• The Machine That Made Us - 5 comments
• Required Viewing: I Met the Walrus - 6 comments
• Movies You'd Erase Your Memory to See Again for the First Time - 115 comments, and a bunch of stuff added to my Netflix queue
• Gaming History: Discovering Deep Ms. Pac-Man Secrets - 5 comments
• On Turning 30 - 30 comments

The "beach" biome inside Biosphere 2.

Not sure what this is, but it's some kind of plant.

(Surprise! It's maybe a photo-blog again!)

• What Books Can't You Put Down? - 145 comments
• The Most Heavily Annotated Flickr Photo - 1 comment
• Unexpected, Unwelcome Visitors - 64 comments
• NOVA: Cracking the Maya Code - 5 comments
• "The Wire": A Panel Discussion at Harvard - no comments yet

• Apostrophe Atrophy - 10 comments, and possibly a little too hyper-specific for the room
• Hofstadter Docudrama: "Victim of the Brain" - 1 comment, but surprisingly widely linked (note: I seem to get picked up in Seed's Daily Zeitgeist a lot...)
• 5 Reasons We'll Miss Arthur C. Clarke - 11 comments and 832 Diggs
• McSweeney's Lists - 7 comments
• How to Use Toilet Paper - 32 comments and 1,554 Diggs

• Workplace Experiments - 20 comments
• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - 36 comments and 2,703 Diggs (my second most popular post of all time!)
• The Hindu Milk Miracle - 10 comments
• Kelvin is Lord! - 3 comments
• What Makes Mathematics Hard to Learn? - 17 comments

• One For the Kids: Storyline Online - 19 comments
• Crazy Garfield Variants - 21 comments
• Interview: "Girls Rock!" Filmmakers Arne Johnson and Shane King - 3 comments
• Nerd History: Clarus the Dogcow - 3 comments

• Fun With Signs: The Lowercase L - 23 comments
• Howard Rheingold on Cooperation and Competition - 3 comments
• Wikipedia's List of "Lost Work" - 7 comments
• How You Put Yourself To Sleep - 47 comments
• Kluster - Social Networking for Projects - 1 comment
• Photo Challenge #3: Show Us Your Junk - 9 comments

• Victory Mail: WWII’s Patriotic Post - 1 comment
• Buy the World's Greatest Music Collection - 8 comments
• Clinton Vs. Obama: Their Flickr Pages - 13 comments
• Project Orion: The Nuclear Spacecraft - no comments

• The Great British Venn Diagram - 2 comments
• The True Story of Audion - no comments; a tragedy!
• The $39 Experiment - 52 comments, including one by the experimenter himself!
• 5 Ways to Get Closer to Your Garbage - 2 comments
• 4 Strange Greenpeace Moments - 1 comment

• Required Viewing: How Do Ants Know What To Do? - 2 comments
• One Year Ago Today: Advertising, Remixed - 1 comment
• One Year Ago Today: Nerdcore Hip Hop Could Reign Supreme - 7 comments
• Super Mario World + Quantum Physics = Lots of Fun - 8 comments
• On Quitting - 42 comments

• J.J. Abrams on Tannen's Magic Mystery Box - 3 comments
• Who Are the Top Amazon Reviewers? - 6 comments
• The Amateur New York Subway Riding Committee - 3 comments
• Plane vs. Conveyer Belt: Hell Yeah the Plane Takes Off - 19 comments and some ouching on my part
• 5 Famous Missing Fingers - 7 comments

• Required Viewing: People in Order - 8 comments
• Send Us Your Photos: The Oldest Thing You Own - 12 comments
• Geocaching: A Global Treasure Hunt - 19 comments
• Mac Tips: Backup (Part 1) - 4 comments, and 26 people signed up for MozyHome Free
• Top 5 Folky Covers of Rap & Hip-Hop Songs - 43 comments plus 684 Diggs (including plenty of snarky jerk comments over on Digg)

• David Simon on Writing, America, and TV - 2 comments
• The BBC's 100 things we didn't know last year - 1 comment
• The Guardian's Writers' Rooms - 4 comments
• How We Work - 6 comments
• A Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie - 10 comments

