New artwork: Plan of Salvation. Inspired by a comment my friend Naomi made about another piece.
This is also one of the first times (maybe the very first time) that I’ve superimposed things like this, especially out of chronological order. Hopefully it doesn’t make the piece overly confusing.
Last but not least, I’m really liking the SVG filters for making the edges seem more hand-drawn.
Long ago before the pandemic, I took some footage of a short walkthrough of my Sacred Shapes exhibit, for those who couldn’t go see it in person. Finally got around to editing it (adding titles and music, nothing major):
I don’t use Premiere very often, so it took a little while to rediscover how to expand the audio track for keyframing levels, and I wish it supported different leading values in multiline textboxes, but overall the editing didn’t take very long and went smoothly enough. Makes me want to make more videos. (Bad idea right now, when school’s about to start.)
A mere two thousand words remain left to scribble down on the first draft of this novel. It seems a thing almost miraculous when I look back over the trail of desiccated novels I’ve abandoned over the last couple decades. I wasn’t sure I would ever reach this point, but I’m glad I kept at it.
In Robin Sloan’s week four POTO diary I came across three important-to-me ideas about writing.
First, he quotes M. John Harrison on worldbuilding:
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfill their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.
Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.
John’s full post is good, if you’re of a similar mind (which I am). Back to Robin:
I find this formulation both cautionary and invigorating. The message, as I receive it, is that the words are all there is. You cannot substitute exhaustive backstory for language that crackles and conjures. That’s the cautionary part: don’t try to compensate for your cruddy sentences with an intricate magic system.
The invigorating part is: the words are all there is! And if that’s true, then words are all you need, and, my gosh, what LEVERAGE.
Invigorating indeed, and beautiful, too, for a minimalist like me. The words are all there is.
In my own experience, worldbuilding is fun and it does help generate ideas, but I’ve learned that I’d rather put most of that time into writing the actual story instead. Because then I have a finished story at the end of it.
How does this play in to my recently expressed plan to do more prep work and outlining on my next novel? No idea. Still figuring that out.
Later in the post, Robin talks about getting bogged down in “this, then that.” Guilty as charged, here. Being conscious of it now, though, will help, as I strive to avoid thudding monotony locked into a single temporal resolution (as he calls it) and instead try to write more time-elastic prose.
A second but similar axis he mentions is Roy Peter Clark’s ladder of abstraction idea. From Roy’s book Writing Tools:
Good writers move up and down a ladder of language. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like freedom and literacy. Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy and technocracy lurk. Halfway up, teachers are referred to as full-time equivalents and school lessons are called instructional units.
I’ve long been aware of the need to use concrete words (at the bottom of the ladder), but I hadn’t thought much about the bouncing back and forth between concrete and abstract words. An intriguing idea. As for the middle rungs, to be honest I’m not entirely sure yet how to tell the difference between them and the top of the ladder, other than that the middle seems to show itself as a vague, bland malaise that greys out the sentence. Something to watch out for.
In the spirit of working in public, and inspired by the office hours professors keep (and maybe others, though I’m not familiar with the idea outside of an academic context), I’m now holding occasional ad hoc office hours via video chat.
For now I’m starting with fifteen-minute appointments (less daunting for both sides, I think) and asking people to email me a list of three time slots that work for them.
This thing is very much an experiment. It may bomb. I don’t know that anyone will actually want to talk via video or audio rather than just sending an email, but it’ll be available for those who do. (Luckily, since the scheduling is ad hoc, it’s not a problem at all if hardly anyone ever uses it.)
New artwork: Before the World Was II.
It’s (in my opinion) a much better execution of Before the World Was, which used a quick DrawBot script that didn’t pay much attention to placement.
This time, working off the Generative Artistry circle packing tutorial, I wrote a Python script that places all the circles so there’s no overlap, then outputs an SVG with the turbulence/displacement filters I wrote about not too long ago.
For comparison (original on the left):
I also went with a slightly less saturated background in this new version, and I put a little bit of texture on the circles themselves to make it feel slightly more painterly.
Came across Marie Brennan’s AMA today and was struck by the bit about incubating story ideas. I write down ideas in Liszt all the time, but I never review that list…making it somewhat worthless. In a similar vein, something else I read recently (can’t remember where) talked about regularly reviewing cultivating your idea list.
To that end, I’m planning to start reviewing my list once or twice a week. I’ll also be pulling the most promising ideas out into their own documents where I can flesh them out further.
In concert with all this: writing a novel where I pretty much just made it all up as I went was fun, and it got me this far, but I’m very much itching to be more thoughtful about the ideas in my fiction going forward — more thorough exploration of the ideas in the book and their ramifications, more interesting combinations of ideas, etc. (And of course do this while also trying to serve up a riveting plot and lovable characters.)
I recently discovered weeknotes, and I am excited. Extremely short posts (one or two lines, like a tweet) feel too anemic to me for a blog, even after making titles optional, and now here’s a lovely way to handle that: bundle several small posts into a longer, less frequent, more substantial post. Has a nice feel to it, almost like an issue of a magazine.
Some discussion on weeknotes I dug up as I scoured the web:
And here are some of the people whose weeknotes I’ve come across so far (why so many of them are in the UK I do not know, but being an anglophile I also don’t mind in the least):
These feel humanizing to me in a way that scrolling through Facebook/etc. doesn’t. It’s wonderful.
So of course I’m now planning to start writing some myself, probably on Fridays. It’s unclear at this point which types of posts will end up in weeknotes vs. on their own, but that’ll all work itself out eventually.
Lastly: if you find other weeknotes you enjoy reading (or if you start writing your own), let me know!