Hugh Howey's Blog, page 21

Why Publishers Fight Digital

I was reading the new Steve Jobs biography last week, and the author briefly touched on the roll-out of the iTunes store. Prior to the launch of the store, iTunes was just another place to organize songs, most of them no doubt stolen via Napster, which was terrorizing studios at the time.

Even with a promise to monetize digital albums, Apple had a tough go of getting all the major labels onboard. Were it not for the energetic push from one of the studio heads to corral the other five studios, it may not have happened. And were it not for charismatic Jobs behind the push, and Apple seen as a minor player, it might not have happened. It’s useful to remember that Apple had very little market share at the time; Windows was dominate. Jobs assured the studios that the iTunes store would not be made PC-compatible, which soothed the CEOs and bean-counters. The PC version would launch within the year, and within a few years, music stores would begin to shutter as listeners moved eagerly to digital.

The hesitation by studios to sign the iTunes agreement was largely due to the fear that they’d lose control of distribution, that they’d alienate existing retail partners, and that the then-existing model of selling entire albums just so fans could get the one or two tunes they wanted would wreck how music was produced and packaged. They were right to be worried, of course. These things came to pass. But they were wrong if they thought they could stop the change from happening.

Book publishers have been much more coordinated in their attempts to slow digital adoption, perhaps learning from music studios’ mistakes. The history of Amazon and Jeff Bezos getting publishers on board the Kindle store, and the subsequent pricing of ebooks at $9.99, similar to Jobs’ push to price songs at 99 cents, all have incredible parallels. Publishers eventually went to the enemy of the music studios for salvation, agreeing to a deal with Apple at the launch of the iPad to uniformly raise ebook prices and beat that $9.99 price point. But the fight against digital adoption had been going on long before that.

It started with a process called “windowing,” which meant delaying the ebook until after the hardback edition had its run. When readers revolted and peppered Amazon book pages with 1-star reviews on any release windowed like this, publishers gradually gave in on select titles. They next began protecting print editions with high prices on the ebooks, often higher than the eventual paperback edition. This, despite the paperback needing to be printed, shipped, warehoused, and often returned and pulped. The claim that ebooks cost just as much to produce as paperbacks always rang hollow, but the claim was debunked by publishers themselves with the release of these slides to investors.

Even though ebooks are more profitable than the venerable hardback, publishers have fought their adoption for many of the same reasons that music studios were reluctant to hasten the end of physical album sales. The number one service major publishers and major music studios offer their artists is retail distribution. That’s the absolute top incentive they offer. It’s all about distribution. Advances for new artists are too small to live off of, and editors and sound producers can be hired for a one-time fee. Writers and musicians alike have been producing their own quality offerings for generations. What they’ve had a hard time doing is reaching an audience of millions. This is what major publishers and studios offer. I’ve been pitched by dozens of publishers, and this is always the big promise: We can get you in front of a lot of readers.

The iTunes store and Amazon weaken this offer. When the album of the year can be a self-produced hit like Macklemore and Ryan’s debut, or the top of the charts can be reached by someone like me, then something has been disrupted. Make no mistake: Publishers are not primarily concerned with readers or writers. And rightly so. They should be concerned with their bottom line. In the short term, that might mean full steam ahead on ebooks, which are highly profitable, and which readers will hoard without cluttering their homes, which means lots of dollars spent on unread ebooks. But in the long term, publishers would have to relinquish what they know to be their prime offering to their clients: The ability to reach readers. For this reason, they’ve done all they can to stifle innovation and adoption during the most exciting era readers have experienced since Johan refined the printing press.

     Two Kinds of Love

There are those who love books, and there are those who love to read. Often, these are the same people, but not always. People who love to read almost inevitably become book lovers. If you have that many positive experiences with an object, you eventually have a warm and emotional reaction to any similar object. Book lovers might find this hard to believe, but the same is true of ereading devices. All it takes to feel the same sensual pleasure when lifting a Kindle is to read dozens or hundreds of amazing books on one. Soon, you feel naked without it. You carry your Kindle and hundreds of books with you everywhere you go. As avid readers, our love of books is a learned experience from all the pleasure derived from them. Those who only have this association with the physical book are aligned with publishers in their fervent hopes that digital adoption goes away. But there’s another reason for the strong feelings. Not all book lovers are avid readers.

There are also those who love books but rarely read. They might have dozens or hundreds of books in their homes, most of them unread or only partly read. These books are purchased and enjoyed as status symbols, and also like gym equipment. They are both a signal to others that this is a thoughtful, educated person. And they are also promises to ourselves to be the future person we hope to become. The gym equipment sits shamefully under the bed, but our books are on proud display. For book lovers, a move to digital reading is an absolute nightmare. Coffee will have to be enjoyed in a coffee shop rather than a neighborhood bookstore, where they pick up the latest must-read non-fiction work, like Capital in the Twenty-First Century, knowing they’ll never read it, but wishing they were the sort of person who might.

If this sounds harsh, it’s not meant to be. I’ve purchased plenty of books as a promise to myself, and then broke that promise. My house used to be loaded with books that I kept meaning to get to. Those unread books often prevented me from buying more, as I knew I had that shame-inducing pile at home beside the bed. Moving to digital reading, I not only read 2-3 times as much as before, I probably purchase 4-6 times as many books! There is no clutter warning me off. I’ve gone from being both a book lover and a reading lover to just a reading lover. I’m getting more reading done. Those who love books but not reading will see this as a sad affair. Those who read for the love of reading will probably know what I’m talking about.

