Archive for the ‘Featured Resource’ Category

The End is Nigh; On Writing, Focus, and Determination

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

No, not the end­ing of all things in which Xenu returns and bat­tles a Scientologist-​​built Voltron piloted by John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, and Beck.  That’s sched­uled for sum­mer 2012.

The end­ing we’re talk­ing about today is that of writ­ing the final chap­ters of my first book.

I know, I’m dis­ap­pointed too.  But what are you going to do?

I wish I could tell you what changed a lit­tle over a month ago that broke my writer’s block.  Maybe my father’s death faded into the past finally enough that it didn’t haunt me any­more when I took to the key­board.  Maybe step­ping down from my anti-​​anxiety med­ica­tion allowed my brain to recover its sup­pressed cre­ativ­ity.  Wouldn’t that be a huge pain in the ear if we have to be anx­ious to be creative?

Or it could be that I finally learned how to cap­ture my focus.  I think it’s this one.

It’s no coin­ci­dence that the very first thing I did after get­ting my new MacBook was to install the Scrivener demo.  I’ve heard Mac-​​based authors gush­ing about this pro­gram for years, and so I wanted to check it out.  And I noticed this lit­tle but­ton called “full screen” mode. So I clicked it.

Have you ever been to an opera, or a ballet—some place where the audi­ence is incred­i­bly appre­cia­tive of the show?  And you’re sit­ting in the audi­ence and every­one is chat­ting and sud­denly the lights dim a bit.  And a hush rolls over the crowd.  A moment later, the music begins.  If you were an alien observ­ing the sit­u­a­tion, you might think it was the hush that sum­moned the music, and not the reverse.

That hap­pened in my brain when I opened up the “Full Screen” mode. I hadn’t real­ized how much any com­puter is a ball of dis­trac­tions to me.  Twitter, Facebook, IMs, emails, RSS updates.  I could spend my entire day feel­ing very pro­duc­tive deal­ing with all of the var­i­ous infor­ma­tion streams that I’ve set up for myself.  And you’d like that, wouldn’t you Twitter?  You minx.

The hush rolled over me and I heard a faint voice in the back of my brain, in the very back rows.  A crazy per­son began to shout—or, it would be more appro­pri­ate to say that he had always been shout­ing and I had been unable to hear him.

I brought him up on stage, and gave him the floor.  He con­ducted, and my fin­gers played.

BAM, I had a story that has trou­bled me for sev­eral years.  BAM, two more fol­lowed in quick suc­ces­sion.    I say BAM, but what I really mean is I spent sev­eral hours a day hid­ing in the cor­ner of a cof­fee shop to remove even the phys­i­cal dis­trac­tions of my home envi­ron­ment,  launched Scrivener, and worked.  But com­pared to the strug­gles of the past few years, the sto­ries were prac­ti­cally Athenian in nature.

I resolved rather quickly to ride this don­key as far as it would take me, and so far, I haven’t missed my count of a thou­sand words a day, although I got close a cou­ple of times last week when I had bad days unre­lated to the writ­ing. I even tried to give up and stop, but I felt so ill at the idea that I got out my lap­top at 11 PM despite being exhausted and I wrote sit­ting on the couch while my wife watched Glee.  Glee, for fuck’s sake!   If any­thing should have been able to assault my new­found focus, it would be that … show.

Most days, I do between three thou­sand to five thou­sand words, which is why I am right now 3 chap­ters away from fin­ish­ing a 60,000 word novel.  When you real­ize that I have been writ­ing at least 3 or 4 hours a day to man­age that, it prob­a­bly sounds a lot less impres­sive.   Still, I’ll take it.

It’s kind of a crap novel, if I’m being hon­est.  But it’s mine and I no longer doubt that I’m capa­ble of doing this.  This biggest ques­tion I have always faced has not been “can I write a good novel?”  but “can I write that many words at all?” And now I know I can.  I’ll have this draft wrapped up by Sunday or Monday at the latest.

As far as qual­ity, they say writ­ing is when you put words on the page, and edit­ing is when you make them good.  Unfortunately, I’m even worse at edit­ing than I am at writ­ing. But I am as pig­headed as… god, my brain is almost com­pletely devoid of analo­gies right now.  We’ll just say I am stub­born.  It was never a ques­tion of that, but of endurance. So I will beat the man­u­script with sticks until it sucks less.  And if that doesn’t work, then I will kill it with fire, piss on the ashes, and start a new one.  Because that’s how I roll now.

And yeah, I don’t know that I rec­om­mend to any­one else that you write a novel in 3 weeks.   Unless you want to; in which case I say, close this browser win­dow, unplug your inter­net, and start typ­ing.

Write like the devil is chas­ing you.  Write like you have ter­mi­nal can­cer.  Because you might.  You never know.   And if you don’t, then that in and of itself is a gift from the uni­verse, telling you, “make some­thing with this time you have.”

Write it now, write it hard, and write with­out fear or doubt.  Just jump.

It’s not the end of the world if you fall.  The land­ing is almost always a soft one.  But don’t be sur­prised if you start flap­ping your arms.  Frantic at first, then with pur­pose, and before you hit, you take flight.

And if you don’t, then there’s always paint­ing, or music. Or sex.  Awwwww yeah.

Five Movies That Inspire Me To Write Better

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I draw a lot of inspi­ra­tion from film.  I sup­pose it’s my gen­er­a­tion, that I’m influ­enced as much by the visual medi­ums of TV and cin­ema as I am the writ­ten word.  It’s eas­ier to become con­ver­sant in cin­ema than it is in lit­er­a­ture for the sim­ple fact that it takes less time to watch 100 great films than it does to read 100 great nov­els.  I envy writ­ers from the 19th cen­tury.  They had con­sid­er­ably less “canon” to digest.

Movies evoke mood won­der­fully for me, and it’s some­thing I often find I want to emu­late in my short fic­tion.  These are some movies that make me ache with a need to accom­plish for oth­ers what they did to me.

Amelie (2001)

image Directed by Jean-​​Pierre Jeunet, this film man­ages to cap­ture a tech­nochrome Paris that almost cer­tainly doesn’t exist.  It’s the pro­to­typ­i­cal slip­stream film to me.  It feels strange and won­der­ful, and from the very begin­ning in which we see a young Amelie, we’re made aware of how her world is very much not like ours.  It inter­sects in places… geo­graphic loca­tions, lit­er­ally, that you rec­og­nize if you’ve spent a lot of time in Paris. But they still seem some­how more alive, rich, than the reality.

The sound­track never fails to recre­ate a sense of whimsy in me when I lis­ten to it, a feel­ing of spin­ning in cir­cles like a sufi mys­tic, always spin­ning, on the edge of los­ing con­trol and col­laps­ing into fits of laughter.

It’s a love story too, a love story for misfits—as all char­ac­ters in Jeunet’s films are. This list could be entirely pop­u­lated with Jeunet films, honestly.

Whenever I think of strange cities pop­u­lated with peo­ple just a few degrees out of sync with nor­mal, I think of Amelie’s Paris.

O Brother Where Art Thou (2000)

image The Coen Brothers.  Sometimes, I think they’re the best work­ing cin­e­matog­ra­phers.  Sometimes they make films that leave me cold, and then they make a film like O Brother.

The Odyssey is my favorite epic. I’ve always iden­ti­fied more with Odysseus than any of the more tragic fig­ures of the Iliad, although I think per­haps the great­est descrip­tive phrase I’ve ever read is “the wine-​​dark sea.”   In the hands of lesser artists, retelling the Odyssey in a 1930s South would come across forced, unauthentic.

Oddly enough, this is another one with a bril­liant sound­track.  But it’s less evoca­tive of the feel­ing the movie puts me in.  Whenever I want to feel shame for my dia­logue, espe­cially comic pat­ter, I sim­ply put this one and and wal­low in it.  The Coen Brothers can write snappy dia­logue, sure, but the actors they cast into the roles really make it shine.

