As I prep to tackle the next round of The Antithesis Progression and another pair of SF novels later this year, I’m having fun wrestling with some biggies. Long story short, I thought it would be fun to share some of them with you guys, partly for the fun of the conversation, and partly to give you a peek behind the curtain for those of you who are interested in seeing the process that begins with a question and ends with a story or a novel.

So, to kick it off, here’s my nomination for one of the biggest questions anyone has ever asked.

“Where is everybody?”

Biggest question…seems kind of a grand claim, but I’m going to go a step further: I think it might be the single most terrifying, and the single most exciting, question anyone has ever thought to ask.

To illustrate why, I’ll give you a little context. This is the question that a man named Enrico Fermi asked when he turned his radio telescope at the heavens to listen in on television and radio broadcasts from alien civilisations, and found only static.

The universe is a big place. If carbon chemistry is common (as it seems to be), and if life bootstraps really easily, (which is now virtually certain), then in a big universe there should be at least some other folks out there who are building civilizations, and since all civilization is defined by energy use, they should be making some noise.

So…where is everybody?

It only took humans one generation between the invention of the radio (the ability to make cosmic noise) and the nuclear bomb (the ability to silence that noise forever, without reprieve). What if everybody eventually, inevitably, succumbs to self-destruction? Terrifying, isn’t it?

On the other hand, what if we’re the first? What if we are truly alone? This one’s terrifying too, but it sure is exciting–there’s a lot of universe out there that’s not being used, and oh, the places we’ll go!

But there are other answers, and some of them are very intriguing. Certainly, we haven’t figured out all the potential answers yet. I’ve got some ideas that I’m exploring in projects I’m currently working on, I’ve even got a few opinions.

It is a big question, though, maybe one of the biggest. Because whatever the answer is, it will forever define our relationship with the universe around us, and will profoundly affect the way our civilization unfolds as it winds out into the solar system and beyond.

Read more about this question here, then tell me…What do you think about this question?

2011 has been a remarkably productive year, and the last four days are going to be some of its busiest as I hurry to package a few new short stories, finish up two books, and put together a kickstarter video.

But the best part, the part so many of you have been waiting for, has already started:
The recording studio is back up and running. We’re recording audiobooks for Free Will (which will be podcast), for the Clarke Lantham books, and for a few other things that we’ll announce later on. And today, we’re also recording new episodes of Apologia.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to have it all ticking over again.

More soon. Until then, have an excellent year’s end!

That seems to be true. But it’s not the whole truth.

Since Kepler (the space telescope designed to detect planets) was launched, we HAVE found the occasional Earth-like planet. But it’s only occasional. Mostly we find gas giants orbiting close in (about 75% of the time). They orbit close enough in that they might actually get stripped of their atmospheres and before terrestrial planets. This might make some sense out of the recent discovery that, in order for our Solar System to form correctly, there must once have been a fifth gas giant, though that is only my guess as a layman.

When you put those discoveries together with something else, though, you run into a pretty staggering implication.

You see, it turns out that Kepler’s having some trouble because stars really do twinkle out in space. Particularly young stars–they spin faster, they’re more violent, they have weirder magnetic fields. Kepler’s job is to look for exoplanets around stars that are the same type as our Sun, but most of those stars are so damn noisy, it’s hard to get a clear picture.

Noisy stars should be even better at stripping gas giants than quiet stars, so a lot of these near-star gas giants we’re finding will, eventually, be new Earths. Hooray for noisy stars!

Noisy? Yes. Like two year olds. They’re spinning so fast, making so many sunspots, that it’s hard to see what’s around them (Kepler detects planets by looking for a particular fluctuation in brightness–when the star’s brightness is fluctuating a lot, that’s not easy to do). It’s almost as if they’re all, well, young. Our Sun, on the other hand, is very well-behaved, almost like it’s the oldest child who’s allowed to go to parties with its parents.

And if our Sun is among the oldest, it means that there are going to be lots of planets out there for us to move to when it heats up to Red Giant stage, and when it dies.

But, more importantly, if our Sun is among the oldest, we now know the answer to one of the most fundamental questions ever asked:

In a universe that seems geared to produce life as an end result of chemistry, where is everyone else?

Answer:
They’re still growing up. We’re the first (or, at least, the first ones on our block).

Since sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God, and since unless we implode or blow ourselves up we’re going to make it to other stars someday, and since some of those stars will have life forms that are a few years behind us, there’s only one thing to do: Pull out your bucket lists, boys and girls, and scratch “achieve godhood” off the list (might as well scratch off “Solve Fermi Paradox” while you’re at it). Time to get working on the next item down–interstellar travel.

Well, you’re in good company. The impulse to tinker is universal. So universal, that some people make vast fortunes just so they’ll have the ability to tinker endlessly. People like, for example, George Lucas.

I don’t need to belabor this point too much, other than to perhaps mention that George’s newest release of the original Star Wars trilogy contains MORE changes that do nothing substantive and occasionally undermine the original work’s dramatic power. You know, just like the last four times he’s released them. The movies people know and love, the original ones made way back when? They’ll never see the light of day again, at least until George dies.

His inability to resist indulging his tinker’s urge has had three basic effects on the world:
1) It has utterly arrested George’s creative growth. In the 70s, George was a growing creative force. He got better with every film. He was experimental. He was thoughtful. Whether he was writing or producing he turned out superior products, and he never sat still. Through the 80s, he came into his own as a producer, giving us great popcorn films (Indiana Jones and Willow), sharp-tongued comedies (Radioland Murders), and some really kick-ass breakthroughs in craft and technology for films and theme parks alike. In the late 80s and early 1990s, he created Pixar, then had the sense to let it go to make its way in the world. He produced The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which were superior in many ways to the Indiana Jones films. George Lucas wasn’t just Francis Ford Coppola’s golden boy, he was THE golden boy, and he did it on his own, as a maverick, outside the studio system.

Where’s that growth now? Where’s the energy, the expansion? It’s all gone into the tinkering. Everything stopped and slammed into reverse when he dug Star Wars out and started rewriting it. And since then, his creative chops and the quality and appeal of his work have gone solidly downhill.

2) It’s deprived his industry of one of the finest producers in the world, full stop. When George is doing Star Wars, George is not doing the noir films, the mythology films, the art films, and the TV shows that he’s been talking about in interviews since the 1970s.

3) It’s rewritten a big piece of American cinematic history. The Star Wars films that (along with Jaws) changed the entire business structure of the film industry, that created modern fantasy cinema, that kickstarted the digital revolution, and that launched the career of Harrison Ford? They’re gone. We don’t get to see them anymore. Oh, and George’s other films–like THX-1138 and American Graffiti–they’ve been revised too. Nonsensically. We don’t get to see those either, even though they also became important cultural touchstones (Graffiti much moreso than THX, granted).

— — —

So, this is just me griping, right?

Well, no. This is me jumping up and down with a big sign pointing at George and saying “SEE? Heinlein was right!” The most important (and most controversial) of Heinlein’s rules of professional writing is:

You must not rewrite, except to editorial order. With Ellison’s addendum being And then only if you agree.

That rule is there to remind you not to turn into George Lucas. Rewriting a finished piece (I’m talking rewriting, not doing the normal copy edits, continuity tweaks, and fact checks that you do as part of the writing process) is the road to nowhere. It most often results in bad work, for a very simple reason, as exemplified by the post-1997 George Lucas corpus:

Writers are not competent to tinker with their own work.

With recent work, it’s because they’re too close to see what might be broken–this is why we have beta readers and editors. It’s also because, living with our own voice all the time, we don’t understand what makes it special.

But what about an old book that you’re wanting to bring up to date and/or perfect, as George keeps trying to do?

In that case, you’re not competent to do that either. And there’s a very good reason why:

That book (film, whatever) came from a person that doesn’t exist anymore. You wrote it at a different time in your life, when you had different concerns, and different skills. You don’t have access to that creative headspace anymore, and you’re very unlikely to be able to actually improve one aspect of the book without completely fucking up another aspect.

Now, if you’ve got a book like that that you REALLY want to redo, don’t rewrite it. Reboot it. Pick your favorite scene, or idea, or handful of characters and rewrite it from scratch. Don’t just rework the style, give it a new coat of paint, or try to do a new draft. Don’t even touch the old document. Start with a blank page. Do what’s called in Television a “reboot” or a “re-imagining.” It’s always possible that the first time you wrote the book you were too ambitious, tried to do things you weren’t close to being ready for. Books like that might do well with a reboot.

But do it going FORWARD. Don’t do it looking back. You’re not updating an old work when you do this, you’re reincarnating it. Make it new, and stretch yourself. Let the storyline go different places than the original. Let it surprise you.

Or, better yet, leave your old books alone. Treat them like they were written by another person. Leave then on the market, learn from them, and move on to the next story. Work on doing better this time what you did poorly last time, and work on that improvement every time.

Growth comes from moving forward, not moving backward. Tinkering is moving backwards, and it moves your creative growth backwards. You don’t want to wind up on this path. No matter how brilliant you are, you can get stuck in your own creative swamp. And if you wallow there long enough, that’s where you’ll die.

Just ask George.

But this show isn’t drama–it’s essentially a game show. Another foray into the genre–reality TV–which the Brits perfected and which is by far my least favorite form of entertainment, as it’s neither reality nor does it frequently feature anything interesting enough to be worthy of display on a television screen. But I digress.

So, what is this amazing, magical show?

Well, you’re not going to believe me, but it’s actually a magic show. It’s called Penn & Teller: Fool Us.

The concept is pretty simple:
Contestants do a single stage magic routine in front of a studio audience that includes magicians Penn & Teller. If Penn & Teller can’t figure out how the trick was done, and describe it to the contestant, that contestant wins. The prize?

They get to open for Penn & Teller in Las Vegas.

Okay, So What’s The Big Deal?

But this isn’t just a pedestrian game show. Or a pedestrian reality TV show. Or even a run-of-the-mill magic show. This is something else again. To explain, let me recast in tribal terms:

The two most renowned old warriors in a village announce that it’s time for a new generation to rise up and come into their own. They put the call out far and wide to all the neighboring villages, and stage a competition. “We have grown weary of hunting, having long since mastered all we learned in our youth. We are weary of teaching, for we have taught all we know.” they say. “Anyone who can teach us a new technique, a new art for hunting, they shall lead the next hunt.”

Young hunters, at the peak of their creativity and ambition, bring their best skills from all across the countryside. They display their best work, and when sometimes one of them is so groundbreaking that the old masters have never seen it before, the masters bring them into their party. Sometimes, there are no new techniques, but the demonstration has such finesse that the masters are astounded and envious, and sincere about their awe in the face of mastery as great as–or greater than–their own.

And so we have in this dynamic all the things that are best about human nature: community, mentorship, maturity, non-destructive competition, the transfer of knowledge between the generations (which is the substance of culture), hard work, virtuosity, the appetite for learning, the appetite for–and display of–wonder, and the application of close examination and critical thinking.

Intelligence, mentorship, love of a shared culture, community, and all of it wrapped up in a candy coating of witty banter and smart comedy.

Folks, truly, it doesn’t get any better than this. It can’t. Because this is the best of what we are, in microcosm.

Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.

But first, the reasons why the two popular methods don’t work for me.

Pulling Down My Pants

“Pantsers” are folks that write by the seat of their pants. They trust their subconscious and just fly on from word one, muddling through as they go–and often, they’re brilliant. Many of my favorite short story writers (including Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Dean Wesley Smith) write like this, and they are quite often bloody brilliant.

I’ve done this with short stories–sometimes, I’ve done it really well. But for every short story I’ve finished with this method, I have five that started, sputtered, and stopped. Some I’ve gone back and done in a way more suited to my workflow–others I’ve abandoned and think of fondly, like childhood friends I’m unlikely ever to see again.

Why do they sputter? Frankly, it’s because I often write from a milieu, and only infrequently is a milieu sufficient to sustain a whole story. My process often relies on the collision of two dissimilar ideas in my own head, and without those two ideas, the story won’t spin.

With novels, it’s the same problem, only worse. Unless the story itself is a discovery process with a very constrained point of view, there isn’t a lot I can get a foothold on. Even then, I only get so far before I have to resort to other methods.

Which brings us to outlining.

Sketchy Thinking

The beauty of an outline is that you never have to worry about where you’re going. You decide in advance what happens, and why, and when–sometimes in rough detail, sometimes in minutia. Many of my favorite novelists (including Gail Carriger, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Frank Herbert) work this way, to spectacular result, and the method has innate appeal. The question of “what’s next” that can get writers blocked on a project, and pre-laying the track means you don’t have to worry about going off it and losing the plot.

But it comes with a cost: spontaneity. My particular neuroses innately rebel against tight pre-plotting. Once I’ve written an entire story in my mind once, it’s a slog to write it again, and that slog sometimes shows in the finished product (which is why there are a few novels and stories that will never see the light of day–they are, according to my betas, stale-born, and I don’t have the heart to go back and redraft them from scratch).

However, for someone of my disposition there is a third way to write.

I call it “playing jazz.”

Why Jazz?

Using music as an analog, a pantser would be like a musician who has so internalized structure that they can pick up an instrument and do a solo jam that is neither dull nor directionless. An outliner would be a concert pianist who rote memorizes perfectly a pre-composed piece, and then adds texture and flourish by the way she performs the notes and accents the silences.

Jazz is an artform between. Like writing, music depends upon deviating from a well-understood structure. In both music and writing, structure is king–without it, you don’t have anything that resembles a story, or music. But with jazz, the structure is malleable within certain limits, and the bulk of the piece within those limits is made up of improvisation to such an extent that no two performances of the same piece will ever be the same. Sometimes, they may not even sound like the same song.

To play Jazz with words, you need the baseline structure–a few story beats you must hit for everything to work well. Then, in the vast spaces in between, you connect the dots by playing in between them–exploring the complications, finding the indirect ways between points A and B and C. In a long, plot heavy novel like The Antithesis Progression, the individual storylines will all have those points, and there will be planned points of intersection between them, but the jazz happens in the execution. In books with a more straightforward structure, like The Clarke Lantham Mysteries or Down From Ten, there is more improvisation–but in either case, the method lays in playing to the strengths of both outlining and discovery writing, while sidestepping the aspects of both processes that my particular twisted psychology finds unendurable.

It’s All About Process

My first million-and-a-quarter words qualify me as a neophyte in the writing world, but they have taught me why it takes so long for writers to find their voice. Learning a process will allow you to grapple with story structure in a way that will help you tell stories that connect with your audience. There is no right way. There is only the way that you find that works for you. If you, like my conversation partner last night, are feeling confused by the prescriptions offered by writers further along than you, take heart! It’s normal for all of us to think “my way worked for me, so it should work for everyone.”

But however well-intentioned that advice, the fact remains: only you are capable of working out what process works best for you. And whether you’re writing books and screenplays with highly developed structures (like episodic television, or category romance) or that are more free-form (like slipstream), the process you go through to get there will vary according to your psychology. Take my description of “playing jazz” as another possible option–but don’t take it as gospel. Your mileage may vary.

I’m one of those poor tortured souls who is a stickler for detail, to the point where I’m rarely able to meet my own standards when I write–but, let’s face it. If anyone wrote like that, they’d either write only in their area of historical specialty or after years of research. The trick with writing is to create a successful illusion, not a master’s thesis. Besides, the vast majority of readers aren’t the kind of obsessive compulsive pain in the ass that I am–a lucky thing!–so there’s a certain amount we authors can count on getting away with.

Still, I can’t help but think there’s some level of rigor that one ought to aspire to. Some minimal standard–particularly since the stories we professional liars tell often form people’s view of the past long after their high school and college history classes are long-forgotten–must surely be in order. Something that we can at least hold up to keep ourselves from being embarrassed at conventions when a fan calls us out on an obvious boneheaded anachronism?

There might just be one. Let’s call it “The Wikipedia Test.” After all, most readers who are confused on a point of history or arcane knowledge (and who are of an intellectual or curious bent) that you employ will go to Wikipedia to catch up with you. It therefore follows that if a point in your story–particularly a major plot point–turns on a bit of arcane knowledge, you damn well better make sure that a cursory glance at Wikipedia won’t make you look lazy.

Not that I have anyone particular in mind, but for the sake of illustration, I’m going to pick on two popular authors (one of whom I really like, the other of whom I admire, but don’t much enjoy).

[Be warned: Spoilers follow]

First, Jeff Lindsay, creator of Dexter. For the book Dexter in the Dark he brings in a serial killer who leaves the device “mlk” at his murder scenes. Dexter, after a considerable amount of Internet research, concludes that this is a reference to the god “Moloch.” So far so good–anytime someone’s got the guts to work some obscure mythology into his storyline, I’m a happy guy.

Unfortunately, Lindsay then goes on to say that “the characters ‘mlk’ were from an ancient language…Aramaic.” And that’s where the book, for about two chapters, descends into the kind of incoherence that only badly-researched mysticism can create.

Moloch, you see, is a Phoenician god, and the Phoenician used an entirely different alphabet from Aramaic (the language of the Canaanites), despite the languages being related. Aramaic doesn’t have any letters that look remotely like an “m” or a “k”– but Phoenician does. There are a dozen other reasons, too, that the idea the Moloch would speak Aramaic is ridiculous, but let’s just stick with these two which–feel free to check for yourself–are easily confirmed by a Wikipedia search.

