4) Bat Man of Shanghai. Video.

7) Over-the-counter DIY witchcraft from the 19th century: The (annotated) Long Lost Friend. Available on Amazon.com

Randomness for 9/3

1) An easy way to separate eggs. Video.

3) Nine Crazy Things People Find Inside Walls.

5) Yet another dude making awful threats against female comics pros. One instance where reading the comments section is a good thing.

6) Seven deadly weapons you should never make out of common household items. aka: the prop list for the next season of Burn Notice.

7) Film school in comic form! Part one: Writing the screenplay. via @RodRamsey

Bonus 7A thing) Read “comics” on an iCabinet (powered by a hand-crank). There’s no app for this.

Randomness for 8/26

1) Barkour! Video (not a typo)

2) Organizing a game session through a flow chart.

3) Godzilla vs. Kinkade.

4) A working hoverbike you don’t need a pilot’s license to drive.

5) The World’s 19 Weirdest Hangover Remedies.

6) 27 Ways to Rethink Your Bed.

7) Mark Waid’s four panels that never work.

Randomness for 8/14

1) Some Advice For How To Cope In These Tough Times.

2) 17 Images You Won’t Believe Are Photoshopped, (part 10)

3) A labyrinth created from a quarter-million books.

4) The self-described “Hardest Game In The World.” h/t to my son

5) The Tragedy Series.

6) A $2 Million Dollar “Batcave” Movie Theater.

7) Brilliant or Gross? 20 recipes. None of these sound good to me, and I’m not a particularly conservative eater.

People love when I review stuff.

Except when they don’t.

Yesterday I posted about my disappointment with the Pathfinder Beginner Box and it prompted quite a bit of conversation online.

First was over on my LiveJournal account. (Because of their spam filters, I’m happy to leave comments open there.)

Second was on Twitter. Game designer Rob Donoghue kicked off a discussion about bringing new people into gaming. I tried to use Storify (for the first time) to preserve that conversation here, but that looked like a pain in the ass so here’s a couple of screen caps. Of course they’re behind the cut. Continue reading

The worst four-letter word in the whole fucking world.

Occasionally, I suffer from hope.

See, I write these books that some readers (and me) like, but I occasionally get this idea that this or that particular story is going to be a big hit with a very large readership.

That’s hope, and it’s an awful thing. It distracts and disappoints. It makes me take my eye off what matters most. It tricks me into thinking there’s some external standard that I need to meet.

I was just discussing this elsewhere in another author’s private space: there’s this sense that we’re writing the wrong thing, and readers turn away from us and our work as if we were beggars shaking a tin cup at them. We get a few sales, a few reviews, then our books fade away because everyone moves on to some other thing they’re excited about. It goes without saying that no one “owes” a writer anything, but it also goes without saying that we can’t help but give in to that four-letter word when we release something new.

I can say from experience that it is incredibly painful to put a year of work into a book only to have it widely ignored. It’s not as painful as that time no kids showed for my son’s birthday party, but it’s still pretty bad.

But there’s one thing I can’t compare it to: I have no idea how it feels to write something because you think it must be “the right thing” for commercial success, and have it fail anyway.

Here’s a true story that I’ve talked about here once or twice: My editor wanted me to change the ending of Game of Cages. Specifically, she wanted me to change The Sentence (if you’ve read the book you know the 500+ word sentence I’m talking about). She knew it was a powerful scene, but it was not a commercial choice at all. Too dark.

She suggested, quite sensibly, that I revise it so the protagonist could be more of a hero. Readers like heroes.

Now, I was seriously torn over this. Child of Fire wouldn’t come out for months, so I wasn’t even a published writer yet, who was I to disagree? Besides, I loved that scene–the whole book was aimed to create it.

My agent (who is awesome) said my editor was right about that creative choice being anti-commercial, but she was ready to support whatever decision I made. The truth is, I could have changed that ending, and no one would have known by my editor, agent, and me. No one would have had a clue.

But what I told her, finally, was that I was afraid that I would replace that dark, harsh scene with something more Indiana Jones-heroic, but the book would fail anyway. Then I wouldn’t even be failing with my book.

It was almost certainly a stupid decision, career-wise, but I made it and I’m still living with it. You know what else I’m living with?

Hope for the new book I’m revising.

Check this blog post out: An Unexpected Ass Kicking. It’s worth reading, for real, especially if you use computers and/or care about elder wisdom. The OP’s takeaway is:

1. Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.

2. Do things that have never been done.

Me, I’ve tried to be original in my work, but I’ve never felt I was original enough. I’d really like to do better in that area.

As for what I “have conceived to do,” I have conceived to be my own marketing category, to write books are are uniquely mine, and to have a large readership who want to read them as soon as they’re available. Not because those books make the smart commercial choices or they are about the right subjects, but because I think they’re cool.

But seriously, read the linked post. It’s short.

Anyway, I have to pursue this stupid goal of mine, but I have to do it without killing myself hoping it will come true.

Fans and “Gatekeepers”

A short while ago, a friend sent this link to a mailing list I’m on: Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both Sides: His keynote address at Montreal’s Just For Laughs 2012. I enjoyed reading it but I wasn’t sure how to respond at first. Now enough time has passed that I think it’s too late, if you know what I mean.

So I want to talk about it here. If you didn’t click the link, you should. Oswalt’s a funny guy and he brings a historical precedent to the changes in the arts and entertainment biz: the last upheaval in the stand-up comic world was when Johnny Carson retired, and what that meant.

Anyway, the piece is broken up into two parts: the first is addressed to other comedians, telling them they don’t need to worry about pleasing “gatekeepers” anymore, and the second to the supposed gatekeepers, telling them that they are welcome to remain part of the process if they change their relationship to the artists doing the actual work–instead of approving/disapproving/demanding changes, they should become “fans.”

Now, on one level, this speech is the same thing you hear from everyone else nowadays, with the bit about Carson thrown in to give it weight. Boogedy-boogedy gatekeepers! Hamina hamina reach your audience directly! Woogity woogity [name of person who found success this way]. Those who did a runaround of the system and hit it big draw our attention the way iron draws a magnet, but the ones who struggled and failed are ignored.

Now, in TV and film–where Oswalt works when he’s not touring–your big break gets you the chance to work on the gatekeeper’s project. You write a spec script, they love it, they have a project they want your take on. With actors, it’s always someone else’s project unless they’re the producer, too. (See “The Room” and “Jake Speed.”)

For a novelist, you make your work and you send it into the world. If you self-publish, you hope readers like it and tell their friends, creating a snowball effect. If you other-publish, you hope you make fans among the people with access to good distribution and excellent production staff, at which point they turn it over to readers.

That’s what it is, and what it’s always been: making fans. Look at this post from Jennifer Laughran, in which she addresses a question I’ve seen authors bring up for years: Why do agents have to love a book before they represent it? Aren’t they salespeople? Can’t they just take the product and sell it, the way my cousin does with window blinds/radio airtime/insurance policies?

But as Laughran says in the post, she has to love it before she will invest her time and energy into it. What Oswalt is asking for in film and TV already happens in the book world. When you see those lists from self-published authors showing how many times this or that debut best-seller was rejected, they always try to pass it off as The gatekeepers don’t know what they’re doing and never have.

What I see when I look at those lists is this: those other places looked at an early draft and they didn’t fall in love.

Of course I’m talking about my own experiences here, and I’m not exactly an industry veteran. I’ve heard the stories, like everyone has, of books that are picked up because a publisher needs to fill a slot in a popular genre, or that a writer with a great first book (or few books) falls into a slump. It would be ridiculous to suggest that an industry as large, diverse, and complex as trade publishing always did everything one way.

But Oswalt is asking TV/film people to become fans of the artists they work with. Publishing people have already done that; it’s on us as writers to show them work they want to love. So, Oswalt’s speech is great, but I’m glad it doesn’t apply to me.