Weeknotes 2024 W13: The Spicense

March 25​–​31, 2024
1800 words

Quick bits:

It’s more and more clear that I am a morning person.

As part of the short fiction writing workshop, I committed to writing a daily evening reflection. It is similar to my morning pages, but simpler: just bullet points with no detail.

And yet, I find it so difficult. In the evening, my brain stops working. I can’t get any creative or intellectual work done. I can’t focus. After 9 PM, I am a zombie, only fit for consuming entertainment. I can’t even write bullet points!

I’ll stick to the morning pages only. No evening reflection for me. There is no point in forcing myself to do something that does not fit.

Being social in Berlin is still an odd challenge. It has been getting better, but I still don’t feel I quite have the right amount and the right quality of social occasions.

At the start of the pandemic, there were attempts are creating real-time social spaces on the internet. Overwhelmingly, these did not work for me. I don’t think it’s just me: online spaces don’t even come close to being social.

Consider the online short-story writing workshop I am taking. People log in right when it starts, and then as soon as the workshop is over, everyone immediately disconnects. There is no time to socialize — neither before nor after.

The Shut Up & Write sessions in Berlin are nice, though. There’s a little socializing before, though afterwards people also tend to leave quickly. What works much better is arriving early, by as much as half an hour: there’ll be people who arrive early too.

On Friday (Good Friday), a bunch of us took the train to Frankfurt (Oder), shutting up and writing all the way there. We hopped across the Polish border to Słubice and had delicious pierogi, then took the train back to Berlin. An altogether lovely excursion.

The job search is still muddling along. Rejections are piling up. I’ve never had a job search process this arduous. It’s been over two months with no clear results!

I even got a rejection from SoundCloud, a former employer. I got a rejection straight up, without even an initial call. You’d think that re-hiring a former employee (who left on friendly terms) would be a no-brainer. Alas.

My idea of moving to London is at risk. With the job market this dry, it’s most likely not smart to move to London. I don’t want to be in the situation of losing my job and being kicked out of the country when I can’t anything new quickly enough.

There’s still the chance of getting a Global Talent visa, but that takes time and money, and I’d rather figure that out at a later point in time.

I wrote some flash fiction: Flood.

I had an itch that I could not get rid of until I wrote that story. I had to write.

Afterwards, though, I felt drained, even after writing such a tiny story. The process of writing was arduous, and after finishing it, I felt that I never ever want to write anything again, ever.

Luckily, that feeling lasted a just few hours. The next morning I was already thinking about what other bits of fiction I could work on.

I write fiction because I can’t not write fiction. The outcome doesn’t even really matter: I write because I need to.

That doesn’t make it easier or less painful, however. Writing is tough, right?

For a while, I’ve had this question in my head: can fiction writing be taught?

I have read plenty of books on writing. Many of them are inspirational and encouraging, yet what I practically learn from them is quite limited.

When I try to write using techniques from guidebooks, the outcome is never something I am content with. All of the writing that I’ve put up on my web site is the result of writing in the only way that I know: writing word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, and then seeing where I end up. Pantsing, as they say. The story builds itself as I go. The first draft is usually chaos. The second draft is a reinterpretation of the first draft, and it is that draft that usually works well — but still I don’t use any of the techniques I’ve learnt from books.

Perhaps the best way for me to learn is to read. I can learn from good fiction, but also from bad fiction: reading something unpleasant can make me understand what makes good fiction good.

Learning to write fiction is vastly different from doing more technical work like software development or technical writing. In the latter fields, there are relatively objective criteria for measuring quality. Books on software development and technical writing give very concrete advice that is immediately applicable.

Books on fiction writing seem like they could have some of that, but so little of it resonates for me.

So, can you learn to write fiction? Yes. But can it be taught? I don’t think so; the only thing that works — for me, at least — is self-directed learning, and there is no substitute to learning by doing.

I believe the same is true for acting. Can acting be taught? Not really. Can it be learnt? Yes. Books and teachers and coaches are helpful, but there is no substitute to doing the work, and repeatedly trying and failing.

I am making progress with the budgeting app prototype!

The parser rewrite in Go is now complete. It takes about 50ms to process 67 000 lines of data. That is delightfully fast — two orders of magnitude faster than the Ruby implementation.1

As I’m making progress with the implementation, the conceptual differences with YNAB are becoming clear. In my budgeting app prototype, the way money is allocated is easier to understand — no confusing “allocated in future.” It also supported multiple currencies, and split transactions are simpler.2 I am still early in the implementation process, so it remains to be seen how it will evolve.

I learned about poison pill licenses recently, and I love the idea. All my open-source work I’ve licensed under quite-permissive licenses like MIT.

Lately, though, I’ve found it more attractive to not release my new work at all. It seems not worth to create something and then be stuck with the burden of maintaining it. This is especially true when my work ends up being used by corporations.

So, I’ve made an effort to create my own license. Behold the Dune license:

Copyright 2024 Denis Defreyne

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

  • The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

  • You must not fear the Software. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. You will face your fear. You will permit it to pass over you and through you. And when it has gone past, you will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only you and the Software will remain.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Highlight mine.

You are permitted to call it the spicense.

Entertainment:

Links:

Entertainment links:

Tech links:

  1. The reason why the Ruby implementation is slow is not because Ruby is slow, but because the implementation is just inefficient, and I haven’t bothered to change it. ↩︎

  2. Arguably simpler — it uses double-entry accounting, which I believe is simpler (especially for complex transactions), but people might disagree. ↩︎

  3. Pillars of Eternity (Obsidian Entertainment, 2015), published by Paradox Interactive. ↩︎

  4. Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023), published by Larian Studios. ↩︎

  5. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire (Obsidian Entertainment, 2018), published by Versus Evil. ↩︎

  6. Cory Doctorow, Attack surface (New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021). ↩︎

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