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Things that only exist in my head…

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Things that only exist in my head…

Category Archives: writing

A title, because there should be one.

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category, tech, writing

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thumbs

This is a test of the thumb-writing communication medium.

So far the thumb-os have driven me crazy. I may have to break down and begin using the aids. No, never! The thumbing aids are created by marketing people for hypothetical Consumers who don’t want to be confronted by anything so confrontational as being allowed to use a vocabulary that contains many jokes for oneself as well as the occasional obscurity. I just want to be able to type fast on a black rectangle with a keyboard that’s too small for thumbs if I hold it one way and too wide—but still too short—if I hold it the other way.

And that, I say in my best Gump, is what I have to say about that.

A Good Day in Feed

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, reviews, writing

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antibiotics, charlie brooker, dead ideas, zombie politics

I read blogs much more than I write mine, so I fire up Akregator once or twice a day and cast a net into the RSS sea. I waited until late yesterday before hauling up that net, and brought up the kind of haul that depresses the global price of fish dinners and omega-3 commodities.

A new post by Charlie Brooker! Yay! — Brooker is the source of some of the best media commentary on TV (his Screen-, News-, and Gameswipe series) and science fiction and horror TV (Black Mirror) of any one person from the land-of-rocks-on-well-tended-green-hills.

This followed two interesting posts on the more practical aspects of keeping oneself alive through the food hole: Ferrett Steinmetz’s “I’m going to eat goop for a solid week, and probably not die”, about homemade food-substitute-drink; and Stina Leicht’s “The Little Picture Versus The Big Picture”, about the problem of factory farming, which is becoming more than a matter of feel-good, affluent, pseudo-activism. Either way, it is now easy, cheap, and healthy to stop eating meat—and less of an overt political statement—than it has ever been.

Charlie Stross is writing a doorstop, and his mind is managing not to be distracted too much by politics: The Myth of Heroism.

Flash fiction for Terrible Minds: Ideas, We Breathe

25 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in fiction, writing

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Chuck Wendig, concepts in retirement, flash fiction, small gods, terrible minds, war of ideas

This week’s challenge: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/04/18/flash-fiction-challenge-pick-an-opening-line-and-go/

I chose J. C. Hemphill’s line, which made Chuck’s fave list.

Ideas, We Breathe

I met a man made of smoke today. We talked for an hour, he and his friend and I, at Catteré, a cafe in the Third. The smoke from my cigarettes kept him aloft above his seat. Passers-by said hello to our little group; the residents of the Third know my companions well but were only being polite to me. A few might remember my face for a nauseous moment when I’m in front of them, but I’m as nameless in myself as the man of the smoke and the forge, Ogun Petr, is bodiless. Continue reading →

Flash Fiction for Terrible Minds: Z to A

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in fiction, scifi, writing

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Chuck Wendig, flash fiction, terrible minds

Another flash story inspired by one of Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction challenges. The theme? Life in hell. I’ve had a few false starts, but always started with a literalist confusion about the Sartre quotation. I ground this out today, start to finish, including edits.

Continue reading →

The Next Red Wedding(s)

06 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, horror, writing

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predictions, sympathetic characters

Not only does George Martin kill beloved characters and deny his heroes any real traction upon history, but he builds up the most sympathetic characters, tears them back down to the ground, and gives them permission to do terrible, stupid, destructive things. In doing this he links our favorite puppies back to the despicable characters of both yore and five-minutes-ago.

I predict another couple rounds of reaction shot videos this season. As books the story remains firmly in the tragic fantasy genre, but on the screen the story will do best if it slips into psychothriller and horror.

Land of Unknown Knowns

01 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, writing

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john wesley powell, savagery, the unknown known, wariness

Errol Morris made the rounds last week to plug his documentary, The Unknown Known, about Donald Rumsfeld. In Rumsfeld’s famous press-conference response, Rumsfeld talked about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. From what I can remember, Rumsfeld didn’t mention the fourth combination, the unknown known. Errol Morris uses this fourth combination as the title for the doc, and goes into the background in a post on NYTimes.com.

Continue reading →

A Computational Mask for Editing

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, poetry, writing

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cession, editing, have had, poetry, that that, the voice of the first draft

Can it be that it is only the little words together like a song that is heard only when sung but looks on the page like many other little words unneeded and dribbling and gasping for derision? My little mind hears another little mind who can’t hear the thought, so we think that because we and they don’t hear the song there is no song to sing? Little word songs of poems of dialect, my dialect, the writer unthinking, and dialect of in with so of little words to sing of the writer must sing them. Little unneeded ors and its that that and over and still to be cut and cornered to come back to inside and over for cision and cession for of and over to come up again to be unheard and seen and slashed and cut and never sung.

Long Sentences, Big Comments, and Slow-Growing Stories

16 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in writing

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comment echoing, comment length, long sentences, myriad day, stupid comments

Long sentences exist because of the spoken word, not in spite of it. Short sentences are conversational but only because they follow, usually for no reason, the convention that we speak amongst ourselves only at the sufferance of each other. Conversation waits with limited patience for its turn to speak, patience thinning as the wait lengthens. In conversation, long sentences inspire interruption. Continue reading →

Myriad Day

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in writing

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magic spreadsheet, maunderings, myriad day, nanowrimo, stream-of-consciousness, ten thousand words in a single day, wordcount

I wrote ten thousand words today (in addition to this post) to see if I could. Early afternoon is indeed the very worst time of the day to write. Cranky, falling behind the thousand-words-per-hour pace I set and audibly cursing the distractions who think open exhaust expresses one’s individuality, I cut loose and managed to finish. For this reason I can’t really post the thing without offending a lot of people (and losing others with the long, circling, unreadable bits). South Park has already addressed the v-twin subject better than I could in that one expletive-rich paragraph. But I did it. I wrote a gen-u-wine ten thousand words in a single day, in about nine and a quarter hours, mostly on the subject of writing ten thousand words in a single day. A myriad of words, ten thousand, from the Greek. One hundred squared, which if you think about it would make a very challenging multiplication table. For the first time I think I can say I have a favorite number.

My nanowrimo experience was a bust. I wrote the fifty thousand but they weren’t of-a-single-thing so I don’t intend on claiming it. November was a regular month, writing-wise. Since then I’ve been skipping days entirely and being a slug, doing research. So I figured what I might need is a complete day without the internet but not away from the computer. I’ve tried to do this a couple times before and never got more than a few thousand words into it. My goal was to begin typing words into the typey-type and see if it was possible to spend absolutely all day typing stuff from my head without censoring much or editing. It is. Possible. Just. With coffee and ibuprofen. At around two in the afternoon my brain stopped working but I soldiered on while I set some food going. As mentioned above there was a moment when I imagined pouring gasoline on and lighting up every member of the open-exhaust-hipster Mafia. After this late lunch I regained sanity and spent most of the afternoon catching up. The final thousand words flew by in about 38 minutes.

I’m tempted to enter it into Mur Lafferty’s Magic Spreadsheet. Plus this post, of course, whatever it ends up being.

For the future I need to slow the rate. To consistently better one hundred words every six minutes it is necessary to abandon a thread of writing the moment it gets complicated enough to sit and think about. That’s not very satisfying and it doesn’t really advance the long-term cause. But it broke my tendency to distraction.

Nanowrimo

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in writing

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hubris, nanowrimo

NaNoWriMo is beginning at the end of the week and…

pbbbbbffftt.

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