When?

Being a Very Frequently Asked Question

This particular site was officially inaugurated on 11 November 2005 (a mere 6 years, 85 days ago), which was not only four years to the day after my first ever blog entry, but also, by a pleasant coincidence, Martinmas. I created it with the specific goal of uniting my different interests under one proverbial roof. Interestingly, though I see in retrospect how old said interests are, I didn't realize I had them until quite recently.

I never intended to do anything with computers. I did a lot with GW-BASIC as a kid, including an actual video game or two (made fairly pathetic by the fact that each frame took most of a second to repaint). In middle school, my friends and I gained something of a reputation after news leaked of our plot to make all the library computers play the Meow Mix jingle on an infinite loop. But I never really thought of myself as a computer person—more like a gifted amateur—and my involvement since then has been strictly accidental.

This entire site, for instance, is basically just one big comment script. Shortly after I began blogging (with Blogger), I found myself in need of a good comment script. A friend of mine gave me the code of a little comment script he'd come across. It was a very simple little PHP number, which saved each comment thread in its own little file on the server. I used that script for a while, but found there were things that bothered me about it. Tweak by tweak, I taught myself PHP without even meaning to, just so I could make my comment script work the way I wanted. Before long I had a great comment script but was fed up with Blogger. So I adapted the comment script to post entries instead of comments, and the first version of BlogHead was born. As time went on, I taught myself MySQL so I could get away from the static files, which were obviously limiting. By then, BlogHead had evolved substantially—so much so that, when I switched from "ninjavampire.com" (my first web site) to "flyingghoti.net", it seemed only natural that the whole damn site should be managed by BlogHead. And so it is: everything but the Eleventh Volume (which is a moderately tweaked version of MediaWiki) can be edited straight from the BlogHead console. I doubt there's a single line of code left from the original comment script, of course, but still, everything here is a direct descendant of that ugly-as-sin scrap of PHP.

Another big interest is in linguistics, and I'd have to say my interest in the subject predates my really having any idea what the subject was. In high school, I managed to convince the administration to let me study Spanish and Russian simultaneously. I don't think I ever explained to anyone, myself included, why I was so intent on this. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. At St John's, I studied neither Spanish or Russian, for the simple reason that neither was an option. I studied Ancient Greek instead, and loathed it intensely for a variety of reasons, both good and bad.

But Greek class did lead to a major step forwards towards linguistics: one day, bored to death with pluperfect middles and such, I decided to create my own language. It wasn't exactly complicated (as I recall, there were five cases, and the endings were a, e, i, o, and u) but it was a start. Shortly afterwards, a friend of mine and fellow conlanger pointed me towards The Language Construction Kit. I found myself incredibly interested, especially in things like articulatory phonetics, to the point of impulse-buying The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association in a bookstore up in Tenleytown. (It's become one of my favorite reference books, and I'm a man who likes his reference books.) That was the direct source of my interest in linguistics, and the main reason I wound up at the University of Maryland, which has a really quite good (albeit more rabidly Chomskian than Chomsky) linguistics department.

(Actually, my inner linguist and hacker have collaborated on one occasion—most of the Python I've learned over the years has been directed towards CGISF, a delightfully quixotic attempt to teach a computer to generate grammatical but meaningless sentences in a given language given syntactic, phonological, and morphological rules and a lexicon. It has, in fact, mastered its namesake sentence.)

Writing is another pursuit that both is and isn't new for me—in fifth grade, I won an honorable mention from a small mystery bookstore in Fells Point for a short story involving Sherlock Holmes and a time machine. At the time, this felt like a Big Deal, and I decided that I was clearly cut out for a writing career, which indicates I didn't read my own story very closely; my attempted port of the Sega Genesis Jurassic Park game to the Tandy 1000 was better-conceived. I tried writing several things over the years, each more derivative than the last, but always got bored pretty quickly. The first thing of any length I actually completed was a really horrible play in ninth grade, which my director (this was back in my thespian days) was nice enough to have her acting class do a reading of, bless her. The fact that my father was coming into his own as a playwright around that same time made me think that playwriting was my destiny too. I just never got around to, you know, writing any plays.

In the summer of 2001, I had a dream, which would become the Shúyu ke Fássesyu legend. I tried writing it down several times, but it took me a good two years before I had the very rough first draft I managed to scrape together. In the meantime, I had heard about that miraculous thing known as NaNoWriMo. In November 2002, under the auspices of NaNo, I sat down and wrote 50,000 words in a month. Those 50,000 words were the first draft of Fear Sweeney. It's taken me 9 years, 67 days to take that first draft to the more-or-less-final draft I have now. (And whichever draft that may actually be, I assure you that in my head it is the more-or-less-final one.) In the meantime, I've started a small host of other writing projects, mostly novels. As a personal conceit, all of them take place in the same geographical area (the Baltimore-Washington corridor) and the same time period (the 31^st of May through the 7^th of June, 2002), but they never directly interact. I love personal conceits.

I used to call myself a "linguist" all the time, but inexplicably stopped when I got my B.A. in the field. I almost never call myself a "writer". I might call myself a "hacker", if I didn't know so many people who totally put me to shame. As it is, I have to be reminded sometimes that this site is actually a pretty big achievement. In the end, I've always been a generalist.