I Write Because I’m a Writer, and That’s What Writers Do.

In Writing on 10 November 2009 with 5 comments

I despaired yesterday.

After decid­ing to fin­ish (or rather, truth be told, get a bet­ter start on) Book One of the Love & War paper series, I sat down at my desk to write and ended up read­ing chap­ters one through four, reas­sur­ing myself that I don’t, in fact, suck. While there are def­i­nitely sec­tions that need to be rewrit­ten, and it seems I need to make up my mind about how a cou­ple of char­ac­ters intend to inter­act with each other, the story thus far is solid.

But by the end of the day I had only writ­ten 750 words.

That’s ridicu­lous.

I’m so eas­ily dis­tracted. I admit it: most of the time I’d rather watch Big Love on HBO on Demand than write. I keep remind­ing myself what I learned from that fan­tas­tic Twyla Tharp book: writ­ing and being cre­ative is a job. It’s work. It’s not always going to be fun, it won’t always come eas­ily. And like every other job out there, you still have to do it.

Still I man­aged to dis­tract myself. I checked Twitter inces­santly. I text mes­saged old friends. I added new friends to Facebook. And all the while I won­dered to myself how the hell I was going to fin­ish this novel in two years let alone three months (which is what I’ve given myself for the first draft). The only thing I could man­age to make myself do was read and wonder.

Then I took a walk. I talked it out. What specif­i­cally needed to hap­pen next? (I’d been stalling because I had only fig­ured out so much of the plot, and once I reached that part I didn’t know where to go next.)  What was the dri­ving force? Who is the vil­lain? I know it seems like some of this basic stuff should have already been worked out by now, but it hasn’t. That’s not really how I write. I don’t so much dic­tate as I do med­i­tate, let­ting the story come from some sub­con­scious part of my mind and find its way to the com­puter screen.

So I took a good long walk, talked to myself out loud. (My neigh­bors know I’m crazy. My talk­ing to myself is the least of their wor­ries. They’re just glad I finally put blinds up in my bed­room win­dows.) After 45 min­utes, I had the plot worked out. Some details needed more thought, but since I wasn’t to them yet, they could wait. I knew what had to hap­pen next. I was even jazzed about writ­ing it.

But when I got home, the inter­net really needed my atten­tion. I needed to make din­ner. And excuses upon excuses piled up until I had nowhere else to go but 43folders.com

And lo and behold, one of my per­sonal heroes, Merlin Mann had a piece posted about writ­ing in honor of NaNoWriMo. I read the article.

And I cried. I felt like he was speak­ing to me.

I pad out to the liv­ing room where my hus­band is sit­ting on the couch. “I need help,” I say. “I need a sched­ule. I need to write. I need to get this book out of me and move on to the next thing. But between Zachary, and work­ing out, and house­work, and cook­ing I feel like I have no time to do the very thing I stopped work­ing to do. I never signed up to be a housewife.”

My hus­band smiles. He’s the one who bought me the Twyla Tharp book. Though he doesn’t say any­thing, he knows the obsta­cles I’ve just listed are the least of my prob­lems. My biggest prob­lem is me.

“Here’s what you do,” he says in his project man­ager voice. “Take Zachary to school at 7:30. Come home, enjoy your cof­fee, have your break­fast, set­tle into your day. You should be ready to work out at 9:00am. Do your work­out, stretch, shower. Start writ­ing at 10:00am. Write until 12pm. Take a break for 30 min­utes; have some lunch. At 12:30, go back to your office and write until 2:30. Don’t write in the liv­ing room on your lap­top. This is your job. You do your job in your office. You can write for fun in the liv­ing room. Pick Zachary up from school. If you’ve writ­ten five thou­sand words, you can stop for the day. If you haven’t, get your 5,000 words on paper. They don’t have to be good words. Just get them down. When you’re done with that you can worry about tidy­ing up and prepar­ing dinner.”

I shake my head. “I’m going to need more than four hours of writ­ing. Stephen King writes for eight hours a day,” I say. I feel defeated.

“Well right now you don’t write for an hour a day,” he says, not with­out reproach. “So let’s see how four hours goes.”

Four hours is a sur­pris­ingly long time when you don’t check your email, send text mes­sages, get on World of Warcraft “just for a sec­ond”, or waste the whole after­noon on Twitter.

In four hours today I man­aged to write 5,000 words. About 4,000 of the words are good. The other 1,000 might need some work. But they’re there. The plot is devel­op­ing. The story is fur­ther along than it was yesterday.

