#fridayflash: freedom

Here's this week's #fridayflash. Please leave comments/critiques!

John glanced at the clock on the microwave. He still had fifteen minutes to get to work. No problem; it was only 7:30, and the queues wouldn’t be that long this time of the morning.

He yawned, slugged back the remains of his coffee, and stuffed the last bite of toast into his mouth. Fortunately he’d had the wherewithal to leave his overcoat, hat, and briefcase by the door; it was a habit he was trying to keep, but some nights he forgot. He pulled his work keycard from the outside pocket of his briefcase and stuffed it in his overcoat pocket — the people behind always hated it when someone fumbled for their destination ID. On the way out the door he grabbed his house keycard from the row of hooks by the door and tapped it against the scanner in the hall to lock up.

On the street there were a fair number of people at the cafés and fast food outlets getting breakfast, but the commuter queues were only three or four people deep on the boulevards. A streetcar grumbled by with commuters who had less than the minimum transport length of ten kilometres to travel. John checked his pocket watch, which told him it was 7:40. He supposed he had enough time to get a coffee to go; the stuff at the office was awful, and there weren’t any cafés handy nearby.

There was a long queue at his favourite café, maybe a dozen people, but it moved quickly. John waited for another streetcar to pass so he could cross the road to the transport boulevard. He paused to admire the street. In some neighbourhoods they had just built right on top of the old parking lanes, but where John lived the old lanes had been resurfaced with paving stones — nicer for people to walk on than plain old asphalt. They’d added some trees in cement planters too. It looked good. You’d hardly know that ten years ago cars used to run on the same streets.

John picked a queue that looked like it was shorter than the others, then waited his turn. The commute was moving well this morning. A woman in a blue suit and a grey fedora was directly in front of him. John met her often, but didn’t know her name. He nodded hello when she noticed someone was behind her and glanced back. She smiled at him, and John smiled in return. Maybe in a few more weeks he would get a chance to ask her name.

It was the woman’s turn to commute. She stepped through the turnstile doors onto the pad, made a quarter-turn to the left, and reached back to tap her work keycard against the scanner. John always had fun watching how people used the transporter. Some people positioned themselves to suit the location of the departure pad. Some people planned how they would look when they arrived. The woman vanished in a burst of white light.

The turnstile doors hummed and the indicator light turned green, telling John the woman had transported to her destination and it was now his turn. He pushed his way through the doors, letting two fingers hook through his briefcase handle while the other three held his cup of coffee in the same hand.

Through the glass walls that surrounded the transport pad on three sides, John could see a young couple struggling with a beat-up couch on one of the oversized cartage pads. He rolled his eyes and wondered why they didn’t just rent a furniture cart like normal human beings. “Always has to be someone doing it the hard way,” he muttered to himself.

He reached into his coat pocket and tapped his work keycard against the scanner.

He was never sure if he actually did blink, but it felt like he had. One moment he was standing on the boulevard in front of his condo building; the next he was in the lobby of the office tower he worked in.

John stepped out the exit doors of the arrival pad and glanced at his watch. 7:45. He was doing well. He still had fifteen minutes before the morning status meeting.

He walked to the elevator bays and tapped his keycard against the elevator scanner. The elevator ascended to his office’s floor and he got out. As he reached his desk, he could hear Mike from Accounting complaining about his commute again.

“Twenty minutes today,” said Mike to Agnes, who was doing her best to pretend she was interested. “Twenty minutes, at seven in the morning! Don’t you think that’s insane?”

“You have to learn to keep calm about it, though,” said Agnes. “The cops are starting to crack down on queue rage.”

“People should be ready,” said Mike. “If they’re in the god-damned queue, they should be ready. Otherwise they’re just part of the traffic problem.”

John started his computer and sat down, leaning back and taking his first sip of coffee. It was still too hot to drink, so he hung his coat and hat up and made sure he was ready for the morning meeting while he waited for it to cool down.

“Hey John,” Mike called from across the office floor. “Got lunch plans today?”

“Just going home.”

“You always go home.”

“It’s cheaper and the food’s better.”

“Even with paying for transport four times a day instead of two? Are you sure?”

John grinned and headed back to his desk.

He checked his e-mail, dashed off a few quick replies, then locked his computer to go to the conference room for the status meeting. As he got up, he took a quick glance at his desktop wallpaper.

It was a photo of his father with his first car — a petroleum-burner that had constantly needed repairs. Whenever he took a good look at the photo, John remembered what his father had said when John was growing up: “You’ll never know. You’re never going to know what it feels like, to get that kind of freedom from owning a car.”

No, no he wouldn’t.

#fridayflash: what's in the name

This is my first foray into #fridayflash. Just something light this time — let me know what you think!

Ellen locked her apartment door behind her and sighed. It had been a rotten Friday rounding off a rotten week at work, and she was looking forward to a night of TV-watching. As she prised the high-heeled shoes off her feet, she tried to figure out if she would be better off making herself dinner, or using the last of her patience to wait for pizza delivery.

The phone started ringing as she hung her coat up. She was expecting a friend of hers to call about seeing a movie Saturday, so she picked it up without checking caller ID.

"Yes, am I speaking to Mrs. Stilzkind?" said a voice that sounded like it was coming from far away, over cheap equipment and a bad line.

Ellen hobbled to the couch, wishing her toes wouldn't take so long to straighten out after she took her shoes off. "Mrs. Stilzkind is my grandmother," she said, "but just skip to your sales pitch."

"Sorry, ma'am?"

Ellen rolled onto the couch and gingerly pressed her toes into the cushions, wincing. "What are you trying to sell me?"

"Oh no Mrs. Stilzkind, I only wish to inform you of an excellent offer to have your home re-insulated with straw. High-tech straw insulation is a wonderful way to invest in an environmentally-friendly product that will put money in your pocket through reduced heating bills—"

"I live in an apartment," said Ellen.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Stilzkind?"

"I live in an apartment, and Stilzkind is my father's name, not mine. Also, I'm not interested. Good-bye!"

She pressed the disconnect button and dropped the phone on the floor, letting her arm hang off the edge of the couch. Supper, she decided, would have to wait until she could bear the thought of standing up again.

The phone rang.

Before she could stop herself, Ellen picked up the phone, pressed the answer button, and said, "Hello?"

"Good evening, Mrs. Rumpole," said a smooth, confident voice. "I'm calling to remind you that it's time to put your garden to bed for the winter. Castle Greenhouse has a great selection of straw mulches that can be delivered right to your back door—"

"Mrs. Rumpole is my mother's name, not mine, I live in an apartment, and I'm not interested. Good-bye!"

