Document formatting in fiction

(cross-posted)

Formatting is fun.

Time was, when you were ready to have a book published, you sent off your typewritten manuscript to the publisher and they determined what sort of physical form this would take. Typeface, page size, font size, paper stock, often cover art, hardcover vs. trade paperback, all that stuff.

That’s still true, to a large degree, but all the advances in technology for dead-tree printing have really let us go to town with creative formatting. This can take a variety of forms. I’m going to lead, however, with a historical example.

William Faulkner wanted The Sound and The Fury to be published with more than just black ink on white paper. (Well, he didn’t have anything to say about the paper.) But I do know that he wanted multiple ink colors to indicate the various speakers and time periods and intersections thereof. My recollection from undergrad is that he wanted four colors (or perhaps five if you include black); the Times article above suggests fourteen. At any rate, the publisher said ‘no’, because that would have been super expensive in 1929. (The ultra-deluxe 14-color modern edition linked above sold for $345 at printing, though I doubt this was strictly necessary and is almost certainly a case of conspicuous consumption for lit nerds.)

There’s an interesting discussion of how the new coloration may actually make the book too non-difficult to read. I wouldn’t know, since I read the broke undergrad Penguin Classics version, but it’s an interesting thought. I have the impression that The Sound and The Fury is sort of a rite of passage, and that this makes accessibility a bad thing, to a certain type of person. That’s a topic for another time I suppose.

So that was then, and this is now. Custom formatting is cheaper and easier, yay! I’ll admit that I first started noticing it when I was reading Cell by Stephen King, which would have been, gosh, ten years ago. One of the recurring images is the main character being crushed by a piece of construction equipment. The equipment’s brand is Link-Belt. “Here comes Link-Belt!” is I believe the refrain. But it’s in sort of a font like “Here comes LINK-BELT!” And as it gets closer and closer to crushing his leg (debilitating leg injuries are something of a motif for Mr. King), it gets bigger.

“Here comes LINK-BELT!”

 

“Here comes LINK-BELT!”

 

“Here comes LINK-BELT!”

(To this day, when I pass a construction site on the highway and see a LINK-BELT piece of machinery, I think of that.)

That’s fun. And technology is letting us do more stuff like that in more things ‘cuz cheap production, which is good. It even lets us do some completely bugf— crazy things like this.

house-of-leaves-sample

House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski) is, uh, a thing that exists. (I did not take this picture.) It’s weird. Leaving aside the question of whether or not it pulls off what it’s trying to do, let nobody say that it doesn’t try to do it. And it just wouldn’t even exist if it we didn’t have the ability to do something like this for a few (seven) hundred pages relatively cheap. It costs about as much as any other roughly-letter-sized 700-page book. We aren’t talking about asking the publisher ‘can I use Helvetica instead of Times’? We aren’t talking about something like The Sound and The Fury here, where it’s maybe better/closer to the original intent if you have a few extra colors. Cheap formatting is an existential requirement for this book.

Yay cheap formatting! I’m generally in favor of books existing! Really going out on a limb there, I know!

Obviously this is even easier in digital formats. I’m going to go out on another limb and include web sites in that calculation. Philosophically they’re just books with javascript and a database, or perhaps more like the memex, but the relevant thing is, these were all conceived of as digital text, and in this sense ‘text’ means ‘a document’ and ‘a document’ means ‘a book’. (This is a lie, but a convenient one.)

Anywho, formatting is cool, and it lets you do things with a text that you couldn’t do before, and that’s good. Here’s something from the re-draft of (new working title) The World Beyond Eels:

formatting.png

Thoughts on the California Primary

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Pretty much.

There’s been a lot of ink and many, many pixels spilled over the Democratic presidential primary. I say this by way of introduction in case you’ve had your head stuck under a rock. It’s been reaching its end-game every couple of weeks since March. There was Super Tuesday (which gave Hillary a small structural lead, but Bernie still had a chance!),  then Superer Tuesday (which gave Hillary a huge structural lead, but Bernie still had a chance!), then the Acela Primary (which gave Hillary a nigh-insurmountable structural lead, but Bernie still… ah, fuck it, he’s saying he wants to overturn the will of the voters now), and now we’re coming up on California and New Jersey for the… next primary, which will give Hillary a mathematically insurmountable structural lead.

