Wild Keys
A ragtag crew of escapees from my own keyboard.
My Left Foot
07/09/04 | "my left foot"
A week ago, I badly sprained my left ankle. I must never before sprained any of my joints—remarkable for one so not-young—because "sprained" does not sound bad enough for the way this injury has felt.
At the time I did it, stepping backwards (while looking for a neighbor's hidden key) off a short flight of steps into a hole in the sidewalk I hadn't noticed until it devoured my foot and caused me to twist and fall, I sincerely thought I had broken it.
"Ow and damn and ow and shit and ow," I may have said. And, "Ow, oh, help, ow!"
Don wasn't far away, fortunately, and I stayed put where I was while we inpected at my left foot. The ankle already sported a swelling, not quite so large as a tennis ball, but larger than a golf ball. "Ow," I said to it. Having children hurt worse, but there were babies to admire afterwards. Bonking my forehead on a beam in the attic hurt worse, but for less time. Most other things that have happened to me have hurt far less. This is the kind of hurt that makes you breathe in a series of hisses. Ow and damn and ow and shit and ow. But not broken, according to whoever read the X-rays at the hospital, if such callow personages can be trusted.
Anyway, this has been a week of watching my left foot. The first night it was mainly grossly puffy, with slightly jaundiced toes. By the end of day two, the swelling had subsided a little, and the foot had developed a corpse-blue tinge. On the third day I could see angry red striations up the back of my heel and around the area where the shin bones cap the ankle bone. The foot developed a dark purple stripe--like a high tide mark where the top of the foot merges into the sole. Yesterday it was less corpse-blue and more of a sickly aqua. Today it is gray, with a new yellow swelling like the throat of a bullfrog.
Yes, I've stayed off it. "What an excuse to write!" Pah. I used to like writing in bed. Shudder.
Still Here
07/03/04 | "still here"
If you've been with me this far, you've grown used to unannounced breaks in the flow of posts. Nothing terrible happened this time around; life was rich, full, hectic.
But, in addition, I built up obstacles to posting, like:
- I really should get the new design up first
- I really should have something interesting to say
- I really should streamline my workflow to make posting more automated
Nothing like a should to scare away any chance of doing good work.
July finds me with a manuscript to tweak and send to a generous editor who offered to read it at home. (Yes, that means the Nordstrom Contest was a nope, but I've rallied.)
July also finds me staring at about six weeks of construction and kerfuffle which will first render the kitchen off limits, and then the bathrooms. While the kitchen we can work around, since the dining hall is open for summer school, the bathroom lack will force us to decamp. I'm hoping that before school resumes in the fall we'll be cooking and showering in spiffy new spaces.
Open Thread on Reading
04/26/04 | "open"
I'm declaring this an open thread for anyone who's reading something they want to share.
I'm currently reading Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband, Hughes and Plath—a Marriage, which forms a background to a project of mine called 'Thought Foxes'. Also newly brought home from the library is Ibid: A Life, which is composed entirely of footnotes. I'm curious to see if the form holds up the story.
I'm Tinderboxin'
(to the tune of "Barefootin'")
04/24/04 | "Tinderboxin'"
As Mark writes, it was exhausting and exhilarating and exhausting. I have been remarkably stupid all day, which I hope is due to fatigue and not my reset-to-default state.
I got to meet a number of people I've run into online: Mark, of course, and Elin, but also Ken Tompkins, who like me enjoys being married and who has gorgeous medieval stuff at his site, and Marc-Antoine, who needs a more expressive web site because his all-text one doesn't do his kinetic gamin presence full justice, and Jeffrey, of the elegant Tinctoris, who helped confirm that a bit of worldbuilding for my novel-in-progress The Doe's Heart—(a "mandolyre")—might well be a plausible and useful instrument.
As promised in the virtual brochure, the first day we met in the Armenian Library and Museum, which was a marvelous setting and was stuffed full of interesting exhibits I didn't get a proper look at.
Elin got things off to a start by giving us what was nominally a tutorial in Tinderbox's basic workings, but also was an engaging example of good teaching (capture your audience and make them care) and a delightful excursion into hyperlinked narrative. (Elin, not only did you demonstrate the linky goodness of Tinderbox, you captured your audience. If good wishes have power, you'll never have a dateless Thursday night again.)
The whole weekend was like this, really. The best moments were those sudden glimpses into other people's Tinderboxen. I am grateful to Rosemary Simpson of Brown for unseating a very fixed prejudice against MS Word, showing me that the art tools (silly bloated add-ons) can be used to make witty cloud callout adornments for Tinderbox maps. The complexity and size of her research file was boggling and yet extremely graceful. The latent indexer/archivist in me wants to sit at her feet and learn from an expert.
