A lovely wolf photo, that I had embedded (that's surely a no-no), here.

Bacteria R Us

Now I've got this image of organisms as products made by bacteria, of plants and animals being their equivalent of appliances, modes of transport, works of art, toys, musical instruments.

Then they got the bright idea of making meta-functional organisms. And here we are.

There's something artificial about a Möbius strip, because only if the strip has no orientating marks—to differentiate between either top and bottom or back and front—does it look kind of tricky. Not differentiating is what makes the seam disappear.

Why do I consider such stuff? Well, why not?

You know how when you go to a gallery opening, you get to schmooze with the artist and learn what they have to say about their work? And how interesting that is? It's that kind of contact I like to have with writers.

For example: Jean-Christophe Valtat on his book Aurorama 

(via Open Letters Monthly)

I'm going to file this away for later, more in-depth perusal.

For now I just want to say that pacing and texturizing count for something in effective writing. And, of course, no graph stands alone. And, of course, no work will ever, ever, ever stand up to all possible criticism.

I'll go a long ways to accept a writer's voice and intent. I'll go about as far to give them the space they need to just write as well as they can, especially if I'm real sure they're on track to get better and better.

3 Quarks Daily is hankering for new columnists.
Got sumpin' to say to the educated classes?

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/10/3-quarks-daily-is-looking-for-new-monday-columnists.html

she woke, hungry, from
dreaming she fitfully slept

into neither kansas nor oz,
barefooted, striking sparks,

and wishing her wakefulness
might so lucidly congeal

into jello parfait — layered,
sweet, the color of rubies.

::

Hmmm. I like making shaped poems.
I might want to shape this into a footprint.

Of interest today: Adrienne Mayor's Legends Of The First Americans, in which she compares fossils with mythic creatures.

Finally! An approach to folklore that makes sense and is essentially non-religious. We're naturalists to the bone, methinks.

Also, a discussion of the future of cities at glasshouseconversations.org.

I don't like living in a drug-riddled world, and I don't much want any of that in my story. So why do I feel like I'm arguing about it? And with whom? If I decide I must deal with it somehow, via which characters and in what contexts?

While working through location blocking for the pretend novel, I decided to give myself a break and visit bldgblog.blogspot.com -- and true to the nature of looking askance to see something better, I was alerted to an upcoming lecture by the blog's author that might be just the kind of thing I was looking for to jog loose lurking questions.

There's so much architectural detail in his blog posts, and such pretty pictures, that I've missed his main focus: the links between architecture and narrative, which is what he'll be talking about.

It will be netcast live, and eventually archived with sciarc's other videos. Cool!

"We do not come into this world; we come out of it,
as leaves from a tree," sayeth Alan Watts.

"Through Adam and Eve we lost a gift but earned a heart,"
sayeth Robert Pogue Harrison.

My imaginary novel is not so imaginary anymore. I'm planning like I mean it, even though I've only graduated to calling it a pretend novel. If I can produce something trunk worthy, well, I'll just celebrate by buying a trunk to put it in.

Maybe the difference is that I'm clearer on the kind of book I most like to read. Re-reading has made a tremendous difference, along with attending to writers' advice and reflections on the process. Reading is linear; writing is anything but. It's more like collage.

Now, if I can just write it, or at least keep the momentum going, because this is getting to be an engrossing challenge.

Oh, and it helps to have found a very useful tool: TreePad.

I remember lounging around the apartment complex swimming pool in junior high with a few friends, someone's comment that I had a golden tan -- and my instant plan to mess with everyone's head. I told them I was part Chinese.

It was astonishingly easy to make it believable. It took nothing more than a reasonable possibility and a straight face.

Years later when I got some hints of a large Chinese population in Mexico and learned of some recent ancestors' northern migration, I even came to wonder whether I do indeed have some Chinese relations somewhere.

I don't understand Tink's motivation. But just that, the not understanding, is in itself a motivation for me to pursue The Story.

I recognize aspects of myself in all the characters. It's quite interesting to, at one and the same time, (1) write and (2) watch myself engage and explore.

A Prediction

The next variation of LolCats will be known as "Shrimp Cocktail."

Work the metaphor, make it viral.

Spurred by a post at Boing Boing, I got to thinking about Tom De Marco and Ed Yourdon. Way back in the late seventies, their seminars were the go-to place to be, especially in Seattle when Microsoft was seriously about to get serious.

Anyhoo, I was wondering if De Marco might vaguely remember me. In a class of 80 or so, I was the one and only person to solve the problem we were given. Not my team; me. My team just sat back and watched as I noodled my way through the logic of the problem and nailed it.

