So another Nanowrimo draws to a close. The title says HEX CODE, but today’s writing was finishing out a few details in scenes in BOT NET (the second part of the Spellpunk trilogy manuscript I’m working on) and then a new beginning for ROOT USER (book 3). That new beginning, which played out a scene I’ve had in my head a long time, was very easy to write.
“That’s a damn shame,” says a distant voice, “so large an animal, in so small a cage.”
Muzzily, I grogs awake. What the fuck? Can’t they see I’m sleepin’? But then the words they’ve spoken starts to set in, balls in a Pachinko machine, rattlin’ in through the Pascal’s Triangle patterns in my brain to rack up a score of maximum annoyance.
The cage, you see, is large, for its type—a safety cage. Eight by thirty, made of elaborate wrought-iron vines, fashioned special from a welder we knows in Little Five Points, the safety cage is the largest and nicest I’ve ever been in—and the largest we could fit on our front porch.
The porch is big, and Southern, in front of a house big, and Southern, a third of the way down Fairview from Moreland, not three blocks from L5P. Pretty big even by Atlanta standards, but county code sez leave the front door unblocked, so thirty feet wide is was the cage limit.
Not that it feels limiting; there’s lamps and books and ferns and an ahw-SOOOME sectional sofa we found at an outdoor patio store, which stretches almost from the porch door on the left to the <regulation width with code #> stair down to my den.
It’s a full fourteen feet of sofa, fully twelve feet of it usable—which is a good thing, because stretched over it right now, covering just about its full length this very instant, is the enormous animal that the annoying interpopers have named.
Me.
That’s why the last day of Nano has that spike: let your inspiration flow!
That brought me to over 65,000 words, the most I’ve done in Nano, as far as I know, ever:
SO I have a new record to beat. But I also cracked 700,000 words on my spreadsheet … which means, since I’ve done Nano at least three times before, my total Nano total is 850,000 words.
I feel pretty happy about that. Nano has brought so many creative ideas to the table, I can’t even begin to describe it. Easily a half dozen completely new ideas came to me this month - one even within the final writing session just before midnight tonight. I have to credit Nano for giving me this inspiration.
Now, onward to the next round of edits on THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE … and the 50,000 other projects I’ve been putting off, like my library … though I *might* take out a little time to play a video game, or, perhaps, read a book … you never know ...
-the Centaur
1995 was one of the best years of my life: I got engaged, I published my first scientific paper, and I published my first short story. All that gave me a great feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment, but that happiness was short lived: that engagement ultimately disintegrated, my PhD dragged on, and I didn’t publish another short story for years.
Now, there were great sparks in there - successive internships at CMU in Pittsburgh in 1996, SRI in the Bay Area in 1997 and Yamaha in Japan in 1998 - but I didn’t really start feeling great until 1999, when my thesis advisor started an internet startup with me and one of his graduate students - Enkia, my first taste of the inside of a healthy startup.
But the dotcom crash happened and everything got acrimonious (as things do when external factors turn sour, since people are no longer glossing over problems that didn’t bother them before) and my father grew gravely ill and we all agreed it was better to part ways, so that happy time evaporated too. I don’t even really have good pictures of this time, not digital ones.
The pattern repeats - ups and downs, good times and bad, a few really so-so jobs with really nice people, meeting my wonderful fiancee and having a terrible-post wedding experience with my mother, and so on, and so on. It’s really easy to focus on the bad, sometimes, to think of all the things that have gone wrong.
This year was no different: loss of the family matriarch, extreme disruption at work (I lost 2 SVPs, 2 directors, 2 bosses and 2 teams in the last year to other-than-normal churn) and the delay of my latest novel, the CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. But at the same time, I had a great novel published - LIQUID FIRE - found a wonderful new team, and had a great time with friends and family.
You know what? Crap happens. But wonderful things happen to. And the way that we choose to take things affects what we get out of them. If you focus on all the bad stuff, you may end up feeling like your life is in the shitter. But if you take the time out to appreciate the good things as they happen, to share them with friends and family, and to remember them …
… you might find everything really did turn out all right.
-the Centaur 
