I plan on putting some of these ideas into practice as soon as I can breathe again.
I was speaking to a friend the other day and we both agreed that if the we had the same technology 20 years ago that we have today, we would have never and I mean never have left our bedrooms. Now, as an adult,there are so many distractions, so much stimulus. My oldest daughter can text, talk on the phone, watch a dvd, listen to music, surf on her laptop, IM, e-mail and hang with her friends all at the same time. Me, I can barely push a cart in the grocery store and talk to my wife on my cell because I forgot something on the damn shopping list. I remember as a kid how stupid I thought my parents were when they couldn't program a VCR or make copies on a cassette recorder. Am I becoming my parents, being left behind by technology? When it comes to the wonders of innovation, and the instant gratification of information at the push of a button, I feel like a rubbernecking tourist in the big city, in awe of it all. Sometimes the research is more fun than the actual work.
But in response to Mr. Doctorow's maxims,I'll just keep on writing, and take 20 minutes out of the day to apply to my novel... Yeah, I can do that. But then I need to find out how to apply a different 20 minutes to writing plays, reviews, short stories (my other novels) and comic scripts. But right now, I'm gonna go play some goofy game with my four year old daughter who has just watched Mamma Mia for the zillionth time
L
Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction
from Locus Magazine, January 2009
"We know that our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet, but of course writers face the same glorious problem: the delirious world of information and communication and community that lurks behind your screen, one alt-tab away from your word-processor.
The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from. Every now and again, when I see a new website, game, or service, I sense the tug of an attention black hole: a time-sink that is just waiting to fill my every discretionary moment with distraction. As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.
But the Internet has been very good to me. It's informed my creativity and aesthetics, it's benefited me professionally and personally, and for every moment it steals, it gives back a hundred delights. I'd no sooner give it up than I'd give up fiction or any other pleasurable vice.
I think I've managed to balance things out through a few simple techniques that I've been refining for years. I still sometimes feel frazzled and info-whelmed, but that's rare. Most of the time, I'm on top of my workload and my muse. Here's how I do it:
* Short, regular work schedule
When I'm working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I'm working on it. It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there's always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn't become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day's page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you've already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.
* Leave yourself a rough edge
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you're in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you're in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day's knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the "hint." Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it's hard to build on a smooth edge.
* Don't research
Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.
* Don't be ceremonious
Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.
* Kill your word-processor
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don't write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they're at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can't transmit a virus.
* Realtime communications tools are deadly
The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer's ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention. The more you can train your friends and family to use email, message boards, and similar technologies that allow you to save up your conversation for planned sessions instead of demanding your attention right now helps you carve out your 20 minutes. By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.
I don't claim to have invented these techniques, but they're the ones that have made the 21st century a good one for me."
Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things. Cory Doctorow is one of a dozen Locus columnists and reviewers. Every issue, we review dozens of books and magazines, most before they appear in print. A subscription will get you all those as well as the rest of the magazine -- news, People & Publishing, commentary, reports on events, and a list of all books and magazines published that month.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Thursday, December 25, 2008
in His Own Words
Harold Pinter: In his own words
— “I can sum up none of my plays . . . but my writing life has been, quite simply, one of relish, challenge and excitement”
— “Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living”
— “It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940s, but I felt I had to stick to my guns”
— “The crimes of the US throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless and fully documented but nobody talks about them”
Related Links
* British theatre will never be the same
* 'A loyal friend and generous human being'
Multimedia
* Harold Pinter
— “I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on Earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either”
— “One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness”
— “I know little of women. But I’ve heard dread tales” Moonlight, 1993
