Ben Crowder

I’m in love.

No, not a girl. It’s Beanstalk: hosted Subversion. This is so cool.

For the non-geeky among you, Subversion is one of the more popular version control systems out there. And what’s version control? I’ll let A Visual Guide to Version Control answer that question.

So, Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion (SVN) repository. No hassles. The site’s a beauty to look at and to use, and everything works seamlessly. Sure, the free account is only 20 megs, but it’s not bad. I’m very much a fan.

Why would you use this? Version control has been primarily the domain of programmers, but it’s really useful for all sorts of other things. I’m using my Beanstalk repository for my writing — I’ve got directories for books, stories, poetry, plays, essays, etc. — and so I’ve got an automatic offsite backup along with a perfectly preserved history of any changes I make. Bliss.

I plan to start using this for my hand-coded websites as well (Blank Slate and Riverglen Press, mainly). And for the books I digitize. I’d use it for my design/art, too, but those files get really big really quick. Maybe someday…

Anyway, Beanstalk is exceedingly cool. If you do anything with text — coding, writing, whatever — you need to think about backing up with Beanstalk.

[tags]Beanstalk, Subversion, SVN[/tags]

Not that I want to keep blogging about being sick, but since it has taken over my world for the moment, it’ll unfortunately keep cropping up until it disappears. Which doesn’t look like it’ll be anytime soon. I’ve spent the whole day in bed, pretty much.

Almost. I did manage to lug myself up to campus this afternoon for a few hours, primarily to get some church stuff done that had to get done, and while I was up there I decided to try sticking around for Orson Scott Card’s “1001 Ideas in an Hour” session at LTUE.

I won’t go over the whole thing, since this pounding in my head makes it hard to write. The most interesting part to me was at the very end, when one of the attendees asked, “How many revisions do you do?”

Card said, “When I type the last word of the last chapter for the first time, I send it to my publisher.” That’s right. No revisions. He went on to say that he will start a piece over several times until he gets it right, but after that it’s a straight shot without any tweaking.

His rationale, he said, was that the first draft is always the most alive, even if it’s a little ragged. But so many people polish and smooth their drafts until they’re sparkling little gems which are absolutely dead.

It’s an interesting thought, one that took me rather by surprise, but I can see where he’s coming from. I’ll have to try it with my own work and see if that’s what happens. But in the meantime it’s back to bed for me — o the joy! ~sigh~

[tags]Orson Scott Card, LTUE[/tags]

Tagging has two meanings in the blogosphere: the tags that categorize a post (whether internal or for some site like Technorati), and tag-you’re-it questionnaire thingies. I have to admit that most of the time I try not to see who got tagged on posts like the latter, because I’m clearly not culpable if I didn’t see it (right?) — but alas, this time I looked. :P And, since it would be the one time I got tagged, here I am. (Granted, this does give me a ready-made post topic for the day. Can’t complain there.)

The tagline as received: “6 habits, things I like to do, or things about myself.”

The tagline as reinterpreted by Ben in order to change the course of history: “7 habits: two good, two bad, three you wish you had.” :)

The answers:

1. Good: I don’t eat sweets very often. There were times when I did, but I just don’t like the way I feel afterwards, so I prefer fruit and nuts and that sort of thing.

2. Good: I get up at 5:00 each morning. Granted, the last week or so I’ve been sleeping in because of this cold, but 5 a.m. is the habit, and I’ll be going back to it as soon as this cough vanishes.

3. Bad: I bite my nails. I try not to, but duh, it’s a habit. :P

4. Bad: In a similar vein, when I’m thinking hard, I often find myself pulling at my eyebrows without realizing it. But even so, the eyebrow-less patch on my right eyebrow is from a childhood accident, not from any frenetic mental activity. (Maybe my brain is trying to symmetrize the patch on the left. I knew there was a reason for this habit…)

5. Wish: I used to study Latin for half an hour each morning. I wish I still did that. (Or studied any language that regularly.)

6. Wish: I keep meaning to write for a certain amount of time each morning (half an hour to an hour), but thus far it’s sporadic at best. There was a short spurt where I managed to do it, but I didn’t hit the magic 21 days and so all my momentum evaporated.

7. Wish: Compliment people more often. Especially girls. ;)

The tagged: aye, there’s the rub. Those who don’t want to be tagged will murmur ancient curses at me in Old Church Slavonic under their breath, and those who do want to be tagged but who I didn’t name will feel neglected and hurt. So, in a weak attempt to please everyone, here’s the deal: if you want to be tagged, you’re tagged, with my full authority and blessing — whatever that means. And if you don’t want to be tagged, why in the heck did you ever think I would tag you? You’re clear.

