Oh, well that's typical.

As you might expect, I have been poking morbid and inappropriate fun at this swine flu situation from the start. Ever since an official health emergency was declared I have been in on the pig jokes, the cracks about how nothing I am doing today matters, the attacks on sensationalist media and the real and present problems that go along with the wonders of a society with such ready access to discussion and information.

Naturally, I have a runny nose.

I suspect this is allergies, it being the season when trees go at it like brazen hussies. But if it proves to be anything more serious than the sniffles, I'll be calling in sick, talking to my doctor, stocking up on chicken soup, and admitting to whatever is hiding above the stratosphere that, alright, I probably deserved it.

Won't stop a tongue-in-cheek labeling, though.

Annotation Requests

This post will be the permanent hub for Blogger-based annotation requests. If you want something in Not Providence clarified (within certain basic boundaries), please leave a comment. Comments are screened, so if they don't appear right away, I am just busy earning the money I need to keep myself in gin and circus peanuts. Comment, and be fulfilled.

Not Providence: Putting the "Inter" in "Intertron".

I'm a trivia sponge. Any weird facts I read, any little snippets about this celebrity or that scientific theorem or those historical events, get logged in my brain for later use in impressing people at parties. If that weren't damning enough, I was also a Literature major in college. When you combine these two things, you are probably not surprised at my deep love for annotated editions. It is one of my life goals to own the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, along with the Annotated Alice; I don't want the Annotated Ulysses only because I am concerned its density could collapse the spatial integrity of my living room.*

Now, the point is, as I was sitting on my computer one day, trying to do some work, a friend mentioned that they would love to see an Annotated Not Providence. This appeal to both a not-so-secret obsession and an even-less-secret vanity was too much for me, and I set about wondering: how would I even make this happen?
And the answer, as so many bloggers and Internet celebrities have learned, is simple: talk to the readers. It's called the Internet; lets put its "inter" to the test.

So, here's the plan, short and simple. If there is some reference in Not Providence, some joke or allusion or piece of slang, that you want explained, tell me so, via the handy-dandy Annotation Request form, a link to which will soon be creeping, cancer-like, onto the Not Providence update pages. Each week (tentatively; depends on the demand, but it will not be more than weekly), I will go over the requested annotations, and create annotated versions of the relevant Not Providence updates for your perusal. These annotated versions will be linked to by, but stand separate from, the original updates, so that those who do not enjoy annotations can avoid looking at them.

Now, like any project of this nature, there are a few ground rules:

No spoilers. I will happily explain asides, slang, references, and other assorted trivia of both my writing style and the Not Providence universe; I will not, however, explain how a statement ties into the greater plot. At least, not before the connection is revealed in the course of the story, and even then, not in public—see the final rule.

Annotations will appear with the earliest relevant update. If you ask me to explain a slang term first used in Book One Part One, you'll find the information there; if enough people ask about something already covered that I think I've mislinked/miscoded the file, I will refer back to said file in a later update.

Annotation requests should be submitted via either email, a blog comment on a Not Providence-related post (preferably the Annotation Project post), or an @reply on Twitter. All three of these options are available on the Annotation Request page.

Annotations will be released on no more frequent than a weekly basis. Ever. Period. I cannot afford to tax my sanity to that degree. Each week, currently aiming for Saturdays, I will update the annotated versions of all pages
I will tell you that your request has been received. If you do not hear back within 3 days of making the request, feel free to re-submit it.

I will always respond to annotation requests. The response may be an email or a comment saying that fulfilling your request would result in spoilers, but I will always respond. Again, if I take 3 days or more to respond, please feel free to see if your request was received.

There. Rules outlined, system more or less prepared. I've already gotten a couple requests from people to whom I rumbled about this idea, so I'll go ahead and consider those added to the pile for this week.

*Translation: I totally want the Annotated Ulysses, and damn the consequences to my sanity and/or geometry.

Not Providence is up.

Happy Tuesday! It's Update Week here at Notes from the Underworld, I guess.

Today's special is Not Providence 9: Randall Stocks Up on Hand Sanitizer.

Not Providence: Hey, at least we're not talking about the swine flu!

