Matt Weber's Blog, page 10

Work week 2023-01-23

Maker: Figure out January newsletter content

Manager: Continue transcription of HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT

Marketer: WINDBURN WHIPLASH to socials and blog for real this week, you god-damned animal

Today’s featured image is a drawing my 11-year-old daughter made when she discovered her Kobo is apparently also an Etch-a-Sketch?

Recently watched: THE RENTAL, dir. Dave Franco. I might have enough opinions about this to say something in public?

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Post-holiday TBR

Two rereads, one stalled book, three gifts, and an acquisition. I’m especially excited about SHE EATS THE NIGHT; I had no idea Liu & Takeda were doing a collaboration other than MONSTRESS! (Which continues, IMO, to be the best epic fantasy currently being produced in any medium.) Thanks to Fantom Comics in DC for the signed copy:

Currently reading: See above. But also THE HEART OF WHAT WAS LOST, by Tad Williams.

An alternative Levittown

Here’s an experience for you:

I’m on a train from Trenton to DC. This travels the same track as my old commute from Trenton to Philadelphia, but after a minute I realized I wasn’t seeing the same things: some marshy areas with nothing but bare trees and a few birds of prey, the backs of a row of mobile homes, an unfamiliar highway; I missed the Levittown station entirely. I genuinely thought maybe Amtrak was using different tracks than the commuter rail.

Then I looked across the aisle, out the left-side window, and everything was familiar again.

There’s a reason for this: The commuter rail to Philadelphia starts out nearly empty at Trenton, and gets full starting at I want to say Cornwells Heights. The trains have two-seaters on the right and three-seaters on the left. The calculus as a commuter is: You’d rather have a seat all to yourself, but if you can’t, you’d rather share a three-seater with one person than a two-seater; but you’d rather be the second person in a two-seater than the third in a three-seater. So if you’re going all the way, the reasoning goes: Better to grab a three-seater, because you’ll get a partner sooner but you’ll keep your elbow room for longer, because the middle seats in the three-seaters are the last to fill.

And so you always sit on the left. And you don’t get the view on the right until you take the Amtrak to DC.

This is the first time I’ve traveled on my own since the pandemic began. I forgot how much I enjoy train trips up and down the East Coast. Trenton to Boston’s a bit more fun because of all the little seaside towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts, but Wilmington and Baltimore aren’t so bad either. Definitely not my usual side of the aisle.

Work week 2023-01-17

Maker: NA

Manager: Transcribe HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT to end of manuscript; if done, decide on fate of SNOWDRIFT STARLIGHT plotline

Marketer: Couple of blog posts; WINDBURN WHIPLASH preorder to socials.

(Sometimes it helps me to have notes on my intentions, so I can at least know I’m doing what I’m not supposed to be doing. Format is cribbed from Orna Ross’ three-part framework.)

Currently reading: HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING, Harlan Ellison.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

The wicked flee when none pursueth

Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s SUPERGIRL: WOMAN OF TOMORROW wears its TRUE GRIT conceit lightly, which serves it just as well; Supergirl was never going to be a particularly credible stand-in for Rooster Cogburn, and King doesn’t try to force it. Instead, he lets the book be about a friendship between a young woman and a younger one. Where Rooster Cogburn is gruff and closed off, Supergirl is open; where Mattie Ross comes by her respect for Cogburn grudgingly, Ruthye Knoll’s admiration for Supergirl is quick, open, and wise. This is maybe the first time I’ve felt Tom King being too Tom King by half; I’m not sure the final twist quite stands up. But it’s still a lovely book.

Physically as well as story-wise. Clayton Cowles’ colors elevate Bilquis Evely’s pencils to something literally otherworldly, over and over again. Just look at this.

CURRENTLY LISTENING: FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN, by Tade Thompson, read by Clifford Samuel.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

The Nona maneuver

Just marking this as the day it occurred to me that the Streets of Flame Quartet may need to become a quintet.

This all relies on very, very raw turns of events in HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT, which only exist in my head and a notebook, so all of this is highly abstract and none is guaranteed. But I was thinking about how best to get the book done, and it occurred to me that the fourth act would have an awful lot of potential to get big, but it wasn’t clear that it could be a prologue for the next book… but maybe it could be its own book.

This would make the prospect of getting HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT done this year a lot more straightforward, because the draft could be done in probably 5-10K and I could be editing by March. The question is really whether what I’m imagining for what would now be Book 4 can sustain a novel’s worth of words. NONA THE NINTH did it; but “be Tamsyn Muir” is a tricky business model, and arguably taken.

