Symbolic Forest

Back in the mists of time (well, January), I posted about the mechanism I use to keep track of ideas I’ve had for posts to write about, so I make sure that if I’m in the middle of something else and think “that would be a good blog post topic,” it doesn’t just get forgotten and allowed to wither.

I realised, looking the other day down the list of “tickets” for post topics to write about, that practically all of the things I actively want to write about are ideas I’ve come up with in the past couple of months, since moving house. There are plenty of things I wrote down before moving, but none of them really spark anything inside me at the moment, as something I want to put down and get out there. Some of them I do at least understand; others are a little bit more mystifying. When I put down a few words such as “Post about the fast-flowing water in Stockholm,” what did I really mean and what exactly was I going to say?

Moving house, it seems, has subconsciously been a much bigger upheaval than I realised it would be. A much bigger and cleaner break from the past than I was expecting. I can understand no longer having the energy to write posts about Bristolian local history; but all of those had been cleaned off the backlog already in any case. Somewhere in my head, all of the ideas I came up with before moving are now in a dusty mental box marked “do not need to unpack”.

Nevertheless, although I had a bit of a lull, there are now plenty of ideas to come. At some point, too, I’ll get back on to the old ones, maybe even finish writing that modern version of The Box Of Delights that I started to make a rough stab at. There is a lot more to say, even if as yet I don’t know exactly what all of it will be.

Keyword noise: blogging, writing, ideas.

A few days ago, I mentioned in passing that there I have lots of ideas for topics to write about on here, and the backlog of ideas is slowly building up. What I didn’t say was: how I track the backlog and remember all those ideas; instead, I thought to myself, that would make an interesting post for another day. “Backlog” isn’t meant to be derogatory, by the way. I see it as a good healthy thing, that I have lots of ideas that I haven’t as yet have had the time or energy or inclination to turn into words yet. Better that than a dearth of things I want to talk about, after all; that’s what would make this site slowly dry up and wither.

The Plain People Of The Internet: That and there not being any readers.

I don’t mind too much if there aren’t any readers. If I cared about readers I’d be cross-promoting this everywhere, doing complex deals and joint projects and promoting myself as the exciting new face of self-published diarising. I don’t, though, because the point of this is the writing, not the reading. But that’s by-the-by too really.

It’s very easy to get into the situation where ideas do just flit away on the wind as soon as they come along, and the spark of inspiration never gets turned into a post on here. Write your ideas down, is the standard piece of advice, but that means having something to write with, something to write on, and somewhere to collate and collect all of your scribbled notes. Working in software development, though, there are a few closely-related solved problems, so when I restarted this blog last summer I decided I was going to use the skills and tools I know from the day job to help me plan and track my writing on here. There are two key related tools that I’ve been using to help, which any software people reading this really should know about: version control and issue tracking.^* If you are a software person, and you think the next paragraph is teaching you to suck eggs a little bit, then just remember that there are always people in the world who don’t know this stuff. Nobody is born with an innate knowledge of project management.

Version control is, very simply, the idea of keeping an archive of your working files that preserves their state over time, at least at the intervals you choose. It has a long history; the concept has been around probably longer than computers themselves. The leading system for it at the moment is called “git”, and was created by Linus Torvalds in order to help with development of his “Linux” operating system.^** It effectively takes snapshots of all the files in a given folder at a point in time, and you can reset your “working copy” of the files to any snapshot whenever you want to. Moreover, each snapshot (or “commit” in the jargon) has a record of its parentage, and this ties commits together in a way that makes the folder’s history more than just one-dimensional. The chain of commits starting at a particular recent one and reaching back through the sequence of ancestral commits is called a “branch”; your archive can contain any number of named branches in parallel, and you can switch between branches whenever you want too. Not all developers really understand how to use branches properly, but if you do, they are a very powerful tool to help you organise disparate strands of work.

