S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 22

Sure, Tax the rich if it makes you feel better. . .

It doesn't do a lot else though.  Over time the revenue increase on hiking taxes is pretty much a wash with the downward pressure on revenue caused by the drag taxation causes on the economy.  Here is a demonstration in handy chart form:

The last two decades are particularly notable, the evil Bush tax cuts for the wealthy barely shifted the bottom line.  So, all these people who are whining about people making $250K can afford these frakking tax increases, you may be right, but you aren't going to do a damn thing about the deficit with them.

Government revenue is a function of economic growth, and that factor overwhelms any fiddling you do on tax rates.  Our complicated tax code is an exercise in social policy, not fiscal policy.  It is a means for the State to engage in social engineering by rewarding some activity and punishing other activity.  It only affects revenue in the long term by how it affects economic growth.

And you really want to put downward pressure on this economy because you think people above a certain income level can afford to feel more pain?

Why I'm going to let the TSA grope my fat white ass

Sure, it's borderline sexual assault and a violation of the fourth amendment, but bear in mind what your other option is.  The motive behind the "enhanced" pat-downs is IMO less to do with our security and a lot more to do with "encouraging" you to file meekly through the good old naked body scanners.  There are two main reasons why I'm still opting out and letting Bubba the TSA dude grope my junk.

Bubba ain't going to give me cancer.  And the TSA is underreporting your radiation exposure by a factor of ten.  And they don't have a great history of maintaining x-ray machines safely.

Bubba ain't going to take a photo of my junk and leak it onto the internet.

NaNoWriMo Final Thoughts

Now that I'm done and I can spare a few hundred words for my blog, I'd thought I'd give a little recap on what I think this NaNoWriMo thing was good for, despite some asinine anal-retentive elitist asshat skeptics out there:

First, what lessons this provides a newbie author:

The first rule of writing: to be a writer one has to write. This is not planning to write. Not talking about writing. Not regaling forums on teh interwebz about what you're writing. Not reading books or blog posts about writing. Not doing research, making character sketches, color-coding your filing system, or playing with Google street view to find the perfect house for your kick-ass heroine. This is butt-in-chair putting-words-down-in-proper-order-writing. It is the only essential task, and if you came up against NaNoWriMo and it kicked your ass even though you spent every day on the forums on their site talking about what a tough time you were having, you need to keep reading this paragraph until you realize where you went wrong.
The second rule of writing: to be a writer one has to continue writing. In other words, novels are long, and require a certain amount of discipline to even attempt, much less finish. Waiting for the muse to strike is all well and good, but if you don't learn to keep at a project every day until it's finished, you will end up with a lot of first chapters, but precious few first drafts.
The importance of being able to kick the internal editor off the bus for the duration. To write at a professional level, editing and polishing your prose is an essential step, but you need to train yourself not to mix revision with writing. They are two different animals, and if the editor is driving when you're trying to get a draft done, you risk getting caught in an infinite loop of write, go back and fix what you just wrote, write more, go back and fix everything to that point, repeat. . . until you have a wonderfully shiny first chapter, but again, no first draft. This isn't to say you cant revise something that's in process (sometimes you have to) but you put down the writing hat and pick up the editing hat. And if you find yourself doing that switch off more than a couple times during a single project you may want to reconsider how you're going about that project. (Maybe you need a little outlining, some continuity notes, or a higher threshold for clunky prose in a first draft.)
For those that completed the task, it gives a realistic understanding of just how much work this actually is. All this effort and you have 50K of first draft that most likely is not even a complete novel. If you accomplish this— or even a substantial portion of it— and you're still excited about what you're doing, you may just be cut out for this writing thing.

What I, the established pro, got out of it:

A demonstration that I could do it, which was not as much a given as it might appear. Prolific I might be, but that's because I write steadily, not because I write quickly. I normally do something like 600 – 1000 words a day, this required me to double my regular productivity for a month. (Thus the virtual shutdown of my blog.)
A demonstration that I could do this without any prep work. Almost everything else I've written has had months, if not years, of fermenting ideas before I set first word to page. The two exceptions are notable for being the two other novels where I also approached this kind of productivity for an extended period. ( TeeK and Wolfbreed for the curious.) This time round I made a conscious decision to do this with an idea I had driving home from WFC the day before NaMoWriMo started. This suggests I may be able to force my Muse into slave-driver mode. Good to know.
I got the raw material for a brand new novel, which may help me eat at some point in the future. This is a good thing.

NaNoWriMo, concluded

Well I did it (go me!), 50K words in a month.  This is a task I've manged before, but never as a conscious act.  Before, the few times I've been this productive, I've had a muse with a whip chasing me.  This time I literally started completely cold.  All I had was an idea that occurred to me on Oct 31, so I had no outlines laying about, no long-deferred story ideas that had been waiting for me.  Thirty days later, I have fifty-thousand words, most of which I think are usable in some form.

