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Category: writing.

analog data: the longevity thereof.

Posted on by Marko

One of my regular reads from the old Fatherland has an interesting article today about a letter that took 71 years to deliver. (link is in German)

In WWII, German troops occupied the Channel island of Jersey for five years. Some of the local yoots decided to steal a bag of German military mail as an act of defiance. They didn’t destroy the letters, but kept them safely stashed away. One of the former defiant yoots turned a bunch of them in to the Jersey archives 70 years later. They made copies, translated what they could, and then contacted the post office. The Jersey post office got in touch with the German Mail, and together they came up with the idea to deliver whatever letters they still could. Some of the recipients couldn’t be located, some letters went to (now luckily defunct) National Socialist organizations and offices and definitely couldn’t be delivered anymore, but ten of the letters found their way to the addressees or their descendants.

I’ve mentioned the hand-written recipe books my wife owns—they were written by her maternal grandmother before she emigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. Not only can I still read them (with a little difficulty—the Sütterlin script taught in schools back then can be a bit hard to decipher even for a German speaker), but it’s really neat to be able to hold and own an object that she owned and filled with her own handwriting. The postcard story above reinforces to me that the analog ways of data recording and transmission not only still have value, but also advantages that digital data lacks. Imagine if your descendants go through some old stuff in the attic in seventy years and find a USB stick with your writings or drawings on it. Will they be able to extract the data on whatever computers they use in 2082?

(I have a set of Jaz disks in a box in the attic that have some of Robin’s college and grad school stuff on them. I’m quite handy with a computer, but even I don’t have the necessary hardware and drivers to extract that data. How about a bunch of 5.25” floppies with WordStar documents on them? Or maybe a 3.5” disk formatted for AmigaOS?)

Handwritten notes, however, will still be perfectly legible and accessible, providing they’re stored in a dry spot.

That assumes, of course, that our descendants in 2082 can still read.

41.

Posted on by Marko

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I’m not much of a photographer, but this picture is probably my favorite of all the ones I’ve taken. It’s the cemetery right up the road after the surprise late October snow we had last year. I used no filters or any post-processing, and the camera was the lowly built-in iPhone 4 one.

I’m 41 today. The sun is out, and the day looks a lot like that picture, minus the white frosting.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins—thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. I think I’ll turn the computer off for the rest of the day and take the kids out for some lunch and a bike ride out in the green. The writing will be here when I get back, as it always is. I have two novels to finish by the end of the year, but it won’t hurt things to take the day off from the regular routine. I need to recharge the batteries a little and think about how to spend my forty-second ride around the sun.

a shack of one’s own.

Posted on by Marko

Neil Gaiman has one.

Roald Dahl had one.

So did Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, and a bunch of other famous inkslingers.

I am, of course, talking about a writing shed. The idea for one (or the obsession with it, however you want to look at it) has been firmly planted in my brain for a while now, and my desire for one of my own grows stronger as the distractions in the house get more frequent.

I have the main computer set up at the standing desk in the living room, but I can’t really do any work there that requires focus. Not only am I in the middle of all the house ruckus generated by two kids and four dogs, but I’m also accessible to everyone. So a little writing shed on the property away from the house a bit sounds more wonderful with each passing year. I mean, I put up an 8×10’ chicken house, and we had the handyman attach a 10×12’ run with a proper roof. If the chickens can have such a spacious condo, why shouldn’t I be able to mark off a flat 8×8’ patch of ground somewhere on our ten acres and then put a little private hut up in that spot? No plumbing, no Internet, no electricity—well, maybe an extension cord for a space heater for the winter—but otherwise nothing but a desk, a bookshelf, and a spot for ink bottles and such.

Two weeks ago we went over to some friends for dinner. They have a little 8×8 playhouse on their property which our friend built for his daughter. It has a properly high ceiling suitable for adult use, it has a proper door and windows, and it’s just big enough for a couch and a play rug—the perfect size for a little writing den free of distractions and cat-waxing opportunities.

I asked him how long it took to build that little playhouse.

“Oh, that just took me two days,” he said.

*blink*

I told him about my desire for a writing hut of my own, and lamented my lack of carpentry skills. He said he’d be glad to help me with it. So I offered him all the beer and pizza he cares to consume in exchange for his assistance. Now I just need to stake out a suitable spot on the grounds of Castle Frostbite, and then sell an extra freelance article or short story to get together the play money for the lumber, but then Project Writing Hut is a go.

funday morning.