Tomorrow we’ll start all over again. I’ll look for­ward to my work­out more than I will the writ­ing, and I hate work­ing out. But I’ll buckle down and I’ll do it any­way. Because I’m a writer. And writ­ing is what we do.

Epilogue to a Rainy Day

In Baking, Family on 9 November 2009 with no comments

Rainy days demand good food. My idea of good food is home­made bread and a deli­cious soup. Yesterday we pigged out on grilled cheese sand­wiches made with home­made bread, and home­made tomato soup with mozzerella and basil.

We were some happy sons of guns up in this house.

This is my bread recipe.

This ain’t a food blog, so yo don’t get pix. Use your imag­i­na­tion and enjoy your deli­cious dinner.

Slap-Yo-Mama Good Sandwich Bread

2 cups whole milk (Can you use skim milk or even water? Yes you can. But then it’ll just be good, not slap-yo-mama good)
1.5 Tablespoons yeast
1/2 cup of sugar
1.5 tea­spoons salt
1/4 cup but­ter (Can you use veg­etable or olive oil? Fo’ sho’. See above note.)
6 cups flour
1 egg

Warm up the milk. Don’t make it too hot. Dump all this stuff in the milk and mix it up. (Add the flour a bit at a time to keep from mak­ing it too dry. Bread is finicky. Don’t overdo it on the flour. Slightly too wet is bet­ter than too dry.) Knead it for a long time. Until warm and elastic.

Put it in a greased bowl, cover it, and let it rise, like, for­ever. Because of the fat con­tent, it’ll take a while. Like two hours. Sometimes more. I don’t have a lot of patience, so some­times I cheat. I’ll put the oven on warm and put the bowl on the stove. Or if it’s hot out, I’ll put it in my grill on the patio and close the cover. That works GREAT. Whatever you do, just don’t let it get too warm or it’ll start to cook.

After the dough has about dou­bled in size, cut it in half and form it into two loaves. Cover and let rise again. Forever.

When it’s about dou­bled in size (it should be ris­ing up nicely over the rim of your bread pan) set the oven to 350. When the loaves have dou­bled in size or are tow­er­ing high and proud like sol­diers, gen­tly place those bad boys in the oven and cook until nice, rich, golden brown. Usually takes about 20 min­utes in my oven. Your  mileage may vary.

Let the loaves cool com­pletely before you slice them. You’ve been warned.

Reading for October: Summer of the Ubume

In Books, Reading on 8 November 2009 with no comments

Summer of the Ubume, by Natsuhiko Kyogoku.

If you’re think­ing that I have been on a Japanese kick, you’d be right. I get tired of the same-old, same-old (who doesn’t?) and although I love hor­ror nov­els, I get a bit tired of American hor­ror. Right now, with vam­pires and zom­bies being trendy as hell, the mar­ket is flooded with these kinds of super­nat­ural thrillers. And frankly, I’m not ter­ri­bly inter­ested in vam­pires or zom­bies. (Although, when my local book­seller finally gets a copy of Del Toro’s The Strain, I’ll prob­a­bly read it.)

Anyway, I say all that to say that switch­ing cul­tures is a breath of fresh air. The Japanese have their own fas­ci­nat­ing pan­theon of things that go bump in the night; more­over, it’s a pan­theon I know noth­ing about, so every­thing is shiny and cool. So when I picked up Summer of the Ubume, I expected  some­thing of a Japanese night­mare. What I got was some­thing I wasn’t quite expecting.

Summer of the Ubume is, more than any­thing, a mys­tery. True hor­ror it is not. It has ele­ments of creepiness–and good creepiness!–but it’s not really a hor­ror novel. It uses all the devices of a clas­si­cal mys­tery, espe­cially red her­rings, to build drama and sus­pense. Usually I don’t care for mys­tery nov­els, but the clever inter­min­gling of Japanese folk­lore with the mys­tery made it readable.

If you can get past the author’s pro­lific pon­tif­i­ca­tion thinly dis­guised as dia­log in sev­eral chap­ters (and I can’t blame you if you can’t; this kind of pub­lic mas­tur­ba­tion usu­ally dri­ves me crazy), there’s a, intrigu­ing story wait­ing to be found.

We Can Get There From Here: making a badass web

In Culture, Web Development, Writing on 3 November 2009 with no comments

My arti­cle, You Can Get There From Here: Websites for learn­ers is live today on A List Apart.

