In this post I’d like to talk about the appreciation of objects in their utility and elegance, the sensations they inspire and the impact they have on our lives. Materialistic? Certainly, but we’re a tool-using species and a fascination with objects is what elevated us from the mud.

Tools, buildings, ornaments, furniture, clothing. These are the vestibules of humanity, artifacts through which anthropologists can glimpse the spirit of bygone civilizations, and by which we can judge the nature of modern-day cultures as well.

This Wednesday, January 27th, saw the announcement of the iPad. As a media and print enthusiast, small-press publisher, typography and New Media nut (not to mention Machead) I was understandably excited and followed my usual tradition for such Apple events.

The keynote speech by Steve Jobs would start at 7PM my time so, coming home from work, I immediately sequestered myself in my home office (my boyfriend is the understanding sort), popped up four browser windows side-by-side and launched a different live blog feed in each of them, after which I spent the next two hours reading the reporters’ quick posts  typed into their laptops and squinting at blurry photos they took on their phones during the event. I twittered furiously, and although I understand the lunacy about live-tweeting about an event I was ‘witnessing’ only second-hand, at least ‘twittering’ in this case isn’t a metaphor for self-abuse.

As a media and print enthusiast [etc] I have many opinions about iPad. Many expectations were dashed, some surprises blew me away and it’s a good thing the device won’t be sold for another two months, because I’d like to be able to form a coherent opinion on it before I inevitably break down and buy one. Until then, however, my mind is on Things. And here, now, is a List Of My Favorite Things.

My iPhone 3G, purchased on the day it launched in my country during a midnight sale in Rotterdam where I was accompanied by two good friends and my younger brother + entourage — and which, I might add, turned into quite the rocking late-night street-party — is a Thing which I enjoy immensely. Other than Jimminy Willikins, no object spends as much time in my hand as my iPhone. I enjoy the physicality of its interface, the depth to which the interactivity model has been thought through. The sophisticated simplicity of the design, seamless, and its weight. It stands proudly in its cradle on my work desk.

On my desk right now is also a Moleskine notebook. I’ve never written in it, though I have ones at home that are worn and filled and bulging with stuff stuck into them. My penmanship has always been rather poor and my mother never prepared me better for my adult life than when she sent me to typing classes at age ten, but nevertheless I’ve always enjoyed the linearity of writing by hand and the way that process guides the mind.

So even though I’m nearly fully digital, I still love the Moleskine for its functional design. Small-signature binding so it lies flat when opened, rounded corners to prevent fox-ears, off-white paper and faint lines, a harmonica fold to stick loose items into, a bookmark ribbon and an elastic  to keep it closed. Useful, portable writing perfection, justly legendary, so when I found an old blank one at home I brought it to work and just left it on my desk as an ornament. I like it, why shouldn’t I keep it around?

It’s not all about looks, though. The very best pen I ever used wasn’t a thing of beauty per se. It was a cheap translucent plastic home brand rollerball with blue-black ink that cost a euro and a half when it was still manufactured. Tastes vary of course, but for me, for my chickenscratch handwriting, it was perfection. The rollerball nib glided smoothly over the page with just enough friction to keep my letters succinct and in control. The ink spread richly, dried quickly and struck a gorgeous contrast against the cream paper, sustaining its beauty even years later.

My very favorite book, growing up, was my favorite not so much because of its subject (though it was a fascinating read), but rather because of its substance. The book in question was Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, and purported to continue where Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time left off. Through historical accounts and anecdotes Kaku illustrated the lives of some of the greatest thinkers in the history of science and guided the reader through the complex and abstract curiosities of theoretical physics. The sophisticated science was accessible because Kaku explored the life and mind of the thinker to illustrate the nature of the thought.

It was the book itself, the material object, that kept me going back to the library to fetch it. A library hardcover, converted through lamination from a softcover, it had a very satisfying thump to it when knocked or set down. Apparently this copy suffered some form of damage, and that’s what gave it such allure. The pages were off-white, a soft ocher-cream, discolored at the edges with a more cinnamon tint. The lettering was well-balanced and crisp, and printed with an overabundance of magenta so that the print, while ostensibly black, always seemed a gorgeous and regal red out of the corner of my eye.

Best of all was the smell. I’ve never experienced its like. Whatever happened to this book suffused it with just the faintest scent of sulfur, like a freshly-struck match. Undetectable for the first few minutes of reading, I didn’t even notice it until the second or third time I read the book, but once I realized I understood what it was that intoxicated me so. Even years later, the pages retained the scent.

The Mac computers I’ve owned, culminating in the current 24-inch iMac on my desk, were a heady blend of industrial grace and software sophistication. Glossy white or matte black plastic composites, black glass, brushed aluminum all carved into shapes that spoke of thought and insight and the thorough understanding of an under-appreciated and oft-mocked facet of the human psyche: emotional connections with things that aren’t alive.

I’m not talking about such curiosities as moe, but rather the way that every experience and observation interacts with our state of mind, to the point where we endow the inanimate with emotion and value just as surely as we do people. A workman comes to value some tools highly as they serve their function well, a soldier appreciates his weapon and his uniform. There’s no one source for this attachment, though the context of the object’s relationship with its owner is certainly a large part of it. A wedding ring is a prime example; the thing is meant to be beautiful but the (hopefully) happy association makes it all the more spectacular.

We can complain about the materialism of modern society, the excess and the idolatry, but we mustn’t forget how innate these qualities are. We value things as ugly or beautiful, clever or ridiculous, and we bond with some of them in silly or heartwarming ways. This is who we are, and I, for one, am not embarrassed.

Dear Senator Conroy,

As the subject of internet safety is as hot a topic in the Netherlands, my home country, as it is in yours, I have closely followed the progress of your fabulous efforts to protect Australia’s children from the exigencies of the modern World Wide Web. While I applaud how close you’re coming to restricting the internet activities of your country’s citizens, I have some serious concerns about the possible flaws in your plan. First and foremost: despite your laudable efforts, I have personally observed that there are still a few Australians on the internet, and I’d like to highlight some of the ways in which the exclusion of Australia from the datasphere could be more effectively achieved.

As you were born in England, Senator Conroy, I sincerely hope you see yourself as the 21st-century champion of your nation’s colonial policy of ‘convictism’ in which the quality of the English population was markedly improved by dumping all the undesirables on the then-newfangled continent of Australia. The inconvenience this caused the Aboriginal People is a lamentable tragedy, and I’m pleased to see you’re using more modern means to achieve the same goal without causing undue stress for others.

However, I cannot voice my full support for your plan as it seems a bit on the wishy-washy side. As it’s currently proposed, with the technology that’s currently been prepared for the live field trial later this year, this plan of yours will do nothing to ‘protect Australia’s children’, i.e. ‘protect the world from cyber-savvy Australians’.

Before I go into details, though, let me first say I have absolutely no objection to your use of this program to also provide a service to the citizens you represent! Coming from such disadvantaged stock — criminals, musicians, civil engineers, sluts (I’m looking at you, Mary Wade) and some Irish — they’re understandably threatened by complex subjects such as sex, euthanasia and drugs. The Australians are as horrified by the Netherlands’ excesses in these matters as we are by the fact that Australians pronounce every sentence as if it’s a question…?

There’s no harm in solving both problems at once, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps you’ve ‘gone native’ since you moved to Australia and have lost sight of the bigger picture. You’ve shown such strength, ignoring the protests of internet rights groups, protest marches, the recommendations of the ISPs who must ultimately implement your plan and the majority of your own senate, but I find myself disappointed that you fail to go that last mile that would truly achieve internet security from Australia.

When you claim that the internet filter has, in tests, proven to be “100% accurate” you’re being blatantly deceptive. Of the internet filter technologies you tested last year, those that were able to effectively filter as much as four out of five harmful sites (requiring Australian internetters to click up to a dozen times to circumvent the filter and access the porn), the filters also blocked at maximum 60 000 out of every million other webpages. That means there’s still 940 000 sites where Australians can continue to use words like arvo and fair dinkum and strewth. This does almost nothing to protect us!

You’ve booked more impressive results with the impact of the filters on internet speeds. One of the more promising technologies you tested out was able to slow the users’ internet speed by 20% even when it wasn’t filtering, with some others providing up to 86% slowdown during actual use! This is a measurable success, Senator Conroy, as this should effectively prevent Australians from uploading YouTube videos about surfing.

But does it stop them from social sites like FaceBook or LiveJournal, where the majority of the content is text-based? Even 24% of modern internet speeds would still enable your country’s citizens to bother the rest of the world with opinions, information and meaningful dialogue.