Since we were sharing, I demonstrated my rudimentary mastery of getting agents to collect stuff related to my paper filing system (pretty much fullfilling my prophesy of revealing my skill level to be on a par with toast) and received all sorts of clever suggestions for expanding this particular file's usefulness. People got a good chuckle at my names for things: the file cabinets "chaos" and "entropy," frex.
Melissa "Penny" Chase shared a conceptual map of links to all things Egyptian, which, when zoomed, gave somewhat the effect of exploring an excavated tomb and finding wonderful little side-rooms and galleries.
I don't even know how to describe David Kolb's uberfile. In map view, the top level looks like a Calder mobile that has been self-replicating when the curator's back is turned.
I was sorry to leave Marc-Antoine's presentation of how he's hacked Tinderbox before the end—and miss, too, the closure of the conference. (I had a sudden strong allergic reaction to something—very odd—perhaps there was cilantro in my salad?—and wanted to be sure it didn't blow up into something that would prevent me from driving home. As it was, the drive was a white-knuckled affair with the storm sitting right ON the highway most of the way. It looked exactly like the tornado weather I used to see when I lived in the midwest, and there actually was a tornado watch out for Connecticut not long after I got home.)
Have you eaten your carbs today?
05/20/04 | "carbs"
I almost missed out on learning that today is Save the Carbs Day. A holiday after my own gastronomy.
Resist faddish behavior. Embrace grains!
Have you eaten your gratuitous carbs today?
Marriage
05/18/04 | "marriage fairness"
I love being married. Personally, I can't imagine a better way to live, a happier way to be.
What if someone had said, 22 years ago, "No, you can't marry. You two don't match (or you match too well)." Huh?
Good luck all you newlyweds in Massachusetts. May your marriages be happy, and lawful, partnerships for all time.
You can read some marriage stories here, at MarriageFairness.org.
Fifteen Minutes
05/18/04 | "15 minutes"
Not of fame, but of concentration. When I find myself scattered in too many different directions, I push myself to set a timer and spend 15 minutes focusing on just one thing.
Like now, for instance, I'm trying not to clean, file, cogitate on client work, design anything, eat, comb the spring sap out of the dogs' coats, or surf online.
Instead, for fifteen minutes, I'll push words along the screen. You know, hit those keys and all that. The cursor buzzes along the horizon like one of those hired airplanes you see on a day at the beach, a message trailing after it: Lisa has her butt in her writing chair. New words daily.
Five minutes left. I could deploy more planes. What's my message? I haven't the faintest idea. "How can I know what I think until I see what I've said?"
Snippet from an old notebook
05/16/04 | "from an old notebook"
I found this while sifting through my files:
" [A woman I used to know] only wears black and white, or black, or white. Always white stockings and high black pumps, even in summer.
" She is painful to look at--so, so thin, with a sharp nose and an aggressive mole on one side of her face. She combs most of her shoulder-length hair to the other side and then leans that way as if it's very heavy.
Filing Filibuster
05/15/04 | "Filing Filibuster"
Nothing like getting blogged by Mark Bernstein for driving traffic to my site... Y'all come back now!
A footnote (ha!) on my filing project. I mentioned that my physical space imposes limits and requirements on where and in what type of product I file a paper document. A document itself has its own specs for where (how easily accessible) and in what (hanging files, accordian files, funky non-standard container). These in turn influenced how I set up the Tinderbox index to these files: I wanted to know where they were in the room and in what type of file thingie I had stashed each one. This led me to create agents that gathered notes for each file based on a user-defined location attribute (filePlace) and also to give myself a few other user-defined attributes like "relationship" (is this a file for a client or for my stuff?), and "genre".
As I get further into this project, what I'm finding is that the Tinderbox file is showing me whether I'm really making appropriate use of the different file spaces that I have. I can see a primo-accessible space getting filled up with what are really archival materials and elect to change things around. It's really quite dynamic, this interaction between the physical sorting and arranging and the digital cataloguing and analyzing.
A note to any clients who may be reading: I am not just cleaning my office. Think of this process as enabling me to serve you better. Besides, I'm dividing my time between filing and working on your stuff. Really.
Dishy recipe for fiction
Beth Bernobich, who has brought us such dainties as "The Secret Diaries of Writers and Editors," is in fine form yet again and serving up "A Recipe for Writing Fiction."
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