For var­i­ous rea­sons, this arti­cle was a long time com­ing. I started writ­ing it over a year and a half ago, but I just couldn’t spit out what I was try­ing to say. Every incar­na­tion of the arti­cle either turned into a rant about how the web indus­try has failed every­one who isn’t mak­ing com­mer­cial web­sites, or it got unwieldy and lengthy enough to be a small book.

The folks at ALA waited patiently. They offered gen­tle guid­ance. Krista Stevens, bless her heart, gave me the insight that prob­a­bly allowed me to fin­ish the arti­cle with­out giv­ing up. Yet still another month or two passed with­out the arti­cle com­ing to fruition.

Finally, I told myself enough was enough. Get the god­damned arti­cle fin­ished already.

And finally, I did.

Of the three arti­cles I’ve writ­ten for A List Apart, I think this one is my favorite. Not because it’s my best (I don’t think it is; there are still aspects of the piece I’m not com­pletely happy with) but because it speaks to some­thing I feel very strongly about: do-it-yourself, mav­er­ick edu­ca­tion. So many of us look to the web to edu­cate our­selves on top­ics from home­school­ing to can­cer. And if the web isn’t friendly to us, we miss out, indi­vid­u­ally and cul­tur­ally. We could be learn­ing so much more. We could be hav­ing much bet­ter learn­ing expe­ri­ences than we are.

In fact, the basic prin­ci­ples that under­lie my beliefs about how the web should be are the very prin­ci­ples I built All’s Fair in Love & War upon. That web­site was specif­i­cally designed to be dis­cov­er­able. And as the site and the nar­ra­tive grows, so too will its discoverability.

I still think the web indus­try has largely failed the non-commercial web. Those who cre­ate web­sites to show­case beauty, or to edu­cate, or to enter­tain have been given the same advice about “how to make a good inter­net” as web­sites that want to sell you some­thing. But mar­ket­ing advice, as well-intentioned as it may be, isn’t good enough for web­sites whose pri­mary pur­pose is to con­tribute some­thing mean­ing­ful to our cul­ture. What advice do we have for those web cre­ators? What advice does the indus­try have for those who aren’t try­ing as their pri­mary goal to increase their ad rev­enue or get their cus­tomer to make it through the check out process?

And so we’ve failed thus far. But we are doing bet­ter. Content—the stuff peo­ple, in the­ory, come to your web­site look­ing for—is finally get­ting some action due to the hard work of peo­ple like Kristina Halvorson who travel the world, lit­er­ally, spread­ing the good news about why you need to love your con­tent. And that’s fan­tas­tic. It’s a giant step in the right direction.

But it’s not enough. We’re still not doing enough. As I wrote in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle, “Making Badass Free Culture on the Web”, we have a long way to go to make the inter­net I dream of: a web that is rich, dis­cov­er­able, chal­leng­ing, enlight­en­ing, fun, and beautiful.

We can get there from here. But we have to work to get there.

Illustration: © Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

I’m Scary. And Bored of You.

In Family, Halloween, Miscellany on 2 November 2009 with no comments

Karinna, age 11, the offi­cial emo haunt of our fam­ily grave­yard. She creeped out quite a few peo­ple as she hov­ered around trick-or-treaters, glow­er­ing at them, arms crossed over her chest. No mat­ter what any­one did, she refused to speak or even smile. She just cocked her head to the side in a severely bored–and creepy–fashion.

The entire fam­ily finally found ade­quate Halloween spirit early Saturday morn­ing. We dec­o­rated the yard, bar­be­cued, and feasted on melted cheese and candy. And beer. Because it’s not Halloween with­out a crazy, drunk man on the porch throw­ing candy at lit­tle kids.

More pho­tos, and their sto­ries, can be found here.

The grave­yard comes down today. I do so hate to dis­man­tle it. Not because it’s hard work, but because I love the way the head­stones look in the pale morn­ing. I can see them from my desk as I write. There’s some­thing serene about it.

My Halloween Spirit Done Got Up and Walked Off

In Halloween, Miscellany on 29 October 2009 with no comments

I have a sink­ing feel­ing this is going to be the worst Halloween in a long while.

