Writer, designer, misanthrope
Why failing to write a novel was a good thing
Dec 5th
My final NaNoWriMo status. Not exactly a home run.
Good news: I managed to beat my previous record for National Novel Writing Month! After four false starts, my fifth novel concept shaped up into a healthy 470 words before the deadline at midnight on November 30.
Detractors might impatiently call my attention to the supposed 50,000-word requirement to “win” NaNoWriMo, waving their .pdf certificates of completion haughtily in my face. Frankly, they can stuff it. Writing isn’t about word counts and deadlines!* It’s about finding a way to tell a story that’s enjoyable to read and meaningful or useful to its audience.
Portlanders apparently wrote the equivalent of a library over the last month.
It’s true that I never really got much prose written throughout the last month, but I spent dozens of hours thinking about the process and forcing hundreds of ideas and themes through a trial by paper. When I picked up a novel, I began to realize that what I was enjoying was more craft than art — the product of countless hours of trial-and-error, research and revision, and occasional frustration and hopelessness.
The residual effect of not finishing a novel for National Novel Writing Month is that I’m still writing my ideas down. I’m still thinking about what I would have to say. Writing has always been one of those things I’m naturally compelled to do, even if it ends up being disposable, but I’ve never attempted to write something in a long format. I’ve got myself to blame for that. Once I was two years into college and the looming specter of declaring a major was swooping down upon me, eager to suck all the fun out of my scattershot class schedules, I realized I had to commit to something. Journalism drew me in with the promise of making me a much better writer, with strong command of grammar and an ability to write well under pressure. All of those promises came true, but in the process I had forgotten how to write for fun.
Fortunately, last month proved it’s never to late to figure that out.
*It is if you’re a journalist.
Three reasons to love Portland
Nov 23rd
Forgive me, for I’m about to violate a couple of the Cardinal Rules of Blogging:
- Thou shalt not write about the minute, inane details of thine day; and
- Thou shalt not blogge about Portland, for every individual Portlander doth blogge
To be frank, having to move out from my apartment in Northeast Portland has been one of the most disappointing turns in recent memory. I had to move back home for a number of reasons, which is certainly better than having nowhere to go, but giving up my autonomy to move back into the guest room at Mom’s isn’t exactly the highest aspiration of someone in his twenties.
Adding insult to injury, I’m now playing host to some disgusting troupe of illnesses that seems quite intent on haunting me until I arrive at the grave, tired and mucus-y. I’ve spent more than a week at home feeling terrible, so it was fortunate that a friend who’s visiting for the holiday decided to call me up on the first day where I really started to feel capable of functioning in the real world. She suggested a trip into downtown Portland. It made for a nice reminder that Portland certainly isn’t perfect, but it is still certifiably awesome.
We stopped in at just a few of my favorite places, but they’re all worth mentioning.
Mio Gelato isn’t the only gelato shop in Portland, but it’s probably the most reliable one out there. Generous portions and a great variety of flavors make for a great snack, even when the weather is dismal. I’ve heard the sandwiches are great as well. I used to frequent Staccato Gelato when I lived in Northeast, which deserves recognition for its weekly bizarre flavors (usually worth trying) and fresh donuts, but when it comes down to it, Mio just makes the best gelato. We stopped at the one in the Pearl District, but the one on NW 23rd is just as good.
The Stumptown Coffee at the Ace Hotel in Portland (SW 11th and Stark)
I wouldn’t claim to be anything of a coffee expert, but I know that Stumptown Coffee brews the absolute best black coffee I’ve ever had. Although it’s a bit excessive, I was accustomed to spending a bit more to buy Stumptown whole bean coffee to grind and make at home on a pretty regular basis. Fortunately, their cafe drinks are just as impressive as the coffee they originate from.
When I was in Seattle a couple months back, I spent a fair bit of time walking around downtown and Capitol Hill. It surprised me to see so many smaller coffee shops advertising Stumptown Coffee; isn’t boasting about serving coffee from another state heresy in Seattle? I suppose it could be interpreted as an important life lesson: When coffee tastes this good, not much else matters.
