A Lil Bit More On Voice, Sauce, and Gravy

A few weeks ago I guest blogged about “voice in writing” for Shimmer. That essay starts something like this:

I want to talk about voice–about your capital-V Voice as a writer, and the little voice of each specific piece you write–but first I want to tell you about how this guy I know makes steaks.
He goes to the butcher and buys a few good cuts of beef. Back home, while these steaks drain on the cutting board, he makes his “sauce.” This sauce consists of Worcestershire sauce, malt vinegar, salt, pepper, brown sugar, ketchup, maybe barbecue sauce, whiskey (or whatever he finds in the cupboard), beer (maybe), wine (why not?), soy sauce, and season salt. He marinates the steaks in this sauce for an indeterminate period, then sears them briefly on a high-BTU gas grill.
If you’ve spent any quality time in the kitchen, then you see how absurd this “sauce” is . . .

and ends like this:

Voice is the economical result of not throwing anything away, but instead boiling and scrapping until what you have left is as concentrated as possible, a half-once of liquid with more flavor than the chops you started with. Every good story will make its own gravy.
And your Voice emerges from the process of cooking up story after story after story in the same iron skillet, until that skillet is so seasoned that you don’t need oil to fry an egg, and any steak seared on it comes off tasting like it put you back $50 at a necktie establishment, even though you didn’t even bother to sprinkle salt on the pan prior to sizzling.

In the middle I specifically cite David Foster Wallace and Stephen King as examples of how a Voice–even a very ornate one–arises from a process of reduction. So, I was interested to come across this note DFW sent Harper’s magazine regarding this nifty lil piece he wrote about Kafka for that magazine in 1998. The note reads, in part:

The deal is this. You’re welcome to this for READINGS if you wish. What I’d ask is that you (or Ms. Rosenbush, whom I respect but fear) not copyedit this like a freshman essay. Idiosyncracies of ital, punctuation, and syntax (“stuff,” “lightbulb” as one word, “i.e.”/”e.g.” without commas after, the colon 4 words after ellipses at the end, etc.) need to be stetted. (A big reason for this is that I want to preserve an oralish, out-loud feel to the remarks so as to protect me from people’s ire at stuff that isn’t expanded on more; for you, the big reason is that I’m not especially psyched to have this run at all, much less to take a blue-skyed 75-degree afternoon futzing with it to bring it into line with your specs, and you should feel obliged and borderline guilty, and I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.)

I share this, because DFW was fundamentally wrong. I was a UofM comp lit student with a subscription to Harper’s when that essay was first published, not to mention an embarrassingly enthusiastic fan of DFW’s, and I remember reading that piece–feeling how breezy and conversational it was–and I’ve gotta say that this sense of the piece’s voice wouldn’t have been at all affected if DFW had elected to use Chicago Manual of Style-compliant punctuation after his abbreviated Latin introductory clauses, instead of being a royal prick.
The takeaway: Don’t do this; don’t squander even a few minutes from your limited store of earthly hours fussing over pinches of pepper on what is already a really damn good steak.

Me & Mitt, Mitt & I: Pranksters, Bullies, Mormons, Jews, Education–AMERICA!

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This latest installment is about the school Mitt Romney and I attended, bullying, pranks, progress, identity politics, and how institutions seek to change over time. It starts like this:

Mitt Romney and I went to the same high school – three decades apart. This would be immaterial, except the Washington Post just published a fascinating 5,500-word remembrance of Mitt Romney’s hijinks at Cranbrook, a high-pressure prep school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
I attended this same school in the 1990s; it’s an architectural gem, the staff is excellent, the program an academic crucible. Later, as a University of Michigan student, I shared a broken-down house with three fellow Cranbrook alums. One was in a sociology class, and we were delighted when he revealed that his textbook listed Cranbrook as “one of the last vestiges of American aristocracy.”
Because Mitt and I attended Cranbrook exactly 30 years apart, we ended up standing back-to-back on a balmy June evening in 2005 – the same year Mitt received the school’s 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award. The governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and I stood together at the lip of a deep, inset fountain, which gurgled contentedly, almost as though it was whispering ♪♫Daaaaave, I would be an excellent place for a GOP splaaashdown!♫

The rest is here: The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Mitt and Me

Recommended Buy: “Stop Motion Studio” for iPhone–Make Animated Films in Minutes with Your iThing!

