Now that the 1 has flipped over to 2 on my novelty “Numbers In Strict Numerical Sequence-A-Day Calendar” I can call your attention to a couple of goofs I had going. It was an unusually active April Fool’s Day for me…so much so that my Hand-Blackening Soap (”Indistinguishable from the genuine article…guaranteed ice-breaker”) remained in its original packaging and will be stored away for another year.

First, my pal Jason iChatted me with a preview of what he had planned for his TV site, TeeVee.net. On April 1, TeeVee would become Radeeo, the blog that would have existed in its place if television had never been invented and radio had remained the single dominant form of entertainment and information throughout the 20th century.

I thought it was a fabulous wheeze, and it immediately inspired a brilliantly funny idea. And when I completely and spectacularly failed to figure out how to make that idea work, I went with my second idea.

This Radeeo piece really was going to be it for April Fool’s Day. But at a little after midnight on April 1, I impulsively typed something into my Twitter window and clicked “Update”:

A few seconds later, I saw that message in my Twitter feed. I immediately thought “Oh. Oh, dear…I seem to have started an April Fool’s prank that might inconvenience me for most of the whole rest of the day.”

Well, Twitter seemed to be a neat medium for perpetrating an ongoing April Fool’s gag. Fortunately, the timing worked out so that by the time I had to “leave for the airport,” it was time for me to go to bed, and my flight wouldn’t “touch down” until after I’d woken up.

So I spent the day publishing a nice, tidy little serial adventure, in about four dozen 140-character chapters. The first post starts right about here. Twitter posts appear in stack order, so start at the bottom of the page and click the “Newer” button to get to the next installments.

I prolly ought to archive them here in proper order…but it’s late and I still need to finish a Sun-Times column.

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Okey-doke. Now that National Terrible Unfinished Novel-Writing Month is over, I ought to put a nice bow on the whole thing.

I trust that you all realize that my NaTeUnNoWriMo thing was just a gag? That’s why I wound up mentioning both NaTeUnNoWriMo and National Novel-Writing Month in the same posts. “Life of Brian” starts off with Brian attending Jesus’ “Sermon On The Mount” for much the same reasons. Were I half as clever as any member of Monty Python, I would have stuck in a “Blessed are the cheesemakers” joke, but I’m not.

You already knew that of course.

So NaTeUnNoWriMo was by no means a slap against NaNoWriMo or the thousands of fine Americans who took part therein. True, I’m less pleased with all those foreigners who had to horn in on our fun (typical!) but what the hell…it’s Christmas.

National Terrible Unfinished Novel-Writing Month was my answer to a couple of problems. I really wanted to take part in some fashion, but November was a hellaciously busy month that only got more complicated as the days ticked on, so I knew I couldn’t really go at it properly. And this alternative worked out great; had this been an actual novel, it would indeed have been incomplete and pretty damned awful.

I confess that I also enjoyed the opportunity to exorcise a few demons. See…I’ve always been just a little creeped out by the concept of “Writing as a Lifestyle.” The Internet is full of people who desperately want you to know how totally, completely, awesomely a Writer they are and (correctly or incorrectly) I tend to react the same way I do when someone seems just a little bit too eager to tell you all about their religion. Or is working suspiciously hard to convince you that they were absolutely nowhere near that motel when the murders were supposed to have happened.

Being a Writer is a simple game: you just sit down and write. And sometimes you go out and buy books about technique, or hang out on blogs and message boards, or attend workshops. But in the end, there’s just that simple division between people who write and people who merely fancy themselves as writers.

The real writers buy the books and attend the workshops and hang out on the message boards because they think it’ll help them with the writing (or they think it’ll help them to get something published). The Lifestyle Writers do it because for whatever reason, they haven’t found that inner drive to start and finish that story they’ve been mulling over for years. They didn’t write 1,000 words of prose today, but they did write 2,000 words of blog comments and message posts…and if the goal is to maintain a self-image instead of actually writing, then that’s just as good.

NaNoWriMo wasn’t set up as a mechanism for helping Lifestyle Writers to continue to aim their energies in the wrong direction, but it’s certainly an easy thing to abuse. Writing is a tough and lonely business and the presence of an Internet resource that can reassure and support you can be incredibly seductive.