Are we good? :)

Earlier today I came across an interesting post on the Mormon Artists Group blog:

What will the hymnal of 2043 be like? If the evolution of our hymnbook is any indicator, the 2043 book will have many new voices…. Hymnals are a reflection of the church’s population. They contain the creative ideas of average church members elevated through the arts of music and literature but made sacred by their prominent use in our worship…. With that trajectory, won’t the 2043 hymnal include melodies from Argentina, Samoa, Russia, and Nigeria too? Won’t the Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Sibelius, and Vaughn Williams scores be joined by the world’s greatest modern composers? Will Stravinsky, Copland, Britten, Bernstein, and Messiaen appear? The pattern of our history says yes. I, for one, welcome the idea that my children (who will be merely my age in 2043) will sing the testimonies of people whose landscapes were starkly different from Mormon pioneers of the American West. I want them to sing the hymns of African, South American, and Asian LDS songwriters. I fully expect them to sing harmonies and rhythms that would have sounded completely wrong to my grandparents. We call that inclusion. It is the anthem of progress.

A very good question. Down in the comments, Dan Carter (who has typeset hymns for the Church for the last twenty years, and yes, I want his job ;)) has a good counterbalance explaining why such a hymnbook is unlikely.

Thoughts?

Speaking of hymns, by the way, the annual Church music submissions are due March 31, so if you’re itching to send something in, now’s the time to get on that. The last time (er, the only time :)) I submitted something was in 2005. But this year, I’m definitely going to write something, so help me. Both in the general music category and in the hymn text category, in fact.

(On the same note, the Daily Universe ran a story about the Church music festival not too long ago, along with a piece on two BYU students who write hymns.)

Anyway, let the hymnwriting begin…

[tags]LDS, Mormon, hymns, Mormon Artists Group[/tags]

Last night I finished Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl, and wow, it’s good. Spun into a novel from the Grimms’ fairy tale of the same name, Goose Girl easily pulled me into its world, coaxing me with a love potion that’s got me head over heels for its characters and its story. This book is so well done. It’s beautifully written, the magic is delightfully plausible, and it perfectly captures the fairy tale feel. I love this book.

And the fact that Shannon is LDS is icing on the cake. Is it just me, or is there a new, rising generation of LDS authors — Hale, Brandon Sanderson, etc. — who all seem to be writing primarily science fiction/fantasy for general audiences? It’s almost as if they’re Orson Scott Card’s literary children, so to speak. Not meaning that they necessarily write like him — just that they’re LDS and do sci-fi/fantasy. (Which does makes perfect sense, at least to me. Card’s got a great essay in Storyteller in Zion which talks about Mormonism and science fiction being intertwined.)

Speaking of Orson Scott Card, I’ve already blocked out Feb. 14-16 for this year’s Life, the Universe & Everything conference, at which both Card and Gail Carson Levine (of Ella Enchanted fame, and no, she’s not LDS) will be present, along with Brandon Sanderson and a dozen or two others. It’ll be good. Geeky, too, but good. ;)

[tags]Shannon Hale, Brandon Sanderson, Orson Scott Card, Gail Carson Levine, LTUE[/tags]

Today I saw a blog post on writing a book in Google Docs. Interesting. One of the things that stuck out to me was the <div> hack to rein in the line lengths — that’s one of the things that has bothered me about Google Docs, and yet somehow I never thought to just edit the HTML. It’s brilliant.

In general, though, I write in a text editor — TextMate if I’m on my Mac, Wordpad if I’m on Windows, Vim if I’m on Linux. I can’t use anything too bulky or too slow, anything that gets in the way. And so text editors are the way to go. While I do think I’ll start making backups of my writing in Google Docs (right now I backup to my personal wiki, which also works, but redundancy is a very good thing), I don’t really see myself doing the actual writing there. Still too much of a barrier. (Yeah, I’m weird. ;))

Anyway, I’ve mentioned this at least twice before, but I really, really, really love writing in lightweight text editors. It makes me happy. Not only is it fast, but it’s portable — pretty much every computer on earth has at least a text editor.

