Oh Nigel

Y’see, Nigel, there is a subtle difference here.

Making 10 louder may well accomplish the same as having amps that go to 11 across the board, but having amps that go to 11 across the board kinda demonstrates, in an obvious way, that your ten isn’t loud enough.

I need to amp u p a lot of things in Doleful Creatures –characters’ motivations (notably the evil ones or neutral evil ones) among many things. But I don’t want to do it with characters that are obviously pegged at 11. Because my potential readers are going to read and say, yeah, 11 across the board. And it’s obvious and a bit expected and boring.

I want the natural ten in the books I read. And trust me, I can tell when someone hits 11. I think that’s what drove me nuts about Terry Brooks’ books. Many of his characters shot up to 11. Others, like Tolkein and Pratchett, can get up to that ten and make it believable and subtle enough you don’t notice that their ten is as loud as potentially an eleven could be.

Granny Weatherwax sticks out as one who hits ten on a regular basis (viz, the climax in Lords and Ladies).

No exclamation marks. None. And she doesn’t need them. We see the transformation from Queen to “elf-woman” as a natural consequence of what Granny does and says. We don’t need to go to 11 to see it.

Ray Bradbury goes to ten in Fahrenheit 451, and doesn’t need to hit 11 across the board:

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.”

I’ve got some ideas for Doleful Creatures. It’ll hit ten yet.

Cancelled Christmas Follow-Up

Funny I should use a clip from A Town Called Panic when I wrote last about the drive at work to revise documents that had just been released after extensive review.

Because Christmas is not cancelled, though I have seen a lot of wish-listing and catalog-searching as I worked on revisions this week, just as this new clip shows. We’re revising documents! Time to check to make sure everything including the kitchen sink is in there, even if we removed the sink at the last revision!

But it’s not that bad. Just little stuff, not extensive rewrites. Well, one extensive re-ordering, but not a re-write.

I’m just glad I casually found out yesterday they want to use the procedures in full next Monday – nobody was going to tell me that otherwise, apparently. Most of the time, they think I can read minds. I have to remind them I’m too lazy to do that.

I have to give the people I work with credit – once they decide on a new direction, they go quickly to implement it and everyone is happy with the world. Even me, as I sit here on an early Wednesday morning with only minor pushing to do to get the reviews completed.

This means I should have a quiet rest of the week. Though I’m not going to tell anyone that, lest they suddenly pour on the changes. Yeah. I should not have said that. I can feel the tidal wave coming . . .

Ooga

I have become Mordac, Preventer of Information Services.

Or at least his less-competent minion, The Guy Who Maybe Gets Stuff Done If You Ask Him Enough Times to Do It.

That’s at home, at least, where I spent a good portion of my time working to get InDesign put back on Michelle’s desktop computer.

And what a pain that was. Some of it was necessarily self-inflicted, but most of it was due to Adobe.

You know Adobe – they created InDesign, which Michelle loves. Many moons ago we bought the third iteration of their Creative Suite. They have, as is the wont of software companies, moved on. But they have moved on from an insanely-expensive product – as I recall, we paid more than $300, with student discounts for CS3 – to an even more insanely-expensive monthly subscription service for their newest iterations.

And a while back her computer crashed so I had to try to reinstall her suite, which wouldn’t work. Last weekend, I reset her computer back to factory settings – minus the removal of the Windows 10 upgrade, which apparently has its tentacles wrapped and locked – and tried again. Got to the last step, and no-go. Then had to go online with Adobe support for more than an hour for a new product key, and a new setup file. Not happy. And not, technically, sure it’s fully installed and operational.

And because we had to reset to factory, I had to reinstall a bunch of other software, printer drivers, etc. And I’m not sure I’m done with those, either. The next thirty days will tell. Or sooner, if she gets messages about any trial use and such, which I hope she does not for InDesign.

One Mordac success this weekend: We replaced two keyboards.

Which One, I Must Ask, Are You?

Are you sure you’re you? Or are you a copy, a veneer?

The real deal?

A fake?

Or a mixture of it all?

Say something the Internet finds offensive, and you may find out.

I’m new to the concept of “context collapse” as academics struggle to define it.

But it sounds intuitively familiar.

