I've just finished chapter 4 on my novel. I'd gotten a bit bogged down in research on drug culture, since I want my character to have just exactly the right kind of OD experience, but I've sorted that out now. (If anyone knows how much any street drugs cost in Kansas City circa 1985, please speak up!)
With chapter 4 done, I'm pausing the novel long enough to dig through my obscene backlog of unpolished fiction. It's damn well time to get stuff out there. I've got
Once that's done I'm strongly considering a piece for Haunted Legends. To which I'd also just like to say a huge thanks to both
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ellen_datlow and nihilistic_kid for having an open submission period.- Music:Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - What Happens Next
In preparing to write a description at the beginning of 4, I did a bit of research I really should have done before chapter 1 and neglected to do because I thought I could trust my memory.
Hah hah. WRONG!
At the beginning of the book, it's June 1985. My main character runs a Commodore 64 BBS and has a huge collection of demos and games -- in fact, he's got a hard drive, which was a hugely exotic item at the time. Due to plot things, his collection of demos becomes important and he trades a bunch of them with another character.
The problem is that there was no established demo scene in 1985. The first few appeared that year, morphing out of the crack intro, but there wasn't any sort of established scene until later in '86.
For a variety of reasons I can't easily just move the narrative forward a year or two (there's a bunch of plot stuff depending on very specific and time-limited tech). It's note a huge problem -- I've already solved it, in fact. I'll just make the focus in that part of the book be entirely on cracked games.
It's a problem that got me thinking of prevention, though. So I went out and got a copy of The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford, and I'm going to order up a couple more books from Amazon. I don't want to get caught similarly ill-informed when it comes time to write the government agency parts of the story.
Between phreakers, crackers, carders, a registered nurse and the FBI, CIA, NSA and NRO I am going to be utterly swamped in jargon. It's going to be interesting balancing it all so it's comprehensible to readers. Not everyone liked the new Miami Vice movie, and a commonly cited reason was that it made pretty much zero concessions to explaining things to the audience.
- Music:Fields Of The Nephilim - Last Exit For The Lost
By the time I was done taking notes I'd developed a formula for the rate at which humans use volumes of time (measured in liters).
This pleases me.
- Music:Dead Can Dance - A Passage In Time
Do you box up everything because it might be useful some day? Have you been doing so since 1985? Are you a computer and/or gadget freak?
I need stuff from the 1985-87 era. What kind of stuff?
- Sharper Image catalogs
- Issues of Computer Shopper, Byte!, Compute, Computer Gaming World (or any other publication of that variety -- and yes, I'm aware there is a collector's market for some of that stuff; I don't want to collect -- see below)
- Manuals for telephone equipment (consumer or otherwise)
- Any ads for tech stuff from any magazines of the era
I don't need (or even want) actual physical copies. Scans are ideal and they only need to be good enough to be legible. If you can't scan them yourself, I'll happily pay for postage, scan them on my end and return whatever you sent me in the same condition you sent it (or pay you should something evil and postal happen in transit or while in my care). I don't even really need entire magazines. The ads are most useful to me, though reviews of hardware are great too, as well as speculative articles. I am completely aware that in asking for scans of ads and reviews from 1985 era Computer Shopper I am asking for A LOT. I'd be completely happy with a representative sample of just 10-15 pages, preferably covering several different areas of tech (pc, C64, Atari, printers, bulk floppy sales, etc).
Just to make matters easier, you can be enormously useful to me if you've got any of the stuff listed above just by leaving a comment here with some of the following information:
- Prices of floppy disks, tractor feed paper, ink ribbons
- Vendors for above
- Location of users group meetings and what their focus is
- Names of equipment manufacturers, what they make, how much it costs
- Ads for things that sound stupid or impossible
Also, if I'm being completely dense and missing some available public source (or even quasi-public) for that stuff, I'd appreciate being told I'm a bonehead who doesn't know how to google. Providing you also include a pedantic example of how I should have done it.
If you don't have anything of this sort, but know people who might, please send them the link to this page.
All queries should be directed to the comments, where I'll happily arrange whatever variety of transport is required.
- Music:Enigma - Endless Quest
Today I wrote a character going to a party, getting some PCP and jumping into the great big swimming pool of radical depersonalization. It was extremely fun to write, but I enjoy taking my characters to places they don't intend to go. Though, to be fair, this character signed up for more or less what she got.
In other news, I've got an art project to finish now. I think if I'm to balance the two impulses, art must come after writing. Doing the pixel-pushing thing is no sweat after I've been writing for a while, but trying to write after using the visual part of my brain for a bit simply doesn't work. I not only forget how to type, but putting words into sentences gets to be an insurmountable difficulty.
But you know what? At the moment, I am loving my novel so much.
I hope I'm not liking my book so much it's making gregvaneekhout angry at his.
I've been hanging out in this park watching the other kids play for long enough that I know there will come a day when I'm certain that the novel I'm working on is made entirely from raw sewage, so I'm just going to bask in the love I feel right now. Also, I am doing art things.
- Music:Talking Heads - Drugs
- Music:Depeche Mode - Little 15
I've been using the C64 Scene Database to download old C64 demos and cracks and games to get a better handle on the era of the story. It's been really fascinating to see that era through the lens of history and to be able to compress things or expand them as I choose. It's also been neat to see a lot of the old demos I'd watched on a proper PAL C64 (emulator) so they work correctly, but that's another story completely.
At the moment though, I'm at Panera and I've discovered that there's a nanny filter on their free wi-fi and it considers the Scene Database to be pornography. Odd.
Mind you, a nanny filter hasn't stopped me even a little bit. I'm working on a story about hackers, can I really justify letting something so petty get in my way? Of course not. So I'm hacking into a database about hackers so I can gather research to write a story about hacking. Delicious!
- Location:Panera
- Music:Employees arguing over hours
