{"id":552,"date":"2016-01-02T13:33:43","date_gmt":"2016-01-02T21:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pixel-stained-wretch.com\/wordpress\/?p=552"},"modified":"2016-01-02T16:25:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-03T00:25:05","slug":"dear-sir-or-madam-would-you-read-my-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pixel-stained-wretch.com\/wordpress\/2016\/01\/02\/dear-sir-or-madam-would-you-read-my-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Sir or Madam, Would You Read My Book?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took me years to write,\u00a0won\u2019t you take a look?<\/p>\n

Actually, it both has and hasn\u2019t taken years to write. The idea for the\u00a0book, Fuzzy Bytes<\/a><\/em>, first occurred to me in the 1980s, when I was working at UCLA, helping faculty and students use a\u00a0new-fangled thing called\u00a0\u201cword processing.\u201d One service faculty frequently requested from me was to\u00a0convert their word processing documents\u00a0from one format to another.<\/p>\n

It was a crazy time: personal computers were rapidly evolving, standards were fluid, disk formats and data formats were myriad, and almost nothing was compatible with anything else. I remember looking one day at an 8-inch disk from an NBI word processor\u00a0(a standalone piece of office equipment that was briefly popular at the end of the\u00a01970s; \u201cNBI,\u201d by the way,\u00a0stood for \u201cNothing But Initials\u201d\u2014really!) and thinking, \u201cWe have, and can still read, manuscripts that are over a thousand years old, but five years from now no one will have the slightest clue about how\u00a0to read\u00a0any of the documents stored on\u00a0this disk.\u201d<\/p>\n

I imagined the plight of a literary scholar living half a dozen decades from now\u00a0suddenly discovering the rough drafts of a major literary figure\u2019s works, all stored on disks that were only compatible with devices that had passed from the scene half a century earlier. How would this scholar proceed? Could<\/em> this scholar proceed?<\/p>\n

I made a stab at writing the story of such a scholar years ago, and got 40 or so pages into it when I abandoned the tale.<\/p>\n

However, this year I found myself with some free time that coincided with the yearly creative demolition derby known as \u201cNational Novel Writing Month\u201d (NaNoWriMo<\/a>, for short). During NaNoWriMo, aspiring writers and other self-destructive individuals attempt to compose at least 50,000 words of a novel. I dug my\u00a0old Fuzzy Bytes<\/em> manuscript from the file cabinet (it\u2019s on paper; the digital draft is, not surprisingly,\u00a0inaccessible\u00a0😉) and figured I would try to finish it.<\/p>\n

Instead, I read a few pages and tossed it aside: it was terrible. But the underlying idea still intrigued me, so I decided to start from scratch and just start writing. Which\u00a0I did on November 1, 2015.<\/p>\n

By the end of the month, I had reached the 50,000 word goal with several hundred words to spare. Unfortunately, the story was far from complete. Since then, I have continued to work on the book (though not as feverishly as I had during\u00a0NaNoWriMo).<\/p>\n

As of today,\u00a0January 2, 2016, the story\u00a0still isn\u2019t complete: it will take another three chapters to wrap the tale up, as far as I can tell (no, I don\u2019t know for sure: the story has a mind of its own). But I do have enough written, and in reasonably good shape (I think), to start showing it to other people.<\/p>\n

And so, as a New Year\u2019s present for (or curse upon) the world, I have begun to post chapters of the book<\/a>. I\u2019m starting today\u00a0with the first two chapters, and I plan to post an additional chapter every week or so. I hope that by the time I\u00a0post Chapter Sixteen (the last one written\u00a0to date), I will have finished the few remaining chapters.<\/p>\n

The race is on!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took me years to write,\u00a0won\u2019t you take a look? Actually, it both has and hasn\u2019t taken years to write. The idea for the\u00a0book, Fuzzy Bytes, first occurred to me in the 1980s, when I was working at UCLA, helping faculty and students use a\u00a0new-fangled thing called\u00a0\u201cword processing.\u201d One service faculty frequently requested from me … Continue reading “Dear Sir or Madam, Would You Read My Book?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[44,45,46],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary","tag-announcement","tag-nanowrimo","tag-novel"],"yoast_head":"\nDear Sir or Madam, Would You Read My Book? - Worlds of Wanwood Leafmeal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.pixel-stained-wretch.com\/wordpress\/2016\/01\/02\/dear-sir-or-madam-would-you-read-my-book\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dear Sir or Madam, Would You Read My Book? - Worlds of Wanwood Leafmeal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It took me years to write,\u00a0won\u2019t you take a look? 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