Entries from May 2007 ↓

Big news in the Web 2.0 world today. Google announced a new framework called Google Gears, which allows your web applications to save and retrieve stuff even when you’re not online. This online-only limitation has been a huge Achilles heel for the web app industry so far, and one of the major reasons that Google Apps — in its current form — has no chance of even denting Microsoft’s dominance in the office wars.

But it’s only a first step. It’ll probably be a year before the major vendors start pushing out viable disconnected web applications, and a couple of years more before they gain any traction in the market. There’s a better way. I call it WebAppetezier 1.0 (BETA).

WebAppetizer is a service that installs itself quietly on your machine, and then goes out and looks for all desktop applications that save and retrieve data locally. And then the magic happens — it modifies those apps so that they cannot save or load any data unless the machine is connected to the web. So your word processors, spreadsheets, photo editors, music players, etc won’t do anything useful unless you’re online. The data’s still there, just inaccessible. It’ll be exactly like using a web app, except much more annoying.

I’m a little surprised no one’s thought of this before, actually. It seems like an obvious solution — just a different way of looking at the problem, really. Mostly, people try to fix deficiencies in their products by making them as good as, or better than, the competition. Why not, instead, just make everyone else as bad as you? It saves time and effort.

Of course, this technique will only work for Windows computers outfitted with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is an excellent delivery mechanisms for programs like this one — the kind that need to be installed automatically, without the user even knowing about it. Why bother all those busy people with details on how we’re making web applications a viable alternative in today’s industry. Just do it!

I see that Google just spent $3 billion to buy DoubleClick, another product that quietly does stuff to users that they don’t know about in order to make money for other people. I’d be willing to sell Google my product for a tenth of that price. Given the amount of money I’ll be saving them in R&D, development, and advertising, I think that’s a bargain.

I heard an interview with Scott Frank the other day. He’s the guy who wrote the screenplays for Out of Sight, Get Shorty, and Minority Report, clearly a man with a serious handle on how to put stories together. So it was incredibly gratifying to hear him say this:

I find that when I really conscious of thematic things at the beginning, and I try to write from a thematic idea, or even structure … whenever I’m that clear, it’s bad. It just comes out awful, because it feels built — it feels like either the theme was built, or the characters were being plugged in in a way that doesn’t work.

I’m making it sound way more pretentious than it really is. You just don’t want to think about it too much — you want to just kind of do it and think about it afterwards, and kind of shape it and apply your intellect to it, once you have this blob. It’s a very messy process.

This is more or less exactly the same way I write, with almost exactly the same caveats. If I try to start with anything even resembling a theme, or a style, or a structure, the story implodes after a couple of pages. I’m sure other writers are able to build their stuff around thematic scaffolding — but I can’t. It’s too damn hard.

And there’s a reason for that — Frank hints at it when he talks about shaping the blob, and it’s why writers are generally such neurotic insecure people. The source of story, buried inside all of their heads, is a mysterious, flighty, cantankerous cipher. You don’t know what it is, you don’t know where it is, and you don’t know why it does what it does. All you know is that you can sometimes sit down at a desk and fumble around in your mind and open a spigot and wait and coax and hope and finally a couple of drops of raw id spill out and if you’re lucky and patient those drops quicken into a little stream and if you’re even luckier the stream becomes a river.

The important thing to do when fortune smiles on you this way — the crucial thing — is to leave everything the fuck alone. Do not attempt to divert the flow, or shape its contents, or interfere in any way. Just let it happen. It’s a djinn’s gift — real and tangible only as long as you play by its rules. Mess with it, even a little, and it disappears into a puff of cackles and derision.

I’ve taken this maxim entirely to heart over the years. It’s gotten so that I’m even suspicious of plots. They seem like an dangerous imposition on the whole, delicate apparatus. Whenever I try to intervene in a story that’s going in a direction I’m not entirely comfortable with, I feel like some cigar-chomping studio exec: prying himself out from behind my desk, waddling over to the writer, informing him that his screenplay needs more explosions, or tigers, or boobs, or transvestite werewolf hunters. It’s no way to motivate the talent.

So that’s the first part of the job — ride the beast for as long as it lets you, and do everything in your power to make it happy.

