Category: essays

Beginning to Write, Again

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When I wrote about playing the long game recently, I said at the time that I wouldn’t really begin working on something new until September. When I wrote it, I thought it would take me longer to come up with a plan of execution. I also realized I was hedging a bit. Why wait, if things began falling into place.

I think things have finally started to fall into place. I know what I want to write about. I have a plan for completing a draft in what I think is a reasonable amount of time. I have a method for tracking my progress. All I really need to do is get started.

I am going into this trying to learn from my previous mistakes. A big change is in what I think of a the “pre-production” phase of writing. With short fiction I’ve always had an idea, an idea for how the thing might end, and I’d just start writing. No real planning. I also did this with the first novel draft I wrote back in 2013. This time around, I am trying to be more strategic.

For one thing, I learned from the first novel draft attempt, as well as the many failed attempts since, that flying by the seat of my pants doesn’t work for me when writing at that length. I have therefore been jotting notes down. I’ll be continuing to do this, putting together a kind of skeleton of the story, more so that I understand the gaps and know how to fill them. So while I am considering today my first “official” day on this project, there may not be any writing beyond notes.

For another thing, I’m trying to keep things simple. I often get bogged down with the tools I use, building all sorts of elaborate means of tracking what I write. Not this time. I’m writing everything using Obsidian, story, notes, and anything else. I’m treating it the way I treat software projects, committing my changes to a git repo each day. If I want to go back and get information about my writing, I can use git’s functionality to do that. Finally, I’m keeping a log book that I think might be handy when working on a second draft.

I do have a schedule. It’s the only way I can work on something like this. I’m giving myself 4 months to complete the first draft. Call it 120 days. I’ve given myself a goal of 1,000 words/day with a target of 100,000 words. But 1,000 x 120 = 120,000, so what gives right? Like on a software project, I’ve built a 20% buffer into my schedule so that things don’t get too stressful if I don’t hit my goal on some days. Sometimes, the writing just doesn’t come. Indeed, my initial plan is to write 6 days a week, giving me a day off each week. I may write on my day off, but I won’t feel compelled to do this.

One thing I won’t be doing is talking about what I am writing about. I get that people are curious. But I am one of those writers who lose interest in what I am writing if I talk about it. I want to save everything for the page.

So there you have it. If all goes well, I will report on or about the end of September 2021 that I have completed the first draft of this first novel in this reboot of my writing career. Fingers crossed!

Yard Work

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I woke up this morning certain it was Sunday. I lazed around in bed until nearly 7:30 before finally getting up. The sun was shining and the sky was blue, which was a nice change after 2 days of gray skies, rain, and cold weather. It was cool when I headed out for my morning walk, but the sunshine felt so good. I often think of Superman when I turn my face up to the sun and soak in the warmth, even if the air is cool.

Arriving back home, I was surprised to see the yard crew at the house. They normally come on Mondays–and that’s when I realized it is Monday. I hadn’t realized the yard service worked on holidays. Seeing the yard crew reminded me that I had been putting off some yard work, re-mulching at the front of the house. I headed over to Home Depot and despite a fairly full parking lot at 8:30 am, I managed to get in and out with five bags of mulch in about 5 minutes. I came back home and spread the mulch around the bushes and tree in the front of the house. It looks much better now (although my estimate of 5 bags was probably one bag short).

Newly mulched are of the front yard

Now that I’ve completed that task, I’ve got to get the ladder out so that I can clear out a spot near one of the gutter spouts that I noted some clogging. We have covers for the gutters, but occasionally I notice small leaves getting in there. Maybe I can have that done by 10 am and then have the rest of the the day to relax and enjoy the (finally!) nice weather.

A Good Nap

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I try to get one good nap every day. I used to be bad at napping, but after our youngest daughter was born, I began to nap when she napped. This habit continued and it has become a daily ritual that I look forward to. Usually, we head down to the guest room, but on our nap playlist, and we are both asleep within a few minutes. We have a good routine down. I usually drift off for 20 minutes or so. The Littlest Miss is usually out for at least an hour.