Happily, though, I see that you do have a solution for this. The Australian Communications and Media Authority will, in your plan, maintain a blacklist of sites deemed ‘objectionable’ and the looseness of the terminology you’ve consistently used in defining your plans fills me with confidence that this is where you’ll compensate for the technical shortcomings I highlighted earlier. Having given no indication of how a ‘public complaint’ against a particular site will be reviewed, nor established any means by which the blacklisting of a site could be appealed, you’ve cleverly guaranteed the AMCA the ability to chip away at the information space with which Australia can interact, severing that digital umbilical one strand at a time.

My last concern, though, is about the length of time that it will take to completely isolate your country from the internet the rest of us use. Let me assure you, Senator Conroy, that I will do my part to expedite the process! As the writer of fiction for adults, I’ll be sure to advertise on as many sites as I’m permitted to so that you can blacklist each of those for containing ‘objectionable material’.

Further, I’ll encourage everyone I know to engage in discussions about sexual health, drug dependency, unwanted pregnancy and the suffering of the terminally ill so that you have ample fuel to ensure that any site frequented by wholesome, upstanding citizens of the rest of the world can be protected from the involvement of Australians.

Your detractors have bandied the tag #nocleanfeed on Twitter, and created slanderous websites such as www.nocleanfeed.com to feebly protest the march of progress you’re staunchly championing. To them I say:

#GetAussiesOffTheNet

With passionate, abiding affection,

Alex Fucking Vance

PS: I included the F-word in my name at the bottom of this letter; could you please ensure that my site is added to the blacklist at your earliest convenience?

Note: Google Wave is currently in Developer Preview, meaning it’s not yet even beta, and only has a few thousand users. The current user experience is not representative of the stated vision, so for the sake of clarity I’ve taken some liberties in this part by including functions which currently have not yet been implemented or don’t reliably work, and assume a larger userbase than is currently the case.

It’s a beautiful day! I am a modern, well-connected individual with a challenging day job, rewarding hobbies, and hip friends both near and abroad. My bed is comfortable, but the spot beside me is empty. Childless and alone, I weep, briefly, then shake hands with the unemployed and get up to face another fabulous day.

While I was sleeping, my friends overseas were enjoying the best part of the day and no doubt had many interesting adventures and emotions. Shall I sit down at my computer, coffee in hand, and browse to LiveJournal? Facebook? Twitter? Maybe open my RSS reader? Nay. Via clever robots and server-side support from the soc-nets in question, all blogs/notes/articles are neatly arranged in my inbox, awaiting my response. Trifling, short status updates are aggregated in a single wave per service where, too, I can respond to each of them.

Cluttered? Hardly. I made folders into which my friends’ LJ posts and Facebook notes and articles on sites I follow are automatically inserted, so my inbox can be used for actual messages while I can spider through my social web at leisure.

If I were An Award-Winning Graphic Novelist instead of a lonely yet optimistic new media enthusiast I might have a Google search pre-programmed to look for mentions of my wares. Look! There’s my Search Wave in my inbox, with the newest hits highlighted (or highlit, if you like) as unread items.

Of course, there are also actual people who want to talk to me directly. Look, there’s a new wave from my workmate Murgatroyd, who asks me if I’d like to grab some lunch with her and my other colleague  Pippin, whom she’s shrewdly also added to the wave. Further down the wave she asks if I’ve seen the new Tarantino movie, and further still whether I think she’ll ever find a husband.

Neither Pippin nor I really like Murgatroyd, but we like free lunches. Ah, I see that Pippin has already replied to the paragraph where she asked us out. Excellent. I’ll add a reply there too, and suggest we go have lobsters stuffed with caviar boiled in champagne into which pearls have been dissolved. A simple meal, by Murgatroyd’s delightfully expensive standards.

Now, I have indeed seen the new Tarantino, but since I know Murgatroyd is a persistent stalker and a creepy paranoiac who will assume I just don’t want to go see it with her I immediately provide her with proof. I pull out my phone and open Wave on its browser. I haven’t pressed ‘save’ in my desktop browser, mind — I just log in on my phone’s browser and select Murgatroyd’s wave, where I reply to her Tarantino question by snapping a photo of my ticket stubs and attaching them. The reply and associated photo has appeared in my desktop browser by the time I’ve pocketed my phone.

Lastly, feeling sympathetic to Murgatroyd’s plight (being horrid, she’s quite unweddable) I reply to her paragraph that I’m sure she’ll find The One, and that her Keanu Reeves is just around the corner.

But Pippin, rotter that he is, is also awake. Irresponsible to the core, he’s driving while waving, and he’s just witnessed my messages being typed letter by letter. Cackling with snotty glee, he swerves through rush-hour traffic and privately replies to my reply to her marriage question. He writes such foul and unkind things, but I can see it’s in a private reply that Murgatroyd can never have access to despite the fact that it’s a part of her wave. I titter; I know I ought not to but I do anyway.

Off to work. Is my train delayed? I forgot to check before I left home, so out comes my phone. I made a wave with a gadget that calculates the optimum public transport schedule from my home to my place of employment, and opening that wave instantly updates the gadget. No delays, the train leaves at the usual time. Brilliant!

In transit I catch up on my preferred periodicals with my trusty do-everything Cordless Radio Telephone. An RSS reader automatically compiles a daily digest of the latest posts from blogs and sites I follow, and I can handily flick through this list of snippets, all in a single wave. Finding a particularly compelling piece that I simply must argue with I click on the ‘read more’ link. In the olden days that would have opened the article’s webpage in my browser, but these are not those days. These are modern times and any blog or site worth its salt not only offers an RSS feed of their content but also has a Wave version of each article. I’m given access to this article’s wave and added to its participants (there are two dozen others already, in addition to the article’s writer and his editor) and can scroll through all the comments before adding my own bilious opinion.

Titillatingly, my comment garners an immediate response from the writer. Barely able to contain the flattery I feel I don’t even wait for him to finish typing and respond to the letters I’ve seen him complete so far immediately. After all, there’s nothing he can write that can change the fact that he is a big fat booby-head and I’m more than happy to inform him of this, thus providing him with the enlightenment I’d expected him to give me when I read his article.

How time flies! My train has arrived, and it’s time to join the commuting masses in the Kansas City Shuffle toward the platform’s stairs. Once the station’s vomited out this newest batch of travelers, myself along with them, I’m more than ready to fire up the ol’ corporate spirit and spend my day working for The Man.

Did I mention my company recently installed a corporate Wave server? Let’s all stay eagerly tuned to see how my workday progresses in a Wavified workplace!

- Alex F. Vance

This article includes examples of functionality that is not available in Google Wave at the time of writing, including planned functionality, and likely (but imaginary) future uses by third parties. Enjoy a pinch of salt with your article.

Faster, stronger, better, more.

As a New Media fag I’m all about doing more things faster, and the Rasmussens and their team clearly love me a great deal. While Wave is an open protocol and platform, and anyone will be able to build their own Wave server with their own interface, Google’s Wave interface is fast.

Not necessarily in terms of performance, just yet (it’s still developer preview and it’s some wicked new tech) but rather in terms of user experience. They’ve taken away a lot of bulky conventions we’ve grown accustomed to, such as the difference in the experience of reading an e-mail and composing one and the traditional agreement between computer and user that I shall not save your work unless you command me to.

Time for a change, and for the better, says I.

Google Wave has this nifty feature called playback. Just as Wikipedia articles preserve a history of previous versions you can browse, all changes to a Wave are recorded for posterity. Every added photo, every reply, edit, correction, deletion, everything. This allows you to step through a wave’s evolution and quickly get the gist of the ebb and flow of conversation, or quickly scrub back and forth using the nifty timeline slider.

That’s a cool feature in and of itself. Hours of fun. What makes it a big deal, however, is that it gives the user a tremendous sense of security. Once I’ve typed something in a wave, I know it’s safe. The power could fail, the browser could crash, or I could just walk away without saving, but it’d still be in my Wave account exactly as I left it, for me to edit and improve before sending.

There’s no separate subject line, no to: or cc: fields. You start a new wave, you just get an empty panel. Start typing. Your first sentence is automatically put in bold; that’s your subject right there. Hit return and continue on with your message. Every keystroke is logged, at any time you can be interrupted and when you open your Wave account back up again, there’s your draft just as you left it.

Finished composing your message? Drag in some contacts. You can do that from the IM-style buddylist on the side or click a button for a handy popup where you can filter your contacts list and select the one(s) you want to add.

Then you click send.

Right?

Wait, no, just kidding you don’t click send. You don’t click anything. When you added those contacts to the wave it immediately showed up in their inbox. Scary? Hardly. If you made a mistake you can just remove that contact [doesn’t yet work in current developer preview] and they’ll never know they received an errant wave.

This makes Wave wicked fast. You never confirm an action because that’s implicit in performing it. If you type something you want to send, it’s sent. Your computer, suddenly, trusts you to know what you’re doing and you don’t have to feel any additional pressure, because you know that everything is infinitely undoable and fixable so you can just get on with your life.