And, once again, it will be over! And Hillary will have reached the point where she’s unbeatable! Yay, it’s over! Maybe Bernie will concede around then, like Hillary did last time!

2008 was a pretty hot contest too, remember? Remember how we all hated each other? Remember PUMA’s, that year’s Bernie-Or-Bust’ers?

Remember Hillary saying that “having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual” and using “Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June” as an example? That was dumb.

Remember Florida and Michigan losing their delegates because they jumped the gun on the primary schedule? And they were probably very favorable territory for Hillary? That was dumb.

I’m not a professional pundit, so I can’t just make shit up, but I’m also too lazy to look up exact examples for this next one. But I definitely remember people grumbling that Obama’s 2008 victories across the South didn’t matter because those aren’t states that send electoral votes to Democrats in November, and the superdelegates should take note of this. That was stupid when Bill Clinton basically said it in 2008 and it was stupid when a Sanders surrogate said it in 2016.

So hey! Everybody’s terrible, OK? But don’t lose track of the bigger picture. The narcissism of small differences is a hell of a drug:

It is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and that are related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and are ridiculing each other because of sensitiveness to these details of differentiation.

Don’t forget who the real enemy is.

That said, I’m voting for Hillary. Take this primary out of its misery, please. Just drag it behind the shed and shoot it. Even Jerry Brown agrees, and he’s not exactly the Clintons’ biggest fan.

Eel Pie Island Eel Pie Co.

First, a bit from draft 2:

James F.X. “Nuts” Adams sat on the pier waiting for the eel trawler to come in from the river. He drummed his fingers on the weather-worn wood. It hadn’t been varnished in a while. The splinter under his fingernail could attest to that. He’d just have to go ahead and add ‘re-varnish the pier’ to the chore list back at the eelhouse.

The eelhouse sat up on the hill behind him. EEL PIE ISLAND EEL PIE Co., read the old company sign. (Great granddad must have really strained himself, coming up with that name.) Like the pier, the sign was in dire need of re-varnishing. The whole building was. For that matter, so was everything else in London that had survived the Blitz. It wasn’t quite like that over on the Continent. Mom and dad liked to blame the weather for this, though what a bunch of clouds could have to do with it was beyond Nuts. He preferred to chalk it up to some sort of original sin unique to the English.

It smelled like woodsmoke and eels, inside the eelhouse. Frozen eel, dried eel, eel guts that could probably have been taken out back a little while ago. Empty fish tanks, about half of them shattered, adorned the walls. Eel pies baked in the wood-fired ovens. Nuts, Kate, and Blake sat by a hearth. They were wrapped in blankets and had their hands out to the glowing coals. Kate was still wringing out her hair and drinking brandy. Blake was coughing up river water and Nuts was shivering. Every so often, Kate would add a sentence or two to her story.

The front room of the eelhouse wasn’t a dining room, not quite. It had tables and chairs, yeah, but also a cash register and some supplies hidden poorly under sackcloth. The Co. wasn’t exactly a tourist attraction, but they got visitors from time to time, and it was nice to have a little place for them to sit. A small rack of pamphlets graced the wall by the door and a corkboard with assorted pictures hung from another.

Nuts and Cornelius and Kate sat at one of the tables. They had a little radio plugged in on the next table over. There was an eel pie, one of the big ones, steaming at the table with the radio, and Nuts and Cornelius had slices on plates in front of them. Kate said she wasn’t hungry.

Second, a friend of mine did some drawings!

Here they are, with and without some Instagram filters.

Inspiration

A long time ago—not that long really, but never mind, it feels that way—I took a creative writing class. Not my first one, probably not my last either. It was in high school.

That school is long gone now. It was sort of experimental, and then they ran out of funding, so the experiment was over. We had three classes a day, and they were each about ninety or a hundred and twenty minutes long. Every other day you got one of the periods off. If you were doing well in class, you got to do whatever you wanted as long as you stayed on campus. We were on a university campus, so we had a lot of leeway. I spent a lot of time at the diner across the street and the main library. They let me go to the diner because they liked me.