There’s not much that needs to be said about Powell’s Books. Its reputation precedes itself. Essentially, it’s a book lover’s paradise, and one could easily lose an entire day wandering the stacks. I’m a notorious book abandoner — I start every great book I hear about and end up abandoning it about halfway through to start another one — so I have to be cautious with my money at Powell’s. But even just browsing the store’s massive selection is enjoyable.
None of these locations will be unfamiliar to anyone who’s spent much time around Portland, but I wanted to write a bit about them so I can remind myself why I like living in Oregon. It’s hard to say when and where I might move next, but I know I can’t just stay here forever. In the meantime, it’s nice to remember the elements that give this city its identity — and give me a reason to return.
Writing is hard!
Nov 22nd
If I learned anything from studying journalism as an undergrad, it was that a deadline is the best source of motivation to a writer. I wrote more stories in less time than I knew I was capable of. It was kind of exhilarating in a way — like cheating death, if death was just an angry professor/editor.
But as I’ve learned from attempting National Novel Writing Month again this year, fiction doesn’t work the same way at all; at least, not for me. Between school and blogging, I’ve grown so used to having a set of facts to gather and write about that the mere act of making something up is practically impossible. I’ll spend hours sitting in front of a blank document trying to get over myself and just start telling a story, but then my conscience will step in and shove the results in my face with a disapproving tone. “‘Guy feels like he’s out of touch and longs for a girl he doesn’t deserve? Oh, and music plays a major role.’ Hmm. Congratulations, jackass! You just ripped off Nick Hornby.”
So now I’ve got eight days and change to write a brand-new 50,000-word novel. It’s my fifth concept for a novel so far this month, but I feel like this one’s going to write itself. It’s got two characters, a beginning and an end, and plenty of room to just make up whatever the hell I want in the middle. This experience hasn’t exactly turned out like I’d hoped (I would have loved to, just for once, not procrastinate until the last minute on just one thing in my life) but I know I need to finish it now, either way. After all the disheartening experiences I’ve had in the job market, I need to do something real and succeed at it to remind myself that I do have some practical use on this planet — even if it’s just making shit up.
Two reasons why I’m a weirdo
Oct 26th
This is what the rain can do to a person.
The rainy season unmistakeably arrived in Portland today: Streets are flooding, umbrellas are out, and Californian expatriates are preparing for the End of Days.
I’m no stranger to the gloom that perpetually overcast skies bring with them, but I’m also notoriously bad at preparing myself for the winter doldrums. Well, not this time! I’ve got a foolproof 30-day regimen that’s guaranteed to ease me in to Oregon’s annual unpleasantness with finesse.
During the month of November, I will write a 50,000-word novel, abstain from shaving (not that anyone will be able to tell) and blog about the whole unfortunate thing.
So why write a novel? I won’t deny the appeal of adding another outlandish boast to my repertoire for cocktail parties and art-gallery soirées, but I’m also chiefly interested in the lessons to be learned from committing myself to a major project I know very little about and forcing myself to get through it by the skin of my teeth. I’m notoriously bad at committing to work until the eleventh hour (thanks, college!) and I’m eager to see if there’s actually any reward to be found in pacing oneself when undertaking a massive effort.
As for the lack of shaving? That’s more of a “just get it over with” type of situation. As a man, I am theoretically blessed with the super power of growing facial hair. But thanks to some rather unfortunate genes and sour luck, I rolled a few natural ones at my moment of conception and wound up a couple decades later with a distressingly uneven smattering of facial hair.
Thankfully, I live in a city where an unshaven person who spends hours each day writing a meandering novel looks just as natural as a fat man in a button-up shirt, spurs and a ten-gallon hat raising a pair of pistols to the heavens does in Texas. (I have never been to Texas but I am told this is what life means to a Texan.)