But today in the lunch line I used a more portable system: the notebook. (Paper, that is. :)) I was standing there mulling over this new play I’m writing (and I finally snagged an idea last night and have some direction with it), when I realized that nothing was stopping me from drafting a page or two of dialogue while I was there. So I did. And it was great. I love being a writer. :)

Hmm, I’m not sure if this post is worth posting — my brain shut down around five o’clock this afternoon — but whatever. I’ll have a review of Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl up in a day or two when I finish reading it.

Writing one play wasn’t enough. Two weeks ago I got a hankering to submit something to the New Play Project’s Eccentricities playfest (the deadline was the 11th), and so I wrote a play called Snowstorm (a comedy about five people stuck in a middle-of-nowhere motel during a blizzard) and sent it in before I left for Vegas.

And it got accepted. :) It’s one of a handful of plays (either nine or seven, I can’t quite tell), and the performances will be February 29 and March 1, though I’m not sure where yet. More details later.

If anyone’s interested in acting or directing any of the plays, here’s the call for auditions I got in my inbox last night:

[Auditions] will be held Tuesday, Jan 22 from 7-9 pm and Wednesday, Jan 23 from 3-5 pm in the Harris Fine Arts Center on BYU campus, exact room TBA. Check the website this weekend for details. Performances will be Feb 29 and March 1. You don’t need to prepare anything for auditions, just plan on attending either day for around 30 minutes to do two to three cold readings from the scripts. We also still have slots available for applicants to direct or assistant direct as well as dramaturgy and technical positions.

The Facebook event for the auditions says, “We’ve got 24 roles available for our upcoming show, ‘Eccentricities.’ Each role will rehearse an estimated 2-4 hours per week.” So there are plenty of opportunities.

Anyway, I’ll be revising the play over the next few weeks, and I’m also starting work on a play for the NPP Lost & Found playfest. Beyond that, I’m slowly drafting my Amor Libris book, and in the near future I’ll start to revising Out of Time into something readable. If only I had more time…

(I’m still behind on everything, by the way, but I’ll be responding to y’all’s comments and e-mails by the end of the week.)

[tags]New Play Project[/tags]

Out with the old…

Last year I wrote 355 blog posts, which seemed like a lot until I went back to my 2006 New Year’s post and found that I wrote 452 in 2006. Goodness. But I do think this year’s posts were better, at least to some degree. I hope. ;)

With Riverglen Press I published only Phantastes and Beowulf: Student Edition, both way back in January, but I also designed Lorin Farr: Mormon Statesman and Niels and Christiane Christensen (two family histories), and I’m in the middle of designing books by Truman Madsen and M. Catherine Thomas.

As for the rest of life, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English Language, got an exceedingly cool job at Special Collections going through all the treasures in the vaults, started my MLS (master’s of library science), and got a staff position at Special Collections processing manuscripts (which means I can check out 100 books at a time for six months each :)).

And now for the list:

1. Didn’t quite get all A’s my last semester at BYU, but I did graduate.

2. Turns out being graduated didn’t quite give me all the free time I expected; I only read 60 books this year. And 28 of those were by the end of April — how on earth did I read more books in school than out? Sixty isn’t bad, but it’s nowhere near 100.

3. I wrote a whole novel, Out of Time, in November. (Finally!) And while I didn’t write a full-length play, in August I did write a 20-minute play Candle in the Darkness, and it even got produced in October.

4. Riverglen Press published two titles, not 10. ~sigh~

5. I did get a job at the library (two, actually) and not only figured out where I was going, but also started. (I’d originally planned to work for a year and then start my master’s, but life threw me a twist in the road.)

6. The study program didn’t happen.

7. My planning sort of got better, but it’s still far from perfect.

8. Didn’t really save money at all. And I bought 137 books in 2007.

9. I eat marginally better than I did last year (I usually get a salad for lunch now).

10. It’s hard to measure a goal like this (focusing on others and serving more). I still have much improvement waiting for me here.

11. I give more compliments than before, but not by much. Needs improvement.

12. This one’s even harder to measure. :)

And in with the new…

This year I think I’ll keep to the more quantifiable goals, since I seem to make more progress with them than with vague goals like “eat better.” I have a few more resolutions than I’ve listed here, but thirteen was just too good of a number to end on, so we’ll cap it there.

1. Read 80 books. I figure I may as well be realistic (though considering the trend, being perfectly realistic would mean setting a goal for 50 :P). Sure, I do have free time, but these other goals (like writing novels and plays) take up a lot of reading time, so it’s okay if I don’t read quite as many books as I’d like. It’s the whole consumption v. production balance thing.