We nap in the guest room, which is down stairs, and since she doesn’t like being down there alone, I usually setup a FaceTime video between my office and a laptop that I leave in the guest room. That way, when the Littlest Miss awakens, she sees me and can let me know she is done napping.

These brief naps are surprisingly refreshing. I miss those days when we don’t have our naps together. Yesterday was one such day. These happen, although not often. She is a real grouch in the evenings if she doesn’t get her nap so we encourage it.

The routine we have worked out is pretty simple. We she gets home from pre-school, the Littlest Miss has her lunch. She can then have a little play time, after which she and I head downstairs, put on our playlist, and drift off. It is rare when we are both not asleep within minutes. We measure this in “songs.” Usually, we are both asleep before the second song in our 35 minute playlist is over. I usually wake up toward the end of the playlist.

On Thursday, the Littlest Miss finished pre-K. She is now a rising kindergartner, and as such, she will be in school for full days come next school year. That means no more naps at home–at least during the week. And since this is about the same age our two older kids stopped napping, I suspect we are coming to the end of our napping time soon. We’ve got the summer left, and that’s it.

For me, it is bittersweet. I try to savor every nap I get to take with the Littest Miss knowing there aren’t that many more ahead of us. For her part, the Littlest Miss has been napping for shorter intervals, and is more resistant than she used to be to head down for a nap. I am growing into them, while she is growing out of them.

It is a lazy Saturday morning, cool, wet, and dreary, a day right out of The Cat in the Hat. Already, I am looking forward to a good nap, just about an hour away as I write this. I try not to think about it too much, but I know there aren’t too many of these left. The summer will fly by, as it always does, fall will be upon us. The good naps will dwindle to the just the weekends, but I suspect even that won’t last long.

I’ll take what I can get. There’s nothing quite like a good nap.

Fiction Cravings

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Despite the best laid plans, the butterfly has flapped its wings, and instead of hitting up that list of nonfiction books I’d planned to tear through, I’ve found myself with a fiction-craving, which is similar to a fast-food craving for me these days. It doesn’t come as often as it used to.

It started with a re-reading of ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. I followed that up with a re-reading of Bag of Bones. I forgot how good that book was and I enjoyed it much more the second time around (I think I first read it in 2012). Last night I bounced around quite a bit, even reading half of Hell House by Richard Matheson before giving up on it (it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be). Late last night (or very early this morning), as I had trouble drifting off, I decided to switch to Harry Bosch, and started where I’d left off, with Trunk Music. That seems to have stuck for now.

I enjoy character novels like the Bosch books. I think my favorite of this type is Craig Johnson’s Longmire books, which I absolutely love. But the thing I like about Bosch is that they are set in L.A. and having lived in L.A. for nearly 20 years, many of the places are familiar to me. I can see them that much more clearly and that makes for a better over all story.

Michael Connelly has to be a fairly prolific writer and that kind of thing impresses the writer in me. I always wonder how some writers can be so prolific and still maintain what I consider to be high quality in their writing. There are, by my count, 23 Bosch novels that have appeared between 1992 and 2021, a period of 29 years. Consider, however, Connelly wrote 15 additional books in the overall “Bosch” universe making for a total of 38 books in a 29 year period. I guess that’s what it means to play in the big leagues.

These are great books to read over a long holiday weekend like the one that begins at 5 pm local today. After a spate of great (and sometimes very hot!) spring weather, things look cool and dreary this weekend with lots of rain. Reading Bosch novels, at least I can imagine I am in a place with some better weather than what we’ll be having on the traditional opening weekend of summer here on the east coast.

Which is Better?

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If there is an underlying malaise to the human condition, it is the need to sort trivial things by which is better or which is worse. Fifty times a day I see articles online asking things like “Which is better? iOS or Android?” You know what I am talking about. There are all kinds of these meaningless comparisons that sprout up every day: which is better, Coke or Pepsi? Which is better Yankees or Red Sox? I can’t understand it, despite being guilty of it myself now and then.