And, really, if you’re going to go to the trouble to use something as esoteric as Moloch, and you’re going to try to make it cool by dipping deep into Kabbalistic Demonology, you’re going to have to do some research (unless you’re like me who reads stuff like this for fun), so why in the world wouldn’t you do a basic fact check?

A more eggregious example of this kind of thing is Dan Brown, who writes occult history thrillers (so far so good), claims that admitted hoaxes such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail are legitimate true histories (not so good–at least he could rely on hokum that hasn’t been publically acknowledged as a prank by its authors), and then goes that one further:

In The Da Vinci Code, a multinational conspiracy of elite catholics spend gobs of money and kill loads of people in order to save the church from a secret that would destroy it: That Jesus was…married?

Um…come again? Okay, yes, the Vatican is a bastion of sexual repression that has inarguably engaged in a good bit of historical forgery and cover-ups over the centuries. But of all the secrets they could be hiding about the origin of Christianity, this has to be right up there with “Jesus used Crest Toothpaste” in the annals of “inconvenient facts with the fewest possible consequences to Christian doctrine.” If Brown wanted some real dynamite, he could have gone for another fringe theory that’s actually got some scholarly support and would actually give the Catholic Church huge headaches if it were to become commonly believed(such as the fringe scholarly theory that Jesus Never Existed).

Still, sex is sexier than fraud, I suppose. And Brown writes a hell of a page-turner, as evidenced by his amazing sales numbers.

[End of Spoilers]

I humbly submit that if we’re going to be telling stories that present the illusion of reality, that delve into the “what ifs” and “what could have beens,” why not at least put in Wikipedia-level research? Or, if we can’t be bothered, perhaps we should let go of pretense to connect our illusions to reality, and just make up the names as well. Seems to me it would be much less confusing–and present much less of a liability to the coherence of the illusion–than throwing out bogus facts that put us at risk of failing the Wikipedia Test.

—-
A few great authors that usually pass the Wikipedia test:
Gary Jennings, Ken Follett, Clive Cussler, Clive Barker, Isaac Asimov, Gail Carriger, Leon Uris, Cherie Priest, Thomas Harris, Stephen King (this is what I came up with at 4AM. It’s not an exhaustive list by a long shot).

So, fonts are cool.

Except…

Well, fonts are weird. I laid out a cover for a short story earlier this week, and this particular story needed a different font-ish approach than I normally take with the covers for my short stories. Finding the right font involved typing the relevant text at the appropriate sizes, and then cycling through my font database.

Let me tell you, if you want to have a transcendental experience, there’s not a lot you could do that would be more effective than testing fonts.

I’ve had the name “J. Daniel Sawyer” since I was ten–before that, I had varients of the first and middle name, trying to find something that fit, but I found the fit when I discovered the joy of stylized signatures. It’s just fun to have that first initial hanging out there on its own, as if daring the universe to unravel what it’s hiding under the period that follows.

But cycling through fonts, narrowing the field, it occurred to me that “Daniel” is just a really, really weird looking name. I mean, what’s with that “a?” And the “ie” near the end, doesn’t that seem like overkill in the vowel department? And why had I never noticed before that “Daniel” is an anagram for “D. Alien?” And, while we’re at it, the space between the letters in a non-proportional font looks a little…suspicious. Like the “i” and the “l” are social rejects, the rest of the letters edging away from them like they’ve got really bad gas. And, for the love of all that’s holy, how could anyone think that a word that looks THAT weird be a real name?

But soft! I thought Maybe that’s the zen of the thing. The name is just a label. It has no meaning–I mean, really, why would an atheist need a name that means “God is my judge” or “Justice from God?” I’m not exactly expecting a final judgment, and I certainly don’t need a divine mandate to dollop out justice upon the annoying. This name is a kind of cosmic irony. Yes, that’s it! Names are a joke, meant to mislead people who read too many bad paraphrases of The Golden Bough . Calling myself “Daniel” instead of “Loki” is surely a feeble attempt at humor. Names are really just labels to distinguish the illusion of identity from the background chaos that forms the universal consciousness!

I was down to the Zs in the font selection tree, so I eased myself out of my meditative state and wondered if I hadn’t accidentally stumbled on the true secret of the universe. If I could find a way to put it on a T-shirt, I thought I could be the next Depak Chopra! Low overhead…high profits…and I’d get to use the word “Quantum” a lot…Such possibilities!

It was at this point that I realized that the temperature had climbed north of 80 degrees and I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since waking up five hours before. I grabbed some tea and a packet of nori and settled back down to work, surprised to find that my name no longer looked like the projection of an alien face through my computer screen.

Just goes to show you that the yogis were on to something: Fast long enough, and you’ll get transcendental visions. And for an antidote to the visions, just reach for a picnic basket!

If you find this post entertaining, please consider buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

Last night on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog I made a snarky comment about the deleterious effect of a Literary Studies degree (or, in my case, 90% of a Lit degree) on creativity. The comment went something like this:

A Literary Studies course is the worst thing you can do for your creativity, other than bashing your skull in with a mallet while reciting the lyrics to “The Song That Never Ends”

Needless to say, this caused a minor row in the twitterverse among my fellow literati, and I received a few demands to justify myself (which is not easy to do on the best of days, let alone in 140 characters or less), so, in the name of entertainment, here goes, in no particular order:

1: The Premise of Literary Studies is Misguided

Leaving aside those in search of an easy “A,” people generally go into literary studies either because they want to pursue a career as a writer or because they love stories and want to teach literature to high school and/or college students. Literary Studies courses, however, don’t do much to prepare you for either.

To write effective fiction, there are a number of things you can study that will help: psychology, history, language, applied sociology and group dynamics, neurology, chaos theory, evolutionary biology, religion, semiotics, and philosophy leap to mind. And you can also learn a lot from studying literature, in the sense of reading books that you might not necessarily read for pleasure. Cultivating a habit of learning, and observing the mediums of communication around you, is extremely useful. Getting practice actually writing stories is also very important.

To teach literature effectively, it helps to be familiar with the historical context of the work in question, the background and literacy of the audience, and the subtle connections and influences of the work to other works in the canon being studied (it is, for example, difficult to explain a lot of the symbolic subtext of Lord of the Flies to someone who’s completely unfamiliar with the mythology surrounding Satan). One would also do well to learn the the techniques of Socratic Dialog, effective communication, critical thinking, and rhetoric.

But Literary Studies degree programs, while they touch on many of these elements, do not focus here. They focus on deconstruction, explication, and political analysis (and in ways that are dishonest, which I’ll get into in a bit). A Lit. Studies student is required to write a lot of papers, but is very seldom required to engage in creative work (such as writing stories). Even in the best of programs that don’t display some of the problems I’ll detail below, this leads to a very one-sided understanding of the creative process.

In explicating a poem, for example, one teases out the layers of meaning and symbols, underlining the ambiguities and tensions and bringing them into sharp focus. The explicator comes to see poetry as an exercise in precision engineering–such glorious economy of syllables hyper-condensing such subtlety surely must be the work of precise craftsmanship, akin to designing a car.

So when you go to write poetry and imbue it with meaning, you fall flat on your face. You can’t imagine that metaphors are something you pluck from the air, rather than something you labor over with great deliberation. It doesn’t occur to you that the process of composing metered poetry (we’ll leave freeverse to one side), while it has its exacting mechanical requirements, is not engineering. Jazz also has exacting mechanical requirements, but they’re requirements that have to emerge chaotically from the practiced subconscious, or the result sounds like shit. The multilayered themes that Lit students pick apart are just as often subconscious and accidental as they are deliberate, and some of the best comes in the heat of the moment, by accident, when the author/poet isn’t trying to be profound.

How can this be? Like jazz, poetry (and narrative) obey rules so complex that it’s impossible to “fake it” by reverse engineering. The only way to brilliance is the long way around, training oneself and honing one’s craft through laborious trial and error. The method is too complex to learn by rote.

Explication and analysis have their place (I still very much enjoy them), but they don’t do the three things they’re supposed to do:
They don’t help you learn to be a better writer.
They don’t help you understand how the poet/author created her masterpiece.
And they don’t necessarily tell you what the poem or story means, because while looking at the pieces it’s very easy to miss the gestalt, and many truly masterful wordsmiths produce works that can only be enjoyed or understood on the gestalt level.

To use philosophical terms, a work of literature is “contingent” rather than a “thing in itself.” It is always a piece communication, and that nature has a non-trivial bearing on its meaning, content, etc. Studying “Literature” (in quotes here because “literary studies” encompasses film, lyrical music, narrative nonfiction, and poetry as well as fiction) in the way it’s been studied in the last seventy years is, essentially, to spend a great deal of time studying nothing at all.

2: The Methods of Literary Studies are Dishonest

Every field in the academy–the sciences, critical history, the plastic and visual arts, the dramatic arts–has a toolkit. In a science department you learn to do science (methodology, experimentation, reporting, peer review) and use its tools (from Bunsen burners to calculus), so that you may produce new and important work in that field (new scientific theories and data). In a history department, you learn to do history (research, evaluation, criticism, interact with the empirical and social sciences that might have a bearing on your studies) so that, in the end, you are prepared to make discoveries and communicate them. In a graphic arts program you learn to do art (sketching, painting, sculpting, photography, the ethical and legal environments you may have to navigate as an artist, etc.) so that you can grow into a competent, producing artist.

You see the trend. In every degree program, you learn to do the discipline. You don’t just learn to think about it, you are equipped to be an active participant in the creation of further knowledge and culture in that field.

If you’re pursuing a lit degree, though, you will come out of your degree program equipped to talk about written works as if you understood them (unless you’re an exceptional student and learned less popular methods of analysis, you probably don’t). That’s it. Four to six years and a hundred thousand bucks, just to learn the jargon. Here are some things that you won’t learn in any literary studies program I’ve ever seen:

Character voice, nested plot structure, cliffhangering, tension, writing effective sex scenes, misdirection, making violence interesting, structuring conflict, copyright law, libel law, contracts, the unique tax problems of writers, effective (and multisensory) imagery, subtext, dialog, and (unless you’re studying poetry) rhythmic techniques, applied psychology.

Note that those are things that all fiction writers employ to some extent, whether they do it consciously or subconsciously (and the business items are things that all writers ignore at their own peril).

Instead, what you’ll learn to do is “analyze” literature. What they call “analysis” is not something that would pass for analysis in any other field. The standard literary method derives heavily from Foucault and Derrida, and deals in things like deconstruction, post-structural approach to narrative, and social power dynamics projected through the medium of the text. These guys were the last of the Marxist/Bourgeois literary/social philosophers (each had different roots, but that great philosophical divide in many ways reaches an end point with them), and giants in artistic philosophy circles. They were both quite concerned with how narrative creates culture, frames thought, coerces conformity, and serves as the velvet glove of the power elite. Their concerns were with the meta-narrative–their word for “worldview”–of western culture.

For those of you in the know, yes, I realizing I’m simplifying this to a criminal degree. For the rest of you–I’m sorry that this stuff is so esoteric. It really is relevant, as you’ll see next.

Getting into the ins and outs of Postmodernism (the school of thought that they inadvertently codified) is a long and much more complicated discussion, but here’s where it gets dishonest with respect to literary theroy:

The devotees of Postmodernism began using literature as a way to do philosophy under the radar, so to speak. By carrying out their philosophical and political dialectic in the realm of literature, they were able to promulgate an ideology (some aspects of which I heartily agree with, others not so much) without being subject to the normally ruthless forces of substantive academic debate.

Over the course of the twentieth century, critical thinking in literary analysis gradually went out the window, replaced by ideologically driven thinking encapsulated in a jingoistic (and obfuscatory) vocabulary. And, in all of it, the one thing that wasn’t being studied was literature. Instead of the object of study or of craft, literature became the cypher through which myriad agendas were worked (because, after the Marxists learned how to use this kind of doubletalk, everyone else appropriated the shell game for their own ends).

3: The Culture of Literary Studies is Anti-intellectual

If you spend any time around academic institutions, you’ll sense a bit of tension between the sciences and the humanities. Back in the time of Percy Bysshe Shelley, these two broad fields of endeavor more or less declared war on each other. The hyper-rationalistic scientists looked with scorn upon all things emotional (believing, as they did, that superstition, indolence, and poverty were all the results of ignorance and fear). The Romantics fought back, arguing for the purity of nature and passion, and arguing that science could tell us nothing useful about the human condition. That split deepened and grew bitter over the centuries, and is a deep source of much of the culture war that plagues Western civilization right now.

In The Lord of the Rings, when Saruman declares himself “‘Saruman The White’ no longer, but ‘Saruman of Many Colors,’ for the white light may be broken and bent to more effective use,” Gandalf replies “He who would break a thing to understand it has left the path of wisdom.” This, in a single exchange, is the fight between the Romantics against the Rationalists. Because of that fight, the Romantic half of academia [i.e. The Humanities] (literary and religious studies and some philosophy–though this camp used to also include philosophy and history) has seen itself as the sanctified purveyor of wisdom about the human condition.

I consider it a good thing that the last fifty years have seen astonishing advances in our understanding of creativity and how it works. Rationality is no longer seen as antithetical to emotion and creativity, but as an expression of both. If you want to study any kind of art, you can’t do it anymore without an understanding of the latest in neurology. Applied psychology, sociology, optics, and ecology wouldn’t hurt either. Although the scientific picture of humanity is far from complete, the understanding of the mechanisms of human communication and thought are now far superior to the fuzzy mysticism that once passed for precision in the humanities. This doesn’t mean that there is no room for the ineffable, only that we better understand how and why some things feel ineffable.

The culture of critical theory (almost any degree program with “Studies” affixed to the end of it), though, don’t see it this way. Instead, like the priesthood of a dying religion, they have spent the last forty years fighting a rear-guard action against the sciences, and in the process they’ve grown moribund. If you want superb literary analysis, with very few exceptions, you have to go back to the era of World War 2 and before. Literary studies have, in the meantime, produced almost nothing new, and very little of note.

Ironic and tragic, but in a field of study where the horizon is as limitless as human imagination, the bulk of the intelligentsia are ghettoized. Only a very few brave souls, such as Steampunk Scholar Mike Perschon have dared to break out of the narrow brackets of modernist literary criticism and delve into the un-respectable “genres.”

Alas, the prevailing culture regards the unreadable, the unenjoyable, the old, and the highly political as the only works worthy of study and comment. (This isn’t a new phenomenon. The “Classics” of today were the pop entertainments of yesteryear. But it is a much more intense, and intensely unpleasant, phenomenon today).

Literary Studies and Creative Paralysis

When taking an intellectual approach to any field of endeavor, one risks short-term creative paralysis in the face of information overload–centipede problems, they’re called. I don’t have a problem with that–it’s natural, and it does pass if you relax and let the learning sink in.

But the broken culture, the dishonesty, the political doubletalk, and the intellectual vacuity of Literary Studies programs can and do produce long-term creative paralysis. The Lit student who learns “analysis” under these conditions is prone to adopting those same lazy, self-destructive mental habits as his own, forever second-guessing himself, wondering if this or that turn of phrase betrays unconscious racism, or sexism, or if it will be construed that way, opening him up to slander from his audience. If he’s one who wants to write romance novels, or mysteries, he’s left to wonder if his life’s work will be worth the bother, since he’s been trained to de-value entertainment and enjoyment, and to think of genre literature (or anything that doesn’t carry a heavy political message) as “pulp,” “hack,” “fluff,” or “trash.”

In the meantime, hacks like Bradbury and Ellison and Andre Norton just mastered their craft through practice without the benefit of literary studies (none of them went to college, one of them never even attended high school). Most authors through history, and most authors today, did not learn their craft by studying for a Lit degree.

So, like I said, if you’re wanting to be a writer, do yourself a favor:

Study literature by reading. Pay attention to how your favorite writers (or writers you don’t particularly like) use words to shape your perceptions, evoke emotions, and alter your consciousness. But for Pete’s sake, don’t go into debt to get a Lit degree. You won’t learn anything you need, and you’ll very likely use years of your creative life unlearning the self-destructive mental habits it teaches you. If you ARE interested in deep symbolic analysis, learn history, get familiar with your culture’s literary heritage, and take some semiotics courses. But don’t waste your money on lit courses.

If you find this post useful or thought provoking, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

In the midst of the upheaval in the publishing industry, I’m seeing this a lot. As agents are conning their clients into unethical business arrangements (and kudos to Peter Cox and Kristen Nelson for going on record about the danger this represents to writers), editors with excellent reputations are getting kicked off writing forums for providing data on the change, publishers are defrauding their authors and engaging in massive rights grabs, breaking the rules can earn you some pretty serious grief from other writers who are following the rules and hoping they’ll get reputation points for it.

Trouble is, this isn’t first grade. There are no gold stars for following the rules. And a lot of people are breaking the rules.
And they’re winning.

