The microscopic saber-toothed tiger currently prowling the earth has disrupted what would’ve been normal activities for most of us, no doubt. This decade is only a few months old and it’s coined a few buzzwords and catchphrases already. Whodathunkit? From my experience, most decades take at least a year or two to shrug off the aura of the previous decade and find their own groove. But these Not-So-Roaring Twenties did it in a fraction of that time. Now if we could just get rid of that racism crap too, that would be great. Like somebody once said, we’re all in this together.
I’m trying to make the most of the setback, investing some of that shiny new free time I have towards professional development. Just in case that comes in handy.😉 Nobody ever became terminally ill just by coding JavaScript. We ain’t a race of cyborgs yet…
…although even these seemingly harmless functions I wrote need to be zipped prior to sending by email. File compression is apparently the computer equivalent of hand-washing.
I continue to edit SILVER BROWN when I’m not willing web apps into existence. This chapter I’m working on now is a complete rewrite of a passage from an earlier draft. It dawned on me the other day that said passage would better serve the narrative if I put it earlier in the story than it was previously. As a result of this literary reconstructive surgery, the new rewrite features two characters that weren’t in that scene in the first draft (one of which is an artificial intelligence). A wondrous new dimension to the whole dynamic has consequently taken root.
Ah, wonder. Something that is in tragically short supply these days. That sense of wonder I derive from these Lutherans is a much-needed boost to personal morale in the face of this surreally dark period of human history. I could spend my time in social isolation flailing my arms running around like a headless chicken, but I’d rather just write.
An encore presentation of Chapters Seven and Eight of SILVER BROWN is showing at the Olde Zuckerberg Theatre, today being the opening day. At a rate of one page a day, as is the usual custom. In these chapters, the witch Florys MacNab visits a mysterious program called Yggdrasil, which (aside from the presence of some kind of tree) bears little resemblance to its mythological namesake. There’s at least one other allusion to the Icelandic sagas in the text somewhere, and a hyperintelligent puffin…
The earliest drafts of what would eventually become SILVER BROWN came into being solely because I needed an outlet for my creativity. An outlet I wasn’t getting from my job. I went to college to train in the field of digital media. A line of work normally associated with creating things. But I was seldom allowed to actually create anything. The corporate culture of the firm I ended up working for was extremely hostile towards any semblance of creativity on my part. Particularly during those last few years, when my boss’ mental health had deteriorated to a point where she started engaging in unlawful things. There was only room for one creative genius at that firm, and it wasn’t me. My job was just to follow her orders.
Prior to entering such a suffocating work environment, I loved building websites. Then that love was kindly shown into a black sedan somewhere and garroted from behind like Luca Brasi. So I found a completely different craft to put my passions into – writing. I have no regrets about taking up this noble and ancient art, a craft I’ll continue to practice for as long as the Fates will allow me to. Writing is good for the soul, without question. Seeing your own words right in front of your face has a way of illuminating certain truths in ways that Enlightenment philosophers and pleasant conversations with friends simply don’t.
Even so, one cannot live on writing alone. Every writer needs fuel for their creative motors. With no experiences outside of writing, what will the writer write about? So after some hesitation, I dived into the Hudson to find Luca Brasi and pull him out to shore, reanimating his skeletal remains by immersing myself in the Old Craft, with a focus on learning about this fancy newfangled middleware and how to use it.
Node.js is definitely not your grandpa’s JavaScript. In ancient times, JavaScript was an interpreted client-side language, running locally on a web browser. It was equipped with a number of tools to enable communication between a web page and a server, but willing an actual server into existence using only JavaScript was the stuff of science fiction. Yet science fiction tends to become science fact with the passage of time. In some ways, that’s a good thing. As recently as six weeks ago, I was pretty convinced building some kind of web application would be problematic for me, on account of lack of access to the appropriate resources. Namely, a working server on which I could run scripts. But now I have such a server, having acquired the knowledge to build one myself. Here’s a mini-Twitter I built from scratch that runs on said server…
It’s not much to look at and there aren’t many bells and whistles yet. I mostly built this to get my feet wet playing with this shit.
This is just the tip of the iceberg; I am fully intent on furthering my education in this technology in the coming months (I tend to catch onto these new technologies in short order – hell, even my psychopath former boss once described me to a few of her contemporaries as a “quick study”). But the grand adventure on the side that is SILVER BROWN is and never was a waste of time. I know it doesn’t go unappreciated, hence the reason why I continue to write. A more detailed report of the progress of the book will come at a later date.
In the meantime, I should mention that I connected with a writer over the holidays who has published over sixty books and is a Master Mason to boot (if I ever get the itch to join that ancient brotherhood, I know who to call). In the first week of the new year he presented me with a printout of the first chapter of SILVER BROWN I had emailed him on New Year’s Eve, which was augmented with his editing suggestions and commentary. His only real complaint was that there was too much jargon used in the text which might get in the way of audience comprehension of the story. But his overall impression was favourable. To use his exact words, he found it “interesting”.
