Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 19

Diesel Reboot

I've been pretty quiet about what I've been up to so far this year, aside from a few oblique references on Twitter to 'scripts' (still keeping that a secret) and 'fashion clients.' But the time has come for me to talk a little more about some of that fashion work!

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of helping Moving Image & Content to create the Diesel Reboot project. It's a deceptively simple thing: the Diesel Reboot Tumblr assigns missions; an audience submits entries; eventually, a few are selected for special treatment — for example, printed in The New York Times.

This could have gone so, so wrong. It could have felt like any other user-generated content project, asking an audience to do spec design work for a questionable payoff.  It could have felt exploitative. I am bursting with pride when I say it is carefully designed to not be that ugly thing. Here are a few reasons why:

1. No promises. This isn't that predatory "make some ads for us" garbage because… when the missions started, nobody knew they'd ever go anywhere but Tumblr. It was very important to me that the community form around the pure idea of sharing creativity, rather than gambling or competing for a specific reward. 

2. The focus is on connection, not on content. The quality of submissions is absolutely blow-your-head-off incredible. Light years beyond what I ever expected. But the focus the whole time has been on forging links between members of a community — and Diesel artistic director Nicola Formichetti is himself a member of the community. If we've done our job right (and it looks like yes), many of those new connections will persist forever.

3. The brand shares the spotlight. Diesel is a part of the community, and acting as a curator — but the Reboot isn't fundamentally about Diesel. Another team, another day, another project would have tried to make the brand the main focus, which would have led participants to feel like they were being used. Diesel is shining light on creators, and not inserting itself into the conversation where it doesn't belong — none of the missions require Diesel clothing or a Diesel logo, for example.

It's a pure and beautiful thing. A community whose seed is simply: let's make art together. I really couldn't be more proud.

Show Me the Money: The Copyleft Dilemma

The copyleft movement is very fond of talking about the benefits of giving your art away for free. The theory is this: if you, as an independent artist, give away all your writing or music in digital format, then you'll more than make up the difference by selling hard copies. Or related tangible merchandise, like t-shirts. Or maybe through tickets to shows!

It's a nice theory. But giving this message to writers who are just starting out, or who are established but have modest followings at best, contributes to an environment where it's OK for everyone around written work to make a living… except the writer.

Dance, Monkey, Dance!

Not long ago, The Literary Review ran a piece by Guy Walters that talks about the hard and potentially poverty-inducing reality that is promoting your work. You should read it. I've never spoken to an 800-person crowd, but it definitely rings true to my experience.

"As I drove home, I did some maths. Those eight hundred people had each paid £7, earning Hay a tidy £5,600. Compared to Hay's turnover of £4 million and gross profit of £1 million, that's not a huge sum, but it is certainly greater than a homeopathic ratio. Hay had probably made around £1,400 from me and I had got, er, six bottles of wine. I googled the wine to see what it cost and found it for as little as £8 per bottle. So 48 quid all in, and I bet Hay paid a lot less for it than that."

Writers trying to get more audience for their central work very often do incredible amounts of extra work for no compensation: book signings or promotional appearances, writing articles or guest blog posts, podcasts and interviews. It sucks up a tremendous amount of time. The month A Creator's Guide came out, promoting was something close to a full-time job. 

Sometimes it sucks up a tremendous amount of money, too — partly due to travel expenses, which aren't always reimbursed, but also because time spent promoting is time you're not spending writing. …You know, that thing you love to do.

Note that everyone involved in these deals except the writer is usually in line to make a little cash. The bookstore hosting a signing profits from selling extra copies of your book; podcasts and magazines run advertising or get sponsorships; conferences do all of the above, and sometimes they charge hefty ticket fees on top, too. (I object to this last so strongly that I will very seldom accept invitations to speak at for-profit conferences charging hundreds of dollars per person, unless the organization is paying an honorarium on top of travel expenses. I'm not in the business of donating my time to make someone else richer, you know?)

The promise is that the attention garnered through your tireless efforts will be your repayment. People will hear your interview or read your article, and they'll be moved to pick up a copy of your book or CD or whatever it is you're flogging. That's the value of "exposure." Put in for free now, for hypothetical benefit down the line.

