Weaponized Schedule, 28 Jan 09

The bad news is, I'm posting this late; the good news is, I'm posting it late because I have been busy this week with writing and doing the odd update to the site. So, here is this week's 5-Day Plan:

Day 1: Complete. Wrote 1200 words in "A Million Stories".
Day 2: Complete. Wrote 1300 words in "A Million Stories" as well as the 900 word short piece for Rabbit Hole Day.
Day 3: Write 1000 words in "A Million Stories"; this should finish the piece.
Day 4: Edit "Those Who Don't".
Day 5: Edit "Those Who Don't".
Floating Days: 1 remaining, to be taken tomorrow.
Website Progress: Updated blog format; sifted through for more links to be added to the site as a whole (update to come in the near future).

I like that I seem to be capable of such a high output, and a high output of reasonably high-quality prose, too. "A Million Stories" feels good to me at is core, though there may be quite a lot of excess plaster around the elephant; I need to practice what I preach and let it sit for a week or two after I finish it, and then see if I can get it pruned down a bit. For now, it is Doctor Who and the priming of miniatures. Call me a Swiss Army Geek.

[Rabbit Hole Day] Sorry to disappoint...

I'm sure at least one of you scanned your friends' list and wondered why I didn't make a post for Rabbit Hole Day. Unfortunately, my dedication to Carroll wound up a little up-close and personal.

See, yesterday I got hit by a car.

I'm fine now, I mean, nothing broken or anything. I'm a little stiff on one side, and my face looks a rotten eggplant, but I'll recover alright. The fun part came right after the sudden smack and the full body jerk of the impact, and then the white flash and me feeling like someone hooked a bungee cord to my sternum and strung it out through my back.

The place I wound up had a sky the color of a cigarette filter and red earth packed so tight you'd call it concrete, hemmed in by four gray buildings. It was me and about six other people, talking in about four different languages. Half of them didn't seem to care that I was there; only one of them bothered to talk to me. He looked like Nick Nolte's character in Mother Night.

I, of course, asked the brilliant question that proved my wit and mental acuity: "Where am I?" He shrugged, and smiled the way you smile to a cancer patient. "We're sitting in whatever's left."

I joke all the time about how the world seems like it's being directed by this or that person. Whatever weird pain-dream I was having, it was clearly based on something by Sartre.

The man's named turned out to be Dick. He'd died from blood loss after taking an entire sheet of blotter acid and attempting to fuck a lawnmower. His last word was "Beethoven" and his last memories were fluorescent lights, crying, and people trying not to laugh. He was sad, but he made it pretty clear that had nothing to do with death; he'd been dead for a decade, which apparently is enough to get over the whole thing.

Dick's good people, one of those few who I can always count on for a relaxing and engaging conversation; as long as I didn't shift from leaning against the wall I forgot about the tugging in my chest. Which of course meant that it was time for someone to go apeshit.

One of the other five guys lost his mind; he kept pointing at me and screaming in what I think was French, maybe some sort of creole. He tried to explain something rapid-fire to one of his friends, then to another; when I stood up he let out this one syllable yelp and just charged me head-on. It's happened three times in my life and I still haven't learned to brace for impact.

He screamed in my face, jump-cuts of anger; punched at my clavicles, shook my shoulders. He demanded, then he begged, but he never listened, and when he finally got that whatever I was saying meant that I didn't understand, he staggered back, started crying, hit himself in the temple as hard as he could, and bull-rushed one of the walls.

That, for some reason, was worse than him committing assault. Dick and the other four people charged after him, grabbed him by the arms, hissing like a bag of angry snakes and trying to clap their hands over his mouth. He punched one of them, kicked someone else, and he just kept shouting, and every time he yelled I felt the cord in my chest vibrate. Then my spine iced over, and my brain exploded, and my whole body became one nauseating post-morphine chill.

I realize everything scary looks kind of like a man, but seriously, this guy looked kind of like a man, an athlete rolled in gray African river mud and then left to starve into muscles and twigs. His head was gone, or stretched, or something; his mouth and nose were stretched taut into a hooked beak, and I tried to tell myself it was like the female lead in Beetlejuice but it wasn't really helping. It looked down at the five men as they scrambled, and talked in a voice that sounded like reel-to-reel tape rewinding, a gummy sound-loopy mess that only occasionally sounded like a person with laryngitis. All I could tell was that the thing was agitated. The five men prostrated themselves and begged; Dick yelled at me to kneel down.