— “Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself” Tea Party, 1964
— “I hate brandy . . . it stinks of modern literature.” Betrayal, 1978
— “I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs” Moonlight, 1993
— “I made a terrible mistake when I was young, I think, from which I’ve never really recovered. I wrote the word ‘pause’ into my first play” Interview, 1989
— “I don’t give a damn what other people think. It’s entirely their own business. I’m not writing for other people” Interview, 1971
— “I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else. No one particularly. Just if I could put the pen down on paper and suddenly come out in a totally different way” 1971
— “I’ve never been able to write a happy play. [But] I’ve been able to enjoy a happy life” Interview, 2007
Sources: haroldpinter.org; Times Database
— “I can sum up none of my plays . . . but my writing life has been, quite simply, one of relish, challenge and excitement”
— “Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living”
— “It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940s, but I felt I had to stick to my guns”
— “The crimes of the US throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless and fully documented but nobody talks about them”
Related Links
* British theatre will never be the same
* 'A loyal friend and generous human being'
Multimedia
* Harold Pinter
— “I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on Earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either”
— “One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness”
— “I know little of women. But I’ve heard dread tales” Moonlight, 1993
— “Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself” Tea Party, 1964
— “I hate brandy . . . it stinks of modern literature.” Betrayal, 1978
— “I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs” Moonlight, 1993
— “I made a terrible mistake when I was young, I think, from which I’ve never really recovered. I wrote the word ‘pause’ into my first play” Interview, 1989
— “I don’t give a damn what other people think. It’s entirely their own business. I’m not writing for other people” Interview, 1971
— “I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else. No one particularly. Just if I could put the pen down on paper and suddenly come out in a totally different way” 1971
— “I’ve never been able to write a happy play. [But] I’ve been able to enjoy a happy life” Interview, 2007
Sources: haroldpinter.org; Times Database
THIS SUCKS SO BAD
From The Times
December 26, 2008
Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter dies
Harold Pinter
(The Times)
Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005
Image :1 of 2
Patrick Foster, Media Correspondent
Obituary | Dominic Maxwell | Peter Stodhart | Oliver Kamm | More tributes | In his own words
"Harold Pinter, universally acclaimed as one of the greatest British playwrights of his generation, has died.
The Nobel Prize winner lost his battle with cancer on Christmas Eve, his agent confirmed. He was 78.
Pinter, who also enjoyed success as a screenwriter for film and television, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, being hailed by the awarding committee as "the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century".
December 26, 2008
Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter dies
Harold Pinter
(The Times)
Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005
Image :1 of 2
Patrick Foster, Media Correspondent
Obituary | Dominic Maxwell | Peter Stodhart | Oliver Kamm | More tributes | In his own words
"Harold Pinter, universally acclaimed as one of the greatest British playwrights of his generation, has died.
The Nobel Prize winner lost his battle with cancer on Christmas Eve, his agent confirmed. He was 78.
Pinter, who also enjoyed success as a screenwriter for film and television, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, being hailed by the awarding committee as "the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century".
Thursday, December 18, 2008
SHOW DON't Tell
This one was posted in Kungfu Monkey. Much like it!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Waid Wednesday #2: 101-A (a.k.a. "More Than Words")
Novelist walks into my office. Relatively famous, not as famous as Aforementioned Screenwriter, but a multiple award-winner in his genre nonetheless. And he’s immediately on my bad side because the comics script he has handed me is the dullest thing I have ever read, and I used to be a legal secretary.
It isn’t a bad story. To the contrary, the conflict is clear and intriguing and the plot moves along at a good clip. But the Ambien on the page comes from the fact that the writer’s a novelist. He’s accustomed to introducing his characters by writing hundreds of riveting words describing how they view the world, what their hopes and dreams are, and what’s going on inside their heads from moment to moment. But there is no room for that on the comic book page, so he just left it out, and now I’m holding a script starring a bunch of plot puppets who are indistinguishable from one another, who don’t reveal themselves through action, and who are interesting only in the writer's head.
Comics is a visual medium. That means the writer has to find a way to externalize the conflicts--literally or, with practice, symbolically--and not leave them locked inside the protagonist. I’m not saying punches have to be thrown--not every comic is or need be about Spider-Man--but if comics is the avenue through which you want to tell your story, it had better be a story that is, in its telling, visually interesting. If it isn't, you have chosen the wrong medium. I have been in awe of E.M. Forster's talent since I was fourteen, but I can imagine nothing more tedious than a graphic novelization of A Room With a View.