But say you're giving your work away for free. In that instance, since nobody will be paying you for the work itself, you're not only not making any money out of the deal — you might be actively digging your way into debt. Even assuming you're comfortable or good at speaking in public in the first place.

And on the other hand, even if you are giving your work away, you still have to promote your work somehow. If you can't charge for the work and you can't charge for the promotional activity, where exactly is the writer supposed to get paid?

Tangible Goods

Oh, right. Those hard copies and t-shirts. Let's walk this through. To put out a physical copy of a book, I have to have the interior laid out, a cover designed, and physical printing done. The typical writer isn't going to have a copy of InDesign to lay out pages or the design chops to make a great cover, nor should they be expected to. So our hypothetical independent writer will have to pony up some hundreds of dollars to someone else to perform those services — again, someone besides the writer is earning a living. Anyone notice a trend?

And then, depending on the size of the print run, the books in question may feel prohibitively expensive. It's a rare and wonderful soul who will pay $15 for a paperback when they can get the ebook for free. But alas, including costs of shipping, that's about what a writer would have to charge just to break even on printing costs… much less squeak out a modest profit. And that's not even taking into account the money spent on that designer laying out the pages and designing your cover.

Not to say those rare and wonderful souls aren't out there — they definitely are! But in my experience, they're maybe 10% of your total audience, and often much, much less.

T-shirts have much the same problem. Small runs are proportionally more expensive, which makes them a harder sell to any but the most dedicated fan. And again, the writer is spending a lot of time and money to do something they may not even be good at or may not enjoy. The writer is forced to become a manufacturer and fulfillment house, at the expense of time spent writing.

The small independent artist, just starting out, may not have enough fans to even break even on design costs. That means the route to profitability and independence is much further out of reach for more people. Which means less art in the world.

Do we really want that to be the price of admission to be a writer?

Why Do We Write?

There will be some noble soul coming by, I am sure, telling me that they write for the joy of it; for themselves and for their audiences alone. Why should a writer have to make money at all? 

There's an unstated implication there that commerce sullies the artistic process, or that writing isn't work, and that it's right and proper that people shouldn't make a living from it.

I don't know about you, but that makes me very sad. Great art requires commitment. Years spent developing craft and executing. Great art requires an infrastructure that supports the artist financially so they don't starve to death or die of consumption while producing their masterwork. Without that infrastructure, without compensating for the work of imagination, those masterworks might just stay in the artist's head because they're too tired when they come home from that job at the factory or the restaurant or the nursery school. The whole world is the poorer for it.

If we cannot come up with a system that allows an artist to eke out a living without first sinking into debt through production costs and promotion, than we're ultimately creating an environment where spending the time to make serious art is a luxury few can afford. That is not the world I want to live in. 

The Time and Place for Free

Sometimes free is a good idea, of course. I've done it myself! Right here, and right now, you are reading work I am giving away for free. I don't run ads on my site, nor do I ever intend to. It's my gift to the world.

But it's not a gift lacking ulterior motives. It established my presence and opinions on the internet; it gives me a platform to promote the stuff I hope people will pay for, like the Guide, or like Lucy Smokeheart.

Even in the case of Lucy Smokeheart, I've been known to give the first episode away for free as a promotional effort, hoping to lure people into buying later episodes. But that's a key element: I am selling other pieces of work that people can pay money for.

The idea that all content should be given away for free and that creators should make money through nebulous other means is wrong and it's damaging. We should support a system that allows writers to make a living by writing… and then selling what they've written. 

An Observation On My Experience of Sexism

I've been on something of a roll over the last couple of weeks, apparently. I made a pithy observation about a Texas politician during #istandwithwendy that was retweeted widely and Tumbled tens of thousands of times. I wrote about why I haven't signed the Scalzi pledge; John Scalzi himself retweeted it, which increased the attention on the piece a good three or four orders of magnitude. Earlier in the week, I wrote a piece on Medium about why Medium isn't a very good deal for writers. That's been linked from Ycombinator this morning, and according to Medium stats, the piece is coming close to 10 thousand views. 