Again, I was witty. "What the fuck is that?" Talking almost made me vomit.

"It's the thing they left behind!" Dick yelled.

It looked at me, and it started screaming; and the cord in my stomach snapped, and my world went brown, smoky black, too white and painful; and then LH was jumping up and running over to my side and wishing me a good morning through her happy tears. I think I made a joke about hating IVs before I fell asleep.

I still feel raw inside my chest, even though X-rays say nothing is there. Which of course is standard, and it kind of annoys me that my one real experience with this stuff has to be so pedestrian, which I guess is why I haven't gone looking for information on Dick--no need to be yet another Fox Mulder.

I'm going to try to go back. I just hope the next trip doesn't take me getting hit by a car.

There is a man named Warren Ellis. Warren Ellis plays at being a psychotic drunken lowlife who happens to have a gift for prose. You probably know how this joke ends.

This man writes a great many things. Among them is a free thing, entitled FreakAngels, which will be getting a starring role in the Fictions and Curiosities menu perched to the right of this post. I will not trouble you by linking to everything about FreakAngels that is excellent, but I will say that when it comes to reasons for writing, Warren Ellis has got it in one.

Mr. Ellis is absolutely on the money with that one. I am envious.

More thoughts about Mr. Ellis and his tenuous connections to one Art Spiegelman to follow soon. After the post I claimed at the end of last year would be "next".

Seizing the Means of Distribution

I wonder. Specifically, I wonder about the distribution of entertainment media.

Joss Whedon, master that he is, showed us via Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog that a creative work can be distributed via the Internet, free, and yet still break even (if not profit) from sales of that creative work in other media. Warren "Hyperlink Terrorist" Ellis is doing something similar with Freakangels, distributing the comic for free online but garnering revenue via trade paperbacks. And then of course there are the multitude of webcomics and entertainment sites--Penny Arcade, Questionable Content, Homestar Runner--that manage to provide for their creators purely through merchandise and advertising. All this gives me some hope that self-published, creator-owned content really is viable now; that an artist or a writer could make some, if not all, of their income via this sort of model.

So really, I guess this is less about self-publication as that term is usually used, and more about the use of the Web as an alternate means of distributing media that has been controlled by the facilitators and distributors (publishing houses, record labels, what-have-you). It seems like it is getting to a place where this is really viable, and where companies are beginning to look long and hard at the issue.

A part of me wants to try it. And a part of me doesn't.

Don't get me wrong: succeeding in this way would be welcome relief. It sounds so nice after the rejections, the editors, the hoop-jumping, the little song and dance that is any creator's effort to get themselves noticed and funded and God help us actually able to spend their time and energy wholly on the business of creating. But then there's the stubbornness, and doubtfulness, and fear.

Ellis and Whedon have advantages I don't: they're famous. Joss Whedon's creations have fanboys before they're anything but a rumor on SciFi Wire; Ellis could scrawl outlines on napkins and make a profit. And Penny Arcade is a media juggernaut—they are a part of the nerd zeitgeist in a way that I could only pray for. They have built-in P.R. machines, Internet enclaves that will rush to digest whatever they put out if for no other reason than to say they were there first. I'm lucky when one of my blog posts generates a comment.

Then there is the stigma of self-publication, not unique to novels, but certainly endemic. The combination of Internet self-publishing scams and abysmal fan-fiction communities means that anyone who isn't going through the "accepted" channel of a magazine publishing house, and thus through a gauntlet of slush piles and editors and other systems for filtering out bad taste, is almost inevitably going to be judged more harshly, if not dismissed outright; and the usual methods of getting attention to a web original like this (banner ads and the like) are just going to drag them down further.

And finally, there is the dogged desire to stay the course; the feeling that being published via the "usual" route will be in some way a victory, a validation of my capacity to produce "real art"; and there is the simple love of the symbolic content of seeing my work in print, of having real paper in my hands with real ink shaped into my words, an artifact I can touch and hold up and smell and, maybe if I'm lucky, put my signature on. This is partially about a need to be vindicated in my struggle and partially about a fear of the roulette wheel that is trying to succeed on the Internet, and it is born of very little reality, given my constant complaints about the low quality of some of the books being produced.

