Typing and The Letter “C”Posted by dhoffman on February 2nd, 2010
First off is this kind of cool math problem (which you don’t have to be a mathhead to find cool and interesting) from j-walkblog.com. I’ll quote it below for the lazy who are only allowed to click so many times in a single day:
You arrive in purgatory to find it’s just a typewriter on a desk. As you take your seat, you notice that the C key is glowing faintly.
A demon says, “All you have to do is type the integers, in order: ONE, TWO, and so on. The first time you strike the C key, you’ll be released into paradise.”
That doesn’t sound too bad. Assuming it takes 10 seconds on average to type each number (and that you spell each correctly, in English), how much time will pass before you first type the letter C?
The answer:
You’ll type for 300 quintillion years before reaching ONE OCTILLION.
And I’d bet you I’ll have to go back in and fix the code on that quote there once I hit publish. So it goes.
Last night was a writey sort of a night, but it was only writey after I’d ran a couple errands, cooked some dinner, paid the bills, entertained the pets (my lord, Missy is a demanding kitty — she leaps up onto my desk and mews in my face, which sets Jack the Dog off barking, which gets her going worse — and all while I’m trying to figure out how to describe entering your kitchen to find a strange woman you may or may not know waiting to talk to you about pastries and beer), dealt with a whole lot of email and then, finally, focusing my thoughts to actually writing.
I got a bit done.
More important, I got my head (somewhat) on straight. I think I posted last week that these next two or three chapters are going to be pretty much wholly new. This is a result of stuff I killed from the First Draft in earlier chapters, and now — heh — I really can’t use the old stuff anymore.
This is happening a bit; lots of new stuff, but there’s actually a lot of the old surviving through. Repurposed, if you will, like the Army coming in and taking over a resort or park to set up camp for a relief effort. “Put to good use” would be the best way to put it. Sometimes it’s whole paragraphs, sometimes it’s nothing more than a quick turn of phrase, used in a way I’d never really intended the first time around.
It’s immense fun.
Last night I wrote and rewrote the same tedious scene probably twenty times before I realized I was a moron, trashed it, kept the one good line (about “ghost freckles” for the curious) and moved things directly along. Works much better now, and then I got to have one of those moments where, after fighting for two to three hours to not suck, something wonderful came out.
Then I had to sort out what came next.
Which, I think I did on the train into work this morning, so that’s a nice thing, too.
I figure I’m somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 of the way through this draft of Animals. The pace I’m setting is alright, and I think I’ve got about another 1/4 of the book that’ll move over almost completely from the First Draft. I told Jessy this weekend; “I was thinking I could print out the first fifty pages and let you take a look, only it’d probably piss you off when you finished them and there wasn’t anything else to read.”
She seemed hopeful, though, so I’m going to have to push on. Maybe when I’ve got a hundred pages I’ll let her take a look . . .