Because messages are sent and received near-instantaneously, and Wave is endowed with very sensible and intuitive shortcut keys, a Wave can be used as an IM conversation. Someone sends you a Wave, right? You open it up, see the icon of the person who sent it, and the little green dot that indicates they’re online right now. You reply, calling them a naughty name. They reply back instantly telling you something unkind about your mother. You know, banter. You and your friend have that kind of relationship.

As you’re chatting, your messages are transmitted letter by letter. Now, this can be turned off if you prefer, and experience alone will show how people respond to this ability, but there’s a lot to be said for it. When you speak to someone you don’t have the ability to correct your sentences before uttering them, and even if we sometimes stammer a little, we don’t let that get in the way of a good conversation.

This nifty real-time information transmission is a fundamental Wave feature that applies to basically anything you could do in a wave, not just text. The Google Maps plug-in demonstrates that. If you and I are chatting in a Wave and I want to show you my house, I drag that plug-in into our wave. We both see a Google Maps window in the wave itself, and as I click and drag around it, you see your map moving around, zooming in, until I drop a pin on my house. You take over, zoom in further, remove the pin, and I see it happening. I notice you’re zooming in on the back yard. I remember I was having one of my special invitation-only parties on the day the satellite passed over, and I quickly delete the Maps plug-in from the Wave before you can squint at the wobbly shapes long enough to discern my curious back yard proclivities.

Of course, I’m still not safe, because you can use the playback feature to see how we moved around the map. I guess I’m pretty screwed. No more parties for me.

All the troublesome stuff like conflict resolution (what if we’re both clicking and dragging around the map?) is taken care of by Wave’s technology, so the developer of a plug-in like this Maps example only needs to focus on how his plug-in works, what information it sends and receives, and trust the Wave protocol to take care of the rest.

What you wind up with is a platform that can transmit data fast enough for live interaction, store meticulously granular history, allow multiple parties to interact simultaneously, and all this within a browser. That’s a strong, strong platform.

So what would it be like to actually use it for a day?

Coming up next…

The Rasmussen Brothers, who sound like a zing-hip edge-jazz outfit that only really cool people have heard about, understand something that few technology inventors focus on too much: they have no control over the future. Most innovators like to own their invention and would love to be the King of the Thing that becomes hugely popular. This isn’t a dig against the Zuckerbergs and Andersons of the world, but there’s a lot to be said for the Buytaerts (home town boy made good!) and Mullenwegs who embrace the unknowable and actively encourage others to play in their software sandbox.

The Rasmussens clearly thought about the commonalities between the most popular forms of communication over the last century, and the most promising emerging ones. As Vladimir Propp did for the fairy tale, they defined a taxonomy of characteristics that circumscribe how humans interact with each other, and how we’d actually like to interact now that new technologies are available to free us from the bondage of time and space.

But the future is unpredictable. In the ‘50s kids thought that today we’d all be wearing silver body-suits and zip around on hover-scooters and snort astronaut food from a syringe. Instead, we have cell phones, carsharing and the battle against bootlegging.

Google, therefore, has considered that if Wave is to be the new e-mail it must be blissfully agnostic, without specific boundaries on the type of content that can be shared, while affording any new innovation all the wondrous boons of the real-time and/or asynchronous communication technology that has been developed for Wave — and to allow waves to be used freely as content items for purposes other than merely the most obvious.

Remember that I said a wave is a shared object, like a web page? That object is an XML file, an interoperable and flexible exchange standard that does All Sorts of Neat Stuff, from RSS feeds to those Office 2007 files your colleagues from Head Office send you which you still can’t bloody open. With a little bit of wizardry that isn’t nearly as complicated as you might imagine, it’s possible to embed a wave in a web page.

Before I go into how this works and why it’s awesome, just go with it, okay?

You will outfit your Wave account, for free, with that Little Bit of Wizardry, which is a magical amulet that connects your mind to the All-River, and connects your Wave account with your blog. You fire up a new wave. You whisper the incantation to your magical amulet. The power of the All-River flows through your veins and… your blog has just been updated with a new post, namely the wave you just wrote, for everyone to read.

You notice a typo. Without thinking, you hit backspace and correct it. Do you need to click anything? Confirm? Re-publish? No. It’s done. That wave is now a post on your blog, and if I were reading it I’d have noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the word ‘niggardly’ is now suddenly spelled correctly instead of being the innocent impetus for an endless avalanche of lawsuits for racial slander.

But wait, it gets cooler.

That Wave is sitting pretty in your Sent box, nary a care in the world, then suddenly pops back into your inbox to let you know that there’s been a comment to your blog post. In fact, the comment someone posted is right there, at the bottom of the wave. Is there a handy link to take you to your blog so you can reply to that comment? Nuh uh. You reply right then and there.

By embedding a wave it becomes a broadcast, just like a blog post, but it’s still a wave. That’s what I mean when I say that this brilliant bit of insight and engineering smoothly allows you to transition between different modes of communication. You’re in your wave account, writing and replying just like you would e-mail. I’m on your blog, reading your posts and replying just as I would with any other webpage.

Since Wave is also a socket you can plug stuff into it. Third-party extensions are being written by the droves to let you embed your waves in your WordPress or Drupal blog, but also to read your Twitter timeline. That one’s really cool; you drop that little plug-in into a new wave, sign in with Twitter’s credentials and you see all the most recent tweets.

And you can reply to them.

The recipient will see a reply to their tweet, coming from your Twitter account, but on your screen it’s like the timeline is just one long wave with lots of little messages you can reply to. The twitter plug-in serves as an ambassador between your wave account and your Twitter account, translating back and forth without you having to worry about a thing.

The plug-ins come in two flavors, namely gadgets and robots. Gadgets are a lot like Facebook apps or Firefox plug-ins and let you embed other stuff in your waves, anything from a Google Map to a game of chess to, down the road, a Skype webcam chat. Robots are ‘virtual participants’ in the wave and scramble diligently in the background to do anything from fixing your racist typos to translating your wave to a blog or twitter post to translating your every written word into Hebrew. The sky’s the limit.

There’s a subtle paradigm shift at play, namely the unification of a variety of communication methods, current and future. It’s hard to correctly grasp the significance of this shift, but think of it like this: how often do you get a message about content?

All the time. You get a text message to tell you you have voicemail. You get an e-mail to tell you there’s a comment on your blog, or that you’ve been mentioned on Twitter. And isn’t that just plain retarded? LiveJournal does you a favor by including the full text of the comment you received in their notification e-mail and offering you a reply form in the e-mail itself, but that form doesn’t always work. With most such notifications, in order to read the content they’re alerting you to, let alone interact with that content, you have to click a handy link that takes you from your mail environment to whatever website the content resides on.

With Wave, it doesn’t have to be so. The message is th content. The wave is the blog, the reply is the comment. That’s AWESOME.

I have three more things in store for you very shortly, and then a followup down the road after the Goole Wave Beta goes live.

First, coming up next, is a quick overview of the cool technologies that already exist that show how Wave can replace e-mail and be better, how it can replace IM and be better, how it can replace on-line document collaboration and be…

Second, thereafter, is a walkthrough of a typical day in the life of a future Wave user, based both on what Wave can do currently as well as what it can do when it’s finished — and, for the hell of it, what could conceivably be made for it.

Third, and finally for now, I set aside my delicious drink of Kool-Aid and look at the current reality, warts and all. What impresses and what disappoints, what works and what doesn’t.

Stay tuned!

Explaining Wave is a difficult thing. Going by bullet-points, knee-jerk reactions include understimation, confusion and dismissal. I tell you plainly, therefore, that Wave is the shit and to keep that in mind as you read this. I promise, pinky swear, that there will be honest critical evaluation later. For now, just go with it, ‘kay?

I will now explain to you, in one sentence and four pictures, what Wave is. Ready?

A wave is equal parts conversation, document, broadcast, and socket.

There. Done. Next.

Or… Let’s take another look at this.

• A conversation is two-way communication between one person and another, or a group of manageable size. The principle is that you take turns speaking and listening. This is how e-mail and instant messaging services operate. I create a message and send you a copy of that. You create a reply and send a copy to me. Rinse, repeat.
• A document is a mutable text that can be modified by whoever has access to it. The simplest form is a piece of paper on which I write a bit, then you write a bit, then me again.A digital document is more easily shared; I can e-mail you a copy, you modify it and send me a copy back. Even better are online document management systems like Google Docs or even, in a way, Wikipedia, where you don’t need to send each other copies because the most recent version is always online.
• A broadcast has one speaker and many listeners. Television operates on this principle, as do lectures and blog posts. The latter two commonly have a secondary component that allows responses to the original broadcast in the form of a Q&A round or a comments section under the blog posts. These comments and questions are initially responses to the original broadcast, and secondarily responses to one another.
• A socket is something you can plug stuff into that does other stuff. Electric sockets let you plug in lamps, coffee machines and personal entertainment devices. Browsers like Firefox and websites like Facebook allow third parties to create plug-ins that plug into them to do cool stuff in the browser/website which the original developers might never have thought of.