Let me give an example: My father and oldest brother are bricklayers. Bricklayers have a lot of specialized tools, notably the mason’s tape measure. A standard American tape measure has on it familiar units – inches and feet. A mason’s tape measure has those, but it also has markings that show how many courses of brick a mason may lay in a given standard measurement. In the context of bricklaying, the course markings make sense. But hand the tape measure to, say, a carpenter, and the carpenter is going to find the tool harder to use than a standard tape measure because of the specialized markings on it.

The context of the tool has collapsed. For the carpenter – not for the bricklayer.

Context collapse, then, can be defined as “The absence of additional information that would give the viewer a more well-rounded overall picture of the person or institution offering an isolated comment”.

So context collapse can occur on social media – or the Internet at large – when something someone says or shares is isolated from everything else that person has said or shared. In context, the shared item may appear to be one of a long string of, say, sarcastic or devil’s advocate statements. Taken in isolation, however, the absence of context allows multiple interpretations to come into the picture – painting a person as a bigot, a homophobe, a gun-nut or a gun-lover, ripe for the social justice warriors to vilify.

We saw that happen to Quinn Norton.

(Context-heavy article there. Go read it, because I can’t reproduce the context here and give it justice.) And that right there is why context collapse is a significant phenomenon. It’s easy to find offense in isolation – but harder to justify it as the longer it takes to build up a context around the thing one finds offensive.

Here’s an example: After the dust settled over the Boy Scouts of America allowing gay boys and leaders to participate fully in Scout activities, I saw nothing wrong with the change. (Furthermore, I’m in full support of ongoing changes allowing girls to join the BSA and earn its Eagle rank.) You can, however, search my Internet past and find instances where I shared the opposite view.

Which one is the real me?

Well, both of them. Because my thinking on the topics evolved over time.

One could, however, isolate one of my past statements and paint me as a homophobe. Easily. Without knowing that over time, my thinking turned the opposite direction. Accusing me of being a homophobe based on those past statements would be an example of context collapse.

What do we do about it?

Let’s let Quinn Norton answer that:

Here is your task, person on the internet, reader of journalism, speaker to the world on social media: You make the world now, in a way that you never did before. Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots.

Diagram THIS

I remember enjoying(!) sentence diagramming when I was a kid. I could quickly see there was no real future in it, but it was an amusing thing to do at the time.

So when a Facebook friend launched the challenge to diagram this:

I thought I'd take up the challenge. Pretty sure I failed miserably.

Experimenting with The Farming Dragon

“It’s daft.”

We stood on the thin grass verge next to the muddy field. Coxcomb thrust her snout into every badger hole in the hedgerow, snorting and occasionally flaming as she shot dirt from her nostrils.

I had to admit I was nervous.  I’d finally trained her to hold a bit in her mouth, but gave up after she melted each one. The blinders, I’d given up on them too, because they confused her so. With them on all she could do was stand stock-still and pant heavily – and you don’t want dragons panting heavily when all your roofs are made of thatch.

And I’d never tried her with the weight of the plow behind her.

“When do we need to plant?”

“Weeks ago,” my father said, and spat.

“And why haven’t we planted?”

“Soil’s too wet. All this blasted rain.”

“So we’ve got to try.”

“It’s still daft.”

I nodded. It was daft. But we’d never know if it would work if we didn’t try.

I patted Coxcomb on her head, between her ears and spines. “Let’s go to work, shall we girl?” She looked at me with one rotating eye; the other stared still down the last badger hole she’d explored with her nose.

I pulled her halter from my bag and quickly strapped it onto her head. She snaked out her tongue and tried to grab the leather, my hands, whatever she could get, but the hide I used for the halter was thick and my gloves were even thicker. She shook her head as I buckled the halter down.

I played the straps out to the waiting plow. Shaking his head, papa fastened the straps to the plow and stood on the plowboard.

“You’ll run her like an ox,” I said. “I’ll run the flame.”

“We’ll have it all on fire, the house, the barn, the neighbors too,” he said, wiping the rain-slicked hair out of his eyes.

“But we’ll have the seeds in the ground,” I said.

“Maybe.”

He shook the reins and clicked his tongue, and Coxcomb lurched forward. With my strap, I pulled her snout gently toward the ground, then jiggled the strap. She snorted, then belched a burst of flame at the ground, which sizzled.

“Slowly,” I said to papa. “Until we get the hang of it.”

