Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Writing a novel on 3x5 cards (Alison Gresik describes Dorothy Bryant's system)

Writer Alison Gresik describes Dorothy Bryant's system for writing novels starting with 3x5 cards:

On Monday, my day off, I picked up Dorothy Bryant's book, Writing a Novel and reread the planning chapter. Bryant is the author of The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You, among many other books, and she has a unpretentious approach to the mechanics of novel writing. Even though I've written short stories before, even a linked collection, I've been somewhat mystified about how to tackle a novel. How much should I map out ahead of time? How do I know when I'm finished planning and can start to write?

Bryant describes a system of planning that uses 3x5 file cards. She writes short notes for settings, character, and plot on these cards, and throws them all into a box. She reads through all the cards each day, and writes more, until she finds she's repeating herself and not coming up with new material. Then she categorizes the cards into piles. Putting all the cards together and shuffling them around shows her where there are holes in her plot or gaps in her character sketches. She writes more cards to fill these gaps, and then she's ready to begin her first draft.

Sounds promising - I have the book on order on interlibrary loan to see it in her own words.

UPDATE:

From the newsletter Holt Uncensored #312 in 2002:

Dear Holt Uncensored:

Could you please let those of us who would like to buy this Dorothy Bryant book about writing a novel where and how we can get it? I just talked with a wonderful woman at Kepler's (they're all wonderful, of course) who found the book and a 510 number of the publisher, but she was afraid it might not be available any longer. Bookpeople and Ingram do not carry it.

Debbie Duncan

Holt responds: "Writing a Novel" is still in print and available from Ata Books, 1928 Stuart St., Berkeley, CA 94703. Pre-paid order by check. $9.95, plus $2 shipping, plus .80 tax if you live in California. If you want ordering information on all of Dorothy Bryant's books, write to the same address. Phone 510 841-9613, FAX 510 548-9846

And the main Dorothy Bryant web site has more details and ordering information.

Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love. - David Brin

One of the Very Short Stories published in Wired Magazine.

Blog analytics, some tools and experiences with it

I'm closing in on 1000 entries in this blog, so it's time to do a little bit of retrospective analysis and look at some of the tools I'm using to keep track of which parts of the site are unusually active well after the original post hit.

The more general term for this would be blog analytics. Here's some capsule reviews of some tools and an approach.

One theory of blog analytics is to identify the things that you're writing about that don't own page one for the queries that are being searched for, but which still are clicked on regularly by people who go a couple of pages deep in the listings. If it's good enough to look at on page two, write about it again until it shows up on page one. Tools like 103bees and Hit Tail are specifically focused on this task, and they have views into your analysis reports that show which pages are on page two (or even deeper) on search results. You can do the same thing by hand if you have raw server logs by looking for "start=20" or "start=30" in the referrers - those will be indicative of click-throughs from pages deeper in the search listings.

A second useful approach to seeing where your blog fits in the greater world is to focus on the postings that are getting hits months after the original. If you are using a typical chronologically arranged publishing tool these are pretty easy to pick out since the filenames often include year and even months. Find a perennial favorite and revisit the topic from time to time either with new insights or just with an update to what else is new around the net since you last wrote. (Thanks to Brian Kerr for this idea.)

A third technique for testing effectiveness of a blog as a way to focus people's attention on something else is to look through the logs to see where people went to after they visited your site. The mybloglog tool has pretty good reports and tools for doing that, both for reporting in real time what the most visited links are as well as collecting over time where the hot exit points are. Close the feedback loop here again by writing about things that people are actually clicking on at the moment.

You can, of course, get so enveloped in feedback that you never actually write anything. Sometimes you want to get as far away from what you've said before and think about something new, and I don't know anything better to give ideas for that than LibraryThing's Unsuggester tool. It doesn't actually work on blog postings directly, but there's nothing better to help mix up your writing than to contemplate two opposite works (Polya's How to Solve It vs The Devil Wears Prada) and come up with a synthesis of the two.

Notalon, Cornell Notes style application in Python

Notalon is an application designed to make taking Cornell notes faster and easier. It is written specifically for the task of taking Cornell notes, unlike a word processor.

John Hritz has this mini review of Notalon:

With regard to Notalon. I not sure what your take is on this software, but it seems to require an outside in approach. That is to say that Notalon assumes that you will know the headings (or questions) based on the notes ahead of time. There also doesn't seem to be a fixed method for creating the page summaries.

The author, Saketh, describes the motiviation for writing the code:

The Cornell note-taking system contains two essential features: headings and text. Although the term was originally conceived as part of an efficient method of studying, it is now also used to describe a specific document layout. Documents in this format contain a 2.5-inch wide column for headings, and a 6-inch wide column for the text. Headings in the first column must be aligned with the corresponding text, and are used to index and summarize the contents of the text.

Cornell note-taking is an excellent method, and in fact some institutions feel that it is excellent enough to be mandatory. If you face this requirement, know that you are not alone. It's possible, but awkward, to create Cornell notes using a word processor. Notalon was born from both the author's distaste with mandatory Cornell notes and his frustration with word processors.

Technorati Tags: cornellnotes, notalon

Guide to Miriam Hilton Papers, Northern Michigan University Archives

Guide to Miriam Hilton Papers from the NMU archives.