    A Reversal

Imagine for a moment that the arrow of time was reversed. Let’s pretend that ereaders have been around since the time of Gutenberg. Books were always distributed electronically. The telegraph saw a flowering of adoption out West, and Dickens decried the drop in ebook prices in his day. And then a bookseller named Amazon came along, offering books printed on paper and for sale in their brick and mortar stores. The name of the company was meant to remind readers of the forests they were chopping down to fashion their stock. “No batteries,” they promised. “Disposable,” they said. “Only slightly more expensive,” they admitted. “Better smelling!”

Of course, trees for paper are grown like any other crop, planted, harvested, and then replanted. The idea that our forests are disappearing to supply paper has been outdated for decades. There are more trees in the United States today than there were 100 years ago. But the fact remains that 30 million trees are cut down each year for the book trade. 30 million! Each year! That’s a lot of trees. It’s easy to be a reading lover and be a tree-lover. I’m certainly one. Hard to be a book lover and a tree lover without some mental gymnastics. 30 million a year! That’s like 1,200 Central Parks every year.

Granted, plastics and electronics aren’t environmentally friendly themselves, but ereaders are the weird electronic devices that don’t demand to be upgraded. The pace of sales is often compared to other tablets, but this is a facile comparison. I know people who use their original Kindle and wouldn’t trade it for the world. (They feel the same way about the device that you might feel toward a leather bound tome). There is no question that ebooks are better for the environment than paperbacks. The shipping costs in fossil fuels alone make the case. And trees are cut down by diesel-guzzling machines and processed with loads more electrical power than used by the servers that supply the ebooks. And one ereading device might result in several hundred books being read, at a minimum.

    Books for the People

There’s another reason I love imagining a reversal of time’s arrow: Ebooks are for the people, while print books are for the corporations. Imagine a world where writers make 70% of the proceeds of their sales and thousands of writers enjoy a full-time living with their writing, with tens of thousands supplementing their incomes doing what they love. These writers also employ cover artists, editors, audiobook narrators, assistants, publicists, and agents who earn a full-time living helping these writers produce top-notch work and reach the broadest audience possible.

Now imagine that Amazon’s felled-tree print books take away market share from ebooks (which is the opposite of what’s happening). Bookstores pop up across the country. Publishers form large conglomerates in order to represent catalogs of new releases, which their sales reps present to book buyers. What is displayed in stores is soon determined by co-op dollars, rather than what readers want to read. Bookstores also purchase on a fully returnable basis, which means the wasteful ordering of double what they will eventually sell, which leads to unsold books being returned to publishers, where they are tossed in a furnace and burned.

Losing their ability to reach readers, the previously digital authors sign on with publishers out of desperation. It’s the only way to get in these newfangled bookstores, and the only way to affordably print hundreds of thousands of copies of these darned pulp books! Instead of making 70%, they are now making 12.5%. The rest is going to these large skyscrapers which are popping up across Manhattan and London, in the most expensive parts of town. The money readers were previously sending to artists and their helpers, allowing them to work from home and be with their kids and families, is now going to people in suits who take two-hour lunches, conspire with one another on prices and release dates, and pay that unbelievable corporate rent.

    This is Not the Side You Want to Be On.

What’s most amazing to me about the recent attempt to make ebooks and print books a cultural war is the absolute wrong side that some players have chosen to be on. You’d think the New York Times would be the place touting this liberating and disintermediating shift from corporate profits to the support of artists, but they are just as beholden to the staid old print days as publishers are (and they share some neighboring real estate).

You’d think socially progressive websites like Salon and Slate would cry for a hastening of the transition to digital books, which make reading more affordable, move reading into rural areas, saves 30 million trees a year, and puts power with the people rather than large, conspiring corporations. But the opposite has been true.

I really believe a lot of this comes from book lovers who aren’t reading lovers. It’s hard to make sense of it otherwise. I think it’s time for those of us who are addicted to reading to be a bit more vocal in our love of the best form of it possible: Digital books. Better for the environment. Larger type for the visually challenged. Text-to-speech for the blind. Lighter weight for the arthritic. Better access for the rural and the impoverished (ebooks can be read on existing devices, like phones. And even with a $49 e-reader, this is paid for in just a few purchases, or by going to Gutenberg.org).

Ereading is simply superior for those of us who love to read. You finish a book, and you can purchase and start another in minutes. You can go on vacation stocked up with new reads. You won’t even feel guilty if you don’t finish them all. And the more you read digital, the more you’ll wind up reading self-published works, which means more money going to artists and their freelance helpers, and less going to wasteful real estate in New York, to corporate suits, to lawyers, all of which leaves a pittance for the people whose works you enjoy.

This is why publishers need to rage against digital adoption. It’s why they need the support of those who equate a dated medium with the beautiful words that medium holds. Their lives depend on it. Their lives depend on the destruction of 30 million trees a year. But our reading habits don’t.

If you are an avid reader, I humbly suggest that you do yourself a favor and try an ereader. Check out the thousands of classics at Gutenberg.org that you can download and enjoy for free. Legally! These books are in the public domain. You could read classics for the rest of your life if you want. Or you can start checking out the many diverse voices that don’t make it into bookstores. Minority voices. Gay voices. Female science fiction authors and male romance writers. And all those who write in genres that readers love but that publishers think have been played out.

If you have a reader in your life, get them a Kindle. They start at a mere $69. It will change their lives. I’ve given most of the readers in my family Kindles over the last few Christmases. But it doesn’t have to be a special occasion. The challenge is to read a few great ebooks so that the same thrill we feel when we pick up a paperback is felt when we pick up our e-readers. It does happen, whether you believe it or not. It’s the stories we love. It’s the non-fiction we learn from. It’s the authors, not the imprints. Support them. Save the environment. Increase the amount you read, rather than the amount of books you display.

Publishers will fight this transition, but the rest of us should take a stand. And we should be honest, as authors, about why we are doing it. It’s not just good for readers, and good for the environment, and more democratic, with more diverse voices . . . it supports the lives of authors. And editors. And cover artists. And so many more. That 12.5% pittance becomes a 70% liveable wage. That difference has changed thousands of lives. It will keep changing lives, and changing the way we read, and we can help hasten that. We shouldn’t want to go backwards. And every indication is that we won’t.

More on that, and some very shocking results in the next AuthorEarnings report, due out soon. You’ll see what avid readers are doing to change lives. Until then, keep it up. Be proud. Brag about reading. Write reviews. Recommend ebooks to friends and family. Make a tree happy today.

 

 

The End Has Come

This is a very special release day for me. It was nearly two years ago that John Joseph Adams and I had lunch in Chicago and he told me about his idea for a 3-part anthology or “Triptych.” Each entry of the triptych would focus on one stage of the end-times. With The End is Nigh, we looked at the pre-apocalypse. And then came The End is Now, which was when the bad stuff went down. Today, we proudly release The End Has Come, which looks at the post-apocalypse.

The roundup of authors who signed on still astounds me. It’s been an all-star lineup, and I’ve been both terrified and honored to work with them on these stories. There’s a little bit of everything in here. Just what a great anthology should be.

A few notes about my story: This is the only place where I’ve continued to write about the world of WOOL beyond the original trilogy. The story arc of my three pieces was set up very deliberately. I wanted to explore how people with tenuous connections to one another can still manage to drastically shape lives, even over great distances of space and time. What we choose to do reverberates. What motivates us has consequences. There are characters here who make decisions out of fear and anger, and this leads others to make even worse decisions, and it all ends badly.

I know many readers will be shocked at the final page of the third story. Know that I don’t write in order to be gratuitous. Often, what I write hurts me as well. It hurts deeply. And that’s reason enough to go there and to explore those ideas and to commit to them. Because it shouldn’t be easy or flippant. Nothing about this series has been. And that’s why I’m as proud of these books as any that I’ve been a part of.

 

 

The Next Big Thing

Technological breakthroughs are a lot like falling in love. The more you pine for a particular object of your desire, the more elusive it seems. Meanwhile, when you’re least expecting it, some stranger sneaks right up on you. Before you know it, you can’t live without them.

Over the past century, there have been a handful of major examples of technological progress occurring just like this. What we think will signify the arrival of the future doesn’t come to pass as predicted, while something else entirely changes our lives. In this pattern we can discover some deep truths about human nature. We might also be able to uncover the next unsuspecting stranger who will sweep us off our feet.

There are three major examples that I’d like to toss out there. Each example features a technology that came to symbolize progress. None of the technologies came to fruition, but something else that we didn’t foresee did. The things that did come to pass have changed our lives and our culture, and have turned small companies started by a handful of people into the largest and wealthiest corporations in the world. It will happen again. So what’s next?

Rather than play prognosticator, I’m going to play matchmaker. I’ll be that annoying aunt who tells her niece to stop chasing that boy who isn’t good for her anyway, and see about this nice young gentleman who has a lot of potential. But first, we’ll look at the ones that got away — and the sweethearts we fell in love with instead.

One of our earliest unrealistic crushes has been with robots. A staple of science fiction stories and popular science magazines, the idea of a robot goes back further than the name. Before it was robots, it was golems. Or elves that came out at night and did our work for us. Anything automated that would let us rest while our chores were done. For a species that is used to getting its work done by brute strength, the allure makes perfect sense. We have a long and ignoble history of subjugating animals and our fellow man for our labor, so naturally this is what we thought mankind needed from our machines.

It will certainly come to pass, but not nearly along the timeline we had hoped for. Many expected to be living with these conversant, mobile, and dexterous shiny helpers fifty years ago. It’s still a ways off, a hundred years later. So what was the unforeseen love that snuck up on us instead? The humble personal computer, or PC. The heavy lifting we assumed would increase our productivity and explode GDP ended up being of the more mental kind.

What about the flying car? Our second example has represented technological progress so thoroughly that it has come to be synonymous with it. It has also become synonymous with breakthroughs thought to be inevitable but that never come to pass. The dreaded “vaporware.”

For some, the measuring stick for humanity’s progress was for us to have flying cars by the turn of the 21st century. When it didn’t come, we were disappointed. Just as we dreamed of physical work from robots, we dreamed of physical freedom by means of swifter and less constrained modes of travel. What we got instead of the flying car was the smartphone, and physical travel gave way to telepresence, or the ability to be everywhere at once.

Our third example is also so classic that it has come to represent failed human progress. Decades before we landed on the Moon, men and women dreamed of living on Mars. We were supposed to have a colony on both heavenly orbs by now. This is our third unrequited love. We have yearned for it like teenagers, to no avail. Meanwhile, an even better match moved into the house next door, and it swept us off our feet without warning. It was the Internet, and living on another world was replaced with the ability to surf the entirety of this one.

In all three cases, a desire for physical movement or power was usurped by a digital analog. The dream of augmenting and replacing our muscles was replaced by the ability to augment and replace our memories and minds. The desire for physical travel was replaced by virtual connections. And the urge to travel to other worlds was softened by the flattening of this one.

With each development, there is a corresponding company that came to symbolize the breakthrough and profit greatly from it. Many other companies played a crucial role, and lots profited mightily, but the three I have in mind are: Microsoft with the PC, Apple with the smartphone, and Google with the Internet.

All three were founded by just a handful of individuals working out of a garage or the equivalent. All three changed our lives and have disrupted much larger and previously much more powerful companies. They were able to do so because of the digital nature of modern breakthroughs, which rely on ideas and human capital more than material and financial capital. So what’s next? What are we pining for today that will never have eyes for us, and what will sneak up on us instead?

I have a guess. And based on my deep and thorough study of history, years of meticulous research, and a keen understanding of the human mind, I can say with complete confidence that my guess will be dead wrong. Hilariously wrong. These prognostications always are. But it’s never stopped us before, and it’s not stopping me now.

What I hope will give me a sliver of a chance of getting some part of the following right is the pattern found in my three examples above. In each case, our lizard brains desired something that made sense from a primitive perspective (go fast, move stuff, explore), and what we got instead was something that met the needs of a modern lifestyle — one that our DNA is not coded to long for, predict, or understand.

Once you think about it this way, the next great failure of modern science and technology is easy to spot. It’s the singularity, which has lately taken the place of the flying car, the robot, and colonies on Mars as the clarion call for futurists and the measure of our technological progress. We even have a target date of 2050, set by the brilliant futurist Ray Kurzeil, singularity’s most outspoken advocate.

I’m not going to speculate on why the singularity will be much delayed, except to point out that the lust for immortality is even greater than the lust for free labor, the ability to fly, and our need to explore. These four primal urges match up with our lust for what science might bring, just as they have analogs in what we hope our religions might offer. For this reason alone — our overwhelming and primitive desire — we might be suspicious of anyone suggesting that salvation is right around the corner.

I’m less interested in what won’t come to pass and more curious about what less glamorous breakthrough will change our lives while we aren’t looking. I predict it will be something we might call Personal Intelligence rather than Artificial Intelligence. Personal, because it will be based on our unique behaviors and actions. Personal, because it will be as reliant on us as we are of it. Bringing together machine learning and the torrent of data we each generate, PI will mine our external breadcrumbs of intelligence: the things we write and the things we do, and become a rough substitute for us.

Again, the pattern has been for us to crave movement or assistance in the physical space, but the breakthrough technologies that enrich our lives have come in the digital and non-corporeal space. And so the lust for our physical beings to become one in the singularity, or for our meat to travel into the computer, will again be inverted. What will happen instead is that our digital traces will be extracted and turned into useful objects. All of us won’t become one; each of us will become many. The digital population will explode with the advent of our dozens and then thousands of personal digital assistants.

The very first and most rudimentary examples are already with us. On my smartphone, I use a third-party keyboard that provides me with predictive text. Upon installation, the software asks for permission to go through all of my email to learn my typing habits. A very basic type of machine learning takes place, and as I type, the keyboard suggests entire words that it thinks might come next. Typing in “new” leads to a suggestion of “York,” “release,” and “idea.” When typing brief texts to friends and family, the keyboard software often becomes spookily accurate. Entire texts and emails can be typed by selecting words rather than letters. No compromise is made on the selection, either. My responses have been so habitual and consistent in the past that they can be used to predict the future.

There will be a lot of philosophical hand-wringing over PI, just as there has been for other technologies that have changed our lives and revealed our deep-seated natures (our addictions to smartphones, the Internet, and PCs have resulted in articles, books, and official psychological diagnoses). Two of the issues that will arise will be questions of free will and identity. If we are predictable, what does that say about our autonomy? And if our communications can be simulated, what does that say about our uniqueness of self?

Despite these difficult (and possibly damning) questions, the technology will be seized because it will be useful. Immensely useful. It will start with predictive word choices, which will turn into predictive sentences, which will turn into predictive paragraphs, until our emails will answer each other, only needing our quick scan for accuracy and then acceptance.

This will happen, because the need is too great. Too much of our productivity is lost handling emails that we respond to the same way, every time. Businesses wrestle with this. Individuals have taken to declaring “inbox bankruptcy,” deleting everything in their accounts and starting over with zero debt.

But it won’t just be text. The real breakthrough will be the operating system and the browser that learns our every move. When our cursors and clicks become part of our data trail, tracked and learned from, the small actions we perform every day, countless times, will become automated. The OS will perhaps simulate the action and ask if we want to proceed. We will say “yes,” or press a button, or nod, or wave our hands, and the operating system will do the rest.

