The Local Yarn 
Unlike last year, spring took a long time to get here (we were still seeing snowfall in May), but like last year, spring weather and temperatures have lingered well into what are normally the “summer” months. We need the rain, but everyone would like to see the sun again soon.
These are my favourite pictures from our trip to the cabin last weekend. The second photo is also the new seasonal banner at the Howell Creek Radio podcast website.
This was and is probably in my top ten favorite Sesame Street clips from when I was a tyke. The scenes look a lot like the area of rural Minnesota where I lived. When my daughter is this age I hope that, somehow, she has as much opportunity to experience nature as I did.
I don’t know for certain who did the background music, but I’m pretty certain it’s a Richard Harvey piece. They seem to have been kind of fond of him in PBS studios back in the eighties.
Given time and opportunity, I always favour writing longer, thoughtful pieces. When we first relaunched the site as The Local Yarn, I didn’t even have a place for short posts. Surely, I reasoned, everything I write and publish here will be long and satisfying, a thoroughly-cooked multiple-course meal of prose, themed to fit neatly into any of several pre-planned “series.”
Enter a new job, an additional freelance job, and preparations for first child due in July. The weeks fly by like minutes, and the pump over the old writing well sits forlorn and un-primed.
But it must be primed, even if it can’t be manned long enough to fully irrigate the fields of desired output (have I used up this metaphor yet?). So over the past couple of days, I’ve kluged together a blog on this site, a place for short posts that don’t fit anywhere. This is where I’ll be for awhile, writing short, opinionated pieces about anything that interests me. “Depth without duration” – that’s the theory, and the hope.
This isn’t something I’m doing out of guilt; it’s something I’m doing because when I don’t write, I get cranky. It’s a compromise I can live with for now, given the other choices I’ve made. The rivers of living water will have to come when they come, and until then it’s one cupful at a time.
And if you think about it, cupful is a weird word.
Yesterday, Flickr announced changes to their service. Pro subscriptions are doubling from $24 to $49 per year. If you opt for a free account, you get a flat 1TB of space.
When the price doubles, a lot of users will switch to the free accounts and will start seeing advertisements. From what I’ve seen, most people are excited and positive about the new look and the drop in cost, but most people are missing the real implications.
It’s obvious that Yahoo believes Flickr can bring in a lot more revenue by serving ads than by attracting user subscriptions. Starting May 20th, Flickr is no longer a user-supported service: it’s an advertising platform. We’ve been down this road before with other services and it usually doesn’t turn out well for users.
This rough-and-ready edition, which contains new chapters starting at 0021. Prototype and no rewrites of earlier chapters, is a bit more “rough” than “ready.” I plan to do more like this, in order to keep up the momentum, and to better practice the “release early, release often” mantra. Even with all the tools and workflow that encourage frequent releases, my inner editor still tends to treat each batch of chapters as a book release of its own, rewording and second-guessing myself until the text reaches some kind of zenith or equilibrium in my mind. Depending on how busy my life is, that kind of equilibrium might not happen but once or twice in a year, so as nice as that would be, I’m going to stop using it as my inner guide for when to release. As long as I’m doing lean publishing I might as well wade in with both legs.
I’ve had several helpful conversations with readers on the book’s direction. After my last release’s appeal for books which might be similar to this one, readers sent in (with explanations, reservations and qualifications) to several writings:
I’m still reading through all of these, any other suggestions are still welcome.
The direction of this book is shaping up in my head as a kind of more literary, subtle kind of “Choose You Own Adventure” book for grown-ups: interactive fiction in book form. I’ve decided I want there to be an overarching narrative involving a definite story or series of stories, and that it/they should be non-linear. I hope to use the numbered headings to implement this — it would be silly not to take advantage of them — perhaps by including suggested browse-to numbers at the end of each chapter, creating multiple possible trails throughout the book. I’m not sure whether it’s possible to begin including these without having finished all the chapters first, however.
