Google chairman: Google+ is completely optional!

Google Plus is completely optional. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to.

--Google chairman Eric Schmidt (via Gawker)

Gee, thanks, I took you up on that the very first day, without your specific permission.

It's amazing that despite its relatively infinite capacity to store and study data, Google feels it needs to know even more about me than it already knows after I've been using GMail for years. Schmidt would probably say Google can't protect me as well as it might be able to, if only it knew I liked the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- but it already knows that, because I've written about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on this blog, which is on the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google. So how is me filling out a profile on Google+ going to give them any more?

Anyway, I wrote a whole novel about this -- or rather, half the novel is about this kind of thing, and half, more than half really, is just loads of sex. Which was a lot more fun to write about.

Check it out.

How They Scored now available on Amazon.com

My novel How They Scored is now available on Amazon.com as both a paperback ($16.98, available for free shipping) and Kindle edition ($3.99), though the latter has a strange notation that it is "not available for customers in the United States" / Update 9 Nov 09: The Kindle edition is now fully available.

Too much talk

I looked at "The Savage Detectives" again briefly on Sunday, having bought a paperback copy of the novel to accompany my now-damaged hardback copy. As far as I could determine, there are no direct quotes in the entire second section, which takes 80% of the book.

Some of the chapters in the current novel I'm writing, titled "Knock Yourself Out," are written like this, and they're my favorite chapters. You know what the great thing is about forbidding direct quotes? It eliminates the long talky sections that mar my writing. Anytime I have an extended dialogue scene, it tends to get away from me. I can hear the dialogue and individual lines are good, but when there's three or four pages of talking, of clever dialogue, everything gets lost. For example, in the chapter I just finished, a scene at a party devolves into three pages of dialog, with a descriptive paragraph every ten lines or so.

It's a mode of writing that's always easy to do and dull to read. The first novel I ever attempted, which I titled "Us and Them," had pages and pages of this talk. I had seen it done in other books and it didn't seem to grate, so I thought it was permissible to do. But it just doesn't fit with the kind of book I want to write now.

When I wrote "How They Scored," I was able to alternate between direct and indirect quotes. I would have a long passage of narration, with indirect quotes if necessary, and then a paragraph or two of direct quotation, and then go back to indirect quoting -- all in the same scene in which one character was telling a single, long anecdote. It worked pretty well, I thought. I haven't been able to achieve this yet with my current project, though as I say, the chapters where I have no direct quotations at all are fine..

technorati: writing

More on my new book 'How They Scored'

See that thing on the right that looks like an ad? It's my ad! It's about my new book. Click it! You'll end up on the website I created for the book.

Q. What's with the highway picture?

A. The whole first half of the book is a road novel. Of course the picture is from a highway near El Paso, Texas, and the journey in the book is from San Francisco to a mountain in north-central Washington state. But the pass pictured in the photo captures a nice road-novel feeling. I actually created a new cover for the book based on the same picture. If you click through to the Lulu page selling the book, you'll see the cover. Totally different from the softball team cover. Collect 'em all.

Q. You mean it's not about softball?

A. No, although at one point the characters do play catch, although "catch with deadly consequences."

Right, that's done

This just in: The NYT raises the possibility that Gawker is over. Me, I stopped reading it sometime in 2005. And I stopped reading Wonkette after the original editor left it. Blogs are not about the subjects they cover or their material. They're about voice. A consistent voice.

I've been spending more time lately filing posts on SF Metroblog, becoming its most consistent poster, though I'm not sure anyone really cares or is reading. I was cheered, however, when a local more famous blogger told me she thought that SF Metroblog did get attention; she was even surprised its writers aren't paid, but that might be because she just got a paid blogging gig. Anyway, I'm posting more there than here, these days, mostly because it's possible to do one or two good posts a day about San Francisco topics but hard to find time to surf around and post the stuff I really like to post about.

However, this is priceless. Some geek wandered the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show -- with a TV B Gone. Now that's anti-entertainment.

In personal news, today I have officially, and for about the fourth time, declared work on my novel How They Scored done, printed it out, and tomorrow I'm mailing it to my publisher. Which means they should be sending my agent a check within a month or so.

Barring any protests from How They Scored's publisher, I'll now go back to work on my India book, which is now titled "Bangalored".

technorati: How They Scored, novel writing, blogging

The last day

I meant to finish the first draft of my current novel project last weekend, but I stopped a couple of pages short. I didn't want to rush into it, and -- typical -- I had to be somewhere in the early evening, so I cut my writing day short.

Then I thought I would be able to grab a few hours during the week, ideally on Monday, and finish. It was only a few pages. But instead I got utterly hammered at work. In my 12 years in the high tech industry, I don't think I've ever been as snowed under as I was this week. In fact, I'm seriously considering going in to work on Sunday just to get a head start on the next week.

I rarely write about my day job as a technical writer at a large software company. It's something I've been doing for several years one way or another, but I've only been a true technical writer since the fall of 2004 -- three years and then some. I have been able to handle pretty much everything that's been thrown at me, but this week my relative inexperience meant that I had too much to do at the very end of the project -- a project which I've thought was done about six times now. It's not all my fault, but there's more I could have done to alleviate the crush that happened this month.

Another motherfucking learning experience.

