Jeff Deck, Author at Jeff Deck, Author & Novel Coach

Talking to Other Humans

I’ve been back in New Hampshire longer now than I was out on the road for the book tour; it’s been more than three months. And the distance from that adventuring time keenly manifests itself now in my interactions with other people. The other week, I attended a gathering of strangers and lost the nerve to talk to people, even in the interest of brazen self-promotion, which was the concern of most everyone else. At an early opportunity, I fled. O regard him, the man who gave hundreds of interviews, including at least a dozen on TV, who faced Al the Mad Roker, and who coolly deflected dick jokes from Australians and spoke in radio-friendly bites and learned to smile into a dark lens– ridiculous! Where was that calibrated persona now?

I’ve seen flashes of him in recent job interviews, perhaps because they more closely resemble media appearances than do ordinary conversations. Questions like “What was a recent work-related challenge and how did you overcome it?” are begging for a canned response and a shit-eating grin, wouldn’t you say? (Though occasionally there is the temptation to go off-script and say something like, “Hmm, in five years I see myself swaying gently beneath an oak branch.”) So now the goal is to take that glib bastard and apply him to more informal scenarios, where humans tend to meet and converse, the world somewhere outside the frosted windows of my Portsmouth apartment.

It’s been a womb of sorts, or perhaps a tomb. New England winter and cold tongues outside, while inside we have warmth and writing and my books and games, and Jane returning regularly to warm things still further (though not over this particular, particularly long weekend). Too easy to stay inside and let the Skill of relating fall dormant, while other Skills wax.

No more, friends! (I address this to the furry, stuffed friends lounging on the blankets.) To the outer realms once more I go, to re-remember what it’s like to be a certified member of the human race. I’ll gather my threadbare clothes about me, and name myself Writer, and I will be interesting and congenial and I will share stories and listen to those of others and occasionally steal them for later.

By the way, the bloom is off the rose for this WordPress app. Why should link pasting be so effing difficile?

Bamboo
One of the furry friends

Scribing on the Go

Since so much of my writing mind has been fixed lately on a tale involving the wondrous future of mobile devices, maybe it’s only fitting that I now scrawl this on a webOS WordPress app, hoping against hope that these words will not capriciously vanish into the ether, the Cloud, or the Plane of Phlogiston.

Maybe this is the future, reclining on the red couch in my office (our office, Jane would hasten to add), for what could be less intimidating than to peck on a few keys as I lie under a fleece blanket? Certainly feels surmountable, in comparison to the dread that my perfectly innocent desk and chair setup evoke sometimes (the dread increases the longer I’ve been away from my task). All the resources of the internet are right here if I need them. For example, a few lines back my brain went dead at the thought of what the word was for the material of this blanket, so I just opened up the browser app and typed in “blanket material.” And of course, the intimacy of this phone-based textual format cannot be denied; I might otherwise be embarrassed to admit that I’d forgotten a word like fleece!

Linking and images also promise to be straightforward. Here is your dossier on the fine product of sheep. And here is an unrelated picture:

Super Bowl Nachos

…OK, so that took a little while. And I would prefer that the Super Bowl nachos were horizontal rather than vertical. But hey, that’s still kind of like magic.

Obviously working on a phone is unsuitable for any kind of in-depth editing or long-form writing. Typing is rather slow going, or at least it is with the tiny keys of my Pre. But for a quick blog post to let the world know that you’re still alive and still care, this seems like just the ticket. And getting back to the theme of writer’s dread, which we all have to face sooner or later (save perhaps that tiny minority of loathsome, never-blocked authors whose output stacks higher than the Andes), maybe this format is ideal for the crappy first draft of a scene or chapter that you just can’t get down to otherwise. Just don’t accidentally publish your tender, early story draft as a blog post!

Stuff We Don’t Even Own Owns Us

Good afternoon. Currently I am procrastinating instead of polishing the beginning of a funny/scary tale about near-future technology and its ability to help save the world from itself. I should be writing that, but instead I am writing this. At least I’ve tricked myself into still writing, either way.

