Idyll

The river felt like wet green velvet. It was just a little cooler than her skin. Her long blond hair billowed on the surface as she floated on her back. She held her legs rigidly straight and you launched her like a torpedo upstream.

The wind rustled the leaves in the trees. The scent of honey suckle wafted across the water from somewhere upwind. She drifted past you and you grabbed her arm. She grabbed your arm and her body swung in a wide arc around you. You felt butterflies in your stomach. You braced yourself and launched her upstream once again.

The dappled pattern of the sun through the leaves overhead glistened off of her wet, black, one piece bathing suit. You found yourself wishing she wasn’t dating your friend. She stirred up feelings you still didn’t know how to deal with. You took deep breaths and tried not to stare at her erect nipples.

Even though her eyes were closed, you knew that she knew that you were staring at her lustfully. You blushed as you imagined her, opening her eyes and challenging you. She knew you had a crush on her and teased you mercilessly about it. But there was deep affection there, trust, like the trust she had in her big brother. You would do nothing to betray that trust.

She tired of your human torpedo game and swam around you just a tad more than arm’s length away. You stood flat footed on the bottom of the river and spun around to face her as she orbited you.

In a year she would be engaged to someone else, someone other than your friend. In eighteen months, she and her new husband would be off to Minnesota to teach in a rural public school system. She would teach Art. Her husband would teach English. And you? You would be on to other adventures.

When you got back from Europe three years later, you would meet a guy with the same last name as them. It would turn out that he was the husband’s first cousin. It is a small world. And your crush had long since faded. But the memory of that hot summer day in the cool, green river will haunt you for the rest of your life.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

You Can Come Home Again

The library is the holy place of the writer. It is here that we find the books that fuel our love for words. It is here that we find a quiet spot where we can concentrate on the thoughts that have been accumulating in our head in our noisy busy day. It is here that we find kindred souls of similar values with which to strike up the occasional conversation.

Occasional but not too often. That would impinge on the sanctity and solitude that characterizes the experience. I have many good memories of libraries. I got a library card as soon as I was old enough. I remember the weekly pilgrimages to the library with my mother or sometimes my father. It seems they rarely found time to both go to the library at the same time but that was more a function of how busy they were raising me and my brother and both holding full time jobs as teachers.

I had my first introduction to science fiction at the library. It was a book entitled The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron. Before I knew it I was on to read Andre Norton’s juvenile science fiction and fantasy. I remembered loving The Time Traders series. I also loved Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books and Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars.

Soon I was starting to plunder my father’s science fiction shelf. I learned the dry sarcasm of Robert Sheckley and the exciting adventures of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark. My own collection started growing as well. It was a proud day when my dad judged me grown up enough to read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

I’m not sure when I decided I wanted to write fiction. I think it started out as a desire to write plays and movies. By the time I graduated from high school I was putting in a half hour here and a half hour there. I struggled thinking of things that I wanted to write about. I was so enamored of the process and the tools that I couldn’t concentrate on the substance.

As time went by, I got distracted. By raising a family, by having a career, by the various and sundry activities that consume the days of our lives. Until about ten years ago. I found myself yearning to write. I discovered Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I found the 750Words web site. I have written almost every day since.

So, now I find myself back in the library again. This time it is as a member of a writers critique group. It feels like coming home.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Deadlines Are Your Friends

I’ve never particularly liked deadlines but they do seem to boost productivity. For example, I had from February 8th until March 8th to write approximately 2000 words for my writers’ group. After a couple of weeks, I came up with an idea for a story. I wrote about eight hundred words of the story. Then I let it sit until two nights before the deadline.

It sounds like I was just procrastinating and I’ll admit that there was a component of procrastination at work but there was also something else. I was trying to figure out how I was going to tell a story that I was beginning to suspect was more of a novella than a short story. It took the pressure of an impending deadline to trigger that last little bit of imagination that helped me to reimagine it as a short story.

A short story has less room to develop complex ideas. It is more like a sketch than a complete drawing. It takes advantage of stereotypes and other means of suggesting more detail than is actually there. And the point is often some sort of twist that is clever but doesn’t result in any major change on the part of the protagonist.

So, two nights before the deadline, I finally figured out my twist. I wrote five hundred words that night and the rest the next. The story isn’t polished yet. That is the point of the writer’s group. I am looking for help to tease the most out of the story. But I did end up with a credible first draft and I credit the deadline with helping me to pull this juicy piece of bacon out of the fire.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Literary Allusion

NOTE: This blog may be a trigger for arachnophobes.

