Gulf City Blues Update

Sam Falco

I did not think it would take over a month to start wordsmithing of the second draft. Planning the revision was not that hard, but finding time to focus on it was. Looking for a new job is exhausting, demoralizing, and time-consuming. In between those activities, I’ve been teaching Professional Scrum classes. I’ve had enough students to make the classes worth teaching but not enough to believe I can stop looking for full-time work. I enjoy teaching very much, but two full-day classes plus preparation the day before and decompressing the day after can really distract from creative pursuits.

Nevertheless, the second draft is under way. I have a lot of new scenes to weave into the middle of the narrative. I can use the first four chapters almost as they are. That “almost” does a lot of heavy lifting, though. I’m changing the timeline and even though the change itself seems small, it requires moving the sequence of the early scenes. Doing that is harder than writing new material.

This is my process. I write a lot of words to discover the story, then throw away a lot that doesn’t align with my discovery. It’s true for almost everything I write. That’s one reason I rarely write business-related material. The effort far outweighs the reward.

I’m not even going to try to forecast when the second draft might be finished. It’ll be done when it’s done, however long that takes.

Gulf City Blues Revision Planning

Sam Falco

I started revising Gulf City Blues with a hands-off read-through of the existing manuscript. It was good!

For about 180 pages. Then the whole thing goes in the crapper with a bolted-on subplot that never makes any sense and isn’t resolved before the grand finale, which connects to the first 2/3 of the story and is satisfactory. That’s what I expected; I remembered how I struggled after about 55,000 words to figure out how to get to 80,000. Next time, I will remind myself that when the story is done, wrap it up and end it rather than forcing a word count.

What I didn’t expect was how good the first 2/3 would be. It’s engaging and fun, and sometimes I even forgot I was reading my own work. Where I have room for improvement is to give Mark a harder time getting information from people. There are a few witnesses who ought to send him away so that he can take a second run at them later. Some people not only give him information too easily, but they give him too much information. Mark ought to have to search a little harder. Since I need to cut almost 25,000 words from the end, I’m glad I see how I can broaden the scope of the story that works.

I’d like to move faster, but I picked up a few classes I wasn’t expecting to teach. Since one of them was a class I haven’t taught in almost two years, I wanted to make sure I gave my students my best effort. I sacrificed a little writing time to make that happen.

I still worked a little each day, though, and I’ll continue. I’m not pushing myself to finish by a specific date. I’d rather have a good second draft than a hastily completed, shoddy one.

Gulf City Blues Revision Stage One

Sam Falco

I finished the first draft of Gulf City Blues a month ago. I set every first draft aside for a while after I complete it. For previous stories, I’ve only taken a couple of weeks before I start revising but I’ve always been too close to the story when I return to it. This time, I resolved to spend a month letting the whole thing go. It wasn’t easy. After the first week, I felt like I was wasting time. Especially since I’m unemployed right now, I felt like I should be taking action. But especially since I’m unemployed right now, I took other action—like looking for work while also trying to build my side gig up.

After two weeks, the feeling faded. By last week, I’d developed a healthy distance from the story. I have the right balance of fondness for it and its characters vs. the understanding that the narrative structure will certainly need to be adjusted. Waiting any longer means my interest will start to wane as other ideas emerge from the primordial soup of my mind.

My first step is to read the whole thing straight through, without marking anything up. I want to remember what I’ve written and evaluate it from a reader’s perspective. Then I can start working on the superstructure. Do I have the right scenes, in the right order, to tell the story I want to tell? That’s the question I want to answer in this draft. I expect that I’ll find there’s a lot to adjust. Once I complete the first read-through, I’ll go through it a second time. The second read-through is where I’ll determine what scenes I need to drop, add, or move. Those notes will guide the work of structural revision.

I have no idea how long it will take. I’m not going to push myself to complete it by a target date. That has never worked well for me. I’ll aim to write a target number of words per day, whether that’s in the form of exploratory writing in the notebook or manuscript words, or a combination. Steady pace with focus will create a healthier experience. Once I’m done, I will let it lay fallow again. I might need a second structural pass, or it might be ready for a revision that focuses on scene-level structure. I won’t know until I get there, and I won’t worry about it until I finish this draft.

I’ll keep you posted.

Dream. Home.

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
Write about your dream home.
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I live in a 1920’s-era Spanish Revival style home with three bedrooms and two baths. It is roomy enough for two people with no children, and yet I often dream that it is larger than it is.

