Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 60

Sprites 1.7.1

E woke up and ate a half wet bagel. She dropped it in the sink and swore and threw it in the toaster anyway. By the time it was heated it was mostly dry but the feeling of sink aura remained. In her mouth, the soft bits mixed coarsely with the rest, the properly toasted rest. It didn't mean anything and she was barely awake enough to care, but it remained with her as her day got worse, then better.

E wrote her resume. She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her couch as J played Mario Kart, this time recording her run and saving it through some dingus she'd picked up that saved video games as a movie. She told E her entire grand plan to make money off of this somehow, but that conversation occurred mid-bagel drop, and though it began twenty minutes before and continued throughout the morning, it may have well have been stored in the half second after it broke loose from her nails but before it hit residual liquids.

E had six jobs on her resume. Two were made up, but written shittily enough to blend in and not cause alarm. The nice thing about working in restaurants was that they went out of business every ten seconds and nobody asks for referrals. The shitty thing about working in restaurants is that resumes are essentially useless but you need them anyway for some reason. E figured it was more a spelling and basic computer-operating test than anything telling about one's history.

"My resume is old balls," E said. J agreed with her but mostly shrugged. She was barely paying attention to J, largely because J was actually talking, actually trying to explain something very important to her about video games and making a real go of something or other than E both didn't understand and was too asleep still to care about. The bagel, still soggy, mostly uneaten, sat next to her. She'd pick it up and finish it in two hours, after the resume writing was done and printed and she figured she'd be stuck in dead end garbage for the rest of her life because of both decisions and the things that she did that were not decisions.

As J went on and on about her video game make believe job, E deleted words and changed things around. She changed the font size and tried to make her name look professional. It was comically long, and she experimented with shortening it. Elumina. Elumin. Elumi. Elum. Elu. El. E. She typed just the first letter and liked it the most. She thought about going with just that. She practiced in her mouth, introducing herself to new tables. "Hi, I'm E. I'll be serving you today." Her tongue stuck out to the side and she smiled. J thought she was smiling at her but she hadn't heard the best part of J's plan at all.

As E typed she burned her past and rebuilt it with better memories. She established relationships instead of working with others. She studied processes instead of learned skills. By the time she was finished, it looked as if she'd invented the art of being a great waitress through years of painstaking handcrafticide. She changed the font one last time, tweaked it all, missed six typos and one entirely missing sentence where she explained that she could probably do some math (which she aced in high school and was offered scholarships, offered so much in the fields of engineering and research, and took none of them out of rage and spite and immaturity, didn't even humour the idea of becoming a programmer as her parents wanted, simply because they wanted it, simply because it was the logical road ahead). She hit the print button and thirty copies were birthed from the printer in another room of the house.

E said, "Okay, off to not starve to death, presumably. Want me to pick anything up while I'm out?"

J said, "You weren't listening at all, were you?"

E shook her head.

"I need an extension cord. Twelve feet. With at least three plugs on the end. If you forget, that's okay. But it'd be nice!"

E wrote it down on her wrist and put on her sneakers.

E had been handing out resumes since she was thirteen. She knew what to do. She knew how to smile. She knew when a place would just never, ever call her. She knew that she would probably not get a job on the first day, but she never, ever went longer than five days. She'd been at it for nearly ten years, at least once a year, from good economies to bad. She'd never been out of work an entire week.

Since moving into her apartment, she'd walked the route twice. She'd do it again today, walking blocks in a counter-clockwise direction, turning left until the loop was closed, then moving away by a block and doing it again. She'd walk it and remember where she started off the day before, until she'd walked for miles in a circle. It had worked for her since she figured it out at 17, when she was sick of the job she had at the time, which was fun enough but required a bus to get to.

After an hour of dropping off resumes to disinterested managers who might throw it on a pile but likely just toss it, she texted S.

E--I haven't seen you in forever.
S--I know. You've been a ghost.
E--Am I a sexy ghost at least?
S--You are the sexiest ghost. Okay, maybe second sexiest. Lincoln is pretty sexy.
E--Ew gross. He's so tall. I would not fuck ghost Lincoln.
S--You're telling me, someone tells you that you have the opportunity fuck not just Lincoln, but a weird spooky spectre version of Lincoln with like chains and boos and sheets or whatever, you don't do it?
E--This isn't even a conversation.
S--I miss you too.

E texted with S throughout the day, stopping to check her phone after every failed meeting with a prospective employer. She was having a shit day. S made it bearable.