In my younger days, I had strong opinions about things. Coke was better than Pepsi. Science fiction was better than fantasy. Reading was better than watching TV. In those younger days, I never really asked myself why one was better than the other. It just was. At some point, however, I began to ask myself why I thought one thing was better than another, and the answer I came up with changed my perspective somewhat. Coke was better than Pepsi because drinking a Coke made me happy. Science fiction was better than fantasy because reading science fiction made me happy. And reading was better than television because, well, you get the picture.

The need to have an opinion that one thing is better than something else is insidious. For trivial things like Coke vs. Pepsi, or baseball vs. football, it seems innocuous enough. But it also seems to create a mentality that everything has to be either better or worse than something else, without any relative or even measurable standard to compare against. Yankees are better than Red Sox becomes New Yorkers are better than New Englanders. Before long it is Northerners are better than Southerners, red is better than blue, etc., etc. ad infinitum.

My kids seems to play versions of the “which is better” game. “Would you rather have a million dollars or a million hamburgers” or something similarly ridiculous. Why does it matter, really? What does it mean if Coke is better than Pepsi? Better how? Better tasting? To someone who like the taste of Pepsi that doesn’t mean much.

I think the better question (if any question must be asked) is: Which makes you happier? Back in school, there were bands that were cool to like, and bands that were not. I imagine that many people “liked” the cool bands because that was the band to like if you were cool. I suspect the band’s music did not make everyone happy.

I have been guilty of this myself. Search back through my posts here and you’ll find me exclaiming how something is better than something else. Peanut butter and jelly is the best sandwich, meaning it is better than all other sandwiches. I’ve tried to move away from these. I’ve tried to explain to my kids that I prefer to think of which makes me happier as opposed to which one is better. I don’t think it sticks.

A variant of the “which” is better that I see a lot of on the Internet is the “why this is better than that” post. “Why Windows is better than Mac” (a premise I made a million times in the 1990s). “Why physical books are better than e-books.” Again, you get the picture. In this variant, the implication is the decision has already been made which is better, and you are being told why, rather than being asked for your opinion.

I wish there was a browser that would filter out these ridiculous comparison posts (mine included). The problem is, if such a browser existed, I’d say it was better than any other browser out there.

Playing the Long Game

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When I started writing with the idea of selling stories, I was 20 years old, going on 21. When I sold my first story, fourteen years had passed. I wrote intermittently during those years. Sometimes pouring out stories, other times going months without writing a single word. Funny thing is, from the very start, I felt as if I would sell each story I wrote. It was years before I began to think of writing as a practice, and more years before I began to realize that the only way to improve was through that practice. And believe me, I needed a lot of practice. The lesson I drew from that is the answer I’ve given to many writers just starting out who ask what the “secret” is to selling stories: Practice, I say. Lots of practice.

I’ve been thinking about this for three reasons:

  1. I’m re-reading Stephen King’s novel Bag of Bones the main character of which, Mike Noonan, is a writer. That has me thinking about writing, naturally.
  2. I’ve felt like I’ve had writer’s block for the last several years. Indeed, reading about the (fictional) Noonan’s own experience with writer’s block was helpful, because it reads so much like my own. I want to write, but I am afraid to do it.
  3. We are beginning to plan for retirement, and that has me thinking of the passage of time.

I turned 49 this past March. Our current plans will see me retired from my day job when I turn 59-1/2. Call it ten years from this coming September. Ten years is still a long time, but given that I’ve worked at my company for nearly three times that (27 years this fall), it is conceivable. If there are no big surprises between now and then (a big if, of course), I’ll retire after 37 years with my company. Not too shabby in a time when five years at a company is a lifetime for many people in tech. Add to that 4 years I worked in college, and 3 years I worked through high school. All told, that’s 44 years of work.

Once retired, what then? I’ll still be (relatively) young. The natural thing for someone in my line of work would be consulting. The idea of consulting, however, makes me shudder. When I began writing I was a junior in college. I had to write “in the margins”; that is, I wrote in whatever little gasps of time I could find. Once I graduated and got a job, it was the same. I worked all day, and wrote when I could. I’ve often dreamed of what it would be like to really have time to write. When I retire, I told myself, I could do that.