Happy Monday, it's a site update.

I haven't tweaked the template yet (we need some images up in this piece), but I have added and mutated a few things. The Curriculum Vitae link actually does take you to my curriculum vitae, not just my short list of published works, so that's a plus (Acrobat Reader required, for the nonce), and I got my contact information up there, too. Let the harassment commence, oh you imagined creepy people.

Sacrifice

Having finished today's bout of writing early (I force myself to keep expectations low; I can't afford and don't want to react to my job like a burden), and having no plans until 4 p.m., I found myself browsing TV Tropes, my favorite site for killing some time. And I found myself on the page for Enforced Method Acting, and reading some of the both hilarious and horrifying stories of things done to and by actors to get scenes just right: Mark Hamill not who Luke's father was until just before the revelation, William Friedkin discharging guns on the set of The Exorcist, the voice actor for Ikari Shinji literally strangling another actor while recording dialog for a violent scene. The list goes on and on and actually gets pretty absurd in places. And as I sat here reading it, I felt a little twisted, because I couldn't help but feel kind of jealous that they were pushed that hard.

I'm not a proponent of true art being angsty, or nonsensical, or indeed any one thing by default. But I do think art is something worth gambling on and worth doing right, whatever that means. Creative works mean more to me when I know that something about them pained the creator, that they really challenged themselves and pushed their boundaries doing it. There is a place for comfortable art, but it's not the art I'm interested in. Research topics that disgust you; show up drunk for a scene where you're supposed to be miserable; spend an hour staring at your grandmother's ashes before you try to write a biography of her life. Much as it's done to death as a joke, tears really do season art, and I am at my happiest with creations when they take me a little out of my comfort zone.

So again, I'm kind of jealous, because I don't have a director to do that to me. I can't show up drunk to my keyboard (well, I can, but I am one of those rare writers who writes total crap when intoxicated); I can't have someone fire off a gun at me; I can't actually strangle a character before I write a scene where I kill them via asphyxiation. These are impossibilities, and it makes me wish I'd found my calling somewhere else.

A little. There are stories about writers taking it that far--writers who buy cow tongue from a butcher to see what it feels like to cut it with scissors, writers who did a drug just to find out how to describe it, writers who deliberately base characters they're going to kill on people they love to get that proper wrenching feel out of the death scene.

I won't do drugs just for research purposes, given a nasty experience with hospital morphine, but I try to follow in their footsteps. I try to push a little, try to strain myself, try to find my boundaries and give them a good swift kick. Here's hoping that it really does give things some added flavor. And here's to all the artists who bled a little for their art.

The Real Problem with Social Networking (and also, I'm a nerd).

As of this posting, I am now on no less than four networking sites--Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, plus the hybridized, partially-network-based LiveJournal and Google Reader--and I am running into a major issue: What do I share where?

This is a problem I first started having with Not Providence (note the subtle pimp) but which has since spread to my Internet experience in general. I give NP a by because I can't know whose feeds are going to overflow on what site and I'd rather maximize exposure, but that's a PR/self-marketing issue, not an issue of Internet etiquette. With things that are not so important as a writing career, I never know how much sharing is too much, or when I've crossed a digital boundary.

Some things are obvious, of course--News items go in Google Reader, short anecdotes of the weird go to Twitter--but where do I mention a new movie, or how I'm feeling, or something of that nature? I'm drowning in options, and what's worse, I feel like every one of my options needs regular care just to make sure it's clear I'm alive and actually a participant in this whole Internet thing. I realize there are programs to allow me to share across multiple networks, but the truth is, I really hate those things. Not only does that sometimes cause glaring mismatches with update styles (though that has lessened somewhat with the removal of Facebook's automatic "is"), but it means that people who follow me on multiple networks are that much more likely to start treating what I say as mindless noise because of its redundancy--something which is already a high risk on Twitter.

And God, if that weren't enough, I really need to update this blog more often.

So here I sit, having just updated everything that needs updating...and both dreading and loving the need to do it all again. Because at least now, once I get this figured out, everything in my slice of the Internet will have a place.

Not Providence: You know the drill.

Part 8 is up and running. Tommy bothers me.

In other news, HTML is a lot harder than it should be; but you should be seeing Twitter and Facebook links on the right-hand side, under "More from the Intertron". Click in good health.

It's that time again.

Tuesday?

About 9 a.m. Pacific?

Must be time for me to put up the new Not Providence. Today's episode: Randall Eats Bagels.

A query for you folks, perhaps to become a poll if I can truncheon Blogger into explaining how that's done: is the 9 a.m. update good timing for you? Would earlier in the day be better? Later? This happens to be convenient for me—I can upload it before I start my work day, and have a couple minutes before the other Pacific time zone commuters get to their workstations—but I want to accommodate others as best I can. I don't publish this for my own ego. Not purely, anyway.

Edit: Link fixed. How come update day never goes smooth?

amazonfail: Just to get this out of the way...

I am quite well aware of the amazonfail phenomenon. And of course I have an opinion about it.

For those who are not aware of the situation, what is absolutely known is that Amazon.com, at first slowly and then in a torrent over Easter weekend, removed a multitude of LGBT and abuse-survival books from their rankings. Here are a handful of links: the story at Wikipedia's Amazon.com entry; the blog entry by Mark Probst (an author whose book was de-ranked in the process of this) that Wikipedia claims first brought this into the public eye; the Publisher's Weekly article wherein Amazon blames the situation on a glitch; and a Theory proposed via LiveJournal that makes a fair amount of sense (though the writer could perhaps have been less arrogant about it). The other links I have seen have been histrionic or condescending, depending on the side they take, so I would rather not debut them here (because avoiding bias in a discussion about bias is going to be oh-so-easy to do...).

My personal feeling on the matter is this: Somehow, somewhere, Amazon screwed up. The "Bantown" LJ theory seems plausible, as does some sort of poorly-chosen set of criteria for flagging books as "adult" (akin to when LiveJournal banned a bunch of non-erotic communities a while back). We can argue about Amazon's culpability until the sun goes down, but they definitely made some sort of mistake somewhere, in addition to the even worse mistake of sending what seems like a form letter to Probst instead of really investigating the problem.

Unfortunately, Amazon's mistake hit two of the Internet's major ammo dumps: the LGBT community, and abuse survivors. These are groups who have legitimate grievances as regards their overall treatment, and whom I would never want to see treated as anything but human beings, but which, as a result of their experiences, are liable to react badly and to trigger others not in those groups into temper loss.

So, Amazon screwed up, somehow; and then the Internet opened up a fresh box of berserk rage, and started attacking/boycotting/deriding Amazon. Whatever Amazon did at that point was going to be moot; until they find the actual culprits behind this problem (whether human beings or lines of code), present unassailable evidence that these are the actual culprits and not scapegoats, and find a way to both reverse the problem and take action against those culprits, they will be bearing a massive black eye.

And in the meantime, the attacks against Amazon will get more unreasonable, spurred by corporate stupidity as Amazon flails to mend the gaping hole in its PR; the boycotts will spread, to the point where many accounts lost during this period will never come back; sales may dip, leading to damage to publishers and writers, or sales may barely be affected, leading to a dismissal of a very important group of voices as just more screaming on the Internet. All sides of all debates will think the other sides are even dumber than before, and we will slouch on without any real progress being made. This is how Internet drama goes, with a wide array of rapid coverage forcing people to respond to breaking news before they themselves are certain of what's going on.

In the end, I can only say this: keep buying books, from wherever you think best. And if you have some data to add to this discussion, please, don't hesitate.

Twilight, again. Yes, really.

I'm going to do that annoying thing bloggers do, and say something we're all thinking. In response to these rumors ricocheting around the Internet (notably this io9 article) that Twilight fans are attacking people who express their dislike of the book...I'm calling half-truth, half-bullshit.

On the truth side, people really are that unstable. People get assaulted over sports games; it's not unreasonable to think books would get a similar treatment. People find some strange things to fill the vacuums in their lives, and really, who is more likely to feel empty and rudderless than teenagers, who make up the bulk of this book's target audience? I had serious temper problems in high school, and I personally know, off the top of my head, four people who self-injured on a pretty regular basis for a good chunk of their high school careers. It's not hard to believe that they might both find solace in a book and react violently to those who tell them their chosen anchor is somehow lacking.

