Props to the nice people who made PHP, for creating a package that installs so cleanly, even on a weird platform like Darwin. (Ironically, much more cleanly from source than from the Mac binaries that are out there!)

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As I mentioned earlier, one of the first things we need for this Medline project is code that will let us grab abstracts out of the database to evaluate them. Dave was leaning toward JSP, but I kinda don't see the point; 1) we don't need a servlet when a server-side form will do, and 2) I know fuckall about Java to begin with, and since I'm basically the lead programmer on this thing (translation: they tell me what to do, and I say "Yes, Marc," and go do it), I want to work with things I kinda already know how to use.

Ironically, at the moment it appears that no one has gone to the trouble of installing postgres on que, which is the XServe that we're housing this project on. Oops. Unless Dave installed it someplace weird (and, um, didn't bother with man pages or something?), it's just not there, and will have to be put on. So now, before I do much else, I get to sit and wait for Dave to confirm or deny.
</geekery>

As it turns out, this delay is kind of convenient. Since "The Gold-Bug Variations" will end up too long for Polyphony (though not for Alchemy magazine, so it's in no wise backburnered), I've gone back to Plan A, which is the Unfortunately Titled Story that I've mentioned before: "Alexander Finally Gathered the Courage to Break Out of His Shell." Yes, I like long titles. No, it has nothing to do with oralelk. It has two scenes to go, one of which has been incubating in my head since, oh, Januaryish, and the other one of which spat out an ending about a week ago and sat back to wait. In any case, the delays involving postgres mean that I can't do much with the web-driven stuff for the time being -- I could write the code, but I can't test it -- and since tomorrow is Thursday, our weekly meeting, I feel perfectly justified in going in and saying "I did W, X, and Y, but I couldn't start on Z because of A, so I read a whole lot about Z and will be ready to do it as soon as A is fixed."

This means that I have absolutely no guilt monkeys whatsoever about going to the coffeeshop and hammering out deathless prose until pretty much whenever tonight. Ha!

It occurred to me just now that a lot of writers -- the ones who refer to themselves as "organic" writers, who hate outlining and seem to think of their characters as living bodiless entities -- go on about their characters "talking" to them, or sometimes refusing to talk to them.

I am not an organic writer. I am an Outline Nazi. I logline stories, then I go through and logline every scene in a story, and sometimes I go through and logline portions of scenes before I feel comfortable really moving forward. (One of the big reasons that "Laid" took about five months to write was that the first scene fell out of my head pretty much intact, and I wasn't sure what to do with the rest of the story.)

Characters talk to organic writers. Scenes talk to me. I just realised that, now, when I made that comment about a scene spitting out an ending.

My, I'm abstract today, aren't I.

It's time for lunch now.