(And I certainly don’t put myself above these people. Sometimes I think if it weren’t for deadlines, I wouldn’t do much writing at all. If I could make half as much money just talking about stuff I wanted to write, I’d take the deal in a heartbeat.)

So natcherly, National Terrible Unfinished Novel-Writing Month was a terrific outlet. By the time the month was over, I think I’d covered every terrible trap of Lifestyle Writing that I could think of.

Here’s the sum total of my advice to the guy who was working on his NaTeUnNoWriMo Novel…or anybody else who doesn’t want to accidentally become a Lifestyle Writer:

1) Don’t tell me about your novel until it’s done.

Not even if you’re a good friend of mine. The succinct but clumsy way to put this is “I don’t give a damn about what you intend to write.” So: don’t post a synopsis. Don’t post a fragment of dialogue or a scene setup. When you post three paragraphs from your so-called “novel” you make me think that this is, in fact, all there’ll ever be.

An idea for a story is like an idea for a tunnel from Boston to London. Anyone can create the idea. Creating the actual thing requires time, dedication, effort, perseverance, and a certain constructive amount of insanity. If it’s the 1800’s, an inexhaustible supply of cheap and expendable immigrant labor is also a big plus. These days, we quite appropriately frown on such things.

If writing a novel — anything, actually — were as easy as coming up with the idea, then terrific novels would be piled up and blocking the fire exits in every home and office. The fact that it’s so difficult is actually a safety feature.
I do care about how you’re dealing with the whole process. Tell me you had a good day or a bad day, or even a day when you wished to be reincarnated as any sort of lifeform that was incapable of operating a keyboard. Tell me that you’ve reached a point where you can’t keep making stuff up and you need to go do some actual research. Then blog about what it was like to walk through a real 150-year-old lighthouse.

That’s all great stuff. It’s not that I don’t want to hear about your work, you understand. Somehow, I can’t get enough of Process stories. Movies like Amadeus and Big Night and Unzipped…love ‘em, along with a great many writers’ personal blogs.

All of these things underscore that there are usually many years and many tears between “Dum-dum-dum-DAAAAAH…hey, that’s catchy” and a completed Fifth Symphony.

2) Don’t fetishize your tools.

(Unless paper and pen are actually some sort of sexual turn-on for you. I don’t get it myself, but fine. Just close the door behind you before you dress up your Kensington WAVE wireless keyboard in the little stewardess costume.)

The sort of pen that you must use when writing and the sort of emotions that your notebook of choice engenders…those are dead-boring topics. Honestly, I couldn’t care less.

I admit that I love my Pentel Excalibur pen and my Clairefontaine writing pads, and I’ve probably stated as such here and on my old blog. But I’ve never spent any time pouring out thousands of words on the romance of the subtle dance between the tip of the pen and the surface of the paper or any other such nonsense. I use this pen and this paper because they’re fun to write with and in some valid or delusional way, they help me with the writing. Period. If I can’t find my Excalibur, I’ll grab any halfway-decent gel pen.

Writing tools aren’t there to be romanticized over. They’re to be used. So shut up and write, already.

3) Don’t write about writing. Just write.

(See a recurring theme forming?)

I swear to God…I don’t care where your head was at when you wrote something. Where your head was at will become crystal-clear to me once I read it.

Seriously. Look, my longest relationship was with a fellow writer. We had some absolutely wonderful dates that will probably seem weird to outsiders. We’d meet at the Boston Public Library, sit at opposite sides of one of the big tables in the Periodicals department, and then we’d write for one or two hours in total silence.

She’d be writing on a legal pad, working on a novel. I’d usually have my PowerBook out and would be cranking away on a column or an article. At some point, we’d both look up and realize that neither one of us was still deep in the throes of The Writing Thing. And then we’d pack up and head out for dinner or coffee or something. If we talked about writing at all, it was just in the generic, mutually-supportive areas of “So, Sweetie…how did your day go?”

What I’m getting at is that I saw this woman naked on a regular basis and we still didn’t really want to talk about This Glorious And Frustrating Gift, or about Wrestling With The Muse. And we never discussed Lord Montague’s problems in maintaining the unsteady truce between Whoever and I Don’t Care.

She read my stuff when I finished and published it. The relationship ended before she published any of her novels, so I actually still have no real idea what she was writing.

