Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 7

The Lie Every Social Network Tells

Let’s talk a little more about the problem of disentangling yourself from the possibly-democracy-destroying social networks that currently dominate public discourse.

Now that we’ve moved full-blast into a gig economy, one of the most frightening prospects of leaving social media is losing the network that keeps you afloat. Artists rely on their social graphs to spread the word when they have new work out, or when they need a new project. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills, to be sure, but a total lack of exposure means you’re definitely not selling any books (or games, or commissions, or...) Obcurity is the biggest problem early and even mid-career creators have to solve, because it doesn’t matter what heartbreaking works of genius you produce if nobody ever looks at them.

So sure, I could delete my Twitter account in a principled stand for what I believe in. But I’d be losing access to (as of this writing) 6,757 hypothetically human followers who have opted in to what I have to say. Gosh, that’s a lot of potential book sales to give up, isn’t it?

And yet.

Here’s the lie every social network is telling you: It’s your friend or follower counts. Your number of impressions and views. Your numbers of likes, faves, RTs, hearts.

We live in a world that wants to quantify everything, a kind of numeromancy meant to give us the feeling that we know and can control the future. Your resting heart rate and the amount of cholesterol in your bloodstream become the entrails we read to know if we will die soon. Calories consumed and burned become a scale of virtue, weighing our moral worth. Likes are a way to scry the hearts of others, to know how much they love you.

Did I say yet that this is a lie? Because it’s a lie.

This is a problem advertisers have grappled with for decades. There is no way to measure the hearts of humankind, so we measure what we can and pretend it’s the same thing. We have a whole arcane set of practices arisen solely from trying to derive truths about what we can’t measure from the things we can: conversion rates, A/B testing, sentiment analysis.

These numbers we can see and know feel like money in the bank. But the dirty truth is that I can’t count on all 6,757 of those people to buy a book. To the contrary, I can count on the fact that they won’t — and if I sell that many of anything, most of those people won’t know a hoot about where to find me online.

On Twitter, I can’t even count on all of my followers to even see my promotional efforts, no matter how hard I dance. Honestly, I can’t count on all of them to even be human beings, or to still be active on Twitter anymore if they are. So the loss of value to me in leaving is far less than 6,757 book sales, multiplied by however many books over however many years Twitter is the place to be.

How much less? Who can say?

This is an even more complicated problem when it’s not a career issue, but a personal one. It is nonetheless the same problem. You can have five hundred friends on Facebook but nobody to call to feed your pets because you have to make an emergency trip out of town. You can have five thousand Twitter followers and nobody who checks up on you at the right moment because they know you’ve been having a tough time these days, and they just want to see if you’re okay.

It’s possible that the 51 people who have subscribed to get my blog posts in email (and perhaps also the couple-hundred who read me in RSS)  are all the people on Twitter I could count on in the first place, as audience members, or as colleagues, or as friends.

We have a lot of ways to say this same thing. The map is not the territory. Quantity isn’t quality. And you know the alleged Mark Twain quote, that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.   

Numbers can be real, and yet not true. Let’s not fool ourselves. And let’s not allow ourselves to be fooled. 

You Don’t Have To

I’m exhausted and on a course of antibiotics. Sometimes you get a sign from your body, and this is one for me. It’s definitely time for me to engage in a little self-care: refilling the well that good work comes from, and maintaining this frail meat shell without which I can do nothing at all. I’m enjoying the thought of wrapping up some fairly small pieces of work and then spending some time reading books, playing video games, napping, swimming.

And yet. Today, it seems, is the first day of NaNoWriMo.  As always happens, this is the point in the year where I panic, because though I’ve written six novelettes, two alternate reality games, and at least a half-dozen other projects, somehow none of that counts. Not to the part of my brain that wants to, you know, write novels.

It’s not too late to fix that, hisses a voice in my ear. You can do NaNoWriMo. You can start today.  

This voice is toxic. This is the voice of the American Work Ethic, for which no amount of work is ever enough, and to whom any rest at all is inexcusable idleness. And it’s all lies.

Friends, this has been a difficult year for many of us. We’ve dealt with the regular stresses of life: loved ones passing, jobs lost and found, heartbreaks large and small. And this has been a landmark year for stressors we aren’t accustomed to: hurricanes and fires, terrifying politics, the quiet possibility of nuclear war.

Be kind to yourself, whatever that should mean to you. If it means that NaNoWriMo is not for you this year,  then I congratulate you on your self-knowledge, and I hope you can spend the dusk of the year on something else, something that nurtures you so you can bloom brighter when the time is right.

You’re enough already. Believe it, and act accordingly.

Miss Congeniality (After A Word From Our Sponsor)

OK first two quick promotional items: one, Season 1 of ReMade is on sale for $4.99! Look, they made a gif and everything!

And two, on Halloween I’m going to randomly give away Season 1 of a Bookburners to ten lucky subscribers to my blog/newsletter hybrid, in a transparent effort to boost my numbers. Mmmm, marketing!

But I can’t just market at you, because this is not what friends do. So instead I’d like to talk about Miss Congeniality, which I saw this weekend for the first time since it came out in theaters.  (Yes, I saw it in a theater.)

 

Movie Thoughts With Andrea

Miss Congeniality is very, very much an artifact of its time. It’s trying hard to do the same things that Legally Blonde did in terms of Grrl Power and social justice, but it has the same muddled stance on it that, frankly, I remember having at the time my own self, and that’s where a lot of its humor is meant to come from. 

I mean, the core conflict is the tension over being a strong-with-the-punching and empowered woman, or living up to an arbitrary beauty ideal. The movie tries to suggest you can do both without giving up the core of who you are. And it tries to show that the society of women can be special, but it doesn’t really earn that. I’d have liked to see the pageant contestants step up into a strong-with-the-punching role as well. Hey, maybe that’s what happens in the sequel? Maybe I’ll have to watch it.

We also have brief mentions of gay and lesbian relationships! Yay, representation! But with a particularly Year 2000 sensibility: a nervous laugh, ha ha this is a thing! Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s not unlike how we see a lot of trans representation done right now in mainstream media. The same nervous laugh, the acknowledgement that this is a way that some people are, and it makes some other people very nervous. But we’re pretty far past that for gay people now, which gives me hope that we’ll get that way for trans rights as well. The window is shifting.

The one thing that surprised me on a rewatch is that the cast is fairly diverse... but there’s no mention of racism at all. Since race is the elephant in the room in the year 2017, that was a little weird and jarring. Maybe that shows we’ve come a long way, too, since there is at least a public conversation about that now?

All that said, Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens is a much more interesting riff on beauty pageant culture, since it’s more from the POV of the actual contestants, and therefore has much less “ha ha can you believe it?! BUTT GLUE!” So maybe read that one instead.

Annnnnnnnnd that’s it for right now. Getting ready to head out to Switzerland. You’ll hear from me soon! 

Switzerland Bound

I’m going to Zurich next week! I’ll be delivering a keynote and a workshop about transmedia storytelling* to the film educators of CILECT, a consortium of film and television schools.  If any of you will be there, please come and say hello! I’m not sure if I’ll know anyone at this particular conference, and I’m always a bit nervous going into rooms full of strangers.

My hosts tell me there will be a river cruise on the first night, serving fondue. Twice now they have asked me, anxiously, “Do you eat cheese?” 

Friends, I am going to eat all the cheese in Switzerland. And then purchase a cuckoo clock? Isn’t that what you do in Switzerland? Is there something amazing in Zurich I should be doing that I might not know about? Besides the cheese?

And I’ll likely take a million photos while I’m there, then share only the good ones with you here. It’s going to be great! 

 

* This may seem at odds with my declaration that I’m giving up the punditing business; but in this case, I’m talking about very specific, practical elements of craft, which continues to delight me.  No snake oil here, folks!

 

I’m Not Quitting Twitter. Yet.

Let’s talk personal social media strategy, and how I’m trying to protect democracy by setting up a way to get my blog posts by email. No, really.

Look, we all know the stark truth. In the year 2017, Twitter is a hot mess, a festering swamp of villainy, a miasmatic and oppressive empire of Nazis and the people who enable them. The company’s attempts to fix rampant abuse and harassment have been shallow and ineffective, often targeting victims more than perpetrators. Something has to be done. Nothing is being done.

I say this as someone who loves Twitter. I wouldn’t be enjoying the career I have now if it weren’t for Twitter.

But time and Trump have changed the world, and social media most of all. A lot of people are increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge that being on Twitter makes us complicit in an ecosystem of unrelenting evil. And there’s a certain vulnerability that comes from making commercial advertising networks your primary internet home. Not just the constant knowledge that at any time the eye of Sauron might fall upon you and evil will come your way; no, something subtler and more pernicious, even, than that.

Social media are a vector for propaganda, paid and otherwise. They’re sources of bad information and unsupported opinions. They are the domain of emotion over fact, and what you let into your brain shapes your very identity. Ordinarily a certain skeptical vigilance would armor us from this. But now we live in a world where anyone with a botnet or a troll farm can exploit the human urge to engage with our peers in good faith. This is a danger to democracy, and it is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

And yet. Twitter is where my friends and colleagues are. It’s where my readership and reviewers are. It’s a source for work and promotion that I don’t have a replacement for. Leaving Twitter and quitting writing are not the same, but it’s hard to see where the difference lies for me.

Which is a third kind of vulnerability: as goes my Twitter account, so goes my readership. And if Twitter falls, or if we do collectively decide to leave the platform en masse, then I could face a real struggle in keeping my head above the vast ocean of obscurity.

That’s doubly true on Facebook, where what you see and who sees you are heavily regulated by an invisible and ineffable algorithmic hand. When you speak up on Facebook, there’s no telling if anyone will ever hear it. And often the things it chooses to show are the least important things of all.

So it’s time to start looking for an escape plan. Time to execute a diversification strategy, as they say. This is risk mitigation, pure and simple. There are too many of my eggs in Twitter’s basket.

I have long maintained that the best platform is the one that you own. And this is the place that I own — if you can find it.

But blogs aren’t what they used to be, and for a lot of reasons. For one thing, search engine visibility relies a lot on social traffic, these days, for good and ill. When Google Reader went bust, a lot of people just gave up on their RSS feeds, preferring instead to just click links as they happen to see ‘em pop by in a social feed. You can post, but there’s still not any guarantee that anyone’s paying attention.

There is a third way, pioneered by outfits like Tinyletter. The good old-fashioned email newsletter.

I do have a newsletter already, and if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re subscribed already. But it’s a sporadic sort of thing where I mainly announce new ways for people to give me money. It’s got a lot of subscribers! But I don’t figure those people would be happy if I started mailing them every day, or even every week.

So I’m starting a new, higher-frequency list. This new Deus Ex Machinatio newsletter is going to send out my blog posts, no more than once a day, and probably less because ha ha ha ha ha who are we kidding if we think I’m going to be blogging every day. Though who knows? Maybe I will.

You can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/c75VPb (And if you subscribe before 4pm on Oct. 19, 2017, you’ll get this very email in your inbox! Neat!)

Going forward, I’m going to move a lot of my social media energy back over here again. No more threaded tweetstorms. Maybe I’ll post my daily sketches here, and talk about... you know... day-in-the-life social stuff. How my work is going, or how I like my haircut, or which conventions I’m going to this year and why. And as always, I’ll noodle over writing craft, game design, or post my hot takes. You know, what you expect from me.

That means I’ll be somewhat less visible online unless you’re opting in or following me here. Please consider opting in.

I’m really excited about this, I won’t lie. I miss the depth and substance of the blogging days. This might be a path back in. Dang, do I hope this works.

But to make it work, this is needs to be a two-way street. So I want to know where to find you in your space, too. Do you have a newsletter, too? Link it in comments. Got a blog? Hook us up so we can Feed.ly our hearts out. Tell us where you live on the internet and why you’ve picked those places.

It’s not a solution. Not a bold or brave stance. This is just damage control. But listen, if we’re going to save democracy, we all have to start somewhere.

Patreon 2: Electric Bugaloo

I'm reposting some stuff here that I just sent to my Patreon backers. It's not all baked yet, but I am setting the wheels in motion. Ready?

First, some history. I stopped posting here because I had some qualms about limiting access to my work, and therefore limiting the number of people who would ever be exposed to it. Eventually I was posting stories to my blog, too, and nobody here minded... but nobody elsewhere read, either. And that's not a great way to get new readers.

Now, though, I'd like to do something a little different that I'm super excited about. Growing my audience is important, but there are a lot of kinds of projects I'd love to do that I don't because there's just no market for them anywhere. Stuff I used to do as a weekend project: a story in a Google Calendar, or My Super First Day, or quick little interactive twiddles with a voice mail and a couple of email autoresponders. 

I want to play.

Not full-fledged ARGs, though. Nothing episodic. Just me poking at the edges of form and story to see what I can find, and sometimes iterating to see if I can do a thing that's been done before in a different or better way.

These things will be short—minutes to go through them, and certainly never as much as an hour—and very unchallenging, since I'm interested in narrative dynamics way more than puzzles. I'll try to do monthly but we'll see where life and deadlines take me.

Updates to the Patreon coming soon. Gotta make a new video, gotta rewrite rewards and goals and so on. Happy to hear your ideas if you'll give them to me. And then... let's see what happens, OK? In the meanwhile, if you want a quick peek of what the Patreon used to look like (or you want to get in on this new thing right the heck now), you'd better click fast.

Thank you, as always, for believing in me. I hope we can have a lot more fun together going forward. <3

The Cultures 182: Yoga Pants, What Makes Things Cool, Nation-States

You guys, this one was a GREAT episode. In it I explain the connection between startup culture, perception of status, and our current epidemic of athleisure fashion; Adrian Hon discusses what actually perfectly effable things make something cool or not; and Naomi Alderman muses that perhaps we should abolish the nation-state altogether as a thing that exists.

As always, you can follow us on Twitter!  Listen to the episodes on Libsyn! You can even subscribe on iTunes! And once you do, please let us know what you think. Happy Monday!

Where to Find Me at Confusion 2017

I'm going to be at Confusion 2017 again this year, in Novi, Michigan from Jan. 19-22. And I'm gonna be on programming, too, so woooo!

I don't have a lot else set up yet beyond this, but I'd really love to put a couple of meetups for drinks or coffees on my calendar. So if you're going to be there and you might want to hang out, drop me a line?

And without further ado, here's my schedule so far:

All Your Data Are Belong To Us

Saturday, 4:00 PM. Room: Petoskey
What is "the internet of things?" How smart do we really want our devices to be? What will society look like when whole systems of objects talk to each other to shape our lives? And who controls the data our things collect?

Group Autograph Session (5 PM)

Saturday, 5:00 PM. Room: St. Clair
Come meet your favorite authors, artists and musicians and have them sign things! (Please limit your signing requests to 3 items per person.)

Reading: Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Andrea Phillips

Saturday, 8:00 PM. Room: Saugatuck
Authors read from current or forthcoming works

Pantsers Rule! (Or So They Tell Me)

Sunday, 10:00 AM. Room: Interlochen
No plan! No safety net! Writing by the seat of your pants is the best, most effective writing strategy. Well... at least for some writers. What are the strengths and weaknesses, and what might be some alternatives, other than outlining?

Writing is Fundamental

Sunday, 11:00 AM. Room: Isle Royale
Some of the fundamentals of prose storytelling have evolved over time, and some vary wildly between genres. What has changed since the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres came to be as we know them, and how have genres like mystery, romance, and YA diverged?

The Cultures 181: $12 Coffee, Things That Make Us Happy, Resolutions

Another Monday, another episode of The Cultures! And I've been remiss in posting about them, but trust that they're out there every week whether I'm posting about it or not.

This is a very special New Year episode meant to be somewhat more uplifting than we've been lately because of the... you know... the politics. In this episode we talk about the Stabucks plan to make super-premium coffee because mere premium coffee like they offer now is a little too accessible; we talk about things that bring us happiness right now; and we share some resolutions for the New Year, though this year of all years resolutions are something of a moving target.

As always you can get this week's episode on LibSyn or on iTunes. Tune in and let us know what you think!

So Long, 2016

It's that time of year, friends. As this neverending year winds down and the nights become long and cold, I like to turn inward to take stock of where I've been and where I'm going.

This is not an awards eligibility post; more a summary of all the things I've done this year, so I can remind myself that it was more than Witcher 3 and K-drama. Technically this is my second year of eligibility for the Campbell Award. But I firmly believe that ship has sailed for me, and I urge you to look elsewhere. I'll have more to say on that when awards season begins in earnest.

New Stuff

So here's what I did in the Year of the Trashfire, 2016. First: releases! I didn't write all of this this year, but this is the year in which these things were launched into the world.

Novelettes

These are all novelette-length, but they're each episodes of longer serials published by Serial Box, which I co-author with two incredible teams of other writers.

Bookburners Season 2 

Webs

Shock and Awe

ReMade Season 1

Hungry

Whiteout

Memories of Arcadia

Season passes and individual Serial Box episodes are also available in audio and ebook format on their website and in the iOS app.

Games

This Lucy Smokeheart tie-in is a choose-your-own-adventure style romp published and distributed by Choice of Games.

The Daring Mermaid Expedition (Google Play, iOS, Kindle, Steam)

Middle Grades

The long-awaited interactive book for ages 8-12 where the reader is a part of the story, saving a magical circus from doom.

Circus of Mirrors

Nonfiction

This year saw the start of my Metagames column at Strange Horizons, and stellar human Chuck Wendig kindly gave me his keys to talk about some things, too.

Metagames

Fitness Games

Video Games are the Best Art

Playing at Good and Evil

Discord in the Symphony

Pokémon Go and Staying Power

Conflict and Consensus

Terrible Minds

Throw Everything at the Wall

The High Goddamn Responsibility of Fiction

Podcasts and Speaking

Hosting

The Cultures (co-hosted 52 weekly episodes, on LibSyn and iTunes)

Guest Appearances

StoryForward Podcast: Ethics and Immersion

StoryForward Panel: Storytelling for Social Good (video)

PurseStrings Radio

I was also on programming at Confusion, Readercon, and Worldcon in Kansas City. I met Tim Powers, co-paneled with David Brin, and established myself as a person with many, many, MANY opinions about self-driving cars.

Marketing

I'm very proud of the work I did for a little activation for Handmaid's Tale at NYCC, and another thing that is... still pending.

Personal Stuff

This year has been a trashfire for national political reasons, and I lost easily weeks of my life to paralysis as I watched it burn. But my personal life has also been, ah, somewhat complex.

The year began and is now ending with drawn-out child health concerns—the kind that end up requiring multiple rounds of scans and IVs and ER visits. It turns out that dealing with a potentially serious health issue your child is having is even more stressful than having such a problem yourself. Who knew?

I had a young adult novel go on sub, and when it didn't get picked up, we decided to sit on the manuscript for now. Sad, but them's the breaks. It's a persistence game. Worse, though: the long-term project I'd been working on ran out of funding and shut down without shipping anything, which has been disappointing on many levels. In the aftermath, I went after a job I was really excited about and landed it but ultimately declined, with regrets, because it wouldn't have paid enough to live on.

The washing machine we bought late last year to replace the one emitting a horrible burning smell sprang a leak, flooded our (upstairs) laundry room, and led to replacing the machine, the floor, and the ceiling beneath it. But not until we'd been operating without a washing machine for two solid months.

It wasn't all bad. My older child entered high school. We went on a cruise to the Bahamas and it was utterly glorious! We refinanced our mortgage and wound up much better off for it. I spent some time with some amazing people in person and in private chat.

I also wrote some short fiction. And I wrote a little bit of two different novels, but didn't finish any. I've been feeling really terrible that I didn't manage to write a novel of my own this year. That's my baseline goal in every year: write a book. But looking over this post in draft, everything I've done and everything that's happened to me, I'm starting to remember why that didn't happen. It really hasn't been all Witcher 3 and K-drama, has it?

What's in 2017?

I like to end these things on a positive note. And positive always means: the future! So what do I have cooking for 2017? First off, there are new seasons of Bookburners and ReMade to look forward to. I'm also writing a little more short fiction and I'm confident some of it will be published next year, even if it means sending it up my own self. 

I've done a little games writing that you'll get to see in 2017, too. I have a nonfiction proposal out; I'm thinking about Kickstarting a new season of Lucy Smokeheart. Oh, and maybe I'll write a novel for real this time. Or the other novel. Or both novels!

And I'm volunteering for the NYCLU. Because, while this isn't a political post, politics have indelibly shaped this year. And if I want future years to look even better, I'm going to have to work for it. Same as it ever was, right?