But that’s not really important. Anyway, we had a teacher, Peter, and for the life of me I can’t remember his last name. He was one of the ones who liked you to call him just by his first name, so I guess that’s why I can’t remember it. And boy was Peter interesting. He’d done a lot during his life, but the one that was kind of most interesting is, he did some work with the Peace Corps somewhere in the Caspian region a while back. Now, for whatever reason, my school had a lot of immigrants and first-generation kids from that area (Iran too, but that’s a whole different story; it’s sad). And they liked his stories about Georgia and Kazakhstan.

So he told them. One of them stuck with me, I don’t know why. He was in Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan, somewhere out in the steppes, and he was sort of wandering around maybe. The details are spotty. And he stops at some place for food and a drink, I always imagined it was some dusty, leather-detailed wooden building that had withstood the winds of ages. A revenant.

Peter said it was lit by candles, but when I think back I’d guess he probably made that part up. It was lit by candles and the clientele was grungy. He got some sort of hard-bread-and-spread deal, had a beer or two or three, and the day wore on and eventually he realized he was in the middle of nowhere, and he wasn’t sober, so he decided to rent a cot and spend the night.

By now, I imagined, the inside must have been thick with cigarette smoke. Seems like the sort of place where people smoke, right? And of course the floor was dirt, it just had to be, when I would picture it in my head. The floor was dirt and the people wore fur or something, I don’t know. I was fourteen.

And the locals start sort of making fun, you know, joking around, like you do, and they decide to show him what the locals really drink. Lord only knows if this is actually what they drink, or if it’s just something they keep in the back for the one old dude who lives in the village and still drinks it. You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about. Except this one wasn’t just a dinged-up old bottle with a faded label, it was a glass jar where they measured how much you drank by measuring the level of the liquid on the side before and after. And at the bottom of the jar there was a dead snake, like the worm in a bottle of shitty tequila except, you know, a snake. The guys said they ate the snake when they were done.

I don’t remember what happened next. Peter probably finished the story and had us write a poem or something. I don’t remember what Peter had been doing in Kazakhstan or wherever, but it may have been teaching algebra. I do remember that Peter had lived in San Francisco for a while doing art, and that he had thinning hair and it was ginger, and that he had pudgy hands and some freckles on his nose, but that’s about it.

There’s a couple other things I remember but they’re not really important.

Peter was a great teacher. He turned me on to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and he put up with me being the sort of goofy kid who wanted to read Finnegan’s Wake, and he showed me some Philip K. Dick, and we read, you know, Ray Carver and the rest of the stuff you’re actually supposed to read, the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds and all those guys. (They’re all guys, except for Flannery O’Connor).

The class wasn’t really graded per se, just sort of a check/check-plus system. There was one midterm and one final. They were each a single piece of paper. “Please write either a story based on this prompt, or a personal essay.” And since the classes were so long, remember, you could do a lot with that in one period.

He handed out the prompts face-down. We flipped them over when he said to. I didn’t peek, not that sort of kid.

I wrote a satirical fantasy piece for the midterm. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was about, except that there was a scene involving climbing a rope really far.

For the final, when I flipped the page over, it said,

Please write either a story based on this prompt, or a personal essay:

On Tuesday, every fish on the planet disappeared.

Of all the things, these I remembered? The Kazakhstan story, this writing prompt, and his first name.

I guess I could probably ask somebody what his last name was.

Greetings, Juicers!

Major^4 here. TaMara informs me that I’ll be mentioned in today’s Authors In Our Midst post. How exciting!

First, I’d like to say that I was insanely busy for the months of February and March with various real-world distractions, so I apologize for not being present on the previous threads. And of course you should all check out the wonderful Becoming Phoebe by one of our own (Kirkus review here).

Anywho, I’ve got a few stories floating around on this blog, but the one that ended up taking off in my head is the one that TaMara (hopefully) linked to, the one where the fish disappear, which you can find here. If you’re already there, hi! This is the rough/first draft of a novel-length story I’m working on. Suggestions most definitely welcome. Since it’s rough, I’ve taken a throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach in some of the chapters, so apologies in advance if some of it is crap. Enjoy!

(I’ll be out and about for a bit, so I’m posting this now.)