What does this mean concretely?

There. Doesn’t look too alien, does it? Looks like you’ve got an inbox right in the middle, an open message on the right and on the left there’s some folders and a contact list. Having used instant messengers and e-mail clients they’re all quite familiar to us. Whew!

What’s different from either e-mail or IM is that you’re not looking at a bunch of messages — or rather, copies of messages which were sent to you and which you sent, but rather, you’re seeing a list of message objects to which you have access.

Let’s say that again: when you see your e-mail inbox you’re looking at copies of messages that you’ve received or sent, but when you see your Wave inbox you’re looking at objects to which you have access.

You don’t send a wave as much as share it. Technical stuff like ‘federation’ aside, there’s only really one copy of any particular wave on a server somewhere. When you reply, you’re modifying that one single wave object. Everyone else who’s on that wave then sees it as ‘unread’ because it’s changed since the last time they looked at it.

This is kind of a big deal. While it looks like e-mail and smells like IM, the fact that each message is a shared object makes it a lot more like a blog post, where there’s only one post on a server somewhere, and any comments are simply added to it, rather than copies being sent to all the participants.

See why a wave is also a document? The shared nature allows for a great deal of interaction. Not just a reply where you assume the recipient remembers the last message he sent, or where you copy-paste chunks of the last thing you received. You can insert your reply at any point in the message on a per-paragraph basis so you can hit on the key points.

More radically (and more like a document) you can also edit the original message — or, I should say, object. This can be as innocuous as correcting your mother’s spelling to something as brilliantly useful as signing your name to a friend’s suggestion to go see movie X or Y.

Think about that. Instead of twenty people replying their preference, changing their minds, or failing to reply everyone can just open edit wave and add their name to the list of people who want to go see X, or the list for Y.

Next up: Broadcasts and sockets, or why Google Wave may be the future of the web (or not)

The brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who built Google Maps, set themselves this question: “What would e-mail look like if it were invented today?” It’s a worthy question. E-mail, as a standard, is now four decades old. Instant Messaging likewise, having been born as Unix Talk in the ‘70s. Since then we’ve encountered a multitude of problems and opportunities the creators could never have dreamed of: spam, push, mobile intertubes.

As I said at the end of part 1, the key is that Wave was designed for the smooth transitioning of one mode of dialogue to another. Live to time-delayed, private to group conversation, all in the same space, in the same manner. Further, as a platform, Wave permits the evolution and inclusion of new media through a third-party plugin architecture.

And one further crucial thing to understand is that Wave is open. This is possibly the biggest difference between Wave and flavour-of-the-month social networks and services; Google doesn’t want to own it. Or, well, they probably want to, but they’re deliberately creating a level playing field where they could, in principle, be competed into oblivion.

Much of Wave’s code is already open-source, more will follow. The idea is that anyone could build a Wave server that could securely and reliably interoperate with all other Wave servers. Just as anyone can build their own e-mail server today. Does a Gmail user notice anything different when he e-mails a Windows Live user instead of a fellow Gmailer? Not a sausage, and that will apply to Wave as well.

Next up, I’ll list the many wondrous features, functions and technologies and the overarching vision that makes Wave such a fascinating and revolutionary prospect. If you really can’t wait, however, take a peek at the Cliff notes of the presentation Lars and his team made at the Google I/O developer’s conference in May.

Some say people are getting dumber; I say that communication is becoming more egalitarian, that the dumb are simply more visible to each other and to us (who are not dumb, naturally). There’s a justifiable horror in response to l33t-speak, txt lnguaj, personal profile pages that are an abomination to the eyes and ears and sanity, but it’s not such a big deal. People are communicating more and more, filling every moment of their day with interaction with other people and even though a tweet is no substitute for Face Time, all of them are to be celebrated. Nobody ever really got dumber from talking to somebody else, so let’s cheer for the adorable idiots who flood the ‘net with OMGs because they’re learning and becoming more awesome, bit by bit and byte bi byte.

Of course, at the same time there’s also a sieving process going on that causes us to expose ourselves less and less to information or forms of dialogue that require more than a minute to consume. This is legitimately worrisome, but, again, it’s not the end of the world since the value of byte-sized data and dialogue is evidently increasing. Wikipedia articles are brisk and informative, and the risk of vandalism or misinformation is no greater than the risk that a printed encyclopaedia article is, by the time you read it, laughably out of date. Twitter is largely meaningless chaff with little substance, but browsing the last hour of tweets is a lot like nipping in to the town pub to get the Cliff notes on what your cyber-locals are up to and catch up on the talk of the day.

The twentieth century saw the emergence of communication technologies that were either true paradigm shifts or technology-enhanced versions of existing, proven forms of communication. The radio and telephone broke new ground in human consciousness by allowing direct, synchronous conversation unbound by space, but he telegraph was merely a much faster form of postal mail, the car– and cellphone a more convenient form of telephony. And even then, these were versions of modes of dialogue that had been in operation for centuries: the spoken conversation and the written letter.

In the twenty-first we’re seeing the emergence of more radical media. Blogs represented an egalitarian form of one-to-many broadcasting previously reserved for newsprint and magazines, IM allows us to hold live, synchronous conversations with many different people at once.

But the most interesting, popular and successful communication media have been those that blend the different models: synchronous and asynchronous, one-on-one and one-to-many, private and public. You can be notified of and reply to an e-mail or text message instantly, holding a live back-and-forth, or you can get back to it at your leisure without offending the sender. You can write a blog post and ‘lock’ it so that only your select friends can see it.

As we integrate more modes of thought and conversation into our lives it becomes more and more important to us to be able to smoothly transition from one to another at will. This usually means switching the conversation to another medium — checking to see whether your friend is on IM after you get an e-mail you want to take action on immediately — but that’s awkward for many reasons.

For one, you have to know many contact points for each of your friends. What’s your Facebook? And your e-mail? And which IM do you use? Also, what’s your birthday?

For another, this leaves the history of your conversation spread out across multiple platforms. You asked your friend for his address, but you can’t find it any more. Did he send a message on Facebook? Is it in your e-mail archive? How about your chat history?

So, what does Google Wave have to offer that makes me giddy? Coming right up…

This article first appeared in FANG Vol. 1 in 2005.

There was once a time, just between the rise of the fast-food, fast-everything economy in the West in the seventies and the flourishing of the modern Internet in the ‘90s, when the distribution of one’s  art through amateur media was possible, although it wasn’t easy. The availability of small-press printing methods, not to mention photocopiers and stencil machines, made it possible for individuals to make magazines in moderate quantities – with the assumption, of course, that they’d fill this magazine with interesting material.

Non-professional art and literature enthusiasts found in these technologies a great opportunity to distribute their work to an audience, if they had one, but the most interesting use of these technologies was the way they were employed by artists and writers amongst themselves.

Amateur journalists, political activists, scientists, artists, connoisseurs, writers – amateurs, all, in the original sense of the word: people with a love for a craft that have no hope of recognition or money or fame. Or rather, they have hope, but that isn’t why they practice their craft, be it reporting or drawing or writing,. It was these people who were suddenly given by the world at large the technology and infrastructure to, for the first time, overcome the boundaries of geography and form communities based on the sharing of their work.

The Amateur Press Association or APA was formed and was one of the expressions of the ‘commons’ principle which is now ever more making its way into the digital realm. A ‘commons’ is a resource of limited availability which must be managed or risk total depletion. Examples are the file-sharing networks so popular these days, Bittorrent, Emule and others, where a single user uploads a file to a small number of other users who, by virtue of the software they use, automatically distribute the portions they have received to other users.

APA’s functioned in a similar manner. An APA consisted of a limited number of artists or writers of like mind and disposition, typically between ten and forty, with a number of rules that governed membership. All members were obligated to produce a mininum number of works per time period, of a quality that honored that of other members’ works. Each member was obligated to manufacture one copy of their work for each of the APA’s members and mail these out to all of them and in return he or she would receive a copy of each of the other members’ works. Such a group could survive without leadership as long as the group’s members could enforce the rules.

Sometimes an APA would have a leader, typically the person who erected the group to begin with. In such cases, members would manufacture copies o their work, but rather than sending these individually to the other members, they would send them to the APA’s leader, who would then bind one copy of each submission together, give it a cover, and mail this magazine-like bundle of works out to the other members periodically. Such closed-circle publications were called APA ‘zines.