• Greatest Hits of '07: "Invisible" LOL Cats - 6 comments
• Greatest Hits of '07: What's the Oldest Thing You Own? - 43 comments
• On Beards and Their Circumstances - 53 comments
• The Lost "Star Wars" Opening Scenes - 60 comments and 1,684 Diggs
• Al Gore's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech - 7 comments

• Suspicious Checkout Line Combinations - 107 comments!
• Greatest Hits of '07: Drunk Emailing - 10 comments, plus 122 on the original post
• Greatest Hits of '07: Gotta Read 'Em All - 12 comments, plus 216 on the original post

• Wii Fit Parody - 4 comments (and worth a look, if you're feeling slightly snarky)
• IKEA Naming Conventions - 15 comments
• Naming Conventions - 91 comments
• Why Cell Phones Make Speakers Go "Blip Blip Blip Buzz" - 15 comments
• The Triumphant Conclusion of "The Wire" - 3 comments (so far)

• Your Most Annoying Office Interruptions - 80 comments
• Cubicle War is Hell - 6 comments
• Reading Levels of Popular Blogs - 28 comments
• 1-800-GOOG-411 - 8 comments
• 4 Things You Didn't Know About Johnny Appleseed - 7 comments

• Amazon's E-Book Vision: "Kindle" - 15 comments
• Brian Piana's Textless Web Site Art - 1 comment, but it's a nice one
• Kids' "Paper Laptop" Designs - no comments

• iTunes U Expands - no comments
• AskOxford's Ask The Experts - 5 comments
• Pogue's Imponderables - 26 comments
• The Photo Detective - no comments
• What's Your Halloween Giveaway Strategy? - 70 comments

• The LOLCat Bible Translation Project - 13 comments
• A Little Diagram Humor - 3 comments
• Dice Stacking - 14 comments
• Le Grand Content - 5 comments
• The Secret Life of Machines - 3 comments

• Calvinball - 7 comments
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut - 5 comments
• The Whole Five Feet - 11 comments
• The Smells of Fall - 22 comments
• Buy a Friend a Book (Week) - 3 comments

Thought on blogging: it's getting both interesting and tiring -- I think these things are related. What I mean is, I finally think I understand what I can do with the mental_floss blog -- I can pose interesting experiential questions to this audience to trigger a personal interaction. The best examples so far are asking about authors you've "finished" last week, this week's one song on repeat, the post a while back about a borrowed cat. The 120 Minutes post brought out some of that connection for people of a certain demographic. In general I think my contribution to this blog will be in finding and relating these sort of conversation-starting questions -- this is a bit different from the (very well done) "list of things" or "where are they now" posts that are the core of the blog, but I think it's my personal brand of content. In some ways, the novel writing is seeking a similar connection, it's just not as direct or immediate.

Having said all that, I don't think I can figure out a new compelling question every day (nor will the audience really want to engage that much, I don't think), and filling in all the days takes some doing. But...so far, so good.

• A Series of Digressions: Storytime - 4 comments, and genuinely a fun thing to watch
• Keyboard + Dishwasher = It Works! - 11 comments
• Listening to One Song on Repeat - 59 comments
• Visualizing Movie Dialogue - 8 comments, mainly related to layout problems
• Archives: The New York Times and Siskel, Ebert, and Roeper - not really any comments, so much

• R.I.P., Alex the African Grey Parrot - 1 comment
• Help Find Steve Fossett - 22 comments, including (a bit unexpectedly) a bunch of "screw that rich daredevil" stuff
• Gotta Read 'Em All - 90 comments; most comments yet for me!
• Advanced Tetris Gameplay - 4 comments
• Documentaries I Like: Cosmos - 4 comments

• The Bizarre World of Ferrofluid - 5 comments
• Visualizing Consumerism - ooh snap, no comments!
• More "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks - 29 comments, including a mini nerd fight about whether frequently-updated site was an example of improper punctuation
• The Forgotten Lens: 50mm - 10 comments