I’ve had this thematically recurring dream for decades. I find a door, a stairway, or a ladder that leads to a space several times as large as I have. Sometimes, the new space surprises me. The first time I remember the dream was when I was in grad school, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. I found an iron, spiral staircase leading up and discovered it led to a glass-walled arboretum filled with exotic, tropical plants. Since then, I’ve dreamed of cavernous basements, rooms that I vaguely remember having closed off years before, and whole new wings of the house I live in now. Sometimes, I even remember within the dream that I’ve had dreams like this before. Of course, in keeping with the way dreams work, I never realize that I’m also dreaming now.

When Sweetie and I began getting rid of clutter last year, we were both stunned at how much more space we had than we realized in the basement and the cedar closet in the hall. I said it seemed like one of my dreams and she said, “But this is real.” And I said, “That’s exactly what you would say if I were dreaming.” Then she poked me in the ribs, we started giggling, and I didn’t wake up, so it must have been real.

But when I do have these dreams, what’s going on? I once read an article about researchers who believed they had proved rats dream and, in their dreams, plan how to get food. Maybe dreams are a way of mentally rehearsing our lives and my subconscious occasionally reminds me to look for opportunities and options I have forgotten I have.

What if I didn’t sit?

Sam Falco

Yesterday, when I returned home after running a couple errands, I had a few tasks left on my to-do list. The familiar thought that crossed my mind was, “I’ll start them after I sit for a few minutes.” And then I thought, “What if I didn’t sit?” Sweetie wasn’t due home for a couple hours and there were many things I could do around the house beyond the basic to-do. What could I accomplish if I refused to sit?

A lot, it turned out. After knocking out the to-do list, I started tidying the office. It had become super cluttered over the past month. The built-in cabinet was a mess. The chair I used to like sitting in for journal entries was piled high with supplies I couldn’t put away because the cabinet wouldn’t hold anything else. Papers covered my desk. I kept at it until the only thing that still wants attention is a rolling cart that has an assortment of odds and ends. I’d have put them away, too, but Sweetie came home earlier than I expected and off we went for dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant.

I have developed a habit of doing a small thing and then rewarding myself by sitting “for a few minutes.” I have a hard time doing nothing, so I pick up a book, become absorbed, and a few minutes turns into thirty or more. I’ll set a new goal for when I’ll get up. It’s easier to keep reading and more fun, too. The cycle repeats and time slips away. I’ve read a lot, but necessary tasks pile up. The sheer volume of stuff to do intimidates me and… well, it’s so overwhelming that I have to sit down.

I don’t need to rest after fifteen minutes of light activity. Or even two hours. I’m even standing up as I type this post. I’ve put a sticky note on the cover of my Kindle, my laptop, and at the top of my computer screen: “What if I didn’t sit?” I bet I’ll get more done.

Ideal Day

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
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This prompt reminded me of an exercise a friend introduced me to: “the ideal average day.” Rather than describing the most perfect day you could ever have (which is how this prompt initially read to me), you think about the kind of day you’d like to have, on average, every day.

I like that focus better. The “most ideal” is a day you’re going to have once if you’re lucky. It may be unattainable and then you’re chasing something you can never have. And if you achieve it, it’s all downhill from there. Regression to the mean applies to more than statistics.

Rather than thinking about what the best day ever would look like, I prefer to consider the whole of my life. What’s my ideal daily experience?

What’s Important?

To answer that question, I have to first think about what’s important in my life. Sweetie. Creative expression. Learning. An income.

Yes, I would like an income. As a recently-laid-off guy, I miss the regular paycheck. (Or will once the severance runs out.) Do I want a job, in the form of a forty-hour a week gig? I am looking for one, and I will certainly take a suitable one when I find it. Unless I have another means of making money.

My ideal average day includes the things that are important to me, and it somehow includes an income. For this exercise, I want to envision an ideal average day where my income derives from my creative endeavors.

Morning

I wake up around six. Coffee is waiting for me because Sweetie gets up before I do. Don’t @ me; I’m not being sexist. She’s a morning person who gets up at least an hour before I do and she makes coffee. We have our coffee together if she hasn’t already had her two cups. Then we go for a walk together, pet the neighborhood dogs and cats, and come home for a light breakfast. After washing our hands, in case you missed the part about the neighborhood dogs and cats.

After breakfast, I take about an hour to write in my journal. That often segues into creative exploration that bridges into the rest of my morning’s creative expression. Most likely, that’s writing, although occasionally there’s a computer program I want to work on.

Afternoon

After I wrap up my creative morning, it’s time for lunch with Sweetie. We make it together. She tells me about her morning, spent in the garden. She’s seen new growth on her plantings, caterpillars going into chrysalis, and dozens of birds in the yard.

After lunch, I study or do research. Learning feeds my creative mind. Then I turn to business matters. Remember that income I mentioned? My creative work feeds it, and so I have to attend to it. The afternoon is when my analytical mind is at its strongest and the creative mind is quiescent. I leverage that pattern to play to my strengths.

Evening

Dinner with Sweetie. We cook together again, except on the nights when we visit our favorite restaurant. (Good Intentions. Try it. Your taste buds will thank you.) After washing up and doing whatever other daily housekeeping chores need doing, we go to the living room. The television is tuned to a soccer match. I’m not paying attention to it but I like the background sounds as I read fiction, or play a computer game, or write some more. Between 9:30 and 10:00, I brush my teeth and climb into bed. I sleep well.

What Mrs. Otto Taught Me

Sam Falco1 Comment

I learned to program in BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20 my parents gave me for my fourteenth birthday. I knew I needed to learn more, so I signed up for a computer programming class at my high school for my junior year. A schedule mix-up took over a week to sort out and I transferred in late. The teacher, Mrs. Otto, told me to do the best I could on the current assignment and promised to help me get up to speed afterward. The assignment was something simple like printing a multiplication table. The instructions said it should take ten lines of code.

I wrote it in one.

On a VIC-20, every byte was precious. You only had three kilobytes (yes, kilobytes) of RAM to work with. Line numbers took up memory, so I’d learned the value of cramming as much code as possible into a single line. To complete Mrs. Otto’s assignment, I nested two FOR loops and put all the operations inside the inner and outer loops. I may have used an array variable, too. I ran the program and showed it to Mrs. Otto. She said, “I can see that it works, but I don’t understand what you’ve done.”

Courage

Imagine the courage it took to say that to a cocky sixteen-year-old.

I later found out that this was her first time teaching BASIC programming and that she was new to the language. She could have said, “The assignment was ten lines. Do it right,” and dismissed me. Instead, she showed courage by admitting that she didn’t know something. I might have mocked her or replied with arrogance and impatience. She didn’t care. She wanted to know why what I did worked more than she wanted to appear knowledgeable.

Being able to admit ignorance, especially when you’re supposed to be “the one who knows,” takes guts. Mrs. Otto’s courage demonstrated the value of humble curiosity.

Empathy

By taking the time to understand why I chose to write my code the way I did, she also demonstrated empathy. When I explained how little RAM I was used to working with, she pointed out that the machines we had at school had much more RAM. Space wasn’t as big an issue. She said that part of good programming was making code easy to understand. Someone else might have to read my code later. Shouldn’t I make it easier on them?

Then she challenged me to rewrite my program. Could I do it in five lines? I could and did. Although I didn’t learn anything new about the language, I learned something new about program design.

Humility

Once she realized that I already knew all the concepts of BASIC that she was going to teach, she might have told me to transfer out, or let me treat the class as study period. Instead, she leveraged my skill and knowledge as a teacher’s aide. Sometimes she had me teach lessons and then critiqued my style. By stepping aside and letting me shine, she helped me grow skills I didn’t know I needed or wanted. Today, I’m a damned good Scrum Trainer and she paved the way for it.

I don’t know what I expected when I walked into Mrs. Otto’s class for the first time. Did I think I’d skate through an easy class for a semester? Did I hope to go beyond what I’d already taught myself? My journal from that time is of no use because I didn’t write it down. But whatever I expected, Mrs. Otto taught me more. I didn’t learn computer programming. I learned to be a better human.

Persona prompting

Sam Falco

In a recent post on using ChatGPT, I covered four prompt patterns I’d used for a specific task. Today, I want to elaborate on one of them. The persona prompt pattern is enormously useful, and I’ll take a deeper look into how to use it.

What is it?

The persona pattern is named for what it does: it instructs ChatGPT to respond as a specific person or type of person. ChatGPT’s training data is vast. As a result, it can be difficult to get it to focus on what you want. The persona prompt channels ChatGPT to select the kinds of details it should focus on as it generates its output. Focusing the output also helps when you aren’t sure what type of output you want, but you do know the kind of person you might ask for those details. For example, you might not be sure what to describe at a murder scene, but you know that a homicide detective could tell you what’s important and what’s not.