Everett is how I wish all my fast-​​talking char­ac­ters could sound like.

Jaws (1975)

image The movie that per­fected the art of the sum­mer block­buster and has rarely been sur­passed since.  This movie ter­ri­fied me as a kid, and I grew up in Kansas with­out ever hav­ing seen the ocean.  I was afraid to go near any body of water.  And when you think of just how rarely you see old Bruce, it’s pretty amaz­ing.  Of course, the film did tremen­dous eco­log­i­cal dam­age in cast­ing sharks in such a hor­rific role, but there’s not much we can do about it now.

The pac­ing in this one is just per­fect for me.  And it has what I think is prob­a­bly the great­est mono­logue of all time, deliv­ered by the late great Robert Shaw—you know exactly the mono­logue I’m talk­ing about:

You know the thing about a shark, he’s got…lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that ter­ri­ble high pitch screamin’ and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin’ and the hol­lerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces.

The way that scene is wrapped in the rest of the movie reminds me of a Tootsie Pop.  A lit­tle bit­ter sweet wrapped in crunchy candy fun. And the cam­era tech­niques… I can watch on repeat that first major use of the Spielbergian zoom where Brody is on the beach and sees some­thing in the water.  It cap­tures that feel­ing of lean­ing for­ward in shock and fear, of bolt­ing upright at the real­iza­tion of some­thing ter­ri­ble.  Using the camera’s move­ments to evoke emo­tion is kind of like using sim­ple words to build up a mood with­out the reader catch­ing on.  I want to do that!

Hot Fuzz (2007)

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I’ve watched this movie a dozen times, and each time I notice some new trick of the script that blows me away.  Every early scene is chock full of easter eggs for later scenes—it’s absolutely a mas­ter­ful piece for demon­strat­ing fore­shad­ow­ing.  The dia­logue is used to great effect here.  The whole freak­ing first act is a giant gun on the mantle­piece, and holy shit does it go off in the finale.  And the way it toys with genre conventions—just bloody brilliant.

I wish I could write scene tran­si­tions like Edgar Wright directs in this film.  There scene where our heroes and drunk and headed to Danny Butterman’s place to watch films, and it cuts back and forth to the scene in the kitchen where the mur­der­ers are set­ting up a late night snack cracks me up and aston­ishes me every time.

A great use of a twist as well that doesn’t feel any­where near as cheap as some of the later M. Night Shamalayan movies.

I’m a sucker for just about any­thing Simon Pegg and Nick Frost do.   I am really look­ing for­ward to see­ing Paul, which sounds a bit off from the descrip­tions I’ve read, but I really trust Pegg as a writer after Spaced.  And it goes with­out say­ing that I’ll fol­low Edgar Wright into any film he’s even remotely attached to.  Scott Pilgrim really cemented his sta­tus as a top direc­tor for me.

Spirited Away (2001)

image I could once again prob­a­bly add any of the Miyazaki films to this list, but Spirited Away is one of my all-​​time favorite fan­tasy films.  The feel­ing of strange­ness and oth­er­word­li­ness it evokes is some­thing I try to cap­ture over and over again, and I’ve never done it to the level of my sat­is­fac­tion (I sup­pose I have a few more decades to get it right).

Part of the won­der for me here is that I’m not famil­iar with any of the source mate­ri­als Miyazaki draws on to cre­ate his spir­its, and so each one of them feels unique.  The coal sprites are just about the cutest damn thing ever animated.

And that train… I have dreams about that train.  I’ve rid­den on a train in the U.S. once and it was a thor­oughly unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence, but some­thing about the train in this movie is haunt­ing my imagination.

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There’s noth­ing remotely sci­en­tific about this list.  Ask me again tomor­row and I might draw out of mem­ory an entirely dif­fer­ent set of films.  Right now, I’m really ques­tion­ing whether I should have left Donnie Darko, my favorite sci­ence fic­tion film, off the list, but it’s late and I really want to get this blog post sched­uled, so I’m just going to have to leave my gush­ing over that one for another post.  And yes, I know this list is super-​​heavy with really recent films.  I’m not sure what that says about me, but I’m sure it’s some­thing unpleas­ant.  Let us not speak of it.

So what about you guys?  What movies inspire you to write bet­ter?  What flick­er­ing cel­lu­loid dreams do you want to evoke in your words?

The New World In Which We Live

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The inter­net is the most dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy to the cre­ative arts since man first put paint on cave walls.  Everything about pub­lish­ing is chang­ing.  Cases in point:

Konrath EBooks Sales Top 100K

Joe Konrath isn’t a writer who I was famil­iar with until today, but he’s see­ing some amaz­ing suc­cess going against tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing meth­ods. Joe’s mak­ing more money on his own with ebook sales than he makes from any of his books with tra­di­tional publishers. 

Why are my self-​​pubbed ebooks earn­ing more than Whiskey Sour, which remains my best­selling print title with over 80,000 books sold in var­i­ous formats?

Because Hyperion has priced Whiskey Sour at $4.69 on Amazon, and I price my ebooks at $2.99.

For each $4.69 ebook they sell, I earn $1.17.

For each $2.99 ebook I sell, I earn $2.04.
So I’m basi­cally los­ing money hand over fist because Hyperion is pric­ing my ebooks too high, and giv­ing me too low a roy­alty rate.

Even the print sales (Whiskey Sour just went into a fifth print­ing) don’t come close to mak­ing up the money I’m losing.

If we assume I could sell 833 copies per month of Whiskey Sour, I’d be earn­ing $17,000 per year on it, rather than $5616 per year. (I’m guess­ing my num­bers have gone up recently, and am esti­mat­ing 400 Whiskey Sour sales per month.)

Let’s mul­ti­ply that times the six books Hyperion controls.

I’m esti­mat­ing I cur­rently earn $33,696 annu­ally in ebook roy­al­ties on those six.
If I had the rights, I esti­mate I’d earn $102,000.

Do I want my books to go out of print?

Hell yeah.

imageWe’re see­ing a gold mine rush in ebook pub­lish­ing right now, and I don’t think it’s any­where near peaked, as Konrath points out.   I pre­dict as peo­ple look at his hard num­bers, we’re going to see a lot of promi­nent writ­ers rethink­ing their atti­tudes about self-​​publishing.  We’re going to see ebook rights play­ing a much larger role in nego­ti­a­tions.  Successful writ­ers who own their own ebook rights are going to find that pub­lish­ers are going to play hard in try­ing to acquire them—it would not sur­prise me if authors are being told they won’t sell new works unless they sell off the ebook rights to older books.  Publishers have got to be look­ing at this whole sit­u­a­tion and rethink­ing their game.  I know authors are.

The world is chang­ing.  The world has changed so much from 8 years ago when I started writ­ing.  And it’s still moving.

And what’s more, this kind of “set out on your own and make a liv­ing at what you love” suc­cess story isn’t lim­ited to pub­lish­ing fic­tion.  Indie video game devel­op­ers are see­ing the same thing.

$250,000-a-day Minecraft striks indie game gold

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Minecraft.  I’ve lost at least one week­end to the game.  It’s in alpha.  Costs about $12.  Has graph­ics that are about on par with Nintendo 64.  But it’s addic­tive. Oh god, is it.  Mix a lit­tle action adven­ture with the sand­box plea­sure of build­ing stuff with lego blocks, and you kind of get at the cen­tral play model.

Basically, you start Minecraft and you have an entire world in front of you, pop­u­lated with a few ani­mals, trees, and hills.  There’s some water and sand too.  You’re kind of at a loss at what to do first.  You punch stuff, and soon you find that trees break apart into logs which you pick up and add to your inven­tory.  You look in your inven­tory and you find a 2x2 craft­ing matrix.  Throw a cou­ple of piles of logs in there and you can make sticks.

