Fast Fiction

Today was my first day of coffee house writing for the year. I went to one of my favorite spots, Sabor y Cultura in Hollywood. They have excellent Mexican Mocha, or at least they normally do. This time my mocha was too sweet and didn’t have enough espresso in it. I asked for a double shot, maybe I was missing one.

No matter, I pounded out the words.

time…...running tally….words…words/minute
11:30 AM…....4177…......135…....9.00
11:45 AM…....4616…......439…...29.27
12:00 PM…....5110…......494…...32.93
12:15 PM…....5525…......415…...27.67
12:30 PM…....6052…......527…...35.13
12:45 PM…....6513…......461…...30.73
1:00 PM….....7074…......561…...37.40
1:15 PM….....7500…......426…...28.40
1:30 PM….....8074…......574…...38.27
1:45 PM….....8652…......578…...38.53
2:00 PM….....9252…......600…...40.00
2:15 PM….....9761…......509…...33.93
2:30 PM…....10363…......602…...40.13

35.12 words per minute average
6,321 words for session
3 hours

The plot, as thin as it might be, is moving along.

My novel has invented a candy bar that was made back in the early eighties. At the moment it’s called the ‘Splodio (SPLOH-dee-oh) Bar and it was made by the Atlanticandy Company. It was a fluffy stawberry nougat with strawberry pop rocks in it covered in milk mockolate (fake chocolate coating). I’m thinking of changing the name to the Popperberry Bar ... or maybe the Splodio came in Popperberry flavor and possibly Mocha and Mint while I’m at it. I don’t think they were particularly good bars, but certainly original.

My main character, Natalie, is trying to track down a tee shirt, or something from the candy bar for her boyfriend’s birthday. Of course the Atlanticandy Company went out of business years ago, so she’s still tracking it down and eBay has been no help either. Yeah, I like throwing obstacles in her way. At some point I have to bring in the title of the novel, Limited Liability Chocolate, an LLC, but you know, details and all that.

The good news is that with 10K tallied in the novel so far, I’m already 20% of the way through the thing and feeling comfortable about the amount of plot I have left to cram into those other 40K.

Today I wrote at home. I rarely write at home, but The Man went down to Laguna to see his folks so I had the house to myself.

The problem with writing in the house is all the distractions. So made a little challenge for myself that I could go take photos of candy after I got to 4,000 words for the day (tomorrow I have to get 6,000 words to get back on track for the week).

time…...running tally….words…words/minute
1:00 PM…....2,468…......721…...48.07
1:15 PM…....2,890…......422…...28.13
1:30 PM…....3,241…......351…...23.40
1:45 PM…....3,590…......349…...23.27
2:00 PM…....4,042…......452…...30.13

I don’t really care for writing at the dining room table especially with my noisy neighbors, so next time I might try the seclusion of the back room.

The story is crap but I’ve found out that my novel is set in Los Angeles.

If nothing else, this year’s novel will be remarkable because of the way it started. I know in the past I’ve stayed up late and started at midnight before, but this was the first time I joined others to wait for the toll of midnight.

Chris Baty invited the NaNoWriMo staff over to the office to start the month off. I was already up in San Francisco, so I could hardly refuse the invite. (Besides, I had candy to get rid of!)

I really have very little clue about what I’m writing, and though it’s a little clearer now that I’ve started, I fully intended to toss out whatever meager words I logged that night.

Here’s the synopsis of what I did:

time…...running tally….words…words/minute
12:15 AM…....525…......525…...35.00
12:30 AM…....1,096….....571…...38.07
12:45 AM…....1,570….....474…...31.60
12:52 AM…....1,747….....177…...25.29

But I’m starting to think that I might keep what I have so far.

I don’t usually start my novel right at midnight. Oh, sure, I have in the past. But I usually toss those words out and start over. (Though I have to admit as a swimmer I never had a false start in all my meets.)

So tonight I have to start because I agreed to go to a midnight write.

Which means I have to know what I’m doing, at least enough for the first thousand words or so.

I’ve been thinking about characters and maybe an arc.

I was thinking if the novel is going to be focused on candy, it should have a character in it that loves every candy I detest.

I was also thinking there should be a quest ... that my main character has to be searching for something or trying to do something. You know, something. I haven’t figured out what it is. I haven’t decided anything past the first sentence and scene.

