o i know how hard you try

on the bus, i met a boy who tries so very hard. things get tough but he wears jeans with determined creases and a black shirt. when he sat down next to me, i said almost out loud, i understand. i know how hard things get, and i know how hard you try. but his phone rang just then and the moment belonged to he who had selected it first. his mother, i explained. she calls every two hours and he patiently tells her exactly where he is.

i adjusted the AC duct. he opened and closed a book. we were two people traveling into the city together and i held his hand. he didn't turn. he held my hand back. warm, small. behind us, cable TV wires and crows rolled past like many pictures.

his stop came a few minutes before mine. i didn't know his voice but i knew his hand. and when he turned around, my face was a silhouette framed in the sky.


(experiments with flash fiction)

pune

i've been accepted to attend the open space writing masterclass next month in pune.
looking for a cheap place to stay/couchsurf there for a few days every week for 3 weeks.
also looking for nice places to sit, eat, people watch, write!
any info, let me know!

Ps, i love you

diti's teaching me photoshop!
my first assignment was to take this picture she shot and do "something" with it.
i used all my available skills to do this :) (you need to click for bigger version to read)
not entirely happy with it, but hopefully i'm getting there!

how to turn a human into a personal plaything

my zorro is a weird wonderful little doggie-boy
who spends pretty much his entire day either sleeping
eating
or trying to con people into letting him come up to my room
when someone does bring him up here
all he does is sit in a corner by the door as if he's been punished
and makes us feel all guilty
then we rush to open the door and he goes charging back downstairs
and repeats the whole exercise a few minutes later
i'm not sure what it all means
maybe he has goldfish memory
or maybe it's his way of keeping us on our toes
by keeping us in a constant state of self doubt
he's either completely brainless or an evil genius
three years and i haven't figured it out
o he's evil genius alright...


ladies and gentlemen, the face of evil...

collab

i've always been fascinated by collaborative projects of any kind. fascinated and trepidated, to use a big word incorrectly. they always get me happyexcited, but i must admit on some days and with certain kinds of tasks i'm not too good at working in teams. maybe that's the side of me that emerges when i edit. i kind of like the loneliness of the work. i like being able to sit in a corner and bury myself in something for days. and then i like being able to emerge from it, as if breaking water, dying to talk, share, meet people. and then go back into it when my batteries run out. that's probably also the introvert in me talking. (reminds me of this piece i found via rands on twitter. mostly true but for the "exuding calm" part. if anything introverts exude awkward restlessness, i feel).

so i felt a bit understandably shaken when i came across bite-size edits (all hyphenated and all!), a collaborative editing project. well, proofreading is the better word. but that's meant to be a solitary job, i damn near wailed when i saw this. and in the next instant thought, but that's how people used to think about writing once upon a time too. right? and about a whole lot of things that are being done in a collaborative way today.

i know this discussion is very old school web, circa 2005, but having been in such situations before, i can't help thinking editing is something best done by a single person, or at least a select group of people carefully coordinating with each other. and proofreading even more so. should the compound adjectives be hyphenated? is it british or american grammar? is there an oxford comma? these are the kind of answers style guides offer, the kinds of decisions arrived at after some amount of discussion. and some might argue readers don't care about this stuff being inconsistent, only editors do, but truth is a reader will notice inconsistent punctuation and poor formatting. no not consciously. very few will say, "o this semicolon is incorrect and look no indent before this one paragraph!" but these inconsistencies make an overall impression on the reader's mind that he can't quite specify but simply feels.

reminds me of when i first started working in digital and would often find myself saying things to designers like, "i'm not sure, there's something about this page, it just doesn't work," and only later learned to say, "well the form fields are all different sizes and the text isn't aligned and the footer's position changes from page to page by a few pixels." i couldn't quantify it, but i knew something wasn't quite right.

so my worry with collaborative projects is with these not-quite-rights.

but there are two things here. one, the collaborative model lends itself to to some projects very well. crowd sourcing is sufficient proof of this and i don't need to editorialize. and two, no collaboration is 100% collaborative. the line's usually always drawn somewhere. there is often clarity between the input of different participants. and someone usually cracks the whip. and that's all i'm asking.

rant complete.

mnml

i've become addicted to these three new tools literally within minutes of discovering them. loving the new minimalistic wave of software and tools appearing everywhere (all slightly apple-y in nature, and that is in no way a complaint). they're usable, pretty, and also free, which always helps. sorry, i'm poor.

the first is a software i've been aggressively selling on twitter for a few weeks now. ommwriter is currently a mac-only (but soon coming to pc) writing software. i know, such an abused term that is. but this seriously works. you don't even have to use it to know it works, just watch this video. so simple and pretty i almost cried.

Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.

favorite feature: ambient key clicks that give all the pleasure of a typewriter with all the beauty of a mac. i love number 5 the most.

next is a browser-based app (yay for cloud) with a very clever name. teuxdeux is everything i was looking for. everything in the to-do tool category that is. again, just watching the demo is enough to know i'm right. i'm right.

TeuxDeux Demo from TeuxDeux on Vimeo.

favorite feature: the "someday" bucket :)

lastest (and i'm afraid to say leastest but definitely worth a mention) is scribbles. i heard of this through sam brown, mister exploding dog, who apparently uses it to make some of those scaryamazing characters. this one has fewer features than ms paint, but the ones it has are the ones it needs.

psst. teuxdeux was designed by swissmiss who's threatening to turn it paid soon. at which point i'll go back to covering my desk in post its.

and when ommwriter becomes unaffordable i think i'll just have to switch careers.

broke my phone :(

but look how pretty it looks!