Your Reality Check Just Bounced

A friend showed me this video of an art student being criticized.

Apparently, something wasn't perfect with her project and her peers had some less-than-flattering comments about her picture.

This story reminds me of a paradigm shift I had about 10 years ago. I write software for a living. And I write subversive fiction when I can. The paradigm shift was that I quit thinking the QA tester dude was my enemy, but a colleague offering a valued service.

In the case of software, it's easy to hand it over to someone to test, and they can tell you which requirements it failed to meet. Or which behaviors it did not do, and which malfunctions were observed. In the case of fiction, things get far more subjective.

But in both cases, you get feedback. It's lovely to find out you've exceeded expectations, performed everything asked of you flawlessly, and have created an exemplar of perfection for the generations to admire.

And although it is lovely, IT NEVER HAPPENS.

Everyone starts out knowing nothing. Those of us who are lucky learn. And learning works via positive and negative feedback. Do something a little right, you should get a little positive feedback. Do something wrong and you should get some negative feedback. You need both to learn.

We can argue about injuring someone's self-esteem, and how negative feedback should be directed toward fixing what's wrong with the piece.

Yet even when you get abuse from a mean teacher, you learn something you've done is wrong and you know you must do something different to make it right. You need to know what works and what doesn't work. You need someone to see what you don't see.

I fail to see what I don't want to see: my own imperfections. When I'm working on a bit of software, I don't want to hear that I'm not finished. I don't want to know that the task is more difficult and I've got to put more, better thought into it. I don't want to learn that tests that worked last week have broken just now, because of something I did wrong.

I don't want to face into the negative truth that I'm not perfect. One of the surprising things about being perfect is that you can't learn anything when you're perfect.

And that's what a fool does, s/he stuffs cotton in the ears when the critique comes in that s/he does not want to hear. (In this case, Henry Cloud says you have to change the conversation to "why aren't you listening?") But I hope you're not a fool, and I hope you want to know when your painting is more like some kids' refrigerator art than it is like Rembrandt. I hope you want to know when your prose is so wooden it is an insult to furniture. I hope you want to know when your software does not meet spec.

Because only when you want to know these things can you want to learn. And only when you learn can you improve. And when you want to know the negative facts about your work, then you can sincerely ask your friends to tell you what they see that's wrong. And you can seek out those with more refined perceptions who can tell you the harder things that are wrong.

Of course, then it's up to you to do something with that feedback. Sure, you can tear up your canvases, burn your manuscripts, or format your hard drive, but none of those things are constructive. It's up to you to seek out what you can do differently that'll enable you to do better next time.

So, here's your hunting license: If you see anything in my prose that's wrong, feel free to tell me about it. I may not heed your critique, but if I don't it's on my own head.

Ockham's Penknife

I have a friend who is in my local writers' group. He had a story that he'd started, but got bogged down and quit. Since he'd read part of it in group, I knew where he was, but didn't know where he was going.

So, I started asking questions about his vampire story: where did the central McGuffin of the story came from and how did it work. Dave didn't know, so I started making stuff up and asking Dave if my handwavium was consistent with his vision for the story.

I got wild and crazy and started making connections, of the McGuffin to the Holy Grail, and then to Prester John who guards it in Shangri La. And if you have some two-thousand-year-old warrior dude, he'll have to have a foil that a contemporary reader would relate to this could be a brash apprentice I termed "Star Wars" John.

This put several sticks of dynamite under the creative logjam.

While Dave and I were discussing all this at lunch my son was listening on. He has a better grasp on myth than I do, afterwards I asked him what he thought of our brainstorming session. His answer was typically laconic, "too many moving parts."

And that's the lesson for today. Ockham's Razor states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Extending this notion to design, given multiple designs for the same device, favor the one with the fewest moving parts.

When you are telling a story a lot of interesting backstory will either come to mind or be required to motivate your characters' actions. You want to be very stingy about disclosing that backstory.

Some of it should never see the light of day and should forever remain "scaffolding." Some has to go into the narrative to make the current scene make sense. And some will make for a delightful springboard to another story.

Nevertheless, all of it is tangential to this story you are telling now. If your story must be Teflon, you can't disclose any of it. And if your story can be Velcro, you can disclose lots of it. You need to maintain a balance between these opposites.

Don't be afraid of feeling some tension while you decide this. The tension makes things interesting.