In October, Will S. sent me an email:
You say you’ve never seen anything like it, and I agree. But it’s not so exotic. I read it as casually epistolary. A series of sticky notes, attached to various objects that I run into walking around town, written by some unknown narrator I’ve never met. A narrative through which I guide myself unintentionally, tool tips for the abstract.
Perhaps thinking about it in this way might yield something interesting.
That jives. This one thought has helped (or will help) to give me a bit more focus when writing, especially in the case of second-person narrative (see notes to Release #2 below), which, based on reader feedback, seems to have been hit-or-miss from chapter to chapter. An interesting side-note on that: in most cases, the “misses” were chapters I had re-written specifically to inject second-person narrative where it hadn’t originally been written from that perspective.
Finally, you may have noticed that I’ve replaced the book’s cover. I now have a better idea of the book’s tone and subject, and wanted the cover to reflect that in a more compelling way. I floated a quick comp on Twitter and app.net last week: the feedback seemed to match what I was hoping for, so I went with it, borrowing a modest amount on future revenues to purchase rights to a high-quality photo of Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia. I put a good deal of thought into the composition of the new cover, so any additional thoughts on the finished product are welcome. You could look at this as a case of necessary diversion into the business and marketing side of things; a book’s cover is probably the single most important tool for attracting readers.
(To download the latest version of the book, visit the book’s page at LeanPub.)
Earlier today, I tweeted my idea for a writing band.
The world is ready for a writing band: a lead writer, a poet, two backup writers, an illustrator & an editor. We could practice at my place.
— Joel Alexander Dueck (@joeld) February 4, 2013
The group would be the analogue of a rock band. We’d get together with the goal of practicing and producing something within a short time-frame as a group, only instead of music it would be a four-page magazine issue or a children’s book or whatever fits the group’s style. We’d snap photographs of people working, rough drafts with ink, layout mockups and so forth.
The results go up on the web for sale through Gumroad, and any sales get divided equally among band members.
Hey, maybe if we get good enough, we can perform at bookstores and art festivals.
Readers may be interested to learn that twelve years after I wrote this post, I married a Canadian.
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
I saw this music video more than a year ago, and the aerial dancers and a few of the lines combined in my head somehow to remind me of another story.
Consider the atmospheric elements this production has in common with Jacob’s episode at Bethel: a supremely low point in life; dreams; a mood of a powerful uncertainty; angels ascending and descending; direct revelation. Look at the way it uses light: shifting, dim, filtered and refracted, it appears alien and, at times, even oppressive, but always from above, and almost always with an attractive power, much as the bright sun would appear from the bottom of a lake — or as the light of Heaven would appear from under the fires, mists and dusts of Earth.
The lines in question have an obviously Biblical flavour, and I later found out that Flowers is well-known to be religious (Mormon); but I don’t see those things as directly relevant to the value I find in the video. The story of Jacob’s Ladder is a colourful and powerful one, and here’s something that actually helps to reveal that colour.
So Rebekah called Jacob her younger son, and said to him, “Surely your brother Esau comforts himself concerning you by intending to kill you. Now therefore, my son, obey my voice: arise, flee to my brother Laban in Haran”…
So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night; and he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
— Genesis 27,28
Jacob's Ladder by William Blake
In this story, Mr. Wasserman argues in favour of the imperial system of lengths in part because base-10 systems can’t be cleanly divided into thirds. Nearly nine years after this story was posted, George Dvorsky wrote an article summarizing why we should switch completely to a base-12 ‘dozenal’ counting system :
First and foremost, 12 is a highly composite number — the smallest number with exactly four divisors: 2, 3, 4, and 6 (six if you count 1 and 12). As noted, 10 has only two. Consequently, 12 is much more practical when using fractions — it’s easier to divide units of weights and measures into 12 parts, namely halves, thirds, and quarters.
Moreover, with base-12, we can use these three most common fractions without having to employ fractional notations. The numbers 6, 4, and 3 are all whole numbers. On the other hand, with base-10, we have to deal with unwieldy decimals, ½ = 0.5, ¼ = 0.25, and worst of all, the highly problematic ⅓ = 0.333333333333333333333.
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
The man who saw through the red and the black to the white.