Collection Number: Univ Series 63
Volume: 2 boxes (.6 linear feet)
Inclusive Dates: 1949-1975
Prepared by Kim Shannon and Marcus C. Robyns

Biographical Note:

Miriam Hilton was born in Iran, daughter of John and Ruth Elder who were missionaries there. She received her BA from Wellesley College and her MA from the University of Michigan. In 1947, Hilton married Earl Hilton. In 1974, she authored the first book length history of Northern Michigan University entitled, Northern Michigan University: The First Seventy-Five Years. From time to time, prior to Earl Hilton’s retirement, Miriam Hilton taught adjunct courses for the Departments of English and History. Over the years, she has also become known for her very active volunteer service activities in both the Marquette community at large and in her church.

Scope and Content Note:

The collection contains the papers of Miriam Hilton. The collection mainly documents her research and writing of the book. The collection includes book drafts, notes, news clippings, alumni questionnaires, and transcriptions of faculty interviews (Meyland, Hedgecock, Wahtera, and O'Dell). Also included are records relating to Church Women United of Marquette and writings of Hilton's father, Dr. John Elder.

Processed, March 1995

Still pining for marginalia

I still long for a web page composition environment - I could call it a blogging tool - that easily and quickly lets me edit a stream of pages that are themselves composed of blocks or chunks, all tied together in some way, and where writing in the margins is a first class operation and not some awful CSS or Javascript hack.

I've tried Drupal, but the edit environment is a mess and it looks like it would be a deep dive to design something. Some wikis look like they might do the trick at least for the raw ease of edit, but then you lose the nice page flow of the blog.

This is why I still compose on paper - when what you're writing really needs four columns on one page and three on the next and six skinny ones with a big footer every so often, and to do that all you have to do is draw lines on your quadrille paper, it's a real relief.

Technorati Tags: quadrille

Finding a form (William Gass)

From his essay Finding a Form in the book of the same name:

I often think, overhearing myself at work, that I do not write; I mumble, I declaim, I inveigh. My study is full of static when it is full of me.

His In Defense of the Book is available at Assistive Media as an MP3 reading - a lot of his stuff really begs to b read out loud.

Nano in science and science fiction - seminar Sept 8/9 2006

The Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and Biological Sciences is doing a symposium Sept 8-9 2006 on the U of Michigan campus. Register at http://www.nano.med.umich.edu/

What caught my eye was this Saturday session title:

Eric Rabkin, Ph.D., a U-M professor of English language and literature, will give a talk titled “Science Fiction, Perceptions of Science and the Future of Nanoscience.”

Some searching turned up this related journal issue, hidden beyond an academic paywall, which I will excerpt just as much as I can:

Jones, Anne Hudson "Editor's Column"
Literature and Medicine - Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2001, pp. vii-xi
The Johns Hopkins University Press

Excerpt

In early 1979, not long after I had joined the faculty of the Institute for the Medical Humanities of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, I was invited to give a seminar presentation about cloning in science fiction for one of the basic-science departments at the university. Eager to oblige my new colleagues, I gave the presentation, only to be taken by surprise by their disdainful responses. Why, they asked me, would anyone waste time writing a story or novel about human cloning when it could never happen? They assured me emphatically that the scientific and technical problems inherent in cloning a mammal were so great that no mammal would ever be cloned.

On the morning in 1997 when I heard the news that Scottish researchers had cloned a sheep named Dolly, I immediately thought back to that day eighteen years before when those scientists were so certain that a mammal would never be cloned. It was in reflecting on this experience that I developed the Call for Papers for this thematic issue of Literature and Medicine, which focuses on Science Fiction and the Future of Medicine. Since the mid-1980s, the editorial board had from time to time discussed the possibility of a thematic issue on medicine in science fiction; however, for one reason or another, the possibility was set aside in favor of other themes. When the idea came up in discussion again for the theme of the first issue of 2001, the time seemed right.

Throughout the twentieth century, writers of science fiction have helped prepare us for the extraordinary advances in medicine and biomedical technology--such as organ transplantation, cybernetic organisms (cyborgs), and cloning--by imagining what those technologies would be like and by speculating about the ethical issues and social changes they would evoke. As we begin the twenty-first century, however, the time lag between the speculations of science fiction and...

...alas, the excerpt ends here. Sounds interesting, nonetheless.

Technorati Tags: nano, sciencefiction, science

Thinking in quadrille 3x5" notecards

(Written on a 3x5 card.)

Having cards to reorganize is much different from using bound pages. It is a lot easier to reorganize thoughts.

In some way I am writing like it was little email sized wiki wiki essays. If I had a bigger format the thoughts would be longer.

If you can capture a thought in fifteen square inches, and then move on, you can catch a lot of thoughts.

Unpacking the language of the field

Whenever you go into a new field, or otherwise extend yourself a bit beyond your usual comfort zone, you run into all kinds of terms and language and jargon and terminology that is unfamiliar. Sometimes it's entirely new words or acronyms that need to be figured out, hard enough. But when it really gets difficult is when it's perfectly ordinary words that are reused in ways that make perfect sense to six or twelve or twenty people and which are utterly baffling to outsiders.

There's a few lists I'm on where people in a field, or maybe they aren't all in the same field but they are all on the same mailing list, are trying to figure out what they have in common. The field of "information architecture" seems to go through this periodically, and recently the six species of information architect were enumerated (graphic designer, project manager, reformed techie, library dude, copywriter, and usability IA). Similarly, the nascent field of "community informatics" has a list where they're trying to figure out whether it's "the social appropriation of ICTs", "social impact of ICTs", "ICT4D", "social informatics", "la informática de la comunidad", etc etc. 34 messages on this in a few days.

Heaven help the poor person who tries to merge two fields together. Though I suppose if you are the only one doing whatever you are doing you can call it whatever you please and no one is the wiser for it.