Author: jkonrath

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Fieldstones and Moleskines

I know I said I don’t do new year resolutions, and I don’t.  But one of the things I’ve been trying to do – it’s more of a course-correction for my post-40 memory loss – is writing down every damn thing that pops in my head, with hopes of later mining this stuff for story ideas.  I know it’s something I should have started doing decades ago, but it’s something I’ve been trying to be militant about.

I just read this book,Weinberg on Writing, which talks about his “fieldstone” method.  The analogy has to do with those fieldstone walls you see on old farms.  (Watch the last five minutes of Shawshank next time it’s on TBS; they run it pretty much daily.  There’s a nice fieldstone wall in that.)  When a farmer builds one of those walls, they don’t go to Wally World and say “gimme a thousand yards of stones.”  They plow the fields, and when they hit a big stone, they pull it aside and save it.  After years of doing this, you have enough stones to build some fencing, or a nice fireplace hearth or wellhouse.  It takes time to find the right stones to fit the odd cracks and holes, but if you’re always looking, you never know when you’ll find it.

Most of the art of writing has to do with dragging your subconscious mind into your conscious mind and then dumping it onto pages in a way that can transfer into someone else’s conscious mind and creep into their subconsciousness.  Anyone that tells you it’s about marketing or the three-act structure or hitting plot points or what your cover looks like is full of bullshit.  That’s about selling books.  Salvador Dali wasn’t a genius because he painted the crying clowns and prairie field landscapes that he knew would sell; he was a genius because he would have fucked up dreams and then immediately paint them with no censorship or conscious thought, and those paintings haunt you and are hard to shake because they drill into the bottom of your mind.

The problem is, you can’t sit at a blank page and consciously think, “okay, let’s dump my unconscious mind into this buffer.”  You just see fits and spurts of what you need: while you’re in the shower, when you’re cleaning up cat shit, when you’re stuck in an endless meeting.  Something pops into your head, and it would be awesome in a story.  And then, if you’re above 40 and have spent your lifetime drinking from aluminum cans, it’s gone in ten seconds.

This requires some way to always capture this shit.  The current strategy is a three-pronged approach:

1) The iPhone notes program.  It’s pretty easy to use; it syncs up with IMAP in my gmail account, so I can also get at it from my Mac or my iPad, making cut/paste pretty easy.  The downside is typing with my thumbs, and it’s not always easy to whip out a phone and tap away.

2) A google docs document that does the same as above.  I use this less and less, but there are times where I’m not at any of the above three iOS machines, or where I need to cut/paste in something sizable, like a big chunk of an article.

3) A moleskine notebook.  The classic, hardcover, lined.  I’ve got a little folding pen that bungees right into the elastic cord, and it stays in my jacket pocket or bag at all times.

There’s a certain tactile satisfaction to keeping notes in a moleskine; that’s a huge plus.  And there’s an overwhelming joy in filling up one of these leather-bound pocketbooks, like you’ve accomplished something more than just dumping ASCII into a buffer.  I just finished one of the books, and it took me almost two years, just because I write in fits and spurts, and this “capture everything” movement just got into gear.

Now here’s the real problem with the moleskine: how to move these fieldstones into the production line.  The iPhone notes thing is easy: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.  The notebooks – well, first my handwriting is horrible.  And I barely hit the lines to get all of this stuff parallel to each other so OCR can handle it.  And I can’t ship it off to someone and have them transcribe it, since I can barely read it.

The current workflow is to scan the entire thing in as a single PDF using Preview and my printer/scanner.  This take some work, only because you end up with a 50-meg file, and there’s no way you’ll do a hundred scans without Preview crashing at least five or six times.  (I know, Windoze people are like “ha, it doesn’t just work”.  But I was able to use a piece of software that came on my system for free, without spending 19 days researching what third-party program works with my brand of scanner, brand of USB chipset, version of Windows, brand of USB cord, IRQ settings, motherboard configuration, and then find out the software I paid fifty bucks for is a “lite” version and the “pro” version costs $999.)

Then, I split the PDF into a hundred or so PNG images.  I have a Scrivener project that’s just a dumping ground for all of my fieldstones, failed stories and books that still have some reusable bits, and whatever else.  So I create a folder for the book, and dump the PNGs onto a file in the binder, then split that up into a bunch of files, and either type in the bits of each page, or ignore them.  (Sometimes a page will just be a partial grocery or todo list, or something I’ve already used, so not everything is gold.)

The process of turning these fieldstones into working stories and books – that’s another project, and a workflow I haven’t mastered yet.  But a lot of The Earworm Inception  came from fieldstones that were grouped and fleshed out, and this next book is using a lot of stuff collected like this.  Some of them will be duds; some just become a single line in someone’s dialogue, or a little aside.  And some will be the nucleus of an entire work.

So I’m having fun, transcribing this stuff, finding little gems.  And I’ve got the next Moleskine up and running, ready to capture whatever happens in the back of my head during my TPS report filing during the day.

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Twenty years of e-publishing

I have been e-publishing for just a few days shy of twenty years.  Not twenty months.  Twenty years.

Back in 1989, my friend Ray started a zine.  We listened to a lot of obscure metal, thrash and death metal, and you could barely find Metallica tapes in northern Indiana back then, let alone underground music.  Ray scoured the earth for this stuff, and started writing letters to weirdos in Sweden and Germany and Japan, trying to trade tapes or score free shit, and he eventually started writing reviews and printing a little homemade magazine that he gave away at record stores and sent to record labels to get free stuff.  He eventually got me to start writing for him, too.

(Various things we did not know at the time: these “major labels” like Earache and Nuclear Blast America and Roadrunner were run out of tiny closets of offices; the people in “signed” bands like Napalm Death probably made less money than I did washing dishes in college; there was a whole universe of zines outside of the arena of death metal that was about to explode; there was a whole world outside of Indiana that was infinitely more interesting, too.)

Ray handled all of the business issues with the zine, which was great because his mom ran a business that did some mail-order stuff, and things like postage rates and bulk-ordered envelopes and offset printing quirks were totally within his wheelhouse.  And so was finding all of this unknown metal music and talking to record labels and getting people to buy ads.  I never could have started a zine like this, because I wasn’t plugged into any of this, and this was long before the days of google, where you could just put “where can I find a printer that’s not totally into jesus” or “what the fuck is media mail” in a search engine and get your results.

I have no idea what it would take to publish a real magazine, but even publishing a zine was an arduous process.  Once you actually got all of the reviews and interviews done, you had to put them in a word processing program.  I knew a little about this, but Ray was the one that actually owned a computer, and he used some weird program called GeoWorks to get all the fonts done correctly.  When you had the actual pages done, you had to go to a printer and get a thousand or two of them printed at once, which cost hundreds of dollars.  (You could photocopy, but then each issue would cost two or three times as much, and look like garbage.) Then you had to sell those, and pay postage to get them all out to people.  All told, it didn’t seem like you could really do a zine for under a couple of thousand dollars, although once you made the nut on the printing, you could use the proceeds from orders to cover the postage.  But issues that went to trades or to record labels or otherwise as promotional fodder would come out of your own pocket.  You’d never print a thousand copies and sell exactly a thousand copies.

I went back to college in Bloomington in 1991, and this major revolution in publishing was about to happen, and I didn’t realize it.  First, I spent all day fucking around on usenet news, and found some heavy metal newsgroups where I actually found other people who listened to bands like Carcass and Unleashed.  Sure, this was interspersed with a whole bunch of people who wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Guns N’ Roses or that new Metallica album Smell the Glove, but making fun of them was almost as fun as finding out about that new Entombed album before it came out.  This was as cool as writing to some freak in Denmark who knew all about the cool bands, except it didn’t cost a bunch of money in postage, and it was instantaneous.

This got me thinking: what if you did a zine where the whole thing was just a text file that you posted on usenet or emailed to people?  You could put in the latest news, maybe interview some people, review stuff, have addresses or ads for bands trying to sell tapes, and tell people to email in their news or band info.  There was no way to sell issues like this, and you couldn’t include any artwork or band logos or photos.  You also needed a computer to read it, along with a way to get email, and this was before AOL was everywhere, when a new PC cost four or five grand and a 2400-baud modem would run you a hundred more bucks. But it would be free to “publish”, and people would be able to write back right away if they liked it.

Ray came down to Bloomington in February, to sleep on the floor of my tiny apartment and hang out for a long weekend.  The band Prong was in town, and while they were not super high on our list of most extreme bands ever, but we got maybe one cool show a year in town, and tried not to squander it.  It was right after Valentine’s day, and I had been whatevering with this girl for a week or two and went straight from third base to the friend zone, so I was insanely depressed and in need of loud music and fun.  Me and Ray stayed up late every night, and talked about this zine thing, and whether it would work or not.  Late one night in one of the computer clusters, we typed something up, and I posted it online.

That was February 18, 1992.  Here is the original post.  It is somewhat horrible, far more than cringe-worthy, filled with typos and stupidity and corny fake satanism.  But it’s been there for almost twenty years.

This was insanely confusing to people at record labels.  My main goal was to get them to send me free stuff, and it was like explaining the Kindle to a geriatric.  Nobody had email then, and I tried printing out some copies and mailing them in, but that confused them even more, and defeated the purpose.  I thought about eventually doing both the electronic version and a print version, something whipped up in WordPerfect with some nice fonts and a few pictures and whatnot, and by the 4th issue did that, but I also wanted something out of a god damned Bruce Sterling cyberpunk story, a computerized mind-meld of text and music and artwork and interactivity.