Pattern Structure

The structure is simple: “Act as a {persona name},” replacing the curly bracket text with whatever you need. “Act as a homicide detective…” in the example above. Then you follow it with the body of the prompt. Here’s an example:

Act as a medical historian and outline the important events in 17th century Europe.

You’ll get information about the Great Plague of London, the development of microscopy, and advancement in understanding human anatomy, among other topics. Omitting the persona produces output that describes events pertaining to wars, politics, and arts in addition to mentioning the effects of the Great Plague.

You can also append a prompt with this structure. For example:

The protagonist in my novel is a gambling addict. What are some things she might do to hide her problem from her family? Respond as a behavioral psychologist.

The last statement executes the persona pattern.

Variation: Outputs

A variation on the Persona pattern can help you narrow your scope, especially if you’re not sure what you want. The variation looks like this: “Provide outputs that {persona} would create.” Here’s an example:

My character wants to help a struggling student improve her grades. Provide outputs that a teacher would suggest.

I’m not a teacher, so I might use this prompt to know what kinds of assignments, exercises, or other tools a teacher might provide to the student. Then I could focus on the ones that support your story.

Uses

You can use the persona pattern to support your writing in many ways. Here are some things I’ve done with it:

  • Research assistant. While working out what a fictional Florida city might look like, I didn’t know how to start. I prompted ChatGPT to answer as an Urban Anthropologist and tell me factors I ought to consider.
  • Sounding board. “I’m having trouble coming up with a red herring for a mystery novel. Ask me questions about my plot from the perspective of a mystery reader until you can suggest some options for me.” That combines the persona with another kind prompt pattern, flipped interaction. ChatGPT probed what I already had in the way of plot twists before suggesting options that got my thinking started again.
  • Character development. I’ve provided the LLM with some details of the character’s background and psychology and then asked it to respond to questions as that character. That has helped me generate new ideas to deepen backgrounds, suggest motivations, and dilemmas the character might face.

You can combine multiple personas to examine a question from different perspectives. In the city-building example, I didn’t stop at Urban Anthropology. I also asked about the city from the perspective of the 19th century robber baron who founded it, a 1970s civil rights activist, and a teen who lives there today. Those outputs gave me fresh ideas to pursue.

These three ideas only scratch the surface of what you can do with the persona prompt pattern. Try it out, and please leave a comment telling me how it worked out for you.

Cheat GPT

Sam Falco

“But isn’t that cheating?” a writer friend asked when I mentioned that I’m learning to incorporate ChatGPT into my writing workflow. So we’re not friends anymore.

No, no, that’s not true. We had a fascinating discussion about it. I won’t try to reconstruct it, but I will dig into why I’ve come to embrace a tool that I, too, was skeptical about when it burst onto the scene not long ago.

And I was skeptical. Very. My initial experiments with ChatGPT produced poor results. Media portrayals of how it worked were shallow at best and often wrong. That, and what I saw people doing with it, led me to think of it as a plagiarism machine. After I explored its capabilities a little more I changed my mind. While it can be used unethically, that doesn’t change the value of the tool, and I don’t think it’s “cheating” to work with it.

CNC Routers and Woodworking

Bear with me on a digression. One of my hobbies is woodworking. That community has a lot of people who believe that using power tools isn’t “real” woodworking. It’s not butch enough if you flip a switch; you must do everything with hand tools. Of course, if you drill into that opinion (YSWIDT) you discover that they can’t back it up with much more than “because it makes it too easy.” Weird flex, my dude. (It is almost always a dude.) Do you fell your own timber, then mill it from the trunk, and so on? What does “too easy” mean?

But even people who accept power tools often balk at one in particular: the CNC router. A CNC (Computer Numerical Control) router uses computer code to cut complex shapes into and out of wood. Using a CNC router allows woodworkers to create amazing designs and shapes that would be difficult if not impossible to create by hand. An easy way to start an argument in the woodworking community is to talk smack about CNC machines, either pro or con. And the most common criticism is that using one is “cheating.”

That’s a load of crap. When you use a CNC machine, it’s only doing what you tell it to. It’s still executing on the decisions you make and the design you give it. It expands the range of what you can create. And by “you,” I mean “not me,” because I don’t have space for one in my shop. But I’d get one if I could.

