First off, Philip K. Dick didn’t write Blade Runner, but he did write Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the story on which Ridley Scott’s science fiction masterpiece was based.
Also, Dick never had a chance to see the completed film, but he did apparently have a chance to see a short clip, which was enough to inspire him to write this letter to the Ladd Company (producers of the film) expressing his pride and enthusiasm for Blade Runner.
If you know much about Dick, you know he was very troubled, and it made me feel good to read this letter. It’s too bad he didn’t get a chance to see the entire film, which is one of my favorite films in any genre. Speaking of which, I’m going to create a page on this blog to list some of my favorite books and movies. Lists are fun!
Earlier this week I blogged about Ringworld by Larry Niven, and if you missed that entry, I didn’t like it much. I actually wrote that blog entry before I was completely finished with the book, and through the last couple days as I worked through the last part I thought, “Maybe I’m just being a sourpuss and holding a certain dated-ness against the book more than I should?”
Then I got to the end and immediately started The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein, a book written more than a decade before Ringworld, and the difference was so dramatic, the contrast so stark… it was like spitting out a mouthful of sour milk and cleansing the palate with a few swigs of ice cold root beer. So, so much better. I’m not far enough into this new one to say much about it yet, other than Heinlein knows how to craft a sentence and his dialogue is pretty sharp. This one builds more slowly than I’m used to with Heinlein — he usually busts right in with a spaceship out of control spinning toward the sun, or a bunch of teenagers fighting bugs fifteen feet high.
In other news, if you know me through Hypnos or have tried to email me through hypnos.com you may have wondered what’s up, as our web site and very busy Hypnos Forum and our hypnos.com email addresses are entirely conked-out today. The hosting company that manages the hypnos.com domain is all dealing with some kind of catastrophic server issue and we’ll probably be out of action all day today. If you need to reach me or Lena you know how to find us on Facebook, otherwise leave me a message here.
A quick outside link to an article by Peter Straub, bestselling author of Ghost Story and a couple of collaborations with Stephen King, discussing the matter of genre. If there’s one category of writer even more touchy about genre than science fiction people, it’s probably horror writers.
Straub says…
Just for beginners, let’s admit that literary fiction is a genre, too, shall we? Expectations guide its readers, that of respect for consensus reality and the poignancy of seemingly ordinary lives, of sensitive character-drawing and vivid scene-painting, of the reversals and conflicts characteristic of the several sub-genres of literary fiction.
I’ve touched on this subject several times already in a blog that hasn’t yet seen two dozen posts, and that’s because I’ve gone through three periods of writing in my life, each time in a different style. As a teen I wrote horror/supernatural stories influenced by Twilight Zone (both the TV show and the magazine), somewhere halfway between the short fiction of Harlan Ellison and Stephen King. In my twenties I wrote more straightforward stuff meant to be “literary” but couldn’t stop myself from adding strange flourishes that might have been postmodernist or magical realist, or might now be called slipstream or “new weird.” Now I’m writing science fiction, but with a great emphasis on people, relationships, internal thoughts or feelings, as compared to “spaceships, aliens and planets” kind of science fiction.
Having come out the other side of these transformations myself, I realize: The same kinds of ideas and surprises have always interested me, and in a sense I’ve always written about the same things. The settings and the clothing are different, and that’s the biggest thing “genre” really is. How is everything dressed up?
I suspect most writers wish the boundaries of any given genre were more flexible.
Those of you casually perusing this blog might say “This fella here looks like one of them wannabe writers, who talks a lot about how he wishes he could write some day, but doesn’t actually commit any words to paper.”
I’ve known people like that, more in love with the idea of writing than with the act itself, but I’m not one of them. I don’t write every single day, but I’m pretty productive. No, the reason I haven’t said much about my own fiction yet is a bit of self-consciousness about talking my own ideas and process. Having asked myself “What’s up with that, anyway?” I’ve come to the conclusion it’s mainly due to being unpublished at this point, so I feel more qualified spouting off about science fiction books and writers, since every reader feels qualified to be a critic. I figure, though, if I have enough nerve to send my work to professional editors to consider for their periodicals (a threshold I’ve crossed), I can certainly put myself far enough out on the limb to talk about some of my own creative philosophies and mechanisms.
Rather than starting with something I feel confident about, though, I’ll begin with a question to which I don’t really know the answer. One thing I feel unsure of, and I go back and forth on this question, is this: How many stories should I be working on at any given time?
