Brian Crick

Formality

While I haven’t worked on it much lately, I’ve been feeling really confident and excited about Tinselfly. I’ve now got a page and a half of bullet points describing scenes I want to have and how they fit into my overall story. Structurally, this is really coming together.

* * *

I’m hesitant to talk about story too much; I don’t want to give away any spoilers. That’s been making me uncomfortable for a while. I want very much to share my thoughts on how to tell a story here and post playable demos; that’s an important part of this process to me. However, one thing I’m really exited about is this series of short vignettes I’ve decided to put in near the beginning of the story proper. Not just because they fit in an interesting way with the story proper, but also because I’d feel comfortable talking about them in detail and posting playable demos of them, without talking about their overall context.

* * *

Given the egalitarian nature of my universe, I’ve been stressing about designing androgynous formal wear that is still recognizable as formal wear, and that isn’t just having one set absorb the other (i.e. putting all the women in tuxedos).

My initial idea was to try mashing up the visual details of men’s & women’s formal wear — a gown with a formal jacket over it; a tuxedo with semitransparent/floral/embroidered details. But that’s kind of a shallow approach.

What I should do instead is get at the logic of formal wear, the different things it’s trying to accomplish for each gender, and mash up the logic. Once the logic is worked out, a costume should become self-evident.

Not that that approach is working to well right now. It’s very abstract, and I’m much more comfortable just doing visual mashups.

Tried to draw up a sketch in Illustrator (left), which isn’t really helping me sort out my thoughts that much.

I think what I need to do is just keep working on my character customization stuff; eventually, I should have a system where I can make an XML file or something that defines not just one costume, but a set of options for a given gaggle of extras. So like, the formal wear XML file might say something like, there’s a 75% chance the character will wear slacks and a 25% chance the character will be wearing a floor-length skirt, and maybe the shirt’s tucked in and maybe it’s not, and I can work with a whole look and (hopefully) see multiple extras generated from my script all at once in a neat little table in my editor.

(That will probably make more sense once the tool is up and running, and I’m sure I’ll babble about it more then.)

The End is Near

Over the weekend Marie and I finished up the text for the Celestial Stick People book. We worked while on a date, and also while I was on the elliptical — whenever we could squeeze this in. Got a sudden surge of motivation here.

I procrastinate much less when I know the exact steps necessary to get something done, and I’ve been trying to figure those steps out here.

So, here’s what’s left to do:

In addition to the text, I need to know how far off my colors will be when printing — I tend to make everything too dark. So last night I ordered a funny prototype deck through The Game Crafter, who will be doing my final printing. The prototype will have a real box, and folded-up instructions, and 78 cards, but the cards won’t be real cards. It will be 5 sets of 13 different sample cards, each set containing different color adjustments. I’ll pick the set that looks the best, then adjust all my cards with those color adjustments for the final product. Also, I can see if I need changes to the box and instructions at that time.

The Game Crafter says you usually get your stuff in 7-10 days. So worst case, the color-testing deck arrives on the 23rd. I spend that weekend doing final prep work with better colored-cards and order a new prototype with proper colors and a full set of real cards.

Again, worst case, the second prototype arrives the 6th of April. I’d be surprised if any changes come out of that; it’s mostly final verification. The deck I get on the 6th will probably be the deck that people can order for real. I spend the weekend of the 6th getting my store page and product web site in place, with real pictures of the product, and then I’m done.

My biggest worry right now is the quality of the instructions. It will be three sheets of 8.5 x 11 paper, stapled in one corner, and folded in half. And folded in half again, and again, and again, and you’ll get a 2.125 x 2.75 crumpled up thing 48 pieces of paper thick. Not ideal, obviously, but I’m just shooting for adequate here. Part of the point of the web site is to have an easily navigable card reference.

Speaking of which, in the future I might want to think about making a free, lightweight card reference app for phones & tablets to supplement the deck. I might even want to explore an actual paid interactive reading app, as an alternate version of the product… but right now, I just want to get this thing printed.

