Dear Repub­li­cans and/​or conservatives,

I don’t know how to break this to you, since you obvi­ously haven’t fig­ured it out your­selves yet, but it’s start­ing to become a prob­lem. So here it goes.

You lost.

Last Novem­ber, the Amer­i­can peo­ple took a good hard look at where your ideas and poli­cies have taken us, and decided, as they say in show­biz, “to go a dif­fer­ent way.” It’s not that we didn’t under­stand your posi­tion, it’s just that, well, we’re just not that into you.

I know it hurts. I know you’re used to throw­ing your weight around and get­ting your way. But that’s just not going to hap­pen any­more. Democ­rats, lib­er­als and other folks you’ve spent the last three decades demo­niz­ing are call­ing the shots now. It’s over.

It didn’t have to be like this. Pres­i­dent Obama (gee, I just love say­ing that) and the rest of the Demo­c­ra­tic lead­er­ship tried to reach across the aisle. They asked for your input into how we should go about fix­ing the mess you put us in. We tried, so very hard, to be not bipar­ti­san, but post–par­ti­san. We wanted your help.

What we got instead was a bunch of petu­lant prima don­nas stomp­ing their feet, hold­ing their breath and shout­ing “NO!” at the top of their lungs at any­thing and every­thing. In the great­est cri­sis most Amer­i­cans have seen in their life­times, Repub­li­cans have opted to act like three-​year-​olds. Well, that’s your call.

But here’s how it’s going to go down. We’re going to fix this coun­try with or with­out you. We’re going to do what’s nec­es­sary, even if it’s not pop­u­lar. We’re going to raise taxes to pay for nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture. We’re going to spend tax­payer money to cre­ate jobs. We’re going to nego­ti­ate with other coun­tries rather than just wav­ing bombs at them. And we’re going to see if just maybe you cre­ate fewer ter­ror­ists by build­ing schools than by blow­ing them up.

And as we do this, you will have no input and no choice. This is entirely your own doing. We asked for your input, and the only thing you offered was the same tired and thor­oughly dis­cred­ited ideas that got us into this mess in the first place. Let me be very clear. Neo­con ide­ol­ogy, of pros­per­ity through tax cuts for the rich and peace through bel­liger­ent nation­al­ism, is has been proven just as wrong as the flat Earth the­ory. We don’t believe the sun revolves around the Earth, and we don’t believe in Reaganomics. The extreme ver­sion of con­ser­vatism espoused by the Repub­li­can party has been proven to be wrong. It sim­ply doesn’t work. So we’re not going to do that anymore.

And as long as that’s all you’re will­ing to bring to the table, you will remain in exile, ignored and irrel­e­vant. If we have to, we’ll start forc­ing you to actu­ally fil­i­buster the bills you want to force to 60 votes and show the Amer­i­cans you sup­pos­edly rep­re­sent how you’re try­ing to hurt them for your own polit­i­cal gain. It’s sad, but it’s your own deci­sion. When you’re will­ing to act like adults and have a seri­ous dis­cus­sion about our seri­ous prob­lems, we’ll be here. But we’re not hold­ing our breath.

I know one of the biggest mis­takes in blog­ging is to blog about why you’re not blog­ging (META ALERT) but as you’ll see below, avoid­ing mis­takes doesn’t seem to be one of my tal­ents. So I thought I’d let my read­ers know what’s going on in my life these days and how that’s affect­ing my writ­ing, both fic­tion and non­fic­tion. If my per­sonal life or how I try to work writ­ing into it along with every­thing else doesn’t inter­est you, move along. Maybe today’s Mar­maduke is funny.

I got a bit of a shock Wednes­day. I had expected a main­te­nance guy to start re-​tiling my shower, in which I’d jammed fallen tiles back into place at angles so they braced against each other. It’s been this way for nearly a year. Such is the qual­ity estab­lish­ment in which I cur­rently live. I’ve also had my car stolen out of the reserved park­ing spot lit­er­ally ten feet away from my bal­cony. Klassy with a K is what I’m saying.

When I got home, it looked like they hadn’t even started. Curi­ous, I headed over to the leas­ing office to find out what was up. The apart­ment man­ager, a real sweet­heart who has always been on my side, told me that the work­man com­plained about the smell and that her boss told her that I had to go. There was noth­ing she could do. She’d give me a good ref­er­ence and it wouldn’t be treated as an evic­tion if I coop­er­ated, but I had until the end of the month.