There was a lot of disparate pieces of technology that weren’t linked together that offered pieces of what I envisioned. There was this thing just starting to show up called Gopher, a hypertext system that let schools and libraries publish linked documents on the internet.  It didn’t really have graphics, and only big institutions had servers running, without an easy or obvious way to publish your own info, unless you ran a university science lab somewhere, or worked at NASA.  We swapped a lot of text on the web in usenet and email, but just very unstructured stuff, with no real centralized organization.  Those of us in the know used FTP servers to look at pictures, mostly porno stills that would take hours to download and then offered blocky pixelated images.  And you could digitize music to .au files, which were gigantic, but could sound great.

Later that year, some people at CERN came out with a great improvement on gopher, that let you post pictures and sounds and let almost anyone make their own pages.  I quickly created a thing called a hyplan that played a sound clip from a Cannibal Corpse song, but didn’t envision that this would take off to the point where anyone in the world would use it to read zines online.  But of course, that’s basically what happened.

My little zine only lasted five issues.  Ray’s zine, Metal Curse, is still around today.  I didn’t make any money, although I got some free tapes and met some cool people and interviewed a couple of  decent bands.  More importantly, this put this idea in my head to write creatively, which eventually led to stories, and then to books.  And it instilled some DIY ethic in me, which made me start another zine, and then decide to publish my own book in 2000.

I have not made millions self-publishing.  (Someone with a name similar to mine has.  That’s not me.)  I think that aforementioned dishwashing gig brought in more money than all of my books combined.  The internet thing did land me a career doing technical writing, though.  I think if I added up all of my paychecks from when I started doing that in 1995 to today, it’s in the seven figures, and it gave me free health insurance and paid vacations, but also involved a lot of dumb meetings and things that make TPS reports look like a god damned Tolstoy masterpiece. But self-publishing gave me the ability to do what I wanedt, to not have to worry about changing me by changing my writing because Rumored to Exist doesn’t contain enough vampires or teenaged wizards to sell enough copies to keep a roof over my head.  It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been fun.

So here I am, 20 years down, 40,000 words into the next big book, and wondering what the next 20 will bring.

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More Scrivener Tips

I switched to using Scrivener as my full-time writing tool last year, and still love it.  I always had a lot of trouble coming up with a good way to seamlessly manage a bunch of little chunks of writing, and now I have a perfect way to do that.  And it’s not trapped in a weird proprietary format; I can easily export it into different forms. Since last April, I’ve used it to put out two books (Fistful of Pizza and The Earworm Inception) and re-release Rumored to Exist as a Kindle book. I’ve also been using it for other ongoing projects, and have been pulling in all of my old books and writing, with eventual hope of either rereleasing them or cannibalizing them for parts.

One thing about Scrivener is that a program this feature-rich is going to either have a huge learning curve, or a lot of features you’ll  never figure out, or both.  And while Scrivener comes with a huge 446-page manual, I’m often googling away to find the solution to some issue.

So here are a few things that I’ve found that were not amazingly clear in the docs.  Part of my reason for posting these is to help out other Scriveners, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I just posted this crap here so I’ll remember it six months from now after I’ve forgotten it, because apparently now that I’m on the north side of the 40 year mark (and I’ve spent a lifetime drinking out of aluminum cans), that happens.

OK, here goes:

  1. Every word processor has its own little shorthand to enter stuff like returns and tabs and other invisible characters into the find and replace dialog boxes.  And Scrivener doesn’t use the typical ^t or \t.  Instead, when you’re doing a find or replace, hold down the Option key and type your special character.  (Your Option key is also known as the Alt, depending on your hardware and key setup.  No idea what it should be on a PC.)  The characters are not shown in the dialog box, but you’ll know you entered them because the little X to clear a field will be visible, showing you’ve got some text in the blank.
  2. If you’ve imported or pasted a bunch of text that was originally a text file, it may have a hard return at the end of every line, like around the 70 to 80 character mark. The way to drive yourself insane fixing that is to move to the end of each line, hit the delete key, enter a space if needed, move down a line, repeat 9374 times.  Don’t do that.  Open a find/replace, and put an Option-Enter in the find box, and a space in the replace box.  You might first have to search for each double enter and replace them with qqqqqqqq, then replace the single enters with spaces and the qqqqqqqqs with enters.  Same for enters followed by tabs.
  3. You can drag and drop text files into the Scrivener binder (that collection of file pieces on the left side.)  But you can’t drag and drop HTML into your Manuscript.  Why?  I don’t know; the docs say you can.  What you can do is drag and drop into any folder other than the Manuscript.  For example, you can drag and drop a web page into the Research folder.  (This is actually a good way to keep a bunch of research material handy.  If you’re offline and you need to get at that wikipedia page about some historical figure or space program or whatever, you can keep it handy within your project.)
  4. If you do the above, you’re left with an uneditable page that can’t be put in your manuscript.  To edit it and move it to the manuscript, do a Documents > Convert > Web Page to Text.  It can’t be undone, and you’ll lose some formatting, but it will become a fully editable text document.
  5. Composition mode.  You know that wave of full-screen, no-distraction writing programs?  No need to buy anything else; just do a Command-Shift-F.  I bump up the width and font, and have a nice picture of Venice Beach in the background, but do whatever brings you to your happy place where you can write.
  6. Typewriter Scrolling lets you change scrolling so your current line is in the middle of the screen, which works great in Composition mode.  Unfortunately, if you set this by using the menu option of Format > Options > Typewriter Scrolling and you’re not in Composition mode, it doesn’t work.  And if you’re in Composition mode… you can’t see the menus.  Solution?  Do a Command-Shift-T when you’re in Composition mode, and it’ll toggle this on.
  7. Labels are neat, but I find the default settings useless.  (They’re stuff like “chapter” and “scene”, but those are things I group with folders and documents, so who cares.)  Status is also neat, but there’s not an easy way to see status in the project binder.  So I edit the labels and change them to stuff like “Needs work”, “eh”, “golden”, “garbage”, and so on.  Then I go to View > Use Label Color In and pick Binder.  Then all of these status colors are shown in the binder, and I can easily find what needs work.
  8. This isn’t a Scrivener tip, but it is an iPad tip that helps when you’re releasing on Kindle.  If you need to see what your mobi file looks like in the iPad Kindle app, go to iTunes, click on your iPad, go to Apps, and scroll down to the File Sharing heading.  Click on the Kindle app, and click Add, and you can copy your mobi file to the Kindle app and proof away on the device without sending anything to the KDP store.
  9. If you don’t have it, get Growl and configure it to your liking.  It’s a universal notification system that a lot of different apps can use to send status updates in little popup alerts on your screen, sort of like how Outlook tells you about new mail messages.  You can turn on Growl support in Scrivener and it will open a popup when you’re saving or when you hit your target count.  Also, Growl may prevent you from going to your mail program every damn time you get a new email, if you get a popup and can see it’s only junk mail and you don’t need to stop writing.  And a Growl hint: if you get a ton of popups, Option-click one and they will all vanish.
  10. I use a Scrivener project called “plotomatic” as a catch-all for all of my notes, unexplored ideas, and leftovers.  It’s much easier than having a scattering of notes in ten different places, and it’s easily searchable.  Think about an easy way to do something similar, to limit the amount of searching you have to do for old stuff.

Hope this helps. Happy Scrivening, and please get in touch with any of your favorite tips!

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Longest Novel Ever

I’ve been vaguely thinking about scraping some of the old essays I’ve posted here and turning them into a book, so I imported all of my old entries on rumored from 1997 to present into Scrivener just to see what it looked like.  It turns out I’ve written about 650,000 words here, which means if I trim out the 90% I don’t like anymore, you still get a decent-sized manuscript.

A book of this size is difficult to manage. It’s big enough that Scrivener stutters a bit when you try some intensive operations, like if you select all of the text and reformat it in one pass.  (And this is on a relatively fast machine with 8 gigs of RAM).  I also got enough shit when I released my first book, Summer Rain, which was about 220,000 words.  That translated into about 650 pages, which I think is perfectly readable, but that was ten years ago, and now people tune out in the middle of a 140-character twitter update.  But printing a 650,000-word book presents challenges other than attention span.  CreateSpace can’t even handle a single volume that big; unless I made some creative font and margin choices, that would most likely take three books.

I am not sure if I’ll actually pursue this, because I really need to be writing new stuff, and even if I did, it would be some kind of best-of with a couple hundred pages, max.  But I was googling around and looking for the relative sizes of various books (Infinite Jest, War and Peace, etc.) and I found a guy who wrote a seventeen million word book.

Check it: http://marienbadmylove.com – it’s by a guy named Mark Leach.  It sounds interesting, a B-movie romp through time travel and UFOs and all sorts of things, but it also looks like it’s more performance art than readable fiction.  I mean, even if it was the best damn stuff in the world, it would require a year’s sabbatical from life and a forklift to handle all of the possible volumes.  But it appears he’s done a lot of Burroughsian experimental stuff, like using the cut-up method, to generate that much text, so this isn’t like sitting down to a Dan Brown novel.

This makes me think I should take all of those out-at-third-act novels I never finished, dump it into a big cut-up tool, and mix it down into some gigantic sick and twisted mess of a book.  It’s a thought.

 

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The Allure of Used Media

I was just reading today about some rumors surrounding the system that’s being called, for lack of a better name, the XBox 720.  It’s supposed to be coming out in late 2013 or 2014, which is bad for a couple of reasons.  One, if they screw the pooch and don’t get it to hit that magical pre-holiday season shopping surge, they’re dead.  Second, the entire console gaming industry could be as lively in 2014 as the current 8-track tape industry is today.  But that’s not what shocked me about the news; neither was the fact that they’re moving to BluRay discs for their format.  What threw me is the announcement that the new system won’t let you play used games.

