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Spreadsheets Are Amazing

I recently quit my job, and am on the hunt for a new one. It makes me particularly glad that I live in Victoria, where the job climate isn’t quite so dire as in many parts of the U.S.. Maclean’s recently ran a front-page article on the way a lot of the U.S. is deteriorating into circumstances comparable to a developing nation. It’s terrifying; as a citizen of the U.S., as a citizen of a country that borders the U.S., as someone who will be in the job and political arenas for decades to come and dealing with a shifting reality no one expected. The U.S. is such an international standard that even BBC reports in pounds and USD – usually with the pounds in parentheses, not the dollars. But, even with the recession officially over, the U.S. continues to slide slowly; I was in the market last week and American tourists, while still allowed to pay with USD (we’re a port, after all), were paying on par.

But one to happier subjects: spreadsheets.

I have a deepseated love of them. They make organization simple, clean, and direct. With Google Docs, they’re also shareable, and so even more useful! Everything it makes sense to organize via spreadsheet, I do.

Surprisingly, then, it wasn’t I who proposed that my latest project be organized via Google spreadsheet. Mason Kochanski and I share a mutual love of music and desire to expand our musical horizons. This project was born out of that mutual love, and an evening when I visited that was spent listening to 90s grunge we’d forgotten about and adored. We started a spreadsheet keeping track of bands we like and why. Having a goal – expanding the spreadsheet with more information – has helped us both find interesting new music we wouldn’t have come across under the normal circumstances of itunes and internet playlists. It’s a fun project, still underway.

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Theory Train and Dying of Suspense

I’ve recently gotten involved with a brainchild of a friend of mine; starting an ezine. It’s coalesced, over the past few weeks, into Theory Train, an online literary magazine specializing in poetry and speculative fiction. As the second literary magazine I’ve been involved in – the other being Island Writer, and different in being a print magazine, and local – I feel not completely adrift in helping launch it. It’s exciting, and interesting, looking into the myriad factors of it. We lucked out in a major way in that another of the people involved with setting it up is able to provide us free hosting and a domain name. And now we have the basic infrastructure set up, so it’s just a matter, now, of drumming up submissions, advertising, drumming up advertising on our site, sorting and selecting from submissions, and getting the magazine itself together. Oh, plus registering it with the Canadian ISBN Service System. No big deal, right?

At least we have until December.

And while I can wait for that, and enjoy the time we have until crunch time, I’m currently caught up in anticipation for the results of this contest. It’s been going on all summer; a round every two weeks, and I’ve made it to the final round, going for the championship. All of the entries have been in since last night, and, even though not much time has passed, I’m incredibly anxious for the results. A fun sort of anxiety, in that I’m up against a formidable opponent who won in one category while I won in another, and I know we both put a lot of effort forth. But I want to know! Really, it’s so inconvenient, the judge (also, coincidentally, Theory Train’s webmaster) having a life outside of judging the writing contest.

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Trying to be Less Wrong

I recently discovered the blog Less Wrong, written collectively by a number of interesting people. I found it through a writing project of Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s. The whole idea of approaching human rationality as a sort of extended humanitarian science experiment fascinates me. The power of it is really evident in Yudkowsky’s, where his characters actually examine how and why they think; it gives them a depth of character, and makes reading about their adventures linear in a compelling way. They do things because of a trackable train of thought that follows logical processes, not because of magic or unarticulated ideals. How much more interesting, then, for real people to model the same behavior.

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Beautiful Red

I just finished reading Beautiful Red by Darusha Whem. Whem has made it available in hardcover, numerous electronic text, and audio form; the latter two available free under Creative Commons licensing. The new-wave distribution ideology suits the subject matter; in the future, corporations literally run everything, and everyone is plugged into the everywherenet – the new internet – by skull-implanted chips.

Well, almost everyone. The story follows Jack as she runs into a group that is radically against machine integration. It’s a fascinating look at how reliant we are on technology; some of the imagery really hit home for me. People on the street slack-jawed and vacant as they log into their virtual worlds – how different is that from staring intently at a smartphone?

The story was hauntingly real, and the world was such that, aside from a few incidental heinous crimes, I would love to live there.

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True Stories

Lynne Van Luven came to speak to the Victoria Writers’ Society last night about Creative Non-fiction and how it’s thriving on the Island. She mentioned how many people are branching into it; Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier, both noted local poets, have written creative non-fiction now, and more and more fiction writers are adding creative non-fiction to their repertoire as well.

True stories have become more compelling to us as a culture. It’s taken a long time for In Cold Blood to seep into our collective consciousness, and many more solid works have come along, with that strange panache of the fantastical actually happening. It’s leaked into movies, as well – 21 followed the dated adventures of the MIT blackjack team, Middlemen followed turn-of-the millenium pornographers, The Social Network follows Mark Zuckerberg’s still-expanding supernova.

In that way, creative non-fiction is becoming more immediate; there’s less of a time lapse between doing something and writing about it. The plethora of information and stories of every kind available now means we have to write it down, quickly, to remember any of it, need to tell the story to ourselves to make it true.

