Drew Lackovic's newly titled blog

Scale Smithing End of Week 1

2011-08-25T23:00:00.000-04:00

So our first week of scaling has come to a close. Sue finished enough to throw her armor on the dress form, mainly so she could agonize over how to do the contractions so that it'll fit right. Contractions still escape my logic, but after some forum post questions, I think Sue knows what she needs to do. My armor is now almost perfectly sized for Jack's chest. We ran out of cleaned scales on Tuesday, so we spent Wednesday night cleaning scales and watching the new Sherlock on Netflix. Not bad. Here are some pics:

Sue Day 6

Drew Day 6

Sue Day 7

Drew Day 7

Scale smithing Week 1 Days 4 and 5

2011-08-22T21:36:00.003-04:00

Aah the weekend. Now that we finally hit our first weekend of scaling, we were excited. Except of course we have kids, so our time scaling was pretty much the exact same 9ish to midnightish it was during the week. Oh well. At least we're both becoming a little more proficient at weaving things together.

By the end of Day 4, I had a nice big happy 'Y.' I also, sadly, learned that my 5x5 diamonds were a crap idea because they make for cock-eyed assembly. Sue had explored the minor hells of weaving the bottom half of a diamond--hell because it doesn't really hold a good shape while you're trying to weave things that way. And minor for two reasons 1) Once she figured it out it wasn't hard to do 2) part of figuring out was that she grabbed a chopstick and used it to enforce shape while weaving. Brilliant.

Day 4 Drew

Day 4 Sue

I was real excited for Saturday night because Sunday is the only day of the week that we don't have alarms (aside from the Maaamy alarm). I started out by fixing the cock-eyed ness of the 5x5 diamonds. Then I tried making a 6x6 diamond and realized that it was a bit too large and cumbersome to really build all that well. I've decided to go down to the 4x4s that Sue's been using all along. What's that saying, "If at first you don't succeed, do it the way your wife told you in the first time." After the 6x6, I went about filling in the gap between the amended 5x5 and the new 6x6.

Sue finished wiring up the other shoulder and started adding down over her breast.

Drew Day 5

Sue Day 5

We're still really digging the process, and I'm real sad thinking that all next week I'll be away on business and not able to scale (If I didn't already decide that I need to write like a banshee while away, I'd totally smuggle some scales along with me.)

Armor Smithing Week 1, Days 2 and 3

2011-08-19T23:48:00.003-04:00

As we continue on our way making our scale armor, things are getting easier. By the end of day 2, I'd finished two 5 across diamonds, and Sue had started knitting together her 4 across diamonds into the neckline for her armor.

Day 2 Status Drew

Day 2 Status Sue

Day 3 went even better. I finished four 5-across diamonds and knitted three of them together--I would have gotten the fourth knitted as well but I knitted it backwards and had to take it out. Sue completed knitting together nine 4-across diamonds and is now beginning to worry where/when she's going to have to do contractions to handle the boob issues.

Day 3 Status Sue

Day 3 Status Drew

We're both really enjoying this project, and spent a little time talking about how exciting it will be when the kids demand some armor of their own. I've already been told that if Molly wants purple, that I'll be weaving that lest Sue get the purple poisoning.

More soon.

Armor Smith, The Blog

2011-08-18T20:54:00.001-04:00

Week 1, Day 1

Recently, Sue and I were talking, and considering how much we both enjoy the medieval faire (Went twice this year already and planning a third trip to the Pittsburgh faire in September), she suggested that as a winter project, we make Scale armor. I immediately said that I was too inept at doing things with my hands to be able to pull something like this off, but after a couple of days of encouragement, we went out to TheRingLord.com and ordered 5,000 stainless steel scales as our mutual Christmas present/winter project. The scales came yesterday, and we could hardly wait to start.

Weaving scale armor is a lot like making chainmail--in fact, the standard scale weave is very close to the standard chainmail 4-in-1 weave. The only major difference being that there's a scale in there too. Instead of standard chainmail kinds of rings where the ring is split needing a rivet or weld closure, we got splitrings--much like keyrings. They're more durable in the longrun, because you won't have to worry about scales popping off as easy, but there's a considerable learning curve attached to getting the rings to work, as we found out last night. Below are the results of our first night as armorsmiths.

(my scales are on the left and Sue's are on the right). As you can see, I'm a bit more retarded about scaling than my wife--she ended up spending a good half hour trying to help me fix the mess I made of my first pass. I got a little ring happy and started adding and tying scales to too many other scales, making my pattern go all wonky off center. Towards the end of the night though I was starting to understand it better, so hopefully tonight I'll be able to catch up to Sue's progress while she's at class. Overall, we worked for about 2.5 hours last night; and I managed to link 19 scales correctly. I think sue is somewhere around 24 or 32, I can't remember which. TheRingLord.com's scale calculator estimated I'd need something in the neighborhood of 3,260 some odd scales to finish my armor--for Sue, she'll need about half that because she's planning on making hers backless and connected with leather straps instead.

All that being said, the first night went well and I'm looking forward to day two. I'll try to keep regular updates on our progress here.

Ontologica 3.1 Now Available!

2011-08-04T21:30:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to announce that Ontologica 3.1 Summer 2011 is now live! The issue contains works from these fine authors:

Non-Fiction

Jessica Erica Hahn
Maureen Foley
William Pomeroy
Kilean Kennedy (Book Review)

Fiction

A. Lucia Cravens
S.V. Meyers

Poetry

Carolyn Moore
Karen L. George
Tasha Cotter
Ruth Foley
Gary Lehmann
Chris Compson
Bruce Majors

Eleanor Bennett
Fabio Sassi

Please take a moment and check out the new issue: Ontologica Issue 3.1

The next Issue will come out some time in the Winter. We will announce the open reading period for the Winter issue probably some time early in the fall.

The First Post in Two Seasons Presented by The MollyJacks

2011-06-25T19:47:00.001-04:00

Once, I taught this class where I assigned all my students a weekly blog post. And just to ensure that I was still in-touch with reality, I did the same thing—posted at least one post a week every week…for I think 13 out of 15 weeks. Jack was born towards the end of the semester, so Priorities got in the way, but, well, that’s a far cry from the current state of things. Seeing that the last post was mentioning the possibility of the Summer reading session for Ontologica, and now not only is the reading period over, but the Issue is now well on the way to getting its little feet out in the great green deep of teh Intarnets (probably by month’s end). Notwithstanding, a whole heck of a lot of things has been going on since Jan 29th or thereabouts since I last blogged about.

Likely the most interesting thing to cover would be the latest –isms from Molly, and now Jack as well. So, without further ado, the MollyJacks present the next chapter in the dictionary that only their little minds can build.

Part the First Mollyisms

Lasterday -- n. abst. 1. Yesterday 2. Sometime earlier today. 3. Some other time, possibly never. This term always appears at the beginning of the sentence: Lasterday, I went to Regular Gramma’s House.
Regular Gramma – Not to be confused with Nanny. Regular Gramma is Sue’s mom.
Regular Papa –Not to be confused with Grampa From the Woods. Regular Papa is Sue’s Dad
Nanny -- Nanny is my mom.
Grampa from the Woods – this is my dad.
Nuffin – 1. coll. Nothing 2. Retort. Used like this: “Molly Why aren’t you listening?” Molly: “Nuffin.” Often paired with a loud snarky “Unnnh.”
Black Cat – Black Cat is one of Molly’s most cherished friends. She has two stuffed black cats (identical actually, because when the first one turned up missing, we had to “rescue” a new one from the toy store, only to have the original to surface a few days later). But neither of these are the true black cat (though sometimes they are the avatars for black cat). Black cat in essence is her best kitty friend. Black cat knows magic, and is a lava kitty (she can traverse through lava with her lava paws.)
White Cat – White cat is Molly’s other kitty friend, though this friendship seems strained and nebulous at times. White cat is always mad and yelling at black cat, and sometimes so much so that Molly gets sad. White cat also has magic and when White cat and Black cat are both present, they usually take residence on Molly’s shoulders.
Lava Feet -- You need lava feet to make it across the lava when the floor turns to lava. Otherwise you need to stay on the pillows.
Donut Boy, Hot Dog Boy – Terms of endearment for Jack. ex: “Jack is a donut boy.”
Him, Her -- Molly hasn’t quite nailed her pronouns yet, and I find it endearing to hear: “Him is a good kitty, him is my faborite.”
Oh Nonono – Ask Molly a question and sometimes you’ll get this gem of a response. It makes me cackle.
Kitty Black Cat, Kitty Super Hero – These are Molly’s super hero names. Often paired with the super hero song—do do do dodododo do do do dum dum. When she’s at the super bungee jump at the mall, she always does some superhero kicks and sings the song.
Holy Crap! Look at Kon – This came out Lasterday (this morning). I don’t know actually what Kon was doing because I was laughing so hard that she said holy crap.
Those guys are bad guys, daddy? – Thursday we hit gridlock in Pittsburgh in an area where 279 and 376 and some other roads came together and there wasn’t any sort of traffic signals to make people, I dunno, merge intelligently. And of course it was one of those things where everyone on the left needed to get all the way right and everyone on the right needed to get all the way left. It was a clusterfuck that took about 30 minutes for 0.4 miles of driving. And during that, Molly looked at all the jerks cutting people off and driving awful and said, “Those are bad guys, daddy? Them jerks?” “Yes honey, they sure are.”
Not quite – This is another phrase that she uses slightly wrong, but always in a humorous way. “Molly are you going to finish your lunch?” “MM Not quite.”
I have 2 Poops/Pees – When going to the bathroom, she usually has either two poops or pees in her. At least she’s consistent
Soup Poop -- An undesirable poop experience where thing are not a hard poop
Pop Poop – A poop that goes pop because it comes out with three farts (always three farts too)
I have to wait for my fart to come out – When she’s taking a long time on the potty, this is almost always the reason.
Far Far Away – Lots of things can be far far away. Usually this is anything outside the house.
Check it Out – She says this like Princess Bubblegum says it in Adventure Time – Very well enunciated
Guys – She recently learned to refer to groups of people as “guys.” So now she’ll say, “Hey guys, check it out.”
Let me show ya – Little miss know-it-all will be delighted to show you all kinds of stuff. And she’ll explain how it works too.

Part the Second – Jackisms

Tankuuu – Said when receiving food or drink. Thank you. And damn it’s genuine too.
Dipppeeee – Coll. For Dippy Coll. for Sippy cup
Oh Boy -- Dude gets excited
Woow – Jack is uncannily apt with the Wows.
Weee Weee – Whenever he’s going fast or flipping around, he’s lovins it. Dude’s going to be my rollercoaster buddy in about seven years.
Hiiii – All Jack’s words have a long drawl at the end. Like he wants to keep that word working for him to fill in for all the others he hasn’t quite grabbed yet
Guda Guda Guda Ga – Jack’s Filler words. Molly did Dukka Dukka Dukka if you recall. Jack’s are a little slower, but just as cute.
Buyyyyy--- He’s super cute at saying bye to people. He’ll even lavish some kisses. But half the time he waves and looks in the wrong direction. Maybe he thinks he’s leaving too.
Yoooooo! (matched with fist pump) – Jack always joins in on the last “Yooo!” of the Yo Gabba Gabba! theme song; it’s his favorite show. Favorite to the point of poo brain
Poo Brain – Not really a word he uses, but it’s the state that he falls in when transfixed with something. As a male, he becomes single-mindedly focused and nothing short of shaking or loud (and I mean loud) noises will sway him away from his object of affection. Molly finds Poo brain to be hilarious and will actively fuck with Jack to see how far she can go without distracting him.
The Headshake – Jack’s got the No Headshake down pat. It’s good too because, unlike Molly, Jack means no when he uses it (Molly had a long stint where no meant both no and yes – maybe it’s a universal girl thing)
Acrobatics – Jack is a climber. He’s at least 6-8 months ahead of Molly’s development at the same age in respect to climbing on things. Stairs aren’t an issue going up- and even coming down, he’s starting to learn to bend his legs instead of just plop falling each step. He can get up on the couch and run amok like the best little monkeys. I’m afraid for the day when he figures out how to climb out of the crib—because then I don’t know how we’ll contain him.

So that’s some of the cooler highlights of the kids’ collective linguistic growth. Until next time….

Ontologica 3 Stirrs and wants YOU

2011-01-29T00:36:00.000-05:00

We're gearing up to getting the new Issue of Ontologica off the ground, and this year we're planning on not only starting bi-annual publications, but also open reading periods. If you've been itching to submit something, we'll have an open reading period from March 1 to April 30. Take a look at our Submissions page and send us something already!

The November NaNoWriMo Wrapup and Other Writerly Junk

2010-12-03T23:58:00.001-05:00

Now that November's over and NaNoWriMo is complete, I finally have the time to talk about last month's reckless abandon in writing, and all the crazy things I found and learned during the course of the month.

Overall Stats

I ended up finishing NaNoWriMo with just shy over 53,000 words. And a couple days later, I more or less finished the manuscript, which in total is 127,459 words. Not bad for only three months of writing. Easily the most creative production I've ever done in my life. And man it feels good. Also During this year's NaNoWriMo, I set a New daily Wordcount record for myself: 8,146 words on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. That massive push by my count should have netted me the 50k month win, but NaNoWriMo's official wordcount api differed from Word's by 350 words so, I officially finished up the next day.

This year I also did a lot more work in tracking just exactly how I write, and how it stacked up against the posted suggestion from the folks over at the Office of Letters and Light. If you know me, I love graphs and charts, so this was a great motivational tool for me.

I ended up starting a daily new wordcount spreadsheet back in late August, and ended up modifying it a bit to give me more granular information for November. From there I broke out weekly Word Count V. Target charts and daily Word count v. Daily Target (1,667 words) Charts. I also Made a daily Word count vs. 50k chart to see my progress grow with each day. Week one was by far one of the most productive weeks of the whole month; I was really fired up, but it meant that I fell prey to the doldrums of Week two a bit, struggling a lot with exhaustion. As I rolled towards week three I tried to ensure that my weekends were spent away from writing, taking two nights off, and I tried to ensure that I was a little better at getting sleep.

Another practice that helped keep wordcount anxiety down was that I spent my lunch hours typing instead of reading or walking; that way on good days I'd killed already 700-1200 of the daily word count requirement. Also on nights that Sue is at school, that made me really try to push hard since Sue is always happy when she has to read stuff, and considering that school tends to make her tired and stressed, having a couple thousand new words always improved her mood.

So from there I ended up with what I have now. Now that we're in December, I started using this program called yWriter to help me organize, tag and manage the novel's content. It's amazing. For example, last night after I loaded in all 76 of my chapters, I realized that the timeframe for the whole novel is only 12 days. I also saw that almost every night, Nigel has a bad dream and/or interaction with Layil. This is an unconscious construction on my behalf, but considering the novel's theme, it works really well.

Speaking of Writing programs, during the month of November I started having my Google Reader account follow the Lifehacker bundle of blogs. And Lifehacker did a huge and wonderful series on Writing Tools To make your life easier. From all of these posts I downloaded a number of writing tools from Distraction free drafting clients to yWriter, to learning about 750Words. Some of this stuff wasn't for me, but other things, namely yWriter and 750words are slam-a-cow awesome and will comprise the remainder of this blog post.

750words

The idea of this site is that every day you write three pages (250 words/page is the generally accepted standard) of stuff. The site doesn't care what those three pages are, nor does it care how or when you do it, only that you do it. By default this 350 words is private to only you, and you have to do some stuff to allow others to see it--which in this Dr. Strange-O world of disappearing privacy is a godsend. I started 11/16 and in the last month have only missed two days. One of the most sexy things about it for me is the fact that it puts together all kinds of really cool metadata metrics based on what you write. Things like calculating your emotional state, recording the weather, most commonly used words, perception of time (Past present future), usage of the senses, etc. You also get Xbox 360 like Achievements called Badges in the shape of an animal when you complete certain streaks or configurations. I like rewards. I also like the pressure of keeping a cumulative streak going. I find myself using the site as a cross between a brain dump, and a cheat to get myself to write something (like this blog entry) very quickly. Did I mention it tracks how fast you type and how fast you reach your 750? My personal best is 11 minutes. The brain dump aspect of it has really become a sort of look-forward-to therapeutic thing that at one time, in college, I did all the time, but sort of lost the initiative to do it at some point or another. Either way, I’m totally engrossed in the site, and I’ve currently signed up for the December Challenge—750 a day for 31 days without missing a day. So far So good.

yWriter

The idea behind yWriter is to organize, plan and help you write your novel. It’s very similar in some respects to the popular Mac program, Scrivener, but from my limited experience using the Windows Beta of Scrivener, yWriter offers a lot more granular control to what you’re doing. The primary modus of this is the notion that yWriter divides your novel into Scenes instead of chapters. Chapters are still around, but rather than having the chapter as the smallest unit of the novel, yWriter goes down to the scene level. And since everything’s a scene, and scenes belong to chapters, you can really get crazy with moving things around. Also, yWriter has some serious metatag components built into it. Each unit, Chapter, Scene, Character, Location, and Item comes with a tags field allowing you to specify metatags on everything. Also, by allowing you to keep a running definition of Characters, Locations, and Items, you can further build consistency and, in my case, keep everything straight in my head. yWriter also comes complete with tools to help you plan, manage, and assess your current writing progress by allowing you to set deadlines for various drafts as well as wordcounts, words/hour and all that kind of good stuff.

Since I’ve been considering turning this project into something that is both web based and non-linear in design, yWriter will help me get there. I can tag and crosstag all of the elements in each manuscript, which form there can be sucked into a database of sorts and disseminated in a choose-your-own-adventure kind of way. Also, with all the character, location, and item tag data, I can make mini-blog posts on the Ae’rinus blog to help build the flavor of the world, and enhance things that are going on in the background but not readily available in the current arc of the story.

11/25/10 -- I Win

2010-11-26T23:59:00.000-05:00

Depending on your word count API, I crossed 50k on 11/24. NaNoWriMo didn't agree, so I hit the official 50k yesterday. Let's see how much farther I can go. Stats and other goodies to ensue sometime in early December. It's been a great month of writing though that's for sure.

NaNoWriMo 2010 Here I come

2010-10-25T23:17:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year again. NaNoWriMo is upon us. I'm pumped. This will be my third year of stabbing away at the keyboard. But really, consider it more my second. Year one really amounted to very little because I didn't take it seriously enough. I've been doing a lot of stretching of the writing fingers this year: September I logged 40k words, averaging almost 10k a week. This month I've kind of slacked off, but I keep telling myself that I'm just pacing myself so that I don't get burned out in mid November.

This years NaNoWriMo project will be a continuation of last year's--the Shadowman Project (for lack of a better name).

More later.

30/5 Birth-iversary, or, The Weekend We Spent in Toronto Celebrating our Fifth Anniversary and Sue’s 30th Birthday

2010-10-12T21:46:00.001-04:00

Part1: Inception

Way back in July, I hatched a plan. I wanted our fifth anniversary to be something special, and on top of that, since generally our birthdays are usually overshadowed by some other event that ensures we don’t get to enjoy our birthdays, I wanted to also make sure that Sue’s 30th was one to remember. So after a little thinking cap work, I figured we’d go to Toronto. But I wanted all of this to be a surprise. And so between July and Now, I secretly planned our trip to Toronto while a number of things happened to derail said surprise. Including but not limited to:

AAA, the first travel agency I signed up for called the house, and divulged a bunch of travel information to Sue when I was at work. Sue was very upset and they really didn’t care that they screwed up a secret. Fortunately they didn’t mention the destination. But I canceled the trip from them immediately and booked through Expedia like I should have in the first place.
Then in August I remembered that Sue’s passport was still in her maiden name. I spent a week scanning the web to figure out if the boarder control would give her hell. The short answer: no if you don’t have kids. But if you do have kids, the passport better show the married name, and the kids better all have the same last name, or the Canadians will assume you’re trafficking children and feed you to a Moose.

So I had to say to her, “I need you to get a passport photo, but don’t ask why.”
Four weeks after I sent out the passport renewal for her, the Passport office called and told her that she was lying on her form, that she couldn’t possibly be married under the license we supplied. He claimed that the type of license we had was outlawed fully two years before we got married. And he was being a jerk about it. And he also was very adamant that the passport would not be completed by 10/8, and that Sue would have to jump through several dozen flaming hoops to prove that she did get a legal name change.

So we called the court house; they said the passport office was full of shit. AND they said if the passport office continued to be full of shit, they’d sue the shit out of them for us for infringing on our rights.
We got a fancier version of the same marriage license and mailed it off.
The passport guy, when he received the fancy version of the same marriage license, said, “Oh well since you didn’t send me the fancy version in the first place, I just assumed you were lying. I will process your request in time.”

In September an out of state lady driving a rental (which she declined insurance on) hit Sue and the kids up at the mall. And because the lovely lady didn’t want to take responsibility for her actions, we had to play the insurance runaround game, which offset the repair time until dangerously close to the time in which we were planning on leaving.
Sue tried very hard to pump everyone she thought might know about what was going on for information. I had to have her boss lie, making her think that she still had to work on her birthday. I guess Pam went so far as to keep a hidden layout of her schedule that way so Sue would actually think she had to work.
Almost to Canada, and I found out that Sue’s dad’s Garmin we were borrowing didn’t include Canadian maps. And since I didn’t want her thinking we were going to Canada until we were in the line for the boarder, I had to cheat the GPS a bit to get us the last leg.

Part 2: Getting There

To appropriately whip my wife into a fervor of excitement, I was purposefully vague about how many hours I’d be working on Friday the 8th (half day). I also left her with a letter explaining that she needed to pack, and that she did indeed have the weekend off. But that’s about all it said beyond basic here’s what you need stuff. To help tide her over, I had a little edible arrangements thing delivered to the house.

So then we packed up and left. And as we drove, I used several devices of misdirection to keep her guessing where we were going. Molly kept telling her we were going to see horsies. And much of the trip, Sue figured it would be Belhurst Castle, but she was wrong there. I also hinted at one point that we were heading to NYC; however the drive to Toronto was perilous enough—I can’t imagine 7 hours of under 4 backseat insanity.

On the way up through Buffalo, traffic wasn’t too bad (though Eastbound I-90 was an insanity construction traffic jam for miles and miles—needless to say we took the backroads home once we came back into the states).

We stopped at Red Robin In Buffalo to eat, because Erie is one of those places with the IHOP/Red Robin Commercials, yet neither restaurant. So for the rest of the world that has these standard chains, they’re strangely fantastic to us. And our late lunch at Red Robin was indeed strangely fantastic. At this point I also took advantage of poisoning Molly by telling her we were going to a castle. Then once Molly started talking about going to the castle and seeing the horsies, Sue really started to get excited.

As mentioned above in Part 1, the GPS promptly failed as I tried to program in our destination in Toronto, so I did a Niagara Falls cheat, and stayed on the bridge to Cana-da. At which point Sue put it all together and correctly guessed Toronto, thinking that we might be going to Medieval Times.

Now, I forgot to mention, that in the letter that she read Friday morning, it specifically said she didn’t need her passport. Well, that’s because I had it stashed in the car. In fact, I had several envelopes stashed in the car, each containing more information about what we were doing. The first envelope had our passports and birth certificates in it. The second had an anniversary letter and some spending cash (in Looneys of course). The third had a pile of google maps to various locations I thought might be interesting.

So we rolled through the boarder and promptly joined about a hundred million other people all on the road to Toronto. I didn’t realize that we happened to book our trip to Toronto during Canada’s Thanksgiving weekend. And whiile the speed limit for most of the trip between the border and Toronto was 100kph, we were lucky to stay at 50. It was slow going. Oh and Jack, good well-behaved child as he is, decided not too long after we entered Canada that he was done with being in the car. Much to our good fortune, Molly decided to be actually really good, and she did everything she could to help calm Jack down. She gave him toys, tried to hold his hand, and then started singing songs. Molly loves to sing, and while many of her songs have interesting verses like:

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells

All far away

Oh what fun to ride far away hey

Old mcdonald had a farm

So we got to singing The Wheels on the Bus, and Sue and I couldn’t remember more verses than Wheels, Wipers, and People, so we started to ad lib, much to Molly’s delight (and to some degree Jack too—he calmed down a bit when Molly started cackling).

Here are some additional Verses to the song:

The Grammas on the bus go have some snacks

The Papas on the bus go Where’s my Train

The Yams (Aunt Yam) go Where’s my Ant

The Daddy’s on the bus go <fart noise> <fart noise> <fart noise> / I hate traffic

The Mommy’s on the bus go I need snacks

The Jacks on the bus go Daa daa daa

The Chus on the bus go Yuck Yuck Yuck

The Kon’s on the bus go Where’s my cake? / Is it Fish? / I want cake (Kon’s part got sung a lot so we kept changing it up)

This worked for a while, but then Molly started getting tired, and when Molly’s tired she becomes a very much broken record. And so she started saying “I want to go to the castle” over and over and over. Fortunately we were actually in the city by this time, and coming in off the Gardinier Expressway, there were lots of “castles” to be seen.

Park. Valet? Yes. I’m too tired to park myself. Check-in. Unpack. And while we unpacked, Jack got his wish: some time to zoom about, free from the carseat: Molly was also happy to be free from the car seat, and quickly claimed the Chaise lounge and settled down with bunny, Bubbles and a good book (I love you, Stinky Face)

And Sue took some pictures of the sunset outside our hotel window:

A quick kiss, and we were on our way to part 3

Part 3 – Dinner Crash

The Concierge directed us over to The Old Spaghetti Warehouse as a fine family type eatery. And by the time we got there and were seated, it was pushing 7:15. The place had a lot of character. It reminded me of backstage in an old theater, where the restaurant was carved out around all the old props that weren’t in use. We sat in a carousel. There was also a trolley car, a british style phone booth, and a bunch of other interesting rebuilds containing tables with people eating copious amounts of pasta. Here are some pre-meltdown pictures:

And though it was incredibly cute when Jack discovered the fun of playing with spoons, and Molly learned about the world of blowing bubbles in her milk, our food didn’t really arrive until about 8:00, which was exactly Jack’s bedtime, and the little man, after a a good many hours crabbing about being in the car for too long, was DONE. So he proceeded to FLIP-OUT (Adventure Time style). Despite the fact that dessert was included in the price of our meal, we had to skip out on it and head back to the hotel, where we all promptly crashed. Molly insisted on sleeping with us, which meant that she bed hogged big time, leaving me with next to nothing for mattress and a constant arm, leg, or head resting on me. Still, at least she didn’t do the cry-whine/itch thing she did last week (that was a true hideous night).

Part 4 – Sue’s 30th Birthday, or, Saturday in Toronto

Originally we were planning on hitting up the Toronto Zoo on saturday, but seeing how I had no working GPS, and was still fatigued from Friday’s driving, I suggested that we leave the car where it was and took advantage of the public transit system to tool around downtown Toronto. Sue was down with the idea, and Molly was pretty jazzed about taking the trains, so after some breakfast purchased at the little grocery store across the street from the hotel, we were off to Union Station.

You know, Japan, our first real experience with subway systems, trains and the like, really spoiled us. Ever since, we have forever been mildly confused with American, and now Also Canadian mass transit systems. In Japan, there were big maps of destinations, with prices on them. It was very easy to navigate even without know much of the language. Toronto was ok to navigate, but buying tokens was a bit confusing, and in the end, we got a family day pass, but that was after I ignored Sue’s good advice to ask before purchasing anything. Oh well, we have 4 souvenir subway tokens.

We took the subway to Yonge and Queen street and started out in the Yonge Street shopping district with the intent to hit up the Eaton Center. It wasn’t quite open yet, so we headed into an egg restaurant, and ordered up some more breakfast for Molly; because the kid never eats enough.

