This is the biggest one yet, ringing in at nearly the same length as Predestination, and the adventure scales with the book. Teaming up with his assistant Rachael and his new squatter Nya Thales, Lantham gets to match wits with alien hunters, Chinese assassins, and FBI agents in his attempt to solve an apparent alien abduction before the only witness is…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the back-of-book copy, to give you a better feel for what’s going on.

The California Academy of Sciences, a bastion of integrity in scientific public relations, has agreed to play host to one of the most valuable travelling exhibits in the world: a Mars rock with microbial alien life. But the attention it’s drawing isn’t just international, it’s interstellar. When a commando team of gray aliens steals the rock and abducts a security guard, in full view of the cameras, the head of the security contractor has only one place to turn: Clarke Lantham Investigations.

When the field gets that crowded, someone’s bound to get hurt. But even that might be okay for Lantham…if he didn’t have to sleep on the couch.

Read the first couple chapters here.

Then, grab the book and dive in. It’s available right now through Read the rest on your Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.

I hope you have at least half as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Enjoy!

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

As you might be able to tell from my stories, I love to cook. Cooking is responsible for many of the relationships I have had throughout my life (guys, take the hint: being a good cook will get you laid), and is the basis for many long-running friendships. Since everybody eats, it’s a more stable basis for friendship than silly things like politics, religion, family ties, or mutual devotion to Star Trek (though don’t underestimate Star Trek’s ability to cement a friendship between strangers. That’s a topic for another time).

This recipe is the first I’ve ever posted, and as with many other things in life the blame belongs entirely with Gail Carriger, with whom I regularly compare cuisines and who asked me for the recipes contained herein.

These Gyros differ from the stuff you get in the restaurants in a few important respects:
1) It uses sliced meat instead of shaved sausage
2) It’s kinder on your breath, as it has fewer raw onions
3) It has other veggies besides just the onions and tomatoes
4) You can make everything (including the bread and yogurt sauce) from scratch in about half an hour.

Gyros from Scratch

The Meat
First, get a fertile ewe…well, maybe not that much from scratch.

So, let’s assume the lamb or sheep or goat has been butchered and you have a nice healthy hank of the leg (lamb and mutton work best. Beef tends to be too bland, and goat tends to be too chewy and tastes too much like the way a locker room smells when you spice it this way). So stick with animals that you can make a decent sweater out of, and have somebody–a neighborhood butcher, a factory in New Zealand, or your buddy the hunter–turn it into a roast.

Take about a pound of it and slice it up thin, as if you were slicing beef for fajitas, or even thinner than that. You want a big pile of little ribbons of meat. Trim off all the excess fat, keep that for making soap later (or, if you’re not into making soap, use it as part of a gore bag in that independent slasher movie you’re working on).

While you’re playing with deadly weapons, go ahead and use that knife to demolish a clove or two of garlic and either 2 shallots or half a white onion, and stick those on the meat pile. To top it off, chop a hank of fresh mint to a fine powder (enough to make a third of a cup should do the trick).

Now that you’ve done all that slicing and dicing, put everything into a large bowl and drizzle it thoroughly with balsamic vinegar and olive oil at a ratio of about 1:3, then squeeze a half lemon in, then liberally sprinkle black pepper and salt. Now, hand-mix the whole gloopy mess and let it sit at room temperature to marinate while you prep everything else. The longer you marinate, the more tender and tasty meat at the other end. I find that an hour is about ideal, but half an hour is still pretty good good.

Now, while the beast is marinating, it’s time to move on to the salsa.

Salsa
Using a clean knife and cutting board, dice 3 Roma tomatoes (or the equivalent volume of heirloom/beefsteak tomatoes), one hank of mint (roughly the same size as the amount you used for the meat), the other half of the onion or a couple more shallots, a clove of garlic, and a med. sized cucumber. Combine in a bowl, and add salt, pepper, the other half of the lemon, and a teeny bit of vinegar. Let it sit and sweat down while you make the bread.

Bread
This is my all-purpose flat bread recipe. Like everything else here, it’s a cook’s recipe rather than a baker’s recipe, so you’ll have to practice it to get it right, but it is heavenly.

The secret to an excellent pan-fried flatbread is the texture. You want something light, but with plenty of structural integrity. To this end, I use two kinds of flour: Masa flour and Bread flour, though you can get away with using all-purpose if you’re willing to accept more breakage in your bread.

Take a big mixing bowl, put about two cups of hot water in it (I say “about” because I always just eyeball it).

Add to the water:
1 shake of baking powder (equivalent to about 2tsp, I think)
1 drizzle of olive oil (maybe a tbsp)
1 small pat of butter (important for getting the texture right, otherwise I’d just use olive oil)
A few shakes of salt
a few shakes of pepper

Now, start adding in the masa flour, stirring as you do. Once you’ve built it up about to the consistency of a thin batter, retire the masa and start with the bread flour. Continue mixing flour in until you achieve a texture somewhat drier than cookie dough but slightly wetter than pizza dough.

The Sauce
For the cream sauce that is popular on all things Greek-ish, stir a half cup of plain yogurt together with a tablespoon of minced mint leaves, add a dash of lemon juice, one or two shakes of salt, and four shakes of pepper.

Cooking
Warm two pans (I prefer cast iron, cause they’re glorious for really hot cooking).

When the pans are hot, throw the meat in one of them and stir it occasionally–you want to sear it but not burn it. Once it’s seared, turn the heat down and let it simmer in its own juices, which will sweat off as it cooks. Take it off the heat when the juice reaches the consistency of a glaze.

While that’s cooking, assuming your pans are properly seasoned and/or you have nonstick (if you don’t, you’ll need a teeny bit of oil), take a hunk of your bread dough a little larger than a donut hole, then, working it in your hands (you’ll want to dip your hands in flour first), roll it and pat it out until it’s about the size of the bottom of a tea cup. Now, throw it in the pan and continue patting it out with your fingertips until it’s about as big as a taco-sized tortilla. When it’s about half cooked, flip it over. When it’s fully cooked, take it off the heat and repeat the process with the next hunk of dough.

Note: The pan is HOT, so don’t burn your fingertips. The bread will insulate you as long as you don’t stay in contact for too long in any one location.

Serving
When all is said and cooked, set up an assembly line: flatbread at one end, then meat, then salsa, then a bowl of crumbled feta cheese, then your yogurt sauce. Assemble as you would a taco.

A tip: The salsa is REALLY good, and tends to be popular. If you’re serving more than two people, consider doubling or tripling the recipe. People tend to load up on it.

—
The above recipe feeds 4 very comfortably. Goes well with cider, iced tea, beer (I’m told), and red wine. The Hungarian wine Bull’s Blood is my favorite accompaniment, as it’s bright and lively and an excellent compliment to the minty Greekness of the lamb.

— — —
And there you have it–an excellent spring or summer dinner, right in the dead of winter. Enjoy!

I need to get that straight right up front, because I’m seeing other authors do something that I think shows a fundamental misunderstanding of both their relationship with Amazon, and the business model of the independent author.

You see, Amazon has started offering KDP select, where an author enrolls their books for renewable periods of 90 days on an exclusive basis. In exchange for the exclusivity (and for allowing Amazon to lend your book to prime members at rates yet-to-be-determined), the author gets the promotional tool that everyone’s been gagging after for two years now:

The ability to price their book for free (for an author-selected 5 days out of every 90) to goose sales.

And it seems to be working, at least for some authors, in a spectacular fashion. They list their book for free, the curiosity boosts their popularity ranking, helps them crack some also-bought lists, and leapfrog into the recommendation engines that Amazon’s servers have running behind the scenes.

Sounds great, right? It’s been treating some of my friends astoundingly well over the last month and a half.

It also gets around a problem with the Amazon KDP agreement: Amazon guarantees a low price, and when you sign up you warrant that you will not sell through Amazon competitors at a lower price. If you do, Amazon may pull your book or close your account. If another retailer discounts you without your permission (for example, because they don’t follow the agency pricing model), Amazon reserves the right to discount your book to match, without your further permission.

This means that setting something free through Smashwords while charging for it at Amazon puts you in a tenuous legal position, which leaves some authors uncomfortable (and some of us unwilling to play system-gaming games in case someone at Amazon decides to make an example of us).

When you put these factors together, you get the recipe for a judgment call summed up by LJ Sellers in her recent blog post: She’s pulling her books from all other retailers, except Amazon. And who can blame her? The bulk (between 70 and 95%) of most indie author’s income currently comes through Amazon, so why not capitalize on it? Why not remove the risk that Kobo will discount your books and cut into your income? Why not put yourself in a position so you can rotate your books on promotion?

The Context of Doing Business
Capitalism is an amazing thing, and among its most amazing qualities is that it makes allies out of people who might never have spoken or met before. The guy that runs the hot dog stand on the street corner, or who drives your taxi, is in your life because they can do something you want better, faster, cheaper, or more conveniently than you can do it yourself. You value the service and products they give you more than you value your money, so you buy, and everybody wins.

In this sense, an economy is very like a biosphere. Symbiosis is as much a part of it as predation, and creativity results in destruction and spurs greater creativity, and thus are industries forged.

But like a biosphere, a healthy industry needs diversity for the free exchange of energy and information to continue. From the point of view of an author, in the book industry, retailers are our allies–they help put our books and other products in front of customers who might want them.

But unlike with the local butcher, who might become your friend if you chat with him while you do business, a corporation is incapable of having friends. It’s not human, it has no feelings. It is merely an ally, and when the ecosystem (or economy) changes, the alliances within it change.

Amazon Is Not Your Friend
Amazon is a corporation, and it has (on the whole) behaved astonishingly well by its indiependent authors. Its dynamism and creativity make it one of the worlds most powerful, best-growing companies.

If you’re a small supplier, this dynamism is a two-edged sword. Today, you’re on the cutting edge because the strategic needs of the business dictate that you’re a good ally. Tomorrow, you might wind up on the bleeding edge, when the industry changes. This isn’t just true of Amazon, it’s true of any company. While you may benefit handsomely and for a long time when your interests are aligned, you must always remember:
They are not in business for your benefit, they are in business for their benefit.

You, as a businessperson, must take a similar view.

Short Term, Short List Thinking
If you’ve got only a book or two out, chances are you’re chasing sales, or audience, or eyeballs, etc. I did when I had only two out. Everyone I’ve known has. You have one egg, so you try to find the basket that’ll do the best by it, and watch the basket. You go out and try to get everyone to come check the basket out. In the short term, it feels marvelous.

The trouble is, eventually the rate at which you find people who want that egg will slow to a trickle, and you’ll pour more time and money into the effort of continuing the build, when, in the long run, you’ll do better by laying more eggs. And if someone comes along, without malice, and steps on your basket cause it’s in your way? Well, then you’re pretty much screwed.

Leverage
Successful business works on leverage: one bit of promotional energy creates multiple opportunities. One new product creates geometrically greater exposure. Here’s how it works:

If you have 15 storefronts, and one new product, you have 15 streams of income (of varying sizes). If any one of them dries up, or goes dark for a while, you might hurt, but it won’t sink you.

But if you have one storefront, you have one stream. If that stream dries up, you’re screwed.

Similarly, if you do any promotion, advertising, book tours, speaking tours, etc. on that one stream of income, all that effort only makes the one stream swell. And, best case scenario, if you catch one customer, you get one sale.

However, if you have 15 products in 15 storefronts, you’ve got 15×15 (read: 225) streams. Now, every time you do any promotion work, you have a better chance of making one or more streams burst their banks. But better than that, anytime someone falls in love with one of those books, they have another 14 they can go through. Catch one person, get 15 sales.

Every time you add one book (or audiobook, or film) to the inventory, you’re geometrically increasing your income potential. Every time you catch a new customer, you’re increasing the likelihood that you’ll move from their “that was a cool book” list to their “I can’t get enough of this author” list, because there’s enough of your stuff for them to really gorge themselves on.

Short Term, Short List Thinking
Some of you have asked me why 2011 was a quiet year for me, podcasting-wise. What you just read is the reason. I podcast two novels, and I had only two novels to show. I was giving it away as fast as I could produce it. I had nothing around that you could tell your friends about, and many of you got frustrated waiting for the next book in the series, or the next thing from me.

But many more of you (perhaps these ones aren’t reading) liked my books, but couldn’t find anything more, so moved on to fresher pastures. And that’s a crying shame, because my livelihood depends on entertaining the hell out of you.

So I took a year off, to get my house in order, and now I’m back in the studio recording more audiobooks–but not at the expense of writing more other books. I intend to keep this going for a long time, so I have zero incentive to pull my books from markets just to take advantage of a sales-goosing opportunity in a single market.

The Unseen Markets
A year and a half ago I started building a spreadsheet list of what rights I’d licensed out to stories, so I could keep track of what I could legally put on the market. I started with the rights I could license from a single story, intending to code a quick listbox. After all, there are ebook rights, serial rights, hardcover rights, trade paper rights, and MM Paper rights.

Then, I got to thinking. I’ve worked in film. So I know there are film rights, TV rights, Radio rights, audiobook rights, full cast audiobook rights, video game rights…

I kept listing them. When I ran out of ideas I called another writer friend, who listed more. Between the two of us, in under an hour, we had a list of marketable rights for a single short story that topped four single-spaced pages (at one right per line). At that point we stopped because we both had prior appointments. One of these days, I’ll finish that list–I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes to 8 pages, or more.

What does this mean for you? It means that when you go exclusively through one retailer for one book, then you concentrate on goosing the sales on that one book, you’re leaving most of your medium-and-long term money on the table. It means that in limiting your exposure (even without an exclusive agreement), you’re reducing the odds that someone who might see it who wants to license a film deal, or a video game, or a graphic novel adaptation–not just here, but around the world in places where Amazon isn’t a strong presence, but Apple or Kobo or Sony is.

Rushing to narrow your niche in order to spike your sales on one or a few titles also narrows your opportunities to exploit each property to its full value. And with all respect to my friends who are currently doing this (all of whom are, at the moment, selling better than I am), it’s bad business.

Short term cash is nice. Long term dependable income is my goal. We are in the intellectual property business, entertainment and information division (i.e. not inventions). In this business, the only sustainable model is the long-term one, because it is the only one that dependably creates passive income.

