Tag Archives: reading

February 11, 2012 · 9:50 PM

The Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Done

So the reason my computer was running so slow turned out to be… something.  It was running at 100% CPU usage, which, for those of you who don’t speak Computer, is way too much.  In light of that, I called my father, the computer guy, and asked him to help me fix this problem.  After hours and hours of searching through my computer, he failed to identify the source of its slowness, i.e. the thing that was making it eat CPU for breakfast.  Then I took a look through the programs it was running and saw something titled “Bing Bar.”  I assumed this was Bing as in that search engine no one uses, but it might have been a virus.  At any rate, I uninstalled it.

The good news is that my computer stopped running at 100% CPU.  The bad news is…my computer broke.  My father looked at it again, and eventually decided there was nothing more he could do and that I’d have to take it somewhere to get someone to look at it.  Luckily for me, we have Information Technology Services (ITS) right on campus.  So I took my computer to them, and they fiddled with it, and then they decided that the only way to fix it would be to restore it to factory settings.  Gee, I thought, I’m so lucky that my computer is still mostly functional.  Now I’ll be able to back up all my files and not lose absolutely everything I ever lived for.

That night, I plugged in my external hard drive and did some dragging and dropping of files.  My dad gave me the sage advice of checking to make sure everything backed up properly by plugging the hard drive in to another computer.  I thought this advice was good, but (and here’s the important part) I never actually went through with it.  Even though I was suspicious of how quickly everything had “backed up,” I still never got around to checking that everything I lived for was okay.  I have no idea why that didn’t fly to the top of my priority list, but I’m kind of scatterbrained.  Especially when it is least convenient for me to be so.

Skip forward to after my computer has been wiped, and ITS nerd guy plugs in my external hard drive to retrieve all of my everything.  Can you guess what happened?  That’s right.  He looked at me and said slowly and quietly, in the tone of someone admitting to the fact that they just ran over all of your pets and your grandmother, that I had not backed up a thing.  All I had done was copy shortcuts from my computer to my hard drive, which does absolutely nothing.  Then, for about ten seconds, I had to live with this fact.  Ten seconds to try and wrap my head around the fact that I had lost everything, and that this problem could have so easily been avoided.  Then Mr. ITS said, “But…” and I perked up my ears.

Thanks to sheer luck, the damage was not too bad.  Mr. ITS installed a program on my computer that had the potential to recover documents from my computer’s hard drive.  It did this quite well.  So well, in fact, that it brought back Word documents that I had deleted years ago.  But I still thought I’d lost a lot.  None of the JPEG files could be recovered, which meant that I’d lost London.  Remember how I was abroad for a semester?  Maybe you don’t.  But I thought I’d lost that.

NOPE

Apparently, at some point I backed up all of my files, including my pictures from London and my books, onto my flash drive!  I couldn’t fit all the pictures, so I lost Dublin, but I can get pictures of that from my best friend who accompanied me on that trip.  I’m certainly not complaining.  Not only did all of my books get saved and my pictures from London, but the recovery program found my completed version of Grotesque, the only book that had not been recently backed up.  Considering how stupid I had to be to get myself into this situation, I am incredibly lucky that pure serendipity got me out of it, despite the fact that I probably didn’t deserve such a nice bail-out.

At this point, you might be wondering why I’m telling you all this.  Aside from the fact that it’s funny in a “Ha ha, I almost lost my entire reason for living” sort of way, it also pertains to this blog.  See, I recently acquired a Wacom tablet, which I was using to draw funny little cartoons, if you’ll recall.  Unfortunately, I lost Photoshop Elements when I wiped the computer, as well as all the things I drew using it.  This means that I lost an entire artistic series of pictures I drew based on those iconic, red phone booths you see in London.  Hours and hours of work.  Gone.  I will redraw them anyway, and maybe share a few, when I’m able to reinstall Elements.  The only problem is that the CD to restore it to my computer is somewhere back in California, in a large cardboard box maybe.  (We just moved)  So it looks like I won’t be able to illustrate my blog for a while.  Not until that CD or some other solution is found.  My only other option is MS Paint, and well…

…I just don’t think that would work out so well.

