In November 2003 I embarked on a new adventure: writing a novel. I took part in Nanowrimo, an annual novel-writing challenge that takes place every November. Nanowrimo stands for 'National Novel Writing Month' and the task is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. I first discovered Nanowrimo just 3 days before the 2003 edition started, while browsing Erik Benson's website. Erik had posted an entry describing his preparations for Nanowrimo and I was immediately intrigued. I clicked through to the Nanowrimo website and read all the details. Hmm yes, I thought, this is what I have been looking for!
You see, like many people, it's always been an ambition of mine to write a novel. I'd tried a couple of times before, but I couldn't seem to get off the ground. Nanowrimo sounded like it could provide the structure and motivation I needed. I was impressed by the Nanowrimo approach:
"Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly."
That made me realise - the thing that had held me back the previous times I'd attempted to write fiction was an obsessive need to write Quality (with a capital 'Q'). I wanted to be Hemingway or Joyce. But here was Nanowrimo encouraging the exact opposite. In Nanowrimo, the measure of your progress would be 'words per day'. 1,700 words per day to be exact. This seemed like a liberating notion to me.
It was the evening of 28 October 2003 and I nervously tapped my pen at the keyboard. I wondered if I should enter. Before I could rationally weigh up the pros and cons, I made a rash decision. I went back to Erik's website and entered a comment. Mine was the first comment and it read:
"I think I'm in
I just discovered NaNoWriMo tonight, but I'm twisting my own arm to do this. I hope I don't chicken out."
As I clicked the "Save" button to publish my comment on Erik's well-read website, I knew I'd committed myself to Nanowrimo. I couldn't back out now, I had done the weblog equivalent of spitting in my hand and shaking on it (with Erik's weblog). I think it was then that I realised that I only had 3 days to prepare and come up with a plot and characters!!
There was another reason why I decided to write a novel. In the week leading up to this, I'd been stirring the pot in the blogosphere. I'd picked a fight with Clay Shirky on the Many-to-Many website about "broadcasting vs conversational" modes of blogging. My postings got some attention, although Clay decided not to get in the ring with me. Probably because I am a flyweight and, as the reigning heavyweight champion of the world in social software, he would've knocked me senseless. As I say, I was just picking a fight in the blogging sense. And you know what - it left me cold. I didn't feel satisfied because a) I hadn't gotten my point across to some of the Many-to-Many crowd, b) I wondered - was I just writing for the attention? and c) I didn't feel I'd adequately covered the topics that were knocking around in my head. So I thought maybe writing a novel will help.
To be continued...
What's your primary content?
I felt a bit guilty about dissing Jason Kottke's new design yesterday. I didn't mean to be negative, actually I admire that he's put all his content in one feed. It has its merits - for example readers only need to subscribe to the one RSS feed. The drawback though is 'info overload' for that RSS feed and readers may have difficulty seperating out the different content types. In any case I read some of the 100-odd comments on Jason's re-design announcement post and it helped clarify my thoughts on what I want to achieve in my own re-design. Anil Dash made the point that Jason's ancillary content (reviews, links, etc) are merely "page components" and are "subordinate to primary posts". This is the view I hold too. Jason's reply was: "But everything is my primary content." I thought a bit about this and as I wrote an email to Greg Gershman about weblog re-design, the following rule-of-thumb occured to me:
We all have 1 primary type of content that we focus on. For me, my primary content is story writing. And by that I mean both non-fiction articles about web technology and fictional writing like my novel. It's what I most enjoy doing. So my weblog Read/Write Web is based around my original writing. If I want to add other things like links, reviews, lists (which I do want to add here), then I'll add them as ancillary parts - I'll call it side content.
But other people are different. Programmers may use their blogs primarily to make technical notes for their development projects. Some people may use blogs as their personal diary. A lot of people use their blogs primarily to collate links. Others may use their blogs mostly for political rants. Some may just want to write music reviews of their favourite bands. And maybe some people, such as Jason Kottke, really do consider their written thoughts to be of equal value to their links and reviews etc. That's all fine and noble. It all comes back to something I wrote a couple of months ago and it turned out to be my most popular article: Why would normal people want to write weblogs? And the answer is: they don't. Normal people want to create content that allies with their interests, that complements their niche in life. One person's primary content is another's ancillary.
So anyway, my weblog re-design... I guess I'm saying that the design I come up with must primarily support my story writing. Secondary is my links, music reviews and so forth. I suspect this is different to Jason Kottke's motivation for re-designing his weblog. Or for that matter different to Dave Winer or Mark Pilgrim. Everyone has a different primary content.
I've released the 0.9 version of my Nanowrimo novel, which I wrote in 27 days during November 2003. Apparently there were 3680 people all over the world crazy enough to successfully complete the Nanowrimo contest in 2003. So here's my effort:
Dirtside to Spaceside (PDF - 344KB)
Shortly I will begin to write some thoughts on the processes I went through when writing this novel and the things I learned. Probably in December and January I will undertake my first review of the novel, when my mind has been refreshed from it. In the meantime, if anyone reads my novel I'll be very interested to hear your feedback - feel free to email me or post a comment on this site.