(I’m sure she’s published by now. I never read a single sentence of her stuff but she had the assets that truly matter: dedication and determination. With those things in your arsenal, your good stuff will find a publisher your awful stuff will become the foundation for something better later on.)

It’s a basic principle. I imagine that it’s the same deal with just about anybody who makes things for a living. The carpenter comes home and drops his toolbelt in the front hallway where he’s not supposed to and he collapses into a chair. He tells his wife all about all the framing he did that day. How hard it was to make these custom windows fit into frames whose proportions were dictated by the local building code. How when he built the wall separating the master bath from the walk-in, he felt like he was just sort of willing the nails to go where wanted them to go and time seemed to stand still.

His wife nods and smiles through the entire story. She isn’t the slightest bit interested. But the woman’s in love, and she likes that the guy had a nice day.

4) There’s nothing special whatsoever about being a writer.

You are not the keeper of special Truths. You are not in special communion with anything. The Universe did not bestow upon you any gifts.

Your purpose on this planet is the same as anybody else’s: you are here to celebrate the Humanity of yourself and others. The Universe did not put you here specifically to craft gems of perfect Truth, Beauty and Wisdom for a dopey society of unsophisticates desperate to be healed by your Art.

Don’t be embarrassed. It’s a pretty common misunderstanding.

Here’s the deal: for whatever reason, you dig writing. If you’re lucky, you got bitten early in life. The act of writing causes lots of happy chemicals to slosh around in your brain and it’s such a pleasant phenomenon that you want to do it again and again. It’s so pleasant, in fact, that even when you write something that sucks in a heroically epic fashion, the experience doesn’t make you want to stop writing. It just makes you want to do better.

And the act of wanting to do better and wanting to give it another go causes you to get better and better at it as time goes by.

This is not the result of being Gifted. Nor of being in communion with your Muse. It’s merely the simple template for getting good at damned-near anything.

I took piano lessons for something like four years before I hit a certain wall. I could read the notes and I could translate those dots and lines into keypresses, but no matter how hard I worked at it, I couldn’t “read music.” Improvising? Oh, that’s rich.

But I had friends who understood the language of music and who seemed to find it effortless. I needed days and days with a piece of sheet music before I could play the song. My pal Don could put it on the stand and play it as effortlessly as if he were just reading a book. Who knows? Maybe he was born with some sort of musical x-factor. But Don’s most important asset was the fact that the pleasure he took in playing the piano was stronger than any challenges he faced.

Not so with young Andy. I got tired of being a sucky piano player and got tired of putting in so much work for nonexistent rewards and so I quit.

Writing and programming were different stories. I’d get home from school and get right behind the keyboard to work on one or the other. I still have the first short story I ever wrote for fun, way back in seventh or eigth grade. Yup, it sucked. But I enjoyed writing it so much that I’ve written something damned-near every day since.

Don and I weren’t more Gifted than anybody else. We just worked harder. God couldn’t care less if neither of us ever sat down at our respective keyboards ever again.

You are not special. Get over yourself. Put down the glass of Absinthe (unless your sole purpose in drinking it is to get bombed). Take off that brown velvet suit, stop sniffing that lily and just freaking write already. Writing is not your curse and it is not your salvation. It’s something you do for fun or satisfaction or money or ideally all three.

5) You are a writer because you write. Not because you’re a member of any sort of writing community.

Message boards don’t count. Dinners, blogs, workshops, writers’ groups…it’s nice to get out and socialize but when you’re taking part in a long message thread on the differences between Midnight Blue ink and Midnight Aurora Blue ink and how well they interact with an iridium fountain pen, you’re not making yourself into a writer. Doing actual writing is the only thing that counts.

And of course, that’s terrific news. You don’t need to get certification or permission from anybody. Just go right ahead and do it. When you finish your novel and send it to publishers and agents, it’ll be on precisely the same footing as the novel written by someone who received his or her postgraduate degree from the most competitive and prized creative fellowship program in the country.

Because agents, publishers, and editors are no more impressed by Writerly trappings than I am. In the end, it comes down to the words and only the words. So the sooner you squirt them out of your head and into a more reliable medium, the better.

* * *

Yes, yes. I appreciate the irony. I’m writing a long blog post in which I complain about writers who write about writing. So look…don’t even start.