Git was originally designed to be a highly decentralised system without any single copy of the archive holding the privileged position of being the main primary copy. Most developers, however, don’t actually use it like that. A number of companies and organisations have sprung up to offer Git hosting services, and most development teams use one of these hosting services to host the primary copy of their Git data and use it as a centralised exchange point to share their code. That isn’t an issue for me writing this website, but these hosting services also offer additional services which are very useful: particularly, in the context of this post, ticketing systems. These are basically databases that let you create a “ticket”, generally some sort of work item such as a bug, a new feature or a task to be completed, and then let you track the progress of each one. The really fancy systems are so customisable you can completely shoot yourself in the foot designing over-complicated workflows, building reports, and adding custom data fields to each type of ticket, but I don’t care about any of that. The important thing here is that I can create a ticket, and I can access the “create ticket” function from anywhere through my phone. Whenever an idea for a new post comes along, I can immediately create a ticket with a brief description or title in it; then when I sit down to write something, I have a whole list of ideas I’ve had on the screen in front of me. Nothing gets forgotten, and all the ideas are there for me to come back to eventually, unless I didn’t put in enough of a description for it to make any sense.

When I start work on a post, I do exactly what I’d do when working on a piece of code. I read the ticket and click the button to flag it as in progress. I go to Git, make sure I’m at the tip of the “main” branch (as this reflects what’s currently on the website), and create a new branch with the ticket number in its name. I go into the site’s content code and create the new post, and when I’m happy with what I’ve written I create a commit with the new article in. Then, my Git hosting site has tools to help me check over what I’ve just done before folding those changes into the “main” branch. If I really wanted to, I could set up “continuous integration” code that would automatically push those changes out to the website as soon as they are folded into the main branch; although I’d use that for a software project, for this site I prefer to keep that process manual. When the changes have been made and the whole thing has been published, I mark the ticket as “closed”, and it disappears from my ticket backlog.

This sort of system isn’t for everyone, and it might not work for you, but I find it invaluable to keep track of what I’ve been thinking and what I’ve been planning. I find it’s fairly lightweight—it helps that I need to be comfortable with the tools anyway—but I understand not everyone is likely to agree. The hardest part, at least at first, is the discipline. Thinking to myself “better create a ticket for that” when an idea pops into my head, rather than just letting the idea float away again. Then again, that discipline is just as important if you rely on writing all your ideas down on paper; and the benefit of the technology is being able to easily file them all once you’ve done that. If anyone reading this is a non-tech person who has adopted these type of tools for non-tech activities like writing or indeed anything else, I’d love to know, and I’d love to know how much of a success it has been for you. For me, this is one big thing that helps me write, because it turns a lot of the administrative aspect of the writing process into something that is purely mechanical. For you, it might be different—but I’d love to know what you think.

* To be honest, there are a few software dev workshops that don’t use one or the other of those tools, even though they almost certainly should. They’re not new, and they make your life a lot easier. Even in top global businesses there are teams here and there who refuse to use version control, or more commonly, don’t really understand how to use it properly. It would be unprofessional of me to name and shame, but all I’ll say is, you would be surprised.

** This is not the place for a debate over whether Linux is an operating system or not.

Keyword noise: blogging, writing, version control, git, project management.

Happy Boxing Day and all that!

Regular readers will have noticed I’ve been writing a modern day retelling of The Box Of Delights over the past few weeks. If you’ve noticed that, you’ll also have noticed I haven’t got anywhere near the end of what is supposed to be a seasonal story—I mean, we haven’t even come across the titular box yet.

Bearing that in mind, and bearing in mind my probable low speed of writing, the question is: what do I do now?

• Keep writing and publishing it here as I write, even if that means the Christmas conclusion is published in August.
• Keep writing and drafting and publish it here next December.
• Stop writing it, it’s not very good anyway.

Answers on a postcard to the usual address, etc. And, indeed, feel free to send in any other questions.

Right, now I shall go back to building one of the things I received to play with—feel free to guess what it might be! Merry Christmas!

Keyword noise: writing, stories, fiction.

Writing this post from the other week, with its long rant about the poor quality of the worldbuilding in BBC3’s Being Human, has made me think more in general about the quality of writing, and the quality of my own writing. After all, am I in a position to excoriate other people’s ability to write and worldbuild, when I don’t exactly have much to demonstrate on my own behalf there?

It set my brain off on a tangent, though. Not so much about worldbuilding, but about the authorial voice. Because that’s something I used to worry about, years back: I would never be any good at writing because I didn’t have my own voice. If you read any of my prose, there would be nothing at all distinctive about it. Whether that was true back then, back when I used to worry about such things, I don’t know, and I have no real desire to go back and read anything that old. It probably isn’t true any more, though. Certainly, one of the things K likes about my blog posts is that, she says, in my writing I sound just as I do when I speak.

I’ve been a reader since I was small: I’ve been able to read since before memory, since before virtually all of my memories, so I have no conception of what it feels like to see words and not understand them. Ever since I started reading for myself, though, I’ve been a silent reader, a very quick reader, and I also tend to be a very poor reader. Because I’m a quick reader I skim too much. I miss things. I miss things out, have to go back, don’t notice Important Plot Points and don’t take in any of the craft involved in the work. However, I think I’ve found a solution to this. I’ve started reading things aloud, and it has turned around the way I look at writing.

What started all this was: I’d just started reading a book I’ve had sitting around unread for a couple of years almost, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.^* Only on the second or third chapter, we had to take a plane journey, and K didn’t have anything interesting herself to read. “Read to me?” she asked. So, since, I’ve been reading a passage of Wolf Hall to her in bed every evening. It’s been a couple of months now; reading aloud is much slower than reading silently, and we’re not awake enough for a chapter^** every single night. In doing it, I’ve learned a lot about syntax, prosody, and prosody’s representation. Hilary Mantel has been one of my favourite novelists for many years now,^*** and Wolf Hall, award-winning and all, is very readable, but it’s not always the easiest novel to read aloud. Its long sentences are just slightly too long for comfort in the voice: lists of things, and there are many lists of things, always have one term too many to easily read aloud. Her authorial voice is very readable, very concise and very accessible, but her sentences are sometimes a little too long to know automatically where the stresses are intended to fall. Which isn’t to deny that it is, absolutely, an excellent novel; it just isn’t perfect for me to read aloud, at least not without a rehearsal.

Wolf Hall‘s sequel will be coming out before too long, and no doubt will be something I will read to K at some point. In the meantime, we are assembling a list of books to be read: The Third Policeman after last week’s opera;^**** some Peter Ackroyd, such as Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem; maybe Lanark, although that will be a mammoth adventure. In the meantime, I am taking a lot from reading aloud. It makes me confident that I do have a voice when I write, a voice I can manipulate if I want to. It makes me confident, too, that I have a readable voice, a voice that might be publishable. Most importantly, it has helped an awful lot to reconnect the craft of writing with the act of reading. The two, obviously, are very closely linked; but I think I’d forgotten just how closely linked they are. I think I’d forgotten to write for the reader.

* I can tell you where I started reading it, too: waiting for a train in Frankfurt an der Oder.

** Strictly speaking, it would be very hard to read a chapter every night, because Wolf Hall has very uneven chapter lengths. Some are getting on for a hundred pages of the book; others are no more than two or three.

*** At root, her earlier historical novel about the lives of Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins is one of the things to blame for the time I got myself on the telly the other year.

**** Tricky, with all its footnotes.

Keyword noise: books, Hilary Mantel, literature, novels, reading, reading aloud, Wolf Hall, writing, Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, Alasdair Gray, Lanark, Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem.

There’s one big problem with computers and pervasive connectivity. The problem is: it’s all at your fingertips. Which means, when you sit down to do some work, it’s all too easy to realise that there are other things you’d rather be doing; and there are a lot that can be done there and then.

