On Exercise

I read the Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, almost every day. He often recommends things he finds on Amazon. Often as not, I'll check them out--particularly, authors. Some months back, he linked to a treadmill desk.

I have some experience with exercise equipment. I get excited about something I see advertised, then talk myself into buying it. I then spend a few weeks getting excited and using it faithfully. Then my ardor fades and it ends up unused, gathering dust in my basement.

My wife knows this and we have an agreement that if I spend more than a nominal amount, I need to involve her in the buying decision. Most of the treadmill desks I saw on Amazon were in the hundreds of dollars. When I broached the subject, she pointed out that I had a treadmill that I was not using. Hmmm. So, I started using the treadmill in hopes of getting an upgrade.

This notion of upgrades spilled over to the television I keep next to the treadmill. THAT I could and did buy. The next time I got on the treadmill, I noticed I was juggling remotes and had no space for them and the book I was reading and a pad for taking notes. I needed just a little space to put these things on.

Shortly thereafter I got out a tape measure. If I had just one foot just at the height over the treadmill, that would work. How wide? About three feet. But it would have to be stable. If I made the space L-shaped, it'd be a lot like a proper desk top and it would be stable if I have a couple feet by four feet on the right.

At this point, I started laying out how this desk top could be cut from a 4x8 sheet of plywood. But how would I hold this desk top up?  I help with the toddlers at church and they have these hand-made tables for the kiddos that are held up with 2x4s. So, I could make a framework of them and attach the desk top to this.

I spent the idle hours of a few days drawing this up and working out the simplest joinery I could think of. Simple, because I didn't want to exceed my limited carpentry skills. And I came up with a nice bill of materials.

One Saturday last spring I had breakfast with my friends, then went to Menard's, a local lumber yard. They sell 4x8 sheets of plywood that are already finished on one side. I snapped that up and a bunch of 2x4s, some 1x3s and a box of deck screws.

The hardest part was sawing the desktop into the proper L shape with a handheld circular saw and rounding the corners with a saber-saw. We used a sophisticated Maxwell-House coffee can gauge to get the curved corners to the right radius.

My across-the-back-fence neighbor did the hard parts for which I'm grateful. After that it was an easy matter of cutting boards to the right length and screwing them together according to plan.

Turned out that I miscalculated and needed one more 1x3. So, I didn't finish until the next day after I bought another board.

I didn't keep careful records, but I spent less than $100, one day of labor, and a lot of obsessive planning on the project.

All in all, I'd say I made a better investment in lumber and time than I have for any other exercise-related expenditure. I've been on the treadmill on most days for at least a half-hour. In fact, I wrote this while walking and standing on the treadmill.

It was a fairly straightforward project. If you'd like to do one like it, feel free to ask me anything. I'll post some more pictures here and on my facebook page.

This shows the desk as you stand on the treadmill facing forward. If you don't like the view, that's a problem.

This shows the strip of adhesive LED lights I bought to spruce up the appearance of the treadmill desk and maybe see the treadmill display better.

This shows how the desktop is held to the 2x4 legs which hold it up.

This shows how the rails at bottom and almost top keep the legs square. Everything was screwed together using deck screws.

This is looking right at the desktop. The pre-finished birch plywood is worth the $44 I paid for it.

This shows the treadmill under the desk.

I Used To Like X

I want you to fix in your mind your favorite artist. Make a list of all the things s/he did to make you like him/her. Let's suppose you like the way s/he puts words together. Or you like the way s/he provides insight into the human condition. Or you like that clever twist at the end of his/her short stories. Now, for the purposes of this essay we'll refer to this artist as X.

If I met you in a coffee shop and mentioned X, you'd wax rhapsodic about him/her and recite at least some of those things on that list that I asked you to make.

Now, suppose that you discover that wonderful creative person you had in mind was also a leader of the National Socialist Party. Or s/he was outed as a closeted KKK member.

I'm supposing that everyone reading this hates fascists and white supremacists. But if you don't, substitute something else that you hate. (It is an unfortunate trait of our society that we tend to identify mutually antagonistic classes of people and then we set at each others' throats.)

Armed with this additional factoid about X, let's return to the coffee shop and I ask you about X. Now what do you say? Perhaps you'll feel rather sheepish: regarding X's writing as a guilty pleasure, or perhaps denying any enjoyment of X's work.

Then imagine the next time you're in a bookstore and you see X's latest work on the shelf. Will you snap up a copy with the same fervor as before? And after you finish it, will you post a review that is as positive as before? Or maybe not, you don't want the taint of association with double-ungoodness.


If you are an artist, you won't want that taint, and you won't want to be identified with any demon groups. This is a matter of personal brand management. Though it is easy to eschew evil in its Nazi and White-Supremacist forms, it get tricky when you're a Republican looking at a Democrat artist, or vice versa. (That's why I'm a Whig. A pox on both your houses!)

A bit of controversy can be great fun as any fan of cismale gendernormative fascism or glittery hoohas can attest. If someone on one side says something ridiculous and someone on the other side responds with ridicule, pass me the popcorn. This explains why I like Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt.

It's easy to go too far as I've said about Ann Coulter. I'm not concern-trolling Mr. Correia or Mrs. Hoyt, because they have NOT gone too far. But I am not interested in tilting at every windmill. Unless you really enjoy slapping around idiots, there are some topics of conversation you might want to avoid. Some controversies are more interesting to me than they are to you, I want to shy away from those you'll find boring.

Let's return to your friend X. It is common in these busy times to go off half cocked. Internet mobs are like traditional mobs in that low-information people respond to half-truths or lies with great passion. Thus we may find that X really isn't really a Nazi, but s/he said something that could be construed as such. Or maybe X's art was wholly independent of his/her Nazism.

If you liked X because of his/her art, and you discover a taint of something evil in X, you should remember the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every person. You should be slow to judge until you've got all the facts. And checked them. And you should temper your judgment with understanding.

I fondly remember the Tarzan and John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My enjoyment thereof is alloyed somewhat by accusations of racism, but I cannot deny he could spin a great adventure yarn. Though I used to like Edgar Rice Burroughs, I should not dismiss his work.

Create A Snazzy Cover

When you publish an ebook you're going to need a cover.

I like pretty girls and I won't balk at buying a book with a pretty girl on the cover. Obviously, I'm not into Regency Romance novels, but if I were I'd be on the lookout for books with a pretty boy on the cover--some dashing Captain back from the war in a pirate shirt. Maybe holding a sword and looking swashbuckling.

And a girl holding a sword looking swashbuckling is appealing, too. I'm not trying to be a sexist jerk here. I'm just saying that your ebook will have a market and that market will respond to the cover of your book.

Sex sells. If you are gnashing your teeth at the intimation that an attractive female might be reduced to an object of commerce, you might take comfort that attractive males can be so objectified, too. And this is the problem with using sex to sell: you can easily offend unawares or unintentionally. Tread tastefully.

If you are a closet Rembrandt, then all you need do is dash off a pleasing study of your main character doing something interesting--hopefully with a gun or swashbuckling. Sadly, I am not a closet Rembrandt, or Picasso, or anybody else. My art is best pinned on refrigerators with little magnets.

With this in mind I set about finding an artist. Here's what I did and it has worked out quite well for me: I went to Google image search and put in "steampunk" because I was looking to publish a Sherlock Holmes story. I confined the search to deviantart.com. After paging through a few hundred images, I found one I liked. Then I looked at the artist's portfolio and liked what I saw. (I recommend you look for a particular "style" that you find agreeable.)

A few moments later I emailed Joanne Renaud asking if she might do the cover art for The Aristotelian. She would and she quoted a price I found fair. We drew up a simple contract to do the art and get paid. PayPal provided a satisfactory conduit for payment. Joanne and I live in different states, but we were able to make effective use of email, facebook & twitter to convey my vision to her and to get back drafts.

Your publishing project may include a different mix of specialists, and you should learn to work effectively with each business partner. I recommend that you keep the questions "what" and "how" clear in your mind. You own the "what" and your specialist owns the "how."

I regard Joanne as a business partner and I value her opinions about artsy stuff. I would propose ideas and ask if they worked artistically. I had a devil of a time describing what a Lasanian skycycle looked like and I ended up googling images and saying "like this, but elliptical." I suppose that had we been able to share sketches on the back of a napkin, it might have gone faster.

You should learn to do rough sketches and storyboards. More on that later...

It is important to share a clear vision of what you want to the cover to look like. I recommend going through bookstores and finding the covers that jump out at you. I suggest standing about 20 feet away from a shelf of books and then look at their covers. If they pop out visually, consider something like them. Then go to Amazon, where most people will be making the buying-decision for your book, and look at what works for you. And understand why it works for you.

I devised a sort of "grammar" of what the big-money book designers are doing and I tried to implement something like that in Finding Time. In the case above, I took inspiration from both Sarah Hoyt's Darkship Thieves and also Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

Ender's Game is an interesting book-cover-study. Do a Google image search on the cover. You'll see how cover design has evolved in the last three decades. The cool, angular space ships and funky typefaces of the '80s have been replaced with something that's more personal and more iconic.

You'll want to think a bit about your cover lettering. It should mesh with your story. I picked a Trajan typeface for Finding Time because it was more "timeless" and I used an Algerian typeface for The Aristotelian because it was more "Victorian."

But don't do what I tell you, do what you think works for you.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Axe-grinding vs Story-telling

Unless you receive a Federal subsidy large enough to blind you to things like sustainability, liberty, and basic mathematics, you might not like the direction the USA has taken in the last decade or so. Or you might think that the government exists to tax your enemies, subsidize your friends and get large enough to make sure nobody can escape its clutches.

The citizens of a representative democracy are responsible to know what its gubmint is doing and replace corrupt rascals with just statesmen. The only problem is that both parties prefer to put no one but weenies on the ballot.

Let's be clear: I think the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democrat Party.

This poses a problem for the writer who is also a citizen: what do do about this?
 

I've seen Sarah Hoyt, Ric Locke, and Larry Correia tackle this problem in turn. If you like guns, you can get an articulate argument for training responsible citizens in gun handling, and defense so that the crazed murderer can be immediately confronted with a violent response. (When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.) And if you hate Communists, Sarah Hoyt can regale you with tales of Portugal under the left. I have no doubt that if Ric Locke or Robert Heinlein were alive to day they'd be doing likewise.

I have friends whose politics are as contradictory to mine as night is to day. And they've poured their politics into their writing making all the villains like me and all the heroes like them. This makes their stories as readable as a Jack Chick tract. Tolerable if you agree, intolerable if you do not. The ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is over ten to one.

I've also seen slightly more sophisticated tales wherein the labels are scrubbed from the heroes and villains, but they act out allegories of good and evil while sermonizing about the virtues of their position. Atlas Shrugged comes to mind here. It's a little better than a Chick tract, but I still skipped past the 20 page sermons by John Galt, et al. Here the ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is improved, but still heavy-handed.

I thing Michael McCloskey gets the balance right in "The Trilisk Ruins" (5 stars). The gubmint is the antagonist and it doesn't matter whether the administration is Republican or Democrat. (Both parties signed onto the USA PATRIOT Act after all.) The heroes are "criminals" who aim to misbehave. They spend a fair amount of time when they're in civilization scrubbing logs of incriminating evidence and bribing bureaucrats to overlook minor infractions. And they find the Feds like to infect everyone's computer with dormant spyware.

None of this gets in the way of a ripping good yarn. The hero and her handsome male companions go rocketing off into space in search of treasure with the gubmint a few steps behind trying to stop them and/or steal the treasure for themselves. I figured the axe-grinding to story-telling ratio was fairly light-handed, but I should get a 2nd opinion from a statist.

Many times you'll read an SF story wherein the aliens are just like us, but with some prosthetic makeup on their nose and funky jewelry (Bajoran), or pointy ears and eyebrows (Vulcan), or spots on their skin (Trill). Why, you might ask Gene Roddenberry? Because more elaborate makeup and alien get-ups cost too much, he'd say.

McCloskey has no such constraints. He devises aliens with tri-lobed brains, or 20-lobed brains, and he gives them really alien forms. Like 40 limbs, no sense of smell or hearing, but a sense of mass. And he gives this a plausible explanation without getting bogged down in technobabble. High marks for making his aliens alien.

Often you'll read Science Fiction with artificial intelligences and lots of networked computers and there's a sense that technology is just magic with wires. Not so in "The Trilisk Ruins." Communications protocols, encryption, and other terms of the geek's art are handled intelligently without any hand-wavy bull.

"The Trilisk Ruins" is the first novel in a series. If you buy this and like it, be prepared to buy a few more follow-up novels. I just did.

My timing is either Really Good or Really Bad

Did I say how something about buying ebooks from Baen?


Let's pause for a moment to remember who we're talking about when we're dealing with Baen Books. These guys sell Science Fiction books, and the market for science fiction books include a disproportionate number of geeks like me. Geeks like me were the early adopters of ebooks. Yes, I own a SONY Reader--one of the first ebook readers that came out when the Kindle first did. And yes, I paid way too much for it.

Moreover, Baen has been one of the best publishers to embrace the hacker ethics of anti-DRM and giving away the titles that would otherwise go out of print.

It's a great loss-leader to have a series of N books with a give away of the first half of the series. We'll just give you a taste, a sample, to get you hooked. Baen learned this way back when.

Put all these factors together and it made sense for Baen to put together a book-selling-and-giving-away operation that was independent of Amazon's Kindle site.

But not playing nice with Amazon had its downside as I discussed above. Sure, I can follow the procedure outlined in that note, but it's a lot easier to push the Buy-Now-With-1-Click button. For an early adopter like me, the procedure I used to buy Sarah Hoyt's Darkship novels makes a lot of sense.

Nevertheless, the world of ebooks and ereaders has evolved from us early-adopters to the mainstream. In the years that have elapsed, Amazon has dropped its DRM requirement, so the hacker ethic is now OK with buying ebooks from Amazon's Kindle store.

This morning I read here that Baen and Amazon are getting in bed together. My post about buying ebooks then and now is soon to be obsolete. You want a Baen book, just click on Buy-Now...

The downside, if there is one, is that Baen cannot give away books for free or charge $6.00 for titles that would otherwise go for $9.99.

So, if you know of any Baen titles you want to buy at $6.00 or snag for free, you'd better move fast before Baen's agreement with Amazon goes into force.

Buying Books Then And Now

In 2009 I purchased Darkship Thieves as described below. Just now I purchased its sequel, Darkship Renegades and I'm updating what I originally wrote back then. And added what I've learned.

How Books Are Were Bought In 2009

I was minding my own business, surfing to my favorite blog. Instapundit. He linked to a SF novel twice. The second had an interesting author's story of how the novel got published.

This interested me enough to want the book. But I was not going out and I doubted Barnes & Nobel has it on their shelves this soon after release. So, I clicked the Amazon link that Professor Reynolds helpfully provided. Sadly, I learned the book is not available on the Kindle.

My sadness was short-lived. "Hey, the publisher is Baen." Those guys aren't luddites. There's got to be an electronic copy available somewhere. So, I bypassed Amazon.com and went to see if they were selling an ebook that I could download immediately. I could.

A few mouse clicks later, I'd purchased the ebook for $6.00. A relative bargain. Moments later, I received an email with links to download the book. I clicked on the link for epub format (for my Motorola Droid and also my SONY Reader) and also mobi format (for my Kindle DX). They arrived on my hard disk and I unzipped them to a scratch directory.

