an interesting historical trail, it could be fun to trace that. One other cool thing could be to take some metaphysics.

I could¹⁴ go into a whole discourse on what matter is, not as a matter of physics but as a philosophical thing. I did say a few times that one goal I have for a thesis is that I can¹⁵ use it as a text for any course I could likely teach in the future. Now, does anyone really think that’s an appropriate idea? I sure kind of do, but I don’t know if it will be approved.

Oh! Right, I was going to rant about modern textbook design. I think another issue is that people today are too afraid of using words. There are reasons for this, to be sure.

First and foremost, writing is no longer emphasized at any real level of education for a growing scientist. You can see this in who gets recruited for technical writing. Companies find it easier to teach English majors science than science majors how to write.

It goes deeper than that, though. I think that most of the scientists I know only try to speak to other members of the field.¹⁶ There are shades of this, obviously.

I’m only going to be writing to people fluent in English, for instance. That does cut out a large portion of the world. If I cut it down to chemists who understand basic chemical nomenclature, that cuts it down significantly again. Most people would argue that a Ph. D. thesis can be targeted to at least the level of an upperclassman undergraduate in a field, though.

The issue I have is that people go even further than that. They repeatedly use phrases that only have meaning to people within their own specific subfield, sometimes to the point that there are maybe twenty people in the world who can understand the jargon. In a research paper, I can understand and even respect that choice. After all, a research paper is meant to focus towards the field. There are other avenues to share research with the broader public.¹⁷

I think that in a lot of people’s views, a thesis is just a continuation of that thought. Ok, think is probably a bit of an understatement. Given that the prevailing way to construct a thesis that I’ve seen recently is just stapling papers together, it is exactly the thought process.

Ope I never said why I respect the choice. Jargon has a purpose, and I will never deny it. There are shades of meaning, and it is far more efficient and effective to use a word with shared meaning rather than dancing one’s way around it for a paragraph. If I want to talk about benzene, for instance, there is no reason that I should have to describe it as a structure where each of six carbons is joined in a ring with on average one and a half bonds to its two neighbors.¹⁸ If I’m going to talk about benzene to a broader audience, though, I might need to do that.

Of course, if I’m talking to a broader audience, I might have to take the step back and explain what a bond is, and what exactly separates carbon from every other element. I might also, depending on the context I’m speaking about benzene, not need to reference its structure at all. If I’m describing the fact that there are many clear liquids, for instance, I can just say that benzene exists.

I do agree that I think a little more philosophically about my research than most of my peers, I’m realizing during this musing. Much like a child that asks “why” to each successive answer, I’m dissatisfied with ending my field at something above first principles. Of course, first principles means different things in different situations.

I cannot think of a way that I can meaningfully connect the Higgs-Boson to the rotational constant of a molecule, for instance. There are reasons for this.

One major reason is emergent properties. An emergent property is just when an ensemble of something behaves differently than you would expect from a single piece. It’s related to another concept that I can’t remember the name of but that I’m sure I remember an XKCD about. I can’t find the comic right now, for all that I remember it clearly.¹⁹

Ok the concept is called reductionism, and it says that you can explain something by just explaining its component parts. The comic points out the ridiculousness of this approach, by separating the word “reductionism” into its component letters and their specific meanings. I don’t really like reductionism as a concept, and particularly not when looking at my molecules. They are fundamentally different than a collection of quarks, and I don’t know how much learning about quarks helps you to understand the rotations.

Of course, the same is true for any piece of information. On its own, it has no use. It gains value almost by existence of any other piece of information.

Anyways, while I don’t think that it’s useful to describe first principles in Chemistry²⁰ as anything smaller than an atom. Of course, there are other orthogonal directions we can take.

Ensemble averages in statistical mechanics, for instance, are only really useful when you explain the quantum classical divide. Rotational spectroscopy, when I take a step back and look at it, is kind of wild. It’s inherently a statistical mechanics problem, because we’re probing millions and trillions of molecules and seeing how they respond in ensemble averages. However, the way that they respond still correlates really neatly to discrete quantum transitions. I’m sure there’s something analogous between the way that pressure broadening makes multiple lines look like one line and the way that energy levels become bands in metals.