There are the people who are pursuing the established business model of licensing their work to a large publishing house, and they’re not following the script. You know the script, right? “You have to get an agent, then your agent will sell your book on to a publisher after they help you shine it up–because publishers don’t buy books that need work, and they don’t buy books from unagented writers.”
This script is, of course, a lie, and a dangerous one. Many new writers spend years hunting for an agent. Leaving aside for a moment questions about the future viability of the agented business model, there is one thing an agent can’t do, has never have been able to do, and will never be able to do: Write you a check. You can spend an entire career trying to sell your book to someone who is unable to buy it.
Or, you can do what over 40% of first-time novelists do–including my friend Gail Carriger–and say “fuck the rules.” Mail your book to an editor who doesn’t accept submissions, the worst they can say is no. You won’t get a bad reputation for it; frankly, you’re not that important. You’re one of thousands of names they see every month, and unless you’re extraordinarily rude, your name will be forgotten as quickly as your manuscript. On the other hand, you might instead get notes like some I’ve been getting recently–notes from people who swear up and down in public that they’ll never look at an unagented mss, who are asking to see yours. (But if you mention that you’ve done that, you’re likely to get attacked by people who feel threatened when others don’t follow the rules).

Then there are the folks pursuing the new opportunities provided by the changes in the industry–either exclusively working through the new distribution channels or pursuing both the old and the new models simultaneously, with varying degrees of success. These are people like J.A. Konrath, Barry Eisler, Amanda Hocking, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, James Melzer, Jennifer Hudock, Nathan Lowell, Scott Sigler, Brand Gamblin, and (last and least) me. These people have looked at the rules and said “Well, we obviously don’t need those anymore.” And they’re really pissing people off.

Both camps have something else in common, besides breaking the rules: The people who feel threatened by rule-breakers call both camps “Outliers.” They make out as if the normal rules don’t apply to us, because we’re somehow special. That there’s something magical about our talent, or our social savvy–something that makes us so rare that we shouldn’t be studied or listened to.

Think of this logic: The people who are most successful at what they do (or even, as in my case, marginally successful at the beginning of their careers) should be ignored, because their experience is so atypical it can’t be learned from. In other words, if you want to win, ignore the people who are good at winning.

This, my friends, is a recipe for failure. Every author’s career path is different, and you’re going to have to cobble together your own as you go. If you’re slavishly following a program rather than adapting and experimenting, your odds of success are diminished. If you’re dismissing “outlier” data, you’re cutting off your arm. If you’re slavishly following the advice of an “outlier,” you’re probably also missing out. Business requires creativity and a willingness to experiment. It also requires resilience. You don’t get that by operating on tunnel vision.

From the point of view of the people who dismiss the rule-breakers, the world is getting smaller. The business is in upheaval, and the opportunities are diminishing. Self-publishers are flooding the market with crap, and no good work will get found in all the white noise.

This argument is a load of bullshit. If white noise were capable of preventing people from finding good content, then the Internet (which is, by some estimates, over 70% spam) wouldn’t function. You wouldn’t be reading this blog right now.

But this? This is the best time in history to be a writer–better even than the Golden Age of Pulp, and that was a damn good time.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can listen to the other “outliers,” or you can listen to the Consulting Editor at Wiley Press, who says exactly the same thing. These are times of unparalleled opportunity.

So if you’re trying to figure out why your career isn’t going anywhere, perhaps it’s time to look at your paradigm. Do you have a million words or close to it under your belt, but aren’t selling? Maybe you’re not sending material to people who can write checks. Are you selling, but not making a living? Perhaps it’s time to put a foot into the self-pub world as well, and spend the time learning how to package your work to attract eyeballs.

Or maybe you’re a new writer, with only a year or two under your belt, and like most new writers (including me when I was baby-powder fresh), you’re looking for a program to follow: solid answers and prescriptions for writerly success in a few short months or years. It’s time to stop looking, because it won’t happen. Writing is a discipline that takes practice–at least a decade’s worth–to master. And it takes constant learning of all kinds. There is no end, unless you quit.

That’s the breaks. And don’t tell me I’m an outlier, because if you’ve got the stamina and creativity to write novels, you’re already more intelligent and determined than around 90% of the population, which makes you an outlier by definition. You become an outlier among outliers by taking risks, being adaptable, and working your ass off. Don’t use the success of others who have more years in this than you do, or a bit more luck, as an excuse to avoid experimenting.

Don’t wuss out.

If you find this post useful or thought provoking, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

It raises the obvious question: At what age does an adult undergo a mandatory brain wipe and forget about what it’s like to be a teenager? Even teenagers with nothing evil happening in their lives directly know friends who have awful things going on. More than that, teenagers are coming to grips with mortality and sex in two important respects: in both cases, they are confronting both the knowledge that they can make decisions that will give them power over the death and over the sexuality of other people, and with the equally uncomfortable realization that other people can have that kind of power over them (and that, at least with death, there will eventually be nothing they can do to stop it). This is to say nothing about their own desire both for sexual gratification and for some (safe) experience of violence and danger. Sex and death, folks. It don’t get more real, or dark, than that.

Now, I know the author of the article didn’t espouse the “all children’s entertainment must be sanitized” view, but nonetheless her basic argument rests on the assumption that children are somehow innocent (and that teenagers are somehow children). It’s a pernicious lie sitting close to the heart of one of the major culture wars, and frankly it offends my intelligence. It should offend yours, too.

Ask yourself: Is it a coincidence that YA books have been hotbeds of incest, taboo, tragic death, drug abuse, murder, domestic violence, mindfuckery, rape, evisceration, perversion, and demonic possession since the genre has existed? I doubt it. Anyone that ever sat around a campfire has told those tales themselves at that age, sometimes to the great dismay of adults listening in. Adults who have somehow forgotten that it’s natural, proper, and vital that teenagers call up the spirits that dwell on mortal thoughts. After all, would you want to live in a world where thought experiments were impossible? You may as well prohibit toddlers from walking, for fear that falling down might frighten or discourage them.

But there’s another part to this reality check: Teenagers aren’t “innocent,” except perhaps when they’ve been criminally sheltered. Most gradeschoolers aren’t innocent. Innocence doesn’t survive contact with the hypocrisy of adults, with the dominance games on the playground, or with those first rushes of power at age three when a clever child discovers the ease with which even the most clever of adults are manipulated.

Innocence also doesn’t survive contact with the neighborhood. Even a “good” neighborhood. For example, with the exception of two years in a very rough neighborhood (during which I was so young I didn’t realize I was playing baseball in the middle of gang warfare, literally), I grew up in a good neighborhood with very little crime and respectable middle class family values. I attended church in an even wealthier neighborhood, and spent the majority of my time among educated, mild mannered conservative Christians who were, by and large, not hypocrites. And in THAT environment, here’s a few of the things I encountered either first or second hand by the age of ten:

Embezzlement, blackmail, suicide, rape, murder, pedophilia, socially sanctioned and approved ostracism and scapegoating, gang violence (both formal and informal), degenerative disease, mind control games (not administered by any church), professional malfeasance, institutional corruption both in academia and in religious circles, brainwashing, pathological dishonesty, alcoholism, wanton sadism directed at people and animals of all ages and persuasions, petty gossip, delusions, insanity (clinical, diagnosed insanity), burglary, domestic violence, incest, and appallingly bad dress codes.

That’s an abbreviated list. There are a lot of things that could be on it that don’t fit into a two or three word sound bite, and a lot more things that should be on it that I frankly don’t wish to discuss in public. Now, read that list over again and bear this in mind: With the exception of getting beaten up on by other kids in school, I was not abused as a child; I walked through my darkest places later. This is not a litany of my private miseries, just a partial list of what a privileged white kid runs into growing up in a good neighborhood before the age of ten. Call it a reality check.

Children are not stupid, nor will adults ever succeed in keeping them ignorant without moving into the wilderness and isolating them (I’ve got a friend who grew up this way. I don’t recommend it). And teenagers, for all their wild emotional swings and poor judgment, are not children. They’ve got a full decade of sophistication in the ways of the world on a preschooler, and a good proportion of preschoolers already have a good (if limited and unnuanced) idea about the darker or more scandalous things in the world. It is only adults, who have learned how to be frightened of knowing dark things (because they remind us of dark experiences), who think children can, or should, be protected from knowledge of dark things. It is only adults, who admonish their children to honesty, who could view the world so dishonestly that they could construe lying to children (by omission) a virtue. And it is only adults who have successfully forgotten the difficulty of growing up who can possibly imagine that teenagers aren’t already thinking, talking about, and experimenting (in fantasies) with things far darker than they’ll find in any book…

…assuming, of course, that those teenagers are the fortunate few who haven’t been on the receiving end of a rape, or privy to a murder, or the victim of a cover up, or affected by a death, or the target of institutional or domestic or peer abuse. Because, by the numbers, most “kids” are, at one time or another. And if their books too must be bowdlerized and Disneyfied, how exactly do you think that’s going to help them learn to live in a universe painted in shades both of light and dark?

If you find this post useful or thought provoking, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

— — — —
Previous chapter: Market Awareness
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If God had a lounge singer in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, I’d lay you even odds that it would have been Peggy Lee. Along with Etta James, Billie Holiday, and Rosemary Clooney, she had a glorious, smoky, rich alto that wrapped naturally around horns and clarinets to make sounds that were the aural equivalent of chocolate.

Peggy Lee had a good friend named Walter, and Walter need a singer/songwriter for his new project. Walter did good work, and he was a good friend, so Peggy gave him a good rate, and in 1955 the result of that project hit the country like Christmas. It was a little movie called Lady and the Tramp.

It was a great collaboration, and they had a good contract for the time (Peggy and her cowriter retained rights to “transcriptions” such as record albums and sheet music–a smart move). Everything might have been peachy for life, if Sony hadn’t screwed up the world with home video.

Videotapes have been around pretty much since the Big Bang (or at least since 1951) in broadcast, but nobody really expected that it would wind up being something people used at home any more than the early computer manufacturers thought that your phone would contain twice the computing power that sent men to the moon (which some of them now do). Even if it were technically possible, why would anyone want home video when they had, you know, lives? And television? A professional toy like video tape wouldn’t appeal to a mass market–or such was the thinking. Sony, by the 1970s the world leader in miniaturization, disagreed. In 1975 they introduced Betamax, the first home video format.

It took a few years for it to catch on, but (thanks largely to the porn industry) by the 1980s home video was THE thing (and in the years since, this trend has only deepened with more formats being released). Studios started making their bread-and-butter money from video rentals and sales, rather than from theatrical exhibition. The only people who had a problem with this were the artists who weren’t getting paid for the work they’d done for theatrical exhibition–but most of them just grumbled. Not Peggy Lee. Peggy Lee pulled out her lawyers and said “Sic ‘em.”

Disney argued that the original license left them with an implicit right to sell the movie in any format, and that “transcriptions” didn’t cover home video because it was just another video format, like film and television. Peggy Lee argued that it was a transcription, and that she couldn’t have sold home video rights, because home video didn’t exist at the time that Lady and the Tramp was produced.

It took a long time for the lawsuits, contrafilings, and court case to run its course. At the end of it, in 1992, Peggy Lee won two important victories. First, she got a few million dollars for her troubles, which helped with her retirement even after her lawyers got their cut. Second, she got a precedent, known in entertainment circles as “The Peggy Lee Decision.” According to this decision, rendered in the California Supreme Court, an artist can’t sign over rights that do not yet exist.

Let me say that again. An artist can NOT license rights that do not yet exist. All those old movie contracts suddenly got complicated, as studio lawyers had to scramble to make sure their creatives (such as composers, songwriters, etc.) signed addendum allowing the use of their work in home video. At the time, Internet streaming didn’t exist except in experimental theory, so very few studios listed that in their addendum–that came later (this is, btw, one of the reasons that certain episodes of TV shows, and certain films, are not available on DVD and/or for streaming–studios would not meet artist’s asking prices for their music and other creative contributions in the new formats).

To get around this, studios started introducing bullying language, where artist signed over rights to “any other formats which may come to exist in the future.” It’s a bluff–at least on contracts adjudicated in California, this clause is probably unenforceable, but how many artists are likely to sue on grounds that nebulous? And in Hollywood, where there are guilds for talent, there are often other compensatory provisions entitling the artists to residuals for those future formats, to be negotiated through the guilds at that time, which further reduces the incentive to go through the expensive rigmarole of a court case.

To people outside of Hollywood, this used to be fairly academic. As of this last year, that’s no longer true. If you’re a writer (or a musician) and don’t know about Peggy Lee, you’re asking for trouble. Here’s why:

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been doing an excellent series of posts on the transition currently underway in publishing. Some of the stuff she talks about, such as terms that have recently come into vogue in publishing contracts, is relevant to all entertainment fields, and I highly recommend reading the miniseries. You can find it here, here, and here.

In the most recent post, she touches briefly on a a rights grant clause that showed up in a contract she saw recently, and it’s a textbook Peggy Lee dodge, but worse.

The clause in question (pilfered from this post) reads:

“The Author hereby grants to the Publisher…the exclusive license to produce, publish, sell, distribute and further license any Electronic Version of the Work…. ‘Electronic Version’ means versions that include the Work…in a complete, condensed, adapted, or abridged version and in compilations for performance and display in any manner whether sequentially or non-sequentially and together with accompanying sounds and images, if any, transmissible by any electronic means, method or device (including but not limited to electronic and machine-readable media and online or satellite-based transmission or any other device or medium for electronic reproduction or transmission whether now or hereafter known or developed…)”

Kristine Rusch isn’t the only person I’ve heard about this from–she’s just the most well-established author who’s run into it. Read that clause carefully, because you might see it, or something like it, if you’re in the business of making a living off your creative work.

To my amateur eye, this isn’t just future-proof insurance for publishers. This is a wholesale rights grab. That pesky word “adapt” is one to watch for, because in context with the rest of the clause, it means that if you sign this contract you’re signing away:

Movies
television
web series
radio drama
audiobooks
games (video/RPG/board/card/all other kinds)
foreign language (maybe, if the lawyer is very clever and the author is a pushover)
“enhanced” ebooks
computer reference works/supporting material
versions of the story for other audiences (i.e. a bowdlerized version for church libraries, or a juvenile version for children)
ghostwritten sequels (for which you don’t get paid)
turning your book into a shared world a’la Dragonlance (with no further compensation to you, but with your name on it)
spinoffs

And a lot more. The list goes on–literally–for several pages depending on the level of verbosity with which you list them.

And it does all those WITHOUT FURTHER COMPENSATION. Your advance check (and the royalties on your print/ebook/subsidiary rights the contract entitles you to) is all you will EVER get. No long tail. No ancillary income. No retirement money, nothing.

But it gets even worse than that. Because it’s an EXCLUSIVE rights grant, it can be interpreted to:
Prevent you from doing paid public readings (and maybe even unpaid public readings) of your own work.
Prevent you from writing sequels to your own work
Prevent you from using the characters/world/gimmicks/etc. in any other work you ever create. Depending on how nasty their lawyers are, and how easily intimidated you are, after a few contracts like this you could wind up constrained from every writing anything fictional again, for any media or in any format, for the rest of your life.

Is this clause enforceable? I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know for sure. I suspect that, if you got to the Supreme Court, a lot of it would get declared unconstitutional (based on the Work For Hire provisions in copyright law and the historic interpretation of the Constitutional nature of copyright law). But the trouble simply isn’t worth it. And there’s another problem.

It’s also worth remembering that the Peggy Lee decision was a California Court decision. Publishing contracts are normally adjudicated in New York, and their laws for this sort of thing are different. I don’t know New York law well enough to even speculate (even with all the disclaimers) on how such a case would turn out in New York.

Peggy Lee spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more), to enforce her rights and recover royalties due her, on a case that was much more clear-cut and less sweeping than this one. She lost nearly a decade of her life to that battle (5 years in court, plus all the preliminaries)–and it cost her her professional street cred (when she died, the Academy refused to run her obituary at the Oscars, as is customary. Her family rightly took this as a profound insult).

Clauses like this are sneaky, and they’re often distributed through contracts. I will never sign a contract like this, no matter how much money they wave at me. And with this kind of stuff going on, I will never sign a publishing deal without a qualified lawyer on my side–not an agent, no matter how good he or she is. Agents are not lawyers, and having dealt with a handful of very reputable, ethical agents, I’m very comfortable saying that publishing agents are, on the whole, not hip to this kind of legal sneak attack. If I deal through an agent, it will be IN ADDITION to a lawyer, not instead of one.

It’s situations like this that underline the unequal bargaining muscle that publishers (of all media) bring to the table. But there is something you can do to equalize that balance: When faced with a clause like this, say “no.” Period.

Next time, the long-promised post on dealing with power dynamics: Embracing Your Inner Two-year-old.

:::Addition:::
For those of you interested in further reading on the Peggy Lee case, a good starting point is the Variety article reporting the CA Supreme Court decision.

Please share your thoughts, criticisms, and reactions below. If you’re a lawyer and spot a problem with what I’ve said, or you just think I’m out to lunch, please say so. I’m happy to amend the article. And remember: I am not a lawyer, and this is neither legal advice, nor should you consider it adequate foundation to deal with this kind of contract without consulting a lawyer.

If you find this post useful, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

Well, no problem there. Turns out there was an excellent break point where book 1 could end naturally–and on a very nice cliffhanger–so I could move on to the new book 2 (which was originally the planned second half of book 1). I’d just sit down and write book 2 as soon as the time afforded.

Yeah.

If you’ve been following my progress with this book, you already know how that bright idea turned out. I’ve gotten four other books written in the meantime, and I’m quick on the way to finishing a further two, and still Free Will mocks me with its recalcitrance. And it’s not because I haven’t kicked ass on writing it either: Predestination rang in at 122,000 words after some serious cutting post-podcast and only had to cope with four major storylines. That’s a healthy sized book–it’s fantasy-novel length. Free Will is…well…bigger.