This hasn’t been entirely clarified, but I’m guessing that games will force you to do some sort of online activation scheme, or otherwise be bound to your Microsoft ID.  If you can’t beam home and lock that copy to your ID, you can’t play.  This would probably be swaddled in some distraction, like saying “I’m going to go online now and download all of your COOL NEW GIANT BONUS GUNS!!” and then lock down the game while pulling down updates.  The DIVX DVD player from a decade ago had a similar system, and failed miserably.  It used a phone line to connect back to the mothership, like an old-school cable box did for PPV purchases, but now that every home (in theory) has wifi and ethernet and broadband, that part of the equation is less of a big deal.

I was just reading a J.G. Ballard interview where he talked about the influence of used book stores when he was younger, how he’d dig around these places after some old geezer kicked the bucket and his widow hauled off a century’s worth of book hoarding for six pence a title, and find among the pulp paperbacks the occasional gem.  I used to do the same thing, partly because the prices were always good, but partly because the only other book stores around were Walden’s-type places that didn’t stock anything interesting, or maybe the occasional Border’s that would have the last one or two of an author’s works, at full cover price.  I spent so much time poring over titles in basement stores, taking home books that looked cool, and occasionally stumbling onto something life-changing.

I did the same thing with CDs and music, too.  I mean, I worked both sides of the deal, dragging a backpack of the lowest-rated titles from my collection every time I was broke and had to pay a massive phone bill or buy enough groceries to coast into next payday.  But I’d often spent hours going from A to Z in those used CD places, trying to find something obscure, or just looking for bands I’d never heard, so I could try them out for half the price of a retail CD.  I buy 100% of my music digitally now, and that experience is completely gone now.  I can listen to 30-second clips of an artist’s songs in the iTunes store, and that’s helpful, but the entire tactile situation of running my fingers over five thousand plastic spines on jewel cases to find some obscure d-list band on Earache is gone.

I don’t know how big the used game market is these days, although at the height of my PlayStation 2 days, I’d frequently turn in the duds in my collection for store credit.  I was always the kind of gamer that would be stuck on a single title for weeks and months on end, instead of having to get the latest games as they came out and then immediately solve them.  I am guessing if you’re that kind of gamer, you probably use one of those Netflix-like game rental services, although this begs the question if they will also be screwed by a one-player-per-title system.

The main thing killing the console game system is another reason why the game-ownership system makes less sense.  When you play something like Mafia Wars, you don’t buy the game; the client is your browser, and you “own” your online account.  You don’t spend money buying a physical disk; you buy game currency or points or guns or upgrades or whatever else.  I think more games will follow this WoW model where the client is either free or cheap, and you either pay for upgrades or pay per month or hour or whatever.

I’m also wondering if this will cause a “dark ages” in collecting of systems in the future.  I can hop on eBay and hoard away any number of Atari 2600 titles.  But will there be a point in ten or twenty years when the then-middle-aged person goes to buy all of the XBox720/PS4 games they didn’t have as a kid and be as screwed as that guy who built a replica Cray supercomputer and can’t boot it because nobody has an OS for it?

 

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41

I turn 41 today.

Five years ago, I ate dinner at Per Se in New York.  I had a twelve-course meal that cost something like $750.  Then I went home and watched the movie Idiocracy.  Then my iTunes library crashed, and I spent the next day restoring it, so a huge chunk of my songs say they were imported on 1/21/07.

Ten years ago, I went to Las Vegas with Bill (who shares my birthday), Lon, and Todd, starting a long tradition of going to Sin City for our birthdays. Todd took pictures of me sodomizing pretty much every statue on the strip.  While we were in town, I bought 40 acres of land in the mountains of Colorado, starting that whole obsession.  I also shot a full-auto M-16, bought this ridiculous Coke jacket, and made far too many references to Fear and Loathing over the weekend.

Fifteen years ago, my uncle died from brain cancer on my birthday.  I lived in Seattle then. I went out the weekend before, with a bunch of people from Spry (Bill, Todd, others) and I bought a new bed, but I spent the actual day of my birthday at work.  A somewhat boring and introspective day, but those are good too.

Twenty years ago, I turned 21 and could legally drink.  Me and Bill went to Kilroy’s, the dumb jock bar in Bloomington, to get our free drink.  I still have the glass.  Then I went to a liquor store to buy something with more octane than the fruity drink with ten drops of rum in it, and the fuckers didn’t even card me, which pissed me off.

Twenty five years ago, I turned 16 and hit the age when I could get my driver’s license.  I didn’t get it for a few months, but that was the first big step in escaping orbit.  I think my obsession at that time was Iron Maiden.

Thirty years ago, I think I had a Superman cake.

Forty years ago, I was in Edwardsburg, Michigan and I still have the picture of me putting my hands in the chocolate cake that pretty much everyone has from their first birthday.

It’s now 8:43, and at 8:53, I officially turn 41. I’m still in bed, plinking at the laptop, enjoying a day off.  Later, I will go to Denny’s.  Not really thinking about my own mortality or where the time went or any of that stuff.  Just thinking about pancakes.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for everything in the last year.  I hope the next one is even better.

 

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The Cult of Keyboards

As I approach the end of my 40th year, my body is falling apart.  Okay, that may be an over-exaggeration, but every morning, it feels like another piece has been overextended or abused or mutilated, from the various discs in my back to the muscles and joints in my shoulders or arms or knees or toes or whatever.  Ever since I’ve started working from home, poor ergonomics has caused a rash of various repetitive stress injuries.  Or maybe all of the steps I’ve tried to prevent said injuries have caused it.  I don’t know.

I do know that my keyboards have been the main focus of this hell.  I mean, I also bought extensions to raise my desk, a different mount to raise my monitor, and one of those freaky bicycle seat-looking office chairs to prevent me from slouching, and that all helps.  But I think in the last decade, I’ve probably put down about a million words between work and fiction, and all of those go through my ten digits via some kind of USB-connected appliance that’s based on a design originally thrown down a hundred and a half years ago by opium-deranged business machine sadomasochists trying to find a way to keep busy women in between bouts of making sandwiches.  Never mind the fact that we don’t yet have machines that read our minds or let us simply talk to our computers like we’re Scotty whipping up a batch of god damned transparent aluminum. The fact that we still use essentially the same QWERTY design as a century ago, the one that was specifically invented to slow down typists, is a travesty to all things mechanical.

When I got to Seattle in the mid-90s, ergo-mania was happening, and I knew more people who had RSI or carpal tunnel than I knew in Indiana who thought the earth was created 3000 years ago, and that’s a lot.  Ergo was huge, and there were all of these bizarre startups running out of garages churning out short runs of chording keyboards and strange split devices and custom DVORAK layouts, not to mention all of the alternate mouse designs, like track balls and track pads and track pens and track cocks and whatever else.  And this was before the advent of USB, when this stuff became really easy to make, and before Microsoft upped the ante on RSI by inventing prolific right-click menus and then the scroll wheel, two things that have caused more arthritis of the right hand than all of the collected works of Megan Fox.

Microsoft both created and destroyed the ergo market by coming out with their own mass-produced split keyboard.  I will give credit where credit is due and say this is one product that Microsoft got mostly right.  I’ve gone through a succession of these split keyboards, most recently using the Ergo 4000, which has a large number of “media” buttons, which are nice for doing things like pausing iTunes or skipping tracks or zooming the browser window.  However, aside from the fact that I go though about one of these a year (mostly because of a combination of eating at my computer and the fact that the letters wear off almost instantly) there’s always been something slightly wrong with these peripherals.

Before the Microsoft models, I went through a series of IBM Model M keyboard clones; in fact, my first keyboard I bought in 1991 was an honest-to-god 83-key IBM keyboard from a 5-slot 5150 PC.  In 2012, there are a lot of issues with these keyboards, aside from just the total lack of ergonomic comfort; you’re not going to find a Windows key or an Apple key, and they use a cable that predates USB by at least two or three iterations.  Most of the vintage ones have also gone from the 90s computer beige to the yellow-brown color of linen in a ten-pack-a-day smoker’s house.

But the switches in these keyboards were magic.  New keyboards don’t use individual switches; they use dome switches, where the keys push this rubbery sheet that contains little bits that complete the electrical connection. The result is a quiet and cheap keyboard that feels like typing while your fingers are suspended in a bowl of mush, and at some point, the little domes will sporadically fail, and every 10,000th character you type will randomly miss, eventually causing insanity and the cost of both replacing the keyboard and the window you throw it through in a maddened rage.  The old keyboards used actual mechanical switches, each one happily clicking with a sharp tactile feel as you snapped away at the keys.  Even if you couldn’t type fast, it felt like you were typing fast.

This introduces this never-solvable paradox that seems to creep up in every damn aspect of my life.  I want an ergonomic split keyboard, that is modern and uses USB and has all of the new keys people use like Win and Alt, and has mechanical key switches.  The Microsoft ergo uses rubber dome switches, and at some point, those fail and cause madness.  It also means that even with a brand new keyboard, it feels like I’m typing underwater.  There’s a whole cult of mechanical switch keyboards, mostly from gamers who need lightning-fast key response.  Those are all standard layout, mostly because gamers only use the WASD keys.  There’s also the issue that these keyboards are all marketed to 14-year-old Asian boys, and have names like the “Viper Frag Kill 9000” and you will pay $200 for backlighting and extra buttons specifically used for Skyrim or whatever.  And outside of Microsoft, the ergo keyboard market has largely been killed.  Add to this the frustration that every single computer sold comes with a keyboard, and because the cheapest way of making them is good enough for a person who types at most 140 characters in a row, the $19 OEM POS is fine for almost everyone.