Oh gosh, energy levels are something I haven’t even thought about or addressed. In general chemistry, they’re all over the place. Despite the fact that I’m doing quantized transitions, we never really use them in rotational spectroscopy.²¹ I wonder why that is.

A few reasons pop to mind immediately. For one, we often work with well over ten thousand energy levels. In order to represent that on a page in any meaningful way, the page would need to be massive.

Ope ok so returning to the essay. People today are afraid of language, which has a lot of reasons. I’m not afraid of having a distinct voice in my thesis, which I think will help, and I’m not against making it broadly understandable. I’m willing to put forth the extra energy to make it theoretically approachable.

Older textbooks come from a place of authors also not knowing as much, because the fields had so much less information. As a result, if they had five pages to fill on quantum mechanics, there was less information they needed to cram, which meant there was more time that could be taken to explain. Anyways, this feels like a good place to end for the night. It’s a rambly musing to be sure, but I plan to spend some time in the coming days and weeks revising some of these rambles.

the more or less part is referencing the fact that a friend and I try to go together every day. I do my NaNo every day, even when we don’t work together↩︎
the fact that I treat this site as a journal is certainly an interesting change. Oh! I just remembered that one other idea I was given/ came to was reflecting on whatever I posted about five years ago today (the first year of the blog, and the most successful iteration). It’s a little strange to realize that I started this blog almost a fifth of my life ago. It feels both like far more than a fifth of my life has passed me by and like I’m exactly the same person I was then. I’m sure that’s not too uncommon of a view, though.↩︎
wow is this foreshadowing? Why is author writing the post so late? Will we ever find out?↩︎
you can treat the nuclei of a molecule as stationary when solving for most molecular transitions↩︎
that phrasing felt wrong for a second. I realize it’s because I’m splitting the infinitive, which was frowned upon in early American grammatical conventions. The reason, like many, comes from the fact that everyone agrees that Latin is the best language. Since Latin has one word infinitives, you cannot split them. As a result, people thought we should not do it in English either. I hate that for a lot of reasons, not least that I like the fact that to go quickly and to quickly go have shades of different meaning. By labeling one as inherently incorrect, assuming that usage doesn’t change, all you do is pressure people into one framing of a situation↩︎
because positive charges repel↩︎
because we know a priori that molecules are real. I have a whole rant brewing in my mind about how much of science is not really provable, but rather relies on “well yeah, of course this is right, look”, and how we diminish the importance of that in a lot of scientific discussions. Of course, part of that rant belongs in the vignettes section of today’s musing, so we’ll wait for it↩︎
my group members tried to argue that I wouldn’t have the time to write such a long thesis. The fact that I can regularly put out five thousand words a day did not seem to sway them, for some reason. I do think that they underestimate the quality of my sprint writing, but I will acknowledge that most of it is not directly ready to go into a thesis (maybe)↩︎
or at least could↩︎
or, later, through the lens of a bunch of different disciplines.↩︎
ooh, I suppose D existed, so you could have like DHD+, which does have a dipole. Shoot↩︎
I think you can see where this is going. In some regards it’s a play on a semi famous quote in astronomy that things are either chemistry or interesting.↩︎
hmmmm, I wonder if there’s a way to phrase and structure the chapter so that it is interesting. Cosmology as seen through rotational spectroscopy is limited, of course, but also hmmmm. I will consider more↩︎
initially typed we, because I thought of this as a science thing, and as we know, science uses the royal we (a phrase not all my friends know about for some reason)↩︎
changes in scientific understanding independent↩︎
I know that it is a fairly common reaction when I say that I give a lot of public talks that scientists don’t like to do it (this is phrased badly, and is a sign I should start wrapping up this musing before my brain goes too much more to mush)↩︎
for all that no one really uses them ever↩︎
especially since that’s slightly inaccurate.↩︎
I found it! Reductionism ↩︎
generally. I fully acknowledge the fuzzy edges of the discipline, but here I’m speaking for at the very least the chemistry I’m doing, which relies on molecules only barely being constructed of atoms (in that like we abstract away atomic information as quickly and fully as possible)↩︎
I’m realizing this isn’t true. We do when discussing coriolis coupling, which is where two rotational transitions of similar energy both shift slightly to have even more similar energy. I’m a little unclear why that happens, but I think it’s something about how vibrational and rotational energies aren’t actually separable, we just pretend they are and add fudge factors↩︎

Book Review of The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide

Draft 1

It’s been a while since my last book review! Looking at the site,¹ I’ve reviewed seven books so far on this blog. I’ve read far more than seven, so let’s see if there’s something in particular that links the books I have reviewed.