That’s all I have to say for today.  Somehow I will persevere.  I’m lucky that I got back what I did, even though I still lost many things that were important to me.  Obviously, I learned to be more careful with my files.  I’ve already gone back through and properly backed them up again.  I also learned that there is no point kicking myself forever about this mistake, because it’s in the past.  Yes, I had every opportunity to prevent it, but I didn’t.  And nothing I say or do is going to change that.  All I can do is deal with the consequences and try to learn from it.  I’d like to say I already have learned a good deal.  Only time will tell if this lesson will stick, but I have a feeling it will.

My father will probably be somewhat peeved when he reads this, so let me just say: I’m sorry, Dad!  I know I should have listened to you.  Thanks for all the help, though.  I don’t know what I’d do without you.

Word of the Day: Serendipity (n) – The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.  Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.

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December 24, 2011 · 12:12 AM

Chekhov’s Gun

Well, by the time I post this, it will be the 24th.  And you know what that means!  (Hint: I’m not referring to Christmas)

That’s right!  It’s my birthday!  I’ve turned twenty-one!  Yaaay!  Happy birthday to me!

I will say merry Christmas, too.  And happy Chanukah to my fellow Jews!  But this post is not about the holidays, or my really inconveniently timed birthday.  No, I’ve actually got more literary things to say, and as you may have gleaned from the title of this post, it is about Chekhov’s gun.

Anton Chekhov wrote lots of stuff like short stories and plays and things.  If you haven’t heard of him, you should probably look him up.  He’s relevant to this post because of this thing he once said about writing plays.  Quoth the Chekhov: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.  Otherwise don’t put it there.”  I remember a different variation, which I guess he never said, but I like to tell it like this: If you put a shotgun on the mantle in the first act, it better have gone off by Act III.  I don’t know where I got the shotgun from if he was talking about a pistol.  I guess it just sounds more purposeful or something.

Anyway, this quote pertains to more than just plays.  It can apply to movies and books, too.  Since we’re more interested in the latter, I’m going to focus on that one.  This concept is all about the world you create.  The thing about writing books, movies, and plays is that, unlike in real life, you get to choose each and every person, place, and thing that shows up in the story.  So, by that logic, if you’re going to choose to put it there, it has to have a purpose.  Otherwise why would you put it there in the first place?  It could just as easily have been left out.  That’s the shotgun/pistol/grenade launcher on the mantle.  If you put it there, use it.

Earlier in this blog, I offered a couple literary exercises.  I would like to add this one: Write a story that contains a “Chekhov’s gun,” so to speak.  Put in some seemingly innocuous object towards the beginning that ends up being really important or relevant at the end.  The point is to make its relevance a surprise (though it doesn’t always have to be).  Then have other people read it and ask them if they predicted what that “gun” was going to be used for.  Obviously for this exercise to work, you can’t tell people ahead of time what you’re doing.

The reason I’m talking about this is…no, scratch that.  There are two reasons I’m talking about this.  One: I get so many of my ideas by accident through this Chekhov’s gun method.  I don’t even try to do it.  I just mention something in passing and then realize later that it would fit perfectly into the plot for such and such reason.  And soon after that, I realize that it’s a good thing I thought of a point for that thing, otherwise I would have had to take it out.  And the reason for that is that readers/audiences know, at some base level, all about Chekhov’s gun.  If they see something or hear something get mentioned, they are likely going to expect to see it come up again.  So if it doesn’t ever come back, that might leave the writer open to criticism.  For an example of one of the times this situation has snuck up on me in my writing…I once had two characters talk about Character Two’s older brother having a job interview.  It was really just to make them seem more human by having them converse about everyday things, but later the job interview became a plot point.  Who knew?  Certainly not me.  Now for an example of the failure to bring something back.  Unfortunately, this means I have to admit to seeing Real Steel.  You know…Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots the Movie?  With Hugh Jackman?  Yeah, I was bored that day.  Anyway, (no spoilers here, not that you care) the kid finds a robot and at some point realizes that the robot “understands” him.  As in it’s sentient.  And that just…doesn’t go anywhere.  I kept waiting for it to be relevant somehow and it never really came back.  The robot was just a robot…that punched other robots.  So that was bad.  Not that the movie was very good to begin with, but still.

