random observations

This is awesome

This (via Isobel Carr) is a very funny article in Cracked (and, not to display my advanced years, but who the hell ever expected Cracked to be an exciting and original source of humor in the digital age? When I was a kid, it wasn't even the better of the two Mad knockoffs) that is also very true.

He brings up writing:

Being in the business I'm in, I know dozens of aspiring writers. They think of themselves as writers, they introduce themselves as writers at parties, they know that deep inside, they have the heart of a writer. The only thing they're missing is that minor final step, where they actually fucking write things.

But really, does that matter? Is "writing things" all that important when deciding who is and who is not truly a "writer"?

For the love of God, yes.

And he lists all the ways you can ignore criticism (take it as an insult, shoot the messenger, focus on tone to avoid content, pretend improvement is selling out). It pretty much rocks.

Amazon vs. blind and deaf school kids--hmm, could be a PR problem

Apparently there was a protest by the National Federation for the Blind at Amazon headquarters, because its proprietary Mobi format is not as accessible as it could be. They've really got Amazon by the short hairs on this one because the company is trying to promote its e-books in schools. (The ADA? What's that?)

I'm glad to see people putting the screws into the e-book providers, because e-books have such great potential to make so many more books accessible to the visually impaired--no need for special formats or expensive Braille editions. I mean, I understand someone not wanting to cough up the money to create a Braille version of their book, but if it's a matter of making Mobi files compatible with plug-in Braille displays so that blind and deaf kids can learn at school--come on, they can do that. Do they really want to be the bad guy in the latest remake of The Miracle Worker?

"Effectuation"--I like it!

In my last post, I cited a Wall Street Journal story that mentioned what Saras Sarasvathy calls "effectuation," which is a thought process used by successful entrepreneurs.

I thought what was there was pretty insightful, so I wanted to look up more. Unfortunately Sarasvathy is an academic, so most of her stuff is wildly expensive and unavailable at the libraries in my area. (Let's hear it for those academic presses! I hope they finish going under soon!)

Still, there's a Web site about effectuation, this article in Inc., and there are excerpts of Sarasvathy's work around--parts of her book can be read here, for example. And a nice definition of effectuation (contrasting it with causation, which is how managers at large corporations tend to think) can be found here. It reads:

Causation rests on a logic of prediction, effectuation on the logic of control

In her book, she lays out five principles success entrepreneurs tend to rely on. These are all principles focused on things these people control, rather than abstract or expert notions of what ought to work. They are:

1. The "bird in the hand" principle: You use what you have.

2. The affordable-loss principle: You plan depending on what you can afford to lose.

3. The crazy-quilt principle: Similar to the bird in hand, but it applies to people--if you can get someone to help you out with X, then you focus on doing X, instead of trying to do Y.

4. The lemonade principle: When life gives you lemons . . . you "leverag[e] surprises rather than trying to avoid them."

5. The pilot-in-the-plane principle: You are in the driver's seat, and what you want to do and are good at is more important than, say, what genre of book is the most commercial or what marketing strategy worked for somebody else.

I think these are all good, and many of them are especially applicable to writers, who really are the pilot in the plane!

To focus on one for a moment: The affordable-loss principle puts a name on a phenomenon I've certainly noticed--when people focus on the potential for success, they sometimes decide not to do anything, because of course there's never any guarantee that something will be successful. Or, they decide to take some insane risk, because they're blinded by their dreams of bestsellerdom.

But if you focus instead on the (REALISTIC) price you will pay for failure, then that helps you make better decisions: You will risk what you can afford to lose. That helps you avoid paralysis on the one side, and ruin on the other.

My observation about successful indie writers is that they tend to experiment and to keep experimenting until they find what works. If you never do anything, you can't ever figure out what works; if you bankrupt yourself, you'll take yourself out of the game too soon to succeed.

Nothing is really wasted

If you haven't noticed, I haven't written in a while, primarily because life circumstances are not allowing it.

The funny thing is, this off time has resulted in my figuring out some plot problems in Trials that were bedeviling me, and gave me some good ideas for making the book's climaxes more climatic. So this "wasted" time, this time not spent writing, has actually turned out to be really beneficial, and when I finally get back to writing (which I will), I will do so feeling newly excited about my book.

That got me thinking about how very few things are truly wasted. For example, I "wasted" a good deal of money marketing at sci-fi conventions--and indeed, from a marketing perspective, that money was very poorly spent. But from a professional-development standpoint? Well, I probably wouldn't be doing an audiobook right now were it not for the money "wasted" at GeekGirlCon.

And remember that very successful indie writer I met earlier? This person initially put tremendous effort into social media, garnering gazillions of Twitter and Facebook followers, and then discovered that those followers were not their actual audience.

What did this writer do? Well, they started a business promoting indie books. It turns out that having a business that promotes lots and lots of other people's books affords excellent opportunities to promote your own as well!

While having big social-media presence among authors might not have directly led to sales, I'm sure it helped to build this book-promotion business--which did lead to quite a lot of sales.

You just never know. Crabby McSlacker, who just produced a book based on her Cranky Fitness blog, writes: 

I said goodbye to Cranky Fitness back in the beginning of 2010, with no plans to return. I had tried to turn it into a part time job, but alas, couldn't get quite enough ad revenue to swing it.  But I left the blog up, and checked back in every quarter or so with an update... just in case.  Then after a year and a half (an eternity in blog time) I missed it too much.[. . .] Plus I'd reinvented myself as a Life Coach and figured it might make sense to use Cranky Fitness to let people know about that.  Quitting back in 2010 was totally the right thing to do! And yet, so was returning.[. .  .]

Did I regret all the time I'd spent on Cranky Fitness the day I quit?  You betcha!  Do I regret it now? Not one bit.  Life is weird that way.

Before you think this is all mushy Pollyannaish goo, it turns out that a willingness to be a little wasteful, as well as a willingness to work with what you have (which includes the results of previous "wasted" efforts) are both traits of successful entrepreneurs. According to the Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):

Research by Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia, suggests that learning to accommodate feelings of uncertainty is not just the key to a more balanced life but often leads to prosperity as well. For one project, she interviewed 45 successful entrepreneurs, all of whom had taken at least one business public. Almost none embraced the idea of writing comprehensive business plans or conducting extensive market research.

They practiced instead what Prof. Sarasvathy calls "effectuation." Rather than choosing a goal and then making a plan to achieve it, they took stock of the means and materials at their disposal, then imagined the possible ends. Effectuation also includes what she calls the "affordable loss principle." Instead of focusing on the possibility of spectacular rewards from a venture, ask how great the loss would be if it failed. If the potential loss seems tolerable, take the next step.

What edge are you cutting?

I recently read Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model by model/sociologist Ashley Mears. It's an interesting, if rather dryly-written, book about the economics and culture of fashion modeling. (And I was surprised reading it to realize that I know the male model "Michel"--he comes off as way more of a freak in that book than he is in real life, I think because English is not his first language. If you write nonfiction, please note how simply changing someone's name is not nearly enough to protect their identity.)

Anyway, Mears points out that there are two major schools of modeling: Commercial modeling (catalogs, advertisements) and editorial modeling (fashion shows, magazine shoots).

Commercial modeling is seen within the industry as, you know, commercial. Hot babes do well. But it's also regarded as Not Art--the idea is to appeal to Middle America, not challenge it. You or I probably have just as good an eye for a commercial model as anyone in the industry.

Editorial modeling is seen more as an art form. Those seriously bony girls with light-green, shiny skin and no eyebrows? They are editorial models. They are considered high fashion and on the cutting edge. While commercial models are pretty and sexy, editorial models are edgy, avant-garde, belle laide, and many other French terms for funny-looking. While commercial models are supposed to appeal to Middle America, editorial models are supposed to prove that whoever is trumpeting them is a true artist, with a unique and fabulous eye.

Which, as Mears points out, means that editorial models are suppose to appeal to other people in the industry.

Given how cutting-edge editorial models are supposed to be, how they are supposed to challenge conventional notions of beauty, which group do you think is more diverse?

. . . ?

Commercial models. Yuppers! People actually do market testing with commercial models, and it turns out that Middle America is actually a pretty diverse place! If you're pretty and sexy, no one cares much what your racial or ethnic background is!

Editorial models, in contrast, tend to be white, white, white. And really anorexic. (Apparently there are no really good non-white models in existence. It's kind of funny to watch the RAGE boil out of Mears' academic prose in response to that one.)

It turns out that if you have this small little gaggle of people who all socialize together and who are all constantly judging each other's taste, that taste becomes really homogenized--even if these are people who pride themselves on seeing the world differently!

I think that's a big part of why you get homogeny in movies and commercial books, too--it's not just the financial expectations that make everyone in the industry seek to produce clones of the latest hit. It's that tendency to move as a herd--everyone's in the same city, they have worked or will work together, and they do tend to socialize together. Consciously or not, they don't want to piss each other off, and that makes even their "edgy" decisions very, very safe--within their world, anyway.

Gurus

The other day I was talking about an article about Hugh Howey, and Jim Self mentioned how nice Howey's humility was. And it was nice, because Howey freely cops to not really having anything to do with Wool taking off--it just did, so he did his best to encourage it. It actually kind of annoys him because he put much more effort into promoting his other books, and the one novella he didn't promote got all the love.

The reason that was so nice to read is that there's a lot of advice out there, and sometimes you wind up dealing with people who feel their success means that they know what's best for everybody. And many writers really want that--they want someone with all the answers, who can look at their book and give them some simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom.

With someone like John Locke, it goes even further, and you get sold a book with a simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom (although he left out some bits). Or maybe the person wants to sell you some services to enact this simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom. Or maybe they want you to buy those services from their cousin (who is certainly not kicking back a piece of the action).

And you'd be a fool not to pay for that, right? I mean, after all, this person sold a bazillion copies, and who are you? It's a simple plan, and it magically guarantees bestsellerdom--what's not to like?

I would point out two things:

Thing #1: It has, alas, never been uncommon in the world of publishing for people to realize that there are a lot of folks out there who dream of becoming a bestseling writer, and that all those people sure do have a lot of money floating around in their pockets. The fact that a person may have a legitimate and lucrative business (as an agent, a publisher, or yes, even as a bestselling writer) doesn't mean that they're necessarily inclined to let all that lovely money go.

Thing #2: Nobody can ever EVER EVER predict what books will become bestsellers! NOBODY!!! NOBODY can MAKE a book into a bestseller--EVER. The streets of publishing are littered with the corpses of executives who thought that they could. If God himself appeared in the sky in his fiery glory and said to me, "Mary Sisson, I can guarantee that your next book will be a bestseller," I would laugh and laugh, and then feel really bad that so many people believed in this guy for so long. Overpromising is the mark of a scammer.

The "I sold all these books!" card is actually not all that rare these days. It's really wonderful that so many people have been able to make self-publishing work for them, but if you dig down and try to find the "secret" to their success, you will find:

Some think you should offer free books, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should offer 99-cent books, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should advertise, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should use KDP Select, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should have your book available everywhere, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should be open to traditional-publishing deals, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should do giveaways and prizes, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should use social media, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should blog, and some think you shouldn't.

What do they have in common? All those people can point to their copious sales and say, "I'm an expert." It's the story of the blind men and the elephant.

Although it can be hard to remember this, it's actually a very good thing that there are several possible paths to success in self-publishing, instead of just one. It reminds me of the best advice I've ever seen regarding exercise: What is the very best, very healthiest exercise possible, the one that will get you the most fit? The exercise you actually do. If it works on paper and doesn't work for you, it doesn't work.

I mentioned before that I like Lindsay Buroker's approach. But I should also mention that I don't try to be her. Lindsay hires out just about everything. I hire out almost nothing! She likes to focus on her writing, and indeed her success is probably in no small part due to her copious output. I've already spent years experiencing the joys of writing seven fucking days a week, and it makes me happier to finally figure out why none of my mix tapes ever came out right.

With Buroker, 1. if it makes her want to hang herself, she doesn't do it, and 2. she's willing to try different things. I think those two elements are common to the vast majority of writers who have found success self-publishing. The willingness to explore, to find one's own path, to keep experimenting is really crucial.

It's also a lot harder to do than glomming onto someone's simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom. It's easy to be a child and get led by the hand. It's harder to be an adult.

"I’m an author and I’m not good about this stuff"

Passive Voice has a post on Penguin suing authors for not delivering books that they received advances for. Obviously Penguin is a troubled company, and suing is kind of an odd decisions, since unless the advance was huge, suing costs more than just writing it off as a loss.

But forcing people to feel sympathy for Penguin is...Elizabeth Wurtzel! She gave an interview with NPR that contains the hilarious line:

I think at some point they did send me a letter about this. I mean, I think it’s one of those things that I probably should have dealt with and didn’t because I’m an author and I’m not good about this stuff.

She then goes on to say that Penguin shouldn't sue her, because having a relationship with her (you know, the kind of relationship where they give her $33,000 and she give them bupkis) is worth so much more. Sooooo much more!

The whole "I'm an author and I'm not good about this stuff" bit is especially implausible because, as Peter Winkler pointed out, Wurtzel used to be a lawyer. She also graduated from Harvard, was a journalist before getting fired for plagiarism, and pretended to be a lawyer before she actually was one! A woman of many talents, it seems.

And, you know, many problems, most of which appear to stem from her having an ENORMOUS sense of entitlement. Still, that attitude that if you are an author and an artiste, then you don't have to worry about piddly little crap like, I dunno, actually writing books is one that obviously has some traction with people who aren't as pathologically self-indulgent as Wurtzel.

It's an attitude that traditional publishing has encouraged--you don't ask authors to deliver clean files because they'll think it's beneath them. You keep the authors removed from the publishing process, that process remains an intimidating mystery to them, and then they won't run out and self-publish. Everybody wins--as long as "everybody" doesn't include writers or readers.

One of the many things I like about self-publishing is that it forces authors to not be snotty little prima donnas about everything--I mean, you can be, but it's going to cost you. Explicitly. Don't feel like leaving out that junk code? Hope you feel like paying a formatter two or three times as much as you would otherwise! Don't want to think about how you're going to position your book to readers? Get ready for poor sales and angry reviews by people who feel misled! Too brilliant to worry about the "technical" details of spelling and grammar? Be prepared to have many, many readers fail to understand your genius!

Nobody wants to watch you flagellate yourself

(OK, fine, I lived in NYC, I realize that there are people who DO want to watch you flagellate yourself. But there aren't very many of them, and do you really want to encourage that sort of thing?)

There is a comedic television show I recently discovered, and I liked it so much that I got the DVDs, in no small part because I wanted to watch the commentary and get some insight into how such a delightful show was created. And I thought that the show would likely have decent commentary because it was created, written, and directed all by the same guy, who was also the guy doing the commentary. Sounds promising, right?

But, no. Nooooo. Nonononono. Turns out that this guy is one of these self-flagellating writers, the sort who has decided that the best way to head off any criticism about his work is to hate every last aspect of it with a virulent passion himself. And apparently I am a stupid asshole with absolutely no discernment whatsoever, because if I had any, I would never have liked the show--in fact, the fire of my loathing for that show would have immolated the very Earth itself.

Seriously, do you think that sort of thing is pleasant to listen to? Not only did I come out of it feeling like my taste had been repeatedly insulted, but I felt really horrible for anyone who has to work with this guy. There's one scene containing this priceless bit of physical comedy, and he shuts up to watch it for about a second, and then he screams because (brace yourself) there's a poster on the wall in a funny place.

Given that kind of supportive workplace atmosphere, I'm amazed the entire cast and crew didn't commit suicide.

I've seen this sort of thing before--people being unrelentingly negative about their work--and it's always extremely unpleasant. There's no point to it: If I like the work, it's insulting and depressing, and if I don't like the work, it doesn't help to listen to someone beat themselves up about it. (For example, I didn't care for that fellow's commentary, but when he started whinging on at the end about how awful his commentary was, shockingly enough that didn't change my opinion about it.)

Of course I go through periods of feeling like I can't produce anything good--in fact, that happens reliably whenever I'm about to release a work. But I know what that is, so I don't wallow in it. And I especially don't wallow in it in public.

Why not? Well, for one thing, I obviously don't like reading or listening to that sort of thing, so I'm not going to impose it on others. But the other thing is that I have sense of purpose about this blog--this blog is to help writers.

To my way of thinking, it's helpful to say, "Yes, I made a mistake and am learning from it, or I'm unhappy with this part of the book and have to fix it, or I'm nervous and it's affecting my judgement," because everyone deals with that--and I think it's important for writers to realize that it's normal to do things like make mistakes or suddenly doubt the worth of your entire output. These things happen, you deal with them, and then you move forward.

Acting like it's the end of the world--"This is imperfect!!! AIIIIGGGGGHHHH!!! MY ENTIRE LIFE'S WORK IS RUINED!!!!! RUINED!!!!!!!!! MY DREAMS ARE DESTROYED!!!!!!!!!"--is supremely unhelpful, both to me personally and to anyone reading this blog who might be influenced by it. And you do have to think about how your words will affect others: I never want to do to anyone what William Shawn did to Jospeh Mitchell. Writers are dramatic and perfectionistic enough without my adding fuel to the fire....

I'm here!

Yes, I am back from my long trip to Foreignia--Peru, specifically.

It was a great trip; we never had to go to the hospital or even see a doctor, which was a serious relief. And the place is fantastic. The high point was, of course, Machu Picchu, which really lives up to its billing--fascinating ruins in a truly awesome natural setting.

Anyway, tomorrow Foolscap starts, so I should have some posts on that soon, assuming all the stuff I have to catch up on doesn't kill me first.

Lindsay Buroker (whose books kept me mightily entertained on that 8-hour plane trip) did a post on offering subscriptions to short stories, but the main thing that intrigues me is that she's thinking about strategies to diversify writers' income streams away from Amazon. (I'm assuming that it's not a coincidence that she has another recent post about selling ARCs directly to readers.)

Obviously, if you're just getting started, Amazon appears to offer the most powerful tools for getting noticed. (And both Buroker and M. Louisa Locke have good posts on maximizing the impact of Amazon exclusivity.) But I do feel that it's important to diversify revenue sources (and marketing venues) when you can, even though it may take more effort and be less rewarding than occasionally scheduling free days on KDP Select. If diversifying was easy, fewer people would get caught in the trap of their own expectations.

And Joe Konrath says that since phony reviews don't kill anyone, there's nothing wrong with them. Right. This is pretty much what you can expect from an on-line fight. "I am becoming increasingly shrill defending something that I would never, ever do! Just because I would never do it in a million years, ever, doesn't mean that it's wrong!! You're an asshole!!! Fuck you!!!!"

The only reason I bring this up is because Konrath's moral relativism takes a different spin in the world of law enforcement. The Federal Trade Commission determined in 2009 that, yes, "paying for positive reviews without disclosing that the reviewer had been compensated equates to deceptive advertising and would be prosecuted as such."

Now, do paid reviews kill people? No. That's why you can rest assured that you won't go to death row for doing it. Will you get fined? Will you have to wear an orange jumpsuit and pick up trash along the highway? Will an ankle bracelet become your latest fashion accessory? That depends entirely on how annoyed the FTC gets about this issue. Remember how I said that ethical behavior helps you to not get sued? It also helps you avoid nasty letters sent by the district attorney's office. Something to think about.

DAISY, DAISY, give me an answer, do

So I did a little poking around into DAISY, and I don't think I'm going to do it. It seems easy enough to convert something into DAISY--there are add-ons for Word and OpenOffice that will save something as a DAISY file--but once you have the file, what then? You can't put it up someplace yourself for people to buy--or if you can, they're keeping that information mighty quiet.

The other thing is that a lot of the things DAISY was designed to do, e-readers can do now. Kindles read books aloud, and apparently Apple devices can make Braille. If you're on Smashwords, someone can buy the .DOC version of your book and convert that into DAISY themselves, and hopefully soon they'll be able to do that with an ePub file. To be honest, I hope that DAISY becomes outdated and unnecessary as e-books become more adaptable.

Dribs 'n' drabs

The Passive Voice has a profile of the head of HarperCollins. There's a lot of self-serving nonsense but also some interesting nuggets: According to the article, more than half of HarperCollins' revenues on fiction books sold in the United States come from e-books, almost half of revenues from its Avon romance imprint are from e-books, and the company expects that more than half of all its fiction revenues will come from e-books within 18 months.

Note that these are revenues--i.e. the actual dollar/pound value of books sold--not the number of books sold. Since e-books usually sell for less than paper, that means people are buying more books--a lot more. Quoth the article: "While sales of HarperCollins's paper books are flat year on year at about £120m, according to Nielsen Bookscan, digital titles are up 250% and now account for 20% of UK income."

And this is a useful post from Crabby McSlacker on managing your time when you're working for yourself--the flip side of flexibility is lack of structure, which can be a challenge. Plus, she has pretty pictures from her vacation in Scotland!

And this is just really funny

The IT Crowd has led me to Richard Ayoade's other stuff, in particular Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. It's extremely funny--the idea is that Garth Marenghi is a horror writer who was popular enough in the 1980s that his publisher financed a TV show. A terrible, terrible show, which was "rediscovered" only recently. And Marenghi's a terrible, terrible writer, who, just like Anne Rice, is utterly convinced that he is a genius. Since I find Rice completely hysterical (oh, that works on many levels, doesn't it?), Marenghi was an easy one for me.

The DVD is available only in the UK format (boo! I'd buy it!), but this is from the extras and has a lot of publishing jokes in it. At the 4:02 mark, they even make a joke about returns.

Progress report

Back in the saddle! Wrote 1,600 words today.

After yesterday when I decided that I couldn't possibly write because I had to buy groceries, I realized that I was resisting my dharma.

Some people have a low tolerance for yoga-speak, but as someone with perfectionist traits, I find the philosophic elements of it tremendously helpful (and doing yoga is great if you sit all day). In this case, I found it more useful to think in terms of resistance than to think in terms of laziness, because let's face it, sometimes it's as much (if not more) work to not do something than it is to do it. If I cleaned the linoleum (which was really gross), then I'm not lazy, am I? I'm working hard, doing something very unpleasant! But what I'm really doing is the work of resistance. Likewise it's a form of resistance when I choose to focus on outcomes (or, as Dean Wesley Smith would put it, to focus on dreams instead of goals).

Writers and speculative politics

As you may have already heard, Gore Vidal has passed away. He was, of course, a very political writer, and I usually found his writing reasonably entertaining. But I didn't agree with much of what he wrote, and it wasn't a simple, "Oh, he's on THIS side of the liberal-conservative political divide and I'm on THAT side" kind of thing. It was because Vidal really embodied a way of political thinking that I think a lot of fiction writers tend to embrace: His was a speculative approach to politics.

What do I mean by "speculative"? Well, think of something that's happening (say, global warming), and then imagine that it becomes this HUGE problem that more or less renders the planet uninhabitable. Congratulations! You've just written Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as well as any number of other fine dystopian novels.

Is that likely what's going to happen with global warming? Hmmm.... Well, the nation's decision-makers are based in Washington, D.C., and lately summers in D.C. have been quite unpleasant. Winters haven't been a picnic, either. Oh, and hurricane season's getting worse and worse--that affects them, too. All the carbon in the air is acidifying the oceans and causing the oyster crop to fail, so if you like fine seafood, it's going to be a rough year. Meanwhile, in the country as a whole, there's a big drought, which is going to drive up the price of all kinds of food--and voters just LOVE it when that happens.

In short: Carbon air pollution is starting to cause some really annoying problems. When a type of pollution starts to become a hazard and a nuisance, people actually do have a pretty good track record of halting its production--this is why we haven't all died from lead poisoning or acid rain, even though we're all still living in cities and driving cars and whatnot.

But that's the economist/journalist view of the future: You know, the one that's profoundly grounded in reality and that acknowledges the power of small, incremental changes. If you ask me, "What do you think is going to happen?" and you are asking that about the real world, that's the kind of answer I'm going to give you.

Writers like Vidal (and many other fiction writers) don't think this way, because it's not just exciting or dramatic enough. Vidal loved conspiracy theories--those are fun! He loved this idea that the world was teetering on the brink of collapse!!! Nothing ever made him happy: An African-American is elected president (something he thought Americans were far too racist ever to do), and he said, “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon."

But while I really, really do not agree with Vidal's thinking as it applies to real life (if the choice is between changing out lightbulbs and committing suicide in a survivalist bunker, I'm gonna go buy me some CFLs), I can't argue that the speculative approach doesn't have value to the writer of fiction. I mean, Philip K. Dick made Gore Vidal seem like a calm and reasonable fellow. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell both wrote novels that they genuinely thought reflected what the future was going to be like. The imaginative habit of taking Trend X and extrapolating it to an extreme is key to speculative fiction--even fantasy creatures tend to be extensions of traits you see in yourself and other people. And what is an insane conspiracy theory other than a rip-roaring story?

Lessons from a polar expedition where five people died

Yeah, I'm reading The Worst Journey in the World, a memoir written by Apsley Cherry-Garrad (God, British names crack me up sometimes) about the Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole, where Robert Falcon Scott died along with four other people after reaching the pole a month after Roald Amundsen did.

I want to say that I realize that Scott's reputation during the 20th century went from unrealistically high to unfairly low, and I'm not trying to pile on here. (Honestly, I feel like before people criticize explorers, mountain climbers, and the like for poor judgement, they should first give sleep deprivation, hypoxia, exhaustion, and malnutrition a shot for a month or two and see how their mental processes hold up.) I also feel like people who run down Scott tend to valorize Amundsen for contrast, and he was hardly a perfect person.

Still, Cherry-Garrad's book--which was not written to be critical of Scott at all--is a really frustrating read, and I think it does contain lessons for authors trying to navigate this new world of publishing. (Hey, if I'm willing to do it with the Transformers, clearly nothing is a bridge too far for me.)

Lesson 1: Admit what you don't know. Scott had visited Antarctica ten years before on an earlier expedition. You'd think that would have been helpful, right?

Oh, no. Scott felt like he knew exactly what Antarctica was supposed to be like. The ice was supposed to be this way, the blizzards were supposed to be that way, the temperatures were supposed to be another way. They were all supposed to be exactly the way they were when he had visited Antarctica before.

The Terra Nova expedition spent almost a year in Antarctica before making the disastrous run for the pole. In that time, it became painfully obvious that the weather in Antarctica is totally unpredictable. It was colder-than-expected inland. Blizzards could crop up at any time. Local weather conditions were fantastically specific, so it could be sunny and warm in one spot, and two miles away there could be a blizzard. Also, it was considerably colder than it had been at any time during the previous expedition.

Now, I am the first to admit that it's hard to plan for, This is totally unpredictable!!! But they didn't seem to try. Instead they assumed that the weather during the run for the pole would be the way Antarctic summer weather is "supposed" to be--clear and relatively warm. They left depos of food rations on the assumption that people would be able to walk about 10 miles a day, every day.

So what happened when the support parties headed back north and ran into unexpected storms that slowed them down? They went hungry. What happened when the party that actually reached the pole headed back north, were going more slowly than planned, and ran into more unexpected storms? They died--11 miles away from a huge food cache.

Let's hope no one actually starves to death here, but do you understand why it makes me nervous when people with absolutely no track record of sales make financial plans based on the expectation that they will sell X many copies of their book? This is not salaried work: You do not get a regular paycheck every two weeks. As a new writer, you don't want to set up your financial life so that if you don't sell X copies your book each and every month, you go hungry. And you really don't want to be that tragic author who perishes in the snow six months or six years before sales finally start to kick in.

Lesson 2: Leave room to fail. Cherry-Garrad makes a big deal out of the fact that Scott wasn't just making a "pole dash"--he was trying to figure out what would actually work in the Antarctic.

So, for the run to the pole, they had motor vehicles, ponies, and dogs. Before his death, Scott even arranged to have mules brought down on a relief ship so that people could try them out, too.

The problem with all this was that Scott didn't give himself any room to have an experiment fail. The motor vehicles and the ponies didn't do well, and in neither case was that some big surprise. Dogs did much better (that's what Amundsen used), but Scott didn't have many dogs because he had packed so many motor vehicles and ponies.

I feel like Scott's motivation were very noble: He was hoping that motor vehicles would provide an alternative to using and killing animals. But in 1910 the reliability of motor vehicles was just not something you could bet your life on, even if you weren't on a polar expedition--cars were still hand-cranked at that point, for God's sake.

Using ponies was also a new and untested idea. And it basically killed Scott. That huge cache of food he died 11 miles away from? It was supposed to be 30 miles further south, but the ponies couldn't make it.

So, give yourself room to fail. If you have a great new marketing idea, that's swell--don't mortgage your home. Don't set yourself up for disaster. Remember--these are experiments, not certainties.

Lesson 3: Be honest and realistic about your goals. Remember how Cherry-Garrad said that the expedition was no mere pole dash?

Unfortunately, that's not how Scott saw it: He felt like the entire worth of the expedition depended on reaching the South Pole.

The actual run to the pole was not just a disaster at the end: It was a disaster the entire way. Those unexpected storms didn't just unexpectedly turn up on the way back north, they unexpectedly showed up and unexpectedly slowed the party on the way to the pole as well. Of course rations earmarked for later in the trip unexpectedly got eaten early, because everything was unexpectedly taking so much longer.

Seeing how all their planning was proving inadequate, did they abort the run for the pole while they still could? No, they did not.

Did Amundsen? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, he did. His first shot at the pole was aborted because of bad weather. It's not that he wasn't competitive (he was), but he also seemed to understand that sheer force of will would not get him to the pole and back alive--good weather would.

Amundsen was just more realistic, and he made a ton of compromises to get himself to the pole that Scott did not. Scott put his base camp in a location that was further from the pole and actually cut off from it for part of the year (!) because it was a better location for the many scientists in his party. Amundsen, in contrast, had almost no scientists in his party. Amundsen was doing a pole dash, period.

Now obviously we can argue that Scott was a nobler person who was dedicated to the ideals of science and all that. We can argue that Scott's "failed" expedition actually accomplished more that was useful than Amundsen's "successful" one. But the problem was that Scott defined success in a certain way (reach the pole!), but he wasn't really willing to acknowledge that (this is no mere pole dash!). As a result, he was ill-situated to actually reach his goal, and then he got desperate.

Honestly, I see that most often with writers who really, really want to be popular--they want big sales! and their name in lights! and fame and fortune! But they also want to write whatever they want, whether or not that's something anybody wants to read.

You can't, OK? Even with self-publishing, we're still operating in a market. Certain types of literature are more popular than other types of literature.

If your goal is to tell Danielle Steele to suck it, your abstract poetry is not going to get you there. I would guess that most people who write bestsellers think long and hard about what most people want to read before they write--I've certainly read and heard memorable interviews with ones who did.

If you don't want to write within those sorts of constraints, that's great--neither do I. But I also never assumed the Trang books would be big commercial sellers. In fact, the whole point of writing Trang for me was to move away from making Big Macs. I'm not going to freak out and do something stupid because there isn't a McSisson's on every corner with a sign proclaiming how many billions I have served--if I wanted that, I would have written a very different book.

Bigotry and writing

This is an interesting (albeit old--come on guys, it's a romance blog, you can't expect me to keep up) post by Isobel Carr on presenting villains who are members of minority groups in historical fiction. She notes that Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy, the villain is a Jewish moneylender. Although Heyer was apparently pretty anti-Semitic, Carr doesn't think the mere existence of the character is objectionable, since at that time and place most moneylenders were in fact Jewish, and successful moneylenders tend not to be soft and generous people.

But, writes Carr:

Where Heyer runs into problems in my opinion is in her actual on-the-page stereotypical depiction of [the moneylender] Goldhanger as a greedy, oily, and ultimately cowardly, Jew. Had he been an elegant, cool, hard-nosed businessman, I wouldn't have had the same negative reaction.

(Full disclosure: I was friends with Carr in high school, and yes, it's true, she has been doing historical reenactments her entire life.)

It's an interesting question for me because when I worked in educational publishing, I did a lot of books on Black history. So when I read or watch fiction (or fictionalized history) set in those eras, it's usually pretty annoying: Either you have stuff that's straight-up racist (Birth of a Nation); or you have a whole lot of whitewashing going on, where all the good guys are marvelously enlightened about discrimination (news flash--even abolitionists were, on the whole, incredibly racist); or you have works like Uncle Tom's Cabin where the victims of discrimination respond in an unrealistic saint-like fashion. (Like the Olaudah Equiano character in the movie Amazing Grace. This was an actual guy whose response to oppression was to, whenever possible, punch sombody out, and they turned him into this passive, weepy martyr.)

In some cases, I think people decide that it's simply too difficult to convey to a modern audience just how bad it was. For example, in the movie Amistad a woman commits suicide on a slave ship by jumping overboard. Totally unrealistic, because that kind of thing happened all the time, so the slave ships were set up so that you couldn't jump overboard. The grim truth is that slavers who weren't masters of forcible suicide prevention didn't stay in business long.

Amistad also features what was clearly the best-fed load of slaves ever to complete the Middle Passage. There's this impulse to be prescriptive to modern viewers--in that movie there was obviously a desire to portray Africans as beautiful, so they cast a bunch of underwear models as slaves. I've known many beautiful Africans, but I'm guessing they'd be a hell of a lot less beautiful after being chained to a shelf, starved, and abused for a few months--I know I would be.

This desire to be prescriptive is where you're getting this tit-for-tat, if-you-have-minority-bad-guys-you-must-have-an-equal-number-of-minority-good-guys thinking, which as Carr points out, is hard to do realistically in a historical romance (somehow your upper-class heroine is supposed have lots of friends from a group that is specifically excluded from her world).

I also think it can backfire. If beautiful underwear models can survive the Middle Passage with their looks intact, then slavery must not have been that bad, right? In a similar vein, you sometimes find the Embittered Minority Villain, who would be a good person were it not for all the discrimination they face. The problem I have with that is while it can be interpreted as Discrimination Is Bad, it can just as easily be interpreted as Members of This Group Are Dangerous and Should Probably Just Be Shipped Back to Wherever They Came From.

Maybe the problem is simply the two-dimensionality of it all. People are complicated, and their response to bigotry is equally complicated--especially if they're being isolated from another group. People like Benjamin Franklin and Lincoln Steffens who were publicly, openly, and horribly bigoted changed their minds later in life. Granville Sharp fought long and hard to end the enslavement of Africans, but he thought that Catholics should all be shot. Likewise, there were as many different responses to being enslaved as there were people enslaved: Frederick Douglass was infuriated by fellow slaves who so identified with their owners that they would argue and even fight with other slaves over who had the better one--and he took the opposite path.

Working with other kinds of artists

So, like I said, the panel I went to today (after finding the Magical Land of Free Parking--I'm telling you, a lot of good things happened today, but that was the highlight) was really interesting. The panel was: David Brin, Jennifer Brozek, Miss Amber Clark, Michael Ehart, and Dara Korra'ti. All of them cross art boundaries on a regular basis: Either they collaborate regularly, or they do more than one form of art themselves, or their actual job is to get people from different fields to work together.

They all agreed that one of the main problems is that people from different disciplines use different jargon, so that even when you're trying really hard to explain to people what exactly you want in words, you're going to fail. In fact, it can lead to what Brozek called "violently agreeing"--i.e. you both actually want the same thing, but you don't realize it because you're using different terms.

The answer: DRAW. Even Brin draws! "If you can't go ahead and show it, it will be misinterpreted," said Korra'ti.

Clark noted that another area for communication difficulties is when people have a large problem with the work (the overall tone or whatever) and instead of saying that, they name particular details they don't like. So Clark goes and fixes those little details, but it doesn't take care of the larger problem, so they go through round after round of little fixes until finally she figures out what the person actually wants. So, you know, if you just don't like the whole thing, be up front about that and save everyone a lot of time!

(I'll toss in some observations of my own: Publishing in particular seems to attract a lot of hedgehogs, so sometimes you had artists who basically did not read working with editors who had nothing but contempt for anyone didn't spend their spare time leafing through Finnegan's Wake. It was a bad mix--the editors didn't understand that, no, the artists probably hadn't read their deathless prose, and when they found that out the reaction was often quite insulting. So I would keep in mind that there are different kinds of intelligences in the world, that you can't expect everyone to think exactly the same way you do, and that just because someone doesn't have the same proficiencies as you do doesn't mean that they don't have equally good if not better proficiencies of their own.

Another problem was the assumption by some writer/editor types that the only reason visual artists ever do anything is to be cool and pretentious. I even knew people who assumed the overhead lights were always off in the art room because the artists were trying to be cool and pretty much having a party while on the clock. (It's because working that way is a lot easier on the eyes, hello.) They usually do have reasons to do what they do, and if you're willing to talk to them respectfully, they'll even tell you!

Yet another source of conflict was that writers and editors of prose tend to be somewhat more linear and organized thinkers--it helps their art to keep track of storylines and maintain continuity and all that. Visual artists tend to be less linear and more intuitive and kind of random, which helps their art--if you look at something like this, there is stuff from all over the place, but it all makes a kind of sense. If you are a more-linear thinker, dealing with someone who is less-linear can be disconcerting: They're running all over the place, their office is a pigsty, they keep changing the topic of conversation, it's utter chaos!! And I sometimes see the writer/editor types trying to rein the artist types in as though they were rambunctious children. Really, as long as deadlines are being met, let it slide. It's OK, and it's part of their process--if you really try to quash that, you'll make it so they can't do their job.)

Korra'ti is a musician (among other things) and noted that the digital revolution hit musicians first and "writers are next in queue." Some similarities: Nowadays literally anybody can release a song, and the challenge for listeners is to find something they like. How that filtering works in music nowadays is by having, say, fellow very secret member of the Illuminati Jay-Z work with you on your song--no more Prince making his name by doing one-man albums!

Korra'ti is also doing something very cool: She's working on what she calls a soundtrack for a book that combines reading of its highlights with songs. This idea really appeals to me--you could actually create something from the ground up that integrates song and story. Basically a musical in audiobook form!

So, today...

I went back to Westercon--that panel just sounded too interesting to miss, and indeed it was very interesting, so I'm going to give it its own post. (And I found The Secret and Magical Home of Free, Legal Parking near SeaTac. Shhh!)

I'm going to move the list of artists into its own post, too, both because that's probably more useful and because I realized that I had jotted down only the artists whose subject matter match my own planned titles--not so helpful to people who aren't me. I went back and took down the name of anyone who I thought was making stuff that would work on a book cover, and I'll look up their Web sites and add them if they appear to be actually selling art.

I got the final OK from GeekGirlCon and bought myself a paper trimmer.

And...dun-dun-duuuunh...I became organizer for the Seattle/Everett E-Publishing & Book Promotion Group, replacing Lindsay Buroker, who has moved out of state! Boy! It's like something out of The Secret: You muse about writers' cooperatives and groups, and you get one of your very own! Hopefully this won't drive me insane or consume all my time....

New stereotype!

OK, I've been at Westercon two days now, and I'm cranky. Why? Because my old-person stomach kept me up all night, and then my middle-aged-lady cats woke me up at the crack of dawn. (The sun was up, so why wasn't I?) And then, since Westercon is a con, today people kept assuming I was yawning and sleepy because I was up all night yiffing or something.

Anyway, last night as I was glamorously grabbing my stomach and wishing I was dead (because I am young! sexy! and exciting!), I realized that something was really bothering me about Jaye Manus' excellent post on not putting a bunch of weird formatting into your files. (To keep this from being a complete gripe fest--which, trust me, it's going to be--Manus also posted an invitation to send your source files to someone who is trying to develop software to automatically strip out the weird crap.)

What was bothering me was this: Why were people including all this weird crap in the first place? It's literally been decades since publishers set things in type--layout is all done on computers and has been for a very long time. Screwy codes mess up Quark just as badly as they mess up e-book conversions.

And then, of course, I remembered--it was always someone's job to yank out all the weird coding. A file would come in from a writer, and it would be all jacked up, and the very first thing that had to happen to it was that someone (usually a lowly assistant) would have to spent their day de-jacking it.

I would sometimes suggest that, hey, shouldn't we tell the writers that they're fucking everything up and making someone's life difficult by putting two spaces after every period or putting in a million tab characters and hard returns. Then maybe they wouldn't do it! Efficiency!

The answer, of course, was oh, no. Do not attempt to educate writers about publishing. The average writer is too dumb and too much of a prima donna to make minor changes in their habits that would save hours and hours of somebody else's time.

And there are writers who really embrace this concept, you know? These are the people who can't for the life of them produce a clean text file, even though it's probably easier to produce a clean one than a screwed-up one. This is how they wrote papers in college back in 1972, and they'll be damned if they're going to bother educating themselves or changing their ways, because they are writers, and their only job is to write.

Today, as I was groggily watching an ignorant and insensitive traditionally-published author act like a fool and an asshole, I realized that here is a new stereotype: The traditionally-published fool and asshole.

In the interest of not demonizing, I will note that I don't think all or even most traditionally-published writers are fools or assholes. But those who are seem to follow a particular pattern.

1. They are exceptionally ignorant. Exceptionally. This person opened the panel, which was about a fairly basic aspect of book production, by noting that they know absolutely nothing on the subject. They went on to state that they would probably be able to tell us only what their editor and agent say.

2. They spend 99% of their time bitching about how their agent and editor treat them. Their input is not welcome. They have no control. Bad decisions are made that have the potential to harm their book, and they are not allowed to stop or fix them. Their agent puts their editor before them. They are treated like a mildly retarded small child, and they resent it. If only some alternative business model existed, which allowed a writer complete control over their work. Too bad it doesn't!

3. They are convinced that self-published work must be crap. Oh, yeah. (And yes, I pushed back on that one. I was even fairly polite about it.) But apparently The Way of Self-Publishing is to half-ass it, because no self-published writer gives a shit about quality. At least, that what this author hears. You know: From their editor and agent and all the other good people at their publishing company. Who have no vested interest in this whatsoever.

Jesus Christ, I'm watching people beat themselves to death over quality, and this ignorant idiot has to blather on like they have the least fucking clue about anything--like they haven't put themselves in a position where they are at a very low risk of ever getting the least fucking clue about anything, because their agent and editor control all the information.

Ass.

And I'm so very sure Hugh Howey cries himself to sleep at night over the quality of his work.