She hit the disconnect button so hard she had to press it a few more times to make it pop up again. Then she dropped the phone on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, and decided that ordering pizza wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Ellen waved her hand over the floor, trying to find the phone, but it had bounced and rolled away when she dropped it. She made herself roll onto her side so she could see where it went. At first she thought it had vanished, but then she spotted it halfway under the couch.

She picked up the phone, and was just getting into a position where she could comfortably dial with her other hand when...

The phone rang.

Ellen considered answering and then immediately hanging up, but she didn't want to put the caller on hold by accident and wind up talking to them after she'd ordered her pizza.

She jabbed the answer button and said, "Hello?"

"Good evening!" said a voice with far too much energy in it. "Have I reached Mrs. Romila Stilzkind?"

"There is no such person," said Ellen, wishing she didn't have such good phone manners.

"Ah!" said the voice. "I was wondering if you'd say that. Please, I am a floor supervisor at the sales centre that both Enviro Insulation and Castle Greenhouse outsource to. We don't usually do this, but I couldn't help but notice that you were contacted by two of our staff tonight, but under two different names. You told us that Stilzkind is your father's name but not your own, and Rumpole is your mother's name, but not your own. Please ma'am, if only so we can correct our records, what is your name?"

"Rumpole-Stilzkind!" said Ellen. And she turned off the phone, unplugged its base unit, took the battery out of her cell phone, and turned off her wireless router. Which is to say, for all intents and purposes, she disappeared from the world without a trace.

cognitive dissonance when the rubber hits the road

I am a car owner. I hasten to add, that I am only a car owner because the public transit infrastructure where I live is so painfully underfunded that I need one. To me, the best kind of car is one that couples in a row to run on tracks, preferably with a bike rack compartment somewhere handy.

So every once in a while I wind up reading some articles about cars (mostly to see if they're going to die off finally). Recently, I discovered this article by Ian Law, writing for the Wheels section of The Toronto Star (3 June 2011). He gives a lucid, solidly-argued explanation for why drivers who are not passing should stick to the outside lane. Even when there are three lanes. Even when the outside lane disappears from time to time, forcing drivers into what was the middle lane, but is now the outside lane (ie: how most Southern Ontario highways are constructed).

Funny thing, though: there's a 12 September article also printed in the Wheels section of The Toronto Star entitled "The science behind traffic jams". It gives three behaviours (mass behaviours of groups of drivers, not individual driving behaviours) that cause traffic jams. The first two behaviours are about how changing lanes causes traffic jams.

So we're supposed to drive in the outside lane (what most Golden Horseshoe drivers think of as the "merge lane") and change lanes when that lane disappears into an exit ramp (and it will), yet changing lanes is what makes traffic slow to begin with.

Personally, I agree with Law that usually the outside lane is for driving in. The problem is, it seems that the Golden Horseshoe does not have "usual" highways. I remember when one of my brothers came home from a motoring vacation in Germany: the first thing he wanted to tell me about was how much easier autobahns were to navigate than GTA-area highways, because you didn't have to worry about exiting by "accident", even in high-volume traffic. That meant out-of-country drivers like him who weren't sure when the exit they wanted was going to come up could stay in the outside lane, confident they would remain on the highway until they were ready to leave it. You can't drive like that in the GTA —you'll wind up on a local road, trying to figure out how to get to the next on-ramp.

Look, I took my driver's test same as everyone else on the road (er, at least I hope they did), and I know perfectly well the right lane is supposed to be used except to pass. But that behaviour is simply not supported by the road designs in this part of the world.

When I got my first car (at age 32), I hadn't driven more than once a year for about five years. I made a point of sticking to the right lane like glue so that all the other drivers could go around me and not worry about me getting in their way as I learned how to navigate Toronto and area by car instead of by public transit. Anyone who's driven here knows it's not the handling the car part that can be stressful, it's knowing how the different roads (and the lanes that make up those roads) are going to change in the next two kilometres.

I tend to be a middle-lane driver now, much to the chagrin of Law and others who think like him. I see it this way: if there are three lanes, the outside lane is for merging and exiting, the middle lane is for driving, and the inside lane is for passing. I know that's not the letter of the law as handed down by the Ministry of Transport. I also know it's the only way to get from Point A to Point B around here without having to change lanes a lot.

And changing lanes a lot, as studies have shown, causes traffic jams.

YOU MUST LEARN

The cliché is that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. There's another cliché, though, the one about history being written by the victors. In this case it's not so much the victors as the advertisers, though, and historical accuracy is not in their selfish best interests.

I've seen lists like these in some of the computing magazines etc., and they always have one or two things wrong with them. First of all, they're often inaccurate, and rush too quickly to get to the star names. It's like they're worried their readers will stop reading if they learn something new.

Second of all, they're often confused. They'll start way early in the timeline, or way late, like a student who didn't exactly understand what their own thesis statement was.

This is my timeline for the development of personal computing. Don't let your eyes glaze over, 'cos unless you're a computer science major (or act like one), you may learn some surprising things. Besides, if you're reading this blog, it means you're taking a break from on-line games or porn or your friends' status updates or whatever else you usually look at.

• The rough sketch for what we now call the personal computer (or tablet, or smartphone, or whatever) was published in July 1945 by someone called Vannevar Bush. He wrote about it in an essay called "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly, and it's still available on-line today. It's as good and accessible a read as anything that magazine publishes now. Bush gives a series of small examples, which, while interesting, leave you thinking, "okay, so....?" until he puts them all together and delivers the knockout punch at the end.
• That July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly was read by, amongst other people, a man named Douglas Engelbart. Once he finished serving in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, he went home to the US and started working on creating some of the things Bush presented in his essay.
• Engelbart invented the mouse in 1963. Bill English carved the first prototype out of a block of wood. Engelbart patented the mouse in 1970, but the patent papers were filed in 1967.
• 1968: The Mother of All Demos. Engelbart demonstrates using the mouse, display editing, copying & pasting text, hypertext (links), and multiple windows. The whole thing is video conferenced, so that those who want to see the demo but can't attend in person can watch on closed-circuit TV.

Please pause and re-read that last entry. All of that stuff was working well enough to demonstrate live in 1968.

Oh yeah: in 1969 Engelbart (again!) helped start ARPAnet, which eventually became what we now call the Internet. I don't think it's a big exaggeration to say that he's shaped to a very large extent everything the world thinks of as "normal" in a human-computer experience, and yet most people haven't heard of him. Luckily he seems to be a force for good.

And that is where I'm going to end my timeline, because from where I'm sitting, everything that comes afterwards is a long, slow, painful crawl to commercial acceptance from that 1968 demo. If you look around Doug Engelbart's site thoroughly, you'll see that his overarching aim has been to augment human intelligence. That we were stuck with the 1968 paradigm for so long (albeit with prettier video interfaces) is a tad worrying.