I'm thinking about re-designing my weblog. While I was busy writing my novel in November, others were exploring the boundaries of the weblog form. Dave Winer re-designed his hugely influential blog, Mark Pilgrim did a re-design (and curiously, Dave and Mark's blogs have ended up looking pretty similar - or maybe it's just me!). Dave is doing a lot of interesting things with categories, OPML and "distributed directories". At first glance, it seemed to overlap what Paulo & Matt, and Phil Pearson have been doing with topics. But Dave is more interested in a hierarchic ontology, using OPML as the glue I think. Also I noticed Jason Kottke did a re-design, where he's bunched together his writing, links, movie and book reviews, and comments he's made on other sites. A lot of prominant bloggers made a fuss of this, but I'm not really sure why. Then today Bill Seitz posted an interesting idea - building a Wiki inside of Radio Userland, in order to take advantage of its RSS and upstreaming functionality. This is something that appeals to me.
So what do I want to achieve in my re-design. I'm still working through that in my mind. I do know that I want a topic-focused weblog...but I also still want the familiar chronological order of items on the homepage, a simple straight-up RSS feed, and the other things that make a weblog easier for people to read and subscribe to than a Wiki. Inspirations here include Bill Seitz with his WikiBlog, Erik Benson with his Nodes concept, Paul Ford with his Semantic Blog.
I want my weblog writing to be even more thoughtful and original. My novel-writing experience has taught me the value of that. I also want to include my linkblog links, but as a side extra (not lumped in with the main course, like Jason Kottke seems to be doing). Maybe I want to include music and book reviews...the jury is still out on that. I can say that I like what Keith Robinson does on his site with reviews. He includes them in his main RSS feed, but they're a weekly feature under a distinct heading. Hmmm. I do like Kottke's idea of including comments that I made on other sites on my own blog. Kinda like my Microcontent Wiki concept. But how to automate it?
I want to do my own CSS design. I want to make it XHTML compliant again, but this time I'll ease up on the "no tables" stance - as Cristian Vidmar has done. Tables do have a time and a place.
Blogroll - should it stay or go? Hmmm. On one hand I approve of the concept of linking to people that inspire me or whose content I value. On the other, there are people I link to on my blogroll who haven't returned the favour and linked to me. And likewise there are people who have me on their blogroll who I haven't linked to. This all seems slightly unethical, or unfair. Maybe the problem is that the blogroll concept is outdated. Maybe we should be publishing our entire RSS Subscriptions list, via an outline. Or maybe we should have like a Wuffie-roll - a "wuffie" is a measure of reputation, coined by Cory Doctorow in his novel 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdon' (which I'm reading right now). In a Wuffie-roll, you give fellow bloggers a reputation score out of 10 that changes daily depending on how interesting/relevant they are to you at the time. For example Andrew Chen is posting some interesting content currently, so his Wuffie score with me is quite high at the moment. Wuffie could be the new Technorati, only it'll take over the blogroll as a concrete thing we actually publish on our sites. I'm sure this has been discussed before, it's just that I'm only getting round to reading Cory's novel now - so it's on my mind currently.
Hmmm, still thinking about what I want my weblog to look like and what features and functionality it should have. To be continued...
The world premiere of the Lord of the Rings was held in Wellington, New Zealand today - my hometown. Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director of the Rings trilogy, is from Wellington. He's the King of Wellington as far as I'm concerned. And NZ's capital city turned on a beautiful sunny day today for the premiere, temparature in the early 20's and not a cloud in the sky. Ahh, summer has arrived! I went for a walk down Courtenay Place at lunchtime, down towards the Embassy Theatre where the premiere is being held. I walked past Elijah Wood eating lunch at a sidewalk cafe. I didn't stare at him. About 3.30pm there was a parade that started on Lambton Quay, where I work. My workmates and I had a great possie, looking down on the Quay. The stars went past in their shiny red cars, accompanied by assorted people and horses in LOTR costumes. As Liv Tyler went past, she looked up at us and I swear she waved directly at me!
But the day really belonged to Peter Jackson. He was interviewed on the Holmes show, which is the most popular nightly current affairs tv show here in NZ. btw my novel character James Hore is closely based on Paul Holmes (along with another popular media personality here, John Campbell of TV3). Anyway, back to Peter Jackson. Holmes questioned him on why he stays in New Zealand when so many other successful kiwis have moved offshore. Peter Jackson said something like: why should I? I was born and brought up in Wellington. It's my home. I shouldn't have to go elsewhere to do the thing I love doing - make movies.
So Peter Jackson brought Hollywood to little old New Zealand, a country with 4 million population. He employed thousands of kiwis on the filmsets, took advantage of the breathless South Island mountain scenery, and most importantly gave innovative kiwi companies like Weta (the visual affects team) the chance to make their creative mark on the world. Later in his speech to the crowds gathered on Courtenay Place, Peter Jackson told the story of how the sound affects were all done by a company based in Mirimar. Which is a sleepy middle class suburb in Wellington, New Zealand. Beautiful!