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Samwise Gamgee is not amused

And uh, here’s a picture of my cat having had enough of my shit.

 

 

Cheers!

The Fish Meta: Part 2.Meanwhile… Suggestions?

Howdy kids,

The second half of Part 2 is going to be a series of shorts from around the world about the last two weeks (in-story time obviously), with some characters you know but mostly one-off folks that you don’t. Maybe they’ll come back later, I don’t know.

Anyway, my question is–should anybody have any suggestions–any suggestions? Parts of the word you’re curious about, anybody you haven’t heard from recently, and so forth. Some ideas:

  • Jiro has a quirky hobby
  • Question Time at Westminster gets nasty
  • Amsterdam is fucked
  • Oceania is fucked
  • Water wars in North Africa
  • Fun with hákarl in Iceland
  • The Finches have a word with their butler
  • BankBuddy Park repairs
  • And so forth.

I sure hope the commentariat has suggestions 😁 not that I need them, but who doesn’t love engagement?

Liminality #4

Zach rode his bike into an alley in Little Seoul, where he found Cindy’s bike already locked up. The bike rack was overcrowded, so he locked his to hers, removed his helmet, clipped it onto the strap for his bag, and tried to make his hair dignified. Once in front of the alley, he spent ten seconds checking that he hadn’t been followed (FCC-EAD pre-mission field rule #7.a), confirmed that he had reception on no less than three devices (#7.b), and then proceeded into the doorway marked by a sun-scorched plastic sign that said “The Liquid Ambassador” and featured a drawing of something resembling a martini glass.

He rounded a corner and went down the stairs. Once belowground, he confirmed that he had no reception on any devices except for the emergency beacons (rule #7.b said nothing about reception once a mission started), and he entered the establishment proper. Passing by the bar, he ordered his usual, an Upper Illinois IPA, and joined Cindy, with her usual accompaniment of something-clear-on-the-rocks, at their usual booth in the corner.

The television sets on the walls played Ajeossi, a Korean revenge drama from the golden age of their cinema that Zach remembered seeing a few years back. The original title meant ‘Uncle’, and had been curiously translated into English as ‘The Man from Nowhere’. There was a particularly memorable standoff happening on the screens right now, by an empty swimming pool in a mansion-turned-slum. It would soon be followed by a bloodbath. It held Zach’s attention for a moment, and he mouthed a note, picked up by his earpiece, reminding him to watch it again some time.

Nearby, a half-dozen occupied karaoke booths leaked what amounted to a resounding wall of white and pink noise that obscured their conversation better than any auditory countermeasures they could have brought. The haze of cigarette and pot smoke emanating from the barstools formed a surprisingly effective barrier to lip-reading or even seeing very far, and the stateside variant of cash-stakes Pai-Gow taking place throughout the room would serve to distract any lesser law enforcement that might wander in.

These were, of course, rationalizations—a meeting room at the FCC-EAD would offer better protections. But, you see, The Liquid Ambassado had beer.

Zach sipped his. Too cold and flavorless. He took a glass from the stack on the table and poured it in, then tried again. Better.

“So, Zimmerman,” Zach said, “thoughts?”

“Well.” Cindy pulled her FCC-EAD tablet out of her bag and laid it open on the table. “There is one thing that does stand make this one stand out from a lot of the others.”

She tapped her finger on the text and highlighted a phrase. “Forty thousand requests per second? I think a few minutes of that would be enough to crash one of our servers.”

Zach sipped and thought. “Can’t they just close the port?”

Cindy, halfway through a sip of her own, shook her head. “I think Healthwire would have to reprogram all of the other hardware in their little experiment to go somewhere else, and this is a Defense grant, so who knows what kind of numbers they’re dealing with.”

“Hell, with that kind of money flying around, I’d be surprised if Healthwire knows what kind of numbers they’re dealing with.”

They shared a sad chuckle at that.

“This request rate has me a little worried, Zach. I think this one might actually be credible.”

Zach thought for a moment and realized he’d been holding the beer the whole time. He shook the moisture off his hands and rubbed them together to recover feeling. “I guss it explains the Deputy Director’s level of concern. Probably not the usual cover-your-ass job… Where the hell do we start?” He opened his tablet and scrolled through the file. “I mean, you can’t just waltz into a Comcast node. They might as well have armed guards.”

