The L&L Blog
Christmas Tree Farm and toddler talk
You know, when I was younger and greener, a friend of mine had a young child who spent a lot of time with us. We all lived in a big post-student house and her daughter spent a lot of weekends in said house. And I, what with being younger and greener and all that, had a notion that capitalism and ownership must be a learned concept, based on an isolated observation of this girl's daughter giving away without any qualms whatsoever some pine cones she had collected. ("When you have your own children" is a sentence-starter that can be on a par with "When I found God", so I apologise for the next sentence:) When you have your own children, such illusions are soon shattered (I wanted to put in a simile referring to a chimera and Belleraphon here, but my Greek mythology just isn't up to it). The first words most of these little tykes learn is ,"No, mine! Mine, mine, MINE!" Ho-hum.
All the same, watching language develop is fun and interesting in equal measure. I wish toddler social habits could be carried on into the adult world (admittedly, some adults have toddler social habits). It being half-term and all, today we did one of our family trips and visited Christmas Tree Farm in Downe. I was surprised there was so much greenery so close to South London. Anyway, of all the animals on display, Thurston went straight for the chickens, turkeys and ducks. Over and over again. We dragged him around the rest of the farm, to be sure, but that was where his heart was. But you know, as we walked around the farm, it kind of depressed me. The parenting skills on display, I mean, You get into the farm and you can buy, for a mere 50p, a bucket of animal feed. And strewn across this farm were empty buckets. Not just one or two, but dozens. Which adds up to a lot of parents who just do not give a flying donut about their child littering. At this point, I need to calm my blood pressure. But I digress. Blah blah, terrible kids, terrorising animals, blah blah, and then Thurston, after saying, "Sorry chicken" to some chicken he's bumped into with the gate, pours the rest of the animal feed right over the top of a chicken, laughs his lungs out, and then spends the next ten minutes chasing ducks. Toddler fun, parental consternation (which could be a mantra). And after that, we go to a local pub, and in the garden there is a toddler play area, and a little girl playing in the wooden den-house. And this is how Thurston, without further ado, introduces himself to the little girl: "I chased ducks." Now that's an introduction, and no mistake.
I sort of wish, now, that I hadn't spent so much time in my younger days (not that I'm exactly old, but hey, Jesus died when he was my age, and Kurt Kobain, who, let's face it, has had far more impact on my life than Jesus, died when he was six years younger than I am right now) wasting time on deliberating about how to meet people (did I say people? I meant girls). You just march right up and, without further ado (or embarrassment), announce the most important aspect of your day or life. Some possible introductions:
"I ate eggs for breakfast."
"I bought PCGamer."
"I surfed for porn."
"I typed over one thousand meaningless numbers into Excel today. That's more than yesterday. Meaningless, I mean."
Come to think of it, I doubt if it would have helped. But it might be worth a go anyway. At worst, the other person will just think you're talking on your hands-free mobile phone. Feel free to leave your own, should you happen by.
Half-Term: Nearing the end of Kafka on the Shore
Half-term... How come doing nothing for days on end speeds up time? Makes me think of that character in Catch 22 who spends his time trying to be as bored as possible, so as to prolong the hours he has left alive.
A brief history of Scrivener: Part 3 (This isn't actually that brief, is it?)
I liked the idea of growing a tale so much that I was going to call my software BookTree, if I ever wrote it. BookTree also referred to the idea that you would use a tree view to organise your ideas - a "tree view" in Windows is what is known as an "outline view" in OS X. I got the idea for BookTree from a piece of PC software called NewNovelist. I looked at the screenshots and ordered it in the hope that it would be a decent organisational tool for my writing. Incidentally, I know a lot of people say that writing software is pointless - why can't you just use a cork-board, some index cards and a notebook like everybody else? I've tried, believe me I've tried. But my desk gets snowed under, I can't find anything, I end up rewriting index cards and synopses and spilling coffee and going mad and... Well, you get the idea. And is anybody saying that a real writer doesn't need a word processor? No. No sane person, at least. Good software just virtualises a real-world process, it doesn't try to force you into working in a way that you wouldn't were you using real-world methods... Which brings me neatly back to NewNovelist. NewNovelist was a great disappointment. It was completely rigid. The outline list on the left of the text view could not be changed - it had twelve items and that was that. And each of these twelve items corresponded to Christopher Vogler's twelve-step interpretation of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. Groan. Enough already. I don't want to follow some pre-set plot, thank you very much.
A brief history of Scrivener: Part 2
About ten years ago I read some book or other that collected together a number of essays on writing by female writers. One of the essays was by Hilary Mantel, and it was called "Growing a Tale" - I liked it so much that I photocopied it. This is how Hilary Mantel describes her process of putting together a story:
A brief history of Scrivener: Part 1
You know what gets my goat? When people accuse Scrivener - which hasn't even reached version 1.0 yet - of being a rip-off of Ulysses. Let me get this straight: Ulysses is a wonderful application, but it is an original implementation and not an original idea. If you've been on a Mac for a while, you might remember a program called Z-Write. It had a list of documents on the left, and you clicked on one to select it and edit it in the text view on the right. It was around long before Ulysses, but it was nowhere near as sophisticated or beautiful. So in all fairness, if you are a long-time Mac user, you could be forgiven for thinking that Ulysses is the only software of its kind aimed specifically at writers. But I came to the Mac two years ago after being a long-time PC user, and the PC has been rife for some time with applications trying to do what Ulysses does so well: provide an organisational tool for writers. There is WriteWay Pro, WriteItNow!, NewNovelist, Liquid Story Binder and, by far the best in my opinion, RoughDraft, to name but a few. All of them have some form of list of contents next to a text view for editing a chapter or scene, and they all allow you to keep separate notes for each chunk of text. Sound familiar?