I sus­pect the com­bi­na­tion of unsea­son­able rain (for which, don’t get me wrong, I am very grate­ful, for we’ve been suf­fer­ing drought con­di­tions since last year) and crappy econ­omy had led the folks in my neigh­bor­hood to forego the usual Halloween dec­o­rat­ing. Even I have fallen guilty. My lawn is usu­ally rid­dled with grave­stones, spi­der­webs and pump­kins by now. I have a cou­ple lonely grave­stones out. That’s it. Everything else I’ve left in the garage for fear of rain damage.

And then there’s the ennui.

I’m just not in the mood and just can’t be bothered.

Of course, that may be because I’m unusu­ally busy. Between house­work, the kids, the exer­cis­ing (nay, not exor­cis­ing, though it’s the per­fect time of year for that!) the novel, and the web­site, I don’t have a lot of free time right now. I have my fin­gers in a lot of pots. And Halloween dec­o­rat­ing takes time. (When you dec­o­rate like I do. My stag­ing includes home­made zom­bies, life-size witches made from man­nequins, ter­ri­fy­ing scare­crows, and other things that go bump in the night. Last year I started mak­ing my props in July.)

So Halloween may very well come and go this year with­out leav­ing so much as a foot­print in my quiet lit­tle neigh­bor­hood. I guess that’s okay. There’s always next year.

To Bake A Cake

In Baking, Family, Miscellany on 26 October 2009 with no comments

I love to bake. The pri­mary rea­son I made Gracey Daylittle a pie baker is because it gave me an excuse to make lots of pie in the name of research.

But I, myself, am pri­mar­ily a bread and cake baker.

Today is my husband’s 35th birth­day, and I am mak­ing him an Italian cream cake. When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted, he replied, “Anything with cream cheese frosting.”

His wish. My command.

While I watch I Am Legend, the cake is in the oven. It smells like heaven. Butter, toasted sugar, coconut.

We are a house­hold of fall birth­days. In mid September, my hus­band came home from work, walked into the pantry and said, “Is there any­thing you want to tell me?”

I looked up from my book, con­fused. “I“m sorry?”

“There are four boxes of cake flour in here,” he said. “What do you need four boxes of cake flour for?”

I smiled, shook my head. It was like he didn’t even know me. We’ve spent the past 14 years of our lives together, and he can ask a ques­tion like that in all seri­ous­ness? “Birthday sea­son,” was all I said.

But bak­ing cake in this house isn’t the eas­i­est thing on the planet. Although I was very clear about my kitchen and counter space require­ments when we built this house, some­times you have to com­pro­mise. I exchanged more bed­rooms upstairs (where the chil­dren live) for a smaller kitchen with­out as much space as I would have liked. And that I could live with.

Unfortunately, four out of the six out­lets in my kitchen don’t work. Or rather, I’m sure they work just fine, but some GFI switch or some breaker or some­thing is tripped and I in all my elec­tri­cal use­less­ness can­not fig­ure out how to get the out­lets to pump juice. Four out of six. And when you con­sider I need cof­fee grinder, KitchenAid mixer, lap­top (for view­ing recipes) and who knows what else, you real­ize a girl needs out­lets that work.

Add to that the fact that I have only one oven (for shame) and that almost none of my cake pans match (tragedy!) and you get less than ideal bak­ing conditions.

It’s okay, though. I’m always up for a challenge.

Two min­utes left on the timer. My house never smelled so good.

Books for October

In Books, Reading on 22 October 2009 with no comments

I did a lousy job read­ing this month, pri­mar­ily because I was run­ning around like a mad­man try­ing to launch my own web­site on time. Oh well. There’s always next month.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
I admit that I’m not the most patient reader on the planet. I don’t expect nov­els to get to the point right away, but if you don’t get me really hooked within the first 50 pages chances are not good I’m going ot stick around. But because this book came so highly rec­om­mended, I gave it until the halfway mark before decid­ing it was never going to get any bet­ter. I already knew what the book was about (and if you don’t, and decide to read this, make sure you don’t look at the CIP data, which totally ruins it for you) so I skipped ahead look­ing for the “good parts”, some­thing to make the book worth slog­ging through. I didn’t find any. I won’t say I hated this book, but I will say I couldn’t even almost fin­ish it.

Emperor of Scent, by Chandler Burr.
It might be that I’m biased because I love per­fume, but I doubt it. This book is sim­ply won­der­ful. Although non­fic­tion, it reads like a novel. It’s funny, it’s engag­ing, it’s fast-paced, it’s gen­er­ous. It’s part sci­ence, yes, but it’s also part biog­ra­phy. I found that after the first 10 or so pages I could not put the book down — I had to know what hap­pened next. I became obsessed with Luca Turin and what was going to hap­pen with him, and after I fin­ished the book I had to look him up on the inter­net to find out more. The book was just that good. Loved it.