Still hyped by a late coffee and this earlier post on iPhone stop-motion animation, I dropped 99-cents on Stop Motion Studio after dinner tonight. Elapsed time between downloading the app and uploading our finished video: *Literally* five minutes (including having to muck around with the App Store’s new “security questions” BS)–and that included poking around to figure out the controls, composing and shooting the frames, doing a little light editing to remove a totally botched shot, rendering, and adding the soundtrack (with foley work by my kid). The video and sound editing make this a total *steal*; it’s easily worth 10 times the current price, as it allows for a full end-to-end production all in one app (which is *great* if you need to work within a kindergarten attention span).
PRO TIP: Turn on both the “Grid” and “Overlay” options; they make lining up shots and maintaining frame continuity (i.e., the two most frustrating things about shooting stop-motion) a total breeze.
Seriously, *Buy This NOW*. You’ll make the investment back before bedtime.

LEGO Stop-Motion Using Your iPhone!

(You can obviously shoot *any* subject in stop-motion, it’s just *really* pleasing to use LEGO.)
Great post from Will at Tested.com on shooting stop-motion films using the iPhone (which has native HD video–and, in fact, shoots pictures at such nice resolution that I’m doing all the pics for my next book using my damn phone. We’re living in the *FUTURE!*) The best part: These stop-motion apps–which are as good (or better!) than anything that was on the market five years ago–are under $3!!!
How To Turn Your iPhone Into a Stop Motion Camera – Tested
Here’s one of Will’s efforts:

(For a review of my previous efforts at stop-motion–and *acting*–from years passed, click for the “expanded view” of this post)

Continue reading “LEGO Stop-Motion Using Your iPhone!”

The Flyest Single-String Electric Guitar I’ve Ever Seen

This is the diddley bow that Chris Lynas built last weekend, riffing off the “$10 Electric Guitar” in Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred (Project #13)–plus a sweet lil Dirt Cheap Amp (Project #12) to go with it:

And here it is in action:

I *love* this! Such a great fit for these lil hands!
Incidentally, Chris is one of several builders who have used a thicker gauge of wire to wind their pickups and still had good results. Quoth Chris:

I used 40 gauge wire because it was what I could find. Works ok and was easy to handle with 5yo assisting. In combination with the beefy magnet it’s quite a hot pickup. Neck is ash (from past project), body from old pine shelf. Machine head and string cost about £4 total from local guitar shop. All other hardware from the bottom of the toolbox.

I.e., Chris stayed within the $10 budget, despite the strong pound sterling! Supercool!
Some folks may already be familiar with Chris Lynas from this project, where he 3D-printed new discs for an old-school Fisher-Price “record player” (which was actually technologically more of a music box):

(Worth checking out the link, as the code/CAD-based solution is pretty fascinating.)
*thx Chris!*

Recommended Buy: LEGO Heroica Game

For the first time since having kids I had a solid Toys R’ Us win on Saturday, and it’s this:

BACKSTORY: My five-year-old and I go to the same dentist. Because I’m an adult man and skipped going to the dentist for about a half decade when I had no dental insurance, my visits to the dentist are persuasively unpleasant (i.e., Guess who had six cavities and a 1.5 hour deep clean after his first return-visit to the dentist? Guess who flosses daily–or more–now?) But, this is a cunning dentist who works his *ass* off to make sure that kids *love* going to the dentist. In addition to the cheap-plastic-from-China toy bin and a big ole goody bag of flossers and colorful cartoon toothbrushes and *krazy flavvvvorz-funtime adventure toothpaste!!!* and whatever, he also gives every cavity-free child a $10 gift card to Toys R’ Us–which represents a huge portion of my son’s annual income. Coupled with his $1 per week allowance (he feeds the pets) and occasional boons on birthdays and holidays, he periodically has a fair amount of buying power–provided he goes to Toys R’ Us (which itself is sort of a *grrrrrr* situation but, you know, I’m not gonna look a gift-card in the mouth).
After many delays (we’ve got a new baby), the boy and I finally made it out to the store on Saturday. He had long planned to purchase “Sensei Wu” from LEGO’s Ninjago line. I *hate* this line, because it is a totally rip-off: The Ninjago packages are basically a fighting-tops/Pokemon hybrid, cost $15-ish, and include one (1) specialized LEGO minifig that stands on one (1) weighted dreidel and can hold his many little specialized (and easily lost) swords. There’s nothing to build, and they aren’t fun to play with, but they have excellent marketing (including trade-style comic books my son reads over and over and over), and all the kids talk about them, and thus all the kids want them–so goes the world.
Fortunately, my local Toys R’ Us was out of Sensei Wu (suck it, Sensei Wu!) Our 5yo brave-faced it, but was clearly bummed as he wandered the aisles looking for a stray Wu tucked among the Technics sets and Space Police (or whatever they call that line). Then, while looking for breast-pump parts, I stumbled across an ill-situated end-cap of LEGO games marked down 30%.

