Bes Sculpture

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After a long break since my first attempt at sculpting (the Book Trolls), I have returned to make a gift for a friend: Bes, the ancient Egyptian-turned-Mesopotamian dwarf-god of play, music, dance, and sexual pleasure. He was a very popular house god. Put him in your home and he wards off evil and will fight off snakes and demons. And he also just seems like he would be great fun to hang out with.

The original inspiration.

I first came across him in the book Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary by Jeremy Black and Anthony Green while doing research for my bronze age novel. Since then I have seen and read about many different versions, all wonderful, but the one that always stuck with me was the first. So that’s what I based mine on.

I made no attempt to make it “professional”, or sleek or perfect, which I feel many people pursue in our 3D printing world. I wanted it to feel rough, crude, and hand-made, and to look like something dug up out of the earth.

So I dipped it in coffee, rolled it in coffee grounds, and then weathered it with acrylic paints diluted in water. Overall, I am very happy with it, even though there are areas I could have done a much better job.

I hope to do more sculpting, and not wait years this time to come back to it.

Beta Release of my open source minimalist novel-writing program, WareWoolf

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I’m sure any professional programmer who took a big sip of coffee before looking at WareWoolf’s code would immediately spit it onto their monitor. But I’ve been using it for a year now, and it works! So I’m doing a beta release and calling it v0.9.0.

You can view it on Github here: https://github.com/brsloan/warewoolf

I am nervous about it, as I know that it must have bugs that only come up when someone other than me uses it, and I’m afraid someone will lose their work and want to murder me, but that’s life on the internet. We must not live in fear.

My legions of avid followers will no doubt recall that I built a word processor (“writerDeck”) and wrote WareWoolf for use on it. So it is designed primarily for use in a writerDeck with no mouse, but works fine on desktops too.

Really, it started as just an exercise to see if I could build a simple text editor in Electron, but once I saw how easy that was, I started expanding it and adding tools I wished other applications had, until suddenly I had a (nearly) fully featured novel writing program. So since it started as just a test/lark, I did not use good clean code principles (encapsulation, etc.), and while it works the code is a kind of spaghetti ball. Eventually I hope to rewrite it properly.

I would also like to write an even more simple, terminal-based version in C, but that will take learning C, and it will be a while before I can give that the proper time and attention it needs. I must, after all, balance building fiction-writing tools with actually writing fiction. No doubt my split attentions will prevent me from mastery of both things. Life would be simpler if I had fewer interests, but far less interesting.

A Note on /r/WriterDeck

On a slightly related note, the subreddit I set up last year to build a community of people interested in building their own writerDecks is now up to 610 members. There are dozens of us! And many people on there have produced beautiful and interesting machines, such as the Mythic I and the Muse. I knew there was some interest in these machines, but never expected to gain so many members so quickly.

As Raspberry Pis grow more available again, I hope to see many more, and to build many more myself!

WareWoolf Alpha: A Single-Purpose Writing Device I Built

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word processor with vertical screen and keyboard, made of copper and dark stained oak with brown retro-styled keys

I’m a huge fan of the Astrohaus Freewrite, but it is only really good for first drafts. You can’t edit on it. I wrote my own software, WareWoolf, for editing on a computer, but I missed the isolation of the Freewrite–the separation of my writing tool from my everything-else tool. My distraction-doom-and-death tool. So I decided to build my own modern word processor, or “writerDeck”.

side view of word processor with vertical screen and keyboard

I made it out of oak and sheet copper I folded/hammered into shape, making it all up as I went along. The screen is just a premade all-in-one housing for a Raspberry Pi which I painted, stripped the speakers out of, and mounted on a DIY copper plate/hinge. The white cord poking out the top is not a permanent feature–its only there because the global microprocessor shortage has Raspberry Pis out of stock everywhere. So right now it runs off my Raspberry Pi 400 externally.

The butt-plug you see there is made out of cork I took from a wine bottle and cut down to protect the keyboard cable from the copper and keep it snug. The black cable coming from the screen is the power cord. If I do a revised version, I’ll think up a better system for handling the power cord than just wrapping it around the neck. But it works.

Eventually, I’d like to replace the screen with e-ink. But until then, I’ve turned the backlight down as much as it will go. I can’t wait to put it to work.

The Tick Nominated for PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize

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My short story THE TICK was nominated by the excellent people at Barrelhouse for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Each journal is allowed to nominate four first-time writers, and there are a lot of journals out there, so the odds are much longer than that graphic implies, but I’m happy just to be nominated. After struggling so long to get anything published at all, to have my first story selected for this is a great encouragement.

Now I need to get back to writing more fiction–and better.