Where is computing going now? On the one hand I'm glad that innovations like the gesture-based commands in the Wii and Kinect systems made it to market, because I think a thinking environment that encourages us to use all of our bodies instead of being hunched over a desktop is a good thing. On the other hand, it's a tad worrying that these are coming out of the gaming world, which means they might be a hard sell in the business realm. After all, back in the 80s PCs themselves sometimes had to be purchased at large corporations as "word processors" or "adding machines" to avoid refusals from the accounting department.

Notice I made it this far without mentioning Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (or even Steve Wozniak). Notice how young Gates and Jobs were when all this was happening. Bush's essay was published ten years before either of them were born. I don't mean that Gates and Jobs haven't contributed; I just mean that there was already a lot in place by the time they started working on things.

The advertisers tell us that computing is changing very quickly, and that we have to run to keep up. Given that the idea came in 1945, was realised by 1968, and then didn't catch on until the 1980s, I'm not so sure.

there are things you should know

I remember the first subway posters I saw for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I can't remember exactly what they said, but somehow I got the impression that it was a horror novel. Since I don't generally read horror, I just decided to be pleased that a book was getting so much advertising space, and sort of ignored it after that. Every once in a while the poster would catch my eye again, and I'd wonder what all the fuss was about, but was never really tempted to read it.

Then I read an article... somewhere. I think it was this Quill & Quire article. That led me to some Googling, and let me find out a bit more about who Stieg Larsson was, and who Eva Gabrielsson is. I also learned that those subway posters had misled me — the Millennium trilogy are a series of crime novels, and strongly feminist ones to boot.

And all of a sudden I had to read these novels. Once I finished the first one (in a day and a half of drop-everything reading one weekend), I started evangelising about them and telling everyone I knew that they had to read them too. Even I thought I was being obnoxious about it.

Every time I did a recommendation, though, I mentioned about what I had learned from my on-line news-reading: how Larsson and Gabrielsson had been a couple for decades, how they had never married so that Larsson's place of residence could be obscured, how the Swedish government doesn't recognise common-law marriages for what they are, which means Gabrielsson got nothing of Larsson's estate. She still receives nothing of the profits from the sales of the Millennium trilogy or its spin-offs.

I was thrilled to learn that Gabrielsson has written her own book: "There are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me. The ever-wonderful Carla and J-A went with me to the Swedish Consulate-hosted event to launch the book in Toronto. Gabrielsson spoke and answered questions for an hour, then signed books. It was a thought-provoking and positive way to spend Midsummer.

Gabrielsson was very thoughtful and articulate during the presentation, and already J-A and I have had some spin-off discussions based on some of the things she said that night.

I finished the book in the two days after I bought it that night. It's written in a very concise and clear style (it's not surprising to learn she's an architect by profession). Most of the book is about Gabrielsson's and Larsson's life together, rather than the aftermath of his death. There's a lot of warmth here, and a reassuring amount of humour. There were also a lot of surprises, although mostly those were in the final chapters (my head is still reeling from the "contractual" marriage proposal, if that's not too much of a spoiler).

It seems to me there are a lot of people taking the attitude of, "all the inheritance was done legally, they weren't married, suck it up." At best, this is a blatant failure to recognise the difference between what is morally right from the letter of the law.

"There are Thing I Want You to Know"... explains what is morally right, and why, and manages to be a damn good read at the same time.

Which is why everyone who has read the Millennium trilogy — and everyone who wants to fight the good fight — should read it.

there's worse things than dead air

I heard the news this morning that CKLN is off the air — again. As I write this, the radio station's web site says that there will be a statement Monday, and that the fight with the CRTC (and within CKLN itself, really) isn't over yet.

I'm glad there are people out there fighting the good fight, but I'm worried that there are not enough people seeing the big picture. This is not the first time this sort of conflict has happened, and not just at Ryerson University, CKLN's physical home and the sponsor that makes them "campus/community radio".

In 1992-93, I finished up two degrees at the University of Western Ontario while working as a volunteer at CHRW, their campus/community radio station*. Western was always a weird fit with the campus/community radio paradigm. The university is notoriously conservative and known for not interacting with the city it is situated in. It sits on the top of its hill, supposedly once a golf course, with a big black metal fence around most of the main campus. The fence is supposed to keep would-be rapists out, but as a day-to-day architectural feature, it felt more like it was keeping the public out when they wanted in and the students in when they wanted to explore the larger community.

It was almost twenty years ago and would take a long time to explain, so I'm not going to go into all the details here, but it happened like this at CHRW: a group of station volunteers felt that the then-new station management was barely following the letter of the station's Promise of Performance (the "contract" of content the station must fulfill to remain on air), and certainly not the spirit of it. Management said that as volunteers, we had no say in the matter and should shut up and follow orders. Volunteers spoke out against changes at meetings. Management retaliated by summarily removing volunteers from shows, and by threatening volunteers with suspensions or expulsions if they continued to speak up. There were several incidents of a volunteer showing up to work their shift, only to discover that the timeslot had been given to a completely different show without their prior knowledge. Typically the new announcer didn't even know the shift hadn't been designated vacant.

Then management told the concerned volunteers that they wouldn't speak to us unless we had a group name, so some people made one up for the purposes of communicating. But when we went to the university ombudsperson and the CRTC to follow due process, they said they couldn't help us because the channels we were using were for individual students and citizens, respectively, and since we were now an "official" group we didn't have the right to follow those processes.

It ended with the station finally banning everyone they could name from the station for life, including me. It was supposed to be in retaliation for a peaceful demonstration that had been held to protest the management changes. I never attended or took part in planning the demonstration. I wasn't even in the city of London, Ontario when it happened — I was working a five-week teaching contract in Toronto.

The part that still hurts, besides the "guilt by association" summary dismissal, is that there was at least one time where station management argued that I shouldn't be allowed to attend the volunteer meetings and ask questions because I wasn't a volunteer. This despite the fact that I had paid my dues, filled out the paperwork,  was listed on the volunteer roster, and had my station ID badge photo taken by the station manager himself. But I was the (then) girlfriend of an announcer with a long-running show, and somehow that meant that I wasn't a person in my own right in the sphere of station politics. That attitude was present and obvious long before the dispute started, even amongst people who prided themselves on being left-wing and feminist. Maybe that explains why I decided to fight management.