I’m on record as being more than a little disappointed in the LEGO corporate trajectory–with its growing reliance on marketing tie-ins, uselessly hyper-specialized bricks, gendering, and violence-based problem solving–but I *love* the games they’ve been producing. As build kits they’re at least moderately entertaining, and the games themselves are balanced and playable by a *wide* age-range. A few weeks ago we’d been introduced to these LEGO games at my sister’s house, where my 10-year-old nephew, 5-year-old son, 66-year-old mother, and I all happily played MINOTAURUS–and were evenly matched. CREATIONARY is likewise a delight (and, thank Gott in Himmel, bounced the curséd Candy Land from the mix).

Not only do these have the cachet of being for older kids, but my son has also recently gotten into D&D (in the form of DnDish–more on that in a future post), which made HEROICA: CAVERNS OF NATHUZ an especially easy sell. The HEROICA series (which includes four games, all under the same rule set, which can either be played independently or linked together into one epic campaign) is basically a boiled-down version of the movement/combat system from the old red-boxed Basic Dungeons & Dragons box from the 1980s.

The rules are simple enough that a precocious 5-year-old can grasp them (although the game is marketed for 7+), but complicated enough that it preserves that *lots can happen* and *many monkeywrenches* feel of dice-based RPGs. There isn’t really a narrative built-in–or mandated–but it’s easy to add a narrative layer (and, in our situation, kind of inevitable).
So, for the price of one goddamn Ninjago dude my kid got an entire game that he spent a happy hour *building*, and we then spent an enjoyable half-hour playing as a family (wife and new baby even enjoyed it, and neither of them are paper-and-pencil RPG people), and are already inventing new rules and scenarios for.
Plus Toys R’ Us actually had the breast-pump parts and organic diapers I needed. Critical hit!

Handset letterpress-printed covers for my steampunk novella are hot off the presses and ready for mutilation!

Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate, letterpressed cover – a set on Flickr

Last week Fritz Swanson and I printed these *awesome as Hell* new covers for the “patrons-only” print edition of “Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate.” These covers are handset using a mix of antique lead type and wooden poster type (i.e., the kind used on Old West *WANTED* posters), with a few modern elements (like the graphic on the back, which is a magnesium block Fritz had made a few years back). They were printed using Fritz’s century-old Chandler & Price New Style letterpress–which we hauled back to Michigan from New York a few years ago, and were almost crushed by (long story; immaterial here). (FYI, the letterpress shown in that Wikipedia entry is Fritz’s *actual* press in his Manchester, MI, workshop. NOT SHOWN: Me off in the corner cursing my damn stupid eyes as I realize I’ve once again set all of the type completely backwards.)

This print edition–which runs 70-some pages–has letterpress-printed covers and laser-printed interiors with original illustrations by Chad Sell. Each book has a hand-sewn binding and is individually distressed, signed, and numbered.
If you just want to read the story–which is well thought of, if poorly publicized–you can drop a buck or two and buy it for Kindle through Amazon or pick-what-you-pay for the DRM-free ebook (including a Kindle-compliant mobi file, PDFs, digital extras, and more). But if you want a unique steampunk curio–perfect for giftifying or stashing in a very confusing time-capsule–then the Patron’s Print Edition is the way to go. Want a customized message or dedication? Just mention it in the “notes” when you pay.
As for the story itself:

[“Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate”] is at one level nearly wacky, but it has deeper concerns, reflected in the examination of the treatment of such disadvantaged individuals as alcoholics, Confederate veterans, the Chinese, Jews, and of course clockwork ex-soldiers. It all comes together very effectively.
— Rich Horton, Locus, July 2008 (Recommended Story)

A Simple Jig to Make New Tumblers from Old Booze Bottles (via @ManMadeDIY)

Want to cut wine bottles? Build this jig!

I’m not generally a huge fan of Instructables–the skinny on my criticism: project quality is inconsistent and the site’s presentation insanely frustrating–but this little jig is *fantastic*! I *love* this sort of mid-1970s upcycling, and am really glad it’s making a comeback (not least because I have a ton of weird liquor bottles I look forward to making into drinking glasses).
The results?

Rad!ManMade DIY !*