What you have to give up to write July 31, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest, Rants/Opinions, Writing.2 comments
Apparently an “aspiring novelist’s letter” inspired a post over at Whatever yesterday- whoever that was, I bet they were -awesome-.
That aside, the post is an excellent comment on what is actually a significant problem: the prevalent idea that you must be willing to sacrifice everything in order to be a professional writer.
There are people who write sheerly for the enjoyment of it, but far and away the majority of people write to one day see themselves in print, and many dream of giving up their day job and being a full time writer themselves.
To these people the words of those who have “Made It”, the John Scalzi’s and Lawrence Block’s, mean a great deal – and there are a lot of writers out there who are writing books, blogs and articles aimed at these aspiring novelists.
A lot of these books are full of stories about the pain that it can take to become a writer. I think some people probably think they are doing a kindness by preparing others for the pain that there dreams may lead them through: but some of the stories are horrific. They tend to go something like this:
A friend of mine quit his job to become a writer. His first book sucked but he kept trying. He ran out of money but he got a subsistence job to live on and kept trying. His wife left him and took the kids, and his dog died and he was living under a bridge but he kept trying and then his twentieth book took off and now he’s living the dream!
Sure, this is an extreme example (but not -that- extreme, compared to some of the similar stories out there), but there are a lot of them. It has bled into sort of a global belief that in order to be a writer you have to be willing to sacrifice everything – kids, wife, house, your entire life. Only then are you dedicated enough to being a writer, to your dreams and your art, that you can fight your way through the struggle.
At an intellectual level, I don’t believe that. I believe that with hard consistent work and a supportive family you can one day live the dream without having to sacrifice all else that you love. But it is this sort of irrational belief that curls up in your stomach like one of Conan’s serpents and squeezes the confidence out of you, the courage from your heart, until at midnight you are sweating in your bed and staring at the ceiling and you realise that you really -don’t- want it enough to give up your family.
I had that moment. I’ll say it without reservation, there is -nothing- in this world that I want enough to give up my family. I get up in the morning, go to work and slog through anything they throw at my purely so I can go home and see my daughter’s smile and talk with my wife.
So a big thank you to Scalzi for saying what we already knew, but needed to hear someone else say.
I am reminded of an anecdote I read once, went something like this:
A man with a burning desire to play violin met a traveling violin master and begged the master to listen to him play.
“If you tell me I have potential”, he said, “I will devote my life to the violin, but I would never want to do that if I had no chance of success.”
He played and the Master sat, and afterwards said. “I am sorry, you do not have the fire.”
The man went away bitterly dejected.
Years later their paths crossed again and the man shook the Master’s hand and said, “Thankyou, I have become a successful businessman and am glad I didn’t waste my life. I am glad you were able to recognise that I had no talent.”
And the Master said, “I didn’t listen to you play.”
The man was shocked, “Why?” He asked, “Why would you have done that? I could have been great! I could have been a master myself by now!”
“Because,” said the Master, “I tell everyone they lack the fire. If you had the fire, what I said should have made no difference.”
I guess we need to remember that in the end, no matter what anyone else says, it’s down to us.
Go read Scalzi:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/07/29/what-you-have-to-give-up-to-write/
Consumers and their Limited Resources June 23, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest, Rants/Opinions.add a comment
Finally.
It is beyond my understanding how, even after so long, with so many people pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, the big media companies are still able to claim that every download is a lost sale and that illegal downloads are destroying music/movies/books/their-ability-to-make-billions-off-their-artists.
Well, that last one might be true.
The bottom line is, or at least should be, that not business model has any intrinsic ‘right’ to succeed. If the market changes, and it certainly has changed, and your business model no longer works to make you money then you need to adapt.
And yes, I am aware that convincing governments to pass laws making your business model sacrosanct and then having your customers arrested, charged in civil suits, and forced to give you money is in fact adapting. It might be better to adapt into something with a bit more long term survival.
If you keep biting the masses, eventually they’ll bite back.