It’s gotten to the point that most nights I can just sit in the quiet for a few moments and I start to channel my blog post. Sometimes I get a couple of sentences in to it and I realize that it is perhaps a little bit too personal or it otherwise steps outside of the boundaries that I’ve established for my blog posts. In those cases, I save it as a draft and I start over.

But more often than not, I’ve managed to start an interesting story. I just have to carefully tease the story out of my subconscious. If I pull too heard, I break the thread. If I don’t keep up it gets out of hand and leaves me behind. But usually I just write the words as they pop into my head and the story appears on the page.

It’s not always the topic that I expected to write about. Sometimes I discover that I don’t feel the way that I though I did about it before I started writing. But I always learn something, usually about myself. It could be a lot worse than that, I suppose.

Tonight I realized that I have until Wednesday to finish writing my two thousand words for my writer’s group. Talk about deadline pressure. I’m not sure when I’m going to get it written, perhaps tonight when I finish my blog.

What I’ve discovered is that it takes a certain amount of pressure to force the words out of my finger tips. Not too much, not too little, just enough. The hard thing to learn is how to arrange to have just enough pressure available to keep the thread flowing.

It makes me feel like some kind of literary spider, weaving the words of my web in which to entangle my readers. I will encapsulate them in a cocoon of narrative and they will emerge a butterfly having been transformed by my story. I’ll be back tomorrow with another blog post. I hope you are here to read it.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

On Being a Child Actor

Being a child actor is one of the greatest things that can happen to a kid. I should know. It happened to me. When I was eight years old my father and mother and I were members of the cast and crew of the outdoor play, Stars in My Crown. My mother was cast in one of the major supporting roles, I was an extra, and my father was the property master.

The reason I think it is so great is that the child gets to play pretend with a bunch of adults. It has a remarkably positive effect on the kid’s self image. It also teaches them to be confident in front of a large crowd of strangers.

I suspect that there are similar benefits to being a child actor in films but I don’t have any personal experience in that regard. I have made some short films for You Tube with the children of some of my friends but I somehow think that was a bit different from them having a role in a major commercial movie.

I’ve said it before in this venue but I miss performing on stage. When I feel the urge become strong enough I suspect I’ll do something about it. In the mean time I have a lot of interesting memories to write about.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

How the Means of Distribution Affects the Role of Music in Our Daily Life

When I was a teenager I had about a dozen records. I listened to them over and over again. We listened to the radio but the stations we listened to played songs that were on the top forty list. This limited our exposure to new music.

As I got older we entered the era of the mix tape. We would make tapes of our favorite songs and share them with our friends. This was also the era of album rock FM stations. This broadened our experience quite a bit.

By this time I had played in several garage bands. We never played in garages but we didn’t play gigs per se either. We practiced a lot and taught each other songs. We even wrote a few songs along the way.

When I graduated from high school I got a job playing guitar in the saloon show of a western theme park. This experience taught me that when you play the same song four times a day, six days a week for weeks on end, you get very tired of them.

When I was in the Army I encountered what we called the barracks rat. This was a guy with no family, no obligations, and nothing better to spend their money on than expensive stereo equipment and records. I spent many a Sunday afternoon listening to music in the barracks with my barracks rat friends.

The next innovation in music delivery was the CD. It was easier to take care of than with a record or a tape and soon after it hit the market computers started coming with CD burners so that you could make copies of the music. It. was a dark time for professional musicians.

Napster came along and changed the game again. You could download any music that you wanted off the internet. This made it even harder on the professional musician. But soon we saw indie artists that were taking advantage of the situation and making their money from playing concerts and selling merchandise, including copies of their own CDs. This model seemed to work well for some artists.

This brings us to the modern streaming era. The breadth of exposure is unbelievably large. Artists are somehow managing to make a living in spite of the wide availability of free performances through music streaming services like last.fm and Pandora and video sites like You Tube and Vimeo.

I’m not sure how musicians make a living these days but I know that I listen to more different music than ever and occasionally I buy some. As much as music has meant to me up until now in my life I have to conclude that it is more of an integral part of my daily life than it ever had been earlier in my life.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

It’s Not Rocket Science… No Wait…

I was complaining to my wife that I didn’t have enough time in the day for all the things I wanted to do. In the process I said, I have to spend eight hours a day working with rockets. She laughed and asked what my sixteen year old self would have to say about that. It was a good question.