S--Are you listening to the mix I just sent you?
E--I think it's so cute you made me a get a job mix. It's so funny.
S--What song are you on?
E--Army.
S--Dad said son you're fucking high.
E--It's so funny. I should join a band and play the gong.
S--You're a bass girl and you know it. You'd be all aloof and not wear a shirt. You'd have abs and wear a hot pink bra that had a built-in smoke machine.
E--I'd be an artist, bitch. I'd sit on a stool and tell feels. I'd be like Jewel.
S--You are absolutely not anything like Jewel.
E--I am ten Jewels.

Before E knew it, she'd hit the mall, eight blocks away. She wanted a smoothie. It had been six hours and she hadn't eaten. She realized all at once how fatigued and starving a day of walking and bullshitting made her. She mentally upgraded the smoothie to three steaks.

She walked into the mall and removed her sunglasses. She looked for the nearest place that could feed her. E texted S about her severe hunger and he suggested they make out, which was cute and unhelpful. Her eyes darted, feet shuffled, and then, and then, a wild Cinnabon appeared.

"Fuck," She said to everyone within ten feet. "Fine. Whatever."

But then something happened on the way to ruining her day. E put her phone away, tightened her grip on her shoulder bag, squinted her eyes and accepted not just her day but herself, accepted that this was probably going to be it for her, every few months a new search for something sad and unprogressive, something that would kidnap her youth away and leave her on the other side without anything other people might call success or happiness or calm.

There was nothing special about her accepting this. She did it several times a day. What happened is a man held out a brochure and asked her to take one.

"Hey, how are you today?" He said, to her maybe, but at her most likely.

"Shiny," E said. "And you?"

"Better," he said, as if he'd rehearsed it eleven thousand times. As if someone with a leather glove hit him in the face every time the intonation was off. "I'm doing better now. Do you want to be better?"

The man stood in front of a small bench, with five stools on the mall-facing side, a folding door to get past, and a printed stand with the word "Better" in the same font, just a lot larger. The background was sky.

E looked down at the brochure in his clean hands. The word "Better" was designed in attractive thin type. The whole thing was coloured orange and blue, with hues and shadows that calmed her. "What is this?"

In what felt like forever but was twenty two seconds, the man smiled and confirmed. "Come on in. I have a lot I think you'd like to hear. Let me get you a coffee..."

"And a bagel?" She near-begged.

"We have cinnamon," he offered. "And cinnamon cream cheese."

"I love you," she said, taking one of the stools. "I think I've always loved you."

He smiled. He disappeared behind the print.

As she waited for him to return, she gazed at the printed sky.

Transparency and Status Pages

I feel like publishing drafts of my writing is a pretty transparant way of doing business. I don't see many other writers doing it, and I've found it to be helpful in my process. In fact, I've never made a move toward transparency that didn't work out well for me.

The Brooks Review is a technology news and commentary site I enjoy. As with most of the good ones, it's penned by one author. But unlike any I've seen, it now has a status page, revealing not only his production schedule and hits, but also his financial information. It's a bold move. But what's the upside in something like this? If I had to guess, it would be reader trust. Here, the page says in meta-data. This is the real me.

The article, and more

While reading Esquire's digital magazine this weekend, I noticed something with a good number of pages: they were actually videos. Take a look at this page, from this Olivia Wilde profile:

Now look at this page. As I read the magazine, a video played, marking up the article as if the editor was right there with me.

I've noticed that Esquire and a few other magazines do this kind of thing with their covers. Upon opening a new magazine, you're greeted with a video of the cover "coming together" in a sense. But this is the first time I've seen it done with an article on the inside. What's more, the issue had a ton of this, with almost every feature containing at least one "video" page. It's at first nice and flashy. You can really see the effort the layout team put into this.

Annoying side-note: every now and then the page will shift slightly, but not turn (due to an errant thumb on the glass, most likely), which would cause the video to start again. This is hugely distracting, and it makes whatever advantages the gimmick has dry up pretty quickly. But I'm not going to dock Esquire for this, as every magazine with video snippets does this.

Curiously, the website version of the article is marked up quite differently. I'm assuming the print version looks like the digital "Video" page, but on its finished state. So, this is interesting, right? And probably a lot of work for the layout department? But is it good, and, most importantly, is it readable? Do people want this to happen as they read?

Really, there's two experiments in layout happening here, one on top of another. The editors wanted to do an "annotated" and messy looking article, with both text and meta-text, and decided the best way to showcase this is to present the meta-text as freshly written above (as well as its actual writing process). Remove the "process" part, and you've got what is (still assuming) in the printed magazine. Remove the "messy" part, and you've got the website version. Only the digital version allows the editors to show everything individual parts.