In a lot of cases that’s straightforward to solve: disconnect yourself. It’s a bit trickier, though, when it comes to writing blog posts. Particularly, the sort of blog posts that need fact-checking, more information, and so on. Once you have to start doing that, you start getting sidetracked down a line of “research” which is very interesting and distracting, but doesn’t really help you with getting your blog post written. The inspiration fades away amid a mass of non-information.

What I’m going to have to do, I think, in order to get this process going properly again, is to make more notes. Get a notebook, and find a place far away from the internet. Hide my phone. Lie back in bed, maybe, and write my posts with pen and paper first. And after that, put all the links in and do the fact-checking, after the text is already down. It all goes back to something I wrote a long time back, wondering if having a Blog Editor would improve the quality of this blog. An independent Blog Editor is highly unlikely to appear, so I have to fulfil both roles myself; but if I do try to explicitly divide writing time and editing time, then maybe much more will get done.

Keyword noise: blogging, distraction, editing, writing.

Last week, in the last Book I Haven’t Read post, I mentioned By Hook Or By Crook by David Crystal, and predicted that – in contrast to the book I was actually writing about – I’d have By Hook Or By Crook rattled through and quickly finished off.

Well, indeed, I have: it’s read, finished, and back on the bookshelf now. Prediction correct. And, as I said before, I think it was easy to read precisely because it mirrors the way I think. To recap: it’s written as a road trip, during which the writer muses on anything, really, that he finds of interest as he passes. A nearby manor house reminds him of a railway engine named after it, which prompts him to muse on railway engine names in general. The journey from Anglesey to the mainland prompts him to recount the history of the Menai bridges,^* and a trip to Hay-on-Wye leads to the history of inn signs, coats-of-arms, and many other things besides.

It’s a book of associations, and a celebration of associative thought. I’m sure that it didn’t actually take place as a single trip, and that when Crystal sat down to write the book he didn’t just muse on whatever came to mind; it’s too carefully structured and crafted for that. But it does read as if that’s what he’s doing. It made me think, moreover, of the way I write this blog, which isn’t at all carefully structured and crafted. But, as I move through the world, I see things which spark my brain alight and give me something to think about; and this blog is the result. It’s full of rambling and digression, but, rambling and digression with a common thread behind it, the thread being the things I encounter.^**

I was thinking about this as I got towards the end of By Hook Or By Crook. So, I was quite amused when I reached Crystal’s thoughts on blogging.

[Blogging] is writing which is totally spontaneous, put up on a screen without the intervention of an editor or proof-reader, so it is much more like ‘speaking in print’ than anything before. And it shows many of the properties of spoken language, such as loosely constructed sentences and unexpected changes of direction. Bit like this book, really…

David Crystal has a blog. He started writing it at the end of 2006; he said, as a sort of FAQ page. Given that By Hook Or By Crook was published in ’07, though, I’d assume that he started blogging either a few months after the book had been written or when it was in the final stages of completion. I’m wondering if writing that book was one of the other things, though, that prompted him to start writing a blog. Because, really, they’re often exercises in a similar sort of vein. Spotting something that interests you, and telling other people about it.

* from building up to burning down, you could say

** Which is all a bit of a longwinded and pretentious way of saying: I write about whatever’s on my mind.

Keyword noise: blogging, books, By Hook Or By Crook, David Crystal, information, inspiration, journey, road trip, travel, writing.

Have spent today on a wild goose chase around the county. In one sense: a bad thing, because nothing productive at all got done. In another: a good thing, noone could bother me,^* so I had some time to think to myself, and plot things. I started writing a film treatment in my head; the challenge will be to get it on paper in some way that resembles my mind’s-eye view. Which is hard. It reminds me of a passage on writing by Tibor Fischer:

The ideas, the visions that turned his ignition were exciting but it was like taking a pebble out of a river where it gleamed and watching it became matt and boring. Pataki tried to splash with ink the invisible men that only he could see, so that others could detect their outlines, but he always missed and was merely left with a mess

(from Under The Frog, p32 in the Penguin edition)

Someone recently searched for: “how to build a souterrain”. Which is an interesting idea. As far as I know, noone’s tried to build a souterrain for a millennium or two, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t give it a go, if you have enough land. You can go for cut-and-cover fairly easily: dig a banana-shaped trench, maybe about twenty or thirty feet long, down to about eight feet or so in depth,^** and pop a roof of some kind, probably turf or thatch, over the top. In soil it’s probably a lot safer than a shallow tunnel, unless you really know what you’re up to. In rock, it’s a lot of work.