Well, I can’t find anything that directly links the books. There are some I had a bit of a historic connection to, some that I read for external reasons, and some that I just chose to read on my own. With that long introduction⁹ out of the way, I’ve figured out what this post will be about.

I recently read The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist by John McNally. If I remember correctly, either my father or one of his colleagues was getting rid of a lot of his¹⁰ books. My father thought that my little brother and I might be interested in books on writing, and we each saved a few.

One of the books I saved was a book on how to do NaNoWriMo successfully, which I annotated and gave to a friend who’s doing the event with me this year.¹¹ In addition to the other books, which I have yet to read, I got the aforementioned survival guide. I realized about halfway through reading that it was an ARC¹². I can’t imagine too much of the content changed before final publication, but who can say.

Despite the fact that I have no intention to make a career out of writing,¹³ it had a fair amount of advice that seems relevant to me. Most of it was given as asides to his main points, but I don’t think that makes the advice any less useful. For instance, he talked a lot about the resistance that many young authors have to being told that their writing can improve. I know that there are strains of that still within me, and I should really get rid of it. I know that I am not a great writer, for all that I think I’ll start to defend myself as a good writer these days.

Other relevant advice was that you need to treat writing as a commitment, and that inspiration only strikes when it’s made incredibly easy.¹⁴ That is, while sometimes a short story or poem comes out incredibly easily and polished from an early draft, it only comes because of a heavy grind. This is one place where music is absolutely a great analogy, for all that it’s also true for me in writing.

In music, if you just practice scales and tone every day for like fifteen minutes, any song you attempt after three weeks will suddenly become easier. Small composition exercises on voice leading makes writing interesting and singable lines almost second nature. Writing a sonnet a day starts out feeling impossible, but a few short weeks later, is incredibly easy.

Other good advice was generally remembering that everyone you interact with is a person.¹⁵ That is, when you talk to an editor, for example, the editor will remember you after the conversation. Even if that doesn’t directly make it easier to publish with them, it does mean they’re more likely to point you to a place you might be able to publish. If you give a reading, anyone who comes can be great or terrible publicity for your book.

As someone who’s steadily making a more public presence by giving talks, that’s probably worth remembering. Every time that someone leaves a talk of mine and thinks better of science or the University¹⁶, I’ve done a good thing.

Anyways, the book as a whole gave me a lot to think about, and it has a long list of books to read on improving my craft, so I’ll probably try to read more of those in the future. I don’t know if I’ll reread this book, but if any of my readers have been considering a career in writing¹⁷, I would recommend it. He did make it very clear that most writers end their careers at their best writing, which makes so much sense to me now that it’s been pointed out.