Do you see where this is going?

Sticks turn into basic tools. Tools like you get new mate­ri­als like stone, and even­tu­ally met­als when you dig deep enough.

Problem is, when the sun sets, mon­sters come out, and you don’t stand a chance against them with your fists and sticks.  So you need to build a shel­ter to pro­tect your­self, and you need light, so you make torches.

This Penny Arcade comic cap­tures the essence of the expe­ri­ence pretty damned well.

And it’s only in Alpha.  It’s amaz­ingly addic­tive as it is—who knows what fea­tures the devel­oper, Notch, is plan­ning on adding to the game. 

Minus some Paypal fees, the money Notch is mak­ing on this game is pretty much pure profit.  And recently, he made $250,000 in one day sell­ing copies of an unfin­ished game that has no tra­di­tional pub­lisher, with what I sus­pect is a near-​​zero mar­ket­ing bud­get.  The game’s got­ten plenty of word of mouth, but that’s about it.  Now, Notch is hir­ing staff and build­ing his own game studio.

Do you see the pat­tern here? I know I do.  Creative folks are wak­ing up in a world where we don’t need per­mis­sion from any­one else to chase our dreams.  The prob­lem is still going to be one of qual­ity, and con­quer­ing obscu­rity, but bar­ri­ers between artist and audi­ence are absolutely, with­out a doubt, crum­bling.  You can argue whether this is a good or a bad thing, but I don’t think you can dis­pute this.  Twitter, blog­ging, and all of it.

There’s still going to be a role for cura­tors.  I think that aspect of pub­lish­ing still has value.  At least at first.  But once you’ve estab­lished an audience…?   

There’s an awful lot to think about these days.  I know one thing’s for sure—I’m start­ing to recon­sider my posi­tion on not cre­at­ing ebook files.

Twitter Killed My Blog: How I’m Bringing it Back

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Hey, remem­ber when we all used to blog?

Let me take you way, way back to 2007. You could still buy and sell a house for exor­bi­tant prices, and there were still banks that would give you loans for that.  You prob­a­bly actu­ally had a job, you know, work­ing for some com­pany that employed real live peo­ple, instead of spend­ing all your time launch­ing small busi­nesses or pol­ish­ing your resume and carpet-​​bombing employ­ers with it.  Twitter was around, but only Left Coast lib­eral elit­ists used it.  Not us nor­mal, real, work­ing Americans! Not blog­gers.  We thought “what in the world would I say in only 140 char­ac­ters?  Give me my Blogger/​WordPress/​Movable Type/​Other!”

Maybe that was just me?

Times changed fast, didn’t they? I picked up Twitter, became a heavy user, and then  2010 became the year that my blog died.  I’m blam­ing Twitter, whether it’s hon­estly respon­si­ble or not.  I have made over 11,000 tweets, but the qual­ity of my blog posts is gen­er­ally higher than my tweets.  Overwhelmingly, my blog has pro­vided more value to my read­ers than Twitter has.  But Twitter is like infor­ma­tion crack.  Need another hit?  Oh look, another 400 updates to your stream.  And writ­ing a tweet takes 1/​100th the effort of pen­ning a blog post.

It wasn’t long after I signed up that I found myself doing noth­ing but Twitter and ignor­ing my beau­ti­ful, inspir­ing, edu­ca­tional, and—above all else—humble blog.  Instead of writ­ing posts that con­nected resources together and shared them in a mean­ing­ful con­text, I tweeted links, some­times with­out any con­text.  Talk about instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion though. People retweet a hell of a lot more than they com­ment on blogs.  You can watch in real time as some­thing funny or clever spreads virally from your friends out into groups of peo­ple you never even heard of with vaguely dis­turb­ing per­sonal pro­file pho­tos. You really get the sense that peo­ple are lis­ten­ing on Twitter.  It’s harder to know when peo­ple are read­ing your blog unless they are com­ment­ing on it or retweet­ing your announce­ment of the post.  Nothing sat­is­fies the need for atten­tion quite like retweets.  They’re dead easy to do, but empty of real con­ver­sa­tion gen­er­ally.  They’re a medium, not a message.

It’s not just what Twitter has done to my shar­ing habits that dis­turbs me.  It’s the way my thoughts them­selves have changed.  For a while now, I’ve felt my thoughts turn­ing much more shal­low, and I can prob­a­bly only blame that par­tially on my heavy use of Twitter.  But it doesn’t take gen­er­at­ing real, actual con­tent on Twitter to get that lit­tle dopamine buzz of atten­tion.  You can just share a link from your Google Reader.  Or retweet some­one else.  I didn’t just become a con­sumer of information—I became a lazy syn­di­ca­tor, with the false feel­ing that I was gen­er­at­ing con­tent when all I have really been doing is shift­ing around some­one else’s con­tent (coin­ci­den­tally, this also describes a bunch of inter­net news sites that will remain unnamed here).

I’m not going to beat myself up about it.  At the same time I was spend­ing more time on Twitter and less time on my blog, I was launch­ing my web design com­pany Clockpunk Studios.  And Twitter has some very large pos­i­tives asso­ci­ated with it.  It has been invalu­able in mak­ing busi­ness con­tacts.  I’ve got­ten more than one client from a Twitter recommendation.

So look, Twitter’s not all bad.  It’s not all good.  It’s just a new thing that I need to bal­ance along with all the other things.  Maybe you’re strug­gling with that too?  Let’s talk about this. Has Twitter killed your blog too?  Head to the com­ments! And keep it civil. If you just want to make fun of peo­ple who use Twitter, find some place else to do it.  Like your own Twitter account!

I’ve sworn to myself—because I appar­ently enjoy mak­ing ridicu­lous oaths to myself—that I would relaunch my blog before the year is out.  The new design is only half done.  You’ll notice an absolutely lack of side­bars.  But we’re gonna focus on con­tent for a while here, and let those other fea­tures fill in with time.

I’m start­ing with this post (which I am writ­ing 5 days ahead of pub­li­ca­tion, as a part of a gen­eral effort to a: spend more time on blog posts, and b: get the con­tent log rolling ahead of me to build momen­tum).  I’ve worked up a ten­ta­tive weekly sched­ule, which will cer­tainly change once I’ve got­ten into it a bit and begin to under­stand what is work­ing and what isn’t.  When I blogged reg­u­larly, I kept a 3 day a week sched­ule, but that would be too easy to slip out of now after being so out of habit.  Regular, daily con­tent gen­er­a­tion is the only thing that’s going to build up my blog­ging mus­cles again.  So here it is:

My New Improved Blogging Schedule!

Monday:  Personal Anecdotes

This is the day you won’t want to miss if you’re really super inter­ested in the day to day of my life as a small busi­ness owner, aspir­ing midlist writer, and some­times pho­tog­ra­pher.  I’ll be dig­ging into my past in these posts with a gen­eral goal of try­ing to under­stand how I became who I am today and how that impacts who I want to become.  Of course, it will all be writ­ten in my trade­mark humor­ous style.  You will laugh, you will cry, and you will won­der why you became friends with such a bla­tant narcissist.

Tuesday: Inspiration

This is where I’ll share the inspi­ra­tional bits of things I’ve col­lected over the pre­vi­ous week.  This will include snip­pets of cool web design, awe­some quotes in writ­ing, cool comic book pan­els, and so on.  Stuff that inspires me to be a bet­ter artist, pho­tog­ra­pher, writer, and human being.  And not only will I share them—I’ll talk about why they inspire me.  The goal here is to get beyond sur­face level thoughts and back into that crit­i­cal think­ing mode that got me through lib­eral arts col­lege with a solid B– average.

