I'm free! And freedom tastes of Reality! And cheesesteaks!

Saturday, March 19 9:03 PM

Well, this posting is belated by at least...no, exactly two days. The "final-but-not-really-final draft" — more on this later — draft of my next book was handed in a week ago Thursday at 3:12 PM. I'm sure you'll all agree that I was entitled to take a week to recover and decompress, but that still leaves two days during which I could have slung something onto this slap-happy blast of whimsy, but didn't.

Why? I suppose I was just checking to see if the world would end if I failed to share my God-given gifts with the populace. I didn't really expect it to, you understand...but I can't help but feel a little disappointed. Six billion people dying in a sea of fire would have been a Bad Thing -- scratch that: a Really Very Bad Thing -- but wow! What vindication! It's exactly the sort of thing I could throw in my editors' faces when the time came to hammer out my next contract, even though the day would never come because the world would have ended. And making this doubly-pointless, all of my editors would be dead, besides. Serves 'em right for not giving me that raise.

Yes, the book is done, after a particularly gnarly final few weeks of round-the-clock effort. And for the past week, I've felt like the title character at the end of "THX-1138." Now that I have my long-dreamed-of and hard-won freedom...I'm just sort of standing around and blinking. I hardly know what to do with this thing called "Free Will."

Actually, I take that back. I knew what to do first: shower. Shower, shower, shower. In times of extreme deadline crisis, when deadlines are stacked up all around the office like unexploded ordinance, lack of attention to personal hygiene is a professional survival mechanism. The amount of time I save by not showering or shaving is negligible, but it does have the effect of locking myself inside impenetrable nimbus of funk that acts as a biological house-arrest bracelet. Oh, I can fantasize about going out to see a movie or grab dinner with friends, but so long as I have this thing on me, I can't take so much as one step outside my house without Society inflicting harsh and immediate rebukes. Thus, any temptation that might spring into my brain remains just that, and I continue my sad, stately progress towards the project's completion. It's how Nature protects the career of the full-time freelancer.

Getting 530 pages of manuscript into final shape over a two-week period Just Plain Sucks. Don't try it yourself. It would have sucked enough if it were a novel, and I were free to make stuff up as I went. But it double-sucked because this was a book about a huge and complex piece of software that has been undergoing constant evolution in the three months since I wrote the book's first elements. I'm a Sensitive Artiste...

(Andy pauses, takes a long sniff from the long-stemmed lily he's holding, and pauses to reflect upon the rarity of the Aesthete in today's thuglike world before he continues)

...and in general, I actually enjoy rewrites. It's another opportunity to burnish each and every sentence into a Flawless Gem of Perfect Truth, Beauty, and Wisdom.

(another long sniff, then Andy wipes a single, sensitive tear from his eye)

But almost all of the goals of the final rewrite on a book like this are practical ones. There are changes that need to be made because a feature didn't exist when you worked on your first draft, or maybe the feature existed but it didn't really work; there are changes that need to be made because a feature works completely differently now; and then there are the changes that you need to make because when you wrote the first draft, you were a bit of a dumbass, and you didn't understand how this one thing fit in with this other thing.

So the final two weeks of the project were a blur of stress and un-sleep. I've spent the days since then just sort of re-acquiring basic day-to-day skills and reveling in each triumph, no matter how tiny. The Giant-Day Ball frightened me and made my eyes hurt at first, but I quickly came to appreciate that daylight hours bring with them opportunities to engage in exotic activities such as "buying books and magazines," and "having a hot sandwich prepared to my exact specifications and served to me where I sit." The talkin', movin' pictures have come to the Boston area. It's no rumor: I have witnessed them firsthand, and seen two of these "movies" in the past nine days.

And a few days ago it snowed, and I was able to actually go out and shovel it myself. Friends, I was so far-gone that I even pulled the extreme, Dad-like move of shoveling while the stuff was still coming down. "We're s'posed to get another four inches by morning," I announced, while sliding into my windproof pants. "I'd rather get an early crack at it than give that slushy crap at the bottom a chance to freeze up overnight." I spent the next hour heaving shovel after shovel of wet, evil precipation to the side of the driveway, each load weighing about as much as a gallon of water, and I actually found myself humming along with the music on my iPod; yes, as the first three hours of snow fell, I assembled a special Snow Shovelling Playlist. Then and only then did I fully appreciate just how desperately I needed this book to be finished and done with.