Zero Page

It’s been a while since I had a post about improving my efficiency. Mostly, I’ve just been trying to stick with my cyclical schedule where I don’t get to pick what I’m working on next, and that’s been working well. Just trying to make that process more frictionless. It’s not that exciting to talk about, but reducing friction is important. And hard.

Before I get into that though, I wanted to restate the goal of all this. The goal is not to be able to do more. I forget that sometimes. Instead, the goal of improving my efficiency is to minimize the actual time I spend doing this stuff, so I can spend more of it with friends and family and, ya know, things that matter.

* * *

So on to the friction. I’ve got this simple system. To recap:

I keep a list around of my pet projects.
Each project in the list includes some notes about what I’m currently working on.
Whenever I sit down to work, I look at the top of my list and work on that project, doing whatever it says in the notes I should be working on specifically.
After 30 or 45 minutes, or when I’m done with my current task, I write down what I need to do next for the project I’ve just been working on, and move the project to the bottom of the list.
If I have time, I repeat this with the new top-of-list project; if not, I just skim my notes for it so I know what I need to work on next time.

The point of all this is, I don’t waste a lot of time or energy trying to decide what to work on next; I don’t have a choice of what to work on next. I just go through the list. This works pretty well, when I actually do it. Trouble is, I don’t always do it.

Sometimes, when I sit at my computer, I just want to play a game. Or check up on news. Or I may have to do work for my regular job.

So the first thing I did to make things run a little more smoothy was to add games and news and job to the list, so I manage it all just like everything else. In some ways, this makes the act of relaxing with a game feel like any other chore, but that’s kind of the point. If I’m working so much that I feel like I need to stop in the middle of everything and do something mindless, I’ve failed to manage my time well. Those breaks need to be a preemptive maintenance sort of thing, not emergency damage control. Scheduling video game breaks in forces me to, well, take breaks regularly.

* * *

The second thing I’ve done is keep my head a little emptier. I’ll explain this by way of a tangent.

When programming for the Apple II, there was this concept of the Zero Page. It was a tiny, tiny section of memory — just a couple hundred characters’ worth of data — that you could access very quickly in your programs. So while you had much more memory that that total, you wanted to make sure that the things you’d be accessing the most frequently were on the Zero Page.

So, say you were making an dungeon crawl. You might store the player and monster positions on the zero page since you need to look at those every frame. You’d store the player and monster stats, items and skills in regular memory since you’d only need to check those in response to getting hit, using your current item or checking your inventory. And finally, you’d store your world map on disk, and you’d only read from the disk when you’d entered a new dungeon.

Back to project management. My head is the Zero Page, my notes are regular memory, my design documents are the disk. My head can’t actually store that much. If I’m trying to keep track of too many things, my head overflows and I get confused.

So let’s say I’m working on a font. I glance at a sample and notice that the P, G, N, W, T and Z need a bit of cleanup.

Normally what I’d do is just try to remember all that, start on the P, move on to the G… and then forget where I am.

But what I’m doing now is, I’ll glance at my font, and write in my notes that I need to work on these 6 letters. I start on the P, and completely forget about the other letters. When I’m done, I erase the P from my notes and note that the next thing that needs work is the G.

I’ve gone from editing my notes two or three times an hour to editing them every couple of minutes. Any given bullet point might only be there in my file for half an hour, or even as little as a single minute. But it’s totally worth it to sort of cache my thoughts there; and it’s not like I’m wasting paper since this is just a file on my computer.

* * *

The only problem with this is, my file is getting kind of long and unwieldy. And the longer and more detailed it gets, the more janky it feels to copy whole sections from the top and paste them on the bottom when cycling through projects. That, in and of itself, is adding a little bit of friction to this process.

I think it may be time for a proper app for this, which I’ve threatened to work on before.

HItchhiker’s, Part 5: The Question

Well, I finally got to the part about the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Ever totally miss some really mainstream thing, like, I dunno, The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; never saw those; and it’s middle school and you’re terribly terribly concerned about fitting in; and all your middle-school classmates are gushing about these movies, and how awesome they are, but the more they gush about them and their awesomeness, the less you want to see them? And… you end up with this feeling like all these mainstream things, they’re not really for you, even though it’s not like you’ve really experienced all of them on their own terms. All that gushing kind of backfires.

That’s kind of how I felt about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Within certain circles, it’s terribly mainstream, and every time I heard someone talk about it or quote it I wanted to read it less.

So I finally got to the bit about life, the universe and everything and the significance of the number 42, and I was all like, oh, bother, here it comes.

And yeah, perhaps just because I knew it was coming, that part just kind of failed to grab me.

And then — so that’s the Answer to the whole life, the universe and everything stuff — and then they talk about the Question. And that… that was lovely. Touching, in that beautiful way that well-written absurdist comedies can blindside you with something that’s just perfectly blunt and honest and real. That, I didn’t see coming. And it’s one of those things where, once you’ve read it, you start to say hey, every previous scene in this story kind of had to be there for this to work, and it’s just beautiful and satisfying and exactly what I like in storytelling.

Now, I’m not suddenly going to start finding jokes about the Answer extraordinarily funny; I’m just not a big fan of random pop culture references. The point is, it’s pointless. Nothing to see here; there are, it seems, themes in this book far more worthy of my time.

I really, really hope they don’t ever reveal the new Question; I hope it’s not just a set-up for a bigger joke. Because right now, this here comedy is serious stuff.

Hitchhiker’s, Part 4: Keeping it Real

Looks like there’s a plot kicking in, though still in a jaunty, episodic sort of way. Arthur and Ford have met up with Zaphod, and they’re exploring a strange, enigmatic planet which I assume will harbor the climax of the story.

They’ve hinted at Zaphod having some sort of screwed up backstory, and I’m hoping they’ll explore that more. The characters have been perfectly likeable so far, but I’m not getting a sense of a traditional arc for any of them. Stuff is happening, our characters are reacting… but they seem unchanged mostly.

So Arthur and Zaphod met before, and that coincidence is critical to our understanding of the Heart of Gold‘s power system. That’s kind of a fascinating twist, and if this were another book… I’d be looking out for some sort of stunningly elegant and beautiful and perfect revelation about how these amazing coincidences are going to all add up and say something really cool about why these people are here, why the Universe needed this absurd chain of events to happen and how these people all needed to meet each other, so each one of them could be more complete… but I rather suspect this is not that book.

Still, the bits about the whale and the pot of flowers were priceless. 🙂 I love the opportunities you get, with this whole Infinite Improbability Drive thing, for random, completely absurd humor.

* * *

I still can’t tell you what the Heart of Gold looks like, except to say that I generally think of the bright white & glassy look of the Enterprise in the latest Star Trek movie, which I think was the last spaceship-based movie I saw. I suspect that if I’d recently seen a movie set on a spaceship with dull metallic sets, I’d think the Heart of Gold was dull and metallic.

But I’m coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter; what makes this ship interesting, and what makes it feel real, is not its looks, but how it behaves. And like the comedy I was talking about earlier, it’s all more conceptual than visual. The bizarre engine that powers it; the way the door chimes make its crew feel; the absurdly pleasant computer voice.

I read this Star Trek book once called Spock’s World as a kid, and what I remember most about it was how it made the Enterprise feel real. Like, I had a sense of how it would feel to be on it; to live and work on it; and none of this feeling was necessarily about being able to visualize the sets from the various TV shows and movies.

I already had a clear idea what every Enterprise set looked like, but none of that gave me the sensation of being there like reading pages of text about it. And it honestly hadn’t occurred to me until just now that maybe that wasn’t because the book was the best written thing ever or because it was paced slowly enough to let this stuff sink in or because it was based on a property I was familiar with… maybe it succeeded in feeling real to me because it was a book.

So when an avid reader gushes about how this or that imagined world felt real to them, maybe I’ve been interpreting those sorts of statements all wrong. Maybe it’s just more about the feeling than the visualization, and it would seem that books excel at creating those sorts of feelings.

Okay, that’s probably old hat to most of you. But… I’m excited about this revelation. What we’re talking about here is the written word’s ability to bypass actual stimuli.

