some dorky wordcount stats

as an experiment, i tried tracking my word-count-per-hour carefully while writing the second chapter of summer is miles and miles away. here's some statistics, recorded here mostly for my own benefit / idle curiosity, but maybe it's interesting to someone else, idk:

* average writing speed: 310 words an hour
* total time spent writing this one: 30 hours. final wordcount ~9.5k
* lowlight: i had one 3hr session where i only got 289 words, partially because it was an absolutely brutal scene to write, and partially because i kept learning i needed to do more research aihgealigh
* other lowlight: had a stretch near the end where i was only hitting like, 150ish words per hour—but this makes sense; it was the scene i'd specifically put off writing because it was so tricky
* highlight: the scene i felt most certain/excited about came more quickly, obviously. but not astronomically faster! absolute max was 700ish words an hour, and most "good" days were closer to 500 words an hour

some more qualitative observations:
* it seems hard for me to work in chunks of time shorter than 2 hours, and 3 hours is ideal
* i had a vague awareness before this that i tend to "max out" at 1,000 words a day. i can see why—3hrs is a pretty long writing session, and if you spend any extra time doing edits or dithering or research, like, that's most of the "focused" spare time i'm going to have on any given weekday
* that being said, i did get a few days of higher wordcounts while writing this, but those were on weekends—one 3hr-ish session after i woke up, and another one late at night
* i did a little less editing-as-you-go than i normally do, but not much less.
* i also tracked my "planning" time, though, more loosely—since, like, obviously i think about whatever story i'm writing in all kinds of random moments, right, and i'm not tracking that. but i do tend to sit down with an outline for a few sessions, or try to figure out in advance what the highest-tension-scene is going to be, or whatever—and i do have to actually sit down to hash these out, or else i just avoid thinking about the hard stuff :P anyway, by this metric, i spent ~9.5 hours in just "thinking/outlining/researching time" before i wrote much
* by all these metrics i should theoretically be able to finish a 90k novel in like, 5 months, assuming ~15hrs/week of work, and uh, not getting owned at any point, haha
* i started outlining on may 9, started writing in earnest on may 16, finished a draft may 25
* i haven't done editing yet, obviously. for pieces of this length, generally, one full-day (8hrs-ish) editing session usually is "good enough" for me or whatever
* nanowrimo is like. never happening for me lol

book post: desert solitaire by edward abbey

Have you ever been like, “Boy, I wish there were more nature writing like Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac”? Of course you have; you are an excellent person with excellent taste.

Have you ever been like, “Also, I wish A Sand County Almanac were narrated by a bitchy, racist, sexist, neo-Malthusian gonzo-journalism-wannabe asshole who says condescending shit to tourists while serving as a fucking National Park ranger”? No? Then, um, whelp.

( Read more... )

book post: pilgrim in the microworld by david sudnow

I enjoy telling stories at cocktail parties about my youthful internet exploits, because I am both a goddamn nerd and a goddamn delight. Explaining the basic shit like Neopets or IRC channel shenanigans is easy enough; most people have some experience with message boards or chatrooms. Explaining play-by-post RPGs is a bit trickier, but still doable—you frame it as a collaborative storytelling thing, compare it to Watership Down, describe your favorite wolf-soap-opera plotline, and at that point, you’ve either confused the shit out of someone or made a friend for life.

But the one thing I’ve never quite been able to describe, to my own satisfaction, is play-by-post horse battle RPGs.

Ostensibly, it’s really similar to the standard play-by-post RPG format. Your horse attacks the other horse; you describe it in a few sentences of prose. Theoretically, this could be as simple as “Smokey pivots on his right forehoof and kicks at Huey,” then “Huey rears up and falls on Smokey’s back,” or whatever, and you go from there.

But that would be too easy.

( Read more... )

book post: nba jam by reyan ali

This is a thoroughly amusing making-of romp, covering, of course, the titular arcade classic NBA Jam, aka the last place where my beloved Seattle Supersonics still exist.

The book is very much in the vein of, say, Masters of Doom. It’s short and plenty fun if you’re a dork about arcade history, but here’s some of the more amusing tidbits I learned:

( Read more... )

book post: the spirit catches you and you fall down by anne fadiman

This anthropological book was apparently was so successful that it’s now regularly taught in medical schools, and I see why—there’s a whole lot of good and hard stuff here.

High-level summary: this book covers the story of the Lees, a Hmong refugee family who immigrates to the US (specifically Merced, California) in the 1980s. They don’t speak English, they can’t read or write, and access to proper translators or well-equipped social workers is tragically limited in Merced—so, when their daughter develops a rare form of epilepsy, it’s impossible for the doctors to explain what exactly is happening; the Lees think the doctors are over-medicating; the doctors come across as frosty and arrogant which only furthers the Lees’ skepticism... and, yeah, a lot of shit happens, and their daughter is brain-dead by the book’s end.

The primary impression I had of the story was: here is a bunch of incredibly kind people, trying extremely hard to understand each other, and still fucking it up, still hurting each other over misunderstandings or irreconcilable cultural differences. It would be a less compelling account if Neil and Peggy weren’t such highly qualified and empathetic doctors. (I can think of more than a few doctors who would readily dismiss the Hmong as crazy/stupid and just run roughshod over their wishes; while Neil and Peggy aren’t perfect, they emphatically do not do that.) It would be a less compelling account if the Lees weren’t such loving parents, if the social worker weren’t such a fierce advocate for the Lees, and so on. This is a story about everyone doing everything as right as they’re able and still, things don’t work out.

But I expected all that from the blurb on the back. What I didn’t expect was the particularly vivid and heartbreaking portrait of the “third culture” folks in the Merced Hmong community: the small handful of educated, westernized, English-speaking Hmong folks who have to perform the difficult duty of translation (linguistic and cultural) for their whole community, even while never feeling fully a part of that community:

( Read more... )