Oh, and you know what? You never hear anybody complain that Nisus Writer or Mellel are rip-offs of Microsoft Word.
But anyway. The thing about programs aimed at writers is that no one program is going to suit all writers, because all writers work in different ways. Had Ulysses or any of the other writing software programs out there suited the way I write, you can be sure that I would never have created Scrivener. What would be the point? It's not like I'm ever going to make much money out of Scrivener; my only motivation for creating it is that I want software that suits me (more on that later). When I first bought my old iBook, I scoured the net for OS X writing applications, hoping to find the killer app that had eluded me on the PC. When I came across Ulysses, I thought I'd found it. The interface for me came to represent what I was beginning to love about OS X: simplicity and cool. The killer for me was that Ulysses is plain text, though: no formatting whatsoever. Now, I like being a little experimental in the appearance of my text. I'm a Vonnegut fan, so I may well want to put sketches or pictures into my text. (For a really good example of a work that plays with formatting, incidentally, read The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done by Sandra Newman. It's all written in bullet points and lists, but it is tremendously moving.) I like the way Salinger adds emphasis to certain syllables of dialogue, so I often do the same, and I didn't want to have to look at text that looks like this while editing: "//Per//fect," he said, "That's //just// what we need." There was another killer for me, too: no hierarchical organisation in the list of documents. I wanted a bit more control in that area. And I know I'm not alone, because the Blue-Tec forums get about a dozen requests a week for italics and hierarchical folders. But Blue-Tec won't do it, and good for them. Good for them, because they have a very strong design philosophy and they're sticking to it. They have something that is beautiful and unique and a lot of users love it, and they shouldn't try to change it into something it's not for those of us who don't work like that. But those of us who don't work like that have to look elsewhere, and that is where Scrivener comes in.
Was Scrivener influenced by Ulysses? Most certainly. In particular, the full screen mode and the idea of being able to assign each document a label and status were lifted straight from Ulysses. There was no way I could make my perfect writing software without them. But did the whole idea for Scrivener come from Ulysses? Definitely not. The idea for Scrivener came to me back when I was using a PC. Back then it was going to be called BookTree and it was just a pipe dream; it wasn't until I discovered the ease of coding applications for OS X that it became a reality.
Apple Pie
I don't get it. What is it with Apple? Why does the brand inspire such religious zealoutry in its consumers? Let me start by saying, I love Mac OS X. Love it, love it, love it. I first bought an Apple machine a couple of years ago because, despite their reputation for making expensive machines, the iBook was, at the time, the cheapest laptop available that did not weigh about the same as a small off-shore tanker. I wanted small, I wanted light and I wanted portable, and the iBook was all that. And I fell in love. Actually, another reason I bought an Apple was that I figured:
Geek Joke of the Month
"There are only 10 kinds of programmers: those who know binary and those who don't."
I came across that in somebody's signature on a forum. I know it makes me an irredeemable geek to find that funny, but I do. I do, I do.
If you really want to know about it...
It's been about a year since I decided to learn how to program in Cocoa so that I could design and build my own application for writing in. I've been meaning to write down my thoughts on this process and on the reasons I decided to embark on this project for some time, so thought I'd start this 'blog as a place for those, and other, more general, blatherings.
The last 'blog I started (over on LiveJournal) died a death after only a few entries. It started with a rant on Why I Hate The Lord Of The Rings Films, and degenerated (which was quite a feat in itself) into an angry rant about how someone had stolen my son's name. I'm hoping this one will fare better.
It's probably safe to say that the reasons for my decision to build a writing application and for me deciding to start this 'blog are one and the same: procrastination. It means I don't have to face the fact that I'm not doing the one thing I should be doing: working on The Novel. It's a strange doublethink: I *want* to work on The Novel, but I feel I can only ever look at it sideways, like the spaceship on the cricket pitch in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. So I find a hundred other things to do to avoid facing it. One of my favourite quotes in this regard comes from the film Sliding Doors (otherwise complete tosh): when the writer boyfriend of Gwynneth Paltrow bursts into the pub announcing that he's got amazing news, his best friend asks him if he's finished his novel. The writer looks at him with contempt and snaps, "Of course not - I'm a writer, I'll never finish the novel." So at the moment I'm headed the Peter Camenzind route: forever collecting notes and writing down snippets, but never putting it all together.
There are some good 'blogs out there too (and from here on in, as much as it pains me, I shall abandon the grammatically-correct apostrophe that prefixes 'blog - blog, there we go, that... wasn't... so... pain...ful), so I guess I also want to try my hand at this medium.
As for the name, Literature and Latté, I always wanted to open up a coffee-cum-bookshop-cum-vegetarian-café with that name. I've probably been beaten to it somewhere - certainly the phrase googles a few hits. But it kind of sets the sort of tone I want for myself here - general coffee-conversational waffle in a bookish setting. And the Marcus Aurelius quote is just there 'cos it's one of my favourites, but it may well prove to be very apt: trite babbling, and I'll probably forget all about the blog after a few posts. God and Guatama, as I used to say when I didn't know any better.
There, that's as good a blog introduction as any. Or at least, 't'will do.