The way I saw it, reading fiction worked like this:

Book describes visual, aural, or tactile properties of stimulus (ship interior, character appearance, etc.)
Reader constructs vivid image of stimulus in head, using written description.
Reader reacts to constructed image.

But it’s not really like that, is it? Is it more like this:

Book describes various characters’ reactions to stimulus.
Reader, seeing the world through the characters, reacts to stimulus in a similar way as the characters.

Hence, the stimulus, in and of itself, need not be described or understood in extraordinary detail. I know the door chimes on the Heart of Gold are annoyingly happy sounding because Marvin the perpetually depressed robot finds them annoyingly happy. I still can’t tell you what those chimes actually sound like. It’s not that important.

If you asked me to draw a picture of the bridge of the Heart of Gold, I’d treat it like any other design project, trying to choose visual elements that created in the viewer the sort of reactions I had when reading the book… and while I’d find that an interesting challenge, it’s not my job as a reader to do this. The book is already getting the reactions it wants out of me… I just need to let it keep doing that.

Saving the Day

This is going to be a sort of grand finale type cue to go along with a scene near the end of Tinselfly.

My computer’s hard drive died last week, and life has been one giant install party lately. Everything was backed up, and the backups were backed up, so thankfully, this is just a minor annoyance and not the crisis it could have been.

The first application I reinstalled was Flash Builder (which I use for work-work). I’ve been trying to squeeze in as much real work in as possible between reboots and progress bars, trying to catch up. But in the interests of keeping my creative side happily fed, the second app I installed was Mixcraft, my music composition software. And the only creative, pet project type thing I’ve done in the last few days is work on this new piece of music, since I didn’t get my personal files restored until yesterday.

It’s not done of course, but considering the relatively small amount of time I’ve spent on this, I’m pretty happy.

what went right

Getting ideas. It would seem that nothing helps me flesh out a level design or story beat like composing music for it. While working on this, I figured out a pretty satisfying through-line for my protagonist that is sort of an anti-power-fantasy, but still feels heroic in its own right. That’s been the goal of the project since its inception, but I wasn’t sure how to end it in anything other than a bleak, nihilistic, deconstructive sort of way.
Short bursts. I work best in short bursts. I can engineer short bursts, but it’s difficult to fake the sort of burning need to work on something that you get when you’re desperately trying to squeeze it in with more important tasks.
The rhythm. I’ve always wanted to do something in 5/4 time. So what I did here was, I created a single-measure, blank drum track and had it loop incessantly while editing it. I could move the beats around in realtime until I got something I liked, and didn’t think about chords or melody at all. I’m pretty happy with the results. This should probably be a standard part of my process; usually, I don’t give much thought to rhythm.
Structure. There’s a bridge, and an ending — two things I’ve never done before. They need some work still, but I’m glad I forced myself to add those things in, so at least I have something to work with now.
Changing time signatures. The piece changes to 6/4 time just for the bridge. I originally had the bridge in 5/4 like everything else, and it just felt wrong. I think that was a good choice; it adds variety but doesn’t feel jarring at all to me. Also, when I use the main melody elsewhere in-game, I’d like to have it be 6/4, so it just goes to 5/4 for the finale.