It’s an altogether foolish plan for self-improvement, but at least my friends and family will get a few cheap laughs at my expense.
For updates on my novel, beard status and sanity, kindly subscribe to my blog.
Regarding The Beatles: A fairly decent story of how I discovered their music
Sep 24th
This post originated on the Rock Band forums in a thread asking people to describe how they first heard and got into The Beatles. I ended up running with the topic and found I had a lot to say. It’s not my best writing by any means, but it felt great to finally have something to talk about in detail. I’ve reposted it here — hope you enjoy it.
I’m curious to hear how other people first started listening to the band, so feel free to leave a reply if you want to share.
I almost never got into The Beatles.
I grew up in a household where there were plenty of records and CDs but very few were ever queued up to play. My dad listened almost exclusively to talk radio or the classic rock station, and when he talked about his favorite bands (Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers Band, The Grateful Dead) The Beatles never came up. I’d heard The Allman Brothers’ double album “Eat a Peach” before I even knew what The Beatles’ White Album was.
My mom owned an impressive collection of Beatles records from her childhood, but we never had a working record player. They sat in a box in the closet for as long as I could remember. I’d leafed through them a couple times, laughing at their ridiculous haircuts and marginally clever album titles.
As a teenager I lumped them into the broad genre of “oldies” — a term that basically meant “music that has no business hanging around.” Their songs sounded overly simplistic, at times insipid (Drive My Car, Eight Days a Week, Twist and Shout) or just plain weird (Piggies, I Am The Walrus). It wasn’t until a few years ago that the band finally made sense to me.
There are only a handful of albums I’ve come across that were so powerful and consuming that I remember exactly where I was when I first heard them — Radiohead’s Kid A, The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, for example. My recollection of the first time I listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is probably the most vivid of all of them.
A couple summers ago, I was driving back to school from Portland to Eugene with one of my best friends from grade school. We both ended up going to college at the University of Oregon, but we had fallen a little out of touch over the years. I was excited for the trip as a chance to reconnect and share some music.
Heat’s rarely an issue in Oregon — temperatures over 90 are uncommon, even in the summer — but this day was well over 100 degrees, and the air was thick with humidity.
So of course, my car’s air conditioning decided to stop working that morning.
The freeway was packed, the car was stifling, and I was sweating to the point where the seat was fusing to my clothes. Neither of us was bold enough to talk — the air tasted like a track meet.
It was kind of disgusting.
My friend began rifling through his bag, looking for some music to put on that would distract us from the fact that the ceiling was damp. He pulled out Sgt. Pepper and waved it at me.
I shrugged. He put it on.
What I heard wasn’t supernatural, or beyond belief, or maybe not even the best album in history. But it was audacious, adventurous; it was unlike anything I’d heard. It was convoluted and over-the-top one moment and heartfelt the next.
When the album ended, it was like awakening from a daze — not the best realization when you’ve been driving a couple tons of metal at freeway speeds for an hour — and I was struggling to think of something to say. The heat may have contributed to the surreal nature of the experience, resulting in something of a poor man’s spirit journey, but one thing was certain: There was something very important to be found in listening to the Beatles.
My friend and I had bonded over music when we were friends in high school, but back then his tastes (Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Limp Bizkit) and mine (Blink-182, Sum 41 and…Limp Bizkit) were limited, to put it delicately. Thankfully, in the decade since we’ve both since grown a bit older and wiser — and hearing Sgt. Pepper was proof of that.
I must have listened to that album a hundred times over the last couple years. I sought out copies of the rest of the Beatles’ catalog and listened through every album. I became fascinated by the history and the mythology surrounding the Beatles and the people that were a part of it. Between the Beatles Rock Band instruments scattered around and the countless Wikipedia pages I’ve been scouring, my desk is beginning to look like that scene in A Beautiful Mind where John Nash’s wife stumbles upon his shack in the woods.
I’m sure I’ll eventually learn all I want to know about the Beatles, but I’ll never grow tired of their music.