And that is, more or less, my plan. But I have also always been pragmatic about my writing. It’s something that I enjoy, but it is something that I am also paid for. The money I’ve made from my writing has never been much more than pin money. It bought me a laptop. But I couldn’t live for a month on the total money I’ve from my writing so far.

Maybe retirement can be different. Maybe I can actually supplement my retirement with writing income. Of course, to make more than pin money as a writer you have to write books–for a fiction writer, this means novels. I’ve written a single novel draft in my life, back in 2013. Moreover, your novels have to be good enough to sell. They don’t have a to sell particularly well–we wouldn’t be planning to retire at 59-1/2 if we couldn’t afford to–but it would be an added bonus if they did.

Thinking about all of this recently, I wondered how I could get to the point where I’d be able to write a novel well enough to have a decent chance of selling it. And I had a kind of epiphany, courtesy of Mike Noonan (or maybe, Stephen King). In Bag of Bones Noonan’s writer’s block is hidden from everyone for the first four years he has it thanks to a trick he had up his sleeve. Over the course of 10 years of writing novels, the fictional Noonan wrote 2 novels in 4 of those year and put them in a safe deposit box. He was playing a long game. It was these 4 novels that gave him breathing room when his writer’s block set in.

My epiphany came from the fact that Noonan was expected (as most mid-list writers are expected) to write a novel a year. And he did this for ten years. Ten years. That’s just about how much time I have before I retire. As in most of my own stories, one idea isn’t good enough. It has to collide with another idea before there is chemistry. The idea this collided with was my advice to new writers: the secret to selling stories is to practice.

I’ve always been a short story writer. It took me a while to get to the point where I felt I understood the form and could write a story that would sell. If I had to do it all over again, I’d practice more, trunk stories that I knew were junk after learning what I could from them, and then move on to the next one. Many writers I know had not only written many short stories before they began to sell, but many novels too. I’d never done that.

Looking at it now, maybe I am finally in a position to play the long game. I have a little over ten years between now and retirement: if I could write a novel a year for the next ten years, that should give me plenty of practice. Ten novels is a lot of practice by any standard. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that this really may be a thing. Not only does it give me a target to write to, but it also:

  • Allows me to try things without much risk. For instance, I plan to experiment, writing different types of novels to get a feel at what works best for me. Maybe some s.f., maybe some mainstream. Maybe some mysteries. Maybe some thrillers or horror. Why not? I’ve got ten tries. I should explore, right?
  • Gives me a framework to figure out how best to organize my time. I don’t want to spend every waking moment in retirement writing. We have other plans, too, which includes travel and doing all of the things we didn’t do because we were saving for retirement. So figuring out when to write, how much is reasonable, etc. is the part of the practice.
  • May result in a novel manuscript ready to submit when I do retire. Assuming, of course, that with practice, I will improve somewhat each time around, maybe the 9th or 10th year will produce a story that I can actually sell, thus giving me a little head start when the clock rolls over into retirement time.

For some reason, this idea has caught fire with me over the last few days. For the first time in a long time, I actually feel like writing. I’m not quite ready to write. I’m still thinking through the overall logistics of my plan. And I do need a plan. That is one thing I’ve found that helps me focus. A novel is a big task. Breaking that task down into small steps makes it feel much more manageable to me.

Is it possible? It is possible that when I retire, I can write and begin to sell novels? I think it is. I’m not deluding myself into thinking I’ll be anything more than a minor writer, but I have two things in my favor that I think give me a big advantage: (1) I’m willing to work hard, and put in the practice necessary, even if it means throwing most of those drafts away; and (2) I’ve already proven that I can write fiction well enough to sell it in short form.

So when does all of this begin? Like I said, this is a new idea for me, and the plan is still germinating in my mind. (What does write a novel a year mean? Does it mean write a draft and throw it away? Does it mean write a draft, set it aside for a while, and then write a second draft–my usual practice for short fiction?) Right now, I’m thinking of trying to have a plan finalized before the end of the summer. That means I’d begin carrying it out sometime in September–just about exactly 10 years before my planned retirement date.