Another thing that’s been searched for recently: “feeling absolutely drained of all energy”. I couldn’t agree more. And so to bed.

* “Sorry, the battery on my hands-free headset has run out”

** I hope you realise I’m pulling these measurements off the top of my head, rather than looking up archaeological reports and so on.

Keyword noise: archaeology, fogou, passage, souterrain, Tibor Fischer, Under The Frog, underground, tunnel, writing.

I’ve noticed I’ve been a bit lax updating recently – if you look on the sidebar, you’ll notice these past few months have had far fewer posts than before. Back in January I said to myself that I was going to try to update every day. As you can see, I haven’t been managing it.

“Why do you have to update if you don’t have anything to say?” someone asked recently. I feel I should, though. Previous attempts at creating diaries have always faded away due to laziness; when I started this site, the intention was to try to stick to one post per day. No more, no less, and the rhythm would stop it fading away. I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening quite yet, but I am going to try to put more effort in.

Big Dave is still up to something – he’s been up to something all week, I’m sure, but he’s not saying what it is yet. Lots of phone calls that he won’t take in front of people.

We were both up to something the other day, to be honest – we found a rather good screensaver^* that simulates, very closely, a computer that has crashed so horribly that it won’t start up. Dave, of course, couldn’t resist installing it on the PC of someone who recently played a joke on him. He waited until we knew the chap was away from his desk, installed it remotely, then sat back and waited for the phone call.

The funny thing, though, is that he also installed it on his own PC, so he could see what it does. So now, every time he comes back to his desk,^*** he has a millisecond of “Shit! Aargh!” before remembering that it’s his screensaver. Our fear of blue screens is that ingrained, he can’t help it.

* It’s from Sysinternals, a very good site if you have to be a Windows geek, with all sorts of useful semi-official system tools. It used to be independent, but was absorbed^** by Microsoft this summer.

** or maybe “adsorbed” is a better word.

*** after answering one of those mysterious phone calls he keeps getting.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, blogging, Blue Screen Of Death, BSOD, jokes, laziness, practical jokes, schedule, Sysinternals, writing.

Talking of ghost stories, I dreamed an interesting one a few nights ago. I liked it so much, in fact, that I rather fancy working it up into a proper story.

No doubt the plot is one that’s been covered many times before; but there aren’t really very many ghost-story plots that haven’t been well worked-over. The way it came out in my dream – which was of someone telling the story, rather than of the story itself – it was a version of one of the most frequently-used plots of all, the Disappearing Fellow-Traveller.^* However, it was, well, rather inverted. I don’t want to say any more, because I don’t want to spoil it for you if I ever do manage to finish it.

* At least one classic story of the Disappearing Fellow-Traveller genre made it, in a retold version, into an anthology of supposedly true ghost stories. I can’t remember many details at all about it; but it concerned someone who got chatting to a fellow-traveller in a railway carriage, and found that the stranger was a friend of the people the traveller was going to visit. On mentioning him at the destination, of course, he turned out to have died some time earlier. I really should work this up and look up the names of the writers and books involved. I’ve got a feeling the “true” book was Railway Ghosts And Phantoms by W B Herbert, but I’m not at all sure.

Update, 22^nd August 2020: Unsurprisingly, I didn’t do anything with the story idea and now have no memory at all of what it was about. I have a nagging feeling the story I talk about in the footnote was by E Nesbit but I haven’t yet tracked it down.

Keyword noise: ghost stories, literature, story, synopsis, writing.