Summer Break is Upon Me, but not Quite

I don’t know why I decided to be a history/linguistics double major.  I guess because it at least required fewer papers than English?

 

Here’s my tribute to the end of the semester, and college papers in general:

 

Whose words these are I think I know.
My semester is long over, though;
I hate to see me sitting here
To fill my screen up, row by row.

My sluggish laptop must think it queer
To write without a due date near
Black words to paper’s hunger slake
But desp’rate failure’s lurking here.

He gives his letter’s keys a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the creep
Of deadlines which now make me quake.

My dreams are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And papers to write before I sleep,
And papers to write before I sleep.

 

Welcome to the Diamond Age

Welcome to the future, friends.

I’d argue that Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age is one of the best cyberpunk (or post-cyberpunk, if you prefer) books out there.  It tells the story of how one little book transformed the world.  And now Motorola’s Zoom laptop is doing the same thing for children in Ethiopia.  The OLPC Project dumped almost 1000 tablets in two villages in Ethiopia in sealed boxes with no instructions.  Within five months, these kids who had never seen an English word before had hacked the OS.  You can read the details in the article linked above.  The point I want to make is that Stephenson’s book was an inspiration for the project, and it just goes to show that Science Fiction is more than words on a page.  The ideas in a novel can affect the lives of thousands of people and make the world a better place, and it doesn’t even take that much effort.  This isn’t the first time that science fiction has predicted the future, and it definitely won’t be the last.  So the next time someone calls you out for being a nerd or a geek or “wasting your time on that crap”, just remember these kids in Ethiopia, and what science fiction has done to help improve their lives.

 

Oh, Lili, you’l…

Oh, Lili, you’ll never believe it:

We’ve missed our ship and are now trapped here in Orsol. They’re not letting anyone leave. I hope this letter finds you safe in Rimmik, or I don’t know what I’d do.
They burned the cathedral with the priests all inside. We are heretics, and their duty is to save us from ourselves. How could they get everything so backwards, Lili? Can they even be men?
It’s just not fair. We were so close. Mere steps away as the gangplank was pulled aboard. If it hadn’t been for that cobblestone coming loose and cracking the axle, we’d have made it. We watched the ship sail from the docks under a witch-wind, so that we could barely stay upright to gaze after it, and so we were still standing when the Enemy’s own landed. Could anything be blacker than those monstrous things? On my word, they seemed to suck the sun from the sky, and I’ve heard the Great Gate cracked at the drop of their lines. I think we’re going to die Lili, that’s truth.
When some burned the Cathedral, the Gate turned them grey as ash and they blew away. But the cathedral still burned. Their faces… It wasn’t fear, it was conviction. I don’t think their lives meant anything to them. They dare not slaughter us all, now, before the eyes of the Gated, but the Cathedral still burned… How can stone burn, Lili?
They burned a man in the streets, too; and the Gated nae even turned their gaze. You could hear the screams from the docks to the hills. Mikkat tells me he burned black as coal and there was nothing left but the white of his bones melted into the cobbles. Where is his soul now, I do not know. Has the Gate ever been shut so? We all looked, but there was nothing. Nothing rose; the Gate did not open; you could not hear the Song of the Other side. There was just nothing, Lili, nothing at all.
I’m not so afraid to die, I suppose, to escape these beasts. But to become nothing? To burn from black to white and leave nothing but bone? I cannot bear to think of it. How could nothing feel the sun? How could it see your smile?
I can think of little else to say. Please be well, Lili, and I shall write again soon.

On this side and the other,
Your most faithful Martoneu

The first letter in my epistolary fantasy WIP.  I’ll be posting one or two of these a week as I go through discovery-writing the first draft.

 

ARGs and OMG: Alternate Reality Gaming and Augmented Reality

One of my favorite new developments in gaming and entertainment in general is the idea of the alternate reality game, or ARG.  An ARG is a game played in the real world that uses various forms of media such as e-mails, graffiti, or just the Game Masters’ voices to create a sense of realism and true player participation.  The game generally changes based on player interaction rather than rigidly constructed scripts that are supervised by an AI, such as in online rpgs.  An ARG can be a live-action role-playing game, but it can also involve regular people being their ordinary selves and testing their mettle in an extraordinary situation.

Anyone who’s been in college these past few years, especially in the US has a good chance of having encountered Humans vs. Zombies(HvZ), which is a very loose, short, and simple ARG set in a zombe apocalypse.  Online geeks may have heard of the character Slenderman, which is often invoked in short-term ARG scenarios.  Aficionados of speculative fiction might be familiar with This is Not a Game by Walter John Williams, Charlie Stross’ Halting State, or Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End.

Which segues us nicely into the other meaning for ARG: augmented reality game.  This is a game also set in the real world and containing non-real-world elements, but rather than just suspending disbelief, this kind of game actually “changes” the real world.  Using augmented reality technology, such as Google’s Goggles to overlay a virtual world onto the real one.  To my mind there is significant overlap, either present or possible between these genres.  In some ways, augmented reality is just taking alternate reality a step further.  However, it does allow a game to treat the real world like another world entirely.  A secondary world.  Which is sci-fi and awesome.

 

I support alternate reality games as a gaming fan and someone who enjoys being outside and interacting with real people, and I support augmented reality as someone who enjoys culture and technology and the ways the interact.  Several in-progress novels of mine, in various universes, possess a construct that I’ve taken to calling the ARSphere.  It’s kind of like the Internet overlaid on real life.  In my imagination, it covers the whole earth, thus the sphere, and it also comes in infinite “Layers”.  After all, you can have as many different overlays on the real world as you want, activate them in many combinations, and basically have a worldwide version of any social networking community or (AR)game that you want.

A company called synapse software has already begun to apply this concept to the Internet itself, in the form of a single Layer overlay called Goggles.  (Gosh doesn’t that name sound familiar?)

In my story worlds, of course, I can make all the rules, so p2p server networks host all the Layers, and there’s millions of them.  For games, for graffiti, for leaving notes to friends or communities, even for advertising.  I shamelessly stole the idea of ad-hacking from Vinge’s Rainbows End because thats totally what’s going to happen. The whole Earth is gonna be a giant damn billboard.

 

There’re a lot more things you could do with augmented reality.  My favorite pet project being a working air violin.  There’s also a lot of smartphone apps and such that let you see reviews based on a phone pic, or give you up-to-date subway schedules and the like.  They’re pretty cool, but I would love to see some more artistic or interactive applications of the technology.  Especially in the are of ARGs.

If you wanna see the current state of the genre, you can pop on over to ARGNet.

 

I currently have a novel planned which involves a slip-stream story line about an alternate reality game in the more literal sense, and how the the mundane ARG community gets tangled up in the creator’s fantastic world and the repercussions of a game that has outgrown its own creator.

 

How Getting Published Has Become Like Getting Laid: Writing/Publishing is Emulating the PUA Culture of Modern Dating

While reading a thread over on AbsoluteWrite about the old adage: “You should pitch your book as a standalone-with-series-potential” I finally made the connection to a trend a lot of dating blogs talk about: trying to game the system.  Pick-Up Artists spend a great deal of time marketing–and I assume selling, or they would get a new gig–tips and tricks and even full-fledged systems for getting laid.

 

There’s all sorts of different people peddling different ideas, but the major idea of PUA is that women are gate-keepers (usually for sex), and that there are sure-fire ways to trick/convince them to unlock those gates.  If you aren’t getting laid, you just need to get more game, and the PUA masters can sell it to you for ten easy payments of $9.99.  These systems occasionally include good information hidden in the dross, but their main suggestion is that you need to lie, cheat, and trick women into liking you, and there are scientific reasons why and for how to do it.  In fact, you can even convince someone who doesn’t want anything to do with you that what they actually want is nothing else but you.  Hopefully you agree that that’s total bullshit, and dis-respectful at best, possible rapey at worst.

 

And after reading some of the response to that thread on AW, I’ve come to realize that a lot of publishing advice tends in this same direction, although it tries much harder to present itself as education and understanding of what publishers want than PUA tries to pretend it cares about women’s feelings.  Obviously gaming publishers into giving you a contract is morally incomparable to the sorts of rape-tastic, misogynistic, creepy bullshit that is most PUA, but while the degree differs greatly, the pattern of thinking is remarkably similar:

 

If you just do the right things, say the rights things, have the right timing, women publishers  will give you a blowjob contract, and the reason you’ve failed so far is because you just haven’t learned the rules.  Even if you’re ugly/poor/an asshole your book has some issues, you can greatly improve your chances to get laid be published, if you just learn these ten simple tricks/pick-up linesbody language cues query rules/grammar tips/plot structures.

 

But that’s not really how dating writing works.  These ideas teach you to lie to women compromise your story on the basis of a few trends or anecdotes coming from a small group of people, many of whom don’t really have the knowledge or experience to back up their claims.

 

The issue that inspired this post was about querying series vs. standalones.  And how you should pitch a standalone-with-series-potential, even if you wrote the book you’re pitching as a pure series/pure standalone, and some fairly significant changes would have to be made to fit this “rule” of querying/publisher’s desires.  Otherwise you’re committing serious publishing faux pas.  And this is just one example from a long list of writing and publishing truisms, such as “show, don’t tell” that don’t reflect the reality that much.  There’s a whole mythology behind this type of thinking, and it’s being perpetuated even more now that the writing community is so interconnected and interactive.  Someone, no matter what their platform, spouts off about these rules, and the people who hear them take it as gospel and repeat it to everyone they know.  I’m not saying anyone is doing anything intentionally malicious here.  The fact that 99.99% of this interaction is in good faith makes it all the more insidious and damaging.

I have a problem with this type of thinking for a few reasons:

A)  A lot of it is just plain untrue, or misunderstood from legitimate/contextually specific suggestions and advice.

B)  Not every situation is the same, nor do all agents/editors/authors/readers agree on every little detail.

C)  It perpetuates an idea that the rules are what get you published, explain why bad books get published/accounts for why your literary masterpiece is still seeking representation after five years and forty rounds of increasingly desperate querying.

 

Much like the great majority of PUA philosophy, it takes the responsibility off the shoulders of the AverageFrustratedChump author, places the authority in the hands of a few misogynist assholes merely lucky/misguided/well-meaning-but-misinformed authors/agents/editors.

That’s not to say that these people are lying, or stupid.  Just that success doesn’t necessarily equate to understanding of that success.  Eeveryone’s experience in dating writing/publishing is different, and you can’t apply every little thing to every single person.  Sometimes you just have to admit you’re boring/an asshole/have bad timing aren’t quite ready for publication/this book will never be published.

I wish I had some answers.  Some way to remove this fog of misinformation.  A sure-fire route to publishing success.  But just like everyone else, the process is always going to be just a bit beyond my full understanding, and I’ll have to take some risks, indulge in some trial and error, and eventually work my way there by hard fucking work or a bit of lucky coincidence, just like everyone else.

 

RE: Amazon’s used e-book patent

There seems to be a fairly obvious fact being missed in most of the discussions I see about resale of print books versus resale of e-books:

All nit-picking of “licenses” versus “objects” aside, print books degrade and e-books don’t.  You can keep selling the same e-book forever, but eventually a print book just plain falls apart.  That’s what makes it a scarce product, whereas an e-book is forever.

 

Some Notes on Stats and Search Terms

Ever since some poor soul linked to me on tumblr, I’ve been getting traffic to one of the posts on the Chimney that is honestly not my favorite, not related to my genre, and I think it kinda just sucked a little bit.

Here’s the top five posts over the life of the blog:

1. How to Create a Believable Magic System

2. Common Magic System Pros and Cons: Elemental Magic

3. Magical No-Nos

4. Rules for Being a Bitch

5. Meeting Your Goals for Magic

 

I bet you can’t guess which post I’m referring to…

And it has almost twice as many views as the post just beneath it.  Tumblr, why you do me like this?

 

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the traffic.  And shit, I got linked to in a list of resources with posts from Janice Hardy.  I mean, holy crap she is awesome, you should go check her out if you haven’t before.  Like, how could that post put me on the same level as a published author?

The vagaries of the internet, I guess.  Apparently several different writing blogs on tumblr stumbled across it at the same time and found something they liked.

I just… I wish I could predict these things, and then maybe my traffic could compare to Janice hardy et all as well.