Afterwards, a lot of the people who had been fired from their volunteer positions over the dispute discussed alternative ways they could reach their audiences, often joking wryly about the need for an alternative to a supposedly alternative radio station. Using very low-wattage transmitters, the kind that real estate agents use to broadcast information about houses as you drive or walk by them, was considered, but ultimately not tried because of practical considerations. Internet radio was experimented with a bit (yes Virginia, even in the mid-90s there was internet radio — it was just a much bigger pain to create, transmit, and listen to). Ultimately most of the "concerned volunteers" went on to other community-based projects where their skills could be put to good use. For the first few years after the firings, there were several ironic incidents where a new volunteer from CHRW would call a former volunteer about a project they were working on and request an interview, only to be told that the former volunteer could not accept in good conscience because of the lifetime ban.

We also discussed going back on air after enough time had elapsed for forgetting (we didn't expect forgiveness), but there didn't seem to be any point.

The dispute was given some coverage on CBC radio. At the time we were disappointed that coverage of the CHRW situation was being truncated, but the sad thing was we lost coverage because there were other, similar disputes happening at other campus/community stations throughout Canada. From where I'm sitting, CKLN's latest news is another episode in an ongoing saga.

There are two things about it I find particularly troublesome:

1. Many of the people with power at campus/community stations — the power to take on and fire volunteers, the power to set content policy — don't know the CRTC regulations about such stations, or don't understand why those regulations are in place. There seems to be this idea that campus/community stations should be just like commercial radio, except "belonging to the students", who are encouraged to think of them as a public-broadcast version of last.fm (Don't get me wrong — I love last.fm. But it ain't campus/community radio, and it's not supposed to be.)
2. This has been going on for over twenty years (CHRW was hardly the first), but it only seems to make the news when a station is threatened with being reprimanded for CRTC infractions. I've been told that's because the mainstream media sees campus/community stations as competition. If so, they're being beyond ridiculous. Campus/community radio stations don't have the broadcasting wattage, the resources, or the advertising enticements of commercial radio by design.

There's more to consider, like accessibility, community representation, and other considerations, but this post is going long. I'll finish by noting one thing: see that black-and-white logo on CHRW's web site, up at the top of the home page? I was surprised to see that they were still using it — it came in around 1991. The original, which used a sans serif font, was created by a volunteer who did graphics for television. But he became one of the concerned volunteers, so the Times New Roman version you can still see on the station web site was created. That way management could claim that they had made the logo themselves, and not accepted it from a volunteer they then summarily dismissed.

* And no, I never had my own show, although I did guest sometimes when an announcer couldn't make their shift because of vacation or illness. I actually volunteered to learn how to work a mixing board and other radio engineering tasks — but what happened with that is a blog post for another day.

decadence done right

With the major exception of dark chocolate, I'm not a big sweets person. I actively dislike boiled sweets/hard candy, and a lot of the desserts on menus leave me cold. I mean, honestly, so you threw a bunch of brownies, fudge, and caramel on top of a chocolate cake and called it "sinful" — I don't believe in sin, and it's just not that good. You can't just pile a bunch of sweet stuff on top of each other and claim it's a tour de force. My favourite restaurant dessert, which I have had at a restaurant precisely once, is three fresh strawberries dipped in dark chocolate. That's all anyone needs if the rest of the meal was good.

A few weekends ago the ever-knowledgeable J-A and I ran errands on Queen West, and we had Indian food for a late lunch. I'm used to Mumbai Indian food, which has enough heat to please most people, but isn't overwhelming. Our food was well-prepared, but it was so mild I had to wonder if there was any spices used in it at all. J-A suggested we go to Dufflet's for dessert, and I said that sounded like a great idea. I figured I'd just get a cookie or something small.

Dufflet's was packed to the rafters when we got there — not surprising on a rainy Saturday afternoon. So we trooped over to the Red Tea Box instead.

I'd never been before. I didn't even know it was a place you could get tea and dessert at. From the streetcar, it always looked to me like a very impressive cake-decorating place (although of course they do that too). Inside was like an art gallery by way of a tea shop. J-A checked that a table was free while I wandered around the part of the floor where they sell cookies and other goodies to go. There were square cookies iced to look like pictures of Japanese cherry blossoms, gingerbread men iced to look like little Japanese girls wearing kimonos and cute smiles, petit fours with pictures of pandas. Every single piece was amazingly well-crafted.

We took the outside customer's route to the back building where the tables & chairs were, and were seated at a table with vintage overstuffed porch chairs on either side of it. J-A ordered a mulled pear drink with a fruit tart, and I got black assam tea with a honey saffron cake.

J-A's order was a poem of aromatics. The bowl of mulled pear juice came with a sprig of fresh thyme floating in it, and the tart had all the expected wonderful fruit flavours plus some twists that couldn't be explained by the visible ingredients. Unfortunately, the photo I took of her order came out blurry, but I did get some good snaps of my honey saffron cake:

Yes, that's a cake. And those decorations on it are royal icing made with 24 karat gold. It was several minutes before I could bring myself to cut into this, it was so beautiful and perfect. The blue icing came off the cake in one colour-saturated piece, but I ate it anyways (and turned my tongue and teeth blue, which was fun in and of itself!). The cake inside was light and flavourful, and the honey saffron cream filling was gorgeous.

Was it expensive? Yeah — the beverages and desserts came out to $17 per person for the two of us (the honey saffron cake alone was $12). But as affordable indulgences go, that's not too bad. That's 9.6 Kit Kat bars out of the vending machine at work. The one-time experience of eating this cake was far more enjoyable than 9.6 Kit Kat bars spread out over the course of several weeks. I'd rather just remember eating the cake than have a Kit Kat bar, and I used to really like Kit Kat bars when Rowntree still made them.

I can't see myself going for something like this more than a few times a year, but each time will be very much appreciated. This is what a treat is supposed to be like, people.

Help, please: Somewhere on the interweb is a wonderful video about a woman who is just finishing lunch with her new boyfriend when he has to leave early. He tells the server to let the woman have whatever else she wants for lunch and to put it on his credit card. She then agonises (in a very, very funny but true way) about whether or not to have some cake for dessert, finally decides to indulge, and is just getting into the cake when her boyfriend returns... but I won't spoil it for you. What I need is to find this video again. It is absolutely hilarious, but it's funny because it's true, true, true. I've just tried Googling for it, and am coming up with nothing. Anyone have any leads? Please? Pretty please?

the virtues of being ready

I received a letter from Descant magazine sometime during my business trip. It mentioned that the formal launch of the issue with my story in it would be 1 March, and that it would be in bookstores shortly thereafter. It's available at Book City, Chapters/Indigo, and various independent shops. If you like ghost stories, definitely check it out.

Since the story is in final form and officially published, I thought now would be a good time to blog about its making. In some ways it's at least as spooky as the actual story.

