Robin Sloan

The real Locust Grove

The nar­ra­tor of Annabel Scheme is a super-​​smart server named Hu who lives in a data cen­ter on the banks of the Hood River in Locust Grove, Ore­gon. Here’s Alexis Madri­gal on the real Locust Groves. These are such zeit­geisty places, and for my money, such Amer­i­can places, too: high tech­nol­ogy and crazy amounts of cap­i­tal mixed with back­woods weird­ness… and lots and lots of empty space.

Dream-​​fortresses all look the same

Ooh, I love this. The Citadel from Nor­mal Heights looks like the Geisel Library at UCSD looks like… the snow fortress from Incep­tion!

Hat tip to @ToastyKen.

World of Jesus

This bit from Tim over on Snark­mar­ket, and the ensu­ing com­ment thread, is my favorite thing writ­ten about Annabel Scheme so far.

In other news, what­ever hap­pened to my wee­knotes? They’ll return soon. This site is like a hiber­nat­ing bear—actually no, it’s like a bear that is not only hiber­nat­ing but also dream­ing, and oh boy, wait ’til it tells you about its crazy bear-​​dreams.

Make an instrument

Nick Zam­muto from The Books explains the mak­ing of the rhythm sec­tion on a new track:

It’s a four inch sub­woofer attached to an oddly shaped flex­i­ble mir­ror using a cop­per plumb­ing fix­ture. Why a mir­ror? No rea­son, it was the best piece of plas­tic I could find for the job at the Auto­zone. When you put a low fre­quency sound through the woofer, it sets the mir­ror vibrat­ing, and since it is oddly shaped, dif­fer­ent areas of the mir­ror move in dif­fer­ent ways given the chaotic rela­tion­ship between the root fre­quency and their own set of res­o­nant fre­quen­cies. What I did for ‘A Cold Freezin’ Night’ is send a 20 hz sound and a 30 hz sound through the mir­ror simul­ta­ne­ously, and held a ball point pen gen­tly against dif­fer­ent parts of the mir­ror and recorded the result. Of course at this point it just sounds like a buzzing night­mare (i’ll try to post the sound later tonight), but if you slow the sound down by two octaves all of this amaz­ing rhyth­mic struc­ture becomes appar­ent. The chaotic rela­tion­ship between the 2/​3 sound wave, the vibrat­ing mir­ror and the tip of the pen gives an aston­ish­ingly expres­sive, and super­hu­manly accu­rate drum solo. It was pretty easy to mas­sage the rhythm into shape using my wave-​​editor after that.

Also, re: the arrival of Aphex Twin on the music scene in the 90s, he observes:

Peo­ple were begin­ning to accept cyborgs as just another mem­ber of the band.

Yes and yes.

Make a tool

William Faulkner, media inven­tor:

“I think that nobody can say, ‘I’m going to use stream-​​of-​​consciousness as my method for writ­ing.’ That’s—that’s wrong. He’d get into trou­ble. He must use that sim­ply as a tool, only when noth­ing else will do the work. It’s much bet­ter to show the char­ac­ter in famil­iar terms of—of action, of speech, but some­times that’s not suf­fi­cient. Then you have to use another tool, just as at times the car­pen­ter real­izes that his famil­iar tool is not quite enough to do what he wants to do, so he’s got to stop and make some­thing, make a tool…”

Via Tim.

See also: Haruki Ryu Murakami’s iPad app!

The soul of an old machine

There’s a line in Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store where I com­pare book scan­ning to “an exor­cism,” and there are some dark flick­er­ing moments in the video above that look ghostly indeed. More details here. Eeee.

What’s a media inventor?

Just a note that if you’re new here, you should check out Annabel Scheme and Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store.

Also: what’s a media inven­tor, any­way? Here’s my (totally made-​​up) def­i­n­i­tion: It’s some­body pri­mar­ily inter­ested in con­tent who also exper­i­ments with new tech­nol­ogy, new processes, and new for­mats. Allen Lane was a media inven­tor. Early blog­gers were media inven­tors. Right now, the indie video game scene is full of media inventors.

Fun­da­men­tally, I think, a media inven­tor is some­one who isn’t sat­is­fied with the suite of for­mats that have been handed down to him by his cul­ture (and econ­omy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, sin­gle; RPG, RTS, FPS—a media inven­tor doesn’t like those choices. It turns out a media inven­tor feels com­pelled to make the con­tent and the container.

Some­thing like that, anyway.

Update: Frank Chimero con­nects media inven­tion to Car­men Sandiego and Cit­i­zen Kane. 

Bravery, foolishness, hubris

Wow, I owe you an update. There’s cool stuff going on—and I’ll post about it soon. But for now, check out this piece by Eric Rosen­field. It’s pretty self-​​aggrandizing to even link to it, but I’m okay with that. I liked this bit:

…in Annabel Scheme there are plot prob­lems, an uneven­ness of style, sen­tences that don’t quite make sense or seem to be miss­ing a verb. In other words, it reads like a draft in need of an edi­tor, with the rough edges of a novice writer that will hope­fully be sanded down as he con­tin­ues to develop. The fact that he would even con­sent to release some­thing to the pub­lic at this stage speaks some­thing to his brav­ery, fool­ish­ness or hubris, depend­ing on your perspective.

