By now you’ve heard that Copyblogger’s Twitter Writing Contest is over, if you were following it. Of the dozens of prizes handed out, the best prize was unexpected: the winners scored a mention in the LA Times. Talk about instant exposure.

Instead of wasting time wondering how close I came, I’m following a tip from screenwriter John August (via Daring Fireball): take a good piece and reverse engineer it. “Think of yourself as an ordinary mechanic given the task of reverse-engineering a spaceship,” he says. “Figure out what the pieces do, and why they were put together in that way.”

First Place

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill. (Ron Gould)

This one has a perfect three-act structure. The first three words are a killer hook. The second sentence sets up the conflict, the third brings it home. It makes me wonder where the narrator found the note, and what happened to him or her — in the future, in the past, whenever. First through third place all made great use of the last-sentence twist.

Second Place

Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head. (Anthony Juliano)

“Tony was a snitch” — again with the hook. You know exactly what’s coming when you read those four words. But you want to know who had Tony whacked and, of course, where they found that head. Also, what’s the narrator’s relationship to Tony? I believe someone commented that this one would make a great novel opener.

Third Place

When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven. (Thelonius Monk)

This one is my favorite. It packs so much tone and character into a small space — you can almost see the sepia photograph. You get everything you need to know about the relationship between the narrator and his father. It’s economical and understated. Contrast the laconic bittersweetness of this one with the emotional tempest in the next one…

Honorable Mention 1

Happily sobbing she held the boy, her memory of his violent conception falling away. She had learned to love him, this would be her revenge. (Melissa Pierce)

This one hits pretty hard and never lets up. “Happily sobbing”, “violent conception” and “revenge” are tempered by “she had learned to love him” — a triumph of will over emotion. I have to take a couple of points off for a missing comma after “sobbing” and a misplaced one in the last sentence (it should be a semicolon or a dash).

Honorable Mention 2

The priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other. The silence spoke volumes. (Derek)

My second favorite. Death and mommy issues are always good material. At first it seemed to me that “at the funeral home” could be cut without taking anything away from the story, but I think the word “funeral” in the first sentence is necessary to set the mood.

Congratulations to all the winners! I’ll be stalking you all on Twitter soon.

My old reading list was getting long in the tooth, and it was a pain to update, so yesterday I replaced it with the Shelfari plugin. If you’re on Shelfari, click through and add me as a friend. I know, it’s yet another social network, but they have a Facebook app, so you can keep all of that sort of thing in one place.

Speaking of Facebook apps, Bryan took his Facebook application from zero to live in about five minutes. If you’re interested in liturgical music with a modern edge, please take a look at Sharebit.

I have the day off today, so I’m going to go knock out some chores and then get to all that writing I’ve been putting off. Somehow, it still creeps down the priority list even on free days.

What have I been up to for the past month?

• I got sick of writing “I’m a big slacker” posts. No one wants to read those.

• Besides paying work (which I could use more of), vacation, and family time, I’ve been reading the Bible through, following World Cup soccer, and learning the game of go (research for a novel… at least that’s the excuse I use). What’s so interesting about soccer and go? They’re both incredibly elegant. Simple rules, endless possibilities. Americans may tell you that soccer is boring, but they aren’t paying attention to what happens between the scoring. Go is the one game the computers can’t beat us at.

• I haven’t opened my RSS reader in at least a month. If I open it, I’ll find thousands of headlines screaming “READ ME!” with no filter to screen out stuff I don’t care about (that’s why I miss SearchFox). There are feeds I really do want to follow, like Signal vs. Noise or 43 Folders, but even the good ones are gateways to massive time wastage. I’ll end up clicking through to another and another link. If I blow an afternoon on surfing in the interests of “catching up”, there will still be 2000 new headlines tomorrow. “Catching up” is a myth.

I don’t want to contribute to the noise, either. I hate the term “musings” that so many people attach to their blogs. If you ever catch me using it, quit reading. I haven’t had any thoughts that were original enough to post, or worthy of the time. I can’t seem to write a post without spending 30 minutes cleaning it up and messing with links. After I update my site, I have to go check everyone else’s to see if they’ve updated theirs… and, of course, leave a comment so they come back and check mine.

The problem with the blog format is the signal-to-noise ratio. It’s too easy for us digital kids, Generation Soundbite, to crank out (and consume) superficial “musings” like there was nothing else important to think about. I’m writing this post in a notebook. I wanted to avoid even the overhead of turning on the Powerbook and getting distracted from writing.

