not falling down

Hey, I’ve talked about her pseudonymously before, but Hillary Eason is an old friend (whom I haven’t actually seen in person since 2002) and one of my favorite writers and thinkers. Now that she’s operating under her own name, you should go see why she’s a perennial pick for my Internet All-Star team.

Anacrusis/Ommatidia is done! I started it in July of 2003, wrote 2003 stories, and now it is my 30th birthday and my present to myself is, I don’t have to do it anymore. (Landing on this date is only sort of a coincidence: I calculated the timing versus post count last summer, and you have probably noticed some bonus stories appearing on weekends since.)

The website won’t go away, but the every-weekday part of the project is over. You will probably see the occasional story pop up in future, if you keep the feed in your reader, and I’ll try to do a bit of curation and shuffling. I may end up keeping Anacrusis as the chronological record and Ommatidia as more of a categorized library. Or: not.

Now follows a list of things I got out of this deal.

• About 266 subscribers on Google Reader, which is to say, by my estimate, 133 total readers
• Some useful characters
• A lot more confidence about my word choice
• Very little confidence about my plotting
• A great deal of evidence that I thought stupid things were clever at 1:30 in the morning
• A name-drop in a doctoral dissertation that I’m not allowed to read
• A gig writing for one of my favorite comic artists
• Some really nice letters from cool people
• Approximately 2003 fewer hours of free time

If you read and enjoyed this thing, thanks, and I’m glad. I owe a debt to Holly Gramazio, Sumana Harihareswara, Leonard Richardson, Andrew Cole, John Dixon, Stephen Heintz, William O’Neil, Kevan Davis, Ben Wray, Riana Pfefferkorn, Joe McDaldno, Tim Coe, Dave Michalak, Ben Carson, the indefatigable Geoffrey Pieper, Christin Clatterbuck, Kris Straub, Penny Arcade, and all the regulars from the LJ/FB feeds for putting the occasional gleam on my raw monument to doggedness. Many of these people have done me the additional kindness of writing guest stories! I’ll be posting them over the next couple of weeks.

I look forward to having my evenings back so I can devote more time to writing code and also homoerotic fanfiction about Inception characters. You think that’s a joke but it’s not.

It’s a threat.

I used to talk about Sigurdur Petursson all the time? His spirit has surfaced again, in the person of one Hideaki Akaiwa.

Hey, you guys know Andrew Cole is back in the saddle and knocking it out of the park over at The Fabian Society, right? I bet you thought I mixed that metaphor, but you’re wrong! The park is for polo.

If you’re enjoying the Ashlock stories, you will definitely want to follow along with Wolverton, a fantastic series in the same world and format that Ben Carson is posting on a matching schedule. He also keeps coming up with cooler and more exciting twists, which is great, not at all like he’s making me look bad and had better WATCH HIS ASS OR ANYTHING CARSON

And I like it! But I think that, in a fit of pique, I won’t be buying any more of his clothes. Screenshot against its inevitable disappearance:

For your convenience and edification, I present herein the Brendan Adkins Lunchtime Heuristic Decision Chart. It has served me well for years, and I can confidently recommend its immediate adoption.

I am, under normal circumstances, a very reliable exhibit of the human behavior pattern that goes “my stupid system sort of works so I will never change it.” But there are times–rare ones–when my desperation to avoid writing fiction actually overcomes my desperation to avoid writing code. Tonight, after three years of counting words for Anacrusis with a hacky PHP script I wrote in 2007, I finally reached one such point.

This is the word counter I’m going to use from here on out. Unlike the old script, which I was reluctant to publicize because it involved processing user-submitted text on the server side, this is all Javascript and it updates in real time. You can also click the little tab at the bottom if you want to see what the hell it thinks it’s doing.

My dear friend Joe Mcdaldno–writer, game designer, and fascinating Renaissance human–was kind enough to interview me about Anacrusis for his nascent radio show/podcast, The Stories We Tell. This marks the third podcast to feature me, and my second time on Canadian radio. Soon, listening to my nasal drone trail off in the middle of half-baked jokes will be completely unavoidable!

Incidentally, the term I can’t think of at around 16:45 is syllepsis (and more generally zeugma).

But just to be clear, the above statements are not causally connected:

“Separating artist and art can just plain be difficult. More than a decade ago, I talked over this issue with a prominent, veteran science-fiction author who’s won every major award in the field. He came down firmly on the side of the importance of the art over the artist. And then he paused, thought about it for a minute, and added something to the effect of ‘Except when it comes to Harlan Ellison. Ever since I met him, I can’t read anything he’s written without hearing it all in that high-pitched, angry little voice of his.’”