I’ve had some minor success with this anti-technique in the last couple of years — not the kind where any actual stories are sold, of course — more the minor, incremental kind that keeps things interesting, and worth doing. More importantly, I’ve had nothing but failure when I try anything else. The mysterious djinn inside my head gets its way, or it melts back into the shadows and disappears for days, or weeks, on end. Period.

But that’s not everything, of course. Once you’ve got all the raw material, you have to step in with your conscious brain — the part that you actually own — and finish it. That’s the second part of your job. Everything you need is there, pretty much, it’s now a question of chiseling it down into something presentable. The chunk of raw id you’ve just dumped onto the page may be sparking with potential, but until you shape it into something palatable, something that someone else might actually want to read, then it’s just that — potential. It’s like sculpture — you may see the statue embedded in that giant hunk of rock, but until you chip away at all the stuff that isn’t the statue, you’ll be the only one who does. The only difference between a sculptor and a writer is where they get their rocks — sculptors coax them out of quarries, writers coax them out of their brains.

So a writer actually has to be two, distinctly different, people: a passive conduit, and an active shaper. Part of the difficulty lies in know when to be which: at what point do you step in and start directing the show? Jump too soon, and you dam the flow, or redirect it into canals of your own making — you tame it, contain it, render it worthless. Jump too late, and the story floods its banks, drowns the countryside, submerges all the machinery that was waiting patiently for a chance to fashion it into something coherent.

There aren’t any answers here. Every story has its own rules, which it doesn’t tell you about. The process of writing is, always and everyday, a journey into the dark parts of the map, where getting lost isn’t just inevitable — it’s the whole point.

Here’s a picture of Beauregard carrying around his comfort cowhide, the remains of an old Halloween costume.

Beau has a love hate relationship with toys like this. Whenever he’s stressed about something he likes to put large fluffly things in his mouth and run around the house with them, mewling pitiably. The first thing he did when we brought him home was find and lay claim to a giant draftdodger, which stayed in his mouth for a couple of hours.

But when he gets over whatever’s bothering him, he sits down and slowly, methodically tears his stuff to pieces. This cowhide has another week of life, maybe.

Beagles are weird.

This is what it’s like to be a conservative whackjob in America today:

Plans to vaccinate young girls against the sexually-transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer have been blocked in several US states by conservative groups, who say that doing so would encourage promiscuity.

So, to summarize:

1. Having sex is bad, and
2. Fear of cervical cancer might be a good way to discourage girls from doing so, but
3. There’s a drug out now that completely eliminates cervical cancers transmitted via sexual intercourse; therefore
4. This drug must be destroyed.

QED.

I’m not sure how long it takes to twist your brain into a state where teenagers having cancer seems preferable to teenagers having sex, but I can’t imagine it’s easy. You really have to struggle to be that stupid.

I had a nightmare last night. I was locked in a room, writing a story. I was writing it on a PC, using Microsoft Word. There were no Macs in the room, and there were no other editors on the computer — not even Notepad. I had to use a PC, and I had to use Microsoft Word, and I had a deadline.

All that was nightmare enough, of course. But it was about to get much worse.

I was halfway down the first page when the window sort of stuttered and blinked and a little icon in the lower right hand corner swelled up until it was the size of the whole document. It had the body of a paperclip and the head of Jar Jar Binks. It was Jar Jar Clippy.

“Hellosa!” said Jar Jar Clippy. “Meesa think yousa writing a lettersa!”

“What the fuck,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy made a face and disappeared.

I kept typing. The wall in front of me turned into a giant clock, ticking implacably toward my deadline.

Jar Jar Clippy appeared again. “Greetsa! It looks like yousa making a postersa!”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy disappeared.

I was on page three before he appeared again. This time he charged out of the side of the screen and slammed into Word, pushing it halfway off the desktop. “Salutationsa! Why yousa keep making meesa go byebye?”

“I can’t believe this shit,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy didn’t disappear. I clicked it again. He didn’t disappear more.

“Now!” said Jar Jar Clippy. “Meesa think yousa writing an Italian sonnetsa! Meesa helpsa!”

“I don’t need help,” I said. “Please. Don’t help me.”

Jar Jar Clippy put a stunted paperclip arm to his lips and studied my first paragraph. “Hmm,” he said. “This bad! Yousa badsa writersa!”

“Alright, that’s it.” I brought up process manager and looked for the Jar Jar Clippy task. It wasn’t there. I did find something called “horrible-annoying.exe”, but when I killed that Windows shut down.

