Jackson Allen's Blog, page 19

Notes from Eugene – 12/20/2023

They say when you can’t sleep it feels like the longest night of the year. That of course is nonsense, because tonight is the hibernal solstice, and I haven’t slept a full night since the raccoon came to town.

It’s my landlady’s fault. RoseMarie refuses to put catches on the top of our trash barrels. Naturally it’s became a target for the two legged wildlife of Eugene, and more recently the four-legged kind. This is her idea of karmic revenge – Grandma never listened to her when she begged her to get a Life Alert. Now RoseMarie refuses to listen to me. Some sort of weird, preternatural middle-aged Circle of Life where she asserts dominance by ignoring ideas no matter how good they sound.

“The raccoons have struck again! Get out there with the rake while I get the snow shovel.” It happens at least twice a week, I wouldn’t mind so much but the raccoons can never decide on which nights to strike. Five nights out of seven, I binge YouTube with white-knuckles, waiting for the sound of little claws across the fence. My kingdom for a wrist rocket.

RoseMarie tortures other people besides me. She has a nephew – nice guy, nice family. Calls him up on a random Sunday morning and demands that he dig up a friend with a truck, driving across town to pick up a free couch on Craigslist. Then they take the couch back across town, sprain their backs getting it into Rose Marie’s living room. No money for gas. Her only gesture of compensation is a free glass of room-temperature tap water. Then she has the nerve to act surprised when her family refuses to take her calls. For me, the lack of a functioning vehicle is a blessing in disguise.

For centuries, society benefited from the illusion that we were not, in fact, a wild tapestry of sociopathic symbiosis. The signs we are sinking deeper into dystopian ruin increase with every passing day. I still believe that a good life is possible, but not while RoseMarie loses a guerrilla war to marauding trash pandas. They’re efficiency at navigating her discarded plastic bottles of Mexican vodka for the moldy Entenmanns’ poundcake and gold foil Almond Roca wrappers is nothing short of remarkable. So far, the opposing sides have been unable to negotiate a ceasefire.

The night is well along, and the day draws near. I have no such hope. Last night I dreamt the entire plot to a Batman – the Animated Series movie that doesn’t exist. Part of it was significant in that everyone finally saw Batman’s face, but nobody seemed to care. Yeah, sure, Bruce Wayne. So what? I’m not sure what to make of that – so perhaps it’ll end up in another installment of the Superhero Shrink.

Time to get the day started – more emails to send to lit agents for Mike.Sierra.Echo. May your racoons skip the block tonight, and may your hibernal solstice result in sweet dreams.

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Cait Corrain’s Professional Implosion

I heard about this yesterday but it wasn’t until this morning when I read the Mary Sue breakdown of Cait Corrain’s professional implosion that I truly understood. An author, on the cusp of success, kills their own career in a matter of hours. How did it happen? Why?

TL;DR: New author (they) review-bombs her competition, gets caught. Then they deny, can’t fake-news her way out of it. Now her professional brand crushes like a beer can. Yikes, yikes, and more yikes.

At this writing, Corrain has checked into rehab. I wish them well on her personal recovery journey even as I deplore her choices. This isn’t more dog-piling. The Mary Sue’s got that covered. What I am interested in is: why? Addiction is only one possible part of the answer. What drove them to despicable decisions, especially when the potential benefit was negligible at best? Why would you do that?

What Happened?

Let’s take a look around – see if we can’t find some answers. Let’s pretend we’re Matt Scudder from the Lawrence Block series for a second. Don’t investigate their career death – try to understand her life. Her blog is offline, so let’s start Google. When you do that, you see that Corrain was/is an unhappy person. As the saying goes: ‘hurt people will hurt people.’ It’s not an excuse, but it helps us understand.

How do I know that? Their Goodreads bio is a clue:

I’m a writer, artist, and relapsed goth from the East Coast, where it rains regularly. I’m currently trapped in the sunny desert of LA, with my service dog and two parrots who boss me around all day.

When not writing, I can be found doing academic research for fun, engaging in casual falconry, devouring audiobooks and podcasts, forgetting to reply to DMs, and staying up past my bedtime.

I have a BFA in Sequential Art from Savannah College of Art and Design, where I also minored in Art History. I spent time working in film/TV before jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire by becoming a programmer.

