This dude is trying it with golf, and after two years, he’s got about 1/3rd of his 10,000 hours.
I’m sure it took me more than that to start writing stories that sell, but I still don’t consider myself a writing expert. I don’t think I’ll ever feel that way. But good luck to Dan. It’ll be interesting to see if he can do it.
via @RodRamsey
Four years and ten months ago, my laptop died. I don’t even remember what brand it was, but I went out to the Apple store and picked up their cheapest laptop.
I’m still using it almost five years later, but the internet has become nearly impossible. All sorts of web pages make Safari seize up. Facebook, G+, The Daily Beast… the list is endless. My browser picks up the spinning beach ball with only very few tabs open.
Twitter is trying to discourage third-party app makers, but I can’t type out a single tweet without stopping for the spinning beach ball. My own fucking website slows things down interminably, mainly because it tries to contact Twitter et al.
It’s frustrating and a waste of time. Most of my laptop browsing is book-related research, but this old software is just excruciating. The browser crashes too much, freezes too much, and wastes way too much of my time.
And I can’t afford new right now.
The Sentinels of the Multiverse expansion Infernal Relics (plus swag) arrived today.
Check it out:
For folks who don’t know, this is a superhero-themed cooperative fixed-deck card game. It can be a little fussy, what with keeping track of all the plusses and hit points, but the enhanced edition makes that easy. What’s more, it’s fun.
The boy and I both wanted to play tonight, but I’m just too wiped for it. This weekend we are going to be doing two Pokemon tournaments, so I’m not sure when we’ll have a chance to take on some of these new villains, but the boy and I are pretty psyched to give it a try.
Great game. Seriously.
1) In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?
2) Little kittens battle each other in B&N review section: “Will you make an alliance with tigerclan?”
3) The Proper Way To Lock Your Bicycle.
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
Do you guys like the RSA Animate videos? I do. They’re occasionally inaccurate (when the speaker gets a fact wrong) but I think they’re a visually arresting way to take in information.
This one is especially good and it’s relevant in several ways. Check it out.
As a followup to yesterday’s call for public shaming, I want to make a point that I’ve made on Twitter, G+, and of course in the comments on LiveJournal: When bloggers or Goodreads reviewers receive crazy hate mail from authors unhappy with their unhappy writeups, there’s a huge groundswell of support. Comment sections fill up with commiserations and well-wishers, and folks turn to their own blogs and Twitter accounts to talk about how awful it is.
That’s how it should be.
But when agents receive hate mail for a form rejection, they get crickets. As I mentioned yesterday, the flow of vicious emails agents get camouflages the threats from truly dangerous people, and it should not be accepted with a sigh and a what are you going to do?. There’s no reason to accept it; those writers should be exposed and shamed just like the self-publishers who get nasty with reviewers.
Last night on Twitter it came out that an agent was attacked outside her house just after she’d gotten into her car.
After being convinced to call the police, they wanted to look at the emails she’d gotten recently. She was sure there was nothing to it. All she had were the usual responses to rejection every agent gets from writers: “The normal I hate you and I want you to die and I’ll kill you”.
The cops were not so casual about it. They identified one guy, went to the address he put on his query, then busted him.
But here’s the thing: how did we get to the point where an influx of hatred, threats, and vicious remarks are an acceptable thing? I realize people have been turning a blind eye to the horrifying shit women bloggers get, but agents have been receiving the same treatment for years to the point where it’s seen as the normal course of business.
Here’s a tip: If you’re so outraged at receiving a rejection that you have to send a hateful response, self-publish. Seriously, if you’re moved to respond in a nasty way, you aren’t ready for that end of the business. Just go ahead and publish your work yourself.
Because every nasty response, every threat that you didn’t really mean, every expression of contempt, is just cover for threats that come from the crazies who really will do violence. It normalizes the awful behavior to the point that recipients can’t tell when the threats are genuine.
I suggest there be some sort of public display of these hate messages, along with identifying information: name, city, email address. Your query would be confidential. Your response to a rejection would not.
I don’t know if that would work, but I wish there was something we could to.
There’s been an awful lot of talk lately about sockpuppet reviews: essentially, dishonest reviews posted under pseudonyms that either praise books or slam them. Sometimes the author themself is writing the review. Sometimes it’s a firm they hired, or friends. Sometimes the review was written out of spite by someone who hasn’t read the book.
Still, book buyers say they still use reader reviews to help decide whether they will buy a book or not. So! How can a reader tell the difference between a genuine response to a book and a review written for those Nefarious Other Purposes?
Allow me to illustrate some basic principles from the fictionalized examples below. And feel free to play along? Sockpuppet? Or Real?
At first glance, this might seem like a sockpuppet. Look at how effusive that praise is! And completely unqualified! But note that the reviewer makes sure to mention that they totally found the book at random, not because they were intrigued by the premise or the author’s other work. It was just crazy luck! Convincing? I say yes.
Also, there’s no way this could have been written by, say, the author’s friends. My God, it’s like, two sentences. Two and two words. What kind of shitty friend would take the trouble to post a fake review but only write a line or two?
Verdict: Real
*****
If you thought this sockpuppet review was the real thing, then I feel genuine pity for you, my friend. Look at it again and you’ll see within those few words a brutal personal attack on the author. To whit:
What kind of inhuman monster says they would recommend a book to their friends and then give it only three stars? Have YOU ever looked at a three-star review and thought “Gosh, I should pluck that out of the ceaseless tsunami of printed matter washing past me every day!”
Of course not. That’s a clear and obvious taunt directed at the author.
Verdict: Sockpuppet
*****
A less-savvy observer might view this as a kind of author advertising, most likely placed by the author themself!
However, note the run-on sentence and sloppy spelling (er… in the review, not the body of this post). Would a sensible author write so poorly? I think not. What’s more, the book named in the review is on the Kindle, which means there is almost certainly a free excerpt available. These books are pretty much uniformly terrible. Would an author want readers to sample a terrible book? The idea itself is ludicrous.
Verdict: Review.
*****
The raw, vicious hatred behind this review is clear on its face.
Verdict: Sockpuppet.
Remember, authors: Any review that makes you feel bad is probably a personal attack.
Remember, readers: Any review that makes you reluctant to buy one of my books is absolutely a fake.
I hope you found this lesson helpful.
Over on the LiveJournal version of yesterday’s post, I had someone say they were surprised to hear that I was working on a project called KING KHAN. I thought, Have I not talked about this?
Let me give you a quick rundown on this project, what it is and what it will be.
Back in April, indie rpg company Evil Hat was having a pretty good run on a Kickstarter. They were trying to fund a trilogy of books based on their Spirit of the Century game, which is a pulp-adventure game with an emphasis on the 1920-30s, and it was doing well enough that they set some stretch goals. One of those was for me to write a book featuring a particular reader favorite character: Professor Khan, an intelligent gorilla who teaches at Oxford.
After some discussion, we decided that I was going to write a book that had Professor Khan visit Los Angeles in the studio era. There’s a mysterious death, a stolen weird-science maguffin, and lots of high-strangeness of the lightning gun/shrink beam/hopping ghost variety.
And it’s funny. At least, it’s supposed to be funny. There’s action, naturally, but I’m hoping the characters and situations will be amusing and uplifting. Did I mention that it stars a gorilla who teaches at Oxford?
Anyway, I’m nearly finished with the first draft (it’ll be a short book, probably 70K or less) and, after a polish, will send it off and get back to EPIC FINALE WITH NO DULL PARTS. No rest for the weary.
1) There are a lot of folks who like to kick school teachers (esp the unionized ones) and you might think that I, being a homeschooling parent, am one of them. I’m not. Check out this post by a friend on why she quit working at a public school in an L.A. ghetto. Yeah, she’s a talented writer, but I know she wanted to stick it out. Unfortunately, we live in a top-down society that likes to micromanage our workers.
2) As reported on Genreville, there’s an opening at Harper Voyager for books in their upcoming ebook-focused Impulse imprint. Submissions will be open for two weeks only, starting October 1st. More details at that link, for the curious.
3) No, authors do not routinely create sock puppets to praise their own books and disparage others’ so don’t let these assholes fool you. There’s something sad and grasping in all the recent revelations about fake reviews, purchased reviews, and bullying of readers who post one-star reviews. Kate Elliott was on Twitter talking about visibility, and how desperate writers can feel about their work. “If only people would give it a chance!” Right?
But that assumes that success is an incredibly frail thing, something so delicate that a couple negative reviews can destroy it. I don’t believe that. Enthusiasm is a powerful thing, and if you can make people excited about your work, that enthusiasm will be enough.
4) You know what makes me laugh (quietly, on the inside) when I see big corporations complaining about copyright violations? The knowledge that it’s their fault. They’ve spent decades building this consumer culture where people are constantly pushed to get more more more, are judged for what they have, are assured that they can get it cheaper and faster, and have generally been driven into a state where acquiring shit they don’t need feels awesome.
Then technology changes things so they can get what they want without paying, so they do. They don’t care how much money, time, energy, or expertise went into something. They see it. They want it. They take it. And honestly, that’s the kind of culture we’ve built.
5) What I can’t stand, though, is the way companies have responded. Take a look at this io9 article about Ustream cutting off the online feed of the Hugo Awards midway through because they showed (with permission) clips from TV shows. An automated system shut down the video immediately and there was no way to restore it until after the awards had ended.
Now, you’d be hard-pressed to find another spec fic writer who cares less about the Hugo Awards than I do. My indifference is colossal. However, the program that shut down the feed shut off service without any attempt to discern that the users were at fault. Just, boom, you’re out. Notice also that in his apology, Ustream’s CEO made sure to mention their paid service, suggesting that things would have been fine (of fixed quickly) if the users had paid up first.
There has got to be a better way to work things out.
6) I’m writing this last night and I won’t be around when it posts. The plan is to duck out of my home early and get to work on KING KHAN. I’m so close to finishing this first draft I can taste it (but I won’t finish tomorrow. Probably.)