Robin Sloan

Week 1569

Busy. Busy, busy, busy. Brain very occu­pied. I’m day­dream­ing less—and that’s big trou­ble for a writer! Do I need to set aside a block of time for day­dream­ing? Can it even work that way?

I’m typ­ing this from a plane. My tweets this week are going to be 100% geo­t­agged pho­tos; you should fol­low along, because I think it’s going to be weird/​fun.

Com­ing tonight or tomor­row: the first of the Annabel Scheme remix projects! Yep, it’s Emily Cooper’s renderings—and they are beautiful.

Have just real­ized that, given my afore­men­tioned tweet exper­i­ment, I will be unable to tweet about the ren­der­ings this week. Hmm. You’re going to have to help me get the word out.

This Fri­day I’ll be in Austin for a few days of SXSW Inter­ac­tive; drop me a line if you’ll be there, too.

(Note to wee­knote aggre­ga­tors: you’ll prob­a­bly want to take me off your list, as these are increas­ingly ten­u­ous approx­i­ma­tions of the wee­knote genre.)

Glimpse of a remix

Well, well, well. Look what I have on my hard drive:

Five image files labeled “SF.” Gosh. I won­der what those might be.

This is a ter­ri­ble tease, I know. But it’s not quite ready yet!

I do wish you could see how much I’m grin­ning right now. You are going to love these.

Week 1568

Decades hence, we will refer to this period as the Sea­son of Lame Wee­knotes. Our peo­ple will tell tales: ah, we thought all was lost; ah, for so long we heard noth­ing; ah, it was all work and no sto­ries. Our hearts shrank, our skin grew pale and the birds—the birds didn’t bother with melody any­more. Instead they croaked like frogs, hissed like snakes.

That’s okay: some­times you have to really invest in one part of your life so all the other parts can, in short order, reap the rewards. Like Shake­speare said: “There is a tide in the affairs of men…”

Some­day very soon, the sea will sub­side and we’ll walk on land again and unfurl the tents and ban­ners and scrolls we rolled up so carefully.

But until then: wow, what a flood.

Notes in the margin

Two nice com­ments recently:

• Re: Mr. Penum­bra from TagShadow—“notes on a reor­ga­ni­za­tion of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion.” Cool!
• Re: The Writer & the Witch, in a com­ment on the story. Wow.

Week 1567

Num­ber of new jobs started: 1.
Num­ber of words added to Pil­grim: 0.

As expected.

See you next week!

Unstartled; unsnared

Unstar­tled, like a lion at sounds.
Unsnared, like the wind in a net.

—A Rhi­noc­eros Horn

Scorecard

The lit­tle par­al­lel struc­ture “ways in which we are trapped; ways in which we are made free” poked into my brain as I was walk­ing down Clement Street just now. Okay then:

Ways in which we are trapped:

• inside our own minds
• inside our language(s)
• on this planet (for now?)
• by our spa­tial scale (e.g. we can’t chill with these guys or these guys—not really)
• by our tem­po­ral scale (i.e. 10,000 years is about all we can muster, and that’s a real stretch)

Ways in which we are made free:

• through language(s)—tricky!
• by tools—especially the ones that aug­ment senses and skills
• by envoys: books, songs, descen­dents, space probes (maybe?)
• through non-​​attachment (maybe?)
• through imag­i­na­tion

Just keep­ing score!

Week 1566

A redis­cov­ery this week: when it comes to writing—specifically when it comes to mak­ing progress on a big piece of writ­ing, like Pilgrim—there is an order-​​of-​​magnitude dif­fer­ence between a ses­sion of one or two hours and a ses­sion of three or four. There’s just some­thing about that span. It’s the amount of time I need to load the program—it’s like the icon is still bounc­ing in the dock ’til hour two, and then… ta-​​da. I think it’s closely related to the dif­fer­ence between read­ing word-​​by-​​word and read­ing in flow. You know what I’m talk­ing about: the words melt away, the movie plays. That’s the good stuff.

Work­ing in a cafe helps me under­stand the dif­fer­ence. While the pro­gram is still load­ing, I am of course totally inter­ested in my surroundings—faces and book-​​jackets and con­ver­sa­tions over­heard. But after hour two? I become, to my delight, the weird per­son in the room: obliv­i­ous to every­thing around me, lost in the screen, mouth mov­ing silently. (Just a lit­tle bit.)

The point is: I man­aged sev­eral four-​​hour (and longer) writ­ing ses­sions this week and they were hugely pro­duc­tive. What a joy.

(I don’t want to make it sound like ooh mag­i­cal writ­ing. It’s still mostly just bang­ing things out and writ­ing “[[X]]” when I can’t think of the right word or “[[SOMETHING]]” when I can’t think of the right… some­thing. [You’ve never seen my rough­est drafts; they’re full of these place­hold­ers, like vari­ables.] It’s just that, in the third hour and beyond, it all picks up speed dramatically—like I’ve finally escaped some grav­ity well.)

In other news.

I added a new tool this week: a sim­ple log­book, not intended for idea-​​capture (that’s the iPhone) or reflec­tion (that’s this) but rather the very basics: what I did and what I ate.

It is cheap and tiny (3″ × 5″) and entirely un-​​precious. All data, no poetry.

This week I fired up Xcode twice, vaguely intend­ing to fid­dle with the new iPad stuff, and then forced myself to shut it down imme­di­ately both times. Focus. There will be time for that later.

I start at Twit­ter on Tues­day! Hmm: how many four-​​hour writ­ing ses­sions do you think I can pack in between now and then?

Silicon Valley fiction

Two things:

• The Lost Books of the Odyssey sounds super-​​great. Just bought it. Its author, Zachary Mason, is a com­puter sci­en­tist in Moun­tain View.
• Look out New York: We are com­ing for you.