But then there's John Dies at the End, linked in the sidebar; David Wong is best known purely on the Internet (as the progenitor of this and the term "monkey sphere", and of course his editing work on cracked.com), but this book appears to have been a cult success. So it is doable; there are companies that will publish you after a web publication (though a cursory search suggests J.D.A.T.E. is not still up for free on his site, which may be contractual); and people will take Web writing seriously. So it comes back to stubbornness, and the fear of taking that big, bold step straight into a thirty-foot drop.

All this is to say that I am considering the idea, and researching it, and wondering how best to get my name out there (on top of the now-mandatory monthly submissions). All this is also to say that I may have a new project brewing, with multiple levels of utility and at least one level of entertainment. In short: stay tuned.

A Virtual Toast

I'll be succinct; another speech would just do the ones preceding me injustice.

To President Barack Obama. May he find safe harbor and steer us in the right direction.

Weaponized Schedule, 19 Jan 09

This last week saw one of my occasional setbacks; a variety of factors (read: excuses) led to a low energy level and a late start on Wednesday night that saw absolutely nothing getting done; this coupled with a bit of a chaotic schedule over the weekend meant I only got 3 days of editing in instead of 5, and did not make my deadline for a reading draft of Done with Mirrors. However, much as kicking myself might sound good, that doesn't do me any good, especially in the wake of some serious doubts; all I can do is forge ahead, set the plan for this week, and stick to it.

Fortunately, this week is a bit easier--I only have one day on which I am absolutely spoken for, so there is a floating day off I can use when my energy level tanks. Without ado, this week's 5-day plan:

Day 1: Edit Done with Mirrors: Touch-ups and conversions
Day 2: Edit Done with Mirrors: Character descriptions, quirks, further conversions.
Day 3: "A Million Stories": +1000 words.
Day 4: "A Million Stories": +1000 words.
Day 5: "A Million Stories": +1000 words.

Forced Day Off: Saturday; my parents' anniversary trumps writing, at least until they go to bed. Not a good day to plan doing anything.

Deadlines: "A Million Stories" must be 4000-5000 words by the end of the week, and if not finished be at least firmly in the denouement. Done with Mirrors goes out to beta readers before I go to bed Sunday.

My projects and hopes for the year remain unchanged; I do, however, have to add in more care in planning these things, and with that, an inspection of my life for places I could get more efficient and flexible.

There. Scheduling done. Show this off next time someone claims writing is easy.

More microblogging on the Final Rockroll

Rick Astley is here to save America.

Another Link Vegetable.

For all that it's an inventive genre (though prone to abuse), too much steampunk can be bad for your health.

With thanks to Warren Ellis and apologies to those who already read him, too. If you don't, I recommend him; if you don't mind seeing people flay off their own eyebrows, he's probably funnier.

Rejoice

I hate to bury my last post with month-old news, but given all my ranting on this subject it bears repeating:

All of the Dr. Horrible bills are paid.

Crew, paid off, cast paid off. As of November 29th. Purely through iTunes and DVD sales. I hear a giant middle finger extending.

I really hope that Joss has created a revolution, that creator-owned works and the cutting out of big business really are going to work. There is that part of me that fears saying it when I want to hold a real, professionally-published book of my own in my hands, but I am all for the artist getting their fair share and I think this is a huge step in the right direction.

So bravo, Joss. And bravo to everyone who helped make it happen. (I'll shake my own hand to the tune of fifteen dollars.) Now to see if we can find a way to make it work for novels...

Back At The Desk

Right. New year. Symbolic fresh start.

This is in theory a chronicle of my writing career, such as it currently is. So, you might ask, what am I working on?

That's both simple and complicated. I am about 52% of the way through Draft Zero of Eyes of Stone, and ideas for what to include next keep tumbling out, so that's a continuing project. But one of the goals for this year is to be more free-flowing with the submissions, which means editing some of the short works I've completed in the last year and doing a few new short pieces. One piece is currently off with a friend of a friend and an Actual Published Novelist, another is about to be dusted off and given a run through the Belt Sander. I have two or three ideas for short pieces bouncing around in my head, as well; it's funny how a well written short story collection can cause that effect.