Wednesday: Tutorials!

I do a lot of stuff.  Sometimes, other peo­ple want to know how to do that stuff too.  I’ll be writ­ing up var­i­ous cre­ative tuto­ri­als for Wednesdays.  This will run the usual gamut of top­ics, but expect a lot of web­site related stuff.  Your feed­back will guide the direc­tion of these posts, so if there’s some­thing in par­tic­u­lar you want to know about, then speak up.  As a com­ment or on Twitter.  Either way.

Thursday: The Week in Links

I have to give myself at least one easy day!  I’ll run down a list of links of inter­est that you might enjoy that I’ve gath­ered up from var­i­ous resources through­out the week.  I’ll even go a step fur­ther than the old Delicious​.com auto posts and actu­ally pro­vide some con­text to the links!  And they won’t be posted daily, so you’ll prob­a­bly have seen and read every sin­gle one already, but hey, who knows…

Friday:  Lesson Learned

Finally, I’ll look back on the week and talk about a les­son I’ve learned, with a par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on my self-​​employed lifestyle and run­ning my busi­ness.   But I reserve the right to make it lessons I’ve learned in just about everything.

So that’s that.  For now.

It takes remark­able ego to write a blog at all.  My ego’s going to have to grow a lit­tle bit to man­age 5 days a week of hope­fully scin­til­lat­ing con­tent.  But with a lit­tle fer­til­iz­ing in the form of feed­back from my friends and com­plete strangers who clicked through from a Google search for “Yogi Bear foot fetish”, I think my ego will grow and grow until it wins 1st prize at the County Fair.

So here we grow!

On Types of Writers Block

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

When I first began writ­ing in earnest, I didn’t believe in writer’s block.  You know how it is.  When you’re com­pletely lack­ing in self-​​consciousness about your works, it’s much eas­ier to get things done.  Doubt hasn’t entered the pic­ture then, nor a dozen other ever-​​present con­cerns, experience-​​driven instincts, and mild pho­bias that you develop with time.  These things are internal-​​process bar­na­cles that form as an outer crust on the hull of your cre­ativ­ity.  They weigh you down a bit, but when the wind is right, you sail straight enough despite them.   The sail­ing is smooth and easy at first with­out them, but you prob­a­bly have no real des­ti­na­tion in mind, and the sail­ing is so smooth that it’s down­right bor­ing to any pas­sen­gers along for the ride.

Since my days of proto-​​writerhood, about 8 years ago, I’ve dis­cov­ered that writer’s block is real enough, and not only that, it comes from a vari­ety of causes. Because writ­ing is a damned bor­ing thing to talk about lit­er­ally, I’m going to flog this naval metaphor as I explore the forms of block I have encoun­tered in my years at sea.  (The irony of me rely­ing on this—me, the kid who didn’t see the ocean for the first time until he was 19—is not lost.)

No wind

The most com­mon block to my writ­ing is a lack of wind in my sails.  The dri­ving force behind my work goes away, and leaves me in the Sargasso Sea of the blank page.  Why does the wind aban­don me?  Why does the wind do any­thing?  The fac­tors are too com­plex to pick apart.   The wind of my inspi­ra­tion can come from a lot of dif­fer­ent places, mostly deep inter­nal aspects of my self that I don’t really feel com­fort­able exam­in­ing too closely.  It feels like frag­ile machin­ery that would be too easy to dis­turb when it’s work­ing right, and when it’s not, I never want to risk tin­ker­ing for fear of break­ing some­thing completely.

When faced with a lack of inspi­ra­tion, I shut down almost entirely as a writer.  I sit in mySar­gasso Sea and pass the time as best I can.  Read, watch TV. Sometimes, I draw.

When I’m clever, I remem­ber the god­damned boat has oars, and I heave to as best I can.

Right now, I can’t even find where I put the oars, but that’s another story entirely.

Wrecked on the rocks

Oops, steered this one wrong.  Now I’m stuck in the muck, marooned on the rocks.  I write myself into a cor­ner often, espe­cially when I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m headed—when I’m writ­ing for the fun of the jour­ney and not the destination.

The best way for me to avoid this is to know where I’m going ahead of time.  For a while there, after con­ceiv­ing of a story, the very next thing I attempted to do was envi­sion the point or the finale.  What would it build to?  With that in mind, I could set sail.  And if I saw a bet­ter des­ti­na­tion along the way, there was no rea­son I couldn’t change course!  My plans or out­lines are never set in stone.  They’re there just to keep me from the rocks.

There’s a leak

Sometimes you set sail with a story made of lit­tle more than a vague idea and a half-​​sketched out char­ac­ter con­cept.  And it isn’t until you’re in deep waters that you dis­cover your ini­tial con­cept is full of holes (made by the worm­rot of the implau­si­bil­i­tus, incon­sis­ten­tia, or been-​​there-​​done-​​that-​​allia species).  Now you find your­self sink­ing, maybe bail­ing for your life with a lit­tle hand wav­ing, but the boat’s tak­ing on the waters of dis­be­lief and some of your pas­sen­gers aren’t going to see the jour­ney to the end.  “No thanks,” they say as they dive off and swim back to shore. “We’ll take the next one.”

I scut­tle a lot of story boats this way delib­er­ately.  The ini­tial rush of an idea, those hard fast winds that come early; too often, I would set sail imme­di­ately with­out any plan­ning at all, buoyed by the excite­ment of the fresh­ness of it in my mind.   More often than not, when I dis­cover the flaws in my half-​​assed idea, I would sink the whole thing and move on.  I’ve prob­a­bly aban­doned five times as many story ideas as I’ve ever fin­ished.  I was a strong swim­mer in those days, but now I would just as soon arrive in a leaky boat and start work on patching.

I try to never patch-​​edit while I’m work­ing on the first draft. That’s a sure fire way to end up com­pletely bogged down.

Listening to the Crew

When things aren’t going well, the crew, made up of internal-​​editors, voices of self-​​doubt, and so on, they tend to get rowdy.  Sometimes, even when things are going well, they’re a noisy bunch, and it’s tempt­ing to give in and lis­ten to the nasty bunch of swine.

If I had my way, I’d make them all walk to plank at the start of a voy­age, but they’re not com­pletely worth­less.  Best to gag them, tie them up, and throw them into the hull until you’re done with your maiden voy­age, I say.

NOT Listening to the 1st Mate

My friend Jay Lake calls his sub­con­scious Bob, but I tend to call my sub­con­cious “Potatohead,” because he’s really not too bright.  Sure, he’s cre­ative and all, but he doesn’t have any con­cept of the real­i­ties of being a human being.  Impractical, is what I’m saying.

But when it comes to sail­ing, Commander Potatohead was born into a life at sea.  He may not know how to bal­ance a check­book or even earn a decent liv­ing, but the bas­tard knows how to sail bet­ter than I ever will.

I don’t always give him his due.  Me, Captain Ego, I want to be right all the time, want to be in charge.  I don’t like lis­ten­ing to the sea­soned advice of Mr. Potatohead who really knows these waters bet­ter than any­one.  When you fail to lis­ten,  you often end up  with a mutiny on your hands, marooned, or stuck in a Sargasso Sea.  Again.

That’s not even tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the dif­fi­culty of com­mu­ni­ca­tion! While I speak the Queen’s English, Commander Potatohead speaks some patois that I’ve never even heard of before.  I’m pretty sure he orig­i­nates from some­where in Polynesia—some obscure island nobody has ever heard of.  So we can’t really talk.  We resort to draw­ing vague pic­tures, ges­tur­ing wildly in some ridicu­lous game of conscious/​subconscious Charades.  And worse, we don’t keep the same sleep sched­ules, so we have to leave mes­sages for one another on scraps of paper, rope, what­ever we can find.

