đ Hi, my name is Max Zsol.
I'm a computer engineer and writer of sci-fi, some times with the help of AI.
I also blog about writing, mindfulness, engineering leadership, mechanical keyboards, and a long etcetera.
đ Hi, my name is Max Zsol.
I'm a computer engineer and writer of sci-fi, some times with the help of AI.
I also blog about writing, mindfulness, engineering leadership, mechanical keyboards, and a long etcetera.
Iâm giving Atom a try this year for writing short stories. After fighting with other tools, I feel most comfortable with code editors, so why not try it?
Things that I like about Atom:
I have been using Atom to write Markdown on and off for a long time. Here are a few things I had to configure to have a good writing experience.
Soft Wrap At Preferred Line Lengthctrl-shift-m
text.md
Cmd+Ctrl+ZCmd+Shift+;Ctrl+Shift+MThe articles below inspired me, and helped me get started on the right track:
Mostly this new year I want to follow Ray Bradburyâs advice and hope to do so by implementing Heinleinâs rules as closely as possible.
That means writing short fiction and submitting some of it to markets. Letâs forget the novel for now and letâs focus instead on building on top of small victories.
âYou must write to the end of the story.
You must make progress toward that end today.ââ Harlan Ellison
I am just now learning about Heinleinâs rules for writing:
- You must write.
- You must finish what you write.
- You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
- You must put the work on the market.
- You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
And itâs ironic that I didnât know about these rules, because one of my favorite writers was a firm follower of them. Harlan Ellison even rewrote the third rule to read âYou must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order. And then only if you agree".
To get a better understanding of the rules I read Heinleinâs Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing by Dean Wesley Smith, who does follow the rules himself in his personal writing. In the book he explains the spirit behind each rule in detail.
Iâve always been fascinated by prolific writers (Ellison famously wrote over 1,700 stories), and these rules seem like the right blueprint for such a feat.
Of course, not everybody agrees with the rules. But, hey, isnât that the same with all rules?
I should also recognize that these rules (specifically rule #3) contradict another famous quote attributed to many writers:
âStories arenât written are rewritten.â
âJohn Dufresne
Uncanny Valley is a short story about our need to hide the truth and our quest for selfdiscovery.
As Adam turned toward him, his mind went roaming down the darkness of the alley, impatiently following the glistening thread, unable to shake off the sense of urgency that told him: Take hold of this now, or it will be lost forever. He didnât need to linger in their beds for long; just a few samples of that annihilating euphoria were enough to stand in for all the rest. Maybe that was the engine powering everything that followed, but what it dragged along behind it was like a newlywedsâ car decorated by a thousand exuberant well-wishers.
He tried grabbing the rattling cans of their fights, running his fingers over the rough texture of all the small annoyances and slights, mutually wounded pride, frustrated good intentions. Then he felt the jagged edge of a lacerating eruption of doubt.
But something had happened that blunted the edge, then folded it in on itself again and again, leaving a seam, a ridge, a scar. Afterward, however hard things became, there was no questioning the foundations. Theyâd earned each otherâs trust, and it was unshakeable.
He strode toward the gate, wheeling a single suitcase. Away from the shelter of the old manâs tomb, heâd have no identity of his own to protect him, but heâd hardly be the first undocumented person whoâd tried to make it in this country.
âWhat are stories but mystery boxes?â
â J.J. Abrams
A story about humans colonizing a new world and finding them outsmarted by the local biodiversity.
In two days, the machine was ready.
It was delivered in a small crate to the warehouse. The crate was opened and the machine leaped out and stood there, poised.
âA cat!â exclaimed the quartermaster, pleased. He stretched out his hand toward the black fuzzy robot.
Even about himself there were many things man didnât know, dark patches in his knowledge which theory simply had to pass over. About other creatures, his ignorance was sometimes limitless.
One sentence review: A beautiful and complex metafictional parable that rewrites the myths of Adam and Eve, and lures the reader into swapping the roles of Devil and God.
In 1974 The Deathbird won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and Locus Award for Best Short Story. Here are some quotes from this short story:
But he was patient. Perhaps the most patient of all his people.
Thousands of years later, when he saw how it was destined to go, when there was no doubt left how it would end, he understood that was the reason he had been chosen to stay behind.
But it did not help the loneliness.
[âŠ]
It was like an old man. Seamed, ancient, dirt caked in striated lines, autumnal, lonely; black and desolate, piled strength upon strength. It would -not give in to gravity and pressure and death. It struggled for the sky. Ferociously alone, it was the only feature that broke the desolate line of the horizon.
[..]
The Great Coiled Oneâwhose rings were loops of wisdom acquired through centuries of gentleness and perception and immersed meditations that had brought forth lovely designs for many worldsâhe who was the holiest of Diraâs race, honored Dira by coming to him, rather than commanding Dira to appear.
We have only one gift to leave them, he said. Wisdom. This mad one will come, and he will lie to them, and he will tell them: created he them. And we will be gone, and there will be nothing between them and this mad one but you. Only you can give them the wisdom to defeat him in their own good time. Then the Great Coiled One stroked the skin of Dira with ritual affection, and Dira was deeply moved and could not reply. Then he was left alone.
The mad one came, and interposed himself, and Dira gave them wisdom, and time passed. His name became other than Dira, it became Snake, and the new name was despised: but Dira could see the Great Coiled One had been correct in his readings. So Dira made his selection.