When I was sixteen years old we were in the middle of the golden age of moon missions at NASA. My best friend and I had followed the space program with avid interest. When something had gone wrong we were poring over our books that we had accumulated on the space craft to try to figure out what they were talking about. It was as if by focusing our attention on figuring out what was wrong and how to fix it we were doing something to help the crowd in Florida and Houston solve the problem.

Looking back, it was pretty miraculous. We sent those intrepid souls up in little tin cans strapped on top of massive ordinance. The flight computer in the Apollo was huge and expensive, both in terms of price and in terms of weight which related directly to the cost of launching it out of Earth’s gravity well. And yet it had less computing power than a programmable calculator that an eighth grader might use in math class today.

I actually date myself there. Eighth graders don’t use calculators any more except maybe to take tests where the concern might be to prevent them from cheating by “asking a friend”. They use their cell phones the rest of the time.

And now that I’ve mentioned it, as a result of the advances in miniaturization that were largely driven by the requirements of the space program, cell phones have become the ubiquitous, universal appliances that science fiction writers postulated in my youth. The Dick Tracy wrist television is reality. The Jetson’s flying car is still struggling along in the development laboratory. We’ll get there eventually. Whatever we can imagine we can usually figure out how to build given enough time and money.

Yes, my sixteen year old self would be flabbergasted by how much for granted I take my job and the technology that I own and use daily. When I was sixteen I was already interested in computers. They were still big cabinets that lived in special air-conditioned rooms with access to them restricted to elite operators. This would soon change as computers got smaller and cheaper. Soon academic science and mathematic departments in state institutes of higher education could afford desktop computers that cost a fraction of what their mainframe big brothers did.

By the time I had spent a couple of years in college, the age of the personal computer was dawning. The last trip to the moon, Apollo 17, was several years in the rear view mirror. The Space Shuttle flight was almost a decade in the future. NASA had lost some of it’s luster, if only temporarily. The hard core space fanatics of my generation were still following every development with relish but the typical American of the time had their mind on other issues.

I joined the Army because I needed a job to support my growing family. I knew one thing when I talked to the recruiter. I wanted as much computer training as I could get. I asked for the longest school that involved computers. I was steered toward a job repairing the computer systems in the Pershing Missile system. It was a turning point in my life. Instead of becoming a Film Maker or a Musician I became a Computer Programmer.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

A Pause to Plan

I have come to the conclusion that the major reason that I am finding it so difficult to write a blog post most days is the time of day that I’m setting aside to do it. I have been waiting to blog until right before I go to bed. By then I am tired and not thinking as clearly as I do earlier in the day. I struggle to remember the things that have occurred to me earlier in the day that would indubitably be exciting topics for a blog post.

Life is about making choices. I made an important choice seven years ago when I started writing at 750words.com. In those seven years I have become a much better writer. I have completed NaNoWriMo twice and attempted it two other times. I have written several short stories and hundreds of blog posts.

Almost a year ago I decided to step up my game and commit to writing a blog post daily. I felt like it would have several beneficial effects on me. It would force me to write things to be read by other people. My journal was private. No one but me would ever read it so it didn’t matter what I wrote. When you write for someone else to read, you shoulder a certain amount of responsibility. For example, responsibility for the veracity of what you say when you assert that something is true. You also accept a certain amount of responsibility to entertain, or inform, or both. You must give your reader some reason to read what you’ve written.

At about the same time, I stepped up the quota on my journal entry to a thousand words. Writing longer journal entries helped me learn to sustain longer threads of thought. It has been a productive year.

Now, I find myself feeling a need for a shift in my focus. I want to do some writing to share with a critique group. The experience of reading other people’s writing and giving constructive criticism of it while at the same time having them critique something you’ve written seems like the next step in my development as a writer.

This is going to require me to rethink my schedule. I can’t continue to write approximately fifteen hundred words a day, a thousand word journal entry and an approximately five hundred word blog post, and still have enough time left over to write things for the critique group.

The choice that I face now is what to keep and what to put aside, either for a while or permanently. My blog is something that I want to keep writing but I need to move that writing to a time of day when I have more clarity of thought. My journal entry may need to be repurposed and perhaps made shorter. Perhaps I should use it as a venue for writing a first draft of my blog post. Or perhaps I can use it to write pieces to be critiqued. During NaNoWriMo I used it as the time and place that I set aside to work on my novel so using it for other purposes than journaling is certainly not without precedent.

These are all good thoughts. I need to consider them for a while before I make a decision. I felt like it was the kind of thing that might be of interest to those of you that bother to read my blog. Although it was a bit of navel gazing, it had a clear motivation and it does effect the future direction of this blog (which is in no danger of ceasing publication any time soon.)

