OK, I’m back.

Went to bed at 8

, Oakland time, and woke back up at 2, unable to sleep, so here I am, digging through the piles of trash from my luggage, trying to return the gadgets to their daily configuration so I can get back to The World by Monday.

The flight back yesterday was decent but long.  We boarded at about 1

Frankfurt time, and I had a “business economy” seat, which is slightly bigger than a coach seat, but still in a 3-wide row, with no special plugs or media viewers or amenities, beyond the meal that almost looked like chicken, and a dollar’s worth of Cokes.

Frankfurt was good.  It’s a weird city, trying to hold onto the past, while also trying to radically build itself into a Zurich-esque financial center, which in some senses it is.  I was struggling to name a sister city in the US with the same kind of feel and dilemma, and the best example I could think of is Charlotte, North Carolina, which is the second-largest banking center in the US, with rows of shiny chrome buildings downtown, and then sixteen blocks later is failed tobacco farms and abject poverty.  I don’t know what it’s like outside of Frankfurt, but I do know they have struggled over the years with their identity and people have pushed back against the image of “Mainhatten,” but the skyscrapers make it an interesting contrast to a lot of other European cities.

I’m not really in the mood for travel writing at 4

AM, so I’ll plow through a quick list of highlights:

• Our hotel was decent but horrible.  I think it was designed by the people who engineer prisons to drive people insane.  Features included a single shower with all glass sides in the middle of the room, with water controls designed by Erno Rubik; a bowl sing that rang like a Tibetan gong when you looked at it wrong; a bathroom light you could only turn on from the outside, which results in blinding your partner during every nocturnal visit; an extensive “pillow menu” but the room only included a single pillow per person that wasn’t much more than a thick towel; etc etc etc.  It wasn’t a dump, but it tried too much to be quirky and modern, and it needed someone to QA it.
• The German Museum of Architecture was my favorite, and the exhibit on postmodern architecture and Heinrich Klotz helped give me a lot of context on the city.
• The Museum of Modern Art had an interesting exhibition on African artists which was themed on Dante’s Inferno, with three floors for heaven, purgatory, and hell. Unfortunately, it didn’t have any of the permanent collection out, and is supposed to have a second facility opening with that stuff out, but not until the fall.
• The Museum for Communication is sort of a postal museum, and is a good place to see old telegraphs, radios, TVs, and mail equipment. I was hoping for more early computer stuff, like a West German VAX or something; I think my obsolete computer collection has more stuff in it.  Also there was a thing about the Bildschirmtext system, which was an early BBS-like system run by the post office on specialized hardware.  They had a couple of terminals, but no English text explaining it.  (google it for a deep k-hole, though.)
• The Schirn had an art exhibit based on Infinite Jest.  It was… interesting.  It was more or less curated around ideas about the book, and was very meta and didn’t really have to do with the book, but did.  Or didn’t.  I need to learn more about art.

I ate a lot of asparagus for some reason.  Lots of sausage, too.  I am glad to be back on a regular diet.  It will be nice to get back to a regular sleep schedule, too.

I have a thousand pictures to sort through.  I’ll get to it.  First, back to writing.

Good to be back here.  I have walked a lot and ate too much and just bought a hundred pounds of art books.

OK, a bulleted list summary:

• The flight out was brutal. Couldn’t sleep on the plane, other than little half-hour naps here and there. Left SFO at about 8
  PM after a mechanical problem, got to Frankfurt at 4
  PM the next day (but a nine-hour jump in there) and then had to wait for a 9
  .
• I wandered the concourse, found a place to shower for 6 €. You got a little booth with a lock, a sink and counter in one half to put your stuff, and then a shower.  It’s Germany, so it’s all sterile and looks like an Ikea showroom.  I brought a change of clothes in my carry-on, and it was the best shower ever.
• Screwed up meals royally - ate dinner at 4
  the night before, skipped the meal on the plane, and then the “breakfast” we got was a dinner roll and a packet of jelly. Got off the plane and promptly ate an entire McDonald’s.
• Handed over $200 at the airport exchange and got a handful of coins.  The Euro is doing much better than the buck.
• I wandered around the airport and it was absolutely abandoned, then realized I was on the wrong level, and had to clear customs and go down one more level to the actual departures area.  Sat around and spent about a hundred bucks on hot dogs and tiny bottles of Coke.
• Got to Nuremberg, got to the hotel, slept like a baby for eight hours.
• Sarah had to go to her trade show on Saturday - she’s been at it all week.  So I loaded up what I still call the walkman (iPhone now, I guess) and walked about 2.5 miles west to an absolutely incredible little guitar store.  They had a ton of Fender basses.  I played some of the Custom Shop heavy relic Jazz basses and they were absolutely incredible.  Also played a Rickenbacker, which looked cool, but I found I am not a Ric guy.
• Walked around Nuremberg for a long while, taking pics.  There was some kind of vegetarian festival going on, which was interesting.
• Walked to the big train station, ate, dumped more dollars, bought some NyQuil, walked back to the hotel.
• Went out for dinner with Sarah’s work people and spouses and ate a tremendous amount of Nurnburger (sp?) sausages, white asparagus, and hard pretzels.  Ended up getting sick from all of this shit.
• Walked over ten miles for the day, and got a 20,000-step badge on the fitbit, which was a first.
• Today, we woke up and found a triathlon was going on, and all of the streets were blocked off in a giant loop for the racing bikes.  It was too cold to swim though, so they made them run twice.
• We went to a railway museum, not because I am Sheldon Cooper, but because it was attached to this communication museum, and it was a two-for-one.  The railway museum was all in German, so we made up descriptions for all of the exhibits.  (“Very few people knew Harland Sanders was a Colonel in the German Army prior to World War I, but was secretly a Jew and fled the country for Kentucky” etc.)
• The communication museum was also mostly German and confusing, but they had a bunch of old telephones and crypto machines.
• Ate lunch at the German National museum, but did not go in, since I’ve seen a lifetime of Gutenberg bibles and suits of armor.
• Went to the New Museum and there was a Laurie Simmons exhibit there.  Who is… wait for it… Lena Dunham’s mom.
• Bought a ton of books at the book store, including this giant Chuck Close book that was marked down to 7€ and a Damien Hirst book big enough to kill someone.
• Walked not as much today but still a lot.  Everything was closed on Sunday, which was weird.  Even Dunkin Donuts was closed.
• Leave for Frankfurt tomorrow.

So the first draft of the next book is done.  I sent a copy to John to read, and I will now let it ferment a bit before I start the next pass.  It’s in pretty rough shape right now. I think the plot is there, and there’s a lot I like about it, but I feel like the “texture” of it isn’t in yet.  There are probably major continuity problems, all the names have to be changed — it hasn’t even been spell-checked, but it is “feature complete” at this point, and the length is just about there.  I will probably read it while I’m on vacation, or maybe when I get back.  Until then, I will relax, do some free-writing, and think about other projects.

I got a question or two about what program I’m using to write, and I have mentioned Scrivener on here, but haven’t written much about it in a few years, and that was when I was first getting started, before I really knew much about it.  And my workflow for this book was much different than my last few.  So maybe it’s time for me to write another “how I write with Scrivener” post.  I’ll chip away at that.  I’m not sure how many screen shots I can do without major spoilers, but maybe I’ll just blur things.

I’m leaving for Germany tomorrow, and I am woefully unprepared.  I have not started packing, aside from leaving little piles of cords and adapters all over my office floor, and going through my camera bag to pull out all of the junk I left in during my Hawaii trip last fall.  I always want to pack light, like my friend Bill, who goes on 40-day trips to India or whatever with only a single carry-on that’s not much bigger than my laptop bag.  But I also read all of these gear and tool sites and start locking into all of these travel gadgets that I want and don’t need, and then I suddenly need to carry a hundred pounds of voltage adapters and noise-reduction headsets and rechargeable batteries.  There has to be some compromise, but I won’t find it in the next 24 hours.

I started reading this biography of Joe Satriani that just came out. I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday and saw it, and read about half of it last night.  It’s strange, because I have not followed his career much in years; I think I last got his 2008 album, but I haven’t paid much attention.  (I think the stock response to that is something something “maybe he should stop singing on his albums,” although he did that once and it was 25 years and 73 albums ago.)  When he was first breaking out in the late 80s, I was obsessed with his work, and used to read everything he wrote in the old guitar magazines, all of the interviews and music theory lessons and news.  I listened to his first and second album incessantly in high school, too.

The book is a bit of a mix, I guess.  It has very little biographical information, which is a bummer.  He spent his early years hacking it out here in Berkeley, giving lessons in the back of a local guitar shop and playing in little bands. I wish I could find out more about that, like where he lived or where that shop was or where he hung out.  That is a Berkeley I don’t know, and when I am around the UC campus and it reminds me of Bloomington, it makes me wonder what that area was like in the 80s or 60s, if any of the old shops were the same or had the same sort of transitions that the same types of stores had on Kirkwood near the IU campus. There’s not really any of that in this book.