I’ll freely admit that legally, I had this com­ing. One of my cats, Kosh, is a “spe­cial” cat. If the cat­box isn’t com­pletely clean, he’ll go else­where. I try to clean this up when I know about it, but there’s only so much a vac­uum cleaner can do, and if he whizzes some­where when I’m at work, I won’t even notice it on the tan car­pet until long after the odor mol­e­cules, which form unbreak­able bonds with acrylic car­pet fiber, have become per­ma­nent addi­tions. No mat­ter what I do, the place smells like a cat­box. I’ve become com­pletely inured to it, and hardly notice it any­more, but I’ve been told it’s pretty notice­able. So sure, they have a legit beef.

It was a shock, com­ing with no warn­ing, but I ral­lied. I still had some of my tax refund in the bank, and had two pay­checks com­ing by March 1^st, so all I had to do was find a place with an imme­di­ate vacancy and move in. I made an appoint­ment with the com­plex I wanted to move into last year but couldn’t quite pull together the money. The plan was to sign the new lease Sat­ur­day morn­ing and start mov­ing my stuff over there. I’d planned to move in August any­way, and this way meant I could spend the sum­mer in a new place with cen­tral air (my cur­rent digs faces south­west and has two barely func­tional wall units, so it bakes in sum­mer afternoons).

On Sat­ur­day morn­ing, I woke up and did what I do every morn­ing on wak­ing up. I grabbed my phone and checked my email. I noticed an insuf­fi­cient funds notice from my bank, and thought, “That shouldn’t be pos­si­ble. Yes­ter­day was pay­day, and I have all that tax refund money left.” So I got up and went to the desk­top com­puter to bet­ter take a look at my bank web­site and fig­ure out what was up. And there, plain as day, was the prob­lem. All my money was gone. Just van­ished, poof!

I called my bank and they told me there was a court-​ordered hold on my account. They didn’t have much more info and won’t until Tues­day, as Monday’s a fed­eral hol­i­day. They did tell me who the hold was for, which sounded famil­iar. I tracked it down to a law firm here in town that tried to sue me to col­lect on a credit card on which I’d defaulted in my 20s. I called them, and they explained that they hadn’t accepted my pay­ment arrange­ment offer, they’d tried to con­tact me to nego­ti­ate and I hadn’t returned their calls. I don’t remem­ber that hap­pen­ing, but as it’s my pol­icy to screen calls and delete voice­mails unheard from blocked Cal­lerID num­bers, I couldn’t prove them wrong.

So now I’m los­ing my place to live and have no money with which to secure another. And if I really was as alone as I’m sure we all some­times feel in this old life, I’d be well and truly screwed. But as it turns out, that’s not the case.

I’m mov­ing in with my par­ents, and if that doesn’t work out for some rea­son, I have a stand­ing offer from my sis­ter to take me in. A friend gave me enough cash to tide me over until next pay­check (which, though gar­nished, I should be able to access). And friends both here in Den­ver and all across the inter­nets have made sure I know they care and are stand­ing by to help if needed. I may not have my own place, but I have every­thing I really need.

Over the next few months, I’m going to save up as much money as I can to try to both pay off this debt and save up for my own apart­ment. It might take longer than I planned. I might not actu­ally move out on my own again until next spring. But I know I’ll be okay. And I’ve learned, the hard way, that I have to take a more active role in my own life, stay on top of things rather than let­ting them snow­ball out of hand. Maybe this is the time to find a GTD solu­tion I can really stick with. Too­dledo looks promising.

Oh, and yeah, writ­ing. I’ve been dis­tracted this week, and I’m going to be pretty busy for the next two weeks at least. My fic­tion is on hold until I get set­tled, but only until then. I’m going to get back to Home­world in early March, and I’m out­lin­ing another project that I might work on after my Home­world sec­ond draft, or maybe con­cur­rent with it as a change of pace. But the blog­ging will recom­mence imme­di­ately. Microsoft is going to make some excit­ing announce­ments at Mobile World Con­gress in Barcelona this week and I’ve got a few things to say about them. I have my net­book, I have my smart­phone, and there’s no rea­son I can’t keep blog­ging (and tweet­ing) while I move into this next phase in my life. A writer writes. It’s just that simple.