I’m pretty sure I wasted $15 on that LSAT prep book
Jul 19th
I’ve never been content with just killing time. It’s been a full year since I finished my thesis and officially graduated, and I feel like I’m just as lost as I was then.
I know a few people going to law school. They’re friends, but we’re very different people. They’ve always been very big on their families, and civic duty, and religion, and all those things that I’ve respected but never felt drawn to. They’re both eagle scouts, like me, but they actually enjoyed their time with the Boy Scouts, which I did not. I just wonder if there’s a very distinct personality that’s destined for success in law, and the majority of people applying — those who just aren’t sure about the whole ordeal, like me — are doomed to slightly better-paying office jobs that barely compensate for the monstrous debt they’ve all picked up in the process.
I just noticed something. If you type “should i go” into Google, the top auto-complete result is “should I go to law school.” Are a lot of people as doubtful about the whole institution as I am?
Hmm. Here’s the top result: Should You Go To Law School? Not Unless You Want To Be A Lawyer.
I know better than to go by just one person’s authority, but this is a pretty well-reasoned statement. I don’t think law’s the path for me.
So.
Now what?
On Running a Real Blog, or: Where has Nick been for the last year?
Apr 22nd
So, funny story — I haven’t posted here in a month. And this is after I promised frequent updates, right?
Well, I have been blogging daily, believe it or not. Just not here.
For the last couple months, I’ve been pouring heart and soul (and carpal tunnel-ridden hands) into editing and writing for a gaming blog called Silicon Sasquatch. It’s a project I started with Aaron Thayer, a friend and fellow graduate of the University of Oregon School of Journalism, Communication and Terminal Unemployment. Our mission has been to deliver daily news, analysis and reviews on anything related to videogames and gaming culture with a definite emphasis on the Pacific Northwest.
Writing about games is something I’ve dreamed about doing for as long as I’ve been able to read, and while it’s not quite as lucrative as I’d imagined (we’re never going to make any money, ever) I’m having a blast maintaining and improving the site on a daily basis. I’ve become addicted to Twittering and Digging each story and tracking traffic to an obsessive degree. I’ve got Photoshop macros built for resizing and downsampling images for the site, and I’m working on developing a watermark filter. I’m positively smitten by this fake little not-capable-of-profit business I’ve built for myself.
In this month alone, we’ve more than quintupled our page views: We’re now averaging more than 1,000 views per month, and the average continues to climb daily. We’ve also started receiving comments from real, actual people that we don’t know, which is exciting. But the most exciting thing was when Aaron’s review of an indie game called The Path was picked up by the game’s developer, Tale of Tales. They quoted Aaron and posted a link to our review from their site, which continues to give us exposure. It’s a minor nod, but to know that someone’s paying attention is pretty exhilarating.
I miss writing about other things, but between working full-time (for my dad, but hey, it’s work) and working on the gaming blog I just haven’t had time for anything else.
In any case, I hope you’ll check out the work we’re doing on the gaming blog, even if games aren’t your thing. Any and all feedback is totally appreciated.
If that ain’t love then tell me what is
Mar 2nd
Portlanders, rejoice — we’ve finally got a reason to hate our lives!
My friend and partner in crime sent me a link to BusinessWeek’s list of the most unhappy cities in the United States, and guess what? We won!
The victory was determined by factors like depression, suicide rates, divorces and crime. Personally, my favorite component is the number of cloudy days: a staggering 222 per year in Portland.
I’m not sure I’d call this list fair by any stretch of the imagination; the article’s hefty disclaimer only reinforces the lack of scientific validity backing it up. Notably missing are factors like quality of public parks and transportation as well as air quality. Bad weather gets me down like nobody’s business, but living in a place that’s smothered in trees and foliage also makes for a healthy, cozy place to live.
Oh, and the beer helps.