I got a new book light before vacation. It only really works with paperbacks (so I guess I need to spend even more money on the hardback version… brilliant marketing). So I went to the library in search of a decent paperback to take out of town. I stumbled over two classics I’d never read: East of Eden and Fahrenheit 451. I started the latter first because it’s shorter, and closer to my usual SF/fantasy light reading territory. In 451 (which I haven’t quite finished), books were banned, not because of any subversive or anti-establishment content, but because people just quit reading. Attention spans weren’t equipped to handle anything tougher than TV. Burning the books was just entertainment.

(There are some scary foreshadows of the reality TV trend, as well as people who walk around all day with earbuds or cell phones stuck to their ears.)

Our fascination with “musings” is like crying on TV. Ever notice how, since the whole reality thing started, even the news tries to catch people crying? It satisfies our craving for drama and spectacle, on the surface, anyway. It breaks down the fourth wall (between performer and audience). In 451, a character has TVs on three of her walls and begs her husband to install a fourth.

Am I Thoreau now? Maybe in some ways. I’ve already talked about the problems that come with being a sponge. Another one is the inability to discriminate. I don’t have the free time to chase every rabbit trail that I come across. Not if I want to progress as a writer, developer, husband, father. Not if I want to keep the buzzing out of my head.

So is the blog a distraction or an aid? It depends on how I use it. I can practice my writing fine without it. The blog is for peer review, conversation, and brand recognition. Eventually I need a portfolio to show off.

But. If I’m not writing — and I haven’t, really, in the past month — the blog is an irrelevant distraction. The writing needs to come first; if it does, the blog takes care of itself.

Or is this just another “I’m a big slacker” post?

Callie got me thinking today. She says that bookstores are her favorite places. Now that I think about it, the library has always been a personal favorite of mine. There’s no pressure to buy anything, and no mob of people coming and going. When I was a kid, I’d ride my bike down to the local branch on weekends, or haunt the school library during lunch and recess.

Childrens’ sections at the public library are cozy and inviting. There are mats on the floor and Maurice Sendak posters everywhere. School libraries are similarly friendly places.

Have you gone into your public library lately, as an adult?

It used to be that I’d rush down to the library when a new book I wanted to read was coming out, and slap a hold on that sucker if it wasn’t there yet. Lately, the first thing I do when a new book comes out is put it on my Amazon wishlist. When someone suggests I get that new book from the library, it’s like they’re asking me why I don’t fly to work. The library has lost its mindshare. And it’s only a block from where I work.

Architecturally, the main branch of the Richland County Public Library (image above) is impressive. Green glass rises four or five stories off the sidewalk on two sides. The building’s interior structure is cantilevered outward — kind of an inverted half pyramid — so that each floor is bigger in area than the one below it. When you look in from the outside, the impression is that of a cutaway diagram. Escalators zigzag up through the large atrium. Concrete, light, industrial carpet, and tall shelves are everywhere.

In short, not the least bit cozy or inviting.

My theory on this is that adults are not supposed to read for enjoyment. We’re all too busy with our jobs and our kids and our hobbies. Someone at work reminded me of a statistic that says that, after graduation, some whopping percentage of Americans never open a book for pleasure again.

So no one much bothers to create a pleasurable reading environment for adults. No, if you go to the library at all, you want to find it, check it out, and go home. Or back to work. You’re not going to spend, say, your whole lunch hour sitting around and reading.

Or would you? If there was a comfy place you could go, close to work, and read awhile (or write or work or listen to music), would you? Would you pay for the privilege?

My name is Jonathan and I’m a sponge.

I soak up information. I’ve always been known as the guy who reads all the time. As a kid, I’d lie on my bed with an encyclopedia, surfing from one subject to the other. Replace “encyclopedia” with “Web” and you have a good idea how my idle time gets spent during the day.

Last night, a friend commented on my recent lack of output, and asked me how much time I spent reading versus writing.

Stammer. “Um… you mean reading just books, surfing the Web, or what?”

He suggested I shoot for a 50-50 split.

Wow. That’s daunting. Spend as much time squeezing the sponge as soaking it? Should I count TV time as well? You’ve got to be kidding.

Well, eventually the sponge gets full of water and won’t hold any more until it’s squeezed. There’s got to be a lesson there.

So how do I know when the sponge is getting full? Monkey mind is one way. Words bounce around my head and I can’t focus until I let some of them out. Or I start carrying around my notebook and pen, looking for excuses not to use them.

He’s absolutely right. How much time do I spend on input that I could be using for output?

I’ll stick that in my pipe and smoke it the next time I start whinging about not having any time to write.

Sci Fi Wire reports that one of my favorite childhood series is making the jump to cinema. I highly recommend the books even for adults. Let’s hope the movie(s) aspire to be more than just Harry Potter knockoffs.