Things I learned from my friend’s dog
My
friend Fleur has gone on a 5-week jaunt through Asia and I’m looking
after her two-year-old dog, Snow. I’ve never had a dog before, so the experience
is teaching me a lot.
So far I’ve learned that:
- There’s a sleepy dog smell.
- You don’t have to be very big to snore like a foghorn.
- Snow has no setting between OFF and MAXIMUM POWER.
- Due to some kind of biological quirk, the phrase “Come here” cannot be detected by Snow’s ears, but she can hear the opening of a door from the other end of the house through solid brick walls.
- If you step backwards (at any time), you will stand on Snow.
I’ve also gained some insight into her thought processes. I’m pretty sure that her philosophy goes like this:
- The purpose of life is to locate humans and stand as close to them as possible.
- Disgusting = interesting.
- Corollary A: The fouler it smells, the more it needs to be sniffed.
- Corollary B: If it drips, if it stinks, if it does both at once, bring it in the house.
- It is uncouth to push open a slightly ajar door in order to pass through it; rather, one should sit in front of it and whine.
- When you gotta go, you gotta go.
- The grass is always greener on the other side of a closed door.
- The only thing more exciting than going on a walk is coming home from a walk, unless you’re already home, in which case the most exciting thing is going for a walk.
- If you don’t know what it is, lick it.
Um… (#2)
Clearly I didn’t think this through. I now have to write a six-volume
series chock full of appalling characters just to satisfy all the people who
wrote me annoying “Um…” e-mails. It was meant to be a deterrent, dammit!
Now stop it!
Um…
Okay, that’s enough. At first I thought this was kind of funny. Then
it wasn’t so funny, then it got irritating, and now it makes me want to hurt
someone. I’m talking about the practice of starting a post with “Um.”
This is particularly virulent on technically-inclined mailing lists and forums. It goes like this: a person posts something—a comment, a question, anything—and some other guy thinks they’re wrong. But he doesn’t just come out and say that, oh no. First he says: “Um…” Like this: “Um… Word won’t run on Linux.”
This is meant to convey the impression that the initial post was so mind-numbingly stupid that at first he couldn’t believe it was actually meant in earnest. Then, as he began to phrase his reply, he had to pause to ratchet down his intelligence a few levels so that the drooling simpleton who had uttered such idiocy would be able to comprehend it. This created a pause which had to be filled by “Um.”
Only that’s not what happened at all. If you’re having an actual conversation with someone, sure, you might say “um.” But if you’re typing out a post, what the hell are you doing? Are your fingers operating independently of your brain? No! You’re just being an asshole!
Maybe I could deal with this if it only happened when genuinely brilliant people wrote messages to real morons. After all, geniuses aren’t supposed to have social skills. But it happens all the time. This is the exchange that finally sent me over the edge:
#1: Happily seen that Gentoo has released 2004.2. I’m now using 2004.0 and I wonder whether it is necessary for me to migrate to 2004.2 from 2004.0.
#2: Uh.. if you do an “emerge -uD world” then you too will have all the bonus’s of 2004.2…
#3: Really? I think simply doing this won’t change my /etc/make.profile. It’ll be still point to ../usr/portage/profiles/default-x86-2004.0, isn’t it?
#4: Um, its a symlink… change it to point to the new profile
No! No! Not “Um!” The first guy was right, goddamn it! You can’t “um” him when he’s right! What is this um doing? It’s a totally unjustified um!
This is a cancer of the internet, I tell you, and it’s got to be stopped. Please. I can’t take much more.
(P.S. If anyone writes me an e-mail like “Um… Word can run on Linux if you use an emulator,” I’m going to name a really bad character after them.)
Chuck & me
So
this is about six months too late and I actually got scooped,
by myself, on
chuckpalahniuk.net, but:
I was on book tour in the US earlier this year, and this meant staying
in a lot of fancy hotels. In Seattle it was the Alexis, which is apparently
frequented by authors so, uh, frequently, that it has a special room
for them: the “Author’s Suite.” This, I assumed, was a dingy sub-basement
hole where people could yell down things like, “Max, don’t forget to do
the washing,”* but no: it was swish as. The hotel asked (oh, how politely
they asked) every visiting author to sign a copy of their novel, and
the walls of the Author’s Suite were fairly groaning with these. I had
lots of fun hunting down copies of some of my favorite books, and was
especially happy to find a Fight Club. Chuck Palahniuk is one
of my top two modern authors (the other is Neal Stephenson); I don’t
see much resemblance between Chuck’s stuff and mine, but am very happy whenever
someone else does. By the time I left,
this is what the Author’s Suite
copies of Fight Club and Jennifer Government looked like.
* (I actually wrote that and thought, “Crap, I have a load of washing in the machine.” I had to go and get it out before I could finish the blog. Yes, my life is that glamorous.)
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Chuck & me
Company re-organization
Is it a good idea to sell a book to a publisher, then extensively
re-write it? The marketer in me says, “No.” (Also, “Put pop-up
ads on NationStates!”) But that’s pretty much what I’ve done
with Company. At first I was just going to do a little
tweaking: snip a sub-plot here, pat down a character foible there,
that kind of thing. But the more I re-wrote, the more I saw that
needed re-writing. Then, before I knew it, I had a new second half
to the book.
(Of course, when I say, “before I knew it,” I’m using artistic license. No-one actually ends up with a novel “before they knew it.” I’m always seeing this in movies: someone decides to write a novel and two weeks later they’re typing THE END into a laptop at Starbucks and exhaling in satisfaction. Two weeks! I can’t get a sentence right in two weeks. Also, I hate people who write novels at Starbucks. And people who exhale in satisfaction in public; them too. So you can see why this annoys me.)
This is something of an addiction of mine; I’m always throwing out the last half of novels and trying again. I never intend it; I just get obsessed with improving things. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if you ignore the fact that I’m spending enormous chunks of time writing bits of novels only to cut them later (which I try to). But now I’ve done it to a book a publisher has already bought, and, presumably, thought was pretty good.
So I’ve confessed to Bill, my editor. As I e-mailed in the new draft, I put the question to him: am I a hard-working, committed author, or just some kind of idiot? He replied:
It depends on what you’ve done. If it’s turned into a searing portrait of the artistic struggles of male ballet dancers, I shall not be pleased.
He’s reading the draft now. There are no ballet dancers. But I’ll have to wait and see what he thinks.
The many faces of Jen
I’ve
received a bunch of foreign-edition Jennifer Governments
lately, which is always cool. There’s a Finnish version called
Jennifer
Valtiovalta, a wicked little
Japanese version
called something your computer probably doesn’t have the correct font
to display, and, my favorite, an Italian
Logo Land.
The groovy thing about that is they’ve gone with the original cover
design, but
re-shot it for no apparent reason.
It’s the 1998 Psycho of book covers.
And speaking of covers… and… um… posters, this thing to the left comes courtesy of Rob Treynor, who responded to the Fark.com challenge: “Photoshop a scene from the next movie that Hollywood will make that butchers a good book.” Oh yeah!
(Now I know I’m going to get mail about this otherwise, so for clarity: no, Drew Barrymore has not been cast in the movie. This is just one guy’s amusing vision of hell.)