Much bigger. Two and a half reams of paper big. It isn’t done yet, and it’s north of 160,000 words with fifteen storylines (eight of them major). That’s too long, even though the second half of the book is wall-to-wall action and the first half moves along as a very fast clip. Too long as it is, and I’ve still got a lot further to go–easily another 50,000 words if I play the story to the original end point.

After printing the whole thing out today and separating out the storylines I had a read-through of each, and I discovered something:

I’ve done it again. My original planned Book 1 of Antithesis isn’t just two books. It’s three. Well, two and a half. And I’ve already written sixty pages of book three by accident.

What does this mean for you who’s been waiting eagerly?

Well, it means I’ll actually finish Free Will this century. Probably this month. And I’m close enough to the end to head back into production on the audio this week, which I’m doing. It also means that Free Will will be a reasonable length–it might even sneak in under the equivalent of 650 pages when all is done. It means you’ll get a book that ends on a sequence of scenes that is the biggest, brashest you’ve seen yet…

And it means that the first two acts of book 3 are going to be incredibly explosive.

This series keeps surprising me with how much story is wrapped up in it. I can’t wait to share that surprise with you.

There’s a word for “it.”

Resonance.

Emotional resonance is that thing that makes us look at a book title and go “oh!” (or “oh?” or “ah” or “huh?”). A title with immediate resonance requires no thought–it jumps down below our conscious minds and evokes something before we know what it’s doing. Here are some titles that tap into something specific in our cultural atmosphere:

Soulless by Gail Carriger: The title contrasts with the subtitle (“A novel of Vampires, Werewolves, and Parasols”) to subvert the connotation of “soulless” as being something negative and monstrous, but not entirely. It creates enough ambiguity that it makes us interested. Ambiguity that lures (rather than confuses) is good–it’s one of the basic elements of seduction.

The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follet: A title which is actually a quote from 1 Samuel 2:8, a Bible verse that almost nobody has heard in a couple generations–but which was a favorite a couple hundred years ago. So much so that the image of eternity and strength becomes tied to this phrase in our language. Even though the cosmology (flat earth as the center layer in a layer-cake universe) is now completely alien, the phrase still evokes the sense of permanence and imperiousness that it did to its original audience. It is, to borrow another ancient image, titanic. And it works so well that it’s helped Follett’s book become one of the bestselling books of all time.

A Dark And Hungry God Arises by Stephen R. Donaldson: You gotta hand it to him, Donaldson knew his audience–this is the third book in a five-book space opera based on the Ring Cycle and steeped in Wagnerian and Lovecraftian imagery, and anyone vaguely familiar with Lovecraft will feel the echo of Cthulu in this title. Both of these mythoses serve (throughout The Gap Cycle) as a veneer over a plot which is centrally concerned with Babylonian notions of the war between Chaos and Order, and Nietzschean notions of power and responsibility. The titles of the entire series are themselves a philosophical statement, and they resonate with the target audience because they pull at, and subvert, ideas that anyone who reads SF or Fantasy is steeped in to the point they don’t even realize it.

So these are titles with immediate resonance because they hook into something deep in the cultural consciousness, often without the customer knowing what they’re doing.

But there is another kind of resonance–an acquired or secondary resonance, if you will. These are titles which require a bit of thought, but which become unforgettable after that initial bit of thought. For example:

The Unincorporated Man by Eyton and Dani Kollin. This is a double-take title if I’ve ever seen one. The mental process it elicits goes something like this: “The concept that a person is not a corporation is so basic as to be completely obvious, right? But if it’s SO obvious…then why make it the title of a book?” If you make it that far in the trani of thought, they’ve got you. You’re hooked. Even if you don’t buy the book, you WILL remember the title.

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe. Yeah, we’ve all heard it so often that it feels like immediate resonance, but it’s really not. It’s a non-sequitur–he’s putting together two things in this title that really don’t seem to belong together, and yet they hint as desperate suspense. Pits, after all, are deep, dark, unpleasant places, and in Poe’s time “The Pit” was the preferred polite term for “hell.” Pendulums, on the other hand, regulate clocks, and signify order and dependability–so right away you have a very short mental journey from “a list of nouns” to “a terrifying juxtaposition,” and that’s enough to make the phrase stick in the mind, which makes it a great title.

The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams. Adams was a master of titles that twisted the language just enough to mke them stick, and this one might be his best. It’s a mash-up of that most British of civilized frivolity (tea-time, that pseudo-meal of tea and desserts and nibbles at 4pm) and one of the most potent metaphors for despair and depression in the English Language (The Dark Night of the Soul, from the poem of the same name by St. John of the Cross, 16th century). So, what do you get when you throw together civilized frivolity with existential angst? A title that makes you go “huh?” long enough to pick the book up and read the back.

— — —

Now that we’ve seen how titles work, let me let you in on a few tricks I’ve seen other authors use (or used myself) in creating catchy titles:

Juxtaposition: setting two contradictory elements against each other in a way that suggests a deeper consilience, or which promises a gripping conflict, or both.

Cultural cannibalism: stolen quotes and aphorisms, sometimes (but not always) mangled just enough to pull them out of background cliche` and make them fresh. Examples include almost all of Agatha Christie’s titles.

Subversion: As in the Douglas Adams example above, taking images from the cultural background and subverting them to suggest a mystery or explanation within the pages.

Movement: I once wrote and directed a film called The Hunting of Kestral Mannix, which sounded a lot grander than the film aimed at being. Eventually we retitled it to Hunting Kestral. The title change made raising money and casting the film MUCH easier, because the tense is active and the title suggests movement.

Atmosphere: Titles that deal primarily with weather or emotions can be effective and evocative, such as David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars.

Surprise: A title which is simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously, to the point where it can’t pass unnoticed. Examples: Ice Pirates, The Unincorporated Man.

Allusion: A title alluding to another famous title can be quite effective. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None has proved useful to me twice. In the first instance, it was originally released in the US as Ten Little Indians, also the title of a poem in the book which is structured like a slasher film (the book became the blueprint for slasher films, despite its genteel aesthetic). This led directly to the title of my own book Down From Ten, which has a few plot similarities (though only a few) and works on a countdown-clock structure, with each chapter title counting down from day ten to day zero. I’m told the title is arresting–if it is, it’s because I cheated and borrowed a bit of Dame Agatha’s thunder.

Of course, the same title also served as inspiration for my own book And Then She Was Gone. Same cadence, almost all the same words, but with a plot very different. The reason? It’s a damn good cadence–it’s very suggestive, it’s a sentence fragment, it’s evocative, and everyone has heard the old title, even if few have read the book, so it sets up immediate resonance: the title feels familiar in exactly the way I wanted it to. 80% familiar+20% alien=intriguing.

Pun or Double Entendre: Seth Harwood’s Jack Wakes Up refers both to awakening from sleep (at the beginning of the book) and to awakening from a mid-life stupor. Ken Follet’s Eye of the Needle is a complex pun: his villain is codenamed “The Needle”, the story depends on his perspective, in the climactic sequence his eyes are injured, and he is the proverbial rich man (or, at least, well-financed by the Germans) attempting to get into the kingdom of heaven (or, receive the honors due him in his home country, to which he can’t wait to return).

Recombination: Some authors keep interesting titles, and then combine bits of them at random. You can get some great stuff this way. For example, combine Stranger in a Strange Land with The Jaguar Hunter to get The Stranger in the Jaguar or Hunting the Stranger or any number of other permutations (notice that this is not my preferred way, as I’m not all that great at it).

And, of course, there’s hundreds of other ways to do things: Euphemism, Dysphemism, Jargon, appealing to status, an interesting character name (Amadeus), a defining characteristic of an important character (The Time Traveller’s Wife), or a totemic image (The Piano, Captain Correlli’s Mandolin). You can go on forever with techniques for titles just as you can for techniques for storytelling, but the important factor remains the same, and it’s still one word long:

Resonance. Shoot for that, and you may find titles just a little easier.

You have goofy ideas too–I know you do, because one of my goofiest ideas is that reality is to some extent knowable (which puts me two goofy steps out from the perspectives of certain Hindus and Buddhists I know personally), and in a universe this big the statistical likelihood of anybody actually having all the right answers to all the possibly questions is pretty much zero.

Still, it’s kind of rude to say someone has goofy ideas, isn’t it? Particularly when you use words with more bite than “goofy”–words like “screwy,” “stupid,” “false,” “questionable,” or worst of all, “wrong.” It rubs a lot of people the wrong way, like it’s contrary to the spirit of tolerance–or, maybe, it devalues the person who holds the goofy idea.

I think it’s quite the opposite. Without overstating methods, I humbly submit that recognizing that people have goofy ideas is the soul of tolerance and the backbone of civil society. As Douglas Adams observed, the universe is an unsettlingly big place, so most beings attempt to move somewhere smaller of their own devising. He tells the story of a curious race on the planet Hogloroon who live their entire lives in a small and crowded nut tree–the only Hogloroonians who ever leave the tree are those that are thrown out for the heinous crime of speculating whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life. He concludes the parable by saying:

“As exotic as this behavior may seem, there is no being in the universe who is not, in some way, guilty of the same thing.”

Through most of the world, throughout most of history, the proper and expected response to a person who trespasses upon your ideology has been to cast them out of the tree–and often to slit their throat or bash their head in before you throw them out. Even more important than family, the ideas you have about reality, morality, and knowledge are the things by which we demonstrate our belonging to certain groups.

The problem is, when ideas are this important, civil discourse is impossible. But when we can share ideas, our ideas (as Matt Ridley puts it) can have sex. They affect each other, and they allow us to do more extraordinary things than we could do alone. Libraries, Internet forums, twitter, and universities (where they don’t enforce idealogical conformity) are essentially idea brothels with an open orgy policy.

On the other hand, ideas really are important. As recent history demonstrates, the way we perceive reality severely restricts the courses of action and the kinds of creativity available to us (a six-day creationist will almost never make an important scientific discovery–the idealogical framework into which he’s invested is too restrictive, and the stakes for violating it are too high).

The genius of civil discourse is that we can separate the ideas from the people who hold them, even while understanding that some kinds of goofy ideas, which I’ll call “evil,” can damage or pervert the personalities of the people who hold them. We can let our ideas have sex, we can cull the herd of culture through conversation, and never feel so threatened that we must hurl someone else out of the tree. Sometimes we might be tempted, but we know through experience that we don’t have to do it. As long as someone’s actions and character comport with civility and a willingness to accept responsibility, we don’t ever have to throw them out of the tree. In fact, the goofiest ideas will often move their owner to jump out of the tree voluntarily, because the goofier an idea is, the more prone its owner is to feeling insecure.

In a universe this vast, we’re all bound to have goofy ideas. In a liberal society, when we don’t chose to jump out of the tree to find somewhere smaller of our own devising, we’re going to have acquaintances, or even friends, whose ideas we consider goofy, wrong, immoral, or truly evil.

I have a lot of friends like that. Because of the stridency and vociferous of many of my opinions (particularly in culturally sensitive areas), I’m fairly sure that some of those friends feel the same way about my ideas. But our ideas have sex anyway, because we recognize the fuzzy boundary between the idea and the individual.

And, so far as I can tell, we’re all enriched by the experience. So let’s embrace the Doctrine of Goofy ideas. Let’s argue Let’s fight. Let’s get into the boxing ring and duke it out–and then let’s go out for a drink afterwards. It is the most remarkable thing about our civilization, and this very minute it’s in the process of disrupting very old parts of the world.

I think that’s something worth celebrating.

Vanity
For your starter today, I’ve recently finished Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. We recently had a three episode set discussing the premise and arguments Harris addresses in the book. I’ve also posted a review at Goodreads. It’s an interesting and provocative book–if you have an interest in ethical philosophy, I highly recommend it.

Whimsy
This is an oldie, but goodie, video of a squid filming its own escape from a skin-diver.

Civil Liberties
Are you offended and frightened by the recent shooting? Wish you could silence people who are talking about “targeting” and “taking down” the opposition? Think that such speech is the moral equivalent of a terrorist threat? I humbly suggest that you might want to rethink your position in light of this excellent piece from Slate.

In a similar vein, the attempt to silence political speech on the Internet has been whole-heartedly embraced by the Obama administration. EFF brief here.

Politics
In the “I reserve skepticism but it’s starting to look like I was wrong” department, there’s encouraging news about the early effects of the new health care bill.

Business and Writing
In the “cool research for Steampunkers” department, the Guardian talks about the FEMALE criminal underworld in Victorian London.

Ever wondered what the real scoop is on the most important part of you’re book’s marketing (i.e. the cover)? Turns out that Laura Resnick did a very extensive series of articles a few years back that goes in depth on how the whole business of covers works. Well worth the read.

The charming Kate Elliot posts a great article at SFWA offering advice to teen writers from someone who’s been there. If you’re a teen writer, check it out.

Bob Mayer expresses admirably why I’ve not yet done a book trailer, and why it would take a special project for me even to consider it. A quick read, worth the click.

For your treadmill-listening pleasure, Gail Carriger gives a delightful and characteristically witty interview with SF Signal, discussing the impact of social media on the book industry and the author’s business model.

Nathan Lowell’s publisher Robin Sullivan does a guest blog for J.A. Konrath in which she busts some myths about indie publishing and talks about the sales growth curve of her authors. Interesting, useful stuff.

If you thought 2010 was tumultuous for the publishing industry, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Borders is in the process of a crash-and-burn, and depending on how it goes down, it could do anything from expanding the print-book market to seriously shrinking it over the near-to-medium term (though I doubt it will actually sink any of the publishing houses along the way, it may mean a lot less cash going around to buy new titles). If you have print books on the market or on the way to market, it behooves you to read Joshua Blimes’s excellent and thorough Borders post-mortem report.

Science and Technology
As an enthusiastic tender of a bacteria culture (lacto bascillus San Francisco), this kind of stuff fascinates me. An in-depth article, with sub-links, on the unique ecosystems that exist within cheeses.

Perhaps I’m showing my age–and I can’t believe I just said that–but I’m still blown away by the return of lay people to the sciences. Last week, a ten-year-old girl discovered a brand-new supernova, and setting a world-record in the process.

The Singularity (in the loose sense) continues apace with the development of contact lenses that display information directly in the field of vision. This is the very epitome of “augmented reality” technology. Wonder how long it’ll be until we can buy them at Walgreens.

Another nifty extra-solar planet discovery–this one very like Mercury.

It’s early days yet, but there’s more rumblings from legitimate autism research that might just have nailed down one of the reasons for increasing incidence and prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in the last couple decades. Encouraging news, as this one is completely preventable. Also weird as hell, which tickles my interest-o-meter.

In archeology news, physicists seem to have cracked the secret of the Mayan ability to make dyes that last forever.

At the end of December, the BBC did a wonderful 1-hour documentary on the most world-shaking scientific and technological advantages which, thanks to the marvels of YouTube, you can now see for yourself.

Along similar lines, here’s an article on 8 Science Fiction gadgets and plot devices that became a reality in 2010.

Laser weapons deployed for use on the high-seas! That’s right, non-lethal stun lasers are now being tested for use against pirates. No joke!

And, for the sake of great science-fictiony fun, here’s a great essay by Ronald Bailey speculating on the GOOD things that the lack of ET signals could portend.

Orwell
In other news, moral crusaders continue to Bowdlerize and lie about history “for the sake of the children.” If I can point to the single most harmful strand of human nature, aside perhaps from the propensity to commit genocide, this is the one I’d pick.

On the other hand, there are people of genuine moral fiber still circulating in the world. If you want something that will make you cry or stand up and cheer, check out this statement by the father of one the 9-year-old girl slain in the assassination attempt this week. Someone who takes his responsibility as a member of the body politic seriously enough that he’s unwilling to call for the curtailment of the civil liberties of others as salve for his grief? Uncommon! And displays most excellent character.

Weird Apps
Digital Life has info on an app for all you iPhone folks that will tell you when you can leave the theater to hit the bathroom without missing any plot points in currently-released movies. Behold, RunPee!

And that’s it for this time. Catch you around next time the world gets weird!

Right. Except that a few years back I resolved to no longer make resolutions. Ironically, it’s one of the few I ever wound up keeping. Instead, I use this wonderfully arbitrary and booze-infused time of year to make plans. Because, really, is there a better time to make serious plans than when you’re halfway through a bottle of scotch?

This coming year, I’ve got a very aggressive schedule for podcasting, writing, and producing trans-media projects (and yes, I know I haven’t dropped a podcast episode in six weeks — but they are coming, and what’s coming is pretty big).

Underlying all of the goals is the word count. I’m aiming to make at least a thousand words a day for the year, for a total of 365k words for the year. Marathon pace, but everything else depends on it. To that end, I’m going to be installing word count meters and updating them daily (at least on weekdays), so that, should I fall behind, I can at least do it in public where my humility can entertain others.

And, for those that might be interested, I’ll post little tidbits that I discover along the way, and updates on what’s coming out for public consumption in the near future.

So, here’s the metrics as of this evening:

Malice Aforementioned (short)

Free Will (Antithesis, book 2)

The Auto Motive

Also, they’re fun to rant about.

So, for the first entry in this series: Plots that depend on thinly-justified character derailment.

1) Characters act out of character because an alien took them over
Invariably, the “acting out of character” is so obvious that a blind macaque could spot it at a hundred yards, and yet their friends never notice until it’s convenient for the plot. Also, see #5

2) Characters act out of character because a virus is running rampant
There are viruses that do this. Recent research suggests that a virus might even be responsible for schizophrenia. However, such viruses aren’t cured by a quick zap by the magic thingamajig. They don’t cause the most plot-convenient conflict. And people don’t magically forgive injuries done to them by a virus-maddened former-friend who’s now trying to kill them, steal their spouses, and sexually molest their pet parakeets.

3) Characters act out of character because a computer replaced them with a hologram.
Really, guys, is this the best you can do? A computer wants to feel what it’s like to be human so it takes over someone’s life? Again? Didn’t I see this on every other SF show ever produced? And didn’t it really suck then too?

4) Characters act out of character because someone stole their DNA.
Because, really, if you were jealous of someone’s life, you couldn’t think of a better way to get petty vengence than by putting your body through a painful and likely fatal mutagenic process just so you could attempt to pass for them and kiss their significant other? Whatever happened to framing someone for murder, besmirching their character, or doing something else that might,for example, leave you alive and able to feast on the spoils of your victory instead of dying a horrible death at the hands of your own experiment? Or worse, getting contrived forgiveness after everyone you just greviously wronged manages to save your sorry ass from your own blinding stupidity?

5) Characters act out of character because someone stole their body/swapped bodies with them.

The personality exists in the brain, which is part of the body. If you’re going to swap bodies, you’re going to have to do a brain transplant. If, in your fictional universe, there is an immaterial soul that carries the personality, is it really going to sit around defenseless while you try to redirect it into another body by clever manipulation of television antennae (or the functional equivalent)? If your soul is so fragile that it’s vulnerable to anything nearly as flimsy as the Mcguffin’s in Science Fiction, then having one is clearly overrated in the first place–or your fictional universe would have fallent to pieces at the drop of the hat far before the time when your story takes place.
This story is dead, really. Heinlein did this one first, and best, with The Puppet Masters. The rip-off, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was almost as good. When something’s been done as good as it can be done, you just stop. Period. In both cases, these worked because they paid attention to the way human anatomy, physiology, and psychology work: The Puppet Masters hijacked the nervous system but left the original personality intact, while the Body Snatchers made a cosmetic copy of the body and killed the original person off while they slept, but copied over memories to avoid confusion.

6) Characters act out of character because an imaginary scientific anomoly is driving people crazy
Because, in real life, when astronauts go through the Van Allen belt, or walk on different planets, or breathe a different oxygen mixture, or look at the sun without sunglasses, or get exposed to radiation, or inadvertently eat bad food, they always go on a psychotic killing rampage or a nymphomanicial sex bender or feel the irrepressible urge to reconfigure their equipment to enable an alien invasion.

7) Characters act out of character because of an external influence because it’s the only way to get the characters to have sex.
Because we all know that post-pubescent and otherwise apparently mature adults (particularly unrealistically attractive single ones who are constantly flirting), never, ever have sex with anybody–and if they do, they’re completely embarassed and self-conscious for several episodes, unless they can claim that an alien plague made them do it.

Characters act out of character because the plot requires them to be uncharictaristically stupid.
Because really, where’s the drama potential in a cast of highly intelligent, eccentric characters with opposing interests and differing vaules all being forced to work together (i.e. the plot of every series drama ever written)? You could never get conflict out of that. What you really need is for someone to accidentally lick an experimental battery and decide to take over the world.

9) Characters act out of character because it’s the only way to generate enough conflict to keep the story interesting.
See #8, but remove the experimental battery justification.

10) Characters act out of character for any bullshit reason involving made-up science, magic, violations of the laws of physics, or an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.
Granted, this would kill over 90% of all televised science fiction, but you can’t make an omlette without killing a few writers.

Vanity

On the ever-so-self-indulgent subject of, well, me, there are a few items potentially of interest.

First, I released a second Clarke Lantham novel. When Clarke Lantham goes home for Christmas, the results can’t be good.

Meanwhile, the first Clarke Lantham book has been getting some attention. KindleAuthor just interviewed me about it, View from Valhalla loved it, and Seth Harwood, Gail Carriger, and Philippa Ballantine all liked it well enough to provide blurbs. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check out the first couple chapters here. For that matter, you can check out the first part of book to, A Ghostly Christmas Present, here. Enjoy!

Art and Writing
If you’re an artist, or a writer, and you live somewhere that the influence of Hollywood reaches (i.e. everywhere), it’s very easy to forget that being “in shape,” “fit,” or “athletic,” doesn’t mean the same thing as “lean,” “6-pack abs,” or “what I saw on the cover of Vogue this month.” Forgetting this basic fact of life robs stories and paintings and graphic novels of realism, even if slightly. So, for your benefit and mine, here’s a photo essay featuring over 100 Olympic atheletes in phenomenal shape, each featuring a very unique body type.

Odd how the two most “offensive” words in the English language at the moment were words that were only mildly naughty 30 years ago. While one of these will continue to be a problem for a while, the other is redeemable. Check out Hal Duncan’s brilliant linguistic history of “cunt,” and his take-down of the implicit sexism sold with the demonization of what is, after all, a very cute word for a very delightful organ. He also goes into depth in the way usage varies on either side of the Atlantic. Unusually thought-provoking, and not played for shock value. Very useful for writers who write cross-culturally.

Publishing
We all know publishing is changing — snooze, hit the alarm, pull the other one, etc. We read about it in the New York Times a hundred times, which one would expect, as publishing is a big presence in New York. But when you read about it in the LA Times you know the movement’s gone big. Of course, this is the LA Times, which isn’t exactly a bastion of non-sensationalistic accuracy. Even so, it’s a fun read full of links to authors doing innovative things. Fun stuff!

TeleRead posted an interesting overview of the history of book piracy, it’s sociodynamics, and economics, with a follow-up column speculating on what it means for the industry. Some interesting stuff here by Chris Meadows.

For those of you who, like me, have a huge library full of books by dead people that will never be released in e-book format (or, at least, not for anothe decade or two) there is an inexpensive non-destructive way to digitize your books. This method is legal and ethically benign so long as you do not share or sell the resulting digital books. As an open source advocate and DIY culture member, I am very much in favor of projects like this. As an author who makes his living off his intellectual property, I work hard to make sure my work is always available in forms that do not strip the reader of his or her fair use rights. The other side of that contract is that the reader doesn’t steal or pirate the creative work of the entertainers whose work they consume. So, with that caveat, enjoy the workshop experience I’ll keep writing ‘em if you keep reading ‘em.

Speaking of piracy, Paul Cornell writes a provocative ethics article about illegal downloading filled with many good and some rather flacid points. Worth a read, nicely thought-provoking.

Got a book available on Kindle? You can now post the sample on your website with the Kindle for the Web app. This post from indieKindle gives instructions for embedding the app on your site or in a blog post.

And, speaking of e-books…solar powered e-reader, anyone?

Beauty
A really fun time-lapse of what looks like the blizzard from hell — over 3 feet in less than 24hrs. Most impressive – the best 30 seconds you’ll spend today.

Terry Gilliam, whose work has always been kinda steampunky anyway, is producing a steampunk puppet movie that looks really damn cool if this short film version of it is any indication.

Not to be out-done on the time-lapse front, NASA brings you a time-lapse of a sunset from another world. Click here to watch a Martian sunset.

And for breathtaking, how bout a collection of photos of man-made footprints on other worlds?

Science & Technology

Recycling. We all do it for the environment, but some kinds of recycling–like recycling plastic–are a waste of energy, resources, money, and doesn’t yeild an environemntal or economic gain. This isn’t true for everything–aluminum, scrap metal, electronics, and (thanks to a recent breakthrough in dealing with treatment of toxic de-inking chemicals) paper–all yeild tremendous benefits when properly recycled. But plastics…man, plastics are a problem. They’re all chemically different, they have to be very carefully sorted, cooked, and then are downcycled (made into things further down the supply chain) rather than recycled to the same quality. It’s a dirty secret, and it’s been a bit of a problem and embarassment for a couple decades now. That might not be true for much longer. Seems that, rather than resorting to dogmatism and moral guilting on one side, or lazy-bones naysaying on the other, one scientist has figured out a process for recycling all plastics that’s inexpensive, energy efficient, and a net environmental gain. Bravo!

In the realm of philosophy of science, Alvin Plantinga, an otherwise respected epistemologist from Harvard, is in the process of dipping his face in egg when it comes to philosphy of science. His companionable discussion with Daniel Dennet gives you the bulk of his case in his own words, and P.Z. Meyers (whom I consider entertaining but not exactly one for nuance) takes him apart very effectively here.

Research on different kinds of invisiblity continues apace. This article talks time distortion effects of certain kinds of meta-materials, and gives a roadmap for a proof-of-concept. I’ve been having a blast watching this field go from the stuff of dreams and science fiction to the stuff of serious, hard-core well-funded research in the last ten years. I can’t wait to see–or not see–some metamaterial-based invisibility prototypes in action.

In other news, 3D image editing for anaglyph is coming soon to a computer near you.

The field of linguistics has long been one of those in-between sciences–not quite a real hard science, but something more quantitative than a social science. Google Books looks to be changing that. Ronald Bailey talks about the new trend in tracking linguistic and cultural evolution using quantitative analysis of Google’s book database.

You know the insomnia you get after a traumatic experience? Turns out that trying like hell to get to sleep might not be such a good idea after all.

If you’ve heard about geopolitical unrest because of China’s attempts to lock down the rare-earth metal market, don’t worry. Turns out they’re not the only country with lots of the “rare” stuff.

Education

If you’re a strong autodidact like me, you’re always on the prowl for new educational stuff. OpenCulture just updated their list of free online courses from major universities this month, and the selection is getting really impressive. Even scarier, as one who grew up in academia, I’m starting to recognize a lot of names on that list.

Meanwhile, one of the most excellent shows on the history of technology, James Burke’s Connections, has made its way onto YouTube. Bears multiple re-watchings. Check it out.

If you’re like most people, you’ve heard about the Theory of Relativity (E=MC^2) and have a vague idea that it means all matter is energy or something like that, but you’ve never really been able to get your head around the math to understand what it really means. Well, fear not — the always-readable Bertrand Russel wrote the definitive popularization of general relativity, and Derek Jacobi read it. Now, it’s available for free to the public as an audiobook. Go grab it now, give it a listen, and prepare to have your mind turned inside-out. Fun stuff

Also in the “good clean fun” department, someone with actual sexual experience on the order of decades is now producing a sex education series on youtube. Funny, clever, and no-bullshit, he calls it the “Guide to Getting It On,” and he hits a lot of points that younger, hipper educators often miss.

Politics

This is the only political article this time, and I’m including it because of how much of a shocker it is. Francis Fukyama’s analysis of where liberal econimcs went wrong by embracing the liberalization of financial markets instead of trade-goods markets. It’s very interesting watching the Keynsians, the Monetarists, and the Hayekians all starting to converge on this point in the wake of the recent banking crisis. More interesting to me is that Adam Smith got there two hundred years ago–and that politicians and policy makers still aren’t listening.

— — — —
I got tons more in my salad bowl, but that’s already a more substantive meal than I had planned to serve up. Hope you enjoy — and have a great New Year!

Fall is crazy, right? Halloween, Thanksgiving, School restarting, Christmas, RenFaire, Dickens Faire, conventions, festivities, and all those bleeding birds nesting in my trees and eating my pears, it’s enough to make one want to accept exile to an obscure Italian island.

After my writing binge this summer, I’ve been caught perpetually in the feeling that I’m wading through treacle, and it’s been driving me bonkers. Too much time on the road, too much Real Life ™ getting in the way, not enough time podcasting, or writing, or doing any of the half dozen other things that are in the top five of life priorities.

Turns out I’ve traded up one set of problems for another. As I conquered the word-rate barrier, I ran into a bunch of other roles and problems I had to grow into right-quick. And that can take up a lot of time and even more mental space.

What problems? Well, there’s new properties to manage and market. There are old projects that went begging that needed finishing up. There are three more books to finish by the end of the year, and new short stories that refuse to wait their turn.

It’s enough to make you feel like you’re working your ass off for no accomplishments whatsoever.

So, imagine my surprise when I total up my progress for the year and discover that, even with time on the road, I’ve been consistently writing at NaNoWriMo rates or better. The binge wasn’t a fluke, it just turns out that there’s a rhythm to the way I write: 5k words one day, 10k another, 1k another, 500 words another, but it averages out to 3k a day or better, and the progress on the various projects only feels slow because that work is spread over three novels, several shorts, and two nonfiction books. But they all grow.

Lesson: The next time someone tells you that one novel a year is really fast, spit in their eye. And keep writing at whatever rate you can manage. And next time you feel like you’re not accomplishing anything, step back and take a look at the last three months. Use some kind of objective measure. Then, make a change if you need to, or power through if you don’t.

Me? I didn’t do NaNoWriMo this year, and I probably won’t do it again, but it’s not because I don’t want to write a novel in a month.

It’s because I’m already doing more than that in an average month.

Generally people find it easy to start a novel, not so easy to keep it going after the initial burst of action and setup. The reason is that concepts are easy. Sustaining them, particularly when you’re not practiced at it, is hard.

Concept
Concepts are the easy part. Here are a the concepts for four of my novels (three you might recognize, one is in the works:
“The National Security Advisor escapes a contract on his life by leaving the planet.”
“A group of bohemian artists gets buried in an avalanche.”
“A soccer mom hires a surly private detective to find her missing daughter.”
“On her first night in her new apartment, a woman’s car is stolen only to be returned in the morning.”

This is your elevator pitch, stripped down to its bare essentials. It’s what is technically known as your “inciting incident,” and it’s where most people start a story: an idea that can be described in a single, action-oriented sentence.

When Concepts Run Out
If you’ve got a good strong concept, it’s easy to barge into your new novel with all the confidence in the world, right up until you hit a hard wall and can’t write anymore. The story just doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

We all hit this wall at some point. Some of us hit it with every book. Some of us write short fiction splendidly, but can’t quite ever do novels, because the mystical power of sustaining action eludes us.

Well, I can give you the secret to the mystical power. All you need are the Six Magic Words.

Six Magic Words
There are six magic words that you can append to the end of any concept sentence that transforms the idea from something appropriate for a short story, a sketch, or a prose poem into one that is more appropriate for a novel. Those words are:
“…and then everything goes to hell.”

Why?

It gives you a bridge into act two. Your concept is act 1 of the traditional five act story structure. Act two is “complication,” which can be hard to get into once you’re done with all the setup. You have your scene set, and now, for drama to proceed, you have to break something. You don’t want to, cause it’s beautiful. Or you can’t figure out what to break, because you don’t know what will happen. But if everything goes to hell, your life is simpler. You can break everything, see what works, then fix the things you didn’t need to break or that get in the way of the story. Or you can stagger the order in which things break. You have options–but you don’t have to pick between them right away.

Which gives you the freedom to plunge on writing.

I’m not the first to come up with this — most writers have their version. My favorite was Raymond Chandler’s answer when a fan asked him “How do you beat writer’s block?”

He said: “Someone with a gun comes through the front door. By the time I figure out who they are and why they’re there, the story is moving again.”

Happy writing!

Welcome to the second of several Down From Ten Feedback shows. This one is episode ten, part two of the Dealing In series of feedback shows, where I and several friends answer your emails and talk about whatever comes up. This time, I’m joined by Metamor City and Down From Ten cast member Chris Lester, New York Times Bestseller Gail Carriger, and producer/actor/cartoonist Kitty Nic’Iaian. What do we talk about? An incomplete list, in no particular order:

Food
Pacing
Screenplays
Chekov
Soulless
Racism and bigotry in the Victorian world
Douglas Adams
Thomas Mann
Cultural change throughout history
The Death of the Author
Focault
Deride
Shakespeare
The Royal Shakespeare Company
POV characters
George R.R. Martin
Neal Stephenson
Shakespeare
Employing Symbolism in writing
Tee Morris

Since I enjoy being entertained (even while having my manuscripts torn up), I suggested something which I would be proud to hang on my wall for the sheer conversation-starting value.

So, here is my ideal rejection letter for completely hopeless writers:

Dear [writer],
Thank you for your submission. While we do not think it advisable for you to commit suicide this early in your career, your writing displays the kind of promise and angst that have made unknowns like Sylvia Plath, Anne Frank, and John Kennedy Toole into posthumous best-sellers. These writers made the crucial mistake of dying with only one or two books to take the world by storm–don’t let yourself fall into that trap!
Unfortunately, our policy only permits us to publish fiction in your genre after your scandalous death, so we encourage you to build up your backlist and contact us again when you feel you have said your piece.
Sincerely,
[editor]

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go to the mailbox to check for today’s round of rejection slips.

What are some of the best rejections you’ve given, gotten, or heard of? Chime in in the comments!

“Picard, I could blast this ship out of existence if I felt like it. I could grow hair on your head. Turn your crew into embryos, force Worf to recite doggerel. I could turn your ship inside out, your reality outside in. I am not being condescending, Picard… not that I’m incapable of it, you understand, but this simply isn’t one of the times. Now, what I most definitely am, Picard, is arrogant. Why? Because I have a reason to be. I have a right to be. So… mortal… what’s your excuse?”