• Trek Analysis: The Red-Shirt Phenomenon - 11 comments
• Fun Podcast: Coyle and Sharpe - 2 comments
• My New Favorite Thing: The Sound of Young America - 3 comments (though one is by Jesse Thorn)
• Rephotographs - Third View Project - 2 comments
• My Credit Card Experiment - 19 comments

• Accio Harry Potter Audiobook
• Survival Tips From Popular Mechanics
• De-Garfed: Modified Garfield Cartoons
• The Items We Carry - 34 comments
• My Favorite Documentaries: Sherman's March

• Daguerreotype Q&A
• iPhone Versus Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - including a hot graphic I made
• Survivorman Returns - including many comments pro/con Man Vs. Wild star Bear Grylls, who they seem to consider a rival to Les...I think Les is in his own category, personally
• What to Do With a Borrowed Cat? - 49 comments: we discover that cat people read Mental Floss Blogs
• My Ball of Wires - 23 comments, yay

• Rubber Ducky Flotilla Nearing Britain
• Summer First Aid Tips
• Inbox Zero: Inbox Currently at 100

• How To Be An Alaskan Fisherman
• iTunes U Debuts
• The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks - 20 comments! A fairly popular post (for me, anyway)

• The Internet Archive Part 1 - The Wayback Machine
• The Internet Archive Part 2 - Moving Images
• The Internet Archive Part 3 - The Prelinger Archive
• The Internet Archive Part 4 - Audio Archive
• The Internet Archive Part 5 - Texts and Education

• Fainting Goats
• Patrick Blanc's Vertical Gardens
• 600-Year-Old Music Found Encoded in Chapel Walls
• George Orwell - Why I Write
• TED Talks - Smart Lectures

• Apple's Knowledge Navigator
• Seeds in Space
• The Dullest Blog in the World
• Listening to Words - Online Lectures
• Advanced Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) Variants

• Image Macros: Intro to LOL Cats
• Image Macros: "Invisible" LOL Cats
• LOL Cats: I Can Has Cheezburger
• Image Macros: I'm in Your X, Y'ing Your Z
• Image Macros: Oddballs and Advanced Forms

• April Fools' Day - Tech Prank Roundup
• EMI to Sell DRM-Free Music
• If You're Not Watching...
• ThisToThat.com
• Some People Really Love LOST

• The Open Letter-Off of '07
• The Mother of All Demos
• The Best Video Game Ever?
• Gadget Watch: Image Toasters
• Photographic Convergence

Week 4

• How to Have a Lucid Dream
• The Congressional Bunker
• Brain Training Toilet Paper
• Fun With Ear Wax
• Did You Feel it Too?

Week 5, from Las Vegas!

• How to Tie a Tie
• The Brightest Light in the World
• The Valley of Fire
• Las Vegas: The Koyaanisqatsi Connection
• How to Lose With Style

Week 6

• Fun With Time Lapse
• DARPA Funding Better Prosthetic Arms
• Happy Pi Day!
• New Species of Leopard Identified
• Learn Via Podcast

Week 7

• Gasoline Powered Boots
• The PopSci Podcast From the Moon
• Radio Podcasts: This American Life, Fresh Air
• Signs of Life
• MIT OpenCourseWare - Free College Courses Online

Week 8

• Witty Lectures Presented By John Hodgman
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
• Movie-a-Minute
• Book-a-Minute
• The Help Cat

• Advertising, remixed
• Nerdcore Hip Hop Could Reign Supreme
• Atari 2600 Cartridge Source Code as Art
• X Is the New Y
• Free Stuff on the iTunes Store

UPDATE - here's the second week's worth of blogging:

• Terminator: Do Robots Think in Apple II Source Code?
• Spamusement: Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!
• Visualizing the Blog "Echo Chamber"
• What's That Book?
• Computer-Generated Zeppelin

As you can see, I'm covering technology, nerd culture, that sort of thing. This month's print magazine contains some of my work in the Scatterbrained section (the HAIR bit), and upcoming issues will feature additional Scatterbrainification, on subjects I mustn't divulge.

Those wishing to drop me a line or hoping to read entertaining, cryptic comments made by my pseudonymous friends may enjoy the newly fabulized Chris Higgins Myspace page. Friendship available by request.

The only bummer is that you need to register on the site, but I found it painless. And how cool will it be to be part of the Groundswell of Internet Support for Mr. Riggs's film?

More stained glass from Hinton.

By popular request, just a bit more neon signage from Dunedin.

I find the results pretty fun. You find yourself realizing that a lot of Russian people (or at least, people typic in some Cyrillic alphabet) use LiveJournal.

Oh, a word of warning: sometimes there's porn.

A bit more of that neon "Dog Grooming" sign. I think it's interesting because of the contrast between the clean bright colors and the dirt and dust on the sign (it's in a storefront and is a little scuzzy). Well, and that it's neon, and neon = pretty.

Part of a neon sign saying "Dog Grooming" in scenic Dunedin, Florida.

As of Saturday, my father is now an ordained Deacon in the Episcopal Church! In six months he'll be a full-fledged priest. This is a picture of a stained glass window at the Ascension Episcopal Church in Hinton, West Virginia where he gave the Deacon's Mass this past Sunday.

(My tribute to the dullest blog in the world.)

But then, Lyza emailed me today to alert me to something called Frak Party. It's a mechanism for hosting BSG viewing parties. Since I already go to a weekly LOST party (okay, I hear you starting the 'nnnnnerd' in the back of your throat, stop it), I figured I'd go ahead and host a Frak Party. I posted my party four hours before the premiere.

Three random internet people showed up (WITH ONLY FOUR HOURS' NOTICE), and they were totally fun!

So we're going to have it every week from here on out.

If you're in the Portland area and want to watch BSG at my house, comment or email me or something.

Okay, so last time I blogged about the Gold Star Method. Now I have actually gone through and marked up my first 57 pages (six chapters) with stars. When I bought the packs of stars, they actually had gold, silver, blue, red, and green stars. So I used them as follows:

• Gold - Major good bit
• Silver - Minor good bit
• Blue - Eating disorder (theme)
• Red - Setting/Florida (theme)
• Green - Psychological problems (theme) [aka 'mental problems' for my short story readers]

I put the gold and silver stars in the left margin of the paper, and the other three (the themes) on the right. This took a while. Fortunately, I recently read the whole thing aloud to myself, so I was pretty familiar with it. I could recognize bits that I thought of as gold/silver stars easily -- and those are the most important. The others were sort of incidental, since I happened to have extra colored stars hanging around.

First lesson: it takes a lot of gold stars to mark up six chapters. I used a whole pack of 440 labels (stars provided by Avery), using up all the gold and silver stars, and about a quarter/third of the others.

Then I went through and plugged in all the star counts into a spreadsheet. This also took a while.

Second lesson: because of the way the document is formatted, a few pages are extra short. These are pages right before a chapter break. So they'll have artificially few stars. I added a column to my spreadsheet to note these, and ended up using that column to also track notes about particular pages -- explanations for why particular pages had lots of stars.

Third lesson: when you are tracking five data elements on the same image (see above), it's really hard to see what the hell is going on. So here is one with JUST the gold/silver (major/minor) stars:

Some Analysis of the Gold/Silver Stars

Fourth lesson: I don't see any clear relationship between gold and silver stars. They are not linked. So there are some pages with more silver stars than gold stars, and some the reverse. Sometimes there are none of one or the other.

Fifth lesson: Silver stars are more stable (in terms of number of stars per page) than gold stars. For most the period, you see one to three silver stars per page. This deviates in parts, but it's a pretty okay trend.

Sixth lesson: Something weird is happening between pages 1-12 in terms of gold stars, and 11-18 in terms of silver stars. This likely means that I should focus on these pages to spice them up.

Seventh lesson: What's happening on pages 29, 31, and 45? Those are all points where either gold or silver stars crash. Answer: 31 and 45 are both "short" pages before a chapter break, so we can ignore them. Page 29 is not a short page, but it has a healthy number of silver stars. Maybe figure out a way to cram a gold star onto this one.