Late one worknight, I was surfing the web. Most of me was already asleep, and there was one part of me that kept looking at the clock on the computer desktop and thinking, "really ought to get to bed". But you know how it goes: one more link, oooh that sounds interesting, one more link...

The last link was an interview between Neil Gaiman and... someone. It was a promotional interview for The Graveyard Book, and at one point, either Gaiman or the person conducting the interview said, "No one expects a ghost". The other person agreed.

I honestly can't remember who was quoted as saying what, and I've never been able to find the interview since. I suppose if I dug through Gaiman's blog enough I'd eventually find the link again, but it's never seemed worth it, because of the two things that happened next.

The first thing was that some part of my still-conscious or subconscious brain found the statement "No one expects a ghost" very offensive. As an awake person writing this now, I have no idea why. I just remember feeling very angry about it. I even remember saying out loud, "They do too!"

And then Mary Beth started telling me what happened to Avery. Judging from her voice, she was at least five years older than the ten-year-old child in the story I wrote, but I could literally hear her in my head. She had that distinctive accent only used by people of Anglo-Saxon descent from Wellington or Halton counties. It's probably died out now with the influx of people in the new subdivisions there. I've never been able to imitate that accent out loud, but apparently one part of my subconscious knows exactly what it sounds like.

I opened up a word processing file and started writing down what Mary Beth was telling me. The first three-quarters of "The Expected Ghost" started off basically as dictation-taking. My conscious brain was able to guide things a bit — I picked the name "Avery" deliberately, taking it from a totally different web page I'd read earlier in the day — but a lot of it was just taking the words down without crafting them at all.

It would be more romantic to say I stayed up the rest of the night taking down that first draft, but the truth is eventually I looked at the clock and realised I really had to get to bed, so I reluctantly saved the file, shut the computer down, and caught some sleep. I finished the rest of the draft the following evening. One of the first revision jobs I had to do was to make sure the seam line between the subconscious dictation and the deliberate "awake" writing was invisible.

I got to write a ghost story that a ghost told me about. As far as "craft" goes, I can't say I'd recommend this as a usual method. It's far more likely the writer would just fall asleep on the couch than get any work done. I'm very lucky that I had the wherewithal left to open the word processor and start writing instead of thinking, "good idea, shall have to figure that out tomorrow". That seemed to be the biggest lesson — when it arrives, write it down.

banking in the shadow of Disneyland

I just spent ten days in Orlando, working as part of an implementation team that was launching some software for a bank. Sunday was our only day off, and whilst sitting by the pool, chatting with co-workers, I pointed my cell-phone camera up and took this photo:

Since the other nine days of the trip were spent working 10-15 hours per day in windowless rooms lit by fluorescent tubing, it seemed a well-deserved break.

Per company policy and my own ethical standards, I can't tell you about the people I worked with (although they were all, to the last one, excellent, wonderful, and lots of other positive adjectives), or any details about the implementation (except to say it went very well). But I can tell you what I was thinking about during the few hours when I was awake, not working, and not with co-workers. I was thinking about Baudrillard's assertion that Disneyland exists to obscure the fact that America is Disneyland.

The hotel we stayed at is in the heart of the tourist area. Partly that's because tourist areas are where the hotels are, and partly that's because data processing centres for banks tend to be in less-expensive parts of town — which in Orlando's case means they are close to the major amusement parks. Every morning, just as the sunrise was making the eastern sky pale, I would pile into an SUV with my colleagues and watch the strip malls, countryside, and orange groves slide by, the same way you watch the singing animatronic models slide by when you're on the "It's a Small World" ride. We would leave the office after sunset, and pick a restaurant to eat at with a different theme from the previous night's venue, the same way people staying at the Disney resort do.

The motels I stayed at as a kid in 1978 are all long gone, but the architecture of their outdoor, terraced room entrances is echoed in the newer hotels, which were all built around ten years later:

The rooms were designed for families with children to stay in, or for university students who wanted to save money by bunking together. They are all suites, with a living room (the sofa folds out into a bed), kitchenette, full bath, and full-sized bedroom:

This living room area always reminded me of the Florida scenes from Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise, even though its decor is the faux-luxe of the mid-80s rather than the leftover-from-the-60s portrayed in the film.

And that's how everything outside where we were working felt: like a film set, like an amusement park. The Floridians I worked with had some wry comments about "tourist Florida" versus "living Florida", and I believe them.

The exact border between the end of the parks and the start of the real, unsimulated Florida was impossible to pick out.

amazons are made, not born

I am, according to my doctor, exactly 175cm tall. That's almost-but-not-quite five feet nine in Imperial measure; the actual fraction is five feet, eight-and-nine-tenths inches or something awkward like that. Since the average Canadian woman is only five feet four, that makes me stick out as a tall woman, at least in this country.

Being a woman, I talk about personal safety with my friends from time to time. It's just the usual stuff that gets distributed in those "safety tips" e-mails that float around the internet — how to carry your purse so that a mugger will decide you're not a good target, how to keep your cell phone handy so that you can call for help quickly but not get noticed by a cell phone thief, and so on. While we're on the topic, we might discuss toxic relationships, domestic violence, what to do if someone tries to assault us. Not something to dwell on and get paranoid or hateful about, but information needs to be shared, right?

It never fails, though: there's always a more petite friend who will turn to me and say, "You're lucky. You're tall, so you can protect yourself better."

This blog post is about why that is complete and utter nonsense.

Yes, I'm fully aware that many sources (like this one) will mention that women can be at risk because of their smaller size (they should say "on average", but this is rarely included). But consider: being tall just means that I'm tall. It doesn't turn me into Wonder Woman. I am most definitely not stronger than the average man my height or even a few inches shorter than I am. I don't have any special innate self-defence skills because I have long legs. It doesn't increase my pain threshold, or how likely I am to get bruised or broken when struck hard enough. I have no idea how to throw a punch, or how to shield myself while I'm throwing it.

If anything, I would argue that being tall puts me at a disadvantage to some extent. I can't move as fast. It takes longer for me to duck. It's harder for me to escape if I'm in a tight spot.

I've also got the myth going against me. I'm tall, so I'm supposed to be at a lower risk. If I do have someone smaller, man or woman, assault me, and I try to defend myself, what do you think is going to happen to me if my assailant claims I started the fight?

The thing is, height doesn't make might any more than might makes right. There's this weird perception out there that just because a woman is tall, that means she has other physiological attributes normally associated with men her height, like relatively greater strength. There's a whole host of other ways this assumption manifests itself in non-violent situations, but that's a rant for another day.