The term ‘zine which, since it contains an apostrophe in itself, I haven’t given quote marks, comes not from ‘magazine’ but from ‘fanzine’.  Fanzines were amateur magazines printed through modern means of reproduction such as the aforementioned photocopiers or stencil machines, run by amateurs and contributed to by amateurs. They operated in that blessed space within copyright law that is governed by common sense, a space which has been more and more marginalized here in the west, and while few now still function they were very similar to the doujinshi of Japan. These, like the fanzines of yesteryear, are magazines by amateurs dedicated to a television series, a film, a book or a fictional world where amateurs would write stories or articles and draw art or comics set within the setting of the series, book, or film, sometimes making use of that setting’s characters.

The difference between a fanzine and an APA is that a fanzine has editors who decide whether or not a submitted work is printed and that a fanzine is available to the general public. Anyone can buy one or subscribe to one, while an APA is available only to contributors.

]]> http://www.alexfvance.com/2009/09/19/the-book-the-%e2%80%98zine-the-net-and-their-authors/feed/ 0 http://www.alexfvance.com/2009/09/19/the-book-the-%e2%80%98zine-the-net-and-their-authors/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alexfvance/~3/bd_yZ5hNjQM/ http://www.alexfvance.com/2009/09/14/the-not-writer-part-7-all-a-matter-of-perspective/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:25:00 +0000 Alex F. Vance http://www.alexfvance.com/2009/09/14/the-not-writer-part-7-all-a-matter-of-perspective/

I’ve been quite unfair, in this series (of which this installment is the last) in sketching a Jekyll & Hyde scenario of the Writer vs the Not Writer, because we’re all a bit of both. At different times, for different reasons. There’s a sliding scale between one and the other, see. The goal of these articles is to make you reflect, honestly and fairly and without emotional burden, where on the scale you fall, and whether you’re comfortable with that, and what is required from you to change your position.

How many hours do you spend writing in a given week? A given month? How many words do you write in those hours? Would you want to spend more hours writing, and write more words during them?

Why do you want that?

There’s nothing wrong with being a Dabbler, who cranks out the odd snippet of story of a blue Monday for the lark of it, nothing at all. A Dabbler is a Writer when he Dabbles and a Not Writer when he Doesn’t — but still a Writer some of the time, and isn’t that a fine thing to be? The problem is when a Dabbler dreams himself a Novelist and finds that his habits won’t produce a novel in a realistic time-frame and of satisfying quality.

So what should he change: his habits or his goals?

Most of us wouldn’t mind firm pecs and visible abs, or a wasp-waist and perky boobs (and in some cases, curiously, both) and almost all of us could have that if we ate what the books told us to eat and nothing else and spent an hour at the gym really working ourselves to the bone every day for three years. Some of us do it, and some of us don’t. We look at the dream, assess the value it has for us, then look at the actions required to attain it and the effort they cost us, and we compromise. We all have lots of different dreams, after all, so is this one worth that much effort?

We can’t write all the time, we’d never get anything else done. Every prophet in his house, to each its season, and all that malarkey. Now is the time to do the dishes, now is the time to study, and now is the time simply to snooze and relax for a bit. There are only so many hours in the day and we must each decide how ours are best spent.

We have obligations, voluntary and necessary, financial and familial, that require us to commit a great number of those hours. Such is the way of adult life, but even then, the responsibility to mediate between commitments and liberties is entirely ours. And it’s up to us to define the value of time, as well.

Is twenty minutes’ standing commute to work in the morning a time when I can write? And on the way home? Can I get in the writing groove if I know I can be interrupted at any second? If my muse fails me, should I just leave her to rest for a few weeks or months until she loves me again?

I’ve made fun of these questions, but they bear serious thought. If you only write sporadically, can you fulfill your dream of having A Novel published? Not likely, mate, but that isn’t the end of the world.

If the circumstances of your life, your preferences, your habits and your values don’t permit you to invest the time and energy to write a novel or to become a prolific short-fiction creator, then you really, really need to chill the fuck out. You don’t have to stop writing altogether, just don’t burden yourself with such expectations. Writers’ block: same deal. If your wheels are stuck and skidding in a snowdrift, take her down into lower gear and ease back on the road. You’ll feel better, and who knows, that might be just the thing to help you get back on the highway to novelizing.

However…

If your goal means a lot to you, and you don’t want to quit, then you’d best get out and run on your own two feet, no matter the cold and ice and bears. Confront the Not Writer in you and tell him he needs to watch his fucking step — or else. Practice discipline. Figure out ways to use the dead time in your day for writing, block out a half-hour every day (and more on weekends) to do some writing, and don’t ever tolerate any excuses from anyone, least of all yourself.

You’re exhausted? Tough shit, bitch. Go write the story of your exhaustion, even if it’s only a page or so. Your sister’s getting married? You’d best get up an hour earlier then, you maggot, if you want to get some writing done today. Forgot your laptop, and is your cellphone out of juice? Order a cup of coffee and ask the waitress or bus-boy if you could have a few pages from their notebook and a Bic pen. Watch them flush with excitement when you tell them you’re a Writer, and see their eyes sparkle as you instantly become 15% more attractive — and believe you me, that’s a SCIENTIFIC FACT.

Every day is a battlefield between the part of you that is a Writer and the part that is a Not Writer, every day a fresh conflict. If you let the Not Writer win too many battles, you’re a Not Writer. If you hold your own, you’re a Dabbler — but if you can look yourself in the mirror in the morning and know, honestly, that the Writer won the battle yesterday and the day before and will almost certainly win today and tomorrow as well, then baby, you’re doing it right, and you know what you are.

And sooner or later you’re going to find that you love it.

Not just the satisfaction of having the words just flow when the spirit moves you. Not just the thrill of finishing a piece and sharing it with others, tittering on tenterhooks while you wait impatiently for their praise. Not just the egoboo of mentioning offhandedly to a stranger at a party that you’re a Writer (and gain +15 in charisma, as I mentioned). You’ll love all of it.

The exercise of your intellect and imagination to craft the next scene of your story despite the fact that your muse has fled you. The strength you must muster to stave off sleep just twenty minutes so you can wrap up a juicy dialogue. Your ingenuity and fortitude, thumbtyping your magnum opus as you cling for dear life to a handrail in a derailing train and hit ‘send’ just as it careens, screeching, into the depths of oblivion so that even when the phone is smashed and your bones are pulped you can still pick your story right up where you left off as soon as your new Cyber-limbs have been grafted onto your brutalized, barely-sentient thorax.

There’s no shame in having a few pounds ’round the tum you could stand to lose, none whatsoever, just don’t expect people to swoon over you when you flex your unseemly bulges in public. There’s no shame in Dabbling for the fun of it, just don’t torment yourself with the illusion that you’ll crank out a novel when you ‘get a little more time’ or ‘figure out the trick of it’. There’s no get-fit-quick pill, and there’s no magic bullet for your inspiration.

This concludes this series on the Not Writer. Good luck, soldiers!

- Alex Fucking Vance

One problem with a creative mind, to put it diplomatically, is that it is a problem-solving machine which is very difficult to selectively turn off. Many of the interruptions we suffer while writing occur when we encounter unrelated problems that require attention. Another, more significant problem with a creative mind is that it requires a certain levity and chaos, making us easily distracted.

For both these reasons there’s a lot to be said in favor of a special, personal space, if your living situation allows it. The other members of your household should ideally respect your ownership of your Hut and agree not to disturb you when you’re in it, and you in turn should only go there if you truly intend to write, rather than abusing the privilege of privacy simply to avoid dealing with the monstrous people in your hizzouse. Not meaning to be sexist, males in particular seem to benefit from this practice, no doubt an evolutionary spandrel related to territoriality.

Even without a physical space, many writers still create virtual ones that offer similar clarity and focus. A separate user account on your computer which has no shortcuts to instant messaging software, no bookmarks and no files cluttering your desktop, for instance, is a good way to differentiate your ‘writing time’ from your ‘my life is a disheartening maelstrom of desperate chaos’ time.

For all the benefits of having a real or virtual writing space, there’s a commensurate drawback: you can’t always use your Hut when you really, really want to write.

While a Hut can certainly help you be a Writer while you have access to it, you might inadvertently create another opportunity to be a Not Writer whenever you’re away from it, and for understandable reasons. You have an idea you’re dying to deploy, but it’d be so much easier and better to deploy it when you’re back in your Hut. Your notes and drafts are there, after all.

Up with this we shall not put!

You’ll do yourself a service by using your creative, problem-solving brain to consider, truthfully, whether you’d really benefit much from a Hut. How many hours a week could you realistically use it? How much time do you spend in your home? How much of that time can you really spend on yourself without impacting your domestic responsibilities? How much time do you spend traveling or visiting friends?

The 20th century saw the greatest increase of individual mobility in our species’ history, and much of our technological evolution in the last two decades can be described as an effort to compensate for that. Web-based e-mail and messaging services, cell phones and myriad other innovations all try to bring to life the dream of doing anything “anytime, anywhere”, and they don’t cost an arm and a leg any more.