Please buy my books so I can stop doing that forever.

I’m not a mental health professional, but it looks as though Corrain has pivoted several times through their life with different career paths and interests. Their last line is a bit of a tell: “please buy my books so I can stop doing that forever.’ It doesn’t look like their job makes them happy – they’re looking to you, the reader, to help them escape.

Why This Didn’t Work

Why is that wrong? It’s a logical fallacy, a twisted version of :‘If your plan depends on you suddenly being ‘discovered’ by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.’ Yes, being poor sucks. Yes, nobody cares. But at the end of the day, you are responsible for your own experience. This is YOUR journey. This is YOUR personal Mount Everest. Corrain missed that point in the Creative People Survival Guide – now they’re paying the price.

Torching your personal creative career on an amped-up Mean Girls-style whisper campaign takes a special kind of cruelty. You aren’t born with it – you’re taught it. Hours and hours of effort to dim other candles so that their candle burned brighter. Someone taught them that trick. I wonder who the person in Corrain’s life was that taught them that A) it was okay to do this and B) it was effective. Somewhere in their history, this happened to them – they tried to do it to someone else, a core career meltdown ensued.

Corrain Will Be Fine – Eventually

Even though the story plays out like a cautionary tale – let’s remember something. Controversy sells books. Don’t believe me? Look at James Frey. Publicly dragged on Oprah before a national TV audience in 2003 for claiming that ‘A Million Little Pieces’ was non-fictional. Twenty years ago, we all thought ‘this guy’s done.’ Not so. In 2007, he signed a seven-figure deal with HarperCollins. He’s been busy writing, creating, and making money ever since.

I predict that, although Corrain wouldn’t be welcome in certain author circles, they will go onto a successful career otherwise. They’ll exit rehab, do an apology tour, make amends with the authors they tried to cancel, and then off to the next project. Two or three years from now, readers will be buying their books and they’ll be doing just fine. In my darker moments, I almost envy them.

Or perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps we don’t live in that universe anymore. Perhaps actions have consequences and even though we can be empathetic to Corrain, we’ll let them go back to the world of ‘programming’ and ‘listening to podcasts.’ But not writing. This industry doesn’t seem to agree with them, if they’re willing to push others down to make sure they rise to the top.

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Authors, Marketing, and Convention Audience Engagement

Another drippy, cold morning in Eugene – let’s talk authors, marketing, and convention-style audience engagement. Ars Technica posted another ‘why did E3 die’ article this morning, so here’s a ‘yes, and’ to their analysis. E3 and Comic Con were always about the marketing – your happy community experiences were just the sprinkles on top of a ‘sell you something sundae.’ You can blame COVID, or industry changes all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that companies only invest in marketing that results in positive return on investment. Someone in the SLT said ‘wait, why are we doing this?’ and the numbers didn’t add up. Bye-bye to E3.

Comic Con happened anyway, in spite of the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, and good for them. Nonetheless, the experience was scaled back – Marvel and DC didn’t bother to show up. What’s the point of a comic con if two of your biggest publishers tap out? Only time will tell if SDCC2024 can recapture the momentum.

Here’s Why That’s Okay

It’s a bad news/good news thing for introverted indie creators like myself. I used to wear myself out, masking my way through thousands of people without an anxiety attack. Even if nothing went wrong, I was left worn out and exhausted, needing days to recharge. I can’t just blame anxiety. As an author, I just didn’t have the budget or energy, I didn’t have the marketing tools or resources, to engage with convention audiences the way others could.

But that’s just me – let’s say you’re an author and you’re thinking about doing a convention. What are some must-haves to make sure your event is a success? There are some big decisions that must be made – questions answered. Here’s a list of them, courtesy Jessica Taylor:

Author / Writer Convention TipsHow much is the table fee?Is the fee refundable if you have to cancel? Non-refundable after a certain time period?How big is the table? Do you get your own table or do you have to share with someone?Do they provide tablecloths? What color are they?Can you bring an assistant with you? Are they free or do you have to pay for them?Are they arranging discounted hotel blocks for authors? If not, do they have recommendations for nearby hotels?How will you get there? Fly or drive? If you drive, what’s the parking situation?How will you get your books there? Do they offer shipping to the venue, or do you have to bring it all with you? How will you get your items from your hotel/car to the venue?Where will you order your books from? Amazon? IngramSpark? Bookvault? Somewhere else? Plan in advance!Will there be Wi-Fi available? Does it cost a fee to use for vendors? For attendees?What payment methods will you use?About how many attendees do they anticipate? How many tickets have they sold?