R100 vs R101

My work in progress is a novel, Steamship to Kashmir. It has an airship with Mycroft Holmes as a passenger.

When I conceptualized the airship, I looked at the Hindenburg for inspiration. Since I did not want to see the airship end in a fire-ball, I opted for a non-hydrogen lifting gas--steam. The US zeppelin program lasted several years longer, but the highest-profiles zeppelins operated by the US Navy were lost in storms.

Sadly, I gave short shrift to the British airship programs. This is unforgivable when researching a novel featuring a British airship. The Akron and the Macon as well as the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg all get prominent mention in the articles I've read, but less so the R100 and R101. It's probably the flashy names.

I had heard of how the disastrous crash of the R101 on its maiden flight doomed British airship development. But I had not heard the story behind the story of the R101 disaster until I read this chestnut. It seems the R100 and the R101 were built by a company named Vickers and by the British civil service, respectively.

One of my surprises upon visiting the UK was seeing private-owned infrastructure where I didn't expect it. If you wait at a bus stop in my home town of Grand Rapids, the bus which pulls up will be owned by GRATA, an entity of the city government that loses money and is propped up by taxes. If you ride a train in the US, it is owned by AmTrak, an entity of the Federal government that loses money and is propped up by taxes.

Thus it makes sense to me that Britain would run two airship programs side-by-side in a competitive fashion. I may be mistaken, but it sounds like running two Apollo programs operated by Boeing and NASA, respectively.

The R101 is a good example of what can happen when political rather than economic or engineering considerations drive a project. The government does not want to be embarrassed and it will use whatever means necessary to avoid embarrassment and shift blame away from itself. Conversely, corporations do not want to lose money and it will use whatever means necessary to minimize loss and shift risks away from itself.

NASA was pushing for faster turn around time and more launches per year, and so they overrode the warnings and launched the Space Shuttle Challenger while icicles were hanging from it. The cold temperatures made the o-rings inflexible and the inflexible o-rings failed catastrophically. Apparently, the same kind of thinking was in play when the R101 took off for India. It got as far as France.

The R100 had already successfully flown to Canada and back. To minimize further embarrassment the UK government grounded it and broke it up for scrap.

To be fair, the state of mathematics and computations at the time made strength-of-materials calculations difficult and time consuming. Thus both ships were probably too weak to handle extreme weather and the UK government's decision to fly in deteriorating weather doomed the R101.

It is simplistic to say Capitalism good, Socialism bad. There are different relative advantages to each approach. If you want to get maximum performance for least expense, you want Capitalism. If you are willing to sacrifice these things for the good of the collective, you want Socialism. Even if the good of the collective requires grounding and breaking up the R100.

Just a few years after this the US Navy's airship  USS Akron would be lost in a storm, and a few years after that the USS Macon would be lost in another storm. Given the available materials and the inability of the engineers to accurately gauge loads, the R100 would have probably been lost in a storm--eventually.

Though the Germans-built airships Graf Zeppelin and Graf Zeppelin II were not lost to storms, they could not survive Herman Goring's order that they be dismantled. Perhaps the Germans knew a little bit more about structural engineering or meteorology than the UK and US.

Apples to Eat vs Apples to Sell

This post is a sort of "why I am not writing" apology.

Some years ago a friend at a company I was working for related a conversation he'd had with the Vice President of Sales. The guy said, "You're worrying about 'apples to eat,' not 'apples to sell."

When my friend told me a bit later, he was in high dudgeon. He regarded this as sleazy--a sort of cheat. Like the software my friend was building didn't have to work, it just had to look good. I thought the same until recently.

My grandmother's house passed to my father when she died, and it was part of his estate when he died. And for reasons it would be tedious to read about, I have to manage this property.

Previous tenants left the house in something of a wreck and I've been spending every available hour there effecting repairs, cleaning, painting, and replacing trim. Among the many problems this property has is its drain field.

If you don't live in the country, you may not know what a drain field is. When your house is not attached to the city sewer, you need a means of getting rid of dirty water. I'm most familiar with disposing of dirty water with a drain field.

Water flushed from the toilet goes into a septic tank and from there it goes into a drain field. The drain field consists of a layers of sand, gravel and/or crushed stone with some means of supplying waste water to it. Septic waste water soaks into the ground, percolates through the soil, and is purified in the process.

This is centuries-old technology and the county health department manages inspections and issues permits for everything. This is the proper role of government.