The second reason I brought up Chekhov’s gun is this: I think it works in reverse, too.  In this case it would be, “If at the end of the book your character fires a shotgun, the gun better have been mentioned at least once before.”  I came to this conclusion a few days ago when I was writing Grotesque.  I’m almost at the end of it now, and I realized I was missing some key element that would tie everything together.  But it was a really little thing, not something I cared very much about.  I just needed an ingredient.  Literally.  I needed an ingredient for a magical potion.  And I came up with some leaves and decided to bring them up and be like “Look!  These are the leaves! The ones that we had but now he has them and we need them back and oh God he can’t be allowed to use them because that would spell disaster for us!”  (You get extra brownie points if you were able to follow that)  But then I realized I was doing a lot of exposition to explain these leaves and it was so close to the end of the book that it didn’t feel right.  It felt like I was throwing them in at the last second, and they started to get more significant than I’d originally intended them to be.  Which meant that I had to go back through the book and mention them earlier, do the exposition earlier, so that my readers wouldn’t feel like I just threw this thing at them out of nowhere.  As in, “This exists now!  I am the author and I say it exists so it does!  Just go with it, man.”  And that’s how I came to understand the reverse of Chekhov’s Gun.  This post has gone on way too long and there haven’t even been any cartoons to break up the wordiness.  I am sorry for that.  I feel like I want to talk more about this, but I’ll save it for another post.  Until then, enjoy your holidays!  And to anyone else out there who shares my Christmas Eve Birthday, Happy Birthday to you!

Word of the Day: Chekhovian (adj) – of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Anton Chekhov or his writings, especially as they are evocative of a mood of introspection and frustration.

P.S. I just realized that the leaves thing is doubly relevant to this post.  Yes, it was the reverse of Chekhov’s gun, but there was also this point earlier in the story when I had someone mention that they were going to try to find some edible plants, and then he never found any or brought up his search or anything.  Which is an example of mentioning something and then failing to bring it up again.  So then I decided to fix that problem by going back and adding the super special leaves in to that scene, thus killing two birds with one stone, and it worked out perfectly which is so amazing because I never even predicted it would happen that way.  I mean, I didn’t even know those leaves existed until long after I’d written that scene.  It’s cool how writing works, huh?  Ok, good-bye for real this time.

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December 7, 2011 · 2:33 PM

They Say

First, an update.  My mother pointed out a continuity error in Chapter 1 of Grotesque that has now been fixed.  What’s great is it actually reinforces an earlier point that I’ve made.

In Fantasy, you make up your own rules, and are at liberty to change them.  The error I made was very small – the fireplace in Serrafiel’s room is described as having no wood in it, but then later his master lights a fire in it, and suddenly there’s wood there.  This happened because I originally decided that magical fire would not need anything to burn.  But as I got farther in the book, those rules no longer worked.  For reasons that I don’t care to go into, it became necessary for magical fire to need wood.  So I went back and changed it so that the fireplace in Serrafiel’s room contained wood.  What I did not realize was that I’d mentioned the lack of wood in two places, but I only changed it once.

Moving on…I mentioned that I was going to talk about this in my last post, and I will stay true to my word.

They say, “Write what you know.”  Well, I don’t know who “they” are, but if I ever meet them, I’m going to punch them right in their collective smugness, which I’m now convinced is a punchable organ.  I shall explain why.

Here is a list of things I know:

–          My name

–          Sarcasm

–          How to talk (usually without stopping)

–          Psychology, via courses in high school and college

–          Horses (How to ride them, and some random facts)

–          English, some Japanese, some Spanish

–          Judaism

–          Literary analysis

–          What it is like to be cis-female/Things associated with being cis-female

–          Video games

–          The capital of California

–          How to drive

–          Baseball

–          The lyrics to Fireflies by Owl City

–          Cooking/baking

–          The names of all the kids from Ms. Frizzle’s class in The Magic School Bus. (Dorothy Ann, Phoebe, Wanda, Keesha, Arnold, Carlos, Ralphie, Tim)

–          I love chocolate

–          I hate broccoli

–          Grammar (Usually)

–          How to make lists of things

–          How to type

–          How to navigate an airport

–          Which fork is for the salad

–          How to stop a list

It could go on.  I promise you that I know many other things.  But long as that list is, it is infinitesimal in comparison to the list of things I don’t know.  Here is a brief sample of the things I don’t know:

–          What it’s like to have magical powers

–          What chocolate-covered crickets taste like

–          What it is like to be cis-male

–          The capital of Wyoming

–          Where I’ll be in twenty years (and the future in general)

–          What I ate for breakfast on March 19th, 1994

–          How to shoot a gun (What a relief, right?)

–          French, German, Arabic, Swahili, Welsh, Sanskrit (among others)

–          What kind of tea George Washington preferred to drink

–          The exact number of stars in the sky

–          The lyrics to Last Friday Night by Katy Perry (although I’m pretty sure the phrase “Last Friday night” makes it in there somewhere)

–          What causes laughter (Looking for a more scientific answer than “Jokes.”)

–          Why people major in Philosophy

–          What it’s like to be a chinchilla

–          What it’s like to be in love

–          How to build a windmill

–          How to pilot an aircraft

–          How old Leonardo da Vinci was when he died

–          The names of all the elements in the Periodic Table (Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Iron are in there somewhere)

–          All the species of butterfly that exist in the world

–          Your grandmother’s maiden name

You might have noticed that in the first list, I didn’t mention writing as something I know.  That’s because this blog, and specifically this post, is all about how to “know” writing, so I figured I’d leave it out.

You might also recall that there is another common expression that contradicts the “Write what you know” mantra.  Ever heard someone say, “You could fill a book with what that guy doesn’t know”?  That bears some thinking on, doesn’t it?

My point in listing all of these things is that you can’t possibly limit yourself to writing “what you know.”  I think it’s insulting to even suggest that you should.  The whole point of creative writing is that you get to write about stuff you don’t know, oftentimes stuff you could never know – like what it feels like to break a man’s spine with your mind.  To say that you should stick to what you know is saying that you’re not good enough at being creative to write convincingly about something you don’t know.

That said, it is important to remember that what you know can be very useful, like a supplement to your writing that makes it awesome.  Take emotions for an example.  If your main character is a fairy princess who just saw her entire kingdom fall into ruin, chances are, you’re not writing from experience.  But here’s something you might have experienced – sadness.  Or desperation.  Grief.  You can use those things, find those feelings, and insert them into your writing.  Without the emotion, it’s just description, and you can do that easily enough.  You don’t have to have seen a fairy kingdom falling into ruin to be able to call up an image of it in your head, and then write down a description of that image.  It’s the emotion, the feeling, that makes that image meaningful.  That’s what I think of when I hear someone say “write what you know.”

And yes, if you read through my books, you’d see that I have inserted a lot of myself into them. I do that because it’s fun, and because it does help guide my writing if I have little things like that thrown in there that I have some personal connection to.  So that’s what I’ve got to say about that.

Word of the Day: Platitude (n) – a flat, dull, or trite remark, especially one uttered as if fresh or profound.

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