Surreality Check

A Savage Writer's Journal

October 2003
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Last Month (September)

05 October 2003
Non-Update

Not much going on in the sharktank over the last month. Except exhaustion and frustration, based upon some nonsense going on in the local legal community. As I am licensed here, but do not practice in the courts or before administrative agencies here, I have been asked to dig into the situation. One of the three people who made the request understands that I start digging with a backhoe; the other two don't, at least not from seeing it in action.

Otherwise, lots of programming and stuff. I am analyzing some heft royalty statements (400 pages or so) that did not result in heft royalty payments. Going over a few of them, I noticed some conditionals that tended to predict some of the problems; the programming is to test those conditionals for each of the nearly 100 books covered. Then, the fun begins.

Not incidentally, I completely redid all of the style sheets for the journal, and will be back-converting when I can.

09 October 2003
Napster Bad

Napster is scheduled to unveil its "new, legal" version today, under new ownership (Roxio, one of the leading makers of CD-R/RW burning software). Oh joy. I'm thrilled.

The biggest problem that I had with Napster—bigger even than its massive copyright violations—is the inherently insecure nature of the system. I hope that they are fixing that. I really wouldn't like the idea of someone being able to get a directory listing over the internet of part or all of my hard drive! That is just begging for exploitation, such as posting a slightly altered version of a popular MP3 that contains viral code, then sending an "execute" command to that viral code when it is found on a hard drive. (Note that this does require knowledge of the exact file name under which it is stored to work.) Of course, this is just a "delivery package" issue, which is something that those of us in my former profession have been thinking about since the early 19th century, and "secret police" have been thinking about even longer.

In any event, the pricing and reproducibility structure is going to be veeeeery interesting. As is the struggle to CSSize this website.

14 October 2003
Only the Shadow Knows

What lurks in the hearts of marketing dorks. This time, though, they've crossed the line. And when I'm done demonstrating how, I'll send a copy off to Mikey.

Kent Brewster cheerfully eviscerated some spam he just got from XLibris. <SARCASM> I feel left out; I have six books to my credit and I didn't get one. Waaaaaaaah! </SARCASM> Actually, Kent was too nice. He neglected to point out the violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act and California Business and Professions Code § 17200 and its not-quite-as-generous cognate statute in Pennsylvania that are inherent in the following statement:

Xlibris helps authors with flexible, inexpensive methods of editing, publishing, marketing, distributing, and selling books.

How do I loathe thee? Let me count the (deceptive) ways…

  1. It's not "flexible" if the contract is take-it-or-leave-it and filled with nonstandard and difficult-to-parse provisions that even publishing attorneys cannot interpret by concensus.
  2. Neither is it "flexible" if one cannot adapt the physical form of the book and its binding to the content, nor use color in the interior.
  3. It's not "inexpensive" if the only package with a reasonable chance of creating a professional-looking product is over $1,000.
  4. It is deceptive to imply that XLibris offers worthwhile editing services. It is even more deceptive to characterize those services as "flexible" or "inexpensive."
  5. The use of the word "publishing" without the necessary qualifier "vanity" is inherently deceptive. It's sort of like saying "low-cost housing" without saying "manufactured" or "mobile home"; and yes, that is a reference to specific case law.
  6. Marketing? Really?
  7. Distributing? Well, distribution without orders isn't really that difficult, so I suppose I can't complain too much about this one. Yet.
  8. Although selling even one copy of a book is technically within the meaning of the term "selling," it is not what the "least sophisticated consumer" would consider "selling." The claim later in the letter to have sold over one million copies of over ten thousand titles implies a median per-title sales record of less than 100. Even late-night-TV MLM operators are more honest than this!

15 October 2003
Over There

The Guardian is ordinarily a pretty solid newspaper. However, it has its own blind spots. One of them is that at least one columnist subscribes to the limited-number-of-plots theory of fiction.

To repeat what I've said before about this, in perhaps slightly less polite language: Bullshit. "Archetype" and "plot" are two different things, that have two completely different functions in any story. "Archetypal plot" is an oxymoron. Dammit, if yer gonna talk theory use the right terms!

20 October 2003
Sparseness

I have had yet another "needs to be done right now" item dropped on me. That's my excuse for not posting here much. I've also been writing up some reviews; unfortunately, I can't quite get CSS to do everything for me that I need it to do, so I have delayed doing much else. The reviews are a range of positive to positively vitriolic—some surprise.

There are, of course, limits to just about everything in coding for the Web. For example, this website remains extremely low graphics so that it will retain readability on just about any screen using just about any moderately standards-compliant browser. The way I have chosen to code things on the journal page, however, will not work for the reviews page, due to the floating and irregular-sized graphics for the book covers. We'll just see, though.

My next convention activity will be Windycon in Chicago, 07–09 November. I don't have a tentative schedule yet, but we'll get there. I'll bring Jaws along, too. He'd better behave himself, though; last time, he started nipping at a helpless swimmer in the hotel pool.

23 October 2003
Writing What You Know

Is a trap for the ignorant. Teresa Nielsen Hayden makes the following cogent comment at Making Light, her weblog:

If you’re writing novels, it’s not enough to arbitrarily have standard genre fantasy characters running around loose in standard genre fantasy settings, questing for the magic rose-quartz dingleberry while they try to defeat the Dark Lord who’s trying to take over the world. If that’s all your audience wants, they can get it elsewhere.
   …. If all your readers want is the usual matter and appurtenance of genre fantasy, they can also find that stuff in more thoughtful, complex, and inventive fantasy novels. That’s what they like best anyway.
   Writing nothing, or a version of nothing that’s enacted on the same sets and uses the same props and costumes that everyone else is using, is a losing proposition.

"On Writing Genre Fantasy" (22 Oct 2003)

If anything, she is understating the case. The problem is Grisham's Law, the publishing corollary of management theory's Gresham's Law: bad fiction drives good fiction out of the marketplace. There is quite a bit of good work being done, in fantasy in particular. It is available at Amazon, and even in most of the chain stores. However, it is virtually never available in endcaps; instead, it is mixed in with the dreck that Sturgeon's Law dictates fills most speculative fiction sections. In turn, this means that many aspiring writers have never read anything except knockoffs of Tolkein and Lovecraft(or perhaps only one example), and therefore think that fantasy requires a Quest with Plot Coupons. This creates a positive feedback loop—which, when dealing with a problem, is a negative thing.

So go read something different for a change. Experiment with Terry McGarry or Neil Gaiman or Naomi Kritzer instead of more R0ber+ J0rd@n, or T3rry Br00k5, or other derivative crap. (I refuse to give those particular paragons of awfulness the satisfaction of an indexable mention in this journal.)

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