If that doesn’t work, I guess I can always start over!

When I was pulling my FAQ for Candy Blog together, it seemed that some of my readers think that I’m a top blogger and I might have some authority on the subject.

Well, I’m not so sure about that, but I’ve certainly learned a lot through trial and error over the years, enough to share some of that with others. So here are a few of my thoughts in a series that I’ll post over the next week or so.

Stake out a Little Corner

The following are some technology basics that you should keep in mind when setting up your blog.

1. Get a good URL - there’s nothing wrong with blogspot, typepad or livejournal, but pick something folks can remember and spell easily. Is it too late for that? Even if you don’t want to get your own hosting, you can get a domain name and point it. 2. Claim your blog at Technorati.com - they index blogs and you can add keywords to your blog so others can find you. You can also keep an eye on your blog and see who’s linking to you. Go see what they’re talking about and how it relates to what you’re talking about. There are other blogs that allow you to track your position in the whole scheme of things, such as blogshares.com and blogpulse.com. 3. Ping - your blogging software probably already does it, but make sure that you’re pinging all the networks so that people know you’ve got something new (I recommend pingomatic.com to catch those sites that your blog software may have missed). 4. Get listed - there are always big sites that aggregate huge link lists. For local Los Angeles bloggers it’s LA Blogs, for foodies it’s Kiplog ... just find where you belong. 5. Publish a feed. Even if it’s not the full post, at least folks will know that you’ve updated. Make it easy for readers to add your site updates to whatever they read with. Little chicklets help, but even a little sidebar space with text versions works well. If you choose to use a feed publisher like Feedburner, you’ll be able to track who’s reading you and what’s popular. 6. Use tags - keywords and tags help other people find your posts. Sign up with something like del.icio.us or digg - you add a little tag at the end of your posts and then other people who may never have seen your site might find you via the subject of your post. 7. Optimize your blog for search engines - this means permalinks so that other folks can link to specific posts and when someone searches for content, they go right to where you blog has what they want.

Next week I’ll talk about Layout and Templates.

I haven’t decided what to write for NaNoWriMo this year. All I have is a topic. Candy. (It’s about time I wrote a candy novel.)

I thought the whole thing with starting with a title back in ‘04 worked pretty well (that was the year of An Alphabetical Order). I also thought I would work in a different genre this year, as I always do. I’m running out of new POVs, so this one might be 3rd Person Limited.

The current title is:

Limited Liability Chocolate, an LLC

But I’ve been thinking of other titles as well, since I’m going for the Comedy genre. (The LLC novel would be a satire, I believe, somehow involving corporations and chocolate, as the title would imply.)

A new title that I’m mulling over would go something like this:

A Novel That Has Lollipops in It

Of course that breaks my rule about having a title that alphabetically sorts high.

It’s a work in progress.

So last night I was sitting on the couch enjoying some Prik King from Rambutan Thai and watching the premiere of 30 Rock.

My laptop was on the dining room table, plugged in, but with the battery removed.

We’re watching TV and the damn thing made that loud pop again! The battery isn’t even in the same room, so it’s not the battery. Something’s seriously wrong with it. It still works, doesn’t feel unusually warm to the touch. But a loud pop is not a good sound.

I don’t know if it’s going to make it through this NaNoWriMo and the sad thing is that even my desktop computer isn’t working anymore (no strange sounds of that because I can’t even get it to boot). I’m in bad shape. Bad, bad shape.

(See previously Not a sound you want to hear from your computer.)

Every year as NaNoWriMo season begins, I get a little stressed. It gets easier and easier to be the ubermoderator for such a big community. But the one thing that I’ve noticed is a good indication of my stress levels is dreaming in October.

For the past three years my dreams in October have had large portions formatted as forum posts.

Seriously. The dream bits are separate posts. Not specifically text, but somehow, in that dream-way, enclosed within forum code and forum frames. The dreams are not necessarily nanowrimo-related, but just formatted as topics and threads.

The dreams this year, of course, started on October 1st. Last night I had no forum dreams that I recall. Will this complacency blow up in my face? If I do not live, breathe and dream nanowrimo, will it still come together?

Last night I was working on my laptop ... on my lap, in front of the TV. I can’t recall what I was working on, probably an email or the forums.