what’s going wrong

Length. This is just over three minutes long, and is the longest piece I’ve ever made. If this were part of a movie or something, I suspect that would be fine. But as something you play through… my gut feeling is that anything you’re imagining as a movie scene is going to take at least 3 or 4 times as long if you want to express the same concepts as a level in a video game. While I get bored easily with repetitive action in movies, action is the supposed to be meat of the storytelling here, and repetition becomes more important.
Totally 80’s. This is supposed to feel more modern, more synthy than the other pieces of music in Tinselfly. I know it’s not everybody’s favorite thing, but I like it when movies do that during important moments. It’s a reminder that you’re being told a story; that this is, after all, about real world issues and not the issues in this made-up one. But unfortunately, I don’t think this is synthy enough to feel different from my other pieces.
Cryptomnesia. I am, as always, worried that I’m just dutifully copying something I heard before, and don’t realize it. Like, I dunno, some 80s sci-fi like Solarbabies. The beat reminds me of Mars, Bringer of War and We Belong; the introduction of the chimes make me think of Curtains, used in Myst IV; the first couple measures of the bridge, I have just realized, are just a single note off from the intro to I Dreamed a Dream. And the image I have in my head, of the visuals that go with this — a circular panning shot of a bunch of random people rushing to the edge of a sort of open-air space platform perched above a stormy gas giant — just feels like it’s been done to death. I don’t know why. Maybe I’ve just forgotten that this is all only a few days old, which I am wont to do. But, the more specific things I can think of that this is like, the more comfortable I am; the more likely I am to question what I’ve done and make this my own.
Transitions. I’ve got a main section and a bridge and an end, and that’s good… but for the most part, I think the transitions from one section to another need to be smoothed out.
Muddiness. Some of the instrument clusters just sound messy. Need to clean those up too.
Adding more themes. I really want each theme to have a clear connection to a specific character or place, and I want to make sure I don’t have so many that the whole score for this just feels like a bunch of random things I threw up there with no relationship to each other. But… I’m not sure what this theme is… maybe it will be my protagonist’s theme. Strangely, I don’t think I have one yet.

Hitchhiker’s, Part 3: Taking Breathers

Got a few more chapters done in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

As always, spoilers ahead.

* * *

So… Vogon poetry.

I’m pretty sure that’s my favorite scene so far. I love the absurdity of it all.

As I suspected, the story is concentrating on Ford and Arthur, having left behind the construction people back on Earth. I like that; it’s a limited number of characters to have to keep track of. I hope it stays this way.

So Ford and Arthur have stowed away on a Vogon ship, endured Vogon poetry, been flushed out an airlock, got rescued by the Heart of Gold, and are about to meet its captain. And I’m wondering now, how will the meeting with the captain go? Will they get along? Will we learn why Zaphod Beebebrox stole the Heart of Gold?

There’s a great sense of momentum to all this, perhaps because of the book’s radio-play roots; it seems every chapter ends with a great hook that makes you impatient to read the next one.

And, I must admit, I’m impatient to get back on the elliptical and read some more.

Despite that, I don’t get a sense of an over-arching plot that the characters want resolved, and I keep wondering if or when that’s going to happen. Because, while I like episodic fiction, I’d like to see some sort of solid through-line here, something a little more meaty than the action that’s been going on so far. Maybe I’m just not far enough in yet.

* * *

I’m not sure how to organize this really; lots of reading progress here. Have a list.

Normal pacing. Thankfully, the book did stop being so phrenetic once they were done blowing up the Earth. Yay!
Reading comedy. I’ve read hardly any books that would quality as comedy; this may in fact be my first. I get the impression that book-comedy is kind of a different thing than movie-comedy; book-comedy (in this book at least) seems to be about the stupid things we think and the silly things that motivate us; it’s all very internal. And this stuff would be hard to express on film I guess.
Talking heads. I frequently get lost during long stretches of dialogue, having forgotten who was speaking. I have found that it helps to assign each character in a scene a location, like I’m looking at one of those video games where you’ve got a couple of mostly static, hand-drawn characters that slide in on either side of the screen and yammer at each other. So while I’m reading the dialogue, I’m thinking about the position of this character on this imaginary screen… which helps me more than trying to remember their appearance. It’s like… listening to something in stereo. Which takes me to:
Visual details. I tend to stress out about my perceived inability to imagine what a fictional scene looks like, whether I’m reading science fiction or playing a pen & paper rpg… and while this may legitimately be a problem, it was suggested by a friend that it’s not as big an impediment as I think it is, and the more I read of this book, the more I am inclined to agree. What matters more, at least at the moment, seems to be thinking about relationships and an overall sense of mood. So like I mentioned above, thinking about the abstract physical placement of characters helps my reading comprehension more than trying to imagine specific details about them or their environment. Similarly, I didn’t even try to imagine what the Heart of Gold looked like — I just think about the emotions its design elicits in others, and that makes it feel relatively real.
Digestion. Betweeen chapters — and, sometimes, when there just happens to be a double line break between paragraphs within a chapter — I’ll stop and review what I’ve read, what new characters I’ve met, what happened in the plot, what I’ve learned about the universe. While I’m reading a story for fun, this is still all about information transfer, and it takes time to digest this stuff. Reviewing it every now and then helps.