Frankly, it’s amaz­ing we have ever com­pleted a voy­age together at all.

* * *

But we have. And I’ll be damned if I am going to let any of these things get in my way to com­plet­ing my jour­neys in the future.  I don’t care if I make it to the other side leak­ing like a sieve, tied up and held hostage by the crew,  being slowly inched over the edge by a Commander Potatohead wear­ing an eye-patch—I’m going to make it.

When I look at cre­ative block in the abstract, it’s much more intim­i­dat­ing.  Abstract con­cepts aren’t eas­ily defeated, but when I con­cretize the idea into a giant tuber wear­ing an eye-​​patch, it sud­denly seems so much eas­ier to overcome.

Maybe that will work for you too.  Yarr.

Writing is a Sail Boat, And I’m Stuck on the Reefs

A short history of my personal finance: How freelancing saved my sanity and gave me back my soul.

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Most have heard the apho­rism that “money can’t buy you hap­pi­ness.” Strictly true, I sup­pose, but then, money can buy things that will make you happy, at least for a while. Not all the things that would make you happy, pos­si­bly, but… it’s just not true in a looser sense.

That’s not what I want to talk to you about today.

What I want to talk about is the per­sonal les­son that I have learned from my first year of run­ning a web design busi­ness and being per­son­ally respon­si­ble for my own income. Money might not buy hap­pi­ness, but it can buy peace of mind.

Let’s start with the olden days.

The Way Things Were

Sarah and I grad­u­ated from col­lege with an unbe­liev­ably large amount of loans, and I brought to our mar­riage a not insub­stan­tial sum of credit card debt. We made decent money out of col­lege, and when I think about the rent we were pay­ing, I cry. $400 a month for a 2 bed­room! I can’t get than for less than 3 times that now.

But we never saved, and our expenses seemed to grow to match our income every time. Slight raise, oops, need a new car. Credit card debt grow­ing out of control–let’s con­sol­i­date all that into a home equity loan and do some house repairs while we’re at it. We spent a lot of money, we bor­rowed a lot, but we never saved, and if the Wall Street Journal is right, nobody else did either.

The prob­lem with this lifestyle was that we only ever had just enough. We were the def­i­n­i­tion of liv­ing from pay­check to pay­check, even though we were doing fine. We had no way of bud­get­ing to deal with emer­gency expenses, how­ever. A bro­ken down car would nearly result in me hav­ing a ner­vous break­down. Somehow, we’d scrape up the money every time, but I’d be pro­foundly happy about the entire thing, some­times for days or even weeks.

I was ter­ri­fied of los­ing what I had. Afraid that we would end up bank­rupt and by all rights, we prob­a­bly should have. I’d seen my father weather bank­ruptcy as a kid, and in my mind it was basi­cally flunk­ing adult­hood. It kept me up at nights some­times, and I devel­oped panic attacks now and then.

I’m skip­ping over a bunch of stuff, but even­tu­ally we moved to Fort Collins from Wyoming and went back to rent­ing after being home own­ers. Selling our house cleared out a lot of our debt, but not all of it. We still weren’t sav­ing much, but we had put a few thou­sand away from the sale of our home. If felt kind of good.

CUT TO The Econopocalypse

After a cou­ple of years of work­ing in Fort Collins, con­tin­u­ing to live pay­check to pay­check, slowly grow­ing to hate the world of cubi­cles and office meet­ings, I was laid off sud­denly and unex­pect­edly. It was a curi­ous thing, being laid off. Everyone around me was in tears about it. They had poured part of their life into the com­pany. I was still the new guy. I tried, but I couldn’t hide the grin on my face. I felt bad about being happy, but I was.

Getting laid off felt great, felt like sud­denly I had been handed pos­ses­sion of my own soul again. It felt like some­one open­ing the door of a cage and lur­ing me out with a bloody flank steak (in the form of a small sev­er­ance pack­age). I took it and ran, gnaw­ing along the way.

We tried to be respon­si­ble. We made dras­tic cost-​​cutting mea­sures. I began look­ing for a job, and to make the time pass more eas­ily, I took on some free­lance web/​design projects, mostly for peo­ple I knew. I felt… good. Because thanks to my sev­er­ance, I had a bit of a sav­ings. I had a fall­back, a safety net.

At the end of that sum­mer, I got offered a seem­ingly great job; work from home, great ben­e­fits, doing some inter­est­ing work, and so I took it, and side­lined free­lanc­ing. It seemed like free­lanc­ing with­out the risk. All the while, the econ­omy was totally tank­ing, but I wasn’t pay­ing attention.

That job turned out to be more stress­ful than every other one before it. I worked hard, worked fast, and I did what­ever I could to earn my pay and keep the job. Because now I had this fear of being let go, because I was depen­dent again upon the whims of the com­pany. I was para­noid. We started to put a lit­tle away. Just in case.

Six months later, I was out of work again, but this time, I wasn’t grin­ning. While I wasn’t the first to be let go, and as soon as oth­ers had been, we had dras­ti­cally cut our expenses again. We got rid of every­thing we could, and nego­ti­ated pay­ment plans for some stu­dent loans for a while. And we socked away all the excess in sav­ings. The sev­er­ance was a pit­tance, espe­cially com­pared to the last. And now the news was full of ter­ri­ble things about a pos­si­ble global eco­nomic collapse.

I was scared shit­less it was all going to come down on our heads now. But that sense of free­dom had come back, and the weight of a lot of stress evap­o­rated upon its arrival. I was scared, but I felt good at the same time. But I thought I needed that safety net of a “reli­able” job.

I applied for work fran­ti­cally. Early on, I landed an inter­view with a com­pany down near boul­der. The job struck me as the kind of utterly bor­ing, soul-​​crushing kind of thing that had slowly dri­ven me mad in Laramie. so I had fun and played the inter­view com­pletely hon­estly. Oh man. Don’t ever do that.

I wasn’t admit­ting it to myself then, but I didn’t want another job that could be ripped out from under­neath me. I was liv­ing on a com­bi­na­tion of free­lance and unem­ploy­ment at this point. Unemployment just barely got us by, and every free­lance dol­lar I took just reduced that, so I was mostly just tread­ing water. But I was divid­ing my time between free­lance and search­ing for work.

I spent almost six months get­ting by on free­lanc­ing before it finally sunk in that I was hap­pier than I had been in a long time. I gave up the job search, even turned down some job offers around the same time. I was seri­ously con­sid­er­ing this… this uncer­tain world, to not be just some place I was vis­it­ing between jobs, but a place where I would set­tle per­ma­nently, and make my own way.

Our sav­ings began to grow even faster because my atti­tude towards money had changed. Money is great to spend now, but it’s even bet­ter later should you not have a job lined up. Also, because I had to start pay­ing my own self-​​employment taxes and I had no idea what they would be, I started sock­ing every­thing into sav­ings that wasn’t what we needed to get through a month.

By the end of that year, we had more in sav­ings than we had ever had in our lives. I was still fright­ened, but the work was com­ing in, and if it stopped, our lives would not end. Everything would be alright.

CUT TO Today

My busi­ness is grow­ing well! I have amaz­ing clients, and new ones lin­ing up. We’re finally mov­ing into a slightly larger, slightly less slummy rental, even if it’s a bit more expen­sive. I recently had to trans­fer a bunch of money over from sav­ings to cover some of the costs of it, and I’m also fronting some money to fam­ily in hard times. It was a lot of money to move over from sav­ings to check­ing at one time.

The old fear came back. That deep, gnaw­ing fear that I almost hadn’t noticed. The voice whis­per­ing “you will be liv­ing in a card board box under a bridge inside of six months.” It doesn’t carry the same weight as it did before, but it def­i­nitely makes me uneasy and dis­turbs my peace.