Meanwhile, I read a little piece of this book I'm working on for the first time last night to a few people at a dinner. It was a very interesting experience. When you're reading out loud you can instantly tell which sentences are well constructed and which sound awkward -- which is why they tell you to always, always read your stuff out loud before considering it finished. It made me remember how, in my past experiences at LitCrawl (2006, 2005) I closely edited the piece I was about to read with a mind to how it would sound read out loud. I didn't have the opportunity to do that last night, and it was good to be reminded of how important it is.

So on to the last few pages of this book, which I will subsequently spend as much time as I can rewriting. (Rewriting the whole book, not only the last few pages, important as they are.)

Update, 3:45 pm: I finished! The total word count of the first draft was 85,293. That's an average of 2031 words per session, with the book finished in 42 work sessions from July 28 to today.

Previous first-draft-finishing milestones:

Make Nice on January 1, 2003. That one took about five years.

Bangalored (which used to be called "Dear Prudence") on December 28, 2006. That one took a little more than two years.

technorati: writing, novel writing

Almost at the end

I had a productive day writing today, reaching -- but not finishing -- the last scene of the book. Even when I do finish it, I still have to go back and write a good three or four thousand word chapter outlining a crucial part of the narrator's backstory.

So tomorrow I will do my best to write the ending, and then make some notes and get started on that last piece. Gettin' there!

Getting closer

Aside from a long scene I still need to rewrite, I came a lot closer today to being finished with the first draft of my current novel project. I basically wrote the scenes that provide the climax of the plot. I need one more chapter, and then I need to go back and basically write chapter 10 again. Maybe next weekend.

End of the weekend

Finishing up another weekend of writing, having redeemed the slow day yesterday with a good 3000 word day today. I'm nearing my 75,000 word count goal for the novel, and now I have another challenge: ending it. Yesterday at the start of work I mapped out several scenes that remain to be written purely from a plotting perspective; even after this weekend, there are at least seven more plot movements to hit.

That will take some doing, but it's pleasurable work; writing the end of a book and hitting plot points that have been prepared for all along is like kissing somebody you've had a crush on for a long time and having it turn out just as much fun as you always imagined.

technorati: writing, novel writing

Another fucking beautiful day

I'm not sure how many more of these gorgeous fall days I can take. I took a break from writing in the middle of the day and went home and sat in the garden with Cris for a few minutes. Milagrito the cat was out there with us, enjoying the family feeling. A bumblebee circled about.

Then I walked back to my office and did another 3000 words. This was a good weekend, over 5600.

Another sunny day

Here's another sunny day I'm spending indoors working on my book. In years past I used to hike all day long on Mount Tam on days like this. Especially in the fall, it's beautiful out there. Oh well, I also used to wonder why I wasn't writing. Now I am.

Deep autumn

End of another day of writing. I got a very late start, but once I got going it went well, and I wrote the scene I wanted to, about 2600 words. Now I think I'm going to do some thinking about what needs to be in the next chapter, so I can sleep on it and then get started tomorrow with a little more alacrity.

Last night we went to the symphony and I actually got an idea for the book's ending. It was generally not a fantastic night at the symphony but I was able to jot down a note and that felt really worth it.

Another progress report

I slogged through another weekend of working on my novel. I wasn't very inspired this weekend so I only managed about 4600 words for the two days, instead of the six or seven thousand I wish I had. At this rate it's going to be a little bit tight with the deadline, but on the other hand, I think the whole plot thing has settled into a groove. I hope.

A weekend to concentrate

After returning to the city, I had a whole weekend in which to work on my book, and I happily wrote over 6000 words. Today I wrote about one of the strangest and most ironic sexual experiences of my life: The time when I went to bed with my girlfriend Stephanie and one of her co-workers from the Lusty Lady. I already wrote about this experience in a short autobiographical essay published in Best Sex Writing 2006, but in that essay I left out the most ironic part of the experience because it didn't reflect on the main point of the essay, which was about Stephanie. So I'm writing about it again in a work of fiction, but the description of the event is actually more complete, because I include the ironic part of the evening.

But I'll leave it at that, to whet the appetite of anyone who might be reading this.

Novel 3,557, Bookshelves 2

I cut short my writing days yesterday and today so I could come home and work with Cris to put together some bookshelves we'd ordered a few weeks ago. They've been sitting in our living room in boxes for a couple weeks and this weekend was finally the time we were going to put them together. The first one took 6 hours, from 4:30 to 10:30 last night. The second one took 2.5 hours this afternoon starting about 4:00. We would have put the third and last one together then, but one of the pieces was damaged, and I have to go on the phone tomorrow morning and try to get them to ship another piece. Not looking forward to the phone call.

On the novel writing front, I did get 3,557 words in, which is about 2000 less than I would have preferred. I should get a lot done on the next two weekends, since Cris will be out of town, so I'm not too worried about my progress. I'm finally well into the meat of the book -- which may seem a strange thing to say after 40,000 words, but sometimes it takes a while. As for the shape of the book, I'm not sure what form it will finally take. It might turn into a 320 page monster. I sure am enjoying writing all the sex scenes, though.

Character making

Did some work on the characters for my new book today. While taking a break I talked to my friend Bob, who owns the house I rented my office in. He's a composer and non-fiction writer. "I don't know how you fiction guys do it," he said, while applying some sort of sealant to the bathroom floor tiles.

"I'm just making it up as I go along," I replied, meaning the technique, not the book. I've done each book differently, and I am trying some new stuff with this one. I'm thinking of doing my notes as a wiki this time.

But I might have answered: You just play God with the characters. Not too much, though. At a certain point, they take on a life of their own and you have to stop interfering.

I'm definitely at the starting-from-scratch God part now, though.