The holidays are nearly upon us. I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked myself into a mania over the last month or so tracking the ephemeral deals and lightning-round sales on various sites. One even sent me an e-mail with the title “Black Friday III.” Really? Dear God, make it stop. I wish I could figure out what it is about the human brain that makes it delight so in participating in these annual orgies of consumerism. It’s not even about other people, anymore. I pretty much finished my gift list a while ago, but I’d still check in daily or hourly about whatever the latest video games Amazon was stuffing into its gold box of wonder. Jane and I were in the market for a speaker-dock set for our– I mean, her– iPod, and we must have spent weeks comparing reviews and figuring out what the best deals might be. At a certain point, the goods own you. At a certain point, whatever money you might have saved has been far outspent by the time you’ve lost bargain-hunting, time you could have spent… I don’t know, creating your own video game! Soldering together a home for your portable media player! In the hordes of the commercially brainwashed, I am just one more footman, brandishing his plastic and searching the heavens for divine proclamations of discount.

Ever noting in Evernote

All right, NaNoWriMo is done– for me, at least! After a slow start– a very slow start– I somehow managed to completed my 50,000 words two days early, just before midnight last night. I’d had a run of astonishing productivity, around 5,000 words a day for several days in a row, and I credit having a schedule with limits for this. I was spending a few days in a row at my girlfriend’s family’s house in Maine for Thanksgiving, and I knew I could disappear for only so long at a time, so I’d designate three different times per day to really jam in as many words I could in a strictly limited period of time, an hour or an hour and a half, say.

Now that that particular simian has leapt from my shoulders– now that I have once again a clear mind (though NaNo can really induce a clarity of purpose), after NaNo and before that the book tour and before that the runup to the book tour, I can devote myself to organization. Productivity. Charging ahead. All of those proud concepts. But what a scatterbrain I am– how can I keep on top on all of these things I’d like to file and accomplish?

The answer for me will be my renewed devotion to Evernote. It’s time for to-do lists again, o happy season, and it’s time for bulging virtual notebooks on various ideas and areas of interest. I have the full-fledged program on my computer, and a bastard corollary on my Palm Pre (held-back child in the smartphone family; I expect the Evernote functionality on my next phone will be much more sophisticated– but I really should hold off on chasing the next sexy thing for a while… right? You’ll wait for me, Epic, won’t you).

Let me know if you have any good ideas for using Evernote efficiently. There seems to be a pretty good body of advice out there in the rolling azure fields of the internet, but hearing thoughts directly from an actual human being is nice as well. I get pulled in a lot of directions by shiny new bits of informations, so I’m trying to designate separate notebooks by category of info. At the same time, I’d like to use it on a daily basis for mundane tasks like keeping on top of bills and other necessaries of responsible citizenry. Might be too ambitious or foolhardy to rely on a single program as a Tool of Everything, much as physicists struggle for a theory of everything, but both seem worthy causes to me.

Tour Success

I’ve discussed it over at the Great Typo Hunt site, but I just wanted to mention what a pleasure it was to meet so many people interested in improving communication during the course of our book tour. Everyone kept mentioning how they thought they’d been alone in their concern for good spelling and grammar, and I kept having to say, Look around you! Here are your kin. I’m grateful to everyone who helped Benjamin and me along the way, by hosting us, coming out to the readings, sending us nice messages, calling into our radio interviews, and spreading the word about the book.

Soon enough we’ll have another project for everyone to participate in, called 50 Typos in 50 States. You’ve been sending us pictures of typos you’ve found and corrected yourselves, and we’d like to showcase your efforts, because typo-hunting really is a team project.

But enough about that– this is my personal blog, so you’re presumably here to hear more about me, yes? Fools! I mean, welcome! I’d like to share some of the things that I’ve been reading and absorbing lately. Some is for research for future projects, some just edifying in general, none of which I necessarily endorse personally. I’m trying to use everything interesting that I come across, sooner or later. The first is this site about nonviolence. I came across it while trying to answer the hypothetical question, what do you do to try to change society, outside of the democratic process (voting, etc.), without resorting to violence?

The site identifies nine types of nonviolence: non-resistance, active reconciliation, moral resistance, selective nonviolence, passive resistance, peaceful resistance, nonviolent direct action, Gandhian nonviolence, and nonviolent revolution. The differences among some of these are not immediately clear to me. Will have to examine them more carefully.