Monsters On Parade

In Fiction, Halloween, Writing on 21 October 2009 with no comments

As the days begin to shrink in earnest and the tem­per­a­ture drops below what my California-reared skin can com­fort­ably lounge about in, mon­sters begin to claw their way out of my sub­con­scious and into the fore­ground. They whis­per, they cajole, they bark and they howl. Sometimes this is haunt­ing. Mostly, it’s extremely liberating.

Even as a child I knew exactly what kind of writer I was going to be. I would tell any­one who would lis­ten that I was going to be a hor­ror nov­el­ist. Eventually I had to stop say­ing this, how­ever, as more than a few peo­ple heard “whore nov­el­ist” and would blush and guf­faw. Eventually I started telling peo­ple that I wanted to be Stephen King.

That was only par­tially cor­rect, how­ever. What I really wanted was dark mythol­ogy, a uni­verse were peo­ple were con­stantly tor­mented by evils they could nei­ther see nor hear, but which were incon­tro­vert­ible and inexorable.

What draws me to the hor­rific and the fan­tas­tic are rarely phys­i­cal mon­sters. While I can appre­ci­ate the beauty of Frankenstein’s mon­ster and the wicked­ness of Dracula and Mr. Hyde, these char­ac­ters never moved me the way mon­sters I would invent later in life would. The sto­ries are cap­ti­vat­ing and tragic, and I’ve always been jeal­ous that Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein when she was only 18 years old. Yet while the merit of the sto­ries is doubt­less the mon­sters them­selves failed to sway me. They did not inspire fear.

When I was lit­tle, my father was some­thing of a bud­ding occultist, though I doubt he would have termed him­self that. A song­writer by trade, he decided to try his hand at a novel about the anti-Christ, and as part of his research delved into the worlds of demonology, scrip­ture, magic and the arcane. I would creep into his office and find books like The Magus and The History of Witchcraft and Demonology on the floor. Naturally, I flipped through them, both scared and fas­ci­nated. I was famil­iar with the Devil, of course. And while my Christian upbring­ing taught me that the books my father was read­ing were evil and not to be tri­fled with, I couldn’t help but be drawn to them. They con­tained some­thing within their pages that stirred in me real fear and trans­fix­ion, and the mag­net­ism of being ver­boten twisted me into a kind of secret, demon-loving freak.

Oh, to be sure, I was ter­ri­fied of my father’s books. I knew that their power could turn Jesus-loving lit­tle girls into drug addicts, psy­chotics, and hea­thens. I knew that to show too much inter­est was to invite the Beast into my world. I’d seen The Exorcist. I had no inten­tion of being Linda Blair.

And yet…they were just so won­der­ful, in their way. Too won­der­ful to resist. These were actual mon­sters. These were the objects of my most pri­mal fear. The demons and dev­ils that filled my head in those early days were beings of hate, woe, evil, and lust, and if you weren’t care­ful they had the power and priv­i­lege to posses your soul and take over your life. They could destroy your body and rend your soul from its shell and carry you straight off to Hell.

And why? Because they could.

What child could resist?

I admit that I have not spend too much time read­ing mod­ern mon­ster lit­er­a­ture, but what I have read dis­ap­points, because authors seem to enjoy strip­ping mon­sters of their mon­stros­ity. They want us to under­stand their mon­ster. They want us to be sym­pa­thetic. They want us to see their mon­ster from another point of view, to put our­selves in its shoes.

Real mon­sters don’t have moti­va­tions. They aren’t sub­ject to human morals or guide­lines – that’s what makes them mon­sters! They must be iden­ti­fi­able – if they are too dif­fer­ent from us, they’re not mon­sters, they are ani­mals. Monsters are nec­es­sar­ily born in the uncanny val­ley – they bear enough resem­blance to some­thing we know that we expect a cer­tain per­son­al­ity or inter­ac­tion. But upon closer inspec­tion we see that some­thing is hor­ri­bly, revolt­ingly wrong.

Monsters don’t care about us. They don’t care about our world. They don’t care about fit­ting in. They merely are what they are – incar­na­tions of the very things we fear most.