It sounds absurdly obvious, but I am so continually confronted with writers so in love with their dialogue that I'm going to say it again: comics is a visual medium. Bring every important character on stage by having him or her doing something--spinning a basketball, operating an electron microscope, taking a fistful of vitamins, anything--that instantly tells us something about them. When there's conflict, find a way to make it visual. Witty dialogue and clever repartee are priceless, yes, but probably more than in any other medium outside of, oh, mime, comics depends on the writer showing rather than telling. So give your artist interesting things to draw. Can this dramatic revelation happen in, say, a planetarium rather than in a hotel room? Can this confrontation happen on a Ferris wheel instead of a generic alleyway? Can these characters be acting rather than reacting?
One last time: comics is a visual medium. Use that. I am a huge, huge believer in page one of any comics story of any genre having an unusual image that will grab the reader and draw him in. It doesn’t have to be “super-heroey”--in the right story, a shot of a woman looming over an empty crib has just as much impact as, I don’t know, Superman punching a meteor--but by now, any comic book that opens up with four pages of guys in business suits standing around a generic boardroom is just death. D-E-A-T-H. Every issue, we have twenty-two pages, give or take, to tell readers a story that they paid good money for, so as a writer, I get very nervous opening with (or, once I’ve opened, spending more than about two pages on) something you can see on TV every day for free, without my help. Always think visually. Always, always look at your scenes once they’re drafted and ask yourself if they have more visual impact than two guys in business suits standing around a boardroom. If not, rewrite.
Next: Economy Of Storytelling
Posted by Mark Waid at 9:34 PM
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Waid Wednesday #2: 101-A (a.k.a. "More Than Words")
Novelist walks into my office. Relatively famous, not as famous as Aforementioned Screenwriter, but a multiple award-winner in his genre nonetheless. And he’s immediately on my bad side because the comics script he has handed me is the dullest thing I have ever read, and I used to be a legal secretary.
It isn’t a bad story. To the contrary, the conflict is clear and intriguing and the plot moves along at a good clip. But the Ambien on the page comes from the fact that the writer’s a novelist. He’s accustomed to introducing his characters by writing hundreds of riveting words describing how they view the world, what their hopes and dreams are, and what’s going on inside their heads from moment to moment. But there is no room for that on the comic book page, so he just left it out, and now I’m holding a script starring a bunch of plot puppets who are indistinguishable from one another, who don’t reveal themselves through action, and who are interesting only in the writer's head.
Comics is a visual medium. That means the writer has to find a way to externalize the conflicts--literally or, with practice, symbolically--and not leave them locked inside the protagonist. I’m not saying punches have to be thrown--not every comic is or need be about Spider-Man--but if comics is the avenue through which you want to tell your story, it had better be a story that is, in its telling, visually interesting. If it isn't, you have chosen the wrong medium. I have been in awe of E.M. Forster's talent since I was fourteen, but I can imagine nothing more tedious than a graphic novelization of A Room With a View.
It sounds absurdly obvious, but I am so continually confronted with writers so in love with their dialogue that I'm going to say it again: comics is a visual medium. Bring every important character on stage by having him or her doing something--spinning a basketball, operating an electron microscope, taking a fistful of vitamins, anything--that instantly tells us something about them. When there's conflict, find a way to make it visual. Witty dialogue and clever repartee are priceless, yes, but probably more than in any other medium outside of, oh, mime, comics depends on the writer showing rather than telling. So give your artist interesting things to draw. Can this dramatic revelation happen in, say, a planetarium rather than in a hotel room? Can this confrontation happen on a Ferris wheel instead of a generic alleyway? Can these characters be acting rather than reacting?
One last time: comics is a visual medium. Use that. I am a huge, huge believer in page one of any comics story of any genre having an unusual image that will grab the reader and draw him in. It doesn’t have to be “super-heroey”--in the right story, a shot of a woman looming over an empty crib has just as much impact as, I don’t know, Superman punching a meteor--but by now, any comic book that opens up with four pages of guys in business suits standing around a generic boardroom is just death. D-E-A-T-H. Every issue, we have twenty-two pages, give or take, to tell readers a story that they paid good money for, so as a writer, I get very nervous opening with (or, once I’ve opened, spending more than about two pages on) something you can see on TV every day for free, without my help. Always think visually. Always, always look at your scenes once they’re drafted and ask yourself if they have more visual impact than two guys in business suits standing around a boardroom. If not, rewrite.
