Posts Tagged ‘money’

Writing Is Made of Failure (And That’s Okay)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

You can fail on a sen­tence, para­graph, page, scene, and story level.  You can fail a mil­lion ways in writ­ing, and most likely, you’ll fail in 999,999 of them of the course of your attempts.   So it is with many things in which we seek improve­ment.  We fail, fail, fail, and get incre­men­tally bet­ter with time and effort.

I strug­gle with accept­ing the fail­ure.  I have worked in cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments where fail­ure was not an option.  You could eas­ily be fired for  fail­ure.  Once, I was threat­ened with imme­di­ate fir­ing for allow­ing a typo to appear on a web page. (Later I was laid off).   

In my small busi­ness, I can­not afford to fail right now, and nor can my clients afford to have me fail.   I was just lis­ten­ing to the radio about how a major soft­ware upgrade for the state went mil­lions over bud­get and was delayed an entire year.   I might never work again if that hap­pened on one of my projects.  No room for that.  One bad project, and I’m des­ti­tute.  This year more than last, I’m in a tight spot.  This means I tend to turn down projects that I am not 100% cer­tain about (not sure about tech­ni­cal require­ments, the bud­get, etc). Sometimes, this means turn­ing down thou­sands of dol­lars.  But what’s worse, to turn down the money and tighten belts, or to take the money and utterly fail the client by miss­ing dead­lines, or deliv­er­ing com­pletely buggy soft­ware?  I’d rather keep the pain of that lim­ited to myself, and not ruin some­one else’s dream in the process.

It’s this issue of fail­ure in my jobs that pay and have paid that bills that makes me so hard on myself when I fail at writ­ing.  Because I sac­ri­fice busi­ness time to do the writ­ing, and the fact that I can­not pro­duce pro­fes­sional, sal­able mate­r­ial with any­thing resem­bling con­sis­tency or reg­u­lar­ity makes that time essen­tially a waste from an income stand­point.  I love doing it, but writ­ing is very costly to me.  It costs time and lost income.   So it’s dou­bly hard to real­ize that I’ve pro­duced a failed story, or novel.  Efficiency is key when time is money.  And I’m try­ing to be effi­cient enough to jus­tify the time.

It’s all vaguely ridicu­lous, to attempt to man­age your cre­ative writ­ing work the same way you try to man­age your web devel­op­ment work. But for now, I just don’t have any other option.   Hence back­ing off of writ­ing again, at least until I know where I will be liv­ing in August.  Hopefully not in a parent’s basement.

If you can afford it, give your­self the gift of fail­ure.   You’re going to do it any­way, so you might as well learn to for­give it.  I’m try­ing to do that myself.

On the Amazon Kindle 2 Controversy

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Some authors have posited that hav­ing an ebook reader able to con­vert words into sounds on the fly is a good thing.  See Neil Gaiman.  Others have argued that such tech­nol­ogy should be cov­ered under audio­book rights.  And Wil Wheaton has cre­ated an audio com­par­i­sion between a human read­ing a book and the Kindle.

What a load of greedy bull­shit, and per­haps the most bone­headed idea to come along since those self-​​destructing DVDs called Div.     I’m a writer.  I like money.  I don’t get much of it for my work.  You would think that I would agree with any­thing that stands to make me more money, but I am not an insane greedy mon­key.  I am also a reader and a con­sumer and the think­ing behind this atti­tude is utterly ridicu­lous.  In case you haven’t fig­ured it out yet, I come down firmly on Neil Gaiman’s side on this.

This “par­cel out the means in which media can be con­sumed to squeeze out dimes” approach to lit­er­a­ture is going to do NOTHING but alien­ate con­sumers.  Here’s why:

When we buy a book, we believe that we can do what­ever  we want with it short of print­ing up copies and sell­ing them.  We reject any notion of tech­nol­ogy being used to arti­fi­cially limit our rights to media.  DRM is dead, just ask the RIAA.   We want to share and we want to remix.   It’s been demon­strated time and time and time again across all media.   You can­not fight the use of tech­nol­ogy to inter­act with media with more, evil tech­nol­ogy.  It’s a per­ver­sion of the nat­ural state and it NEVER lasts.  The sys­tem always rights itself.  The human infor­ma­tion net­work routes around things like DRM and arti­fi­cial rights as if they are dam­age.   All you do is frus­trate your hon­est con­sumers and waste money.

If it can be con­sumed by the human mind, it can be shifted, trans­lated, trans­mit­ted, and and all those other things that tech­nol­ogy inher­ently makes pos­si­ble and makes greedy bas­tards wake up in a cold sweat, afraid that some­where, some­one is using their “prop­erty”  in a man­ner for which they could have tried to rape your wal­let.  No.  We as con­sumers are not going to put up with it.   We haven’t been putting up with it.

When we buy an audio book, we are NOT buy­ing the book.  We are buy­ing a record­ing of a per­for­mance of the book.  It is a dis­tinct enough entity from a book that I believe the rights do deserve to be sold seper­ately.  But the text itself, that’s just one right, as far as I am con­cerned.  You sell me access to the text, and  I will do what­ever I want with it.  I will cut up your book’s pages and make a hat.  I will scan it with an OCR and put it in my per­sonal data­base.  I will even give the book away to a friend when I am done with it if I don’t want it tak­ing up space any­more.    You can’t stop me.  Publishing indus­try, seri­ously, with the decline of read­er­ship and sales, is this what you want to be spend­ing man-​​hours on?  Finding ways to LIMIT the ways that peo­ple can inter­act with your products?

With read­er­ship falling like a fuck­ing stone, with every­thing else that is going on today thanks to the Depression-​​like econ­omy, the pub­lish­ing indus­try has big­ger things to worry about than a text-​​to-​​speech func­tion, some­thing my com­puter has been capa­ble of since 1997!   Just because Amazon adds it to a ridicu­lously expen­sive e-​​reader doesn’t mean now it’s sud­denly time to hyper­ven­ti­late and claim that rights are being tram­pled and money is being lost.

If I was pres­i­dent of the Author’s Guild, I’d be focus­ing my energy on fig­ur­ing out how to get my mem­bers works printed on cereal boxes and bill­boards.  Massive dis­sem­i­na­tion, through any chan­nel I can think of.    I would be doing every­thing in my power to encour­age read­ing.  The money will fol­low if you just let peo­ple get on with the act of con­sum­ing the ideas.   We don’t mind pay­ing, but we will not be gauged repeat­edly for the access to the same material.

Anyone who thinks that the Kindle’s text-​​to-​​speech func­tion is more akin to a per­for­mance and less equiv­a­lent to show­ing some words on a screen–well, there’s not much hope for you as far as I can tell.  I hope you enjoy frus­tra­tion, because I pre­dict an awful lot of it in your future on this issue.