NaNoWriMo Guidance: Every story is about saving the world

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Every story is about saving the world. The only question is: what is the world you’re saving?—Max Gladstone

It’s so fantastic that the Cambridge Public Library has an author speaker series for National Novel Writing Month! The last session on world building with Max Gladstone was fully of lively discussion and great perspectives about creating immersive, coherent worlds in fiction. One point that really stood out to me was a world-centric view of stories that Max mentioned, quoted above. In the days following his talk, I found myself looking at story after story through this lens, considering the sorts of worlds various characters are trying to save—a microcosm of interconnected friendships, the Candy Kingdom, a starship full of spacefaring humans, the inner life and family life of a tween… I love how applicable this way of looking at narratives is.

I wish the NaNoWriMo Author Insights speaker series could go on and on beyond November… Fortunately, it seems like there are always author talks and more on the library calendar!

NaNoWriMo 2015 at Cambridge Main Library

Delightful Media This Week: Hidden Brain, PBS Space Time, TED Radio Hour

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Hidden Brain-d4dc2bc0fb94c4fa0074fb7ab2e1b681e6245d7a-s600-c85It’s been another wonderfully stimulating week of public broadcasting. NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast consists entirely of a witty, informative interview of Aziz Ansari by Shankar Vedantam on patterns of romance-related behavior (word of caution: a lot of bleepings in this one), while in another corner of NPR, the TED Radio Hour looks at our ability to change. And PBS Space Time once again does a fantastic job nutshelling intriguing topics, this time laying out how to thwart killer asteroids in not just 1 or 2 but 5 ways!

I love how these podcasts and videos build out the story of who we are as a species.

Most Scenic Grocery Shopping Yet

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Dang, if I could shop weekly at a Safeway like this Canmore Safeway
getting my groceries would be just that much more therapeutic, among other things. In case you’re wondering, the interior of this Safeway in Canmore, Alberta is much like pretty much every other Safeway I’ve been in, including the only one I’ve visited that rivals this one in terms of scenic surroundings: the Banff Safeway.

The Safeway in Pollock Pines, California is also pretty great.

Barry Yourgrau wrestles with Internet distraction too?!

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I found myself back at my laptop, Web surfing. It was all sinkingly familiar. I was suckling on the cyber teat in the face of gnashing anxiety. I realized (not for the first time) that thanks to new technology I’d harmed my capacity to press on through such anxiety. The same way computers had affected my handwriting. My muscles for sustaining focus had turned twitchy and flaccid. 

This passage in Barry Yourgrau’s latest book Mess really caught my attention as it opens up a facet of his life with idiosyncratic authenticity. And that’s really the crux of this book; it opens up Barry Yourgrau’s physical and mental world for us in distinctive poetic prose that delightfully almost verges on melodramatic at times. It’s a travelogue taking us through his life by way of an itinerary of personal belongings, attempts to wrangle their overwhelming abundance and actual travels—the chronicles comprising the narrative all rendered in the writing style that made Mr. Yourgrau’s fantastical travelogue, The Haunted Traveler, a unique joy to read.  Continue reading →

Back to the Futurism of 2001: A Space Odyssey

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This stunning book by Piers Bizony from Taschen goes well beyond the infinite wonders of the film.
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The physical heft this interestingly oblong tome seems to promise that The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is the definitive text on the iconic film. Then, when you slide the book out of its sleeve and open it, this promise is upheld. And man, does this book deliver. Numerous full-color pages and foldout leaves dazzle and delight. The astounding trove of behind-the-scenes images and descriptive text brings my appreciation of the film to a whole new level. The extent to which it details the realization of the film is unbelievable and even overwhelming.  Continue reading →

Tech I Have Known and Loved

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This photo was only taken a few years ago, and everything here already looks (even more) ancient, except maybe the MacBook Air. Even so, they look incredibly even intimately familiar, in the way a CRAY-2 never would, immediately recognizable as portable, personal computing. It’s obvious yet still noteworthy that the laptop form factor is still largely the same as it was a couple decades ago, still a screen and keyboard+trackpad united by a hinge.

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We can easily mentally update this image; we know what would sit on this desk to the right of the MacBook Air in this lineage of personal computing. We’ve got the new MacBook and MacBook Pro models and most recently the iPad Pro, and those still look much like these ancestors that came before them. Are future iterations of being productive with personal technology just going to be thinner, lighter, more powerful renditions of the laptop and tablet form factors?