Posted on by Marko

Back from Readercon. I got to meet friends again I hadn’t seen since last year, meet new unsavory writer and editor types, attend awesome readings and panels, drink fine liquor and interesting new beers, and eat grown-up restaurant fare with other grown-ups while talking shop and making bad jokes for three days. Thanks to my lovely wife for minding the shop in my absence and letting me run off for a few days to hang out with like-minded miscreants.

Now I have to dive back into work—got some stories to write, some more to finish, and a bunch to submit for possible Fame & Glory™.

newsletter from castle frostbite, july 2012.

Posted on by Marko

Oh, hey there, Internets!

Team Munchkin Wrangler had a busy week and a relaxing weekend. The kids enjoyed their science summer camp, and I enjoyed my five morning Dadcations. Lyra was in preschool day camp, which let out at noon, and Quinn’s camp let out at 3. I dropped them off in the mornings, went into Hanover or West Leb to find a spot to write for a few hours, and then came back to pick up Lyra at noon to take her home. With the return trip in the afternoon to fetch Quinn, I did a ton of driving back and forth. A tank of gas usually lasts for two weeks with my regular driving patterns, but last week I blew through a full tank by Thursday.But hey—the kids had fun, I got some time off, and that dinosaur juice was combusted for a noble purpose.

006

We’re back to the regular routine this week, except for Friday when I get to go to Boston for the weekend and attend Readercon. A bunch of my writer friends will be there, so there will be plenty of geekery, shop talk, and consumption of adult beverages.

Cluckheim Keep still stands unmolested, and the chickens are reasonably happy with the new arrangement. With the way our handyman overbuilt the run, I don’t see any fox or raccoon getting into it. The only worry I have is black bear—friends of ours thirty miles away have had a persistent member of the species break into their shed and then their barn repeatedly to get to their chickens and feed. The run is ridiculously sturdy, but bears are ridiculously strong, and a determined black bear would be a challenge to keep out. The run is close enough to the house that I’m counting on hearing any demolition attempts and being able to come downstairs to, uh, strongly discourage Mr. Bear. We had one on the property two years ago, but he hasn’t returned since then. We don’t have bird feeders out, but you never know.

The fiction-writing business is coming along as always. A while ago, I had the brilliantly stupid idea to write two novels in tandem, and then I started playing with some ideas for a third one. The Military SF novel stands at 90% complete, the Urban Fantasy detective novel is 50% done, and the YA novel is at 30% or so. It’s nice to be able to switch gears and work on something else for a bit when you get stuck with one novel, but it sucks when you’re stuck on all of them. But things are progressing at a good clip now. (I’ve set up shop in the attic temporarily, where it’s kind of hot but very quiet, which may have something to do with the increased output lately.) I will have three finished novels to shop around later this year, in three different genres. Or I could just combine them all and mix chapters, see what kind of response I get from agents…

the forever war.

Posted on by Marko

It appears that Joe Haldeman’s excellent Military SF novel “The Forever War” is on sale for the Kindle for a measly $4.95. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should, and if you have, you should get a Kindle copy anyway just because.

I’d have to lie if I said that “The Forever War” wasn’t at least somewhat in the back of my brain when I wrote my own MilSF novels. (The first one is still in Slushpile Hell, and the second one, being a sequel to the first, will probably not get any traction until #1 is sold.)

 

those old-timey writing tools.

Posted on by Marko

There’s an interesting article up on the BBC’s website on the rise of fountain pen sales, an unlikely trend in a time where handwriting is on the decline.

The article includes an explanation by that Neil Gaiman fellow why he writes with those old-fashioned things these days, and some of it echoes my own reasons for having gone back to longhand:

I found myself enjoying writing more slowly and liked the way I had to think through sentences differently. I discovered I loved the fact that handwriting forces you to do a second draft, rather than just tidying up and deleting bits on a computer. I also discovered I enjoy the tactile buzz of the ritual involved in filling the pens with ink.

Of course, I don’t have the rather nice problem of being famous and receiving gifts of fountain pens from adoring fans all the time, so I only have about half a dozen of them. But it’s nice to see that other, rather more successful individuals in the field have come to the same conclusions regarding the merits of the fountain pen for first drafts.