Whew! That's a lot of attention, isn't it? (Now if someone could just tell me how to make that happen with The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart. Heh.)

It may have escaped your notice, but I am a person with ladyparts. No, seriously! And we all know what that means in the tech/geek/internet world, right? All that fresh attention means people are inevitably going to be talking about how bangable I am. Or if they disagree with me, how I'm a fat ugly slut. Right? I mean, that's just how the internet works, right?

Wrong! Shockingly, all of these conversations have focused on the ideas and content presented, not on my appearance and/or worth as a human being. People are definitely disagreeing with me -- especially on that Medium piece -- but the discourse hasn't been about my gender. Not about me at all, in fact. Gosh, it's almost like nobody even cares if I'm a man or a woman! Isn't that great?

In fact, out of all of the tens of thousands of people who have read something I've written in the last couple of weeks, I've only had one outright sexist attack...

 

A troll today asked me "Why are you such an angry whore?" Dig deeper, grasshopper, the answer is already within you.

— Andrea Phillips (@andrhia) July 9, 2013

 

...and that was a troll I had kickbanned from a chatroom. Don't lose hope in the fight, comrades. We've taken a lot of ground already.

Why I Haven't Signed the Scalzi Pledge

John Scalzi, the famed science fiction novelist, all-around übermensch, and friend to the oppressed, recently made a pledge. He will neither speak at nor attend a convention that doesn't have a clearly stated and enforced harrassment policy. He later made a thread for others to co-sign this policy and adopt it for themselves. At last count, I believe we were closing in on a thousand co-signers.

I'm not one of them. It seems like the sort of thing that I'd be totes on board with, being a long-time strident feminist and all. Yes! I think the pledge is a fantastic development and I'm delighted to see it spread the way it has.

The reason I haven't signed it myself is because I'm afraid. 

It's no secret I'm on the side of calculating and ambitious. I go to cons for professional reasons, not purely social ones. My career is a tremendous part of who I am, maybe even the biggest part! I want to make amazing things, huge things! And when advice-seekers email me asking how to get started, I tell them: write a blog. Go to conferences. Try to speak. It's what works for me (or has so far.)

There are definitely things I'm not willing to sacrifice for my career, of course. I refuse speaking engagements all the time because that day is my daughter's birthday, or because it's Halloween, or because eight days is just too long to be away from my family. Sometimes it's just because I can't afford the travel.

And yet I am a small fish. I seriously doubt a SXSW or even a StoryWorld is going to adopt a harrassment policy on my account; they're likely to just move on and invite someone else. So co-signing the Scalzi pledge adds another filter to the already-tricky considerations I have for attending -- and the consequences of refusing to attend too many events are pretty significant for me. It doesn't come down to seeing my friends at another place or time. It's a question of finding enough people to become my colleagues, clients, and collaborators such that I can continue paying my mortage.

Opportunity is precious and hard to pass up. Right now, as I write this, I have a yawning void in my calendar starting in mid-August and I need to find work to fill it up. (It usually arrives in the nick of time, but the wait and the hustle to make that happen are always nail-biters. ...Hey! Need someone with my varied skills? Email me!) As much as I'd love to sign the pledge, I'm afraid I'd come to regret it by way of my checking account.

I've had to make the choice between my ideals and my checking account before. I'll probably have to make it again. Am I a coward or a hypocrite? Sure, but maybe I'm just being pragmatic. There's no shame in passing by the battles that you can't afford to lose.

Rights Grabs

I've been running into a problem a lot lately. It's this phrase, or ones just like it:

"a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to exploit all copyright rights now in existence or that may arise in the future"

That comes from the Terms of Service of Medium, a shiny new content platform. Yesterday I used Medium to write a post on why writing for Medium is a bum deal. The translation: Medium is claiming the right to take what you submit and use it in any way they can dream of, forever and ever, without telling you and, more to the point, without paying you.

I don't know about you, but if I posted something on Medium and it happened to make them a million dollars... I'd be super mad if none of that ever trickled down to me. (It's a moot point right now in that Medium doesn't appear to have a business model at all, but I'm confident that won't last forever.)