Google tackles the eBook Market June 17, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest, Rants/Opinions, iPhone.add a comment
Slashdot Technology Story | Google Set To Tackle eBook Market
As a long-term ebook reader myself, I have been both excited by Amazon’s entry into the market raising the profile and the usage of ebooks, and disappointed in Amazon’s heavy-handed tactics and DRM, a side of the retail giant that is quickly becomming “business as usual”.
So I for one welcome our google overlord’s entry into the ebook market. By pushing a free standard and open access, hopefully we will see some decent kindle competition – because nothing breaks down unnecessary and greedy restrictions like open competition (come on Android come on!).
In a related note, the best ebook reader programs I have found so far are uBook (micro-book) for the pocket-pc, an excellent little program that worked very well on my old iPaq, and Bookshelf for the iPhone, which is the application I currently use and makes the most of your own file formats and the beautifully clear resolution of the iPhone screen. Reading on the iPhone is convenient and a pleasure and I generally carry half a library in my pocket at all times.
Chaser’s Censorship (or Much Ado About Nothing) June 10, 2009
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Well, I finally got around to watching the second episode of the third season of Chaser’s War On Everything, the current whipping boy of Australia’s Moral Guardians and Supreme Example Of All That Is Wrong With The Media Today.
To recap, Chaser performed a sketch entitled “Make a realistic wish foundation” which involves presenting pencil cases and a stick to children in a parody of the make a wish foundation. It ended with the now infamous line that prompted complaints, a two week ban and the censoring of all future repeats of the episode. “Why spend a lot of money on them, when they’re going to die anyway.”
I feel like a bit of disclosure is due at this point, I myself have spent some time in contact with disabled and dying children and my wife has devoted her career and a large amount of her life to them. Personally I think the make a wish foundation does a wonderful job of providing some small comfort to the children and their parents, who have to face continuing after their death. It is not a fun situation, it is very serious and painful.
I hate censorship and would be here defending them regardless of what they said. With all I said above I sat down with my wife and we watched the show fully prepared to be completely offended.
How surprised was I then that the skit was incredibly short, and made me giggle. It wasn’t roaring funny but neither was it this filthy searing insult to sick children everywhere. It was obviously an irreverent poke at a revered institution. I did wince at the end line, I do think it was in bad taste, but without the controversy I would have forgotten it minutes after it was over.
Sure it was bad taste, but it’s chaser. If you don’t like bad taste humour you’re watching the wrong show, and it’s not like all Australia doesn’t know what they’re like by now.
It’s well overblown, astonishingly so, and it’s disgusting that we have all spent so much time on this issue. It’s also insane how many comments on this issue begin “I haven’t seen the show but…” and then go on to denigrate and abuse them based purely on hearsay, from which you would almost be expecting them to be assaulting sick children in their beds.
To my mind they’ve done far worse in the past and have done nothing but upset the over sensative now. As George Carlin famously said, there is no subject so sacrosanct that you can’t joke about it. He punctuated this with a quite funny routine about rape that elicited much the same response.
That was about thirty years ago. Guess we haven’t come all that far after all have we.
Grow up Australia. If you don’t like it, turn off.
The power of Death April 7, 2009
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http://bananasfk.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/hp-lovecraft/
A capsule note on H.P. Lovecraft, noted weird fiction writer and father of modern horror, which is more of a link between Lovecraft and Stross than any real comment on Lovecraft himself.
Other than a forgettable note on the author, this post is notable for one reason anyway: The line “As Lovecraft is dead, his ‘horror’ is rather over wordy…”
I can only imagine what will happen to my own works, already quite wordy, after my death! What a fascinating idea, words mingling free of their creator’s gaze, free to multiply and procreate and turning regular works into wordy ones!
The mind boggles.
The problem of “Salary + bonuses” April 6, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest.1 comment so far
http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2009/04/the-bonus-babies/
Frederick Pohl on the credit crunch. This is the simplest explanation of why the banks made sub-prime mortgages that I’ve yet seen, finally the reason we’re in this mess makes some kind of sense. The fact that people -fell- for this line just goes to show that the world is full of stupid people. Or at least, somewhat naive and gullible people.