I am playing the long game here. A lot can happen in ten years. But I am exciting at the thought of attempting this. I am excited at the thought of actually trying to write again. And I have a fictional writer to thank for the inspiration. That seems almost poetic to me.

Weekend Guests!

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For the first time in forever, as Princess Anna might sing, we have weekend guests. My sister and her family have come down for a weekend. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited to have company. After all, it has been forever1 since we last had guests. The guest room was feeling neglected.

I generally lean more toward the introvert side of the scale, but even I have enough alone time. Yesterday, the Little Miss had a friend over and when her dad came by to pick her up, I chatted him up for half an hour just because it was another adult in the house to talk to. Kelly was impressed.

My sister and her family arrived last night. I stayed up past my bedtime just to keep chatting with them. Indeed, I would have stayed up later if it wasn’t that everyone was tired (except the kids, of course). We all went on a leisurely hike this morning, and then grilled some hot dogs and veggie burgers for lunch. Everyone left for the Little Man’s soccer game, while the Littlest Miss and I stayed home for her nap. They’ve been gone less than two hours and I am pacing the house awaiting their return so I can have more time with our guests.

It was an added bonus to wake up this morning and see that the county we live in has enough vaccinated people to be listed as “moderate” risk for COVID after months of being listed as first “very high” and then “high” risk.

All of this is to explain why I didn’t have a post up first thing this morning, and why I decided to push the post I’d started to write until tomorrow. I’m just so happy to have guests again that I felt the need to tell the world about it. Things feel like they are getting back to normal. And that normal doesn’t feel normal at all–it feels wonderful!

  1. Well over a year, anyway. ↩

On Harlan Ellison

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A few nights ago, trying to figure out what to read next, I landed on some audio recordings of Harlan Ellison stories. These were all stories I’d read before, but they came with these off-the-cuff (so it seemed) commentaries by Ellison. They were great, and for an hour or so, while I lay in the dark listening, it was as if Harlan Ellison was still alive.

I never wrote anything on the blog after learning of Harlan’s death in June 2018. I learned of his death just as we had arrived at the Dollywood Resort for the beginning of 10-day road-trip family vacation through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. I was pole-axed when I heard the news. Harlan was one of those people who seemed like he would like forever.

I knew vaguely of Harlan Ellison when I was in high school. I remember a car commercial he was in sometime in the 1980s. But it wasn’t until I got to college where I began to read Ellison’s stories and essays and got to know him through his words. I had been a pretty sheltered reader of fiction up to that point, sticking to mostly what I knew, which was mostly Piers Anthony. Reading Ellison was a revelation. I couldn’t believe it was possible to write the way he did. I didn’t have money to spend on books in college, but I went to the University of California, Riverside, which hosts the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy. The library had plenty of science fiction and I had the opportunity to check out books for free and read them.

In my junior year in college, I read Dangerous Visions. I read most of it while visiting my girlfriend at the time at U.C. Santa Cruz. I found a cozy spot in a campus library and read while she went to class.

After graduating, and starting my career, I moved to Studio City, not far from the Dangerous Visions bookshop, which became a regular stop for me. It was there that I met Harlan Ellison for the first time, an encounter I had forgotten about, and only rediscovered years later.

The first meeting I remembered was a talk Harlan gave at The Learning Tree in Chatsworth in 1995. I sat in the audience, wide-eyed, and listened to Ellison speak. After a break, he pulled some typewriter paper out and said he was going to read to us a story he’d finished writing that very day. The story was “Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral”. I’d never been to a story reading before, and if anyone has heard Ellison read, you know that I was spoiled from the start. It was incredible. Afterwards, I met him, shook his hand, chatted for minute, asked him to sign a few books, and that was that.