When we get home from a vacation, the OS will know that we like to upload our photos from both our phones and our cameras, share them with our spouse so they have a copy on their laptop, upload a backup to DropBox, resize the ones we spent the most time looking at on the backs of our cameras and on our smartphones, and upload these preferred images to Facebook and Instagram. When we sit down at our computers, the images will be open in Picassa, waiting for us to crop and toy with them. Two suggestions will be in our Amazon shopping carts, based on book reviews that appeared in the online newspapers that we read daily. These two books will match previously highly rated books we finished, where our non-reading gaps were short, that we read over breakfast (which we only do when truly hooked), and that we stayed up two standard deviations beyond our normal sleep time to read in bed (ditto). It won’t even matter if we missed the reviews in our online reading: the OS will know that we might have seen the articles, and what our reaction would have been, and make the suggestion anyway. Eventually, we’ll get to trust these action so much that we might even automate the “okay.”

These things won’t happen all at once, but they’ll accrue. And once they start happening, it’ll seem like the changes came fast. The same way cell phones and PDAs crept up on us until the iPhone pounced. Or how BBSs proliferated and intranets formed, and then Google attacked. A single company will come to define the age and the technology. And while it seems logical to assume that an existing giant, like Apple, Amazon, or Google, with their copious amounts of data, will be the ones to unlock PI, if history is our guide, it’ll be a startup that pulls it off. If they do, these seemingly insurmountable corporations with multibillion dollar valuations will go the way of AT&T, IBM, and the Yellow Pages. And yeah, these things are still around and profitable, but not like the upstarts that pushed them aside. They no longer signify our age. Not like the garage enterprises of Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

As a matter of fact, add a fourth example to our list of breakthroughs pined for that never came. There’s the primal, lizard-brain urge for “more stuff.” For the longest time, this was represented by mighty Sears and Roebuck and their hefty catalogs, and then later the large discount store. We dreamed of a store that would provide it all. Or better, a box that could replicate whatever we needed at the press of a button (see the Jetsons). What snuck up on us instead? The cardboard box on your doorstep with a smile on it, and the fourth multi-billion dollar company that changing the way we live today: Amazon. The catalog went digital.

Following the clues seems to lead us somewhere. Our primal urges have us lusting for mobility, strength, stuff, knowledge, territory. These same powers are the ones we imbue in our gods when we dream them up: Omniscience, Omnipotence, Immortality, Omnipresence. They are the things we long for. We keep thinking we’ll get them physically in the form of moving faster and higher, having minions to do our work, having dominion over every scrap of land we can spy, and living in our physical bodies or machines forever.

But if history is our guide, we’ll only approximate these powers, and we’ll do it digitally. At least at first. Robots and flying cars and moon bases will surely come if we are around long enough. But the difference in cost of moving atoms over electrons is enormous, and so the first result of our primitive cravings will be not the objects of our lust, but much lighter substitutes. Whoever delivers that will change our world yet again, and we will reward them by the billions.

 

 

 

The Hard Way

Isn’t it weird how the more time-saving devices they invent, the less free time we seem to have? And what free time we do have feels like it’s jam packed with near-compulsory leisure activities. It’s impossible to fit it all in. We’ve got a Game of Thrones episode on the DVR; Netflix just dropped an entire season Daredevil; the kids are active in three sports; we’re trying to finish that book; and several social media outlets beg for our attention.

It makes it really easy to forego the things we’d love to procrastinate right into next year. Like exercising.

I’ve always gotten a decent dose of exercise, but it got really hard when I started spending time on the road. Hotel gyms were my friend, but I often didn’t have the time to even hit those. So I started looking for ways to get exercise during my normal routine. If there was a flight of stairs between two escalators, I took the stairs. If I had to carry luggage or groceries, I did it with arms away from my hips until I could barely feel my shoulders. What I found was that we have plenty of opportunities to make things a little harder on ourselves (like skipping the moving sidewalk), but we often fall into line with everyone else. I’m pretty sure it’s peer pressure as much as laziness. Working out while doing normal activities can draw looks. One of the best moves I ever made was to stop caring what other people thought.

Which brings us to something we do a lot of while missing out on an opportunity to get some great exercise, and that’s walking. We walk a lot, but walking isn’t a very good fat-burner or muscle builder. In fact, walking is so hyper efficient that we can do it for hours without breaking a sweat. Not a good sign that it’s doing much for us. Sure, it’s better than sitting on the sofa, but isn’t that a rather low bar to set?

This is where the lunge comes in. It’s an exercise so simple that you can’t believe how brutal it is. And you save enormous amounts of time. Are you currently walking thirty minutes a day for exercise? Do the following for five minutes, three times a week, and I promise you’ll be shocked by the results. I can only do about 50 lunges for the first set, and then I shake it out and get a breather, do another 30 lunges, and then finish with a final set of 30. I do these 2 to 3 times a week. I mean, you’ll be hurting everywhere, but especially in your butt and hamstrings. Your quads should be sore immediately after. Here’s what I mean by a lunging walk:

Once you feel restored (it might take a few days), do them again. Add them to your Five Tibetan Rites. With these two exercises alone, you can get into and keep yourself in amazing shape. And by “amazing shape,” I mean being fit so you can stay active in your life. Able to keep up with your kids, keep your heart healthy, and put on a little more muscle so your body is always burning energy. It’ll also help keep you feeling spry and light on your feet, which will get you more active in general. Try it once and see what you think.

When Are We?