After second breakfast, we went into the Eaton Center, which had some very cool fake Geese flying in from the ceiling. They also had Flying Kitties:

Molly wanted one. Can you imagine the damage a flying kitty would cause in your house? Despite being heavily under construction, the mall turned out being quite good. There was a Godiva store, and Sue got her high-end chocolate fix (The Blood Orange Bats are fantastic if you need a fix yourself). She also landed some super deals at The Body shop and got a bunch of free stuff for use with Massages. I was wishing that I didn’t buy her boots in Houston, and instead saved the money for Toronto, because Toronto is apparently a boot mecca. They had lots of very cool boots there. Molly got herself Blaze from the Tinkerbell series, and I picked up a new GPS, so we’d be able to navigate home and other places in the future.

Here’s a picture of Jack and I before we then exited part 4 for

Part 5 – Chinatown, or the best part

Sue was pretty excited when she saw on our hotel map of Toronto that there was a pretty big Chinatown section. And we definitely weren’t disappointed. We walked down a nostalgic lane pretty much immediately upon entering Chinatown (via street car this time), when we found an Anime store. Though it was cool to browse through all the anime stuff, I think it just made us feel old. Still it was kind of cool.

We then started looking around for lunch, and stopped in a bakery for some Chinese buns. We were almost going to settle for that, but I knew Jack would be needing a pile o carrots soon, so we pressed on a little more, looking for the perfect lunch place. And we found it: an authentic ramen shop. And if you know Sue at all, you know that she will stop at nothing to get a good honest bowl of Japanese noodles. And this place, was by far the best Ramen we’ve had since Japan. We both ate EVERYTHING. And to make the lunch all the better, they actually had Black Sesame Ice Cream, another favorite we haven’t really been able to have since going to Japan. It was super lovely. And I think the high point of our vacation. The food was that good.

Sue also found a very cool bamboo shop that fulfilled another longterm search of hers: wooden rice hats. Back when we were on our honeymoon, her mission was to find one, and we never saw anything beyond some cheap touristy kind that you can get over here. But this place had some very nice ones and Sue bought two as well as a very nice paper umbrella.

A little ways further and we went into a teashop where Molly made friends with the little girl of the shop owners. The two of them ran around the shop like little banshees in this roller-racer type car while we looked at the teas. We talked to the owners a bit, so the kids could play some before heading back to dump off our bags.

Part 6 – Why Kids need naps, or, the shittiest part of the trip

We got back to the hotel, dumped off our bags, and I sent Sue down for "the weirdest Swedish Massage she’d ever had” with the hopes that Molly would take a bit of a nap, because she was starting to go crazy. Well naps didn’t happen. And when Sue got back, we decided to hop the ferry and check out the islands in the bay.

Supposedly there was a harvest festival going on over on the Island. But as we walked around, we didn’t see anything like that. We did, however, find a really cool Labyrinth made out of cedar trees, which Molly dubbed Owiee’s house (Owiee is Molly’s imaginary friend. He lives in trees, and is green with green pants and brown shoes. He doesn’t wear a shirt and keeps his towel in his belly button.) So we tromped around in Owiee’s house for a bit, finally coaxing him out to walk with us (Molly kept calling the island Owiee’s island, by the way).

We walked down to the far side near the beaches, and they were all closed for the season—everything was closed. So we went over towards a playground. Then everything went downhill. Molly played the brown note in the playground. Crapped her pants big time. Didn’t even tell us she had to go, despite constant asking her if she needed to go potty. We made her walk back to the beach area, so we could get her cleaned up, but the restrooms were also closed for the season. We walked back further, to some other restrooms we saw on the way into the island. Also closed. Sue and I are both furious now. Not only has Molly made a mess of herself, but it seems like we’re stuck on a series of interconnected islands populated by hundreds of people that came with our ferry alone, and no public restrooms. Fortunately, right by the ferry drop, the restrooms were open, and Sue performed magic by turning her hoodie into a makeshift skirt for Molly.

Standing in line to catch the ferry back, we were somewhat alleviated to see we weren’t the only parents with this plight; some filthy and poorly mannered Swiss or Austrian (not sure which nationality beyond the fact that their German was really sloppy awful sounding) kid had done the same. Except the Swiss parents really weren’t doing much about it, and letting their filthy crap pants child all over the place. But, we did get some nice pictures of the city waiting for the ferry:

Part 7 – Dinner and a Movie

We were pretty much done after the big letdown of the Islands. So we hit up this little Gyro place right next door to the hotel and ordered up Iron Man 2 from the hotel tv. The gyros were super fantastic, and despite the ridiculous fee for the movie, Iron Man 2 was really enjoyable. Both kids were completely exhausted and slept very well…Molly even left our bed and laid down on the little chaise lounge at some point, which, though confusing, was really nice too.

Part 8 – Toronto Zoo

So Sunday we packed up, got breakfast from the Kitchen Corner grocery store again (they had some super wonderful hard crusty bread, and aloe vera water), and then checked out. With new GPS in hand, I programmed in our destination, and we zipped off to the zoo, all of us sad that the new GPS didn’t have Dr. Nightmare’s voice loaded in it. If you don’t own a garmin, they have customizeable voices you can download. one of them, Dr. NIghtmare makes constant ghoulish comments as you’re driving, like “Can we stop for some rope and a shovel” Or “I think you’re being followed.” or “There’s a goblin behind you.” Etc.He’s quite fun, and we generally combine him with the hearse car marker (because if Sue had the money, she’d be tooling around town in a hearse.) Traffic was again hideous.

Once we got to the zoo, we kind of balked at the price--$23/adult. We balked again when we saw that some parts of the zoo, like their new Shark section and Kids section required additional fees. Screw that. We skipped those parts. Some pictures from the zoo:

The Toronto zoo had some pretty cool exhibit houses. The above picture of the alligator snapping turtle was amazing; that thing was easily 40 pounds or so; it would have no trouble taking a foot and not even saying what. Molly got a kick out of the baby lizards and flamingos. Sue got to see a bunch of arctic foxes. But the biggest drawback was that the Toronto zoo was way too spread out. It made Cleveland’s overly spread out zoo look like the Erie zoo. Not only did you have to walk forever between zones, but some places like the Ruined Mayan Temple, were islands of stuff that were one way in/out, requiring you to backtrack a lot. We got there at 10, and by 2, we were done, and we hadn’t seen about 1/3 of the zoo yet. So we ended up just skipping the rest in favor of trying to get out of Dodge before the traffic got too bad.

Part 9 – Journey’s End

Canadian traffic jams center themselves around on/off ramps. All the way back to the states, every time we got near an exit, the traffic would lock up and we’d be down under 40kph. As soon as we got past the exit, it was back up to 70-90. It stayed like this all the way to the QEW, which was pretty close to the last leg on the way out of Canada. And aside from a few “why are you taking me this way” Moments from the garmin as it led us on the backroads back to Erie (so we’d avoid the awful traffic jam on I90 we saw on Friday), we made it back home by 9PM.

All in all, our Birth-iversary trip was a hoot. I know we’ll travel to Toronto again, but probably not until both kids are potty trained. There was so much more we could have done there.

Coming Soon!

2010-10-10T23:23:00.000-04:00

An account of our Birth-iversary Trip to Toronto!

2010-10-01T20:52:00.000-04:00

Yeah we just throw our kids in with the laundry. Keeps em fresh and clean, but they can be staticky at times.

Lots of writing, or My wife is awesome

2010-09-07T22:06:00.000-04:00

Starting in on another week of lots of writing. Almost 14k words of new material in the last two and a half weeks; it's like NaNoWriMo but on my own time. Sue and I have been co-writing the Nigel and Cersee Sagas, and recently she convinced me to stop working way back at the beginning and to start working up at the same spot she's at. It's damn invigorating. And we're spending time together not watching TV.

Maybe sometime in the near future I'll post something of our combined efforts.

Mollyisms Part the Second, Back by Popular Demand

2010-08-17T22:12:00.000-04:00

Ahh parenthood.
These are the things that we hear day in and day out.
Sometimes we laugh
sometimes we don't
but any way you slice it, Mollyisms are not a dumb one.

Molly: Knock Knock us Who's There? Molly: Come in!
It ok Jack
Daddy Jack need a binky.
Molly: Reeed Robin Us: Yum
We going to get presents?
Make the car talk, Mommy (Molly wanting Dr. Nightmare of our GPS to talk)
I had a hard day. I need to lay down.
I want...choclate icecream with a cherry on top and the sprinklies
I want a Star one flavored bug juice (note: star flavored = cherry. Obviously because cherry star kisses from Dairy Queen are red and Star flavored)
This sucks
I want to go back pack ride. I want to take a kitty on it.
Oops.
It's a hard poop mommy (Like a true girl, Molly hates admitting that she too must poop)
Peepee on the potty peepee on the potty (sings)
I make the water turn green Mommy (we dump blue food coloring water in her potty to help make peeing more exciting; try it at home, spice up your potty time.)
I dump it. I dump the peepee in the potty
I flush it.
Mommy I flush your potty?
Yaay Mommy you go peepee on the potty too! Good job Mommy! (followed by a high five)
Build me a castle with the pillows. and the blanket.
I wanna ride a pony
No. That's a dumb one.
Hey Kid. Hey Kid you dropped your cellpone.
I help you?
You play with me kid?
Thank you playing with me kid
your welcome kid.
I have a butt.
Yetitiz (yes it is)
Wanna play? (proceeded by Molly yanking you off the couch onto the floor)
No eat my food Kon not for you.
I want....appiejuits
I tirsty
I want... choclatemilks
I want the cheeeez (cheetos)
I need my Tee-B
I need watch my show
I want.... Adventure Times
Ummm Powerpup girld (Power Puff Girls)
No hamburder
No hot dog dumb
I want to eat yeaves (leaves = salad)
I want trees (broccoli)
I dip it?
I wanna go to the plaaaayground
Daddy, Watch out for the trees!
Oh no monter train!
Daddy you gotta get a stick and yell at the monters and go yah yah
grap the stick with you han and you yah yah
don't hurt baby brodder (shortly after that statement, Molly got banned from coming to Jack's doctor's appointments for trying to slay the nurses for stabbing her brother with shots)
Not your little man daddy, it's mommy little man
It's ok Butterfly, Molly got you (said in the same cadence as Fawn says things to animals in the Tinkerbell Movies)
I don't like it
No funny dumb funny
My Jammies... My glasses! (said in the same cadence as seen in the city of thieves episode of Adventure Time. My daughter is a true nerd in the works. I'm so proud)
You be the monter daddy (I then chase her around the play ground until she stabs me repeatedly with the sharpest pointiest stick you can find)
read me story
you play my kitties?
Need to get the babies for the mama kitty
no like boom booms (thunderstorms)
Mommy I want to watch animals A-N-I-M-L-S
When counting Molly does good up till fourteen, then skips fifteen and sixteen jumping straight to seventeen.
You need a bandaid daddy?
Daddy don't pick your toe
Mommy Daddy needs a bandaid (the above three were in conjunction to a hang nail I had on my toe, which Molly carefully observed daily until it was healed, informing Sue at every instance when it needed a bandaid.)
I got a boo boo too. Need a bandaid (Molly's boo boos are invariably almost always so tiny you can hardly see the remnant of a scab that was a boo boo like three weeks ago. But she's very insistent. And of course anytime someone else has a boo boo, hers are waaay worse and she always has to compare.)
I kiss it better?
Say your sorry to Daddy Mama. Gib Daddy a hug. (Molly always takes my side in arguments; yet another reason why she rocks).
That a dumb lady. (to the lady that almost hit them the other day because she ran a stop sign while on a cell phone)
No hit the car. No hit the car.
Put Jack down he sleepy.
Carry me.
Jack I play your toys?
I not stinky. I Molly.
I not a baby. I a yittle girl (little girl)
Jack smiling at me, Mommy.
Aww it's cuute.
Jack making noisies

Stay tuned for more fun later.

Ontologica, Turning a New Page

2010-08-11T20:39:00.000-04:00

After a whole lot of stress, hot nights cramped in my attic, and chipping away, Issue 2 of Ontologica is now ready for consumption. This issue features:
Rod Dixon
Colleen Harris
Kilean Kennedy
Loreen Niewenhuis
John Seay
Scott Walker
Susanna Childress
Jeffrey M. Hopkins
Josh Smith
"Gentle" Josh Makowski

This issue also saw a changeup in the editorial leadership as Dave Harrity stepped down from his position as Poetry editor and we added Susane Andracki as Art Editor.

If you have a moment, check it out!

I caught the Steampunk bug

2010-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

Sue and I like to game whenever we go on walks. We've about exhausted all of my D&D lines, and I've kinda screwed up the line Sue started, so until that gets back on track, and under the heavy influence of Abney Park, we made a foray into the world of Steampunk. I whipped up some new landscape, and sue created a shutter-pixie named Locke, and we've been grinding away in the dark post-cataclysmic landscape of North America. I'm trying to run it with a balance of emerging steampunk technology and post-apocolyptic Mad Max/Fallout kind of feel. So far, it's been pretty entertaining.

Here's some stuff I wrote up about the gameworld:

Setting Earth 100 years after a global EMP cataclysm.

Memories are soft on exactly how it happened, but around 100 years ago all electronics, radio frequencies, and computers went dark. Major rioting ensued with the fall of most governments and public utility infrastructure. Power plants became the most powerful piece of property, but many were unstable without electronic monitoring causing at least 5 nuclear plants (including three mile island) to go critical.

People in large cities struggled the most -- finding, transporting, and keeping fresh stores of food became increasingly difficult, and cannibalism soon became rampant.

the stabilized powerplants (those that could be easily operated without electronics--largely old coal plants) became havens for their surrounding communities, as they provided vital power, which they soon began to regulate and control by destroying key substations ensuring their grid would remain within a localized zone of electricity, effectively creating city states clustered around coal plants. The Great Lakes Region of the former United States, for this reason, continued to remain relatively stable with its great number of coal power plants (http://www.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=115725047472986165665.00046eed968dc7a707394&cd=4&sll=37.926868,-95.712891&sspn=46.431705,78.837891&ie=UTF8&ll=41.861379,-80.375977&spn=5.547099,9.854736&t=h&z=7&iwloc=lyrftr:msid:115725047472986165665.00046eed968dc7a707394,00046eed9a2a4d87d3ca9,40.513799,-79.200439,0,-32)

However the diminishing supply of coal, and increased difficulty of extracting remianing coal in appalachia gave way to rising fears of a permanent blackout, and many city states began fighting over coal aquisition rights, even going so far as highjacking coal trucks and rail cars. the instability lead to more unrest, and many people began migrating north into canada where the open space held promise for a more pure lifestyle living off the land.

Also during this time initially after the EMP shock, the world's weather systems changed drastically with record high and low temperatures. Hurricanes slammed the coasts of the Americas as far north as Nova Scotia, and coastal flooding swallowed tens of miles of shoreline only to recede in terrible drought a few years later. Scientists presumed that the EMP shock on the planet was enough to force the Earth's magnetic poles to begin to shift drastically, identifying Magnetic north to be somewhere near Moscow, Russia 5 years after the EMP cataclysm, and sliding southward into the Caspian sea within a year. There was an increasing worry that the magnetic poles would reach some form of terminal "Flip Point" where they would drastically roll to opposing sides of the planet over a matter of days or hours, and with this fear in mind, several scientists began development on the Magnetron Network.

Using a top secret method, the worlds' top scientists created hundreds of Mini-magnetrons and began placing them at key locations around the world. the Magnetrons, initially stood no more than ten feet tall and were composed of a single four inch diameter black carbon rod buried five feet into the ground, but the great magnetic force contained within the rods began to draw the metal from the ground and surrounding areas, causing the magnetrons to grow into towering dark obelisks in the sky.

At first people feared these things, seeing that the obelisks deadened the ground surrounding them, and eventually began to gather floating satellites of debris that had yet to settle into the obelisk's form, but within two years of establishing the Magnetrons, the earth's weather patterns stabilized, and scientists determined that the risk of the earth floating off course of its revolution around the sun or the potential of a violent magnetic flip were, for the moment deterred.

The existence of the magnetrons, however, fairly ensured that modern technology would never develop along it's original path--the power of the magnets was so great that they could draw electricity out of any object within their radius, a side effect that turned many power plant city states into ghost towns of ionizing metal slowly being consumed by the magnetrons' draw.

In the mean time, some technology started to resurface. Vintage cars--muscle cars from the mid-late 20th century contained few electronic components, and were relatively easily restored and hybridized with ethanol and solar fuel cells. Solar and wind power also began to grow in effectiveness in areas far from the Magnetrons' influence. Thus four major types of society began to emerge:

The Protectors -- Cities and peoples living near and supporting the upkeep of Magnetrons. these people often lived rusty dark lives with no electrical power available to them. their machines rely on solar, or more commonly, steam. Within the last 15 years or so, many people living in these areas claim to be able to manipulate the world in unnatural ways. Some call it magic, others mutation, and a few very smart folks noticed that the Magnetrons follow key joinings of ley lines, amplifying the fae power flowing into the area. Either way, this magic is soon applied to technology and clockwork steam technology begins to grow and thrive allowing for the bending of natural laws of science to create great flying airships without helium or balloons. Rumors of clockwork prostetics simmer across the land as the protected areas slowly build great walls around their domains to keep their inventions protected from the Wandering.

The Naturalists -- Peoples that lived far from Magnetrons' reach. These areas tended to bee the loosest forms of civilization with return to farming, beasts of burdon, and hunting. The wilds of Canada and more rural areas of the Southern united states returned largely to this way of living

Those Who Challenge God -- Some cities far from Magnetron lines, used aggressive solar and wind technology to try to recapture the modern world before the EMP cataclysm. These areas became the central locations of innovation. The first airships graced the skies over these cities, combining zeppelin technology and solar power. Despite their distance from Magnetron influence, no inventor can revive electronic technology, radio waves, or computing. Scientists are at a loss as to why this technology no longer works and lack the tools to delve deeper into this.

The Wandering -- Over the last hundred years millions of people were spurned from their homes to the dusty roads, some forming ragged bands of nomads, flitting through ruins looking for food, work, or trouble. Most people in settled areas fear the wandering, but for the most part, most wandering ar good people looking for food and work. there is, of course, a dark undercurrent of wicked people out there too that do more than their share to earn the fear felt by most folks about these vagabonds.

The current landscape of the former US holds few major cities, with the most influential being:

Pittsburgh -- Those who challenge god

Homer City -- largest powerplant city state

Sioux Falls SD -- Largest Protector City

Stevens Point WI -- those who Challenge God

Rochester NY -- Protector City

Seneca NY (a new city grown on Seneca Lake) Naturalist Collective

Bangor ME (Now a prime Port of trade) Those who challenge god

Reading PA (Prime Port City and resort area) Those who Challenge God

North East of the former US -- AEC (After EMP Cataclysm) 102

In the years after the establishment of the Magnetrons, along with the growth of "magic," the appearance of supernatural creatures began to grow. Unicorns were sighted in Ireland and around Vancouver, Canada. Pixies, Faeries and other fey creatures have also been found, though they remain rare.

In AEC 85 a dragon was sighted over the ruins of Asheville, SC and burned the remains of the city.

In AEC 86 a team of mercenaries brought down a 20 foot dragon near Stonehenge in England.

In AEC 92 a 25' long Sphinx emerged from the ruins of its own statue in Egypt. It razed a nearby city and demanded that the locals keep it fed with a steady supply of virgins.

In AEC 92 the Protector City Rochestor unveiled a new model of clockwork airship operating on a modified hunk of magnetron and gears. The plans were stolen and pirate clockwork ships began appearing over the skies, levying attacks on protector cities to gain more magnetron hunks.

In AEC 93 a small army of Trolls emerged from the swamps around Shreveport, LA and nearly decimated the city, retreating only after a dying defender accidentally dropped a live grenade near an abandoned gas station, causing a huge explosion and killing two trolls

In AEC 95 confirmed reports of Vampires and Werewolves surfaced from the Black forests of former Romania.

In AEC 98 a Medusa like creature appeared on a small island in the Agean sea, turning all the residents of the village there to stone. The creature was slain by a well-read history buff a year later

In AEC 100 a creature claiming to be the forest king emerged near the Seneca Collective and demanded fealty of the surrounding lands; with the local naturalist's support, the surrounding forests of the Fingerlakes return to their virgin states, trees awaken, and faerie creatures begin appearing in great numbers.

In Defense of Access...Sort of (the good parts at least)

2010-06-09T00:08:00.002-04:00

In my real job I use Microsoft Access a lot; some would say that I use it too much, that Access is an archaic backwards monstrocity that should be dropped from the Microsoft Office Suite, that I should be running on SQL Server with a .NET frontend managing things, that Access isn't powerful enough, isn't fast enough, isn't good enough for anything.

In fact, I think it's easier to think of reasons why Access sucks than to think of its benefits. And as I delve deeper into Access development, I find myself getting more and more indignant when people start shitting all over my development platform du jour.

Don't get me wrong, if I had .NET and SQL server again, I'd probably use them, but I wouldn't be as productive even if everything were shinier, faster, and more "professional" from .NET.

Herein lies the gem that is Access: it allows for fast, useful automation of day to day office activity. It integrates into other Office applications, and after six years of tinkering with it (with much of that time under a really great mentor), I can make Access do all kinds of things that would be a lot more complex to replicate under .NET.

Currently I have databases talking to Outlook, Excel, and Word; making documents, sending emails, creating attachments, all automated with very little user imput needed. And this is just an iceberg's tip of the things I've done/can do. Access as a development platform gives me a lot of really great tools with minimal setup and configuration. And I can extend all of that with Standardized Modules containing all of my most-often-used code. Currently I have 12 Standard Modules for each database containing functions from Basic Database connectivity to Form manipulation, to automated emailing.

The only thing that really holds Access back from being a real contender is Microsoft. Every version of Access I've worked with has had some mind-numbingly stupid implementation Fail on Microsoft's behalf. Want an example? Let's talk Synchronizing.

Prior to Access 2007, there was a feature called Replication. It let you create a replicant database, where you could go offline, make updates and then come back later and synch in with the master. In pre-Access 2007 days I never really had a need for it, but it was always there.

With Access 2007 Replication is supported only in Compatability mode (ie .mdb/mde format). My need for Replication didn't come about until after I upgraded all of our databases. And so some quick searching revealed that the "new" way to handle replication is through SharePoint. Cool. We have that. And everyone in Corporate wants us to use it (because well it's pretty useless). So I tried it out.

Small database, only a couple of tables, and uploaded it to SharePoint. The first thing I found was that Databases run like Garbage on SharePoint. The small table limit (2000 records or less for optimal performance) mixed with our not-so-great network meant that, well, access times went way up. So I turned to synchronizing. Immediately I saw two things: performance went up, and the database started to unravel.

Yes synchronization with SharePoint let's you work Offline with much improved access times, BUT

When you upload a Table to a SharePoint List, SharePoint confiscates your PrimaryID and Renumbers it from 1 -- So I hope you didn't plan on using that as a foreign ID anywhere Else
You can't access that PrimaryID any longer for anything but reading -- So don't bother trying to re-renumber your ID back to what it was
Referential Integrity? Yeah, SharePoint doesn't deal with that bullshit (Seriously, what Database program needs Cascaded Updating and Deleting between Primary and Secondary tables?) [Note Severe Sarcasm for you non-programmer readers].
Validation Rules? Nope.
Default Values? Nope.
Additional Unique Fields beyond the Primary Key? Nope.

How could you NOT be jumping out of your order SharePoint 2007 as your new Online Table Source? Oh wait. Because it's fucking useless. Especially since it's the Only supported form of replication for .accdb/.accde files.

Oh and get this: Microsoft's Solution: Go back to Access 2003. Nice. Why would I, or anyone want to depreciate to 7 year old software? Isn't that against the general plan of things? But then again, Microsoft made Vista and Me and the Early versions of Win98 and XP both sucked too, so I guess I should know better with whom I'm dealing.

Oh the light at the end of the tunnel though: Microsoft will support Referential Integrity in SharePoing 2010...too bad our shop won't update to that until 2012 at the earliest.

My current solution: Hombrew Synchronizing. It'll be awesome when it's done, but it'll be a bit of a beast to retrofit the databases for it.

The point of all this is this: Access, since it is part of Office, beckons lots of know-nothing users into fucking around and making truly hideous databases, but those of us who really work at it, can and do make some pretty powerful applications, with our only limitations being that of the poor design decisions on Microsoft's behalf. So before you start dropping your condescention on the next Access Developer you see, take a moment to find out what's going on under the hood and reserve your words for the people that make us look bad [ you insensitive clod(s)].

Mollyisms Part the First

2010-05-24T23:31:00.000-04:00

Editor's Preface
Parenthood is an oft-celebrated cliche, in which a parent waxes poetic on how smart, funny, beautiful, and tantrum free his or her darling little human-child is. Often, this is done in comparison to another child, wherein the second child is more oft compared to that which spawns in the mucky muck lurking beneath that condemned trailer over yonder by the railroad tracks (wrong side implied). Yet in reality, parenthood is ridiculous work, perilous even (consider the evil plastic cheese wedge, your foot, the bottom of the steps and 3AM--Fucking Deadly) where dog-tired adults pray to any god who will listen that the children sleep [at some point, hopefully at the same time]. Where two year olds learn how to enact passive-aggressive regression tactics (let's un-learn how to use the potty!). Where parents feel embarrassed when their toddler starts slapping the nurse for giving her baby sibling a shot; when deep down we're saying, "Rock on kid, for sticking up for your brother." Yea, parenthood is a minefield...sometimes more literally than we'd like. But,

There is one thing, that above all, pushes parenthood, for me, away from being a brokedown misery of pleading, deal making, and flat out yelling: that being the amazing process of child-like language. Herein lies the first of several installments of Mollyisms.

Mollyism -- (n.) 1. Something Molly said 2. A moment of phrasal hilarity 3. The fruits of parenting at its best.