Meanwhile, stop thinking that just because tall people can reach the top shelf without a stepladder, we can "fight back" any better than shorter people.

Pitouie reviewed

Just sit right back and read a tale, a tale of a fateful trip...


Pitouie (Derek Winkler) is one of those novels that's hard to describe without revealing important surprise plot points. The blurb on the web site of its publisher, The Workhorsery, probably does the best job possible of explaining it without giving anything away. My version goes like this: in the present day there is a small, obscure, independent island nation in the South Pacific. In the early 70s, there are men working at a DEW station in the high Arctic. The common thread between the two settings is how far large corporations are willing to go to see their profit line jump a few points, and the, ah, absurdities that can lead to. Some of the absurdities are funny. Some are chilling.

Pitouie is not for those who believe that the corporate sector provides all that is good in this world (okay, they ought to read it, but chances are they would have a hard time not being too annoyed to finish it). For the rest of us, it offers a lot of laughs, excellent storytelling, and some sobering ideas to ponder after the last page is reached. The plot follows a "crazy enough to be true" line that has made the book difficult for me to describe to my friends — twice I've been asked to clarify if it's fiction or non-fiction.

And maybe that's the point. The story is a tall tale about tall tales, about what humans are willing to believe if the right details are added in. There's even an official web site for the South Pacific island of Pitouie, nudging the story of the novel out into the virtual real world, if not the physical one.

The writing is straightforward and clear — good, accessible subway reading. Character development? Nah. Lars, the radar operator at the DEW station, has a character arc, but most of the rest of the characters are only there to push the plot along. Even Otis, the main character of the South Pacific thread, just seems to be present so he can ask everyone else what's going on and reveal the story.

The story lives up to its top billing, though. It starts with a simple enough premise, but after three chapters I was hooked, and I found the final half of the book difficult to put down.

If you want some light, fast-moving reading that still offers food for thought (lots), check it out.

how soon we forget

Hey Canadians!

Remember the National Do Not Call List registry?

It was (is!) a web site where you could register your phone numbers — home phone, cell phone, the works — and make sure that companies didn't tie up your phone lines trying to sell you crap. There were some exceptions, which are very clearly explained on the web site, but overall it meant that those after-dinner sales pitches were off your phone and out of your face forever.

In theory.

I don't know about you, but of late it seems to me that I've been getting more of those stupid calls. Since I've been spending my winter vacation at home feeling ill, the resentment of dragging myself out of my sickbed just to find out someone who can't pronounce my last name wants to pitch a chimney flue cleaning service at me has been, uh, increasing. Just ask any of the poor saps who have called me lately.

Then I remembered that the DNCL was only good for so many years, at which point you had to re-register your number.  Aha! Must be that time. So I went and did it, and the web elves who work for the government served me up this page:

(In real life, my actual home phone number displayed, of course.)

Okay, so if I, and everyone else who hit the registration web page as fast as they could, are good until 2013, then what's with the increase in phone solicitations?

Two possible explanations.

One: companies that you already deal with are allowed to call you up and pitch more stuff. So are politicians, newspapers, charities, and a bunch of other organisations. I have learned that if you say the magic words, "I do not accept phone solicitations. Please take me off your list," you can get these calls to diminish, but it takes many tries before it works.

Two: just like many people predicted, companies that indulge in telemarketing just waited a few years until they figured things had settled down, and have quietly started calling people again.

Consider this a public service announcement. If your number is a Canadian phone number and you are registered on the DNCL, you can complain about unsolicited calls via the web link I gave above. You have to know the number that called you, which is a pain for people like me who don't have caller ID, but it can be done.

If you have a Canadian phone number and are not registered yet, you may still do so using the link at the top of this post.

And if you get companies calling you, especially if they sound like some offshore outfit with a poor grasp of which country they're even calling, you can always use the magic words, "I do not accept phone solicitations. Please take me off your list." A professional marketer told me if you use that phrase, any self-respecting business will remove you from their list, because they know it's a waste of call time to try to contact you for a sale. If the person calling you doesn't understand what you mean (the caller I had this afternoon found the statement confusing), just say, "Add me to your kill list." That's telemarketing lingo for a list of numbers the auto-dialers will skip because, again, they know they won't get a sale by calling that number.

It can be a hard slog, but it's worth it for the peace and quiet. Don't forget.

the grinch is my hero

There has to be something redeeming about enduring a six-week headache every bloody year.

If you're one of those types who loves Christmas cheer, Christmas decorations, Christmas presents, Christmas dinner... and especially if you feel offended by those nasty, awful Christmas haters, consider this (true) story that happened when I was in third year university:

Late April, a prematurely warm and humid night, sometime around two AM. At the single student's apartment building — a 300-unit set of real apartments, not dorm rooms — drunken louts are lurching and bellowing in the front drive. They're drinking on the front lawn, they're making an insane amount of noise, and they're doing an excellent job of keeping every other resident who wanted to sleep or study from doing so.

A woman on the third floor who is trying to prep a defence of her master's thesis decides she can't take any more. She sticks her head over her apartment balcony and offers the revellers alternatives to keeping the whole building awake. They could go to a friend's house. They could go to a bar. They could go to one of the empty fields of undeveloped land nearby and party out of earshot. She understands that they're done their exams and want to celebrate, but surely they can understand that not everyone else is on their schedule.

Two of the partiers hurl abuse and gobs of spit, but a third one walks over to where the woman's balcony is, beer bottle in hand, and tries to be philosophical.

"You've got to learn to loosen up," he tells her. "This is the time to enjoy yourself, when you're young. Plenty of time to work hard later on."

"But I'm defending my thesis tomorrow," the woman says. "Please, at least let me get some sleep."

The exchange repeats a few times in the way that such exchanges do, until the philosopher decides to expand his statement.

"What I figure is this," he says. "You've only got so many years to live, right? But no-one ever knows how many. So you might as well enjoy them as much as you can." He takes a pull from the beer bottle for emphasis.

"But I want to defend my thesis." The woman is pleading now. From the sixth-floor balcony where I am overhearing this, it sounds like she's in tears.

There's no point in calling the campus police. It's Sunday night and they're thinly staffed on weekends, especially during exam time. It could be dawn before they show up. There's no point in calling the community police either. Unless someone has punched someone else out, they'll claim it's a job for the campus police.

Eventually the louts did get tired and packed up the lawn party that night, but imagine if they hadn't for six weeks. Imagine there were louts all over the place, doing the same thing. Imagine they had their own set of songs — start with Alice Cooper's "School's Out" and work from there — that only got played during exam time. Imagine retail stores trying to cash in on the post-exam euphoria and having special sales to mark the occasion.

