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I was sifting through the office closet again this morning, and I found an abandoned first draft of a manuscript¹.  And it’s fucking awful.  Oh dear Zeus it pained me to just skim through it.  Truly a dreadful, dreadful embarassment.

It’s an old piece, and was probably my first real stab at serious novel-length prose after having written mostly short comedic fiction and spec scripts up to that point.  But it’s dreadful in a good way.  Which is to say, it’s a lot of fun to see all the mistakes and awkwardness of a first draft, especially one in which I was just “getting my legs” in a new format.

We like to dismiss them, but as bad as they always are (and must be), first drafts are awesome.  They’re hastily written and chock full of mismatched tenses and missing punctuation and godawful syntax, but they have the fire and mojo of a fresh concept trying to get out.  They still contain bits of genius and unexplored characters and honest if clumsy dialogue.  Even when we abandon them, we shouldn’t ever get rid of them for good.  They’re learning tools, mines for reusable raw materials, and object lessons in the craft.

Whenever writing something, I try to follow Heinlein’s edict of “you must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order,” and get everything down on paper/screen that I can before so much as auto-correcting a single typo.  If I don’t get it all out of my brain first, I’ll start nitpicking and changing and trying to make things letter-perfect before the story is even told, which results in a boring, suck-ass story with good structure and grammar.  I’d rather have it the other way around to begin with.

So it’s with that in mind that I’m re-reading the old shitty manuscript, and finding that for as rotten as it is, it was a great story that never saw the light of day.  It has a character that I really, really like.  There are a couple of sub-plots in it that I enjoyed, and want to graft onto another story.  And I’m thinking of posting it to the blog in a new section, as well as a ton of other first drafts and bits of incomplete stories.  Why shouldn’t my first draft mine be open to anyone else with a pickaxe?  Personally I like seeing other people’s rough work, and maybe going through my dreck will be interesting and/or helpful to someone.

Thoughts?

I want to know who Abernathy is.

It’s 2008.  Despite the Glorious Technofuture I was promised in my youth, I do not yet possess a jetpack or a hovercar.  I don’t have a cadre of sexbots to please me, or a robotic Jeeves-like manservant to dress me and manage my day and keep me out of trouble.

What I do have, courtesy of my good friends at Clusterflock, is a sleek and shiny new iPhone 3G.

There are a million reviews of the iPhone 3G out there already, two of the best being this very in-depth review by Cheng/Chartier/Ecker at Ars Technica, and this great analysis by Jason Snell at Macworld.

If you’re looking for objective information by pros who know how to do tech product reviews the right way, then I suggest you read one of the aforementioned articles.  But since I promised Deron that I’d let him know about the phone once I got it, better late than never, here are a few subjective observations of my own.

The purchasing experience.
Yeah, I stood in line for at least four hours like everyone else.  And yeah, the activation systems kept crashing and crashing, resulting in a lot of standing still.  Eventually I got my phone (16gb black, to be exact), but by that time the iTunes store had completely overloaded.  They were able to activate my phone in-store, but I wasn’t able to connect to iTunes to reload all of my information onto it until the next day.  Annoying, but not a big deal in the long run.  Overall the Apple Store employees were well-trained, handled the downtime like professionals, and kept everything running as well as they could.

The software.
One of the biggest draws of the iPhone 2.0 release is the availability of 3rd-party apps.  I’ve already downloaded and used (and deleted) several of them, but two of my favorites are Craig Hockenberry’s Twitterific Premium client app for the Twitter service, and Frasier Spears’ great Flickr client Exposure Premium.  I spend a lot of time on the Twitter¹, and previously used the Hahlo web-based service.  It was OK, but not ideal, and the Twitterific iPhone client is robust and full-featured.  The Exposure client is the best implementation of a front-end to Flickr that I’ve seen for a mobile device, and one of its coolest² features is the use of the Core Location function of the iPhone to show you photos on Flickr that were taken nearby wherever you are.  That’s neat on a 1st gen iPhone with only loosely triangulated location info, but add the 3G’s GPS in there, and you can get pretty precise.  The first time I used the feature, I was in a neighborhood bar, and the first photo that popped up was taken right inside that same bar near where I was sitting.  Neat.
Apple has also made plenty of changes to the core software on the phone, which are all well-covered elsewhere, but I did want to mention Apple’s new Remote app, which lets you remotely³ access and control your iTunes library and/or your AppleTV with your iPhone.  I’ve used this extensively, and it is a killer app.
The software still lacks a copy/paste function⁴, which is annoying but tolerable.  And while it works very nicely with MobileMe and push services, it still does not synchronize text notes, which is annoying and intolerable.

The hardware.
Okay, here’s where I’m going to gripe just a little. Yes, I’m admittedly an Apple fanboy, and yes, I loved my 1st generation iPhone, and yes, I also love my brand new one.  But I can’t help but feel that the build quality of the unit isn’t exactly what it could (or should) be.  I got my first iPhone on Day One last year, and loved it.  I never put it in a case, and it always stayed in my front jeans pocket.  For almost an entire year, it stayed in great shape, provided that I blew the speaker holes and headset jack out with compressed air from time to time, and polished it with a dab of cleaner and a soft cloth.  The edges of the phone were all perfecly flush; it felt like one whole piece of hardware carved out of something else.  But the new unit has some sharp edges on it – the new metal buttons feel sharp and rough, and there is one continuous sharp edge where the polycarbonate back meets the chrome front bezel.  Overall it makes for a much less smooth tactile experience in my hand.  This new phone feels like a manufactured device, rather than an organic thing.  I know that’s being somewhat nitpicky, considering the volume of iPhone production now must be orders of magnitude beyond what it was for the very first phones to roll off the lines last June.  But I guess I expected a little more attention to the physical quality of manufacture, even if it is now a commodity item.

Overall impression.
All that being said, I must say that the iPhone 3G is in every conceivable way the best piece of telephony hardware I have ever used or owned⁵.  I’ve used a lot of SonyEricsson phones and even a [cough] BlackBerry at one point, and while they each did some things well, none of them did anything consistently well.  The 3G doesn’t do everything for everyone, but it does everything I need and want it to do.  I’m not an enterprise user, so I’m not going to be one of the BlackBerry users who bitches that the iPhone doesn’t have this or that business app available.  As a freelancer it’s a device that I can mold to my work style, rather than the other way around.  Also, Mobile Safari is simply the best browser implementation on any mobile device, which in my opinion makes up for any other shortcomings.  Need I say more?

Doing what I do, I have a very thick skin.  I have to.  Your critics are always more vocal than your fans, and they like to assault you with arrows and spears and bullets.  It’s best to learn how to deflect them.

But once in a while, if you’re turned just right, someone’s poorly thrown and errant spear will hit you precisely in your skin’s thinnest spot.  A minor and fleeting injury, but it still stings like hell.

We still make things.

The cycle never stops.  The materials, they come in.  The things, they go out.

We make things that make other things.  We make things that are used, discarded, unmade, and returned to us to be remade.

We still make things.