[âŠ]
The man was not Jesus of Nazareth. He may have been Simon. Not Genghis Khan, but perhaps a foot soldier in his horde. Not Aristotle, but possibly one who sat and listened to Socrates in the agora. Neither the shambler who discovered the wheel nor the link who first ceased painting himself blue and applied the colors to the walls of the cave. But one near them, somewhere near at hand. The man was not Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Rembrandt, Richelieu, Rasputin, Robert Fulton or the Mahdi. Just a man. With the spark.
[âŠ]
And the sickness raged on unchecked. Nations crumbled, the oceans boiled and then grew cold and filmed over with scorn, the air became thick with dust and killing vapors, flesh ran like oil, the skies grew dark, the sun blurred and became dull. The Earth moaned.
The plants suffered and consumed themselves, beasts became crippled and went mad, trees burst into flame and from their ashes rose glass shapes that shattered in the wind. The Earth was dying; a long, slow, painful death.
Thatâs Ray Bradburyâs advice: Write one short story a week, 52 short stories a year.
The best hygiene for for beginning writers, or intermediate writers, is to write a hell of a lot of short stories.
If you could write one short story per week. Doesnât matter what the quality is to start. But at least youâre practicing. And at the end of the year you have 52 short stories.
And I defy you to write 52 bad ones. It canât be done. It canât be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come thatâs just wonderful.
â Ray Bradbury
The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure.
âHarlan Ellison
There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the ânormalâ, the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.
âHarlan Ellison
The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.
âHarlan Ellison
Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.
âHarlan Ellison
It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend oneâs life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.
âHarlan Ellison
I donât know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.
âHarlan Ellison
When youâre all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have. It often looks like egomania. I assure you itâs the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.
âHarlan Ellison
Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit.
âHarlan Ellison
Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.
âHarlan Ellison
Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, itâs built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.
âHarlan Ellison
The explanations a writer gives himself for having written any particular book are more often not the real reasons why that book has been written. Honesty is not the issue. Understanding is. A man does not write one novel at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: âThis is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.â
âHarlan Ellison
I intend to keep writing stories that piss people off, that tell the particular kind of truth I think is valid, that will make me feel more and more like a Writer of Stature, Which I honestly think I am, really, I mean it, I donât doubt it for a second dammit, so stop giggling! Stories that will make Dr Shedd sniff the air and make Lester smile as je thinks, âThe kidâs coming along all right.
âHarlan Ellison
The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust.
âHarlan Ellison
People on the outside think thereâs something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isnât like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and thatâs all there is to it.
âHarlan Ellison
A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur.
âHarlan Ellison
âYou learn more from finishing a failure than you do from writing a success.â
âNeil Gaiman
We are all the same,
all thatâs different
is the story we tell ourselves
about who we are.
How delightfully awesome is this old 80âs representation of a sentient AI/robot:
Although my mother was never officially diagnosed â the idea of seeking a medical intervention added to her feelings of failure and shame â itâs clear that she suffered from some form of depression. Other women of her generation, including the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, had also killed themselves, leaving behind their children. As a young woman studying to be a writer in the decades after their deaths, I feared that someday I might find myself sitting in a dark kitchen going over all the ways in which I had wasted my life and become a failure. I didnât think any of these women had been killed by their writing, but the introspection required to compose poems â or diary entries in my motherâs case â was difficult and dangerous work. You couldnât write anything true, complex, or beautiful unless you were willing to examine the unsettling thoughts in your own head; you had to force yourself to contemplate the random nature of the world and the limitations of human goodness. Getting depressed might be an occupational hazard. I wondered how I could be like these smart, creative women â my actual mother and my literary mothers â without inheriting their fate.
âKyoko Mori One Manâs Poison
âEveryone complains about the laws of physics, but no one does anything about them.â1 âGreg Egan, Schildâs Ladder
âI believe the original version was âEveryone complains about human nature.â When the second half became patently fair, three meme just shifted context. You can treat the meaning right out of these one-liners, and theyâll still find a way to keep propagating.â âGreg Egan, Schildâs Ladderâ©ïž
Hereâs my revelation of the day: There are two stories to a book:
Those donât need to match. They need to overlap. The plot is contained within the larger story.
I guess, I finally understood the story vs plot distinction. One is flat, objective, boring, the other is has dramatic intensity and emotion.
So how to write a complex SciFi plot without going mad1:
No warranties though.â©ïž
âWe will have genetically modified humans and we will correct natureâs mistakes. It will be a very different future.â
[âŠ]
âThis will happen with the next generation. Itâs a bit late for us, because reverting the ageing process is harder. But there is no doubt that your children and my grandchildren will live to be 150. And weâll make people with disabilities walk again, and later we will be able to eliminate rare diseases.â
Also he comments on the techno-pesimism that abounds today even as we rely more and more on technology (or maybe itâs precisely because we do).
âThere is a growing sense of skepticism all over the world, that technology has created many of the problems that we now need to solve,â he says. âIf you look at it objectively and with perspective, technology has brought many solutions, such as in medicine, and the problems are mostly due to the way we use the technology.â
Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking.
âMary Poppins1
Is that so? Well, Iâll tell you one thing, Mary Poppins: you donât fool me a bit! âParrot Umbrellaâ©ïž
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