Alas, Medium isn't alone in that kind of language. Another example: Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal is running a contest to find an author for a tie-in novel. In their rules, they say this:

 

Each entry will be the sole property of the Sponsors. By competing in the Contest and/or accepting 
a prize, each entrant (including the prize winner) grants to Sponsors the right to edit, adapt, publish, copy, display, reproduce and otherwise use their entry in connection with this Contest and in any 
other way, in any and all forms of media now known or hereafter devised, throughout the world, 
in perpetuity, including publication on www.darkcrystal.com.

That means they can, say, decide to print an anthology of all of the submitted stories and sell it.... without ever paying the authors for it. That's pretty common language in the terms of service for a site or a promotion any time user-generated content is involved. But it's... not cool.

Sweeping legal claims in website terms of service started out bad and they've only become worse and worse. I can see why it's done -- web services are trying to protect and future-proof themselves in a wildly shifting media landscape. They're collecting all of these rights, not because they actually plan to sell anthologies of content without compensating the writers... but because the copyright system doesn't actually have a simple mechanism in place that allows a web service to act as the agent of a user without staking some kind of ownership over their content.

And in the case of user-generated content, companies are trying to protect themselves from inevitable claims of stolen ideas, suspicious similarities, and the like, ridiculous though those claims usually are. 

But the de facto standard answer doesn't have to be "we own everything you ever show us," nor should it be. Our legal system needs to address this. Maybe we need new licensing standards specifically for web services and for user-generated content.

One wonders what those standards would look like.

 

Lucy in Cold, Hard Numbers

In the interests of sticking to my policy of aggressive transparency, I'd like to share with you my sales figures for the first two months (and episodes) of The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart. Brace yourselves, you guys, this is a biting dose of reality I'm about to dish out right here.

First, for background: the Kickstarter had 251 backers, so I've "sold" 251 copies of Episode 1, and about 248 of Episode 2. (There were a few backers who went in for only one episode.) But I also made Episode 1 available on Amazon, Gumroad, and Barnes & Noble on May 1. Episode 2 went live on June 9. And both episodes went up on iBooks and Kobo on June 23 (or thereabouts, it's published through Draft2Digital which is... not superb for analytics.)

So how is it selling, apart from Kickstarter backers? Like hotcakes, or like... some other, less desirable kind of cake? Judge for yourselves.

May
iBooks/Kobo: not yet available
Amazon: 15
B&N: 1
Gumroad: 3



All said and done, in May I earned on the order of $5.70.

June
iBooks/Kobo: 7 (five of those for free)
Amazon: 12 sold
B&N: 3 sold
Gumroad: 3 bundles sold (one for free), including one subscription to the whole series for $9.99



June made a little more money: we're up to around $15.30. (In late June I dropped the price of Episode 1 to free everywhere except Amazon and B&N, and made a subscription to the whole series available on Gumroad.)

Well! I don't know about you, but I would not consider this a meaningful supplement to my income. That is, however, about what I expected -- actually better than I could have expected, given that all of the people most inclined to give Lucy a shot already backed the Kickstarter. I am crossing my fingers and hoping that numbers pick up some once I have a critical mass of episodes out, but you know, it may not.

To that end, I should probably do more promotion than tweeting once in a while. Once I've released three or maybe four episodes, I may start harrassing friends with blogs or podcasts to see if I can coerce them into giving me three minutes (or three paragraphs). If you'd be interested in running an interview or a guest post from me, do let me know! I am so there!

And meanwhile: It definitely bears noting that I am really enjoying the process of working on Lucy, regardless of riches gained or, you know, not actually gained at all. I've wanted to do a longer project, something that I owned outright, for a long time now. It feels good to stop waiting for permission.

Kickstarter and Profit

Once upon a time, I wrote a short story. It was a lovely short story, one of the finest pieces I'd ever written, but alas, I couldn't find a market to sell it to. Then one day, a shiny new toy came out that I desired but could not afford. An idea sprang into my head: I will ransom the story to the public! If I could raise $250 to buy the shiny toy on Kickstarter, I would publish the story on my blog under Creative Commons as a gift to the world.

This Kickstarter was very successful; I got the object of my desire, and my husband got one too.