Harlan Ellison is arguably the least popular author in science fiction, because his personal reputation (some of which, he’s the first to admit, he worked hard to earn) paints him as something in between Q and the unholy hybrid of Ross Perot and a pissed off garden gnome. He’s also one of the greatest living authors in the world; the quality of his stories, and their diversity, is such that he’s never been out of work since he started selling consistently in the 1950s and 60s.

He edited the two greatest anthologies in the history of the genre, he penned the Star Trek episode that showed the possibilities inherent in Gene Roddenberry’s lovably hokey show, his influence on and friendship with J. Michael Straczynski were instrumental in bringing Babylon 5 to market (thus giving Ellison an instrumental hand in two of the most historically important Science Fiction dramas, as measured by their effect on culture–in Star Trek’s case–and on the nature of televised drama in the case of Babylon 5). He’s the author of two of the most reprinted stories in history. He nursed the New Wave movement of the 60s and 70s to something artistically and culturally important, with ramifications far beyond Science Fiction.

A lot of my friends (as in, almost all of them) can’t stand him. Some will go into fits of huffing and profanity when he come sup in conversation (as will a much greater number of my casual acquaintances). He’s an irascible bastard, with very little patience for those who (in his opinion) don’t get it. He’s scrappy, picks fights whenever he can, and is a master of scandalizing the easily scandalized. And arrogance? Yeah, he’s got a lot of that.

And you know what? I don’t care. Normally I’d smile and nod, but it’s time to go on record saying I don’t give a good goddamn if Harlan Ellison is an asshole. Although I enjoy being kind to people whenever possible and dislike cruelty, I always have and always will admire Harlan’s work ethic, his devotion to excellence, his impatience with half-assedness, his integrity, and the amazing quality of his work over a more-than-fifty year writing career.

So, like Peter David’s Q said, yeah, he’s arrogant. And if you have a problem with that, I gotta ask: What’s your excuse, mortal? I certainly don’t have one. I haven’t earned that right. If I live long enough and write well enough, I might have a ghost of a chance of earning it, but that day is decades off (at best).

I think it’s an important thing to say, and to say now. Because, you see, Harlan is dying. Today, he is appearing at MadCon in Madison, Wisconson, and it will be his last public appearance. Ever.

You can read Harlan’s announcement here.

There are only a very few people left who have been around our field since the beginning, or nearly so. Harlan Ellison, Frederick Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Anne McCaffrey, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, James Gunn, Michael Moorcock. I might have missed one or two, but the fact remains: I can now count our living history in names that don’t even take up all my fingers and toes.

These are the people we owe our field to. Their stories, and the tales of those who came before them starting in the 1920s, have helped shape our civilization, because they inspired the scientists that entered the space program, that powered the computer revolution, who pioneered the internet, and who are now powering the biotech revolution. They are the visionaries whose dreams our stuff is made of.

If you are fortunate enough to be in the room with any of these people, treasure the chance. Listen to their stories. Remember the history. They’re going fast, and I suspect that most of us in the under fifty category won’t realize how precious they are until it’s far too late.

So, you may ask, what did I learn from writing 123k words in 50 days?

Plenty.

What do you need to know if you’re gonna try for this kind of marathon?

Try these on for size:

First, as you can read in my post about the health problems I developed as a result of crappy Microsoft workmanship, ergonomics are everything. You can actually seriously damage your arms, hands, and wrists if you don’t move around regularly, have a comfortable keyboard, and pay attention to your body. Being in a groove is no excuse.

Second, food. I tried a variety of different styles of eating throughout the ordeal, mostly motivated by whatever I could think to put in the kitchen that week. What I wound up discovering surprised me. I expected to want junk food—pre-prepared high calorie, high density, high-protein, ultra-tasty nibbles supplemented with fruits and finger-friendly vegetables. However, it turned out that I gravitated toward made-from-scratch fare. I actually learned to make wood-oven pizza, sourdough from scratch, knishes, and a few other things during this time, and not just because they were tasty. It’s because it gave me something else to do.

If I was doing anything but writing, I felt a lot of pressure to get back to work. But if I was cooking or cleaning, I was holding up my end of the household. Pouring creativity into the cooking also gave me a chance to spoil my partner rotten in return for the tremendous support she was giving me as I tried to see just how far I could push my productivity. There was a lot of culinary experimentation, and between the quality of the food, the physical activity in preparing it, and the fun of creativity without pressure, it seriously boosted the quality and quantity of my output.

Third, exercise. I didn’t get enough of this, really. I can’t write very well at the walking desk—too many typos—so I was only getting on it two or three times a week. When I did get on, though, I went for the long haul. A couple hours at a stretch, and then within an hour of stopping I’d have a new creative flood. Activity helps supply the brain with oxygen—it also flushes lactic acid out of the system, and when you’re sitting that much the cellular waste sits in your muscles and makes them sore. Like bedsore-level sore. It makes you never want to move again, but once you start moving, it feels SO much better.

Fourth, massage. I’ve been doing massage for a long time now, and I have a friend who’s a pro who I trade with. Lifesaver. Getting them kept my RSI from crippling me before I fixed my ergonomics problem (and I did fix it, resulting in a heavenly experience for the last couple weeks here). Giving them helped me relax and remember there were other kinds of touch in the world besides typing.

Fifth, socialization. Weekly gatherings with my nearest-and-dearest, some festivities surrounding my birthday, impromptu meals with friends, all very important. Getting out to help build a retaining wall or join a moving crew for an afternoon was also lots of fun. All of it kept my mind limber.

Sixth, as Number Five said: INPUT! NEED INPUT! Keep your mind ticking over. Hrab’s new album was wonderful for this (you can buy Trebuchet here—it’s a mind-blower, though not for the easily offended). My weekly doses of P&T’s Bullshit!, True Blood, and The Pillars of the Earth kept me thinking in nicely twisty ways that helped the story. My Region 2 DVDs of the British quiz show QI kept me laughing and distracted during the long hours. Reading a Kellerman novel and Mary Roach’s STIFF during down time when I just couldn’t write, and listening to Steven H. Wilson’s Peace Lord Of The Red Planet (which I plan to review soon) kept me smiling and remembering the larger world outside my little projects.

Seventh, pay attention to what motivates you. For me, sitting at the keyboard wasn’t the hard part; it was keeping the juices flowing so my time at the keyboard was effective that I found difficult. Yes, I put in long hours–tortuously long, sometimes. But it wasn’t to hit a word count–I’ve found that doesn’t work for me consistently. It was to finish a story chunk or an article or a topic-based chapter. I wanted to find out how it ended, and I wouldn’t let it go till I did.

What motivates you might be different–figure out what it is and then keep it in the front of your mind.

At the root of all of this (and the plans I have for the rest of the year) is the realization that my backlist is too small. By lifetime word count, I’ve hit pro level. I now have over 900,000 words under my belt (that means 13.6% of my entire life’s writing output has happened in the last fifty days). But the number of properties I have on the market (everything finished piece since the 500,000 word mark) is simply too small, so I’m changing that. And, I suspect, I’ll keep changing that as long as I’ve got the fingers for it.

Telling stories is life for me. Even this one. Hopefully, if you like telling stories too, you’ll find some of these lessons useful.

Happy writing!

For the first half of the duration, I did it by accident. So, I thought it might be worth something to those of you who write or want to if I documented the experience.

It started off with a chat with another author who asked me some questions about guns for a book she was working on. Over the last couple years, this sort of thing has gotten pretty common as I’ve inadvertently acquired a reputation as something of a level-headed gun nut.

I got to thinking that much as I enjoy the excuse to talk shop with other authors, the volume of conversations I’d been having on this topic should tell me something: A lot of the current generation of authors simply don’t have first hand experience with firearms, but almost all of us use them in our fiction. Wouldn’t it be handy if there were a special podcast episode that went over the basics?

It seemed like a harmless enough project when I posted my first call for questions on June 22nd.

The questions came in fast, and in a large volume. By July 5th I had an outline for a fifteen episode podcast series, each episode being roughly fifteen minutes covering information on a single topic. So, on July 8, I started writing.

By July 15, I knew I was writing a book. The chapter list had grown to forty, and I’d split it into two books. I decided to write the first now, and the second in a couple months when I had a break.

On August 4, I finished the book. At fifty-five thousand words, plus illustrations, tables, and references I thought it would shape up to be a very nice e-book release. A companion podcast goes without saying.

But I was also on a roll, drunk on my power over the English language. I’d just done over fifty thousand words in a few weeks. Some of those days I put out more than ten thousand words, others only a few hundred. I had terrible RSIs, I was having trouble keeping up with other stuff (particularly paperwork), and I nearly missed an article deadline, but the words were still coming.

I needed to get back to fiction though. For one thing, if I wrote one more word about firearms I was going to want to use one on myself. For another, I desperately needed to finish Free Will so I could get on with my next projects.

But Free Will wasn’t ticking over for me. It was going to take a lot to get back into it–a couple hundred pages of reading to get back into the characters. I needed a good short story to get my fiction juices flowing again, so I pulled the pilot project for a new series of mystery shorts up and started working on it. Those of you who were at my reading at Balticon remember this one–you were all laughing pretty hard. For those of you that weren’t, think Douglas Adams writes Chinatown.

It was just supposed to be a nice little story, about six thousand words, pleasantly twisty with an appropriately bizarre solution. That was my idea, anyway.

The story itself had other ideas. In the last few weeks, I’ve written it twice. Once as a 20k word novella, and then (after being told it was far too dense) as a nearly 60k word novel (which I finished today). I suspect it’ll grow by another 10-20k over the next couple weeks as I revise and polish it.

Which is, I suppose, a long way of saying “Projects have a way of growing on me like a fungus.”

So if you want to do something this ridiculous and write this fast, how can you do it? Click here for a list of the lessons I learned from this little adventure that might make it replicable!

Most of us have moments in films or books that put us in tears, and for a lot of people, those moments are pretty predictable. Tell someone Old Yeller made owning a dog painful for you when you were a kid, and everyone understands.

But sometimes, it’s the unexpected moments that get you. Reach up and bite you out of nowhere in an otherwise frivolous film or book that’s not meant to do anything other than thrill or amuse you. I’ve had a few of these, and I bet a bunch of you have too.

So here’s what I want to do: I’d like those of you with something to pimp–a book release, a podcast, an album, a transmedia project–to send me your story. Give me a thousand words or so (or less) on the most unlikely movie, story, or song that made you cry, and what it taught you about your own preferred artform, if anything. Include a short bio with links to your work. I’ll put the stories up as guest blog posts, and hopefully we can generate more traffic for your projects while giving our audiences a unique glimpse into our bizarre creative processes.

…between the execrable puns that had me wailing in pain and laughter simultaneously (“Not with a whim, but a banker” — you should be utterly ashamed of yourself in the best possible way. I doubt I shall ever have the guts to do *that* to my readers), and the glorious moments of beauty and mourning, it is the best read I’ve had in quite some time, and will, I daresay, be one I re-read just as I do the rest of the best Heinleins on my shelf.

I discovered Robert A. Heinlein when I was twelve, literally on the day he died. I caught my father crying on the porch – not something he was given to doing in public. I asked him what the matter was, and he told me that Heinlein had died – and then he stared at me slack-jawed when he realized I hadn’t a clue who the man was. He took me to the garage, had me pull a box off the top shelf, opened it up, and produced Tunnel in the Sky. He thrust it toward me and said “Read. And when you’re done with this one, read the rest of them in this box.”

I found in Robert’s books exactly the kind of bitch-slap I needed to begin learning to take responsibility for myself, and the beginnings of my formal training in critical thinking, as well as permission to fall in love with life without embarrassment. It felt like mourning the passing of a well-loved uncle when, in 2001, I closed the page on The Star Beast and realized that there was nothing new left – I’d read them all, even Grumbles and Tramp Royale.

For the last few years, I’ve had Variable Star and For Us, The Living sitting on my shelf, waiting for a rainy day. Two weeks ago, after a long stretch of 12-18 hour work days, I took down Variable Star and nursed it for as long as I could, savoring all the echoes of my favorite author coming through the pen of the man he, from what I understand, considered his best successor.

It was a fabulous duet.

Thank you, very much, for having the courage to take it on. There’s one song left on my shelf, and I’m saving it for another rainy day, but for my money you’ve produced a near-perfect elegy in Variable Star.

Damn you for having the balls to quote Ulysses at the end. And thank you, so very, very much, for giving me one last grumble to treasure.

-Dan Sawyer

[Correction: MWS chimed in in the comments to correct my misapprehension of his current attitude toward podcasting, which is considerably more complex than the paragraph above makes it seem. My apologies for inadvertently misrepresenting him.]

The two of them are generation one podiobookers who appeared in the space hot on the heels of the three founders, and seeing them throw in the towel has a lot of other creators wondering: “Are we all just being idiots giving stuff away for free?” And it’s got a lot of fans wondering “What’s going to happen now? Are all my favorite writers going to give up?”

The Gospel of Free has been pinging around the internet for a while now, it’s even got its own official book. There are folks in the fiction space – like Doctorow and Sigler – that have made it the cornerstone of their publicity strategy and turn a consistent profit at it. The use of free content in career building is a well-established promotional strategy, but it’s a difficult tool to use, and suffers from the reductio ad absurdum that most people hear when they first encounter the message, no matter how subtly it’s preached: “If you build it, they will come.”

So if I just put my stuff on the web I’ll find an audience? Well, no. You might find an audience, if you get yourself seen by the right people (and by “right people” I mean people who are prone to telling everybody they know about their latest new and great thing). You might even find a good audience – but you have to bear in mind, “Free” doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Let’s take what I do for free (well, free to my audience): I use a segment of my professional time as a writer and as a sound engineer to produce full-cast audiodbooks. I pay for this – billing my professional time out at normal rates, and factoring in what I pay my actors in trade (whether they’ve collected on it or not), my cost (not including what I should be paying the author) is in the neighborhood of $10-15k. Now, am I out of pocket that much? No. I do go out of pocket a little bit, but not a lot – however, that’s all time stripped out of my life that I could be billing at that kind of rate. If you’ve wondered why I do less in the way of publicity than some other podiobooks authors, now you know – the time is my main expense, and I have a life and a business. I intend, eventually, to have my writing income make up a greater-than-fifty-percent share of my household budget, but I’m not there yet. I’m nowhere near. This is what is called a loss-leader.

In business terms, a loss-leader is the bait on the hook – the hook is what gets the audience to spend money. Matching the right bait to the right hook and fishing in the right water is a learned skill set, and it relies somewhat on how fast one learns from experience, how lucky one is, and (in the writing game) how good a lawyer one is and/or has. There’s a reason more than 75% of authors wash out of the game after their first book contract runs out, and why only a minuscule percentage of people with authorial ambitions ever get even that far – being a good writer is not the same as being a successful author. It’s even possible to be a successful author without being a good writer (for example, Dan Brown), but I wouldn’t bank on it and I know damn few successful authors who would, particularly over the term of a career. Craft does matter – it’s just not all that matters.

If podcasting is your loss leader, what’s your endgame? If all you’re trying to do is get your voice heard, podcasting or blogging your novel is a perfectly fine idea. If you’re looking to get published, it might help, or it might be a distraction or a detriment, depending on your approach and a host of other variables. If you’re looking to build a sustainable long term career as a professional author, it’s time for you to stop and think about a few things before you go into podcasting:

1) What will podcasting give me?
2) What is my professional time worth – and if I were to bill myself for this, how much of a loss will I be taking?
3) What kind of author do I want to be?
4) Why do I think “getting published” is a worthwhile goal?

Why should you stop to think about these things? Because I guarantee you that your answers to at least one of those questions is wrong enough to set you up for some serious disappointment.

What will podcasting give me?
Podcasting will, if you stick with it and actually produce a decent product with broad enough appeal, give you an audience ranging anywhere from a few hundred to maybe twenty thousand regular listeners. If you’re very innovative in evangelizing your product beyond the established fiction podosphere, your chances for good numbers go up. If you host in a high visibility place like Podiobooks and leave your content there for a few years, your numbers will climb over time due to the long tail effect.

Podcasting may also help you learn the market in terms of audience. This is the primary reason I started fiction podcasting: Market research. I was looking to find out what kind of people would enjoy the stories that I’m interested in writing, so that I could figure out how to find and deliver to that market that, in the long term (and I’m talking about a time scale of decades) I will be able to consistently turn a profit on. Notice I said “stories”, not “books” – that will become important later.

Podcasting may give you a creative community – this isn’t something I was looking for, but I have made some friends through the process as well as more than a few good business contacts that have been helpful along the way.

Podcasting (if you’re good at it) will win you respect and accolades as well as the adoration of at least a few fans along the way, and this feels really good. Just remember that, as encouraging as it can be, it’s a limited kind of street cred. Audience tastes change, and what they love about you today they may hate about you tomorrow. Glory feels wonderful, even in small doses, and can put an extra bit of shine on a life well lived, but it will never make up for insecurity or the need for the kind of relationships you can only have with people who really know you.

Podcasting may give you pleasure – if you enjoy the process and enjoy interacting with people, it’s something that you might like even as a hobby.

But unless you are supremely lucky and very canny, there is something podcasting will not deliver: a paycheck of any substance. If you’re expecting to be have your audio audience put you on the bestseller list once you get that book deal, good luck to you. A few people have pulled it off. Those people are, without exception, people that – by chance or by cleverness – wrote exactly to market. They were selling stories that resonated perfectly (or at least well enough) with the public that a larger-than-average segment of their fan base wanted to own a physical copy, and the same larger-than-average segment went out of their way to pimp the shit out of the books to their friends, family, and strangers who might not even own iPods. A few others have pulled it off by their books being noticed on a site like Podiobooks, and subsequently selling film options.

If you want your book to perform well enough to get to your next contract, you need a publishing house that will throw its weight behind you, a print run that is realistically scaled to your book’s performance, and a property that is going to sell in the current market. If you don’t have at least the latter two of these three things, then (again) good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

How Much Is My Time Worth?

I hate to sound like a schoolmarm (or worse), but time that you’re podcasting is time that you’re not doing four other things, all of which are arguably more important. It’s time you’re not making money at whatever your profession is, it’s time you’re not spending with friends and family building the memories that make life with living, it’s time that you’re not learning, and it’s time that you’re not writing.

If you intend to write fiction for any significant fraction of your life, you need to be doing all of those things. You have to write to grow as a writer, and you have to make money to be able to live while you’re writing. But if you have a life that isn’t worth living – say, a life without significant relationships or learning and enrichment – then it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have anything interesting to write about (and you may be too depressed to write about anything at all, except stories about depression).

Every hour you spend podcasting is billable time – somebody’s paying for it, and it isn’t always just you. Don’t cheat on your mental accounting sheet – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Even in a down economy, your time has a dollar value attached to it – figure
out what that value is, and then keep track of what you’re spending. If nothing else, being aware of the cost will help you keep from feeling cheated at the far end if you wind up not getting a good return on your investment, because you’ll be spending on purpose.

What Kind of Author Do I Want To Be?

If you’ve been in and around the writing business for any length of time, you’ve heard the old saw “you can’t make a living as a writer unless you’re in the top 1%.” This bit of conventional wisdom is what lies behind the blockbuster mentality on the part of authors: you want to have a brand name, you want to be the biggest thing ever, and you must relentlessly self-promote (the blockbuster mentality of some publishing houses is another animal entirely, and Charles Stross and Dean Wesley Smith have both covered it very well on their blogs recently).

If you’ve heard that and are still intent on trying, then you are either mind-numbingly stupid, a heroically-minded risk junkie, a hobbyist, or someone who actually has a clue about business and doesn’t listen to the conventional wisdom of creative people (in which case, good for you).

So you want to be the next Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer? You’d be better off going to Vegas – that kind of trend really is a game of chance, and depends largely (though not entirely) on unforeseeable market forces. That said, there is a whole swath of writers who make a living on their names, which they worked very hard to establish, and who aren’t blockbusters (and yes, Scott Sigler is one of them. He might be a blockbuster by our standards, and his ambition is to be the next Stephen King, but by broader market standards he’s a respectable front-lister, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that).

But blockbusting is not the only way to win this game, and here’s why:

Most authors who make a living at it don’t make a living on their book advances. Oh, the advances help, but they’re not even close to the whole pie. Subsidiary rights sales, foreign rights, royalties from the long tail, article sales, and commissioned work for other commercial ventures (such as being tapped to do a Star Trek or a Dragonlance novel) make up a large part of the income flow, with investments helping keep the rent paid during lean years. These authors generally (though not always) sit solidly on the mid-list, and some of them write under a variety of names for different markets. I know and have known (personally) at least a score of authors who make their living with their words, and the two qualities that distinguish them from the authors I know who haven’t been able to pull it off are: 1) insufferable, bloody-minded perseverance, and 2) continual growth in craft and breadth. In other words, these authors actually treat it like a career, rather than a brass ring.

The truth is that most people who get counted as “authors” in surveys of author incomes are people who publish a single book, or who have a book they haven’t sold. They’re not career writers. They don’t count screenwriters, ad copy writers, stage play writers, or other such folks. In other words, this bit of conventional wisdom is horse shit because it counts every dilettante, aspiring amateur, and washout as an “author.” Authors such people may be, but professionals they ain’t. Some of them will become professionals (I must hasten to add, I’m on this tier — I’m not prolific enough or churning enough cash enough yet to be called a professional, but I’m heading deliberately in that direction) – others are hobbyists. I daresay that if such a survey were taken of all the auto mechanics in the world, with hobbyists and people that change their own oil counted with the same weight as ASE certificate holders, the numbers for auto mechanics wouldn’t be dissimilar to what we hear about with writing.

If you’re looking to do this for a living, writing is a professional business (i.e. a business that relies on being an expert in a particular domain), with all the problems that implies: It relies on individual expertise, a broad skillset, at least a vague awareness of market dynamics, a certain legal acumen, the ability to adapt to contingency, a high tolerance for risk and uncertainty, and a little bit of luck. You know, just like any other non-franchise business.

Why Do I think Getting Published is a Worthwhile Goal?

More than any other question, the answer to this gets to the heart of the matter for an author who is thinking of podcasting their work, because in answering this you’re probably going to answer a significant portion of all the other questions.

My answer to this one is simple: It’s a step on the road. I got a huge thrill with my first short story sale – now, after only a couple more, it’s an exercise in contract negotiations and another tick on the scorecard. It’s fun and exciting, but it’s not the life-affirming experience that the first sale was. Why? Because my sights are on the next set of goalposts, and I need to get to those so I can see the next set, and so on.

But my self-worth is not wrapped up in this. This is business. If I can’t make it work one way I’ll make it work another, and if, in the end, I turn out not to have the chops, I’ll shift my focus and continue writing as a hobby to whatever extent I can justify it. Yes, I am one of those rare people who will write no matter what – it’s the reason I’m making a go of turning it into a profession. But that doesn’t mean that everything I do will be available for free. Some things will, some things won’t – just like, right now, some things are and some things aren’t. My time is billable hourly, and my free stuff is there so that I can 1) build my audience, and 2) learn how to navigate in my marketplace(s). It’s an investment I’m making because it seems sound to me – I know what it costs, and for me the price is right.

Is the price right for you? Think hard about it. I daresay there will always be hobbyists in the podcast fiction space, but if you’re a pro or an aspiring pro, look at it as a business investment. It’s not a magic bullet, and it’s not a shortcut. Even podcasting’s biggest success, Scott Sigler, doesn’t see it as either of those things. Scott needed a platform to prove that there was a market for cross-genre horror, so he essentially invented one. His focus now is on figuring out where the next place to grow his audience is, and what books will be best to write next. There’s a reason he’s made this work, and it goes a lot deeper than “he writes in a popular genre” (although that also is very important).

Wrapping It Up

The Gospel of Free is a pernicious little meme that’s burned out some talented people and seriously burned others, but it’s not a new one. Every get rich quick scheme, every investment bubble, every motivational speaker that comes along has the same basic blend of bullshit and wisdom: “Look at this new thing – it’s no-lose! Look at its merits! Imagine how much you could do with this!” Network marketing, real estate flipping, dot com stocks – there’s always something, and it nearly always takes a pretty clever idea and isolates it from all good business sense.

Don’t fall for it. Free has always been with us, and it’s always been good business when done right. New tools, new media, and new toys are great, but excitement about the opportunities they present can easily obscure the most basic thing about business: supply and demand must meet, and they must trade. If they don’t, then at best what you’ve got is a rewarding hobby, and at worst you’re in a financial disaster. There is no such things as a fast buck except at the craps table, and there is never any such thing as a free lunch.

Me? I’m in this for the long haul. I’m building a business, with all the risk that implies. Right now, my business model includes podcasting. Will it in three years? It depends on what happens between now and then.

So, in sum, my advice to other writers and podcasters, for what it’s worth: Podcast what you will. Keep track of what it’s costing you. Cut your losses if it’s not returning what you need for it to be worthwhile. Above all, don’t buy the bullshit that motivational speakers and other sharks shovel. Celebrity status might be useful, but it’s like Monopoly money: not negotiable currency outside of the small circles that generate it.

For fans of mine and other’s podcast fiction: remember that while this is free to you, it’s not free for us. Your feedback, your cash in the tip jar, and your evangelism are much appreciated. We podcast authors know that we’re being wasteful and reckless – and not all of us will stay in this space forever. For now, I at least am getting what I want out of the bargain, and I do enjoy entertaining you all.

For everyone reading, remember: Life is precious. Don’t forget to enjoy whatever it is you’re doing, and treasure the memories it gives you. Treat your time like an investment, and savor what you buy with it. In the end, the moments are the only thing we have to make a life out of.

It’s been two years since I started putting my fiction out into the aether through podcasts, selling stories, and otherwise subjecting the universe to my…shall we say “colorful” mental meanderings. My readers and listeners have been good enough to send me feedback throughout the endeavor, which is excellent market research as well as great motivation to keep on.

If there is a single topic – beyond “you cliffhangering bastard” – that I get hit with most, it’s about how I deal with sex in my stories. There are the occasional “that’s really hot” comment, but more often there are the complaints, such as “I can’t stop listening, but do you really have to have so much sex/homosexuality/eroticism/etc.?” I find it fairly ironic, in these post-Heinlein days populated by paranormal romance, vampire erotica masquerading as everyday fiction, and abstinence porn, that treating sex merely as a normal part of life could raise so many hackles, but there you are.

More interesting than that, though, is how little I hear complaints about the violence, which is every bit as unflinching (or, in the words of one reviewer, clinical), as the sexual content. There are moments in Predestination or The Man In The Rain which turn my stomach
reading them, and yet they pass with relatively few comments compared to, for example, the sex scene between Joss and Cassy toward the end of Predestination or pretty much anything in Down From Ten.

As an American, I’ve been hearing about the double-standard between sex and violence most of my life – over the last two years I’ve been able to see it in action through my audience and through the eyes of non-American colleagues such as Philippa Ballantine, who once quipped to me: “On American TV sure, we’ll show murder and mayhem, but God forbid you show a boob!”

We all know this, right? Or at least we’ve heard it before. Most Americans ignore it in one fashion or another. Toward the conservative end of the cultural spectrum it can even look like a good thing: Robert M. Price once told me in an interview that he found Hostel powerful because it shows that the trivialization of sex through pornography and prostitution leads directly to slavery and torture (he’s not alone in this assertion – there’s a broad coalition of feminist and fundamentalist philosophers who share the same general conclusion, though their core values otherwise differ).

Normally I keep my trap shut about things like this, unless someone asks me about it directly, because it’s the kind of topic on which people tend to be partisan. That changed this week, though, when I watched through a TV series called Harper’s Island – a nice little mystery thriller made for CBS last year. The premise is simple – it’s Ten Little Indians done in the style of a slasher film, and it’s remarkably effective. It’s effective, well-executed (no pun intended), and deeply twisted.

I had a lot of fun watching it until it occurred to me, sometime in the middle of the series, that this was done for broadcast TV – not cable, not satellite or premium channels, but broadcast. This series which features the kind of gore that, even today, would earn it a hard R rating in the theater, was broadcast on American TV.

You know, American TV, where three frames of breast exposure is enough to cause a national crisis? Where Bono saying “fuck” on an awards show costs the network hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines? Where the word “piss” is bleeped out of Mythbusters episodes that air on cable? America, the land of the free that banned Carlin from the radio? The America that is so culturally brittle that it can’t stand the freedom of speech enshrined in its own constitution for fear of what might happen to the children?

There was a time not too long ago when you could expect the similar levels of sex, violence, and “bad” language on TV. Quality adult programming required a wink and a nod sometimes, but a good writer could do it – and recently there’s been a flowering of really good adult entertainment as broadcast has had to compete with cable and the Internet. It was censorship, and appalling, but there at least seemed to be a consistency about it – a sense that some level of intensity (about anything) was for adults, and thus not okay for broadcast where anyone of tender years might be watching.

Now, the situation seems to be changing, and in a bad way. Harper’s Island features some of the most grisly violence I’ve seen this side of a slasher film – done well enough to make the makeup artist part of my brain goggle in wonder, to be sure – frosted by a sense of calculating sadism and paranoia worthy of the villains (or heroes) of Thomas Harris. It’s not an exploration of violence, it’s merely a thrill-ride, and a remarkably effective and occasionally nauseating one.

Does it feature the kind of language people might use when being stalked by a serial killer? Does it show anything sexual beyond the briefest acknowledgments that its characters have some kind of sexuality? Of course not! Children might be watching.

Growing up as I did on the cultural right wing, I long considered the American double-standard to be harmless and quaint. I understood the fears that lay behind it, even though I thought they were ridiculous. I chuckled at the amount of effort certain groups put into the mind games behind sexual purity, and the money they waste on meaningless political and cultural campaigns. I thought it was understandable, and maybe silly, but not really harmful.

It took seeing Harper’s Island to realize how much my views have changed. The cultural conservative picture of sex, and the double-standard it dictates isn’t just quaint, silly, or something that can be condescendingly shrugged off as the product of too much insularity. It’s an insidious, destructive lie that is now so baldfaced that we can watch dismemberment on prime-time broadcast while anthropology documentaries censor tribal nudity (I kid you not).

A basic part of adulthood is the ability to deal with the world as it really is. Every social creature – including every human – has sex organs, sexual appetites, and sexual inclinations. The bonding impulse is as foundational to life as the need for food. Everyone touches, everyone eats, everyone dies, and virtually everyone has orgasms. To pretend otherwise is unbecoming the dignity of an adult.

It’s also genocidal. That’s because there is, after all, a link between sex and death and violence. The lack of willingness to deal realistically with sex is something that endangers the lives millions of people every day. In the age of AIDS, the price of childish delusion and the illusory comfort it brings can be measured by a metric once used exclusively for strategic warfare: Megadeaths.

I have a very high violence tolerance. I believe that violence in art and entertainment can be life-affirming and useful as it caters to our visceral natures. It helps us cope with the prospect of death. Violence can even be a social good (though such circumstances are far fewer than they once were). It can help us feel keenly alive in ways that we in civil society can’t access in any other way without harming those around us. But in no way is it more life-affirming than our primary bonding impulses, or touch and pleasure, or the difficulties of love and friendship.

[In honor of her new book Soulless, which impressed me with its groundedness in the Victorian world, I asked author Gail Carriger to blog about the art of finding good research sources for Steampunk writing. This is her contribution - thank you very much, Ms. Carriger! -JDS]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: nothing beats primary sources. I hate to be a traitor to the Author Guild’s justifiable objection to the Google Book settlement, but Google books does already have a number of good primary sources from the 1800s available.

* One of my personal favorites, with recipes and other interesting tidbits about domestic management in 1876, is Things a Lady Would Like to Know

* Floote’s Medical Common Sense is another wonderful resource for a historical perspective on the Victorian attitude towards medical science, not to mention a window into scientific, social, and psychological theory. This is an American classic (if non-fiction can be called such).

There are other useful primary sources as well, that you might be able to order through Amazon or a rare books dealer. My two favorites are:

* Baedeker, Karl. 1896. Baedeker’s's London and its Environs. (or any Baedeker’s dated to the Victorian era) for maps, railroad time tables, popular museums and visitors areas, not to mention names of shops, clubs, restaurants, news papers and more.

* Edwards, Amelia B. 1877. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. For language and the Victorian adventurer abroad feel.

As for secondary sources, what you need may depend upon what you’re writing. I write comedy of manners, so my needs reflect this more pedestrian interest level, someone with a more military bent probably has a different list. Never the less, I find myself constantly reaching for the following:

* Pool, Daniel. 1993. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. For the basics.

* Cunnington, C. Willett. 1990. English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. For anything to do with women’s clothing

* Flanders, Judith. 2003. The Victorian House. For domestic life questions. The information is not well structured, but it is there.

* Farwell, Byron. 1972 Queen Victoria’s Little Wars. For the quickest insight into the Empire Building mentality and military history of the age.

Aside from Wikipeda, which can be an okay place to start, there are some good, if not particularly well organized, research tools dedicated to the Victorians online as well.

* By far the biggest and the best is the Victorian Web which is a great spiderweb of all sorts of useful information

* The Victorian Dictionary offers up primary newspaper articles on different topics

And here are a few interesting individual offerings online.

* Victorian Slag Dictionary

* Victorian Etiquette

* The Illustrated London News (starting in 1842)

* Victorian servants

* The Ladies Journal

* Godey’s Lady’s Book

* Naval Ships of Victorian times

* Nick Names of Cavalry regiments

* Some ways to tie a cravat

* La Mode Illustree LiveJournal group

Other tips:

* If you have a DVR or Tivo trigger in keywords pertaining to your topic of interest. You never know what the history channel might be dealing with next. It will at least give you a jumping off point.

* Watch BBC costume dramas, and or, rent the DVD and check out the extras, they often have interviews with historical experts.

* Having a really hard time answering a research question? Cold call a local university history department. Experts love to talk about their expertise, perhaps there is someone in the history department you can ask. They may at least give you a book or article to read.

Lastly, of course you can keep an eye on my website, I often put up bits and bobs I’ve discovered around the net.