Naturally, if any of you have ever blogged about the sumptuous romance of a Moleskine notebook, I’m not talking about you. The ones who truly annoy me are those drippy blowhards who obviously lost sight of the true target long ago.

In creating the lovable character of National Terrible Unfinished Novel Writing Month Guy (international licensing rights still available at attractive terms; please enquire), I certainly wasn’t singling out anyone in particular for abuse.

Nor did I need to, when Lynn Johnston has crafted the perfect Titanically-Boring Self-Satisfied Writeur — or to put it more simply: the perfect artistic ass — in the form of first-time novelist Michael Patterson.

Up until recently, her staff would write and post monthly “letters” written by the strip’s characters. Paragraph after paragraph, Mike’s letters have been textbook examples of There But For The Grace Of God.

I call your attention to May’s insights into Michael’s method:

My head is firmly wedged inside novel number two. It feels good to be back within the comfortable confines of a world of my own creation. I’m in control. Every character, every event, every turn of phrase is generated by “the gift”. Sometimes, I can’t quite access the magic that drives the urge to write and at other times, it takes over. Again, I’ve been swept back into the past. It’s 1874, I’m 23. Having fought with my father for the last time, I signed on to a windjammer - one of the large cargo sailing vessels that carried goods between South America and the Southern United States. Having no skills other than short order cooks (learned in my parents’ dockside restaurant in Galveston), I was put to work in the kitchen of the S.M.S. Princess Aleksandra Janiak, a worn, iron-hulled “maiden” that ferried everything from sugarcane to guano across the Caribbean Seas.

October 2006 is a bit of a pip, as well:

I fall into and out of this story as if I were falling into and out of sleep. It’s taking a toll on all of us, since I have to be here for Deanna and be a daddy to my kids. If I had the luxury of moving to some isolated place I could just let this story take over my mind. I could wrestle with the characters, be the characters, think like they do and say what each one would say - and not feel guilty for losing Michael Patterson for as long as it takes to remove this saga from my soul.

So what I’m getting at here is that your goal in life should be to be ever vigilant against the threat of every becoming even 1/10th the insufferable drip that Mr. Patterson seems to be.

On the subject of National Novel-Writing Month itself: again, I’m sincere when I say that it’s a great thing. I do think that writing is really nothing particularly special and the only thing stopping you from being an Author is the simple act of sitting down and writing something. If NaNoWriMo does nothing else, it encourages a lot of people to stop thinking about it and to actually give it a go. So it’s a hugely good thing.

That said…

I’m just a bit put off by this idea of trying to do 50,000 words in 30 days, and having these online thermometers that advertise your progress. There’s the risk that the writing will be an exercise in just hitting the numbers instead of an opportunity to take actual pleasure in the writing.

I also wonder if there are folks doing NaNoWriMo who just want to be able to say they’ve done it.

Serious runners probably feel the same way about these “anybody can train to run a marathon in just one year” books. It seems like a fine way to get people to start running, reach the given goal, and then hang their Finisher’s Medal on their bathroom mirror and never run another mile in their lives again.

Plus: after one year’s worth of training you can indeed can complete a 26.2 mile marathon. But you won’t do it particularly well. Wouldn’t it be better to buy a book that encourages you to run the best 5K you can, and shares so much of the pleasures of running that it becomes the key to a whole lifelong commitment?

So I dunno. I think I’d be more excited about a writing event with a less-catchy hook: National “Just Write Something” Month. One month is plenty of time to write a short story. You have more than enough time to think carefully about what you want to write and to make good choices as you go. You’ll almost certainly finish it quickly enough that you can get cracking on the second draft.

By the end of NaJuWriSoMo, you’d have a nifty, polished work. It just seems like a much more satisfying experience than collapsing across the finish line after having hobbled through the final nine miles at sub-walking pace, and then spending the next week recovering on the sofa and contemplating black toenails.

Well, I don’t intend to be the screen door on anybody’s submarine. Congratulations to anyone who took part in NaNoWriMo, whether you finished or not.

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A note to Future Andy:

When you do decide to create your own WordPress theme from the ground up, this tutorial is absolutely fab. If it were a book, I’d buy it.

Actually, it explains the strength of printed books over webpages, in certain situations. Writing a theme is somewhere in the same category as writing an entire piece of software. It’s not a simple trick or tip that you can skim through and then use. You need to sit, read, focus, think, and assimilate.

