Brain Check

Here’s a basic report for today, with a more detailed list to follow:

Today was a weird day. I spent my morning doing some programing/computer things. (Kludge firmly planted in fist), and then I helped a friend do some moving (more tomorrow.) I got a little bit of writing in and then there’s a dinner party and probably some knitting, and then bed. Sweater class tomorrow.

• I didn’t sleep enough last night; I was too wired from the drive, I had that low level awareness that you need for drives, but I was bodily exhausted. So sleeping was hard.

• I decided on my trip, as I mentioned last night, that I have a new vision for Breakout, I have a Kludgey solution that will make this technically possible, and I’m looking forward to it.

  • Basically I’m going to do Breakout as a hypertext thingy. I guess in a way this means that there will never be a Breakout novel. Which is ok. It frees some energies up because I think I want to play with shorter forms for a while. I think I’d like to write another novella/novelette, and this will give me the chance to do that.
  • The hypertext will let me write this story without having to fight it. I think a lot of fiction writing, in the traditional mode, is all about making that thing in your head get to other people in a common format. To use a computer metaphor, the Novel is like being restricted to communicate the content of your mind via the WiFi standard: you have to transmit your radio signal in a very precise sort of way. This hypertext, I hope, will be more like speaking, in contrast.
  • My coding/programing thing, was just to make sure that I could script the deployment of this system in a way that I was comfortable scaling as the project grew from a few thousand words to several tens of thousands of words, and from a couple of dozen pages to many dozens of pages. Someday, I’ll write about that, because I think getting the content to work the way I want it, is probably actually pretty easy, and it might be good for other people to have this information.
  • I’m not going to have any sort of release for a long time, I should disclaim, but I’m working on it in a new way.

• I haven’t done any work on the new TealArt site. And Breakout would probably be out at both TealArt and tychoish, in the end.

• I haven’t knit anything. I made a mistake, as I might have mentioned the other day, and haven’t brought myself to deal with it yet. My sock bag is still in the car, so I don’t really have anything else to work on, so with luck I’ll have fixed it by the end of the evening.

• Randal Schwartz, one of the hosts behind the open source podcast (FLOSS “Weekly”) I mentioned yesterday, saw the google juice and commented (woot! auto-notifiers, I suppose; not linking to it in this post for that reason I guess.) It’s not actually a weekly, which is fine by me, because I am all sorts of behind on my podcast listening.

Ok, this entry is cooked, and so is, I think dinner. So I’m going to jet! Have a good weekend. I’ll be back tomorrow…

Onward and Upward!