I want to see publications keep working on this issue, and I want to support experiments like this. I don't like where this idea is right now, but I like where it's going. Keep iterating. Keep making mistakes. Keep getting closer to what we really all want: the article, and more, but contextually appropriate for the moment.

Swipe right to read something else

Just came across this on Behance: Verso, A digital magazine about the future
reading experience. It's got a nice approach to the concept of the digital magazine. I like the transitions, as well how an article expands from the title instead of jumping to elsewhere. Great colour-scheme, too.

It also exhibits one thing I've found somewhat annoying when using reading apps: the swipe left or right to go to another article. In practice, I understand why this exists: when you're done with one article and want to go to the next, it's a handy shortcut. But it's a shortcut that's always there (I'm not speaking less about this app concept and instead something I see in read-later and RSS apps frequently). It's a feature that fires by accident 100% of the time, and I find I forget about it the one time when it does contextually matter: at the end of the article.

Metro is my favourite design language

I've decided I'm going to blog more often about things I like and not just what I create (though there is a new Sprites chapter coming later today).

I just watched the Mobile World Congress Microsoft Keynote, and the thing I noticed more than any of their announcements (there weren't many) or feautre overviews (lots of rehash from last month's Windows 10 announcement) was that Microsoft's actual Powerpoint presentations look awesome now. They really, really didn't use to. Metro may have fixed Powerpoint.

Now that Metro (I'm sticking with the name) is the layout for not just their operating systems but PR approach, just about everything they do looks good.

The thing about it is I've been using devices that reference Metro's language since 2010, and it doesn't look old yet. Both Google and Apple have updated their UX to a flatter, cleaner look, and even those moves haven't made Metro look dated (if anything, it shows how oddly ahead Microsoft was with it).

Welcome to the New Wired

Wired.com was my homepage for years. I've seen the site change roughly every few years. Any site with a healthy budget should do its best to stay modern and relevant, and Wired's attempts here appear to be about catching up (their previous site was long in the tooth). Responsive windows (seen above), images that appear as you scroll, and errata that appears on the sidelines when contextually appropriate. I'm still not sure if I'm a fan of images appearing out of nowhere while I'm reading (more on this when I talk about Esquire later today) but it is definitelely the fashion right now.

I read Wired as a digital magazine, and the first thing I notice about this redesign is that it matches the digital edition a lot closer. I wonder if they'll eventually put it all together. Currently, that's just not feasible: Wired's issues are very large, and a magazine's flow doesn't work as a template for a website (though the table of contents and their front page bare similarities).

Another thing to point out. Above, you'll see the typical social buttons and advertising you've come to know on every article page on the internet since forever. But if you minimize the width to that of a phone, these things disappear, and you're just left with the content of the article. These social buttons and ads scroll with you on the main site, but on your phone, they just disappear. My guess is they've realized that people won't click those buttons (or react to advertising) on mobile, so they didn't do the legwork to integrate them better. It's one of those tells, though: the reading experience on Wired is now cleaner and better on a phone than it is on a full-width screen.

Sprites is going to be a third as long for now

Sprites, Jets, and Elves should be finished up by the end of March. I'll have the first draft of parts 7-10 up by then. But then I'm going to take to write a different story. I'll come back to it to finish off the "Jets" and "Elves" portions of the story after, but I have a great idea for a short story I need to get down. It's called Lois and Lumina and it'll be a bit of a breakup/love story. As with everything I write going forward you'll see it here first.

Sprites simplification

I got to this precipice with Sprites where the book works many ways as it stands right now, but I have to make a call and pick a genre. Over the last few weeks I was excited to take it in a crazy direction, with an evil company and monks and time travel, but I need to calm that down. It needs to be a love story, a messy, warning of a thing, one you wouldn't necessarily wish on other people but wouldn't mind living, feeling the scars along your knuckles. Sprites, Jets, and Elves is a love story about failures. I need to explore that, and not make it something that won't stand up by itself. I can add in all the crazy stuff in and around the core of the thing once I've got it sound. It can connect to No Chinook and Record Year without having to cheat.

Groundhog day

Yesterday, I actually walked 10,000 steps. After work, I went home and actually exercised (like I say I'm going to do most days but don't), accomplished a ton, and then slept better than I have in months. I finally won a round of 100-man Smash (it looks like this), learned a great new InDesign trick involving fractions, and 2 people bought copies of my books.

If only there were a way to make Groundhog day happen over and over.

Listen to Jason Mann and I talk about Strangers on a Train

My friend Jason just started up a brand new podcast. It's called the Alfred Hitchcast and he's going to be tackling Hitchcock films. We tackled Strangers on a Train together and it was a blast, and it definitely comes through in the audio. Listen to the thing here.