I was think­ing about this on Sun­day, and I decided it’s none of the above, and def­i­nitely not brav­ery. I think it’s the oppo­site, in fact. When you keep some­thing to your­self (for years?!) and then present it to the world with the implicit claim that it’s, you know, FINISHED—perfect—man, that takes brav­ery. And hubris, and (I think) more than a lit­tle fool­ish­ness. That’s div­ing into the deep end. And there’s a place for that, but me, I’d rather ease my way into the swim­ming hole, feel­ing the bot­tom as I go. Bring­ing my posse with me.

Any­way, read Rosenfield’s piece; it’s really nice. More news to come.

The oldest living things in the world

A pho­tog­ra­phy project doc­u­ment­ing the old­est liv­ing things in the world? Like, trees and bac­te­ria colonies that have been grow­ing con­tin­u­ously for thou­sands of years? So into it. (There’s a project site and a Kick­starter project, but I like com­ing it at it through the tra­jec­tory of Liz Danzico’s elated blog post.)

Fragments

David Mark­son, the full-​​bleed iPad, and 70s spy movies over at Snark­mar­ket. Take a peek.

Completely myself

When I am, as it were, com­pletely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, trav­el­ing in a car­riage or walk­ing after a good meal or dur­ing the night when I can­not sleep–it is on such occa­sions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.

Yes. (That’s Mozart, via Frank Chimero.)

Nomen Ludi

This story by Rob Beschizza is just great—great tone, great sub­stance, great design. High­est recommendation.

Vicarious immortality

I don’t really know much about Samuel But­ler. I feel that I need to learn more. Here’s a son­net of his, new to me:

Not on sad Sty­gian shore, nor in clear sheen
Of far Elysian plain, shall we meet those
Among the dead whose pupils we have been,
Nor those great shades whom we have held as foes;
No meadow of aspho­del our feet shall tread,
Nor shall we look each other in the face
To love or hate each other being dead,
Hop­ing some praise, or fear­ing some dis­grace.
We shall not argue say­ing “‘Twas thus” or “Thus,”
Our argument’s whole drift we shall for­get;
Who’s right, who’s wrong, ‘twill be all one to us;
We shall not even know that we have met.
    Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again
    Where dead men meet, on lips of liv­ing men.

Whoah! Yes! And this was like a whole line of inquiry for him. I love it.

Hello, Hu

Atten­tion Annabel Scheme fans: Scott Jack­son is build­ing Hu. (If you ask me, a story’s not com­plete until it spawns a Github project.)

Week 1580

Okay so wee­knote 1577 was way opti­mistic. I barely had time to think about fun projects, let alone actu­ally work on any.

I did finally get my iPad—and it’s glo­ri­ous. I have a very sim­ple shell for Pin­nebog (that’s the code-​​name for my iPad-​​specific story) up and run­ning; even with­out any bells and whis­tles, it’s a won­der to see words and pic­tures pre­sented inside this frame. Long-​​term, I think this is going to have to be my medium.

I’m faced with a bit of a fork in the road now. The two months of Cold­wa­ter are com­ing to an end. What a good run: the last seven weeks kicked out Last Beau­ti­ful, Nor­mal Heights, and a short piece in the amaz­ing 48 Hour Mag­a­zine. (See also.)

And now I have two clear options:

• Return to Pil­grim as planned. (For the unini­ti­ated: that’s the book-​​length expansion/​explosion of Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store.) The good news is that Cold­wa­ter had the intended effect: I am now hun­gry to get back to the book. I’m burst­ing with new ideas; I feel sort of “re-​​pressurized,” if that makes any sense. The time is right for a story like this, and I’ve just got to sit down and write it.
• Keep jam­ming on the iPad and get Pin­nebog released ASAP. This is appeal­ing because the iPad is sim­ply so enchant­ing, and so ripe. I feel like there’s buzz to be had for fic­tion that really takes advan­tage of its canvas—maybe even a kind of first-​​mover advan­tage? All the pieces are in place for me to grab this.

But on bal­ance, I have to pick Pil­grim. The iPad’s not going any­where; in fact, it’ll be even more attrac­tive in another three months, with even more users and an even bet­ter OS. But I really believe this book is pegged pretty firmly to the moment we find our­selves in—the fact that I’m faced with this sort of deci­sion under­scores the point!—and if I want it to be a real book on real shelves in real stores (and I do) I gotta get cracking.

I’m going to be crisp about this: start­ing next week, it’s 100% Pil­grim again. Pin­nebog goes on the shelf, to be resumed some­time later in the sum­mer. In the mean­time, I’ll paw my iPad fondly and imag­ine all the cool things to come.

I need to set some new mile­stones for the book; look for those in the next weeknote.

We’re actu­ally clos­ing in on the story’s one-​​year anniversary—how cool is that? It feels right to be work­ing on it again now. The sur­pris­ing suc­cess of Mr. Penum­bra is really what launched all of this, after all. It’s time to get back into the Twenty-​​Four Hour Book Store—and find out what’s beyond it, too.

Here’s a cryp­tic clue: Mátyás Hun­yadi, the Raven King.