Something to think about before you go pulling properties from existing markets in order to take advantage of today’s bright and shiny promo tool. Trust me, the business world never sleeps–there will be another tool like this tomorrow, when you’re in a better place to exploit it without screwing yourself over in the medium and long term.

Audio
January:
Launch a Kickstarter campaign in concert with Gail Carriger. Yup, we’re gonna be working together on something audio-oriented (this will happen toward the end of the month).
Recording Free Will (big project) and the first 3 Lantham audiobooks

February:
Free Will podcast re-launches (probably. If not Feb, then early March, as I’ll be travelling in late Feb).

March:
Commercial release of the first (or more) Lantham audiobooks

April:
MAYBE the DF10 soundtrack, if the timing works out with me and Schadey

Ebooks
January:
Throwing Lead (the long-awaited “Gun Book”) will see the light of day this month.
Silent Victor (Clarke Lantham #4) will also show up late this month.
Chicken Noodle Gravity (Lombard Alchemist #2, featured last month on Escape Pod) will release as an ebook
There are two other short stories as well that will release, assuming I can find time to do the cover art.

February:
The Auto Motive (Motives, book 1–a steampunk urban fantasy YA adventure series–might release after I get back from my travels in March)
He Ain’t Heavy (Lantham #5, again, this is a maybe)

March or April:
The Summer Town (standalone Southern Gothic romance/horror)
Sunday Morning Giraffe (Lombard Alchemist #3, short story)
Several other short stories, perhaps as many as five

April or May:
Probably either Student Culture or The Last Uploader (both standalone SF novels, both currently in progress)

Paperbacks:
Janurary:
Down From Ten
Predestination (re-release–we had problems with the printer that have dogged us for months on this one)
Sculpting God, Vol. 1
A Ghostly Christmas Present/Smoke Rings (Lantham #2 and #3 in a single ace-double style volume)

February or March:
Throwing Lead
Free Will
Silent Victor

April or May
The Auto Motive
He Ain’t Heavy (assuming it winds up being long enough for a solo paperback release)
The Summer Town
The Last Uploader or Student Culture

— —
Projects that might jump to the front:
The book version of Principles of Contracts (with lots more content and a better title)
A podcast to accompany Throwing Lead

— — —

Like I said, this is all tentative and subject to change at my imperious whim. The stuff slated for January is basically a lock, the stuff further out is less certain. There’s also more going on behind the scenes here that is not directly tied to writing output, some of which will produce results that you’ll see on the blog and in other places around the ‘net.

And if you’re an Antithesis fan, don’t worry. I start work in earnest on Avarice (Antithesis #3) in April.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet

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!

I ask you, how could I pass up a challenge like that? I sent back to her “You’ll have it next week.” Not only did she have it next week, but she liked it, and she bought it. The result is this week’s Escape Pod episode, Chicken Noodle Gravity.

Read by Paul Haring, Chicken Noodle Gravity is the second of The Lombard Alchemist Tales, a series of short stories I kicked off earlier this year with At The Edge of Nowhere. The Lombard Alchemist Tales are stories of mystery, and darkness, and wonder. At the borders of society, around the next quarter, lurking in the shadows, all around us are dark and comic stories fit to unmake our darkest dreams. My job? Find them, bring them to you, and let you figure out how to survive them. Centered around a spooky pawn shop run by a devilish shopkeeper in a broken-down gambling boomtown where some people go there for salvation, some for curiosity, and some to scrape up a little bit of money to buy a few more cans of soup. And sometimes, they get more than they bargain for.

So, with that said, I hope you enjoy Chicken Noodle Gravity. Stay tuned for more fun news coming to this space in the days leading up to Christmas.

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It was worth it. And the folks at the company that manages the Lerner estate were very helpful. Because of their kind work, I can now proudly present you with the ebook version of Down From Ten, a novel uniquely close to my heart.

In early January, a group of friends gather for an annual retreat: eight artists, scientists, and authors cloistered together in a mansion in California’s high country for ten days of games, conversation, exhibition, and hedonism while isolated from the outside world.

“Down From Ten is a brilliant, sometimes creepy take on a bohemian cozy with surreal underpinnings and an irrepressibly touching ending.” –Gail Carriger, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Parasol Protectorate series

For the first time in text, read the story that View from Valhalla calls “Unique, lavish, and challenging…amazing in its scope and its detail…with THE most surprising ending I’ve EVER experienced.”
Get it now for your Kindle, Nook, or any other reader.

Or, read the first three chapters here.

Enjoy!

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.

Because of the diversity of your questions, several sections of the book work well as standalone articles, and since not all of you will want the whole book (or are content to wait to get it all at once), I am pleased to present you with the first of the Throwing Lead Singles: Science Fiction Weaponry.

The author of The Antithesis Progression teams up with the author of The Rehumanization of Jade Darcy to provide an in-depth guide to the science fact that underlies some of the most popular weapons in science fiction. Whether you’re a writer looking to add depth and texture to your weapons technology, or a fan who wants to know how it all works, this is the place.

Find out how it all works! This article covers particle beams, phasers, lasers, disruptors, mass drivers, railguns, coilguns, Metal Storm and more, as well as tactical considerations for combat in science fictional environments.

Buy it now for Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.

The Lunar Revolution is faltering, events are spinning out of control, and Bill Shelley is inches away from achieving victory. Meanwhile, far away in the south, the footsteps of a little girl running for her life bring with them a secret that could start the war before anyone is ready.

From the surface of Mars to the forests of Vermont, the players are at the table, their antes are in, and the next round of cards is about to hit the felt. The winners will determine the face of the solar system…if they can survive the game.

Read the first four chapters here.

Or, buy it now for Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.

A new voice in fantasy, J. Daniel Sawyer has already left an indellible mark on his readers with his trademark tales of human desires and the moral complexity they create.

Contains: Lilith, Angels Unawares, The Coffee Service, We Create Worlds, Control Room, The Man In The Rain, and Train Time, plus a new essay, poetry, and bonus material.

Smashwords
Kindle
Nook
XinXii

The following was my response to the committee. If this is something that interests you, please take the time to send your own take on the issue to them, or chime in on the comments, as I have it on good authority that some members of the committee occasionally enjoy subjecting themselves to my particular flavor of psychosis

The following is the relevant text of my email to them in reply to their question about what differentiates a Full-Cast production from an Audio Drama and an Audiobook:

Leaving aside the issue of abridgements or the occasional ad-libs, the
full-cast audio I’ve seen (and produced) tends to be pretty slavish in
terms of its loyalty to the text. If you’re looking for a number, I’d
say “less than 5% of the text can be changed,” but I think the issue is
more the character of the change than the amount.

If I were writing the definition of full-cast audio I would define it
something like as follows:

“A Full-cast audio production is an audiobook that uses multiple readers
to play different roles. While the form may incorporate incidental
and/or theme music and sound effects to heighten the listening
experience, the text of the novel remains essentially unchanged.

Small deviations from the original text are permissible (such as the
substitution of sound effects for onomatopoetic words–such as the sound
of a slap instead of the word “SMACK!” standing alone as its own
sentence–or omission of dialogue tags to facilitate flow) are
permissible. However, if the text of the novel is adapted to dramatic
form (ex: substituting dialogue and foley for chunks of narration), the
production will be considered a dramatic adaptation and treated as a
radio drama for purposes of the awards.

When submitting your sample audio, please include the text of at least
one full clip in-line with the email so that we may verify that your
production is a full-cast audiobook rather than a radio drama.”

For what it’s worth

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.

Edited, you say?
Well, yes. Subscribers to the newsletter will get the occasional special preview, discount coupon, contest, and other such goodies that won’t be available to anyone else. Those items will be clipped out of the newsletter before it’s posted here. But other than that, it’ll be about the same thing.

If you wish to subscribe to the newsletter, simply email me at feedback _at_ jdsawyer.net, or use the contact form on this site, and say so.

So, if you’ve been trying to figure out what the hell I’ve been up to for the last year and a half, wait no longer. You can now download the inaugural issue as a epub, mobi, and PDF.

Clarke Lantham has a checkered relationship with holidays, and this New Year’s Eve is no different. His space is cramped, his personal life is on the skids, and his business is once again under assault from lawyers and bill collectors.

Yeah, right.

Read the first chapter here.

Or, buy it now for Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.

Why on earth would a youngish author (less than 20 years publishing) with ongoing publishing contracts ever even think about cheating on their publisher with Amazon, Smashwords, PubIt, et. al.? After all, isn’t it a lot of work? Who’s going to do the marketing? And if he’s getting checks from the big boys, why bother with the small-potatoes in ebookland? Why not just leave that stuff to the old guys with a backlist, and the newbies who aren’t good enough to land a New York Deal?

If you recognize yourself in the above questions, I’ve got four reasons you should consider cultivating an active indie sideline (i.e. you should be self-pubbing even if you have to write new material particularly for the ebook marketplace in addition to your existing contracts):

As a writer, you have something in common with actors, musicians, and other freelancers: the money you have in hand right now is all you can count on. You write a book, get an advance, and going by averages, the advance is all you ever get out of it. This amounts, basically, to doing day-labor (and not very well paid day labor, even if it is satisfying and occasionally glamorous).

And with advance levels falling, shelf space shrinking, and sales of 3 of the 4 major formats continuing to decline, the “advance is all you get” situation is likely to become more common. And if you’ve signed a contract with a poor out-of-print reversion clause, you’re not going to have the opportunity to re-sell that book or publish it as backlist for 35 years (which is the statutory limit).

This is why people are starting to wonder if authors will ever be able to make a living again–and particularly if writers will ever be able to provide for themselves in their retirement years. The people who are wondering this have not been looking carefully at what the percentages are in the indie marketplace.

Long story short (and I can do a post on the math of this if you want me to–just say so in the notes), when you put a book or short story up in the e-markets yourself, it earns forever. Even if it earns almost nothing, you can build up your retirement by putting up a handful of books and stories every year over the course of a couple decades. If all of them sell pitiably, you’ll still wind up making an aggregate monthly income that will serve as a cushion, or a dependable baseline (and, of course, if one or more breaks out, you’ll be doing very handsomely indeed).

This is called a “passive income stream.” You do the work once, and it pays out forever without a further investment of work. This is what pension plans used to do, when the economy was experiencing long-term growth. This is the kind of income that retired entrepeneurs and inventors live on.

Going indie builds your passive income, and if you do it as a sideline to a traditional publishing career, then in the long run you’ll wind up effectively taking a slight loss on your traditional books in order to raise your profile and drive people to your indie books (i.e. your traditional career becomes your advertising budget, in the long run). Meanwhile, in the short run, the up-front advance money will help you swing from book-to-book in the same way you’ve grown accustomed to.

A basic principle of investment is “diversification,” which we all learned as kids when we heard the parable “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Having titles available on your own insulates you from publishing industry volatility, puts you in a position of power when interpersonal conflicts arise (for example, if your editor kills your next contract because you wouldn’t sleep with him/her or pissed off a more powerful writer at the same publisher. Don’t laugh, this is not unusual. It’s killed or maimed a lot of artist’s careers over the years, like those of B5 actress Patricia Tallman and of my midlister friend Stephen Goldin).

When you are in thrall to a single customer (i.e. one publishing house), you’re vulnerable to all kinds of pressure, tumult, and leverage. When you have books with multiple houses, and particularly when you have your own titles out through your own indie imprint, you are less vulnerable. It doesn’t mean no one can hurt you, but it does mean that things that might once have killed you would only hurt for a little while now–like getting shot with a bullet-proof vest, rather than without.

Having that kind of back-stop puts you in a better negotiating position when you hash out your next contract or film option.

One of the dangers of success is the “golden handcuff” problem. When you do well writing one kind of story, publishers want you to write more of that kind of story, and they can be willing to pay very well for it. They can also be unwilling to look at anything you do that isn’t an obvious riff on what’s given you success before.

It’s made a lot of writers (like Conan Doyle and Piers Anthony) completely miserable. Everyone’s got their price, and if you’re lucky enough to be successful with one of your series, you may wind up with a pair of golden handcuffs and a lot of creative frustration.

Unless, that is, you’re also cultivating an indie sideline. You can take projects indie that don’t fit with your publisher’s concept of your “brand,” (see what Scott Sigler has done with his GFL series, for this very reason), and diversifying yourself creatively will help keep your golden handcuff books fresh as well. Different projects teach you different things, and working in breadth is not only more satisfying, it makes you a better writer.

Now, with self-pub, you can write those other books you want to write, but that you wouldn’t be able to justify if you were dependent upon selling them to a publisher.

Publishers (in every entertainment industry) have always cooked the books. There are a lot of historical reasons for this beyond mere opportunity and greed that are too here, but take it for granted: If you’re doing business in New York or LA, you’re getting ripped off. Most people who’ve been in the game for several decades accept a certain amount of skim as the cost of doing business, because audits are expensive. That “certain amount” is normally considered to be ~10% or less.

Some of you get angry with me for mentioning this–you find it threatening, or you think it’s sour grapes, or you accuse me of libel. But it’s really none of these things, it’s just common industry knowledge and has been for decades. Publishers (in all entertainment industries) rip off artists because they can–because there is no transparency in the supply chain, and because artists let them, for reasons described in this clip from the 1980s crime drama Wiseguy:

Until last year, excepting the occasional scandal where publishers were revealed to be skimming too much (such as the Ace Doubles scandal), that’s how it rode. Publishers stole, but not too much, so no one made a big deal about it. As I said before, publishing is not a transparent industry, and it’s always been very difficult to get an accurate picture of what goes on.

That was then.

Now, authors have a very good transparency lever: they can use their self-published books as yardstick for their royalty reports. How? Easy:

You compare your indie numbers numbers to the ebook numbers on your royalty statements. Authors have been doing this–and they’ve been finding that their indie books are selling more (by a factor of ten) than their hot-new-sexy books from a big press. This is why there are now half a dozen lawsuits in process against major presses, as well as a number of audits.

Self-publishing authors can also get access to Bookscan, which tracks ~50-70% of the paper book sales in the country, and you can check the numbers of your traditionally published books against what’s on your royalty statements (your “sold” books on the statement should be greater than the number that Bookscan reports, by a substantial percentage).

With these two tools in your toolbelt, you may not be able to tell how honest your publisher is, but you will be able to tell how honest your publisher isn’t. Once the numbers cross certain thresholds, the discrepancies between your Bookscan and self-pub numbers vs the numbers on your royalty statements take on a character that shows you it’s time for an audit, or a lawsuit. Using your self-pub work like this is kind of like putting a dog in your house–he might not alert you if someone breaks into your yard to steal your bicycle, but he will tell you if someone breaks into your house to steal your jewelry.

Wrapping It Up

There are other reasons as well, but these are the biggies. If you’re a traditionally published author, you owe it to yourself–for the sake of your creative freedom, for your artistic satisfaction, for your career longevity, for your bargaining position, and for your financial security–to put a little extra work in to build up a sideline of self-pub work.

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.

The $99 e-reader.

Well, now we get to find out. Today, Amazon unveiled the $79 Kindle, as well as a $99 model. Don’t take my word for it, you can go and see them for sale right now.

So, what happens now? To the Nook and the Sony? To adoption rates? To ebook sales?
I don’t know. What I DO know is that this Christmas season is going to be VERY interesting for people in my line of work–and probably just as much so for readers.

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.

People on the net–particularly paranoid authors and lugubrious tech writers–have been speculating about something like this for a while now, and now, according to an article in Wired, Amazon’s actually putting out feelers to see if they can make it work.

Authors, needless to say, are in a lather, because they see the potential that a) their miniscule royalty share from publishers decreasing as more people effectively use the Amazon equivalent of a library instead of paying for books, and b) Amazon might use the sea change as an opportunity to give their e-publishers a big royalty cut (which has been the paranoid topic du jour ever since they bumped it from 35 to 70 percent).

Me? I think it’s bullshit, for several reasons:

First: This is a bit of a “duh” issue, but Amazon can’t actually offer any books that publishers (including indies) give them permission to, excepting books in the public domain. Do you think it’s terribly likely that publishers, many of whom are in the midst of trying to negotiate a HUGE industry-wide business model shift, are going to take kindly to the notion of licensing content on a basket basis for a low price?

Second: If Amazon did the Netflix for books thing, the big loser will be the bestsellers. I would be quite surprised if their contracts had proactively authorized the publishers to sublicense their work in this fashion (very few of the midlist contracts I’ve seen can be read this way, even by a highly motivated lawyer). So, if the publishers did jump at this, they’d be awash in lawsuits from the very authors that generate the bulk of their money.

Third: So let’s say Amazon can’t make their Netflix-for-books idea work without coopting their stable of Indies. They ammend the distibution agreement to give them the right to put books in the Prime store without further consent. If they did this, and then deployed it aggressively, the advantage of listing with Amazon pretty much evaporates for most of us–and all we have to do is take our books down, except perhaps for those we want to use as loss-leaders. There are a lot of other retailers, and the ones we do leave up can link to sites where our books can be purchased. At that point, the situation is the same as putting up the first book in a series for free and then including affiliate links at the end. And Amazon loses, because the purchasing business shifts to other sites. Which brings me to…

Fourth: Amazon is a retailer. Short term, they might seriously boost sales of the Kindle. Long term, though, they’ll make less money with subscription models if they managed to shift the bulk of their customer base over to them. From their point of view, this is about creating a stable baseline yearly income in the form of subscriptions. However, the people most likely to sign up for Prime are those who buy a LOT at Amazon–these are exactly the people who, if given the “free books with membership” option, are going to not buy as many books, and the bottom line at Amazon will hurt because of it. Amazon’s most optimal strategy will be to offer SOME books through Prime (for example, first books in a series) while keeping the bulk of their likely-to-sell-dependably stock in the normal retail store only.

Fifth: Despite what you’re hearing from some other writers who are currently really worked up about this, there are not only six publishing houses. There are over 1900, not including upstart collective labels that publish a bunch of indies. Amazon can not effectively make every, or even most, books available this way even if they wanted to. And the biggest labels are already very worried about Amazon’s current dominance of the retail space.

Verdict:
If Amazon pursues this model, it’ll be in a limited fashion. It might include magazines, first novels-in-series, public domain works, and the occasional book that an author or publisher is willing to license out specifically for the Prime distribution model. But it ain’t gonna include everything–nowhere near. And it’s not going to put us all out of business, or reduce the profession to ashes dominated only by hobbyists.

Katherine Hepburn used to say “Life is a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death.” That’s the situation authors are in right now. We’re in the most amazing era (from an author’s POV) since the pulp era, and the fundamental economic drivers pushing it are creating FAR more (not less) opportunity for writers to make good livings. And yet, writers across the net are kvetching about falling advances, reduction of opportunity, and paranoid ideations of their profession evaporating.

But this is a business, and businesses change. You can’t stop change by complaining about it, you can only learn to roll with it. And when the changes are breaking ninety percent in your favor, the proper reaction is to seize the moment, not to sit around bemoaning the fact that things change.

In other words, relax. The doomsayer scenario isn’t going to happen. You can go back to writing now.

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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.

What if the ebook revolution isn’t about ebooks? What if, instead, it’s a symptom of a fundamental restructuring of most of the nature of market economies?

Here’s my line of thinking:

In getting any given market, you have three basic problems:
1) Discoverability
2) Awareness
3) Perishability

With food (and, as Dean Wesley Smith aptly pointed out, with books), the perishability issue is the most pressing. Turnaround has to happen fast, or the product spoils, either because of inherent perishability (in the case of food and pharmaceuticals) or limited shelf space (in the case of almost everything else), or because of changing demand (fashions, tech gadgets). But with digital products, and with manufacturing-on-demand, the marginal costs of production are much, much lower, so the tolerance for long-term return is consequently much higher, in economic terms.

With ebooks and POD, for example, I can write a book today, and even if it never breaks big, I’ll still be earning pizza money from it in thirty years. If, over that same thirty years, I stick to writing at a manageable pace, I’m building a passive income that will replace my regular household income, so long as I’m patient enough.

Discoverability and market awareness are the next big hurdles, but market persistence is the single greatest generator of market awareness. If you live in town near a hole-in-the-wall restaurant (assuming it serves a cuisine you like and has a sign that catches your eye), chances are very good that you will eventually have dinner there. Then, if you like it, you’ll eat there again sometime–maybe regularly. Coca-cola might spend billions on advertising every year, but all that money does is keep their logo visible. It makes them familiar–which means that you’re more likely to grab for a coke when faced with an assortment of unfamiliar choices.

In the collapsing global supply chain of the last thirty years, this has produced what economists call a “Matthew Effect.” The big brands get bigger, the little brands fade out. They fade out because they don’t make enough short-term profit to assure them of long-term product positioning that could build market awareness and enhance discoverability. The short-term profit problem is tied directly to manufacturing costs: to be on the shelf, you have to have cash outlay to produce a product. To stay on the shelf, you have to recoup enough to make the next round of perishable products, and you often also have to buy co-op space (where you pay rent for your shelf space) to the retailers selling your products. After all, if your product doesn’t move, they’re taking a bath on shelf space they could be devoting to brands that move faster.

In The Long Tail, Clay Shirky spotted that online retailing changes this to some extent–digital products and theoretically infinite shelf space mean that anyone can hang out in any marketplace for as long as they want, so long as their products aren’t perishable and the cost of carrying the product is near zero. He said the future consists of selling an increasingly small volume of an increasingly large catalog (i.e. instead of selling 5 cans of coke, you might sell 2 Cokes, 1 Pepsi, one RC Cola, and 1 7up).

As the long tail model has spread into the content industries (books, films, music, etc.), we’ve heard a lot of doomsayers talk about how the long tail will make it impossible for artists to get discovered, for movies to recoup their costs, for bands to afford studio time. And in some cases, these predictions have born out in the short term–but I’m beginning to think this is a temporary situation. Here’s why:

Corporate accounting philosophy, all things being equal, tends toward the short term. Stock price is based in large part on the perception that profits in the next quarter will match predictions, and for the stock price to rise those predictions and the reports validating them must show a certain amount of growth–otherwise, profit-seekers will move their stocks to other companies which appear to be growing fast. In other words, the stock market is a venue on which people with a short-term focus gamble on blockbusters. The previous generation of VCs, getting their start in the dot-com era, have mimicked this blockbuster mentality, looking for ultra-high returns on a short time horizon. And, in a world of blockbuster products, mass media, and collapsed supply chains, this sort of thinking was thoroughly reasonable.

But it’s also highly volatile. It’s the kind of underlying market conditions that create market bubbles. It creates an unstable economic environment, and a reluctance to invest, as eventually even the adrenaline junkies run out of tolerance for ultra-high levels of risk.

This is where I think ebooks come back into the picture. Take the slow-growth model I outlined above. Agonizingly slow growth, even. With digital products, having no manufacturing costs beyond the initial R&D, it’s a natural fit. It’s the one place where the long tail REALLY works, if you have the patience for it. And I think that this fact, coupled with one other, is starting to radically reshape the fundamentals of the world economy.

That other factor is something called “discount rate on those dollars diminishes–if the project is internally financed, that discount rate can fall to near the level of inflation.

Practical results would include:
Large studios being more willing to finance niche-market entertainment.
Crazy-innovative disruptive technologies would get a longer exposure window in the marketplace.
Niche-market products becoming economical for giant corporations to manufacture (I’ve got my pie-in-the sky hopes for a revival of the Pontiac Firebird line, assuming GM doesn’t go belly-up again in the next ten years).
Drug development becoming more economical, as long earn-back windows become more viable (which translates to cheaper medicines in the medium-to-long term).

From my (admittedly limited) vantage point, the penetration of this kind of long-term, long-tail thinking into these large sectors is inevitable, both because of risk fatigue and because of the continually-diminishing marginal costs created by infinite shelf-space, JIT manufacturing, and easily retooled assembly lines.

The mass market revolution of the 20s-50s, after all, was created by the underlying economic realities of assembly-line manufacturing and mass media. The per-unit manufacturing cost was SO low on an assembly line compared to hand-making something, that artisan jobs shrank to hobbies, and the market access costs through mass media were SO high that only a well-financed company could even hope to have a chance.

But now, thanks to the convergence of the Internet with other communications technologies, the marketplace is atomized. Despite the temporary dominance of any single company (in the last twenty years we’ve seen Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon, and half a dozen others all take their turn at market dominance in one space or another–there’s no reason to expect that the current apparent monopolies will prove any more resilient), then both the marketplaces and the products they carry will continue to grow more diverse. For companies and investors to continue to remain profitable (or dominant),they will be forced to move to more subtle and diverse ways of quantifying risk and tabulating returns; shifting some of their business to long-time horizon projects. And a long time horizon changes everything about the way the world currently does business.

I wish I could effectively emphasize how important this kind of a change is. The best way I know is to list companies that are characterized by this kind of long-term thinking, and that took a long time–often more than a decade–to achieve profitability. Pixar and Apple spring to mind as ones that you’ll all know. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Edison’s Menlo Park are some others.

Because of all this, I think that what we’re seeing in publishing is a minor early symptom of a wave that’s in the process of altering the face of civilization as fundamentally as did the printing press. And, like that earlier revolution, it’s going to take a while to shake out–maybe a lifetime or two. Growing up in the late part of the 20th century, people of my generation had to learn to be extraordinarily impatient in order to survive. Now, the tables are turning. Entrepreneurs in the early 21st century now must learn patience and endurance. That goes double for authors and creatives–at least if we want to see our endeavors pay off (instead of winding up bouncing from one perceived failure to another because we can’t sit still).

Five or ten years or twenty years isn’t too long to wait to live off a passive income from ebooks. Our grandparents had a word for what we’re calling the worst-case income scenario of an indie author who sticks with it for the long haul: pension

I know these musings might rub a lot of you the wrong way. I could be completely wrong. Please do drop comments and arguments below (and please make them more nuanced than “the corporateocracy will never let this happen” or other species of that kind of fearmongering). The more I think about this situation, the more radical the outcomes look to me. Radical changes to the very economic ground we walk on are often tumultuous, uncomfortable, and terrifying. But the possible outcomes of this thing looks for those of us starting on a path of life-long innovation and creativity, whatever the industry, than the situation has in at least a hundred years–if not at any time in recorded history.

Assuming we keep our heads.

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.

By mid-day Friday I had my bearings a lot better. We managed to locate some decent casino food–if your only experience with casinos is looking at the advertisements on billboards and the decadent meals there pictured, trust me, this is not as easy as it sounds–and set about hitting panels and trolling the dealer rooms in search of fun and enlightenment.

At this point, the memories of the weekend blur together. There were lots of parties–conversations with Mike Moscoe (a.k.a. Mike Shepherd), Brad Torgenson, Peter V. Brett, Brent Weeks, Eddie Schneider, Mur Lafferty, Kris Rusch, Alastair Mayer, Dean Wesley Smith, Philippa Ballentine, Gail Carriger, The Brothers Kollin, Robert J. Sawyer, David Brin, and far too many others to name (let alone remember!). Old friends and acquaintances caught up with, new friends made, and a lot of shop talk. The SFWA suite (and the other parties) are the functional equivalent of the office water cooler in this weird profession where our work is done almost entirely in isolation. The conversations were too numerous (and sometimes too bawdy) to recount here, but if you find yourself at a WorldCon and see a table peopled by any of these fine folks, I can’t recommend their company highly enough. Just be prepared to bring your scintillating banter and a willingness to listen.

It was a very interesting climate in which to do shop talk, too. The publishing industry is in the midst of some startling upheavals, and even in the small quarter of Science Fiction, the awareness of and attitude towards these upheavals varies widely, and that has a lot of interesting knock-on effects on the intra-culture politics and business climate. I’m not quite sure what to report about it–I’ll probably take another several weeks to digest it all. But as a pulse-of-the-industry measure, absolutely invaluable.

Three things of a professional nature leap to the front of my mind, though.

The first was the response to the sample copies I brought along and showed around. And Then She Was Gone and Predestination both drew a lot of raised eyebrows from book packagers and publishers I showed them to.

The second went, in the words of one publisher who looked at them: “These are some of the best packaged books I’ve seen in a long time. If they don’t sell, nothing will.” This was a pretty universal reaction, and a huge relief. It’s one thing when a little two-person team who’s been doing design work for upwards of a decade dips their toes into book packaging–it’s quite another to blow the socks off the pros whose pool you’re starting to swim in. This year has been a hell of a marathon for me so far, filled with a lot of frustration and professional growth–you can imagine the buoying this kind of reaction provides.

The third reaction, not quite as universal, was “Can I take this home to read?” We left a goodly number of copies in the hands of the interested–who knows, perhaps we’ll see a review or two come out of that. If nothing else, though, hopefully a handful of people will have some entertaining evenings.

This is not to toot my own horn so much as to keep all of you, who’ve been extremely helpful over the past few years, in the loop. But the good news didn’t stop there.

I also learned that I’ve made my professional pro-rate short fiction sale (this makes my sixth fiction sale over all), and it’s one of the stories that was sent out during the Asssmoving contest earlier this year. Makes me think I should resurrect the contest, maybe on a shorter time scale. I’m open to ideas.

Hmm…what else?

HUGE congrats are due to my friend Chris Garcia for his long-overdue Hugo win, and for an excellent acceptance speech.

On another note, the con organizers (John Lorentz and Ruth…gah, I can’t remember her last name) had the excellent notion to bring back what (I’ve heard) used to be a standard fixture at WorldCons: a panel called “The Killer B’s.” Basically, you stick David Brin, Gregory Benford, and David Bear on a panel together and get them talking shop. Since all of them are scientists, and all of them are working at the cutting edge of aerospace and/or genomics as well as being consistently long-term sellers in science fiction, and they all disagree on most of the interesting points, it’s a hell of a fun time. And, you’re also prone to learning a lot about things that haven’t hit the press yet. Lots of interesting near-term stuff coming in space travel, some of them from groups that made a big splash years ago and have been relatively quiet since. In space travel, as well as in publishing, it’s a very exciting time to be alive.

So, lessons learned for potential WorldCon goers:

It’s WAY too big to park in one bar. If you want to maximize your time, you have to party hop and stay mobile.

Stay hydrated. Particularly if you’re in a dry climate. Forgetting your electrolyte water is a quick way to exhaustion–keeping it on hand will keep you alert.

When you go to panels, take notes (or a recorder). The ones staffed by writers and editors tend to get facts coming fast and furious, and in times like this a lot of that information needs to be triaged. Things are changing, and nobody is exactly sure how.

I hit the ground back in the Bay Area reeling–a hell of an intense four days. And the autumn in front of me has taken on an even greater sense of urgency.

And it’s an ambitious schedule in front of me, which I’ll put dates to later, but here’s a smattering of what you can expect from me this fall:

Paperback releases of Free Will, Down From Ten, Sculpting God vol 1, A Ghostly Christmas Present, Silent Victor (Lantham 3), Throwing Lead (the long-anticipated “gun book), and either The Auto Motive or The Last Uploader (details forthcoming).

Ebook releases of all of the above, as well as some new short stories in ebook.

Wider distribution for the Predestination soundtrack.

And Then She Was Gone audiobook.

The reboot of the Free Will podcast.

And maybe, just maybe, a kickstater project for a very special hardback project.

On top of all of this, I picked up a lot of business stuff I have to get in line on the back end of this. Exciting times–I can’t wait. But oh boy, am I glad I got some solid sleep after I got home!

Anyway, sorry for the rambling post. It was that kind of experience. Huge thanks to everyone who made my first Worldcon a memorable one!

What a different experience from other cons, on many levels.

I set off with she-who-must-not-be-named in the new convertible for the four-hour drive. I had my doubts about making that long of a drive in a convertible–generally speaking, loud transportation wears you out more than quiet, and I was worried about arriving completely worn out.

I shouldn’t have worried. Good earplugs and good cruising music knocked the noise down to just-barely-louder-than-regular-car levels. We secured the cooler to the backs of the seats, where it acted as an extra windblocker, keeping things even quieter in there than normal.

Leaving in the morning also gave us a special treat–not a lot of traffic, and with the gorgeous weather and a new pocket camera we had a fun new road game to play: spot the exotics. In a convertible you can see the whole world, including all the other gorgeous sports cars on the road. There were a lot of them too. When we spotted one, whoever snapped its picture first got a point. Granted, as the driver I wasn’t exactly snapping championship photos, as I couldn’t check the viewfinder. I basically just pointed the camera in the general direction of a pretty car and hit the trigger. We had so much fun we forgot to tally the winner.

There was a bit of road construction near Truckee, but otherwise it was a gorgeous clear drive. I have to give a shout out to the engineers that built I-80. Not only was the road quality uncommonly good for California, the curves were all well-sloped and swooping. I discovered that the little roadster LOVES doing 90 on track-like mountain roads, and even then it kept sitting up and begging for more. By the time we got to Reno I was hopping for joy with fahrvegnugen

The rest of the day, alas, wasn’t nearly as nice. Worldcon is a different kind of con. Normally I’ll find the central bar, set up my laptop, and write a story. Interesting people come in and out, and I stop from time to time to have great conversations or to hit a panel I’m interested in.
That plan doesn’t work very well at a con with 4000 attendees strewn across two casinos and a convention center. I took the whole first day just getting my bearings, barely missing panels, barely missing friends.

On the upside, I did get to meet Robert J. Sawyer, who gave me shit for stealing his name (a gag which continued, to my delight, through the weekend, and which resulted in me meeting many more snarky and enjoyable people who were happy to let me pick their brains), and got to catch up with the Kollin brothers, who are always a fantastically entertaining pair.

At the end of the day, though, the fun didn’t make up for the disorientation. I wound up feeling exhausted, demoralized, disoriented, and outclassed.

I staggered to bed wondering if the trip had been worth it–the next two days, though, proved that it was worth every minute. Tales from day 2 will come your way tomorrow.

And if you’re wondering, yes, I can’t recommend road trips in convertibles highly enough, particularly when the destination is a WorldCon.

Dear Committee–

A couple years ago, the categories surround podcast novels were modified so that single reader podcast novels were given their own category, while full-cast productions were transferred in to the long form audio drama category. While this did solve the persistent issue that had excellent novelists like Nathan Lowell losing to full-cast productions on the basis of production lushness rather than writing merit, it has introduced a more basic, and more intractable, problem.

To explain:
The Audio Drama artform is a well-defined one, stretching back to the very beginnings of radio. The Audio Drama community is a vibrant one, with many sets of awards all basically agreeing on the formula. These are dramatic, scripted presentations–a movie for the ears, so to speak. But Audio Dramas are not, and never have been, audiobooks. The audiodrama version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, for example, has a different text from the audiobook version–it is a dramatic adaptation, with narrative weight shifted from the narrator to the dialogue and the soundscaping.

Full-cast audiobooks are a younger art form, dating back only to the 1980s or so (Simon and Schuster sometimes uses this format, and Full Cast Audio is a company wholly devoted to it). These productions contain the full text (or abridged text) of the novel, complete with all narration. The text of the novel is not adapted for the production, with the occasional exception of omitting dialogue tags. Soundscaping and music may be used, but not to the exclusion of the text. In other words, these are Audio *Books,* not Audio *Dramas.* Full-cast is a fully distinct art form, with a fully distinct history, format requirements, and production ethos.

I submit that conflating the two in a single category is a grave mistake. It does injustice to the unique difficulties and challenges involved in adapting a book to dramatic form or in writing an original dramatic script on one side, and to the different production challenges and more spare style and choices necessitated by the full cast producer.

The Full-Cast producers community is a bona-fide community within the podiobooks/podcast fiction community, even to the point where there is a podcast dedicated to teaching people the ins and outs of the form (The Full-Cast Podcast, which is a 2011 Parsec finalist for “Best Podcast about SpecFic Content Creation”). Yet, as a result of the category changes two years ago, Full-Cast productions have been effectively sidelined. Prominent full-cast community producers such as myself, Philippa Ballantine, Abbie Hilton, Chris Lester, Starla Huchton, et al., who produce full-length *unadapted* full-cast audiobooks have been placed in direct competition with long running episodic series such as Decoder Ring Theater (which is in no way a “long form” drama, yet consistently gets nominated as such), Prometheus Radio Theater (which does actual long-form audio drama serials), and other excellent dramatic production companies whose art form is entirely distinct from the full-cast format.

I urge you to rectify this situation for the 2012 Parsec Awards by giving full-cast audiobooks its own category (or categories, long-form and short-form, as there are a number of casts that do full-cast short stories). Bring us full-cast producers back into the fold, with a category where we compete on the merits of our own form, rather than being artificially forced into a category with equally excellent, but fully distinct, Audio Dramas.

Thank you for your time.
-J. Daniel Sawyer
2009 Parsec Finalist, Best Newcomer, Predestination and Other Games Of Chance
2009 Parsec Nominee, Best short story, Sculpting God
2010 Parsec Nominee, Down From Ten

P.S. This email also will appear later this evening as a blog post at http://www.jdsawyer.net

Grab a pack of cards. Strap your pressure suit on. It’s time to head to the poker game that started it all, and the book that View From Valhalla called “lovingly detailed, well-written thinking man’s science fiction at its best.*”

Joss Kyle is a one-time National Security Advisor who barely escaped Washington D.C. with his skin intact. For three years he’s lived by his wits and the fall of the cards in the criminal underworld of South America, but jumping planet for Space Station Sidon means walking into an ambush more dangerous than any he’s yet faced:
A man named Alex Hart wants to play cards with him.

Their meeting will fling Joss into a game playing for highest stakes in town: control of the entire solar system. Chased by a revolutionary leader, agents of a corrupt senator, and an underworld boss known only as The Green Lady, he quickly discovers that in the looking-glass world above the gravity well, survival, like poker, is just another sport. And in this contest, it isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you rig the game.

Now available in paperback from AWP Science Fiction, Predestination is the story Nathan Lowell calls “A sweeping tale of politics, corruption, intrigue, betrayal, and murder…a fast-paced ride through a world that’s too plausible to be ignored**” and that Brand Gamblin calls “…a lush, powerful story of hunter and pray, betrayal and rebellion, and poker.***.” Available for the first time ever in paper, this handsome new edition rings in at 341 pages contains the full text of the ebook edition, plus new line art and a sample of the sequel, Free Will.

Now, it’s true that you can buy the novel at Amazon now, and you’ll be able to find it in bookstores this fall, but for you loyal folk that read my blog, it’s available for a special rate. Until Worldcon, buy your copy by clicking here and using the coupon code XX2QR2Z8, and you’ll receive $2.00 off the $14.99 cover price.

Finally, for those of you who run vending booths at conventions (or who work in bookstores) and would like to carry Predestination (or any of my other books), shoot me an email from the Contact Form and I will send you the AWP Books wholesale pricing schedule.

I’ll be back soon with news about Free Will and Down From Ten, but until then remember…
It isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you rig the game.

*Odin1eye, View From Valhalla
**Nathan Lowell, Author of The Golden Age of the Silver Clipper
***Brand Gamblin, author of Tumbler and The Hidden Institute

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.

ZDNet reports this morning on the new TOS. Take some time to read it. It’s a HUGE improvement.

As far as closing thoughts on my part?

Well, first, credit where it’s due, Dropbox listened to their users and seems to be addressing the legitimate concerns. That merits cautious kudos. Something else they did that merits unqualified praise is that they released their TOS changes a full two weeks before they went into effect, which gave everyone who wanted to a chance to pull their files and back out, or to send in feedback, or both. This is a practice that more companies should take notice of and implement. I suspect that the combination of these two actions will serve Dropbox’s reputation well among their users.

Second, the broader principle of caution with online services shouldn’t be forgotten: Know the risks you’re taking with free, cloud-based services, and protect yourself. How do you protect yourself? Keep up to date on the TOS, so you don’t get caught unawares by changes. Encrypt everything you upload. Do not upload intellectual property to services (like Google+ and Facebook, both of which currently have TOS substantially similar to or slightly worse than Dropbox’s earlier proposed revision) that claim the right to re-use, sublicence, create derivative works, adapt, etc. your work (or, worse, the files you merely have a license to use, like your music). A little caution (and encryption) goes a long way.

Third, even with services where you are not the customer, enough people getting pissed off enough can, indeed, make a difference. It’s sort of like the cows all running away from the farm at once–the cows are the product, but if there’s no product, there’s no way to sell it. Your power is diminished in situations where you’re the product rather than the customer, but it’s not totally negligible. Keep up with the blogging!

Fourth, there is a very good reason that Dropbox is popular in the first place: They provide an easy backup solution. Off-site backups are important. Without them, you always risk having your files lost in a fire. Just be careful when shopping for one, and do protect yourself.

Related links:
Everybody Knows Peggy Lee (or should)

Some of you will get a sneak peak. You see, this is a big book. It ate up more pages, and more time, than I expected by an order of magnitude, and I’m eager to see it find a good home on the shelves and in the e-readers of all of you, including those of you who have drifted away in the meantime, intending to come back when the series continued.

To let people know Antithesis is back, we’re going to need publicity. Publicity means you! Some of you out there enjoy blogging, posting opinion pieces and reviews, etc., and you are the ones I need. Starting today, the first hundred of you that email me (either the normal way through the feedback at jdsawyer.net address, or through the web form you can find here) with the subject line “Free Will Ebook” will receive a free, pre-copyedits ebook version of Free Will (and a corrected version once the proofs are done).

In return for receiving this advance review copy, you promise to blog the book when you’ve finished reading it and, once the book is released to the general public in the next week or two, to post a copy or extract of your blog review in two of the following: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Goodreads, Kobo, Sony ebook store, Kobo, iBookstore. Those of you who feel enthusiastic enough about the book to post the review in all those places will be entered into a drawing. The four prizes in that drawing will be:

Spread the word!
Also, watch this space. There will be more announcements in the coming days about casting calls, a new Death Threats contest, and other goodies.

Ugh. I can tell you where my photo gallery WON’T be moving. I’m beginning to think that the phrase “Don’t Be Evil” is one of the more inventive demonstrations of the elastic nature of the English language.

Photofocus has full coverage. Check it out (because I’m frankly too annoyed to go through this all again). For those interested in my extended thoughts on the matter, read this post on the Dropbox mess, this post on how the economics of free online services actually work, and this post on perpetual licenses.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning to think we need a real test case for this kind of bullshit to either rule it out of order and illegal once and for all (in which case we can ignore these kinds of licensing terms), or make it clear that such clauses are enforceable (and under what circumstances) so that we know exactly what to avoid.

EFF? ACLU? Are you listening?

But, more importantly for those who have been quietly composing your death threats:

Free Will is done. The continuity edit, all the little fixes, it’s all done. All that’s left now is the copy edit, which’ll take a few days. With any luck, we’re looking at an ebook release this weekend or early next week.

We’re also currently breaking scripts out. Expect a casting call around the same time as the ebook release!

Meanwhile, Gigacom has posted an interesting analysis about what the public reaction to Dropbox might mean for the future of online privacy.

Finally, a reader wrote in privately to recommend the iTwin as a potential alternative to Dropbox. From my once-over, it looks to me like i’ll be very useful for a limited subsection of Dropbox users, and fairly idiot-proof, and it certainly does get around the disadvantages of the cloud services. It’s relatively inexpensive, so if you’re looking for an alternative it’s worth checking out.

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!

—addendum—
There are more updates on the Dropbox situation at my new blog post here.

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!

Am I now recommending them? Hell no. Assuming the best of intentions, I think they are in error about the kind of license they need to run a data archive service. And, again, assuming the best of intentions, the sorts of rights they’re claiming to run their service are very easily abused–and the folks that run Dropbox today, no matter how honorable they are, will not be running the place forever. Young companies frequently have rapid changes of administration, and in my opinion it’s foolish to put that kind of trust in the goodwill of even the most ethical of service providers. For a more lengthy explanation why, see my post on The Third Cousins Rule.

There is also the underlying problem with free cloud-based data services, which I mentioned briefly in one of the comments on the previous post, but which I should do a full blog post on. Think I’ll schedule that one for next week.

— —
By the way, for the benefit of those who have privately posted flames on the earlier comment thread (which didn’t make it through moderation due to using false email addresses) asking whether I’ve read a TOS, I recommend you check out this thread on Reddit, in which TOS from similar services by Microsoft Skydrive and SpiderOak are quoted–and they’re FAR more reasonable and intelligent than today’s Dropbox drivel:

The Reddit discussion

And I gotta say, as a company, if Microsoft has less intrusive TOS than you do, you’re doing something wrong. Kudos also to SpiderOak for blind-encrypting their stuff, so they can’t even get to it if they wanted to. There are a couple examples of how cloud-based data services should be done. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but kudos to Microsoft!

Thanks everyone for spreading the word to those affected by all this!

—-Addendum—-
I’ve posted a follow-up with recommendations on how to decide if, and what, back up service will suit your needs, and how to protect yourself from getting screwed by one. You can find that post here.

—Second Addendum—
There are more updates on the Dropbox situation at my new blog post here.

As of Sat, July 2 2011, Dropbox has joined Facebook and who-knows-how-many-other ass-backward companies in declaring eminent domain on their user’s data. That’s right, boys and girls, if you’re using Dropbox for storing your manuscripts, photographs, creative works, etc., you should know that their revised TOS says that:

you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.

In other words, they own your stuff.
Not that this would stand up for a minute in court–but do you want to be a test case?

That right there is bad enough–almost, but not quite as bad as Facebook claiming copyright to anything you post, link to, etc. (and using everything you post in their advertising), but Dropbox does one better. Lest you say “Haha! I’ve dodged a bullet! I only use dropbox to hold my ebook collection, or to sync my porn files and music between my home and office systems!” you better read on. Following on from the same place in the TOS:

You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.

In other words, if you put something you legally bought for your personal, non-infringing use, you’ve just been made a felon, because Dropbox now requires you to grant them worldwide license (including derivatives!), by uploading a file you didn’t author (for a personal backup or so you can have access to it on a business trip, say) you’ve just granted rights to Dropbox that you don’t own. But by uploading it, you’re representing that you do have the right to grant those rights, therefore you’re committing fraud as well as several sorts of infringement.

I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t see how in the world this will hold up in court–but I’ll tell you one thing: I ain’t ever using this bloody service again. And I’ll go one further–with shit like this getting to be de rigeur among clueless tech companies and their equally stupid lawyers, there’s no way in hell I’m ever using a cloud-based archiving service that “reserves the right to change the TOS without notice” again.

As Tony Sopranno once said: “You can’t fight corruption with card tricks–they use the law to commit crimes.”

Folks at Dropbox should be ashamed–and they should probably be sued. You guys at the EFF, are you listening?

Full text of the grotesque new Dropbox TOS here.

Addendum:
For an explanation of why the wording of this license is pissing me off, read my Contracts post Everybody Knows Peggy Lee (or should) which explains what’s implied by license wording such as the above–regardless of whether it’s couched in language that says “We only want these rights so we can perform the service.”

Further Addendum:
Check out the comments below for more addenda–I’m posting updates as people feed them to me, and it’s easier to add a comment than to edit the post over and over.

Another further Addendum:
I’ve got a new post talking about the factors in selecting an off-site backup service, the basics of data security, and discussing some alternatives to dropbox. Find it here.

Yet Another Addendum:
There are more updates on the Dropbox situation at my new blog post here.

Final Addendum:
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, Dropbox has taken everyone’s outrage seriously, and has fixed the problem. More information here.

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.

The definitive update, in audio for all you grabbing this with podcatchers. Lots of news

As a result, both of the new short stories are now available on the Nook. You can find Self-Sustaining here, and We Create Worlds here.

Now, back to getting Free Will squared away…

Tonight, he hosts dinner with his chief researcher who’s just made one of the biggest applied biology breakthroughs in history; the culmination of a lifelong dream, and a grand occasion for the greatest hospitality he’s ever shown.

Being a kindly soul, it has never occurred to Theo that there can be too much of a good thing. His guest, however, may have ideas of his own…

Now available for your Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.

—Story Sample Below the Cut—

Self-Sustaining

by J. Daniel Sawyer

“…so tomorrow, we release it. Oh, thank you.” I accepted the goblet from my host as he passed by on the way to his throne at the head of the table. “They’ve got no idea what’s going to happen.”

Theo may have been a monk in all but name. He may have been a celibate prick with delusions of grandeur. He may even have been crazy (with the kind of money the man had, most people figured he was entitled). But one thing he wasn’t, was dull.

The Spanish red in the goblet he handed me was a minor evidence of the fact that anyone could discern after ten minutes in his inner sanctum: his studious isolation was matched only by his eloquence and his culinary taste.

Not that he indulged himself. The wine and the fancier foods were all at my end of the table to this point. A hospitable ascetic—one of the things besides his wallet that recommended him as a dining companion.

“You’ve done excellent work. Your entire team. A Nobel-worthy performance, certainly.” He flipped open the wire-cage on an old-fashioned beer bottle and decanted the contents into his stein. Home brewed, naturally.

“Not likely. It’s a process, not a discovery. And the committee’s gone sour on non-medical biotech since the Rossfield affair.” I decided to let the wine breathe for a moment.

“Still. Remarkable, my good man, just remarkable.” He took a sip of his beer. “Excellent, yes. You shall all receive an extra bonus, I think. Every man jack of you. An extra year’s pay as congratulations for a job well done.”

“I’ll drink to that!” I raised the goblet to my lips—not glass. Metal. Heavy. Ponderous. Exactly what you’d expect from a self-styled pseudomonk. The liquid inside had aged perfectly; smooth, dry, with a palate-cleansing finish that left the mouth feeling expectant, and empty.

Theo sipped his beer, and appeared to roll it around thoughtfully before swallowing. He smacked his lips and let go an appreciative “Ah, yes. Good batch—I’ll have to make this recipe again.” He smiled at me. “Blackberry lambic. Long prep time. Far more…decadent…well, I don’t indulge much, but for an evening such as this… A special occasion. Exceptions can be made.” He smiled, and I thought that behind his wizened eyes I saw a glint of mischief. “A special occasion for us both, I think. That what you’re drinking there, it’s my last bottle.”

“This is fabulous. Thank you again.” I didn’t know whether I should ask him why it was a good thing that I was taking his last bottle, so I decided to play it cool for the moment. I figured that when you’re sitting at dinner with a man who could easily buy a few small countries and still have money left over for a six pack, it’s best not to seem too easily impressed.

Of course, playing it cool didn’t leave a lot of maneuvering room for conversation. But my host didn’t leave me dangling for long. Our dinners arrived on the backs of robotic servants—another one of his affectations, born of his world-shaping moral philosophy. After taking another draught, he spread his hands in front of me.

“You may uncover your meal whenever you like.” He uncovered his own serving dish and forked a couple thin slices of meat onto his dish. He scrupulously avoided any vegetables, leaving them on the platter.

Me? I was starving. I’d had a long day wrapping up the stray pieces of a ten-year long project—in my elation I’d skipped lunch. But the yawning in my gut had nothing on the empty feeling that my mind had slid into. Accomplishment is like that – you work for years to make something happen, and the first result of winning is that you suddenly have nothing to live for, at least for a few days. Postpartum depression, comfortable as an old sweater, and twice as smelly. I lifted the lid from my dinner.

Now that was an odor as far from old sweaters as Albuquerque from Callisto. The tray was loaded with thin strips of meat—some looked to be steak, other strips were whiter or redder—stacked in the middle of a forest of asparagus spears and purple potato wedges. I took a healthy portion of what looked like steak, and another of what looked like chicken, and added some asparagus and potatoes, then covered the service to keep the heat in. And the smell. As hungry as I was, that smell would drive me straight into the rubber room even while I was eating—even the less concentrated version coming off my own plate had my mouth watering to beat Niagara.

The taste was even better than the smell, if such a thing is even possible. I started with the white meat–soft and melting and substantive with flavors I’d never learned to describe. Delicate and light, prune and savory and sharply sweet and turkey-salty flavors all wrapped up together in a primal package. I couldn’t speak while I ate, couldn’t even listen. I was loathe to even swallow, just in case the next mouthful wasn’t as good. Without a doubt, it was the most amazing meat I’d ever tasted.

It was…unbearable. Truly. I had to stop after only four bites to take a sip of the wine, hoping to God it would cleanse my palate so I could taste the meat again, and taste it fresh. I felt as if I’d just managed to reach the surface before my lungs collapsed, but though I could breathe in the world above, it would never again seem colorful or appealing.

“My God, Theo, what is this?”

Theo grinned as he sliced a small morsel for himself. Much smaller than the bites I’d taken—he obviously knew how to handle a meal like this. I’d spent the last god-knew-how-many-years in a lab, grabbing what food seemed good enough for me to survive the eighteen hour days. “Do you like it?”

End of sample. ©2011 J. Daniel Sawyer, All Rights Reserved

Read the rest on your
Now available for your Kindle, Nook, or other ebook reader. .

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).

Step into Rick’s parlor. Don’t mind the bell on the door or the old fashioned cash register. Buy a manufactured novel, fresh from the computer—a first edition. Sit in the easy chair or lay out on the sofa. Strap on a helmet and a skinsuit and take a swim on Europa. He can be trusted. Really. It says so on the door. In ten foot high letters, right above the shop front, he tells you exactly what they do:

“We Create Worlds”

And they do it on the cheap.

You can find the story at Amazon and Smashwords.

—Story Sample Below the Cut—

We Create Worlds
by J. Daniel Sawyer

Grand re-opening!

This month only, get a free Hawaii upgrade with any family picnic!

Teach your children about planetary science. Show them the only other place in the known universe to have alien life! Free souvenir photobook with our new ‘Europa Excursion’ scenario. SCUBA certification required, training available.

Take your spouse to an exclusive adults-only resort in Luna City and get a free add-on fantasy package of your choice!

Chose from the best in manufactured literature available anywhere. For a limited time, buy one—get one free!

Opening the universe to you every day with state-of-the-art virtual reality.

We Create Worlds.

It was the same copy as our radio ads, but in the layout it popped. I arranged the words around a good solid curve. Busty, but subtle. Catchy. Nobody would know why they couldn’t stop looking at it, but when a human being sees an eddie or a zoomer it gets distracted. When the shape is disguised, hidden, or cryptic, the brain won’t let it go.

I was the best damn flyer we’d ever put out. Nobody’d used flyers for years—messy, environmentally unsound, irritating. Well, let me tell you, my dear voyeur, one generation’s headache is another’s heroin. Flyers may have been useless back when everyone was putting them out, but now they’re paper gold. Something tangible, makes the offer real. People can touch it, feel the little texture cues, the scent of the paper, and they believe that what they’re buying from us is also real.

So, for the shop relaunch, I went bollocks-out. Over the top, loading in all the subliminals, pheremonals, visuals, and NLP tricks. I knew they actually didn’t work for much, but it was a special occasion, and the owners appreciated the extra effort.

The crowning achievement was the new name—it’s the real reason the relaunch worked. Gone were the days of “Adult Realities.” It was “Rick’s Virtual Playground” no longer—false advertising anyway, since I never owned more than 3% of the shop and didn’t really want to. I mean, Christ, board meetings with the old Sicilians every quarter? Count me out. They smell like garlic and look like death on a good day, and they know this market about as well as a high-speed hunk of lead knows how to tap dance.

Now the new name…ah, the finest gift the goddess ever gave me for the price of a tab. It was straightforward. It was snappy. It reeled ‘em in like pike on a bait chain. It was perfect.

I’d done it up in a sign ten feet high across the front of the building, lit up so you could read it for a mile down the street: “We Create Worlds.”

And we do it on the cheap.

Hey, everyone needs to escape, and slipping off into a world where your brain doesn’t know the difference is a hell of a lot better than slipping your brain down into a needle. I’m a paramedic, and I know it. And, like any good paramedic, I give out treatments. I don’t cure.

Temporary, palpable escape into the worlds made in the closet. They’re gagging for it. Who wouldn’t be? They sit in cubicles, or plugged into net terminals, or hassled to death by their kids all day, and the real world just don’t have the shine it did when they were teenagers.

Everyone—and I do mean everyone—who walks through that door needs me. I mean, they could do it on their own. Most VR shops are self-serve. You walk in, order something up on a screen, and do your business. Most kids buy a home rig – they’re not quite as good, but they’re damn cheap. Nothing’s stopping ‘em, nobody’s holding a gun to their head to make them come here. I have to work for my bread. And if the shop doesn’t run well, I don’t eat. If it runs at a loss, I don’t breathe.

Yeah, I know, I know. The suit slobs aren’t good people to owe money too. It’s a high stakes game, but then, where else are you gonna get the money for a place like this? The market conditions are tough—nobody dared to build an arcade after the Xbox, and nowadays, nobody wants to go up against Sony and Disney in VR. Nobody’s that crazy.

Well, nobody that works at a bank, any road.

So, I provide adventure. I provide service. I keep my shop clean and my nose bent and do what I can to keep the customers satisfied. The job is its own reward, and the benefits are brilliant. When they leave here after a couple hours of happy delusion, their nonsensical grins tell me how long it will be until reality gets the better of them and they come back for the next fix.

Most are satisfied with a manufactured novel, though they don’t sell like they used to. Some people like to keep their fantasy at arm’s length, or at least enjoy the illusion that their secret peccadilloes are private. In the old days, they were the hook on a pretty direct route—they’d start out with the books, then move on to a good old fashioned hunter-killer game with a human quarry. A while later that palled and they’d switch sides in the game, and at that point, they’d need a jack for their fix, every time. The route ain’t so direct anymore, and our focus has changed a bit, but we still have something for everyone.

For example, Sunday afternoons are introverted loser day, with men coming in fresh from church for some serious worship with a projection of the pastor’s wife or the dance troupe leader.

You can see it, can’t you? We provide a valuable community service. Our Notorious World Leaders series gives the sadists a way to let off some good steam by officiating a human sacrifice, keeping a healthy harem of captive and unwilling women plundered from neighboring tribes, orchestrating battles, playing Torquemada or Bathory, or having a good old fashioned pedophillic dismemberment orgy with the Borgias or Tiberius. The only serial killers you’ll find operating in this one-horse town are the ones that come in here on Thursday night. People are kept safe, nobody gets hurt, and the owners stay happy.

If Pilate had my shop he’d never have needed a cross. No half-baked desert hippie could have had a chance to raise a ruckus when everyone else got top shelf stress reduction at hand.

Of course, when you keep a shop, each day is pretty much like the next, and that’s all there is to say. But man, oh man. That day started off with a rash of sorority birds lining up to use all the arenas at once. The suits ain’t compatible across genders—form-fitting sensor nets, them—and I ran dry on the fem suits at one point. The things don’t wash themselves, and those girls weren’t having no tea party.

No, for them it was a standard Hunter/Killer program—jungle variety terrorism, nice for working up a good sweat, and let me tell you, those birds are sadistic. Wouldn’t want to be set on them in a dark alley after seeing what they do to their friends over a game. And, holy hell, I had to network all the arenas together at once—when I spec’d the system for this place I didn’t get one designed to handle that much. Hey, I work on a budget, what could I do?

It was a royal bitch getting’ them routed around the fail-safes, but that’s why the the Red Man lost his shirt to the big penguin. There’s always a way. And it was worth it, let me tell you. At a hundred bucks a piece every hour I earned nearly a week’s commission in one day, and that ain’t the half of it. Ain’t gonna forget this’n—average day gets me maybe twenty regs at the outside and a couple itchin’ tenderfeets, but this place was hopping like a cockroach in a frying pan.

With sororities you can always tell the leader, she tugs the others around like a brood of goslings. She was shorter and rounder than the rest of them, but she moved like an empress and her voice was like chocolate.

“What’s the big occasion?”

“Oh, just a birthday party for one of the sisters.”

“You girls in a sorority then?” A blind rabbit could have smelled the Greek solidarity from the mint patch if he still had his nose about him, but it kept her talking.

I swiped her card and glanced down at the monitors. Her sisters were all at different points in the peeling process—did I say those VR suits are like a second skin? I forgot to mention how much they don’t look like real skin. Getting’ them gone was a definite improvement, at least until they finished their shower off and found their street clothes again. Not an ugly one in the bunch.

“Yeah, over at State. We’re having an end-of–the-year party next Wednesday, would you be interested?”

“Interest is my middle name, consider me there! Ah, here we go, your total is three K. If you like I can bill you monthly, or I can put it all in…or rather through…right now.”

“Hell, put it through now. Better than dealing with the bills.”

“Okay,” I punched my transfer auth into the keypad, “Looks like we have a winner. So…” I glanced at her American Express, “Erin, how can I find you this weekend? Saturday nights can be mighty cold up on that old drafty campus.”

She pursed her lips at me and winked, then slipped a card into my hand as I passed the AmEx back. Smooth as a velvet tongue, that girl. “Call me.”

Before I could continue the conversation a gaggle of her cohorts emerged from the dressing rooms. They flocked around her like she was a kool-aid vendor from Guyana—who could blame them? Her voice sounded like it walked out of a sex factory before they’d had a chance to fit it with a good suit of clothes. The other girls might be a pleasant diversion, but Erin…

I waved them out, just in time. Four hours of solid estrogen pollution hangin’ think in the air is enough to make any duffer choke takin’ a breath. Once I recover though…well, let’s just say that Erin’s way of plotting an ambush in the arena gives me the shivers. There was something there with that girl, and I couldn’t wait to find out what it was.

The bell on the door wasn’t my idea, one of the morons who owns a pile of stock certs has a bit of a fetish for things that dingle. His cat, his children, his goddamned cigar cutters, always dingling with those little rancid bells like they crawled out of Santa’s pants for air. Last time I saw him I had to spend the whole night in an arena watching old Beatles concerts until I couldn’t hear the dingle anymore over the constant torture of “Hey Jude” running through my brain. The bell was his revenge—he didn’t like it when the changeover caught him with his pants down in front of the other dons.

At least it’s only Mrs. Alvarez. She’s a regular, comes in here every now and then to fetch a new manufactured novel. She prefers insipid little romances, the ones that feature secret adulteries and long lost lovers cropping up in unlikely places. But I don’t judge, she’s a good customer, brings a lot of class to the place.

She’s plain, always wrapped up in that wool trench, too old to be really interesting. If my commission structure allowed it, I might feel sorry for her, stuck in what must be a loveless—or lifeless—marriage. If she were younger…nah, not worth it, and I don’t get paid for that. She likes her books, and I’m her bartender, not her magic man.

Even so, I programmed a new set of variables into her presets that she should find mildly shocking and very entertaining. I wouldn’t be doing my job if she wasn’t a little shocked, after all.

Way back in the beginning, we were only a manufactured book store. I got the place funded because I wrote the system. Best virtual AI in the world. This one can actually tailor the manufactured novel to the style of a thousand different authors, which set us apart and got us a more literate clientèle.

The literate ones, back when they were still a good demographic, were the ones who could afford the perks we were offering. I kept the easy chairs and couches even since that business dropped off—we haven’t needed the space yet and people do like to sit down and relax while they read, free of charge. Keeping them around usually means they’ll buy more than one.

Problem was that shortly after we opened, the fad died off. Literacy was passe again, and all the real book junkies went back to “sapient” novels, saying that stories written by humans were more “artistic.” That kind of pretentious nonsense was bad for business.

With that kind of boneheaded appeal to “culture,” we could either change our marketing strategy or we could fold. The money men didn’t fancy their investment failing after only a few thousand percent return, so we added manufactured movies and porn, and it did the trick. Business soared. We eventually made enough to install a few VR arenas and a couple of private rooms for those with advanced tastes.

Of course, none of them—especially not Dingle Man—listened to a damn thing I said. They spotted a good thing and ran with it, and they bought all the advertising they could. We were gonna saturate the market, expand, set up franchises. Well, they thought so.

They didn’t reckon with the main problem: VR porn is big on burnout.

At first, we had new customers come in and order full-on orgies, hard-core S&M sessions, and some stuff that still gives me the shudders thinking about it. Caligula had nothing on those morons, let me tell you. The thing is, you drop-shift a guy from vanilla sex with his high school sweetheart who he married in the little chapel down the road into that kind of theater and they’ll just stop showing up after a couple sessions. They knew what they wanted, what they wouldn’t admit to anyone, and they jumped right into it.

You gorge yourself for three days straight on caviar after eating graham crackers your whole life, and you just ain’t hungry anymore. And that’s assuming they lost interest—I spent a good month hiding from one pissed off woman who found her man out when he couldn’t get it up anymore.

So as sure as you get fertilizer out of a politician, when that happened things went downhill fast. That pissed off little missy got the community involved. The Baptists did what Baptists do best, boycotting us, picketing, blackmailing customers, the whole bit. We were gonna have to fold, and if we did it would be my arse in a sling. All that work, straight down the sewer pipes and flushed out to sea, and the money men’s special collection agents rapping on my door. There’s always gotta be someone to blame, and it’s never them.

I had to think fast before they found a better use for my head. I brought the problem to them, suggesting that we change the whole image. We could be wholesale fantasy, cater to everything, family friendly and the whole cartload. We’d change the name of the shop, and restrict the hard-core stuff to regulars who were already so hooked that they had no one at home left to tell.

They bought it, which meant I could stop sleeping with a gun under my pillow.

The re-branding was the last step, and we’ve done pretty well for it all. Saturday is family day—officially, anyway—and we keep the family scenarios fresh. The Hawaii offer from the ad is particularly popular, and it keeps the kids and the adults coming back for more. What starts as a novelty becomes an indispensable family pastime.

I don’t do too badly for it, either.

Damn that dingling door, always bombing the tracks right in front of a good train of thought. “Adds to the homey atmosphere” my eye. Paul—another regular—came in strutting like a peacock with a branch up his arse. About normal. He asked for the Battle of Waterloo. Again. Most people would want some variety, perhaps even a little triumph. Not this master of the financial universe.

“Paul, have you considered trying out one of the battles Napoleon won?”

“No, no.” He dismissed the idea with an aristocratic wave of his hand. “If the first great emperor won the battle already,” he snorted, “Child’s play. I deserve the honor—no, the glory!—of a more difficult battlefield.” His smirk…god…it’s almost as if he likes getting his arse kicked as penance for his success.

“You know, if you want challenge, I could up the danger by having Napoleon captured rather than killed.” Now, to confirm my theory.

“Ah!” sucking the air in like a goddamn elephant, “Give the first great emperor a chance to defeat the enemy from inside their own encampment.” Anticipation grew on his face and he tucked his right hand into his coat front.

“You cut a dashing figure, my lord. Your doom awaits you in arena 2. You’ll find a fresh suit and helmet in the dressing room.” I handed him the code card with the enhancements and he accepted it with an air of indifference, before sticking his puggish nose in the air and striding back to the dressing room. The piglet as an emperor.

Before he did “Waterloo” he played in H/K programs as the prey. The moment he began to outfox the computer, he upgraded to hopeless battles. He’s been doing “Waterloo” for two months, five days a week. The program says the battle lasted the better part of a day and a night, but Paul started out with three hour runs and whittled it down to under one. Every time he and comes out glowing like he’d had the best sex of his life. I think he’s beginning to believe he is Napoleon. Still, he isn’t the most colorful face I see every week.

Falk takes the cake for that. He is our biggest hard-core customer. If what I’ve seen on the monitors is any indication, the man has more imagination and concubines than Solomon. His stamina is almost as impressive as his credit line.

Almost.

The owners love him, he drops more money here every week than any two other people combined. I love him too; he’s usually around all day, so if I ever get bored, the screen for his booth is only a click away. It ain’t just entertainment, he’s so hooked that I can jack up the prices on him and he doesn’t mind. As long as I don’t pump them so high that I lose him, the owners cheer me on rather than sending me a dinner guest.

I love this business.

I love the people. I love the challenge.

I loved staying after hours. I’d turn off the experience recorders and use a private room myself. I had this program that started with a long massage with a golden-skinned Mexican girl, and I could make that one last until my balls were blue as a summer sky and I couldn’t walk straight. Ah, yes…

The stiff kinda ruined it for me—made me cut back and not go in so much. One of my regulars, should have been outta the store long time before closing—he must’ve paid in advance…it was a bloody mess. Slid a scalpel down his own throat…nasty, nasty. Put himself right out. Eighteen months back, now—last straw for the protesters. Apparently his “Secret Tryst” program was up—why does every lazy two bit git name his program like it was a c-movie?–and he couldn’t take reality any more. Made us shut the place down for six weeks to clean the blood out of the carpet and retool our image.

After all that time, I still couldn’t go back into arena two, it gave me the squeamies just thinking about it. So, I was careful. I couldn’t afford to lose touch like that. Better than the real thing, those created worlds, but I had bills to pay.

Paul finished his battle in only twenty minutes, a new record. Came out struttin’ through the shop glowing like a pregnant woman—you coulda lit a good sized orgy with the smile on his face. I reckoned he’d have to upgrade to the siege of Jerusalem next. I resolved to give his captors some personality next time—maybe some nice broom handles and some Vaseline—let him get his full penance in. That’d keep him happy until he was willing to move to a more hardcore scenario.

The sunlight spilled in over the hills between me and the bay, and I thought about the night at head. I didn’t have anything scheduled. I had to be in early tomorrow to supervise the system upgrade. We were adding a holographic arena in the old hock shop next door. All the demos made it look pretty slick. No helmets, just a latex face laminate for touch sensations. The images are projected in real-time and can be seen with the naked eye. No more retina projectors or VR bullshit. For those with the means, this is the next phase. I may have to try it, just for kicks. Mayhap it’ll ship with a trainer program—or I could use old faithful. Maya, the Mexican massage goddess.

When I went back to get Mrs. Alverez I found her layin’ back on the overstuffed velor sofa. She’d flopped her trench loose over the back so the wool prickled out, and her long peasant boots restin’ on the coffee table like it was a footstool, one crossed over the other under the fringe of her schoolmarm skirt and reading the manufacture I’d programmed for her. But it weren’t from one of the normal readers. She’d sprung the extra ten bucks for a hard copy and was making notes in the margins with a pencil.

In a manufactured novel?

I came close up behind her and tried to read over her shoulder, but her head kept getting in the way, so I cleared my throat. She turned around and looked up at me from her seat on the couch.

“I’m closing up, Mrs. Alverez, it’s time to go now.”

She nodded and closed her book, saying “Thank you, Rick. I’ll be along in a moment.” As she said so she put her book in her handbag and handed me her credit card.

As I walked back to my counter, something prompted me to glance back at her. Her hair had fallen from its usual matronly bun and was cascading in delicate black curls around her shoulders as she used a coffee table to stretch her muscles for the walk home. Her button-up trailed open and the edges hung loosely about her hips, showing a black bodice comin’ up outta her brown skirt. She couldn’t really be in her fifties …could she?

She looked up and nearly caught me staring, but I ducked behind my counter and performed the swipe. I punched in the auth codes, and “Transaction approved” flashed on the screen, and the console spat out a receipt for forty dollars US.

I thought about dialing up a massage program, but as I shifted my weight around on my feet I chucked the notion. I wanted to get moving. Needed to find a party to pull, or something to do. All day sittin’ behind the counter, washing suits, watching the experience monitors…I needed to get out and relax. Find something active to do.

I shut down the console and started the arenas on spin-down.

Mrs. Alverez came out from behind the display case and picked up the card and receipt, and I pushed her out of the store as politely as I could. No customers, nothin’ left to do, and I needed the air.

I punched the lock code, turned to walk off. I nodded at her.

“Good night, Rick. I’ll see you soon.” She gave me an ‘alf smile and kept lookin’ at me outta the corner of her eye even while she walked away. Her heels clopped steadily on the concrete as she walked out to the parking lot.

I needed to go find a way to unwind, but the breeze picked up and I caught a little smell of flowered talc on the breeze. Her boots stopped, I looked back after her and saw her taking a moment to look up at the moon, faint and hazy through the dull red sky.

She’d been writing—writing!—in the margins of a manufactured novel. She’d wasted pension money—you can tell a lot about a bird by the card she uses—on a hard copy when I knew damn well she had a serviceable reader.

She wasn’t moving, just standin’ there on the corner. Hell, I didn’t have any plans anyway. It wasn’t more than a minute’s walk to where she was leaning on the telephone pole.

“What were you doing in there?”

She looked at me like I’d spit on her shoe. “Excuse me?”

“Making notes on the manufacture, why were you doing that?”

Mayhap I was intruding. She arched her eyebrow at me and I suddenly felt like a little kid. Out from behind the counter, not working a party, not trying to chat someone up, I suddenly realized I had no clue what I was doing.

“Why the sudden interest, Rick? I’ve heard of stranger things happening in that shop of yours.”

“It just ain’t…normal. I mean, it’s a machine-made book; why…” It wasn’t a text book, wasn’t a croquet manual, wasn’t a bleedin’ astrophysics paper. It was a manufacture—pure entertainment. “It’s weird.”

She sighed into the night. “It’s a long story, Rick. Why don’t you walk me home and I’ll tell you about it?”

I hesitated, the cold city night tickling the back of my throat.

“Come on, I’ll cook you dinner.”

End of sample. ©2007 J. Daniel Sawyer, All Rights Reserved

Read the rest at Amazon and Smashwords.

You can find the story at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Below, you can find a sample.

Enjoy!

—Story Sample Below The Cut—

Tap, tap, tap.

The cane foot tapped measuredly on the plank, hammering out a steady tick-tock rhythm. It was not a rubber foot, such as had been common on cane-feet for a century now, but a proper pinned steel cane foot, suitable for a weapon or a prop to lean on or a scepter with which to gesticulate. It kept its clock-like rhythm even as a steam engine pulled out of the station, a few feet from the bench where its owner sat in his frock coat and top hat, measuring the minutes in percussive time.

The late afternoon summer was dry and hot, save for the oppressive blasts of humidity that coated the ticket window with fog for a few brief moments when a locomotive deigned to grace the lonely platform with its presence. The endless in-between times stretched on like the deep-split grain of the wooden planks that seemed to continue uninterrupted from one floorboard to the next. Across the double-tracks, past the far platform, flies and weevils swarmed above the autumn grain, taking from it what pickings they could before the harvest.

It was the last day of summer. Soon the dust would rise from the fields and the northern world would hunker down for a winter season that was comfortable and warm, circumscribed by brick and fiberglass, hearths long since replaced by electric heaters. The days when people froze to death for want of wood, or heating oil, or gas were well gone, but the anachronistic frock coat and cane went seemingly unnoticed on the forgotten railway line, where steam power serviced the nostalgic aging population whose automated homes drew nuclear power from the worldwide grid. The coming months would be a time of hibernation for Europe, but neither the cold slow yearly death the old world had endured, nor the slowed down fallow time of the new world were in the future of this man from out the storybooks of Conan Doyle or the misty streets of Whitechapel. And yet for all his out-of-place formality, the bench he sat on was wrought iron, and the foot of his cane kept perfect time. He seemed a fixture in the weatherbeaten station.

The steel band left small indentations in the old, grey oak, and the cane’s wielder was beginning to regret his promise to await the train from Bonn. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. Leaving Gibraltar, they each had business to attend to, loose ends of past lives to tie up before they embarked together for the new frontier. She could have flown in, of course, the airport was near enough from their ship’s moorings. Or she could have driven, but somehow, even back in Morocco, the steam train had seemed best. It had seemed fitting that they leave their old world behind in its proper style, and the Orient Express and a few of the other remaining locomotives on the planet ran right past their destination.

So, it had been settled. They had kissed goodbye with promises to meed in two months. There had been chats, and vid calls, and letters, and every other sort of communication that was available to them, and when they got busy and went without each other for a few days or a week, their reconnection was that much sweeter for the absence. She was a hunger for him, as real as his need for meat and far more dearly sought, while he was to her like water. That’s what she had said, over and over again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

That was what she had said, and he had believed her. But he had been here, waiting on the Orient Express, its last run of the summer, for two days. It had been delayed, there had been no word. Perhaps a mechanical breakdown had stranded it in a high pass – but he discarded the notion as soon as it occurred to him. This wasn’t the nineteenth century – there were were sat phones and radios, and if nothing else the ticket agent should know something.

But if he knew anything, he wasn’t telling.

She was a practical woman, not one to wait around for repairs. If the train were stranded she’d probably found a flat to let while she waited, even though the train had comfortable accommodations, she’d want to take advantage of a last chance to explore an alpine village. She’d dig in and sample the culture, find a club with a good local band and drink microbrews. She’d tour the local historical monuments and maybe have a long conversation over chess in whatever language was spoken in that remote corner of the world.

She spoke all the languages, she’d have no trouble blending in. But when her train departed she’d be on her way to him again, forsaking whatever brief affair she found to occupy her time, to be her last hurrah.

Assuming she had gotten on the train at all. Assuming she would tear herself away from her new life by the stranded train.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

—

End of sample. ©2007, J. Daniel Sawyer. All Rights Reserved

Read the rest atAmazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

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!

Most people why buy a book or pick it up from the library just want to read it–that’s an excellent thing! Sometimes, though, us authors get email from fans who, for whatever reason, what to know what extra they can do. If you’re in that camp, this is for you. If that doesn’t describe you, you’re gonna be bored or annoyed by much of what follows

Let’s say you’ve found an author you love with a series you adore (and, let’s face it, who hasn’t?). If you’ve been a reader long enough, you’ve experienced the frustration of an orphaned series–where the publisher just drops things mid story, and the next book is never written. You might even have gotten very annoyed with the author for it, and confronted them at a convention or a signing, only to be told it’s out of their hands.

Unfortunate though it might be, the truth is that the success of a series lies in your hands. You may be just one of thousands of readers, but it only takes a handful out of every thousand readers to make a huge difference in how a book does on the open market.

Seanan McGuire a.k.a. Mira Grant and Gail Carriger have both recently chimed in recently on how you can help an author out, and it caused a bit of a shitstorm on twitter–I suspect that storm is a by-product of the interesting times we live in in publishing.

To make a long story short, writers have to eat, and the only way we get to eat is if 1) we write books you like, and 2) you buy them. Sometimes, though, there can be some weird confounding factors. Because there are publishers, distributors, and the New York Times in the mix, things can get complicated for books slotted in one of the two business models currently on offer. Let’s call these two models the “Produce” model and the “Long Tail” model.

I’m going to start with the most important thing you can do to help ensure your series continues, and this is common to authors using both business models:

Post book reviews
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Goodreads, your blog, your podcast, twitter–if there’s a place you can post a book review, do it. And be honest–a four-star review that’s enthusiastic but points out the things that bugged you, or even a BAD review that goes into detail are just as good, or better, than a five star gushing review. (A five-star review that goes into detail is, of course, the best of all). A spread in reviews shows other potential readers that the book is well-written enough to provoke a real reaction, and thoughtful, honest reviews help other readers decide if the book is one they’d enjoy.

You don’t have to write a different review for each venue. It really is okay if you write one review and post it in lots of places. We don’t mind.

Word of mouth is, in the end, the only dependable way to sell books. As the reader, you are the mouth whose words matter. If we authors make you feel something, speak up!

Also, when you’ve got a book you’re enjoying, read it in public and tell your friends about it. Loan it out. The ultimate goal is to have a book go viral, and the more people talk about it, the better chance it has.

The Produce Model

The Produce model is focused on cramming as many sales as possible into a short space of time. Publishers have lists they have to fill every month with new titles, so whatever the new release is is the NEXT BIG THING ™. If the book does well in the Produce model, it may “earn its keep” and be shuffled to the backlist through multiple reprintings, and thus stay in print for a long time.

So, Produce books are are new releases from medium-to-large houses (including, but not limited to, those owned by the “Big Six” media conglomerates). These books, like blockbuster movies, have just a few weeks to prove themselves. They’re not afforded the luxury of finding an audience–they either fly off the shelves in the first thirty-to-sixty days, or they don’t get reprinted and/or the next book in their series doesn’t get picked up.

If you’re interested in a book that’s in the Produce section, the best thing you can do for an author is to buy a paper copy (not an e-book copy) of the book in the first thirty-to-sixty days after release (better yet, pre-order it). If you buy the book from a brick-and-mortar store, it’s more likely to count toward the New York Times bestseller list (and if the book hits the NYT list, the author might get higher royalties, depending on her contract terms).

Ebooks, typically, aren’t yet counted in this scheme (which can make life tough on us authors as more of you readers are preferring ebooks). Publishers are trying to slow the transition away from print so they can have time to adapt their strategies, and they are dragging their feet on figuring ebooks into their re-order calculations (they’ve also been caught defrauding their authors on ebook royalties even more aggressively than they usually do with print royalties, but that’s whole other blog post).

This does not mean “don’t buy your favorite author’s ebooks.” This is just information on how the business works right now, to help you be strategic with your buying if you’re inclined to being strategic. Gail’s blog has some other great suggestions on way to leverage your ebook buying to make maximum impact.

Note of clarification: Paper copies get more attention in a lot of publishing houses at the moment because of institutional lag. Big companies have cultures that are slow to adapt to the market. If you buy an ebook, it still “counts,” but since books which are printed today have contracts that were negotiated between one and three years ago, we’re currently in a transition regarding exactly how those sales count. It’s complicated, and if you prefer ebooks, you should feel free to buy your preferred format. The current weirdness will not last forever.

The Long Tail Model

Those books working on the Long Tail model are often older books–backlist–released through mainstream publishers or published by the author. Many authors have some books operating under one model and others under the other, and this percentage will grow as the Long Tail model shakes itself out and becomes more common.

The selling point of the Long Tail is that it allows a book to hang around and find its audience, even if it takes a long time. Rather than selling a lot of books very quickly, a book in the Long Tail model is a success if it sells slowly but steadily. In the long run, it can even accrue more sales than a blockbuster book. In this sense, it’s the opposite strategy from the blockbuster-driven produce model. All self-published books operate under this model, as do many older books from larger houses. If the book you love has been out more than about ninety days, it doesn’t really matter what format you buy it in or where you buy it–a sale’s a sale.

Not all Long Tail books are older books though–some are books written and released under the Long Tail model intentionally. Authors do this when they self-pub an original title, and some small and medium sized presses that don’t have the same distribution requirements of larger publishers operate this way on all their titles as well.

In the case of the Long Tail original book, your author may have a personal threshold after which he’ll write the next book (such as Stackpole, who writes new installments in a series after he’s sold 10k copies of the current installment), or he may have decided to write a certain number in a series and then see how it does before deciding whether he wants to commit to further installments.

Or, as is the case for four of my short stories, a title may be available both in an anthology and as a self-pubbed ebook. In this case, when you buy the anthology, your author won’t get much out of it–a few pennies at best–while if you buy the ebook the author will get 35% to 70% of the cover price (depending on which storefront you buy it through and how it’s priced).

—
This is how it all looks from the POV of the author. As a reader, you may not want to be bothered with this. If that’s the case, my advice is: don’t worry. Just stick to point one: tell your friends. We’re in the business of entertaining you, and as long as we’re doing a good enough job, the rest will ultimately sort itself out.

These are very turbulent times in the publishing, so turbulent that I’m sure I’ll have to update this post a couple times over the next two years–but for now, this is the best info we authors have got.

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!

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.

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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.

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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?

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1) You’ll need a good recording device. The most cost-effective and technically simplest way to do it is to pick up a Zoom H2 recorder. It has gorgeous microphones that make almost anyone sound good, and can
operate as a USB mic, but it also records uncompressed audio straight to a SD card. I recommend the latter method for simplicity. Get the Zoom, a pop screen, and a basic mic stand (~$140 for the recorder + ~$30 for the pop screen + ~$20 for the stand) and set them up in a quiet, dead room. (Dead = no bare walls. You don’t want the echoes from your living room or bedroom walls. A library is the best environment that most authors have, as books provide excellent baffling. Otherwise, a closet hung with moving blankets can work, or a bedroom with blankets hung on the walls).

There are a lot of good reasons to pick the Zoom over most USB mics out there–they bear directly on sound quality.

2) Read your story. This may take some practice if you haven’t done voice work before. Your vocal technique, characterization, and intonation are what’s more important here. Don’t worry too much about
precision. If you flub, just snap your fingers and re-take the line. The snap is important–it’ll show up in editing and make your flubs easy to find. Aim for a reading pace of between 100 and 140 words per
minute–no faster. Enunciate clearly for the narration, as if you’re talking on the phone–most people’s normal speaking voices are pretty sloppy, and that can make your words sound muddled on a recording. Vary your pace, pitch, and volume for emphasis and mood.

While you’re doing this, be sure to record thirty seconds or more of room tone (silence in the room you’re recording in). You’ll need this for editing.

3) Copy the sound file (.wav or .aiff) to your hard drive (be sure to *copy*. Don’t delete your original until you’re done, just in case you make a mistake and have to start over). Open it up in Audacity (a free
program for all platforms–download from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ). You’ll see a waveform. Start
listening from the beginning, and edit your file for pacing and performance. Use your room tone to create spaces–do not insert digital silence, it’ll sound clunky and distracting. Save your work as you go–nothing sucks more than a program crash where you lose an hour of work.

There are good ways to do noise reduction in post, but do NOT use Levelator. There are quicker, easier ways that sound better–if there’s sufficient interest I can do a post on noise reduction.

4) Once you’re satisfied, you’ll need to record an intro and an exit (like the title sequences on tv shows). These can be as short as three or four seconds, just enough to orient your listeners so they know what
podcast you’re listening to. Some people (like me) get elaborate, with fancy intros and then post-story chat where the author talks about how he came to write the story, his upcoming public appearances, responds to listener feedback, etc.

5) When that’s all done, export the open/close sequence to a wav file and import it to your original project, then put it in front of and behind the story. Export the whole thing to a 44.1khz joint-stereo
encoded MP3. Upload it to your website. Make a blog post, add a podcast enclosure, and hit publish.

6) If you want to release on podiobooks.com as well, follow the guide at www.podiobooks.com. It’s pretty easy stuff You’ll also want to do id3 tags, but that’s another blog post (which I’m happy to do if you guys want me to).

7) Be sure NOT to export to mp3 until the very last step. Otherwise, you can introduce audio artifacts that sound tinny.

That’s it Chime in with questions or corrections in the comments.

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!

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.

There are a lot of things that go into the power dynamics of a negotiation. The most obvious is need: whichever one of you needs the deal more has less power to dictate terms. That’s important, and we’ll deal with it in this installment, but it’s not the whole picture.

Why not? For two reasons:

First, people live in societies, and those societies have laws that govern how contracts are made and limit what terms can be legally agreed to, and under what conditions. It is not, for example, legal to sell oneself into slavery in the West, or to sell another into slavery. Snicker all you want, this was not always the case–in fact, by some looser definitions of the term “slavery,” this has only become illegal in the United States in the last two generations. I kid you not.

What constraints the law imposes on your bargaining ability varies from industry to industry, but in general the terms are governed by three areas of law: Contract law, Tax law, and domain-specific regulations (copyright laws, labor laws, real estate laws, environmental laws, etc.). Some of these laws vary radically from state-to-state, and Federal law can trump State law or defer to State law, or it can specify which State’s laws have jurisdiction in an interstate deal–all depending on the circumstances. As the party to a contract, it’s your responsibility to get familiar with the laws in the domains you’re dealing in. If you’re working in a heavily regulated industry, or an industry with a lot of caselaw (ex: anything involving employees or intellectual property), you’d be well advised to run things by a lawyer.

Second, everybody’s human, and as such are susceptible to losing sight of the deal because their focus shifts to the contest. This is the stock-in-trade of every salesperson on the planet: to convince you to buy what they’re selling by distracting you from the deal when you display reluctance. These distractions can take the form of compliments, social bonding gestures (getting you a cup of coffee, talking to you about movies), by threats and insults (“only a fool would pass this up,” “I can only give you this deal today”), incentives (“Act now and get a free dairy cow”), plays for sympathy (“how can I feed my children with a profit margin that slim?”) and affected offense (“I can’t believe you’d think I’d cheat you!”). These tricks come in all guises, and played well, they bear the stamp of legitimacy, but using the trump card I get to later you can strip away a lot of the pretense.

You’re not helpless before these tricks, but you must expect them. Salespeople and negotiators will use these tricks on you. But in many cases, a professional negotiator will be just as prone to fall for them as you are, because they’re used to being in the advantaged position. You can use these tricks on them, too. After all, everybody’s human.

The flipside of number two is that people can get sidetracked and pooch a deal for reasons having nothing to do with the deal itself. Perhaps they don’t like your tone, or your presentation, or something you say or do hits one of their emotional hot-buttons and they forget why you’re talking in the first place. Being on the lookout for such things is a non-sneaky way to give you a bargaining edge: when your partner gets off track, pull them back on track in a way that makes them feel like a valued party. Win/win, and none of the ethical grayness that bugs people about traditional sales techniques. Good feelings at the negotiating table almost always result in more favorable terms for the party held in greater esteem.

Trump Cards
I spoke in earlier installments about how negotiation is a game. Like all games, it has trump cards–two of them, in fact, which are in play in every negotiation (there can be others that are context-dependent. I’m only talking about the two that are always present).

The first of these is the signed contract. Once there is ink on the vellum, the deal is done, and the terms laid out in the contract are the terms the parties are bound to. Further disputes are resolved by reference to the contract–and the language of the contract–not your unspoken “understanding”–is what trumps.

Yes, I know that some contracts are illegal, and can be gotten out of, but it’s a bad idea to depend on a contract’s breakability when you go into it. First, it’s an expensive strategy–see the previous installment Everybody Knows Peggy Lee for a look into how difficult it can be to break a bad contract or enforce a contract on a business partner. Second, signing a contract you don’t intend to live up to (or hope to get out of if something better comes along) is an unethical and frankly shitty way to behave–and if you don’t have ALL your p’s and q’s in order, it can get you into serious legal trouble. Words like “liar” “cheat” “dishonest” and “fraud” tend to spring readily to mind, and those are words that bad reputations (and long prison sentences) are made of. (There are ethical reasons to break a contract, and legal ways to do it, which I’ll deal with in a later chapter. What I’m talking about here is making a habit of signing contracts you hope to be able to break later, or contracts you don’t intend to live up to. It’s better not to get into contracts like that in the first place).

But when it comes to negotiation before the contract is signed, there is another trump card, and it’s far more powerful than most people imagine.

The Ultimate Trump Card
At any time before you actually sign a contract, you are at the bargaining table. And, so long as you are at the bargaining table, there is one word that trumps all of them:

“No.”

And until your ink is on the page, there is no deal. There is only the prospective deal. Despite what salespeople or experienced negotiators will tell you when you’re at the table, you do have the right to walk away at any point before the deal is signed. Always. No exceptions.

When we’re two years old, we know how to say “no,” and we say it a lot. By the time we hit teenage years, we’ve been so thoroughly trained out of it that the adults around us spend a lot of time and money trying to teach us how to say it all over again (“Say no to peer pressure!” “No means no!”)–but they don’t want to actually hear it from us, and most of them don’t know how to say it themselves when they’re faced with someone of superior social standing.

Nonetheless, “No” is a powerful word. If you say “no,” there is no deal–and if you’re willing to walk away from the deal and not look back, it goes a long way toward evening the balance of power in an unbalanced situation. But here’s the thing: unless you’re really good at this, you can’t bluff. If you bluff, and your bluff is called, your leverage is gone.

There’s two reasons this trump card works:
First, you can’t be forced to sign a bad contract. You can be pressured, cajoled, emotionally blackmailed, shamed, guilted, and bribed, but you can’t be forced. If you say “no” and mean it, all the pressure in the world won’t work. If you say “I will not sign a contract with this clause” and you mean it, then the person you’re negotiating with will sense it. If the provision is one they’re willing to sacrifice the deal for, you’ll go your separate ways–but if the provision is less important to them than doing the deal, they’ll cave (either by capitulating fully or offering a compromise).

Second, as mentioned earlier, it’s human nature in a negotiation to get into the mindset that the deal must be made. In most cases, the person you’re negotiating with will be in this mindset–and if you’re willing to say no, then you’re not a prisoner to the same mindset. Sure, you want the deal (otherwise, why negotiate?), but the world is a big place, and there is almost always a better deal. If you walk away from this car, you can walk into another dealership. If you walk away from this publishing contract, there are literally hundreds more companies you can deal with (and the fact that someone made you an offer is often something you can use to lure another deal quicker than the first one came your way).

To reiterate: In most cases, there is NO SUCH THING as a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

There are some exceptions to this, though. There are some, very few, once-in-a-lifetime deals, like an offer to direct Lord Of The Rings.

Peter Jackson was offered this deal, and it’s a fair bet that there will never be another production of LOTR in his lifetime (or at least while he’s young enough to have the energy to do a project that big). It was worth it to him to take an unfavorable deal–but even a once-in-a-lifetime chance was not so important that he couldn’t say “no.” He did say “no,” several times, which is why the deal took five years to broker in the first place, and it took another eight years for New Line to convince him to do The Hobbit.

The Problem of Need
There is a reason aside from conditioning, though, why most people never think to say “no.” They feel like they need the deal.

The trouble with need is that, when you need a deal, chances are you’re gonna get screwed. But when I say “need” I’m not talking about material requirements. Objective, material need may exist, sure, but if an objective need (or strong desire) didn’t exist on some level, you wouldn’t be trying to do business.

No, I’m talking about felt, emotional need. That thing that impels you beyond reason, that thing that gives you the fear that if you don’t get this deal, then all is lost. You’ve missed your big shot, or you’re going to miss out on something great. These two kinds of need are not obviously connected.

You may, for example, really need a car–your old one is dead, and you have to commute, and you can’t afford a rental for more than a week (or less). But that doesn’t mean you need this car. Unless you’re in the middle of Africa with only one neighbor who has only one car for sale, then you have the freedom to shop around, no matter how much of a rush you’re in. Cars are the third biggest contracts that most people will enter into (coming in slightly behind houses and spouses), so it’s very important to separate the fact that you need a car from the felt need for a car.

Or, you might have your first publishing contract in front of you, and it’s your lifelong dream and longtime disciplined pursuit to sell a book to a publishing house. You’re so close you can taste it. Your felt need puts you in a very bad bargaining position.

Or, a situation I’ve been in, you’ve sunk a lot of money and years of your life into making a film, and you’re offered a chunk of change and a distribution deal to finish. You really feel the need in this case, trust me. And if you let that need rule you, you’re going to get screwed (in my case, the deal was bad and had long term negative costs attached, so I walked).

But if you master your need, keep your eyes on the objective aspects of the deal, and control your sentimental reactions, you might just be willing to say “no.” And if you can really, honestly, truly walk away, then you have the superior bargaining position–even if the other guy has more money, bigger lawyers, and more experience.

It’s your signature they’re after. Refusing to grant it is the ultimate veto power. Use it wisely.

Next time: You CAN Fight City Hall

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!

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!

However, it IS coming in the next week or less!

All the original writing for Free Will is now done. I have a few days of continuity tweaking ahead of me, and then some cutting, but it really is now all over but the shouting.

New equipment for the studio arrives this week, and I’ll be resuming production on everything in two weeks after I give things a proper shakedown and take a day or two off.

What does this mean for you?

Predestination and Free Will paperbacks (and Free Will ebook) in June. New episodes of Sculpting God in June. New episodes of Free Will starting in July, and continuing through to the end of the book.

It’s been a marathon–two years of work plotting and researching, and four solid months of aggregated writing time over those two years.. Final count: 212k words. Manuscript page count: 848. (Don’t worry, that will shrink as I shake out the continuity).

Time to crack the champagne!

My friend Danny Schade has now soundtracked two and a half books for me over the last couple years. For Predestination, he composed upwards of nine hours of music, and it made such an impression that people started immediately clamoring for versions they could listen to without the story talking over it.

A year ago, Schadey came out to ArtisticWhispers where he and I brought in veteran producer Mary Mason, and the three of us proceeded to rework the music into an album. In that first glorious weekend, we culled those original nine hours down to nineteen emblematic tracks with a running time target of between fifty minutes and an hour. Then, over the year since, in stolen moments, Schadey composed and recorded new material and arrangements at his home base in Colorado, while we here in California re-mixed, produced, sweetened, polished, and sometimes re-orchestrated the original material, blending the old with the new to bring Schadey’s audio vision snapping to the fore. The result is one we now proudly present to you, for the first time anywhere: A one hour instrumental genre-spanning rock opera. Predestination: The Soundtrack.

Available now as a DRM-free MP3 download.

Also, don’t forget that the novel which started it all is now available as an ebook, with all new scenes and other material to deepen the world and set you up for Free Will, which is coming in June. Get it now for Kindle, Nook, and for all other readers on Smashwords. And, of course, if you like the artwork, you can get a signed and numbered limited edition poster print for your private gallery.

And remember…
…It isn’t whether you win or lose. It’s how you rig the game.

Mondu, once an AI designer at the top of the Nigerian IT industry, needed to escape from a life that was eating him alive. He found refuge as a shopkeeper in the depths of the Amazon, at a unique resort. It’s a preserve for all forms of Amazon life–reptiles, mammals, and human and material culture. No modern technology allowed.

It’s the kind of place where some people come here to disappear.
And others come to hunt them.

Also available as an ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

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.

You’ve heard the story of Adam and Eve? Don’t be so sure. The Bible doesn’t tell the whole story, but if you look closely you see where something has been removed. First, God creates “man” male and female, and then, a few verses later, he creates woman again, this time from Adam’s rib. Where did the first woman go?

If you’ve ever read the Babylonian Talmud, you know. She was kicked out of the Garden of Eden for not being properly deferential, and she went on to become quite notorious in her own right. A sexual predator, a dark goddess, a spurned woman, and the first feminist, this is her story in her own words.

Lilith.
Also available as an ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

“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.

When last we left Rick, he was having a pleasant–if confusing–day. But will it last?

Find out, in the conclusion to We Create Worlds.

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, pushin