Then I fired up Calibre and imported them into its database. (Think of Calibre as iTunes for ebooks.) Then I plugged in my Kindle DX and told Calibre to upload it. Then I repeated the procedure with my Motorola Droid.

Altogether satisfactory. Less time that it would take to drive to the bookstore. Cost is $6.00. And completely DRM-free. This is the way the future of books and reading should be.

How Books Are Bought In 2012

Inflation may have hit food and gasoline, but not ebooks. The price is still $6.00.

Meanwhile, Baen has streamlined the buying process. Buying the ebook directly from Baen is still the only option, but you can tell them to deliver it directly to your Kindle (or iPad).

I love Calibre, but shlepping cables from my laptop to my iPad is annoying.

Delivery from Baen to your Kindle is now a 2-step process.

First, you go to your Amazon account's Manage Your Kindle page. Find the link and click on Personal Document Settings, and add ebooks@baenebooks.com to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List.

Second, copy the email address that Amazon uses for your specific Kindle device under your Send-to-Kindle E-Mail Settings. When you click on the link from Baen, you'll find an option to have them send the ebook to your Kindle, and that's where you'll paste the email address you just copied. Click the button and Baen will do the rest. Painless. Easy.

Let me know if you have any difficulty with these instructions.

(Of course, after you buy Sarah's books, I'll be much obliged if you'd consider Finding Time or The Aristotelian.)

How Much For A Rabbit In A Hat?

The always delightful Sarah Hoyt started a post with "It is a cliche, tired and worn, that one has to remind new writers that magic must have a price."

My knee is quick to jerk about any statement that's so broadly unqualified. Surely, there must be some exception, some time when magic does not have a price. Maybe the price varies depending upon how you define price. And it depends upon how you define magic.

Let's suppose you define magic along the lines of many Grimm's fairy tales. For instance, you can get these magic powers if you sell your soul to the devil. (If you do, hire Daniel Webster, my Whig hero to defend you.) Another example of this sort of magic is one where you can do magical tasks, but each time you do someone drowns a kitten. This is a common approach in some stories including magic. Let's call this Aladdin-style magic.

One thing I have noticed about Aladdin-style magic is that it depends upon a mortal making some deal with some angel, demon, devil, or deity to get that supernatural being to do stuff. Hence the price of Aladdin-style magic is a matter of bartering with the supernatural being.

It also requires some cleverness on the part of the magic-user to prevent the supernatural being from becoming annoyed and squashing your hero like a bug.

Then I started to think more broadly and I found reasons to think that magic might not have a price. But I realized I was thinking of a different sort of magic. Something more procedural in nature like Harry Potter. Or better, think of the magic in Rick Cook's Wizardry novels. One needn't have any special powers, just the knowledge and intelligence to master certain abstruse studies. Let's call this Alchemical-style magic.

I happen to be a technologist of no small skill. I strongly identify with Rick Cook's fiction. Anyone who has ever engaged in software development can appreciate the magical aspect of using science and technology to do things mere mortals cannot. Most technical wizards can find similarities between what they do and Alchemical-style magic.

If I run a perl script, there's a few electrons that move around differently, some ones and zeroes change, and the electric bill is some quantum higher, but all told, that's too cheap to account for. If you want to make the case for magic that doesn't pay a price, then start with Alchemical-style magic and liken it to running software. And ignore the magical-utility bill.

But if you persist in saying that ALL magic has a price and you think the price is much more significant than a mere magical-utility bill, then consider again the technological world. The expense of custom-made software is my time and what's rare is my expertise. Sadly, while others were fitting themselves for high elected office (smoking dope and cheating on tests) I was studying mathematics and computer science. Tuition was expensive then and it's much worse now.

Presumably, the wizard's apprentice has some college tuition debts that must be paid.

My daughter drew a large tick on the back of her last bill from Sally Mae, and that image COULD fit nicely into a wizard's apprentice tale.

If I ended now, I suppose Sarah was right that all magic has a price. But it depends upon how you set up your world's rules of magic. And if you're dealing with Alchemical-magic, the price varies with one's skill set. Perhaps a very highly skilled mage can perform much more powerful magical tasks with much less effort than a low-skill mage. That fits with the technology analogue.

Today I can perform feats of computation on the little phone in my pocket that would melt NASA's lunar lander's flight computers. Moreover, I routinely use algorithms that are much more efficient than those available to me 20 years ago. Greater skill gives the technology user the ability to more at less expense. Moreover, that little phone I'm carrying around replaces my tape recorder, my walkman, my video camera, my still camera, my calculator, my daily planner, and my calculator. But it won't play Angry Birds. I won't let it. Technology has enabled radical deflation of the price of high-end goods.

One would expect that if all magic has a price, the creative author could figure out ways for the price to go way down. It really is up to you. You can do anything you want when setting up how your story's magic works, except be half-baked about it. Think through how magic works as a system itself without regard to the needs of your story.

Always make the story fit your world-building, never make your world-building fit your story.

Makers versus Takers

Depending upon how you look at it, this fat cat represents either a corporate tycoon--one of the 1% who gets his GOP buddies to vote subsidies to his business and swing sweet-heart deals his way.

Or if you swing the Democrat way this fat cat represents a welfare queen who's never worked a lick in her life and is just riding the gravy train nursing at the public teat.

A pox on both your houses. I'm for the Whigs.

This morning an email arrived at my inbox from Sarah Hoyt who is most definitely NOT a poopy-head. Her ire was raised by some concern troll on another blog and this moved her to utter some inescapable truths. It is not safe to utter inescapable truths.

When she said "The 'government' is not some disinterested entity run by angels," I was reminded of a debate between Milton Friedman and Phil Donohue about greed wherein Friedman points out that government officials are not angels.

At this writing, publishing is in transition. Certain fat cat publishing companies have enjoyed joint monopoly powers that they have wielded to their own advantage and not necessarily to the advantage of the reading public or those who write books.

When cats get too fat they cannot catch mice and find alternate sustenance. Like using the government to hobble the thinner, faster cats.
Independent publishers and writers have the means to circumvent fat cat publishing companies who will use any means necessary to save their phoney-baloney jobs.

Sarah Hoyt is has written down inescapable truths that are most definitely worthy of your time. I most strongly suggest you read them. She believes the future hangs in the balance.

Lean Startup And Writing

There's a concept going around called "Lean Startup." Maybe you've got this idea for a better mousetrap: You invent the thing. You tool up a factory and produce a bunch. You open a storefront to sell them. And what's missing? Customers. You will have to make people aware of your solution. Not just any people, but those who can afford your mousetrap.

Lean Startup turns this line of thinking inside out. Start with the people you can most easily reach, offer them goods on a web page, and THEN invent, tool, and produce. The premise is that we make guesses about what folks want and we offer the goods as an experiment to confirm that guess.

If nobody responds, we're only out the cost of producing the "landing" web page. However, if tons of people hit that web page to get the goods, we know we've got customers. And if you've their email addresses, you can get back with them. It's revolutionary.


What has it to do with writing?

When some ink-stained wretch starts scribbling, s/he has to decide what to write. The answer may be "what I want" or "what my publisher wants," but a better answer is "what your readers want." How will I know that? Guess?

Suppose you take your N coolest story ideas. Compose the blurb you'd use to sell each story. Then drop that blurb into a web page. Put it up and try to drive traffic to it. If nobody ever visits, stop. You can't reach that story's audience even if the story is awesome and the audience is massive.

Conversely, if you get a few hundred visits, you know you can attract eyeballs to your story--a necessary first step. And if you get them to click on your response key, you know you have some real demand for that story.

I don't know about you, but I get 100x more story ideas than I have time to write up. I could use such a scheme to prioritize pending writing projects. This is reader pull, not writer (or publisher) push.

It's not that much different from setting up a Kickstarter project to score a fat advance for your non-fiction book on meat, or something--but I digress. I think this is how to proactively engage fears of the conveyor-belt and furnace. Instead of listening to some soon-to-be-downsized editor tell you what you should be writing, you'll hear readers expressing their preferences.

Sounds great, right?


I forget who wrote this: I suspect it was Jerry Pournelle who wrote that an an author is like a storefront. After I found out that I liked Exiles to Glory, I backtracked to find High Justice, Birth of Fire, West of Honor, The Mercenary, then I haunted booksellers for each subsequent book with his name on it. (I'd say the same about Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy, except it's complicated and distracting. I'll explore that distraction another day.)

That's how I read when I discover someone whose prose I adore. I drink up everything they've written and watch for new releases. The writer must protect his or her reputation and respect his reading public.

I ran this idea past someone who knows a lot more about writing than I do. She didn't like it because it is a bad idea to tease readers with something they want, but can't have. It creates resentment. She said it's like waving a candy bar in front of a two-year-old and going, "You can't have it."

This is a pitfall of what I'll call "Lean Writing" (until someone comes up with a better name). If you put up a landing page promising Ailurophages From Space" then you'll need to manage expectations of those who tell you they want to read about aliens eating kittens.

"No, it hasn't been written yet." "Yes, I'm waiting for N emails from folks promising to buy it." "Or yes, I'm X% complete with the I'th draft (where N, X, and I are numbers that'll vary)."

In the software world we have a term "vaporware" that we apply to cool software that someone promised, but never delivers.

Do you remember when I wrote about Heinlein's Five Commandments? Commandment #2 says, "You must finish what you write." Suppose you break it:

• If nobody knows, then nobody gripes. 
• If you're a traditional writer with a traditional agent and editor, they'll gripe. 
• But if you put up a "Lean Writing" landing page, then everyone who clicks the "I want it" button will come after you with torches and pitchforks. And your writing brand will be likened unto the purveyors of "vaporware." 

Don't be that guy.

So, what do you think? Will "Lean Writing" work? Why or why not?

In Love With Linda Chorney

Yesterday I attended the TEDx Grand Rapids event. If you've ever seen a TED talk, you know they present stimulating ideas and I derive the most value from a talk when agree-or-disagree I get some new idea from it.

The talk I loved the most was given by a delightful woman named Linda Chorney. Her incandescent personality filled the auditorium and I was smitten. She is a musician who does not have a Record Deal.

She says, "she's so indie, she's an outie."

Just as there are zillions of writers toiling in obscurity, there are zillions of musicians nobody's ever heard of. But just because you've never heard of Linda Chorney does not means she's not insanely great.

There's an entire ecosystem of lampreys, remoras, and pilot fish swimming alongside the sharks of the Record Companies whose job is to make you hear of the artists they promote. They serve as gatekeepers keeping the riff-raff out. You want to stay on their good side, because they'll make or break your career. (Does this sound familiar to any of you writers out there?)

She described how she used just a little bit of social media savvy to wage a successful Internet campaign to win a Grammy Nomination for her last album. (She played for the TEDx crowd and she sounded great.)

The main reason why I love Linda Chorney is that she demonstrated that someone that nobody's ever heard of can upset the apple cart. She managed to disintermediate all those middle-men by going directly to the members of the Academy and requesting their consideration.

But because she did so without the lampreys, remoras or pilot fish, they were not amused when she was nominated. In the words of Governor William J. Le Petomaine, "We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen!"

Then they launched a campaign of hate.  (I think that the bipartisan effort to utterly destroy Sarah Palin was similarly motivated by her ability to disintermediate the legacy media and GOP apparatchiks, but I digress.) Ms. Chorney showed the TEDx audience some of the nasty things written about her.

She showed us the T-shirt she made and sells quoting the hate and turning it against itself.

I was primed for Linday Chorney's talk by a recent blog post by Sarah Hoyt describing the publishing industry going about its own process of destroying writers' careers to vindicate the opinions of traditional publishing's lampreys, remoras, and pilot fish.

If you've followed the writing careers of John Locke or Amanda Hocking, you know they've had good success through non-traditional publishing and they've also endured a lot of hateful "hrumphing" from traditional lampreys, remoras and pilot fish.

The bottom line is that the world is changing. If you listen to a lot of people saying, "hrumph" it is the end of the world as we know it. But if you're willing to be so indie that you're outie, you'll feel fine.

Reading and Writing Manifestos

Some years ago I happened upon an essay in The Atlantic that became a standalone book, "A Reader's Manifesto." It lamented the sorry state of American contemporary literature: What respectable authors wrote as serious, respectable literature was just awful, pretentious, and affected as far as readers are concerned.

I'm sorry to say that though this essay resonated with me and most of my writer friends and all of my reader friends, the Brahmins who decide what shall be published and who give out MFA degrees did not take any deliveries from the clue bus.

Now we are hearing that the publishing industry is doomed, doomed I say because of ebooks. Or something.

Doom is what happens to any business when those who decide upon the products to be offered make their decisions based upon ideology, politics, and group-think instead of based upon market demand. The jargon term is Market Failure and it happens when customers cannot acquire the goods they desire from providers. When this happens, the consumer Goes Somewhere Else. (If the market failure is caused by a government regulating prices or censorship, Somewhere Else is called a black market.)

Disruptive technologies are God's gift to humanity, because their disruptions often undermine formerly unassailable monopolies, creating opportunities for small, agile mammals to raid the nests of big, stupid dinosaurs. In this context, the disruptive technologies of the ebooks plus Internet booksellers, enable the unsatisfied reader to go Somewhere Else.

When I was a child, there was exactly one dystopian novel of any note. (Atlas Shrugged didn't seem dystopian, because I knew John Galt was going to stop the engine of the world and remake it in Ayn Rand's image.) 1984 was a young adult novel only because every high school student was required by Mrs. Grundy to read it in English class.

Why waste time with Big Brother when there are novels with rocket ships and space suits written by fellas a boy could identify with--featuring protagonists who were escaping danger and helping friends out of danger--or better--hunting for and finding treasure. They weren't filled with angst about who would bite them on the neck and suck the life out of them.

Heinlein's protagonist in this novel worked in a pharmacy and lamented his oversight of failing to stock his space suit with amphetamines. Let's see someone try to get away with something like that in today's YA market. Granted, times change and the American culture changes what it finds acceptable.

Hard work, initiative, and resourcefulness characterized Kip Russell (pictured above), not drug use. Readers of 1958 understood that. They saw NASA putting up satellites and would soon see men in orbit and then go to the moon. The future was full of hope and opportunity that could be exploited for everyone's gain.

Editors of 2012 have tended to steer book deals to Yet Another Dystopian story. (Remember when Star Trek made the Enterprise drive 55?) Is the present bleak and the future hopeless? Are there limits to growth?

Maybe. But I won't spend money buying books about it. None of this is new. I've made some of these observations before.

I believe reading is not punishment. The reader is primary and delivering value to the reader is the writer's duty and the reader--not the writer or the editor--defines what constitutes that value. I hope that my writing as it provides that value can also illustrate some of the wonder and beauty of the universe and human nature, but that can't get in the way of the story.

What is new this week is news of a subversive group of revolutionaries (or reactionaries) who are standing athwart history crying stop. Sarah Hoyt has invited fire by articulating certain principles that she thinks characterizes Human Wave Science Fiction writing. And she's put together a manifesto for Human Wave Science Fiction. She names names of writers producing prose that fits this label and manifesto. And she names my favorite SF authors in the process.

I have always thought the future might hold great tribulation, but things will improve as we get smarter about how the universe works. This optimism is probably the most subversive thing that Mrs. Hoyt, et al. is manifestoing.

Manifestoing?