Brooklyn novelist Peter Brett wrote 100 000 words of his novel over two years’ daily commute on the F line. If your phone supports e-mail (and has a reasonable data plan) you can write chunks of a story in e-mails to yourself, or if it has a proper data connection and web browser you could use Google Docs, both of which you can access from any computer with an internet connection.

Evernote is a massively useful weapon in the modern e-writer’s arsenal as it offers powerful and flexible note-taking and editing software on a range of platforms, including cell phones and the web. The iPhone app, for instance, allows you to create text or voice notes, take pictures, and sync them directly with your account — even with your GPS co-ordinates recorded, if you so choose.

For the old-school among us, the Moleskine notebook continues to enjoy love and loyalty from its adherents and, while the fanaticism is sometimes quite excessive, it’s not entirely misplaced. Sturdy hard covers, rounded corners, an elastic band to keep it closed and small-signature binding so that when the notebook is opened it lays flat — these are details that make the Moleskine a very practical ‘device’ for writing away from home.

Your Hut doesn’t have to be a place, it can be a device, a system, a workflow. A sturdy notebook that fits comfortably in your pocket (be sure to ask the store clerk’s permission before ‘trying out’ any of the notebooks they’re selling, or you’ll be in trouble). A cheap second-hand PDA or a smartphone with a good data plan and software that lets you keep your in-progress projects up to date everywhere with the least possible manual intervention.

Build a Hut you can take with you, and most importantly, develop a routine that makes your Hut work for you!

next up: Parting is such sweet sorrow…

When someone tells me “I couldn’t make this story work, so I deleted it,” I see fucking RED. Well, a little red. Carmine, I think, or somewhere between scarlet and vermilion.

This rage isn’t even aimed at the Not Writer specifically, I know plenty of Writers who do it, and they shouldn’t. Modern word-processing software, on the desktop and on-line, offers ‘versioning’ technology that allow easy roll-back of changes so that any section you removed can still be retrieved. With that in mind, it’s actually more effort to permanently erase something than to simply store it somewhere out of sight and mind. So why do so many still insist on erasing material that doesn’t please them?

The habit, I believe, stems from a desire for purity, a loathing of pollution. The Not Writer feels this more keenly than a Writer — in fact, the Not Writer believes that this very trait, this particular brand of perfectionism, is what makes him a writer.

Not so, says I.

We would all love for our every written word to be a work of genius, for our every keystroke to contribute toward le mot juste, and the Writer, often, takes pains to maintain this illusion outwardly at least. But he knows, in his heart, that he’s a liar. He knows that his studio isn’t a pristine collection of magnificent canvases in a clean, airy space, but rather a dingy attic crammed with splotched and ruined scraps of sketchbook paper and cardboard and spiders.

There are no shortcuts, there is no straight path from a blank page to a brilliant story. There’s an explosion of prose (an ‘exprosion’, as the Yellow Menace call it), after which the Writer steels his nerves and hacks away at this jungle with a blunt machete and a bloodthirsty rage. The Writer rinses and repeats.

This is another crucial difference between a Writer and a Not Writer: the Writer knows that he’ll have to write ten words for every one that finally goes out. Outlines, notes, revisions, excisements — none of these increase the word count, some of them actually diminish it, but all of them contribute, ultimately, to the quality of the work.

And what do you do with the offal? The machete-clippings and other trash? Into the furnace, say some, so you can keep your workspace clean — bollocks to that, says I! Keep it. Tuck it away somewhere out of sight, sweep it under the carpet, just be sure you can find it if you need it.

I used to keep a folder on my computer (now synced online, natch) that I called the Mortuary. All my unfinished, hopeless story snippets, excised chapters, rejected character outlines and sci-fi tech ideas went in there. No organization, no systematic filenames, just a big roughly chronological jumble of files that I could, if needed, search through to remind myself of one idea I’d once had that I might actually be able to use now.

Stupendous is the number of plot points, characters, names and even whole paragraphs that I cannibalized from previously-discarded ‘waste’. It’s magnificent! Free creativity, and nobody can accuse me of plagiarism — unless a vengeful Past Alex travels forward through time to sue me, of course. But his passport would be out of date, and under Dutch law I could therefore have him executed, so that’s not too big a deal either.

So there’s your contradictory perspective on words, to Not Writers and Writers alike. Like the Cybermen, the credo must be ‘delete-delete-delete’ to pare down your sprawling exprosion to a decent, tight little story — but the definition of ‘delete’ must include ‘save somewhere’. There’s no such thing as writing too much, you can always revise and remove, and the waste stands a good chance of being usefully recycled some day.

next up: sometimes you wanna go…

This is where the divide between Not Writers and Writers is thinnest: Story Ideas.

Creativity, at its core, is a misnomer. We don’t actually create anything new, because we’re not capable of inventing anything we don’t already comprehend: we can’t conceive of something we can’t conceive of. The actual definition of creativity, as we use it day to day, has more to do with synthesis. Scientists and artists alike innovate by making connections that others haven’t thought of, and practice brilliance by figuring out how those connections really work.

A story idea is just that; you bundle up a bunch of stuff you already know (types of people, events, technology, politics, dramatic constructs) and realize that particular bundle feels really, really juicy. If you’re into sci-fi, maybe you’ve conceived of a perspective on FTL– or time-tavel nobody else has done before. If you’re into melodrama, maybe you’ve hit on a particularly poignant emotional crisis and if you’re a mystery writer, maybe you’ve put together an especially stupefying murder plot.

That’s what gets our ‘creative’ juices flowing. We feel the vibrations coming off this bundle of concepts, we marvel at the gleam of the interconnecting lattice, the whole thing thrums with potential and it’s a thrill to refine and crystallize that rough rock into the jewel we know is in there.

For the Not Writer, that’s all too often where the process ends.

Endless cycles of thought and imagination, talking about it to one’s Inner Circle, but nothing goes to paper. And it’s easy to unerstand why; you feel an obligation to produce a product that’s worthy of the potential you know the idea has. You want it to be as good as it can be, so you don’t want to write it any less than that.

Which of course means that you spend all your time Not Writing it.

The sad reality is that most of these bundles of inspiration are quite hollow, once you try to pick them apart. Like the many other disappointments of a grown-up’s life, nobody enjoys confronting this when it happens to them, but the Not Writer shies away from that confrontation by staying within the comfort zone of the Idea Phase. The less you put to paper, the better it looks in your mind’s eye.

The Writer knows the pain of this confrontation, but bears it stoically, and keeps his tears at bay. He knows that it may be hard, but it brings rewards, and he maintains a positive attitude toward the disappointment. Recognizing the flaws and inadequacies of the idea, after all, is the first step toward fixing them and improving the story, or recognizing that the cost/benefit ratio is such that the idea isn’t worth the time.

If you have an idea, write it out!

In synopsis form at first, as a stream-of-consciousness, then break it down into a loosely structured set of notes or dive write in and start penning the first chapter in draft form. In the process you’ll feel the excitement and power of the parts that have real value, and also the tinge of inadequacy of the parts that are too weak, too thin. With enough experience, you’ll realize what you need in order to bolster the weaker aspects or, worst comes to worst, that the idea lacks so much that there’s no story to be made of it in this form.

I love talking about ideas as much as the next guy and very often I’m a Not Writer, overindulging in the idea phase, postponing the outlining and actual writing as long as possible and justifying it to myself by saying that I’m letting the idea percolate and mature in my mind. Often that’s true, often it’s not, and often it takes me far too long to realize the difference.

When someone tells me their idea for a story, that’s wonderful. It’s lots of fun to explore a new concept, but unless I know they’ve a reputation for productivity, I tend to take statements like “This story can easily span three novels, when I write it all out,” with a grain of salt.

It’s a painful thing to see that a great idea looks like shit once it hits the page, but an idea in your head is no use to anybody else, and while that may satisfy a Not Writer, a Writer has to produce a real story every now and again.

- Alex F. Vance

This is a perfectly legitimate thing to say if finals are next week, but not if they’re in five months. Stress, health problems, uncertainty at work or at home, children — all of these are legitimate distractions that require careful, prolonged attention and consequently prevent long, solid, intense investments in writing, that’s absolutely true.

But there’s more to writing than just those intense, satisfying, all-else-by-the-wayside engagements that make us feel like consummate creative titans.

A working adult has very few opportunities to spend four hours at a time doing anything without distractions. There’s chores and shopping, there’s a day job or study, there’s social activities and an endless, structural cycle of little distractions. And there’s a predictable incidence of conjunctural distractions as well. Illness, accidents to one’s person or property, unexpected changes in employment or home situation — and anything that can happen to you can happen to your friends or relatives, which may also impact the stability of your daily life substantially.

