Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Unfortunately my windows guru seems to have left his computer at the
moment - I messaged him, tho, and we'll see if he can pull any rabbits
out of hats,...

Oh. Yes. Modeling. There is a bit of nudity here, so consider yourself
warned,...

http://hypnox.com/classic/
http://www.sebastianstudios.com/ads/Img_1984.jpg
http://www.sebastianstudios.com/ads/Img_2084.jpg

Sebastian hasn't released the rest yet, and two other photographers
have yet to show what they got,...

*yawn* Still tired.
-Kelly
  

    
Johanna -- brilliant idea. It ought to have worked, too, but DOS is
smarter then it ought to be and keeps giving me an "invalid directory"
message when I get to what WOULD have been the directory over 66
characters. It's simply unable to perceive it so far...

& no, I haven't, I'm afraid.

Kelly -- they look like someone ought to get out the oils and start
painting.
  

    
I suspect that I'll be sending it off to Chicago -- or even dropping
it off there -- with a "please get off what you can from the following
directories before you reinstall windows 2000 or do whatever else you
have to to make it work" message.
  

    
Kathy Li jumps in with an e-mailed suggestion:

Well, as I'm doing this e-mail, so this suggestion could be far too late, 
but Neil, did you try mapping a drive?

subst z: c:foobaronetwothreefourfivesixseveneight

cd z:nineteneleventwelve

--Kathy
  

    
Kathy, yup, tried it. It simply does not admit to the existence of the
directories beyond 66 characters, even with the subst.
  

    
Kelly~
I'm absolutely jealous of how beautiful all of y'all are.
*sigh*

But I thought you'd said "larger women"?
  

    
The subst idea was my first thought.  I'm trying to think of something
better.

Perhaps we could find a tiny OS (without the 66 char limitation) that
would fit on a floppy that could access the file system (do you know if
it's FAT32 or NTFS?  my guess would be FAT32), so that you could just
boot to that and then get your files off.

I'll see if I can figure something out.
  

    
Kelly -- They are beautiful.  Thanks for sharing...

Neil -- Bozhe moi.  Sneaky little bastard.  (Meaning DOS.)
(And I can only imagine it's Toshiba specific because we couldn't
reproduce it on either laptop here.  Strange failure mode.)
  

    
#9 and #10 of the following support page look like possible avenues,
though the PATH var is not your issue:
<http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q72/1/71.ASP>

Still pondering and tinkering.
  

    
Neil~
This may have been mentioned already, but can you rename the main
files with shorter names, freeing up room in that 66 charecter limit to
go further in, and them rename the files further in with shorter
names, and so on, until you get what you need?

You *do* realize that the 66(6) limit *proves* that DOS is evil? ; )
  

    
And you can rename all of your directories to shorter strings in order
to free up chars, so

copy C:foobaronetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnine*.* a:

could become

copy fbottffssen*.* a:

via

c:> ren foo f
c:> cd f
c:f> ren bar b
c:f> cd b
c:fb> ...etc.....
  

    
I'm constantly amazed at the sheer mass of smarts collected in this
and other online communities.  Maybe there's something about the medium
that creates opportunities to reveal all the different facets of what
people know that isn't duplicated in Real Life, a sort of "show and
tell" effect that we don't get into just trudging around in the daily
grind.  But it's seemed to me for years that there is a high
concentration of really intelligent and knowledgeable people gathered
online.

I love hearing all the fascinating stuff people here talk about.

(Even computer talk.  I confess that programming isn't my thing, but I
honestly like listening in sometimes.  My brain is so non-linear that
I think of programming-speak like yoga exercises for that half of my
brain.  Although people who do it for a living tell me that you get to
art, when you get far enough in, and I believe them.)

Neil: I hope you're continuing to get better.  When will you be gone
to Chicago?  Will you be able to be online without the Libretto?

Also, if you're willing--would you share your thoughts and/or
experience about writing through resistance... for instance, when a
story isn't pulling together, or when you can't seem to get a character
to talk to you.  Do you have any "tricks" that you use at times like
those?  I noticed in your AG notes that you're asking questions of
yourself/the book in early stages.  Do you do that throughout the
process of discovering what's going on?

Mike, Martha, Tara, Erynn, Will, Lenny... anybody else care to share
on that?
  

    
I have no tricks.  You must ask a better writer than I--
  

    
Mike - I stand, in awe and wonder, at your insanity.

Neil - Dear god...

Kelly - Wow! Nice shots. I only took a quick gander at the last two
individuals cause I'm at work, but they're quite neat. I especially
like the three of you looking into the box... makes me think of an odd
hybrid of the Fates and Pandora...

Martha - quit dissing yourself. Don't make me come over there and
praise you publicly again.
  

