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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1458 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 19, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I started reading Kafka's The Trial yesterday, and I was reminded of Jonathan Franzen's Ten Rules for Novelists:

  1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

  2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

  3. Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.

  4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

  5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

  6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.

  7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.

  8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

  9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

  10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

I disagree with a lot of this, but #8 jumped out at me. I have ~65k words of an unfinished novel that I want to finish in February. I've been writing it in Google Docs specifically so that I can work on it on my phone on the train. Ideally, I would like to work on it on my laptop with the internet disconnected, to avoid distraction. I understand that you can work on a Google Docs document offline, and the document will sync automatically as soon as you reconnect. My question is, can anyone recommend a piece of software that will prevent my computer from connecting to the internet for a fixed period of time? The workflow I'm envisioning is, I get home from work, sit down at my laptop, disconnect the Internet and set this up such that I can't reconnect for an hour or ninety minutes or whatever. If this piece of software could also block me from opening certain applications (e.g. Steam, VLC) during the period as well, that would be even better.

Why do you need sync if you're only going to write at the disconnected setup? I would think the simplest way to heed that advice is to get a machine that can't connect to the internet and write on that using some offline word processor (e.g. Scrivener). Maybe back it up on a USB drive occasionally if you feel the need.

In most places you can get refurbished office PC's for cheap that should be up for the task. An old laptop with a broken WiFi card could also work.

Why do you need sync if you're only going to write at the disconnected setup?

I'm not. My first preference is to write at home on my laptop disconnected from the internet, but I'll also need to write on my phone during my commute.

When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

Is it devalued? Maybe. But it's hard to write a novel that takes the reader's time and intelligence seriously if you don't do some research. At the very least a wiki lookup or asking an LLM doesn't hurt.

The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.

Absolute nonsense of the "sounds deep, makes no sense if you think twice about it" variety. If your work is "pure" invention, then I struggle to see how it can be autobiographical. I expect most objections to be quibbling about what counts as pure invention.

I interpreted the bit about autobiographical fiction as mostly a joke.

Cold Turkey is the best I know: the kinds of blocks you can do are sophisticated and flexible, and so are the ways you can implement those blocks.

Sadly, it doesn't work on Linux. I have LeechBlock but what I really want is the opposite: to unblock things for the next X time and then have them block automatically.

I use Self-Control, which lets you block websites for a length of time. You can block all websites but allow a whitelist, or block only a few websites. That doesn't prevent all internet connection though, just browser use.

My question is, can anyone recommend a piece of software that will prevent my computer from connecting to the internet for a fixed period of time? The workflow I'm envisioning is, I get home from work, sit down at my laptop, disconnect the Internet and set this up such that I can't reconnect for an hour or ninety minutes or whatever.

This is easy on Linux or MacOS with a short command line script. Run the script, it kills the wifi or locks down the firewall, and undoes that step 90 minutes later. You can't undo it unless you have admin rights and remember the command to undo everything without using the internet.

So maybe consider getting an old macbook/Linux laptop and keep the setup bare-bones. Comes with the bonus of far fewer distractions, too.

You could also run the same thing on your router directly, taking the whole house offline. It probably supports scheduled internet disconnects out of the box and you can find that option in the web GUI, but most routers run Linux anyway and you just need to get access to run your own scripts.

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