Needless to say, late-February to early-March was a period in which I really didn't do much that wasn't book-related. And alas, among the many things I failed to do during this period of struggle and self-imposed exile was write and publish my annual Pre-Oscars Package. For the first time in about a decade, I have failed to assemble 10,000 words of picks, predictions, and commentary before the Oscarcast. And for the first time since I started doing a live weblog of the Oscarcast-in-progress, I...um, I didn't do a live weblog of the Oscarcast-in-progress. Hopefully I can remedy this somewhat in the next week, armed as I am with (1) a DVD of the show, (2) free time, (3) a serviceable command of the English language, (4) a computer, (5) a word processor, (6) an Internet connection, (7) a weblog, (8) the conviction that even the simplest passing thought of mine will be endlessly fascinating to random strangers (a conviction that's pretty damned obnoxious even by blogger standards), and finally (9) some snacks and beverages, which I like to enjoy while I'm watching the Oscarcast.

Aw, crap...what am I thinking? (10) a DVD player upon which to play the DVD, and (11) a TV to watch it on, obviously. Oh, and (12) a sofa or something to sit on while I watch.

Should I just assume that the house is sort of implied by the sofa? OK: we'll make the house #13 and the living room will be considered to be part of the house. Surely you'll give me that one? Be fair; I didn't make my eyes and ears into separate items on the list, after all. Although maybe I should toss my glasses onto the list. I don't need them for TV viewing, you understand. If I needed them, then (again) they'd have to be implied along with the eyes. But I'm certainly a lot more comfortable switching my gaze from the PowerBook to the TV and back again if I have 'em on.

Okay. Let me look through that list again...

Good. I'm happy with what we've got there. Onward: "Armed as I am with these fourteen items, I hope to get some reasonable facscimile of an OscarBlog out there." It'll still be "live"...just tape-delayed for viewers in Western time zones, provided that the Earth had 504 more time zones that it does at the moment. It certainly does not, but once again I remind you that I am not yet a well man and ask you to throw me a bone here.

Where was I? Oh, yeah...the list. Yup, 14 items will do nicely.

You'll notice one glaring omission, however. I didn't think it required an explicit, individual mention because, well, it's so obvious in everything I do.

To what do I refer?

(Another long, thoughtful sniff of that omnipresent long-stemmed white lily)

Why...my genius, of course.

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And what did YOU commit to for Lent?

Monday, March 28 7:46 PM

It's 1:02 AM on Easter Sunday as I write this. Which means a great many things to a great many people, Christians in particular, but which has a special additional meaning for yours truly: I now have a little less than 23 hours to purchase and eat a Cadbury Caramel Egg.

It's part of The Deal. A Cadbury Caramel Egg is what the world had in mind when the phrase "Nature's Most Perfect Food" was coined, and stands as a silent testament to the importance of not over-thinking a product. Just think about how much time, effort and money has been expended by the candy industry in a mathematical attempt to create and package every possible permutation and combination of chocolate, nougat, nuts, and other assorted FDA-approved bric-a-brac...and yet nearly each one has been a commercial failure, whose predominant flavor was desperation.

But one day, the penny finally dropped and a candy-company executive, animated by inspiration, dashed into a conference room, pulling fellow employees out of cubicles and offices as he went. He grabbed a dry-erase marker and was so excited that he carved the first letters of the following phrase into the whiteboard before he collected his wits and removed the cap:

"Just A Big, Golfball-Sized Glob Of Caramel."

All chatter in the room stopped, replaced by audible blinking. And then the staff erupted like the flight controllers of the Apollo 11 landing. The man was borne aloft on dozens of jubulant arms in a regal procession towards the Prototyping department, the giddy spell only broken temporarily along the way when someone said "But won't that just stick all over your hands like glue?" and someone else said "Then we'll package it in a big hollow container, like an egg...made out of chocolate, so you can eat it along with the caramel." And then the staff found themselves carrying two people through the corporate campus.

To any sensible man or woman, there is only one appropriate response to the sight of a carton of Cadbury Caramel Eggs in a store: "Yes, absolutely; gimme, gimme, gimme." It's exactly the sort of clear-headed, community-minded civic action that I like to reward and encourage with my disposable income.

Alas, I'm of an age where eating two to three dozen Cadbury Caramel Eggs a week is contraindicated. That age is "anywhere after the blastophere stage of embryonic development." The good folks at Cadbury protect children from succombing to their sensible impulses by actually charging money for the product, thus limiting their intake. Adults must tap into hitherto unknown reserves of self-control, a commodity which accounts for the majority of the trade deficit in my inventory of personal attributes.