“Fuck. Fucking fuck fuck.” I rebooted the PC. When it came back up Jar Jar Clippy was sitting on the Start bar, tapping his paperclip foot in an unbearably cutesy way.

“Felicitationsa!” he said. “Meesa fixsa your badsa badsa term papersa!”

“It’s not a term paper,” I said. “And it’s not bad.” I started up Word. My story was gone, replaced by a bunch of horrible stunted prose that looked like it had been stitched together by a lobotomized cliche machine on crack.

“You bastard,” I said. “You Lucasized it. You Lucasized it!!!”

“No! Meesa bettersized it,” said Jar Jar Clippy. He put on a pair of unbearably cutesy paperclip reading glasses, and read:

The force is strong in all of us. That is why we must always respect the environment. The environment is full of good things, like air and water. Air and water are important. Trees are also important. The force runs through all of these things. Air and water and trees. Dirt too. Dirt is important. Rocks are important as well …

It went on in this vein for about ten pages. I flipped through all of them, looking for some trace of the original text. There was none. I took several deep breaths.

“Jar Jar Clippy,” I said, in the most reasonable voice I could muster.

“Yes sa!”

“Where’s the story I was working on?”

“Heresa!” he said. He jumped up and flew around the window, followed by a cape of twinkling stars.

“No,” I said. “The original article. The one that wasn’t about the environment at all.”

Jar Jar Clippy grew a pair of paperclip shoulders, and shrugged. “Gonesa.”

“Gone?”

“Sa.”

“Right.” I rubbed my face. “I’m going to kill you now.”

Jar Jar Clippy affected an exaggerated pout. “Yousa meansa.”

I picked up the monitor and slammed it against the desk until it shattered. Then I looked around for a sledgehammer. Luckily, there was one was leaning against the wall. I used it to smash the computer to pieces. I looked around for a woodchipper. Luckily, there was one in the closet. I fed the keyboards and mouse into it.

Then I sat down, and closed my eyes, and smiled. I took out a piece of paper and a pen, and started to rewrite my article, longhand.

After a minute, the little jar of paperclips on the edge of my desk began to shake. I stopped, and looked at it, a terrible premonition tickling the back of my mind.

A paper clip jumped out of the jar, and landed on my arm. It shook itself, and a little Jar Jar head popped out, gave me an unbearably cutesy wink, and bent over to study what I’d written. Then it looked up at me, and smiled. “Hellosa!” it said. “Meesa think yousa writing a grocery listsa!”

I screamed.

So I’ve been blogging for over five years now, and I’m still not entirely sure why. Is this thing an extroverted version of the diary I never managed to keep? Is it an attempt to scratch the writing itch without doing any actual writing? A hopeful shout out into the void? A reason to spend even more time sitting in front of a computer?

The short answer is “I don’t know”. The long answer is “I lack the epistemological basis for any sort of definitive assertions on the subject.” The surrealist answer is “The cheese rises splatterwise in the eye of the molting cow!”

But the good news is I’ve discovered an actual use for this thing: it turns out to be a really good life barometer. Which is to say, I’ve found that the quality and frequency of my posts correlate pretty much exactly with the quality of my mind — when the mind is engaged, stimulated, exposed to new things, the blog is happy. When the mind is plodding, sluggish, or looping through the same basic patterns over and over again, the blog is unhappy. It’s a sort of canary in my mental coal mine.

The canary’s been ailing recently. Not quite dead, but sort of hanging upsidedown on its perch, squawking plaintively, pining for the fjords.

So it’s probably a good thing that I got accepted into Clarion this year. Clarion is a sort of intensive six-week scifi/fantasy writing workshop, taught by established writers in the field, held every year. I’ve been reading about Clarion for a while, and almost-but-not-quite-applying for nearly as long. It’s a big commitment — you basically have to drop the rest of your life and focus on nothing but writing for a month and a half.

But I finally pulled the trigger and applied, at the urging of my wife, who pointed out (nicely) that I’m getting too damn old for the luxury of this kind of feckless vacillation. You either want to be a writer or you don’t. Choose. (It also helps that Cory Doctorow, one of my heroes, will be teaching this year).

So it’s finally happening, and it’ll probably be the most radically different thing I’ve done in a long, long time. If my blog barometer theory is correct, this should jolt the canary upright, maybe even send it spinning crazily around its perch.

I guess we’ll see.