The Not Writer doesn’t feel that he or she can perform under those conditions, and believes it best to wait till they’re resolved. In fact, though they’d never articulate this even to themselves, it’s almost as if Not Writers feel that writing a little bit under those conditions will actually inhibit their ability to do the inspired binge-writing they see as an ideal.

Like writer’s block, many of these excuses are indeed legitimate. Again, serious, unexpected life changes or tragedy near to the heart have tremendous effect on our emotional state and our ability to function, and we’re all responsible for making our own priorities.

But rare is the circumstance that prohibits us from feeding ourselves, or bathing, or dressing. We take walks, drive, read, watch TV, play games, hang out with friends — often in short intervals, true, but those are things we rarely neglect no matter what else is going on in our lives.

To the Writer, writing is like bathing or cooking. The Writer doesn’t often put it off entirely; when times are hard and stress is high, the Writer writes a little less per day or week, but rarely nothing.

The surest way to realize whether you’re being a Not Writer is hearing yourself say “I don’t have time to write.” If you have time to say that, you have time to write.

Doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, doesn’t have to be part of the Epic Ten-Novel Saga you’re ‘working on’. A quick domestic scene, a little joke, a tragic monologue… there’s always something in your mind that you can write and there’s always a moment to do it in.

Institutionalize the habit of writing, ingrain it in your daily activities as you do eating, bathing, and masturbating. As little as a hundred words a day nets you a novella in a year — and when the stars align and the spirit moves you, you can still binge-write a couple grand of brilliant prose.

- Alex F. Vance

“Finally I have the time to write, and now my muse has left me!” they wail, and take another sip of espresso. Adjust their turtleneck. Sweep back their shoulder-length hair, and clean their trendy ebonny-rimmed glasses. “I hope this writer’s block passes soon.”

Mockery, to be sure, but let me be clear: writer’s block is no myth, any more than impotence or claustrophobia. It can be the consequence of psychological stress and cause further stress on its own, it can have serious repercussions for one’s personal pride and self-image, a vicious spiral of disappointment and despair.

Thankfully, in reality, it’s surprisingly rare. The vast majority of cases of writer’s block can actually be classified as a heady melange of laziness and trepidation, or perhaps intimidation. And that’s a really happy fact, because there’s an easy solution to it.

You ready?

SHUT UP AND WRITE.

Yeah, you probaly saw that coming. But before you complain that that’s no help at all and doesn’t get to the root of the problem, keep in mind that, unlike impotence or claustrophobia, only very, very few people actually suffer from real, honest writer’s block. Most people who self-diagnose it actually suffer from mundane afflictions related to fear and lethargy — and more importantly, those who do sincerely suffer from the condition may actually benefit from assuming that they don’t.

As I said in part 1, I know how it is — how humiliating and discouraging it is to feel that the story just isn’t gelling, that your ideas aren’t beign properly expressed, that your characters don’t come out as vibrantly as you imagine them and that you just can’t for the life of you figure out how to resolve the plot corners you’ve painted your characters into.

That’s not writer’s block. It’s justthe wind and the rain.

Sure, it’s nicer to go out and do your shopping when the sun’s shining, but that’s no reason to cloister yourself away indoors just because the sky is grey and the road’s a little wet. It’s not unsafe to drive, you won’t freeze or dissolve, and you’re out of Mountain Dew and toilet paper so slip into your wellies, strap on a southwester and go to the shops, there’s a good lad.

If the prose isn’t flowing like it should, then that’s just too bad. Can’t be sunny all the time, and there isn’t a magic spell you can cast to fix it. You won’t get through that by Not Writing, that’s for sure.

You have a story on the brain that’s been percolating there for a dog’s age, you can taste its heady aroma, your mouth waters at its delights, but when you try to put the words down they’re dull and plain and lack the lustre and sparkle you see in your mind’s eye. It’s that succulent meal that you want to deliver, not the drab gruel you see yourself writing, and it’s very tempting to consider it (or yourself) a failure and head to the nearest café to drown your sorrows in caffeine-rich, hot black nectar.

Tough bones. Suck it up, and power on.

You’ll get your mojo back eventually, and you’ll get it back a damn sight faster if you write your way through the downturn. You can always go back and fix (or outright replace) the less-than-stellar portions you wrote. When you’ve completed the story you have to go back and do an edit pass anyway!

You don’t even have to continue the story you find yourself blocked on. Everybody needs a break sometimes, and for a Writer there is no better way to take a break from writing one story than to write another one. Pick something simpler, something spontaneous and small and fun, perhaps far outside your usual sphere of interest.

Don’t write for your audience or your own ambition. Odds are that’s what got you tangled up in the first place, so give yourself some breathing room and just write a neat little story that satisfies all your secret little desires. Go ahead, you don’t have to tell anyone.

Like the weather, Writer’s Block will pass in its own time, sooner or later. You might as well get some Writing done while you’re waiting, no?

Coming up in part 3: time management.

When I’m asked for writing advice, however, I stop being an enthusiast and become a brutal drill sergeant. From my nostrils spews a venemous vapour called ‘pessimism’ and my eyes shoot lasers called ‘terror’.

“Writing,” I always say, “is a sordid beast that feeds on your pride and vomits only exhaustion and self-loathing. Writing,” I always add, “leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate…”

Well, you get the idea. I don’t talk about ‘finding one’s voice’ or ‘research’ or ‘style’. These are important topics for writers, to say the least, but they’re far more personal topics; many writers can solve them on their own and any individual piece of advice offers no guarantee of actually fitting a particular writer’s sensibilities. There are of course some stand-bys that never miss their mark: “Read Strunk & White once every six months,” or “Let your manuscript ‘cool down’ for at least three weeks after you finish it, before returning to edit,” that sort of thing.

But that’s advice for writers, and most people who ask me for advice are not writers. Read that sentence correctly, now: I don’t mean that they aren’t writers, I mean to say that they’re Not Writers.

This isn’t a disparagement, now. I don’t by any means look down on Not Writers or dismiss them out of hand. Not Writers can sometimes write very well, paradoxically, and often study hard, being very eager to learn.

The difference between a Not Writer and a Writer is the difference between someone who could write and someone who does. A Not Writer is someone who experiences blocks and obstacles and timing issues and lets them prevent him or her from actually writing. A Not Writer may certainly be creative, insightful and capable of writing lyrical prose, but most of the time they’re too busy Not Writing to get any Writing done. That’s such a shame, such a waste, and that’s the reason I so often deploy Tough Love upon those who ask for advice.

“My studies are really intense this semester, I can’t focus on anything else right now,” says the Not Writer. “I just can’t seem to find any inspiration,” he says, or “It just isn’t gelling for me, I don’t understand it.”

The Not Writer enjoys conversing with other writers (many of whom, themselves, are Not Writers), seeks insights and techniques and delights in sharing stories of the writing experience and often clearly has an affinity for the craft, but at the end of the day he’s spending all his scant free time Not Writing, and Drill Sergeant Alex Fucking Vance holds no truck with that bullshit.

Not to say I haven’t been guilty of it myself, or even that I’ve outgrown it, though I’m twice as hard on myself as I am on others. I’ve often caught myself Not Writing and, some self-flagellation later, set myself straight. There are times when the words just flow, when the emotions and plot twists and characters spark from my fingers to the keyboard, and when that doesn’t happen it feels unsatisfying and frustrating and humiliating. But a Writer mustn’t put up with that nonsense.

In what will hopefully be a short series of posts, I’ll try to highlight the most common reasons that keep creative, insightful people mired in Not Writerhood, and share my perspectives and solutions, all for the betterment of mankind.

Stay tuned.

- Alex F. Vance

Hundreds of copies of Heathen City Vol. 2 “Paved With Bad Intentions” are on their way to Pittsburgh for release at Anthrocon via treacherous and circuitous routes. The brave boys of FurPlanet charge through the wilderness of the Mexican/Canadian Neutral Zone toward the Pit of Burghs or whatever.

Since the Powers That Be insist on once again holding this convention thousands of miles away from my slippers, I can’t attend. Hark, ye: the silver-bell tinkling sound of a writer’s breaking heart!

You can help, though. That is, if you’re going to Anthrocon and are a proud Heathen Citizen.

First of all, battle your way through the unwashed throngs to claim your copy. Then seek medical attention. Once your injuries are healed and your strength restored, do please share whatever observations or photographs you may have recorded — those of us who can’t attend are simply DYING to hear from y’all.

Obviously you can reply to this here mail, or you can tag a Tweet with #heathencity, or you can blog about it and you can be damn sure my army of Heathen City Cyber Samurai will track it down and bring it to my attention.

Did you get the HC logo tattooed on your right butt-cheek in a bid to get an even bigger discount from FurPlanet? Were you successful? Did you get Fel to sign your old, stained and sticky copy of HC #1? Do you have a phtograph of yourself looking wistfully past the enormous lines, sighing as you regard Krahnos’ handsome visage from afar, or thrill to the sound of Vahnfox’s voice?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Nay.