It’s get­ting really hard to deny my Cas­san­dra Com­plex. This sounds an awful lot like what I wrote back in 2000 (yes, nine gor­ram years ago):

Peo­ple are already cir­cum­vent­ing all this by self-​publishing. The self-​publishing indus­try is the only area of paper-​book pub­lish­ing that’s thriv­ing right now. Soon enough, a huge num­ber of authors are finally going to get fed up with the pub­lish­ing indus­try and just self-​publish elec­tron­i­cally. They’ll hire their own free­lance edi­tors, and do the mar­ket­ing them­selves. The pub­li­ca­tion of a fin­ished man­u­script will take min­utes, rather than months.

Cou­ple this with the ram­pant spec­u­la­tion that Ama­zon will start pro­vid­ing Kin­dle ebooks for other plat­forms (the Kin­dle for­mat is based on MobiPocket, so this should actu­ally be pretty easy), and spec­u­la­tion that self-​published ebooks read on cell phones as the future of pub­lish­ing isn’t look­ing so crazy any­more. Who’s crazy now? (well, yeah, still me, but for com­pletely dif­fer­ent reasons)

Really good arti­cle explain­ing how reces­sions work and why tax cuts and “let­ting peo­ple keep more of their own money” may sound nice, but doesn’t actu­ally help anything.

Now we’ve entered “para­dox of thrift” ter­ri­tory. Peo­ple are sav­ing more. And the increased sav­ing isn’t being cycled back into the econ­omy as new invest­ment. In part, that’s because of prob­lems in the finan­cial sys­tem. But in part, it’s because with short-​term demand slump­ing so much, there’s not a lot of worth­while invest­ing to be doing. The econ­omy needs some­one to decide to bor­row some money and start a new firm that employs these newly unem­ployed peo­ple. But with the vol­ume of con­sump­tion going down so rapidly, nobody’s really in the mood to start a new busi­ness. And exist­ing busi­nesses are busy scal­ing back pro­duc­tion, not inter­ested in bor­row­ing money to ramp it up. The result of this is an over­all fall in the aver­age level of income. And that means that even with the share of income being saved going up, the actual level of sav­ings can be going down and we can truly end up in the toilet.

The ulti­mate point of a fis­cal stim­u­lus pol­icy is to avoid that toi­let sce­nario. To get money flow­ing in the econ­omy again, so that sav­ings gets trans­lated into invest­ment which gets trans­lated into jobs which pay salaries which, in turn, are spent and saved in ways that cre­ate jobs.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/02/understanding_the_paradox_of_thrift.php

Now that I’ve started rewrites on my NaNoW­riMo ’06 project, I thought this might be a good time to describe my approach to fic­tion. This is by no means the only way or even the “right” way to write fic­tion, it’s just what works best for me.

For the first draft, best writ­ten for NaNoW­riMo with reck­less aban­don, I take to heart Stephen King’s con­cept of sto­ries as fos­sils, found things in the ground. The writer’s job is to dig up the fos­sil so its shape is vis­i­ble and rec­og­niz­able while break­ing as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. With that in mind, I start with an idea, a few char­ac­ters and a vague sense of where I want to end up and start writ­ing. The story twists and turns, tries to buck me off and I wan­der down a blind alley or three that go nowhere and force me to pre­tend they didn’t hap­pen and start over at an ear­lier point in the tale, but I usu­ally end up with a work­able first draft this way. It’s not read­able by any­one but me, and vast swaths of it even lack punc­tu­a­tion, much less per­fect spelling, as those parts were typed lit­er­ally with my eyes closed as fast I could go. This is what I fin­ished three Novem­bers ago with Home­world, my Mars novel.

A few weeks ago, I started read­ing back through that first draft, rein­tro­duc­ing myself to the story and char­ac­ters. Two years may seem like a long time to let a story lie fal­low, but it took that long for me to get enough dis­tance from it to approach it again with fresh eyes. Reread­ing the story as a new reader I was by turns impressed and hor­ri­fied at what I’d writ­ten. Some parts were great, oth­ers not so much. But the story beneath the telling was just as amaz­ing as I’d remembered.

As I went through the first draft, I jot­ted down the major scenes, just sim­ple reminders of what each scene was about. Like:

Bev is attacked by a space aard­vark. The crew dri­ves it away with Nerf bats.