I used to drive my parents and my teachers crazy with impossible-to-answer questions that I wouldn’t leave alone. But if they thought I was annoying them, they had no idea what I was doing to myself. Because the same questions — and much worse — were constantly spinning through my young and ignorant noggin. I mean, almost nothing about life has ever made sense to me. I’ve devoted the majority of the last thirty or so years puzzling for answers, and all I’ve come up with are even more vexing questions.

Many of the questions that really used to bug me as a kid centered around the concept of death and the afterlife. I hit an age around ten or eleven where I became obsessed with — and mortified by — the idea of dying. I would lie in my bed at night and be so scared of going to sleep. I thought I’d never wake up again. I tried to imagine what death would be like if there was no afterlife, and I saw it as this complete blackness that I couldn’t even see! I was scared stiff. Literally. Lying motionless, clutching my sheets, staring at the ceiling, keeping that encroaching darkness at bay.

I wrote dismal poetry for years because of this. I thought I was alone in these nightly terrors until I saw What About Bob, where the son has the same questions and fears, and this was extremely and gratifyingly normalizing. The terror has since gone away, but all the questions linger. Among them is this question: If there is an afterlife, which version of us persists forever?

Because it occurred to me early in life that we aren’t the same person day to day, much less year to year or decade to decade. I think it was watching my grandfather succomb to Alzheimer’s that clued me in. He became a different person right before our eyes. And even as a very young tyke, I was reading about people like Phineas Gage, who suffered a massive brain trauma and saw his personality change overnight. And what about the young who die before they grow into their adult personalities? Or the infants who never say a word or have a coherent thought before some childhood disease or birthing complication claims them? Are we the average of all our selves? Is the version of “us” that we leave behind our prime one, or the fragile form we often inhabit last?

I had a friend, Anna, whose death shakes me to this very day. She was a senior in high school when she died in a car accident. I was with Anna earlier that day, at the beach, and she was alive, smiling, brilliant, beautiful, with a world of possibilities before her. I’m still very close with her mom, and we talk about Anna all the time. She’s always with us in spirit. And she’s frozen in time at very close to the apex of her potential. She missed out on all that she would accomplish in life, and the family she might’ve had, and the journey she would’ve gone on, but she was the age and inquisitiveness and brightness that I think we tend to see ourselves locked in if life were to continue on forever.

At the same time Anna died, I watched my grandfather wither, and I wondered which version of him was the real him. At seventeen years of age, we’re trying desperately to find ourselves. Little do we know at that age — but the challenge is never resolved. Our personalities, ambitions, peer groups, careers, and so much more are always on the move. And as we try to locate ourselves in some sort of cartesian grid, now we have a fourth axis on which we slide: The fourth dimension of time.

It’s not just the global human question of What are we? or the more personal and intimate question of Who are we? or the cosmic query Why are we? it’s also the baffling concept of When are we?

For many reading this, I am thought of as an author. But I don’t feel like an author. Because that’s such a new part of my life. I’ve been writing for just over five years. I’ve been doing much else for a lot longer than that. Any question of who I am relies on when I am. It also relies on when the people in your life get to know you, and in what context. This is why the bond we have with our family is so unique: they know many of our selves. It’s also the magic of long term relationships, because we get to share quite a few of our selves with the same person, and we get to know quite a few of their selves.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I prepare to move back aboard a boat and live on the sea. Because that is largely who I am. It might not be the person this blog has materialized around, but it’s the person who started this blog. I’ve been a vagabond and a dilettante for most of my life. Amber and I often say that we can do one thing or be in one place for a maximum of five years. Even that is a stretch. Some might see this as a character flaw; I just know it as part of who I am. I want to experience much in life. I think it all goes back to that early fear of death. I haven’t lost that fear so much as coped with it by choosing to live what I consider fully.

Of course, everyone has a different opinion of what it means to live a full life. These are subjective measures. Personally, I would argue that someone who commits to healing others, as Amber has, or teaching others, as my mom did, or growing crops, as my father did, live a fuller and more meaningful life than I ever will. My life has been about the fear of sitting still. Perhaps that’s a bad thing. I would hate to inspire more of it, but I will say to any who dream of breaking out of their routines but aren’t sure how or when the time is right: The time is always right.

It doesn’t have to be anything as drastic as living on a boat, something I first chose to do when I was twenty years old. It might be simply to start exercising more. Or to write that novel you’ve always dreamed of. Or to take that job opportunity. Or to simply quit the job that makes you miserable and move to another state, not scared of the unknown but eager for new opportunities. My brother did this, and it was petrifying to watch, and now he’s happier than he’s ever been. My sister continues to amaze me with her bold life choices and her willingness to take big chances. It’s the secret to not having regrets. And the more we move, the more we might get confused by When we are. And I think this confusion can be a very good thing.

The worst part of the illusion of permanence of self is that it traps us into thinking we’re destined to be a certain way. The memory of our former selves can be ruinous. Not because there was anything wrong with our former selves, but because that memory masquerades as some rigid reality, when it was more of a flowing illusion. Self-improvement and personal growth are made more difficult when we’re resigned to being who we recall. And it might be a case of fibbing to ourselves, but there’s something advantageous to remembering the best parts of our pasts and aiming to emulate that, and realizing that the worst parts of our pasts are things we can strive to change. That wasn’t who we are. It was just one of many when we were.

And how do we know who we can be if we don’t sample much of what life has to offer? Again, this might mean nothing more than taking a wide variety of college courses with our minds open to what our major might be. Or skipping spring break and spending that week volunteering in a different state. Or getting our of our homes on the weekends and being a tourists somewhere an hour’s drive away. Or just walking the dog a direction we never go, giving both our noses something new to sniff. It can be anything. A return to a former passion or a striving for a new one.