Hitchhiker’s, Part 2: Chaos

I’m going to have to talk about reading-the-process and reading-this-book together this time, since I was a bit lost.

As before, spoilers ahead.

* * *

So… they actually have a cataclysmic, it-came-from-outer-space world destruction thing going on here. I really wasn’t sure that was going to happen.

And it’s all, omg omg drink this muscle-relaxant! There’s some random drunkard! There’s some random girlfriend, though I don’t know if she’s the girlfriend of previous random drunkard, but it doesn’t matter, because there are things in space! There are random people on the ground looking at the things in space! And there’s… a towel? A whole page about the importance of towels and earlier, a bit about why this-galactic-travel-guide is better than that-galactic-encyclopedia?

I had a bit of trouble following all that.

But maybe that’s ok, because the world is blowing up and if the author’s intent is to convey that chaos by giving me information overload, then he certainly succeeded. So while I’m a little stressy about not being up to the task of processing all that, I’m not too worried about it.

My favorite lines:

“Energize the demolition beams.”

Light poured out into the hatchways.

”I don’t know,” said the voice on the PA, ”apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.” It cut off.

There was a terrible ghastly silence.
There was a terrible ghastly noise.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.

The Vogon Constructor fleet coasted away into the inky starry void.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I love writing that consciously uses repetition and rhythm to convey ideas — writing that, while made of words of course, is meant to be read in a way that is not strictly about verbal comprehension.

In addition to seeing the world destroyed, Ive met Zaphod Beeblebrox, been introduced to the Heart of Gold, and got a bit about fish who translate things. It’s all stuff that seems vaguely familiar, but that vague familiarity with some of these names and concepts somehow manages to be not at all distracting. It’s like… you’re watching a Clint Eastwood movie, and you know full well what kinds of characters Clint Eastwood is wont to play, but that doesn’t mean you know what he’s going to do, right here, in this particular movie.

Looking forward to hearing what the Vogons have to say in the next chapter.

Isolating Werewolves

My wife, brother and I have been watching both the UK and US versions of Being Human, shows about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing an apartment, just trying to lead normal lives. I love comparing the two shows, though I’m not interested so much in the US/UK cultural differences… and while it’s interesting that, stylistically, the two shows are very different, I’m not that interested in analyzing that, either.

Which I find fascinating about this is when the shows are almost exactly the same — but not quite.

For example, we recently watched episodes where, in both versions of the show:

Werewolf #1 befriends a fellow, more experienced Werewolf #2, who tries to teach him how to manage this whole werewolf thing.
Werewolf #1 is insulted by a Nurse in the hospital where he works.
Werewolves #1 and #2 go to a bar, and Werewolf #2 shows Werewolf #1 how he can use his magic powers of werewolfishness to get a date with the waitress.
Werewolf #1 bumps into Nurse again. She tries to apologize, and Werewolf #1 makes an embarrasingly awful attempt to seduce her, which completely fails.

There are some major changes in the feel of plot point #3 in the US and UK versions; the former has Werewolf #2 coming off totally creepy, and the latter’s werewolf comes off more believably attractive. But I was most intrigued by plot point #4.

The only real difference between versions is the presence of Werewolf #2 in the scene. In the UK version, he’s there with Werewolf #1 and Nurse, goading Werewolf #1 on through a seduction attempt that Werewolf #1 doesn’t really want to commit to. Werewolf #2 doesn’t say much at all; his mere presence is causing some peer pressure.

In the US version, Werewolf #2 isn’t in this scene at all. Werewolf #1 takes it upon himself to try out the magical seduction thing on Nurse, and it completely changes the dynamic of the scene. We see Werewolf #1’s actions as bad handling of his relationship with Nurse, instead of seeing it in terms of trying to impress his new werewolf mentor. We see how Werewolf #1 is already starting to internalize Werewolf #2’s teachings, instead of getting dragged through his education.