My problem with this – or with building a kitchen island, or finding the right desk, or getting a set of sliding glass doors done, or whatever the hell else, is I fall down these deep internet k-holes of endless searching and frustration.  There are several internet discussion boards full of game playing fiends touting their favorite boards.  But of course, if you posted asking for a good ergo keyboard, you’d get a thousand responses saying RSI is a myth, kind of like if you went into a random bar in Arkansas and asked the locals about global warming or evolution.  And your first 900 results in a google search are links to the Microsoft Ergo 4000.

This fall, I finally gave up and bought a Kinesis Advantage.  They are not cheap; I spent just shy of $300 for mine.  But they use actual Cherry mechanical switches, and feature a unique split system, where the bulk of the keys are in two “bowls”, and all of the modifier keys (ctrl/alt/win/apple) plus keys like the backspace, delete, enter, and space, all sit under your thumbs.  This means you can do 99% of your typing without stretching your hands out of the home position, and the keys happily clack away to confirm your speedy typing.  The Kinesis also has a complex and powerful system of keyboard remapping and macro programming in its firmware, which I will probably never use.   The one real bummer, aside from price, is that the function keys are these little rubber chicklets that will inevitably get jammed or stop working.  There’s also the issue that I am not historically a touch typist, and I had to spend a month using a touch typing tutor program (the wonderful and open-source Tipp1o) to get to the point where those ring and pinky fingers were hitting the As and Ses and Ls and ;s with regularity.

The k-hole has been reopened lately, though.  I’ve been wondering if there’s a good way to replace those damn chicklet keys.  Maybe I should get a keypad or jog-shuttle control to remap these keys.  Maybe I should get out the dremel and buy a dozen and a half loose Cherry keys and replace the switches.  Maybe I should remap the largely useless Home key so Home-1=F1;Home-2=F2, and so on.  Maybe I should stop all of this and actually write books.  Sure, right after I try to find a Kinesis macro programming FAQ online, and then hem and haw about buying a Griffin PowerMate.

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general news

My new book, The Earworm Inception, also in paperback

You know that new book I posted about the other day?  Well, the print version is now available, too.  So if you’re not cool with all this kindle stuff and still like to read your books dead tree style, check it out over at amazon.

The print version is 134 pages, and costs $8.99.  It’s also eligible for Amazon’s current “4 for 3” deal, so if you go buy three eligible books, you can get this for free.

This book’s a collection of 20 short stories or flash fiction pieces, and is designed to be cheap and a good short read.  This book is perfect for those with ADD or ADHD.  In fact, it’s so good, you could probably just mail me all of your unused Adderall and I’ll just send you a free copy of the book.

And if you are down with the kindle version, it’s only 99 cents.  If you’re also an Amazon Prime member (and in the US, and have a physical Kindle, not just the app on your phone) you can read the book for free.

As always, every time you mention the book on facebook or twitter, write a review, or hit that like button on Amazon, an angel gets its wings.  (Unless you are a Satanist; then it goes to hell or something.)

The links:

Categories
general

List of Books I Have Not Completed

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a new book out. It’s called The Earworm Inception, and it’s only 99 cents on the Kindle.  So please go check that out.

This book is the latest in a series — can I call it a series if there’s only two and I vaguely plan to do it again?  The idea is that I write a lot of short stuff, flash fiction and one-off blog posts and whatnot, and within a calendar year, that grows to be about book-sized, so I put it in a book and release it.  It’s sort of the same concept as a comedian developing a set, and then when they get a strong hour, they shoot a special.  And, if you’re Louie C.K., you shoot the special, declare the hour officially dead, and move on to the next one, tabula rasa-style.  I love that concept. The tough part is that I can’t go to a shitty comedy club and try out my material bit-by-bit in front of a Tuesday crowd.  I have to develop it with no input, then put it out there and hope you guys read it and give me back comments.

And here’s the real problem: I have all of these half-dead projects.  I started writing in 1993, and I now have seven books: two “real” novels, two of these roll-up collections, and three that are more or less non-fiction.  I feel like if I’ve been writing more or less every year (with the whole day job thing) I should have more than that.  And I do, but it’s all in incomplete projects.

I did a survey of all of this yesterday.  It’s depressing that I have 320,000 words invested in projects that will most likely never see the light of day.  But it’s a learning experience, and when I crack open old stuff, it makes me see I’m learning something.  And it’s good to know my time went somewhere.

Anyway, for your amusement, here’s the list.  Maybe if I officially say all of these are dead, I can get the monkey off my back and work on the next thing.

The Device

  • Started in 1998
  • Tried restarting in 2001, 2002
  • 30,000 words

This was an offshoot of Rumored to Exist, an attempt to add a plot to the nonlinear book that got too overbearing, and got split off into its own book. The basic “plot” had to do with someone coming back from the future and interacting with themselves in the past.  This was one of my first attempts to write a strictly plotted book, and it failed miserably, but I came back and revisited it at least a couple of times. There might be a few paragraphs of this that are usable elsewhere, but there really isn’t even a structure to build on to revive the book in any way.

