internet

I have been planning a serious post, but this ain’t it.

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The OK Cupid blog (which I don’t follow as closely as I should) regularly anonymizes and crunches facts about love, sex, and the usual mating rituals. It’s science! Unlike some of the annoying assertions about genre I keep running across.

Anyway, want to know if a potential mate will be right for you without coming right out and asking? Check this factoid out:

Getting a “yes” answer from a man to: “In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting?” has an 83% correlation with the likelihood that he’ll have sex on the first date. Grim meathook future, your abs are irresistible.

The find out the same information about a woman, or to surreptitiously discover something else, check out the whole post.

That NYer Scientology article

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I have an awful lot to write about, but all I have time for at the moment is a link to this extremely long article about writer/director Paul Haggis and his public split with Scientology.

It just confirms my belief that all the easiest ways to become truly wealthy involve hanging around people I want nothing to do with and doing things that would make me physically ill.

Randomness for 2/7

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1) The Facebook comment decision flowchart.

2) Passive-aggressive notes to your readers are probably not a good idea.

3) Cthonians!

4) Want to read the series bible for the modern BSG?

5) The web sit alignment chart.

6) Backyard fight gets out of hand. Video. Dude should have left his light saber at home.

7) Photos of criminals in Sydney during the 1920s. Amazing photos. Just amazing. Taken from this book.

That health care post going around LiveJournal

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You can read the original here, but many of the folks reposting it are adding their own thoughts. In fact, I want to add so many thoughts that I’m just going to link to it rather than repost.

Yes, the GOP are being infuriating about health care reform. The Obama plan is, after all, largely drawn from the GOP plan offered as an alternative to ClintonCare and from Mitt Romney’s state plan. The individual mandate, which everyone on the right is so freaked about, was originally suggested by The Heritage Foundation.

Obama expected that offering a conservative health plan would get bi-partisan support, but no. The Republicans are much farther to the right than they were 18 years ago. Also in our system, cooperation and compromise from the minority party won’t get them back into the majority; GOP leaders believe that the only way back to the majority is to oppose and obstruct everything. (Thank you, The Onion) And it’s not like the voters punished them last November.

The post also takes slams at the insurance industry, which is understandable. Their business model is based on only doing business with people who don’t need their services, and finding ways to give the boot to expensively sick people.

Can I also point out this: Americans Do Not Want Repeal?

But there’s an unacknowledged problem in the post which prevents me from reposting it. A huge part of the problem here is that all that health care spending we can’t afford? That’s someone’s paycheck. Not just the doctors and nurses, not just the drug company CEOs, but also the small medical suppliers, the people who build imaging devices, the physical therapists, the lab techs.

All that out-of-control spending that keeps people from going to the doctor? It’s someone’s salary, and that’s what makes it so tough to reign in the spending. Without spending controls, universal coverage won’t work (for the record: yes, the ACA does contain spending controls). Without universal coverage, spending controls won’t work (because if you tell doctors that Medicare will pay them less, they’ll stop seeing those patients).

It won’t be easy or fun, but we need to end the current system, which costs 20,000 lives a year (conservatively estimated), spends much more than we can afford, and suppresses the entrepreneurial instinct of so many people afraid to quit their corporate jobs.

Now I’m going back to my WIP. I’ll be skipping the Super Bowl today, unless my son remembers that he wanted to go out to a sports bar to watch.

Norwescon, I guess

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In 2009 at the beginning of December, I received an invitation to Norwescon. For whatever reason, my response to them wasn’t received and it’s very likely that was my fault. I interpreted the lack of response as a “Never mind,” and by the time it was straightened out I had family plans and couldn’t attend. Next year, I told myself.

Well, next year is here. I sent an email to the same person (at the same address) who contacted me before, inquiring about attending the convention, but so far I’ve received no response (again). It wasn’t one of these official contact addresses, though; it’s someone’s personal email address.

I plan to try one more time, but I’m not sure which of these addresses I should use. To be clear, I’ve attended the San Diego Comic-Con but I’ve never been to a “real” science fiction convention, and everything I know about how they work has come from skimming other people’s LiveJournals. So I’m turning to you good folks, because I know many people reading this have much more experience than I do: Which address, if any, should I contact? Or should I just take the hint?

Thanks.

Added later: Email sent! Thank you, everyone on my blog and LJ for the advice.

Waddayano. I’m a Google ebooks author

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Apparently Child of Fire is available in the Google ebook store. They even have sample pages from the beginning of the book. If you look at it as “scanned pages” (iow, laid out the way the printed book is) you can read up to page 37. If you set the sample to “flowing text” you can read a little farther, and can change the font, font sizes, and line spacing too. It’s pretty nice. I haven’t had the opportunity to read a book on an ereader; is this what it looks like, usually?

Interestingly, Game of Cages isn’t available for sale there. I’m not sure why. Maybe it just takes time to load the books in.

Submitting for publication is the only contest worth entering.

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Except this one. In short, it’s a novel contest where the winning entry will get a full edit by Del Rey editor in chief Betsy Mitchell. She’s my editor, and I’m going to tell you right now that she’s smart and knows a helluva lot about making stories work. She won’t be going through the text marking the verbs that should be pluperfect or whatever, but she will get in depth with the characters, setting, plot and tone of your work. Invaluable.

Also, there’s no entry fee, no crazy rights grab, and even if you don’t win the grand prize, you might still win a whole bunch of books. Free books! You can’t beat that with a cricket bat.

I think most writing contests are a waste of time. Better to work on the manuscript, create a good query, and compete in the marketplace. The prizes are better. However I’m making an exception and recommending this one. If you have a novel that you think is damn good but can’t place anywhere, consider entering it. You might learn a lot.

Theft as a market force

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First, the preamble. Posts like this need a little stage dressing, because there are so many folks out there with a My Favorite Argument[1] at the ready and I don’t want to be distracted by the Usual Conversation.

There have been lots of posts about ebook piracy recently. Some folks are furious about it. Some consider it a mild annoyance. Some don’t much care. Some frequent torrent sites to steal books.

Oh, but they don’t like that word “steal.” More than once I’ve heard people say that downloading an ebook without paying for it isn’t stealing because the author/publisher/bookstore still has their copy. How can it be stealing if they don’t deprive the owner of the item?

Well, intellectual property isn’t the same as a Hibachi, and words, miraculous things that they are, often have more than one meaning.

(v) steal (take without the owner’s consent) “Someone stole my wallet on the train”; “This author stole entire paragraphs from my dissertation”

Standup comics have long policed their own when it came to stealing jokes. Bradley Manning is commonly said to have stolen government secrets to give to Wikileaks. Mattel accused MGA of stealing the Barbie concept for their Bratz line. This isn’t a crazy new use of the word.

Now, let me pause a moment to say this: I personally think ebook piracy is a mild annoyance when I think about it at all, and the times I think about it are a) when Google Alerts emails me that my book has appeared on a torrent site and b) when a bunch of people blog about it. I usually shrug and delete the Google Alert messages without clicking through to the sites, and I skim the blog posts.

What does bug me, and maybe this is evidence that I’m seriously screwed up or something, is when people pretend that stealing isn’t stealing, or that they aren’t doing anything wrong, or that what they’re doing somehow helps the person they’re taking from. I don’t really care that that they did it and I’m not interested in why, but don’t try to convince me that it’s perfectly fine.

Seriously. I know the RIAA acted horribly a few years ago. I know they victimized people. But you know what? Victimized is not the same as virtuous. What the RIAA did was pernicious and out-of-proportion, but it didn’t make illicit file sharing all right.[2]

So, if you download books without paying for them, don’t pretend what you’re doing isn’t wrong. Embrace it! You saw something, you wanted it, you took it! Maybe it was inconveniently unavailable in the format you wanted. Maybe you didn’t want to wait for http://www.bookdepository.com/ and their free worldwide shipping. Maybe you already own the book in another format and want a backup copy. Maybe you refuse to pay above a certain price. Maybe you think writing as a profession is going to go out with manual typewriters (I’ve seriously seen this argument made, that writers didn’t deserve to be paid for their work). It doesn’t matter! You wanted, you took. Own your truth.

That’s the preamble. To repeat, I’m not much interested in ebook piracy as an act, I don’t think about it often and I’m generally bored by discussions of it. Mostly, I’m not interested in back and forthing over the rightness or wrongness of it. I’m more annoyed with the justifications than the actual stealing.

This is the main point I wanted to make in this post: Pirated ebooks distort the market.

I know some people believe that ebook piracy doesn’t cost them a dime. I see their point. I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that significant numbers of illicit downloaders would be customers under other circumstances. Some would, but significant numbers? Who knows?

However, I want to quote another line from Ryk’s post which I’ve seen stated elsewhere so often that I think it’s becoming accepted wisdom:

There is only ONE way to mitigate this activity; make the book available easily, very cheaply, online. This is why iTunes makes billions; they recognized that people WILL pay for stuff, but they won’t pay what they think are excessive prices, and they won’t pay ANYTHING if it takes them ANY effort to go looking for it, sign into some arcane website…

And… well… if most of them wouldn’t be customers anyway, what’s the point of looking at the iTunes model, which is meant to bring casual bandits down from the mountain passes? There’s a disconnect there, but it’s an understandable one. We want everyone to be our readers, don’t we? Theoretically. But what about this?

Hardbacks are more expensive to produce than paperbacks, but they’re not that much more expensive. The difference in price reflects, in part, that a certain number of an author’s fans want the new book so badly that they’ll pay hardcover prices. Less fervent fans wait for the paperback. That’s pricing based on demand.

But a lot of intellectual property is no longer being sold based on demand, or what the market will bear. It’s being sold based on what will be so trivially easy and cheap for consumers that they won’t steal the product instead. And the more demand there is, the more likely it will be stolen, so there is no chance to price accordingly.

And what do you call that? Klepto-capitalism? Appeasement Capitalism? Ransom Pricing? Along with the so-called Kindlegarteners, who have been screaming about ebook pricing (with Amazon.com’s explicit permission), this just drives home the idea that the work novelists do is so trivial that taking it without paying is no big deal.

Maybe, as ebook devices increase their market share, more readers will need to be steered toward an iTunes-like (ie, cheap and convenient) store to prevent them from just stealing the books. And while I don’t much care whether this person or that torrents my book, I do dislike the idea that theft has a downward pressure on the amount of money I can make from my work.

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[1] For those who have forgotten or where reading here the last time I touched on this, MFA explained: People typically have arguments that they like to have. When there’s a subject they feel passionate about, and they believe they have a strong, righteous take on it, they’ll often turn a discussion on a tangential issue into a chance to trot out My Favorite Argument, because it’s comfortable and easy.

[2] And, since some people will wonder: no, I don’t have any pirated music. Nor do I have pirated books, films, or software. It’s all freeware or paid for.

Randomness for 1/13

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1) “That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.” Quality parenting advice from Amy Chua. More from NPR. And NMA TV in Taiwan offers one of their video parodies.

2) An alternate ending for RETURN OF THE JEDI: Video. At least we could have avoided the Ewok party at the end. via Tor.com

3) I’ve seen a couple of reviews that deserved this treatment. Video. via James Nicoll

4) Should you work for free? A flowchart.

5) The cost of torrented books, with numbers. The problem is, you can never get people to believe that what they’re doing is causing harm in a way that matters, because they refuse to see themselves as bad people. They just can’t imagine themselves that way.

6) Top ten fonts for book designers.

7) What is it about social media that makes people write these ridiculous articles?

I finally got that WP child theme working

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And now I’m going offline to work on the copy edit of Circle of Enemies. I don’t bring my laptop with me, but damn, if it wasn’t for my struggles with the child theme I’d have started an hour ago.