Next: Economy Of Storytelling
Posted by Mark Waid at 9:34 PM
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
RESEARCH: Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive
This article from New Scientist goes hand in hand with the research I have been checking out for my Stargate Stargate Atlantis cross over comic book script. Science Fiction is a hoot, but this real shit scares me more than anything that I can come up with out of my sick imagination.
L
Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive
* 12:02 31 August 2005 by Shaoni Bhattacharya
"A parasitic worm that makes the grasshopper it invades jump into water and commit suicide does so by chemically influencing its brain, a study of the insects' proteins reveal.
The parasitic Nematomorph hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) develops inside land-dwelling grasshoppers and crickets until the time comes for the worm to transform into an aquatic adult. Somehow mature hairworms brainwash their hosts into behaving in way they never usually would - causing them to seek out and plunge into water.
Once in the water the mature hairworms - which are three to four times longer that their hosts when extended - emerge and swim away to find a mate, leaving their host dead or dying in the water. David Biron, one of the study team at IRD in Montpellier, France, notes that other parasites can also manipulate their hosts' behaviour: "'Enslaver' fungi make their insect hosts die perched in a position that favours the dispersal of spores by the wind, for example."
But the "mechanisms underlying this intriguing parasitic strategy remain poorly understood, generally", he says."
The article continues here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7927-parasites-brainwash-grasshoppers-into-death-dive.html
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn7927/dn7927-1_439.jpg
L
Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive
* 12:02 31 August 2005 by Shaoni Bhattacharya
"A parasitic worm that makes the grasshopper it invades jump into water and commit suicide does so by chemically influencing its brain, a study of the insects' proteins reveal.
The parasitic Nematomorph hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) develops inside land-dwelling grasshoppers and crickets until the time comes for the worm to transform into an aquatic adult. Somehow mature hairworms brainwash their hosts into behaving in way they never usually would - causing them to seek out and plunge into water.
Once in the water the mature hairworms - which are three to four times longer that their hosts when extended - emerge and swim away to find a mate, leaving their host dead or dying in the water. David Biron, one of the study team at IRD in Montpellier, France, notes that other parasites can also manipulate their hosts' behaviour: "'Enslaver' fungi make their insect hosts die perched in a position that favours the dispersal of spores by the wind, for example."
But the "mechanisms underlying this intriguing parasitic strategy remain poorly understood, generally", he says."
The article continues here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7927-parasites-brainwash-grasshoppers-into-death-dive.html
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn7927/dn7927-1_439.jpg
Robotics research
The study of motion can be divided into kinematics and dynamics. Direct kinematics refers to the calculation of end effector position, orientation, velocity and acceleration when the corresponding joint values are known. Inverse kinematics refers to the opposite case in which required joint values are calculated for given end effector values, as done in path planning. Some special aspects of kinematics include handling of redundancy (different possibilities of performing the same movement), collision avoidance and singularity avoidance. Once all relevant positions, velocities and accelerations have been calculated using kinematics, methods from the field of dynamics are used to study the effect of forces upon these movements. Direct dynamics refers to the calculation of accelerations in the robot once the applied forces are known. Direct dynamics is used in computer simulations of the robot. Inverse dynamics refers to the calculation of the actuator forces necessary to create a prescribed end effector acceleration. This information can be used to improve the control algorithms of a robot.
In each area mentioned above, researchers strive to develop new concepts and strategies, improve existing ones and improve the interaction between these areas. To do this, criteria for "optimal" performance and ways to optimize design, structure and control of robots must be developed and implemented.
In each area mentioned above, researchers strive to develop new concepts and strategies, improve existing ones and improve the interaction between these areas. To do this, criteria for "optimal" performance and ways to optimize design, structure and control of robots must be developed and implemented.
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