This is when I real­ized, money unspent was buy­ing me peace of mind, and not only that, but I have a thresh­old level. If I have a cer­tain amount in the bank, and a cer­tain amount of work lined up, I’m not think­ing about money much at all. I have my peace.

I’ve basi­cally turned my sav­ings account into a video game, and I’m con­stantly try­ing to get it to a new high score. Running my own busi­ness, I can make as much or as lit­tle as I want. I’m not tied to some flat pay­ment sched­ule. If I want to book six projects in a month and work really hard, I can, and some­times, I do. Sometimes, the work isn’t there, and that’s okay, because I have a buffer against such things. Feast and famine is some­thing they teach new free­lancers, but hon­estly, they should have taught the con­cept to every­one who receives a so-​​called steady, “reli­able” pay­check too. Or maybe I just should have paid more atten­tion that that ant/​grasshopper para­ble from the olden times.

My busi­ness is the most reli­able source of work I’ve ever had, thus far. I don’t think I want to go back to that other world ever again. They claim it’s reli­able, but they can fire you at any time. At least as a busi­ness owner myself, I know when hard times are com­ing, and I have the power to try and fix it. There was noth­ing I could have done to stop myself from being laid off and I think that’s why it hits some peo­ple so hard. It’s that feel­ing of pow­er­less­ness, know­ing that there’s noth­ing you can do. But it was that fact that I could say, “it’s not my fault” that gave me the con­fi­dence to go for­ward with my life after­ward. I won’t lie–being laid off the sec­ond time hit my self-​​esteem pretty hard. But it’s bounced back sure enough.

I think about time and money so dif­fer­ently now. That’s a good and bad thing, but mostly good. And I owe that change to start­ing my own com­pany and tak­ing my des­tiny com­pletely into my own hands. If you’re a free­lancer or an inde­pen­dent worker or what­ever we’re call­ing our­selves today, or even if you’re not, my advice to you is, fig­ure out your thresh­old for basic peace of mind and make that your first goal financially.

Once you have that, you can take on so much more than before. At least in my case, I felt like I got a good chunk of my brain back that was always wor­ried about money before. Always antic­i­pat­ing that next emer­gency expense. Now, I grum­ble, but they don’t cause me to go apeshit when they happen.

If noth­ing else, my wife heartily approves.

Labeling Oneself as an Artist and Why I Have Avoided It

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve strongly resisted the label of artist for a long time, because I don’t feel wor­thy of it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to avoid the neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions that are entwined with the label in my back­wards, red­neck brain.

Who is an artist? (the ingrained notions)

Here’s what I grew up think­ing of artists–not actively think­ing or delib­er­ately decid­ing to believe, but just absorb­ing in Kansas/​Midwestern culture.

Artists are peo­ple who do not have real jobs.  They are as likely to spend their time drink­ing absinthe, doing drugs, and sleep­ing around as they are to do any­thing hon­est and deserv­ing of com­pen­sa­tion.  Artists do not con­tribute to the growth and wel­fare of soci­ety in mean­ing­ful ways.  They are prob­a­bly not very smart, because if they were smart, they would have gone into a pro­fes­sion like engi­neer­ing or med­i­cine where they could actu­ally do some good and make real money to sup­port their fam­i­lies.  Artists, above all else, are irre­spon­si­ble, child­ish, and poor.  POOR!

Conversely, artists are tal­ented (even if that tal­ent isn’t val­ued very highly).  They can draw any­thing they can imag­ine effort­lessly.  Their imag­i­na­tions are supe­rior to almost any­one elses’s.  They speak a secret lan­guage of color and form, and really, if you want to rearrange your liv­ing room and get some new cur­tains, an artist would not be a bad per­son to ask.  They’ll prob­a­bly help for beer money.

Why I am not an Artist (the rationalizations)

I’m cre­ative, sure.  I do a bit of writ­ing, but writ­ing isn’t art, because art is visual, and writ­ing is lan­guage.   And yes, I know how to oper­ate a cam­era, but art­work should con­vey emo­tions, tell a story, and my pho­tog­ra­phy doesn’t con­vey any such thing.  Anyone can pick up a cam­era and point it at some­thing.  Anyone can take enough shots, throw­ing out the bad, to make them­selves look like a mod­er­ately decent photographer.

I’m a web designer, but design is not art.  Design is com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and it has strict rules (rules that I strug­gle every day to learn and under­stand bet­ter).   And any­way, I pri­mar­ily excel at writ­ing code and solv­ing tech­ni­cal prob­lems, less so than mak­ing things beau­ti­ful and artistic.

Despite my ingrained beliefs about artists as pro­fes­sion­als, I grew up secretly wish­ing I could be some kind of sci­ence artist, but I  wouldn’t ever really because I wanted to con­tribute and make money. And finally, for some rea­son, I can­not ever be an artist because I can­not draw any­thing that I pic­ture in my head.

Why I am an Artist (the realization)

First of all, most of the bull­shit I grew up believ­ing about artists is just that–bullshit.  Artists are as intel­li­gent as any­one else, if not more so,as respon­si­ble, and they are no more likely to drink heav­ily and do drugs than any­one else.  They con­tribute to soci­ety in less quan­tifi­able ways than say, an engi­neer, but they act in a way as society’s con­science, as it’s out­let.  As a means of self-​​reflection.  Artists play a role, and while I don’t quite under­stand that role, I know they have one and it’s deeply impor­tant.  Being an artist is a real job, and has all the bag­gage that jobs have.  It’s also really, really hard to make a liv­ing at.

Being any good does not deter­mine whether one is an artist or not.  And art encom­passes many more skills than just draw­ing.   My pho­tog­ra­phy may be some­thing any­one can do, but every once and a while I make some­thing nobody else  but me could make.  I’m actively try­ing to sell prints of my work actively, so I guess that right there makes me an artist in the same way that actively pur­su­ing pub­li­ca­tion made me a writer.

Design may or may not be art, but I’m a work­ing cre­ative indi­vid­ual.  Sometimes, what I cre­ate is art.  Sometimes, it’s crap.  Well, more often than not.  But I share more in com­mon with work­ing illus­tra­tors and painters now than I do with my friends who spend their days slic­ing DNA in laboratories.

So, yeah.  I am an artist.  Whatever that means–I’m still learn­ing. It’s not all that I am, but I’m done not call­ing myself that just because I can’t draw and I grew up believ­ing some kind of dumb things about who writ­ers are.  My life is cen­tered around cre­ative acts of one form or another, so.  There it is.

Have any of you ever resisted label­ing your­self like that, for sim­i­lar mix­tures of rea­sons?  I’m curi­ous to know if this is dif­fi­cult just for me, or if it is for others.

PS:  I keep try­ing to fix that draw­ing thing.  I’ve been stuck in the first cou­ple of chap­ters of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” for a cou­ple of years.  Maybe this year will be the one that I finally get past the weird trac­ing stuff and start learn­ing how to stop myself from draw­ing on the left side of the brain.

Eight Less Known Websites for SF Readers and Fans

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Everyone knows a dozen author web­sites to read, and the indus­try blogs that tell you about the lat­est movies and TV shows. But what if you’re inter­ested in hear­ing about out­landish ideas you might pil­fer for a story? Or maybe you just want a quick kick of reality-​​based sen­sawunda. What web­sites to do you turn to for that? Try this list for starters.

1. Futurismic

Almost solely the hard work of Paul Graham Raven, Futurismic picks up on the near-​​future sci­ence news faster than any­one else I read at the moment. More impor­tantly, Futurismic is not afraid to con­tem­plate the ram­i­fi­ca­tions and impli­ca­tions of new tech devel­op­ments. Paul has the mind of a great sci­ence fic­tion writer in the mak­ing, I think. I some­times wish he’d spend less time on Futurismic and more time writ­ing short stories.