Over the past dozen years I’ve recorded a lot of ambient electronic music. That’s not what this blog is about, but it’ll come up here sometimes because it’s an important part of my life. I mention it because in all those years, having released a handful of solo albums and another handful of collaborative ones, I’ve almost never tried to work on more than one thing at once. Finish the Griffin solo album, start the Viridian Sun duo album, start the second Griffin album, set it aside entirely and make the second Viridian Sun album, and so on. The process was to start a project and either finish it or set it aside completely before starting another. I never thought about this way of working, but it made sense to me and it seemed to work.
With my writing, I’ve always worked on more than one thing at once, sometimes juggling a really large number of projects and ideas. Last month I counted twelve short stories in progress and another thirty plotted, outlined or otherwise planned (but not yet started). When I have an idea for a story I slowly add little things to the mix during the planning stage, starting from a scribbled sentence or two that could barely be called an idea, into the seed of a story, fleshing it out into a full-fledged anecdote or scene, finally combining elements of plot and character, conflict and drama, until I have something ready to be written into a story. Often I stumble upon elements that fit well only very gradually, and I feel like my best stories have benefitted from being “in progress” for long enough for this to unfold.
Recently I felt overwhelmed by the many long-pending stories hanging over me, and resolved not to start anything new until I could shorten the queue down to just a few. Though I’m not yet entirely sure I need to change what I’m doing, I’m considering this an experiment.
MANY items working at once gives me the benefit of allowing each idea longer to mature, gather a sort of richness or complexity. The drawback is, certain stories get lost in a swirl of too much going on. When I have a dozen stories working, and I’m not able to write every single day, sometimes I’m away from a given story for long enough that it becomes too unfamiliar and I have to reacquaint myself with important details before I can begin working again.
FEWER items working would help me see clearly all the balls I’m trying to keep in the air, and ensure I can give time to each of them every week without spending too long away. The flipside to this, though, is that I can’t take much time away from an idea that seems like it would benefit from being shifted to the back burner for a few weeks, because I won’t have enough other stuff to work on instead.
I’ve been on roll lately, finalizing stories and sending them out, and January’s dozen or so pending stories may be reduced by half before the end of March. This is gratifying because the more stories I have completely finished and off my plate, the more I feel like a “real” science fiction writer and not just this confused guy who’s starting to dabble in a new genre. Also I feel the stories show rapid improvement, which makes me hopeful about getting something published soon, if not with one of the stories already finished and submitted, then with something I’ll finish soon.
In Stephen King’s wonderful book On Writing (and no matter what you think of King’s own work, this really is a useful book on writing that any fiction writer should own no matter what style they’re working in) he suggests an approach not too different from my own, involving sticking a first draft in a drawer for several weeks until it can be seen more objectively, and working on other things in the mean time.
If my focus were on novels this wouldn’t even be a question, as novelists usually just hammer away on their one novel at a time, or at most take a little break to work on a short story before getting back to it. Nobody’s juggling a dozen novels in various stages of completion. I’m curious how other writers focused on short fiction do this. I suppose I’ll just try narrowing it down a bit this spring, and see if that’s better or not. If it doesn’t feel right, I could always just start a few new stories… toss a few more balls up in the air and try to keep them up.
Last week I wrote about a very well-known, arguably classic, work of science fiction based on a big idea. In case you didn’t read my last post, SF Academy 01 – Ringworld by Larry Niven, I was disappointed with how that big idea was executed.
Today I’m going to focus on a more recently piece of “big idea” science fiction, one that was wonderfully effective by all measures. I’m talking about Spin, a novel from 2005 by Robert Charles Wilson.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2005)
In Spin, we observe three young friends, the protagonist Tyler Dupree and his friends, Diane and Jason Lawton, who are brother and sister and whose father is a powerful and wealthy businessman. Soon there is a major event affecting the entire world: the stars disappear, and it is determined that Earth has been sealed off from everything outside by a sort of shield. The sun still appears to rise according to the same schedule, and give warmth and light to the Earth, but it’s not the “real” sun, more of a virtual projection.