Eighth lesson: overall star counts appear to go up as we get further into the story. I don't know what this means. Perhaps it means I had more to drink when I scored the later pages. Perhaps it means the later pages are better. If we assume drinking is not a factor in this equation, I think it means that the first 20 or so pages need attention.

So the whole point of this was to quantify the relative goodness of various pages. The logic is that pages with few/no gold/silver stars are not as good, and they need to be punched up. By punched up, I mean they need to be rewritten, as that is my current method of punching. I could have told you before this analysis that the first chapter (pages 1-12) had problems, but I didn't know the second chapter was also weak (it ends on page 19). HMM. Another interesting lesson is that parts of the story I used to think were pure gold are now just kinda meh. This keeps happening. Either this means that I'm getting better at this, or I just get sick of things I wrote a long time ago. Probably some of both.

Procedural note on the length of a page: for this analysis, we are talking about single-spaced pages with 1" margins, 12pt Times font. I gather that in The Industry one generally refers to One Page as a double-spaced page. So anyway, for whatever that's worth. I guess the point was that this is the first half of the book, as it represents 114 pages double-spaced, which is pretty close to half of the manuscript.

Ninth lesson: if we assume gold stars are the major indicator, page 22 is the best. This would make sense, as it's the page where we introduce Amry, the third main character, who is the focus of the following fifteen pages or so. Also, pages 33 and 37 seem pretty good. Page 33 is where we find out that Maggie (the fourth main character) has had a serious life event (ahem), and page 37 is in the middle of Amry's monologue about her past. So I knew before this that all of these were strong points, but it's interesting to see evidence of this on the chart.

Tenth lesson: it's hard to draw many conclusions about the other three colored stars. Looking at the combined chart (above, top), the only thing I can clearly see is that the "psychological problems" theme shows up pretty regularly. The others seem to come and go, and the eating disorder thing clearly spikes at one point. That makes sense. I think the good news is that the psych theme is indeed showing up consistently. In previous drafts, this wasn't the case -- I think I dropped this shoe way too late, without it being a part of the narrative. So that's good. I don't know what conclusions I can reach about the other themes...I think they're okay, since they're things that naturally come and go based on the action. So, like, whatever.

Question: did anybody read this far? If so, I am amazed at your interest in my work, and you deserve a free soda.

UPDATE: okay, after hearing from everybody and his mother, I realize that people did indeed read this far. Sodas all around.

I'm in Florida to attend a high school reunion. The actual reunion is tonight and tomorrow, and I spent part of today catching up with Carl at the old Perkins on 41. Dude. Venice. I'm writing a detailed account of the trip in an article. It promises to be funny and touching, and above all LONG. (It's already twelve pages long, and I just got here last night.)

I have been exchanging text messages with Jake Logan. He's coming down from Gainesville shortly. My wireless plan charges 25c per text message. I should probably change that. I should take a shower. Maybe I'll do that now.

Oh, the photo: that's this device in the Venice Public Library that, get this, is NEW since I was here last (ten years ago). I have never seen this thing before. It's built like an Apple ][e, but enormous, and sitting there in the Reference section. Oh, the library also has a copy of John's book, and I took a picture of it sitting there in the Walter Farley Youth Wing.

I have long debated whether to talk about the writing process in my blog. This is an issue for me only because I don't want to look like a loser, talking about my writing process when I'm not even published. (Well -- not lately, anyway.) But at the end of the day, I figure there are more people who give a shit than might think I'm lame, so here we go.

Lately I have been facing a problem: when I rewrite a section of the current novel (currently entitled Hi From College), I find that the rewritten part is much better than the original. The reason this is a problem is that I'm working on a set of five chapters (or so) to send to my editor, to demonstrate a nice thorough rewrite to her. Okay, so the reason this is a problem is that it's a lot of work. I had hoped I could kind of pick through the existing work and change a few sentences, and that would suffice for the rewrite. The reality appears to be that when I rewrite a whole chapter, it gets way better. This means maybe I should rewrite all the chapters. I don't feel like rewriting all the chapters, as I have already rewritten several of them multiple times already, and I want pizza from my toaster NOW. (That's an amusing reference to a particular TV advertisement from the late 90's). However, here is the data: it gets better when I rewrite it. So I should do that, regardless of how long it takes.