2. Read all the C.S. Lewis books I haven’t yet read.

3. Read all the Jane Austen books I haven’t yet read.

4. Polish Out of Time and write another novel (as part of NaNoWriMo).

5. Write three short plays and one full-length play. I’m planning to do the full-length one as part of Script Frenzy in April, and the three short plays will be for the New Play Project. (I’m already almost done with the first draft of my next short, which I’ll submit to NPP in a week and a half.)

6. Write a full-length screenplay.

7. Write five songs.

8. Publish five Riverglen Press titles. (This’ll probably include Pride & Prejudice, Words of the Prophets: Selected Sermons from the Book of Mormon, and the Welsh Book of Mormon.)

9. Redesign the look of this blog (Top of the Mountains) and BenjaminCrowder.com.

10. Produce a short film in 3D.

11. Post a drawing to BenjaminCrowder.com each day in January, a painting each day in February, a 3D render each day in March/April/May (focusing on modeling, texturing, and lighting, respectively), and a logo a day in June.

12. Reply to all incoming correspondence within a day or two.

13. Get engaged. :P

Oscar Wilde says it best: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

It’s been a long while since I went back and read any of my journals, but this morning I found myself with a little extra time and inexplicably decided to start typing up my mission journals. (I really have no idea why I started, actually — all of the causal chain leading up to the decision this morning has been wiped from my memory. After reading my scriptures, the next thing I knew I had pulled out my first journal — there are five — and started typing away.)

It’s been more powerful than I expected.

A few years ago I began typing up all my journals, starting with my first one in 1990 when I was seven (though it wasn’t till sometime in 1994 that I made it a daily habit). I skipped around a bit, doing some segments from my teenage years, too. It made me cringe. I mean, they weren’t awful or anything, but goodness, I’ve changed a lot in the last ten years. (And thank heavens for that!) I am very, very, very glad I’m not still the person I was back then. (No, it’s not like I was an axe murderer or a druggie or anything. Just very immature.)

I was expecting a similar experience with my mission journals, but luckily somewhere near the end of my high school years, maturity crept in. Which isn’t to say I’m all that mature — how could I, when I’ve got a whole blog’s worth of evidence to the contrary sitting out here in the open? :P — but there’s certainly a difference between young Ben and contemporary Ben. Heck, there’s a world of changes between the me of just three years ago and the me of now. I’ve learned a lot.

Anyway, I’ve only typed up a week’s worth of entries so far, but wow, it’s been refreshing. So much of my mission has been filed away in my long-term memory storage and hasn’t been brought to the forefront since — well, since it happened. And now all the memories are starting to come back. I’ve poked a hole through the ice, and the light of the past is shining through again, illuminating both what’s behind the ice and where I stand today.

That’s the thing about going back and reading your journals — it’s good to review your life every once in a while, to see how far you’ve come. And it resynchronizes our memories with what actually happened. :) The blurry edges of my mission memory are starting to sharpen. And as a result the pangs of nostalgia are returning, which makes it hard, but I’m going to forge onward anyway.

I’ve also picked up some of my journals from just last year and leafed through a few pages. Some of what I’ve read about I was sure happened just a few months ago, but no, it’s already been a year and a half. I have no sense of time. :)

Afterword: For the technologically minded, I’m typing the journals up in XML, using a very simple markup system (<entry> contains each day’s entry, with a <date> tag and then a <p> tag around each paragraph, and if I remember things that I forgot to write about in the original entry, I add an <annotation> tag at the end). When I’m done I’ll put together an XSLT stylesheet to transform it into HTML and/or something I can import into InDesign (or LaTeX) and then typeset.

Came across an interesting post on Design Observer today:

In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare wrote a “rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” suggesting the meaning of something is more important than what it is called. By extension, the content of a blog post or comment is more significant than the signature of the poster (or postee), which provides something of a rationale for the surfeit of pseudonymous and anonymous postings on most blogs. Alas, my dear Montague, I beg to differ. A rose is a rose, and a real name at the end of a blog post is an indication that the person who authored the statement is taking responsibility, indeed ownership of the words — it is a simple act of honesty. For too long bloggers have been given license that is not tolerated in letters-to-the-editor columns of newspapers and magazines (except in extraordinary circumstances). If one is willing to expound, exclaim, or critique it should be done under a real name and with links to a valid email or website address. If transparency on the web is the new black, then there should be no secrets.

What think ye?