One of my favorite “hor­ror” movies is Shaun of the Dead. One of the things I love about it is that no attempt is made to explain the appear­ance of the zom­bies, nor their nature. We’re allowed to just accept that the zom­bies are the walk­ing dead, grue­some, some­what com­i­cal, and creepy. We can sit back and just appre­ci­ate the joyride they take us on. (Night of the Living Dead is of course won­der­ful also, but there’s some­thing about the dia­logue and blend of hor­ror and com­edy in Shaun that is just brilliant.)

Another favorite mon­ster takes the form of some­thing else near and dear to us – our homes. The houses in both The Dionaea House (one of my all-time favorite Halloween tales) and in House of Leaves are ideal mon­sters because they are rem­i­nis­cent of some­thing we know, some­thing that should be com­fort­ing and ground­ing but which are in fact hor­rific and inexplicable.

Contrast these mon­sters, which are not explained away but sim­ply allowed to just be, with the house in Zemeckis/Spielberg’s Monster House, which begins in much the same way as the house in Dionaea House (if a watered down, though very enter­tain­ing, children’s ver­sion) but by the end of the film is explained as being pos­sessed by the soul of the tor­mented woman who once lived there. Once the expla­na­tion set­tles we have lit­tle to truly fear, because now we under­stand. And while that under­stand­ing makes for a good children’s flick, it makes for a lousy monster.

When I took up fic­tion writ­ing, I at first did so with the inten­tion of spin­ning biogra­phies of won­der­ful mon­sters. After all, my child­hood was shaped by Lewis Carroll and Stephen King – I was doomed early on to have a pen­chant for the strange and unnat­ural. But as I began to develop my char­ac­ters and my plots I real­ized that the more I dealt with the mon­sters, the less scary they became. It became clear that the only way to deal with mon­sters and keep them mon­strous was to write around them, to tell the story from the points of view of those whose lives were being ran­sacked by their inter­ac­tions with the mon­sters. I could show as much about these char­ac­ters as I wanted, but the mon­sters had to remain largely in the back­ground. They could not be seen. They could not be known.

Harkening back to my child­hood, then, my mon­sters were pri­mar­ily incor­po­real – demons, dev­ils, suc­cubi, incubi, and imps. Enough was already writ­ten about these mon­ster to give them sub­stance, but they were unique enough that I could weave them into the lives of var­i­ous char­ac­ters under myr­iad dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances and then sit back and watch as all Hell broke loose. It was won­der­ful! Eventually I ven­tured fur­ther into my imag­i­na­tion to con­coct other evil spir­its com­pletely my own. I was able to spin entire pan­theons and mytholo­gies from the inter­ac­tions of the mon­sters that dwelled in my head.

And yet, for all that I invented them, I can­not tell you much about them, because I do not know them. I keep them at arm’s length even from myself, because if I’m not scared of them, how can I present them in all their fear­some glory to others?

I enjoy see­ing other people’s mon­sters. I enjoy the yard haunts I see both online and in my own neigh­bor­hood, with corpses claw­ing their way out from the ground, ghosts swing­ing from bare tree branches, jack-o-lanterns twin­kling their wicked smiles. I enjoy the chil­dren dressed as vam­pires, ghouls, gob­lins and witches. I enjoy the way we embrace the dark­ness and our fears and cel­e­brate them full force, even if just for one night. For one night, all these mon­sters are beau­ti­ful, and my love for them is reflected and shared all around me. For one night, my mon­sters take a back seat so that the other mon­sters can dance cen­ter stage.

But only for a night. In the morn­ing, my own mon­sters will return, demand­ing to be reck­oned with.

“All’s Fair in Love & War, Texas” is live">“All’s Fair in Love & War, Texas” is live

In Fiction, Narrative, Web Development, Writing on “All’s Fair in Love & War, Texas” is live">20 October 2009 with 1 comment

After months of prepa­ra­tion, All’s Fair in Love and War, Texas is finally live.

I real­ize it might not look like it to the untrained eye, but this web­site was a lot of work. (Work which, I have to admit, I mostly enjoyed.) It’s built on Wordpress, but it was my first attempt at build­ing a WP theme from scratch. So I had that learn­ing curve to tackle, which was respectable. (If I had it all to do over again, I would prob­a­bly start out with the Thematic theme and build a child theme from there. I dis­cov­ered Thematic when build­ing a web­site for my husband’s job, and it’s wonderful.)