So I have been avoiding just flat-out rewriting whole chapters, except for Chapter Five, which deals with my roommate "Rob" at school, who is going downhill during the chapter. I decided that the original chapter was so atrocious (really, kind of mean-spirited and just shitty) that it required a rewrite, and the new version is much more subtle and smart. Okay, so that's done. But what about the other four chapters?

So for some weeks, I sat here, kind of paralyzed. What should I do? Should I suck it up and rewrite the whole book? That would take a long time, and would actually obliterate a lot of what I think of as pretty good writing. On the other hand, it would likely fix parts that are boring or poorly-written, and introduce brand new awesome parts. Clearly the right long-term answer would just be to rewrite the whole damn thing, though that would take another year.

So this week, I decided upon a solution: the gold-star method.

Here's the idea: print out the pertinent bits, then read through them (out loud). When I come across a part that is very memorable, mark that part of the page with a gold star. When I come across a part that is just "pretty good," mark it with a silver star. The idea here is to mark up a big body of work (say fifty pages), then measure it to get an idea of what a typical value per page is for gold and silver stars. Then go through and rewrite the pages that don't have enough gold and silver stars (on a page by page basis, rather than a chapter basis). Ideally, this means that I keep the good writing (the gold and silver bits), and rewrite the parts that need rewriting. Aren't I clever?

Erin suggested that I should market the Gold Star Method. I will set up a series of seminars after I get famous. You just wait.

And a final one from the Welches archive: some sort of fuzzy yellow flower, covered in little insect friends. Are those Solitary Bees? I hope so, as I'm using those for a depressing metaphor in an upcoming book.

On a bit of fallen-down tree, this mossy situation has developed.

Duck. Swimming. ("Bird! Bird! Dude, there's a bird there!" as William and I would say, circa 1999.)

Some more from the vaults. This is some kind of seed pod device.

Randy Riggs and myself in New York, circa 1996. (Checking out Tisch at NYU, but in some park or other.)

This one's from the deep vaults. William Maier, Betsy Herman, Randy Riggs at Pine View. Winter, 1996.

Another from the vault: a tree at the La Brea Tar Pits. It has some tar on it.

For the two of you who haven't talked to me about it, I've been working on a Young Adult novel called HI FROM COLLEGE for some time now. I actually started a second YA book, tentatively entitled THE MURDER GAME (which has nothing to do with actual murder) in April, and that has been going pretty well -- I'm at 80 pages of first draft now. They're different, but follow the same narrator at different points in his late adolescence. HFC is about the first year at college, and starts the summer before college at FSU in 1996. TMG rewinds two years to show the summer of 1994, when the narrator is sixteen and at smart-kid camp (shout out to John Green's AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES for the succinct naming of said camp).

I started on HFC in 1998 as a therapy exercise. I was in talk therapy at FSU, and found myself telling some stories that seemed to have value outside of the room. I think I started with the Sandy Shores material (which actually occurred during my first summer -- between first and second semesters at school), then moved on to telling the story of my first semester. Those of you who have read the recent drafts should be familiar with this; if you haven't read a draft, email me and I'll send you something soon. I am running low on first-time readers, though, so am hoarding them for after this next revision.

Anyway, so HFC became a series of short stories over about nine months of work, back in the Nineties. I spent the winter after school (1999-2000) working on it (among other things, like Robofilms.com) in an attic in West Virginia. I ended up with a pretty complete (but out-of-order) draft, which I proceeded to put on the shelf and stop working on for five years.

In 2005, a friend-of-a-friend asked to read it, and I sent it to him. After he read it, he sent it on to his editor at a real live publisher. Since that time, I've been working loosely with this editor on revisions to the manuscript. I feel really privileged to be working with real people in the real industry on this, and I work hard to bring the quality of the work to that level.