Then remember the Grinch at the start of Seuss's famous Christmas book, complaning about the noise.

Religion, tradition, or rite of passage, it doesn't really matter. If those who need to escape it can't, it's a nightmare, and it's irrelevant how much the participants enjoy it, or how big a community majority they are. If they have left no way to escape, they are being louts, no matter how charitable and moral they may be otherwise.

Yeah, the Grinch capitulated in the end, but that was because he was an anti-consumerist who found an overlap between the Whos's moral framework and his own. It also took heroic efforts on his part to get there.

I don't want to shut down Christmas, not any more than I would want to shut down a group of undergraduates celebrating the end of the school year. At the same time, I don't want anyone to shut me down, either. But that's what happens, every year.

So go ahead and celebrate if you want. Just be mindful of the neighbours.

truth in advertising

My mum sent me this collection of vintage ads with the comment, "The younger generation will never believe these ads actually ran!"

Would it were true.

The only ones that surprised me were the pop ads aimed at babies, especially since they were all about making sure Junior would "fit in" with his peers as a lifelong sugar addict. Even so, I can see it — there's sugary breakfast stuff out there today aimed at (slightly older) kids and their parents that makes claims about giving youngsters "an energetic start to their day" or some such euphemism. The cigarette ads... we've all heard about the cigarette ads, and I'm old enough to remember seeing the "you've come a long way, baby" Virginia Slims ads in the National Enquirer at my grandmother's house, and Marlboro Man billboards during holiday road trips to the States.

That leaves the Del Monte, "wish list," and Kenmore Chef ads from this lot. Domestic cleaning and cooking products are still aimed at women (just not at their husbands for the purposes of buying for women). Also, I know a lot of women of the "younger generation" who will pretend not to be able to open a damn ketchup bottle just so they can get a guy to do it and honestly say he "does stuff" for them.

In fact... maybe we should run ads just like these, except in the present day and for present-day situations. Let the truthiness come out, and then see what happens.

vive la resistance!

It took me a week to recover, but the last week of October had a lot going on, not the least of which was Samhain/Hallowe'en. The cool part was that all of it was inexpensive, accessible, and yet somehow exclusive.

The Sunday before Hallowe'en I met up with the other members of a book club I belong to. Instead of having a book to read, we told each other about books we'd read that we really liked. I brought the books I wanted to talk about along, as did most of the people who attended, so we got to look at cover art and read back-cover blurbs as well as hear about the books — something that will come in handy when I go to look for the books other people mentioned that I want to read.

We met in a café on the Danforth, so the entire cost of that outing was just the tea I bought. Not bad for an entire afternoon spent discussing my favourite subject!

On Wednesday I went to the latest Hutch House Concert, hosted by the ever-cool Cathy & Darren. It was great checking out new (to me) music, and was a lot of fun. The sound quality was noticeably impressive — nice and clear even though we were sitting in an average-sized rec room with the dropped ceilings you always get in houses with forced-air heating. I think any concert I go to now where I don't get to sit on a couch with the musicians less than five metres away is going to be disappointing.

The week wound up with the latest edition of West End Stories on Saturday night. The ever-amazing Joan and ever-inspiring Tara showed up, and a good time was had by all. We stuck with ghost stories/weird tales for the evening in honour of the season. I told the true story of an strict atheist who saw a ghost, and discovered there are only four degrees of separation between the wrestler The Iron Sheik and me (if only I could tell my grandparents — they loved to hate him).

So, three fun events... which wound up costing me less than $25 to attend in total. Try doing that at the local shopping mall!

fiction from fiction

A short story of mine was accepted for publication in Descant magazine! It won't be published until Spring 2011, but it's my first publication and only my third submission, so I'm very pleased.

It's a ghost story, and it's based on a small cemetery near where I lived when I was in high school. I only ever had the guts to go in it once or twice — even in broad daylight, even though it has good sightlines and is on a major intersection, the place is creepy. The earth directly over each grave has sunk an inch or two lower than the rest of the ground, and is always of a squishy texture if the weather is above freezing, while the ground between the graves is always firm. It's a very disconcerting place to walk.

There was one headstone I vividly remembered from my high school years. It was white limestone, cut with block lettering, and dedicated to a woman who had died 1919-1920. She was the mother of several children who were all also listed on the tombstone. They had all died within months of each other.

At the time I thought it was odd that this had happened, since 1919 is relatively modern times. Then I learned about the Spanish flu pandemic and thought, "Aha! That's what happened!".

So yeah, my ghost story has to do with a farmer's graveyard and the Spanish flu pandemic.

Recently I made the drive back to Brampton to get some photos of the graveyard. Since I lived there, they've put up strip plazas both behind the graveyard and across 15 Sideroad  from it. The one behind the graveyard has a much lower elevation than the cemetery itself — there's a retaining wall about five feet high at the northern edge of the parking lot. Which means, yes, the most southerly graves are right beside a parking lot retaining wall (and some do go right to the southern edge of the cemetery)... and the tops of the coffins are slightly higher than the top of the parking lot pavement, assuming those sunken areas I mentioned earlier indicate the total amount of settling.

I lucked out with the light for the photos I took — it was about an hour before sunset. The sky was clear, so everything was washed in a warm gold colour. Take a look at the slide show below if you're interested.

The big surprise was.... my Spanish flu tombstone didn't exist. In its place (or at least, where I remember it being placed) was the red granite Campbell stone. It records a woman and two men, but as you can see from the ages, they weren't mother and children. Apparently my brain invented those. It was a good lesson about getting inspiration from real life sources — since the trip out there, I'm a lot less worried about "copying" things than I used to be.

Do you have any super-vivid memories of things that never existed (or existed, but not at all the way you remember them)?

a directive

For the American Moderns class I took in university, I had a professor named Geoffrey Rans. He told my class... being our lecturer, he told the class a lot of things, but I made a point of writing down something he told us as he was assigning our mid-term essays:

Go for the authors you like.

Celebrate them.
Justify them.

When you've got four senior-level mid-term essay assignments staring you in the face, that's very heady stuff.

It's dangerous to pin a change in direction to a remark a prof makes off-the-cuff, but the truth is my attitude towards books has become a lot more extroverted since then. In elementary and high school, I thought of books as secrets only I got to know. Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang? I took it out of the school library so many times in a row that Mrs. Zimmer, our librarian, forgot to stamp the renewal date on the card once and I got in trouble for it being overdue. I now own a copy of the same edition that was in Brisbane Public School way back when. But I don't remember telling anyone why it was so great. 

Ten years later I was doing the same thing with another of Mordecai Richler's when I read Joshua Then and Now. To be fair, I tried to tell a few people about that one, but I got a lot of eye-rolling and, "But it's not for a class? Are you nuts?" in return.