None of this should be news to you if you've been around here for a while. You lived through it with me! But I recently shared this experience on an online forum and was very taken aback when I was told that the project was unethical. Not what Kickstarter is for, probably a violation of their ban on "fund my life" projects, and in general a terrible thing to have done.

I disagree with this line of thinking, of course. Worse, I think there's a terrible, poisonous idea lurking in its heart: that artists don't deserve compensation, and that artistic work is without value.

The Debate

There are several more specific arguments regarding why the Shiva's Mother Kickstarter was unethical; the first is that the story was already written. Another seems to amount to an insufficient purity of heart; my motive in offering the Kickstarter was personal gain. One is: Kickstarter money should be spent solely on things that are required for the execution of the project, like editing or cover design for publishing, or music and graphics for a game. 

Let's focus on that last one first, because that's the key to this whole discussion. If I require outside services, like, say, an illustrator, it's OK to pay them with Kickstarter money, right? Absolutely. There's no argument there. And then that illustrator, having earned their wage, can spend it on anything they damn well please. I'm compensating that artist for time and craft, and their personal finances are their business. They're under no obligation to spend that money only on colored pencils and licenses for Adobe products, and if you suggested as much, they'd laugh in your face.

If I need several kinds of services -- even a whole team of game developers -- then it's fair to expect every single one of those people will be earning a wage in compensation for their time and skill. You might even say they're making... a personal profit.

Does that work suddenly lose its value if the person running the Kickstarter does it? If I have the skills and chops to design my own cover or run my own website, is it OK to pay myself for those services rendered? And indeed, is it not right to budget a wage for the time you spent in conceiving and excuting your own artistic project? According to the people calling me unethical and deceitful, the answer is no: that's not what Kickstarter is for.

So my question is... why would it be OK for everyone except the core artist driving the project to earn a wage? Must all artistic works rest on a core of volunteer labor out of love? I say absolutely not, no way, nohow, good lord no. 

It all comes back to that pernicious art vs. commerce tension that riddles our society, the idea that the work an artist does, all of the time and craft and passion they pour into it, is morally purer if there is no profit motive. That is isn't right for an artist to make or think about money. And yet you cannot eat art, you cannot live in it, it does not keep you warm in the winter nor does it put shoes on your feet. It is a hard fact that an artist must earn money to live. And if an artist does well enough to afford shiny toys on top of that: more power to you, comrade.

The time you spend in writing is still work that has value in the world. It is fair and just to at least try to earn something approaching a wage for it.

So was the story already written? Yes; call it owed wages for labor done before the Kickstarter ran. Was it a "fund my life" project? No; I executed and delivered an artistic work, just the way I said I would. Was my heart insufficiently pure because I went into it wanting an electronic device? No; how I spend my wages earned is my own business, not yours.

And should I have only spent the money on something necessary to the execution of the project?

...You know what? I did. Because without my own labor, there wouldn't have been any project at all.

Barbie's Quiet Dignity and Progress

Some days it's easy to despair that sexism will ever be over.

Let's take the latest SFWA* scandal. The upshot: Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, two icons of science fiction from yesteryear, made some kinda sexist comments in a Bulletin article entitled "Literary Ladies." Which was, well, you know, sometimes it's hard to keep up with mores that have changed dramatically over your lifetime? Regrettable, but old habits die hard. When called on it, though, rather than apologizing, these gentlemen (and other, presumably male, members of the SFWA) reportedly went on a rampage on the SFWA forums and in a whopper of a rebuttal, among other things telling complainants that they should emulate Barbie and maintain a "quiet dignity."

I'll let other people take this from here. Say, Jim Hines and his fabulous linklog.

And that's just one more drop in what seems like a never-ending stream of sexism. Let us not forget Anita Sarkeesian and the Feminist Frequency Kickstarter and ensuing barrage of death and rape threats. Or that one time the New York Times started an obituary of a female rocket scientist by talking about her cooking and devotion to her children. Frankly there's not enough time in the world for me to catalog all of the sexist garbage that's gone down in the geek spaces of SF/F, games, comics, tech. Even if I were to limit myself to the last year or two!