Humanity scrambles to figure out what happened, who might have caused this, and there’s an apocalyptic feel as fear and hopelessness take hold. Many aspects of this change are considered, and we see how such a thing might affect religion, business, the focus of scientists, interpersonal relationships. All this wide-angle stuff is seen from the perspective of Tyler, who remains intimately connected to Diane and Jason even as their lives diverge. Eventually humanity gains a better sense of what’s happening and why, and Jason is at the center of these efforts, and this brings Diane and Tyler into closer proximity with the mystery of the “spin.” Tyler has always been infatuated with Diane, and he struggles to find a way to connect with her, and he also has difficulty relating with Jason, who is obsessed with the spin mystery to an unhealthy degree. The matter of the “spin,” what it means, who caused it, and how this unfolds is of course the heart of the novel and I won’t include spoilers here.
What’s interesting and unusual here is the degree to which Wilson keeps this an intimate, human story despite the grand scale of space and time covered by the events in the book. As wide as the scope becomes, everything is always filtered through the perceptions and responses of a small group of people we feel close to, and care about. Tyler himself is not drawn as clearly as Diane and Jason, but we understand Tyler’s feelings for his friends, and it makes the events of the plot more dramatic.
Spin won the Hugo award in 2006 and Wilson has indicated it’s the first book in a trilogy. The sequel, Axis, came out two years later, and it’s not quite as strong as its predecessor. I’ll review that one here soon.
This is a book that delivers on what I consider the ideal of science fiction literature, which is to explore big ideas, convey a sense of wonder, and do so on a human scale so that the story packs emotional impact. Wilson is a mature and sensitive writer, and delivers fantastic events on a massive scale, in a way that feels natural, human and real. It’s very possibly the best science fiction novel of the past decade, and I’d say Wilson is my favorite recent discovery as well.
Continuing my efforts to rejuvenate this blog, and get back to writing more about what it was originally intended to be, I’m deleting old posts that were unrelated to the “reading and writing” theme. Ironically one of the most-read posts here pertained to some sports-related controversy from last summer’s track & field world championships, but that’s not really want I want this blog to be about.
So, before I move forward, I’m going to shove a big pile of junk out to the curb where the trash guy can pick it up. Whew, that feels a lot better.
Also, I’m poking around with new blog themes, and yes I realize the blog has a “generic” banner image but I’m not going to choose a definite, permanent banner that’s really my own until I choose a specific blog theme… because the different themes all have different sized spaces for banner images.
I thought about structuring this whole Science Fiction Academy series of posts in some organized way, like laying out the books in chronological order, or in the order I read them, but decided it was more fun to discuss whatever I have the strongest opinion about at the time. And right now, I have a strong opinion about Ringworld, the best-known novel by Larry Niven.
Back in the 1970s, before I had read much science fiction myself (at that time preferring Tolkien and comic books and more Tolkien) I remember seeing a friend reading Ringworld, carrying it with him on the school bus every day for several months. He had such enthusiasm for it, and talked a lot about the cool concept at the book’s center, the Ringworld itself. It’s a giant alien construction far from Earth, encircling its own sun, and with land and gravity and atmosphere very much like a planet. Every edition of the book I’ve ever seen includes a picture of the Ringworld on the cover, which makes sense because the book is about the Ringworld itself much more than it’s about the people or events in the book. If it sounds to you like that might be a problem, that the setting (interesting though this piece of alien construction may be) has precedence in this book over character and plot, you’d be correct. It is a problem.
The book does have a few interesting details aside from the Ringworld itself, weird bits of alien life and technology and lore that apparently appear elsewhere in Niven’s “Known Space” series of stories, of which this novel is part. There’s a fertile inventiveness underlying this novel which make all the more frustrating the problems I’ve hinted at.
The problems, then. The main character Louis Wu, a 200 year old Earth man who remains physically youthful and vital through futuristic biotech advances, is relatively interesting in concept. As for the sort of identifying traits that make a character, though, I have a hard time of thinking of anything interesting about Louis Wu. He’s sort of a bon vivant, and fancies himself some kind of a lover. I don’t really object to Louis Wu, and if the rest of the characters were as unobjectionable as Louis, this would be a better book.
The book’s premise, stated simply, is that an alien member of a race called the Puppeteers (previously known to Earthlings, but long absent from our planet for unknown reasons) has appeared and introduced himself to Louis, stating that he intends to put together a small team to travel across the galaxy using fancy faster-than-light technology way beyond what the humans possess, to check out some anomaly observed by other Puppeteers who are on a migration across the galaxy (which explains why they suddenly left Earth). This Puppeteer, Nessus, is a strangely-shaped two-headed alien, not the usual Star Trek “human with funny shaped ears or forehead” variety, and supposedly the Puppeteers’ defining trait as a race is their cowardliness. This trait is portrayed without the least subtlety, with a clownish idiocy that reminded me at times of Jar Jar Binks.
