God only knows...

This weekend was interesting... I spent the vast majority of my Sunday at work writing, or trying to write. I had a 600-700 word piece due today, and it was a bitch.

The longest I was able to make it was almost 600, even after I went back and stretched each sentence.

Long story short, I was supposed to write a profile/ description of this guy, his product and his company, trying to focus on the product, and if shit got tight, use him and the company...

I talked to him, did a little BS-kind-of interview, because originally, it was going to be a brief note, kind of a hey-check-this-out thing, and all I was able to get was about 150 words. These were a good 150 words, though. Nice, short and sweet.

**fuck the "Harvard Comma"**
"That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far."~ Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark

Then I found out I had to stretch it. Exhausting. Bah.

begin/

No matter now many times you sit down to write, you always face the same dilemma. Or at least, the same one for me. Come to think of it, it's a little worse now that paper isn't around anymore. The only place you can really find it is on the shelves of really rich people, or in the treasure chests of the rest of us, under our pillows, hoping dearly that one day we'll be able to hold the physical form of our work, hold it in our hands and say "this! all of this! it's mine! you cannot take it from me! you can take my body! my clothes, my family, my future! but you can never take away the fact that this is mine! for ever and ever, in my mind and now, once if never again, it exists in form, to be handed off from person to person like back when I was a child!"

Things are so different now. I remember when I was young, I was fortunate enough to live next to a thrift-shop. People were always coming by, dropping books and clothes and broken toasters (but they looked like new!) in front of the door, even though they had a sign in the window that said "closed Sunday." Things were different then, right?

You could even think things were getting better. People weren't dying against their will (as much anyway), and they were living on and longer and longer, but this was still before that got to be a problem.

Where did all of this start? I think it started with paper.

With paper, you kind of have a limit. On a screen, however, you really don't; it doesn't work the same. You can have the approximation of what used to be the standard, back before stories were called "books" in honor only, and give a guess as to how many words you could fit on a page, and most of the word-processors will give you a barely-visible dotted line to show you, you've make a dent.

Dent in what, though, that's the issue. With screens, there really is no end. The only clear end occurs when the power run

/end

Not very long ago, 5 days, actually, I started reading THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It's odd to me... Only done the alternate history thing knowingly a few times before...

In the immortal words of The West Wing, "What's Next?"