That doesn’t really work so good when the medium forces you to sift the actual content from amongst all the crap that competes for attention on a webpage, makes you click a link to move from page to page and article to article.

If I ever threw out my copy of Danny Goodman’s seminal “Complete HyperCard Handbook,” then I’m a damned fool. I don’t do a whole lot of HyperCard development these days (seeing as we’re nearing the tenth anniversary of HC’s death, and the fourth anniversary of Apple finally getting around to burying the body). But my copy was a wonderful artifact of an important time in my life. It was probably identical to every other copy of this book ever sold: dog-eared, scuffed to hell, tape keeping the spine together, fingerprints and food stains on every other page…in short, it was a book that bore the proud battle scars of an awesomely useful reference that got used every day and which was read everywhere. I remember taking it with me to my summer job every day. I read it on the bus over, I read it during my lunch break, and I read it on the bus back home.

Natcherly, this was mostly due to Danny’s God-given gifts. The HyperCard Bible is still a standard of excellence that few tech books have attained since. It took you from the fundamentals all the way through advanced techniques, and did so in a way that was always clear and enjoyable to read.

Mad props to Danny, as always. The point is that I don’t know if I and other HyperCard developers would have gained such a broad, deep and holistic understanding of such a beefy topic if we could only consume the knowledge in isolated, individually-wrapped bites…and had to dodge animated offers to punch monkeys and slap sumo wrestlers while doing so.

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5 days until final book deadline. There’s a certain amount of shaving and showering that should be happening but isn’t.

The true sign that I’ve reached the end game (as well as the low reserves of my mental faculties) is when I must resort to lab rat methods of motivation.

Witness (metaphorically only, unless you’re that kind person who sent me the vintage moose head and the 802.11g antenna that appears to be sticking up behind its left ear is transmitting video from an embedded camera) the small dish to the left of my keyboard. This morning, it contained eight peanut M&M’s. It now contains three. Each candy represents a specific item on today’s punchlist that must be completed before I’m allowed to close my eyes and adopt any posture that invites or even risks sleep.

Yes, I both need a tangible reward for each goal met, as well as a visible indicator of progress and a clear marker of when it’s time to walk away from the keyboard and follow the orange pixies into their magic gumdrop forest.

It is very appropriate that I’ll be boarding a plane and fleeing this whole half of the USA on the day I submit the last bits of this book. I think I’m going to desperately need to spend 48 hours forgetting everything about my office and cocooning myself in a world apart where there’s a king-sized bed, maid service, and cheerful Texans eager to ply me with barbecue.

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You can tell that a project is going well when you’re pleased to be busting your ass. Case in point: my iPhone book, which is in its final week of writing.

It’s coming out great. It goes its own way and it justifies its existence in the marketplace and it’s going to make a lot of iPhone owners really happy with their purchases. Of both the iPhone and the book.

Oh, and iPod Touch owners, too. It would have been great to be one of the first to market but good God! The iPhone is a completely different beast today than it was two months ago.”iPhone Fully Loaded” won’t be the first iPhone book but it’ll probably be the first one to reflect the actual state of the world, not the one that existed a week or two after the release date.

Among the benefits: the evening after Apple announced the iPod Touch, I laughed and laughed and then I went through the manuscript, looking for places to change “iPhone” to “iPhone or Touch.” A couple of phone calls to the publisher and the marketing will reflect that it’s full of tips and techniques for Touch users. First to market!

So today I finally bit the bullet and canned Chapter 8. It was…interesting,  but it was kind of just sitting there between chapters 7 and 9. I looked at its place in the structure of the book and suddenly remembered a much more interesting topic I’d come up with about a month ago, when the book was “locked.” But I had to put it aside, because I couldn’t insert a new chapter at that point without completely disrupting every chapter that came after it.

Welp, I realized that if I dumped the current Chapter 8 — which was damned-near complete — this new topic could slide right into its place. And nobody would have to spend two days renumbering illustrations and callouts because of an inserted chapter.

It was lots of work but damn, it’s much better than what I had there before. If the project were going poorly, an element that requires only 20 minutes of thumb-twiddling would feel like torture. As it is, at the end of six hours I was no farther along than I was when I started, vis a vis the number of completed chapters. But I couldn’t be more pleased.

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