Some things I might cut;  dream sequences I wrote to get out of a block (though their back-story might survive a rewrite) and the smoking hot sex scene that may be out of place in a YA novel.

Now I let it cool for a bit and go on to a proposal I was working on before I started this.  After that's to bed, I think I may go back and finish this thing, once I outline the second half of it.

Happy Thanksgiving Redux

No time with the holidays and NaNoWriMo to add something beyond the fact that I'm still alive, and repost this from a couple of years ago:

Teh Scary, Continued

More NaMoWriMo excerpts:

"He killed her here," she whispered.

"Who? What?"

"She didn't like what he was doing, this place, what lived here. She begged him to move, to take the family away from this place. They argued, yelled, screamed. The floor was just vinyl stick on tile, old and brittle." Her face had gone blank, and while her eyes were open, she didn't look at him, she looked past him. "It started as a freak accident. This place didn't like her. They argued. A tile came loose. She fell. Her foot hooked under the stove and twisted. Her leg broke."

"Amy?" Jason looked at her, and she didn't seem to be here anymore, she spoke as if she was in a trance.

"She tried to get up. He grabbed a cast-iron skillet from the stove. She'd been cooking breakfast."

"Amy?" Jason grabbed her shoulders. "You can stop now."

"The whole kitchen smelled of bacon. You could hear the grease sizzling."

"You can stop. Please."

"Some of the sizzling might have been his hand when he grabbed the handle. He was too angry to notice how hot it was."

"Amy!" he shook her shoulders.

"Down into her face. Hit with a dull thud. Stopped her screaming."

"Stop it!" he screamed into her face.

That seemed to snap her out of it. The blank expression regained animation, and she blinked her eyes and was actually looking at him now. He could see now that her cheeks were damp with tears. He felt her start to shake.

Then, all the lights in the kitchen winked out.

Writing links pretending to be a blog post

Plagiarism and Privilege at Making Light.

Scalzi on MFA Programs and what is left untaught.  (With followup.)

Charlie Stross is dissatisfied with Steampunk. (Yes, I'm late to this particular party.)

First thing we do, let's kill all the writers.

Trying for teh scary

More NaNoWriMo stuff. In lieu of a real blog post, an except of what I just wrote about five minutes ago:

The girl at the top of the stairs was older than Kelly, four or five. Her skin was pale to the point that it looked white even in shadow. Her hair was long and black, falling over her shoulders. She wore a nightgown that seemed to come from another century. Her feet were bare, and streaked with black.

She stared down at him with eyes invisible in the shadows of her face, and beneath that gaze Jason felt a cold so deep that it burned.

"It will know you," she whispered as she took a step down toward him. Jason clutched the banister so tightly that his knuckles went white. He took a step back even as he was consciously telling himself that he couldn't be seeing what he thought he was seeing.

"It will know you," she whispered very slowly, "and you will know it."

Jason's eyes widened as he realized that the girls eyes weren't lost in shadow. They weren't there at all. There was only a deep pit across her face where the eyes should have been, a pit dug deep into the skull. And in the darkness within it, something dark and glistening moved.

Cthulhu is in the barn.

NaNoWriMo update (If the blog seems slow,well something had to give.)

I'm pounding away at my YA ghost story, and as the blog title suggests, it's taken a bit of a Lovecraftian turn.  It probably won't be an explicit Mythos story, but there's clearly some eldritch horrors hanging about.

Internets Whap Editor With Clue Stick

There is not much more I can say about the Cook's Source Magazine scandal that hasn't been already said.  If you don't know what I'm talking about (and if so, what Internet have you been surfing?) we have the author of an article about  medieval tarts (SCAdians take note) who had her article lifted wholesale and printed in a magazine without her permission.  The editor, Judith Griggs, of Cook's Source Magazine not only admitted to the theft, but actually said the following words that may live in Internet history alongside "the internet is a series of tubes:"

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it!

Editor fail.  Copyright fail.  Ethics fail.  And, public relations fail.  (Just note the comments on their Facebook page.)  You see, when you decide to be an asshat to a blogger, especially in such an interestingly twisted and completely asinine fashion, they tend to blog about it.  And, when your statements have reached such an epic level of complete  cluelessness about the nature of the medium itself, it becomes entertaining for other people to blog about it.  So the relatively unknown person you've stolen from blogs about it and gets a linkback from the relatively known Nick Mamatas.  The latter, being relatively known, inspires even more relatively known bloggers to mock the stupid whose name is  Judith Griggs.  Scalzi takes a swing with the cluebat and makes a palpable hit in front of his 30K of daily eyeballs.  (What's the circulation of that magazine again?  Just wondering.)  And the Smart Bitches of equally vast viewage take multiple swipes and offers a present of Google.  Then, at last, the meme goes nuclear when it crosses the radar of Instpundit.

So, Judith Griggs, you are now an internet meme.  I wonder if permanently associating yourself with this kind of asshattery in the minds of a few hundred thousand people was worth the few hundred bucks you saved by not actually buying the rights to your articles.