I like how in the US version, Werewolf #1 owns his own failure. I think it made his story more interesting.

It’s a small difference, but it changes a lot. And that’s why I like watching both versions of this show simultaneously. It’s like you’re getting to isolate your variables in a controlled experiment, and you’re going to learn the most from such experiments when the isolation is clean. It’s a great way to learn about writing.

Big Yellow Bulldozer

I’ve started reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time. While on an elliptical, trying to get into something like shape and improve my reading skills at the same time.

Since I suspect the vast majority of people who stumble upon my journal have read said novel, I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts as I go, as well as babble about reading. This will probably be the first of several posts on the subject.

I’m going to separate this out into about-the-book babbling and about-reading babbling.

(In case you haven’t read the book, there will be spoilers ahead.)

* * *

I got through the introduction and first chapter.

I love how breezy the introduction is, and while I don’t read much at all, I’m a big sucker for long-winded introductions printed in italicized text. Also, I love how it says, in a humorous, roundabout, natural sort of way, what kind of story you’re in for, i.e. not a big epic with big epic people.

On to chapter one… I like the setup for everything, though I don’t have a sense of where it’s going exactly (and that’s ok; I just want to be informed in advance of the tone). I really don’t know if this is going to be some sort of Red Dwarf-ish romp through a post-Earth universe, or if that’s an empty threat. But I like that it starts with the threat of the protagonist’s house getting demolished; that lets you look at the big implied threat in terms of something relatable and personal.

I find the three characters that have been introduced interesting and easy to understand, in this television pilot sort of way where everyone’s being drawn in broad, efficient strokes during what’s supposed to be a typical episode. Again, I don’t really know what to expect here; I’m sort of assuming we’re going to be following Arthur and Ford and leave the construction foreman guy behind later on, though I don’t know why I think that. Maybe just because his name, which I can’t remember, didn’t sound familiar.

So off to a good start here. My biggest worry was that I’d find everything annoyingly cheeky, but that certainly hasn’t happened yet.

* * *

As for the actual reading — I chuckled a few times during the introduction. This is a wonderful thing. It means I was relaxed enough with the reading of the book to enjoy it for what it is rather than struggling with the medium. Growing up, the idea that a book could be funny — or exciting, or emotional, or anything but homework — was a bit foreign to me.

Usually, my biggest problem with reading is context. I’ll forget what’s happening or who’s talking or where we are; you might as well feed me sentences in a random order. I told Marie once that all books to me were about people in plain clothes babbling at each other in plain white rooms with plain white furniture.

So I made a point of trying to hold my context here. During staff meetings at work, I’ll frequently try to hold specific words in my head so I don’t lose track of what’s going on. Like a mantra. Admin design admin design admindesign admindesignadmdesad…

…like any mantra, it kind of loses its meaning upon repetition. This approach does not work well.

So I tried imagining what a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie might look like. And that didn’t work either. Imagine trying to read a book while watching a movie version of it… they’ll undoubtedly get out of sync. I’ll have this movie in my head of Arthur going through this morning routine, and the movie skips ahead to an expected part of someone’s morning routine that hasn’t happened in the book, and it doesn’t happen at all, and it’s jarring.

Finally, I tried thinking of static images, and just added details as I read.

Arthur. Arthur in a bathroom. Arthur in a bathroom with a bulldozer outside.

Clear image. Skip to:

Big yellow bulldozer. Arthur lying in front of big yellow bulldozer. Arthur lying in front of big yellow bulldozer with construction guy standing over him.

This worked well. Each time a new element was added to an image, the image didn’t move; it just became more complex. And I was able to keep those images in my head, and it wasn’t distracting, because it was static and completely nonverbal. Like… a watermark on a web page or nice stationery, just sitting there behind the text, coloring your perception of the text without being at all intrusive.

I have high hopes for this approach, though I don’t know what’s going to happen when the plot kicks in… I’m terrible with those.