Before I get to the remaining characters, this raises my biggest objection to this book, which is the tin ear demonstrated especially by the dialogue, but also the clumsy and awkward writing throughout. Niven writes like a scientist with some neat ideas who decided he could write a novel and had never practiced before or even taken a writing class. I know plenty of readers are more interested in the ideas, especially in science fiction, and if you’re one of those readers, maybe you’re one of those who have made this a “classic” of the genre.
The other characters, then. There’s Teela Brown, a young and beautiful Earth female who is in love with Louis despite barely knowing him, and their 180 year difference in age. Nessus wants to recruit her to the team not due to her skill or experience, but because he believes her to be lucky, asserting that luck is an inheritable genetic trait and that she will be a good luck charm for the group. The way Teela’s dialogue and motivations are written made me wonder if maybe Niven had never actually talked to a real live pretty girl before, and the character felt less real to me than even the aliens.
The last main character is another alien, a member of a race of catlike warriors called the Kzin whose defining traits seems to be inability to control their tempers. The Kzin and humans have been fighting a series of Man-Kzin wars over the years (more stuff from the other “Known Space” stories, mostly just mentioned as backstory here) and though they fancy themselves fierce warriors, their brashness, impatience and stupidity have doomed them in these previous wars. The Kzin guy in this story is named Speaker-to-Animals and apparently he’s been bred to, well, speak to animals, and be a sort of diplomat rather than a warrior. You’d never know this by his actions, though, as he’s boastful and bullying, cartoonishly prone to violence.
The concept of the Ringworld itself is intriguing and cool enough to inspire similar ideas such as the Halo video game series, and the Orbital structures in Iain M. Banks series of Culture novels. Some of Niven’s other concepts and general ideas here are interesting as well. I’d love to have read this great big cool idea carried within a more interesting plot, with better characters.
The sentence-level quality of the writing is so poor, especially the excruciating dialogue, I find it difficult to understand the high reputation enjoyed by this book and its author. I began this overview with a memory of my friend reading the book on the schoolbus, at age 14 or so, and I’ve thought of that often as I read this. Science fiction as a genre has often been dismissed as unserious or aimed at adolescent boys, and while that’s generally both unfair and inaccurate, this book specifically seems written for an audience of young boys who’ve just moved up from comic books, but have never had a girlfriend yet. For that matter, the sex scenes here read as if Niven himself had never had a girlfriend when he wrote this.
I’ve re-read some of my other adolescent favorites, which I’ll get to in time, and the problem here is definitely not that I’ve lost the ability to enjoy something like Starship Troopers or Rocketship Galileo. Those were geared toward teens, but written in a way an adult can enjoy.
Unless someone whose taste I trust can argue me out of it, Larry Niven goes on my “never read again” list after this. It’s an A-plus idea with D-minus execution. I realize this book has won many awards and is considered a favorite of many fans, but really I’m guessing there are a lot of readers my age who read this in junior high school and just haven’t revisited it recently enough to discover how flawed it is.
I haven’t posted here in several months, nearly half a year. It’s not from a lack of interest in what I started writing about here (recent reading and writing for the most part), rather from a desire to focus more on actually doing those things, and worry less about blogging on the subjects, for now.
I’ve been reading a ton — fiction, nonfiction, magazines — and listening to a lot of audiobooks as usual (the old commute), and working very hard on writing fiction. As I blogged earlier, I’ve gone through earlier stretches of intense focus on fiction writing in my life, but since I got started working on electronic music and my Hypnos record label, that had been completely set aside until just over a year ago.
Partly this grew out of the joy of discovering some great new science fiction writers, and also rediscovering some of the books I loved earlier in my life. Partly also, it’s been a response to a nagging sense I’ve had for a long time that sooner or later, I would start writing fiction again. I didn’t want to get back to doing it the way I did in my twenties, with a focus on “straight” literary fiction with a slightly experimental or surreal angle. This, I realized later, was my way of trying to have my cake and eat it too — enable myself to write about “weird” concepts and yet occupy the same accepted and respected literary mainstream of my big heroes like Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Coming back to things after a long break, I realized it was important to me to work on the kind of stuff I enjoy reading and watching. My favorite books and films, and the writers and filmmakers I most idolized, occupied a more “fantastic” corner of storytelling. This could include science fiction, fantasy, horror, and even surrealism or absurdism.
In practice I’ve mostly zeroed-in on science fiction stories, though I’ve dabbled with stuff that could be called urban fantasy or occult/supernatural horror. This feels right to me, and I’ve come up with some stories that I love and feel enthusiastic about in a way that never happened with my earlier writing efforts, toward which I felt a sort of detached aesthetic regard that might barely be called admiration.
Also I think the stuff I’m writing is pretty good. I feel better about my chances of getting published now than I did before. It doesn’t feel like buying a lottery ticket when I send out a story to a magazine, more like playing a round of solitaire. OK, I might be more likely to lose than to win at this point, but at least I feel like my chances are better than astronomical.
One thing I’m doing, aside from questioning all assumptions as a writers of words and builder of stories, is trying to shore up my fundamental base of understanding the genres I’m interested in, science fiction in particular. I’ve undertaken a sort of self-study course to reexamine some of the works I loved before, and more importantly to check out the many classics I’d never yet read. This sort of self-taught course in SCIFI 101 has been instructive, but not always in the ways I would have expected. There have been books I’ve read and said “Wow, how could I have waited so long to discover this?” and others I’ve read and wanted to stop before the end, thinking to myself, “What the hell is this crap? Who decided this was a classic?”
It’s caused me to think differently about the relative merits of some names that occupy mostly equal levels in the pantheon of big science fiction names. I mean, if you post a request on some public message board for recommendations of what science fiction classics you ought to read, you’ll get a lot of people suggesting the obvious Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Bradbury stuff, as well as plenty of Niven and Anthony and Dick and Sagan and Haldeman, and you know what? Some of that stuff stands up really well, and some of it doesn’t. Some of the ideas are really fresh, and some is quite stale. Some of it is very good writing, and some of it is excruciating on a sentence level. Interestingly, some of the guys with the best “big ideas” write some of the worst sentences and most cringe-worthy dialogue, while a guy who’s a better wordsmith might be lacking in the “sense of wonder” department.
As I continue plodding away through my own Science Fiction Academy, I’ve reached a point where I feel like I know only a little, but enough to start asserting opinions, pushing a certain point of view. That’s what I’m going to work on here for a while, a piece-by-piece reporting of what I’ve learned and how I assess some of the major books and big-name writers of the science fiction genre (and other related styles), possibly with occasional diversions into lessons from movies, TV or even art. I’ll tag these entries with Science Fiction Academy, as well as with the relevant names and titles.
I’ll also start to give some more specifics of the stories I’m working on writing.
Now, I have a couple of PCs running Windows (though I prefer using a Mac when I can), so I don’t entirely want to start a Mac-versus-Windows battle royale here. We all know Apple has a certain “coolness” factor Microsoft would love to emulate.
Apple Retail Store
Apple retail stores have this incredible THX-1138 modern atmosphere, and people just love to go in there and browse and feel awesome. Microsoft is getting ready to start opening their own retail store and the rumor is that they’ve been hiring away top Apple store managers to try to steal Apple’s mojo, I guess.
When George Lucas was cool
Microsoft is getting ready to release Windows 7 which, after the monumental pile of suck that was Vista, should be an event anticipated by a certain number of people.
In an attempt to create a bit more of a sense of EXTRAVAGANZA, however, Microsoft in its customary tone-deafness has been promoting the idea of the “Windows 7 Release Date Party.” See here:
The always-wonderful Cabel takes a whack at the low-hanging pinata (note to self: find n character with tilde over it) here with his own slight variation on MS’s vid:
None of my home PCs have any version of Windows newer than XP (and I will not willingly install Vista on any machine I own), but I’ll wait and see what the nerds say about Windows 7. In the mean time, Microsoft remains one of those companies utterly unaware of how they are perceived, and delusional about their own image, trying again and again to “go viral” and create buzz about lame shit like Vista, and the latest Windows Media Player, and worst of all, the Zune.
Only the finest industrial design for our Microsofties
Television was originally seen as this great technology to allow people all over to keep informed of world events, and to find all kinds of free entertainment in the home, only to turn into the world’s great motivation-sucking-time-waster. Something similar, and more modern has evolved, a sort of interactive television. I’m talking about the internet.
On one hand, the internet is an incredibly powerful tool. The advent of near-ubiquitous internet connectivity has allowed all kinds of great efficiencies like paying bills or doing research or communicating with friends online. On the other hand, though, it’s a potentially detrimental distraction or time sink. It can be so much fun, you almost don’t realize, or maybe don’t care, how much time you’ve wasted.
I don’t care about the loss in business productivity from all the people browsing fantasy football leagues on espn.com, or gossip on thesuperficial.com about Paris Hilton’s latest pix, or any of the many blogs, forums, facebook profiles, youtubes, tumblrs or tweets. I mean, business owners should care (and any corporate IT manager can tell you most people’s work computers are used a lot more for screwing around than for work), but that’s not what interests me here.
Paris Hilton making an adjustment
I’m talking about people like myself sitting down to the computer for my own reasons, to work on a project that’s important to me. Let’s say I’m trying to work on some music or graphic design for my record label, Hypnos Recordings, or in my downstairs office trying to get some writing or editing done. Often I’ll think “I’ll just do this little bit of research about which street the UN building is on,” or maybe, “It’ll take two seconds to find out how many moons Neptune has,” or perhaps, “I think I’ll check out that little Russian record label and listen to some of their mp3 sample clips.”
The next thing I know ninety minutes have passed and I’m somewhere deep in web-land, nowhere near where I started out.
The internet has really made a million things easier, sometimes to benefit the user, and more often to benefit a business providing web content, deriving profit from the continued attention of your eyeballs. In other words, the web started out as a way of getting interesting information in front of people who wanted it, but it has evolved into mostly just a way of getting you to look at stuff with advertisements embedded in it. Some web sites, such as Amazon.com or Netflix.com or Youtube.com have spent a lot of time and money developing tools that let them say “We see you are interested in this thing you came here for… perhaps you may also be interested in these many other similar things you didn’t know about?”
How many times have you gone to Youtube to look at a clever video link someone sent you, only to end up watching a half-dozen or more other videos you arrived with no intention of watching? There you are an hour later, watching that dumb kid ride his BMX bike into a brick wall, or an old lady smash a folding chair and fall on her ass, or this.
Something I’ve tried recently is using an old laptop as my writing computer, an old IBM ThinkPad. I don’t particularly like the keyboard, and I hate the lower-resolution screen which makes it hard to fit a whole page on the screen at once. But this machine has no wireless, and it’s nowhere near an ethernet plug, so it’s effectively just a word processor. I’d rather write on a newer computer with a nicer monitor and a keyboard with better touch, and yet I get a lot more accomplished on this IBM because I have no distractions. I just sit down with this thing on my lap and I listen to the music playing from the other side of the room, and I write just like I used to write in the years before the internet came along.
The IBM ThinkPad -- it sucks so much, it's wonderful!
At first I hated this old machine, but then I remembered its very limitations are why I chose it. I’m getting a lot more done, this past few months since I started using it. I’ve often thought of getting an old OS7-era Mac laptop for this purpose, but what I have is working well enough for my needs. I wouldn’t want this to be my only computer, or even my main computer, but again, in this case the limitations constitute the whole point.
Today I stumbled upon a blog entry by someone using an old Mac in a similar way.
Mac Color Classic setup (see SystemFolder blog link below)
My first response upon reading this blog entry, unavoidably despite my own success using an old, “crippled” machine, was to focus on all the things the machine couldn’t do. Gahhh, what about USB?! Again, that’s the point, taking away options and especially removing the temptation of the internet, in the name of a more direct approach to creativity.
I wouldn’t go so far as an old typewriter, as the word processor’s ability to save and edit without having to re-type revised drafts in their entirety is something I really couldn’t do without. I’m a fast typist but who wants to waste that much time?
Another option I stumbled upon, via the same fantastic tumblr/blog incidentally, Minimal Mac, is this simple application that allows a user to voluntarily lock themselves out of any internet connection for a pre-determined period of time.
To me, this seems like it could allow the best of all worlds. I could use my preferred machine, with the best possible monitor and keyboard, and whatever software I choose, without any temptation (during a set writing period or other creative “window”) to screw around online. I wonder if others have had the same amount of frustration at their own time-wasting, or if most people just don’t mind hours spent on wikipedia or amazon. Maybe everyone has a lot more discipline and self-control than I do, but having looked over a few shoulders in my day, I’d say not.
GriffinWords 