There was snowshoeing, though not as much as expected due to poor route choice. But at least the mountain was pretty, and did not attempt to eat us alive.
Thanks to everyone who took my to do in 2010 survey last week.
I’ll leave the link active a little while longer if anyone else wants to chime in. It’s been interesting to see the responses so far.
I feel like I’m often struggling to balance tech projects with crafts/art/music ones, so I know that’s going to continue to be a challenge this next year. My goal is to make more art, and do a better job of getting the things I make out of my home (or computer) and out into the world, whether that’s by selling more work on Etsy, posting photos and videos online, or some other project. I’m considering reorganizing all of the “things for sale” into one consolidated shop on my site, if anyone has suggestions or ideas.
One push in the music direction comes via the shiny new ukulele Lucas got me for Christmas. I’ve already learned a few chords. It’s really a friendly instrument to work with.
Speaking of music, 2009 has been a good year for me discovering new artists and albums, so I made a little compilation of my favorites. Not all were released this year, but were new to me, and at least from this past decade. Have a listen.
I started making a list of my projects in progress, as well as some ideas for this next year, and it kept growing and growing until I started to wonder if there’s even enough time in the year for this much stuff, especially since it doesn’t include my actual job, or spending time with Lucas, or eating dinner (unless I’m writing about it—there’s a checkbox for recipe writing).
So, in order to try to make some sense of this, I made a survey. Please go and vote for the items you think would be most interesting and worthwhile to pursue. There are even places for you to express your interest in collaborating on a project, and recommend other ventures.
Usually I approach Christmas with a mix of excitement and trepidation, but this year I’m feeling really indifferent. I haven’t baked the usual batches of cookies. We don’t have any decorations up. I did buy gifts for most of the people I normally give gifts to, taking full advantage of Amazon Prime (yay flat rate shipping). And I remembered to do Christmas cards. But for Christmas itself, the actual getting together with people and celebrating, I decided to bail on the usual family plans and go snowshoeing instead with Lucas and my brother. I hope something outdoorsy will be a good way to counteract the ennui. Tune in next week to find out how that went.
Other things:
If you haven’t seen the BERG/Bonnier Mag+ prototype demo, and you’re at all interested in ebooks, digital publishing formats, etc., you really should watch the video. They demonstrate a very fluid way of designing a magazine to read on a digital tablet. Software-wise, this is already possible to create on an iPhone, but the screen isn’t really large enough for the reading experience they’re after, especially with photos. So maybe this will happen when Apple finally releases that much-rumored tablet.
Amanda Palmer, one of my favorite music discoveries for the year, posted a video of a ukulele song in place of a written blog post last week. It’s about Lady Gaga and pop music and art, and does a fun job of explaining what she thinks.
I spent a large chunk of Saturday playing a game called Braid. I first heard about it during a panel at SXSW, mentioned as an example of something with a really interesting set of game mechanics and story. The basic setup is like Super Mario Bros. (complete with a princess who is not in the castle at the end of this level, but perhaps if you keep searching you will find her), except you can make time move backward and forward, so you never really die. I got to a point where I’ve collected all the puzzle pieces I can figure out how to reach, and obviously there’s something else I need to do to be able to pick up the rest, but so far I don’t know what. Which is a little frustrating. (If you’ve solved it, no spoilers, but moral support is appreciated).
Today is the shortest day of the year, the official start of winter, but it’s going to be a couple of months before the winter gloom lifts again. It makes me want to hibernate.
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After I wrote this, a man came and knocked on the door and said he’d found a bunch of mail from our building opened and wet, out in front of the building. I was in my pajamas still so I told him to leave it on the doorstep. When I went to check a little later, I found two Christmas cards, opened, and an empty mailer envelope that should have contained two books I ordered as presents.
To say that this is not helping with my lack of holiday cheer would be an understatement.
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And another thing:
I posted this and then I remembered that half the point of these weekly updates is to tell y’all about things I’ve been working on that you can go check out. So, the Curious Life of Ms. Audrey M. Eschright 2009 Retrospective magazine is now live on MagCloud, should you wish to procure a copy for yourself or a loved one. It’s on sale for $2 cheaper than the regular price if you order before the end of the year, thanks to MagCloud’s holiday sale.
You’ll be able to buy it here after I receive the proof and approve it, probably later this week. I’ll post on Twitter when it’s ready. [Update: It's available now.]
The third annual Winter Coders’ Social was last Tuesday night. This has become a really cool year-end tradition for the local tech scene. People from a bunch of different user groups get together for a holiday potluck and board games.
My current reading interest is noir crime novels. While I love a lot of the later derivatives of these, I’d never picked up a Hammett or Chandler book until a couple of weeks ago. So far I’ve read The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. I love the writing style and rhythm. It feels like they were meant to be read out loud, like radio plays. So I recorded a bit from Maltese Falcon on AudioBoo. It’s the section where we first encounter “the fat man”, and the adjectives he uses just crack me up.
