I’ve been playing around with PlotDevice more, and yes, it is awesome. For example, I can quite easily create something like my Latin declension charts programmatically:
As you can see, I’m taking a simple list of words with brackets around the endings and displaying it, styling the endings using PlotDevice’s stylesheet functionality (lines 11 and 15–16). Super easy.
It’s also great for trying out design ideas that would take much longer to prototype in Illustrator, like fan charts for genealogical purposes:
Using that code, which took me less than twenty minutes to write, I can easily try out as many sizing/spacing variations as I want, and the output is high-quality PDF. This is slick.
I recently came across PlotDevice, a Python-based graphics environment for Mac, similar to Processing and NodeBox. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before with Processing, but it dawned on me that PlotDevice would be perfect for prototyping some of the design experiments I do. For example, it took around fifteen minutes to write some quick code to draw genealogy sparklines (code):
For this sample, I have a draw_sparkline function that takes an object with a name, birth/death dates, list of marriages, and list of children, and it handles the drawing. Much easier than copying and pasting and tweaking in Illustrator or InDesign.
PlotDevice is vector-based (rather than raster) and exports to PDF, which means output is high quality and not limited to pixel resolution (e.g., I can create very fine hairlines).
I’m hooked. The only semi-important downside for me right now is that it doesn’t have OpenType features or tracking/kerning controls for text, but it looks like both are coming soon.
For fun, a watersun emblem (code), based off some code in the PlotDevice geometry tutorial:
Thanks to Tod Robbins for the heads up about PlotDevice.
Today I finished the first draft of “Queen of the Cruel Sea,” clocking in at just over 11,000 words. Not terribly long, but this happens to be the first time I’ve stuck with writing long enough to produce a full draft of a piece of fiction longer than a few pages. (I’m not counting Out of Time, my pathetic NaNoWriMo novel from 2007.)
My routine of waking up early to write each morning is working well, as is the outlining process. Getting the story finished by the end of the month shouldn’t be a problem at all.
A good bit from chapter 20 of G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics:
Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of that improvement. The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.
Lately I’ve started getting up early to write (long experience having shown that that’s the only way that works for me), which hopefully will result in some finished stories and eventually novels in the nearish future. I’m also now listing current projects at the top of my writing page, for what it’s worth.
My current project is tentatively called “Queen of the Cruel Sea.” It began life as a brief scene I wrote when I was playing around with Cathode a couple years ago. Since then I’ve tinkered with the story every few months, getting to 11,000 words written on it last year, but plot issues forced me to start over. Between that first brief scene and this current draft, only the title remains the same. The story is, however, much better, I think. I’ve written around 4,300 words so far, with three scenes down and five to go. (Assuming things don’t change too drastically with the outline as I get further along. I’ve already had to revise the outline in some substantial ways based on how the first three scenes went.)
This also marks my first time trying a variation on Rachel Aaron’s technique. First I write a high-level outline (beginning, end, and then middle to connect the two) and revise it a few times till I’m happy enough to move forward. I then go through each scene, writing a very detailed paragraph-by-paragraph outline including dialogue, and then I write the full scene.
So far, it’s working well. Figuring out the detailed outline before I write the actual words has been a huge help, making it far easier for me to see and fix issues (and so more quickly). It’s like figuring out an algorithm in pseudocode before actually writing the code. I recommend it.
Anyway, after I finish and release “Cruel Sea” (by the end of September, a deadline I just made up because I need something solid to work towards), I’m planning to start writing novels instead of shorter works, beginning with a science fiction standalone. And of course plans are subject to revision, same as my plots. And life, though not quite in the same way.
This proof of concept takes the genealogy sparklines idea and puts it on a pedigree chart:
The white diamond represents a marriage, and the small circles represent children. The length of the line corresponds to how long the person lived. (Also, the data is very made up.)
As I’m writing this, I’m thinking these sparklines might work better on a family group sheet instead of a pedigree chart.