    
But seriously, I have no tricks.
  

    
that's fine you can have no tricks... but "ask a better writer than I"
is like saying "I keep losing these major awards" when you should be
saying "I keep getting nominated for these major awards"

Self-negation is my job... I just gotta protect my turf, ya know.

On the unusually-good-news-for-Dan front, a friend of mine just scored
us tickets for Tori's show on Sunday! They're insanely expensive, but
I don't mind. I can see the theatre from my window right now, and can't
wait for Sunday to arrive.
Wahoo!!
  

    
Just got an email from filmmaker Joe Christ. He's a grandpa!

"Here's a picture of Zoe Grace Linhart, born  Oct.29, 2001. Her
parents are Elle Sharp and Alan Linhart (my older son).
-JC"

She's gorgeous, too.
  

    
pamela~ don't know if you want input from a beginner... but I just
have to let the stories gestate. If I force them, it's pretty evident.
So I guess I'd not be a good (fiction) writer on a deadline; my best
stuff just forms there in my head and taps its foot impatiently until I
write it down, and then I go back and edit for flow... I tend to edit
heavily as I write for spelling and grammer and such. My best story has
been almost silent since this summer, at about 85% finished. As I gain
experience, and hopefully more feedback from writers (and thank you to
all the people who've been reading my stuff at Excentrica, and
commenting; it really means so much to me), I'll get to a more
professional on-demand level of writing...
  

    
Pamela -- it depends on the length of the story, and what else I need
to do. There will always be resistance; sometimes because something
isn't quite cooked yet, sometimes because it has a life of its own and
it needs to follow its own path, sometimes because of laziness or
intertia on the part of the writer, or a combination of all of them.

I try and write more than one thing at a time, because if I get stuck
on something I can do something else. 

For short projects I'll sometimes wait until the day when something
gels, and write it then. (I wrote the Wolves in the Walls three or four
times over about 18 months, each time from scratch, until I found the
right voice and the right tone to tell the story with; at 2000 words or
thereabouts it was easier and wiser to do it over than try and fix
it.)

Coraline took ten years.

When you're working at novel length, though, I don't think there's
room for that. You write on the good days and you write on the bad.
(That's the biggest 'trick'. How do you write on the bad days? A word
at a time.)

I don't have an easy prescription. There's a short book I made up in
about 1985 I think I'm almost good enough to write now. That one I've
been putting off because I knew how much cooler a book it would be if I
were a better writer. (But if I knew I were to die in a week I'd be
pissed at myself for not having written it already.)

Martha -- he does have a point, you know. I mean, you've been
nominated for Hugos and Nebulas and the Campbell. And you've even won a
Nebula... I'd certainly listen to anything you said about writing.
Except I wish you'd write more.
  

    
More suggestions from Kathy Li:

Ok, one more suggestion.  Try hauling the directories up the tree:

move onetwothreefour four
move fourfivesixseven seven
....

--Kathy
  

    
Well, but I haven't written in ever so long because it hasn't seemed I had
anything worth writing.  So therefore I'm in no position to give advice to
those who do know they have something worth writing!  Except, if it wants to
be written, you should write it--definitely.
  

    
Neil - Thank you. I realize that I'm coming from a place of "do as I
say but not as I do", but I hate seeing people denigrate their
talents... and obviously I've become a fan of Martha's writing over the
last few months. *grin*

Martha - I have to wonder... is it that you don't have anything worth
writing, or that you just think you don't? I suspect I'd love to read
something of yours that "isn't worth writing."

Speaking of writing, I'm off to go post some new sonnets I wrote this
weekend on my site before Madman and Miss Mousey descend on my
apartment for Barking Mad Poker.
  

    
Well, if it isn't worth writing to me, then it isn't worth writing to me, if
you take the logic....  Writers are wrong all the time, as everyone knows,
but you just can't really write unless you think it's not dumb.
  

    
Martha -- well, no, you can't. But one is not always the best judge of
what's any good. I remember reading "3 Septembers & a January" (the
Emperor Norton story) in black and white, and realising it was not just
the worst story I'd ever written, but quite possibly the worst that
anyone had written. I mean, it was obvious, and dumb. I phoned Tom
Peyer, the assistant editor of Sandman, and begged him simply cancel
that issue and go on to the next. (He pointed out that that wasn't
possible.) 

In retrospect I have no idea at all why I thought it was that bad.
  

    
You have to think it's more or less worthwhile _while_ you're writing it,
though, even if you then lose your nerve afterward.

Several years ago a critic who had said more than a few more-in-sorrow-than-
in-anger things about my writing, all of them easy enough to shrug off--I
don't expect everyone to like what I write, and I can't think I've written
anything that's going to work for everyone--said I was repeating myself.
That was the only criticism that sunk in.  Not repeating yourself.  Hard.