I’ve been enjoying Emily McQueen’s The Green Hymnbook project (@greenhymnbook) — typewritten hymn texts with lovely linocut illustrations underneath.
Blog
New artwork: Prodigal Son.
Atmosphere
I usually listen to music to provide some background noise (helpful with kids in the house), but sometimes music is still a bit too much of a distraction. White noise helps there, so I did some poking around and found Noisli, which is great. Then I realized (naturally) that I could fairly easily make my own local version, no network access required.
It’s called Atmosphere, a Python script that takes a config file like this:
# Sound path
/path/to/that/directory/with/sound/files
# Volumes (>1 = louder, <1 = quieter)
# Don't include extension
brook 0.3
crickets 0.9
fireplace 1.2
forest_rain 1.1
thunder1 1.3
thunder2 1.3
waves 0.05
wind 1.2
And then mixes the looped audio together via Sox. The current version isn’t perfect at all — it can use more CPU than I’d like, and I think it might work better as a menu bar application than as a command-line script — but it works. I’ve been using it for several months now.
By way of the Glue chat comic (interesting ideas, by the way), I came across John Palmer’s excellent posts on spatial interfaces and spatial software. Mmm. As a productivity nerd and a hobbyist toolmaker (there are probably ten or so personal tools I’ve been using over the past several years that I’ve never blogged about, but that’ll change soon), I’m very, very interested in these kinds of ideas. Particularly in using 3D interfaces for productivity. I’ve thought a bit about doing that in VR, but I hadn’t really considered building tools in 3D even outside of VR.
No concrete ideas yet, just little threads leading off to various areas that I’m interested in exploring (todo lists, website/blog engines, writing/outlining tools, etc.).
At this point the plan is to use Three.js for prototyping some ideas to see if it’s viable. My initial sense is that for the kinds of tools I’m interested in, I’ll probably need a good way to render/edit text from within Three.js, and it looks like rendering to a canvas and then using the canvas as a texture will work. Anyway, more to come.
BYU Studies cover
Pleased to announced that Let Him Ask of God is on the cover of issue 59:2 of the BYU Studies Quarterly journal:
The painting also gets a mention in one of the articles, Anthony Sweat’s Visualizing the Vision: The History and Future of First Vision Art. Recommended.
Come, Follow Me reader’s edition
Just released the Come, Follow Me reader’s edition. It’s an experimental supplemental edition of the Book of Mormon:
As for what it actually is: it’s a set of web pages with the text of the Book of Mormon grouped into the Come, Follow Me sections, and it’s reparagraphed sans verse numbers like my normal reader’s edition.
I have no idea whether it’s actually useful or not, but it was quick enough to make that I figured I may as well just do it. Let me know what you think.
Two months ago I posted about the novel I’m currently working on and mentioned how smoothly it was going with my shiny new writing process.
The next day, said process stopped working.
Irrationally, some part of me believed my blog post was what botched it, which in hindsight is ridiculous. If a process is so fragile it crumbles when described, I submit that there are probably larger issues to deal with. (In my case, the method wasn’t actually broken at all. More on that momentarily.)
Then I came across my friend Liz’s writing blog the other day and remembered how much I like reading blogs about writing fiction. To join in on the fun, then, I’ll be casting aside my half-formed superstitions (good riddance!) and writing more about writing on here.
And now for a totally-not-superstitious-anymore update on the novel, which has no title yet:
My process wasn’t broken after all. I got stuck, yes, but some rough brainstorming and outlining got me out of it soon enough, and the alternation of discovery writing and outlining has kept me going since then.
This stream of words I’m calling a first draft is currently 167 pages long (!), and I’m only about 8,000 words away from this being the longest thing I’ve ever written. (Back in 2007 I technically finished NaNoWriMo with a book called Out of Time, but that wretched thing was an utter disaster of a story, so let’s just forget it ever happened.)
As for the original plan to finish this first draft by mid-July…[checks notes]…that’s not going to happen. But I expect to hopefully/maybe/probably finish in a month or so, at my current rate of 1,000 words per weekday. No idea yet how long revising will take, but I’m still hopeful that I’ll have a finished book sometime in the fall.
My aim with this draft is just to get the story down; polishing the prose will come in a later pass. This is often discouraging, though, when I read great books with sparkling, vibrant prose and then turn back to the pallid, dead-fish words I’m wringing out of my hands. But I will persist. (Cf. that Guy Gavriel Key quote I posted last week.)
As of today, I’m starting on chapter 17. I have no outline (yet) and no idea where the story goes after the scene I wrote yesterday. It’s a big ball of terrifying and delightful fun. Back into the fray…
This quote from Guy Gavriel Kay (from a 2014 article in The Guardian) has been comforting and inspiring to me in my own creative work:
I learned a lot about false starts in writing. I mean that in a really serious way. His [Tolkien’s] false starts. You learn that the great works have disastrous botched chapters, that the great writers recognise that they didn’t work. So I was looking at drafts of The Lord of the Rings and rough starts for The Silmarillion and came to realise they don’t spring full-blown, utterly, completely formed in brilliance. They get there with writing and rewriting and drudgery and mistakes, and eventually if you put in the hours and the patience, something good might happen. That was a very, very early lesson for me, looking at the Tolkien materials. That it’s not instantly magnificent. That it’s laboriously so, but it gets there. That was a huge, huge, still important lesson.
Years ago when I was the lead web designer for the BYU library, I developed the (seriously unprofessional) habit of hiding easter eggs on the site. There are still some left, though I don’t know how much longer they’ll stick around as things get updated and refactored. For posterity’s sake, then, here are a couple of the eggs:
Wyrm
If you type the Konami code in the home page search box (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a — no start button needed), you get dropped into a very simple avoid-everything worm game:
It keeps track of your score using the browser’s local storage.
Honeybell
If you type supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. (with the period) quickly enough into that same search box, you get dropped into a very rough draft, totally unfinished text adventure game:
There are a handful of rooms and one or two puzzles, I believe. The bottom floor is full of monsters.
I kept meaning to expand the game into something formidable and awe-inspiring (at one point I was even thinking about turning it into an old-school MUD), but I clearly never got around to it.
Hark! I’ve replaced the formerly anemic home page (a barebones list of recent work) with a more text-heavy page. That’s right! Text-heavy! Turns out I like text, and reading, and words. More of that, please.
To that end, and also as an attempt at getting this site to start feeling more like a cozy personal site again (not a cozy personals site, to be clear) and way less…sterile, we’ve got a new block of text greeting everyone at the front door. It’s an overview of the site (as opposed to the about page, which is an overview of…me as a person, I guess) (there’s a difference between the two, subtle and blurred though it may be). I’ve also included recommended entry points for various parts of the site, a new idea I’m trying out.
Anyway, it’s nerdy and will probably scare some people off and I’m totally okay with that.