He nodded and twitched the reins.

Coxcomb walked slowly forward, firing gentle bursts at the muddy ground. She left footprints in the soil – but that was it. As the plow hit it, it was soil – not mud.

With his stick, papa poked holes in the earth and dropped in seeds.

Coxcomb lumbered forward, whispering flames and shaking her head as I jiggled the strap attached to her jaw.

We took a break after the first row. I removed her halter and straps and let her go back to the badger holes.

Papa stood by the side of the field, staring at the planted row.

“Seeds went in nice, did they?”

“That they did,” he said. “But got a lot more planting to do. And a lot more mud to pass.”

“But it’s working, right?”

We watched the rain patter onto the plowed soil. The rain would quickly saturate the soil again, but we could dig ditches to help the draining. And Coxcomb could come out into the field again if things got too wet.

“When the field is planted and the seeds are sprouted and not drowning, then I’ll say it works,” papa said.

“Then let’s finish.”

“Aye,” he said. And for the first time patted Coxcomb on her rump. Coxcomb hiccupped flame into a badger hole, then pulled her muddy snout out to look at us.

“Let’s get to work, girl.”

Nil Desperandum

I look at the professional writers I long to be like and despair.

And yet . . .

I look at the professional writers I long to be like and see they struggled too.

Take Rincewind the Wizzard, the character created by Terry Pratchett.

In the first Rincewind book – Pratchett’s first – we see a lot more of the classic fantasy novel environment (exotic settings, exciting, scantily-clad women, fantastic creatures, etc.) than we see in Pratchett’s later novels. As a reader, it’s clear that The Colour of Magic is a lot closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars than, say, Thud!

What I’m getting at is best summed up by what Stanford University educator David Labaree says in his article “Writing Essays by Formula Teaches Students how to not Think,” published at aeon.co.

The point is that learning to write is extraordinarily difficult, and teaching people how to write is just as hard. Writers need to figure out what they want to say, put it into a series of sentences whose syntax conveys this meaning, arrange those sentences into paragraphs whose syntax carries the idea forward, and organise paragraphs into a structure that captures the argument as a whole. That’s not easy. It’s also not elementary. [Author Stanley] Fish distils the message into a single paradoxical commandment for writers: ‘You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free.’ The five-paragraph essay format is an effort to provide a framework for accomplishing all this.

I’m going to argue that the best authors do exactly what Fish admonishes: They learn the form, and then set themselves free from it.

Pratchett’s later novels are filled with the satire and humor we expect from him. They’re present embryonically in The Colour of Magic, but don’t come out fully because Pratchett was still learning the form.

The discouraging thing here – for novelists and for teachers of writing – is that to set writers free from the form is something that cannot be taught. It has to be learned through long practice in writing to the form, experimenting with the form, and then finding ways to use the form to one’s advantage (I don’t believe anyone actually strays completely form “the form” – whatever form it takes in the genre they’re writing. It can also be said that in Pratchett’s last novels he’d again become slave to the form of his own making, as he battled with The Embuggerance as well.) But they do become the better writers they want to be. Over time and with lots and lots of practice.

What does this all mean for me as a writer?

It gives me hope.

Maybe I’ll get better. I’ll certainly get better the more I write. I can see that in Doleful Creatures. It’s a long shot from where it was as a finished NaNoWriMo novel in 2005. And I can see the potential in other projects I’ve done. I just need to write more. Practice more.

What does this mean for me as a teacher of writing?

Maybe somewhere in the swamp of students I have had over the years, there are a few I’ve helped start on that long writing journey. Maybe.

Plug it in and Turn the Crank

A common lament is heard in English class – not necessarily this one; you’ve been an extraordinarily patient bunch – is (and it’s sometimes said with a lot of volume) WHY DO I HAVE TO KNOW HOW TO DO THIS?

I have a very simple answer:

So you can get better at it.

The Argumentative Synthesis essay is, by nature, one dependent on a formula:

1. A     An introduction where the writer identifies a problem and explains why the problem is significant.
2. B     A body where the writer explores at least three solutions to the problem, going over the solutions in detail to explore their strengths and weaknesses.
3. C     Concluding on describing their preferred solution in greater detail, along with an explanation why it’s the best of all possible solutions.