Suddenly the computer made a loud POP and I felt the expression of air on my legs. I picked the computer up by the corner of the keyboard and held it like a rat by its tail, fully expecting to burst into flames (it is a Dell, after all). I dare not put it down, lest it catch something else on fire so I held it out for The Man to yank the power cord. It shut off instantly and The Man followed me into the kitchen as I carried it by the corner. Twisting it around and seeing no indication of flames or even any unusual heat or smoke, I put it down on the floor. I felt the top, then the bottom then closed it and sniffed it. All perfectly normal.

We took out the battery, which also looked normal and didn’t feel hot at all.

After a few minutes of puzzlement, “You heard that pop, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yeah. Did it hurt?”

“No, not at all, just, you know, I thought it was gonna burst into flames, like they do on BoingBong.”

We set it down on the dining room table, sans battery and plugged it back in. It works just fine.

The battery wasn’t holding even the slightest charge for the past month or so, so it’s not like running it without the battery is any big deal.

You can be sure the first thing I did was copy ALL of my files off to the server.

Now I can’t decide if I should get a new battery (which Dell doesn’t even sell on their website any longer) or just spring for a new laptop. My Inspiron 2600 turns four this month. That’s 88 in dog years.

I was reading Wil Wheaton earlier about meeting Larry Niven (author of Ringworld). It got me to thinking (which I commented there about) that I’ve always thought that the whole super powers thing is all wrong.

A really powerful superhero would have special powers like the power to make people laugh.

Think about the different in how much work it takes to hurt someone ... any old schmo can do it. It doesn’t even take a weapon or super powers. Sure, you can hurt someone MORE with more power, but really, how much hurtin’ does one person need?

Then think how rare and powerful laughter is.

Or the power to make someone feel good about themselves.

The power of pleasure.

The power of contentment.

The power of just seeing someone else’s side for a moment.

The sad thing is that most of these are not super powers, just rare powers. Undervalued powers.

So, today I decided to tackle the stains on the upholstery in the living room. We have a little carpet cleaner thingy that we got when we adopted Becky which works well for cleaning up all sorts of her messes. So I went to work with the noisy machine on her chair, to make it at least acceptable for company.

While I’m cleaning away, I glance over at the dog, who looks most unhappy about me taking over her chair and making it all fresh smelling. As I back up to examine my progress, I look down at her feet and see what she’s unhappy about. Three different piles of fresh vomit on the living room rug.

Being an optomistic person, I think that this is my lucky day! I can suck that sick right up! No worries about that leaving a stain.

When I was a kid I invented a few things.

One of them was noise cancelling technology. Okay, I never built a prototype or anything, but I made some pictures. This invention came in 9th grade after a science lab where we took long springs out into the hallway and created waveforms by having one student hold one end and wiggle it and another student hold the other end. Many of us quickly saw that you could cancel out your partners wave by creating an equal and opposite one.

I mulled it over and then told the teacher several days later that it would be possible to create a machine that would create equal and opposite sound waves to effectively dampen loud noises. These machines would be installed on cars, jackhammers and pile drivers.

My invention became noise cancelling headphones, of which I own a pair, and paid retail and received no royalties from Bose or Sony. I still think that masking the noise at the source is a better idea.

I didn’t get any extra credit for this. I don’t even think I got an A in the class.

Later in Advanced Bio in my senior year we studied bacteriophages, which are a kind of virus. They’re pretty cool, and the picture in our textbook showed that they looked like the Apollo Lunar Lander. A little module with some legs sticking off of it. The bacteriophage would land on a bacteria and then insert its genetic core and then take over the bacteria as an incubation unit until it would finally burst with new bacteriophages.

I suggested later in class that this could be used to fight diseases, since the bacteriophage was so specific to killing only bacteria (and not human cells) that we could just inject into people and let them keep us clean. It was pointed out that the bacteriophages are usually pretty targeted and not a broad-spectrum antibiotic like I hoped. Then I suggested that they could be used as a disinfectant, in tablet form for drinking water in places like Africa with chronic water contamination problems. But the teacher kind of moved on from there to the next class assignment. (Our textbook and the books in our library did not reveal to me the degree to which bacteriophages were being examined for these same purposes, so I can still say I got the idea in a vaccum. If nothing else, it might make a good basis for a SciFi movie.)

But here it is, 2006 and the FDA has actually approved the use of bacteriophages to fight listeria on lunchmeats.