I also just finished From Hell, the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell graphic novel. It’s a huge book, which I didn’t realize when I ordered it, but dense and engaging. They do some really interesting things with time, consciousness, and different characters’ perspectives throughout, like a section when we’re fully inside Gull’s head and everything around him seems to glow. Highly recommended.
On Saturday we had a Calagator code sprint, the first one in quite a while. Only 5 attendees, in part due to the weather (we were promised freezing rain, which turned out to be cold and damp but only a little icy). But we got through several tickets, and added a couple of small features which should improve usability. You should be on our mailing list and following Calagator on Twitter if you want to find out when the next sprint will be.
The current outside temperature is 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Twenty six. What city is this again?
I actually spent most of last week in Long Beach, where it was 70ish and sunny. Not that I got outside much during the day, or even saw a proper beach, because I was busy cramming my head full of iPhone knowledge at a Pragmatic Studio class. I love that kind of intensive workshop format. What better way to learn something than to work on it for enough hours a day that it infects your dreams? (I don’t really know if dreaming about table views means I understand them better, but it was interesting…)
I started working on a Calagator app to show the current day’s events. It currently looks like this:
Pretty slick, huh? (Kidding, just kidding. It will have real data soon.)
I’m also working on a Life of Audrey 2009 retrospective magazine I’m going to publish through MagCloud. I’ve done a fair amount of writing and photography this year, so I thought it would be fun to compile the highlights into a print object. I’m trying to decide whether to include an excerpt from my NaNoWriMo project. It might be hard to find a section that makes sense on its own and doesn’t need massive amounts of rewriting. But maybe someone will find it entertaining anyhow? Hard to know.
First item of news: I finished NaNoWriMo last night. Seriously. All done. As mentioned on Twitter, I expect this thing will need extensive rewriting before it’s even close to publicly readable, but I don’t have to think about that for weeks or months. Yay.
It’s the tenth anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle, which I’ve written about before. I’m still grateful there’s only been one week in my life where I’ve sat around watching the news to figure out if I could walk around my neighborhood without encountering pepper spray, tear gas, and police lines.
When I’m at the end of a project with a imminent deadline, I discover an amazing tendency to suddenly get excited about some other creative project (one that does not have to be finished anytime soon). This past week it’s been electronic music. I picked up a UCreate Music toy a few weeks ago, but didn’t spend much time playing with it after I unwrapped it. Until this past weekend, of course. Click the audio link above to see what it sounds like.
The device is set up to play 12 installed loops plus 2 you can record yourself. You can plug it into a computer via USB to download your song, or update the samples from various other sets it downloads from the UCreate site. Right now the options are a little limited; just five sample packs. There’s a link for a store, but if you click it, it says “Coming Soon”. (Which is really weird, IMO. Why show the link if you don’t have a store set up and there’s nothing to tell people when it might become available?) It will let you drag and drop the different sample pack sounds to any button you want, but your own recorded loops can’t be moved from the bottom row. So I’d like to figure out how to install custom sounds. I found one other blog post asking about this, but no one who’s made it work yet.
Even without that, it’s still a fun toy. I like how the effects controller pad works. Perhaps I’ll have a video to demonstrate, next week.
The other music toy I’m playing with is the Korg DS-10. No finished sound clips to show off yet, but if you pick this up for yourself, I recommend checking out howto videos on YouTube.
I’ve been trying to do some kind of weekly update on this blog, but this week I don’t feel like I have much to report. My daily log has been “still sick. nanowrimo: X words.” for about a week.
I could tell you something I didn’t manage to work into last Monday’s post, that the weekend before this we went over to a friend’s house with a bunch of other people and had food and watched a boxing match. I knit, not so much for the weird contrast as because I was afraid of being antsy—I’m not really a boxing fan. Group consensus was that HD makes everything much more gruesome. In the slow-mo replays of punches, we could see the fighters’ faces ripple from their chin up to the ear. So: I learned that boxing is kind of interesting when there are people around to tell you about technique, but also, pretty gross. I finished the second sleeve of the sweater I’m (occasionally) working on, while we watched the fight.
My NaNoWriMo word count is now over 37,000. I need another 800 words for today, and instead I’m writing this, which doesn’t help. The process continues to be hard, but (mostly) fun.
All month I’ve been worried about getting sick, because last time I tried NaNoWriMo, in 2001, that’s what derailed me (to be fair, a lot of other things went wrong for me that fall. it wasn’t a very good year in most respects.)
So guess what? I’m sick. Cough, scratchy throat, no fever (yet?). It sucks. But I don’t have to worry about contaminating co-workers (germs don’t know how to use the internet), so I’m working. And I’m still going to try to hit today’s word count. I passed the halfway point over the weekend, so theoretically it’s all downhill from here, but I don’t know what it means that I got this far before figuring out who the real antagonist should be.