Part 1: An annotated List of Terms and Definitions

What are you doing here? -- A constant phrase can be used as an introduction, conversation starter, or general question
Sprinkly one? -- usually used in conjunction with ice cream
Do you like it? Do you lub it? -- often paired questions. Consequentially, we lub lots a things these days.
No. Birdy has a turkey leg. -- Molly's answer to the question, "Does a birdy have legs?"
I want a poopcon. --One night outside of Sheetz, Sue and I were talking about coupons--I, stupidly thought that 1. gas stations didn't take coupons, and 2. that a coupon for a free coke was not a coupon and in fact a voucher. I was later set straight by the cash register clerk. But in the mean time, Molly blurts out, "I want a Poopcon." And we lost it. She then started talking about how Kon, our fat kitty, pooped and mommy had to clean up. We're still not sure what she thinks poopcons are, considering that she's been given some, but either way they have something to do with making the fat kitty poop.
Doctor Horsey. -- Molly has many roles for her My little ponies. One of them is Doctor Horsey. And Doctor Horsey can heal any animal by stomping its head.
Hotchipot -- Molly's word for hospital. We had no idea what she was saying till Doctor Horsey showed up to help a sick kitty.
I lub the Chu. He's my faborite. -- Chu's our other kitty. He tolerates Molly's insanity with the patience of the gods. Someday, that cat's going to collect and demand tunafish for all meals till he dies (I think he's waiting for Kon to kick the bucket though, since Kon eats most of the food in the house anyay)
One more -- One more does not mean one more. Molly will One More something twenty or thirty times if she really likes it.
Anotherone poop? -- One time Sue was changing Jack's diaper and Molly was watching. She pointed at Jack's ballsack and said, "Anotherone poop, Mommy?"
No Poop mommy, I farted. -- We hate this phrase. Molly won't tell us, or admit when she poops. Lately this has been leading to messy escapades, as the training diapers don't quite have the sheer containment space of traditional diapers. Shit storm :'(
Dammy. -- Sue's eternal pain. Dammy is what you get when your two year old isn't paying attention to whom she's speaking, so Daddy/Mommy gets slammed together into Dammy. Occasionally she does the opposite, Maddy, but Dammy happens all the time, and it brings out Sue's Irish rage. I feel her pain though--I used to be Dwerf (Drew/Derf [Derf's my step-dad]) for years.
Chickennuggetfrecnchfry -- The only way Molly orders McDonalds
Let's take the walk -- We like walking. so does Molly.
i wanna go to the wateraparrk -- Molly also likes the water park. Currently she's banned till she learns to use the potty.
I'm crying Mama -- This happens usually when Molly's fighting bedtime and she's turned on the pathetic cannon (her mouth). Crocodile tears + this phrase = us having a difficult time not laughing as we try to order her to bed.
Hi Little guy -- Anyone she doesn't know the name of becomes little guy. This can be kids on the playground, action figures, or people on TV.
Kids! Come back Kids! -- Molly lubs playing with other kids on the playground. Unfortunately, very few unsupervised pre-teens have the patience to race around with a bossy two year old. Also, Molly has a knack for showing up at playgrounds when everyone is leaving, hence this phrase.
Mommy, you clean up? -- Said whenever there's a mess. Messes are caused usually by cats in Molly's eyes. She conveniently avoids pointing out many of her own messes. Strange...
I'm cold need a nice and warm -- a nice and warm is a blanket. Sometimes she does say blanket, but nice and warm gets thrown in invariably. She really huddles up and sells the being cold part too once she gets the blanket.
No. I'm the Molly -- Ask Molly if she's pretty much anything , and this is how Molly will respond. She gets real mad when people try to tell her that she's the big sister. Sometimes she even goes as far as adding "I'm a little girl." when people do that.
It's ok Jack -- Whenever Jack cries, Molly tries to soothe him. She's a bit crazy to be touching him up, but sometimes she'll even come over and kiss him.
Mr. Mommy! Mr. Mommy! -- Since we call Jack, Mr. Jack most of the time, just about everyone gets to be a Mr. these days.
Want to take a bubble bath? -- Molly lubs bubble baths. Some days she wants to take like 9 of them, and probably would too if we let her.
It's my Faborite. -- Molly has a lot of faborites.
Moob. -- Molly's version of Move. She tells us to moob a lot.
I help you? -- She loves to help.
No take my car. -- The family car is hers; did you know that? I get in big trouble when I drive to work (good thing I like to try to walk)
I want a chocklate -- apple didn't fall far from the tree here; our little girl is a choco-holic
Mnem an nems -M&Ms Molly style
Open the door.-- Usually so she can escape
Turn up the light -- This can also be used with the dark. Turn up the dark or turn up the sun. She doesn't like the night because that means she has to sleep. Why oh why do little kids not like sleep?
lemme out mommy -- we have to baby gate her into her room because she can open the door and won't stay in her room at bed time.
I got the key -- Molly lubs keys and opening doors with them. To her, a key can be anything that fits in a keyhole.
awww isn't it cuute -- She says this to Kon a lot. Especially when she glomps on him when he's sleeping. It's about the only time she can catch him.
eew that digustin -- Molly's usually spot on when something is yucky, and she doesn't hesitate to tell us.
that's dedicious -- Molly's real good at keeping this word for just the right moment; only really tasty stuff gets the dedicious label.
I come too -- She'll follow us anywhere; even to the crapper
that's dumb! -- sometimes this is cute, but when Molly is mad, tired, or both, everything, even things that are her faborite can become dumb. And she gets pretty violent about hating dumb things; she'll slap em around pretty good.
No Nigh night -- she fights bedtime pretty often anymore. Before Jack, she was clockwork good about going to bed. 9PM zing up the stairs brush the teeth wash the hands kiss good night love you.
I wanna wash the han -- Washing hands and brushing teeth are two things she's pretty good at. And
Need a bandaid? -- Because she's a big help and because she lubs bandaids, she's there to help you with even the most insignificant abrasion. Oh and Hello Kitty is what' she's packing these days, so I hope you like pink kitties and bunnies to heal your wounds.
Wanna play my toys? -- Two year old games are crazy. Sometimes they're real interesting with the rules that she thinks up, but two year olds have a cognitive limit on toys playing, I think. After so many minutes, the game resets and she starts it all over fresh. Sue can beat this repetition by adding crazy fox elements that rock Molly's world.
Play in my room daddy? -- She lubs when we play in her room, but her room is a minefield of toys that scattered from an un-attributed pipe-bomb blast.
oh no the monters. Hide! -- Molly's not generally afraid of much, but she does like to pretend to be afraid of monsters. There's all kinds of monsters to be afraid of. And usually you're safe if you're under a blanket. Personally, I like Monter Train (train whistles heard while outside at night); Molly gets proper freaked out by that.
I'm scared daddy (fake shaking) -- when Molly is "scared," she fake shakes like she's cold. It's real funny.
dukadukadukaduka -- Because Molly doesn't know all the parts of a sentence, she often fills space where she knows words should be but doesn't know the word with rambly word-like syllables.
wait waita minute -- we say this to her a lot; it's only natural that she turn it around on us.
want to draw mommy -- Molly loves drawing and painting, especially 3D objects. Michaels sells these little wooden animals for like 2 bucks. She'll be blissful in painting heaving for like an hour.
I need it -- Molly needs lots of things, and she won't hesitate telling us.
It's my map -- any piece of paper with stuff other than her painting or drawing on it is a Map.
I'm running -- She tells you when she runs. It's good information.
I got a poop pigeon -- How could I not buy this for her? Littlest Pet Shop has a toy that's a pigeon and labeled as a "Messy" one. It also comes with a park bench and a sticker sheet with stickers of bird poop. When we asked Molly if she wanted a poop pigeon in Walmart tonight, she was like "Yeah! I want a poop pigeon." And she kept talking about it all night. I lub it. It's freakin hilarious.
Awesome -- She says awesome. How awesome is that?
I want Edidabeth -- Elizabeth is Molly's best friend. They're the same age and they lub playing together. Molly talks about her constantly.

Brave New World(s)

2010-05-02T00:11:00.000-04:00

[Most] of my students' final grades are submitted, and as I sit here, slightly uncomfortable in the attic during a strange off-season warm spell (not that I'm complaining), I'm looking at the wide-open door of future writing. Writing, that poor sweet creature, that generally likes to hide from "what have you been working on?" will now have to step up and start flexing her muscles again.

And since I"m no longer under the gun to turn papers around with ninja-like quickness, I have some time to reflect on the projects that I haven't been paying attention to at all for far to long of a span.

Not an Autobiography -- I'm sort of on the down spin of this one right now. Though the final Johnny story, "Cliche" is definitely in the works, I've sort of hit a point in the project where I'm questioning it's overall import in the world of literary worth. Most of this is fueled by my more or less recent growing distaste for literary snark. So unless I'm in a snarky mood or I stumble across a gem of an idea, I'm sort of floating this to the side of my headspace. Aside from "Cliche," I figure that I need to write 1-2 more first person narrator stories, overhaul the second Johnny story, "Endings Lead to Beginnings" (starting with the title, which sounds real clunky to me) and finish up Clare's last story, "7500 Miles to Find Herself" A tall order, but a good todo list.

Shadowman (the working title of the series) -- this will probably be my main project for some time. I want to take and revise and continue working on the NaNoWriMo project from November. I have some plans to workshop the NaNoWriMo project with another NaNoer this summer, and I'm hoping to kick into high gear on continuing Nigel's story here soonishly.

Ontologica -- We're aiming to have Ontologica's second issue out in late June, early July. At the moment, I'm not really sure if I'll contribute anything, but I am looking forward to a smoother publishing this time.

All of this, of course, is made possible by my decision to not return to teaching in the fall. The decision, while a bit of a mixed bag of emotions, I think is a good one overall; not only for me but for the family. Adjuncting is rough stuff financially when you're single; damn nigh impossible when you're trying to support a family with just adjuncting. Overall it was a really great experience, but it's time to move on; time to move back to a more regular writing schedule; back to working more regular hours; back to not having to blow off my family to grade papers.

Teaching is a funny thing. At once it's vibrantly exciting--especially if the class is both active and involved, like my rockin-awesome ENGL004 class from this past semester--but it can also be a super-drag. Nothing is more gut-dropping depressing than a bright student that doesn't give a shit. It gives me fits to watch kids piss away their college careers. Someday down the road, I hope to find myself in a classroom again; hopefully bullshitting about fiction instead of composition, but the future is no mistress that I bed with regularly, so she can keep her secrets for now.

On the more professional side of the writing world, my marketing job is taking me to some pretty wild places. I've been going hog-wild on developing some pretty keen stuff, and it's got me thinking back about the creative nature of programming vs. its scientific nature...something I think I want to expand on more. But not tonight. I think tonight calls for some sort of outline of Nigel's timeline from forever ago to current.

Dadaism

2010-03-23T22:54:00.004-04:00

No this isn't about an artistic movement I only vaguely remember from Art History. This week's blathering is much more personal-the whole parenting thing.

Part 1: The wasteland
On the outside, I think, a lot of 20somethings think that parenting is kind of an end of the road--your life is over kind of thing. Not to mention the physical wasteland of toys strewn about, all of them lying in wait for that midnight run downstairs barefoot in the dark. Yellow Cheese Triangle. Yes, I speak of you and your many pain inflicted nights. Then there's the wasteland of personal fulfillment--the whole me time sorta goes out the window.

Part 1.5: Is it that bleak?
No.

Part 3: Let me explain what happened to part 2
A couple weeks ago I was talking to Grace about the fun of having a 2 year old and an impending stork delivery, and she said "You know you really need to write something about parenting. Part 2 was: Grace, your wish is granted.

Part 4: It's not what you think
Parenting is like the wild west. And you get to be Clint Eastwood or Annie Oakley (for you female types) [Maybe I should reference Buffalo Bill instead for a better parallel with Oakley? Nah. Eastwood is far too badass to leave out. I'd be like referencing a samurai flick without mentioning Akira Kurosawa or Toshiro Mifune.] Sure we all were kids, and our parents did a [fine/meh/wonderful/terrible/great/shitty/so-so/average] job raising us, so more of the same, right?

To me it feels a bit like playing God. But in a safe way. Sure we got to create life, and as parents we get to shape it. But we can't go willy-nilly. It's not like It's an easy process to start over, and god knows Sue'd kill me if I said, "Oh shit, we fucked up this kid, let's game over and start fresh." She's totally done being pregnant in a forever kind of way. And I can't blame her.

But it is a bit like playing God. We choose as parents what goes into their little impish minds (Molly is thoroughly an imp, no doubt there). They gestate and regurgitate in their own version. The rewards are amazing. Within only a couple years, you have this little creature that runs up to you and says "Bao Bao" [That's 'hug' in Chinese] because 1. she loves you and 2. she watches a whole freakin lot of Ni-Hao Kai-Lan. So I have a partially bi-lingual 2 year old in a language that I will never understand as well as her because she's at the language sponge age.

Other rewards come in all kinds of packages from the Daddy-just-got-home-from-work-excitement to an un-prompted Thank You or random hug. Show them love and attention, and man, Kids rock.

Part 5: What about that imp thing?
Yeah, Kids can give you fits too. They give us fits every day. It's part of parenting, and in a way like Stress exercise. How much kid insanity can you take without losing your cool? Tonight, my daughter decided to drink the bathwater [something that we've been yelling at her for for, um, forever]. Not only because doing so is gross, but because she could choke. Well guess what, tonight she choked on it. I was right there, and averted crisis in seconds. But Sue, also FLEW up the stairs, terrified that something happened to her baby. This leads to part 6

Part 6 : Redbull may give you wings, but parenting gives you superpowers
Holy hell. Being a parent allows you to somehow slow time down sometimes and catch children that are mid fall from 30 feet away when you have a herniated disk, broken leg, and are wrapped so tight in a snuggie that you're certifiably mummified. And it's instinctual. I don't know how we do it, but parents get the powers to SAVE LIVES pretty regularly. And we do it on not a lot of sleep

Part 7: Caffeine, a father's reprieve
You know that bullshit line, "Females are the weaker sex?" Childbirth aside, try raising small children that don't sleep well. Then try it without caffeine. Why? Because moms don't get that chemical stim fix like us dads if they're pregnant or breastfeeding. But yet they carry on just as well. Wives/mothers of the world, you rock. For us dads, we may get a little more sleep and get to dope up on [Coffee, Tea, Monster, Redbull, PowerEdge, Mt. Dew, Coke], but it's also our duty to not bitch about being tired, ever. And if you can let the wife sleep in, for god sakes do it.

Part 8: It's an adventure and a half
Last Night, after class, my Daughter, who realized it had finally stopped raining, called me on a promise I'd made to her when she woke up first thing Monday. I'd said, "We can go out and play with your chalk [sidewalk chalk received from Aunt Yam on Sunday] as soon as it stops raining." So at 7:30 Molly and I are outside in the freakin cold wind drawing on our porch. Yet despite the somewhat miserable conditions, Molly came up with a really hilarious game. I had to draw letters of the alphabet. Then she would dictate how many times you had to stomp on said letters. Stomping had to involve silly walks [ala Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks], and it was pretty constant. So despite being cold, it was actually a lot of fun.

Part 9: The Caveat
What I'm trying to say here is that parenting is indeed about the best thing I've ever done. And since I'm on vacation from everything but teaching, I'm happy to say that I'd be real glad to be a stay at home dad if I could. Here's the caveat to all of this though: Most Americans, I think are far too lazy and narcissistic to actually be good parents. It's evident in our legislation where people feel the need to try and control maturity ratings on music and games. Good parents don't need this kind of gov'ment policing, because they know what their kids are capable of handling. And it doesn't take much to be involved with kids; they crave attention.

Outro
Parenting rocks.
[this post partially written while rocking Jack to sleep].

Begins Here One Hundredth Account of Operative Me

2010-03-18T23:23:00.002-04:00

Or, how to get teenagers, dildos, sodomy, terrorism, Wal-Mart, school shootings, and the word "Chesticles" together in one book.

Wow. Before I begin, I just realized this is post 100. [Insert small party here.]

Today, it's all about Chuck
Palahniuk. Specifically Pygmy, his latest (2009) tromp into the world of decidedly disturbing distopia. Two things before I get going: 1. I like Palahniuk. Even when his writing isn't grand, I still like him because he's got the balls to say and do shit that stuns even my thoroughly desensitized core. 2. I'm pretty thoroughly desensitized (which is a good trait to have when you read Palahniuk. Especially considering that people faint at his readings from his wonderfully visceral descriptions.)

With finishing Pygmy, I've now read half of Palahniuk's library, and I have at least two more of his books sitting unread on my shelves. I generally like the guy.

Pygmy the book
A coupla weeks ago we took a trip up to Borders (a store I usually avoid because hours will pass and wives and children will murder me for getting lost in the stacks for too long) and I decided to finally blow the gift card I got at Christmas. I settled on this book because, knowing my reading time constraints, I needed something that would be both interesting and a fast read.

Overall the book has a very promising premise. From the jacket, "Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students...all the while planning and unspecified act of massive terrorism....It's a comedy. And a romance." Thoroughly Palahniuk, right? Add to it the fact that the entire book is written in very poor English, which though difficult to decipher at first, manages to maintain a consistent and logical flow to it.

I've long been a fan of books that play with dialect, and this application, of foreign English worked very well and in a humorous way without relying on custom grammar rules. Here's a fine example:

Magic quiet door go sideways, disappear inside wall to open path from outside. Not total all glass, extruded aluminum metal frame silver edge, doors slide gone until reveal inside stand old woman, slave woman appareled with red tunic, spring apparatus gripping tunic front to hang swinging sign, printed, "Doris." Ancient sentinel rest gray cloud eye upon operative me, roll eye from hair and down this agent, say, voice like old parrot, say, "Welcome to Wal-Mart." Say, "May I help you find something?"....
Smile of operative me say, "revered soon dying mother, distribute you ammunitions correct for Croatia-made forty-five-caliber, long-piston-stroke APS assault rifle?" (Palahniuk 9)

It's both quirky and entertaining, and not so distracting that it breaks down the overall flow of the narrative.

Palahniuk also plays it smart with the actual nature of the terrorists. First, he casts them as kids, making it more difficult for a redneck America to redflag bomb these would-be killers before they get a chance to reciprocate. Second he doesn't show the terrorists doing things that you'd expect right off the bat. Sure the ultimate plan is to kill millions with some type of bomb, but the going about that isn't as you'd expect. And this is typical Palahniuk--always twisting away from what you'd expect; it's one of his primary modes of building tension.

One of my big worries with this novel is that it's structure, consisting of thirty-six dispatches would not be explained. Since we have a metafictive setting of the main protagonist telling his own story, the vessel of that telling needs to be explained. Sadly many books don't do this; they set up the story within a story for effect and don't really explain the purpose of said effect, and thus destroy the relevant power of using metafiction in the first place. Since I'm writing this more in book review style than literary analysis style, I'm not going to reveal the purpose for this structure, but know that my need to have well formed metafictional structures in books was satisfied.

I've said a number of good things here about the book; but if you look over to my GoodReads account, you'll see I only gave it two stars. Why? Well, while this was an enjoyable quick read kind of book it lacked the oomph that other Palahniuk books like Rant and Invisible Monsters, carry. And unfortunately, like Haunted, (and from what I hear Snuff as well), Pygmy relied far too heavily on the shock factor. Very early on in this book Pygmy does something pretty hideous, and Palahniuk apes that image throughout the rest of the book. While I'm desensitized enough to not be bothered by things like this, it seemed like he was trying to use this to build a lot of reader revulsion for the Pygmy's character, you know, cut him way down before building him up, and in the long run, this wasn't enough for me. The overall character growth was marginal, and I'm not entirely convinced that the outcome was entirely earned.

And for all the effort that went into generating a novel in broken English, the overall net effect is that the novel becomes sparse. Weighing in at only 241 pages, there isn't a whole lot to work with to start with, and with the added weight of broken English, the narrative became somewhat scattered and choppy, skipping and jumping across a fairly decent span of time (the dates are all purposefully blacked out, so I can't give the span, but I'd expect at least 4-6 months).

The book was funny and quirky, but not one of Palahniuk's best.

Hello World, Jack Chaucer

2010-03-16T00:37:00.003-04:00

Today at 5:10 PM, Jack Chaucer came out just in time for dinner. Sue did most of the laboring at home, arriving at the doc's this morning already dilated 3cm. Jack was born after only about two hours of active labor--way less than the 30 hour labor-a-thon she had to go through with Molly. Despite this, Sue says Boys hurt so much more. Thank goodness he's out and everyone's safe and happy. 8lbs 9oz. 20.5 in.

Molly's doing well with the change. She was real quiet at the hospital; I've never seen such a serious look on her face. But on the way home, she started to open up a bit. "Jack no like the baath," she said, "He mad." And she was right; Jack was not at all a fan of his first bath. Otherwise though, he seems like a pretty happy kid. Here's to hoping that everything continues to go well.

Nine Weeks

2010-03-09T22:19:00.002-05:00

So this week marks week 9 of the Spring semester. While a good many of my students are living it up in exotic locations and participating in drinking sex parties, I'm thinking about the state of things.

The [soon to be] kid
or sir not appearing yet. Jack's officially due on St. Patty's day. Everyone's hoping for something sooner. Tomorrow would be nice. Seriously. [Jack, are you reading my blog yet? If not, well get with the times, son].

The [insane] kid
Yep. Totally bonkers. Molly is so endearingly crazy that my teeth fall out only to grow back in again so that they can fall out more. About this, she says, "Do you like it, Daddy? Do you lub it? I lub it Daddy. Daddy. Daaaady. Awwww sooo Cuuute." [all of this followed by her trying to bite my nose--a game I started except that she uses her teeth and really does try to bite it off]

The [omfg get this baby out of me] pregnant wife
She's done. The bellybutton's popped. Get that kid out before I become collateral damage in a pregnant lady in pain rampage.

The Writing Front
At present I'm arming the mail cannon to fire a story to the Colorado Review for the Nelligan Prize. It'll likely be my only contest submission this year (despite the grave odds). But 1. I'm broke 2. I'm only entering because most pubs don't consider anything over 3k words let alone stories [like mine] that are largely over 10k.

The Cats
Hey cats, quit barfing. k thx bye.

The student blogging project
Totally kicking myself for not making the students post comments on a regular basis. Just about all of them are gung ho on waiting till the end and posting all 30 in one day. So much for blogs being a gateway to conversation and an extension of class discussions. Sigh. Also too bad since many of them are posting some real good content that could/should get some discussion face time.

The Dayjob
I like working for a truly global company. I have some German coworkers that don't mind me fumbling around in German in an attempt to get better. Plus, with database work on top of that, I'm both blissfully busy and working on stuff that doesn't make me hate life. Who'd a thought that?

D&D
Shut up. Yeah, Sue and I started throwing together some stuff for a new campaign last night. I love the early planning stages of new campaigns. It's the middlish parts where Sue expects me to have some kind of plan (at which point I've been gunning by the seat of my pants for far too long) that I start to fizzle and want to take a break. Here's to hoping for a nice long run on this new bit.

Reading
Joey Goebel's Commonwealth -- Nightly reading to Sue. Gotta love Goebel.
Chuck Palahaniuk's Pygmy -- Lunchtime at work reading. meh. I'll finish it soon.

In Praise of Pat Rothfuss

2010-03-02T23:40:00.003-05:00

So wayback in grade school I got hooked on D&D, and started reading just about every single TSR produced book out there; especially the Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft series. For most of highschool I read nothing but TSR fantasy and D&D rulebooks. And while I did branch out a little and read some Robert Heinlein and David Eddings, I stayed pretty true to the D&D offerings.

Then I started up college, and around started reading literary stuff. And with that came a sense of academic snobbery--the notion that the genre fantasy that I loved was somehow not good enough, and that I needed to aspire to higher things. Of course I was too young in my English career to feel that I had the authority to challenge the status quo, so I found new loves: postmodernism, experimentation, etc ad nauseum.

And my fiction, too, shifted away from fantasy into experimentation and postmodern screwity. But always in the back of my head, I've wanted to get back to the ole roots, and write up some worthy fantasy.

Back in November, I started just that with my NaNoWriMo project. And as soon as the semester's over with, I plan on setting up a regular writing schedule of no less than two nights a week to Sally Forth on said worthy fantasy project.

So how does all of this tie into Patrick Rothfuss? I'll tell you.

Rothfuss author of The Name of the Wind, is the kind of author that we all sort of envy. He had the testicular fortitude to draft up a giant novel over a period of (I think) seven years or so, and then publish it. And by Giant, we're talking rivaling Dostoyevsky. But in a good way (and not to bash Dostoyevsky, I love him, but today's kids...not so sure about that). Anyway, Rothfuss writes and eventually publishes this massive book. It's meaty, it's tasty, it has character development, and goddamnit the language isn't garbage. So, in short, it's fantasy, but fails to fall into any of the genre-pitfall traps that snooty folks poo-poo at when they condescend to genre writers.

Rothfuss not only has an ear for the natural flow of language, but because the story is told largely via dictation, his word choice necessitates such careful selection. And not only that, but he handles for a lot of the common type plot holes you'd see. The most obvious being, how can anyone dictate dialogue from years ago, or how can anyone conceivably keep up with the dictation. All of this is handled in the book in a natural, "Oh yeah that makes sense" kind of way. And that's how the whole book is largely. It's a rampage that somehow manages to take its time but also build incredible strong tension.

I read this book aloud to my wife in our nightly reading. Usually we read about a chapter's worth, but there were days where we'd read 50-70 pages in a drop without stopping. While that may not sound like much, keep in mind that reading aloud nets you, maybe 5 pages in 10 minutes.

And so dovetailing in with all of this is the fact that I received this copy from my best friend as a gift with him saying, "When I read this, it reminded me of how your fiction would look if you wrote fantasy."

I can say I'm deeply humbled by such a compliment, and also, driven to live up to it.

So long of the short, Pat, thanks for rocking out a fan-damn-tastic book. Thanks for paving a new road into the world of fantasy literature.

Is privacy Selfish?

2010-02-26T20:53:00.001-05:00

A joint blog with the FroggPrincess

Preface
Nearly four months ago, I signed off Facebook, saying I'd be gone for a month to work on my NaNoWriMo project. Back then it was late October, and I had some doubt that I'd finish 50,000 words in 30 days with the constant nag of Facebook zipping through the back of my brain. So I did what I always do when I need to buckle down and get work done: I cut out distractions. A month later, I proudly held (well maybe not since I never printed it) 50,899 odd words without a single Facebook login. By then the urge to grind away at Mafia Wars, Mafia II, and Farkle were distant stains in my mind; silly obsessions, that clearly needed no attention further. I logged in, updated my profile gloating my NaNoWriMo Win and logged off.

By December 3rd or so, I'd deleted my account. Well. Not really. Deleting a Facebook account, truly deleting it as in wiped hard drive deleting is damn nigh impossible. Instead, I painstakingly spent a couple hours, physically removing "allow" access to every stupid App I ever tried. Then I removed all of my pictures before going through and setting every single privacy setting to "Me Only" before firing off the "I want to quit Facebook email." I've since done the same to my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts.

Why? I like my privacy

Bullshit
Google my name: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Drew+Lackovic&aq=f&aqi=&oq=
It's not sparse. Most folks won't look more than three pages deep on a search return. You have to slug through eight pages of links before the search results start to thin out and display stuff that's not connected to me. In addition to having three stories online, five years worth of blog entries, several personal websites, old artwork, and dozens of forum posts in places like LinuxQuestions and UtterAccess, not to mention my CV, and all my address info (thanks to superpages.com), there really isn't much of me left to hide. So why disband from Facebook and social networking?

Well, It's complicated.
To start, I hadn't been on Facebook all that long. I can't remember exactly when, but I don't think it was any later than June of '09. I joined partially out of peer pressure (ala everyone else is doing it), and partially because I wanted to see if I could figure out why the hell it was such a popular phenomenon.

Why isn't Facebook's popularity obvious to me?

For all the time I spend on a computer (and believe me it's a lot of time), I really have never been able to see the interestingness in using the Internet to meet other people or to communicate beyond Email and IM.

As a proof of concept of this, back in college I played a lot of Diablo II. Usually though I played local network games with friends. We didn't chat while we played; we just smashed stuff and giggled at the secret cow demon level. On the odd chance that I did log into Battlenet, I was generally shocked at the poor typing and immature content of other players. This was still in the age before texting got big, but "UR" and "THX" were already starting to float about among others. So largely I ignored online gaming until one game appealed to my inner D&D Nerd, Ragnarok Online. Back then it was in Alpha...maybe early Beta. They talked it up as being a RP intensive game. At the time, my girlfriend had sneakily gotten me to quit playing real D&D, so my craving, so I thought, could be sated by this game.

I played from just before Christmas break till Valentine's day. I tried to roleplay. And not once in that time did I meet a single person worth talking to beyond the five minutes of interaction. Granted, I did silly things like selling flowers (a useless and worthless item) outside a boss' lair mainly to start conversations. Largely I got bitched out for not having any potions for sale and/or for actually being there and trying to start conversations (usually merchants would set up shop and walk away leaving the game running while they racked up the cash). And so, I left the realm of online video games for the relative comfort of console games and good ole Pen and Paper D&D.

Furthermore, once I joined Facebook, like everyone, I slowly amassed a group of "friends" that extended beyond my real-world friends I actually see and talk to on a regular basis. Granted, I can easily say that everyone on my friend list was someone I knew, and with my privacy settings the way they were, strangers wouldn't have been able to find and friend me even if they wanted to. And despite the fact that I friended several friends from highschool, some of which that still live in the area, not once did I really have any sort of interaction with any of them outside of the occasional assist in Mafia Wars.

So, Reason one for quitting Facebook: I don't find the net to be very sociable. Or I don't go to the net to socialize.

