[Beowulf] small file systems

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2007, Greg Lindahl wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 01:58:19PM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>
>> Of course first my novel has to sell a million or so copies so I can
>> afford the time.
>
> rgb, we have faith in your ability to write the longest NaNoWriMo
> novel ever!

Curiously, I just had an idea for a really great "traditional" mystery
novel, and yeah, I think that 50,000 words in a whole month would be no
problem -- if I didn't have anything like a life, or teaching...;-) The
Book of Lilith has roughly twice that but it took me about three months
to get through a complete first draft, and then a year or more to edit,
hack, proofread.  It would be fun to try this November, though, sure.

Isaac Asimov is one of my heroes, though.  500 books, 90,000 letters,
and he wrote EVERYTHING -- mystery, SF, fantasy, science...  IIRC he
wrote a novel a month or thereabouts for years straight and "just did
it" -- little to no revision.  I'm not there yet:-)

Also, Lulu (however true to the do-it-yourself open source spirit) is a
bit of an experiment.  You learn a LOT from running through the whole
publication process on your own, no agent, editor, proofreader (other
than yourself).  The place where the model gets a bit weak is marketing
-- it is HARD to market a book yourself.  Getting it "out there" isn't a
problem, but getting it reviewed by somebody that would be taken
seriously, getting it on brick-and-mortar bookstore shelves, that is.

So worst comes to worst I learn from it.  And Lulu IS fun -- I commend
it to would be authors as a playground if nothing else...

But this is slipping off topic, as no, I haven't figured out how to make
my wulf 'bots write books.  Whenever I hook up the damn parallel
pseudorandom number generator driven wulf-monkeys to the typewriter, all
that comes out is garbage bashing C++ or Fortran, the umpty-umptieth
iteration of "how to build a small/starter cluster", or various snippets
of latex equations, some of which I trim out and forward to this list,
some of which I put in random places in my lecture notes.  I just don't
get it!  No Shakespeare, no Asimov.  And hunt-and-pecking out a novel is
hard work!

    :-)

      rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu