Midaregami

The days when our people could themselves consume the sacred offering-cakes have long passed.

We know¹ that long ago, in the distant past, our ancestors must have been able to make and ingest the offering-cake, else why would they have left the manner of its making so clearly writ in their recorded past? Yes, we are forced to assume that long before we came to this world,² before the pollen of the great zhuu-aa continent-trees changed us and found for us a place here, our bodies could metabolize the strange constituents of the offering-cake.

Things are going well.

To wit:

• A discussion with Jake about note-taking led me to set up a locally-hosted Wiki to organize and cross-reference notes. It was supposed to be hard, but setting up MySQL and MediaWiki was almost trivial. I’ve set up categories for class notes, authors, primary sources, secondary sources, themes, and faculty. Those are just guesses at how I might need to organize it, but I’m hoping that the ability to hyperlink everything together quickly and easily will make the knowledge more accessible and studying more efficient. Ultimately, it should be barely more effort than taking notes in a text file.

• I got a box to ship my bike in, and a great honking case to pack my keyboard in. It’s huge.

• Accelerando is everything I hoped it would be. Oh, didn’t I mention Accelerando? I’m sorry, I was busy daydreaming about hyperintelligent lobsters. The daydream also included interstellar ships the size of a deck of cards crewed by the uploaded intelligences of posthuman revolutionaries. You can download the whole novel from Amazon for free. For free.

• The fourth volume of Samurai Champloo is excellent.

I have recently had the happy opportunity to actually do some reading. It’s quite novel. These “books” have “pages,” thin films upon which text is writ. They require no electricity, are non-volatile, and have a pleasant tactile response. I recommend them.

Sometimes cell phone text message conversations between me and Jake can get a little bit out of hand.

Jake: If your package is lost, you are entitled to an indemnity with a max amount based on the weight of the package.

Paul: I hope not to lose my package.

Jake: Me too. It could set the infinity laser back years. Dr. Apocalypto would be furious with me.

Paul: Although I have his genius to thank for saving my life with the revivotron. Even if it did leave me with maddening, precognative visions.

Jake: Yes, but without them, I, your trusted sidekick, could not share in the exhilarating, sometimes horrifying adventures that result.

Paul: how true. I trust you were able to lose Madame Demona’s men before contacting me.

Jake: Yes. Her goons are no match for my obfuscating devices. However, there was another, not with Demona’s men, who was much harder to lose. Could he have been the one from your vision?

Paul: It is possible. if so, we may be in great danger. I can’t shake the feeling that this all has something to do with the Valerian Crystal that powers the infinity laser. Dr. Apocalypto was evasive when I asked its origin.

Jake: Yes, now that you mention it, I remember my plasmodic neutronium spectrometer was reading high. I thought it was just an anomaly, but what if it wasn’t? Perhaps we should report this to the doctor.

Paul: I will notify him via X-wave. Duty, honor, justice! Agent Farsight out.

Months ago, I bought Neil Stephenson’s novel, Quicksilver. I enjoyed his earlier work, Cryptonomicon, but this more overt foray into historical novel-writing had me nervous. Sometimes—frequently—historical novelists feel the need to remind us how many history books they read to write their particular thousand-page opus, with scores of pages of mouldering prose that read like one too many late nights hunched over “Caesar’s Gallic Wars” or something.

About the first third of Quicksilver is like this. Stephenson manages to make even pirates boring and abstract. But keep going. I promise it gets better.

I finally (thanks to the utter boredom at “work”) started and finished Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” It was excellent. It also had a fantastic statement—for my money, as true as statements come:

When a naked seventeen-year-old girl is shedding tears in the moonlight, anything can happen.

I don’t doubt it.

I was trying to come up with a good codename for my next project. Computer companies give their projects codenames like “Panther” or “Ambrose” or “Sagan” or “Bhutanese Phallus Pendant” or what have you, but I couldn’t think of anything that had the proper Skunk Works-like air of sneakiness to it, so I’ve settled on “Untitled.” Occasionally, though, it gets called “I’m writing a bad fantasy novel, this must be some kind of perverse cry for help.” Help.

I’m just over 2000 words into it, which means NaNoWriMo is just not happening this year. But I’m okay with that, as progress has been steady, if slow. I feel that my narrative voice has strengthened with 50,000 words and the intervening 11 months since this time last year, and despite my misgivings about writing a fantasy novel (the potential for abject, egregious badness is so devastatingly high, you see) I’m enjoying what I’ve written, even if nobody else will.

Here are the opening two paragraphs, which tell you nothing at all about the story, yet give away the ending.

Dear Cassandra Claire,

You are some kind of mad, zeitgeist-seizing genius, and I salute you for your audacity, your alacrity, and your all-around virtuosity with modern myth.

Yours,
—Paul

Reading Terry Pratchett’s “Soul Music” today, I ran across this quote:

“Famous I don’t know about,” said Glod. “It’s hard to be famous and alive. I just want to play music every day and hear someone say, ‘Thanks, that was great, here is some money, same time tomorrow, okay?’”

That just about sums it up.

The time to NaNoWriMo is now most conveniently measured in weeks. I have a couple of main ideas, but I am not particularly confident I can pursue them to the mandated 50,000-word extent. Although, considering that last sentence, one wouldn’t think word count would be an issue for me. I could’ve just said “I have two ideas, and either one will work.”

There are major differences between my environment of 11 months ago and my current situation. The biggest is definitely net access. Last November I had none at home and had to use the school computer at work if I wanted to do email. Now, I have broadband at home and a desktop net connection at school. Less isolating, more distracting.

Moreover, I am busier. I have friends, and I often have some kind of diversion (or obligation) to pursue in the evening, which is when the bulk of my writing happened last year. I could curtail some of these, but others (such as my Japanese study) would be more difficult to ignore.

The issue of Japanese study is a particularly tricky one; the nikyuu is coming up, and it’s in early December. November is prime cramming time for this test. Now, I know I’m not going to pass. To entertain fantasies otherwise is more self-delusional than I’m prepared to be. But all the same, the pressure to study will be there. It will be much more stressful to try and do significant amounts of study and average 1,700 words per day.

I want to prove to myself that last year’s success wasn’t a fluke. If it was, I’d rather know ahead of time so I could save myself the head- and heartache.