As always, let me know what you think. You can post comments on Facebook or Twitter, email me at jkelliemiller at gmail dot com, or talk to me in person if we happen to know each other IRL (In Real Life). I have tried repeatedly to set up comments in WordPress but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. I’ll give that a try again in the near future.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The Evolution of Programming Paradigms

My career as a programmer has spanned more than forty years. In that time I have seen a number of programming paradigms promise to make programming easier, more robust, and less error prone. Let’s review these paradigms in roughly chronological order.

Early in my career the latest advance in programming paradigms was Structured Programming.  The essential insight of Structured Programming was that programs should be written using a small set of control structures and that the primitive goto instruction should be shunned. The benefit was more readable code that could be more easily analyzed. The goto ridden code was often referred to as spaghetti code.

Next to come into vogue was the paradigm called Object Oriented Programming. Objects were intended to provide several benefits. First they were aimed at grouping functions with the data that it operated on. It also introduced the concept of encapsulation or data hiding. Data, and functions for that matter, that were not specified as public could not be accessed or modified by code outside the object.

Most popular Object Oriented languages were based on the idea of Classes that specified the data and functional template from which individual object instances were created. These Classes were often organized in a hierarchy such that the more general Classes specified the common data and functional characteristics of a group of objects. The more specific members of the class hierarchy would then add or override data or functional characteristics of the subclass to refine the representation and behavior of the instances of the subclass.

As it turns out, in most cases class hierarchies just added unnecessary complexity to programs. They also introduced problems such as what if you have a class that inherits from two different parent classes. For example, suppose that you had a BankAccount class that represented the ledger of a bank account, the deposits, the withdrawals, and the current balance. Suppose there was another class that represented a PrintableReport. Suppose that you wanted to create a class BankAccountReport that inherited attributes from both the BankAccount class and the PrintableReport class. Now here’s the quandary. Both superclasses have an operation called addItem. Which operation should the child class inherit, the one from BankAccount or the one from PrintableReport? This created so many problems that many Object Oriented languages only allowed a class to have a single super class.

Next to the scene was Aspect Oriented Programming. It’s claim to fame was a solution to the problem of multiple inheritance or, as it referred to it, cross cutting concerns. Aspects were a mechanism that allowed the programmer to conditionally alter the behavior of an object by modifying the behavior of a class without modifying its implementation. It did this by capturing calls to it’s methods and allowing the programmer to intervene before or after the call to the aspected operation of the underlying class.

The latest paradigm is not really new. Functional Programming goes back to the early days of Lisp. It says that functions, in the mathematical sense, should map inputs to outputs without causing any side effects. Functions should further be first class entities in the language. This means that they should be allowed to be stored in variables and passed as arguments to other functions.

Strict functional programming is difficult if not impossible to achieve practical results with. Most programs take input from somewhere and output results to somewhere. Taking input and outputting results are both violations of the constraint that the output of a function should depend solely on it’s input. Most functional languages have well defined accommodations for operations that aren’t strictly functional.

This was a whirlwind tour. I hope it gave an overview of the evolution of programming paradigms over the last forty years. Look these programming paradigms up on Wikipedia if you want to know more about them. Or if I have managed to confuse you totally.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

A Ramble Through the Mind of a Writer

There is a balance between feeling enough pressure that you get something done and feeling so much that you are left without a clue what to write. I have been to both extremes and I’d like to find a comfortable position right in the middle.

I am proving to myself that I can actually decide to do something and then do it. If, along the way, I happen to accomplish something more, like writing a popular story or novel, then that is a happy surprise. I’ve started several writing projects. I’ve written fifty thousand words worth of novel on two separate occasions. That is not the whole story in either case. Both so-called novels need significant work done to them before they even deserve to be called first drafts.

The first was a novel called The Gentry. I started importing what I’d written into Scrivener. It has an impressive suite of tools for polishing a novel. I’m going to work on that for a while. It has sat on the shelf, so to speak, for three years now. I have some sense what the mistakes that I made were. The first thing I need to do is to read it and see just how bad it is. Then I will outline what I’ve got so I can start to clean it up and get rid of some of the pointless rambling and punch up the good parts so that they’re even better.

I’m going to go ahead and post this. It shows the rambling dialog that I’ve been having with myself lately. If nothing else maybe it is entertaining to see me waffle and squirm. Who knows. Maybe someday it will be famous as a peek behind the scenes of the writing of my first novel. You never can tell.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.