ChatGPT is a Power Tool

Using ChatGPT is more complicated than using a CNC. You can’t put a slab of wood onto a CNC, turn it on, and expect something to emerge. Whereas with ChatGPT, you can certainly give it a shallow prompt and it will generate output that looks like something a human might have written. It looks like something that a particularly ignorant first-year high school student might have written, but it’s something. But ChatGPT is tool that can help you create something with greater detail and depth than you could without it, so in that way it’s similar.

Using ChatGPT looks like cheating because it seems like you’re getting something for nothing. And it’s fair to say that some people are using it that way. I don’t even have to cite any examples; you’ll probably see an article in the news *today* about how someone tried to pull a fast one with ChatGPT and it blew up in their face. Because ChatGPT is so much more robust at simulating human thought, it’s easy for people who are lazy, unethical, or both, to use it poorly.

It’s only “cheating” if you use it to cheat–such as trying to pass off its writing as your own. But that’s simple plagiarism, and it’s wrong whether you’re buying a term paper from a human writer and turning it in with your name on it or having a computer create the paper. Using ChatGPT as a sounding board, or a way to challenge your thinking, or to enhance what you would do on your own without it? None of those examples is “cheating,” unless you want to be like the weirdos who look down on people who use table saws.

Learning to use Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT will change the way you work. Word processors did, too. So did the invention of the disposable ink pen, and the fountain pen, and so on. The tool is an extension of the user. Learning to use ChatGPT doesn’t make you less of a writer; it only makes you a different kind of writer. It isn’t cheating. It’s adapting.

Are you using ChatGPT? What difficulties are you encountering with it? Leave questions in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them in future posts.

The cluttered mind

Sam Falco1 Comment
Bloganuary writing prompt
Where can you reduce clutter in your life?
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Before I address this prompt, I have to have a cantankerous old man moment: “Bloganuary” is a terrible, ugly portmanteau which we did not need. Ugh. It’s like trying to make “fetch” happen.

And now, we return to our regularly scheduled program.

Reducing clutter has been on my mind a lot lately. In November, I wrote about how Sweetie and I are digging out from two decades of accumulated belongings. We’ve tried and discarded a lot of hobbies, together and separately, but we never got rid of the stuff. It’s difficult to let go of the thought that we might get back to it, or to acknowledge that we aren’t going to get our money back by selling it. We’ve made progress, yet we still have a long way to go.

Clutter is not limited to things. Clutter can also be mental debris. Similar to the way our closets can be filled with belongings that are no longer wanted or useful, our minds can be cluttered with thoughts and behavior patterns that are no longer helpful–or never were. Hiding your feelings might have been an adaptive habit when you were a child, for example, but it sabotages your adult relationships. Some people learn not to trust their skills, or devalue them, and it keeps them from doing things they want to do.

Tasks are another form of mental clutter. We’re all busy. There are so many things to do, and the list never seems to get shorter, does it? Little tasks that will “only take a few minutes” multiply like tribbles, and “a few minutes” can wipe out an entire afternoon. We lack the time to think. We lack the time to focus. This is where I most need to reduce clutter in my life. I add tasks to the list without thinking about whether they are really worth doing, or asking if I am the one who ought to do them. I try to do everything.

When I was told my job would be eliminated, I thought at first that at least I would “get things done.” I deluded myself that what I needed was time. No longer tied to my desk, I would become a dynamo of accomplishment. To a degree, that was true. I did get a lot done. But I forgot that there would be other “to dos” and I found myself just as overwhelmed as before.

I have been working on cutting down that clutter. I started by switching to a paper calendar and managing my time. Something about writing tasks on paper helps me be more realistic about how much time they’ll take. With a context-free list of reminders on my phone, it’s easy to underestimate how big a task is. Or to flat-out lie to myself. “I know that’s an hour, but I’ll just have to do it in fifteen minutes.” I’m not joking there–I have literally told myself that, countless times. For whatever reason, blocking time on a paper planner forces me to be more honest about what I can do.

It also makes it easier for me to evaluate my capacity. How much time can I spend? When I see appointments, it forces me to reckon with how much time I’ll need to travel to and from them. Or if they are online, to allow time to clear my head before and after them.

With an honest view of how much time I have, I make better choices about how I want to spend it. Instead of trying to churn through as many tasks as I can in as little time as I can, I’m evaluating what is really important to do. I also reserve time for focus and defend against the intrusion of “just a few minutes” tasks that have nothing to do with what I’m focusing on.

Cutting down on that mental clutter isn’t easy, but doing it reduces stress and increases satisfaction. I’ll continue eliminating physical things I no longer need, but the most important clutter I can reduce is the need to feel constantly busy.