So I built the theme myself. And then I ran into some cod­ing prob­lems. See, from the begin­ning I knew I did not want to cre­ate just anther blog-based seri­al­ized novel. There are TONS of those on the net. Given my pen­chant for the web and “new media” in gen­eral, I wanted to cre­ate some­thing that, as far as I was aware, hadn’t really been done else­where. Building upon some basic beliefs I have about how web users assim­i­late infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge (about which I have an arti­cle com­ing out on A List Apart some time this fall) I knew I wanted to cre­ate a nar­ra­tive that had many points of entry and exit. I wanted my read­ers to choose for them­selves which nar­ra­tives to fol­low. And more­over, I wanted to take all the work out of it. I wanted choos­ing a nar­ra­tive to be intu­itive and easy.

So the first thing I needed to do was cre­ate meta­data for each story. Which char­ac­ters are involved? Where does this story take place? Which story line does it fall into? And I needed to dis­play this meta­data in a way that would make sense to the reader, yet wouldn’t be overwhelming.

Turns out, there’s not a way built into Wordpress to do this. You can tell Wordpress to show you the chil­dren of cer­tain cat­e­gories, but you can’t ask Wordpress to show you the chil­dren of X cat­e­gory ONLY if this post belongs to the par­ent cat­e­gory (an sub­se­quently, only if it belongs to the chil­dren cat­e­gories!) This was a fun­da­men­tal nav­i­ga­tional aspect I needed for this site. I needed to say, “Okay, Wordpress, show me the chil­dren of the Characters cat­e­gory that this post belongs to, and then show me the chil­dren of the Places cat­e­gory this belongs to, and then show me the chil­dren of the Events cat­e­gory this post belongs to.”

I tried to make Wordpress do this. I really did. But Wordpress just stuck its tongue out at me. Real mature.

So I cried. (Yeah, nei­ther mature nor pro­duc­tive, I know, but I’m prone to break­downs when code fails. This is after the curs­ing has ended.) I cried because I couldn’t get it to work, and because if I couldn’t get it to work, the entire project was going to fail. Without this aspect, the web­site would be just like tons of other web nov­els out there.

Then I posted about my trou­bles on Twitter where a very kind English bloke offered to help me. And to make a long story short, he fixed my prob­lem. And he’s awesome.

Then I ran into another prob­lem. Each story poten­tially belongs to sev­eral dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives – cer­tain char­ac­ters, cer­tain places, cer­tain sto­ry­lines. I wanted my read­ers to choose how they read the story, but how was I going to make it pos­si­ble for them to con­tinue in their nar­ra­tive seam­lessly? I mean, when they got to the end of the story, the “next” but­ton would always point to the next chrono­log­i­cal post, but not nec­es­sar­ily the next post in the nar­ra­tive my reader had cho­sen. So if they only wanted to read posts fea­tur­ing the Prime of Darkness, they’d have to locate the POD archive, select a post, read, then go back to the archive, find the next post, read it, and so on.

Unacceptable.

I needed to pro­vide nav­i­ga­tion that suited the nar­ra­tive. But how could I know which nar­ra­tive they were on? How could I know how to help them get to the next post in their cho­sen narrative?

I con­sid­ered a lot of options. I thought about adding nav­i­ga­tion for every pos­si­ble exit point. But even with a healthy dose of Ajax, that seemed clunky (and it wasn’t easy to code, as it turned out.)

Then I stum­bled upon a plu­gin that allowed me to do exactly what I wanted. When you choose a link from an archive, the next/previous nav­i­ga­tion remem­bers what archive you came from, and lets you nav­i­gate only that archive. So if you’re look­ing at the Prime of Darkness archive and you click a post, you will nav­i­gate only that story line.

Not only accept­able, but awe­some.

And after that, the site took off running.

I ran into other, less tech­ni­cal, prob­lems, too. The fact that I can’t draw was a huge obsta­cle, so I decided to just include illus­tra­tions where I could cre­ate some­thing that looked halfway decent. I worked hard on the char­ac­ter avatars, and while cer­tain avatars that I made early on could stand to be redrawn, I am mostly very happy with them.

All in all, I count this project a huge suc­cess. It works as intended. (There is one small bug that I still don’t know how to fix, but it’s a bug I can live with for now.) It’s dif­fer­ent from the other hun­dreds of dig­i­tal nar­ra­tives out there. I’m proud of the voice, and the char­ac­ter, and what I’ve man­aged to accom­plish, more or less by myself.

It’s a happy day :)