As terrifying as the comparison is, the rise of creative non-fiction is parallel to scripted reality television. Subjectivevtrue stories allow for a more developed voice than we sometimes have access to in our immediate lives. We can relive, and mock, our own esprit de staircase.

Creative non-fiction is an interesting world, spanning everything from travel writing to memoir, and it was a fascinating talk by Lynne Van Luven.

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The Fourth Wall

I’m in a contest where the latest prompt is breaking the fourth wall.

Conveniently, in the anthology Stories which I read on my recent trip, there are several examples of fourth-wall-breaking stories. But, without exception, they broke it internally; a woman asking her boyfriend to stop writing her into stories as she was losing bits of herself in them, a man who was offered the choice between staying in his adventure story or living as a peasant in the real world. It worked really well, and is the way I’ve seen it work. Breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience is never something I’ve seen work all that well in a static medium like books and comics.

It’s somehow much less jarring if the layers of reality are internal to the story, so that’s the route I’m going to try to go.

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I drove for the first time today

It was exhilarating and a little terrifying, and it only lasted about ten minutes. Tristan, the friend I’m visiting, took us on a country drive, that most American of activities. We went along county roads so overlooked they didn’t have painted lines on them, and were only wide enough for traffic to go each way if both drivers were polite and neither had a very big car. Corn lined both sides of the road, interspersed with mailboxes and deciduous trees.

She finally found a place to turn around at a small junction, marked by the Countryside Restaurant and the Broken Spoke Roadhouse, the biggest buildings for miles. Once we were back on the quiet road facing the other way, she pulled onto the grass and made me switch seats with her. It’s the first time I’ve driven, something I’ve been meaning to learn to do for years but never gotten around to.

With my death grip on 10 and 2, I managed to stay in my lane for the most part, and even managed to pass a truck going the other way. Tristan threatens that next time we’ll go at night, and I’ll actually have to stop at a stop sign.

Driving and the road compass a huge part of the American journey to adult-hood. One of the iconic works of the 50s and, really, the entire twentieth century, was On The Road. The act of it occupies a huge place in the American psyche, and I’m starting to learn, which makes me very happy.

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Sea-Tac Free Wi-Fi is a wonderful thing

I’m on the intermission of my journey to Chicago, IL for a two-week vacation, and very much appreciating the free wi-fi. I have with me Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio’s collection of short stories simply entitled Stories, which includes, among others, a story by Chuck Palahniuk. There’s a sort of meta-pleasure referential to his cult hit Fight Club in reading Palahniuk on an airplane.

Yesterday I finished a book cover for the wonderful Sheila Martindale’s forthcoming book, Here, There, and Somewhere Beyond. I’m immensely happy to have been involved in the project.

In other artistic news, the webcomic I started in college with a friend of mine (I write it, she does the art) is undergoing somewhat of a revival. Here’s hoping for more to come!

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Playboy Documentary

There’s a new documentary piece on Hugh Hefner coming out, about his role as a social activist. Seem weird? Yeah, to me, too. This article takes a look at some of the driving motivation behind the documentary. I have yet to see the documentary (it opened yesterday), but I am really looking forward to it.

The things he, Kinsey, Steinem, and Meads have done – their contributions to the Sexual Revolution, have changed society in a lot of ways. The internet has contributed. In discussing the documentary with my mom the other day, we discussed the fact that she first encountered BDSM culture in her 30s, while she was living in San Francisco. I encountered it in a fairly mainstream fantasy novel when I was 15 and so, curious, Googled it, and found a well-laid-out Wikipedia page.

And that was normal for me, for my generation. Yes, there is a lot of hypersexualization, but there’s also a lot of information available to work with that – information on STDs and where and how to get tested, information on how to be safe in myriad ways. In my social circle, at least, it’s something to discuss -openly – near the beginning of a relationship, just to determine compatibility. Kinsey and later, when we were old enough to sneakily read The Onion, Dan Savage taught us that nothing was weird, simply potentially incompatible. And that was okay.

Hefner, of course, isn’t solely responsible for the social movement towards openness. But he’s a contributing factor, and one in iconic silk pajamas, so I very much look forward to the documentary.

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Island Writer

On Tuesday we had the first meeting of the new editorial board of Island Writer. We gathered at Simeon’s house and had his own white wine and chips and salsa and chocolate in his sunny living room, with Christine and I plugged into our little machines. It’s exciting, to have the working period of the next issue looming. Not too many submissions so far, but they’re trickling in. And, if the last one is any indication, I can expect about 70 in the two days before the deadline.

But talking about our vision for the magazine and the ways we want to organize it was great – I jumped in very late in the game on the last issue, and so wasn’t part of that. It wasn’t necessary, of course, but I really like having a better idea of what we’re doing. And I like that I’m going to be more involved in the process.

The rest of the board; Chelsea Rushton, Simeon Goa, Sheila Martindale, Christine George, and Kim Nayyer, all seem wonderful. Kim wasn’t able to attend, but Chelsea took minutes. I’m looking forward to working with everyone on this issue.