That whole cellphone thing
I don't use them. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are moving to rely heavily on mobile principle--Twitter's ubiquitous "what are you doing now?" is proof of this. Folks with fancy internet cellphones can Tweet and Facebook away no matter where they are. It's a great way too to get around corporate firewalls if you can't Facebook on the ole work computer. But I abhor phones (Imagine that, a former 411 operator hates phones...there's a shocking twist, right?). And furthermore, I think the notion of being contactable at any time and location is obscene. I'm not that important (unless my wife's having a baby, you better not call me when I'm not at home).

This leads to reason two: If I don't like to be contacted by anyone, why would I want EVERYONE (as the new Facebook controls make your stuff go that broad) to know my momentary business? The advantage of having a blog is knowing that the whole thing is public, knowing that I have to filter what I say to a certain degree, because, despite the protection of the 1st Amendment, I could potentially still get nailed and/or fired if I were to slander an employer too badly, or say or do something on this blog that generally makes me look like such a giant dickhead asshole that no one would want to consider hiring me in the future.

Facebook, when I joined, let me set the visibility scope of my activities. And though leery and mistrustful, I accepted this as being good enough for government work, cranked up the privacy to "Friends Only," and despite some groaning from my more social friends, I felt fairly content in the broadcast footprint of my identity. Last December's privacy changes destroyed that happy little world, and would make increasingly larger amounts of my data public. Mafia Wars status updates to my friends are annoying enough (and I did feel bad for those flying around as much as they did), but the thought of all that kind of garbage flowing freely out to the internet for anyone to see, and/or for acquaintances or former students not on my friends list wasn't really acceptable in my head.

I think it's well accepted that we exist in a compartmentalized state. I am a different self at work at FMC than I am standing before students at Behrend, than I am at home playing the Mammas and the Babies with Molly than I am sitting here inside my head clattering some keys at 11:52 PM on a ~~Monday~~ Tuesday (strangely I'm revising this exactly 24 hours after I wrote it; what a co-inky-dink). night. Frontline has run a couple documentaries, "Growing Up Online" and more recently, "Digital Nation," in which this notion of multiple-selves is one that is covered. I remember one teenager in "Growing up Online" saying something along the lines of "There are two versions of me. The one you see here in the world, and the real me, the me that's on the Internet." Sadly, this girl's "real me" was a self obsessed with anorexia (which fortunately was being treated by the epilogue of the documentary). But to her, interestingly, the abstraction of the net, the separation of mind from body freed her to become what she felt was her ideal self. What startles me watching these documentaries, is the reckless willingness of the kids depicted to say/do/think whatever they want over the internet without second thought for potential repercussions. "Growing Up Online," for example discusses an incident where a number of high school students took the train into NYC for a concert at Madison Square Garden. The students YouTubed a number of videos of themselves partying and drinking on the train and at the concert. And when the school administration found out (thanks to one of the kids' PTO parent moms), they were all shocked and outraged that their drunken party pictures were getting them into trouble. There's no doubt that this kind of teenage drunken partying would have happened without the Internet; it has happened, arguably for every generation. My parents spent their teens careening drunk across the state line into New York where the drinking age was still 18 so they could get shitfaced at bars so ramshackle that the bathrooms were nothing more than holes in the ground. People died on these weekend binge rampage. Heading up to Clymer, NY as a kid, my mom showed me "Dead Man's Curve" many times; and she knew the men that died there--too drunk, too fast. But such is the role of late adolescence, to do stupid, possibly dangerous and regrettable things, but the fact that these things are caught on camera phone and willfully uploaded to the net for public consumption seems reckless beyond the point of common sense.

But then again, we live in an age where it actually as to be said, "Hey girls, don't take nudie pics of yourself and email it to your boyfriend, because he'll share it with the whole school."

There's no doubt in my mind that the Internet reduces inhibitions. The faux anonymity of it's existence, allows us to swing up a hefty set of brass ones and pull off a lot of shit we would never do or say in person. Sites like Facebook thrive upon this notion. Zuckerberg's recent statement about how folks want to share more shows that he's interested in cultivating an environment where barriers between this sharing are continually broken down, paving the way for an ever wider superhighway of personal data flowing in all directions. And the barriers? Privacy. Privacy makes for poor business because the private self doesn't want advertisements even if they are catered to private interests. The Private self also won't share as much information to as many people, and in a world where click-throughs equate to dollar signs, again less clicks is less money.

Another danger rises from the miasma of wide-open user information channels: data mining. While this is still in its infancy, the potential danger of social media data mining is immense. PleaseRobMe.com is a perfect example. From their "Why" Page:

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home. It gets even worse if you have "friends" who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That's right, slap them across the face.

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

And while this site is trying to raise awareness about the dangers of allowing geo-locating to Tweet everyone in the world your location, you can be sure some less than reputable sites are doing much much worse.

Or is it an Age thing?
Zuckerberg and Facebook cater to the new hipsters. Earlier I mentioned Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg talking about his feelings towards privacy. He went on, saying

In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time. (Thompson)

And if you look at the curve, I'm sure the social norm is moving in that direction. Living outside of that norm is alienating though. It reminds me a bit of a Fraternity; you're not cool 'till you're one of us. Come join, but there's a price. In Facebook's case, it's your privacy, and the deluge of ads, and shady marketing virals. But once you're in, you're one of the club; you're ok. And if Facebook isn't your Pi Rho, perhaps try another on Frat Row: MySpace, LinkedIn, etc (Like I need to list social networks here). A frat for every type of person. And one day we can all share our drunken sex pics, and our future employers won't care because they're sharing their office bong party pics from last summer, and the Prez is posting YouTube feeds from the Oval office in his pink hart boxers and mustard-stained undershirt with a big Cuban Cigar hanging out of his mouth. Sure there's no doubt that this juggernaut is going to continue RickRolling over all of the world to a point that eventually governments start considering social networking as a potential tap in for legal identification.

I'm old enough to remember computers when the screens were monochrome green, and I was giggling at text based adventure games when they said, "I can't do that!!!" after I typed "Fuck you" into the prompt with all of my ten year old smugness. Maybe because I never owned a computer before 1998, I have some sense of anti-technology curmudgeon in me; a sense that doing things in-person, while at times far more onerous, is the best way for communication. Why? Because I am forced to represent myself physically with all of my conscious and unconscious body language to another person or group under similar conditions. I have a larger vocabulary in person--sarcasm and other subtlties, for example, work as expected (whereas over the net, they're always hit or miss, and rarely interpreted correctly). And if I am to communicate online (which I do quite often), email or direct IM are my weapons of choice. Posting on friends' walls seems silly for me. Why should I care about my Friend A's Friend X (whom I'm not friends with) posting something inane on Friend A's Wall? It's silly to me to broadcast information for one person to everyone.

But I blog and I write
So what should I do with all the other stuff that flits around on the internet with my name attached? I have no intention of taking that down. Perhaps it's more of a control thing. Going back to the idea of compartmentalized self; I know what goes up here on the blog, and on the websites. I control the stories I submit to online pubs, and those that (eventually) will appear under my own publication. It boils back to the notion of the gatekeeper of my information. I like it to rest in my hands, for it to post or fade at my whim, not some abstracted corporation's decision on "what's best for me, or the current social trends." And thinking along those lines, does not the data I control become then more authentic me? By disseminating information under my name knowingly to the world at large, it then represents myself. A company disseminating information on my behalf also becomes a representation of myself, but a representation that I may or may not have intended to exist publicly, thus becoming a taintedself or nonself.

So does that make me selfish to want to try to control the depiction of me to the world of strangers out there [not] looking in my direction? Hmm. But then again, rarely, if ever, is anyone happy about invasions of privacy in other sectors: TSA, for instance now rifles through your luggage regardless, and in some areas have been pushing for full body scans as mandatory. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, lots and lots of people had their calls wiretapped after 9/11. I think just about everyone today has had their social security number stolen at least once thanks to a lost/stolen laptop from [insert just about any company in the world here]. Our names and addresses (both snail and email) get sold to advertisers, who send us gobs of garbage. I could go on, but all of these things are things that generally no one likes. Sure you can make claims that they're protecting our nation and whatnot, but in the long run, we as Americans, in our core, like privacy. So when Zuckerberg starts saying that all this privacy thing is going to the wayside, I'm leery. Especially when we all know that he makes money when more of your information goes public.

So long story sh_rt, I may have a lot of crap out on the internet, but it's my crap. Since I don't monetize this blog, or pay for promotion, my visibility is low as well as my readership, but isn't a smaller more dedicated body of readers better than a swarm of nodding assentors that just jumped over because everyone else was doing the same? I like the internet, especially today's internet for giving me the ability to self-publish cheaply, but I want to do so on my terms. Facebook doesn't care about me; it cares about the money I can generate by spewing me all over the net. I'll find a way to gain my own notoriety thank you very much.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

2010-02-17T00:04:00.002-05:00

Hors d'voeures
A spectre is haunting my mind and that spectre is the role of fiction in the world today. Two weeks ago, I touted Transmedia collaboration as one potential breakaway from the tailspin I see occurring in fictive realms, but pure social collaboration (which is the heart of transmedia fiction) doesn't fully sate my appetite or my interest. And while it may be a swell idea, and one that I'm avidly hoping to pursue more actively once this semester is over and I have time to think again, it doesn't fully encompass the full necessity of fiction.

Back in my Ontologica essay, I argued that for fiction to be truly revitalized in today's hyper-visual world, there had to be a definitive reason for text to be text, and not say a movie, play, YouTube Video or Tweet syndication. And in my particular idiom, I've always felt that certain aspects of postmodernism lend very well to building such a relevant need for fiction to be printed text--perhaps not always linear printed text, but largely text with littler or no graphical intrusion beyond formatting and other structural elements.

Postmodern construction, though, is labyrinthine, and while it could transgress into a transmedic enterprise, I'm not sure how easy it would be to find enough people willing to work with the same ontologies for an extended period to make a successful postmodern transmedia project.

Therefore, I've largely kept these two notions separate in my head, and as such, don't expect this essay to attempt to bring those two worlds into collision anytime soon. Everything previous is merely setup.

Meat
So in the spirit of getting on with it, I recently received Ronald Sukenick's Narralogues as an un-birthday present from my good friend Dave. And while logic would say that taking on yet another thing to do right now would be suicidal, I started reading over my lunchbreak at work this week.

In it, Sukenick opens with a bit of an essay setting up the rest of the collection (of short stories) saying that "fiction is a matter of argument rather than dramatic representation" (2). He goes on to say

My point is that all fiction can be profitably regarded as argument. When you define fiction by representation you end up confining it to realism at some level and arguing that fiction, as a form of make-believe, is a way of lying to get at the truth, which if not palpably stupid is certainly round-about and restrictive. My approach frees fiction from the obligations of mimesis, popularly, and most often critically, assumed to be its defining quality. (2)

This of course really sparked my interest, as I've often said before that realist fiction, today carries next to nothing in weight, especially when stacked against more popular visual media. But if we are to repurpose our fiction into argument, then, effectively all bets are _______, and we can give the reader something more to latch onto than just entertainment. Specifically, Sukenick channels the persuasive direction of fiction towards that of defining experiential elements that the reader can then internalize and use to assist in coping with life. He says,

I realized that the pleasure and excitement that I derived from some novels was attributable to the way they helped me understand my experience and live my life. In other words, for me fiction had always been a way to knowledge rather than a way to goof off. (5)

I don't think this is too far of a stretch for any serious reader to recall a moment in a novel, story or poem that has later gone to shape that reader's understanding of life. I thrive on such experience, and perhaps for this reason I am so attached to works of postmodern literature because what they lack is any true sense of mimesis, rather supplanting it with ontological interpretation that forces me to recognize deeper variances in existence than just the surface "known" world we live in.

A quick list of works that have impressed me as such (incomplete, unordered, _____)

John Barth, "Lost in the Funhouse"
Mark Danielewski House of Leaves
Susan Sontag "Baby"
William Butler Yeats "The Second Coming"
Allan Ginsberg "America"
Jorge Luis Borges "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Library of Babel," "Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius"
Ben Marcus The Age of Wire and String

I'm certain we all have our lists, but mine largely revolves around the notion of Plurality and Ontological interpretation. "What If" mantras interest me deeply, and works like those above largely build upon unseen alternatives, endless expansion, and certain collision of the known into the unknown.

And by extension, my Not an Autobiography project stems in this exact direction. Despite the fact that I've long struggled with the question, "who would want to read a series of linked stories told as mock autobiography from voices of different versions of myself, of which none physically exist on this plane?" the project has taught me a lot about myself and my craft as a writer.

So as I circle back to the premise here, the question of can fiction function as argument, I have to say, I'm leaning in the direction of agreement. I'm about half way through Sukenick's stories, and while many of them remind me of Platonic Dialogues, (which Sukenick attributes as "a remote progenitor" of this book), the overall content is both interesting and thought-provoking. While it's not particularly full of flowery description, the arguments presented are both complex and meaty enough to help pull the narrative along.

All definitely food for thought, and perhaps more formal application once I get my head fully wrapped around how you pull it all off without becoming pedantic.

Oh Millennials, Y do we hate UR generation?

2010-02-13T00:01:00.001-05:00

For the better part of the last two years, I've been thinking on and off about the nature of the generation following Gen X, Generation Y. As one of the last Gen Xers, I often find myself standing more with one foot in each group than anything. And so when folks bring up this newest generation, which spans roughly from 1980 to 2000, I find myself often simultaneously nodding my head in ascent and dropping it in despair.

Fact of the matter is, Most folks think that Generation Y (or the Millennials, DotNet Generation, Facebook Generation, etc) is at best in distress and at worst hell-bent on the unconscious dismantlement of society as we know it. But do the Millennials really deserve all this bad press?

Without a doubt, each upcoming generation gnashes its teeth against the Old Guard. Musically, Gen X started out throwing bottles and spit on stage with Punk and continued on a path of raging against the machine all the way from Hair Metal to Goth to Grunge, Hip Hop to Gangsta Rap. We tore it up.

And as the Hippies turned Yuppies lost everything when the Big 80s crashed it was the first of the Gen Xers coming out of college that paved the new Internet startups. We've been movers and shakers. Granted, we don't do things the traditional way, bringing about cultural analysts like Richard Florida to publish The Rise of the Creative Class, but we drive change through challenging the status quo.

Now as the Millennials are starting to reach their 20s, and most are in college, the bad press has really swung into force. While baby-boomers hated the fact that Gen Xers didn't care about "proper business attire," and were forced to concede to tattoos, piercings, alternative lifestyles, and more casual work attire, Gen X still got the job done. Gen Y, doesn't seem to have the same capability, or so say the critics.

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation provides perhaps, one of the most pointed and quantitatively supported argument against the newest generation. He says, "Today's rising generation thinks more highly of its lesser traits. It wears anti-intellectualism on its sleeve, pronouncing book-reading an old-fashioned custom, and it snaps at people who rebuke them for it" (41). Throughout his book, Bauerlein cites study after study showing the steady decline in reading rates for young Americans, with one study showing that teens spend only about eight minutes of their day reading when on average they had more than five hours of daily leisure time (49). These are some startling statistics. But is reading everything?

Take a break from reading, and watch Professor Michael Wesch's, Digital Ethnography professor at the University of Kansas video,A vision of Students Today
Some interesting statistics

I only complete 49% of my assigned readings

26% of them are relevant to my life

I buy hundred dollar textbooks that I never open
My Neighbor Paid for class, but never comes
I will read 8 books this year

2300 webpages and 1281 Facebook profiles

I will write 42 pages for class this semester

and over 500 pages of email

I am a multi-tasker

(I have to be)

These are some fairly striking statistics. And they came from the students. Two things stick out to me:

Priorities are shifting away from what is expected of them to what they want.
Millennials are less concerned with expectations and more with narcissistic pursuits.

About a year ago, I started laying out the groundwork for an essay on teaching to the Millennial generation. At the time, I was still largely optimistic to the notion, thinking that a lot of what Bauerlein and other critics say about Millennials was more of the Old Guard groaning at their replacements not living up to whatever archaic standards that no replacement can live up to. And in this planning, I came up with several suppositions about Millennials that define their generation:

The Millennial Generation is wholly unlike and preceding generation
Students don't read or just aren't interested in reading
Reading for today's students more often is seen as a chore or punishment
Students think the internet holds all of the answers
Students have little patience for things that have no direct connection to their situation
Students don't look for deeper connection/analysis with with they read.
Students fail to see the importance of writing, which leads to a major crisis in the business world
High school doesn't prepare students for the necessary critical thinking in college
Students have a very poor grasp of grammar, if they have one at all
Students have a difficulty assessing purpose to their writing through recognizing a specific audience

I'm generalizing here; obviously exception exists on both sides of the spectrum, but what I'm witnessing after nearly 300 students worth of Millennials is that some darker currents beyond the above suppositions are rising:

Passionate disinterest
Selective technical apathy
Ultra short attention spans masquerading as multi-tasking
Unwillingness to excel

Along these lines Bauerlein says,

It's a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted a-literacy (knowing how to read but choosing not to) as a valid behavior of their peers. (40)

And so, I'm left standing still between two precipices. I can't help but scowl at the passionate disinterest and apathy I see when students don't even bother to try doing an assignment. I don't expect everyone to feel the readings are relevant, or even interesting, but by reading them, at least we can talk about what could have happened to make the reading useful. A room full of blank stares accomplishes nothing, and ultimately it's their loss not mine; I've earned my degree; I know how to put together an essay, how to deconstruct a text, how to apply it to other arguments.

But on the other side, I feel that pull of narcissism. Teh Intarnets!!111! does have that effect on us. Our social outlets, Facebook profiles, YouTube videos, blogs, scattered comments across the net all serve as brand identity. Brand identity for the big ole capital I. The facade of anonymity draws us in, makes us feel cozy and safe, beckons for us to say anything, and one thing Millennials can do better than any other generation is post anything and everything that's on their minds to the net--privacy to Gen Y is a distant meaningless thing to so many young people today--something that a anti-social curmudgeon like myself will never fully understand.

Turning and Turning the Widening Gyre

2010-02-02T23:16:00.003-05:00

...the author cannot hear the reader.

For years, Yeats' "The Second Coming" has echoed in my head as the drumbeat of the ontological shift, the slide into the postmodern. Perhaps, this constant [mis]reading of the poem will aggravate some, but it's my battleflag. A battle flag rooted in a British Literature Survey class with Doc Marsden back in 2000. Back then, John Barth was about the coolest thing I'd ever read, and 'epistemology' v. 'ontology' was a war I only vaguely understood. But the visceral image of Yeats' poem--"the widening gyre...the center cannot hold" drove me to imaginings of black holes, to the embrace of plurality's structured chaos, and now a decade later, I still hear the echo of this poem, but it's feel is changing.

I'm teaching a comp class focusing on the death of the newspaper, but it's not too far to see a similar corollary in the literary journal realm. This isn't the first time I've visited the topic, but recently if:Book ran an article on Ted Genoways' essay in Mother Jones recanting "The Death of Fiction?" Barring the fact that the notion of fiction dying is probably the most overqualified argument ever--Barth covered it back in the 60s, and if I were to dig, I'm sure I could go back to the beginning of the written word and find someone who proclaimed "everything that can be written has been written." (But as a thoroughly postmodern aside: Doesn't everyone have to eventually in one of their infinite versions of themselves proclaim that fiction is kaput?)

Despite the tiredness of Genoways' argument, he wrangles some truly frightening numbers:

Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies.

That's a recipe for a whole lot of letdowns. And while I think it's both sobering and important for all aspiring writers to face such facts, Genoways like many doomsayers, doesn't really give us much hope for change. He concludes:

To pull out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes—and quick. With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature, reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere. At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I'm not calling for more pundits—God knows we've got plenty. I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ's sake, write something we might want to read.

To which I say, No shit Sherlock. Genoways' solution echoes many others I've seen, and it really does very little to help solve the problem. Ok. We get it. Too many writers writing things no one wants to read, and not enough readers reading in the first place. Personally, I see contemporary realism's inability to compete with visual media as one of the cornerstone problems surrounding today's fiction industry. But my problem isn't necessarily your problem, and to sit here and whine about perceived problems with the industry isn't going to really drive any sort of solution from anyone.

So let's do something.

For hundreds of years, since Gutenberg actually, we've relied on the printing press. But now we have the Internet. And despite what the technological curmudgeons, the Neil Postmans, the Sven Birkerts, might say, our wired world is here to stay.

But it's a young, angry baby. It eats everything in its path. And it grows, oh it grows so fast that you can't keep it in fitting clothes for more than an eyeblink. But it's our baby. And as parents, we are beholden to it, and it to us.

It's time to start modeling, molding, shaping. The Future

Relying on the printing press for anything is increasingly antiquated. You won't find many arguments touting increased reading rates for kids these days, unless such arguments are about reading Facebook walls, fashion blogs, and online news.

Which brings me back to Transmedia.

As the Internet grows, so too do the number of writers trying to make it big. More of us are getting published online, and more journals are either going straight to online only or offering a hybrid between print and online. While print fiction still offers more clout, conceivably this could change. And Transmedia fiction can help usher that change.

With so many new writers emerging onto the scene, and publishers literally buried under a slushpile of [bad] fiction, Transmedia fiction offers perhaps one of the best solutions for our growing problem.

Let's examine its boons:

It fosters a community of writers -- As writers, we don't operate well in a vacuum. The more people we have to discuss our works with, the better said works become.
As a community, Transmedia groups would build thematic collectives, which would easily cater to a wider audience -- Think about this. I've spent considerable time trying to find literary journals that write what I want to read. It's hard work, especially if you're on a budget. But online Transmedia collectives can easily be controlled by tags and keywords. Looking for some metafiction? There's a tag for that. How about post-apocalyptic salon/day spa drama? There's a tag for that too. Very easily like minded people can gather and produce consistently interesting and tightly focused fiction. This is far harder to accomplish in the print world.
There are no boundaries on the internet. We don't have to deal with pretension. An ass-good 14 year old can be giving constructive criticism to captain three-PHD and be none the wiser. The abstraction of the Internet facilitates fierce collaboration without traditional stigmas of race, education, age, nationality, and gender.
People like free things, and Transmedia exercises should inherently be Creative Commonsed and more or less free to be consumed. Most emerging writers aren't making money on their fiction anyway (as most publishers just do the contributor copy thing these days), so it shouldn't be a hard leap to make your content available free of charge. Plus somewhere down the road, if/when you do get real popular, I'm sure someone (if not just LuLu) will want to sell your internet-published serialized book. And then you'll have your $20 monthly royalty checks.
Such communities can operate/become part of your favorite social networking application. Why not have a Facebook group dedicated to writing stories about people with chronic nightmares about having a bad case of Pickle farts?
And when Joe Average starts reading these facebook stories, perhaps, he too will join our ranks and churn out his own pickle fart nightmare. Even if Joe's story isn't destined for a Pushcart, it's a lurch in the right direction, a win for literacy.

No, Transmedia isn't perfect. There are lots of potential pitfalls here as well. But the scope of our problem with fiction isn't that it's dying, rather the format we are used to is starting to break down. Too many people are too connected to the Net to be bothered with print reading. Fiction isn't dying, but a change in gameplan is needed. And as I continue to mull over the status of my own writing, and where I want to see myself as an author, more and more the thought becomes--Transmedia is the only way to go.

Reporting that can be lost

2010-01-28T23:40:00.003-05:00

This past week my ENGL004 class took a look at Gary Kamiya's "The Death of the News." In it, Kamiya takes on the now "old news" (to steal the aptly bad pun) that the newspaper/print media world is dying, but he does so from a slightly different angle, saying,

What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting -- on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides, strive for objectivity and are working with editors who check their facts, steer them in the right direction and are a further check against unwarranted assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious bias.

And so when Kamiya aptly says, "If newspapers die, so does reporting," we're left with a scary thought, or are we?

It's no lie that here in the logorrheaic mire of my mindspace that Kamiya's threat of an anti-reporting distopia becoming "a postmodern world right out of a seminar taught by Jaques Derrida...[where] Nietsche's credo that 'there are no facts, only interpretations' will become our epistemological motto" is one that I would whole-heartedly embrace simply for the sheer interest such an plural version of our reality would bring to me. But then again, good god it'd be hell to win an argument.

But I digress,
Kamiya says that newspapers and reporting are intrinsically linked. And to that I agree, but Kamiya is a professional, a journalist, and someone who knows the industry from the inside. His definition of a reporter is one that is perhaps too specific for "real" world application.

On the beat, reporters to all us gloamish nodes can range from true newspaper journalists in all their monochromatic glory to the tv pundits that irk Michale Lind so much (mentioned in my last entry here). So while Kamiya may be on to something, he's fighting the good fight.

I don't fight the good fight. And I don't think all reporters need saved. Newspapers aside, there's some sneaking shit that needs a severe kai-bosh. And what irks me the most (for the moment) is this whole process of growing speculative journalism.

Let me set the stage.
Wednesday, I turned on NBC to watch the State of the Union at about a quarter after eight, mainly because I couldn't remember if Obama's speech started at eight or nine. I was greeted with a craptacular "pre-game" show for the president's speech. I know this has been going on for a while, but what the fuck? Have we as a population become so incredibly bored that we don't even want to watch some shitty syndicated sitcom from the 90s until the State of the Union comes on? Couldn't NBC find something, maybe the Slap-Chop infomercial to air before Obama took the stage?

Yes, I could have changed the channel. But in my defense, I was only half listening (thank god for that), and I was chasing my daughter, so by not changing the channel, I could keep a lazy eye in the direction for the speech to commence whenever that was supposed to happen.

In my half listening, whatever hack journalist/pundit/guest/whatever happened to be talking began to go into this analysis of Obama's speech before it aired. Now, everything I've ever learned about cutting someone down revolves around the idea that you at least let the person you're attacking get an opportunity to make an ass of himself first.

Instead, I heard this jerkoff pundit going on and on about how Obama's speech is too long, and how the American public does not have an attention span for anything beyond 40 minutes or so. Now, without having seen the speech, which I'm guessing this guy hadn't (I'm sure the president had to release the timing so the networks could set up their scheduling, but I can't see why he'd say a whole lot else about it), how can anyone speculate on whether or not the speech will hold the collective attention of the country? Especially when Obama is relatively well-known for his ability to actually speak in front of an audience (unlike his predecessor). Secondly, the lesser masses of our country, upon hearing that 1. the speech is long and 2. they can't stand listening to something that long are going to take this guy (who has to be both smart and correct because he's on TV) as being generally correct, and thus tune out to the State of the Union.

This is a huge disservice to the American Public. Not only is it advertising a subversive bias against Obama and his agenda, but also it's undercutting our population as being both ignorant and too stupid to be able to make our own decisions.

This sort of journalistic speculation, of course, isn't limited to just the State of the Union; it happens all the time. Think about it. How many times have you heard reporters saying something like "President Obama is expected to announce X, today?" No harm in that. It's objective, and newsworthy, but often what follows is speculation on how whatever X may be will affect us. This, while perhaps ok for some talk show, isn't news.

But that's kind of the problem anymore, isn't it?

The news (on TV at least) has morphed into this monster, where every fact must be vetted through an unacknowledged bias before fed back to us. Can you imagine turning to any news network and seeing only objective stories for more than 15 minutes? Oh wait...that's CSPAN. But no one watches CSPAN.

So as I'm rambling here, let me cull things down to a single point: Kamiya wants to save reporting, but we need to make some distinctions, because the speculative crap on TV is some of that bathwater that needs thrown out. It's like a parasitic Siamese twin to real reporting...you know one of those things that's nothing but a heart, an empty brain case with teeth, no eyes, and a whole lot of hair growing inside your stomach like you're pregnant, but it's your twin, and it's eating you.

But perhaps, thinking back on Kamiya's argument, this is exactly why he he fears for the loss of the real journalists. The newspaper doesn't allow for this kind of inane speculation, as newspapers are generally behind the times, reporting on past events. Their analysis then can be based on objectivity, on some sort of traceable facts.

But it sure would be nice to turn on the State of the Union and not, even if you're half-paying attention, have to hear some jerkoff droning on about how much the upcoming speech is going to suck without any real proof to back it up.

And the speech? Obama's a charmer. I'd be real happy to see just about everything he said happen. But I'm jaded to. We need more than two parties to get any real change in government. I'm looking forward to some good times ahead, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Partisan Rant and Why Paywalls Suck

2010-01-19T22:21:00.002-05:00

Backstory

Back around Thanksgiving, right when I was starting to plan out this class theme of News and the Age of Information, I remember hearing that Rupert Murdoch wanted to delist all of News Corporation's holdings from Google and put them behind some kind of paywall. To which I immediately said, "Awesome. If that keeps Joe Average from reading [un]Fair and [un]Balanced Fox News on teh Intarnets, score one for the world.

And before everyone goes off the handle calling me a pinko leftist commie, lemme say this: While I may disapprove of most conservative politics, I have no problem with conservatives. I DO however have a big problem with partisan news labeling itself "Fair and Balanced." You can't be fair and balanced and push a Republican agenda at the same time. And this is a long standing problem (dating back to Walter Lippmann's journalistic revolutions in the 1920s) with news media--they claim objectivity, but party politics always sneak in. My advise: broadcast your bias, and be proud of it; let the readers decide whether you're right or not. Hiding behind a mask of objectivity makes you look like a douchebag when someone (like George Carlin on O'Reilly) calls you on it.

On an increasingly off-topic parallel, Michael Lind posted this about the growing problem of political media pundits on cable news. His problem: "Most of the representatives of progressivism you see on TV are not really progressives. They are what might be called 'Democratists.' Most publicly prominent conservatives are not principled conservatives at all. They are 'Republicanists.' With the problem being more or less not the political spin, but rather the fact that these pundits spend their time defending their respective parties' actions, rather than actually preaching/believing/acting according to their political affiliation.

So perhaps moreso than a lack of journalistic responsibility in being forthright with your political bias, perhaps the pundits, as described by Lind, are the real downfall in newsmedia.

But I Digress

All of News Corp's holdings haven't yet fallen behind the paywall scheme kicked around by Murdoch in November (though the Wall Street Journal is already there). So for the time being, we can still celebrate the relative freedom as net surfers to choose just about any media-outlet-online-news-poison we want. But, as of Monday, this News Corp talk of Paywalls seems to be a growing fad. I caught this article in the New York Magazine about the good old New York Times starting to reconsider its current situation and undo the free state of the newspaper that's existed since 2005 when they realized no one wanted to pay for electronic subscription (the 2005, sorry, charging you was a bad idea letter to the readers is here). So here's their reasoning:

The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Times would be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars. At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: "At the end of the day, if we don't get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system."

While I understand the need for any business to want to push forward, turn a profit, and stick around, I have a hard time buying into the idea that some sort of "metered system [similar to the one] adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe" is the way to go.

When I search for news online, I like to browse headlines. Some days I won't get much deeper than headlines, others, I'll drill through several articles. The second that some form of paywall stops me, I'm gone. News isn't that important for me to buy an account--especially when I know that I can probably find something similar elsewhere, or as a last resort, use my university account to pull it out of a newspaper database from the school's library site. While every news source will have a different take on the news, there are certainly enough out there that are still free. Drop one behind a paywall, and another online paper that's free gets a spike in traffic. I see Salon, Huffington Post, Smoking Gun, and The Drudge Report all making out like kings from this.

Sharing is Caring

One of the big cornerstones of the net today is the ability to share. Almost every site of any import has connectivity links to all major social media outlets (facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc), in addition to aggregators like Digg. If you block something behind a paywall, you just shut down all the additional traffic you're netting through social media. Why throw away potential readers? That sounds suspiciously like something Verizon would do (damn the customers, damn the employees, worship the profits).

However, all my whining and reactionary thinking against this paywall idea will mean nothing short of ranting unless I offer something up to remedy the situation. One of the best things I learned about whining is that people tend to accept your whining a little more if you try to pair your problem up with a solution. Back in my Verizon days, it united our department, when my boss made us carry around little notebooks that said "issues" on one side and "resolutions" on the other. We couldn't bitch word one until we had thought up some sort of resolution to the problem we had. But with resolution in hand, we had the floor. So, I've gone on and bitched for several paragraphs about this whole paywall idea. Here's my solution: If you want to generate revenue of some sort off of your online news content, and somehow advertising isn't cutting it, take a note from the music industry (and I don't mean those assholes over in the RIAA. I mean NIN, Radiohead, Madonna, Oasis, and all the other musicians who've cut their record company ties and gone solo), and put up a tip jar. When In Rainbows came out in 2007, Wired.com estimated that Radiohead pulled in as much as $10M on their CD, where they allowed fans to set their own price for the album (Van Buskirk). (I payed £10 for my copy, btw.). In any event, letting users contribute what they can when they can, still generates revenue, but it also generates respect and follows along with the sense of "giving back" (isn't that one of the great buzz words of the times?) to something you believe in. Sure, you won't be raking in bucketloads of cash, but for intangible content that people can already get for free, what more can you ask for than a tip?

New York Times, you have some good content. I've used your articles before in essays, but if you ask me to pay, I'll go away, and I won't be the one crying the river. I still have my Slashdot, BBC, and Salon (which I did start reading more regularly as opposed to what my last blog entry said [at the very least, I put its headlines on my iGoogle homepage]).

Somewhere off the Face of the earth

2010-01-12T23:06:00.002-05:00

So in Early December, I posted here saying that I won at teh NaNoWriMo. And since then, it's been pretty quiet here on this blog. Sorry about that.

Call it a New Years Resolution, or perhaps a Interesting-challenge-because-it's-also-an-assignment, but my goal is to blog weekly for the next fifteen weeks in hopes that I get back into a more regular swing in updating the currently lacking ramblesnatch in this pitiful blog's existence.

Either way,

Here't Goes:

Between watching my now thoroughly insane (as in Holy-shit-kids-have-way-too-much-energy-and-why-can't-I-have-a-tenth-of-that insane) daughter sugar herself up into a Christmas frenzy (the first such frenzy [being the first year she was cognizant of holiday fun] of several impending frenzies, I'm sure), and trying to ease the discomfort of Sue's pregnancy (apparently all boys are Assholes [my term not hers] in the womb--I'm sorry mom), and revising the Shadowman project (I finished a solid pass just this past week -- W00t), I've been talking and thinking and prepping for classes, which started yesterday. (I just realized: In the above I listed a bunch of stuff, but not anything about work. It was there too; but that's the ignorable bit; it's like sleep, I guess--an interim between the other, more important stuff. Not that work is bad like it was in the Verizon days, but thankfully and blissfully, contracting has been relatively stress free, and thus totally ignorable like the fifth child out of six).

This time around I've picked up two, a Rhetoric and Comp and a Basic Writing. And it is because of the Basic Writing Course that I'm challenging myself to blog regularly, because that's exactly what they'll be doing. Specifically, I've beet talking to my friend Grace a lot about various topics related to my course themes. Most of our discussions have revolved around a mutual dislike towards Facebook (which started out with Grace mocking me for joining fb back in June or July, and ended with Grace saying "see I told you it was Evil" when I quit in early December). We've also spent a goodly amount of time talking about newsmedia and the current shift that's starting to happen between print and online content.

Personally, I never read a newspaper. I've always found them boring, and the size, formatting and layout annoys me, not to mention the cost. However, slashdot, Google News, and for a good long time BBC news have all replaced any sort of need for reading traditional newspapers. Granted, I'd like to pick up some more sources; in researching essays for class, I've found that online content on Salon, The Atlantic, and a couple other places is really top notch. But I am the king of taking on too much, so while I have good intentions, I don't really foresee my news reading circle expanding much (especially in the face of how much I've been lagging in reading fiction).

So with that said, I think online news is the way to go. I'm sure I'll cover my take on the whole Rupert Murdoch/News Corporation vs. Google bit here soon, probably next week, but I think print journalism is dying, and no one is really going to miss it. While I sit far enough into the tail end of Generation X to not fully understand the usefulness and ubiquity of Twitter and Social networking (perhaps because I'm just not that social--I like my cave, and I don't like to leave it), but I do think that them kids with their cellphones and twitter feeds will be getting most of their news from that. With each successive generation we become more attuned to multi-tasking. And as that becomes more of a necessity, doing things like sitting down to read the paper will become increasingly preposterous. More likely, we'll catch a bit of news in a deadspot between text messages, while waiting in traffic on the road, or have it shipped to us, pre-filtered and set up to our desires via Twitter, RSS and all that other fun Web 2.0 stuff that makes teh Intarnets useful to us.

NaNoWriMo, A Month in Review

2009-12-02T17:52:00.004-05:00

It's hard to believe that November's over. After a month's worth of scrambling to write or think of what I'm going to write next, I'm both exhausted and feeling strangely empty. Empty in that there's no deadline hanging over my head any longer. Guess what,

I love deadlines.

But,

Statistics

50,899 words
52 Chapters
~ 150 Pages in manuscript format

Overall Plot Structure

I originally planned to cover Nigel's life from age 9 to about 15 in the span of 50k words. I ended up covering from 9 to 10, or about the first 1/3 of what I was looking into. This leads me to Lesson learned #1:

I am a wordy bastard. And as such, I expect to cover about 3 times what I actually cover. And that's not a bad thing. (Let it be known though, that My wife, who also did NaNoWriMo, Covers exactly as much as she expects to cover in the range of words she's working with, which is something that I find both awesome and amazing [We'll talk about that more in a bit.]).

So the story if you break it down covers the time from when Nigel leaves his decaying family behind and goes out into the world to make it on his own. Almost immediately, he meets up with smuggler and revolutionary, Robert McKee, who takes him under the ole' wing and teaches Nigel to read all the while filling the boy's head with ideological dreams of a better future.

Nigel then breaks McKee's friend Aleistar Tweedy from prison, a man reknowned for his ability to read any text. With Tweedy out, they steal an elven tome containing banned magic (The Diruleans don't do magic, or elves for those of you not up on your Ae'rinus lore). Their plan, cast some spells and wreck up the town. But,

Nigel gets captured by Leicaster Dunnovan, the noble (and apprentice Necromancer) that Nigel stole the book from in the first place. Nigel spends a good bit of time in the dark, being tortured, before eventually breaking free and killing Dunnovan.

In the process he finds out that there is a second book, which is in possession of Dunnovan's master, William Blakesley. Nigel goes after the book, spends ten days in a shipping crate crossing the Portsmouth bay, and rides back to Darkepoole with a bunch of Na'Claad gypsies led by Quick Jonny Quink.

Upon returning with the second book, things are starting to look good, until town guards attack the tavern where McKee lays out his plans. [details of the climax omitted] Nigel barely escapes with his life, and is forced to flee to Rae'lan.

Flavor of the text
If you've ever read my stuff, you know I'm annoyingly postmodern with orientation--footnotes, metafictive elements, plurality, blah blah blah. This book doesn't have much of that at all. Overall, what I thought of when approaching the writing was two things: Grit and language. So I channeled a lot of what I learned from Ann Pancake's glorious use of language together with a bunch of good dark grit ala the kind I get from reading Kilean Kennedy and all his recommendations, and came out with something that's full of clipped incomprehendible (possibly to some) dialog, and lots of teeth getting knocked out amid spraying blood and gore. I tried very hard to vocalize the differences in accents spoken by the characters in the story, and even varying accents from the same localized area based on age and experience and what not. According to Sue, I was successful. Once it's publishable (word on that below), we'll see how it flies in the wild.

Sound of the text
Music is a requirement when I write. And usually I get some sort of playlist going that builds the mood of whatever I'm working on. This project was a bit problematic with music in the beginning as nothing really seemed to drive the narrative inspiration for me, but once I got up around 20k words, I found myself constantly hopping onto YouTube to watch a quick video or two for inspiration. I ended up making a playlist of them, which is now up to 51 songs. Here's a feed:

Overall though, I think the most influential song was Handlebars by the Flobots (thanks Rod for turning me onto that song way back when in Grad School).

The Highlights
Perhaps one of the best things of NaNoWriMo wasn't the writing so much as the fact that my wife, Sue decided to join in the fun with her own NaNoing. She started out by hand, writing her Cersee stories, but then eventually switched online and managed to hit 30k by the end of the month, which considering that she spent a good chunk of the month rewriting what she wrote by hand, and the fact that she, unlike me, values sleep she did a super job. It was truly a great month for us to be sitting side by side creating things together. And since she isn't done, I'm looking forward to this month and future months of us working on finishing her story, and building new ones. I think this writing process might be a real great replacement for D&D, which with real little kids right now, is very hard to pull off.

I'm also very happy to have finally gotten back to my roots by writing fantasy. Back in college, I felt pushed to bury my love for genre fiction in favor of literary writing...which was probably a good thing, but now it feels awful nice to decend into fantasy again. The Nigel cycle is far from over, and in the coming weeks and months, I plan on building a transmedia experience out of it using a combination of background information-like blogs on my Ae'rinus blog, as well as even more in-depth stuff on the Ae'rinus wiki. As for the actual text, I plan on serializing it and releasing direct to teh Intarnets as soon as it's revised enough for release.

So that's more or less where It all stands. Here's to more stuff in the future!

I win!

2009-11-30T23:10:00.002-05:00

50,899. We'll talk later. Mmm K?

Novels, November, and TransMedia

2009-10-11T01:23:00.003-04:00

Back in July, I posted this bit on TransMedia and fiction. Since then, I've continued to mull on the subject, and much to my happy surprise, I got into a pretty cool email conversation with Scott Walker, one of the founding members of BrainCandyLLC, an online startup that does exactly what I was talking about--facilitates world-building for all sorts of media, and unlike the Harry Potter fanfiction type stuff referenced in the Henry Jenkins essay that kicked my mind off on this whole thing in the first place, Walker's flagship at the moment is a custom fantasy world, Runes of Gallidon, with a surprising breadth of detail and contribution. So from what I can see, this sort of collaborative setting is working out to be a very successful force even outside the already successful fan-fiction realm. And this is a good thing for fiction. Good because:

In an increasingly electronic world, classical literacy is decreasing, so an increase in these types of sites, fan-fiction, or not, will help combat this loss of literacy.
I'm deeply bothered by people who casually say, "I hate writing." Often I think this stigma is created by bored teachers in the public realm, who lack either ability or energy to properly motivate students to write. Online collaborative communities change that.
If traditional print fiction is languishing, fan-fiction, and now other types of fiction are demonstrating that a new collaborative home on the net, may be the spark to kick things into a new renaissance.

So, coupling in with National Novel Writing Month next month, I've decided to start pushing my own brand of collaborative openness. Here's how.

I've been a D&D gamer since way back when. 5th grade maybe. And in those many many years, I found that as a DM, I've always gravitated away from official gameworlds to my own, Ae'rinus. I have a wiki: http://aerinus.wikispaces.com, and an Ae'rinus related blog, neither of which have been all that active in recent years, but I've always wanted to do something with them. So here's the gameplan: I'm going to start writing the fantasy novel I've always wante to write. The one that I've forever put aside for the silly notion that literary fiction was what I needed to do. And while I won't be posting it as I go (because good god, my early drafts are bad), but I do plan on posting both environmental information about Ae'rinus, side stories, as well as other relevant material as I develop the main novel. When the novel's sections reach "publishable" form, I'll post them in serial, and hopefully one of two things will happen:

People will read and enjoy what I've written
People will feel motivated to start adding to this ontology of Ae'rinus.
(with a 3rd pipedream goal of: I become a rockstar D&D DM/writer and get to tour the country running gaming sessions, writing books, and having plenty of time with the family without having to have a soul-sucking dayjob..oh and medical benefits too [hey If I'm going to dream, might as well dream big.]).

Here's a blurb of what I'm working with. A sort of half-assed preface if you will:

Deep-seated in the heart of history there is always the blemish of darkness, dark times, of painful memories and hearts hardened—winter for the soul. Every age knows these stories, of overcoming darkness, transforming a landscape, but stories embellish—they forget the depths, the lows we sink to when faced with demons on all sides. They celebrate the outcome as an inevitability, as if men and women are born heroes destined to save us all. Stories are a point of convienience; they have the vantage to see the whole process from afar. But sliding within the morass, buried in the deep-gut-drop stink where your life is entrusted to a dagger blade so chipped and stress cracked you're pulling your thrust a bit and hoping to hell you don't catch it off a rib or hidden hauberk.

To a great many, Nigel Caedman was a hero—involved with bringing the gods back to the land, becoming one himself, slaying demons. Spread the growth of independent guildhalls, which led to safer roads. He fought in the civil war to overthrow the corrupt Dirulean crown. He traveled the planes. Found lasting love, married, and raised seven children. How could he not be a hero? Unblinking, he murdered men, women, and children if they crossed his ideals. He lived by gypsy code to point of fault; respecting nothing, taking everything from food and lodging to sex. He raped. Pillaged. And even despite the grandeur of ascending to the role of deity, this two he has squandered again and again, opting to cast it all off for a few more years wandering a land that he loves. A land where he has no permanent home. Surely no hero does these things. Heroes are just and pure. They stand for light and hope. Faith, humility, honor and love. Heroes are legendary and celebrated, like Cersee Nailo Caedman—Nigel's wife. But this is not the tale of a true hero. This is the story of that which creeps in the shadows, the bloody knife blade, the stink of whiskey-breath in the morning rain wet from another night under the stars. Doing what needs to be done, whether or not the people agree or realize what horrors are kept at bay by his stained hand.

More on the future of fiction

2009-08-12T02:09:00.004-04:00

Apparently the topic of my Ontologica essay is on a lot more minds than my own. American Book Review just did a big bit on Fiction's future. Many of the authors quoted there echo a lot of what I was talking about in my essay. (By the way I'm writing this, you'd think I inspired people [I didn't though {wouldn't want to set the wrong impression}]). Though I did particularly enjoy Larry McCaffery's quote: "I have seen the future of fiction, and its name is Mark Z. Danielewski."

Ontologica 1.1

2009-08-05T01:21:00.003-04:00

is LIVE! Check it out: http://www.warriorpoetgroup.com/Ontologica

Authors featured:
Sheldon Compton
Jarrid Deaton
Rod Dixon
Sameha Farag
Cameron Fry
Dave Harrity
Kilean Kennedy
Drew Lackovic
Jason Lee Miller
Jae Newman
Chelsea Pruckner
David Tipton
Amy Watkins

Artists Featured:
Susane M Lackovic (Andracki)
Dennis Waddell

Building Thoughts on TransMedia Fiction

2009-07-15T00:17:00.003-04:00

Lately I've been reading a lot of essays about technology, preparing for my "The Age of Information" theme that I"ll be launching this fall in my composition class[es?]. The primary texts I've selected are:
Technopoly - Neil Postman
The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts
The Dumbest Generation - Mark Bauerlein
The Pirate's Dilemma - Matt Mason
Convergence Culture - Henry Jenkins

My primary goal with these texts is to design a course content that invokes introspection on some level relating to the technology that we all take so easily for granted. Back in 1995, Sven Birkerts warned his readers in the essay, "The Idea of the Internet," that taking the technology of the internet for granted would be a huge failing for our culture. Not only does the internet remove us from conventional definitions of communication (I'm paraphrasing Birkerts paraphrasing Derrida here), where the communication takes place between two physical people in an exact location at an exact time, but its top-level appearance abstracts the complexity lying underneath. For example, prior to the internet, a person was only reacheable via phone (most likely landline/fax) or in person. If that person wasn't home, I couldn't establish communication. Now, I can email a video of myself to someone's phone. I don't have to know where the other person is, nor does that person have to have his phone on when I send the communication--the idea of concrete time and place are effectively removed from the schema for communication. Furthermore, since the internet is so abstracted, without considerable computer skill, it's VERY hard to ensure that your communication is being delivered only to the person or people it's intended for. Consider the notion of a embarrasing email forwarded on to an entire organization, or the Bush administration's extensive wiretapping. Specificity of communication is also no longer restricted to exact recipients. Therefore communication as a whole has changed, yet few of us (if anyone) truly acknowledge this shift, or seem to care.

Consider this: How many 18 year old college freshmen post their drinking sex party pics up on facebook? Lots. Now consider this: A large number of HR firms these days make it a regular habit to Google EVERY SINGLE APPLICANT BEFORE SELECTING THE INTERVIEW SLATE. Guess who doesn't make the slate? Titsy McGee and Joe Pukeface.

While I can drive on in this vein for a while, all of this reading has been jarring up my notion of fiction and how it's to be consumed. A good chunk of my essay for Issue 1.1 of Ontologica has to do with the notion that contemporary realism, the dominant literary movement of the day, is driving fiction into the ground because contemporary realism offers little if anything over any other form of media, and in many cases, is very easily interchangeable with other forms of meda. And while this notion of media convergence, as cited by Henry Jenkins is inevitable, I can't help but think there has to be a better way to cross-pollonate fiction with other media without diluting the form. I think it bears importance to mention that I'm primarily concerned with Literary fiction, since the Literary genre seems to claim to have some sort of presigious clout over the other, more lucrative forms of fiction. I'm bothered by the notion that Literary fiction, for all it's clout cannot compete with other genres, and fares even worse in competition to other media. And at the same time, I'm not ready to just write off America as being too dumb to consume Literary fiction.

In Convergence Culture, Jenkins traces shifts in TV Series' plot formatting from Episodic , to Character driven, to season long arcs, to World Creation. Looking at these terms, you hear a lot about Character Driven fiction in MFA programs and other writing groups--it's definitely high on the do-this-and-you're-writing-good-literary-fiction-list. However, in terms of other media, that puts fiction FAR behind the curve. Think about the complexities in a story arc for a season of Lost, or better, the story arc for the entire series. Character driven fiction can't meet that, and it can't build any form of fanbase similar because it lacks said complexities. These complexities, or the current Trans Media way of doing things is that of World Building. Give me a world, any world, and we can build all the plot-driven or character driven stories we want, and each one contributes to the greater whole. Think Star Wars. Think The Matrix.

This idea of world building, of course, isn't new. Faulkner did it with his Yoknapatawpha County. Ben Marcus writes it from the inside in The Age of Wire and String, George Saunders in The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, etc. All of these fictions employ world building at the most intrinsic level.

Brian McHale's Postmodernist Fiction talks (again I'm paraphrasing) in great deal about the effects of what he calls "Worlds in Collision," or, what happens to a reader when the reader is forced to recognize that the world within the fiction is not the world that the reader lives within. Such a collision firstly forces the reader to abandon all forms of epistemological interpretation for ontological interpretation. By doing so, the entirety of the fiction necessitates analysis--nothing should be taken for face value. Since ontological interpretation, at its most base level, is concerned with plurality and the absence of any absolute truths, our subjectivity, level of reading intensity, and knowledge come to be more heavily important on the understanding of the text than in traditional epistemological readings. Furthermore, in an age of TransMedia exploitation, particularly dense works get easily dissected by online forum groupThink exercises, where each person brings a different skill/knowledge set to the same text, allowing for greater depth to be achieved than possible without other perspectives.

I'm part of such a groupThink exercise--the Warrior Poet Group; and throughout our book discussions, we've consistently avoided contemporary realist works in favor of those that involve the creation of entire worlds: The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus, Rant - Chuck Palahaniuk, Visionary/Prophetic Poetry, and Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov.

So why do worlds work so well?
Perhaps in this age of information, our ability to be truly affected by an event is thoroughly diminished to a point nearing total desensitization. Everyday we joke, sing, or causually talk about killing, rape, stealing, etc without blinking an eye. Media Piracy is called "Filesharing" to downplay its illegality, and ask any college student, not one of them will tell you that music piracy should be illegal. Perhaps world creation works so well because in this age, we spend so much of our time trying to assemble a self out of the cacophany of information surrounding us--one tiny voice in the datafeed, we scrabble and scream our way to the top of Facebook, or whatever online den we call home. Star-struck and searching for fame and fortune, we fall into the glamor of world-building because it allows us to transpose not our true self, but the self we want to be into an alternate world where we pull a Burger King and Have it Our Way (for once). Look only to the success of Second Life, WoW and other MMORPGs. Shitty jobs become suddenly bearable when there's another world to run off to once you punch out.

My escape worlds have always been rooted in D&D and video games (currently Fallout 3), but increasingly, as I develop this thing called Not an Autobiography, the inter-connections between stories has begun building a growingly more complicated ontology of Self stemming from each individual voice. And as I see it, the book becomes multi-layered in this way--each character telling the what-if story of several personal past events and claiming each other character, but also the over-arching inter-connectivity; a sort of super-self that gets generated by the cross-overs, similarities, and other flair.

So what am I saying?
In addition to writing good stories, I think we should also start considering how the masses are to consume our fictions. If you can get a group of peole to dedicate a forum to your book, then you're also generating word-of-Internet marketing for your creative endeavor; it's like free promotion.

What if we take this a step further. Take the notion of world building and tack a Creative Commons license on our fiction rather than 1st American Publishing Rights or whatever other licensing offered by publishers -- you can still make money on your own work, but with Creative Commons, you also enable your fans to drive your work futher in derivative creations, building upon your world, and expanding, further your fanbase. Surely this already exists, but can such a creation lead to one or more published books? I'm not sure, but at the very least, on this blog entry, it sounds like a very tantalizing idea.

This is exactly not what I wanted to hear:

2009-06-25T22:44:00.005-04:00

From Gargoyle:

Sorry Drew--

Almost impossible to land anything more than 20pp anywhere right now in these grim times. And we're in the 5-15pp range with most of our stuff lately.

Pax,

Richard

Thanks Gargoyle, for at least breaking up with me quickly. I hate that long drawn out feeling.
The good news: that was a < 24 hr response. I have to say though, if Richard is correct, I'm in a world of hurt. Look only to my currently unpublished list:

Self [Inflicted] Portrait - 38 pages
Endings Lead to Beginnings - 37 pages
7,500 Miles to the Bottom - 24 pages
The Poetics of Self - 18 pages
Contents Within - 17 pages
Substrate - 17 pages

I guess this really means only one thing, I need to finish Not an Autobiography and start marketing it as a finished collection. If only I weren't so interested in developing long winding sentences each with a series of footnotes....

Everything Ends goes Electronic and other stuff

2009-06-11T22:05:00.003-04:00

A cappella Zoo, recently started posting electronic versions of their back issues on their website, and as a member of issue one, "Everything Ends" now has a new electronic home. Given that my story is full of XML, footnotes and other elements of structural screwity, the folks over there assuredly had to do a lot of finagling to get that story online, so take a moment and read it again. Maybe even buy a subscription because they are one of the best mags out there as far as I'm concerned (one of the only literary magazine that touts that it prints experiemental fiction and actually follows through with it).

In other news, Rod, Dave, and I are getting very close to publishing issue one of Ontologica. The website is ready to go, and we're sliding into editing time right now. I expect things to be live sometime in early July. With that said, we're already starting to lay grounds for the Winter release--I know Dave's done some work on setting up the theme for that issue, basing it partially on some of Colleen Harris' work (Her new book is out soon. Buy it).

Lastly, my summer job's led me down the path of web-development, and I've recenly learned massive amounts of CSS, XML, and XSL, all of which is coming mightily handy in building the Ontologica site and setting forth a roadmap to one day rebuild my own domain and the Warrior Poet Group Main Page.

Good bye Spring '09, Hello Summer

2009-05-07T00:23:00.003-04:00

As I type this, I'm finishing up the last of my grading deluge. I posted my composition class' grades the other day, and momentarily, Business Writing will be set to the books. It's an awful nice feeling to be 'done;' very much akin to the done-ness achieved at the end of a semester when you're a student. Funny how when you're a student you never consider how much work is involved on the prof's side of the house--really it's about the same as what the student faces.