It did remind me of a story I heard at uni that seems to be an apt comparison here. One of my lecturers was interested in graphics, machine learning and evolutionary computation, similar research interests as I have as a matter of fact.
One day he set up a virtual robot environment with a straight line joining two points. The robots, he decided, had to start at the first point and learn to travel along the line to the second. In order to do this, rather than attempting to code some sort of routine to control it, he decided to run evolutionary algorithms to evolve robots who could perform this task.
Just to make it more interesting, he decided that physical appearance of the robot’s should be evolvable too, to see if the system could come up with a robot that could perform this task the fastest within the programmed environment physics.
The wonderful thing about evolutionary computing is that sometimes (read, often) the systems themselves can surprise you. It did indeed evolve a robot capable of quickly following the straight line to the second point. It was a large rectangle as tall as the distance between the two points, which, when the simulation was started, promptly fell over – reaching the second point in the process.
Give people (or evolution) a results-based reward and expect them to cut corners and find a short-cut to get there. The problem is of course, capitalist propaganda aside, the process is generally as important as the result.
Stylophone Goodness March 30, 2009
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No Matter How Hard You Try, You Will Never Out-Nerd This Man « Whatever
I’d never heard of a “Stylophone” before. 80’s Nerdy Goodness.
Silicon Dreams special Critical of Senator Conroy Edition March 26, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest, News, Rants/Opinions.add a comment
Labor’s blog-watch plan hits Whirlpool of dissent | theage.com.au
Senator Stephen Conroy is an idiot.
His plans are foolish and will damage this country economically and democratically, lessening our freedoms, raising our fear levels and generally turning us all into paranoid twits.
The worst part of all, the completely unforgivable part, is that the mandatory filtering will not actually work to curb child pornography distribution, which, as many studies have pointed out (and been completely ignored) are traditionally traded in a peer-to-peer fashion, over chat and filesharing networks, rather than the small fraction that are websites.
And now he’s monitoring blogs that disagree with him? I suspect the Minister for Communications is planning on being the Minister for Truth – doesn’t he realise he’s 25 years too late?
I could, and have, go on about this issue at length and in detail, but there are others doing it just as succinctly as I could ever hope to. Go see them, and resist these attacks on your freedom.
http://filtermenot.googlepages.com/home
http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/
http://www.ausbdsm.org/nocensorship/
Also remember that some things that Stephen (The Nanny) Conroy dislikes, disapproves of, and would consider “unwanted material” are not “illegal”. There is a difference. Fetishes are not illegal, just distasteful to fundamentalist Christians. Distasteful to fundamentalist Christians is, in my view, more of a reason to spread something around then filter it out. Most of the people enjoying these things are hurting no-one – unless they want to be hurt – whilst these religious right hurt us all when they try and shape our country in their own image.
“I think it’s disgusting” is never a reason to ban something. “It’s taking away their freedom” -is-.
Books to read before you die March 25, 2009
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MLA’s 30 Books Every Adult Should Read Before They Die on Lists of Bests
This is an interesting list, primarily because I find all such lists to be somewhat interesting. Also because i’ve read 4 of the top ten, which is nice.
But the best thing about this list is that although the Bible gets #2 spot, it gets beaten out by To Kill a Mocking Bird. Go Harper Lee!
The place the rant originated March 18, 2009
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After all that, I forgot what triggered my latent rage in the first place, it was this:
Max Mutchnick: Where Did You Get Them?
There’s an example of disgusting discrimination. (and a quite funny writer) I admit, I would love to see stuff like this completely stamped out, whether it be because of sexual preference or race. I just don’t think anyone is making sense as to how it should be done at the moment, and I don’t think shocking people with the phrase “We are all racists” is adding much of value to the discussion.
It’s a shame really, I suspect there was a lot more of value in that race essay then what I read, but I couldn’t get past my anger at being tarred like that. That probably says more about me than them.