(no, that’s not a real scene from the book)

This gives me a very loose out­line (no Roman numer­als here, despite what you were taught in school) for the sec­ond draft. Just a beat by beat sum­mary of what happens.

Then, with the char­ac­ters and their voices firmly in mind, I start the sec­ond draft. This is com­plete draft, tak­ing noth­ing from the first other than the vague out­line. I’m rewrit­ing every word over again. And, as you might expect after a sep­a­ra­tion of two years, the sec­ond draft is dif­fer­ent. So far there are things I pre­fer in the new draft over what I wrote orig­i­nally, and there are things I think I did bet­ter the first time.

When I’m done with this draft, which will also be the first truly com­plete draft since the first draft got stuck in act 3, I’ll go back over both drafts and com­pare them scene by scene, and merge the best parts of each into draft num­ber 3. After that, I’ll go back over the third draft for style, con­ti­nu­ity, and then finally give the whole thing another pol­ish to reduce word count as much as I pos­si­bly can, shoot­ing for 80 – 85% the length of draft num­ber 3, the com­bined version.

That’s the plan. For those of you work­ing nov­el­ists out there (pub­lished or not), how does this com­pare with your process?

Update: Fit­tingly (or iron­i­cally, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive) for an arti­cle about sec­ond drafts, I for­got to men­tion a few things on the first run through. Specif­i­cally, I told you what I do, but not why. Which is kinda important.

The out­line process between drafts one and two is vital. While the first draft is all about cre­ative aban­don, the out­line process is where I take the key ele­ments of the story, rearrange and oth­er­wise change them as nec­es­sary, and then reassem­ble them into a nar­ra­tive struc­ture that makes sense. This is where I find and plug plot holes, uncon­vinc­ing char­ac­ter moti­va­tion, etc. When I start on the sec­ond draft, I’m secure in the knowl­edge that the story is solid. This is also where I get to do a lot of fore­shad­ow­ing, since I know what’s com­ing up, knowl­edge I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily have in the first draft. But unlike draft num­ber three, which is about style and craft, draft two is still about story, which is why I start over from scratch. There’s still room for sur­prises, but over an under­ly­ing struc­ture rather than out of nowhere.

I’m still hav­ing trou­ble find­ing an ideal cloud com­put­ing solu­tion. I haven’t writ­ten much recently because Google Docs is just enough of a pain in the ass to get to that I don’t bother with it. Turns out I have to be able to write locally, includ­ing on my phone. So a 100% web-​based solu­tion is out.

For the moment, I’m back to writ­ing in plain text files (not only do I not need word until my third draft, which is more of a revi­sion of the sec­ond than a full draft, but it’s actu­ally a dis­trac­tion deal­ing with ital­ics and word count when I’m try­ing to com­pose) and keep­ing them in sync via Live Mesh. This works, and works well, but the Mesh clients on my net­book and smart­phone chew up a lot more CPU and bat­tery than I’d like.

Rumor has it that Google is going to announce their GDrive cloud stor­age any day now, and that it will pro­vide access from any device. Given that they say the same thing about Google Docs, and Docs is frus­trat­ingly read only on mobile devices, I’m not sure how much to believe them there.

On the PIM side, I’ve ditched hosted Exchange and it’s montly fee (hey, in these trou­bled times, etc.) and opted for Nueva­Sync. This works just like Exchange as far as Win­dows Mobile is con­cerned and gives me “set and for­get” over the air sync to my Google Cal­en­dar and Gmail con­tacts. I’m not one of those “thou­sands of con­tacts in dis­crete cat­e­gories” kind of peo­ple, so Gmail con­tacts is fine for my needs.

I am cur­rently with­out a tasks solu­tion, though. I’ve tried imple­ment­ing GTD for Ever­note, but the Win­dows Mobile client is too lim­ited to really man­age my tasklist in Ever­note on the go. I’ve tried Remem­berTheMilk, but don’t like the web inter­face and don’t like their timed-​sync client for Win­dows Mobile. Google opened up Gmail Tasks to mobile users yes­ter­day, but Opera 9 can only han­dle the basic XHTML client. If Nueva­Sync can bring the same easy sync­ing I get out of Gmail con­tacts to Gmail tasks, that will be a home run. But until that hap­pens, I’m pretty much at a loss.