Given that big hot stinking mess of sexism, it's easy to lose hope and think we're not getting anywhere. Sexism can't possibly be going away if we're hearing so much about it, right? The dudebros have won and we might as well cede control of geek spaces to them, alas.

Au contraire, my comrades for social justice. That the SFWA scandal exists and is being perceived as a scandal -- and that the leadership is taking it very seriously indeed -- is amazing and awesome. It means we've made tons of progress. We're winning this fight. No, for real.

You know the famous quote from Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." It's easy to think it's just a nice piece of rhetoric, but actually it's a pretty deep and accurate portrayal of how social change happens. Those "ignoring you" and "laughing at you" steps are what happens when the bulk of an affected population don't agree that a problem is a problem.

If I were to tell you that having long hair was offensive to the follicle-impaired, and if someone subsequently posted a magnum opus on how to style hair a la Princess Amidala, there would be no scandal. There's no perception out there that this is in any way a problem.

We have enough critical mass behind gender equality now that ongoing reports of sexism are being treated as a problem, and a serious one, too. Better, there's a snowball effect in play: Some of the men (and women!) who didn't really think there was a problem before will see, have seen exactly how people are treated when they speak up. Increasingly, you're seen as a total dinosaur or a total dick if you persist in engaging in problematic behaviors. Anita Sarkeesian, bless her, had to live through some horrible things -- but she did so publicly, and in doing so persuaded a vast body of people who hadn't cared about this stuff before that there truly are some awful things out there, and that it's worth fighting them.

The army grows. The battle rages. And then we win.

* I still don't qualify to be a member, of course, even though I've made proper non-ARG narrative games since then. Which makes me very sad. Oh, legitimacy, you are ever found elsewhere.

Spots

I was walking through Times Square on a breezy, sunny spring day when my doctor called to tell me I had cancer.

Finding out you have cancer seems like it should be a dramatic, life-altering moment, but the reality of it brought absolutely no sense of drama. "Superficial," she said, and "non-life-threatening." No chemo nor radiation for me; the entire course of my treatment would be a scrape-and-burn procedure in her office. The two-minute cancer cure. Bam.

I've always known I'd eventually get skin cancer. There's nary a risk factor I don't have: The family history, the light eyes, the fair skin and hundreds of freckles, the bad childhood sunburns, the weekends spent clinging to the edge of a pool. In the Philippine Islands. All year round. And so I've been visiting dermatologists for all my adult life; I had my first biopsy at twenty years old.*

But even knowing that this was destined to happen, I'm yet having a very complex and difficult reaction to the manifest reality. We all know we're going to die one day, too, but that doesn't make it something to look forward to, not exactly.

Cancer sounds terrifying. It is terrifying. Typically in the face of peril, I arm myself with knowledge that helps me triage risk and prevention strategies. But there is no strategy for getting rid of your skin and growing an all-new one. Sunscreen and shade are all I have, and it's unclear whether even that's too little, too late. So I'm trying very hard not to read much about recurrence rates and additional primary cancers. Knowing the odds does not change them. It just gives my anxiety-prone brain more to gnaw.

I tell stories, and so it's natural that I slip into telling myself the story in which I am a cancer patient. Against my better judgement, I find myself worrying about how my family could manage without me. I make sure my husband knows important passwords and lock codes. I worry about whether the girls would get enough calcium and vegetables. I contemplate whether I would feel moved to keep writing if I knew how fast my clock was ticking, and what I would be moved to write.

And yet: superficial, non-life-threatening. A non-event. I am not a terminal cancer patient; you could argue that I'm not a cancer patient at all, except by the barest technicality. This is all not a big deal, and as far as anyone knows I still have another forty years on the clock. But I don't have a narrative structure for cancer that is the yapping chihuahua and not the angry lion with a taste for human flesh. I'm telling myself the wrong story, the story that ends with me dying at a tragically young age, because it's the only story I know.

Then again, given personal history, it's extremely unlikely that this will be the only time I have skin cancer. So maybe, I think, I'm just practicing. Maybe I'm bracing myself for the inevitable worst. I don't know that it's the wrong story, not for sure.

The spot that turned out to be cancer was a freckle that had been there for as long as I could remember. It hadn't grown enormous or turned red and blue or transformed into an open sore, none of the showy signs you're supposed to look for. It was just like it had always been. Unremarkable compared to all of my other dozens of spots. Except it itched. In my case, having cancer is a lot like having a mosquito bite that just won't go away. 

The biopsy that turned up cancer was the third I'd had in my life. On Monday they took five more out of an abundance of caution; I have medical photographs proving they hadn't changed at all in ten years, but now we've moved on to "just in case." After all, the one that turned out to be cancer looked the same in photographs ten years ago, too.

Even now, as I wait and worry for more results -- results that are almost certainly going to be "nothing to see here" -- I find myself staring at my spots, the ones that are still there and the holes where some used to be, wondering which ones will be the treacherous ones. Wondering if they'll all turn out to be superficial and non-life-threatening, or whether they'll do me the courtesy of itching when they develop that hankering for human flesh. 

And then I feel ridiculous, because I didn't even have the dangerous kind of cancer. I don't have a right to all of these scared and morbid feelings I am feeling. And yet: There they are.

*Fun fact: That first biopsy was from my, ah, upper buttock. It was a "crescent-cell nevus," completely benign, but apparently unusual enough that my dermatologist used the slide at a conference. So yeah, my butt has been of scientific interest. No joke. 

Social Media for Old People

Oh, old people. We love you, really we do. You're so wise and loving and experienced, and we would not be here today without you. But we have to talk about the way you use the internet. It's... it's just... you're doing it wrong.

You're embarrassing us.

You're embarrassing yourselves.

But look, we know it's hard to pick up subtle social mores through observation once you're out of your teen years. And there are plenty of amazing things you know that we never will! Like the proper etiquette for a sock hop, or how to darn socks, or even how to find your way to a place that Google Maps doesn't think exists. You're amazing! We get it.

But we want to help you be your very best, modern, social media-savvy selves. And we know you don't mean to be... you know, kind of off. You just can't help it. So let's try to fix that, OK? Here, just for you, is a rundown of how to use various internet sites now called "social media."

Ready? I promise it won't hurt.

Tumblr

This is not for you. Do not use it.

Facebook/Google+

You probably are already on Facebook! This is great! If you're not familiar, Google+ is like Facebook except with fewer people and fewer ads, and I'm only including it here for completeness because you don't need to be on it. Pretend I never said anything.

These two sites are mostly for sharing things that you agree with, and stuff like baby and vacation pictures. And picking fights about religion and politics, if you like that kind of thing.

It is OK to friend your younger relatives and other loved ones to see what they are up to! But you should know that every time you post a comment on something they say, you are probably speaking to an audience including their other relatives, boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse, close friends, boss, coworkers, classmates, and everyone else they have ever wanted to impress.

It is not the right place for "We are so proud of you!" or "How did the doctor visit go?!" UNLESS you see other, younger people not related to them say those kinds of things first in comments before you. Repeated for emphasis: Everyone they have ever wanted to impress is watching.

If you do not understand something, do not comment on it, because they probably are not talking to you. If you are not quite sure if you understand something or not, do not comment on it.

Do not post on someone else's wall. NOT EVER.

Do not try to have a detailed catch-up with someone else and their life on Facebook. If it's not a conversation you should have at top volume on a bus filled with everyone you have ever wanted to impress, it is not a conversation you should have on Facebook, either.

Also, do not comment on someone else's post about something completely different from what they were just talking about. It is like barging into the middle of a conversation and changing the subject, and it is very rude! If you want to talk about something else, post it yourself on your own profile, and type in +THEIR NAME to catch their attention. That plus sign turns their name into a TAG, and it means they will be sure to see the comment. They'll get a notification about it! Awesome!

Instagram

This is not for you. I'm not even kidding. Just don't.

Twitter

Remember how I said that talking to someone on Facebook is like talking to everyone they've ever wanted to impress all at once? Twitter is like attending a party where all of those people are hanging out, and also the whole world, too. It is even archived in the Library of Congress! Twitter is for keeps, yo, and so you need to be really careful about how you use it.