In the years that followed, I met Harlan several more times, mostly at appearances he made at Dangerous Visions. I was there, for instance, when he did one of his bookstore window writing sessions. Chris Carter (of X-Files fame) walked into the packed store with a folded piece of paper in his hand. It was the idea he’d come up with for Ellison to write a story around. He read the idea to the audience: “The 100-year old pregnant corpse.” Ellison sat with his manual typewriter and banged out a story called, “Objects in the Mirror of Desire Are Closer Than They Appear” that later appeared in F&SF.

I went to a talk Ellison gave in Marina Del Rey. He was his usual blustery self, confident, loud, funny–and then a door opened at the back of the room and Donald Sutherland walked in and Ellison became a little star-struck, which was kind of adorable to see.

Long after I moved out of L.A. and began my own writing career, selling stories, and getting to know writers who I admired for so long, I found myself attending a Nebula Awards banquet locally. By then I had become friends with Allen Steele. Harlan Ellison was up for a Nebula in the short story category, which he ended up winning (in a tie, I believe) that night. I was very happy for him, and looked around for Allen, but didn’t see him. Finally, I walked out of the banquet hall, and saw Allen by himself, leaning on a wall with his phone to his ear. “Harlan?” I mouthed. Allen nodded. He got to break the news to Ellison.

As it turns out Harlan Ellison lived just up the street from one of my best friend’s house (my friend’s parents still live there). When I learned that the odd house on that narrow street off of Mullholland that I’d passed so many times was Ellison’s, I was retroactively awestruck.

Harlan Ellison was the first writer I’d ever asked for an autograph. He was also the first writer I’d ever met in person.

As far Ellison’s writing, well, it’s just amazing. There are writers who write in a way that I, as a writer, try to emulate. Stephen King is a good example of this. But I knew as soon as I read Ellison’s writing that I could never emulate it. It is far too masterful for the likes of me. I never even tried. There are all kinds of “classic” Ellison stories, but own person favorite is a story of his called “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore.” I believe that it is possible to write a perfect story, in the same way it is possible to throw a perfect game in baseball. But like a perfect game, the perfect story is extremely rare. “The Rocket Man” by Ray Bradbury is one; “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov is another. Harlan Ellison’s “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” is a perfect story.

I’ve met many writers in the years since I first met Harlan Ellison. One of the fun parts of being a writer is meeting so many people you admire. I’ve gotten to know some of these writers well, and call them friends. That was never the case with Harlan Ellison. But as a presence, I’ve never been in awe of someone as much as I was when I was around Harlan.

Which is why, I think, hearing him gab about the origin of story on a sleepless night a few days ago hit me the way it did. Even now, nearly three years later, it is hard to believe that Harlan Ellison is not out there somewhere, sitting in a bookstore window and banging away at another story.

Why I Can’t Watch Movies Anymore

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Over the years I have had a harder and harder time watching movies. I finally understand why. Television shows are designed to be broken up into segments. The acts in a typical TV show, whether a sitcom or drama, are neatly separated by commercial breaks. Of course, with streaming services, those commercials are typically absent, but the pattern of storytelling remains. You can pause a show at a particular point, perform some task, and then resume without really breaking continuity.

With movies it is different. Movies are designed to be watched end-to-end, as if you were sitting in a theater, eyes glued to the screen. Movies are immersive, and when it comes to story-telling, immersive is what I like best. So why can’t I watch movies anymore? Life, it seems, has become so fragmented that I can’t make it through a movie without having to pause it for some interruption. It is inevitable. I can’t remember the last time I was able to watch a movie end-to-end uninterrupted. As someone who tunes out everything else and falls into the movie, this is a problem.

Interruptions break that magic of the storytelling. I find myself pulled deeply into what I am watching, tuning out everything else around me so that a movie is much more of an experience than just sitting and watching it. The room falls away, the surrounding and sounds disappear, and when I watch a movie, I feel like I become part of the story. Interruptions break that spell, and once broken, it is impossible for me to reclaim that sensation.

This became clear a few weeks ago when I re-watched the Indiana Jones films. Those movies were among the most immersive for me. They are great fun (honestly, I don’t think they make movies like those anymore, everything I see tends to be dark, gritty, and humorless) and the perfect vehicles to lose yourself in for a few hours. Except that I couldn’t lose myself. The movies were fun, sure, but having to pause them every ten for fifteen minute was a drag and spoiled much of that fun. Like time-sharing on a computer, life has become fragmented into tiny slices of time that alternate activity and interruption, and make it virtually impossible to become part of the story on the screen.