read: going to the git repo on my terminal and searching for all instances of book-review↩
if this phrasing feels weird, that’s because I misread dates, and thought it was the first.↩
review or the book could be it, I suppose, but I meant review↩
appropriate here because if my memory serves, the first book is written in first person, and also I like the fact that book two is written in person two. I guess that can’t work if there’s more than three books in the series, because fourth person isn’t a thing. (I wonder what fourth person could mean. If we think about it, first person is referring to self, second person refers to the other participant in the conversation. Third person refers to something not a part of the conversation. I know that there are languages that divide the world differently, but I don’t think linguistics needs more people. Ope. I’ve looked it up, and there are evidences of persons after third. Apparently some languages treat referring to someone nearby and somewhere far away differently. When they do, the latter is sometimes considered fourth person. There’s also a reference to fifth person, so that’s interesting. Otherwise, fourth person is sometimes used in languages that treat generic referents differently than the standard third person (e.g. one should not). That’s kind of cool, and something worth thinking about for any future ConLang I work on.) Ok, so it could work with more than three books when translated.↩
when, before she died, I do not know.↩
though honestly, at this point they’re almost all sweet. There was a part of me that felt like I didn’t value my grandparents enough while I had them, but that part of me knows things that I couldn’t have known then. I’m working on growing as a person, and part of that is letting go of regrets.↩
what a delay wow↩
though as mentioned yesterday, I recently read a book on being a novelist (more focused on the financial and professional consequences of the choice, rather than a style guide or anything, which meant it wasn’t particularly relevant for my life. For all that I do enjoy writing, and for all that I do intend to continue writing for the rest of my life, I don’t know if I really want to try to make it my full time career. I like it being a dedicated but amateur (in the sense of doing for love rather than money, which I think tends to be a newer distinction than I tend to use in my writing) hobby, and I worry about how little I would enjoy it if I were compensated. That’s probably an attitude I should investigate (I should read my old posts to see how often I say the word investigate, because I have a gut feeling I think that I should investigate a lot of my thoughts in the future. Unfortunately, it’s always the present). Actually, that might be a good book to review here. Anyways, the book talked about how there’s a sense in which you should, upon reading something you do not enjoy, ask yourself what is wrong with you, rather than asking what’s wrong with the text. As he points out, if you read something for a course, that means a professor (ever since I made the choice to capitalize all professions in my book and then shift it to a school arc, where there are, obviously enough, a lot of Professors, I feel the urge to capitalize the word whenever I use it), who presumably has expertise you wish to acquire, thinks that it was worth reading. Even if you were not assigned a book, the fact that it’s published (the guide was written before the age of self publishing had really gotten started) means that a lot of people, all of whom are experts in their field, thought that the book was worth publishing. It’s an interesting thought, and one that I feel is useful. I’ve realized that I have started to think of writing and words (there’s a better way to phrase that, I’m sure, but I can’t think of it) with the same part of me that thinks about music.

That is, I have two very distinct mindsets when I listen to music. (I think, let’s see if two is the right number or if I should’ve said N and then fixed in post). Most of the time, I treat music as an accompaniment to my life, something that I listen to because I enjoy, not trying to pick up anything in it. Other times, though, I treat music as an academic exercise, looking and listening deeply to see what makes it do what it does. When I listened to music that I did not find matched my aesthetic in undergraduate, I learned how to appreciate it for what it did well. I should really get better at doing that for literature. After all, anti intellectualism isn’t cool anymore (it was never cool). Wow that was a long diversion from the book I reviewed↩
about fifteen hundred words↩
the colleague was (is?) also a man, so technically his works regardless of which person was getting rid of books↩
and I know that the friend reads the blog. Since I know I’ll forget to ask you in real life, are you still reading the book? Do you find it at all helpful?↩
Advanced reader’s copy, which means a usually free copy sent ahead of the official release date. I’m unsure why either of them would have had it, since neither seem to have a connection to the author, but I suppose that the author went to a writer’s workshop at the same place that my father ended up going to a while later, so it’s possible that he got it there. We also have a shocking number of ARCs (ARC? because copies is still just C. Idk) in my home, I think at least.↩
see the footnote on After the Dragons↩
Ok, that’s two very different things, but I think that they’re kind of the same.↩
having now moved past the paragraphs I discussed and come back to this footnote, I think that I explained it badly. In part, that’s because it’s a summary of like a third of the book (if taken in very narrow slices). It was given as equally important when submitting work to be published, speaking to professionals, and speaking to fans and publicists.↩
hey look, a place where capitalizing was appropriate. I want to bring back the early modern English trend of capitalizing any important words in a sentence, for all that I know that there are probably good and legitimate reasons that we discontinued the practice. That does remind me, though, I read a fascinating legal brief today about double spacing. Why, exactly, the definition of double space was relevant to a federal case, is still a little unclear to me, but it was a great read, as everything petty by lawyers tends to be. Something about being highly educated in the art of argument and using that well honed skill to be petty is just very fun for me to spectate↩
and, presumably, are pre-college somehow, since that kind of seems to be the focus group↩
part of↩

Musings

I'm just copying my father

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