That is something I am very curious about, though, because when I was a kid and it was 1987 and I was reading about him in Guitar for the Practicing Musician, I assumed he was some millionaire living in a mansion in LA like all of the heavy metal videos of the time, sitting by a pool with a thousand guitars around him. In reality, he was probably renting a room in a crappy student apartment building, the kind of lifestyle I had in Bloomington in 1992. The book talks about how for his first record, he paid for all of it on a $5000 credit card he got in the mail, and recorded everything on the graveyard shift or whenever the studio had free hours, and they scrimped and struggled to get everything done.  There’s a story about how one of the songs on the album had fucked up drums on it, and at the last second, while doing another song, they ran out of tape, and didn’t have a hundred dollars to buy another reel, so they recorded over that song, and glued together scraps from the garbage to get the last few feet needed to finish the album. That’s a completely different vision than what I thought when I was a 17-year-old in Indiana worshipping everything he did.

The two things this book does have in abundance are recording and gear information, and to a lesser extent music theory stuff.  Big chunks of the book are like a recording engineer’s log, talking about microphones and outboard effects and stuff, and it’s interesting, although it does get monotonous.  The theory stuff is good when it happens, but it’s a bit sparse.  It does show that he really knows the theory behind what he’s composing, though, like when he talks about the chords or modes he’s using to build up a song, and how they came out of practice marathons or just two chords he wrote down in a notebook a decade before, thinking he eventually wanted to find a way to write something using those.  His perfectionism is inspiring, and I like those stories.  But the book is lacking, so it’s not as cool as it could be.

Anyway. I have so much to do before I leave.  I don’t know what my connectivity situation will be while I’m gone, but I’ll try to update a bit, and there will most likely be a huge picture dump after I get back.  So, Auf wiedersehen and shit.

Busy. Busy. Busy.

I have been trying to finish this next book. I usually write 500, 1000 words a day, and the last few days have been 3000, 4000 word days as I rush to complete this thing before vacation. I had a goal, according to my outline, of 55,000 words, and I hit that yesterday, but the story’s not done, maybe another five or ten thousand left to go. And this is just a first draft, to get the bones down. The writing itself is a mess, and will require a lot more work to even it out. This book is a huge departure for me, the closest to a genre book I’ve ever written, very plotted and end-to-end linear, about as Hollywood as I could possibly get. That leaves many question marks about what to do with it when it’s done, but I’m excited about its potential. I’m also blotto from the tail end of a huge sugar high and have consumed far too much caffeine for the day, so that’s an issue.

I leave for Germany in four days. I am entirely unprepared. I have to pack and figure out what I’m doing, and I feel like I won’t have enough time once I get there. I basically have two days in Nuremberg, then a travel day and three days in Frankfurt, then the travel day back. There’s two full days of flying and airports in there. I have new noise-reducing headphones. I hope they work.

I just read Circuits of the Wind, a three-part novel by old friend Michael Stutz.  (It’s actually now available in an omnibus single-book edition, too.)  I’d read parts of the book years ago, as he was sketching out a mad volume of pages about early net life, but never envisioned how it would all fit together in a massive arc from a 70s childhood before the dawn of video games to the era of the hacker scene and modem BBSes on up to the birth of the internet and the early 90s web explosion. Stutz is a solid writer, a master of the long Kerouacian lyrical style, knitting together observational sketches of deep detail and strong emotion into a longer, flowing river of nostalgia and history.  It was a fun read, but knowing that he probably cut thousands of pages from the final product makes me wish I had a ten-times-longer version to wade through for weeks.

I still don’t know where I’m going with the writing, although I’ve been very productive as of late. I have so many different projects piling up in the background, ideas that are waiting to mature on the vine. But one of the things I keep pushing back is the idea of a giant nostalgic work like Circuits, something that explores the deep emotional k-holes I sometimes dive down when digging through old emails and archives. I did this in Summer Rain to some extent, but I feel like I could do better, do more.  I have a few different half-assed attempts sitting up on blocks, but feel like to do it right, I’d need to start with a real outline, at least a roadmap for where to go and an idea for how the whole narrative would work, so I could dig in and start sketching the thing out.  This is a huge undertaking though, and I’m half afraid if I would try it now, I would just be aping Circuits.  But there was so much resonation in that book, I told Michael that the one major problem I had, which is also the biggest compliment I could give, was the number of times I had to stop and tell myself, “damn, I wish I wrote this book.”