Turns out reading PDFs of old books (from Google Books, Internet Archive, etc.) on my iPhone works out reasonably well. For example:
On the left is the fully zoomed out page. Indoors, I’m able to read it without too much difficulty, though my eyes do thank me when I zoom in (as on the right). The problem with zooming, however, is that navigating to the next page then requires more swiping, and, at least in iBooks, you have to zoom in again every time you turn the page.
After a bit of this, I got to wondering what it would be like to typeset an iPhone-sized PDF, designed specifically to be read on a phone. Here’s how it turned out (and this is a proof of concept, nothing too polished):
The pages are set at 7.573×4.267″, which I arrived at by taking 1136×640 (iPhone screen dimensions in pixels) and dividing by 150. Arbitrary, but it worked out well enough. And the text is at 16 points on the left and 18 on the right. (Also arbitrary, but dependent on the page size, of course.)
The main advantage to a foolhardy scheme like this is full typographic control — margins, fonts, layout (important for poetry), tracking, etc., all without worrying about limitations of ebook readers. I could try to do something about widows and orphans, for instance, though I didn’t do that with this proof of concept.
The downside is that it’s custom-tailored to the dimensions of the iPhone 5S, and on other devices it wouldn’t fit as perfectly. Not necessarily a dealbreaker, though.
Is it worth pursuing? No idea. One of these days I’ll set a full book this way and try reading it on my phone to see how it compares.
I recently finished Mindhunters, John Douglas’s account of his work as an FBI criminal profiler catching serial killers. It’s a fascinating book. What stood out to me most was this paragraph towards the end:
In all my years of research and dealing with violent offenders, I’ve never yet come across one who came from what I would consider a good background and functional, supportive family unit.
On a related note, a passage earlier in the book:
At the request of Buffalo SAC Richard Bretzing, I came up that weekend. Bretzing is a very proper, solid guy, a real family man and a key member of the FBI’s so-called Mormon Mafia. I’ll never forget, he had a sign in his office saying something to the effect of, “If a man fails at home, he fails in his life.”
No doubt it was “No other success can compensate for failure in the home,” often attributed to David O. McKay, who was quoting James Edward McCulloch’s 1924 book Home: The Savior of Civilization. I hunted down the book here at the BYU library and, for curiosity’s sake, I present to you the full paragraph (p. 42):
When one puts business or pleasure above his home, he that moment starts on the down grade to soul ruin. The loss of a fortune is nothing compared with the loss of home. When the club becomes more attractive to any man than his home, it is time for him to confess in bitter shame that he has failed to measure up to the supreme opportunity of his life and has flunked in the final test of true manhood. No other success can compensate for failure in the home. This is the one thing of limitless potentialities on earth. The poorest shack of a home in which love prevails over a united family is of greater value to God and future humanity than the richest bank on earth. In such a home God can work miracles and will work miracles. The greatest miracle that King Herod ever saw was John the Baptist. The religious home, though poor, produced John the Baptist. The most dazzling miracle of all history is Jesus of Nazareth. His education was that of a united religious home. Pure hearts in a pure home are always in whispering distance of Heaven. In such a home there is always a key which one may use in opening the reservoirs of the Infinite and start a Pentecost. The great, good God who made this world ordained man and woman for the home and He is seeing to it that they may search the whole world over but will never find the sweetest joys of life anywhere but in the home. In obedience to God’s law for human life, one should make it his highest ambition to build an ideal home. Make home your hobby; for, if anyone makes a loving home with all his heart, he can never miss Heaven.
I was reading through C. S. Lewis’s letters the other day and came across this bit in a letter to Genia Goelz on 20 June 1952:
I would prefer to combat the “I’m special” feeling not by the thought “I’m no more special than anyone else” but by the feeling “Everyone is as special as me.” In one way there is no difference, I grant, for both remove the speciality. But there is a difference in another way. The first might lead you to think, “I’m only one of the crowd like anyone else.” But the second leads to the truth that there isn’t any crowd. No one is like anyone else. All are “members” (organs) in the Body of Christ. All different and all necessary to the whole and to one another: each loved by God individually, as if it were the only creature in existence. Otherwise you might get the idea that God is like the government which can only deal with the people in the mass.