The Device, mk2 (aka Zombie Fever)

  • Started around 2004
  • Last worked on in 2008
  • 72,930 words

A guy who is retired from the army is called back by the president to take out a drug cartel leader who only eats at Carl’s Jr, and ends up uncovering a conspiracy involving Nazi UFOs from the South Pole.  It has nothing to do with zombies, but that name got stuck on the project as a working title. The first third of the draft was pretty complete; the second part wavered, and the last third was barely plotted.  Big elements of this story ended up being reused in the short story “My Friend, The Jihadist”, which is included in Fistful of Pizza. There are other pieces that beg to be reused elsewhere, like a whole bit on Anthony Bourdain’s khmer rouge-themed restaurant on the Vegas strip, and a president who spends all of his time playing freecell while his secretary of defense wants to nuke Canada.

Six Year Plan

  • Started, sort of, in 1994
  • Still keep puttering with it
  • 88,934 words

This is a short story collection of things that took place during my college years in Bloomington.  One of the stories was the original short story “Summer Rain”, which was later developed into my first book.  Maybe half of these stories appeared in Air in the Paragraph Line over the years.  I’ve never been happy with the quality of the stories, and this type of writing isn’t really “me” anymore, so it’s hard to justify the six months it would take to beat this into a great book.

Voodoo Sex Fire

  • Nano 10 book
  • 51,636 words

This book is about a group of hackers that are trying to destroy this Glenn Beck-like character because the main character’s friend has a sex machine business that got shut down by the guy’s insane fans.  There are bits of genius that get incredibly bogged down in the attempt to follow the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey plot structure too much.  My favorite part is when the characters play a video game called Fuck Shit Up, which is loosely based on the first RoboCop movie, except you’re one of the bad guys looting and destroying Detroit.

Arylcyclohexylamine Is Not a Flower

  • Nanowrimo 11 book
  • Worked on for a few days of November, 2011
  • 20,000 words

This is an absurdist zombie book.  It’s a very stereotypical zombie story where a group of teens take a roadtrip across a post-apocalyptic America to go to a secret government lab outside of Vegas to help a scientist develop the cure.  There are a lot of bizarre elements, like that their shop teacher is Charles Manson and all of his dialogue is quotes from Geraldo interviews, and the zombie virus was spread by a hamburger chain’s genetically-modified meat.  Part of me wants to eventually finish this.

Heavy Metal Hell

  • Started in about 2006
  • A completely new draft and new outline was my Nano 09 book
  • 64,692 words

This is a book similar to Summer Rain, but it takes place immediately before college.  Book 1 is a semester of my junior year; book 2 is senior year; book 3 is the summer between HS and college.  I wanted to capture what it was like to be a heavy metal fan in a nowhere town in Indiana in the 80s, and that desire to get the hell out.  This book is very plotless and difficult for me to even look at.

“Book 3”

Just a brief mention that I have about 30,000 words in a book that’s mostly a collection of surreal scenes that don’t entirely flow together. I have vague hopes that at some point, I will find a structure to stitch all of this together into a Rumored-type book. Time will tell.

Categories
general

My new book, The Earworm Inception, is now available

Abraham Lincoln and Helen Keller opened a Subway sandwich shop on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker to finance their speed metal band, in which I was auditioning as their road ileostomy technician, so I spent a lot of free time in that neighborhood. A lot of touring bands, at least the serious ones, switched over to diverting their intestinal waste into surgical-grade pouches instead of dropping a deuce in a tour bus, so my part-time hobby was sure to pay off, eventually.

I’m proud to announce that my latest book, The Earworm Inception, is now available on the Amazon Kindle for just 99 cents. Also, if you are an Amazon Prime member in the US with a Kindle, you can check out this book for free.

This book is a collection of 20 flash fiction pieces and short stories. It’s not a novel, but they are all tangentially related.  Like Fistful of Pizza, it’s a mix of previously published work and new stuff, and it’s a cheap way to get a good look at my writing style.  Also, it’s funny as hell. The book description:

A food truck craze involving human cannibalism. A Texas Governor who obsessively listens to Rebecca Black right before every state execution. A chainsaw factory that plays Ozzy Osbourne for its welding robots. An ex-girlfriend drunk-dialing from Kandahar, where she’s starting a Shakey’s Pizza restaurant chain. And an endless search to find the right mix of prescription medication to stop the memories of a bizarre past.

These mad stories make up the latest by Jon Konrath, a collection of 20 flash fiction narratives that cross between metafiction and experimental prose, telling grim and absurd fast-paced tales about Konrath’s life in a twisted fashion.

There’s also a print version on the way; I’m waiting to approve proofs, but it will be available for $8.99.

Insert desperate plea for you to check out the book, like the page, share on your faceplace thingee, and tell all your friends.  Also, if you review books, get in touch and I’ll send you a copy. Thank you!

The linkage: