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?

After the blackout yesterday, enough Reps and Senators backed off that SOPA/PIPA might just be dead–notwithstanding the snarky reply I got from one of my Senators over the issue.

Now, the real problem: The lobbyists who are pushing this. Good lobbying is a good investment strategy, and always has been. Unlike most people, I don’t have a problem with that–in an open society, even businesspeople need to be able to put their case forward.

However, I do have a problem when lobbying crosses over into rent-seeking and protectionism and restraint of trade, as these two bills most assuredly did.

People tend to despair about having any effect on the machinery that drives rent-seeking on the part of companies who lobby–but just as elected officials can be voted out, so too can misbehaving companies. Consumer boycotts are one of THE most effective methods of activism in the world. Companies lobby to protect (or enhance) their bottom line, so showing them that their lobbying efforts are harming their bottom line can cause them to seriously reconsider.

To that end, you will find a list on this page of all the companies who put their money and PR engines behind SOPA/PROTECT-IP. Take a few minutes, pick a handful that you actually buy things from, and let them know that you’re not going to buy from them anymore unless/until they change their tune.

I’ve sent versions of the following letter to Monster Cable, Shure, Intel, and Dell. If you care about this stuff, it’s worth fifteen minutes for you to do the same. Please consider it.

I am a longtime customer who has had nothing but positive experiences with Shure and its products (I currently own 6 SM-58s and regularly recommend them to consulting clients), I am deeply disappointed to learn that your lobbying arm was an active supporter of SOPA and the PROTECT-IP acts. As an independent producer of albums, concert videos, and audiobooks I’ve had the pleasure of using Shure Microphones for the last ten years–your products, tough and durable with excellent shielding–have been my go-to for gigs in harsh environments and where EM bleed noise is worse. It’s also been my pleasure, as a studio consultant who helps design recording and PA installations throughout the country, to recommend your products to my customers regularly–in my experience, your vocal mics are the best in the game.

However, this legislation or subsequent legislation like it is such a fundamental threat to my business that I can no longer, in good conscience, support your company with my patronage. I hope that you reconsider your position on lobbying related to the Internet, as I would dearly love to be a customer again. Until then, I shall be recommending Audiotechnica and AKG vocal mics, as they come closest to the quality of your products.

Yours in regret and disgust
-Dan Sawyer
ArtisticWhispers Productions

For those of you following the SOPA/PIPA to-do, be warned: if you live in California, both of your Senators are flogging hard for this thing. Because of that, for these two characters I actually wrote a note rather than just calling, tweeting, or petitioning.

In case you want something to riff on, I’m hereby releasing my letter into the public domain, to remix as you see fit for the benefit of your Senators and Representatives:

Dear Senators Boxer and Feinstein,

As a writer and audio/video producer (with 8 novels, 20 short stories, 8 films, and 3 albums to my name), I have a vested interest in the enforceability of copyright. However, as one not attached to the large studios, none of the remedies in SOPA and PIPA will do me any good–instead, they will do me an immense amount of harm.

The lack of due process puts my livelihood at the mercy of larger businesses in my industry who may take offense to parody, or who may target my web provider due to the offending actions of other customers, or who may decide that their new high-concept film looks too much like one of my books or radio dramas, and that it’s easier and cheaper to shut me down rather than to negotiate a license fee from me.

More fundamentally, though, the future of the American economy depends on the openness of the Internet. Freedom of information and public discourse allowed science and technology to take root here to a greater extent than anywhere around the world in the 19th century; the Internet extends that cultural fundamental into the 21st century.

This bill, in seeking to protect big business, will cripple the economic and political power of the Internet to advance freedom, equality, opportunity, and human progress, both here and around the world. It will cripple the educational power of the Internet as well, cutting off millions from educational opportunities (such as free streaming college classes, Wikipedia, OpenCulture, and many more) that they would not otherwise be able to afford–all of which are legal under copyright law, all of which will be vulnerable to shutdown due to the lack of due process in PIPA.

The PIPA does not do what it claims, and has too much collateral damage to be worth the trouble. I urge you to reconsider your position, and vote against the bill.
Thank you
-J. Daniel Sawyer
Author and producer
ArtisticWhispers Productions

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!

Going through life we collect intellectual heroes. As someone who was raised with academic ideals (critical thinking, intellectual integrity, fearless inquiry), I quickly fell in love with Hitchens when I happened across him during my late 20s as a result of his book The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice. More than a mere polemicist, here was a rabble-rouser who embodied the classical Western values, who didn’t give a damn about what people thought, but cared passionately that people thought. Right or wrong on any given issue, he never failed to provoke in me the determination to examine anything I might care about, and to engage and understand–rather than dismisss–my opposition.

He was not the first such hero, nor will he be the last. But when it comes to rehtoric, to eloquence, and to an unshakable sense of groundedness in his own arguments, I can think of no finer example since, perhaps, Robert Green Ingersol. Though perhaps Stephen Fry was correct in his assessment when he said of Christopher: “He is the greatest debater since Demosthenes.”

From his delight in literature, to his determination in moral argument, to his flair for wordplay, to his rambunctious humor and the desperate love he displayed for all that is best in humanity, Christopher Hitchens was one of the rare figures who truly was a public intellectual. Such people enrich and invigorate democratic societies, and I’ve got my glass raised to all of you in the hope that the vacuum he leaves will not remain long unfilled.

Almost a year ago, during one of the worse phases of his illness, Hitchens debated Bill Dembski in front of an audience composed mostly of Christian elementary and Jr. High school children. My friend Dr. Zachary Moore was there, and recorded it. He’s posted a three minute excerpt in which Hitchens sums up his life with an invitation to everyone to join the conversation.

You’ll find that video below.

Good night, Christopher. You will be sorely missed, but we’ll keep the Enlightenment lit for you. Cheers!

For background, please take 1 minute to watch the following Monty Python clip:

In the commentary on Life of Brian, John Cleese said that the depictions of the fractious, factiony Jewish Revolutionaries were a satire on the left wing activist groups of the 1970s. “They were so interested in ideological purity,” he said, “that they never accomplished anything.”

The last couple years have seen a lot of this kind of thing on the left and the right–the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are not as disparate as their rhetoric makes them seem. To speak in very broad terms, both of these movements are responses to the theft of trillions of dollars from the public and private purses by the collusion of regulators with industry.

The history behind this theft, though, are non-trivial and often subtle, and it’s going to take a lot more than slogans like “Taxed Enough Already” or “We are the 99%” to get anything done. For an in-depth analysis of how this all happened, and a discussion of some things (that are unpopular with all four of the most visible political parties) that can be done, I recommend taking a look at this analysis:

The trouble with both OWS and The Tea Party, in my view, is that these groups have both succumb to the Judean People’s Front syndrome: when faced with a crisis, they have both run home to their pet ideologies as the source of all wisdom, created an insular culture with a bunker mentality, and then started shouting loudly about those who disagree. The Tea Partiers are blaming the socialists for the bailouts and agitating for a radical repeal of taxes and regulations (without agitating for any substantive budget cuts that would make such a repeal feasible), the OWS folks are latching on to a caricatured version of anarcho-syndicalism (the philosophy of Noam Chomsky) or democratic socialism (i.e. European-style central planning and social safety net).

And while everyone is shouting at each other, something vital is being missed:

The Loyal Opposition
When two people disagree about the best course of action, but agree on the goal or on the problem, and both share a true concern for the matter at issue, you have the right ground for the formation of a Loyal Opposition.

This is a basic value of republican society (note the small “r”)–another name for it is pragmatism. Such a system works very well at enhancing liberty and prosperity, as it allows you to watch out for the corruption you find most intolerable, while trusting that the other parties will be watching out for corruption that might slip past your radar. It’s “I’ll watch your back, you watch mine.” The world, and especially politics and economics, is a complex place, and the loyal opposition is vital to the continuation of the Enlightenment civilization.

The trouble is, it’s more comfortable to be in an echo chamber where those who share your views congregate, even if they do not share your values. Jeffersonian Libertarians, for example, have very few values in common with theocrats–but they’re both populating the tea party. Progressive Liberals (i.e. those who believe in working for incremental progress toward the liberalization of society) have very few values in common with Marxists. But these coalitions persist because it is more comfortable to talk in terms of this years electoral policy proposals than it is to talk in terms of long-term goals and agendas.

Different Kinds of Revolution
Broadly speaking (like everything in this post), there are two kinds of political revolution: The Populist, and the Coalitional.

Populist Revolution
Populism has always been the tool of the demagogue. The October Revolution, The Fascist Revolutions, The Cuban Revolution, and the other revolutions that darkened the 20th century were populist in nature. These are movements that start out of vague popular unrest, are backed by a lot of rage and irritation, and explode almost spontaneously on the scene. During the explosion phase, they grasp about, looking for a unifying voice, and that void gets filled by someone who can speak the right homilies–code phrases about class warfare, or about a Christian nation, or about a return to old-fashioned values, or about social justice. That someone is–very often–a demagogue: someone who is willing to say the popular thing and cloak themselves in the mantle of a humble savior, and who promises radical reform, redemption, or revolution. These movements are characterized by their pursuit of ideological purity, of utopian dreams, and of simple solutions that, while they sound appealing, do not stand up to rational scrutiny.

After all, it doesn’t follow that installing a revolutionary dictatorship will result in a better life for people who were suffering under the boot of a corrupt monarchy or corporate-controlled state (as happened in Russia and Cuba respectively). It doesn’t follow that returning to agrarian existence will make the country strong and morally pure and free from imperial oppression (as happened in China). It doesn’t follow that a return to Catholic morality will fix a crumbling infrastructure (as happened in Italy), or that embracing Protestant Lutheranism and Teutonic Identity Politics or exterminating the Jews will rescue a country’s looted economy (as happened in Germany).

Populist revolution is, and has always been, one of the two chief dangers faced by democracy (the other is popular apathy combined with a culture of fear, which invites aristocracy).

Coalitional Revolution
Coalitional Revolution happens when disparate interests with specific agendas team up around their few common goals. Because of the tenuous nature of the coalition, the aims of the Revolution look, necessarily, decidedly modest. “No taxation without representation” is a very, very thin goal, politically speaking, compared to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

There have only been a handful of coalitional revolutions in world history, and they are the only ones that have not lead, in short order, to dictatorship. Two that spring to mind are the Athenian Revolution and the American Revolution (though there have been several others).

To take the case most of us are most familiar with, let’s look at the American Revolution. This was a period where anarchists, antimonarchs, property barons, industrialists, free trade advocates, theocrats, farmers, merchants, and socialists banded together for a single common goal: to end British Rule in the Americas. They were able to do this because of an implicit (and sometimes explicit) agreement that those who fight get a seat at the table to form the new government. There was no common cause, there was no common leader, and the Constitutional convention was filled with people who would just as soon have seen each other dead (fun fact: there have been a handful shoot outs and duels between senators during congressional sessions).

How do you create a revolution out of that? Thomas Paine found a way, by writing a book called Common Sense and encouraging open debates to get people to think about the two issues they could all agree on: that foreign kings were obsolete, and that a people had the right to chose their own government.

The American Revolution was preceded by years of public education and debates, of long and boring discussions and arguments and fistfights (and sometimes gunfights). In all of this time, the one thing that was never in the cards (despite how some people agitated for it) was a grand unifying vision for the country that would result. It was the only way it could happen, in a landmass populated by colonies that were both urban and rural, both slave and free, theocratic and religiously liberal, separatist and cosmopolitan. The people who pushed the revolution realized that the only way to make meaningful change was to table the question of reforms until they were in the place to implement them.

And who can blame them? Patrick Henry wanted a theocracy. Madison wanted a secular state. Franklin wanted scientific socialism. Jefferson wanted anarcho-capitalism. The Baptists in New England wanted the Quakers in Pennsylvania burned, deported, or tried for heresy. Some wanted universal slavery–others wanted it abolished at the outset. The agendas were so diametrically opposed that the Revolution would never have happened had they not believed one another capable of honor–and had the strength to hold each other to the obligation to hash out compromises the hard way.

In school, we learned about the uncompromising men, heroes or villains–people like Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Adams, but “uncompromising” is the one thing that they weren’t. Because when they sat down in Philadelphia, they did nothing but compromise. They did not trust each other with the power to take their property, their land, their freedom, or their labor if given a chance, so they hammered out a compromise that let each of them keep what they held most dear, without giving them the power to take those things from other people.

They found a kind of permanence in an ideal that Marx articulated eighty years later, but never understood: The Permanent Revolution.

Why It Blew Up in Oakland
Reading about a coalitional revolution, you might hear in it the echoes of the Civil Rights movement, and you’d be right. Martin Luther King was very well aware of the techniques of Coalitional Revolution, and during the 60s you could find, at many protests, tents for the sharing of ideas. Little universities, at which people shared reports from the front lines and (at least before 1969, when things started to fall apart) welcomed disagreement and discussion. There were people who were in the business of working out compromises–southern churchgoers side by side with Marxist Jews from New York, Republicans side by side with Democrats, disagreeing about the best policy framework while all agreeing that segregation, lynching, and systematic repression had to go.

But one of the camps in that movement DID lose: The Race Warriors. All across the country, there were people invested in the ideals of violent, populist revolution. They agitated for (and tried to create) a full-blown civil war around the subject of race.

For better or worse, a lot of those people still live in Oakland, and they have a cottage industry called professional agitation. It doesn’t take much effort to learn that crowds on the street can be turned violent very easily. In a group of ten thousand, you only need a few dozen people positioned in the right places to turn a peaceful protest into a riot–either by goading the protesters into misbehavior, or by attacking the cops directly, forcing the cops to push back and escalate. These few folks in Oakland and their brethren throughout the U.S. (and also members of various intelligence services, who have non-classified manuals on the technique) are very good at this kind of destabilizing work.

This is why New York might have had a few police skirmishes early on, but Oakland is the place where things went batshit crazy. Oakland is a city whose underlying social history (on both sides of the blue line) guarantees that, if a riot is going to become a war, Oakland is where it starts.

Street wars are one of the fertile germinating soils of populist revolution, and they are a very, very dangerous thing. So far, the OWS movement in New York seems to be holding their shit together in spite of repeated skirmishes–let’s hope they continue to do so, rather than letting misguided solidarity with Oakland push them into escalating (and let’s hope the vast majority of the Oakland protest keeps its cool heads even as the agitators try to work their dark magic).

Becoming The Judean People’s Front (or not)
Without a non-partisan, unambitious slate of achievable objectives, Occupy and The Tea Party are both going to fail. So long as the members remain committed to utopian ideologies or uncompromising agendas, all they’ll achieve is sewing more and more discord and partisanship in a country that is already suffering from deep-rooted, demagogue-driven populist vitriol.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Tea Party, and Occupy, and most of mainstream America agree on the basic problem:
Government and industry (in this case, the financial industry) have colluded in such a way as to create massive opportunities for fraud and theft, and they then colluded to reward those who perpetrated the theft by protecting them from the consequences of their actions (and all this in a climate of grab-it-while-you-can budgetary policy).

That has to stop, and stopping it without ruining our economy or our environment or our stability as a civilization is a solvable, short term, practical goal.

But people from both camps, and from the vast silent majority, have to start narrowing their focus and talking to each other. We have to rediscover the loyal opposition.

The Real Value of Occupy and The Tea Party
Because of how easily they are gamed, subverted, and perverted, street protests and agitation are often a very, very ineffective tools of political change. They can be valuable though, and if a coalitionary revolution arises from them, they can be world-changers. The small goals that the coalition achieves sends ripple effects throughout the world (look at what’s already happening just with the small amount of liberalization brought about by Arab Spring).

Taking to the streets in useless demonstrations of emotion and unfocused frustration can, and often does, defuse those emotions, which can render the reform impulse impotent.

But for all these objections, both of these movements share something of real value even in their most useless and wasteful demonstrations:

The are reminding people of their civil rights, and of their importance. The right to peaceably assemble, the right to petition the government, the right to bear arms, the right to free speech–these are rights that are again unpopular among vast swaths of the population.

When the powers that be push back disproportionately, it reminds people that this is America, and the very rights to not be gassed and to not be provoked to riot by the cops that are supposed to prevent a riot, are sacred. And they have to be, if we want to continue to live in an open society where argument, and experimentation, and discourse are allowed.

Keeping those rights front and center shores up the ornery nature of the American public, and makes them less likely to accept dictatorial solutions.

Bad picture? Smack the monitor. Computer hung up? Smack the thing. CB or tape deck started acting up, get a big baseball bat and whack the thing.

Disk Error Reading Drive C: <A>bort, <R>etry, <I>nfluence with large hammer

People did this because back when things were all vacuum tubes and copper wire, intermittent contact due to heat swelling was the most common cause of failure. If your TV went out and you gave it a good hard whack, it might make the connections shift and restore the picture. But in the 1990s, everything was electronic and solid state, even the CRTs. In fact, the only things with parts that could be effected by the whack was your hard drive and your VCR, and those depended on such a delicate mechanical balance that whacking them could screw them up permanently.

Obviously, the practice of hitting electronics is useless and stupid, not to mention potentially expensive. Electronics have no moving parts. They have nothing that could be affected by shaking, whacking, or moving them around.

So, now it’s 2011. I have a smart phone. With an accelerometer. And some functions require…well…hitting the phone. Or waving it around. Or tapping it gently. And it’s giving me flashbacks to those old TV sets.

The Wheel turns.

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.

Yesterday, I had occasion to visit an old friend–a conservative Rancher who’s occasionally been very active in Republican politics, who I hadn’t seen in close to five years.

After the normal catching up, talk turned to writing and ranching, new projects and old, when from nowhere came a question of the species I’d been dreading:

“I just don’t get what the deal is with these homos.”

In earlier years, I’d have dodged the issue–or, if I’d been in a surly mood, I’d have taken it as picking a fight. But this was neither an attempt to needle me or an attempt to be self-righteous. There was an edge of worry in his voice that made me think that there was a sincere question underneath. Maybe one of his foster kids was having a sexual identity crisis? Maybe one of his grandchildren? I didn’t know, and I still don’t, but there was something there that told me it was important.

So we talked, nearly for an hour. And the questions he asked are VERY instructive:

Basic, informational questions. Not question begging sneering, not homophobic hate mongering, just questions. It was a productive discussion, but eventually I had to ask why he was asking? This man from the World War 2 generation, who’s been a religious right activist for thirty years, said:

I just don’t get why it’s a big deal. It’s none of my business who has sex with who. It’s like the color of someone’s skin, or if they like football instead of baseball: it doesn’t mean anything. It’s none of my business.

— — — —

If this was just an isolated incident, I might not have commented on it, but it was the second incident this week that brought me up short. The other was from another longtime religious right affiliate, who said to me, almost incidentally:

“Actually, with the DNA exonerations, I’ve decided that our system is too broken. I’d like to see the death penalty done away with. ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’ is too low a burden of proof. There’s no excuse for executing an innocent person.”

— — — —

These two things, taken together with a lot of other things I’ve seen recently, constitute a big deal, because it shows up a place where liberals and libertarians are missing the boat in a way that could make a profound difference in our politics and our culture.

There are two kinds of so-called conservatism in this country. One of them champions self-reliance, individual responsibility, civil rights, personal initiative, the integrity of legal process, and civic engagement. It’s the kind of conservatism you hear in old radio dramas from Democrats like Jimmy Stewart, or Republicans like Barry Goldwater. To people like this, whether you’re a naturalized American or an immigrant, you’re a fellow traveler, and they’ve got no problem with you if you pull your weight. They don’t mind disapproving of some things about you (for example, your sexual preferences or your taste in movies), because they don’t think their disapproval should mean anything to you–after all, it doesn’t mean a thing to them if you disapprove of their religion or their taste in shoes.

The other kind is the reactionary conservative, and these are the folks getting the airplay. These are the theorcrats, the folks that are convinced that science is a covert attempt to drive out religion. These are the folks that never met a conspiracy theory they didn’t like, who think Kirk Cameron is a proper authority figure, who cheer like a mob when the state executes someone, and who are jolly well fine with torture because they figure the bastard must deserve it.

You see a lot more of the reactionaries these days, because they’re politically useful. They’re useful to right-wing strategists and commentators and demagogues, because they have a lot of energy, they make great spectacle, and they are motivated to get out and vote–and, more importantly, to spread fear among their friends who are conservatives of the first kind. There are folks–cynical folks with cameras and microphones, and sincere folks with pulpits–who are making a lot of money and gaining a lot of power spreading fear and disinformation to turn conservatives of the first type into conservatives of the second type.

There are also a lot of cynical folks with blogs and newspapers and elected office that are making a lot of money and gaining a lot of influence doing the same thing. They’re the ones you hear talking about “The Conservatives” as if they’re a monolithic block of groupthinky voters, interchangeable and equally groupthinky as “The Republicans.” These are the same folks who pioneered identity politics, who imagine that walking the euphemism treadmill can somehow change how people think, and who also run THEIR entire operation on fear.

What you’re seeing from the crowd at the Republican debates, what you’re seeing from Fox News, what you’re hearing the folks at AlterNet say about the conservatives in this country, what happens when the talking heads that come on the TV or the radio for a good screaming match? That’s all theater. It’s spectacle. It’s designed to make a political and monetary profit out of polarizing the country, draining away our ability to debate, and replacing it with a determination to beat the other guy.

The left wing’s hatred of the other is every bit as unreasoning as the right wing. The paranoia from both is infectious, and the factual foundation of their rhetoric is as flawed as it is poisonous. And it masks an underlying truth that most people (including me) often lose sight of:

The good guys can still win. The last ten years have given sane folks a lot more in common than the issues that they argue over. Ask a sane Republican or Democrat, or a sane independent (over 40% of voters now) about civil rights, and while you may get quibbles over particular policies, everyone agrees in principle that sexual orientation and skin color should be equally immaterial. Ask them about domestic policy, they’ll be upset about the bailouts and the insane spending spree and the partisan bickering.

But the good guys can only win if we stop taking our cues on how to view each other from the folks looking to divide and conquer. Since the 1970s, folks from Orange County and the deep south have been waging a civil war against folks from New England–using San Francisco and New York as proxy whipping boys. The Beltway Crowd and Hollywood have retaliated with more and more disgusting stereotypes of folks from “flyover states”–attacking their culture and their right to exist as people rather than arguing with them. It’s an old cycle, one that goes all the way back to before the Civil War.

Smug northern bullying and self-righteous southern crusading are creating a hell of a mess. But we proved in World War 2, and in the Internet Boom, and around Apollo, and at dozens of other times that the South and the North and the West (and the subcultural presences they have in almost every community) all have unique–and complimentary–cultural strengths.

Wherever you sit on the political spectrums, maybe it’s time to stop watching your enemies on the news, and start arguing with them over coffee. You might find you have a lot more values and dreams in common than you imagined possible.

Me? I had to go to Reno, for the second time in three weeks. In my case, the sports car is really ideal for this trip–unfortunately, it was in the car hospital getting a brake rotor transplant. And the trip couldn’t wait.

There’s an upside to situations like this: you get the chance to test drive cars you’re curious about. I’ve been curious about the new Dodge Charger since I noticed that the cops here had traded in their Crown Victoria Police Interceptors for these new muscle-car-styled sedans. So I rented one.

I have only ever before driven one car that performs and acts quite like the Dodge Charger. My first car, a 1979 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight sedan. Actually, that’s not quite fair, because the Ninety-Eight had a 350 engine and a four-barrel carbeurator, and moved like that space ship in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Looks like a fish. Moves like a fish. Steers like a cow.

So yeah, the Ninety-Eight was bad. The Charger is worse.

So what’s wrong with it? Well, let’s start with the interior. It’s huge. Like, you-could-fit-a-college-football-team-in-there huge. I am not exactly a small guy–my shoulders are easily three feet across, and I’m soggy around the middle. I like my elbow room. When a car is so big that I can’t reach the arm rests without incurring a repetitive stress injury, it’s too big for 90% of the people out there.

Then there’s the problem with the blinkers. They stick. You can’t flash them like you can in other cars–even when you don’t lock the lever up, they just keep flashing until you toggle them on and off again. The brights also flash backwards, and the dash is laid out very poorly–the steering wheel completely obscures the view to the top edge of the dials, meaning you can’t tell whether you’re doing 50 or 80mph without ducking your head. Raising or lowering the seats, telescoping the wheel and tilting it gives no relief for this. Add them all together, and you’re in for a painful road trip. Most annoying.

The interior’s not all bad–the stereo’s nice, the climate control is well done from controls to vents, and the seats are very comfortable (though, given how the car handles, they really could use side bolsters, which they don’t have), the window motors are very quick and very quiet, and there’s loads of hidey-holes to stash things in.

Unfortunately, that’s about where the good points stop. This thing is a nightmare to drive. It has the turning radius of a high-speed drunken elephant; the power steering is geared at such a ratio that you have to do two full rotations to pull a u-turn, and it’s such a heavy car that, despite being rear-wheel drive, it understeers like crazy–you go around a corner, and the car just wants to keep going right off the edge, and you have to really fight it to get it to stay on the road. I’m not talking about driving it like a sports car, or even a muscle car, I’m talking shooting freeway corners at the speed of traffic.

It’s also underpowered–a hard thing to do with a 250hp V6 in the base model, but they manage it. It’ll do zero to sixty in a couple minutes, and then do the “highway creep” where, when the gas pedal is half depressed, it becomes progressively more sensitive, meaning that the normal weight of your foot will push you from a sensible driving speed to a ballistic missile speed without trying to–and because of the driving position and the way the windows are angled, it’s hard to notice until you have to suddenly stop, which you can’t. The car is too heavy to suddenly stop, at least not with the small rotors and pads they put on these things. At a certain point you’re committed–at least on ICBMs they include a self-destruct abort switch.

The underpowering and accelerator creep aren’t really the fault of the engine, though. It’s the transmission that’s a real issue. It’s an automatic that’s so poorly geared it makes soggy Cheerios look snappy. It drives *exactly* like the Dodge Van my parents had when I was in high school–this kind of transmission is good on a van, for a variety of reasons. In a sedan seeking to appeal to the muscle car demographic, it’s borderline insane–unpleasant, unsafe, and unforgivable.

Then there’s the suspension. There’s comfortable, and then there’s “boat.” This thing is way into “boat” territory. Spongy, isolating, lots of body roll, it’s everything I’d expect out of a 1970s luxury sedan…except this is a 2011 sports sedan. I’ve driven several of the recent sports sedans, and those of you who are familiar with Buicks will appreciate the enormity of the following statement:

The 2005 Buick Century has a WAY better suspension than the 2011 Dodge Charger.

I asked a cop on coming back from Reno what the deal was. Are these things really better than the Crown Victorias? Do the police versions move better?

His response: “They’re strictly for show. They basically look more intimidating, but there’s no way we could run a Camaro to ground in one of these. The Crown Vic’s could catch everything.”

Good to know our police department’s purchasing division is taking the wishes of us chronic lead-foots seriously, and buying cars that can’t actually catch us.

The hell of it is, it could’ve been a great car. It’s got weird-ass styling that’s eye-catchingly aggressive. Not exactly to my taste, but they do at least add some nice visual variety to the road. But you simply shouldn’t need to do a 3-point turn to change directions on Virginia Street in Reno. You don’t need to do it in a full-sized pickup, you barely need to do it in a 16-foot bobtail, there’s no way in hell you should have to do it in a sedan if you want to avoid scraping the curb with your tires.

All in all, this one’s a loser. If you want a good full-sized sports sedan, check out the offerings from GM, BMW, and Volvo. Dodge this one.

5/10 stars.

The temptation persists to substitute a few nouns…

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.

Funerals.

Specifically, Protestant funerals. But it’s not particularly because they’re Christian or religious. It’s because they’re awful. They make the death harder to take, not easier. They short-circuit the grieving process by atomizing the community of people that would otherwise be bonded by their shared grief. When officiated by a fundamentalist minister, they pile shame and fear on top of grief with talk of people who “are in a better place” (because if the dead guy has “gone to glory,” then feeling loss and anger and grief and upset is obviously a manifestation of selfishness, which is sinful, shameful, and reveals your own depravity of spirit). And, at the same time, they come with a sermon filled with warnings of hell for the unrepentant, the unsaved, and the merely-observant Christians in the audience. This double-bind of shame and terror keeps people from grieving properly–it can actually trap them in grief. It’s extremely unhealthy, even sadistic.

Please understand, I’m not talking about the theology here–I’m talking about the presentation. Because even if you buy the whole salvation/hell/eternal life equation, making that the focus of your funeral is, well, dishonest. When your friend or sibling or parent has just died, you’re hurting–you should be. You hurt when a child moves away for college or a career, even though you know they’re going on to better things. Their absence leaves a hole in your life, and it hurts every bit as much as a hole in your flesh. You forget they’re gone and think “Oh! I should totally have lunch with Clyde.” Then you remember that Clyde’s not here, and your world gets dimmer for a while. It aches, like a phantom limb. And when someone dies rather than just disappearing, it’s worse, because there’s never a chance for a “remember when” coffee date (unless you honestly believe there will be coffee bars in heaven, in which case you have other problems).

And let’s be honest: for a religion that that celebrates continuity into the afterlife, with the “Sure and certain hope of the resurrection into eternal life,” Christianity (particularly Protestant Christianity) has a bloody dismal funerary ritual. You go into a quiet, banal, repressively boring chapel designed at all points to remind you of the solemnity of the occasion. You then sit in that room with the corpse’s box, sometimes open to display the partially-embalmed evidently-sleeping husk of the person you once knew. Then, after a viewing and eulogies delivered by friends and family (all of whom are at pains to be very polite and only look on the bright side of the deceased), everyone sits down to listen to some yahoo (usually a pastor or chaplain hired out for the job) yammer on about things only half of the congregates believe and which none of them are paying attention to.

That’s before we even get into the predatory and cynical nature of the funeral industry, which is a whole rant on its own, so I’ll leave it for now.

Still, funerary rituals ARE important, and some cultures get it right. They’re a way of reconnecting with community, of processing grief, of cultivating memory. The Jewish tradition leaves stones on the grave, symbolic of letting go. The Irish drink (a lot) and share stories of their dead loved one. The Vikings set the body on a ship and torched it, then had a barbecue. The Klingons have a bloody great party (well, will have, if you want to get technical about it).

So here’s what I suggest next time a friend of yours dies: Bury the body, or burn it, as you prefer. Have your moment of solemn remembrance. Then get the hell out of there. Break out the liquor, the good food, the great music. Have a dance. Have a big damn blow-out. If you believe in an afterlife, celebrate your loved one’s departure. If you don’t, swap stories about them. Remember them for real–don’t just tell the noble stories about how they won the purple heart, tell the story about how they fell in the latrine. Remember the embarrassing, the bawdy, the reprehensible. The stories are what they left behind–don’t edit them, don’t lie about who they were. Tell the truth.

Forget the chapel, and the hire-in preacher who doesn’t give a damn. Ignore the mortuary salesman who cheapens your loss while emptying your wallet. Go to a restaurant, or a picnic ground, or have it in a large home. Remember that laughter and tears both heal, and that shame and terror do nothing but pick deep wounds.

And for the sake of all that’s even marginally interesting in the world, have fun. We have only an eye-blink on this planet, and the moments are our only real treasure.

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.

— — — —
Previous chapter: Embrace Your Inner 2 Year-old
— — — —

It’s come to my attention that in some of my business posts I’ve inadvertently fed an unspoken, and erroneous, business assumption shared by many people in the arts (and, frankly, most people in society at large). It goes something like this:

“Corporations are all-powerful. They have bigger lawyers than you do. You’ll never find a lawyer to take your case if one rips you off, so you’re just going to have to roll with it if your record label cooks the books, your movie studio subjects you to creative bookkeeping, or your publishing house pads their returns. You’re only the talent–you should expect to be the victim. The talent always loses.”

In other words, you can’t fight City Hall.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a con. You CAN fight City Hall. And you can win. But you have to be savvy.

First Things First

When I say things like “You don’t want to be a test case,” as I did in my chapter on the Peggy Lee decision and its implications for artist contracts everywhere, it’s easy to hear that as reinforcing the erroneous idea I’ve delineated above–an impression for which I owe some of you an apology. It’s true that in untested areas of law, a dispute on a point that’s not entirely clear is a test case, by definition, and that these kinds of cases are a pain in the ass. It’s also true that these kinds of cases are, by their nature, uncertain in their outcome. However, by stating that being a test case is a pain, I don’t mean to advocate fear of lawsuits, or a strategy of folding before parties who have bigger lawyers than you do. Not at all.

What I meant to advocate, and what that chapter will more clearly advocate when these chapters are edited and collected in a book, is a basic principle which I’ll call “Defensive Business.”

“Defensive Business” has its analog in “Defensive Driving” rather than in “paranoia” or “social defensiveness.” You don’t have to be paranoid or live in fear to practice defensive business–in fact, paranoia will usually lead you to rash behavior that can get you into trouble.

Let’s face it, in any business, there are good folks and sharks–if you’re going to be in business, you must assume the risk of swimming with sharks whether you want to or not. This is a mindset thing, and it’s the hardest thing for most decent people to get their heads around. You don’t have to be paranoid, you just need to bring a good harpoon gun and a shark-proof suit. Even though this series has concentrated disproportionately on the arts, these practices are important for any business.

The shark-proof suit is your defensive business practices, and there are a few basic ones that can really save your bacon (not to mix metaphors):

1) Learn Your Area of Law

No matter what business you’re in, there’s laws that cover you. Some of it can be arcane, but there are often excellent references (such as those provided by the folks at Nolo Press) that will get you up to speed quickly. Not learning the law in your field of business is a bit like sitting down at a poker table without knowing what a royal flush is. These are the rules of the road in your industry–failure to learn them will eventually result in your losing a lot of money, finding yourself the subject of a criminal prosecution, or the object of regulatory scrutiny, or all three.

If you’re in the arts businesses, this means copyright law and contracts first and foremost (Nolo Press has great books on both). If you have employees, it means labor law as well as the law for your industry (tenant’s law for landlords, food service regs. for restaurants). And for everyone, it means tax law. All these things have an effect on your position when negotiating a contract.

The investment of time and money is minimal compared to the potential cost of neglecting this. You don’t have to become a lawyer–you just need to learn enough that you’ll know when to get a lawyer and when to deal on your own. Learn the law and operate within it. If you don’t like the law, join a lobbying organization that works to change them. But don’t break them.

2) Put Your Paperwork in Order

If you’re a landlord, don’t go renting out a house you don’t have clear title to. If you’re a software developer or a writer or or other artist, get on a schedule registering your copyrights (being on a schedule makes it easy to remember. Also, remember that registering a copyright doesn’t create the copyright. You own the copyright to anything you create. But registering does make life easier for you, and makes you eligible for higher awards, should disputes arise or should you land in court). If you’re in food service, keep records of stock rotation schedules and suchlike.

You get the idea–apply what you learned about the law governing your business, and get the relevant permits, licenses, copyright registrations, insurances, and other basic protections that form the groundwork of responsible business in your field.

3) Negotiate Your Contracts

As I’ve talked about throughout this series, everything is negotiable. Don’t sign a contract unless you’re satisfied that you can live with it. If there’s something you don’t like, negotiate it. If the wording is unclear, work to clarify it. Contracts should be mutually advantageous, not vehicles of exploitation. Failure to negotiate or to say no are the most common reasons that exploitation occurs (ignorance of law and business is the other big one).

4) Know What You’re Signing

This sounds obvious, but as we’ve seen in this series (and as The Passive Guy regularly demonstrates far better than I ever could on his excellent blog), there are a lot of clauses and wording that can sound like common-sense goodness that can actually work against you if a dispute arises. If you’re new at this, and not sophisticated in the law in your area of business, consult an experienced friend–or, better yet, a lawyer. It’ll cost you between $100 and $1500 for a consultation in most cases (depending on the length of the contract and the area of law you’re operating in). For anything with a potential paycheck (or potential loss) totaling more than four figures, this initial consult can save you a lot of grief.

5) Get It In Writing

Verbal negotiations are an important part of doing business, but if you’re in negotiations, get as much of the conversation as possible in writing. In the unfortunate event that a dispute arises, these conversations can come in very handy. To quote Londo Molari:

“I have gotten into the habit of recording important conversations. One can never tell when an inconvenient truth might slip through the cracks and disappear.”

But if you’re recording your conversations, make sure you do it in accordance with the wiretapping laws that are in effect in your jurisdiction. And be aware that different states have different laws in these matters–when doing business across state or national lines, be sure you’re in compliance with laws in all relevant jurisdictions.

6) Keep Records

Keep records of all correspondence involving negotiations, all drafts of contracts, all pre-deal discussions, all dispute-related correspondence, minutes of all formal meetings, and all relevant conversations between yourself and your lawyer, your agent, and your partners. Should a dispute ever arise, you want to be able to reference these conversations regarding intent, horse-trading, compromises, and settlements.

Sun Tzu said that the battle is won or lost before the armies ever take the field. If you have records that prove your contentions, you’ve won the battle–the fight is a mere formality. But keeping your records, and referencing them when the need arises, can actually keep you out of a fight, and can keep your disputes that do arise from escalating into a court battle.

These are the basics of defensive business. If you’re in business long enough, any business, you’re going to learn them one way or another–better to learn them the easy way (i.e. from the mistakes of others, rather than your own mistakes).

When You Get Screwed

When something untoward happens, and you think (or feel like) you’ve been screwed, your records are your goldmine.

The first thing you have to do is make sure you’re in the right. Read through your contract. Check your records. Make sure your memory is in accord with the facts. Have a savvy friend or mentor go over them too. Consult a lawyer. Discovering that the misunderstanding is the result of YOUR mistake (and desisting) will save you a lot of grief and help foster a good reputation.

I once bought a car on a bad financing contract, and didn’t catch on until I’d owned the thing for a few months. A friend of mine who’d worked in the auto industry in years past expressed doubt about the legality of the terms, and that was all I needed to get very, very angry, so I consulted another friend whose business was auto finance. Upon looking it over he said “Yup, you got screwed, and it’s your fault. This contract is legal,” and he gave me the relevant sections of law to look up. Turns out he was right–I’d signed a crappy contract because I didn’t know how to read it right. I was pissed–but knowing it was my fault saved me a lot of grief and time.

If you are in the right, though, you have to weigh your options. One option is to let it slide–some things truly aren’t worth the trouble if you do a dispassionate cost/benefit analysis. Spending thousands of dollars to recoup hundreds, for example, is probably not worth the expense or the time.

If you decide to let it slide, take responsibility for the decision: swallow your pride and don’t bitch about it. Learn from the experience, and practice defensive business better next time. Notice signs that could have tipped you off sooner that something untoward was going on. Do better next time.

Believe it or not, this part is really important. If you cultivate a victim’s mindset, you’re more likely to get screwed. You’re more likely to make bad business decisions, either through taking bad risks or through failing to take good risks. Thinking like a victim screws up your judgment. Being afraid of failure and the humiliation that comes with it curtails your ability to function both as a business person and as a person. The costs of being a victim are much higher than the costs of being victimized. I’ve seen this over and over both working with crime victims (as a psych student), social victims (as a mentor and occasional activist), and business victims (as a small businessman). Anyone can get victimized, regardless of intelligence, sex, class, or mindset–how you deal with it sets the tone for your life, and those consequences reach farther than any single bad business deal, mugging, humiliation, or molestation. The comforting attention of sympathy might feel good, but it doesn’t make up for the loss of self-respect that you incur when you identify yourself as a victim.

But let’s say you’ve decided not to let it slide. The benefits of defending yourself–even if you lose–outweigh the expense and grief you’ll incur doing it. In this case, you need to know your options. Every situation is different. Sometimes, you’ll need to send a Cease and Desist letter. Sometimes, you’ll need a lawyer to send one. Sometimes, it’s appropriate to press charges. But sometimes–more often than you think–a polite letter or phone call can clear the matter up. So long as you practice defensive business and don’t say or write anything that can give away the store, you can avoid a lot of grief by direct communication in most minor disputes.

However, do be sure not to give away the store. Don’t offer a settlement you’re unwilling to live with, ever. Once you’ve won the fight, you can afford to be magnanimous, if it suits you–until you’ve won the fight, be polite, but firm. Again, these are points on which you may need to consult a lawyer, and every situation is different.

If you work in the arts and, after doing your due diligence (i.e. re-checking your contracts and records) you conclude that you have been screwed, you should consider consulting your local chapter of Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. They may be able to help, or at least to point you in the right direction. And if you do get help from them, consider making a donation out of the settlement you receive.

Pursuing action against someone who’s stolen from or defrauded you is a complex matter, and it can involve going to court. That can be expensive, both in court costs and in fees for legal representation. If the matter is under $5,000, small claims court is the de facto course (in many jurisdictions, the only course), and even that is time consuming. But it can be well worth it. If the matter is over $5,000, you’ll need to go to Superior Court in most jurisdictions. The matter may never go to trial, but it still plays out in that jurisdiction.

Lawsuits are complicated, and when possible, you really want a lawyer to represent you. However, you may find yourself unable to afford one, and unable to find one willing to take it on contingency (lawyers taking cases on contingency are taking a risk, and they generally want a sure thing with a big payoff). But if you can’t find a lawyer, you’re not out of options. You CAN fight City Hall and win, even without a lawyer.

Self-Education

When all else fails, you can sue on your own. To do this, you’re going to spend a lot of time. A lawsuit only goes to trial after everything else fails–everything else includes (but isn’t limited to) filing complaints and evidence, responding to responses, filing demurrals when appropriate, setting demands, etc. It’s a very, very complicated process–but you don’t have to be a lawyer to engage in it.

You’re going to have to educate yourself, not just in the law, but in procedure. You will have to follow procedure to the letter and be prepared to jump on your adversary’s failure to follow procedure. Most lawsuits never go to trial–they’re often settled out of court, once the defendant decides that the plaintiff has both the case and the wherewithal to win at trial. Often times these settlements include a non-disclosure agreement, which is why you don’t usually hear about them. But a NDA is an agreement, and all agreements are subject to the written consent of both parties. Sometimes, if a plaintiff has gonads of steel and a lot of staying power, they can get the defendant to forgo an NDA. When that happens, the whole suit is a matter of public record, which is why I can tell you about a prime example of someone who fought a major corporation and won.

In the early 1990s, Gibson Guitar was in the business of acquiring and killing competing companies, and as part of this process they would foist an addendum upon the employees of the newly acquired company that, much like some of the contract addenda Kristine Kathryn Rusch details here, signed ownership of any intellectual property over to Gibson.

Caught in the middle of this bit of pre dot-com corporate warfare was an independent contractor named D.N. Crowe who was writing real-time embedded software for one of the companies targeted by Gibson. This company was, itself, having problems with shaky contracts, so he was working under a “deal to make a deal” style oral contract until the boss presented him with a written contract that matched the promises he’d been made when he was hired.

In other words, he was practicing defensive business from the get-go.

When warfare erupted between this company and Gibson over their joint venture, G-Whiz Labs, Crowe refused to sign away his IP unless and until the original terms he was promised were met. Gibson attempted to deal with this problem through intimidation, the “my lawyers are bigger than yours” strategy. They sued in Federal court, and backed the suit up with very deep pockets.

Crowe did not have deep pockets. He could not afford a lawyer. He was unable to find a lawyer willing to take the case on contingency in time to respond to the filing. But he had practiced defensive business: He had kept all his records. He had not signed a bad contract. And he was not going to fold. Rather than turning tail and accepting the theft, Crowe–with the help of a friend who’d been through IP disputes before–fought back. On their own. It was a six year battle, it cost them a lot in terms of time, money, and lost opportunities to exploit that intellectual property. They fought the suit to a standstill and eventually won a summary judgment awarding them the repayment of their court costs, a letter of apology from Gibson, and clear title to all the disputed intellectual property. Because it was a summary judgment in Federal court, there was no NDA.

The case is now a matter of public record, and you can read the actual documents (and a summary written by one of his close friends) here.

Street Cred

Standing up for yourself wins you something beyond the immediate fight: if you win, you have an excellent bargaining chip in future disputes. When you’ve demonstrated the will to stick up for yourself, people are far less likely to screw with you. Schoolyard rules, right? Being able to say, with a straight face, “I’ve fought, and beaten, people with deeper pockets than you, such as [relevant case]. Ask your lawyer if I’m right on the law, then decide whether you actually want this dispute to escalate into a lawsuit.”

It’s a good hole card to have–and if you’re smart about practicing defensive business, you’ll only need it a few times in your life, at most. But those few times, it will save you immeasurable time and trouble.

Social Costs

In some businesses, standing up for yourself when things get legal is expected and respected. If you’re in one of these industries, you can stop reading now. I hope you find the tools above useful as you hack your way through the business jungle.

If you’re in the arts, though, keep reading. Because in the arts, standing up for yourself in legal matters is sometimes frowned upon. The culture that’s grown up around the arts is often suspicious of money and lawyers, and artists often come from a cultural background that’s laced with contempt for “the system.” Artists who stand up for themselves against the large corporations that sign their checks often (though not always) get accused by their fellows of poisoning the well, of being unpleasant, or paranoid, or greedy, or ungrateful.

Why? In The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood Joe Eszterhas addressed the subject obliquely, but intelligently. Artists have long been, as Michael Stackpole puts it, the “house slaves” of money and industry. From the patronage system in the middle ages to the various publishing industries (movies, music, and books), artists have supplied the raw product on which financial empires are built. We thus tend to appear to the money people as relatively disposable and interchangeable. The thinking goes something like this:

One artist will do as good as another at generating a fortune–so why tolerate someone who’s “a problem?”

So, by long cultural tradition, artists have bent over for this kind of treatment, in hopes of being one of the favored few. And, of course, this psychology has a flip-side. Artists who “make it” are as often looked upon their fellows as “selling out” as they are admired. Professional jealousy over the money, the notoriety, and the freedom that comes from a successful career can get downright nasty. Don’t believe me? Think about the flak that U2 got for its ZooTV tour–then the most successful concert tour in history–or think about the way James Patterson’s early books were praised, but his current books are derided. Or any other ordinary artist who suddenly (it seems to their peers) becomes a superstar. You don’t have to like a successful artist’s work–you can even hate it–to see this dynamic at work. There will never be a shortage of people willing to take potshots at the fastest gun in the west (hell, I’ve been guilty of it from time to time–nobody’s immune).

This is all feudal thinking. It’s a slave’s mindset. It’s been out of date for at least two centuries, and now that artists have direct access to the market at close to zero cost (through ebook publishing, online stock photography libraries, video distribution platforms, CD Baby, iTunes, I could go on forever) it’s no longer just out of date, it’s positively paleolithic. We do not need kings or aristocrats or large corporations to find enough customers to make a living. This should make us bolder, not more timid.

The problem is, there is security in being a pet artist. Having someone else handle the business end of things seems like freedom–freedom from worry, for example, from the pesky details that can screw up the creative flow. But a slave is also free in that same fashion–free to till the land and get food, with infinite job security.

Does this newfound freedom mean that we should eschew the money offered to us if someone is willing to pay to distribute our work? Of course not. What it does mean is that when New York, or LA, or Hollywood, or London comes knocking, you should stand up for yourself. Deal with them as equals, don’t fall over yourself with gratitude and lose your head. Business is built on mutual advantage–if you get taken advantage of, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

Success is not a zero-sum game. There’s not a limited amount of it to go around. It takes a ridiculously small number of devoted fans to make a modest living, though it can take time to find them. But the success of your friends, or your idols, doesn’t mean there’s somehow less success available for you. It may be natural to think in zero-sum terms, but it’s simply not in accord with reality. The entire world is a profoundly non-zero place.

What does this mean for you if you’re an artist? First, it means you don’t have to be a slave to the old way of thinking. That in itself can be profoundly liberating. Second, the fact that we do not live in a feudal or patronage system means that you–and you alone–are responsible for your business.

And, most importantly it measns that, if the need arises, you CAN fight City Hall. You CAN fight multinational corporations. And you can win.

If, and only if, you take responsibility for your business.

— — — —

Next time: Horse Trading (how to deal with impasses).

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!

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 did not, after all, have the faintest clue what a “clone” was.

Eventually, after struggling mightily with the word to see if I could wrest meaning from it, I asked my Dad what clones were.

He said “It’s a process where you can make a copy of someone by taking a piece of their skin and turning it into a baby twin.”

I said “Wow, you can make a copy of me, just with a piece of skin?”

“Not really,” he said, “it’s just a cool idea for a story.”

Already having some idea of how science fiction worked, I asked the next logical question: “So…is it possible some day? Or is it just pretend?”

“It’s just pretend,” he said. “Some people think it might be possible in a hundred years, but that’s a long time–longer than you’ll be alive.”

In the intervening decades, cellular biologists have discovered a whole class of cells called “pluripotent stem cells.” These are cells that are created in the first generation of pregnancy–a zygote is a pluripotent stem cell at fertilization, and the first few generations of replication produce more pluripotent stem cells until the cells start differentiating.

Funny thing, though. In the last couple years induced pluripotent stem cells have been discovered, refined, and perfected–in Argentina they’re now using them to clone cows from the ear tissue of a parent cow. If that weren’t wild enough, how would you feel about turning your skin into brain tissue to cure you of Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases?

I love living in the future–it’s been a quick hundred years!

But it wasn’t. It was written with writers, musicians, and other creatives squarely in mind–an audience that, by and large, is not highly conversant with all the ways around lawyers and moronic service providers that we hackers and power users have built up into a reflex. When you tell a writer who only uses a mac (who’s not otherwise a computer geek) that they need to encrypt their backups, they’re likely to look at you like you’re speaking Latin, then shake you off and continue right on doing whatever gets in their way least.

So, in the interest of being part of the solution rather than just part of the agitation camp, I’m now going to get into the things about cloud-based computing that, if you don’t know them, can make the whole enterprise very hazardous. I’ll also suggest a few ways to minimize these hazards and the hazards it can pose–and the benefits it can offer–for writers and other creative non-hacker types who use it.

So, here are some things you need to know about using any cloud-based computing service:

If The Service is Free, You Are Not The Customer

If you’re using a service, it’s natural to assume that you’re the customer and the service provider is the vendor–and there are a lot of companies (like that book about the fronts of peoples heads) that count on the fact that you’ll continue to think that.

Why? Well, if you assume that, you’re going to be inclined to several reflexes–you’ll assume that the vendor will try to treat you well, for example, and you’ll be more likely develop brand loyalty to an insane degree, because we’ve been trained to think that “the customer is always right.”

The trouble is, with these services, you’re not the customer. You (and your data) are the product.

The customers are other parties–in some cases, they’re advertising, demographics, and political firms. In other cases, the free service is a test bed for a commercial product and you’re essentially an unpaid QC person.

If this is sounding negative, it’s not because I don’t approve of the business model–if you understand what you’re getting into I’ve got no problem with such things. The trouble is that the Internet is full of people who think that that nice guy from Nigeria really does need help, and it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because they don’t have any idea about how the economic situation works on the net. People (like me) who’ve literally been on the Internet since before it was the Internet tend to forget about that.

What this all means is that the service provider has a lot less incentive to keep you happy, and a lot more incentive to do things that annoy you while advancing their own interests with regards to serving their primary customer base. These things that annoy you often turn up as rights grabs for your data, sudden changes in Terms of Service, sudden discontinuance of a service you’re relying on–and, when there’s a big public outcry, sometimes a marginal backing off combined with very loud self-flagellating apologies and protestations about how important their customers are to them (which is true–but the customer isn’t you. A fact they usually fail to mention).

In some cases, it can get worse than that. Some companies have (or believe they have) the incentive to use your intellectual property free of charge to make money. Facebook, for example, uses your user pictures in their advertising, and they don’t pay a dime for it. You’re obligated to let them unless you specifically opt-out every time they change their TOS. They’ve also, from time to time, tried to claim copyright or free license to all the text posted on their site (your words) and to all the text linked to from their site (which will never stand up in court).

Which brings me to the court test and the other reason you actually need to read your TOS: A lot of them disallow court cases. In them, you agree to binding arbitration in some po-dunk jurisdiction that doesn’t have robust laws regarding intellectual property or Internet business–a jurisdiction often pre-selected because of its statutory or cultural bias against consumer protection, in favor of enforcing binding arbitration, or of not enforcing claims of individuals against corporations. Get screwed over by a company that does this, and you have two court cases in front of you: first, to get the binding arbitration clause ruled out of order, and second to actually pursue action against the company.

On Putting Things In The Cloud

When you park your car on the street. It’s possible that someone might come along and make off with it. Two things protect people in such situations:
1) They lock their cars (which makes stealing them inconvenient–but not impossible)
2) They have cars that are unremarkable

The same holds true for your data. Most of the time, if you post your work online for free nobody’s going to steal it–frankly, most work isn’t special enough to be worth the bother. Most work is the Yugo of online car theft. And the other kinds of data that some sites collect–the demographic, behavioral, large-scale statistical data for resale to advertisers–isn’t individuated enough to worry many people.

The story changes a bit, though, with things like financial data, or unpublished manuscripts, or raw tracks. Stuff that either has intrinsic value (all financial data does, even if you personally don’t have any money) or statutory value (intellectual property).

Unfortunately, even people who are driving the Internet-equivalent of expensive cars tend not to lock them, unless they’re people who are otherwise interested in hacking and security for its own sake, and this is where you get into trouble.

When you use a cloud-based backup service, you’re gaining some useful things: data portability and off-site fire protection spring to mind. But you’re also putting your data on someone else’s server–you’re trusting your intellectual property to the good graces of an organization whose interests might not align with your own tomorrow, even if they do today–which means that if you want to keep yourself safe, you’re going to have to be checking the service’s user relations blog and TOS pretty regularly–and that’s a headache.

You’re also trusting your data security to a corporation whose security practices you can’t practically audit (and, in the case of a new company, whose practices aren’t well-established enough to have earned them a reputation you can check). The company might respect its users privacy, but if they don’t have their servers secure, then Lulzhack or Anonymous or the Russian Mob or an overzealous high schooler can waltz in and have their pick of what’s there.

VW or Aston Martin, Use A Kill Switch
So, say you need the benefits of a cloud-based data service, what are you going to do? There are a few things that can make the enterprise a not-entirely-foolhardy one:

1) Encrypt your data using the strongest available encryption
This is non-trivial if you’re not in the habit, but it is actually the only way to secure your data against most attacks. GPG, and TrueCrypt are both open-source, community enterprises and are the gold standard in data encryption. PGP has several commercial implementations of the same encryption schemes and algorithms GPG uses, and they have some slick front-ends that make it easier to use. There is a learning curve here, but it’s worth it.

2) Select a data service provider that does not have access to your data
This is the standard of professional practice in the data services industry–your data is stored on a TrueCrypt-style drive to which the hosting company doesn’t hold the keys. They can delete it, but they can’t read it. Since this claim is difficult to verify, though, you should also encrypt the data you upload.

3) Select a data service provider that does not share data
You basically want a company that won’t allow anyone–including the FBI–to access your data without a court order.

4) Select a data service provider with decent lawyers
The shitstorm over last weekend was, on the most charitable reading, caused by bad lawyers. So to be very clear: what you store on a server is no more business to your hosting provider than what you keep in a rental house–and I’m sticking to that unless and until the law says otherwise (which, at the moment, it doesn’t). When you upload to a server, you are granting the implicit right to archive, store, back up (which involves making copies) and display your data to the extent (and only to the extent) required by normal data management operations–these are all technical tasks. You are not implicitly granting the right to create derivative works, to publish, to distribute, or to sublicense the content (and if you’re looking at a service that demands that right because they use a subcontractor to handle their data farms, avoid them.

5) Pay for it
You’re going to be in a much better position if you’re using a paid service, and the paid services are not expensive. You spend more at Starbucks every month, even if you don’t drink coffee. This puts the customer/vendor relationship on the proper footing. Don’t, however, neglect points 1-4 just because you’ve paid.

6) Notice of changes to TOS
Always select a service provider that gives at least a billing-cycle’s worth of notice to changes of their TOS. This is something Dropbox did right, and with all the grousing I’ve been doing about them it’s only fair to give kudos where they’re due.

Blessed Are The Pessimists, for They Have Made Backups

The best solution of all, though, is to do it yourself. There are a number of programs available, such as PogoPlug, which make it easy to set up your own cloud-drive that you can access from anywhere. A lot of NAS appliances also include web servers that let you access your files from anywhere. Get something like this, set it up in a friend’s closet (so you have the “off-site” part of your backups covered–important in case of flood or fire), and you’re miles ahead of using a cloud-based service from a company whose politics and business incentives you have no control over.

Of course, doing this, you are parking your Aston Martin on the street, which means you need both a lock (a good firewall) and a very good kill switch (encrypt everything on that shared drive)–and if you have any sense at all, your cloud drive must be on a dedicated appliance or computer, not on your desktop or laptop machine. Isolating it from the rest of your network protects the rest of your network from the Internet, exposing only your (encrypted, right?) cloud drive on its own well-secured machine (device, spare computer, whatever).

Concluding Thoughts

I got a LOT of comments, and a lot of blog posts, commenting on the panicky, breathless nature of my initial post about the Dropbox debacle by people who figured I ought to “know better.” Those people were all either 1) hackers who already know how to navigate this weird world, or 2) people with a good understanding of cyberlaw but a poor understanding of copyright law. Most of them were very intelligent and the comment stream (and cross-linked posts) are well worth reading–but this post is not for them. The first group are already well-equipped to take care of themselves, because they have the “informed” part of “informed consent” nailed. The second group are intelligent enough that they’ll likely be fine too, though I’m nervous about the folks who take advice from them.

If you’re a creative type, your work is your livelihood. You need to be fully conversant in Copyright law, or you’re gonna get fucked. You also need to be moderately conversant in security–i.e. you need to understand the basic concepts, even if you don’t understand the technical details. And you need to apply both to the way you deal with data you put online.

This is a world of informed consent, and most people on the net are consenting without understanding the paradigm or the implications. For most people, the worst that will happen to them from operating uninformed on the net is a little identity theft. Occasionally, one of them might get implicated in a crime through no fault of their own–annoying and unlikely, but possible. But for creatives who are using the net for business, the ballgame is different–if a creative walks through this world as a naive, he risks a lot more headache and wallet ache. It really is worth the time to get savvy.

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 vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.

National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.

Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.

Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:

This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.

I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.

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!

But this is not just a story about smart shopping. It’s also a romance–and a good romance needs a narrative. So, here’s the next part, as a kind of nonfiction short story:

I’ve always loved driving, and in the early years I always had a car that was fun to drive. I loved my POS VW Bug, which I picked up for $100 on a mechanic’s repo and half-rebuilt by hand. I loved the ’87 Firebird which I drove up and down the California coast and central valley more times than I can count.

But ten years ago, when I was sinking every spare penny I had into a movie, I had to buy a car, and I needed a car that would give me no trouble for years. I wound up with a perfectly reliable, perfectly decent brand new Saturn SL1, which treated me great for ten years.

But another driver pushed the car under the rear end of a pickup truck, and it was probably a good thing. By the time the insurance check came through, my memories of really driving were just that–memories.

It was time for a fun car. A proper sports car.

For a long time I lingered on the BMW Z3 and Z4–test driving them became such a pleasure, I almost didn’t want the search to end. The Z3 was more budget friendly, so my focus narrowed, and I came within a couple inches of buying one. But before I put a firm offer, I popped down to a collision shop to have a talk with the tuning specialist.

Thing is, they stopped making the Z3 in 2002, so everything I was looking at was getting kind of long in the tooth, and I knew already that it was the kind of car I’d want to hang on to, and rebuild, and keep for a couple decades. So I needed to know what I was in for.

The mechanic’s first words were “Please tell me you haven’t bought it yet.” My stomach just about dropped through my toes. “Not yet,” I said. “Why? Everything I’m finding says they’re one of the most reliable cars out there.”

“Oh, they are,” he said, “But you see…the thing is…they stopped making parts for them.”

“So you can’t get a new engine, that’s fine,” I said. “How much does a rebuild cost?”

He said “I did one last year for $3k.” I shrugged. It was a bit steep, but it’s a German car, and that was right in line with what I was expecting. But then he finished his thought. “Last month, I had one in here. Parts on it were upwards of $8k.”

Right there, the BMW dream died. Turns out they didn’t use a standard drive train in the Z3. All the parts were custom to that car. And there weren’t enough for any third-parties to manufacture them. The Z3 is a classic now, every bit as much as a Lotus Elan or a 1960s Ferrari. To my way of thinking, then, it’s not a car you can drive–it’s the kind of car you put in a garage for 50 weeks a year, and only take out for the summer vacation.

I was really bummed. Not quite crushed, but close. On the way home I stopped by a lot where I saw the other car I really wanted–a 2002 Trans Am (which they also don’t make anymore, but the parts are all still used on other cars, so it’s not yet a museum piece). I’d avoided this car, because I wanted it more than was good for me–it’s hard to be objective when you’re driving something rare and deeply coveted. But I said “to hell with it,” and took it for a spin. At 90mph on the freeway in the bottom of sixth, under 2,000 RPMs, it felt just like I remembered my old Firebird, but better. Glorious and nostalgic, all at once. And painful, like having coffee with an old girlfriend who you’re still fond of. Sure, I could afford it, but not responsibly. And, frankly, after all the Japanese and European cars I’d driven, the GM build quality was a let-down. Inside it looked like an old VW–even in good condition, the seams showed. BMWs and Mazdas are very well put together–GM cars never have been, preferring to make up for in power and grunt what they lack in finesse. I didn’t used to care–turns out now I do. An American muscle car, no matter how fun, just wasn’t going to cut it.

In the six weeks I was looking, I’d done them all–the Mini (lovely, but SO pricey), the Golf GTI (like a mouse on steroids–fun, but not a car I could own), the Z4 (nirvanna, but too popular to find a good deal), the Z3 (a proper roadster), the Toyota MR2 Spyder (like the Z3, a beautiful discontinued near-classic), the Civic SI and CRZs (overpowered shoe boxes with bad gear ratios. They’re really trying hard to be proper cars, but don’t quite make it), and the Gen 1 Mazda Miata (not enough elbow room, and all of them had too high mileage, but still a great car), and the Z28/Tras Am line (vaguely, but painfully, disappointing). Seemed like every car on my list, for one reason or another, just wasn’t a smart buy. I wondered if I should hold on to the crumpled (but drivable) Saturn for another six months and save some more cash for something new.

But then, I realized that there was one car I hadn’t tried. One car that fit the spec sheet. One more car I needed to give a good solid chance: the Gen 2 Miata MX-5. According to Edmunds, the 1999 redesign had added more elbow room, a touch more power, and better fuel economy. By this time, I’d read enough on them to know exactly what I’d want if I got one–and if the newer cockpit worked as advertised.

I took another week, and test drove the hell out of the line. It was as advertised–it fit like a glove. It drove like an MG or a Lotus in top condition, but it didn’t rattle. It would work–I just needed to find one that had the right mileage, in the right condition, for the right price.

A few days later, a new listing popped up on Craigslist for a 2001 MX-5 way the hell out in Roseville. The seller had a kid on the way, and needed to buy something with a back seat–he was also moving to Virginia, and didn’t want to drive a car across country that he’d have to sell in six months anyway. It had the aftermarket mods I’d want to put on a Miata already installed, and it didn’t even have 90k miles on it yet. I took she-who-must-not-be-named out to Roseville to take a gander.

She wasn’t all that excited about it—the Gen 1 Miatas she’d driven had been noisier than she liked, in poorer repair than she wanted, and fell into that awful category of “almost-but-not-quite.”

That changed when we got to Roseville. The car was in exceptionally good condition, and it had some aftermarket mods (like the larger, vented discs) that hadn’t been listed in the ad. And then, we took it on the road.

In the car-shopping odyssey, I’d had a lot of great test drives, plenty of reasons to smile, plenty of reasons to cheer, and plenty of reasons to feel optimistic. But getting this car out on the road, pushing it hard, unwinding it all the way, I found myself laughing out loud. It hit the sweet spot–the right interior room, the right handling, the right power-to-weight ratio, a gorgeous rear limited-slip diff, excellent road-feel, perfect balance, and at exactly the price I would have offered. And in the passenger seat, my partner in crime was laughing right along with me.

And when we switched places, and she drove, it got better. This is a car that plugs you into the road, and she–who is very hard to please–was blown away.

The car checked out mechanically, and a few hours later we wound up driving it home. I’ve been driving it for a couple months now, and I expected it to get…well, ordinary. When you buy something new, and you get used to it, it becomes a normal part of life. This car, though, isn’t like that.

This car gets better every time I take it on the road. I drive with the top down, all the time, unless it’s raining–and when it starts raining on the drive, I can pull the top up in about two seconds on the go. The aftermarket cold air intake roars like a pissed-off cheetah when I bury my foot. The interior ergonomics are wonderful, and except when I’m pushing it up a mountain, I get a solid 30mpg out of the thing. But even that doesn’t really explain it.

You see, every time I go out to run to the store, or to drive to an appointment, or any of the hundreds of mundane things you do every day in a car, it brightens my day. For the last decade my Saturn was a solid little sedan, but I avoided driving as much as possible, because it was a bother. Now, I’m looking for excuses to hit the road.

When I was eight years old, the most fun I ever had were the summer days when my Dad brought his MG roadster out of the garage and said to me “Let’s go driving.” He would toss the thing around corners, play with what felt like the edge of death, and we’d spend long days or evenings talking about driving techniques, or the latest cool scifi movie, or the new books I was writing, or the latest author he discovered. At the time, I thought I’d never be able to own a car that cool.

Now I do. And every time I go out for a drive, I’m eight years old again, with a smile on my face and the world open in front of me. And if the road throws a few curves in my way, well that’s just fine–I can gear down, open up, and push the laws of physics to one side, and drive.

This little car has me over the moon–and I’m in love with driving all over again. I hear tell there are over a million miles of road just in the United States. If I take time to eat and sleep once in a while, that’s enough road to keep me busy for another twenty years.

I think I can handle that.

Next time, I’ll talk about the financial stuff you need to know to get the car you want from a dealership, without getting screwed. Right now, though, I think I’ll go stargazing the Pacific Coast Highway.

About a year and a half ago, right toward the end of DF10, a nasty new buzz crept into my recording studio. Straight, evil, 60 cycle nastiness from hell. I got a couple of workarounds to finish DF10 and do the first few eps of Free Will, but the amount of time it was taking me drove me bonkers. All the other recording I did during this time wound up happening at other places, because trust me, you could *hear* this. Even if I buried it in background foley, it was nasty.

But because writing new material was higher priority, and all the voice work I had in the meantime was low key enough to do on my mobile rig at a friend’s house, I put off dealing with it.

Until today. I had some new equipment going in inline, and that’s as good a time as any to check every cable connection and power outlet in the place.

After going over everything, and finding no reason for the buzz, I had a friend over who’s done a good bit of electrical engineering. It took him about ten minutes to double-check my work and discover what I hadn’t: that on the high tension wire pole outside, an antique transformer had gone on the fritz, and it was throwing off EM like you wouldn’t believe.

I asked him “So, other than moving house, what can I do?”

He showed me a trick that is so head-smackingly simple, I figured I’d pass it on in case any of you are running into similar problems. He used one of my dynamic mics to map out the magnetic field. He hooked it up to the board, boosted the frequency with the buzz, and started sweeping it around the room. Once he got the shape of the field, he started twisting the microphone.

One of the things you look for in a good dynamic mic is excellent side and back rejection. Turns out this works for magnetic fields as well as for sound. Once he got the shape of the field (which confirmed his suspicion that it was coming from the transformer outside), he positioned the microphone so it’s hind end was pointing in the general direction of the transformer, then he handed me the headphones.

No buzz. Not even a little bit. He said “Now, if it bugs you again, check the orientation of the microphone, then just change the angle until you aren’t getting a buzz. This should work with just about any pro mic you’ve got.”

So, if you have ground buzz that you can’t identify, try looking out the window. Or, just try changing the angle on your mic. Sometimes, really really silly things can fix major problems.

— — — —
Previous chapter: Market Awareness
— — — —

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!

Now we’ve done the undercarriage–though I can’t help feeling like I overlooked something important. Fear not, I’ll mention it if it occurs to me–and we’re on to the rest of the checklist.

The Engine

Pop the hood and look in the engine compartment. If you’re at a dealership, it should be clean as a whistle in here–every dealer worth his salt will have the engine scrubbed and spit-polished to within an inch of its life. It’s a nice touch, cosmetically it’s beautiful, but it can also hide some tell-tales that you’ll want to pay attention to.

First, check the hoses. Hoses should be supple, not cracked. They should be well-fitted to their ports, not overtightened and bulging. They should be even in thickness down their entire length.

Also examine vacuum and hydraulic lines–these are the metal “hoses,” for lack of a better term. Run your fingers around and along all of them that you can possibly reach, feeling for dents, dings, and corrosion If you find any, make a note and inform your mechanic when he inspects it–vacuum and hydraulic leaks are often a labor-intensive fix, and labor is what really kills you at a garage.

You’ll want to check the main gaskets–valve cover, head, exhaust, intake manifold. You won’t be able to detect small leaks, but if there’s staining or scoring around the edges, it can be a clue that the car has, or had, a seriously blown gasket. If you find one, make a note…you know the drill. If you find one at the head gasket, be worried–on aluminum engines (most modern engines), hard driving can cause the head to warp, which will require the whole top end of the engine to be replaced (or at least resurfaced), and that gets pricey. By the way, if you drive your cars up near red-line a lot, and/or you don’t pay attention to your temperature, you run the risk of toasting your engine and warping the head.

While you’re in here, look for enhancements you might want–particularly structural braces. Strut tower and other aftermarket cross-bracing will significantly improve the durability of the frame, particularly on convertibles. Also look for enhancements you don’t want (i.e. anything that might give you trouble with smog). If you find enhancements that you like but that aren’t smog-legal, make sure the stock parts are still in perfect condition and come with the car–and bear in mind that you’ll have to swap the parts out yourself.

Check the normal stuff, too–air filter, plug wires, and the general age and condition of all your consumables. It’s always good to know how long it’ll be before you need to perform a major tune-up. Check drive belt tension and suppleness (or, if you’re looking at a car with multiple belts, check them all). Make sure the electrical cables are properly wrapped and not resting on melt points (i.e. anything that gets really hot). Also take a look at the radiator–make sure it’s not cracked, that the air fins aren’t bent or damaged, and that there’s nothing melted onto it.

Finally, be sure to check the fluids. The oil should be light and clear. Dark oil is ready to be changed–sludgy oil has been left in too long. Oil with metal flakes in it is a sign of an impending engine rebuild–oil with bubbles in it is also a bad sign.

Brake fluid should be pale green or pale yellow–brown or gray means it’s ready for replacement.

Automatic transmission fluid and coolant can vary in color, but do check that they’re at adequate levels (ATF should be checked hot, not cold, so check it after your test drive).

While you’re in the engine compartment, you also want to get a feel for the geography and the elbow room–if you intend to maintain the car yourself in any degree, you need to make sure you can move around well enough to reach most of the normal stuff.

When you’ve finished in there, close it up and head into the cab.

The Interior

So, now that you’re finally in the car, take a good look. Stains, rips, wear, and build quality all matter. Do all the little compartments close and open properly? Is the car clean enough that you can live with it? These are the things everyone looks at, and they’re important, but they’re just the tip.

Check that the seats are properly mounted. They shouldn’t shift even under the weight of the heaviest passenger during an emergency stop. If they’re falling apart, make a note–they’ll need to be replaced and/or remounted if you value your life. Seat belts should operate easily and correctly, and latch securely. The emergency brake should be tight and effective–you shouldn’t be able to drive the car with it set, except under heavy acceleration.

Before you start the car up for your test drive, check every single electrical gizmo in the car, no matter how many there are (including the wipers, headlights, blinkers, running lights, and hazards). If there’s a knob, twist it. If there’s a button, push it. If it’s not labeled, push it anyway and find out what it does. Make sure everything works, make a note of anything that doesn’t, or that is on the verge of failing.

One last thing while you’re in here–if you have (or can buy) an OBD-II code reader (~$30 at most auto parts stores), bring it and plug it in. Run the standard diagnostics on the car’s computer, and make a note of any error codes it turns up. ODB-II code readers will talk to most cars built after 1996, and they’re the first thing a mechanic will use when you take your car in to get looked at. Having one around is always useful. Car dealers generally won’t be happy about you plugging one in, but they don’t need to see anyway–tell the salesman to leave you alone, and you’ll get him when you’re ready to ask questions.

The Test Drive

Test driving isn’t just about seeing if a car is comfortable–that’s important, but it’s not the whole story. The test drive lets you figure out how the car will perform on the road. At this point, I’m assuming you’ve already done the early stages, where you test drive for ergonomics, comfort, performance, and visibility. Now, it’s time to seriously shake down this particular car to see if it’s the one you want to buy.

Your goal during this test drive is to subject it to as wide a variety of conditions as you can. Pick a route that will let you do all of the following: comfortable cruising, hard acceleration from a standing start, hard acceleration from 50-80 (this is probably the most overlooked part of car choice–emergency acceleration on the freeway can save your life, and you want a car that’ll do it eagerly), emergency stopping, hard cornering, rough pavement driving, hill climbing, hill descending, surface street driving, parking lot driving.

As you drive, pay attention to the noises. Does the back end rattle and squeak? The busings could be worn and might need replacing. Does the front end squeak? Is the steering tight, or sloppy? Sloppy steering can get pricey to fix. Does the car drift consistently when you take your hands off the wheel? The alignment probably needs to be redone. Is there a strobing vibration through the steering wheel? One of the tires might be out of balance, or the tie rods might be loose. Make a note of everything.

How does the engine sound? Are is it knocking? Is it misfiring? Does it choke or change power suddenly under acceleration? Does it threaten to stall when you get off the freeway? Is the exhaust rattling? Is it running rough? And, speaking of the engine, does the temp gauge show nominal even when climbing hills or stuck in traffic? For that matter, do all the gauges work properly?

How is the gearing? Can you cruise comfortably at highway speeds, or are you constantly having to shift to maintain both power and speed on the freeway at 65? Is the gearbox grinding when you shift, no matter how careful you are with the clutch (if so, either the clutch or the tranny needs a serious look)? If it’s an automatic, is the shifting smooth and seamless, or is it jolting you like a driving student in a VW bus? And, btw, did you check that reverse works? You’d be amazed how many people don’t?

Do the tires hold the road like a car of this model should? If they don’t, the shocks/struts and/or springs might need replacing (assuming the tires are in good condition and not overfilled). Is the turning radius satisfactory for your needs? Is the ride spongier than it should be (if so, you may need new shocks/struts)?

Finally, the brakes. Braking should be smooth and quickly responsive. An emergency stop from 45mph should have a minimum of brake fade. If the car has ABS, stand on the brakes and see if you can get them to lock up–and if you can, don’t buy that car (if the car doesn’t have ABS, then you will be able to lock up the brakes–you want to find out how quick you can make it stop without locking up the brakes).

Once you park, there’s one more thing you want to do:
Check the oil again. And, again, check for bubbles and metal particles. Sometimes, they only show up when the engine’s warm.

Assuming the car has checked out to your specifications, you’re ready to deal–but there’s a few things you’ll want to bear in mind first. We’ll cover those–and get back to my personal BMW saga, next time.

Keep the conversation going in the comments, and be sure to ask any questions you want answered in the next post–or correct any errors or oversights I’ve made.

I took that opportunity, and took it in grand style, during my recent hunting season. I told you already about the Mini Cooper S–quintessentially British car made by BMW. Since it was so much fun to drive, and at this point in the hunt I hadn’t yet settled on acceptable makes and models, I thought it might be fun to indulge myself and my cohort a bit.

She has always loved the BMW Z3. Not just the looks, but the drive as well. It’s her self-described dream car. Even though they don’t make them anymore, and even though there was simply no way it would be practical (BMWs are expensive and unreliable, right?), there are a lot of them floating around the used market, so we found one nearby and took an evening jaunt to test drive it.

Fun? Yes! Slick? Yes!

But its younger brother sitting on the next lot gave it a serious run for its money–a Z4, which took the driving experience of the Z3 and pumped just a little bit of steroids and meth into the equation. On the first test drive, from a standing start I took a 35mph-rated cloverleaf at 90mph without breaking a sweat–this is a car that loves the ground and won’t leave it for any money.

At this point I realized I might have a problem. Because holy shit does that car drive like a dream. Worse still (from the point of view of my wallet) it sat right at the upper end of my price range, and it fit both me and She Who Must Not Be Named due partly to its nifty elevating seat design.

Still, no one in their right mind would buy one, right?

Unless, for example, you got home and looked up the two cars you’ve just test driven and discover that they’ve consistently garnered 4 and 5 star reliability ratings–and that they each have a healthy, vibrant mod culture associated with them. Then you found out that your driving record is so clean that your insurance company would happily cover you in an Aston Martin for not much more than you’re paying now. Then you might just go a little mad. You might even decide that they’re the right car for you.

At least, that’s what I did. First choice: the Z4. A little better than the Z3 for our requirements (meaning, better gas mileage and more cargo space), and they’re a current model, which has certain advantages. I noticed a very nice one at a local dealership, in my price range, and decided to check it out.

Checking Out A Car

When you’re checking out a specific car, block off a couple hours. Buying a car is right up there with selecting a partner and buying a house for big decisions–you’ll be living with the consequences for a long time. You’ll need the time. You’ll also need a sheet of paper.

On first approach, you do the inspection:

Go over the exterior and the interior with a fine-tooth comb for cosmetic flaws. Cosmetic flaws? Scratches in the paint? Corrosion? Pitting on the rims from brake dust? Cracked and aging upholstery? Stains in the carpet or molding? Mark them all down–they’re defects you’ll have to live with, and if you fix them, it’ll cost you money. Figure out how much it will cost to fix them–you’ll take this number into consideration when you make your offer.

With the cosmetics done, it’s time to move on to the mechanicals.

Undercarriage

The undercarriage and suspension on a car are where it all starts–and they’re the place that can give you the most headache when it goes wrong. Engines are expensive to repair, maybe, but they’ve got nothing on a bent frame for danger posed to live and bank account.

The first order of business is to stand in front of the car, far back enough that you can see the front tires. Is the wear on the front two tires even? If it’s not, it could be an alignment problem, or brake troubles, or uneven suspension, or bad components in the steering. Make a note, and then have your mechanic take a close look at it to figure out what’s wrong (you do take prospective cars to your mechanic, right?).

Continuing with the tires, take your fingers and run them across the top of each tire, and compare the wear pattern across them. This is a more in-depth version of the former, and can show you problems on the inner edge that you might not be able to see without looking–it’ll also give you an idea of how much wear you’ve got left on the tires (and, thus, how long you’ll have to save for the next set).

While you’re at the tires, check the brakes. To do this, reach between the spokes and run your fingers over the rotor (the brake disc). [Do NOT do this on a car that's just been driven--make sure it's been standing for a half hour at least, otherwise you're likely to burn your fingers! -ed.] You’re feeling for ridges and bumps across the surface. Deep grooves show a rotor that needs resurfacing. Deep grooves in multiple strata shows you a badly used rotor that’s already been resurfaced once. Rotors are a wear component, but if you’re getting deep grooves on a disc with under about 120k miles, you’re dealing with a car that’s been driven hard and will probably have other suspension and drive train issues–at the very least, it’s a car that’s not had its brake pads replaced on schedule, which could tip you off that the car hasn’t been well-maintained. (This advice applies only to cars with alloy wheels and disc brakes–on cars with hubcaps and/or drum brakes, you’ll have to do this on a mechanic’s rack by removing the wheels).

Next, it’s time to get under the car. Put it up on a rack if you can, or canter it up on a curb. Bring a dental mirror and a small flashlight to help you get a bead on things–you’ll need them. Under there, you’re gonna look for a number of things.

First, check the inside of the wheels, behind the brakes, for leaks in the wheel cylinders and at the joins on the calipers. Look for evidence of oily fluid everywhere around the wheel–there shouldn’t be any (except at the lube points, where it’s grease, not oil). If there is, there’s a problem with the brakes (usually a leak in the brake line or cylinder).

At the front wheels, on most cars you’ll find some crinkly rubber hoses covering vital parts of the steering linkage. These are your CVS booties, and they’re there to protect the car’s steering assembly joins from grit that can get in an foul the joints, wrecking the steering. Give these booties a feel–the rubber should be in good shape, but show signs of age commensurate with the age of the car. If it’s a used car, and the booties are new, it means they’ve been replaced–do not make an offer on the car until your mechanic has looked at this part specifically. Less-scrupulous dealerships will sometimes replace worn out booties to hide damage to the steering linkage beneath.

Now that you’ve dealt with the wheels, look at the rest of the car underneath–is the exhaust in good shape, or does it have rust eating at it? How about the floor pans? Is the catalytic converter in good shape? Are there aftermarket modifications to the exhaust that might make smog checks difficult? Are there any fluid leaks, or stains in the metal to indicate that there was a fluid leak that the dealer/owner has fixed? If so, trace the source of the leak, and add it to your notes.

Next, check the frame. The long structural beams down the sides of the car, the cross-braces that keep them together. Is there evidence of damage? Scorch marks form re-welding? Seams that are significantly less worn and weathered than the surrounding structure? What we’re looking for is evidence of frame damage–frame damage is expensive to repair, and if it’s been repaired it must be good quality work. Not all frame damage is created equal–dents coming up from the bottom (say, from where the car ran up on a curb) aren’t necessarily a problem. Lateral buckling is. There is a range between–make a note of any damage you find, and figure out if it’s something you can live with.

Now, crawl out from under the car and do the last frame check. Line up at the back of the car and look at all the seams in the bodywork. Are they even? Are all the gaps the same distance apart over the full length of the seam? They should be. If they’re not, you’ve got evidence of an accident that was either repaired badly, or that the owner didn’t consider severe enough to worry about. Make the same examination of both sides (how do the doors hang, are the rain rails straight, etc) and of the front end. Look particularly at the bumpers, and for crinkles in the paint at the bumpers. Note down any anomalies you find, and then (when you get to the test drive) keep your ears peeled for rattles from areas where you’ve found suspected frame damage.

Last thing for this post: Open the trunk. Check for mildew, for carpet aging. If the battery is in the back, check for corrosion on the terminals. Check for moisture in the spare tire cubby, condensation in the tail lights (it helps to do this check the morning after a rain, or after taking the car through a car wash) and to make sure all the tools are in the jack kit. Moisture in the trunk is a major pain in the ass, even more major if there are electrics back there. Make sure the seals are tight.

That’s a lot for one post. Next time I’ll go over the rest of the checklist, and tell you a bit more of the BMW odyssey.

Please post questions that you’d like addressed below, as well as comments on anything you think I might have missed.

“Predatory?” I hear you say, “Isn’t that being a bit dramatic?”

Not at all. In fact, in a good car deal, the predator is you, the customer. You’re hunting a car–the dealerships and craigslist listings and private parties are your natural hunting grounds. That’s where the natural order of things sits, and that’s where it should stay. Of course, salespeople and dealerships out to survive, so they have a strong incentive to slip into the role of predator if you’re leaving a power vacuum.

“Power vacuum?” You ask, “What do you mean power vacuum?”

Yup. Knowledge and intent are power when buying a car. If you’ve got a spec sheet of the things you need in a car, and you understand the economics of dealerships, and you have a basic understanding of automotive mechanics, your chances of walking away with a car that will serve you well are very good–assuming you also exercise good impulse control (being polite never hurts either–just remember that there’s a difference between being polite and being a sucker).

In this post, we’ll talk about creating your spec sheet.

The Spec Sheet

In the case of my recent foray into the savanna full of automotive gazelle, I was part of a team, and the team had a set of requirements. We were replacing a sedan that, though we had no particular love for it, had served admirably for upwards of a decade. I’ve owned unreliable cars before, and I wasn’t willing to go back there unless and until I’m obscenely wealthy and have a very large garage and copious free time.

My opposite number was sick of cars she didn’t fit into comfortably–she wanted something that wrapped around her like a glove, the way my late lamented Firebird wrapped around me, lo these long years ago. The idea initially excited me–happy, engaged drivers tend both to be safer drivers and have a better mood on days when they need to drive, and really, what’s the point in spending cumulative years of your life in a car if you’re not enjoying yourself? Unfortunately, this requirement posed a bit of a problem–I’m 5’10″ with obscenely broad linebacker shoulders, and fairly soggy around the middle. She’s 5’3″ and very petite all around. Finding a car that fit both of us was going to be a tall order, full stop.

Fortunately, we did agree on a few things. Our spec list looked like this:

1) Must have a manual transmission. No exceptions.

2) Must be extremely reliable.

3) Must be capable of 30mpg or better when treated well.

4) Must be straightforward to maintain and user-friendly for home repairs.

5) Must not put a huge dent in the budget.

This got us as far as our first pass looking at what was on the market, and narrowing the list from everything to a manageable set of options. It sounds pretty basic, maybe even moronic, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for you’re unlikely to find it.

Over the following week, our spec list narrowed further, but what you see above was enough to get us out and test driving–which brings me to another basic rule:

Until you know exactly the car you want, never buy a car the first time you’re on a lot–and let the salesman know that it’s your policy. There are some non-obvious reasons for this, which I’ll get into some next time.

The next test drive

After making up our preliminary spec sheet, She Who Must Not Be Named started not-so-subtly indicating an interest in the Mini Cooper (at least, that’s what it looked like to me when the lustful eyes, lolling tongue, and grabbing motions accompanied by chants of “WANT!” communicated to me whenever we passed one on the road). I hadn’t considered one on the assumption that it’d break the budget line item on our spec sheet, but I figured “What could it hurt?” and allowed myself to be dragged along to a dealership.

We grabbed the keys to a Cooper S and took it for a joyride–and let me tell you, the car is a joy. The superchargered engine, the drive-by-wire cockpit, and the stiff-and-low suspension all conspired together to remind me what driving is supposed to be like. Not just what it can be like if you know how to take mediocre equipment and make it dance, but what it’s like when the equipment drags you outside like an eager puppy and says “Let’s play.”

Oh. My. Godlessness.

We took it out to an abandoned road with enough straight and enough curves to give it a good shakedown. It crawled up to 100mph without even pushing, and it easily handled the corners at twice + ten the posted speed (so a 25mph corner played nice at 60mph). The stopping distance was unreal–a light car with broad carbon-ceramic brake pads and excellent ABS meant that I went from 100-0 in about half the distance I’d have been able to do in a normally-proportioned car.

Last time I called the Civic CRZ a rocket-powered rollerskate that wanted to be a car. The Mini is the opposite: a driver’s car with the attitude and poise of an atomic-powered ice skate. Smooth in the right places, rough in the right places–like the original British Mini, a toy in the very best sense of the word. Even better, it fit both of us very well. I have never before driven a hot hatch (the class of car the Mini falls into) that behaved so well.

A little digging showed that Minis before 2005 had a chronic problem with the thermostat sticking, which could lead to head warping and other nasty problems. I spent an hour in a shop with a mechanic who was doing a rebuild and got to know the engine a bit, learning the ins and outs of its charictaristic issues. This is a car where you definitely want to keep up with the oil changes, and only use synthetics–and it’s also a car that tends to get abused. Hot hatches like this are huge in street racing, and very popular with teenagers, so if you’re picking one up on the used market you should take a lot of care.

That said, it is a very well put-together drive train, and if you stay on top of the maintenance it gets a very high dependability rating from Edmunds and JD Power. After crawling around under a few of them I can see why: it’s very well-designed to deal with the kind of driving it gets subjected to. Driven properly and maintained well, it should be quite the joy to own.

They also hold their value very well–less than 30% depreciation over the first hundred-thousand miles, post 2006. This car was looking really good–the chunk it would take out of the monthly budget, though, was just a tad hard to swallow. We put it on our “maybe” list and went on looking at the rest of the field. And since Mini is owned by BMW, the post-Mini conversations naturally led us to a conversation about German cars, and sports cars in general.

After all, we already have a cargo hauler vehicle for gigs and for taking people to/from the airport. We’ve both missed having a sports car in the house. We decided to two more items to our spec sheet, one that puts the definitive shape on what we were looking for:

6) A sports car–or, if it was really good, a hot hatch.

7) If a sports car and not a hot-hatch, Rear-Wheel Drive is non-negotiable. (Hot hatches are almost always FWD, but we both prefer the way RWD cars handle).

And with that, our list of potential make/model combinations shrank from thirty to ten. Now, we had a manageable field to survey.

This spec sheet fit our needs and desires–it may not work for you. If you’re in the market for a car, consider:
1) The practical needs that your car will meet–how much space will you need?
2) Ergonomics and comfort — chances are you’ll spend a lot of time in this car, you want it to feel homey and enjoyable. A well-chosen car can take a lot of stress out of your daily commute. The shape of the seats, the amount of elbow room, the ride height, the driving position, cupholder positions, and the visibility all play in to this aspect. Pay attention to them on test drives, and take notes on what works and doesn’t work for you.
3) Extras. I didn’t talk a lot about these above because we’re both great if we’ve got a good radio with an aux plug. You might need Sat Nav, or a DVD player, or an infra-red HUD. Power mirrors might be non-negotiable to you. Be clear on your expectations.
4) Safety. Check the car’s safety ratings–and don’t accept less than three stars on any impact unless you’re deliberately picking a classic car. If it’s a two-seater and you ever might transport children or pregnant women, make sure you can turn off the passenger-side airbag.
5) Reliability, maintenance schedule, and repair costs. Consumer reports, Edmunds, Kelley Blue Book, and JD Power all have good info on these. Also don’t be shy about talking in depth to a mechanic about specific models.
6) Modifiability. If it’s important to you to modify your car, check the health of the aftermarket for the cars you’re considering–and make a healthy aftermarket an item on your spec sheet.
7) Transmission: Manual and Automatic aren’t you’re only choices. Get familiar with the different options, decide what will best suit your needs, and decide how important it is to you. For me, an automatic is a deal-killer–for others, the case might be reversed. And a lot of people are okay with any transmission as long as it’s behaving itself.
Economy. Gas mileage–and don’t just think in miles-per-gallon. If you want to accurately calculate your fuel costs, calculate it in gallons-per-100-miles. The economy difference between 15 and 20mpg is orders of magnitude greater than the economy difference between 25 and 30, or between 30 and 40.
9) Insurance costs. Once you get a list of models you’re interested in, call your insurance agent and see how much each one will cost you.
10) Budget. What are you willing to pay? (Don’t forget to include taxes, title, and license).
11) Power. How big an engine do you need?

If you’ve got a good handle on all these things, you’ve got a pretty full spec sheet, and you’re ready to do some serious car hunting.

Next time: The BMW odyssey and checking for mechanical integrity.

I don’t mean driving in traffic, I mean driving. Heading out onto the open road, or attacking a mountain and forcing its roads to unwind for you. Feeling the physics, pushing to improve the precision. I treat driving like some people treat horseback riding: a passion that, whenever I can afford to, I practice and perfect.

Two years ago, my uber-boring Saturn had an unfortunate encounter with a truck while in the hands of another driver, resulting in a face that looked like a schoolyard bully had decided to show it what-for. Insurance was fine, claim filed, claim check eventually came in, and I resigned myself to eventually buying a new car.

This was not an experience I was looking forward to. For starters, since I was both a full-time salesman and part-time greasemonkey in a past life, car salesmen tend not to like me when I start sticking my fingers in the tailpipe, fondling the brake disks, climbing underneath the vehicle, checking CV booties, and doing other obscure things that look vaguely pornographic. And they really tend not to like it when they realize I’ve found out the wholesale price they bought the car for, and I know how much they’re paying in taxes to keep it on the lot, and I’m not afraid to walk away if they’re not willing to deal.

The practical upshot is I spend more time car shopping than most folks–but I also usually wind up with cars that aren’t headaches. It’s a good tradeoff for me. Nonetheless, if I believed in hell, I would nominate car-shopping for the eleventh circle (useless labor)–and in this case, useless labor I couldn’t afford to avoid: the insurance company had sent me a check for more than the car was worth.

And it’s worth it, right? Getting a good car?

Well, yeah, but this particular journey was a fraught one with a number of interesting little adventures–starting with the test drives. One of the early cars I took for a test drive was the Honda CRZ, which basically a Civic that’s trying to impress its buddies in gym class.

Hondas are a uniquely frustrating experience–they have lovely engines, and are gloriously reliable most of the time. The CRZ I drove had the six speed manual gearbox (though the gear ratios are a bit of a joke), an obscene amount of elbow room inside, and plenty of get-up-and-go.

The trouble is, it’s a Honda. Sure, they’re cute, they’re even endearing–but not in the kind of way you want a car to be endearing. As you cruise around in one, you get the distinct impression that you’re driving a motorized roller skate. That’s because the stock Honda suspension on the Civic, Accord, and Fit lines is designed for “ride comfort” (this is a fancy term meaning “the center of gravity is too high and the shocks are too spongy for the driver to properly feel the road), while their soundproofing is inadequate even on the newer models, so you always get tire and wheel-bearing whine coming up to you from all four wheels.

Then there’s the clutch. Honda clutches of years gone by always seemed to behave like a yappy Jack Russel terrier–bouncing, oversprung, overeager, and hard on the knees. It’s not a racing clutch–the things aren’t rated for that kind of torque, and they certainly don’t have the kind of precision you’d expect out of a hard-driving clutch designed for an expert. But it’s not really a comfortable street clutch either. And then there’s the engagement curve–to disengage the transmission, you have to go all the way down to the floor, but to re-engage, you have to come all the way off. With pedal travel measuring in at upwards of six inches, this makes shifting slow and sloppy without making it easy or fun–the worst of both worlds. Of course, the CRZ is the sporty model of the Civic, so naturally these trademark pains in the ass are magnified in an attempt to make you think it’s on purpose–kind of like a preteen falling against a window, breaking his elbow, and then saying “Ah hah! I meant to do that! See how cool I am?”

In a vehicle that has a sticker price upwards of twenty thousand? There’s really no good excuse for this kind of behavior.

Now, I’ve driven some Hondas that aren’t like this–the Element drives like it should for the kind of car it is (a TARDIS-like cargo-hauler built for comfort), and a Civic that’s been lowered and re-sprung drives like a proper economy sedan. I hear that the S2000 is even…well…a good car. But generally speaking, Hondas feel like the kind of machine that really, desperately want to grow up some day to be a real car. It’s the automotive version of Pinocchio–except there’s no Blue Fairy to grant their wish. And with the glorious engines that Honda makes, it’s a crying shame too.

Fortunately, this wasn’t the only car I slipped behind the wheel of in the last few weeks–and as the journey unfolded, we gradually settled on our short-list of requirements, and found some true gems…which I’ll tell you about next time.

Click here for Part 2, in which I find a true gem, and discuss how to make sure you’re looking in the right place

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.

In between times, you get harassed by salespeople both fabulous and incompetent, pushed to spend more money than the Harvard students spend on pizza in a year, and–just occasionally–get to test drive a car that leaves you breathless. The weight balance is just short of perfect, the clutch is tighter than a smuggler’s sphincter at a customs checkpoint, the gearbox goes up to six, and the power band is as wide as a ten-lane highway.

You sit at the base of the entrance ramp on your test drive, having established through driving surface streets that it handles well in irritating city traffic and making sure the ergonomics are comfortable, the ride quality good. The light turns green and you punch it ever so slightly, just to see what it can do around the 45mph-rated cloverleaf to get on to the freeway. Then, when you’re about to come out of the leaf, you shift into sixth and glance down, and notice that you’re already doing over 90, and the car has a long, long way to go. You take the merge ramp at 110, then let the engine slow you down to a more socially acceptable 80mph in case any cops are waiting on the other side of the berm.

You put it through its shakes in the next twenty minutes. The thing seems to be glued to the ground. You can’t kick it out without trying like hell, you can’t make it lean out of a curve, you can’t make it stop trying to eat the road up like cotton candy–and yet when you’re cruising at 80 in 6th, the tach isn’t even at 3,000 and the on-board computer shows you making better than 32mpg.

You weren’t actually in the market for a sports car. It’s been a decade since you owned one, maybe more. You were looking for something small-but-fun. Maybe a slightly overpowered sedan, or a 2-door around-town coupe–something with a bit of cargo space and room for passengers. You just took the test drive because the thing was on the lot where you were already looking, and you just don’t let chances to drive cars that nice pass you by.

Except that now you wish you could get it–but thankfully, you’re too responsible to consider it.

Still, to cope, you remind yourself that the kind of cars you’re likely to fall in love with will be impossibly expensive to maintain, a bitch to insure, hell on fuel, and best left in the world of pipe dreams. You re-watch Gone in 60 Seconds to take the edge off. You try to remember that you’re an adult now, and driving is only supposed to be fun on special occasions.

Then you start researching the cars that are making your short list, and you sneak a couple of the cars that are making your inner performance driver sweat like a junkie three days into detox onto the list. What you find doesn’t help. Turns out the world has changed in the sixteen years since you went car shopping. Prices aren’t what you thought, and since you have a spotless record your insurance rates for the new supercar would be less than what you paid for your first VW Bug. Reliability profiles of all brands have changed–build philosophy has changed. After talking to several mechanics at length you’ve realized that maintaining them is well within your capabilities as a mechanic.

Then you find out that the cars you’ve been eyeing with “someday” envy are only one or two thousand out of your price range, and you’ve got some articles at hand that need selling. And your partner points out that there are no kids in the household, and there’s still one cargo car in the driveway. She misses having a fun car as much as you do, and all this one really needs to be able to do is road trips and commutes.

“Did you say road trips?” you think, “This six-speed wet dream was built for them.”

And ooh, boy–that’s when things really get interesting.

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.

Crazy Silly Creative Things
To start off with our garnish, you could do no better than watching this 3 minute video about what Welshmen really do with sheep. Don’t worry, it’s work safe–but you won’t be while watchign it. This is seriously, amazingly cool.

Johnny Carson presents The Great Flydini, an utterly silly and borderline obscene magic act that will leave you in stitches. Don’t let obscene put you off — it’s work safe.

While you’re at it, put down your drink before reading this story about the trials of moving house with a pair of neurotic dogs.

Writing
Gail Carriger shares a surefit of useful research resources for those interested in the Victorian world.

Publishing
Some industry analysts are just flat terrified of change. The tired old doom-and-gloom saw, complete with a helping of elitist nuttery and starry-eyed nostalgia, receives a very articulate (and surprisingly informative) defense in the Boston Review article Books After Amazon. Fortunately for readers, most publishers aren’t this short-sighted, but it is a very informative view into the mind of those who think that ebooks will kill the publishing industry.

Copia, a latecomer to the ebook market, is hoping to create a major third-mover advantage by leveraging social media in a pretty creative way, turning its reader into a Facebook-meets-Twitter-meets-Goodreads-meets-kindle type “experience.” Time will tell.

While we’re on the subject, the official word on Google Editions is that they ARE coming…someday. At least, we think so.

If you sell a story during 2011, be sure to drop an email to this guy. He’s editing the “Best Of” anthology for 2011.

By the way, James Bond? Yeah, his author’s estate gave its publisher the boot and went independent. Details here.

Science
By now you’ll have heard all about the new life form discovered at Mono Lake. Here’s a sober and understandable account of this very exciting, but fairly overhyped, discovery.

Speaking of which, I’m getting very tempted to declare the 21st century the century of virology. It turns out that a lot of cancers, possibly obesity, and now possibly schizophrenia are caused by the irritating little bastards.

Moving to the meteorology front, the Telegraph has an article full of amazing photos of supercell tornadoes that’s well worth a squint.

Miscellaneous Cool
I stumbled across a whole bunch of color movies from the 19th century. Our notion about the Victorian Era being drab and grey where the clothing is concerned? Yeah, that’s a load of crap, and here’s the evidence.

Space Travel
It’s not quite a moon base, but it’s still kinda cool: NASA aims for a base at L2.

Vanity
And finally, your moment of torture. On Get Published, I cackle in my surly way about writing, marketing, publishing, and making a living off of fiction in ways I’m hardly qualified to do.

Opinionated though I am, it’s not an easy question to answer. So here’s a quickie list of the pros and cons garnered from a scarce four years of con-going experience:

Con Pros

1) Networking. I’ve met lifelong friends through Cons. I’ve also made excellent business contacts, both in the writing business and otherwise. I’ve met a lot of really excellent people.

2) Fun. If it’s a good con, and you find your groove we’re talking Disnelyand-or-better level fun, not going-to-the-movies-because-you’re-bored level fun.

3) Vacation. This is different from fun. You can have fun at home. But a vacation is a break from reality, and Cons are definitely a place where many of the normal rules of reality don’t apply (but politeness rules do still apply: don’t be an asshole). It’s good to shake up your picture of the world from time to time, and a good con will do that.

4) Education. A well-run con will have programming in which you’ll learn new skills, get exposed to new ideas, and walk away with a slightly swelled brain. From the learning, not the cocaine.

5) Writing time. I’ve finished two novels and written several short pieces at cons.

6) Sex. If you’re looking for it, you can find it.

Con Cons

1) Expensive. Anywhere from $200 to $1000 for the weekend, depending on travel, hotel, food, and how creative you are with budgeting and buddying up. That doesn’t even get in to what you can spend in the dealer’s room.

2) Culture shock. If you haven’t been to one before, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll see or hear things that offend you. Your boundaries are going to get stretched too. No matter how laid back you are, someone’s gonna push your boundaries. This is more interpersonal shock than culture shock, but if you don’t enjoy personal stretching, this could be a minor negative.

3) Con Crud. You’ll get sick–cons are petri dishes. Plan a couple days for recovery. Also, you know that thing called “sleep?” You won’t get any.

4) Sex. If you’re not looking for it, it can still find you. And follow you around. And not take anything but “you’re creeping me out, go away” for an answer.

5) Bad cons. Some cons just suck. They’ve been run by the same people for too long. They’re afraid of being edgy. They’re insular. For whatever reason, they’ve lost their spark. When this happens, it’s *depressing* as well as a waste of time and money. It’s hard to know when you’re going to run into one of these, but you’ll run into ‘em.

6) Con fatigue. If you love cons, you’ll go through parts of your life when all the wonderful things about cons just aren’t enough to be worth the bother. Maybe you’re a writer at a point in your career where the panels are too elementary but you’re not ready for high-level networking. Maybe you’re transitioning from fan to pro. Maybe there’s a cultural divergence, and you just don’t fit at your local con. Maybe you’ve had a death in the family and, this year, the whole thing seems stupid. Or, maybe you’ve just gotten all you can out of the con experience and it’s time to call it quits for a few years, or forever.

— — — — —

Those are the things to weigh. A great con can literally be life-changing, just by virtue of the people you meet. A bad con is just annoying and will make you feel surly and stupid. Most are somewhere in between.

Anyone have comments or opinions on cons? Chime in in the comments!

This year, I’m on track to do 6 short stories, 1 novella, 3 novels, 1.5 nonfiction books, and 15 articles. Fully 1/9th of my lifetime’s word output has happened this year. And I also landed a collaboration deal for a nonfiction with one of the veterans in the business (you’ll hear more about this during Q1 of next year).

During the same time, I upped my education a lot. I’ve gotten my footing in what had previously been a bizarre and foreign business to my way of thinking, learned how to apply past lessons to the current domain, and taken several other business projects forward specifically because of the gaps this education has filled in.

One of the things that surprised me is the lesson I learned ten years ago at the beginning of my time in and around independent film is even more important in the writing business than the film business. I’m henceforth calling it Sawyer’s First Law of Apprenticeship:

When you want to learn something, look for the folks with the gray hair and the bad attitude. (Caveat: “Bad Attitude” doesn’t mean “asshole.” It means “cynical and difficult to impress, and don’t give a damn what you think about them.” This is important because it means they’ve been around the block and they have their shit together).

In an industry like publishing that’s in the throes of tectonic shifts wrought by technology, particularly for a child of the Internet age, it’s easy to assume that it’s the young lions who know the score.

And, for us Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers, it’s a cultural cache to be insular: to be highly social among ourselves, and to not bother much with the older folks unless they’re the rare ones who are hip to the changing times.

But if you’ve ever hung around old soldiers, you know this one: When the rules change, the old soldiers who survive the change do so because they know why things work the way they do. And they are usually willing to talk to people who are willing to listen–and they are also willing to encourage people to only take the parts of their advice that suit them. In writing, there’s a group of writers who are adapting faster than *anyone* to the new world of ebooks and small presses and making new media pay rather than just making it work, and they’re all over 50 and each has more than 50 novels under their belts.

Over the last few years, I’ve been the beneficiary of a lot of wisdom from people with gray hair and bad attitudes, in a variety of businesses. Most of them, I kid you not, I met in bars or in line for movies, just chit-chatting with strangers who seemed interesting. Some of them I sought out at conventions and conferences. All of them have been a masters-level-or-better education on their own.

And I’ll still be learning for a lot of years. My current endeavor is listening to the Superstars Writing Seminar until my ears fall off. In another month, I’ll have them more or less memorized. And a month after that, I’ll have the lessons integrated into my business strategy. I highly recommend it for anyone in the first couple decades of a writing career (from “ooh, I want to do that” to “So I have a dozen books under my belt, now what?”).

Whatever your business is, your peers are people you need: support, friendship, innovative thinking, industry gossip, you’ll get a lot of it through them. Treasure them. Nurture those relationships. They are the people who you’ll be with as you conquer the world.

But to level up, you need three things: learning, discipline, and mindset.

Learning comes from the people who earned their gray hairs.
Discipline comes from seeing what people twenty or thirty years ahead of you can do in their sleep that you dare not even dream about yet, then trying to push to reach that level. Maybe you’ll find your limits, more likely you’ll push them, and that’s where growth comes from.
Mindset comes from listening to people who’ve been there before you. You learn very quickly how easy it is for a newbie (even a newbie with a resume) to worry about the wrong things, to be as diligent as possible and make dumb decisions, and to self-sabotage without ever realizing it.

Some of this stuff you can learn from books. The rest of it only comes from experience, and from talking with people who’ve had experiences.

Whatever your art, business, or career, maintain your networks. And keep an eye out for gray hairs and a bad attitude. When you find them, buy them a drink and ask them questions. You’ll be glad you did.

When given the choice between the easy way and the hard way, I almost always chose the hard way, and it’s not just out of bloody-mindedness (though there is a bit of that). It’s that I’ve discovered that when you learn something the easy way, you rarely learn it well.

Take driving. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to learn: automatic or stick.

The automatic transmission removes one of the two most intimidating aspects of driving (the other, which is traffic, can’t be removed) and helps students achieve baseline confidence and competence quicker. There’s less to learn, so what is left can be learned well,and quickly. This is why, in the U.S., the vast majority of student drivers (including nearly all that learn at professional driving schools) learn to drive an automatic.

But bypassing the manual transmission means sacrificing a number of advantages for a trivial gain (lower stress in the first couple days behind the wheel). You sacrifice gas mileage, as sticks are much lighter than automatics, and allow you access to driving tricks that goose your gas mileage without sacrificing emergency performance in traffic.

You also sacrifice control over your car–the manual transmission, even a poor one, offers an extraordinary level of control over the amount of torque delivered to the road surface, and controlling this torque is one of the basic tricks of driving in snow, or performance racing, or escaping from mud, or recovering from a skid. All of this amounts to both a sacrifice of safety and of performance and pleasure. Only the most expensive performance automatic transmissions offer a similar level of control.

Lost too is the ability to drive internationally. Outside the U.S., the automatic transmission is the outlier, while the stick is called a “standard” (because it is standard equipment).

Finally for now (as this list could go on), if you can’t drive a stick you are forever hostage when you find yourself in car-sharing, convoy, or borrowing situations. If you know how to drive a stick and how to handle a large vehicle, you can drive almost any non-specialty vehicle on the planet, in almost any situation (lorries with trailers, and loaders being the exceptions: both require specialized training because of their unusual weight distribution).

Those are a LOT of advantages to sacrifice on the altar of avoiding a couple day’s anxiety, particularly because of another quirk of human nature: most people are okay with “good enough” when it comes to their skill sets. When presented with an opportunity to re-learn a skill at a higher level of complexity, most people will pass on it unless there’s a significant incentive, even if it’s a skill they use every day. Mastery is not enough of a lure for most people, most of the time.

I’m no exception to this one, either. Every time I’ve learned something the easy way, I’ve had to be dragged kicking and screaming when it came time to level-up.

So I’ve gradually learned that whenever it’s time for me to learn a new skill, I must select the road that will give me the broadest, deepest possible grounding as quickly as possible. It’s policy. As most of you reading this blog also pursue your own artistic and/or business endeavors, it’s a policy I recommend to you too.

Because to do something for a lifetime, be it hobby or career, it is essential that you do it as if you intend to master it. Otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.

Of course, I could be totally out to lunch. What do you think? Leave a comment, let’s get a conversation going.

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!

But first, I begin with a special treat for my free-wheeling brewer friends. Beer has always been a problem in space — not because of drunk piloting, but because weightlessness does weird things to the sense of taste. There’s also the question of what the bubbles will do to the body, and how drinkable beer will be in zero G anyway. Fortunately, someone is officially working on these problems so that we can take into space with us the drink that made civilization possible in the first place: Click here for Space Beer!

Now, on to the main courses:

Consumerism
As part of the Book Retailer wars, Sears will double your Christmas shopping budget by effectively giving away free books.

Autodidacticism

Can’t afford a Harvard education, but have the drive and desire to get one? Well then, today’s your lucky day. Harvard has started offering some classes online for free

History
Bet you, like most people born after WW2, thought Color Photography didn’t really get going until the late 1930s, right? Well, think again. Here’s some gorgeous Color Photos from the great depression in Colorado and some even more amazing Color photos from Imperial Russia (the Ukraine and Uzbekistan, near as I can make out).

Writing
If you live with a writer, or are dating a writer, or think writers are sexy (we are), there are a few things you should know.

Here’s some advice I should pay more attention to: How to write magnetic headlines

An attempt to make an IMDB for Speculative Fiction books and audio: SpecFicDB

For those of you looking to get press for your new indie book, or those of you looking to sample something that’s not just published slush, here’s an Aggregate list of indie book reviewers

Some delightful fan mail from the Golden Age Science Fiction magazines, all written by girls.

Jordan Summers has a series of reports from the Novelists Inc. conference on piracy, some low-down contractual moves by publishers as they panic in the new marketplace, and more. A must read for any writer.

Vanity
Fair Warning: These next couple writing-related links feature me. First, my post on The Creative Penn’s blog about How To Survive the Ebook Apocalypse

And then, there’s an hour of me talking turkey and story with Mark Jeffrey on his video podcast This Week in Books The goofy looking guy is me.

Science
The man who gave us The Thumbprint of God, Benoit Mandlebrot, died this week. Check out his glorious TED talk here. If you don’t know who Mandlebrot was, or how he and a few of his friends fundamentally changed the game in ever sphere of life, check out This BBC Documentary

Over in Climate-change land, the fight has broken into four camps: The alarmists, for whom we are all doomed and deserve it as punishment for our technological/capitalistic sins; The Warners, who think we’d better do something so we don’t royally screw ourselves; the Skeptics, who are cautiously doubtful of policy prescriptions but also cautiously accepting of a preponderance of evidence; and the Deniers, who think it’s all a left-wing anti-business plot (this taxonomy stolen shamelessly from Stuart Brand). Sometimes, there’s an interesting dataset that allows the skeptics and Warners to make common cause, despite any underlying differences, because they share the same respect for good science. Here’s one such instance, very intelligible to laypeople: a climate history that takes into account all known natural climate cycles AND anthropogenic effects.

If you ever lost a pet as a child, chances are you heard some version of the “Doggie Heaven” story. The one I heard was that Heaven will be happy, and if I want my dog when I’m there, she’ll be there waiting for me. Of course, as we get older we realize that this is a lie told to us by well-meaning parents who, regardless of whether they believe in human heaven or not, don’t really believe in doggie heaven. After all, dogs don’t have a spirituality, do they? Well, according to new neurological research, if humans have anything that can be called “spiritual awareness,” then so do dogs, and most other higher animals.

Social Scientists have a lot to say about educational policy,economics, politics, family values, and culture, so sometimes it’s important to step back and take a long hard look at what they do and do not actually know at this point in history. (This is an excellent article)

Ethics:
And, finally, from the philosophy of ethics department, a paper that argues lucidly that you can’t be good without Science Fiction.

More Reprobates and the final Balticon Adventure next week!
And don’t forget to buy the new Clarke Lantham mystery And Then She Was Gone next Friday!

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

This week’s Link Salad contains elements of science, sex, publishing market reports, book reviews, and is garnished with interesting cultural tidbits. Here you go:

Publishing:
The Mammoth Book of Steampunk is now open to Submissions and Recommendations. So if you know any stories (cough-Cold Duty–cough) you think should go in there, now’s the time to go mention them–they’re looking for reprints until Oct 31. They’ll be looking for original stories after that.

Matthew Leiber Buchman is doing a blog series, detailing how he sold a four-book series (including doing all the negotiation) without the help of an agent–not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t get anyone to take a freebie commission. Astounding story — and VERY useful information for those of you who, like me, are currently churning through the New York and London markets. Find it here (link to the second post in the series, about the query that sold).

Icarus Magazine, a semipro gay SFF market, is now open again. Details here.

Science:
Economist Robin Hanson is “shaken to the core” by Sex at Dawn. His review is very provocative and interesting in its own right and has convinced me to put this book on my reading list.

How would you like to travel to Mars in less than ten days? For those of you who thought the fast space travel in Predestination bordered on the silly, check out the new designs for the deuterium-fusion pulse drive which will do just that.

And for the truly radical (and speculative) in physics, check out this proposal for synthesizing degenerate matter made my head hurt so good.

Culture:
Clay Shirty explains why he thinks that we are not yet tapping our ultimate resource: Cognitive Surplus.

Clarissa Thorn, professional sex educator and kink activist, talks in depth about the demonization of male sexuality.
In a paper which has implications for writers in characterization, as well as far-reaching implications for politics, psychology, and business ethics, The Harvard Business Review goes against the current cultural tide by talking about how powerlessness creates a self-perpetuating cycle of corruption and collapse.

Ethics philosopher Jonathan Harris tackles a BIG taboo Cannibalism!

Politics:
From Blake Charlton, a very good overview (and fairly dispassionate) of the different attitudes and concerns of people about Health Care Reform (explains what the policy is, talks about why people don’t like it. As someone who is marginally irritated with the law, I found this very fair and well done): click here

It is now perhaps more popularly known as “white guilt” day, the day when people who are culturally descended from those early settlers and the people they conquered go into reflexive spasms of regret over the conquest of a paradise uncorrupted by the sins of European so-called “civilization. It brought environmental catastrophe, plagues, wanton slavery, and ugliness hereto unseen on the face of the earth.

I’d suggest that both camps would be helped considerably by reading Columbus’s diaries and some primary sources from the intervening centuries (i.e. stuff written at the time, not later interpretations), but in my experience that would do very little to illuminate the discussion. More’s the pity–in a world where there are persistent social problems involving repression, slavery, genocide, and merchantilist cronyism, the jingoistic crowing on one hand and the paroxysms of masturbatory guilt on the other hand have the cumulative effect of cultural blindness.

So, for the record, and in the hopes of shedding a little light on a day which usually generates meaningless heat, here a few potentially relevant thoughts:

Every square inch of the globe has been taken and retaken in wars stretching back to the beginning of human settlement. Nobody is a native, with the possible exception of the Australian Aborigines (they are the one aboriginal people whose history I don’t know well enough to include in this group).

Slavery, rape, warfare, and genocide, are human universals–each has been practiced in some form everywhere, in all cultures, aboriginal and agrarian, primitive and technological, since the beginning of recorded time, with one exception: The post-enlightenment western world from the late nineteenth century onward. Although the debates over just war, women’s rights, slavery, property rights, and freedom have been popular among philosophers since the fourth century B.C.E., it is only in recent centuries in the Western World that they have been able to gain enough of a foothold to become (slowly, haltingly, and imperfectly) the dominant ideals of a civilization.
Pretending that the crimes of Europeans against aboriginal American nations are uniquely cruel, unprecedented, or a fight of warlike bullies against peaceful victims is ahistorical, dishonest, and racist both against the aboriginal peoples and the different peoples that settled the New World. Worse, it diminishes the continuing presence of these practices in our world in forms as brutal and wretched as any in history.

Europeans are not a unified racial or cultural group, and were not considered one in the US until the mid twentieth century. Many writers had to fight for the right to include Italian, German, and other non-English and non-French characters in their novels during the early decades of the twentieth century. In terms of colonial behavior, the conduct of the Portugese, the French, the English, and the Spanish were all radically different.
It’s no accident that England became the dominant world Empire for three centuries–they were the only power to allow dissent, encourage native education, and, in some measure, allow local native governments to retain a degree of autonomy, and it’s no accident that countries who have thrown off the English yolk still maintain peacable and very friendly relationships with the mother country. No other colonial power in world history has enjoyed this circumstance, and it exists because of the way the English treated their subjects–cruelly, sometimes despotically, but almost always better than the native governments they displaced. It is perhaps an irony of history that the practice of constitutional democracy and the contempt for feudalism and dictatorship spread across the world through the stepchildren of history’s most extensive imperial monarchy, but the historical fact remains:

The colonization of the new world by the people who did so, at the time they did it, allowed Enlightenment ideals to flourish far from the watchful eyes of Torquemada, Calvin, Luther, Elizabeth the First, and the other despotic dictators of the period who were heavily into thought control. In the New World (and nowhere else in history), the ferment of notions such as “The Brotherhood of Man,” “Human Rights,” “Civil Rights,” “Freedom of Thought,” “Freedom of Speech,” and “The Equality of Women” took hold. It spread first to Europe, and then over the next few centuries, to the entire world (which now, at least, pays them lip service). That ferment is directly responsible for the citizen-based governments now present in almost all former British colonies, which to this day represents a disproportionate segment of the non-oppressed people of the world.

To note these differences in imperial approach, and their effects, is not to justify the racism, sexual oppression, theft, and violence that accompanies even the most genteel of historical colonial expansion. It is good and appropriate to reflect, to be self-critical. The freedom and moral imperative to do so is, perhaps, the most important legacy of the Enlightenment. But doing so dishonestly, often in service of reactionary political thinking and uninformed by an understanding of history, is neither enlightened nor laudable; it is simply self-righteous bullying, which is ugly on everyone.

Finally, in keeping with the theme that seems to be emerging in this post, there’s one more thing worth pointing out: One of the basic notions underlying Enlightenment civilization is this: a person’s destiny is not predicated on their heritage. I am a writer. My father was a professor. His father was a rancher, then a laborer. His father was a dirt farmer. Four generations, five different careers. Many people on this continent are less than three generations away from slavery–one of them sits on the Supreme Court. In any other era, in any other civilization, my destiny, your destiny, and the destiny of almost everybody would have been prescribed by law based on the social position of our births. Today, though birth has a definite effect, no law binds us to the position we start in.

It is, therefore, immoral to identify a person as an oppressor because of her heritage, or as oppressed because of his heritage. Each person is responsible for his own conduct and destiny and (though the ideal still is very imperfectly practiced and should never be taken for granted) should not be judged based on the crimes–or lack thereof–of his ancestors.

So, by all means, let’s have the debate. Let’s talk about the unintentional bacteriological extermination of entire nations. Let’s talk about the breaking of treaties, of the deliberate biological warfare, of the eugenics laws, the thefts, the enslavements (by many names). Let’s talk about the innovations of government by the Iriquois–and by Solon of Athens, whose ideas were ignored until resurrected by James Madison. Let’s talk also about the Aztec sacrifices, the pre-Columbian continent-wide warfare, the warlike tribes of the southwest, the raiding parties (provoked and unprovoked), the rapes and child prostitution on both sides of the Indian wars. Let’s talk about the unintended consequence of the colonial conquest of the Americas: a world climate in which colonialism is all but impossible, where invasion of a peaceable nation often provokes a near-universal military response from the other nations of the world.

And do let it be a genuine debate. Let us eschew both jingoism and masturbatory guilt fantasies. Let us throw off the suffocating weight of sacrament–both the ashen sackcloth and the waving flag. Let us instead engage in an honest exchange of ideas for mutual enrichment, rather than a shouting match of competing, unenlightened, and blinkered moral paradigms.

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.

Going to Mars presents a number of problems for us, both in transit and in the ways Mars is inhospitable (Mary Roach, author of Stiff, has a great new book on the subject). Mars, for example, has weather which will make some of the lessons we learn from a Lunar colony hard to cross-apply. But it does have soil, which Luna doesn’t. Either way, if we’re gonna live there a long time, it’s gonna have to get an oxygen atmosphere and an ecosystem.

Terraforming–big word for a big operation. How would we even begin to do it?

Turns out, Charles Darwin was at the back of the world’s first experiment in terraforming. With the help of the Royal Navy, he created an artificial ecosystem. New Scientist has a great article on it.

Specifically, the word “conspiracy” came up a few times, as in “Do they really expect us to believe scientists are in a conspiracy about the Big Bang?”

So why would I, someone who publicly fancies himself a fairly rational fellow, post something that smacked of conspiracy thinking and call it “interesting?” Because I think there’s a difference between a conspiracy and a paradigm, and it starts with understanding how scientific theories work.

Scientific Theories

In common parlance we use “theory” in the same kind of way Spock uses it on Star Trek: i.e. as an idea that gets troublesome problems out of your hair. For example, “I have a theory, Captain: in order to save the Enterprise, you must seduce the alien’s girlfriend” is not a theory, it’s a policy recommendation designed to remove something troublesome (i.e. Kirk) from the speaker’s (i.e. Spock’s) immediate view, perhaps permanently (i.e. when the phaser-weilding alien catches Kirk boinking the girlfriend).

The closest we get to this kind of thing in science is an hypothesis—“hypo” from the Greek meaning “deficient” or “underdeveloped” and “thesis” meaning “idea” or “argument.” A hypothesis is a guess phrased in such a way that it can be proved wrong if an experiment or discovery goes the wrong way. As an explanation, it doesn’t yet have a good body of experiments establishing that it’s likely correct. If you have a guess about how plants grow, but can’t yet offer supporting evidence, you have a hypothesis.

A “theory,” on the other hand, is what happens when hypotheses grow up. A theory is an explanation for a group of related facts that has withstood (or been changed by) a great deal of experimentation. Because theories are always constructed in a way that makes them vulnerable to contrary evidence, no theory is ever “proved,” it is only “established.” In other words, a theory is what happens when you fail often enough, and learn from it.

One quick note on facts: when it comes to science, facts are almost worthless. It’s not that they’re irrelevant, but rather that all of science exists to explain facts. We’re at no loss for facts, the problem is the opposite: we’ve got too many of them, and they don’t make sense unless we can establish the relationships between them. Theories are the tentative maps of those relationships.

Thomas Kuhn and the Fastest Gun In The West

There was a philosopher in the 1960s who caused a big stink by taking this basic premise (that theories are only “established” and not “proved”) one step further and arguing that theories were essentially fashions, having no dependable relationship with either facts, good theory, or the truth. His name was Thomas Kuhn, and he made this argument in a paper (and book) called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

These fashions, he called “Paradigms,” and he argued that they are enforced by the academic and scientific establishment, which squeezes out competing theories and contrary data until enough contrary data exists for younger scientists (i.e. the ones without an investment in the status quo) to come along and wreak havoc. Thus, he argued, science is a socially constructed and socially determined endeavor, not a search for truth or a method for discovering and minimizing error. As a sociologist at the height of the social determinism and constructivism movements, he makes an ironic poster child for his own argument.

So, by Kuhn’s lights, the only time science ever advances (and it doesn’t really ever advance, it just changes fashions) is when enough young hotshots gun for the old coots that they succeed in overthrowing the old dominant theoretical structure and replacing it with a new one. This phenomenon he called a “Paradigm Shift.” And yes, he invented that term.

Kuhn’s notions have permeated deep into popular culture, which already had an erroneous idea of science as THE TRUTH and the source of CERTAINTY (capitalization intentional). As you can guess, it helped make the whole scientific enterprise deeply suspect. Kuhn’s thesis has become an under-girding element of postmodern epistemology and philosophy, and has had a number of other interesting knock-on effects.

It turns out that most of the history Kuhn relied on to make his arguments was incorrect–he was, after all, a sociologist and not an historian, and as Rodney Stark demonstrates, it’s very easy for a very good sociologist to get himself into trouble when he makes sweeping arguments based on a naive understanding of history. The book Thomas Kuhn in the Light of Reason goes through Kuhn’s work with a much-needed critical eye, and is very accessible. Kuhn greatly exaggerated his conclusions and was wrong about some of its mechanisms, but he does deserve credit for spotting a legitimate social dynamic at work.

So, stripping it of some of the bullshit that Kuhn’s over-ambition imbued it with, a paradigm is a collection of theories that comprise an overarching model of the world. And Kuhn was right about something important: Science advances because researchers try like hell to poke holes in the existing theories. Shooting the old fastest gun in the west is a great way to make a name for yourself, or get a Nobel prize. Stephen Hawking made his name paradigm busting, and he helped the same kind of thing.

Conspiracies

Where a paradigm is a structure of theories, a conspiracy is a collusion of people to suppress or obscure the truth, or to frustrate attempts to reveal the truth. Denialists often invoke the language of conspiracies to explain why their ideas are not accepted by the mainstream. Some examples:

The film Expelled posits a widespread conspiracy among scientists to suppress the fact that the theory of Evolution is contradicted by almost all of the facts, and to punish scientists who believe in God. The conspirators allegedly do this in order to advance a utopian social vision.

Holocaust deniers posit a widespread conspiracy among veterans, historians, the media, and others to pretend that the holocaust happened, in order to provide a public justification for the existence of the state of Israel.

Climate denialists posit a nearly perfect collusion of scientists across a wide variety of disciplines in order to whip the public into a frenzy, secure funding, and (depending on who you talk to) transfer national sovereignty to the United Nations.

All these theories, and all other conspiracy theories, depend on three notions: 1) A large number of people have a vested interest in lying about information that is publicly accessible, 2) that vested interest is directed toward a set of articulable ends, and 3) despite the thousands of people involved, they maintain near-perfect discipline and informational control.

Pretty damn unlikely.

That’s not to say conspiracies don’t exist — they do. A conspiracy assassinated Abraham Lincoln, another one led by Deitrich Boenhoffer failed do assasinate Hitler. Read properly, the dealings that brought the U.S. Constitution into existence could be plausibly described as a conspiracy. But the problem with conspiracies is that people talk. Information control is difficult, and becomes exponentially more difficult the larger the conspiracy gets.

History is littered with failed conspiracies (such as the Watergate cover-up) because, as one of history’s most successful professional conspirators and revolutionaries said, “Three may keep a secret, so long as two of them are dead.”

(That was Ben Franklin, by the way, in Poor Richard’s Almanac).

Gunning for the Nobel Prize

So when you’ve got stories about scientific revolutions happening–and there are a lot of them going on right now, it’s an exciting time–don’t mistake the excitement of a paradigm-buster who’s trying to prove the old guard wrong and experiencing social resistance for a paranoid conspiracy theorist. They can sound similar on the surface (in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Climate Denialists and Climate Skeptics can), but when you dig deeper, you’ll discover this distinction:

The Paradigm-buster or skeptic is interested in fixing an outstanding (and often a very widely acknowledged) problem with the state of scientific knowledge.

The Denialist or Conspiracy Theorist is interested primarily in fomenting paranoia and discrediting an existing social power structure by any means necessary (including character assassination, dishonesty, and intimidation).

These categories aren’t ironclad–humans are complicated. Sometimes legitimate skeptics get so angry they act like denialists. And sometimes Conspiracy theorists are really slick and can maintain for a long time the illusion that they’re only interested in the science. Eventually, though, people do tend to sort themselves fairly dependably into one category or another on a given topic.

I’d love to carry on the conversation–please post your comments below!

P.S. For those of you wanting more background on yesterday’s article and the topics it’s addressing, check out Lawrence Krauss giving a lecture on contemporary cosmology, and you can get a multi-perspective quickie overview on this BBC Horizon Documentary about the current cosmological revolution. In both cases, the scientists involved are quite open about the problems posed by Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and other X-factors. It is these X-factors that the article I linked to yesterday is attempting to address.

Sometimes, though, the exciting stuff happens in the sciences. When the incentive system works, the new kids on the block go gunning for the old theories–you make your name by going after the Fastest Gun In The West. With all the fun stuff going on recently with Dark Matter and Dark Energy playing havoc with Inflationary Cosmology, a lot of people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop: at some point, some young and hungry cosmologists are going to try like hell to blow up the Big Bang.

Well, it happened. Whether it will prove a better model, it’s too early to tell. But it is a hell of an audacious theory-in-progress, and lots of fun to read about, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. Enjoy!

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.

One of them comes to Scientific American belatedly (it was originally published on May 16) from the atom smasher at Fermilab, which may just have answered the fundamental question of existence: Why are we here?

I’m not talking metaphysics, I’m talking physics. There’s been a problem in fundamental physics that goes like this: Matter and Antimatter are both created out of the probabilistic churning of the quantum foam in the vacuum all the time – and then they annihilate one another. It’s this kind of probabilistic interaction that produced the Big Bang, but if matter and antimatter annihilate one another, then why should there be anything at all?

Well, after crunching a couple decades worth of data from Fermilab, it looks like occasionally, in special circumstances (like those that prevailed at the time of the Big Bang), the quantum foam produces about 1% more matter than antimatter, so when all the annihilation happens, there’s a residue.

Assuming that the data holds up, we now know with quite a lot of surety why we’re here: because we, and the rest of the universe, were in that one percent of matter which didn’t get annihilated.

But more important than that is the scientific paper today out of AAAS from the lab of Craig Venter, the man who invented shotgun sequencing, the method of DNA sequencing that is now the most widely used in the world. In a modest paper entitled CREATION OF A BACTERIAL CELL CONTROLLED BY A CHEMICALLY SYNTHESIZED GENOME, Venter and his team announced something that will change the world every bit as profoundly as the printing press once did: The creation of an artificial organism.

Let me reiterate: Humans have now created, from scratch (the genome from scratch, that is), a life form that can reproduce, metabolize, and respond to stimuli. An artificial, designed genome runs the show. The ability to do this is something we’ve been seeking for centuries, and now that it’s here the implications are astounding. We now have the ability to, for example, resurrect extinct species, create designer organisms to dispose of pollution or convert electricity from sunlight, and that’s only the very, very tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Remember this date. In twenty or thirty years, when nothing in the world is the same and never will be again, you’ll have Craig Venter to thank for it, and May 19 will be the day on which you remember that it was today (well, yesterday now), that the human race became the author of an entire biosphere, rather than simply the usurping editor of the one in which we arose.

…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

With all the talk of the podcasting revolution a few years ago, I wonder how many people truly grasp the potential enormity of what we’re doing. Just like good old Mr. Ballantine who invented the paperback, we podcasters are creating new kinds of intellectual property. However, unlike Mr. Ballantine, we don’t fully appreciate what we’re up to.

As a culture we value the Creative Commons, which is (in my opinion) a net good for both our work and for the broader markets we’re trying to engage. However, viewing the CC as the whole picture of intellectual property is, in my estimation, an error.

More importantly, as those of us who have been in the game get more sophisticated about how we do things (using custom-composed music, guest voices, licensing music from other commercial sources), we’re wading into more complicated legal and business territory. Some of us, such as Philippa Ballantine, have gotten broader distribution deals on Internet or satellite radio – others of us struggle ever to get noticed beyond the very niche podcast fiction community.

The bar-raising we’ve been doing is pushing podcast fiction, and perhaps podcasting in general, out of the realm of a hobbyist community and into the realm of being a true grass-roots industry. There will always be hobbyists, of course, and I think we should encourage them every inch that we can. But the last couple years have opened up vast new creative, legal, and business territories that few of us are properly equipped to deal with.

This leaves us vulnerable to the kind of exploitation that went on with musicians in the 1960s. At the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, most of the groups we identify with the hippie movement were signed to record deals. It was, for them, a dream come true – they suddenly had distribution – someone was paying them for their art! The community’s revolution was going mainstream, and the days of begging and busking and eating brown rice to get by were over!

Except that the hippe community, much like our own, had always worked on family trust and handshake deals, so when faced with something on a larger scale offered by people who spoke the right language, they signed up. And most of them got taken. They generated fortunes they didn’t get to participate in, they got locked into indentured servitude-like obligations, and they lost creative control of their own work and catalogs – and they had no one to blame but themselves. They signed the contracts without doing due diligence, and they were so happy at any opportunity for exposure that they literally didn’t look at the fine print.

We don’t want that kind of thing to happen to members of our community/industry. Whether friends or rivals or enemies, I know of nobody on whom I would wish that kind of misery, and I suspect most people in the industry feel the same.

At the same time some of us are scaling up to other opportunities, the gulf between those who have established audiences and those who are new to this is getting pronounced, and it’s getting harder (very subtly) for new voices to find the coaching and advice they need on anything but the most basic issues. Sure, there are a lot of resources about how to use Audacity, or where to find a good USB mic, but there’s very little newbie-accessible information on nailing down advertising deals, or improving one’s mic technique or audio engineering, or making the leap into full cast audio, or creating good working relationships with beta readers or voice actors. Or what about a place to get boilerplate contracts, or marketing strategies, or (for those faced with opportunities they’re not prepared for) good basic business resources?

I think the time has come for us to create an industry association for New Media creators, starting with podcasters. Over the next couple months, both Allen Sale of Astral Audio and I will be working on pilot projects and keeping hold of the resources we generate from them – contracts, tutorials, strategizing, a compendium of podcasts that are friendly to publicity interviews, basic legal and business information that we learn or employ along the way – and we will start packaging them for use by other content creators. When we’ve hit a critical mass, we’re going to look into forming a non-profit with the aim of becoming the SFWA of podcast fiction and YouTube video.

Some very good resources, such as the Podiobooks Mentorship Program, already exist, and what they do is vital. But it’s not enough, not if our industry is to grow beyond its little ghetto and more reliably generate opportunities for us in the broader world. We’re looking to augment what already exists, rather than replace it, and create a resource available to everyone to enable them to play in this sandbox at whatever level they want to, whether it’s as a hobby, a podiobook author, a multimedia producer, or a serious powerhouse transmedia content business. Our community has gotten big enough that it has the potential to get in its own way, and our visibility is still rising and generating opportunities many of us simply aren’t prepared to negotiate.

I think we can do better than the hippies did. I think, if we put together a definitive educational resource pool, the individual artists in our community might be able to transition upward without getting ripped off.
As Allen told me when we talked about this project: “We don’t want to fit in – we want to find ways to stand out so that we can’t be ignored.”

Let’s rock.

Related post from Allen Sale

[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.

Twitter is a mischievous little meme. On that innocent network yesterday, I noticed fellow podcast novelist, and fabulous debate opponent Scott Roche say of science and religion: “the two are examining different things.”

Naturally, being unable to keep my mouth shut on religion, sex, or politics (this is, by the by, why I never stay long on the east coast – I have to leave quickly before I’m shot for violating public decency laws), I retorted immediately saying: “Science and religion can not meaningfully be said to be examining different things.” Hello, fundamental conflict (and, consequently, hellooooo blog content)!

On Scott’s blog he wondered whether we were operating on different definitions of religion, so was kind enough to define religion as “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices” that, in his estimation, addresses only things that do not belong in the natural world. In other words, religion deals with spirits, gods, angels, demons, and any other supernatural beings which may or may not exist, and its purpose is to put us in touch with whatever we believe about the supernatural.

Science, he goes on to argue, deals with that which exists in the natural world and is (at least in theory) measurable. It is the method by which we divine how one thing is related to another.

Scott’s division of labor between science and religion seems to me to accurately reflect how most people think about the issue, and even on the basis of this postulated Non-Overlapping Magesteria (pace Stephen J. Gould).* History does not reflect this view – it is actually a relatively recent definition arising form the intellectual ferment of the late nineteenth century – so on the face of it I find it suspicious. Frankly, it looks to me like an epistemic** dodge than a genuine description of historical reality – but I’ll leave that aside for now, simply because one of the realities of history is that words do change definitions. I may get back to the history of science and religion in a later post, but for now, I’ll stick to the current situation, and whether or not it matches the definitions Scott proposes.

Sticking strictly to the current state of the world, I think Scott’s argument fails in two important respects.

First, in a practical respect, religion currently serves a number of functions that have only a tangential relationship to the supernatural. It propounds a theory of human nature, and it provides a cosmogony (a set of metaphysical beliefs about things within the universe such as the ultimate nature of reality, the origin and destiny of life, the universe, and everything, the construction of consciousness). It also serves as a platform from which to make pronouncements about morality, relationships, and human flourishing. On every one of these points, religions differ among themselves as to the nature of their claims and functions, but most religions are concerned with most of these areas, and some religions concern themselves with all of them.

Taking them in no particular order, the fields of knowledge and understanding which religion currently claims authority are now well within the purview of the following sciences:

On every score, scientific research confirms some points of religious dogma and contradicts other areas, forcing religions to adapt by either synchronizing or radicalizing on any given point (which, by the by, is why theologians exist – to cope with the discrepancy between received doctrine and contemporary reality).

Continuing in the practical vein for a moment, religion also provides social cohesion and cultural continuity for a large number of people on this planet, including a dependable power structure. On these final two practical points, as well as on issues of morality, religion’s focus is very much on the things of this world (and, often, on securing and/or maintaining power – sometimes political, sometimes military, sometimes interpersonal, and sometimes cultural – in this world). The hegemonic ambitions, large and small, are justified by appeal to the supernatural, but are always, in practice, concerned with controlling the behavior of beings in the temporal world.

Second, on a basic philosophical level, if a supernatural world actually has an intercourse (either perpetual and ever present, as in Hinduism, or incidental and historical as in the monotheisms), then it is at least in principle accessible to natural science at the point of intercourse, and therefore science and religion are both aiming once again for the same territory.

Thus, in both the practical and the philosophical cases, religion and science are very much fighting over the same territory. The nature of this conflict is missed by religious liberals, who have inherited the syncretic mindset and tend to read their scriptures with modern cosmopolitan glasses that retrojects their late, quasi-deistic conception of God back onto times with a far more definite and robust theology. Nonetheless, push hard enough and in the right place, and you’ll find the points at which even liberal religion is on the defensive in the face of scientific inquiry. Need it be this way? That’s a topic for a future blog post, but I can tell you it has not always been this way. Once upon a time in the west, the natural sciences were seen as the handmaiden of theology rather than the other way around.

So, to wrap up, I’m confident in standing by my tweet which opened this conversation. Although religions can (and often do) preserve wisdom worth paying attention to, and often raise questions worth investigating, they are in almost no sense concerned with different things. Now, it may be possible to create a religion that is completely immune to territorial impingement from science forever, but it would not then be legitimate to argue that religion as a phenomenon was free from such a conflict.

Besides, I daresay that a religion which made no claims about reality, made no demands on its patrons, promised no rewards (temporal, eternal, or existential), and said nothing substantive about human nature would maintain a hold on parishioners for very long. Don’t believe me? Look at the thin attendance of liberal protestant churches compared to moderate and conservative ones.

Back to you, Scott!

*magisteria meaning “area of authority”
**epistemic meaning “having to do with one’s theory of knowledge” – in this case, an epistemic dodge is redefining what one means by “knowledge” in order to get around a problem with what one considers “true”

First, the coolest biomedical news this year: Synthetic arteries have arrived.

Second, some really cool news on dog evolution from two fronts. There’s an article discussing the stray dogs in Moscow, and what selection pressures have done to them over the last 100 years. Then there’s the new BBC documentary on how dogs shaped human development, and vice versa – and answers the question “Are dogs smarter than Chimpanzees?” Check out the video here .

Finally, the single most mind-blowing introduction to Chaos Theory I’ve seen or read. Goes into the history, the development, and the implications of the most radically disturbing area of mathematics ever to come around. See it here and prepare to be astounded.

Enjoy! And stay tuned in the next few days for new episodes!

Basically, Oxytocin is a hormone which, when acting as a neurotransmitter, increases trust and social risk taking behavior between people, with the most profound effects being felt between strangers and/or people who don’t know each other well (though, of course, some people simply are born insensitive to these effects). Vasopressin is a hormone that, when acting as a neurotransmitter, increases aggression towards non-bonded others (the effects are stronger in men tha