I also have these heavy nostalgia trips about two other eras: my time in Seattle, and the period of New York right after I moved to Astoria. Both of these are periods that always come up in dreams, which is a sign that they’re knocking around my unconsciousness too much. They are also parts of my life where I was incredibly alone, and felt a great need for something to happen.  I wrote a lot during both the 1995-1997 and 1999-2001 periods I’m thinking about, and there were periods of dating and friendships, but there was also some horrible, unchecked depression and complete despair about what direction I was going in life.  That makes it a lot like the 1992 period I wrote about in Summer Rain, and makes me think it’s worth mining for fiction.

Another common theme of all three of those periods were they were specific eras in the development of the internet and the culture surrounding it.  1992 was this precursor, when those of us on college campuses had rich internet interactions with telnet and FTP and usenet and irc and electronic mail, digging into online culture and meeting people at other schools through listservs and chat rooms.  By 1995, when I got to Seattle and started at Spry, the web startup era was in high gear, with URLs appearing on ads and products, web browsers like Netscape popping up, and startup culture in full gear, everyone scrambling in the first big land grab for cyberspace.  In 1995, I thought I could help change the world and help form an online utopia; by 1997 or 1998, I saw the world was nothing more than a Dilbert comic strip, and it was all becoming corporatized and diluted, the usenet and telnet era of the beginning of the 90s gone.  And then in New York, in 1999  onward, I worked at Juno, the next era of democratization of the internet, moving from the eccentric tech nerds with expensive home computers to the time when millions and millions had the internet. Another big boom of startups happened, but much more mature and high-stakes.  And it went from dumb corporate culture to behemoth corporate culture.  And then NASDAQ crashed, big mergers happened, big Enron scandals happened.  Cue 9/11 for the end of that story and the beginning of another.

I don’t know how to link all of this together yet. I have vague ideas.  I don’t know if anyone would read it.  And I’m rounding third base and trying to run out the throw to the plate on the first draft of this other book.  And where’s my passport?  How many pairs of socks do I need to pack?  How warm is it in Germany?  How do I convert Celsius into real degrees? Busy, busy, busy.

I think of stupid software every day that doesn’t exist, and I waste too much time trying to find it. I should just start a blog of all of it, and hope someone steals the ideas and writes them. Or, I should really learn to program, quit my job, get a bunch of funding, and get rich riding these ideas into the ground.  That won’t happen, though.

I’m sure these programs exist in some partial way. Or, more likely, they exist but only work for 14 days and you have to pay for more, or they work, but are run “in the cloud” by a startup that will get bought by someone and then promptly shut down.

Okay, here’s a list, off the top of my head:

• A program that goes through my incoming email, grabs everything that looks like a UPS or USPS or FedEx tracking number, and feeds them into a program like the Delivery Status widget. Maybe there’s a way to script Delivery Status to add entries, and maybe there’s a way to scrape email with an AppleScript for Mail.app.  Those are two big maybes, though. Oh, and a Safari add-on so if it doesn’t come in an email, I can click it from my browser.
• The same as above, but flight info and my calendar. (No, I’m not forwarding all of my mail to TripIt. Locally.)
• An iPhone app that can track everything I do during the day and make a log of it, so that in two hours, if I need to know if I ate lunch or not, I can ask Siri and it will tell me.  (Yes, I forget.)
• (Not an idea, but a discovery - I just found out Siri works as a thesaurus!  Just ask “what’s another word for rumination?” and it will pull up a very kick-ass thesaurus entry from WolframAlpha.)
• A way to take Amazon’s recommendations engine and make it find web pages. For example, if I’ve bought all of these Orwell books, find me some online web sites and communities where people with similar interests are. And don’t just throw “Orwell” into google. Use the power of Amazon’s engine, so it knows that if I read and liked books A and B and C, I’m going to want to read web site D.
• A faster way to take the 20 years of old email mboxes that are completely unorganized and scattered across ten different directories and archives and explode them all into one giant timeline that I can visually sort and explore.
• Something that can take my geo-coded photos in iPhoto or Aperture, search for the lat/long in wikipedia or whatever, and try to determine the names of the nearest locations in some sensible way to add captions.  So when I take a bunch of pictures on my phone on a work trip, I plug it in, let it churn, and then it magically says “632 Broadway, NoHo, New York City” in the caption field.

That’s all for now.  If you implement one of these and form a company and get millions of dollars, do me a favor and buy a few hundred copies of one of my books and give them away, so it makes it look like I’m a best-selling author for a few seconds.