DEMAND.

Be off with you, now!

- Alex F. Vance

Krahnos, Vahn, Blue_Panther and I got together with Fuzzwolf from Knotcast
over Skype to record an open-heart roundtable about the production of
Heathen City #2. Artistic insights, puerile joking, and some serious
philosophizing ensued for an hour and a half. Check it out here:

http://www.foxstuffers.com/News_files/f2135dc95d43ba0c33e8a2b9cfd2b7e2-84.html

Or on iTunes, search for “Knotcast”!

Regrettably, Charha, ZooshWolf and Fel couldn’t join us. If this episode
turns out to be popular enough, who knows — we might do a followup in a few
months that brings the whole gang together.

Do let us know what y’all thought, yeah?

- Alex F. Vance

So fine, have at me, you scoundrels.

Stalk me back. See how I like it.

Pry into my every private moment, scan my every intimate thought and hold it against me. It’s only fair.

General
Facebook:   http://www.facebook.com/alexfvance
Twitter:    http://www.twitter.com/alexfvance (on Twitter every character counts, but I deserve an underscore, dammit!
LiveJournal:   http://alexfvance.livejournal.com (no shit!)
MySpace:   http://www.myspace.com/alexfuckingvance (I wonder how long until I get banned for that username)
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexvance (total pro)

Furry
VCL:    http://us.vclart.net/vcl/Artists/Osfer (I forgot I had this)
FurAffinity: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/osfer
Yiffstar:    http://www.yiffstar.com/index.php?action=authorsearch&authorsearch=alexfvance
MyFursona:    http://www.myfursona.com/user/Osfer (does anyone use this?)
Furry4Life:    http://furry4life.ning.com/profile/AlexVance

Heathen City
Facebook fan page for HC:    http://www.facebook.com/thealexvance#/pages/Heathen-city/61315365158
TVTropes entry for HC:    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.HeathenCity
HC on Wikipedia:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathen_City

Privacy is for pansies!

Peace.

The separation of church and state, in my view, is a good thing, but in many civilizations religion was the first true civil order, offering synchronization among citizens and social services far beyond the scope of whatever ruling body officially held power.
Hospitals, orphanages, and other essential civil services were provided first by the church and later adopted by the state, as governing bodies became equipped to (and interested in) expanding their portfolio of services to their entire citizenry. The same applies for legal functions previously executed by the church, such as inheritance, birthright and in some cases adoption.
Governments have adopted these legal functions from the church in the same way that photography adopted portraiture from the art of painting, leaving behind the true core of any religion: exploring and acting upon each person’s individual relationship with the Above. (To complete the painting metaphor, the removal of portraiture as a significant practice in painting left the pictorial arts with their true core: personal expression of the artist, exploring the personal experience of reality rather than merely producing a facsimile).

Marriage is one of these functions too, and in my view, it belongs with the state. The legally and justly elected establishment of a nation, constructed to represent the thoughts and priorities of its citizens, should be the arbiter of the definition of marriage.
The highest obligation of the law is to be fair, the most significant portion of which is to be consistent. The practice of legal precedent is the best example: a decision, once made, informs all future decisions on an identical decision.

In the issue of gay marriage, if gays are considered equals to straights and their relationships likewise, then ‘marriage’ is one of their rights — as it is a civil institution governed by the law of the state.

However, for many people, the Church remains an important factor in their lives and to them, the institutions’ ecclesiastic origins mean more than their current state-run incarnations. I am actually not at all offended when a Christian tells me they support legally-equal civil unions among gays, but that, to them, marriage is a sacrament under Christ, and that they don’t like that word to be used.
I disagree with them, of course, but I can’t at all fault them for their desire, and find it wholly reasonable in the context of their faith.

But as I am unaffiliated with any formal religion, while I’m on this Earth I am a citizen of my nation first. If there is to be a special term for a marriage under Christ that’s separate from a marriage under the Law, I have no problem with that at all — but it cannot be ‘marriage’. That belongs to the state, which is to say, to every citizen of the nation. The practice predates Judeo-Christian religion, and the modern incarnation of the Church has no more claim over it than the extinct faiths of pre-Roman Europeans.

They are of course more than welcome to invent a new word for their view of marriage — and I actually don’t mean that as any form of mockery. Though I do of course invite whimsical suggestions as to which word would be appropriate

Since then, Fuzzwolf has spent considerable time and effort engineering together the various sources, recorded across thousands of miles and far too many time-zones. It was a little after 3AM for me by the time we started, I had a leetle beet of bewze in me already.

It was a splendid experience to hobnob with some of the other authors, although not all could, alas, be in attendance. We had a great time, we made very little effort to stay on topic, but it was damn good fun.

Quite possibly the largest number of writers on a single furry podcast. Somebody call the Guinness people!

First to get free booze. Then to talk about the potential record.

You can check out the episode here: http://www.foxstuffers.com/News.html Or look up Knotcast on iTunes and grab the ep titled “Knotcast Presents X”.

Peace out!

The hell, people. We effing won!

A big thank you to those of you who voted, a bigger thank you for those of you who voted for, y’know, me, and significant kudos to the artists and laborers who made Heathen City #1 possible.

Kamui, cover artist: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/kamui/
Ayato, interior artist: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/ayato/
Distasty, primary colorist: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/distasty/
Krahnos, colorist: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/krahnos/
Fel, colorist: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/fel/
Charha, colorist: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/charha/
Blue_Panther, contributing artist: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/bluepanther/
Zaroi, financier and publicist: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/zaroi/
FurPlanet, printers and distributors: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/furplanet/

I will be doing a wee bit of celebrating tonight, methinks

- Alex

A fiction anthology, a nice, thick paperback book, with ten saucy stories by different authors, each devoted to the theme of one of the Ten Commandments, with no restriction on genre, setting or mood other than that it should be good and sexy.

Fuck yeah, baby.

Oh, it was a pleasure to get back in the saddle. Heathen City is a fabulous challenge to write, considering how the story has to be compressed into a relatively small number of pages with criminally little space for dialog, so having the opportunity to really explore a scene and letting characters talk to each other for more than a few lines was an absolute joy.

Once the roster of authors was locked down (including , , , , Whyte Yoté and others) there was a respectful land rush to grab the most scintillating commandments, but I had my eagle eye on the one I wanted as soon as Kyell approached me.

“I am the Lord thy God” has always struck me as such an odd duck in the list, because while the others are all advice or admonishments, this one is a statement. Even with its amendment “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” it still rings so powerfully: this is the reality, and therefore here are some things you should and shouldn’t do.

I’m not officially affiliated with any one religion, but I’ve always had a fascination for the liturgy and mythology of the Abrahamic faiths, and I had myself a grand old time delving into some of the lesser-known aspects of Christian history, waxing prosaic on the philosophy of monotheism, the sincere worth and dangerous risk involved in such an abstract, total form of love as faith.

This book’s going to be a doozy. An official announcement from Sofawolf Press is still forthcoming, but we’ve been given permission to brag about it already. These are some fucking awesome stories by some stellar authors, with a gorgeous cover by (who’s also doing the internal illustration for my story and one other) and additional interior art by . I’m looking forward to signing my name to this one!

A fiction anthology, a nice, thick paperback book, with ten saucy stories by different authors, each devoted to the theme of one of the Ten Commandments, with no restriction on genre, setting or mood other than that it should be good and sexy.

Fuck yeah, baby.

Oh, it was a pleasure to get back in the saddle. Heathen City is a fabulous challenge to write, considering how the story has to be compressed into a relatively small number of pages with criminally little space for dialog, so having the opportunity to really explore a scene and letting characters talk to each other for more than a few lines was an absolute joy.

Once the roster of authors was locked down (including ,  , , , Whyte Yoté and others) there was a respectful land rush to grab the most scintillating commandments, but I had my eagle eye on the one I wanted as soon as Kyell approached me.

“I am the Lord thy God” has always struck me as such an odd duck in the list, because while the others are all advice or admonishments, this one is a statement. Even with its amendment “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” it still rings so powerfully: this is the reality, and therefore here are some things you should and shouldn’t do.

I’m not officially affiliated with any one religion, but I’ve always had a fascination for the liturgy and mythology of the Abrahamic faiths, and I had myself a grand old time delving into some of the lesser-known aspects of Christian history, waxing prosaic on the philosophy of monotheism, the sincere worth and dangerous risk involved in such an abstract, total form of love as faith.

This book’s going to be a doozy. An official announcement from Sofawolf Press is still forthcoming, but we’ve been given permission to brag about it already. These are some fucking awesome stories by some stellar authors, with a gorgeous cover by   (who’s also doing the internal illustration for my story and one other) and additional interior art by . I’m looking forward to signing my name to this one!