new year, new site, new project

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theClaimDuplex

TL;DR: I am writing, or furiously attempting to write, two novels in 20 days, and posting all first draft copy as well as daily notes and occasional essays to cobblerandbard.com. Come stop by.

Hi all. I’m a little late with this, mostly due to frantically getting things up and running the past few days, but I have things to say! And a place to say them! So I’m running out of excuses for not getting them said.

I have a new author site. I haven’t decided the division of labor between the sites yet; as I imagine it, Cobbler & Bard will be pretty business-focused, the Pulchrifex Papers will continue to aggregate random non-writing-related stuff that grabs my interest, and if C&B takes off then PP will probably slowly die. Further bulletins as events warrant.

For those of you who do follow this site in any measure out of interest in my fiction, you should know that NOT ONLY will C&B be hosting that stuff in general in future, BUT ALSO I have a huge writing and meta-writing initiative that I’m posting up there RIGHT NOW, and will be through all of January. This is surely the place to start—so surely, in fact, that it’s sort of mind-croggling that there isn’t a permalink to that somewhere on the blog page, ah well another thing to do oh god.

And I am now officially way over my allotment of social media time for the day. So I do sincerely hope to see you over at C&B, and please share and comment if you like what I’m doing.

the repetitious, misspelled incantations of thwarted desire

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I forgot I’d written a Goodreads review of THE HAPPIEST TODDLER ON THE BLOCK, but someone “liked” it this morning and I went back to read it. Still pretty proud of it, I have to say. Dementia is setting in, though: I remember a few things about BLOOD MERIDIAN, but if I’m referring to anything in particular here, I’ve forgotten it.

(Why would I name-check BLOOD MERIDIAN in a review of a book about child behavior management? That’s what we call “clickbait,” son.)

fear, love, obscurantism, neuroscience, and the watcher in the water

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ggg

I’ve talked a little bit about Wattpad, but possibly not enough. It’s a social network for writers; I have some free work on it, and I’m a little bit active in a couple of discussion groups. The guy running those discussion groups, Jason Howell, was kind enough to ask me a few very sharp and kind questions about my own writing; inexplicably, on reading the answers, he decided to publish them anyway.

Part 1 of the interview is here. You don’t need a Wattpad account to read it. However, you do need one to vote and comment. Votes are the Wattpad version of “likes,” which is to say the currency of the realm, and Jason has done a lot to enrich other Wattpadders. If you really enjoyed the interview, it would be kind of you to join up and vote (which vote will go to him, not me).

If you already know you like my writing, you might also check out Jason’s, either on Wattpad or at his own pad. He works short, so the ante’s modest, and he’s tricky.

david foster wallace did not use scrivener

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Ed Ditto’s tutorial on creating print manuscripts from Scrivener is required reading for self-publishers. It’s gotten me a huge portion of the way to formatting The Dandelion Knight for print, and I thank him for his service (and Garrett Robinson for the video version, which I haven’t watched yet but would like to one day). But, through no fault of Ed’s, the process fails at one step that is critical for me and perhaps no one else.

Footnotes.

I know. Let’s just stipulate that they’re necessary. But, if you’re compiling to PDF, Scrivener forces you into a Sophie’s choice with footnotes—use Proofing layout and lose some fonts (as well as some amount of control over whether your pages end up recto or verso, at least allegedly), or use Publishing layout and tolerate endnotes. I refused to give up IM Fell for my title page and chapter titles, and I refused to tolerate endnotes. So I opted to compile from Scrivener to Word.

Unfortunately, there are a few aspects of the conversion that weren’t great. They’re all manually fixable, but they do kind of need manual fixing. I’ll show some screenshots.

scrivenerWord-authorTitle

Problem 1: Author and title are too close to the main text.

Solution: This is easy but annoying—manually go through the headers and change them. Unfortunately, Scrivener makes each chapter heading into its own “section” and edits to one don’t propagate through the rest. I’ve tried to fix this in styles but haven’t managed to figure it out.

scrivenerWord-footnoteSize

Problem 2: Footnotes are the same size as the rest of the text. (Oops, it looks like a useless hyphen has also crept in.)

Solution: Also easy, not annoying: Just put your cursor into a footnote, select all, and change the size.

scrivenerWord-widowOrphan

Problem 3: Pages don’t always end on the same line. (In its “two pages” display, Word displays odd pages on the left and even on the right, because it starts with 1—so don’t worry that the odds and evens are on the wrong side or that the margins are reversed for recto and verso. At least, I think you shouldn’t worry.)

Solution: Select the entire main text, then go to Format -> Paragraph. Click “Line and Page Breaks,” then deselect “widow and orphan control.” You want to select all because the document is divided into different sections; the last thing you want them to do is treat widows and orphans differently!

being good to each other is so important

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This comic came across my transom a few minutes ago. Click and read—there’s much more than just the single panel below. I’ll wait.

naterade

On the one hand, beautiful and indisputable. The power of kindness and understanding is formidable. These are values we try to teach our kids, and for the best of reasons, the repulsion of alien despots perhaps not least among them. And I love the art.

On the other… well, it was posted today, today being August 28, 2014. The referents in current events are clear enough, but in case you’re coming to this a few months or years late, let’s state them: the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent overreaction by police to local protests; the recent bloodshed between Israel and Hamas; possibly the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Or, not quite. The referents in current events are the popular reactions to these events. Winehart (Swinehart? I’m assuming he’s “Nate S. Winehart”) is talking about the conversations he’s seeing his friends having. The parallel timelines in the comic aren’t about different things happening in Ferguson, they’re about different ways to react to a world where Michael Brown is dead.

And—it’s difficult to interrogate these sorts of sentiments without seeming to prove their point, but one of those reactions is much easier to imagine when the discussants are both white hipsters who like the same coffeeshop. Who’d want to spend the day together cloud-watching, sharing a movie and a sunset. Who are friends already, whose lives are only separated by different viewing angles on the same abstraction.

It becomes harder to imagine the pink timeline when the two friends have a complicated history. When they’ve hurt each other more than once, then tried to reconcile, then hurt each other again. When one has more often, and more grievously, taken the offensive. It becomes harder to appreciate the pink timeline in light of Ferguson when the joke, the sugar for the pill, is slavery.

I’m grateful for the comic. I’m glad Winehart (please tell me it’s Winehart) drew and posted it. I’m following his blog now because his art is amazing. But—look, I’m reading this book called OVERWHELMED, by Brigid Schulte, which has nothing to do with the ideas at hand except for this:

The overwhelm, they want people to understand, is not an epidemic of personal failures, of whiny moms unable to juggle work and home efficiently. It’s a massive structural failure, and it’s holding everybody back.

The persistence of the blue timeline is not an epidemic of personal failures, of peevish people unwilling to find empathy and common ground with others.

Except when it is. And sometimes it is. But not always, not even close.

Being good to each other is so important. No question. But part of being good is not always insisting on goodness from the other party. Part of being good is respecting justified anger. Part of being good is owning up to history.