Between Last Thursday and Sunday, I slammed through 71 five page essays. I just finished slugging through 5 business proposals weighing in at nearly 20 pages a piece (some more, some less), and sorting out grades on a multi-tiered system for them.

Here are some more stats:

Overall, I read over 3,050 pages of student writing this semester, and that doesn't include revisions; so I wouldn't be surprised if there was another 150-300 pages sneaking around that average that I didn't account for.

I went through 7 pens.

I averaged 10-15 student emails per day.

For my business writing class, we read two books: Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma, and D. Michael Abrashoff's It's Your Ship, as well as three 30 page articles from CQ Researcher, and a good chunk of The Business Writer's Handbook

In Composition, we read five essays: Gerald Graff's "Hidden Intellectualism," Christopher Lasch's "The Lost Art of Argument," Sven Birkerts' "The Owl Has Flown," Susan Bordo's "The Empire of Images in the World of our Bodies," and Arlie Russel Hochschild's "From the Frying Pan into the Fire." We also watched and discussed Steal this Film.

On the side, I managed to read Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, and The Watchmen. Currently, I'm reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.

Oh and I haven't written a word of fiction since...um...maybe November? So sad.

As far as students, I noticed a dramatic improvement in attentiveness, class participation, and overall quality of writing in comparison to the fall semester. Part of this is due to students moving into the comp class after having taken an introductory class (which is optional based on entrance tests), and/or repeating the class after having failed in the fall. In any event though, we generated a lot of good discussion, and I didn't have any 'dead' sections like I experienced in the fall. I also had a dramatic improvement in seeing students going to get writing tutor help; largely this was a good thing.

I did however learn that there are several topics that I never want to read about again. They include:

The Drinking Age
Gun Control
Abortion
Steroids
Gambling
The Smoking Ban
Stem Cell Research
The Death Penalty
Alternate Fuels
Global Warming
Illegal Drugs

While I encountered exceptional papers throughout the above list (particularly there was a fantastic Pro-Life paper, and last semester brought me a stunning Legalizing Marijuana Paper), overall, these topics end up being dry, predictable, and very very similar. Fortunately, next semester, Behrend will be kicking into full-on LRS mode, which will involve required course "Themes," so as long as I'm crafty enough to select a theme that doesn't involve any of the above topics, I'll be safe so to speak. As far as themes go, I'm currently kicking around the following:

Capitalism
Piracy
The Information Age
Counterculture

Now that I have a couple semesters under my belt, I hope to start revising and deviating my lesson plans a bit for the future. I want to incorporate more focus on MLA citation in my Composition classes--this semester's addition of the Annotated Bibliography assignment revealed that many students are still clueless about proper citation. Also, in one of our departmental meetings, Craig presented a sort of handout relating to asking "Good Research Questions." It's something I hadn't considered before, and when I presented it a couple weeks ago, the students really seemed to like it; so that'll go in much earlier in the semester. Also, I think I'd like to develop Problem Statement Format introductions more clearly from the start-- the weaker writers in my classes always benefit from this, as it helps them form a clear direction to their papers. Currently, PSF comes in around week four; I think I'm going to move that up to hit before the first essay is due.

I altered the way I handled open revision this semester (in the fall I didn't put a timeline on revision and received a deluge of last-minute revision), and it worked really well, so I'll definitely keep that as an option.

I'm also working on creating a sort of revision checklist of common errors that I'd say 80% of my students make. Things like putting your punctuation inside your quotes, proper citation format, not opening or ending paragraphs with evidence, etc. Hopefully such a document will help them organize their workshop sessions more, and help them get away from focusing only on grammatical feedback.

So now that School is over for the moment, I've been working at gainful summer employment. At the moment RGIS is my only current holding. I had my paid training session today. The work is ridiculously easy; the hours are awful. Strange times are dealable--Verizon hardened me against weirdo shifts, but the pay is awful, and they only have me down for 17 hours in the next 2 weeks; nowhere near enough to pay the Man.

Fortunately, I managed to land an inteview tomorrow for a Marketing/web development gig at a place that's less than two miles from my house. From the sounds of it, it might solve all the summer monetary problems. So I'm looking forward to that with gusto.

Plus, since my next big project is to build the site for Ontologica, it'll be nice related practice. Speaking of Ontologica, I am finally going to be able to start drafting the essay that's been floating in my head since before Rod posed the notion of putting this journal together. Although I'm not traditionally an essay writer, I'm pretty psyched up to write this, so hopefully it'll pan out well.

Finally a note on the homefront: Sue's gone back to work, and though on many levels I feel like I'm somehow failing at bringing home enough money to cover bills, her work environment has changed drastically for the better, and she's really enjoying herself there; which is really good (and it's really helping with finances).

Molly's just coming out of a real bad stint of no sleep week (see my previous blog post). I guess most of the molars have cut through, because after nearly a week of no naps, and really poor sleeping at night, she's more or less back on her regular schedule (though the daytime nap is more floaty now--she used to crash immediatly after lunch, now it's hitting anywhere between 10:30 and 14:00). She and I have been hitting up the Zoo pretty regularly, and Molly likes that a whole lot. We'd like to hit some other zoos this summer, so hopefully that'll happen--kind of all dependent on work schedules and whatnot.

So now that I've written a blog post that, by all website usability rules is far too long, I'm going to end with a hopeful note about summer.

I hope summer rocks as much as I think it's going to rock.

O my child, why don't you love the sleep?

2009-04-24T08:08:00.002-04:00

Day 2. Log. 8Am ish. I've been up since 2:30 ish (after going to bed around Midnight). Up with my daughter. For the second night in a row, she's on strike. The nightnight time management wanted to renegotiate her sleep agreement, and apparently she gave them a big mouthful of sass to the effect of, "No no no no NOO!" Either way, it means that for two days now she's blasted awake in the middle of the night with no apparent ailments needing attention, and also no interest in sleeping, unless said sleeping occurs on my shoulder while I stand and rock her.

Wednesday night, I stood and rocked her from around 4:45-6:15 before she finally relented and let me lay her back down.

Last night was far more complex. At first even the holding and rocking wasn't working. Sue and I ran the parent gamut--diaper check, food check, drink check, orajel check, no fever check, etc. She needed nothing. No gas, no nothing but a big pile of crab. To make it all worse, Sue is such a good mom, that she can't sleep if Molly's crying. Sue had to work in the morning.

So since it's day two of this and we decide to opt for the cry it out route. Tough love. Well although it's something that often works to help develop the ever lovely pattern of sleeping, last night it backfired; Molly jumped out of her crib for the first time. Not good. Thankfully aside from a scare, no damage taken. But there were still tears and lots of crabbing.

So I opted to take her downstairs in hopes that she'd fall asleep while we watched something. Fortunately The Heist was on HBO, and we caught it fairly early. We both enjoyed it. Which meant no sleeping for her. After that, there wasn't much good on, so I attempted to encourage sleep. Got her to lay on the couch with me...no real sucess there.

So it's 4:30 and I'm getting pretty crabby so we went upstairs and resumed the I'll-hold-you-and-you-sleep bit. It's a killer on the lower back, but she was sleeping at least. Anytime though I though she was enough asleep to lay her down, she snapped back up super fast.

Around 6 I was falling asleep standing. So I tried laying down on the floor with her on my chest. That bought us both an hour of sleep. Then she rolled and saw that the sun was up. So sleep time was over.

So far I'm feeling not too bad for 2 hours worth of sleep. We'll see how that pans out.

all I know is that Threequels suck. So tonight Molly, you better sleep like like a baby. But not like the baby you've been the last two nights.

Pedigogy and the 2009 CEA/PCEA Conference

2009-04-07T09:55:00.003-04:00

A couple weeks ago I attended the annual PCEA conference, which this year was paired up with parent society, the CEA, for a conference at the lovely Omni William Penn in Pittsburgh. Since it was in the 'burgh, I got to cut cost and stay with friends, (and enjoy a nice metro ride into town). Overall, the conference was a pretty decent success as far as I'm concerned. Here are the highlights:

My own presentation:
Unfortunately, I was scheduled for the 1st panel on the first day; so I expected an audience of 0 much like last year's conference, but fortunately, we had two audience members in addition to presenters and moderator, so that was a 200% improvement. Things got off to a pretty good start. I read from "Deconstructing Happily Ever After," and it went ok-ish; nowhere near as fun as the smashing success the story had at Spalding, but still a pretty decent reading.

Flow
Also during that panelone of my co-presenters spoke about Flow and theories set by herself and Csikszentmihalyi regarding the process of writing and how it affects our minds. The presenter, Julie Kearney of Penn State Harrisburg expanded on Csikszentmihalyi's theories by studing the level of serotonin in the brain in relationship to the state of Flow a writer is in. Basically, achieving flow is that state that we as writers, (and by extension, I would imagine any artistic endeavor as well) come to when we lose sense of the world around us and are totally absorbed in our work; that feeling you get fleetingly when "the keyboard is writing for your, or if you're old school like Dave Harrity, when the pen is writing the poem." She found that Seretonin levels go up, which makes me think then that (and this is my own thought, not Julie's) that writing is somewhat addictive; we're always searching for that absorbative high, when we're fully geared in creative mode; and we hate coming down from it. I wonder if so many writers over history were also addicts (Faulkner and alcohol, Ken Kesey and LSD, etc) for this reason -- sort of short circuiting the true payoff. Julie also reported that she planned on running writing experiments with folks that can achieve flow where she inhibits seratonin to see what happens. Interesting stuff.

The New Historicism way of Responding to Student Papers
I went to a panel geared towards comp teachers that stressed a new method of using critical theory as a method to respond to student papers. Essentially, the presenter, argued that "Rubber Stamp comments" were doing nothing for our students and that New Historicism theory will allow instructors to better approach the students' work without making the students just appropriate what we tell them for a better grade. I like the idea behind this; teach the student how to write what they want, and communicate their designs well, but I'm unsure of its effectiveness in the sea of 100 essays every 2 weeks. I currently average between 10 and 20 minutes per paper, which places me at around 30+ hours worth of grading per essay. Adding a new historicism twist by showing students how their essays fit into the historical context of their writing realm, while not rubber stamping comments, sounds, to me, to be very time intensive. Our departmental meetings have constantly stressed that when commenting on student papers, less is more, and that students rarely, if ever, pay much attention to the blood on the page, so I've got to say that I'm not entirely sold on this model of response. It doesn't seem to have openings for structural, grammatical, and clarity issues, which are all too common. Perhaps I'm missing the point of this methodology. I can see definitley how it'd work well in more advanced classes for seminar papers, and even creative works, but it seems a bit too much for a freshman comp class.

Other Stuff
One of the better aspects of the conference was that I got to meet up with several former IUP professors and hear about the very excellent sounding revision they've done to the English curriculum at my alma-mater. When I transfered into IUP in 2000, I was aghast at how archaic and backwards IUP's English program was in comparison to Behrend's. Not only did it severly limit a student's ability to gain depth in Literarture studies, it allowed little avenue to specialize and/or excel in particular interests. I ended up spending a rather large portion of my final two years taking survey classes that struggled to cover massive amounts of literary time, and offered little depth, and because I had pretty specific interests (postmodern theory and creative writing), I ended up taking several more classes than I needed to graduate, just so I could satisfy some of my curiosities.

Fortunately now, IUP is offering a much more modernized track system with several different areas of specialty, and an expanded and updated list of courses. They'll be launching this program in the upcoming Fall 2009 semester, and by the looks of it, it'll be a smashing success.

McDonalds is Craptacular

2009-03-18T02:24:00.003-04:00

Went to McDonalds today for a Shamrock shake--you know a green drink for St. Patty's day.
"Sorry we don't have those anymore," says the disconnected voice coming through the drive thru window as I STARE AT THE FUCKING PICTURE OF A SHAMROCK SHAKE ON THE PLACARD.

Assholes.

So I got a Frosty and Fries from Wendy's instead.

My daughter stole my fries....all of them.

Alone at the Top now live

2009-03-10T00:46:00.001-04:00

"Alone at the Top," the first story I wrote for my first Spalding Workshop is now live over at The Wrong Tree Review.

If you have a moment, go take a look.

State of the Estate

2009-02-05T15:18:00.004-05:00

Life is busy, and by that extension, I'm guessing I can't complain. So here's a slice of the latest, freshest, bit o' life I can dish out. Straight from me to you. No lengthy emails, just straight bloggery at its logorrheic finest.

The Fam
We're all doing pretty ok. We're all busy as hell, but overall things are going as well as they can. Molly just turned 16 months, and she's not one, but three handfuls of cute. She can rattle off probably close to 10 different animal sounds, and has gotten very good at asking "what's that." She listens really well too (most of the time). She's very much in love with Nemo and Tinkerbell, though to her it's Memo and dinkdink (or something like that). Oh and don't think about eating ice cream unless you plan on giving her half.

Now that Molly's a little older and whatnot, Sue's been getting back into her art more. She's looking to expand and restock her holdings at a local art gallery, and/or start expanding onto etsy.com. Right now she's been buying up plain ole plates and painting them up with some really slick designs. She's also planning on doing some fabric art class with aunt Jeanie here soon.

Schoolin'
I'm teaching another full load this semester--100 kids this time, divided up 75/25 between composition and business writing. Now that it's nearly the end of the fourth week of school, I estimate that I've read and commented upon over 980 pages of student work so far, and that's taking only the minimum side of page requirements into account. That's a freakin' lot of damn grading. Fortunately, my kids this semester seem to be a good amount more attentive and serious than last semester, and that makes grading easier.

I also have several international students this semester, which is both humbling and really interesting. It amazes me that these kids not only can write well, but participate in class discussion just as fluently, if not more fluently than the rest of the students. While I'd love to think that someday I could subsist with my German or Japanese knowledge, I know I'll never approach the sort of fluency these kids have unless I'm living in one of those countries. Another cool thing about the international students is that they bring in a really diverse and worldly view on the types of issues we discuss; and these world views have done wonders for fostering our class conversation. While a lot of profs complain about having international students, I'm really enjoying mine, and looking forward to having more in the future.

Grant Musings
Since this is an ultra-random, catchall type post, NEA Grant applications are open now for Fiction/non-fiction. The deadline is 3/5/09. Here's the link: http://www.arts.endow.gov/grants/apply/Lit/index.html. I'm really hoping I can land something like this; it'd give me the time to write and finish Not an Autobiography without having to think about bills, and maybe a little on location travel research too.

Current Music
It's been a while since I've talked up my latest musical influences, so here's a list of things that have been consistently populating my Amarok Playlists:

Blue Foundation--My wife's been spinning up the Twilight sountrack a lot lately, and I really dig the Blue Foundation Song on there....Now before I continue, y'all need to know that Sue's not one of the 800 million Twilight fangirls out there. Sue read Twilight long before it became harry potter rediculous popular; she even Emailed Stephanie Meyer back in the day some (and got responses). Anyway, Blue Foundation. Great band. Really nice ephemeral, trancy kind of stuff.
The Ting Tings. I can't get "Shut up and Let Me go" or "Fruit machine" out of my head. Cha ching. Cha Ching.
The Birthday Massacre--this band rocks. One of the best goth rock bands I've ever listened to. Excellent melodic female vocals backed by a great synthy dirty grind.
Conjure One--another good ephemeral trancy kinda music. This kinda stuff is great to grade to.
Fauxliage--see Conjure One's entry.
Juli--She's German. I fell in love with their song on Rockband. Very good alternative rock sound.
Oasis--loved em in the 90s. Still love em today
"Love Spreads" by the Stone Roses--I forgot about this band and song, but Rockband again rescuscitated that memory for me. Back in high school art class, I borrowed this cd off of Mr. Humes. Great English band, and "Love Spreads" in particular rocks. Plus it's one of the few songs I can sing on Rockband without causing the paint to curl.

Writing
Ha! Not happening. Maybe Spring break. Maybe Summer. With 100 kids and a Molly, there just isn't time for much else.

Reading
I'm slowly chugging my way through Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Alan Moore's The Watchmen. For school I'm rereading D. Michael Abrashoff's It's Your Ship and Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma.

Watching
Right now we're cutting through several TV series on Netflix: Jekyll (very good), Witchblade, The Lost Room (very good), and Miracles (ok--Sue liked it a lot). Movie wise, we just saw Underworld 3 (very good), Wanted (very good), Rocknrolla (I liked it; Sue didn't), and Death Race (suprisingly good). Molly's been all about Tinkerbell, Finding Nemo, Monster's Inc, Baby Einstein, and to a lesser degree, It's a Big Big World. We're about to relive our college anime-nerdness by rewatching all of Rurouni Kenshin.

Speaking of anime, how I wish Netflix were around back when I was in college. I watched so much anime at such a terrible quality, because that's what we had--I saw all of Kenshin for example via TERRIBLE Real Player Rips. And I put up with it. Anime nerds today have it way too easy.

Well that's enough rambling. I have to finish grading persuasive memo revisions.

Fiction Reading

2009-01-27T09:26:00.003-05:00

I will be reading from my fiction at the annual Behrend Reads! event Thursday February 5th at 6pm in the Smith Chapel on Penn State Behrend's Campus. Behrend Reads! is a forum that allows English faculty outside of the Creative Writing department to read some of their creative works.

It should be a good time had by all.

Upcoming Publication

2009-01-10T21:25:00.003-05:00

I just received word that my story, "Alone at the Top," will be the featured story in the March issue of The Wrong Tree Review. Wrong Tree belongs to a couple of friends, and great writers from Spalding. Kilean and Rod kicked off the first two issues; great stuff too.

"Alone at the Top" was one of the two stories I submitted to my first workshop at Spalding. At the time it was so dense that no one really knew what to say about it, but thanks to a lot of help from Sue and Krista, it's finally found a home.

Upcoming Conference Appearance and...

2008-12-28T05:23:00.002-05:00

Merry belated Christmas.

I'll be reading some or all of "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" at the 2008 CEA/PCEA conference in Pittsburgh this coming March. It'll be at the Omni William Penn--the same place where I stayed when I got sent down there for strike duty--it's a nice hotel.

In other news, we had a very nice Christmas down at Sue's sister's place in Bloomsburg. Molly learned how to say 'Yam' (Sue's sister is Aunt Yam and her husband is Uncle Spud). She also learned how to call kitties by saying "Meow." It's retardedly cute.

Morning Derail

2008-11-07T05:59:00.003-05:00

I'm typing this with my laptop precariously balancing on one knee, while my daughter sleeps in my arms.

It's been a rough morning.
It's been a wonderful morning.

Let's start at about 2:36 AM. Molly starts crying--nightmare.
Sue gets up to rock her to sleep; no luck, brings her to bed with us, and Molly goes into "let me pick at your face and drill your nose with my razor finger, mama" mode. (Usually, I'd qualify all of that as a big long hyphenated word, but today, that sounds too complicated.)

So back to bed with her.

She cries.

We try to sleep despite the crying. All parents know that's a lie. In reality, the parents lay a room away from their crying child, eyes closed pretending to sleep and hoping the other will get up and care for the kid, or better yet, hoping the kid will just embrace the beautiful idea of sleep and, well, sleep through the night...maybe just once, but preferably every night.

So at 3:18, I get up, try to rock, and backrub Molly back into the land of sleeper crystals and whatever weird thing babies dream about.

Twice I make it to the door before tears.

At attempt 2, Sue offers Molly in bed with her part 2. By now it's 3:47, and since the alarm is going off in 13 minutes anyway, I relent, stay up, and head down to grade papers until my conscience clears me to maybe work on some fiction.

4:05 and Sue calls down; Molly drilled her nose good again (maybe I'm making that up for dramatic effect). Either way, Molly is standing in the bed when I fetch her.

So the routine begins. And this is the, my kid should be asleep, I want to be asleep, but the kid doesn't want to sleep, so let's do awake things routine.
1. diaper change. check.
2. food. She ate about 1/4 of a banana...so hunger wasn't the issue.
3. set up a sleeping nest in the living room--trick said child to sleep by having sleep be somewhere 'fun.' Check.
4. Let kid roam/play until the sleep demons take over....fail.

It's always the toughest when Molly continues crying when you've done everything you thought she needed. food, clean butt, not cold, has binky, George (her monkey, but not that Curious asshole--fuck him. I hate curious george. Molly's george is cute [for a monkey] and has a really weird outie belly button that's somewhat creepy and yet endearing.), place to sleep, and is eye-rubbing tired.

Change plans. We lay down together. This scares me. I'm still tired. I have the perpetual, sleep through everything important fear. I soldier through though. Stay awake, she doesn't. Score.

Wait...my reward is to grade bad revisions. Oh well, satisfying my concience. Grading begins at about 5ish.

During this time, Molly sleeps with a lot of restless in her. Butt in the air, creeping slowly off the nest until a face drag on the carpet is enough for me to try to intervene. But the best laid ideas are often dashed, right? My desire to help turns into a wakeup call, some more tears.

So we jump back to stage 4. Let her roam. She does this long enough for me to start grading again.

Then the cute starts. Her little tired self comes over to the couch and she lays her head on my keyboard, a feat that I'm still not sure how she pulled off, since I was sitting proper on the couch, meaning she had to kind of twist and stretch to get her head there. Either way, she ended up joining me on the couch in my arms, and I started to one-hand grade (I'm letting the kids submit essays electronically this semester, so I'm doing track changes).

As she nestles in, she grabs a shall laying over the couch and wraps it about her; I guess Sue's smell makes her more comfortable, and since she doesn't often sleep in my lap, I kind of stop grading.

This Molly sleeping in the lap thing is pretty common for Sue; they do it all the time, but I don't often get the honor of being a pillow, so I stop grading all together, and turn to her little body. Looking at her all curled into me, breathing smooth now, warm, wrapped in a shall, I have one of those great parenting moments. This is my daughter. She is tiny and beautiful and love and sleeping. Sleeping finally because I am her safe. I am her protection from whatever awful dream kept reoccuring tonight.

So my morning plans are somewhat derailed. I'm probably not going to check as many things off my checklist of overachievement. But instead I get something rare and wonderful. A small beauty, a moment worthy of reverie and experience.

So I'm going to stop writing now, and enjoy it for as long as I can.

Goalsetting

2008-10-22T15:59:00.003-04:00

So, when I graduated in May, I said, "Self, finish this damn novel in stories by the end of the year. k. thx. bye."

Well, I haven't been doing all that well at keeping up with promises to myself. It all has something to do with timeflow. You see, there are only 24 hours in a day, and well, I can't convince my body that less than 5-6 hours of sleep a night is a good idea (despite my efforts). Plus too, Molly is cuter than buttons, unicorns, rainbows, and the entire cast of Morning Musuimi (Why I'm remembering a fabricated j-pop band that I only vaguely knew about around the year 2000, right now, I don't know). In any event though, Parenting is definitely high on the "need to do list."

In fact, there are a lot of things on the need to do list. Observe:

Parenting (this one is worth 10x all others)
Teaching
Prepping for teaching
finding insurance (or Why the fuck do we not have national healthcare yet, you government assholes?)
fixing our basement (painting, organizing, remodeling)
Downstairs toilet is broken
Grading papers
Recording Molly's cuteness via cameras/camcorders
Prepare proposals for the PCEA conference very soon (I think it's a 11/1 deadline)
Read and prepare materials for the Warrior Poet Group (I'm due to start teaching Nabokov's Pale Fire here soon)
Oh and writing.

You know what I'm best at in life? Taking on more than I can handle. I'm downright awesome at that. And there are dozens of more things that need my attention that I haven't even bothered to list.

So,
I said to my self, "self, stop whining and do something about doing something." And so, I've decided that the best way to try to finish a draft of Not an Autobiography by the end of the year is to sign up for NaNoWriMo with the goal to bang out the last three stories or so that I feel need to be in the book.

Feel free to laugh at my audacity, stupidity, and plain ole inadvoidable ability to take on way too much at once.

Deconstructing Happily Ever After Now in Print

2008-10-17T04:34:00.003-04:00

On Wednesday, I finally received my contributor's copies of Human Voices, an anthology put together by the folks that run the Kentuckiana Metroversity contest. It has all of the winning and runner-up essays, stories, and poems from the 2008 contest. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a website for them, so I'm not sure how/if folks can get copies of it, but I'd be happy to shoot the story to anyone that wants to read it regardless. "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" took 1st place in the Graduate Fiction section.

"Everything Ends" now in print

2008-10-15T06:36:00.003-04:00

This week I received my contributor copies of A capella Zoo, Issue 1 where "Everything Ends" was recently published.

It's a very slick production, and looks to be a fantastic journal for us experimental types.

A great sad blow to the world

2008-09-07T00:05:00.004-04:00

On Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 we lost our dear friend, Judy Knapp. It's so easy for us to take life for granted, to spend too much time in front of the TV, to waste time, to let the days slip between our fingers. But Judy never did that. Judy was life. She, even on her worst days, had optimism that many of us don't have on our best. And she never settled for anything less than a life full of adventure, be it travel, books, or her willingness to try her hand at just about anything, Judy, of all the people I know, knew what it meant to be alive.

Her life force, her personality, and her drive inspired everyone around her. Her laugh infectious, her smile, contagious, Judy met everyone with child-like enthusiasm back with genuine interest. She always wanted to know about everything new and wonderful, but was there too when times were tough.

When I was small, Judy was my gum dispenser. She'd come over, and I'd race to her, pumping my little-kid legs as hard as I could, all the while chanting, “JudyJudyJudy!” When I got there, invariably my next plea was, “Do you have any gum?” Silly story, but when you're a little kid, gum is king. And growing up Judy continued to be a huge influence on me. She turned me on to reading and Edgar Allen Poe. She supported my writing, gave Sue and I countless vacation tips (and plenty of travel envy), and was a great friend and surrogate Aunt.

Judy's life spark was huge and bright. And never was it diminished by sickness. If anything, diabetes made her spark all the brighter, which is perhaps why her passing on Wednesday was so shocking to all of us. That bright ball of light and love, curiosity, intelligence, and laughter snapped away so sudden-quick. But it isn't gone. We have it now, all of us that have been touched by her wonderful soul. It's up to us to carry her spark now; it's up to us to remember all that is Judy and to never forget. We love you, Judy. And will miss you greatly.

“May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.” --Edward Abbey

The failure of the 2008 Summer Olympics

2008-08-24T21:51:00.003-04:00

As I sit here watching fireworks that fired off in a 12 hour offset, I'm thinking that the 2008 Olympics, the first summer games I've ever actively paid attention to pretty much sucked. It didn't suck because China was the host, or I felt that there was some form of preferential treatment/cheating going on (though that I dea has crept into my head), it's the fact that NBC did an abso-fucking-lutely horrible job covering the games.

From the opening ceremony to the torch's last moments, I've had the games on durning primetime nearly every night (background noise as we played with Molly, really), and during that time, I saw: a tiny bit of fencing, bicycling, swimming, biking, volleyball, diving, more swimming, more volleyball, more diving, gymnastics, more volleyball, more diving, more swimming, more volleyball, a bit of running, more volleyball, a moment of trampoline, more diving, more gymnastics, more volleyball, more diving, more volleyball, more volleyball.

In all, I'd say 80% of NBC's primetime coverage was volleyball. And I have no idea why this was decided as the penultimate sport to display. Sue and I were stunned at the beauty of the trampoline finals--why didn't we get to see more of that? And what about Judo? I didn't even see highlights of that. And Tae Kwon Do? All I saw was a brief highlight reel about the Cuban kicking a Ref in the head, on purpose--that should have been prime time front and center.

My wife's a former Junior Olympics medalist in discus. There wasn't any coverage for that--and an American took gold in Discus. Sue syas though that they never televise the non-running sports of track & field. That's sad.

I remember in the past there were special channels you could order for the games, so that you could see more things....Hell, I'd expect at least that NBC would devote most of the day to the games, but no. Daytime TV garbage reigns over Olympic awesomeness. Not only that, but it's sad that the games didn't start until Prime Time. We should have had 24/7 coverage with only breaks for the news. All the other shows are completely unnecessary. We only get the Olympics ever four years; why limit our experience even more?

The announcers also need to shut the hell up. Especially during the diving. That woman announcer, I don't remember her name, constantly criticized everything anyone did, and almost always under-scored the athletes' scores compared to the judges. These people are the world's best, I don't want to hear how they fucked up a tuck or left their feet straight. I wanted to be amazed by a prowress I'll never know. I don't need to hear nitpicky garbage from some announcer trying to fill the tv silence.

Commercials. I swear NBC orchistrated the Olympics footage to be actually less air time than commercial time. Seriously, they'd show two dives, cut to commercial. Show another dive, cut to commercial. I know commercials are quickly overruning our TV land, but they were especially bad during the Olympics.

So what did I like? The atheletes. Everyone who competed was fantastic. China did a great job hosting (although they really spent way too much money putting it all together (I hope they don't let their Olympic grounds fade into decripitude like Athens)).

Well Enough wining for me. Here's to hoping that London's Olympics get better coverage, less fucking volleyball and more diversity.

The good news is that now that the Olympics are over, I won't be watching anything except movies again. Ahh Netflix, you are my friend.

Success in the job market

2008-06-30T04:41:00.002-04:00

So Friday's interview went really well. In fact, it went so well, that Behrend offered me two sections of Comp for the fall semester. The pay's not quite good enough for me to leave my dayjob yet, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. I'm totally pumped; not only do I have a teaching job, but it's one at the ideal location, and now that I've found a job I can spend my mornings writing instead of job hunting. Good stuff.

Wish me luck

2008-06-26T08:11:00.001-04:00

On Friday, I'll be interviewing at Penn State Behrend for an adjunct position teaching two sections of Composition. Wish me luck!

Publishing Update and the other two thirds

2008-06-25T04:30:00.003-04:00

Publishing Update:

"Everything Ends" will appear in the inaugural issue of A Capella Zoo. It should be due out around October-ish.

As for the rest of D&D 4th Edition, overall I think things went in a real good direction. The Monster's Manual, especially, was great. They did a lot of things in it that make the life of the DM a lot easier: no more rolling HPs for monsters, no more guestimating monsters to match the level of the party, hell 4th edition even includes lore data. The artwork in there is pretty great too. My only real complaint with the Monster's Manual is more of a semantics thing--I don't care for the Demons and Devils concept; I much rather liked the 2nd ED Tanar'ri and Baatezu...but really that's a nerd-point that matters little in the grand scheme of things.

As for the new Dungeon Master's Guide, I didn't find it to offer much for the old Hat DM like myself. It has a lot on world creating, encounter creating, and even a little on crowd control (as in how to control your players at the gaming table). I think, had I found the book 18 years ago, when I was starting out in D&D, I would have become a good DM a lot faster. It's well put together, but since they dumped a lot of the former DMG stuff into the PHB (magic items and the like), there really isn't as much in the DMG that an experienced gamer needs to have.

So overall, D&D 4th is a clear triumph over the clunky garbage of 3rd and 3.5rd, but I still think WotC is missing the boat on the Role-Playing aspect of D&D. It was there before 3rd edition, and I'm certain that the miniature rules are what's currently destroying the Role-playing nature of the game, but mechanically, it seems like the game will run pretty clean. I just wish they would have included more non-combat related spells/powers/abilities, or Perhaps one thing that should have been in the DMG: a guide on how to create your own powers and the like.

A One-Third Impression

2008-06-17T04:22:00.003-04:00

As most of you know (If you don't, welcome to the club), I've been a long time D&D nerd. At an age in my life where most of my friends have lost the time to play, my wife and I soldier on...adventuring on our nightly walks with Molly. Though our playstyle has evolved pretty far from the ruleset, I still get a kick out of new source books, and under such pretense, I picked up a copy of the new 4th edition rules. Since I finished plowing through the Player's Handbook yesterday, I'm going to offer up a 1/3 review of the new face of D&D.

Before I begin, let it be known that I'm somewhat old school. I came into D&D at the height of 2nd edition AD&D, and immediately hated and scoffed at all that was 3rd edition for its entire lifecycle (with the exception of the two Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance PS2 ports, to which, 3rd Edition rules worked wonders). In essence, I felt that 3rd edition was a dumbing down and a 180 about face to the 2nd edition rules: roleplaying opportunities decayed into infinite skill/power checks, and everyone wanted miniatures combat so they could use their silly feats. So, long story short, the few 3rd ed books I did buy, were mainly for the artwork, and ideas; I tossed all the rules and replaced with a bastardization of 2nd edition and my own house rules.

I was fully expecting to toss out 4th edition just as quickly, but I've seen several improvements upon 3rd edition, and what's more, an actual evolution that feels right for the D&D name. What do I mean by that? Well, originally, D&D 3rd edition was supposed to be a sort of simplification of 2nd Ed. AD&D rules (I guess the "Advanced" was causing WotC to lose customers or something). But, to all appearances, I think 3rd Ed. ended up being by far more complex than anything 2nd Ed. had done. 4th Ed. is a clear simplification of rules. It's also a very baseline release. WotC (that's Wizards of the Coast, the current owner of the D&D name), in its unending pull for massive amounts of money, drops several thousand hints to bigger and better things you can do for your PCs in upcoming books (that will probably also hit you at $35 per pop). I like that. 4th Ed. embraces the KISS principle in initial Racial/Class offerings. It also has a compact array of spells, powers, equipment, and feats so that anyone can sit down and whip up a pretty decent character on the fly. Content-wise, the new Edition is written clearly enough that a 10 year old initiate will be off the hook excited about it, and yet still with enough interesting stuff that old hats like myself can pull something out of the reading.

Instead of giant blocks of text, I'm going to break into list mode for things I like and dislike with the PHB:
What I like:

The new powers working: At Will/Encounter/Daily <-- this is all very smart
Wizards have become more versatile and less weak seeming--to some effect they can sling a lot more magic per day, and the At Will cantrips do a great job of making their minor magic abilities shine in ways I've always envisioned
Finally, Rogues are not completely shat upon by the rules.
Paragon and Epic tiers are well defined at the get go.
Implements for spell casters (such as rods, staves, wands, holy items) are now integral and pretty slickly incorporated
Overall magic Items have become somewhat more generic, but they serve as a good template for creating a lot of different items. Also, the inclusion of magic items in the PHB is smart.
I'm so glad that they dropped the Threat rating garbage for monsters. Also, from briefly thumbing the Monstrous Manual, I see that they've added lots of flavor text, stuff for what you can learn based on monster lore, tactics, and finally, fixed HP counts for monsters. At a glance, all of this looks very accommodating for no-pre-planning DMs like myself.
Healing Surges, though completely non-realistic are a kind of cool idea, and well implemented.
The God-related Skills are a nice touch.
Halflings have finally become something interesting (neither 2nd or 3rd edition could capture anything interesting for this short-statured race.) They're kinda Kender-like now, and I like that a lot.
Dragonborn and Eladrin are pretty decent as far as new races go.
Retraining is a great idea.
Feats actually seem to fit into this edition in a non-clunky way.

What I don't like:

Almost all the powers in the PHB are combat oriented. I want to see more full-figured powers. Alteration magic, for example, is almost completely non-existent currently.
Some former spells have become rituals, and currently take too long to cast (seriously, ten minutes before your knock spell fires? come on.)
miniature combat. Every time I've ever tried it, it destroys my mental image of the battle scene. I wish WotC would leave wargaming to the folks over at Games Workshop. D&D has never, in my mind at least, been known for its miniatures combat rules. I think 2nd Edition did the best at handling this--they kept it as a supplement. A lot of powers and feats now require squares and all that positioning garbage; I think it would have been easier to have some of that more vague, so that it could fall into the standard realm of DM describing the combat, and players reacting. We've never had trouble keeping all of it in our heads.
Tieflings, though I love them, have really become very generic, losing all of their glorious chaos in appearance, function, and role. This makes me very sad.
It looks like the beautiful 2nd Ed. view of the Multiverse, crystal spheres and the like has been shattered. D&D 4th ed. talks about a lot less in terms of primes, planes and the stuff in between. The Astral is super heavily built up, but the planes, seem, for all purposes non existent beyond the old Inner planes, now called Elemental Chaos. To supplant, they've added Fey worlds and I think the shadow realm, but I think overall, Planescape was one of TSR's greatest creations, and it saddens me that they're throwing out a lot of the beautiful madness of that campaign setting.
The Open Gaming License is no more. WotC, you are a bunch of greedy dumbasses for dropping the OGL in 4th Ed. Shame on you for creating a beautiful 3rd party explosion with 3rd edition only to cut off that world with your new baby.
Plate armor for only 50gp?! Madness I tell you.

I think really, that's about all I can say at this juncture. Overall, I think 4th edition is a big improvement over 3rd, and so far I like it enough to be willing to give up on the (now almost 20 year old!) 2nd ed rules.

End of an Age

2008-06-04T05:04:00.004-04:00

So now I'm graduated. After two years, a lot of fun, hardship, and other bits in between, I am a Master of Fine Arts. How's it feel? Same as always, but different.

I guess the big thing that everyone says is, "well it'll feel different when you don't have to send out a packet." True. But at the same time, I have to keep going, keep writing, but now without deadlines, and that's (for me at least) the true test of my experience. To me, the only difference between a student and a "professional writer" is that students still feel the need for implanted structure; something to force them to do what they want to do--to write. Supposedly, by the time we graduate, we should feel that deep-gut need to write on our own rather than on someone else's timetable. Or at least that's how I see it.

In that vein, I think I'll probably be successful. I have a dedicated time of day (4AM - 7AM) to write every day, and for the most part, it seems to be working out. Plus too, there are other opportunities for "packets:" submitting stories, job hunting, setting up reading/lecturing gigs.

I guess the trick for me will be to keep my goals pretty high, yet attainable. Currently, I'm looking to finish Not an Autobiography this year. I'm also hoping to snag a teaching job before the year's out as well.

I'll end with some fun statistics:

Before grad school: 2 publications, maybe 4 rejections, 6 total submissions

During grad school: 4 publications, 68 rejections, 90 total submissions, 2 contest wins, 1 runner up, 1 Pushcart Nomination

For the visual folks, I paper my office's closet with all my rejections:

And here are the acceptances:
So as you can see, it's a long tiring road, but that, I guess, is the magic of a graduate program like Spalding. Before I started, I wasn't writing all that regularly, and I wasn't seriously trying to get published beyond the couple stories that college workshops polished up all nice and pretty. But as I progressed through the program, I began to develop a stronger sense of my goals as a writer, as well as an academic. And I found as each semester waxed into the next, my neurosis about having to write and then going upstairs and staring at a blank screen slowly disappeared. So while I may be spending a lot less time in front of the computer, the time spent here feels a lot more productive than the time I used to spend here, and that, I suppose is a good thing.

So all in all, having a MFA isn't all that different, other than the fact that I can apply for a real career with it, and it's conditioned me into a more structured writer, and helped me net some publications, and meet wonderful new writer friends, and well, I guess it was a pretty good idea afterall.

Louisville, Kate Nash, and a smattering of random

2008-05-24T08:59:00.003-04:00

So residency is here again, and though it may be futile for me to blog about Louisville since most of my readership is either currently here with me or recently graduated, but WTFN (as in Why the Fuck Not), right?

Although it's only Saturday, and I'm sure I'll be tired and cranky by Thursday, Residency looks to be very very well laid out in terms of planning and sluffing and overall interest in what's going on. Workshop this res for me looks to be particularly good--I really enjoyed all of the pieces, and they were all very thematically different. AND, I get to be workshopped first. Shut up.

Sue, Molly and the fam are due in Thursday and Friday. I'm a little sad that they'll all miss my readings and lectures

Lecture: Structural Screwity: A Brief Guide to Reading and Writing Experimental Fiction

Tuesday, May 27 @ 1:30 PM ELC Lectorium

Reading: from "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" (2008 Kentuckiana Metroversity Contest Winner)

Thursday, May 29 @ 1:30 PM ELC Lectorium

But, since the first thing everyone said to me at Residency went like this: "Hi Drew, How are the baby and Sue? Got any pictures?" I think everyone will be generally happy to see them, and I'll be happy to see my wife and baby (which I already miss terribly). Win-win.

On to new musics:
Thanks to the wonders of my favorite online radio, Pandora, I've found several new bands and other musical type groups that I'm very much obsessed with lately. Kate Nash is at the forefront of this new wave in my musical tastes. Kate's music reminds me a little of Bjork, a little of Anna Nalick, a little of the Dresden Dolls, and a lot of none of them. She has a very [for me] unique sound and sings in a lovely cockney. Her songs are pretty bawdy, and very story-esque. Normally I can't hear lyrics for shit, but because she uses the cockney accent, and because her instrumentation is pretty simple, her lyrics shine out. I first got hooked on her music with the song "Merry Happy," but since I've bought the album, nearly every track is fantastic. My favorites include "Foundations," "The shit song," "Birds," "Dickhead," and "Pumpkin Soup." I guess Kate also won best breakthrough artist in england for last year. I hope she sticks around, because I thoroughly love her music.

I've also, thanks to Pandora, been finding a number of more instrumental bands that I really dig: The Section Quartet (like Apocalyptica, they redo rock songs with their strings.), The Last Cord (very dark instrumentals), Matmos (kinda weird, but also good), and Tom Waits (probably some of the most miserable music I've ever heard. I love his voice and the misery).

Ok I guess that's it. I lied about the smattering of random. I'm sure you don't mind.

Publishing Update

2008-05-03T23:28:00.002-04:00

Good News,

"Ice Dune, 1983-2007" will appear in the Summer 2008 edition of 94 Creations, a literary magazine run by Spalding Alum Adriena Dame.

Enact Social Change

2008-04-30T06:28:00.005-04:00

Lately over at The Warrior Poet Group, Rod, Dave, and I, in addition to discussing the nature of literature and writing in general, have decided to take up the cross of social change as part of our mission. In addition to adding several groups to our website in the hopes of supporting them and raising awareness, we've decided to also start up a blog, called Warrior's Song. The focus of our blog is to act as, to use Rod's words,

a platform to enact change when we otherwise might not know how. There are a lot of things I'd like to see change in the world, but I'm not always sure where to start or what to do--a problem I don't think I'm alone in. The blog will 1) help us feel like we're doing something when we're at a loss of what else to do, and 2) keep action on our minds.

Our goal at WPG, then is two fold: ensure the advancement of literature despite heavy competition from marginalization and mainstream media, and do so while supporting institutions that value the earth, as well as humanity as a whole. Hopefully, our mission will infect all of our friends, and a true literary and cultural revolution can begin to take hold. So if you have a moment, add our blog to your RSS feed, and maybe you'll see something that will help either yourself or someone around you.

Resting on my hotel bed, I compose

2008-04-10T20:40:00.003-04:00

myself after a 6.5 mile walk around state college. A walk that, according to my friend, Gmaps Pedometer, burned 1048 calories. Nice. Surprisingly during/after said walk, I never got hungry for dinner, so I'm guessing the lunch I had at Plyler's Buffet on the way to State college had a full trucker caloric intake of 10,605 calories. It was worth it though. Strangely enough, there were some English ladies (as in Tea and Crumpets not wah wah wah 19th Century Russian Lit wha wha wha). English ladies in Brookfield, PA was, well pretty strange, but also somewhat cool.

If I had an accent, I'd be an English one, and I'm not talking "cup 'o tea, with the missus kind", I'm talking "oi git y'r fookin' arse off me bumpa 'fore me garden breaks open y'r bib n' brace." When I'm alone in foreign places like I am today, I often consider trying to uphold an accent for all conversations....become someone else for a day. Unfortunately, my anti-social nature precludes me from most social interaction, and I generally don't keep up the charade outside my head.

In any event, I've never really been to State College Before. Sure, I was here once in high school with my physics class to look at their nuclear reactor, but we didn't really walk around. So the goal on my walk today was two fold: 1. find gifties for my wife and baby (because all dads have to come back with presents when they go to faraway places. It's a law of fatherhood) 2. observe strangers.

So I did a lot of wandering. I found that College and Beaver streets had plenty of shops and restaurants, so I kinda wandered around there for a while. As I looked at people, I noticed that State College is a lot like a big city; no one smiles, no one notices you; everyone is invisible. I like anonymity but, I really felt almost alien here. Perhaps it's because I'm a decade older than a good chunk of the population, or because I just don't think/act/like a college student anymore (did I ever think/act like a college student? <---maybe for a minute, week).

My observations: America is homogenizing. We're getting fatter. Cell phones are ubiquitous. I didn't feel bad for listening to my headphones because everyone else was doing the same thing.

I remember college being more divided, clique wise. Granted, I only walked a small area, but I'd say 90% of the people I saw fit into a general category of sameness. I saw only a handful skaters, and hippies, and no other groups. Where oh where did all the goth kids go? Punks? Emo? anything? Everyone had that Old Navy, Gap, Abercrombie shit look. Everyone drove expensive cars--I've never seen more Mercedes, BMWs, Volvos, and muscle cars...Isn't state college really expensive? Where the fuck are they getting money to shop for homoginity clothes AND have fancy cars?

We're getting fatter. In a way, I think this is a good thing, to a degree. I'm talking to you, girls. Thanks to all the friends over at Al Key Hall, there weren't all that many rail thin guys and gals floating around. Most people had substance. And I think that's good. It's good because I used to religiously watch America's Next Top Hot Model, and always rooted for the Plus Size model. I don't follow the show so much anymore because, well, the plus size girl never wins...and honestly 10 is not Plus! Fuck 10 is like the "don't go any lower than that, sister" mark for me. The last episode I watched, the girls were bitching at the one girl because she was a 0. A fucking 0. C'mon, who could fall in love with something so thin? That's why I love my wife. She's short. She's beautiful. She has curves, and she's not going to get rid of them because America wants her to. So bravo to all you other girls out there who don't believe that 2, 4, 6 are sexy. You can be healthy and a 10-12. You'll look good, feel good, and not count calories when Ben and Jerry come over for dinner, after dinner, and midnight snacks.

Cellphones: Jesus Christ. I hope someone develops a Cellphone Bomb. Hate em. 'nuff said. Got behind 3 people on the way from Erie to here that nearly caused accidents thanks to Cellphones--one near my house actually; he decided that while he was taking his call at the wheel, he'd also create a new lane to get from Rt 5 to 955; nearly ran me into the meridian. I think he was a priest. Fuck you Church.

Music: One time, a long time ago, my friends and I were talking about superpowers. The first one I listed was "appropriate background music for all situations." I think this one is starting to come true, on an individual level. Everyone down here has iPods, earbuds. Tuned in, tuned out. I was doing the same, and I noticed that all the stores had their music up real loud, so you had to listen to what they wanted, unless, of course you turned your shit up louder.

Tomorrow the conference starts. I present on Saturday. I'm hoping to meet some old profs, and maybe find me a job. That would be the all time best experience. Either way, I'm looking forward to this weekend--especially since I'll get to see my wife and baby on saturday after the conference (I've missed them much this week).

I forgot to bring my camera cord, so I can't upload any of the photos I took today, but maybe I'll edit and add later.

Contest Update

2008-04-06T19:49:00.002-04:00

My Story, "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" was announced the winner of the 2008 Kentuckiana Metroversity Writing Competition for Graduate Fiction. In addition, it will be appearing in Human Voices an anthology of this year's winners.

Zen and the Art of Revision

2008-04-04T22:22:00.004-04:00

'some retarded code
public sub main()
dim CheeZtitle as string
dim nerdOmeter as integer
CheeZtitle="Zen and the Art of Revision"
nerdOmeter = 0
nerdOmeter = IncreaseNerdPower(CheeZtitle)
msgbox("Nerd it up to the power of " & cstr(NerdOMeter) & " nerd points.", vbInformation, "Nerd Power")
End
end sub
public function IncreaseNerdPower(byref BlogTitle as string) as integer
return BlogTitle.length
end function

I think that perhaps, I do need to stop coding so much. Anyway, over at my friend, Val Gryphin's blog, recently there was some discussion on Revision. I thought I'd take a few minutes and lay out my approach to an often groaned about aspect of writing.

Personally, Revision is my favorite place to be. I'm infinitely more comfortable fixing something I already have than trying to make up something new. As such, here are some tips, methods I use to help organize and get the most out of my revision process:

Give the story some time. Seriously. Once you're finished with a draft, forget about the story for as long as you can. Given the hectic nature of my life, 10 minutes usually works for me :P, but two to three days of non-attention is always better than going right into revision after placing the last period.
Start all Revisions as a new filename. I use a sort of Programmer's versioning pattern. I'll start a story out as Story 0.1, and with each pass, I'll Save As and increment the Version number. That way, I never lose any prior edits. Some programs have integral Versioning, but after playing with Open Office's Version handling, I found that making my own versions is much easier. Doing this will also free you up to taking bigger chances and changing things more drastically, because you can always go back to an older version if this particular fork fails on you.
Revise in layers. Don't try to do everything at once. You'll get bogged down after two or three pages. Pick a layer and do a full pass doing nothing but that layer. If you see something else that does need to be changed, make a note and keep going. Try not to break out of your current process.
When using layers, save the nitpicky grammatical bits for last. Your last two passes should be. 1. Read for grammar and 2. read aloud.
Find yourself a Sue. Sue, love me as she may, has no problem telling me EXACTLY when something I've written has turned to shit. This is important for two reasons: 1. it knocks the ego-maniacal bullshit out of your head, and 2. It helps you hone in on what isn't working. This is especially important for people like me who do write in experimental/postmodern forms because weird shit tends to piss off readers easily, so it absolutely has to pass the bullshit test. I'm sure that Sue would be your Sue if you pay her in chocolate and sweet cool drinks (maybe).
(Layer) Break your story down to its structural roots. Analyze how your story fits to the Freytag triangle of Dramatic flow. Plot out exposition, rising action, climax, denouement and make sure it all balances right. Rough approximations are Exposition up to 1/3, and very very very little denouement. This is especially important in postmodern/experimental works. If you aren't adhering to a Freitag triangle for your story progression, you have to have some sort of structural flow, and that flow has to balance out. If your structure is failing, your reader will either become lost or bored due to lack of tension and/or lack of an idea of what the hell is going on.
(Layer) Once you've analyzed your structure, start asking Why. Why doesn't Clare paint anymore? Why can't she stay in a relationship? Why does she hate her job? These why's should come directly from the characters' struggles in your story. If you can't answer any question with the text, do some freewriting in the voice of your character--see what comes up. This is a great tool for helping you figure out areas to cut from the story, because you can look at a particular section and say, "Why does this need to be in the story?" And if you can't find a need, then you know it's time for that section to go. I've used this method to cut several stories from 40+ pages down into the 20ish range.
(Layer) After Structure and analyzing for necessity, take a look at your characters. What are their core struggles in the story? How are they communicated through tension? How have you used elements of the story to make the reader care/not care about your characters? And are they balanced? No one should be black and white good/evil, so how have you added humanity to your villains and darkened your heroes?
(Layer) Take a look at the length of your story. Is it too short, too long? Most literary journals anymore seem to want stories under 8000 words. That's hell for longer story writers like myself. In this pass, look again at cutting unnecessary pieces, but also look at cleaning up language a bit.
(Layer) The language layer. I'm a HUGE advocate against passive voice and adverbs, and I dedicate at least one layer pass to clean up as much of it as I possibly can. Anything with "has, had, is, was, were, have, will, would" modified verbs is up for the chopping block as far as I'm concerned. I also really hate sentences that start with "It." But your language pass could be different, and don't just focus on grammatical faux pas, also take a moment to think about the story's narration. Who is telling/writing the story? Is the voice of the story consistent with this teller's voice? How can you make that voice stronger. In my case, each story in my collection is "written" by the central character, and as such, each character has his/her own writerly quirks. Clare tends to lean towards thicker more fluid language, heavy in alliteration and a sort of poet's mindset, while Johnny is all postmodern fuckery with a particular interest in pointing out every cliche that he uses. The narrator character takes a sort of middle ground between the two, since he's more or less a combination of them. Even if you don't name or have a narrator in your story, think about the language of delivery, think about diction. How can you amp up your presentation by improving the language?
(Layer) Look for repeated story strings. This is where you go through your story and make sure that all the things that your characters see and do have a chance to reflect throughout the story. If your character is a painter, this is the pass you use to ensure that somehow you work her painterly mindset into her daily actions (paint crusted fingernails, warped canvases in the corner, etc). Add in several small details throughout. Also look for things at the end of your story that have significance, and make sure that that significance is weighted throughout the story. Don't drop a bomb at the end without vaguely hinting towards it all along. Also, if you have any Red Herrings, kill them now.
(Layer) Do a grammatical hard edit. I've never been able to do this, but I've had former CW professors suggest that you try reading the story backwards--this will help break your mind away from the story so that you're actually looking at the page instead of reading from memory. It's a good idea, but I've never been able to keep my attention focused long enough to do that. This kind of edit is best done when the story is completely out of your head, otherwise it's hard to keep your mind focused on low-level stuff without starting to skim. This layer is also best done on a physical hard copy--current screen resolutions are significantly lower than what our eyes are used to when we read a printed text, resulting in as much as a 25% slow down in online reading speeds (I read that somewhere, but don't have a direct quote, so trust me that it's true-ish?). Because of slower online reading speeds, we tend to skim a lot more. So when you're doing the hard edit, do it on paper.
(Layer) Read your story out loud from start to finish. I can't tell you how many times I've found grievous problems by doing this. It really helps improve the flow of your language, and also it gives you the opportunity to hear and adjust the aural side of the story. While oral presentation isn't as common for fiction, I think it's just as important as it is for poets.

That's about all I can think of right now. Next time you do a revision, give a couple of these steps a try, and see if they work for you. I'd love to hear if any of them helped/failed for your situation.

Long Road to Ruin

2008-03-31T21:44:00.003-04:00

Today, I kick off my post with a nod to the Foo Fighters. They've always been a band that I've liked and respected, but never listened to seriously until the local college radio station started playing "The Pretender" on heavy rotation. I can't get enough of the new album. Simply, they rock.

Work's been significantly horrific lately--I'm building a project that's guaranteed to waste money, piss people off, and take up a lot of time. But hey, I'm just a goon, and who cares about office automation that saves millions? Not my company. They like making employees feel bad on many levels.

But the point of today's blog isn't to bitch about work (hell, I could get fired for that), It's to talk about the chapter's end booming right up into the presence of my present: The end of Graduate School. In two months, I'll be a Master. Of words. And hopefully by the end of the year, I'll have a finished book.

I sent in my thesis on saturday, and now all that's left are a few things (with ridiculously short deadlines): 1. Workshop Piece 2. Prep for PCEA Conference 3. Warrior Poet Group Creative Assignment 4. Prep for Graduating Lecture and Reading 5. Comment on Workshop stuff.

The worst part? I'm ready to take a break. Yesterday. But I have till the 9th for the Workshop, PCEA, and Warrior Poet Deadlines. I'm sure Rod'll let me slide a little on the WPG (though he may break an arm if I slide more than a day), but the other two are pretty daunting at the moment. For Workshop, I'm taking this story, "The Poetics of Memory" and trying to fix the structural outer story so that it exists as a complete arc in its own vein to mirror the interior arc. Hopefully, the ideas I have tonight will help facilitate that. For the PCEA Conference, I have to condense a 33 page ECE into a 15 minute presentation, and a 23 page story into a similarly timed reading. I don't imagine that portion should be too rough, but it'll still take a couple of days.

Once everything school is done, I'm looking forward to a few days of doin' nuthin' with the family, demolishing my basement, and maybe even playing a little Rockband (the best type of crack/cocaine available).