Consequently, I never tried to tell anyone about Oh Happy Death, at least not until my friend Deb played Crocodiles by Echo & the Bunnymen for me. And I never did find an excuse to rave about how great La Peste was (still tied for first with L'Etranger in my personal Camus list).

Still, one tries, and one does improve. A big milestone was when I was able to rant about Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Watt so successfully that a co-worker thought they were films (um, it wasn't an office where people read much). Speaking of films, it was a lot of fun to tell people that if they liked Cronenberg's takes on Naked Lunch and Crash, then they really should read the books. Somewhat evil, but fun.

This past year I've waved copies of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, You and the Pirates, and Dark Matter under other readers' noses and tried to make it very, very clear that it was important to their lives to read these books. Dark Matter itself was a gift from the ever-literary Howard & Rhonda.

I remember thinking, even as I scribbled down what Rans had said in the top margin of my notebook, that it was odd the phrase he used was, "Go for the authors you like," instead of "Go for the books you like." For most readers, most of the time, it's the book they know, not the author of it.

Right now I'm reading Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, and I think I'm finally starting to understand. Reading it isn't just learning about an amazing science fiction writer —  it's re-learning all those SF books I used to take out of the public library and nosh through the way the other twelve-year-olds used to nosh through a bag of Pop Rocks. It's hard to believe now, but I was the only girl I knew who read science fiction.

But that's the best part: if you go for the authors you like, justify them, and celebrate them, you will find other readers like you, and the amount of justifying and celebrating will only increase from there.

dedication dithering

I have a painting by bill bissett that hangs over my bed:

It was bought directly from bill, in bill's apartment, and has a dedication from bill written on the back.

The dedication is not to me. It's to my ex, who bought it when I wasn't present. When he left me, at the last dividing-up-our-stuff session, he glanced at the painting (then gracing the living room) and said, "You want that? You always liked it."

I was astonished. "Sure, I'd love to have it."

"Keep it." And that was that.

What do dedications and autographs mean? I used to think they were souvenirs, reminders that the you got to meet the someone who had created the something you liked so much. To discard the signed something would be to discard the appreciation that led you to seek out the signing in the first place.

I've learned it hasn't always been that way. I've seen someone use a dedication or autograph to steal a book from someone else ("Oh, when he signed it he put it to me, not you. I guess he misunderstood. I'll get you another copy"), to make the fake authentic, to commodify something as insignificant as a paper serviette.

Above all, in the downloadable age, what does a signature mean anymore? And what's to sign if nothing is in a  version one can touch? I've heard stories of people getting their iPods signed, but I've never known anyone who's had this done, and it seems silly to get something signed when you'll be lucky if you can even get it to work in twenty years' time.

So what's really of value? The signature or the signed?

how i found time to post this blog

Usually I hate it when someone gives time management advice, or evangelises about a time management system. Most of the ones I've come across aren't flexible enough to adapt to different work situations, involve spending as much time managing the thing as they do using it, and don't scale well.

I do even worse with the common suggestions for writing routines. Keeping a word count minimum and/or writing first thing in the morning have the opposite effect: I get so wound up about meeting the goals that I don't write at all. Deadlines can help — I've sucessfully completed NaNoWriMo more than once — but all this stuff about "goals" and "milestones" leaves me clammy.

Sure as I started out this blog post with the above paragraphs, I think I've found a method that works, at least for me. It's called the Pomodoro Technique, and it's been around for twenty years. But it's new to me, and it seems to be new to the people I've been evangelising to telling about it.

Instead of worrying about your word count, or letting the whole whatever-it-is at hand loom over you, you just concentrate on working steadily on one task, for twenty-five minutes straight, without interruption. When the twenty-five minutes are up, you take a five-minute break to do other things. Then you start the timer for twenty-five minutes again. Each twenty-five minute work period plus five-minute break is called a Pomodoro. The details of how to apply the technique are available for free from the Pomodoro web site.

Note: I have no idea how good or bad the stuff they're selling on the site is. My enthusiasm is strictly for the free book you can download. I also found a free timer for my cell phone that was made to manage Pomodoros. Apparently there are several out there for both phones and computers, although the book just recommends a regular kitchen timer.

What I like is that the technique gets rid of all the anxiety that was making me freeze up. I wrote five nights out of seven last week, and got 4,631 words completed — 369 short of the 1,000 words a day x 5 days a week I was aiming for previously (and failing miserably to obtain). I only wrote one Pomodoro per day, averaging 840 words per session. At two Pomodoros per day, someone could comfortably win NaNoWriMo writing at that rate.

Every technique has its pros and cons, of course. But if your current routine isn't working for you, Pomodoros are definitely worth trying.

kicks

I think it works like this.

Sometimes when I'm knitting in public, people will stop and say something like, "I wish I could do that, but I'd never have the patience." My standard response to this is, "a stitch only takes about .75 seconds to create — how much patience do you need?"

It's all about mindset. Sure, an average adult sweater has about 40,000 stitches in it, but if your satisfaction is at the stitch level, that means you just get a kick every .75 seconds about 40,000 times before you have to think about making something new. Talk about cheap thrills, right?

There's a another payoff level, though, and it's when you finish something. That kick can vary, depending on how difficult the execution was, how physically big the item is (very tiny and very large items have the biggest kicks), how desperately you need to finish the damn thing, and how valued it will be by the intended recipient.

A couple of Sundays ago I made this floor cushion:

Since I am nigh-phobic about machine sewing, this was a big accomplishment for me. I still pet the thing like a toddler with a new plush toy, and haven't actually placed it on the floor since I took this photo.

About a week after that I made this necklace and earring set:

It took all of a Monday evening, but I got to use construction methods I don't normally use. It felt pretty good to finish it all in one night.

Now, when I'm supposed to be working on my novel, I'm writing this blog. The blog's a nice quick hit of satisfaction — the template will make it look pretty on the web, I put two nice colourful photos in it, and I got to write something and call it done.

But it's a one-kick wonder. Once it's done, I don't get anything else out of it.

The novel, on the other hand, is sitting just shy of 20,000 words. I know by the time I finish rewrite #2 it will be real, actual novel-length. That's the plan, and although I still think it's a good plan, recently I've been frustrated because I want that "it's done! it's ready to pitch!" kick. But it's not ready for that yet, not nearly. I don't mean in a perfectionist-writer way. I mean in a gotta-finish-the-damn-story way.

In the meantime, I have to remind myself that I can get 500 decent words' worth of story-telling out in about half an hour. 500 decent words in 30 minutes is 16.67 words a minute. How much patience do I need?