Into Uncharted Waters
Feb 17th
Excerpt from Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
If you’re at all interested in how copyright law is evolving with technology, you really ought to pay close attention to The Pirate Bay’s trial. Currently underway in Sweden, the case pits the founders of the BitTorrent search engine against music industry representatives. This might seem like a clear-cut case in favor of the plaintiffs, but there’s a significant grey area: The Pirate Bay doesn’t actually host any of the files on its site, nor does it produce its own torrent links to copyright material. Instead, the site merely lets a user upload torrent files, which another user’s BitTorrent client of choice can use to connect to the host user’s computer to download the file directly.
The real beauty of BitTorrent, as you probably know, is that it pioneered the concept of distributed file sharing — that is, everyone who downloads from the host (a “leecher”) is also a “seeder” who actively hosts bits of the file to other downloaders. In this way, everyone’s computers collaborate to ensure that the more users there are downloading a file, the faster everyone obtains it. It also relieves the majority of bandwidth pressure from a host, and theoretically enables download speeds to increase exponentially as more users seek the same files.
It’s important to know how BitTorrent works because it may explain why, just one day into the trial, the prosecution has dropped half of its charges against The Pirate Bay. The site’s founders are no longer being accused of “assisting copyright infringement,” which leaves only the less sinister charge of “assisting making available copyright material.” While the site’s founders suggest this is indicative of the prosecution’s failure to understand the technology of the site, the prosecution countered by suggesting they were just simplifying the charges.
If you’re interested in following the case closely, I suggest you head over to TorrentFreak.com. They’ve established themselves as the definitive source for torrent-related news, and they’ve been following the case intently.
I’m not sure how I feel about The Pirate Bay’s position in this case. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I’d never torrented copyrighted material, but I can’t condone my actions as ethical. I think that The Pirate Bay’s best-case scenario is they’re found guilty of negligence by fostering a Web community where people connect to exchange copyrighted files without being stopped. But all the same, I think this is going to be a landmark case in shaping how people can interact and share information over the Internet.
What do you think? Should sites like The Pirate Bay be shuttered to protect copyright holders? Should BitTorrent use be regulated? Or should filesharing continue unimpeded?
At least Borders is next door to Café Yumm
Feb 7th
Melissa and I are both graduates of the University of Oregon journalism program. So, as you might imagine, we’ve both spent a lot of time pondering what the hell we were thinking going into a dying industry at the precipice of the greatest economic upheaval in decades.
Living in Oregon, there’s not much in the way of mass media. There’s not much in the way of anything except for trees and grass, really. And after months of unsuccessful job hunting, the prospect of going back to grad school continues to rear its head. And because Melissa and I are both strong writers with a critical and argumentative mindset, law school continues to be recommended to us by our families and friends.
I don’t really want to go back to school. Seventeen contiguous years of education culminating in recitation, late nights and largely unsatisfying work will do that to you. But the reality of this market is even more imposing.
Realistically, my dream job would involve some pretty broad ideas:
- Music
- Culture
- Writing
- Design
- Communication
And I don’t really see a career in law lending itself to those qualities. At best, I’d be an outsider to the innovators and creators, and I’m not sure I want to attain my ideals in a purely vicarious sense.
Nevertheless, we stopped in at Borders to take a look at some practice tests and other supplemental materials on considering and applying to law school. But even for a standardized test, the LSAT is in a league of its own when it comes to condensed tedium (not from concentrate).
As a child I adored logic puzzles. Of all the worksheets and exercises I did in my younger years, logic tables – discerning whether Susie sold more lemonade than Jamal, or determining the birth order of the eleven children in a fictitious family by piecing together a series of bizarre facts – were my favorite. (So much so that at the end of third grade I requested as many xeroxes of additional logic puzzles to solve over the summer as I could obtain from my teacher. In hindsight, I think that may have been the moment where I first began to realize the full extent of my nerdiness.)
As for journalism? I guess I could keep trying for an internship at a publication, but I hear that’s more of a trust-fund thing now.