The house can not be occupied, and it certainly cannot be rented out without a properly functioning drain field.

This project is a big deal because it entails a huge number of discrete tasks in addition to fixing the drain field. We've gotten a lot of things done and quite a few things remain undone.

The secret of managing residential rental property is getting good tenants. And good tenants need to be actively sought out. The goodness of a tenant has nothing to do with skin color, race, creed, or sexual proclivities. It has to do with taking care of things, living like a civilized human being, and paying rent on time. Good tenants generally have no urgent need to move. If someone is urgently seeking immediate housing, you definitely want to know why before you rent to them.

This translates into lead-time. To rent a house on June 1st, you want to be advertising in the middle of May. And to be advertising the house, you'll need pictures. Thus, last night I was putting up trim and my wife was going around behind me staging rooms and photographing them. And I'm composing ad copy when I have a few spare neurons.

 I gave my brother a status report last night and he pointed out the drain field wasn't ready.

That's when it hit me. That Vice President of Sales wasn't advocating a shoddy job papered over with glitzy cosmetics. My project will be complete when I have a nice house with good tenants. Right now, to get good tenants, I have to start advertising before everything is set. I need "apples to sell" so that I can start advertising. I can use the time between advertising (now), and renting to some good tenants to make the substance as good as the appearance. At the end of the day, I'll have "apples to sell AND eat." But right now, I have to get the cosmetics right.

You probably don't have to prep a house for rental, or build a complex software solution, but your writing may be in a state of partial completion. It'll take a while to find an agent, or editor, or do the things you need to bring it to market yourself. However, getting that person or persons on board  can be achieved with a polished synopsis and a double-polished first chapter. This is the "apple to sell" which you need today in contrast with the "apple to eat" you deliver tomorrow.

It is not a cheat, if you really do deliver on the non-cosmetic substance.

The Egg Salad Recipe

The McGuffin is a common element of story telling and you really owe it to your audience to put some thought into it.

In every Hitchcock movie there would be some "thang" that the good guys had and the bad guys wanted, or vice-versa. And I'm not just talking about Hitchcock.

If it is a spy story, it could be a roll of microfilm of the plans to the top-secret Bruce-Partington submarine. If it is a detective story, it could be the key piece of evidence--perhaps a notebook--that would prove the bad guy's guilt. If it is a comedy, it could be  Gussie Fink-Nottle's book wherein he lampoons serious adults.

Exactly what it is is not important, merely that it is sought after and contended for by opposing forces in the story. Stories work better with conflict and the McGuffin provides an easy source of conflict.

If you write a story with a McGuffin in it, I suggest you think back to as many stories as you can remember, identifying the McGuffin in each. Then make sure you come up with a McGuffin that is somethng different. This is tricky because other stories have used the obvious ones--including egg salad.

If you are really stumped, consider changing your story into something wildly different with a wildly different McGuffin--like a bee hive. As a writing exercise, why not use a random noun generator and imagine a story with the noun as its McGuffin.

I just got "banjo."

A man is found murdered, garroted with a thin steel wire. Upon forensic analysis, it is a banjo string. The detective learns a Dixie-Land band was touring the area, but is evading him because of some lesser criminality. Detective tracks down a banjo with one new string that is owned by famous musician Redford Herring. His rival has a banjo with three new strings and the detective realizes the rival has swapped one old strings with Red's banjo...

Go ahead and try a few yourself.

Soviet Xerox Regulation

One of the nails in the Soviets' coffin was the Xerox machine.

They feared ideas and those ideas were the Soviets' undoing. One of the ways they discouraged the spread of ideas was to restrict the use of Xerox machine. They added watermark info so that when they found a copy with something subversive on it, they could track down which Xerox machine it came from.

This put a societal speed-bump on the USSR. Think about how you use Xerox machines. It takes longer to type or retype a page than it does to copy it. Suppose you have an interesting article in a magazine, or in a book. You just warm up the copier and a few seconds later you've got as many copies as you'd like.

The Xerox machine came into common use in the States in the 1960s. By limiting its use the Russians voluntarily set back the clock by decades. More than a societal speed-bump, it was like an anchor on Russian productivity.

There are good reasons why Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and that we're not speaking Russian right now. Centralized planning does not work and tyrannies collapse under their own weight. The problem is information. Only God has the information necessary to know what's going on at the level needed to make this happen. And tyrannies are not run by angels, but by greedy men who'll put their own interests ahead of the Party.