We’re used to formulas. I recall something about the Pythagorean Theorem from my high school days – don’t ask me what it is now; I was a communications and English major in college. But I do recall my high school algebra teacher saying we’d live or die by formulas, and that to solve the problem, all we needed was the right formula, and to “plug it in and turn the crank.”

Well, I remember plugging it in. I remember turning the crank.

But the formulas never worked for me (see previous note about communication/English majoring).

But I have to ask: Was it the formula’s fault?

No.

Mine. Because I didn’t practice turning the crank enough.

It can be argued that I won’t necessarily need the higher maths for the rest of my life. But if I agree with that, I miss the point.

And the point is this: LEARNING.

We have formulas in English composition for a reason. And the reason is is that writing is hard work. I’ve been a professional writer since I started in newspapers in 1997, and there are still things I’m learning about writing. And once I master one aspect, there are other aspects to learn.

Plugging it in and turning the crank – whether in math or in writing – means putting in a lot of practice so you can tell when you’ve got the wrong formula, if you’ve accidentally plugged it into a 220-volt outlet, or if they’ve replaced the crank with a push-button starter.

I want you to progress on your “learning how to write” journey in this class. Thus the learning of a new formula, the argumentative synthesis essay.

But once you master it, oh, the things you’ll do.

Let me draw on an example from the world of music. Namely, Victor Borge. For those of you who don’t know Borge, he’s a classically-trained pianist. Behold:

He plays beautifully, no? He knows his way around a piano. He can plug it in and turn the crank.

But, oh the places he went. Once he knew the formulas, once he could plug it in and turn the crank with efficiency every time, he really began to learn. And what he brought to the world was uniquely Victor Borge. Behold again:

We hear the formulas coming out. But we hear Borge too. Unique Borge.

And that took a lot of practice too.

So. Plug it in. Turn the crank. And keep on doing it. After enough practice, you’ll be surprised at what comes out.

Christmas is Cancelled

So we’re now in that crazy little valley between a big document publishing push at work and when the documents actually have to be used for work, and the reviews are coming in.

Typically, I hear only the bad news, and there is some if I can say revision=bad news. And revisions are expected. Thusfar, the number of revisions requested is pretty small. Knock on wood.

Still, part of me wants to cancel Christmas.

We’ve been reviewing these documents for months. Some of them for more than six months. It didn’t help that the process we’re documenting evolved over time, with more evolution coming toward the end of the review cycle. Then again, that’s just standard procedure here.

We write. We review. We publish. And then we panic and do it all over again, thankfully on a much more compressed time schedule than the first round, as the major lines in the sand have already been drawn.

Yeah. Just got off the phone. A philosophical change that was made just before the documents were published may be reversed. And that’s nothing unusual. Right now, the scope of the changes is limited to two documents, so that’s not so bad. Holding my breath for more phone calls, though.

I’m not complaining. Dealing with change is part of the job, especially on a new process like the one we’re dealing with. I’m more relieved to have the big document push over and done with, so we can let the dust settle a bit and then figure out where to go from here, rather than have additional change add delay to getting the first round of documents out.

And I do work in the perfect industry to call such change and second-guessing “fallout.”

Nut Behind the "Wheel"

Representative Simpson,

I have three children in school. I pray often that as they go about their school day, they'll be safe themselves and be kept safe.

But I look at school shootings like the recent one in Florida and I know prayers are not enough.

If there were a quick solution to this problem, it wouldn't be a problem. But we can start somewhere. The folks at 99% Invisible recently created a podcast outlining the decades-long push to use data, science, and cooperation from industry and politicians to make the cars we drive and the roads we drive on more safe. Key to that safety push was the creation of a database that tracked automobile accidents and the injuries they caused.

Such a database on gun-related injuries and deaths would be a good first step toward perhaps making guns safer, and workplaces and schools safer from those who misuse guns. However, political and lobbying will has thusfar made such a database illegal in the United States.

I'm confident if I sent my children to school in a car -- our oldest drives now -- they would be relatively safe if they were in an accident, because of the long history of safety in the auto industry, that was aided by a database that collected information without names to allow engineers the chance to see what was causing fatalities and injuries in car crashes.

I'd like to see you advocate for a national gun-safety database, similar to the one used for automobile safety. That alone will not solve the problem we face as a nation, but it would be a good first step.

Sincerely,

Brian Davidson