“Ooh, steampunk,” my friend said.

“No, it’s not steampunk at all, actually.”

“Well sure it is.”

“No, really, it’s not.”

“What would you call it then?”

“I don’t call it anything, yet. It’s a story. In progress. It doesn’t have a genre. It’s a little extropian, maybe. But just because it has an $ANOMALOUS_OBJECT and an $OBSCURE_HISTORICAL_PERSON in it doesn’t make it steampunk. Just let me write the damn thing, okay?”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

“Just finish it soon, because I really like steampunk.”

Grrr.

McSweeney’s. Again.

Ouch.

And it was a damn funny piece, too.

Having said that, I do have a bit of a custom when it comes to “retiring” a filled notebook and beginning another.  I did this with one of my Moleskines the other day.  The first one in a while, actually; it’s pretty rare when I fill one from cover to cover.  I always have a bunch of them going at a time, some for specific projects and others lying around for general note-taking and core-dumping.  So more often than not, I’ll abandon them at some point, and they’ll just get stuck on a shelf or tossed in a drawer.

But when I hit the back page of a well-worn Moleskine, it’s fun for me to use that as a reason to grab a fresh one, get it ready, and start filling it with ink.

I reached the end of this notebook the other day.  It’s been in use for a couple of years, staying near me on my desk or in my bag.  It’s gone with me pretty much wherever I’ve travelled.  It’s been places.  It knows things.

This wasn’t really a jot-it-down book so much as as a place for more fleshed-out ideas and concepts.  It’s full of scraps of paper, a writing “cheat sheet” that I keep in most of my notebooks, and other ephemera.  There was a lot of creative energy in that book, and now I’m tempted to scan it into a pdf so I can reference some of it later on without having to pull it down off a shelf.

There’s nothing like grabbing a fresh notebook off the shelf and taking the plastic off of it.  It’s not nearly as fun as unboxing a new Mac or other Apple gadget, but it’s such a great tactile buffet.  Peeling off the wrapper.  Cracking open the (so far) unbent cover.  Pulling the elastic band off.  Feeling the crisp paper.

It’s almost like the book asks something of you.  No, it demands something of you.  ”Put great things in here.  Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone if it sucks.  Just give me words. Lots of words.”

Alright, back to business.  I label the spines of all my Moleskines with a silver Sharpie.  Once you get a few dozen identical black books floating around your world, you have to be able to tell them apart.  I’ve gotten into the habit of scribbling a quote on the top of some of them too.  Whatever comes to mind, usually.  This one got a Balzac (and before you roll your eyes at me, I’ll tell you that the last one got a Ralph Wiggum).

For my more “important” notebooks, I’ll usually grab a new (or new-ish) pen to keep with that particular book.  I had a Lamy fountain pen that I wanted to use this time, but after trashing my office looking for it, decided to use this Acme rollerball instead.  I don’t use rollerballs much, but this one has a great balance to it, and the ink flows really well on the Moleskine paper.

The first ink to go into a fresh notebook is always the “if found” part.  I’ve put the exact same text into that space on every Moleskine I’ve ever used.  Only one has ever been lost, and I got an email the next day from someone who had found it in the coffeeshop where I left it.

Once the new book is prepped and “in circulation”, the retired one gets shelved somewhere in my office.

So then.  That’s my only admitted “custom”.  Silly?  Sure.  These little books, they’re cheap and ordinary.  But they’re the kinds of objects we creatives bring into our lives, and we invest into them so much more than black ink or colored chalk or elegant code.  They have power over us, and have power because of us.  They’re never just tools.  And because of that, I think, sometimes even a $10 hunk of paper can be worthy of a simple ritual.

I used that model for years, from my Mac IIci right up until the time I got my first Mac with USB inputs (an original blue and white G3, maybe? I don’t remember for sure).  Every Mac I’ve owned since then has come with its own keyboard², which I’ve used, with varying degrees of pleasure and productivity.

I’ll admit that I never paid too much attention to the quality of the keyboards I was using.  Well, probably I did, because I sure bitched a lot about some of them.  But I never actually did anything about it until fairly recently.

When I got my first metal-cased Powerbook, I fell in love with the keyboard.  It fit my hands just right, it gave just enough tactile feedback without being too “clicky” on one end or too squishy on the other.  By the time I upgraded last year to a new MacBook Pro, I was doing most of my work on the portable machine and not doing as much on the Mac Pro in my office, mainly because I was much more productive on the keyboard of the laptop.  I tried replacing the stock Mac Pro keyboard — with its huge chunky finger-numbing keys — with a couple of models that seemed similar to the tactile characteristics of my laptop, but never found one I really liked.  I tried a MacAlly, and I think maybe a Kensington, but neither really did the trick.  They had function keys in weird places, and one of them didn’t have any USB inputs on it.  Besides, they were just butt ugly³.