So: where self-control fails, a stern an arbitrary rule picks up the slack. "Within the Lenten season," I vow, dressing in my Jedi costume and standing on top of a milk crate to give it all a sense of Occasion, "I shall eat three and only three Cadbury Caramel eggs."

I have been sitting on this last egg, as it were, for the past three weeks. The first was purchased moments after the product returned to store shelves. The second came a week later. This time, I was able to curb my excitement enough to leave it in the car while I ran some errands; after steeping for two hours in the New England winter, the golden nectar encapsulated within had achieved a perfect putty-like viscosity. I reflected upon the fact that the world, despite all its strife and every reason to lose hope, was still filled with infinite joy and limiteless possibilities.

But the next egg would indeed be the last egg. I passed by carton after carton of the little darlings. They seemed nervous; as company insiders, they were well aware that Cadbury had stopped manufacturing them weeks ago, and that the final products were now filtering their way through the distribution system.

In a dance that's quietly appropriate given the nature of the confection...I have elected to play chicken.

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Galley Slaving

Tuesday, March 29 12:23 AM

Lots of little odds and ends remain to be done on the book. Galley proofs of the chapters are starting to trickle in, but chiefly I get to see them as a mere courtesy. Every change that makes a paragraph longer by one line can make a page longer by one paragraph, which creates a whole new sequence of problems that are all highly technical and highly project-management oriented but can be collectively referred to as "Bad Mojo."

So on the whole, reading these galleys is a lot like being one of the dozens of ghosts that Jacob Marley shows Scrooge at the start of "A Christmas Carol." I'm consumed with the desire to change things for the better, but have lost the ability and can only look on, and wail and moan.

Don't get the wrong impression. I look at the previous edition and then I look at this new edition, and it's absolutely no contest; I can't even tell you how happy I am with how well it came out. Still, I'm always a glutton for opportunities to add just one more little thing or polish the text just a little more. "O, Editor!" I want to cry, "Tell me that I might yet erase the words that are written upon this PDF file! Why show me these things if I am truly beyond salvation!"

One of the final odds and ends I have to take care of is to write the text that'll appear on the book's back cover. This is a fun task and I'd never leave it up to my editors or the folks in Marketing. I've been impressed by the power of that simple paragraph and its ability to convert an idle browser into an active buyer ever since I read the back-cover text of Larry Kaniut's "Real Alaskan Bear Tales." "...And then, as I felt and heard the teeth crunch into my skull, I was siezed with just one thought: This is it! I'm going to die!" I mean, wow: that's good marketing. Admit it: you're headed for Amazon.com right now, hoping to find some sample chapters, aren't you?

Alas, my editors don't always see completely eye-to-eye with me on the importance of tickling the prospective buyer's imagination with the back-cover copy. I fought long and hard for the following blurb, to no avail:

"Join me as I spin a gripping tale of the epic seafarers who struck out from the Port of Gloucester in the latter half of the 19th century. Strong, iron men in fragile, wooden boats, they daily did battle with the mysterious leviathans of the deep, their purpose a solemn one: to provide light and heat to homes and businesses all across an America that struggled for unity after a devastating civil war.

"Would these men have gotten the most from the many technological advantages of [Name Of Product Deleted; technically, I'm still under NDA], assuming that [Name of company deleted] (a) had been around back then, (b) had produced a computer that ran on whale oil instead of electricity, and (c) could have convinced these superstitious primitives that a sheet of glass with moving color pictures on it was not the handiwork of Satan? Yes, indeed they would...but if and only if they had read this book. As for you, well, you live a life free from prejudice and filled with modern conveniences. If you buy this book, you will quite simply become absolutely unstoppable."

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Let's see if this Podcasting thing works...

Thursday, March 31 12:35 AM

Hey, if you're into podcasting, do me a favor and give this feed a try:

http://homepage.mac.com/andyi/cwop/cwop.xml

This is my very first attempt at creating a podcast, and naturally, I'm doing this The Heroic Way (ie, hand-coding everything instead of using any sort of commercial utility). Which can lead to predictable revelations that I have only succeeded in performing a superheroic act of stupidity.

Plus...should I describe the content within the content, do you think? That is, should I start off by introducing myself and describing what's coming? I've marked up the XML file with a description, but now that I've opened it in iPodder I don't see any description at all.

Your sympathies are appreciated, dear readers: yes, it is indeed that part of the process in which I'm a colossal dumbass, and I'm forced to just keep pushing buttons until (a) I get the desired results or (b) nuclear missiles are on their way to Toronto. It's a bit of a toss-up at this point.

Operators are standing by.

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