Oh, my other invention was a low-sodium celery. My grandmother was on a low-sodium diet and couldn’t eat celery. So I came up with a way to use reverse osmosis to draw the excessive sodium out of the celery before market. I couldn’t guarantee that the taste would be the same though.

Of course I probably had some other wacky ideas which were not only no good, but probably so poorly conceived that I no longer remember them. Until they become practical and profitable, of course.

I am loathe to follow fashion, but sometimes something that “everyone is doing” is just a good idea.

Last night I bought a bike.

Part of my hesitation about biking in LA is that I’m afraid of being hit by a car. But the new trendiness of biking, I think, is helping to increase awareness of bikers as part of the normal flow of traffic.

The other thing that’s kept me from buying a bike is that freakishly steep hill that I live on. So, as a compromise, I bought a starter bike. If it doesn’t work out, you might see a craigslist link posted here very soon. But if it does work out, you also might see a craigslist post here very soon as I upgrade!

Actually, if this one works out okay I’ll probably trick it out with some fenders (since I’ll be commuting), a pannier or saddlebags, a kickstand (because I don’t like leaning my bike on stuff) and maybe one of those tall flags (I can get it custom printed with the candy blog logo!).

A few weeks ago Sean Bonner posted about Google News and their screwy, secret and inconsistent policy for including blogs as new sources.

All of the Metblog sites should be added. Granted, not every post is news, but when it comes to big stories like Katrina, London Tube Bombings and Mumbia train bombings as well as the Pakistan Earthquakes and web censorship by the government in Saudi Arabia ... the sites are all over that stuff.

But the thing is that they’re not consistent (which you know is a pet peeve of mine), so I decided to see if I could get Candy Blog listed as a news source.

First try, I was turned down for the following reason:

“we currently only include sites with news articles that report on recent events.”

Okee dokee, I can understand that. But I started thinking about what I read there ... things like movie reviews and regurgitation of press releases and of course recipes. So why isn’t a candy review considered a recent event? My photos are original and many of the products are new ... why is that so different from a soft profile piece about an actor in a TV show? A fan site for Stargate SG-1 and Celebrity Babies are listed! Even the satirical Australian site called The Chaser gets in.

Second try, so I submitted again with an angle towards comparing my site to movie reviews and I got back:

“We don’t include sites that are written and maintained by individuals.”

So there you have it ... I guess since I’m taking my own photos, I’ve done myself in. If I’ve got no editor, I’m not worthy. I looked around a bit and only found one site run by an individual (Mongabay.com), but you know, I didn’t look at all 4,500 sources or anything.

Now, if you think differently, you’re free to tell them that you’d like to see me included on Google News. Of course you could also tell them to include the Metblogs sites too.

Total Miles: 1,866
Gallons of Gas Consumed: 38 (about $125.00)

Saturday
Drove from Los Angeles to Ukiah
Highest Temp: 117 - somewhere near Richmond, CA

Sunday
Hiked Founders Loop - Avenue of the Giants
Hiked Trinidad Head - Trinidad
Miles Hiked: 3
Dinner: Seascape (Trinidad)
Highest Temperature: 97 (Avenue of the Giants)

Monday
Hiked Fern Canyon
Hiked Founder’s Grove
Miles Hiked: 4
Dinner: Larrupin’ Cafe (Trinidad)
Highest Temperature:

Tuesday
Hiked Klamath River Overlook - Requa/Klamath
Hiked Yurok Village Loop/Hidden Beach - Klamath
Hiked Trinidad Beach - Trinidad
Miles Hiked: 4
Dinner: Abruzzi (Arcata)
Highest Temperature: 73

Wednesday
Drove from Trinidad to Olema
Highest Temp: 93 (Cotati)

Thursday
Pt. Reyes Lighthouse
Limantour Point Beach & Spit
Dinner: Olema Inn
Miles Hiked: 3
Highest Temp: 82

Friday
Hiked some other Fern Canyon at the Bird Center
Hiked Palomarin Bluff Trail
Bioluminescence Kayak Tour
Highest Temp: 78

Saturday
Drove to San Francisco via Highway 1
Walked to Ferry Terminal Building
Dinner: Rue St. Jacques (Nob Hill)
Highest Temp: 73

Sunday
Drove to Los Angeles
Highest Temp: 98 (Buttonwillow)