As I sit here in South Africa, working on the boat that will be my future home, there’s a mix of both: A return to a former way of life, but also an urge to see beyond the horizon. The people who have known me the longest and know me best are less surprised about me moving on board a boat than I imagine they were about me living on land for so long. Those who got to know me through my writing think I’m doing something crazy. I thought the last five years of my life was the crazy bit. It’ll be interesting to see what the combination looks like, as I plan to keep on writing.

I can also remember friends and family members always commenting on how crazy they thought my life was, taking off on boats to distant islands, or driving across the country, or working some weird job, and for a while there I thought that maybe I was just lucky to have these opportunities come to me. But when I looked more closely, I saw wild and varied opportunities were there for most people, but it just felt safer and easier for them to decline. Not me. I always said “yes.” To just about anything.

This doesn’t make me brave, by the way. I’m a chickenshit. I’m a coward. I’m terrified of lost opportunities. I’m terrified of a life squandered. I quake with the thought of routines, where day piles upon day until they are all remembered as a single average of themselves, none of them standing out, so that our seventy years on Earth feels more like some vague twenty four hours. This is my fear. It is not courage. I don’t jump off cliffs because the fall is nothing to me; I jump because I feel an encroaching flame at my back. I jump, because to stay feels like certain death.

Here’s a picture of my friend Douglas jumping off a literal cliff. We were on a little island in the middle of nowhere, and we both got there by leaving our jobs in an instant when a boat passed through town on the way to China. We were young, without the families we have now, but we were both moving forward in our careers with opportunities just ahead, opportunities that were created by and promised us more routine. It was crazy to jump on this boat. No pay. No certain future. A very difficult decision. We never made it to China, as a dozen things went wrong along the way. Instead, we ended up marooned in paradise, where we enjoyed what remains some of the best weeks of our short lives, and we wouldn’t change a thing. I’m glad we jumped. And I’m glad we didn’t stay. A fire crackles at my back, and I move, terrified, leaping, plummeting, with a smile on my face.

 

A Question About Editing

Regina asks:

So, I have a serious question here, and forgive me if you’ve addressed it in a blog or something somewhere. Why do you think that there are so many badly- or un- proofread e-books? It seems to me that writers have so many more editing avenues these days. I’m reading this great, imaginative story right now, full of adventure and great characters, and I keep getting sucked out of the moment by spelling, homophone, and syntax errors. Lord knows, I’m no grammar police, but it makes me a little crazy! What do you think?

Good question, Regina. The reason for so many poorly edited books these days is the same reason so many bands you go see at small gigs have an instrument out of tune, an amplifier that doesn’t sound great, or a singer who is off-key. Respectively, each of these is a matter of professionalism, cost, and ability (amount of practice).

Reviews certainly help highlight books with and without problems so readers know ahead of time. Be sure to notice the books that are well edited, and reward the author by highlighting this fact for other readers. Or do what my editor did and email the author with suggestions. Or reach out and offer editing services. Freelancers are popping up everywhere, and they are both sorely needed and greatly appreciated. Many of us just don’t know any better as we set out. We’re all still learning.

This might not seem obvious at first, but some of the fault lies with our expectations as readers. Shakespeare couldn’t spell a word the same way twice in a single sentence. Back in the day, words were there to communicate ideas, not to align to some golden standard. There was no standard. It was left up to the writer. Punctuation didn’t even always exist. At one point, all the letters ran together. No spaces, no periods, no nothing! It was up to the reader to do the work and piece together the meaning.

So writers have indeed gotten lazy these days, but so have readers. We expect perfection. Not a hiss or pop of static or a missed note. Maybe we should train ourselves to read how people used to read: with a little effort. Not getting hung up on discrepancies of spelling and punctuation (which used to abound), but allowing the words, in all their variability, to form pictures in our heads.

This takes practice. It takes a different approach to grammar and spelling. You have to learn to see words the way we hear voices: with accents and drawls and occasional mispronunciations. I go back and forth between books written by US authors and UK authors, and the variability doesn’t bother me at all. It’s part of the voice. I see authors all the time who use semi-colons between dependent and independent clauses, which is technically correct, but I take their meaning, gather a deeper breath, and read on.

They are the ones leading me. It’s their dance. I can choose to fall in with a slightly different step and enjoy the diversity of experience, or I can approach reading the way we perform the electric shuffle, crying “That’s not perfectly right!” and wishing everyone felt the same.

But the primary onus is certainly on the writer. They should have respect for what they’re doing. But if I had to pick between a great storyteller who lacked precision of language and a perfect writer with no story to tell, I’d take the former every single time. We teach too much prose to writers and not enough plot. Plot is king. Prose is pawn.

 

 

Wayfinder: An Early Peek

The Five Tibetans

They are known as the Five Tibetan Rites, a handful of simple exercises that can be performed in less than ten minutes. How old the rites are and where they originated is up for debate. Some say they are over 2,000 years old.

What is beyond doubt is their efficacy. If you do these every day, you will see results in a week. You will see profound differences in a month. Practitioners claim that these exercises will keep you young, and I’m a believer. They fixed a nagging shoulder injury, and my back has never been stronger.