Freaked out yet? Don’t worry, there’s more in Part 2:

You will go through more pens/sharpies than you think you will. Bring extra.The attendees are probably just as nervous as you. You might have to talk first.Practice your pitch. People come to these looking for new authors & books.Build your arm strength. At tear down time, there will be not a cart or trolley in sight for you to use. (Adjacently, remember to lift with your  legs , not your back)Decide what pricing discount you’ll offer; think about event pre-orders, exclusives, etc

Please don’t misunderstand. I don’t think conventions are for me. If you want to try them out for yourself, then I want you to be successful. Here are some other author convention tip pages you’ll want to read through and consider.

Yes, conventions can be overwhelming. When it comes to authors and audience engagement, you have to think in terms of sustainable marketing. Burning yourself out creatively for two nights in Milwaukee? I’m not your dad, I can’t tell you what to do. All I can do is talk through the options so that you can make an informed choice.

Hopefully this helps you understand why I stick to platforms like Mastodon, Kbin.social and the Emergency Reality Shelter. I need to engage with audiences in a way that works for me, and conventions haven’t passed the ‘Jackson test.’ If they work for you, I wish you well. Now it’s time to get back to writing.

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Sci-Friday #200 – Retrofuturism with Michael Crichton

Hooray – Scifi #200 is here – let’s enjoy some retrofuturism with Michael Crichton and then discuss a few other things about the author himself. Take a look:

Interesting takeaways from his talk – having a word processor in the 1970s that required a service contract because it was ‘always breaking down.’ Makes me wonder what the difference between a word processor with a service contract and a subscription-based service like they’re screaming about for Mercedes and Audi. Also, Chricton is both remarkably progressive on some items (VFX, scifi) and regressive (deepfake media and intellectual property rights) in others.

Michael Chricton – of course -wasn’t perfect. If you dig into his history, you become aware of his many controversies – he was a climate change-denier, for example. Married several times. Engaged in creepy, weird battles with book critics.

Not only that – his body of work spanning four decades reveals that he wasn’t much on storytelling craft. Many of his stories regurgitate the Frankenstein ‘new technology will kill us all’ moral panic when they aren’t making tone-deaf observations about minority groups (looking at you, ‘Rising Sun). I’m not defending any of his choices. If we can step away from those imperfections, we can see that Chricton was a thoughtful, intelligent person who knew a lot about where the world was going. It’s great that we still have moments like these that show his flawed, human genius for what it was.

I hope you enjoyed this little adventure of retrofuturism with Michael Crichton. Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend! 

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12/05/2023 – General Housekeeping

Happy Tuesday, folks – doing some end-of-year work on Inkican while I wait for lit agents to get back to me on Mike.Sierra.Echo. Here’s what’s going on:

Emergency Reality Shelter – I started pivoting away from calling my short stories ‘brain tacos.’ Right now, people need shelter from the bad vibes and idiotic current events we suffer through and what better way to do that than an emergency shelter? Shelters promote good mental health and psychosocial well-being – I hope you feel welcomed to stay here as long as it makes you feel good to do so. Creative People Survival Guide – I’m updating the CPSG after a few years of personal work and experience to help people feel equipped to deal with the stresses of being a creative professional.  I began work on this survival guide several years ago and now I’m updating it with new lessons learned that I think you’ll find helpful and insightful.Audiobooks in production – Jeremiah reports that he’s ill but recovering and plans to shoot me some material for ‘The Rocket’ – looking forward to sharing that with you soon.

Write on!