I spent a good eight months or so (2005-2006) working on a complete revision of the manuscript, primarily making it linear, but also expanding several major story lines, and fixing a bunch of broken or incomplete plots. It became a completely linear book, with a beginning, middle, and end. Prior to this, it was totally out of order -- and not in a good way. It was just kind of chopped up.

While I was waiting for feedback on this revision, I first took a month off, then began working on my second book, the aforementioned THE MURDER GAME. I'll post some samples when I'm closer to a first draft. Basically it's smart-kid camp in high school. There is a single, strong love interest in this story (markedly different from HFC in this regard) who is based on a great friend of mine, a great poet. You'll hear more about her and the story in due time. There's lots there, I'm just telling you now.

Last week, I went to New York for work -- my cool job, which I shall not link for fear of getting Googled inappropriately, but anyway -- to consult with potential clients. While I was there, I met with the aforementioned editor for the first time -- previous contact was just over email. I got a bunch of feedback about where to take the next revision. The gist of it was that it's now WAY TOO LINEAR, and I have lost the sense of reader bewilderment that was good in the original draft. In the original draft, the out-of-order bits had an effect of confusing the reader, and in a way that was a really positive effect. I need to reproduce that feeling, without re-chopping the story (well -- let's say I want to keep the good things about the new draft, but I need to add back this other thing; I can't just go back to the original draft, since so much is better now). So I have a plan, and am working to edit the whole thing to bring back more of the crazy and reduce the passages of explanation that make it too comfortable and "normal."

If any of my dear blog readers have more questions about the book(s), please post them or email me, or invite me to Club 21 for a drink. I have a lot to say about this stuff.

William in my hotel room at Randy's wedding. (One from the vault.) Not pictured: Ransom Riggs, John Vidas.

A couple of dandelions atop Mount Tabor in Portland. And no, I did not blow on this after taking the picture.

This is what you see when you take a nap atop Mount Tabor. There's a flight path right over it.

Two blocks from my apartment. Reminiscent of that REM "End Reconstruction" road sign from the Fables tour -- perhaps less cerebral.

Waiting for the train to the airport. Circa Thanksgiving 2005, at the Lloyd Center (NE 11th St.) stop. Let's hear it for white balance, people.

I have a little blue hyacinth on my desk. It smells like hyacinth.

And these are some more little irises.

Here's a picture of some teeny tiny irises growing in a windowbox on my porch.

Here's another one. Possibly good soothing desktop wallpaper?

I went to Pittsburgh to visit my brother Mike over Thanksgiving, and noticed that the light coming through his front door (the glass bit of the door, anyway) made colorful patterns on the wall. Here's a closeup.

Randy's new movie Spaceboy is coming out in February. Check out the trailer! (Note: I helped put up the web version of the trailer; if you have problems viewing it please let me know.)

Earlier this year, I visited the historic Hotel Harrington in Washington, DC. Their web site is sort of interesting -- one thing they mention is that they were the first hotel in town to get air conditioning in 1938. I'm all about the air conditioning. So how does the climate control system work at this place?

This is how you operate the heater:

?? What does the asterisk mean? Is it OFF or ON or WARM or what? Is 1 the coldest or the hottest? How come I can turn the dial to the "Braukmann" position? Anyway, this occupied my thoughts for quite a while. Since it controlled a radiator, it was very hard to tell what effect (if any) it was having on the actual heat being produced.

Okay, so how about that sweet 1938 air conditioning? This is how you adjust the coolness:

If you pull on it, it maybe gets colder? And this is what that control leads to:

Yum. I ended up opening a window, which was fine, and watching a whole lot of Queer Eye. (They have cable with Bravo!)

Blue water/sewer/something caps on the sidewalk in LA. What a lovely shade.

Some dudes making salad behind glass. In LA.

Apparently people paid lots of money to be listed on that wall-o-names on the right. Suckers! Next earthquake that thing's so going to be a pile-o-names.

Hey gang - long time no blog. This is more of Davida's glass work. From an installation in Portland. Also has been stolen a lot for MySpace layout backgrounds.

This is a shot of the outside of the party tent at Lyza's (and David's) wedding in the desert last night. This shot makes it look creepy, but it was actually festive.