Then one day I was tooling around in the Apple Store, and started typing on one of the new aluminum extended keyboards.  Wow.  It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest thing to the feel of typing on my laptop.  I walked out of the store with one, and now I can shift work between the laptop and desktop and not have that jarring feel from switching keyboards.

During the podcast, John and Dan mention that they would be happy to buy any new or new-ish Apple Extended Keyboard II’s that we might have lying around.  I remembered that I do in fact have one, in its original box, and barely used.  I bought it right before I got a G3 years ago, and it’s just sitting in storage.  At first I thought of offering it up to them, but I might just try using it again.

My Muse was late for work today.  Again.  One week on the job, and already she’s pissing me off.

I had to get working first thing today.  Last night I tossed around for hours, struggling with some dialogue, yet stubbornly refusing to get out of bed and work it.  So this morning I wanted to deal with it as soon as my fingers hit the keyboard.

At 7:30, she hadn’t come in.  By 8:30, she still hadn’t shown up.  Shit.

I called her cell.  The one I provided for her when she started working for me.  The one I told her to keep on all of the time.

“Hey, you know, sure would be great if you could show up some time today.  I can’t sit here all morning staring at the screen.”

“Stuck in traffic on the I-90, sorry,” she said.

“You couldn’t have left, oh, thirty minutes earlier to beat traffic?”

“Car wouldn’t start.”

“Pretty sure I specified ‘must have reliable car’ in the want ad,” I said, and hung up.

She came highly recommended, and she’s wicked expensive, so I didn’t feel too bad being irritated at the tardiness.

Twenty minutes later she trapsed into my office and plopped on the couch.  She opened a whimsical turtle-shaped messenger bag, pulled out some tablets, and tossed them on the coffee table.  She propped up her feet and took out a pack of Camels.

“Well, what’ve you got so far?” she asked.

“Nothing yet.  Been waiting for you.  And I’ve told you before, Calli, you can’t smoke in here,” I said.  She pouted and put the cigarettes down.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to snap like that.  I’m just struggling here, you know, and I needed you a bit earlier.”

We sat in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds.  ”That’s a cute bag,” I said, to clear the tension.  ”Where’d you get it?”

“My little sister gave it to me.  She’s a good kid.  Now, are we gonna sit here and chat all day, or are we gonna write?”

I smiled.  Calli pushed her sleeves up over her fully inked arms, and grabbed one of her tablets.  “Now, I’ve got some dialogue I want you to try out.  I think this will work.”

Yeah, it might work.  I’ll still need another week to feel this arrangement out, but I think it might work.

I despise anonymous commenters. It’s pretty much a sure sign that anything the person is going to say is worthless noise if they aren’t willing to sign a name to it.

That said, though, I consider a consistent pseudonym to be a name. I’ve gotten to know lots of people on the web via their chosen pseudonym, and that pseudonym acquires its own authority on the merits of the writing behind it. You don’t need to reveal your full, legal name to be known on the web — it’s good enough to have a handle so we can recognize you.

I don’t allow anonymous commenters on my site, and whenever I see them in other conversations I generally skip right over them.  I don’t see anything wrong with pseudonyms, however; I’ve used them extensively myself, for lots of reasons.  As long as someone chooses an identity and comments with it consistently and honestly, that’s fine.  I honestly don’t understand why so many people take issue with it.

(via Greg Laden)

It is a debate you could only really have in a country that accords its intellectuals the kind of status other nations - to name no names - tend to reserve for footballers, footballers’ wives or (if they’re lucky) rock stars; a place where structuralists and relativists and postmodernists, rather than skulk shamefacedly in the shadows, get invited on to primetime TV; a culture in which even today it is considered entirely acceptable, indeed laudable, to state one’s profession as “thinker”.

That country is France, which is currently preoccupied with the fate of its ailing semicolon.

I’m addicted to semicolons.  For me, finding the proper place to use one in my writing is one of those little mini-moments of pure awesome.  It’s sort of the same feeling you used to get while playing Tetris, and you’d have, like, six rows of crap stacked up with a big hole down the middle.  But then that long straight piece would come falling down, and you’d tip it up on its end and drop it in the hole and four rows would blink out from the bottom and you’d be all like “aw-yeah!” and then you’d get all up in your kid sister’s face about your Nintendo skillz.  Right?

On reflection, perhaps I get a little too excited about punctuation.

(via Marginal Revolution)

(via Kevin Cornell)

…and then the itch goes away.

Not your usual passive variety, mind you, but the skull-crushingly frustrating kind. The kind where you feel like an amnesia victim, with the entirety of your forgotten lifetime just out of sight behind that enormous mental dam. And the dam is cracking, but not fast enough. Or something. (See? Even my analogies suck right now.)

So while I go off to bang my head for a while (possibly literally), please to be enjoying this Don Music skit. It always makes me feel better in these situations.