Hard to the Core
I was reading Electric Spec's interview with Robert Sawyer, and paused over his comment regarding his WWW trilogy's Webmind character as being the hardest writing task he'd ever set for himself.
That made me wonder about my own hard tasks. So, here's a quick rundown, unprioritized, of writing tasks of all sorts, set by myself or someone else, that were sometimes insurmountably difficult, and often resulted in failure.
1. DASH 7 lighting system troubleshooting trees. Bah! That was the last technical writing task I worked on at DeHavilland before leaving the company to write a novel, and go to university. That singular task was so mind-numbingly boring while at the same time so anxiety-raising that I just could not take it any longer. In fact, I never completed the task. And it was probably better for air travelers that I didn't.
2. An Essay on Decartes' 2nd Meditation. First-year philosophy. After leaving DeHavilland, and after working on a novel for a year, going to university was a real mind-fuck. It was one of the first essays I had to write, and I had no clue how to do it. Getting that paper back was a lot like the scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie gets back his theme: "C plus!" You'll shoot your eye out!
3. My novel Trajectory (still unpublished). After 30-some-odd years, the novel at least now makes sense. This was the one project I kept walking away from, after spending months and months at a time working on it. In its various manifestations, it ran anywhere from 180,000 words, down to 100,000 and back up to 140,000.
4. A series of algorithms to parse blocks of text into individual sentences. This arose out of a project for Hughes Aircraft Systems Division (Richmond, BC) pertaining to the Canadian CAATS air traffic control system between 1993 and 1997. The requirement arose out of a need to populate a requirements tracking database with unstructured text taken from requirements specifications. Relying on the LISP programming language and regular expressions, the specifications were successfully parsed. You'd think that it wouldn't be too difficult, but when documents are filled with abbreviations, various uses of apostrophes, quotation marks, numbered lists, reference notes, etc., identifying the bounds of what constitutes a sentence becomes fairly complex. The work was successful, and resulted in a document-based interface to the requirements tracking system, including transaction processing for changes implemented in the documents.
5. Quantum Music. In 1975, I worked extensively with electronic music (using tape manipulation, and analog synthesizers). I was striving to develop a new musical language and notation (as many others had and have done). What arose from that was what I called Quantum Music. This was an internally consistent set of rules that permitted the composer to draw on the spectral frequencies of any matter as a reference "keyboard" from which compositions could be created. Notation consisted mostly in graph-paper plots of frequencies that could be manipulated through music-like means. Structured, yet also highly artificial, QM led ultimately to a musical dead end.
That made me wonder about my own hard tasks. So, here's a quick rundown, unprioritized, of writing tasks of all sorts, set by myself or someone else, that were sometimes insurmountably difficult, and often resulted in failure.
1. DASH 7 lighting system troubleshooting trees. Bah! That was the last technical writing task I worked on at DeHavilland before leaving the company to write a novel, and go to university. That singular task was so mind-numbingly boring while at the same time so anxiety-raising that I just could not take it any longer. In fact, I never completed the task. And it was probably better for air travelers that I didn't.
2. An Essay on Decartes' 2nd Meditation. First-year philosophy. After leaving DeHavilland, and after working on a novel for a year, going to university was a real mind-fuck. It was one of the first essays I had to write, and I had no clue how to do it. Getting that paper back was a lot like the scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie gets back his theme: "C plus!" You'll shoot your eye out!
3. My novel Trajectory (still unpublished). After 30-some-odd years, the novel at least now makes sense. This was the one project I kept walking away from, after spending months and months at a time working on it. In its various manifestations, it ran anywhere from 180,000 words, down to 100,000 and back up to 140,000.
4. A series of algorithms to parse blocks of text into individual sentences. This arose out of a project for Hughes Aircraft Systems Division (Richmond, BC) pertaining to the Canadian CAATS air traffic control system between 1993 and 1997. The requirement arose out of a need to populate a requirements tracking database with unstructured text taken from requirements specifications. Relying on the LISP programming language and regular expressions, the specifications were successfully parsed. You'd think that it wouldn't be too difficult, but when documents are filled with abbreviations, various uses of apostrophes, quotation marks, numbered lists, reference notes, etc., identifying the bounds of what constitutes a sentence becomes fairly complex. The work was successful, and resulted in a document-based interface to the requirements tracking system, including transaction processing for changes implemented in the documents.
5. Quantum Music. In 1975, I worked extensively with electronic music (using tape manipulation, and analog synthesizers). I was striving to develop a new musical language and notation (as many others had and have done). What arose from that was what I called Quantum Music. This was an internally consistent set of rules that permitted the composer to draw on the spectral frequencies of any matter as a reference "keyboard" from which compositions could be created. Notation consisted mostly in graph-paper plots of frequencies that could be manipulated through music-like means. Structured, yet also highly artificial, QM led ultimately to a musical dead end.
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