Then there's Done with Mirrors, which needs to be pounded mercilessly with a hammer until all the first novel goop is squeezed out and its prose is less like it was written by me when I was 23. There are elements of fanboyism present there, for various authors I'd both be flattered and horrified to be compared to, and some of that can't be helped (a rant on the Fanboy Author is up and coming this year, I promise you), but there are cartoonish attempts at others' styles clogging up some stylistic elements that need to just be shed. It's nice to see this relic of me finding my voice, but I want to get it more firmly situated before it goes out to agents again; and go out to agents it shall, as this is one of my primary projects for this year.

In short, it is going to be a very busy year.

Bring it on.

Short But Bittersweet

I'm sorry for a short and pith-free post. I'm sorry for being one of Those Bloggers who pulls this kind of routine on you. I'm sorry for being a little sick.

But when I looking at this TV Tropes page for a show called "Suicide Club" and see that the ad banner says, in huge bold words, "Become Popular", I cannot help but kick my feet and cackle like a glue-riddled madman.

Oh, Internet. You have made degenerates of us all.

No. Or, Why I Don't Love Copyright.

This is being reported everywhere, but I cling to the idea that to someone, I am the entire Internet. It's not writing-related, but it is IP related, which means I feel obliged to report on it:

Worlds.com sues NCSoft for patent infringement. The description of the patent? The foundational architecture of MMORPGs.

I'm not kidding. Really. Take a minute to read that link.

I don't have the time or resources to research how spurious Worlds.com's claim might be; based on the information I've seen, which given my sources could be a little under-researched, leads me to three basic conclusions:

#1: It could be economically and stylistically devastating for Worlds.com to win this suit;

#2: Whoever gave Worlds.com this patent is either outmoded or an idiot; and

#3: This is one of the best cases I have recently seen for a reform of IP law.

The reasons for #1 have been explored in every article I've linked, so I'll just summarize: If their patent is deemed legitimate, they have the capacity to sue the pants off of every gaming company that has ever helmed a standard-variety MMORPG. The damages those companies would have to pay could be apocalyptically high--and gaming is one of a handful of industries whose profits swell during economic troubles, from my understanding, so this is a blow I do not want to see dealt. I realize that it is unlikely the suit will drive anyone out of business if it passes, but I think that the economic situation in the world is fragile enough without payouts for this lawsuit being added to the heap of losses companies are incurring.

I do not recall seeing a date on the patent they are referencing--there is a chance it is old enough that it is legitimate, that someone working under their auspices was the first to develop the technology that is now the central system by which the bulk of MMORPGs operate. If not, then Worlds.com are weasels for having staged this farce; if so, then they are weasels for having, rather blatantly, bided their time to sue. MMORPGs have been running on the supposedly-patented architecture they describe since, to the best of my knowledge, 1997, if not earlier, which means that either Worlds.com did not keep track of a patent that someone there had to have known described an industry- and world-changing technology, or they waited until a company had enough money that they considered a suit worthwhile.

If this is not a result of corporate greed, than it is a result of a system for civil suits that rewards this sort of behavior, and of a patenting system that allows for these kinds of corporate-friendly predations. A single person holding that patent could not, under most circumstances, hope to win a suit against a company like NCSoft; Worlds.com, though, stands what I would consider a fighting chance. And if they do win, as stated, it stands to put at risk the livelihoods of a community of creators that I hold in rather great respect.

If this whole thing doesn't seem insane enough to you, please consider what Massively has to say on the subject of software design and patents: that under the current system, proof of prior art does nothing to defend a person against claims of infringement (translation: it barely matters when Worlds.com's patent was registered); and that software companies often "discourage their employees from consulting the patent system. If they infringe accidentally, the financial risks are far lower -- and it is pretty much impossible to write any software without infringing on multiple patents." [link] Does that sound like a functioning and healthy patent system to you?

I could rant on this subject for a long time, and in the process expose my ignorance; the truth is that I have no good answer, that I am simply angry and want to see a system that protects the creator without all the strange hoop-jumping the current system requires. This is just the latest, most farcical, example.

It's possible that this is me blowing all this out of proportion; that I'm overreacting to a corporation trying to stake a wholly veracious claim. But given that they filed this suit at Christmas, which I find hard to interpret as a desperate defense of an infringed patent, I am inclined to be less than charitable. As it stands, I await the possibility that further data will exonerate Worlds.com, and that this lawsuit will disappear in a puff of air; but for the moment, I maintain that Worlds.com's higher-ups should really just be ashamed of themselves.