Literacy is like heroin – it’s habit-forming. The more people try out the habit, the more likely they are to retain it. Exposure to books breeds consumption of books, which is good, because the act of reading requires deliberate commitment. This is important to keep in mind, particularly for those who wish to arrest the publishing industry’s current implosion before it becomes more like the razing of Carthage than the decline of the British Empire.

Despite its pretensions to the contrary, publishing is a business. The novel, the newspaper, the short story, and the magazine were all shaped to fit market niches, not vice versa. Eventually, somewhere along the line, the people who actually produce and polish the content (i.e. the writers, editors, and publishers) have to get paid.

We writers – and the publishing companies that once made a tidy profit off our work – don’t have a divine right to exist. If there’s no market, we go away.

ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY IS A LOSING GAME

The artificial scarcity strategies that media companies have (unsuccessfully) employed to preserve their markets won’t work for books, even in theory. All DRM is laughably easy to crack or circumvent. Also much DRM strips both content creators and consumers of their rights. Readers, like music fans before them, won’t put up with that. They will pirate instead.
While publishers try to create market scarcity by fiat, writers are trying to stay alive — and readers are trying to figure out how to find the books they want. In the struggle to limit readers’ ability to read the books they pay for, publishers (like the movie and music industries before them) are cutting their own throats, because readers (unlike movie and music fans) have ALWAYS been able to go elsewhere to get what they want. It’s perfectly possible for almost anyone in the western world to read for a lifetime without ever paying a dime for the privilege. That’s been true ever since Andrew Carnegie started endowing libraries.

Therefore, the game for book publishers is different than it is for music or film publishers. People like to search favorite books for quotes. They expect to be able to excerpt passages. They prefer books that are always available. While DRM doesn’t work well for relatively disposable entertainment like pop music and movies, it doesn’t stand a chance in the world of publishing. No copy protection scheme could possibly work, and no reader will endure draconian limits placed on her for long.

LIBRARY AS PUSHER

Public libraries might be a contained threat for now – but increasingly they are going online like a monster version of Google Books. How can our culture survive that? Authors’ copyrights will be shot, our revenue streams will dry up, and the whole literary establishment of the western world will…

..Oh, wait. I’m sorry, for a moment there I thought I was a record company executive.

But seriously, what of freely available books online? If everything is on Google Books, isn’t our business model blown?

No. Google Books merely samples sections of books – a drug pusher’s trick, wonderful for whetting the reader’s appetite. Our libraries should do the same thing, and go one step further:

Let people rent online access to books.

If someone wants to read a book online — or maintain access to one for a research project, or just have an old favorite at the ready wherever there’s wifi — let him pay a dollar for a week, or $2 for two weeks, or $10 for lifetime access. Let him read it on his Kindle or his Mobi or his laptop or his iPhone. And let it remain on the library’s server accessible only with his library card account.

This approach benefits both authors and publishers by providing a new revenue stream for themselves and for libraries. It creates a new market segment without gerrymandering artificial scarcity. And it does all this without curtailing the existing rights of readers, who may still walk into a library and check out the book, or buy the book in a bookstore.

It might also boost e-book sales: creating a niche market among travelers and others who want access to a broad catalog while away from the ‘net, and who will accept draconian restrictions in exchange.

Of course, there will always be a segment of the literate market who won’t actually read. For a variety of reasons, some readers will always gravitate towards audiobooks. Well, libraries could rent out streaming audiobooks. They could even promote print books with audio samples – call it a “gateway drug” strategy.

The audio sampling method is a proven success. A number of novelists (myself included) are already cultivating new markets by giving away audiobook versions with resounding success. Scott Sigler, the front-runner in this new game, hit the NYT Bestseller list for a print book he’s also giving away online in audio form. His strategy is enough like a drug dealer’s that his fans call themselves “junkies.”

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Saving its market won’t be enough to save book publishers — but it will help them survive long enough to fix their other massive internal operational problems. Between print-on-demand, e-books, and Google Book Search, we have the opportunity to grow- the literate market share from its current historic lows, rather than letting it continue to shrink.

If we’re going to do this we must adapt to the market rather than try to strong-arm it into standing still for us. Tom Lehrer had it right for heroin, but he could have been talking about literacy, too. Remember the less on of the Old Dope Peddler:

He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young, innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s clientèle.

Losing the ability to play is one of the more tragic things that can happen to a person. It’s at the root of a lot of the unhappiness in the world I’ve seen, and (from personal observation) it comes in play heavily during quarter-life and midlife crises.

The TED video below talks about the evolving state of play with regards to play, learning, economic innovation, and human flourishing. It’s worth the 18 minutes. Trust me

For this weekend’s foray into steampunkiness, I ordered my outfit for Steamcon. It should be quite dapper.

Now, on to Steamboy.

At first blush, this is a gorgeous film. The artwork is fabulous, the sense of form and movement is spectacular. I’m not actually a big anime fan, but the previews made this movie look gorgeous – a cut above the usual anime standard in terms of visuals and in terms of story, and “Anime Steampunk” seemed a combination just weird enough to be interesting. Besides, these were the guys who did Akira, which was gorgeous.

As the film got rolling, I began to think that Anime Steampunk was a more sensible combination than I thought at first. If there’s one thing that Anime is spectacular with, it’s rendering scenery, and the Victorian London setting, complete with steam-powered giant power plants, gave this film a rich, palpable atmosphere from frame one. Inasmuch as Steampunk is a style, this film must be a perfect example.

The first act of the film was very promising, beginning with a provocative teaser about mineral water miners and moving straight into the story of a young boy – the oldest son of the Steam family – who wishes he could be off sharing adventures in engineering and scientific discovery with his father and grandfather, both of whom are great inventors.

Like The Rocketeer, this film sits in the retro-scifi corner of steampunk, where speculation is made upon technologies known to exist at the time, and Steamboy does a good job of sitting in that genre. The corners of the world are filled up by background (and sometimes foreground) elements of the world of the time – wanted posters for Jack The Ripper, a piece of the plot featuring the crystal palace of the Great Exposition. Sure, the two events weren’t quite contemporaneous, but they still tickle the cockles of a history geek’s heart. The historical flavor is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, dotting its landscape with family names like “Steam” and character names like Scarlet O’Hara and Robert Stephenson (both meant to evoke the flavor of the era rather than stand in for the historical or fictional personages), and this added to the charm of the first act.

Now, you may be asking yourself why I keep referring to the first act?

The reason is that the first act presents a glorious film opening, filled with well-realized characters inhabiting a well-developed world. At the end of the first act, the writers even go in for a bit of intellectual sophistication, explaining the film’s McGuffin in very sharp, intelligent, layman-accessible language that is for the most part fully compatible with the mechanics and operations of steam power (so long as you ignore a couple little thermodynamics issues which are, honestly, very minor).

The story takes a hard left turn into idiocy at the beginning of the second act, and from there it’s all down hill. By the end of act three the film’s initial glory is largely lost, and aside from a few really creative moments and ideas the viewer is mostly left with a large, steaming pile of incoherent dog shit. If you’ve been reading this blog or listening to my podcasts for any appreciable length of time, you’ll recognize this as an uncharacteristically disparaging statement, so let me explain:

The central point around the story turns is the destructive uses of science. Essentially, there is an evil, warmongering charitable foundation which funds research in order to keep the defense contractor that created the foundation in business. The Steam family has been retained by them to create the ultimate steam-power capacitor, something that allows for unimaginably high pressures. The Steam family inventors laughably believe that the purpose of this research is to create a children’s theme park to bring delight and happiness to all children, and when this turns out to be only the tip of a larger industrial iceberg, Father Steam decides to sabotage the project, while Son Steam decides to carry on. Grandson Steam, at the age of about 10, winds up being the moral arbiter of this conflict.

During the course of the film we, the unfortunate viewers, are subjected to long-winded idiotic preachments that hammer home the following points:

All profit motives are evil (in so many words)

Trackless steam engines operating as battle tanks will mean the end of the idyllic, non-exploitative Victorian civilization.

The true purpose of science is to make the world peaceful by making children happy.

True science cannot coexist with any kind of business interests.

And endless rehashings of that sort from one angle or another.

Please bear in mind that we’re not talking about one or two stray lines, or ideas being floated for consideration, we are talking about pages of dialog of Grandfather Steam ranting to Grandson Steam. To reinforce the point, midway through the third act the O’Hara corporation deploys steam-powered cybermen to terrorize, maim, and kill everyone at the Great Exposition (because, as we all know, technologists are so evil that they can’t let a little thing like having the greatest military in the world shoot them out of the sky stand in the way of securing a military contract with the Grand Sultan of Arabia).

You think that’s bad? I promise, I’m being kind. Everything that this film started out with in terms of craft and intellectual sophistication get pissed away in the second and third act in an attempt to create the perfect lesson in Marxism for first graders (complete with the triumph of the steam-powered children’s amusement park at the end). It’s an insulting, stupid, depressing piece of crap – and all the more ironic for coming out of the wealthiest film studio in Japan, a nation of technocrats.

I’ve made no secret that I have no great love for either Marxism or Merchantilism, that I think they’re both destructive ideologies that are, in the end, highly destructive to both individuals and culture. That doesn’t mean that these ideas shouldn’t be discussed, or even encouraged, in films. A number of my favorite films have a strong anti-capitalist and/or anti-technological flavor (Blade Runner chief among them, but certainly not standing alone). But the difference between Steamboy and intelligent treatments of the same subject matter is as broad as the difference between Michael Parenti and Michael Moore. The socialist and progressive traditions in Victorian and Edwardian culture gave shelter to ideas that turned out to be deeply destructive (Eugenics and the Temperence movement chief among them), but it also achieved noble articulation from the pens of thinkers and authors such as H.G. Wells, Betrand Russel, and Jules Verne, who understood the complexities of a developing industrial society and had genuine concern for both the plight of the underclasses and the dispensation of the enormous industrial power that humanity suddenly possessed.

Steamboy is well within the Victorian intellectual tradition in its starry-eyed idealism about science for the sake of science, and in its distrust of capitalism. However its articulation of these concepts is heavy handed, moronic, insulting, and embarrassing. That its writers were so incompetent that they had to preach in platitudes rather than unfolding their ideas through dramatic narratives is the classic hallmark of all self-important bad art.

What’s the first thing you learn in creative writing class? Show, don’t tell.

Steamboy is a failure on every artistic level for this reason. But damn, the first twenty minutes sure are a feast for the geek in me.

As for the steampunky goodness. Today, I’m watching The Brother’s Grimm .

I’m typing as I go along, but not posting until I’m done with the film. Overall, it’s a strange blend of the very good, the irritating, and the really dumb. Let’s start with the good:

The concept is very, very clever. The eponymous Brothers Grimm, hard pressed for cash, parlay their knowledge of Bavarian folklore into a career as ghostbusting con artists. This works pretty well until the Napoleonic army decides to co-opt their skills to eliminate superstition in a difficult-to-conquer village.

In the course of their adventures, where they encounter real enchantment, the story skillfully weaves together the grimmest of Grimm with very well-timed references to the rest of the mythological and medieval worlds. It’s not just Rapunzel here, it’s The Lady of Shallot . It’s the wicked queen from Snow White . It’s Jack in the Beanstalk and Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretal. It’s chalk full of echoes of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory. It’s Alice in Wonderland . There are shamanic rituals underlying it all – from licking the toad to participate in the wisdom of the forest spirits (originated because of the hallucinogenic excretions on the skins of some frogs), to the Corn King rituals, to the Sacred Kingship, to the Pied Piper. This movie is neck-deep in multiple layers of melded mythologies that marry magnificently, while still preserving the original notions that underlay them. The author of this screenplay didn’t just lift the surface of the old stories, he plumbed the guts of them, too.

In a lot of ways it’s a perfect monomythologist’s fable, beautifully rendered, and lots of fun. It *almost* gets to be a faerie tale in its own rite, but it falls short of other recent masterpieces like Pan’s Labrynth, in part because it doesn’t take the integrity of its own universe seriously.

Gilliam, naturally, makes amazing, glorious use of the grotesque – and like the old faerie stories, he takes the grotesque realities of the everyday and gives them the odd prod and twist here and there to bring out the inherent horror implicit in a world where life depends upon death to continue. Although Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro do give Gilliam a run for his money, I don’t think anybody does this better at the moment – certainly not Tim Burton, who currently is the only other serious contender for the directorial title of "Master of the Fantasy Macabre." Where Burton’s works are slick, well packaged angsty goth bullshit, Gilliam (and his latter-day acolytes Jackson and Del Toro) knows how to get at the heart of terror and darkness. He actually understands why the Romantics (like Shelley, Byron, and Poe) put terror on the same level as rapture in their reckoning of the sublime.

The bad:

As is probably to be expected with Gilliam, the film has its rather irritating and none-too-subtle subtext. His glory days of the Trilogy of Man (Time Bandits , Brazil, Baron Münchhausen ), and The Fisher King , seem forgotten here. He’s carried forward his reflexive anti-modernism, his concerns about the mechanized world draining people of humanity until they have to enter the land of magic in order to find their love of life once again. It’s an old trope, and one of the most effective ones out there. If you want to read up on some of its history, check out The Golden Bough on "The Sacred Kingship" (come to think about it, there’s a good Wikipedia article on the subject too). But where once his films were complicated, this one is pretty simplistic. The bad guys are the ones with machines, the fools are all skeptical thinkers, scientifically minded – and he lays it on pretty damn thick, to the point where just about any scene the skeptical general shows up, he’s torturing some poor sod with Rube Goldberg versions of kitchen appliances.

It’s not the attitude I object to – although I’m definitely a modernist, I enjoy quite a lot of art that turns on romanticism or critiquing modernity. It’s more that I know Gilliam to be capable of so much better. I’m thinking particularly of the battle at the end of Time Bandits here, where when the bandits bring war machines from all ages against Satan and then can’t make them work against him. When one complains "I can’t control them!" Satan replies "Of course not, you stupid man, I control them." The blend of camp humor and relentless critique of every sort of authority (parental, governmental, divine, infernal, military, social, intellectual) make that obvious, throwaway joke truly chilling.

Throughout The Brothers Grimm I found myself wishing for that old Gilliam, the one who really was a punk in the classical sense, pushing back against all prescriptions that oppress the soul of man rather than one who uses tropes he helped create in order to pick on obvious, boring kinds of authority and orthodoxy. In short, there’s nothing truly challenging in this film – it’s all attitude and no substance. More "steam" than "punk."

In the end, we have in The Brothers Grimm a simplistic, even dishonest, casting of the conflict between modernism and primitivism, and it fails to satisfy the itches it scratches.

The stupid:

There are a lot of little false steps here and there. For example, I know Steampunk works by melding modern sensibilities, but a 19th century German – even one from the city – would not vomit at the sight of a rabbit being skinned (though I have to give kudos to Gilliam for using a real rabbit). They wouldn’t panic at the sight of beetles. There’s a lot in this movie that they might plausibly have found offputting – but I’m sorry, those ain’t among them. Over and over again, the movie is put off-pace by little sour notes like these.

Overall impression:

Though the "punk" part of steampunk here is more juvenile than a lot of Gilliam’s previous work, the style is beautiful (as his work always is) and the story is engaging. The acting is wonderful – good enough to cover the deficiencies in the script and make for a fun evening. In many ways, this film is what Sleepy Hollow should have been – clever, engaging, full of fun culture references and with a proper understanding of its source mythology, rather than a thinly veiled Freudian/neopagan evangelism tract with nothing below its sexy surface. It also helps that the source material – the myths collected by The Brothers Grimm – honestly were pagan folklore from a superstitious world, rather than a satire making fun of superstition (as the original The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was). It’s the author in me – I hate remakes that plunder, rape, and pervert the original story to make a preachy point exactly contrary to the story they’re attempting to "present." Burton is worse at this than Disney. Gilliam has the decency to respect his source material, and the result is watchable fun with beatiful moments, but not his best work.

Next up on the Stempunk menu: The Japanese Anime film Steamboy

Playing For Keeps is different. Mighty Mur has delivered The writing is smart, the characters are well drawn and have surprising depth, and she sneaks in the thought-provoking concepts in sophisticated, subtle ways, teasing the moral, ethical, philosophical, and emotional implications of her universe out one thread at a time. It’s the kind of book that is a good, fun read the first time through, and then you find yourself turning it over again in your mind a week or two later, until you decide to go back and read it again to find out what it was that you missed. Something hooked your subconscious, and you don’t know what. Playing on three levels: the superhero story, but delightfully satirized, the human story of social rejects getting revenge, and the philosophical level where the reader is invited to ponder what simple concepts that we encounter ever day – such as ownership and respect – really mean when you dig down into them, Playing for Keeps delivers depth and challenge wrapped up in pink spandex. Funny as hell, witty like Wilde, and filled with cliffhangers from start to finish, this is one book you shouldn’t allow yourself to miss.

Mur’s making her run on Amazon today – - not tomorrow, as I mistakenly said in the latest Antithesis episode — so if you can order today, do so. If you can’t, do order as soon as you’re able. This is one talent that the world deserves to discover, and pushing her out into the limelight with her first novel here is a big step towards that discovery.

This first order of business is this lecture from William Hurlbut, and represents probably the best, most nuanced articulation I’ve heard of the bioconservative case. Does anyone else find it distressing that the part he reads from the President’s Report at the end (which he authored) sounds much more like something you’d get out of a Romantic poet than like something you should get out of a scientist?