“They do,” Cindy said.

“Sure, but, like, they might as well have dogs and stuff too, I dunno. Any other avenues of inquiry we can try first, try to get a warrant? What about…” Zach trailed off.

For a while, they just read and drank, Cindy her something-on-the-rocks, Zach his IPA.

A waitress brought kim-chi pretzels. Zach tried a few and found them… flavorful. He tried to give them a chance every time he was at the Ambassador, always to no avail.

Cindy, for her part, almost always finished the bowl.

“Mm!” Zach said, and then failed to stealthily spit a half-chewed pretzel into a napkin.

Cindy looked up. Zach wiped his mouth and the table, stashed the balled-up napkin in the corner, and took a drink of beer. “We should look up what happened in town at 5:06 last night that might’ve triggered this anomaly. Power surge, fire, uh, rabbit attack…”

“Rabbit attack?”

“Quiet, I’m brainstorming. …accidental nanobot release, uh, escaped augmented horse?”

Cindy tapped her glass. “Disgruntled employees, I’ll check for firings or disciplinary violations… building demolitions, openings…”

“Remodelings…” Zach tried another pretzel. Nope.

Cindy swallowed some pretzels she’d been working on and washed them down with something-on-the-rocks. “I think we’ve got enough to go on here, Graves. Been a pleasure. Let’s regroup when we’ve got—”

“—at least three credible possibilities that all point to the same ISP node,” they said in unison, grinning stupidly, “pursuant with the 2025 DISA amendments, § 302.b.iv, regarding the warrant authority extended to the Department of External Anomalies, Federal Communications Commission Charter 15.255!” They clinked their glasses together and finished their traditional avant-mission beverages, then left at least four minutes apart as a deterrence against tails (pursuant FCC-EAD at-all-times field rule #2.d, waiveable in case of emergency without explicit permission of a supervisor).

* * *

Zach and Cindy entered one of the glass-walled conference rooms that lined the third story’s main corridor, affectionately known as the fishtanks. The transparent walls went smoky as soon as they entered, and mounted panels were populated with the relevant documents, which in this case was just the initial report, plus the standard map and timeline of the investigating agents’ locations and actions.

Zack stopped, surprised. He’d read about these upgrades, but he hadn’t been listed as active on an eyes-only, priority one anomaly for, what, a year? The fishtanks really gave you the royal treatment on these. He whistled appreciatively. “Snazzy,” he said. “Wonder where we got the money?”

Cindy had already sat down and started connecting her laptop to one of the wall panels.

She shrugged. “You know how it goes, gotta spend the money or it won’t be in next year’s budget.”

“Fair enough.” He sat down and tried to connect his own laptop. “Uh, how does this even work?”

Cindy looked up. “You should be authorized to bluetooth onto any of these screens.”

“Yeah, it’s not discovering anything.”

“It’s working for me.” Cindy indicated the reflection of desktop up on the wall. “Do we need to call IT?”

Zach shook his head. “It’s fine, we’ll survive. I’ll just switch one of these to whiteboard mode…” He walked towards an unused panel. “Which is, uh—“

“Button in the bottom middle brings up the menu, touchscreen from there,” Cindy said with a sigh.

“…Got it. Cool. So.” He wrote Healthwire on the screen with his finger, underlined it, and then wrote 5:06pm? below. “I can start with the incident reports—fire, police, animal control—“

Cindy laughed. “Seriously, Graves, it’s not going to be a rabbit attack.”

“A good investigator never rules anything out,” Zach said, an index finger raised.

“That is so not true. For instance, I can rule out ghosts right now.”

“OK, fine, we can rule out ghosts. But as Holmes said—“

“Do you have to treat every case like it’s your first, and your only experience is from watching crime procedurals?”

“Can’t argue with results, Zimmerman. My office has a window.”

“Technically.”

Zach sat back down and started pulling up the municipal search engines. “Hey, if you throw a rock at it, it’ll break just like any other.”

“Well, I guess I’ll just have to test that some time. Anyway. You search incident reports, I’ll look for construction activity and see if anybody interesting has some new bad reviews on LinkedIn.”