Futurismic also fea­tures reg­u­lar guest columns–one of which is by Brenda Cooper on trends in futur­ism. Those are well worth a read as well.

2. Curious Expeditions

For a lapsed world trav­eler such as myself, Curious Expeditions is a real treat. Written by Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras , the site doc­u­ments weird and obscure loca­tions around the globe. Their fix­a­tion on cab­i­nets of curiosi­ties have given me many ideas for the Dr. Roundbottom project.

Their pho­tos are always visu­ally rich and unlike any­thing else you will find else­where. It’s a source of his­tor­i­cal sensawunda.

3. Post Secret

Post Secret is a project in which peo­ple mail anony­mous post cards with secrets in to the project cre­ator. Each week, he posts a new batch of cards.

This one has almost noth­ing to do with spec­u­la­tive fic­tion exactly, but for a writer, it’s an amaz­ing insight into the inner lives of other human beings. I always come away from the Sunday posts of secrets feel­ing a lit­tle more wise and a lit­tle changed by the expe­ri­ence. I can’t say that I’ve used any of the secrets directly in my work, but read­ing the site is def­i­nitely fur­ther­ing my under­stand­ing of how peo­ple work in a more gen­eral sense.

4. Sentient Developments

The project of Canadian futur­ist George Dvorsky, this site brings me buck­ets of news about robot­ics and research in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. It does take a bit of a cred­i­bil­ity hit by pay­ing lip-​​service to the dis­cred­ited “aquatic ape” the­ory in my opin­ion, but I can under­stand the appeal of such wacky the­o­ries. Regardless, it’s a great source of sci­ence news.

5. Douglas Rushkoff

Here’s another blog by an eclec­tic and inter­est­ing thinker. Douglas leans left polit­i­cally, so you may not be inter­ested in his cur­rent fix­a­tion about tak­ing the world back from cor­po­ra­tions, but he’s been a great source for me of off-​​the-​​beaten-​​path eco­nomic news. About every­thing else, Ruskoff is inter­ested, it seems to me, in the future of human­ity. This can be a lit­tle pub­lic­ity heavy at times, as he is sell­ing a book, but when he shares an arti­cle, it’s almost always worth a read.

6. Strange Maps

There have been a lot of very, very strange maps drawn through­out his­tory. This blog brings you scans of the some of the stranger ones. Not much else to it, and that’s why I love it.

7. Street Use

This is another sim­ple site. It doc­u­ments with pho­tographs the unusual inven­tions and mod­i­fi­ca­tions of off-​​the-​​shelf tech in 3rd world coun­tries. They quote William Gibson in their expla­na­tion: “The street finds its own use for things.”

Possibly a great web­site if you’re writ­ing post-​​apocalyptic SF.

8. Centauri Dreams

Interested in space explo­ration? This blog by the Tau Zero Foundation is all about that, and tan­gen­tially often about the notion of alien life. I some­times find it an odd read, but it’s def­i­nitely rich with SF mate­r­ial for the writer and afficionado.

So, what are some sites that you think are good brain fod­der for the SF type?

Why WordPress is the Perfect Platform For Author Sites

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I get a lot of requests for help with WordPress lately (which I am happy to answer), and I’m mak­ing a good chunk of my money through my knowl­edge of the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.  I thought today I’d give you some back­ground on why I’ve made WordPress my go-​​to plat­form when design­ing author websites.

Broad Support and User Base

WordPress has one of the largest user bases of any con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.  Why is this a good thing?  Well, it means that there’s a lot of com­mu­nity sup­port.  It means that if there’s a fea­ture you want, there’s a good chance some­one has already devel­oped it as a plug-​​in (there are tens of thou­sands of plug-​​ins for WordPress).  If you run into a bug or other prob­lem, there’s a good chance that you can find some­one else who has already expe­ri­enced this prob­lem with a Google Search.  This all trans­lates into fewer hours and more fea­tures for your author web­site.  You get more for less.

What this also means is that rather than hav­ing to go out and buy expen­sive books to learn how to design WordPress sites, I have been able to learn every­thing I know from read­ing online.  So I have less up-​​front invest­ment (although still quite a bit of invest­ment in mas­ter­ing parts of it). Those sav­ings get passed on to clients, ultimately.

Great Back-​​end Usability

The back-​​end of a site is the part that only the site author sees.  It’s where you go to man­age your con­tent, write new blog posts, and so on.  Because your read­ers never see this part of your soft­ware, you might be tempted to be sat­is­fied with any old thing–that is, if you’re already a com­puter expert, and don’t have any trou­ble learn­ing new inter­faces.  Not all inter­faces are cre­ated equal.  Now, WordPress hasn’t always had a nice, user-​​friendly back-​​end, but these days, it’s quite sim­ple and beau­ti­ful.  I enjoy spend­ing time inside of the WordPress soft­ware, con­fig­ur­ing things, and a good por­tion of my enjoy­ment is due to that.

And chances are, you’ve already used WordPress.  A lot of authors have already used sites like WordPress​.com to set up blogs in the past.  So this means you spend less time learn­ing an inter­face, and more time work­ing on your writing.

Power Theme System

WordPress allows you to con­fig­ure and lay out your site any way you want, and it does it through a straight­for­ward theme engine with well doc­u­mented tem­plate tags.   Through a com­bi­na­tion of plu­g­ins, theme writ­ing, HTML, CSS, and judi­cious JavaScript, there hasn’t been a design con­cept I have come across that can’t be imple­mented in some fash­ion with the sys­tem.  And using a good blank theme as a start­ing base, you can have a theme up and run­ning from an HTML pro­to­type very quickly.  You dream it up, and I build it.  It’s as easy as that.

A CMS, Not Just a Blog

Some peo­ple make the mis­take of think­ing that WordPress is just for blogs.  That’s only a small part of what WordPress can do these days.  With a few basic plu­g­ins, you can build just about any kind of Content Management System fea­ture you might want.  And most impor­tantly to authors, it gives you a user-​​friendly way of man­ag­ing and edit­ing that con­tent.   Rather than hav­ing to spend money down the road pay­ing your web­mas­ter to update your site, you can do it your­self through the back-​​end.  It’s a win-​​win for you and your webmaster.

Conclusion

So those are just a few of the rea­sons I use WordPress.  I was very hes­i­tant to adopt it early on because I had read a lot of neg­a­tives, but each one of those neg­a­tives has been addressed by the devel­op­ment team.  Eventually, it made less sense to stick with an old warhorse like Movable Type and to move on and work with the younger, more dynamic WordPress.  Since I made the move, I haven’t looked back.

If you are an author, pub­lisher, or small busi­ness look­ing for a site built on WordPress, don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me via Clockpunk Studios, my design com­pany.  I am avail­able to take new work on start­ing in early September.    I have a wide range of prices I can offer you, to fit many bud­gets.  We can build your dream site, or we can get you started with some­thing basic at your own domain very quickly, and add to that later.  So don’t assume you can’t afford it.  You might be sur­prised how cheaply you can get up and run­ning with your own WordPress-​​backed site.

Be a Positive Force in Fandom, Not an Asshole

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

If there was one thing that drew me in par­tic­u­lar to genre fan­dom as a whole, it was the bound­less and unashamed enthu­si­asm that genre fans had.  Fans loved things, and their pas­sion was worn on their sleeves.  They weren’t ashamed to like sci­ence fic­tion in gen­eral, or, say, Star Trek in par­tic­u­lar, despite there con­sid­er­able soci­etal dis­aproval of such things.  My nerdy ways got me made fun of as much as my big ears, grow­ing up.

Today, with Generation X and Y in full force, there’s been a bit of a shift, I think.  Sarcasm is some­thing our gen­er­a­tions prize, as well as a well-​​cultured sense of irony.  But what’s worse, when com­bined with those things, is a cer­tain odd form of self-​​awareness that leads to what I’d like to talk about:

It’s cooler to dis­like some­thing than it is to like some­thing today.  It’s more cul­tur­ally accept­able in my peer groups, par­tic­u­larly online, to express dis­ap­proval of some­thing than it is to express enthusiasm.

I’m not against crit­i­cism.  It’s only by being crit­i­cal of art forms that we under­stand them and learn to improve them.  Thoughtful crit­i­cism is a great thing.  So let’s take that off the table of what I’m talk­ing about.  I’m going to talk about how we express our dis­like of things, why, and when we do it.

First of all, I think it’s an unde­ni­able trend that being enthu­si­as­tic for some­thing is much less of a draw of atten­tion than being highly crit­i­cal of some­thing, par­tic­u­larly online.  If I write a blog post that is crit­i­cal of a pop­u­lar movie, it receives at least twice as many views as if I wrote a glow­ing rec­om­men­da­tion.  It’ll receive twice as many com­ments too, and often, what com­ments the glow­ing rec­om­men­da­tion receives are argu­ments against the opin­ion.  There are a lot of rea­sons for this, but in gen­eral, I’d like to see us change it in our cor­ner of the web.

I used to be a reg­u­lar on the blog Metafilter.  We called a cer­tain phe­nom­e­non  “your favorite band sucks.”  Whenever any­one expressed an appre­ci­a­tion or an author or a band, five peo­ple came along to crit­i­cize the author or band.  Here’s where we come to my first rule of the pos­i­tive fan.

Every expres­sion of appre­ci­a­tion online is not an oppor­tu­nity for you to voice your disapproval.

It’s fine for you not to like some­thing.  But every time some­one else says they like some­thing that you don’t is not the best time for you to piss in the corn­flakes of inter­net com­ment­ing.  Every dis­cus­sion is not a debate on the mer­its and demer­its of some­thing.  In fact, let’s put this out there in plain terms: every dis­cus­sion online does not have to be and should not be “fair and bal­anced.”  Know your audi­ence, and know the scene you’re in–will they appre­ci­ate your per­spec­tive, or will they think you’re just being an asshole?

Which brings me to my next point:

Don’t be an ass­hole. Remember: every­thing you crit­i­cize is the hard work of a human being with feelings.

Don’t assume that the cre­ator of what you are trash­ing won’t read it.  It’s the inter­net.  We’re all super­nat­ural beings that can be sum­moned by the use of our name thanks to Google.  Don’t be an ass­hole, and don’t resort to ad hominem attacks.  Be crit­i­cal of the work, and not the cre­ator.  Every cre­ative act should be encour­aged, even if you con­sider it a fail­ure.  All art is a learn­ing process.

If you must be crit­i­cal, be specific.

So you have a burn­ing desire to share your dis­ap­proval of some­thing and you just can’t be stopped.  Fine.  Leave your crit­i­cal remark, but here are crit­cial remarks that do noth­ing but hurt people:

‘It sucked.”

“Don’t quit your day job”

“I want my [PERIOD OF TIME SPENT] back.”

“Who likes this shit?”

Do you see the trend here?  We’ve all seen these com­ments.  Most of us have prob­a­bly left them at some point.    What’s miss­ing here is sub­stance.

You owe your fel­low humans to be spe­cific in your crit­i­cism. It’s in everyone’s best inter­ests for a cre­ator to improve, and they can’t use your feed­back to do that if it doesn’t have any substance.

I assume part of the point of the urge to share our strong dis­like of some­thing online, besides the weird Gen-​​Y/​X need to feel cool via dis­parag­ing things, is that we can’t stand the idea that some­one does like it, and we want to explain to them why their enthu­si­asm is mis­placed.  We’re not going to do that with vague gen­er­al­i­ties. Be spe­cific, and be polite. Consider shar­ing our enthu­si­asm for some­thing else as a coun­ter­point so oth­ers know we’re not just being an ass­hole for the sake of it.  Is it some­thing we would say to the creator’s face, in per­son, while they ball their fists and start to turn red?  No?  Dial down the venom, and remember:

All opin­ions are not equal.  But if you think yours really mat­ters most, you’re prob­a­bly wrong.

Most peo­ple just aren’t going to really care what your opin­ion of some­thing is, unless they know you.  If you’re a ran­dom stranger leav­ing feed­back on a blog, don’t expect your com­ment to hold any spe­cial weight with the other read­ers or the com­menters.  Don’t get increas­ingly angry when peo­ple aren’t swayed to your antag­o­nis­tic point of view.  Silently mark these peo­ple off as morons like you do to every human being you dis­ap­prove of, and move on.

Moving on to the Positive Part

Thus far, I’ve really focused on the neg­a­tive, because I know that’s what is going to get the most atten­tion.  Now that I have it, let’s talk about how we can reverse the trend a lit­tle.  As a group, work­ing together with a com­mon goal, I think we can lighten the tone a bit.

If you like some­thing, say so.

Positive, sup­port­ive com­ments are always far out­num­bered by the neg­a­tive ones.  We need to change this, or at least tips the scales back the other way a bit.  If you take noth­ing else away from this sanc­ti­mo­nious blog post, just lis­ten to  this part.  When you like some­thing, whether that some­thing be a story, a book, a web­site, a blog post, a pod­cast, a paint­ing, whatever–when you like some­thing, tell some­one.  You can broad­cast it on your blog or your twit­ter. That is awe­some.  Or you can go nar­row­band and leave a com­ment for the cre­ator or write an email.  Hell, you want to really make someone’s day, send them a snail mail letter.

We as an inter­net pop­u­lace have a ten­dency to be quiet when we’re approv­ing, and save our key­strokes for when we’re angry.  This is wrong, and I think we can change this.  Let’s put the enthu­si­as­tic fan back into the mix.  We can’t all hate every­thing.  Let’s see if we can aim for bring­ing the positive/​negative com­ment ratio up to 1:1.  And hey–the only thing worse than a bunch of nasty com­ments and feed­back is no feed­back at all.  Don’t assume some­one else will say some­thing.  Take the ini­tia­tive and say some­thing yourself.

For a lit­tle over a year now, I’ve been mak­ing a point of writ­ing authors and let­ting them know when I’ve really liked some­thing they’ve writ­ten.  I write peo­ple I know and writ­ers I have never met.  I’m going to start expand­ing this to other forms.  There’s no rea­son I have to save my fan­nish enthu­si­asm for the printed word.

Now, you may be a major con­sumer of media, and you might be won­der­ing, how can I pos­si­bly send notes to the cre­ators of every­thing I con­sume? When it’s some­thing you’ve paid for, I think your money is often appre­ci­a­tion enough.  However, if it’s some­thing you’ve read online for free, and you enjoyed it, I think we should feel oblig­ated to share our pos­i­tive feed­back.  If you want peo­ple to keep doing what they’re doing, you need to say so.  Again–don’t assume some­one else will do it for you.  We should be as ener­gized to share our enthu­si­asm as our outrage.

I hope you’ll join me in this-​​I don’t want to say “move­ment,” but let’s call it a pseudo-​​philosophy.   I prob­a­bly won’t con­vince the die-​​hard ass­holes to stop being ass­holes, but hope­fully I can con­vince we quiet approvers to speak up more often. I know I’m not per­fect, that I’ve been the ass­hole, but I’m mak­ing a con­certed effort not to be in the future.

I’m sure there are a lot of crit­i­cisms of this post you can make, and you’re wel­come to do so in the com­ments.  Please fol­low the rules above.  Consider this my new com­ment mod­er­a­tion pol­icy on my blog.  I hope I don’t have to enforce it.