On the bird-food side, though, we are talking about teenagers. Teenagers (really, a lot of people, but especially teenagers) deal with their feelings of confusion and chaos by seeking attention. There are plenty of ways to do this (professionals call it "acting out"), but when the Internet gives you a nice shield of anonymity, why not seek some attention via the good old-fashioned method of becoming a victim?

This is not to say that people, kids included, have not gotten punched or whacked with books or otherwise assaulted over this. But I suspect that less than half of the more extreme stories are actually true, or are only based on a true incident with far less dire consequences; I particularly find the signal rocket story to be a bit more than credible, if only because it sounds like a scene from Cliffhanger. If I'm wrong (and please tell me if you have actual corroboration on these events, other than io9 and the Twilight Sucks forums), I apologize, and my heart goes out to the kids who have gotten abused like this.

A note here, though: people getting assaulted over a book is not new. People on Yahoo Answers are getting that (first response to the OP, you are welcome for me rending my IQ by tracking that down for you). I'm not blaming teenagers for being upset about being attacked or exaggerating what happened to them—that kind of insanity is part of being sixteen—but I am blaming people who are acting like this is somehow worse or more newsworthy than any of the other beliefs people get burned, beaten, shot, etc. for on a regular basis. People will get violent over stupid things; Twilight is only unique in that enough people hate it to make the stupidity seem more evident.

And in case you were wondering, I don't hate Twilight. Hating something requires it be capable of raising an emotional reaction.

A cup of coffee, an inbox full of rushes, and an update.

Not Providence 1.6 is up. Meet Arabella. Isn't she great?

For those of you following me via all four areas of the Webbernets I use to announce updates, I apologize for the redundancies; please feel free to consider yourself a victim of marketing.

The Twitter in Repose

For those who were wondering, given the date: no, really, I am on Twitter now. You can find me under the_real_tyler (seriously, the number of people on Twitter named Tyler Hayes is really kind of absurd). A link to the feed will be forthcoming when I have the time for a site update.

Having been on Twitter just under a week, I have a few observations about the process:

• Twitter is a fascinating medium to work in—the character limitation has been analyzed to death, but I really do find that it both forces a different style of writing than the larger and more robust blog format, and also provides a forum in which to relay those events that might not be worth an entry in a normal blog. I try to think of my Twitter feed as a museum of the strange and hilarious in my life, instead of a series of dissertations on same.


• The signal-to-noise ratio really is as terrible as Internet commentators claim. Even the feeds I really enjoy have a tendency to broadcast minutiae that probably wouldn't have made it to the Internet in any other medium.


• This is not the fault of the tweeters themselves, at least not entirely; there is something about Twitter as a medium that encourages one to tweet about trivial events unworthy of a normal blog. I think an inability to post everything at once and the unconscious (and unintended) fact that those who do not tweet get their tweets buried mean that people will do whatever they can to try to fill the gap.

So, there you have it. I'm tweeting now. Will wonders never cease. Feel free to follow my feed if you like; the only thing official and writing-related to take place over there will be announcements of Not Providence updates, though, so don't feel as though you are obligated. And please listen to this, my solemn promise that I will never subject those of you who choose to avoid Twitter to LoudTwitter or its sister programs--I firmly believe that the nature of a Twitter feed means it should be entirely opt-in, and LoudTwitter circumvents that.

And again, in case you thought that was also an April Fool's joke: screw MySpace.

Review: Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy

Review, the short version: Read it, and be changed, and never, ever argue with me about the Cthulhu Mythos.

Preface to the long version: I am well aware of Rudyard Kipling's political and social leanings, and the degree to which he was both more extreme than, and sadly sometimes only as extreme as, his contemporaries. I do not agree with nor condone his beliefs, but reading his fiction is not the same as condoning his politics. I hope in vain that this might put a rest to this argument, but I don't expect to put out the chemical fire that is the Internet.

Now, the long version.