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Sci-Friday #199 – Retrofuturist Tech – TV Modems

Hooray – it’s Sci-Friday – enjoy this little trip down retrofuturist tech lane where we talk about the nascent, niche technology: TV modems! Back in the late 90s – pre-broadband – you were interested in ANY technology that allowed you to download faster than 56K. Why? It took forever! Throughput times in the days, months, years in some cases.  En Technology thought of a neat way to get around the problem using technology everyone had in their home. Take a look and then let’s discuss:

You can see the appeal almost immediately. “En’s Cybercast System, originally unveiled under the code-name ‘Malachi,’ used the speed, bandwidth and universal availability of the analog television signal to distribute data. The end user component, En’s TVModem, worked with virtually 100 percent of all IBM-compatible personal computers in use in the 90’s. TVModems were designed to be affordable, with models retailing for $100 to $150.”

I wasn’t able to find a breakdown of how it all works, but I suspect they were using the analog TV signal – specifically the audio frequency above 150 kHz, out of human hearing – to broadcast data to any listening TV modem. The modem would receive the data – just like if it came across a phone line – and reassemble the demodulated sound into bytes. Neato!

What was it like to use a TV Modem? En Technology’s old website explains: “During a special two-minute segment of the show, dubbed CyberBlast!, viewers equipped with En’s TVModem will receive more than four megabytes of compressed computer content that complements the television program. Viewers without a TVModem can download the content through En’s Web site, although those equipped with a TVModem will receive the information 30 times faster than through a 14.4Kbps telephone modem.”

Other TV programs of the time had their own version of TV data transfer. For example, Bad Influence! was a program on CITV featured a ‘datablast.’ “Datablast – which viewers were encouraged to record on their video recorders – consisted of a number of pages of gaming articles and information that were flashed rapidly onto the screen during the credits. Viewers could then read the pages by replaying it in slow motion on their video player. The information consisted of a watered down version of most of that episodes features, as well as some exclusive content, such as Top Ten video games charts.”

Interesting use of tech. The TV modem never caught on and was quickly made redundant by broadband. Nevertheless, the TV modem remains a fascinating piece of retrofuturist tech for us to appreciate and reflect on.

Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend! 

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Author Journey – Query Letter Tips and Thoughts

This author journey circles back to something I wrote almost three months ago, tips on surviving the Query Letter Blues. As mentioned previously, Query letters get sent to lit agents requesting they review and consider your work for representation/publication. Your query letter – like your love life – is only as good as the response it gets. Writers agonize over these little morsels of creativity. In the process, you learn a little about your work and a lot about yourself.

Ten query letter drafts later … I have a query letter draft that passed muster over at /r/pubtips on Reddit. Yes, Reddit is still Reddit, but there seem to be no other resources for near-real-time feedback on your query letter. So, despite my concerns, to Reddit I must go. Here, for your reference, is the Mike.Sierra.Echo query letter:

Twelve-year-old Mike doesn’t know how Mom managed to keep it all together. Now that she’s gone, everything falls apart. His grades are in the toilet, his unemployed dad disconnects from the family. Even his older sister Jennifer self-destructs on social media.

Grandma makes it worse, swearing revenge on Dad out of grief, using her wealth to sabotage his new job building the world’s first space elevator. Mike’s attempts to play peacemaker, Mom’s previous role, make everything worse. Mike feels helpless, even with an AI as his best friend, to stop Grandma’s sabotage of the family’s future.

Mike knows that saving the space elevator means stealing it. He sets off on the adventure of a lifetime with his trusty AI best friend at his side. He’s the first kid to pilot a space elevator, and the best person to save his family from itself.

Mike Sierra Echo is a middle-grade scifi space novel set in Boston, Santa Fe, and Ecuador 150 years in the future and will appeal to readers of ‘We Dream of Space’ by Erin Entrada Kelly and ‘Rebecca Reznik Reboots the Universe’ by Samara Shanker.

Whew! Hours of time spent on these four paragraphs – research among my author friends tells me that I’m not the only one who struggles to write query letters. Ergo, when I started this project out, I told myself two things. A. Just say thank you to the feedback – don’t argue about it – just take it and re-write. B. People will use your request for feedback to get into your head and it’s okay to ignore them.

That strategy worked! I approached the work knowing I’d be re-writing and, because a query letter *isn’t* your project, I don’t really care if people hate it. Take all the emotion out – write and re-write again – it’s all good.

Having said that, let me pass along some lessons learned that I’ll be incorporating into the Creative Persons Survival Guide at some point.

Tips on Writing Your Query Letter

Let me share one tip that helped me get my earlier query letter drafts into a better place: https://www.querylettergenerator.com/ This is a Mad Libs-style query letter generator that forces you to think about your story in ‘what-does-a-lit-agent-really-care-about’ format. That’s not to say your query letter SHOULD come from this generator – but it’ll give you a place to start from. Very useful.

Second tip: go back to what I said earlier – NOBODY likes writing query letters. It’s okay to hate them. Give yourself permission. Just write. Tell yourself the two things: A. Just say ‘thank you’ to the feedback – don’t argue about it – just take it and re-write. B. People will use your request for feedback to get into your head and it’s okay to ignore them.

I hope these query letter tips are useful for authors. I’ll add some more to the story when I get my thoughts together. Meantime, I’ve updated the Mike.Sierra.Echo page so that any visiting lit agent should be able to see what we’re doing almost instantaneously. Feel free to message me with any referrals into the pub industry you have to share.

Write on!

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What OpenAI and ChatGPT Tell Us About Future of AI

A recent road trip forced me to think hard about OpenAI, ChatGPT, and the future of AI. We hit town after ten o’clock. Murray knows the town as well as I do, which is why we got lost almost immediately. Highway 101 cuts through the east side of town and it’s easy to find a grocery store or Fred Myer. We were on a different mission full of mystery and dangerous implication.

Some of that is Murray’s fault – he prowls Western Oregon in search of various treasures to resell on eBay. I got a phone call from him last week, an estate sale out on the coast. It gives him a chance to get out of the house, and it supplements his disability insurance.  Murray’s van looks as though it shouldn’t be allowed within 500 yards of an elementary school. The trouble started almost immediately.

“We’re supposed to be on the 38,” Murray whines and curses – a panicked sea captain at the helm of his 2006 Dodge Sprinter van. “Where’s the 38?”

I say nothing. Murray made a fool of  himself at our breakfast stop – insisting that his eggs be remade and his coffee refilled any time it dropped below three-quarters’ full. I white-knuckled it through breakfast, expecting to be thrown out at any second. Thankfully, we escaped with hot food in our stomachs and a full tank of gas to find OR-38. The Umpqua highway sucked us through miles of rural Oregon like a boat caught in a whirlpool.

We find Coos Bay and head toward our destination, crossing South Slough on a low bridge past a large shellmound, the final resting place for millions of oysters. We stop at a nearby store for directions and I can’t help comparing my books to each of those shells. Is that what my work looks like when it arrives at a publishing house? Murray negotiates with our host, a wine-drunk beachcomber based out of a faded fifth-wheel trailer who tried to get rich flipping abandoned storage lockers.

How We Got Here

I couldn’t help sensing a connection between their malevolent transactions and the OpenAI saga. In case you’re unaware, Sam Altman founded OpenAI alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Altman would go on to officially join OpenAI as its CEO in 2019 and remain there…until last Friday evening when Altman was forcibly removed as CEO. Altman was as good as gone, so it seemed. The following Monday,CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman and Brockman were joining Microsoft. The next day, we found out Sam Altman was not an official Microsoft employee, because Sam Altman is officially back as CEO at OpenAI.

Some news outlets – looking at you, ABC – are framing this story as ‘good guy whistleblower vs. evil AI overlords’ but that seems to be an oversimplification.  Other details are seeping out – the about what precipitated the drama.  Look at what happened after Altman saw the Toner Paper. “Altman was not pleased with Holt after the paper was published, and he shared his concerns with the OpenAI employees through an email … OpenAI’s head of research, Ilya Sutsekver, initially debating whether to oust Toner from the board. However, surprisingly, he then chose to move against Altman instead – a decision he would regret within days.”

The timing of Altman’s departure seems to be related to the Toner Paper more than a still-published blog post warning about AI’s intrinsic dangers. Additionally, hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened to quit the company and jump ship to Microsoft over Altman’s firing on the following Monday. Even more alarming, Sutskever, the OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist who allegedly started the whole issue, had turned on OpenAI’s board.