Part of this is me, of course. As a storyteller myself, I need to be fully immersed in the story. Other people don’t have to do this. Kelly can watch a movie and do other things and enjoy both. She can and does often skip the slow parts of the movie. I can’t do this–for me, every part of the story has meaning.

There isn’t much I miss about movie theaters with the parking and prices, but if there is anything I miss, it is the ability to fully disappear into the story unfolding on the screen–unless I drink a soda or beer, in which case I’ll inevitably find myself sneaking off to the restroom during some pivotal scene.

3 Phases of Story Creation

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This morning I finished reading Jason Schreier’s latest book on the video game industry Press Reset. These days, the overall process of video game development is very similar to that of making movies. There are three major phases: pre-production, production, and post-production. Thinking about this, it occurred to me that writing a story or a novel can thought of in those same three phases.

Pre-production, for me, is all of the intangible thinking and reading that goes into the creation of ideas. It captures what is most often the most difficult part of writing to describe to non-writers. Writing a story isn’t just about sitting down in front of a keyboard for a few hours a day and hammering out words. For me, at least, it is the part that comes before that. The spark of an idea may take shape in my mind over a period of years. During that time, I am not thinking about the story exclusively, and there are times when it is completely out of my head. But it shaped during that time, consciously and sub-consciously.

For those writers who outline stories, you might think that the process of outlining the story is part of pre-production. I disagree. An outline is a product that is the story in a compact form. It is part of the production phase. Pre-production, in my mind at least, is all what happens before a single word goes on the page.

Production is the creation of the story outside of the writer’s head. That could be an outline, or it could be a first, second, or fifth draft (betas?). The writer is producing something in the physical (or digital) world. They are taking what is in their head and putting it on the page in some form or another. It is the programmer writing code; it is the artists applying paint to a canvas. At the end of production, you have a more or less finished product.

From my perspective, production includes revisions, feedback from writers groups, all of the stuff that takes the idea in the writers head and turns it into a polished manuscript.

Post-production, is the process that takes the polished manuscript, and turns it into a magazine story, a book on a bookstore shelf, a downloadable e-book. In my experience, post-production means working with editors and copy editors who help put finishing touches on the polished manuscript. It means proofreading galleys. For a writer, there is often a lot of waiting in post-production.

I kind of like this comparison between making video games (or movies) and writing stories (or novels). When I read a book like Schreier’s, I often find myself thinking, I wish I could be a software developer like those folks. The irony, of course, is that I am a software developer. But when I think about writing in terms of pre-production, production, and post-production, it makes it all seem much simpler in my head, a kind of mental gymnastics that allows me to think about the process of writing in ways that I have never before considered.

High Fidelity

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Apple announced recently that Apple Music will now have an option for even higher fidelity music files. This did little to stir my blood. I realized long ago that the limits of my own video and audio perception are much lower than those technology is producing. This makes things like ultra-high definition and “spacial” and “lossless” audio diminishing returns from my perspective.

In a way, this is strange. My dad has much higher fidelity audio and video perception than I do, for instance. I remember when laser discs first came out and he obtained The Hunt for Red October. He had surround sound setup in the house and he danced something of a jig of excitement when the opening music played. Even much earlier, I remember a Buick he had sometime around 1980 or so that had a stereo system in the car. Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” came on the radio during Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown, and I can remember my day squealing with delight, “The bells! Listen to the bells!”

You would think such perception was inheritable, but if so, it was a recessive gene on both sides and I didn’t inherit it. I’ll admit that the first time I saw high-definition television, I noticed a difference in picture quality. It was a Mets baseball game (don’t ask) and I felt as if I could see the individual blades of grass on the infield. That impressed me. But when it came to movies and TV shows, I never notice the high-definition quality. It’s the story that interests me, and if the story grabs me, everything else including video and sound quality, goes by unnoticed.