Amber and I are going to take you through all five with some explanations and variations. And then we put the entire routine together at a pretty upbeat tempo. You can do the full routine in five minutes once you get some practice. At first, they may take ten or fifteen minutes. Everyone can make time for the Five Tibetans. The trick is to do them every day. Like writing, the goal is to form a daily habit, the fruits of which come with time.

The first Tibetan is simply to spin in place. I was taught to alternate the direction of the spin each day. It’s okay if you can’t remember which way you went the day before; just mix it up! This exercise will improve your balance. Be careful, though. Don’t spin too fast or do this in an area where falling over could lead to injury.

The second Tibetan is a simple leg lift. Lifting your head (not your shoulders) will activate your upper abdominals. Twenty-one of these to start. Feel free to up the reps as you gain strength.

The third Tibetan is the opposite of the second. If we strengthen our abdominals, we need to balance that with a stronger back. This is a miracle exercise. My variation comes from one of Laird Hamilton’s favorite exercises. If your back is sore, revert to the classic third Tibetan. We show you both in this video.

The fourth Tibetan is to raise your pelvis from a seated position. If this feels taxing on your shoulders, do as many as you feel comfortable, and then revert to the variation Amber shows you. This activates the shoulders, triceps, glutes, the hamstrings, your back, and your core.

The fifth and final Tibetan is the opposite of the fourth. In the fourth Tibetan, you are face-up while lifting and lowering your pelvis. Here, you do the same, but face-down. This moves from downward facing dog to upward facing dog, and it activates your shoulders, core, thighs, calves, and back.

That’s it. Now Amber and I show you our typical morning routine.

Yeah, it’s a little sloppy. And fast. But in five minutes, you can do 21 reps of all five exercises. Everyone can find an extra five minutes in their day. Do them with your kids or parents or loved ones. Make it a habit; never skip a day!

I do these every morning, and they are better than a cup of coffee to get you going. You probably spend ten or fifteen minutes every morning brewing coffee or waiting in line at Starbucks. Try these instead for a week or a month or a year and see what you think.

The Pot Luck Book Signing Begins!

Welcome to the Pot Luck Book Signing!

For a long time, I offered signed books on my website. When my book tour travels got hectic, and the number of orders grew to hundreds a week, I had to take a break. Now I get emails asking about signed books, and it breaks my heart not to make exceptions for everyone. So for a limited time only, signed books are going to be available. We’ll keep this going until May 20th, so everyone has time to stake their claim.

Here’s a glimpse of what’s up for grabs:

The logistics of signing and shipping tons of books can be overwhelming. The fairest solution I could think of is a “Pot Luck” book signing. You can list your preferences, and I will try to make them happen, but please understand that these items are limited, so you might end up with something unexpected. Pretend to be excited! (No, seriously, video yourself opening your package and really put on a show.)

To be democratic, every item is a flat $15, plus shipping. Some of these items would fetch many times that on eBay (and you’re welcome to put them there). Others are probably worth $14.38, and that’s with my signature devaluing the thing. A great place to share what you got and see about trades or bartering is the Silo Facebook Fan Page, so join up over there, share your pics and videos of your spoils, and take advantage of suckers with your crocodile tears and tales of woe.

Three things to do when you check out:

1) Make sure your address is correct! I’ve had items returned to me over the years. Don’t let it happen to you!

2) Let me know who I’m signing your item to. If you are a collector, feel free to enter “No Name.” If no name is given, my tendency is to assume the first name of the person making the order.

3) List your top three preferred items or categories of items. “Something in French.” “Anything audio.” “One of those awesome USB Thumb Drives.” “Comics.” “Manuscript Pages!” Anything like that. I’ll try to match what I can. Please go into this knowing that you might get something other than what you ask for. Again: Crocodile tears! The Facebook Fan Page is your friend.

If you’re keen on participating, start by clicking the Add to Cart button below:

Next, set the quantity of items you want; enter your zip code; choose USPS Media Mail if you are in the US; and then click the PayPal button at the bottom.

Now click down here to go to the payment screen (use that button instead of logging into your account, or you might not get a chance to enter a message to me):

Enter your payment info, and then click where it says “Add” to add a note to me:

Let me know who to sign the items to (include as many names as the items you ordered, or just one name, or “No Name.” Then list your preferences. Be sure to check your shipping address and make sure it’s correct!

Items should start heading out around the end of May. I’ll touch base and upload some videos of Amber and myself packing stuff up. Best of luck! May the odds forever be in your favor. Or something like that.

Oh, and if you have stuff in your cart and need to access it, try this:

Any troubles, or good luck invocations, use the comments below. Begging me for a particular item won’t help, but it’ll be entertaining as hell, so go crazy!

P.S. Every item (as long as it’s possible) will be stamped with this bad boy:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Most Spectacular Pot Luck Book Signing in the History of the Universe

As far as I know, this is the only “Pot Luck” book signing in the history of the universe, hence the superlative.

Here’s the dealio: Living on a boat is not conducive to owning things. Which is why I haven’t owned much over the years. But now I find myself in possession of a storage unit, which holds a gobsmacking number of foreign editions and collectibles that I’ve amassed. I keep getting emails asking when I’ll do signed copies again, and this looks to me like a match made in heaven. I empty my storage unit, and these books find happy homes.

More details soon. And spread the word. If we get enough interest, the coolness of the things I’m offering will escalate.