Kipling is one of those great writers I am ashamed to admit I have not read much of; beyond the obvious and regrettable Disney exposure I have read a little bit of his Just So Stories. So when I was given a chance to read a collection of his work specifically aimed at my preferred genre(s) via the power of the Christmas present, I jumped at it.

What I read rearranged my brain and took my breath away.

Kipling is, simply put, a master of English prose, and this book captures not only some of his most, but some of the most, inventive stories. "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Man Who Would Be King" are, of course, classics, considered some of Kipling's strongest work; but this book is not merely an excuse to reprint those pieces. Kipling's work here is genuinely masterful, and masterful in a way I do not often attribute to such a clear precursor of later, more prominent works; because while I didn't expect it, I have to trace inspiration, if not origination, of some of the greatest works of speculative fiction back to Kipling. "On the Gate: A Tale of '16" peeks through a good bit in Neil Gaiman; "Wireless" reminds me of Tim Powers; and "A Matter of Fact" predates Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" by a good thirty years; and both of them are not only inspirational, but fantastic stories in their own right.

These are not the highest points in the book, either: "The Finest Story in the World" is beautiful and amusing, and "The Brushwood Boy" pulled at my heart and my tear-ducts. But all of them are worth something, even just a wry smile; there are no low points in this collection.

Or at least, there are no low points that are a fault of Kipling. The only trouble I had with this edition (Pegasus Books, 2008) was its copyediting; it is, in a word, abysmal. Some of this may be idiosyncrasies of Kipling's grammar that I am just too post-Strunk to understand, but it seems in most places like the editorial process was simply ignored; I often found myself having to go back and re-read sections of stories just to understand what Kipling was trying to say. There are worse things in the world than having to re-read Kipling, certainly, but I should not be doing it out of typographic necessity.

All in all, this is going to be a tough book to beat for my favorite of the year, and it will be going on my Inspiration Shelf for those nights when the words are gummed up. If you are a reader, I recommend it; and if you want to write urban fantasy, I'd call it mandatory.

It's happened

My consumption into the social networking collective is complete with my acquisition of a Twitter account. If you don't want to read through my feelings on the subject, you can just jump to finding me there, as the_real_tyler.

Let me state briefly my beliefs about Twitter: I think that microblogging, at root, is a fantastic concept, and one with a lot of great applications. I also think that most people do not apply it well at all.

Microblogging's two root words suggest Twitter's real function--it's a blog for things too short or too immediate to write a full blog post about. I think that news stations have also made good use of it by having Twitter feeds for their various commentators, as per what Rick Sanchez does with his Twitter account, to create a running dialog about the news items of the day. Unfortunately, most people seem to feel that they should use it to tell everybody about everything they are doing, like a progress bar for the minutiae of their lives. The stereotype of Twitter I have seen has been, more or less, is a 15-minute span of updates consisting of four message, one of which is an in-joke aimed at a user we may not follow and three of which are about their pants.

I am opposed to this use of Twitter. Not because I think it's unacceptable generally--I won't go against my general feelings about free speech--but because I think that it colors everyone's perceptions about Twitter in a way that it shouldn't be. I think Twitter could be a lot more interesting than it is, and I want to do my part to make it so. Plus it feeds into my secret need to be on every social networking site in the world.

Except MySpace. Screw MySpace.

Writing Rubrics, 3/30-4/5

Right, zo. This week has a little more flex in it--I'm busy Saturday but will have time to myself on Sunday, which means I can actually take a floating day off some time mid-week. The best part is that I sort of don't want to; maybe I'm getting the hang of this.

Day 1: Done--edited and prepared Not Providence 1.5 for publishing.
Day 2: Done--sent off a query about Done with Mirrors (fingers crossed there).
Day 3: Work on Not Providence.
Day 4: Edit Not Providence 6.
Day 5: Work on "Recess".

It may be tough to hold to my resolution to unleash another short story on the world this month--I am looking at digging out "The Color of Your Money" for editing in case "Recess" flags. I am finding Not Providence takes more time up than expected, but I don't think that's a bad thing; training for the actual writing life if it ever comes, and all that. I think I'm hitting my stride. Of course, this means that I should experience horrific writer's block any day now...