After our time was up, he presented each team's results (fail, fail, fail . . . success), saving ours for last. We (meaning me) were the only ones to figure it out. De Marco had dropped in on each team as we worked; he noticed that I was the only one speaking and scribbling and making any kind of progress, and that's why I wonder if he might vaguely remember me, as I vaguely remember him.

One of my co-workers made the move to Microsoft in that era, and I wonder what my life might have been like had I done so. It's just that there was this one "big shop" programmer who'd come to work with us (from Boeing) who, for instance, clipped her toenails at her desk and once came to work with her pants inside out; and the supervisor who never made a decision without consulting an astrologer; and the general woo-woo thing that programming was in those days.

Software engineering out of context just looked kind of perverted, not something I wanted to be part of, and I seem to have a similar approach to fiction: Without context, not much of anything serves a purpose.

Context is Purpose? Purpose is Context?

::

Nothing can be understood in isolation.

("Nothing" can be understood in isolation.)

Is it possible that someone somewhere has re-imagined an Airstream trailer as a multi-colored roll of Lifesavers? Of course it is. I've just thunk it up; therefore anyone could.

Maybe some resistance to public transportation is not just that personal vehicles take us where we alone wish to go, but also that, so far, they are not subject to the likes of building codes.

So, I must wonder whether loosening up building codes might make it more okay for transportation to be uniform. Because, artistically speaking, a work of personal expression "calls for" a regular ground, and vice versa.

Damn. This is rough.

“That’s the torture of walking into a bookshop these days: it’s not that you think the books will all be terrible; it’s that you know they’ll all have a certain degree of competent workmanship, that most will have about three genuinely beautiful or interesting sentences and no really bad ones, that many will have at least one convincing, well-observed character, and that nearly all will be bound up in a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about. All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! Who, indeed, has time to read them?”

But! If we can just drill into the heads of these very competent writers that THE STORY MATTERS, those three sentences and one character need not be wasted.

PS. Tink's cat's name is Marbles, and Valerie is missing most of a thumb on her right, dominant hand.

WIP, take one

Tink tried to sit Peter down for a talk, but Peter would not be sat. What stillness Peter had could only be glimpsed when he peered into tree canopies, hunkered down cold at a fire, or examined a chisel's edge through saw-dusted bifocals. And unless a router was whining for oil, he was not a listening kind of man.

“Less planing and more planning, Peter, is all I'm saying. And only a little bit. Ten minutes a month for a start? Beginning, like, now?”

“Every day I wake up and ask myself, Shall I commit suicide or art? I don't ask what either option counts for, Tink. I just need to know what the day is for before I get out of bed."

Peter held a planer in each hand, working a de-barked tree stump topping out at his chin. A long curl of maple landed between Tink's sandals that could have just as easily been directed another way. The second one butterflied past his ear, and the next he almost caught before it wedged in an armpit. A roundness of feminine thigh began to suggest itself near Peter's waist.

"And to lie down at night," he continued, "I just need to be well used and tired. Planning makes me tired but it does not use me well. It just thoroughly pisses me off.”

Tink always felt like he was about twelve years old around Peter. Partly it was the mere physical presence of this loud dark Greek, the winged eyebrows, the barrel chest. Mostly it was that Tink, as far as he knew, was the only one to have ever seen any of Peter's works in progress. Who else but an artistic naif would be allowed to witness any of this?

He was gay, lanky and red-headed, not-quite-a-lawyer; he and his cat hovered over the tribe occupying Butcher Mountain, never to descend, but always to defend. If only he really knew how. The frackers had been defeated but other developers were about to turn the mountain into some version of Disney Land. Artists were to become performers to entertain tourists. The summit's meadow was to be razed and topped with a complex of restaurants and gift shops. The last person he ever wanted to tell any of this to was Peter.

Tink went blotchy and cleared his throat. "You need to shut up with that shit, man, and you need to hear this. We've held off the frackers, but not the zoners. They intend to write building codes."

The two men turned, one to the right and one to the left, to peer downhill. The hot summer smell of pine, rock and stream was confused by their sighting of tropical fruit in the form of a re-fashioned Airstream trailer.

Yeah, I know; I'm rushing the set-up. This opening needs more background and development before the complications are revealed.

Relax and tell yourself (myself) the story as if you (I) were reading or dreaming it.

Introducing people is like making a gift of each to the other. It's one of my favorite things to do, even on the web, even just a few minutes ago. (In this case, it's Nils Gilman and Jeffrey Inaba.)

::

Currently reading Lark & Termite.
Currently drinking hazelnut coffee with milk and honey.
I recommend both.