A free market outperforms a government-controlled market. It needn't be by more than a few percentage points per year, because that tiny percentage difference compounds over many years. This is how prosperous countries become also-rans, not by actually declining, but by stagnating as more-vibrant countries outpace them.

One of the more exciting technologies that is coming online is 3D printing. It enables people to print plastic parts in almost any shape they can imagine. And in a multitude of shapes no human can imagine, but that software can generate algorithmically.

Think of how many times you've had to discard an appliance because a tiny plastic part broke. For instance, I had a perfectly serviceable Amazon Kindle DX whose switch broke. Instead of sending me a new part, Amazon sold me a new replacement Kindle DX Graphite. With 3D printing, I could scan the old part, then print a replacement for a few cents' worth of plastic.

The reason why I mention this is that someone who loves Liberty more than the Federal Government has figured out how to print a gun out of ABS plastic on a 3D printer. And this guy has posted the plans on the Internet.

The Federales are not amused. No less than Senator Charles Schumer has said, "Now anyone..." (He then enumerates several boogie men.) ...can essentially open a gun factory in their garage. It must be stopped."

This is heartbreakingly stupid. For one thing, a 3D printed gun will never perform anywhere near as well as a conventionally manufactured gun. If anything, such a weapon will have only a novelty value. However, it does disrupt the legislative means the Feds have adopted to subvert the 2nd Amendment.

Yet the worst part of this is the precedent of the Xerox machine. I can readily envision the crowd running Washington (both GOP and Democrats) legislating restrictions on 3D printers. And like DMCA before it, the legislation will serve as a societal speed-bump that'll jack up the price of 3D printers, make them harder to get, and/or restrict what they can print.

How well will those laws work? Ask a Soviet Xerox repairman.

A Lesson From A Grabby Kid

I have a once-a-month job for an hour at my church. I watch toddlers while their parents are in the worship service. Toddler-wrangling exposes human nature without the layers of social convention getting in the way. The kiddos have limited vocabulary and a narrow range of expression.

One lad is a hoarder. He's been recently adopted and I think he feels some uncertainty about losing possessions.

When my own children were small, I'd settle all "Mine!" arguments by tediously explaining who had ownership of the toy under dispute then handing it to the toy's owner. And I'd exhort the owner about the virtue of generosity and sharing. Then I'd find something else for the non-owner to play with. Everyone knew who owned what and nobody felt any uncertainty that they might lose it. Thus there was no need to violently retain possession of it.

(By the way, we settled all division of foodstuffs arguments with the simple, "I cut you choose," rule. In this the person who cuts must let the other choose which piece to take. This guaranteed a to-the-atom equal division when my daughter did the cutting.)

The reminder-of-ownership approach does not work in a group child-care setting where nobody--or everybody--has ownership of the toys. When the lad got grabby and was hoarding toy cars I could not remind him they were still his even if some other kid played with them for a bit.  He was standing next to a table with his back to the cars fending off the advances of another little boy who wanted to play with some of the cars he was hoarding.

I sat down beside him and started handing over cars that had fallen on the ground. I'd say, "have another one," and he'd take it and put it on the table, and I'd hand him another saying, "have another one." He'd put it on crowded-with-cars table and he didn't notice when other cars fell. I'd pick them up and hand them to him to complete the cycle. When kids are young enough they don't get tired after the thirtieth time. In fact, they are delighted by the repetitive action and words.

But I did get tired of the repetition and went on to other things.

Later the little hoarder got in a fight with another little boy about sharing toy cars. I intervened and separated the squabblers. And that's when I learned something.

I handed cars to the other kid and when his hands were full, I asked him to give one to the hoarder. He did. And I handed him another car. And another. We had this little daisy chain of cars passing between the three of us.

Unbidden, the hoarding boy said, "Thank you," to his former competitor and they started playing nicely together.

I don't think the grabby boy would hand over toy cars, but the other boy would, and by saturating the hoarder's acquisitive reflex we got the lad to actually start playing with the toy cars instead of just standing guard over them and keeping the other kids from playing with them.

I am told that Jiu Jitsu works by using the opponent's action against him. He pushes you and you pull him off-balance. He pulls you and you push him. This worked with the toddler's greed and I suppose that if you frame it correctly, it'll work with older kids and adults, too.