That's the news from Erie, the city where the weather always sucks, and I like it that way.

Cloverfield Revisited

2008-03-17T22:33:00.003-04:00

A little while ago, I posted my reaction to Cloverfield (Here). Since then, an interesting conversation has begun in the comments of that post. I'd like to respond to them, as well as put some more information forward.

In case you don't want to read TFA, my original essay said essentially this: Cloverfield failed in my eyes as a postmodern film because it turned its back on too many conventions without making appropriate adjustments to its structure to allow for the movie to stand on its own. Had the movie been direct to Avant Garde, I wouldn't have minded, but since Cloverfield was a major mass marketed hype machine, the movie failed to be truly accessible to the masses. Because it isn't accessible to the masses, Cloverfield is a prime reason why folks shy away from attempting to view/consume postmodern/experimental works. Cloverfield's broken structure leaves the audience feeling gypped, nauseous, and saying, "now what?" Any piece of art/literature/film/etc that invokes such feeling on a large scale is somehow failing. And in today's content-starved culture, I feel it's a travesty for people to give a movie like this good scores when they say things like, "I didn't understand it, but it was awesome."

So that's the gist of what I said earlier. Before I start, I want to establish a few things that I hold to be true for modern film:

All big production films are mass marketed, meaning that they are written, produced and directed to be accessible to the largest demographic possible for their genre.
Movie-goers spend a lot of money at the theater (~$30 for 90 minutes entertainment anymore these days), and thus expect to be entertained.
No one likes to be made to feel dumb, especially when they're paying to be entertained.

Having said that, BlueNight, has posted a pair of fairly detailed rebuttals to my basic premise. His argument is that Cloverfield is indeed a successful postmodern experience. While I agree that the movie is indeed postmodern, this movie is by far not at all successful.

A large part of BlueNight's refutation revolves around classic identifiers of modernism vs. postmodernism, wheras Modernism = enlightenment/immersion and postmodernism = denial of enlightenment/metafictive form. In this binary system of identification, Cloverfield is indeed postmodern. There is no big reveal, and since the movie is a movie of a movie archived by the DOD, we are removed wholly from the actual experience. However, simply being postmodern doesn't make it good. Here's why it's not good:

Metafictive nature:
Metafiction is a tricky bird to play with. If done incorrectly it will entail frustration, anger, etc from your audience. The reason behind this is this: metafiction forces the audience into a state of instability and unfamiliarity. By far, realist/modernist experiences dominate our mental processes, so when you are forced to reckon with the notion that you are watching a film of a film, your mind has to do extra work to keep all the balls in the air (granted, you could ignore the metafictive nature and receive the work as a mondernist experience, but that would be denying the full effect of the piece). Furthermore, metafiction breaks the ontological wall between reality and fiction, or in this case, reality and the movie. In Cloverfield, we are shown the exterior framing of the DOD stamps, which tell us that we are about to see footage relating to an event that has already happened. Since this event happens in a clone of real-world NYC, our minds kick into overdrive to create a parallel ontological sphere where our real world NYC can become destroyed by said monster. This framing is further reiterated throughout the movie by the cuts to "best day ever" and the obviously amateur filming strategy. In a modernist world, we would be able to accept this as "Truth" and get on with the story, but since this is very obviously a postmodern metafictive construction, we also have to entertain ontological questions in addition to the modernist's epistemological questioning. And my big question regarding the ontology of Cloverfield is "Why." Why am I viewing DOD footage of a monster attack on this ontic sphere NYC? I've been placed in this position metafictively, but the metafictive nature of the movie doesn't resolve itself. Cloverfield opened the door to this ontology, but it doesn't give me, Joe audience, any Idea of what to do with it.

Let me give an example from literature to demonstrate. In John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," from very early on you have an authorial intrusion setting up the metafictional status of the story. The first intrusion, "A single straight underline is the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivalent to oral emphasis of words and phrases as well as the customary type for titles of complete works, not to mention." (Lost in the Funhouse p.72). At first glance, the reader is lost to the metafictional importance of this and several other authorial intrusions. All metafiction will cause initial confusion; it's an inherent danger of the form. The pay off comes when the metafiction resolves itself.

Here's another way to put it. Have you ever read a novel that was going along just fine, and then in the last 2 pages, one of the characters says, "and so that's why I wrote this book." Such a statement immediately throws the entire book into a metafictive state. We're reading a book written by a character within the book, but we didn't know this until the end. Usually when I encounter this, I end up walking away angry because the metafictive nature of the book was tacked on as an after effect. One that might make someone untrained in postmodern there say, "ooh a twist" but at the same time, this is something that is a grievous failure from the perspective of application and structure, because at this point, you've now made me say, "Why have I read this entire novel you wrote, without knowing you were writing it?" This is further problematized if the character-author wrote about him/herself in third person. Why?

In "Lost in the Funhouse," Barth slowly reveals to us that Ambrose, the story's protagonist is also the story's author. And in this slow, controlled reveal, we see that the writing of the story mirrors the structure and form of being lost in a funhouse, where funhouse becomes an allegory to both writing and life.

In Cloverfield, we've been given the same sort of "ooh a twist" kind of metafiction. Yes, it's framed by the DOD, but the DOD framing and the amateur filmmaking don't actively contribute to the structure of the movie. I'm not talking enlightenment, I'm talking structure. Structurally, Ambrose's authorial intrusions had to be there. I'm not entirely positive that any of the postmodern elements in Cloverfield had to exist. And my lack of confidence is brought on by all of the ontological questions left unanswered. Assuming that Joe Audience didn't partake in the alternative reality game, the movie offers very little content wise, but at the same time, it offers a lot of promise: Take this hyperreal NYC, add a monster, memories/fear from 9/11, and film it like Joe average would film an incident like this. Also take the DOD and slap some pre/post graphics to set up how this footage is relevant. Now, we've established this ontology. The failure here is that we have nothing to do with the ontology except to take it as it is delivered to us. By nature of the metafictive content, we are removed from the action, and we are also placed subjectively into a single experience of the attack. However, our viewpoint is objective because it comes from a camera's lens. Therefore, defying postmodernism, we are given "Truth" of what happened to that particular group. By referencing this "Truth" solely (i.e. we don't get anything else from the DOD but this amateur film), we are forced out of our ontological experience and back into an epistemological/modernist experience where we are immersed (save for the brief moments of "the best day ever") in the event.

I think it's pretty easy to see how things have "broken" in a postmodern structural sense here. If the movie were to retain it's subjective postmodern stance, it has to offer more subjectivity; we have to see others' struggles in the wake of disaster. Or, if that isn't available to us, we need to see Why this particular video is more important than all of the other experiences contained within the Cloverfield disaster. Why is this the most important event? Why is this the defining moment of the Cloverfield attack? What can we learn from it? What can we do with it in the future? All of these questions should have some sort of inkling to resolution for the ontic sphere of Cloverfield's NYC to be stable. Without these answers, we can't truly believe in the hyperreal representation of Cloverfield, and thus our connection to the world deteriorates.

BlueNight also challenged my interpretation on Cloverfield's dramatic structure. He contends that the movie follows Campbell's Mythic Hero Journey instead of Freytag's triangle of dramatic structure. While the story's protagonist does follow the pattern of the Mythic Hero, such a pattern is contained by the simpler Freytag triangle. Freytag's triangle has existed in drama since its birth with the Greeks, and is the de facto standard for dramatic interpretation. And the Mythic Hero cycle is just a more complex revision of the triangle (you still have exposition, rising action, climax and denouement in the cycle). But in truth, Cloverfield doesn't really prescribe to either form fully. It can't. The metafictive nature of the movie, denies a fully immersive plot arc focusing upon the protagonist (you'd have to throw out the DOD framing if you want to use the mythic hero). Since the movie opens with the DOD framing, we are forced to start our plot arc there. Because of the metafictive nature of the movie and its multiple temporal shifts, you really end up with three pieces on their own freytag triangles:
1. Framing elements: DOD stuff (largely unresolved)
2. The "best day ever" flashback arc
3. The primary action of Cloverfield
Each arc runs independently from the other, and this is where Cloverfield deviates from the structural norm. As we watch the movie, we constantly switch between each arc as they appear. Fortunately, we aren't too burdened by these arcs, as they all progress linearly, but at the same time, each arc is separate enough that there is a healthy amount of distance between them. While arcs 2 and 3 work in a pretty traditional flashback manner, filling in character details to aid the viewer with the present, the DOD arc remains problematic. It tells us only that we're about to watch a video of the incident. Once the video finishes, this arc closes without any further mention, rising action, or resolution. In essence, it is a dead arc, and combined with its metafictive failures, we're forced back to reality as the credits roll without any real notion of what to do with what we've seen.

I guess that's the overall difference, in my opinion, between modernism and postmodernism. In modernism/realism, you receive an experience and you walk away content with that experience. With postmodernism, you are forced to question the nature of an experience, and enlightenment comes out of successful questioning/analysis/interaction with the ontology before you. I can't satisfy my questions towards Cloverfield based upon the information given to me, and to me, that's a sign of postmodern failure. And furthermore, as an avid supporter of postmodern/experimental forms, I think it's a particularly spectacular failure because of the sheer amount of marketing hype that went into the movie. Think about The Matrix (just the first one). It had a giant pile of philosophy packed into it, and it was really hyped up. The result? A global hit with several philosophical endeavors stemming from it, as well as a universal sense of postmodern satisfaction/enlightenment.

With Cloverfield, most of the movie audience boo'd the ending. That's a disconnect. A failure. People didn't agree with some element of the movie. Granted, most of the people were likely looking for a modernist explanation/defeat of the monster, but I don't think such an explanation was ever necessary. All we really needed was proper structuring and usage of postmodern style. I think the movie would have gone over a lot better had the makers just gone a little farther in establishing good postmodern form, rather than sloppy "we're going to look so smart for invoking metafiction and nontraditional storytelling" elements.

BlueNight, I do agree that Cloverfield is postmodern, but I fail to see how it succeeds in entertaining the largest demographic audience possible. I don't really see it succeeding on a small demographic. I think it succeeded largely because mass marketing told us that it was an awesome movie, and anymore these days we listen to what we're told instead of making our own decisions--a point very accurately brought up by Susane's comment: "People want soo badly for something new and exciting that they are willing to accept CRAP just because it is different. I want good different.....not the crap."

And now that I've written a book, what's everyone else have to say on the matter?

Modern Fairytales

2008-03-07T22:03:00.005-05:00

Today, Sue and I went on a date. In a blizzard. We went to a new [chain] restaurant called O'Charley's and had some fairly decent lunch faire. Then we spun tires through snow to the movie theater where we saw Penelope starring Christina Ricci.

I'm sure all of you remember the flaming explosion post I did on Cloverfield--it was quintessential film evil. Penelope on the other hand did a wonderful job as both a film and social commentary.

Here's a real quick synopsis: Old money blueblood family has a curse put upon it that the first girl born will have the face of a pig. Several generations of boys later, Penelope is born with a snout and pig ears. Her parents, freak out, fake her death, and Penelope grows up isolated in a hidden room of the family mansion. At 18, her neurotic mother starts trying to find a suitor, because the curse says something about Penelope needing to be loved by "one of her own." Well blue-blood old-money kids are all a bunch of whiney, stupid, mama's-boys looking to take over daddy's CEO chair in a few years. And once Penelope reveals herself, they bolt like little scared bitches. Long story short, one suitor decides to sell Penelope's existence to a tabloid, and that involves another blue-blood to act as infiltrator to get a picture of Penelope for the news, and well second guy and Penelope kinda fall in love through their daily conversations (with Penelope hiding behind a 1 way mirror). Rising action, climax, denouement from there.

It avoided many of the cliches found in romantic films
It handled the "this plot revolves completely around miscommunication" issue nicely, and though there was a fair amount of miscommunication, it was well done and felt natural to the story progression
Christina Ricci wasn't super disgusting thin; she looked normal, and healthy (and some how made a pig nose look cute)

Here's why I liked the movie: Our society places an incredible amount of attention and substance on outward appearances, and when we encounter something un-like our idealized vision of beauty, we react with revulsion and often surgical corrective measures. Penelope embodies several aspects of appearance that are considered unattractive in our standards:

She is 5'1" tall. She does not have long legs, nor the chiseled man-body that is so popular on the girls these days
She has a pig nose and pig ears
She dresses in a cute, but conservative manner--longish skirts, stockings, no cleavage, etc
She is a brunette
She does not have blue eyes
She is very intelligent

Even if you factor out the fantastical porcine appendages, the neurotic mother in the movie, would likely still have had a hard sell to get "unappealing" Penelope married to another old-money blueblood dipshit. These bluebloods are analogous to the trendsetting American elite--pop stars, etc. They influence what us commoners should believe. Their shallowness is readily apparent because they instantly turn out anyone unlike themselves--even if the dissimilar one is also old-money.

So what happens? (spoiler alert from here on) A commoner falls for Penelope, but circumstances keep the two apart for a good chunk of the movie. Still, even though the commoner was away from Penelope, her strength of character pushed him to stop gambling, and start playing piano again. She inspired him to clean up his act and do better, and even if they didn't reunite at the end of the movie, Johnny became a better person because he took the time to get to know Penelope, instead of taking her for her face value.

By the end of the movie, Penelope admits that she likes herself as she is, snout and all, and this breaks the curse. What a great message, eh? Learn to like yourself for how you are; don't just chop off your nose because you don't like it; embrace it, accept it, accept yourself.

By this time, Johnny has also accepted Penelope, though he believes she doesn't want to see him. On Halloween, she seeks him out with a Penelope mask on (her own curse is lifted, but the Penelope mask is the costume of the year). Once Johnny realizes who she is, he kisses her before removing her mask; he kisses her despite her deformity, demonstrating that he too is willing to accept her for how she is and not how she is expected to be. This acceptance is contrasted sharply with the blue-blood counterpart, who, a few scenes before was about to marry Penelope to help restore his name (the city found out he leaked the Penelope stuff, and by that time Penelope was a beloved local celebrity) and before the wedding he said to his mother, "the thought of kissing her makes me want to vomit." Also at the alter, this boy smiled his most genuine smile, when Penelope said she wasn't going to marry him and fled.

Thus, the difference between classes is fully established. You have a shallow, rich upper class interested in only money and appearance, and the working class proletariat that sees through the exterior facade and embraces the spirit of relationship and connection.

As Americans, we're all under great pressure to lose weight, exercise more, dress better, and ultimately emulate the celebrities that bombard us from every angle. Penelope breaks from that expectation, and asks us to think about the real important things in life: relationships, love, and acceptance. If you have those qualities, (even if you've been beaten half-to-death with the ugly stick) you're immeasurably better off than your rich, pretty counterparts. You have depth, and all the good stuff life has to offer, because we all know how fast money and beauty can fade.

PCEA here I come

2008-03-03T23:11:00.002-05:00

I received word today that at least one of my proposals was accepted for the upcoming 2008 PCEA (Pennsylvania College English Association) conference coming up around the ides of April. I presented there once before in 2002 on an undergrad panel devoted to Edgar Allen Poe.

Since there are a number of professors from both IUP and Behrend attending the conference, I'm hoping that in addition to getting to present, I might be able to land a job somewhere.

I submitted proposals to read from my ECE, "Reestablishing Experience through Ontology: Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire and String" as well as from my story, "(Un/Re/I )Do"

It should be a good time to be had by all. More later.

Some words about Faulkner

2008-02-09T12:48:00.000-05:00

When I started out as an English major in college, I was quickly enamored with William Faulkner's usage of language. Reading As I Lay Dying, I learned that fiction doesn't have to exist in a realm of plain language, but rather it can also incorporate the same type of dense language that you see being employed by poets. From there, I fell in love with other authors like Ann Pancake, and more recently Aimee Bender, Ben Marcus, and Ed Abbey. The dense language writing style, has led me to constantly look for ways to pare down my own fiction, cut out passivity, and make sure that every word's weight counts both aurally and textually.

Today's essay comes from Faulkner's collection of short stories. In it, I talk about his handling of death in two very different ways. What most impresses me with Faulkner's work in these stories is that he can express and capture the ambiguity of death in two very different ways (body and spirit) without sacrificing the power of each story.

The Mystery of Death in Faulkner's Fiction

The final section of William Faulkner's Collected Stories entitled Beyond presents itself with six stories exploring themes and topics either existing outside of his usual motifs, or revolving about supernatural occurrence. The theme of death reoccurs very differently in two stories from this section, “Beyond,” and “Carcassonne.” Both stories take the reader outside of the realm of the living and into a disorienting and distorted view of death and the beyond. Furthermore, each story focuses upon a different portion of the body in its post-death journey: “Beyond” explores the soul, while “Carcassonne” remains closer to the body itself.

Within “Beyond,” the main character, the Judge, dies in bed before the doctor, and transcends into a sort of limbo where other dead souls go to meet and spend time with each other. Faulkner carries the reader into this world along with the Judge without overtly mentioning his death. Rather, he meticulously feeds the reader context clues. At first he found himself unable to communicate to the others in his room as Chorly wailed over the death (Faulkner 782). Then as he left the house, his clothes magically appeared on his body: “he realized that he was still in his pajamas, so he buttoned his overcoat... 'Now, if i Just had my....' He looked down at his feet....He looked at his shoes...He touched his hat...He clasped his ebony stick” (Faulkner 782-783). And with the clothes magically appearing, Faulkner has established that the soul of the Judge has now separated from his body, and appears as he would in his own mind.

Furthermore, as the limbo scene develops, Faulkner controls the language in such a way that the Judge slowly surmises that he's surrounded by other dead people, but in the same sense, he doesn't let any character directly refer to themselves as being dead. The first man the Judge meets refers to his death in abstraction, “'I had to do it...I was late. That's why I was driving fast. A child ran into the road. I was going too fast to stop. So I had to turn'” (Faulkner 784). And then later, the reader is fully clued in to this limbo setting when the man says “'Look for him here'” to the Judge, referring to the Judge's long dead son (Faulkner 785).

Once the limbo plane is fully established, Faulkner establishes it as a place of infinite existence, where scores of souls remain, waiting for loved ones and spending time with them before proceeding on to their final fates. However since the Judge, “detested crowds,” “came here to escape someone; not to find anyone,” (Faulkner 783, 784-785), and realized that this land remained static and unchanging when he learned that his son's pony “was just the right size for him,” he returns to the corporeal realm; returns to his body so that he could “proceed” onwards. (Faulkner 795, 798).

Through “Beyond,” Faulkner establishes a direct connection between the body and the soul even in death. This connection further is built upon within “Carcassonne.” Within “Carcassonne,” Faulkner has created two narrators, each a different aspect of the same being. One, the skeleton of the man, and the other his mind and soul. The mind, believes itself “on a buckskin pony...galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world” (Faulkner 895), but the skeleton “beneath an unrolled strip of tarred roofing,” only groans at the mind's attempt to leave, thinking of the pony as “destinationless,” and traveling “toward the blue precipice never gained” (Faulkner 895). In essence, the man remains motionless both physically and spiritually, though both dream of being free of their terrestrial connections, and connection from each other While the spirit tries to gallop away from the skeleton, the skeleton dreams of “swaying caverns and the grottoes [of the sea], and his body lay on the rippled floor, tumbling peacefully to the wavering echoes of the tides” (Faulkner 899).

However, while they dream of being separate, they remain conjoined, the skeleton grudgingly assisting the spirit by supplying the word “Chamfron,” as the spirit tries to describe his escape (Faulkner 899). In addition, the skeleton, knowing that it has died because of “that steady decay which had set up within his body on the day of his birth” (Faulkner 896-897) is forced to constantly stare at the spirit on his horse. The skeleton is forced to watch a spirit gallop onward to nowhere, not realizing that the body has died: “He could see the saddlegirth and the soles of the riders stirruped feet...thundering along in two halves and not knowing it, fused still in the rhythm of accrued momentum” (Faulkner 898).

In a similar, but slightly different way, Faulkner communicates the necessary connection between spirit and terrestrial body during death within “Carcassonne.” Whereas in “Beyond,” The Judge spiritually left his body only to return later before accepting death, the spirit and skeleton of “Carcassonne,” seem all too ready to fly apart as fast as possible, but as the story draws to a close, and the skeleton helps the spirit “perform something,” by supplying “Chamfon,” the two unite so that they may travel onward to whatever eternity awaits them (Faulkner 898-899). Through both stories, Faulkner establishes that the spirit doesn't just float away from the body upon death, but rather it lingers, or tries to escape, before it realizes that it needs to return to the body to transcend through the final gate of death.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. “Beyond.” Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1995. 781-798.
Faulkner, William. “Carcassonne.” Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1995. 895-900.

Further Introspection on the Topic of Posmodernism

2008-01-25T22:38:00.000-05:00

Last week, I talked about the failure of Cloverfield as an experimental/postmodern film. This week, I want to resurrect a nice little essay I wrote some time ago about John Barth's National Book Award winning Chimera. Like Cloverfield, Chimera uses a significantly different dramatic structure than our standard expectations, however, in this book, the dramatic structure sustains, and completes itself in a structurally and entertaingly sound manner, leaving us with a book that is both experimental and entertaining. Here's the Essay:

Narrative Schmarrative: Interesting Bits from Chimera

With a book such as John Barth’s Chimera, writing a paper examining its craft can become rather daunting. Which elements to choose? How can I relate through analyzing craft, the great feeling I get from reading a book so well written? Easy. Emulate his voice (But you’ve done that already--see “Self Serving [ ] [Another Essay I Wrote on John Barth {I tend to be very self referential at times}]”). Right. So rather than dive into emulation as a means of description, I think this time I’ll try to focus upon the narrative elements within this book, and hopefully avoid dropping myself into a large writing project. So narration it is.

About the book: Chimera, like the mythical creature is really three novellas, which are connected through one medium (which of course works in a couple of ways: self referral, connection to other works by Barth, and all appearing in the same book --> notice the three, chimera like aspect of the connections as well). Each novella examines some old myth, the 1001 nights, Perseus, and Bellerophon. However, in doing so, Barth examines these tales from different circumstances, such as from the point of view of Scheherazade’s sister Dunyazade, or Perseus at age forty looking back upon his life and wishing he was young and heroic again (likewise, somewhat, in the case of Bellerophon.) Therefore, though the stories told through the novel are largely unchanged from their original form (save that the language is spiced up), Barth tells the stories in a different manner in effect to revitalize an old lost form of literature, as mentioned in his essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” when talking about Jean Louis Borges’ Quixote (a novel where a fictional character authors Don Quixote). Barth describes this rejuvenating action because “[Borges] confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work” (31). Therefore we can expect to find similar with Barth’s treatment of these mythical subjects.

I guess what I’ll do here is devote a section upon his narrative actions within each of the three novellas.
SECTION 1: DUNYAZADIAD
The “Dunyazadiad,” as I’ve previously stated tells the tale of the 1001 Nights. However, the tale starts after Scheherazade has told the last tale, in the king’s brother’s bedroom, to be exact. However, the only indication that the reader is given alluding to the story starting after the end of the tales lies with the opening character, a set of double quotes—we are being told a tale. As it so happens, this tale starts on the 1000th night of Scheherazade’s storytelling. He narrates the tale in a kind of looping manner, making use of multiple narrators and viewpoints. Because of the looping story aspect of the novella, the structure of its plot is directly affected by its narration.
The entire first part of the three part novella is told as a massive monologue from the perspective of Dunyazade, which interestingly enough does not end with a complete thought: “Your brother’s docked; my sister’s dead; it’s time we joined them’” (38). Barth uses this open ending sentence as a sort of launching point into the next section and a more or less third person objective narration. Until the very end of the first chapter, the last lines to be exact, the reader has no real idea where Dunyazade is, nor does the reader know how far in the future this monologue is taking place. By doing this, Barth has set up a great deal of reader suspense, stringing us along, knowing that she is talking to Shah Zaman, brother of Shahryar, but not knowing the circumstances. Thus when we are revealed the location of the speaker, standing over Shah Zaman with a razor to his privates, we are interestingly justified for the great sense of suspense that has been building, a sense of suspense that would likewise be growing in Shah Zaman as Dunyazade neared the end of her story and likewise the possible end of his sex life. Thus the first section goes from the almost present (1000th night of the Nights) back to the pre-night days and then forward clear to the present—a large loop, with wavy bits in the middle (not all 1001 tales are retold).

The second chapter of the book follows a similar, yet slightly altered pattern. As I said, it’s told in 3rd objective, and the two argue back and forth during this middle section. However, while we do hear Dunyazade’s voice here, largely the chapter follows Shah Zaman’s tale concerning his role over the past six and some odd years with the raping/murdering thing. He then, like Dunyazade, loops back to the beginning and tells his tale to the present time, which of course has advanced some since the first chapter. In essence, Barth tells parallel tales in a strangely separate manner, which though Shah Zaman’s story is unwritten in the original publication of the 1001 Nights, its ending sufficiently meets the requirements of the original ending: “the royal couples…emerge from their bridal chambers after the wedding night, greet one another with warm good mornings…bestow Samarkand on the brides’ long-suffering father, and set down for all posterity The Thousand Nights and a Night” (55).

One of the rather interesting things that comes out of this double looping narrative is that it manages to create two almost equal climaxes in the story, of which the third chapter becomes the dénouement. The first climax comes at the very end of the first chapter and beginning of the second, as the reader is first shown the situation of Shah Zaman, and his impending and possible doom. Since he is allowed to tell his tale, we are again given rise of suspense, this time wondering if Dunyazade will believe him, which comes to its own climax at the very end of their conversation: “Good morning, then! Good morning!”--They had made it through the night without killing each other (54). In a sense, Barth has achieved double the efficiency out of the same setting and characters; he does this through using the first climax as a sort of springboard towards the second climax, creating a slightly different, extended, arrangement of the basic parts of the story: exposition, rising action, climax, dénouement:

Because Barth is employing a slightly modified story pattern he also uses a slightly different method to finish the story. The main necessity for modification here is required due to the skipping of the proper dénouement of the first climax, so thus both dénouements need to be picked up in the third chapter. However, the third chapter itself does nothing to further the story, so in a sense the story has no true dénouement (i.e. the small ‘e’ in the above diagram referring to the perpendicular line immediately following the climax indicates the true end of the story’s progression). The remnants cleaned up in the denouement chapter, therefore represent at once an authorial defense of the reasoning behind the novel and the end of the first triangle, which concerns Dunyazade. At this particular junction, Barth is at liberty to explain the need for Dunyazade’s story to end after Shah Zaman’s story, which
must end in the night that all good mornings come to. The Arab storytellers understood this; they ended their stories not “happily ever after,” but specifically “until there took them the Destroyer of Delights and Desolator of Dwelling-places, and they were translated to the ruth of Almighty Allah, and their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins, and the Kings inherited their riches.” (56)

Without realizing the morning after, the story, thus cannot end, and therefore, this is why Barth’s slightly mutated plotting pattern comes into making good sense.
Although there are many other aspects of narration that apply themselves throughout this novella, I believe Barth’s use of narration to control plot in this unique manner is, by far, the most interesting aspect of the narration employed. Although he starts his story in a position that would not normally allow for a proper ending (the end of Dunyazade’s story would not lead to the good morning after in any way or form, thus breaking the Arabic standard), he uses an extended plot diagram, through controlling the narration of the story, and efficiently ties the story up without any real required denouement (save one to explain why he couldn’t stop the story with the end of Dunyazade’s story).

SECTION 2: PERSEID
-text missing-
SECTION 3: BELLEROPHONIAD
-yep, same here-
Works Cited
Barth, John. Chimera. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Atlantic. Aug. 1967: 29-34.

In case you're wondering, I believe we had a 5 page limit to the essay, so Sections 2 and 3 were never completed. Sadly, I rented this book out and never got it back. Going to have to re-buy it someday, as it was one of Barth's best.