I downloaded a free trial of Scrivener this weekend, which is as awesome as I’d heard. It’s a book-writing application, an idea that (as someone who does everything in TextMate until it needs graphics) normally would put me off, but they’ve figured out a really good balance of adding tools one needs without having junk that gets in the way (unlike, say, Microsoft Word).
I’m still going to finish the first draft in TextMate, but I think I’ll import it into Scrivener before I start to edit. I also imported a couple of short stories I’ve been working on, and found it useful even for something of a shorter length. Being able to write in full-screen mode, then have the program generate a properly-formatted manuscript to print, is pretty neat.
The last few days I’ve been reading Palimpsest, which I love, but it’s been hard to focus because reading makes my brain want to work on writing instead. Do other people experience that? Still, it’s helpful (see the above ‘oh right the antagonist should be…’ revelation). I recommend this book if you like sexy stories about maps and trains and strange cities. The setting reminds me a bit of Perdido Street Station. Maybe my next task should be to re-type chapters from both of these books until I can figure out what makes them work.
According to my notes, in the last week I’ve read Heart-Shaped Box, seen District 9, and knit the sleeve of a sweater. I’m also up to 17,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project, which has been eating my brain when I’m not working on something else.
Part of the fun of this is that by writing every day, at a pretty steady pace, I’m giving myself permission to daydream that I too could be a Real Professional Writer, with books on shelves at Powell’s and fans who give me 5-star ratings on Amazon. I imagine that I will finish this book, and I will revise it and sell it to a publisher, and I will write another one that will be even better. And really, this is an easy dream to indulge. I’ve been writing stories on and off since I first learned to read and write.
This fits in nicely with Russell Davies’ notes from his Playful talk, about things that are barely games, exercises that tend to be open-ended and have a minimum of rules. He says,
When I walk through the crowds on Oxford Street a tiny part of me is pretending I’m an assassin slipping steely-eyed through the crowds in order to shake the agents on my tail. And I bet it’s not just me. I’m not saying I’m massively deluded, just that, very often, some bit of us is always trying to play those games, to make mundane things more exciting. … I think that’s why we find Jason Bourne so resonant. It’s easy pretending to be him. Because most of the time he’s just commuting.
Click the link for the full thing with some fun pictures, graphs, and interesting ideas. The comparison of time spent in “moody commuting” vs. “fighting & killing” cracks me up.
Pretending to be a writer is enough fun that a lot of people do it, though most remain at the stage where they haven’t gotten around to putting words on paper (or screen, as the case may be) just yet. Right now I have a third of a novel, which may or may not massively suck (probably does, since it’s an unedited first draft), and I don’t have to have a real plan. But the possibilities seem endless, especially if I just continue to write. I like this feeling; it’s a good place to be.
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A quick “things for sale” reminder: I have yarn and felt things in my Etsy shop. They make lovely gifts. I’m also thinking about setting up some sort of photo print shop, and putting last year’s family cookbook Christmas project up for sale as a food bank fundraiser. It has a jello salad recipe in honor of my aunt, who died last spring, as well as a number of other tasty things.
I watched all twelve hours of the V marathon on tv yesterday, since I don’t think I’ve ever seen it (unless it was when it aired originally, but I was four then). This gave me plenty of chances to engage in my current favorite tv-watching game, which is to guess at the plot points before they happen (things like: it’s the last half hour of the 2nd part of 3 episodes, so the girl will probably give birth to the alien baby just before they cut until next week).
There’s sort of a point to this, which is that I’m trying to figure out how to write stories with an actual plot, and not just a character with issues who will sit there and moan about them for a while. I’m actually practicing this skill, by participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo. Currently I’m at 3674 words and into my third story idea (I’ve been keeping a file with these for several months, writing down a couple keywords and an idea for the first sentence as I think of them). The first piece was about a space probe (needs more research so it has Realistic Details instead of a lot of hand-waving), and the second is about stalking people via the internet (needs a plot before I bore myself to death). Idea #3 is a take-off of last week’s comic book remake/remodel challenge, the lovely kung-fu ballerina Super Ann.
I think I have the first act figured out, but not much past that, so I’ll either switch to a new story at that point, or (ideally) be struck by inspiration and figure out how to keep going. I’m not worried about my ability to write 50k words in a month, so much as my ability to stay interested in my under-plotted story long enough before I want to work on something else.
The other half of this post’s title, the raygun, is my Halloween prop. I went as a space pirate. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a picture, so you will just have to take my word for it when I say my hair looked awesome. Also, the gun makes a good tool for interesting TTV-style photographs.
In closing, here’s Lucas looking menacing as a lumberjack.