KDK

Hey cool! What should my first Kin­dle app (!?) be?

But where is the zebra??!

Week 1565

Have you heard about the short 20th cen­tury? The notion is that the 20th cen­tury didn’t really go from 1900 to 2000. It went from 1914—the start of World War I—to 1991—the fall of the Soviet Union. Makes more sense, right? And its coun­ter­part is the long 19th cen­tury, 1789 to 1914.

I’ve started to think of 2009 as “long 2009″ in my per­sonal his­tory. It began in Novem­ber 2008, when my co-​​conspirator Andrew Fitzger­ald fin­ished his first novel and I, in a fit of (let’s be hon­est) jeal­ousy, decided to recom­mit myself to writ­ing. And now, “long 2009″ ends this month, when I begin at Twit­ter.

Which is not to say that the writ­ing ends! No: that course has been set. What I mean is that the fulcrum-​​power of the year is bounded by those dates. And “long 2009″ was cer­tainly the most impor­tant year for me since, say, 2004, when I co-​​produced EPIC 2014 and joined Cur­rent.

Mostly I just enjoy telling sto­ries about time: mark­ing out epochs and hinge-​​points. Maybe a bit of coun­ter­fac­tual thrown in there, too.

This week I saw Sep Kap­m­var give a talk at Twit­ter. His project with Jonathan Har­ris—We Feel Fine—was one of the very first things I encoun­tered that had been made with Pro­cess­ing, and one of the things that made me want to learn it for myself, which led to all sorts of other things. Some­thing about see­ing this old influ­ence in this new con­text… it was a nice juxtaposition.

This was a very suc­cess­ful week for Pil­grim. I wrote a lot of mate­r­ial. Very rough, but all in sen­tences and para­graphs, com­mit­ted to the screen, which is the essen­tial thing. I’m mind­ful of my notion to have a barf-​​draft done by mid-​​March, with SXSW as my arbi­trary dead­line; I think it’s quite pos­si­ble, and hit­ting that dead­line is my focus and my mea­sure of success.

That’s it! Short wee­knote this time.

The Great Christmas Monkey Hunt

[Rough scrap from a story to be writ­ten at some point in the future.]

Annie, age six, saw it first. She squealed, tiny hands pressed flat against the win­dow that looked out across the back yard, and cried: “An elf! AN ELF!”

I darted over, pushed my nose against the glass above her, and a chill ran through me—the chill of a strange sil­hou­ette in your king­dom. Annie was right: there, at the far end of the yard, was the shape of a lit­tle bent-​​over man strug­gling through the snow-​​drifts. But it wasn’t actu­ally a man, and it wasn’t a child, either. The shape was truly tiny. Miniature.

My brain was primed from watch­ing Planet Earth in school this year, and I rec­og­nized the shape: It was a mon­key. (In the next moment, a flash of won­der: I’d actu­ally used some­thing I learned in school.)

“Holy shit,” said Uncle Mike, lean­ing over my shoul­der. From the out­side, he and Annie and I must have made a Truman-​​family totem pole. “That’s a macaque.”

The lit­tle mon­key kept its pace, stum­bling step-​​by-​​step. It really did look like a lit­tle old man with long, lanky arms. It even had the sug­ges­tion of a bushy gray beard. Then the wind rose and gusted for a stretch of sec­onds, pulling a scrim of white across the win­dow, and when it fell, the mon­key was gone, dis­ap­peared over the bound­ary into the next yard.

There were many ques­tions. Where had this macaque come from? What was it doing in Min­neapo­lis? Had it been brought here and given as a gift? Who would give a mon­key as a Christ­mas present? How did it escape?

Was it dan­ger­ous? (Mom.) Could we keep it? (Annie.) How did Uncle Mike know any­thing about mon­keys, any­way? (Me.)

Tru­mans were suit­ing up: Dad pulling on his thick black boots. Cousin Mike Jr. paus­ing his video game and instruct­ing Annie in loud, mono­spaced syl­la­bles: “Don’t. touch. this. Okay? Don’t. touch. it.” Uncle Mike rum­mag­ing in the closet for ski goggles.

And me, beg­ging to come along. Dad agreed, I think because he hadn’t seen the macaque him­self and wasn’t quite con­vinced it was real. Also because he knew I would be annoy­ing to Mom and Aunt Ron­nie if he left me behind.

Uncle Mike cracked the back door and it was like open­ing an air­lock; the warmth was sucked out of the room, out into the sil­very swirl. I felt like Mas­ter Chief in my lay­ers of snow-gear—thick and sturdy and a lit­tle stiff. We all tromped out onto the porch, and Mom sealed the ship behind us and waved farewell through the glass.

I fol­lowed behind Dad, hop­ping to place my steps in the craters he made with his black boots. We were going back across the yard, straight to where we’d seen the macaque last. I nar­rowed my eyes and made a tough expres­sion under my scarf. There might be macaques everywhere.

The Great Christ­mas Mon­key Hunt had begun.

Local color

The banshee’s hair pick

There’s been a Scheme sight­ing, and this hair pick has some­thing to do with it:

Read the story over at Sig­nif­i­cant Objects. Then, two things:

• You can bid on the hair pick on eBay, and the pro­ceeds go to 826 National, the writ­ing pro­gram founded by Dave Eggers. Might be cool to hold a real-​​life quan­tum arti­fact in your hands…
• How am I so sure this is Scheme-​​related? As you’ll see, the story’s nar­ra­tor doesn’t sus­pect it. The thing is, there’s a clue embed­ded in the story; almost a code, really. The first per­son to fig­ure it out and post it in the com­ments here gets a CFRAS t-​​shirt (pic­tured here).

Check it out! Bid on the object! Crack the code!