A snarl from the ramshackle trailer drew my attention. The negotiation reached a critical stage – the wino refused to take less than two thousand dollars for the contents of a shipping container. Murray’s argument was that he couldn’t justify that expense ‘sight unseen’ and our alky – a dead ringer for Walter Brennan in ‘To Have and Have Not’ – countered. “You know where I live,” he wheezed. “If I cheated you, you’d be back here tonight to set my place on fire.”

Angry talk continued about ‘escrow’ and hard dollars. It was all nonsense. Each party saw the iron jaws of defeat at every corner, with no silver medal for second place. No reasoning with someone who’d rather be right than happy. I walked across the street where a bustling restaurant operated out of a deconsecrated church.

Humans Must Grow Up Before AI Does

The more we learn, the more we know that as smart as Sam Altman, the OpenAI board, and the collective company are – their moves seem to be more emotional than rational. They come across as angry, petulant toddlers. Not a good look for a company valued at $80 Billion.

Where’s the voice of sanity in all this drama? Where’s the one person saying ‘hey folks … not like this?’ Where’s the cooler heads that need to prevail? Negotiators talk about the value of emotional intelligence, empathy, and intuition when successfully facilitating the release of a human hostage. No signs of emotional intelligence, empathy, and intuition in the ratty little travel caravan on a foggy road outside town. No signs of emotional intelligence, empathy, and intuition in the OpenAI conversations, either.

There’s a moment in ‘The Imitation Game’ you might remember. Specialists at Bletchley Park, suddenly aware of their technology’s power also understand the responsibility. ‘The team at Bletchley Park cannot act on every decoded message and choose not to save the convoy, despite desperate pleas from Peter, whose brother is a sailor serving on one of the ships.’ Turing’s character arc is that he, although one of history’s smartest people, is still human. There’s empathy in his knowledge, there’s emotional intelligence behind the numbers.

Put Altman into Turing’s shoes for a minute. Movies are stories about people, and those stories communicate emotional truths like the ‘Jerk with a Heart of Gold’ trope. You don’t see the Jerk with a Heart of Gold here, just a thousand people suffering from Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.

Take a step back, get some therapy, and do some meditation. Then answer me this: How can billionaires justify acting like PTA parents? You literally invented the next phase of human progress. Show a little class, a little dignity. Be the grown-up in the room that everyone needs to see right now.

Guys like Murray will never understand this. He could be spending time with his family, taking a class, anything other than a screaming match in a nasty camper van. Murray is too scared to let go of the paintbrush, and the big picture will pass him by.

We can’t afford to roll the dice as we pivot to a higher level of humanity

The OpenAI / ChatGPT drama have serious implications for the future of AI. No matter how smart the machines get, we’re still rabid little meatbags trying to get our needs met.  All of us normals see the danger of putting ultra-powerful tools and trillions of dollars in capital in the hands of people constantly seeking to betray each other. Why can’t they?

Whether Altman, OpenAI, ChatGPT or anyone in AI figures it out in the future is ultimately up to them. We can’t afford to roll the dice as we pivot to a higher level of humanity. Wired summed it up: ‘As we tiptoe toward AGI, we must always make sure that the bots are aligned with the best human values. This won’t happen unless humans are aligned with those, too.’ You can be a spark or a skidmark as you seek to make your mark on the world. Choose wisely. It’s a great time to step back and take a breath, folks. You can’t buy, fake, or generate empathy.

It was dark when Murray dropped me off at home. “Thanks for coming. I needed someone else there in case the little punk got fresh.”

I shrugged. “Time need to feed the cats.”

Murray’s tail lights had faded by the time I opened the front door. Getting to the future depends on learning how to show empathy as we learn about AI – whether we use ChatGPT or OpenAI or neither. Perspective, empathy, emotional intelligence, intuition. We all need a little more grace these days.

Then I sat down to write.

 

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Should Authors Hate Readers? Harlan Ellison Weighs In

I ran across the attached video – Harlan Ellison weighs in on an interesting question: should authors hate readers? That question led to more questions and so I started to write. There are many prevailing opinions about this topic, but Harlan Ellison makes an interesting case for hating or despising his readers. Take a look and then let’s discuss:

“I am an adversary to my fans,” Ellison declares. ” I’m not there to make them feel good …  I want my work to leave them with some with some feeling that they have been through an experience.” Huh.