It is even worse with music. Whether I listen to music on my AirPods or my Bose headset, the music sounds the same to me. Sure, I’ll notice a difference if I hear an old recording of a Bing Crosby song, say a 1931 rendition of “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” There, I can make out the whisper of a needle or the static of the recording. Actually, I think the sounds adds charm to the piece. But give me different qualities of music files and I can’t really tell the difference. It is too subtle for my senses.

Fortunately, this isn’t a problem when it comes to books. Sure, there are font differences on pages, which can make the page of one book differ from another. Indeed, that paperback and hardback editions have a different page numbering scheme can be confusing is true, but one version of the book does not “read” differently from another version of the same book just because of that. The story isn’t any different.

I’m happy for everyone who will benefit from spacial and lossless music, but I doubt I will be among them. I’m also a little bemused by the term “lossless” music. I know that it is a corollary of lossless compression, or lossless image files, but when I think of lossless music, I think of music that can never be lost. And frankly, I can think of at least some music worth losing.

Food and Phases

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I tend to think of myself as omnivorous. I’ll eat (or at least try) just about anything. About the only things I won’t deliberately eat are yogurt and cheesecake. I’ve disliked yogurt since I was a young child and tried some plain yogurt. The awful memory of that has stuck with me and is too firmly ingrained in my tastes to warrant a retry. My kids find this amusing since I usually will try anything. “You’ll like it if you try it today?” they say. “I bet you’d like it if you didn’t know it was yogurt,” they say.

Well, a few weeks ago we had a salad and poured on the dressing that came with the salad, and took a bite. Something about the dressing didn’t taste right to me and my brain immediately flashed YOGURT! YOGURT! YOGURT! “I don’t about this dressing,” I said. “It reminds me of yogurt.” Kelly looked at the packaging. It turned out it was a yogurt-based dressing of some kind. This impressed my kids.

Cheesecake is another matter. I’m not sure why exactly I dislike it. I think it is just too rich for me. But that’s okay. Setting aside cheesecake and yogurt, pretty much everything else is on the table. Indeed, I like to try new things, despite being a creature of habit. The latter means I don’t try new things as often as I should, but I make enough decisions during the day and for meals at least, I try to keep decisions to a minimum.

One thing that bothers me at a restaurant is how granular the servers can get when I order my food: “Cheeseburger,” I’ll say. Then comes the flood of questions: how would you like that cooked? What kind of cheese? Onions? Pickles? Bacon? What kind of side would you like with that? Fries, you say? Regular or sweet potato? I’ve taken to revising my order as follows: “Cheeseburger, medium rare, with everything.” Enough questions.

I get into these phases with breakfasts and lunches. I’ll go for a few months eating the same breakfast and lunch day-in and day-out. Over the winter it was Stofer’s lasagnas for lunch. This spring it has been a turkey, bologna, and cheese sandwich. Sometimes, it is peanut butter and jelly, day after day after day. I don’t mind. It is one less decision to make each day.

Dinner is where I tend to branch out, especially if we go out to eat (there hasn’t been much of that over the last year, but I’m hopeful now that we are fully vaccinated). I like all kinds of meats. I’m particularly fond of lamb and duck. The Little Man has taken to duck, but Kelly shudders at the thought of either. If there is something unusual on the menu, I’m usually willing to try it. On a date night a few weeks back we had an appetizer that included charred cauliflower that was outstanding. I remember an appetizer of buffalo octopus a few years back at bar in Santa Monica that was also outstanding.

I like Caesar salads with anchovies. Servers never believe me the first time I ask for the anchovies. (I also like anchovies on pizza, but rarely order it because no one else eats it.) I’ve had my share of unusual foods as well, from turkey nuts to durian fruit (in the parking lot of a hotel at a science fiction convention).

Writing about food right before lunch has made me hungry for something other than my usual turkey, bologna, and cheese sandwich. Alas, I’m tired today and don’t feel like making a decision about what to eat. I think there might be some leftovers in the fridge. Maybe I’ll just eat that.