Twitter is not a way to talk to one specific person and catch up. It's a public conversation. Even when you use an @reply on Twitter, other people can see it!

That includes information you may not even realize you're giving away, like where someone works, the names of their friends and relatives, when family birthdays are, and other stuff that could potentially help a bad person perform identity theft. Be cool, OK?

Private Communication

But if you can't catch up with people on Facebook and Twitter, you demand, where IS it OK? Didn't you think the purpose of all of these newfangled tools was being able to keep up with their lives?!

Yes and no. It's to keep tabs on things that people are sharing on purpose -- NOT to ask questions about things they have not chosen to share online. Asking questions and talking about personal stuff is OK... as long as you do it in private!

Fortunately there are a lot of ways to contact someone privately.

On Facebook there are "Messages." They are only readable by the person you send them to!

On Twitter there is such a thing as a "direct message." That's a private message to only one person! A DIRECT MESSAGE IS NOT THE SAME AS A REGULAR TWITTER MESSAGE STARTING WITH @theirname. Twitter can make it very hard to find direct messages; they are located on the "Your profile" area, accessible through a button with an envelope on it.

Of course there is the classic: email! Email is a fantastic way to keep in touch with people privately!

And of course there are the reigning methods of private conversation these days: The text message, or instant messaging (either through your phone, or a service like AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, etc.) If you're using text messages or instant messaging, be sure to keep them short and to the point. It's a conversation, so say one or two sentences and then wait for a response. Don't get offended if someone doesn't reply right away (or at all.) You never know what they might be busy in the middle of! 

Oh, and... signing "Love, Your dad" is sweet and all, but you don't need to sign a text or an instant message. It's not a letter.

The Telephone

I am confident you know how to use the telephone already, being old and all. Probably you are a MASTER of the phone compared to young people today!

Just one thing, all right? DO NOT EVER CALL a young person because of something you just saw posted online. Likewise, don't ask a question on Twitter about something you saw on Facebook. This is called context-switching and it is rude.

I'll give you a pass for very major life events, such as "I am getting married," "I am pregnant," or "I have been sentenced to twenty years." If something of that magnitude occurs, then yes, do call.

And of course you're free to call your younger people just because you love them and like to hear their voices! We all expect this from our old people.

Tumblr

Seriously, just stay off Tumblr. It will only confuse you.

MySpace/AOL/Friendster

Oh, you sweet, adorable thing. If you're still on any of these platforms, you can do whatever the heck you want. Nobody else is paying attention anymore. Just have fun and stay safe, you crazy kids.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is basically just an online resume and not really important unless you are looking for a new job. If you are retired, you can safely ignore it entirely. If you're not retired and somebody sent you this post, um, maybe you should stay away. You know, to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of a potential 24-year-old boss. Just sayin'.

One Final Warning

I have a terrible thing to tell you. It's... well, there's no sugar-coating this, brace yourself. Many things on the internet are lies.

It's horrible, I know, but... look, if something seems too good to be true, like you won a foreign lottery or a company is donating absurd amounts of money to charity if you forward an email, it probably is. And if this is proof that your worst enemies are doing evil perfectly calculated to blow your brittle arteries apart... be skeptical. Or if someone is helpfully warning about a danger but you don't personally know anyone who died that way, don't believe it.

Remember, anyone can type something that looks like a press release. Anyone can say that they checked with their cousin the chief of police, or their brother-in-law who works at the company, or their second cousin who's a lobbyist on Capitol Hill. That does not mean it's 100% true. People lie! A lot! So just... check before you share, OK? And check before you answer. A lot of bad people are trying to get your money. Don't let them win.

There's this site, Snopes.com. It collects common rumors and scams that go around on the internet and tells you if they're true or not. Use it. Live it. Love it. If you're not sure how to use it yourself, ask for help. Just about anyone will be happy to help you sort it out.

Fellow Youngsters

In order to make this a better and more useful resource for the old people in our lives... what am I missing? What elements of the new social contract might need spelling out? What habits would you like the gentle opportunity to break? And old people... is there a way to call your attention to these small matters of etiquette without hurting your feelings?

Do weigh in in the comments. We're all friends here.