Some of that, you have to take with a grain of salt. All I can say for Harlan Ellison is thank the Good Lord he died before he could be cancelled. His life, and the public’s patience for his bad behavior, came to an end about the same time. ‘Rock star’ authors are rarely prepared for the moment when the music stops.

But the question remains – should authors ‘hate’ their readers? First, we need to ask – what does ‘hating your readers’ accomplish? Does it help you write so that they feel something? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then I can understand why you would feel this reaction was necessary. But I would invite you to be curious about that conclusion – why would you have to ‘hate’ or despise your readers? What kind of art could you create if you loved them, instead?

But *must* you love your readers in order to write? Not necessarily. I’ve written about my ‘ideal reader’ but I don’t know that I love or hate them. If I’m being honest, I want to relate to my readers – no specific emotion required.

What does that mean? You’re a human being living at one of the most difficult, stressful points in human history. That sucks. My basic response is ‘respect’ as an emotion, and ’empathy’ as a response. Your pain makes me feel pain. I want to help – for your pain go away for a while – to get your mind off of stuff. But I’m not in charge of the universe. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of bad stuff happening that neither of us are in control over.

The best way to describe my situation is ’emotional emergency room doctor’ – I care, but I remain detached. You might not get better, you might not listen to me. It’s not in my power take away the bad stuff happening in your life. We both have to live with unpleasant outcomes.

Does that make sense? Are you still there?

That detachment might sound callous to some, but allows me to remain focused on survival versus being overwhelmed. It lets me keep something in the emotional gas tank for the moment when yet another horrific human tragedy arrives – mass shootings, wars, bombings, natural disasters – and there’s nothing to do but keep calm and carry on.

So that’s my personal feelings – but how does that impact the work? I approach the work with intention and purpose. If this is something that can make you feel better, than it needs to be the something that will make you feel better. That’s what you deserve, that’s what you’re trusting me to provide. I may not be the best writer, but I want you to feel like I appreciate and respect your trust, and you as a human being.

Some people will take that respect and trust and use it poorly – I can’t stop that. Any more than an ER doctor can prevent their patients from getting shot walking out the front door of the hospital. That’s the horrible risk we all take giving a piece of ourselves to another human being – those pieces might end up in the garbage. Even so, that some of my work and energy gets wasted isn’t bad – it means I have something of myself I can freely give.

Circling back to the original question. When Harlan Ellison weighs in and we ask, should authors hate their readers? The answer, based on the evidence, is no. Ellison was an edge case. He lived at a time where you could punch your way to success. Not so, today. Not if you want to do your best work. May you respect your readers, and treat them with the same kind of trust you expect from them.

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Sci-Friday #198 – Free Classic Scifi Short Stories

For this Sci-Friday, I’m passing along some free classic scifi short stories that I think you’ll enjoy. One of them is over a hundred years old and predicts email and video projectors. Short stories introduce complex topics and share ideas in bite-sized chunks. I learned to write short stories by reading what other authors have done. Here are four you can enjoy with your kids (Although I wouldn’t read ‘Smear’ to small children). Take a look:

Smear by Brian Evans The Egg by Andy Weir And then there were none by Eric Frank Russell The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)

You might want to learn more about these authors. For example, E.M. Forster was Edward Morgan Forster OM CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, as well as a limited number of biographies and some pageant plays. He also co-authored the opera Billy Budd (1951). Today, he is considered one of the most successful of the Edwardian era English novelists.

That’s not all! Eric Frank Russell (January 6, 1905 – February 28, 1978) was a British writer best known for his science fiction novels and short stories. Much of his work was first published in the United States, in John W. Campbell‘s Astounding Science Fiction and other pulp magazines. Russell also wrote horror fiction for Weird Tales and non-fiction articles on Fortean topics. Up to 1955 several of his stories were published under pseudonyms, at least Duncan H. Munro and Niall(e) Wilde.

Even short stories can become rabbit holes of discovery. I hope these free classic scifi short stories create a sense of curiosity and wonder about the universe, yourself … that glorious ‘itch’ that comes from wondering ‘hey, what if?’ That’s what makes scifi fun, and it’s something anyone can enjoy.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be looking for more scifi short stories to enjoy. May I humbly recommend some of my brain tacos? If you enjoyed this discussion, please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend! 

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