CURRENTLY READING: SUPERGIRL, WOMAN OF TOMORROW, by Tom King and Bilquis Evely.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

The square-cube law

I posted some quick thoughts on generative AI on a closed Facebook group for the Alliance of Independent Authors. Then I tried to find them and, WOW, is searching a Facebook group a miserable experience. So here they are, in case I ever want to find them again:

I think the philosophical question here is interesting, but I have to admit I’m more concerned about the fact that concentrating any form of craft in AI concentrates power with those with the resources to scrape the web for vast amounts of labeled data, engineer the models themselves, and rent or purchase the hardware needed to train and run it. It feels like “democratizing art” or “democratizing audio” when we’re all producing AI-generated covers and audio for free or cheap instead of paying professionals… but it’s these Silicon Valley organizations who decide what we do or don’t pay. This is not a prediction of any kind, but note that over the long term there’s room for a Wal-Mart play: Run at a loss for a while, squeeze the smaller practitioners out of the market, raise prices when you’re the only game in town. 

Maybe that doesn’t happen because the barriers to creating high-quality generative models become low enough to allow a robust competitive ecosystem… or for any number of other reasons. But we are already so reliant on a small number of very large tech companies for so much of our business (and our lives in general, outside of publishing). Right now, we’re lucky to have a huge community of cover artists and narrators who compete on quality and price. If that community is replaced by a few big tech companies, that competition may be gone. (This is also not a prediction; I’m writing this post on an Apple device on a social network run by Meta; obviously Big Tech has done some good in my life! But that doesn’t mean I trust them to prioritize me over their shareholders.)

“The philosophical question” is whether training an AI on Picasso’s paintings is different, IP-wise, from a person getting inspiration from Picasso’s paintings. It’s an interesting question! Seth Godin thinks there’s a simple answer. He might have the right answer, but if he does, I don’t think it’s because it’s simple.

I think it was in eighth grade science class that I learned about the square-cube law? Scale changes things. And the law (the common law, not the square-cube one) isn’t just a set of principles. It’s for protecting people, it cares about reality and changes in reality. If we decide machine learning is the same as flesh brain learning for IP purposes, we should do it because it’s the best decision for people, not because we’re pretending they are anything alike in how they work; they aren’t.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

2022: An epilogue

I obviously haven’t made as much use of this blog as I’d have liked since I resurrected it this summer. Figuring out how to balance this with writing, the newsletter, and the other 95% of life is an ongoing project. But I’ve got a bit of free time at this end of 2022, and since this is supposed to be a season of reflection, it felt worthwhile to do some reflecting on where I’ve been and what I’d like 2023 to look like.

Writing: Milestones hit & missed

This section is going to be the most mechanical and, frankly, annoying to read because it’s the part of my life that most needs granular project management. I’ve tried following vibes to structure my writing life and it’s led to a trunk full of stuff that’s probably worth publishing but isn’t currently positioned for it (see: first draft of sequel to book previously published by small press that dissolved into a blockchain grift; that will see the light of day, but very likely not until 2025).

I had a slate of seven goals for 2022 that I shared, with monthly updates, on my writing group’s Discord:

It may be worth noting that these goals are exclusively actions within my control; I’m not setting targets for things like sales numbers, short fiction sales, and so on.

Their fates are these:

Brimstone Slipstream is out (and free to download; if Amazon is listing it at a price higher than $0, let me know and I’ll get it fixed). Windburn Whiplash will be out early in 2023. I arguably deserve a little more than half credit for this, as a lot of the delays were down to my cover artist, who had a bit of personal stuff going on; but I also didn’t communicate with her as conscientiously as I could have, which probably could have saved me a couple weeks of delays. I woke up at 5:00 most weekdays to write, and actually used the time for writing. I sent an email to my subscribers every month (except for January, which was a planned break, as next January’s will be). I pushed to complete the book with an infusion of 60,000 words this fall and I didn’t, although I certainly hit at least 40,000 and made huge progress in the manuscript. I’d really like to figure out how to be more productive; hitting 600 words a day is actually really hard for me right now, and it’s going to be hard to produce at the rate I’d like if I can’t do that regularly.  I pronounced this goal dead in midsummer or so. It wasn’t going to happen. (The WIP is an as-yet-untitled story about a reporter visiting a fictional libertarian seasteading community, inspired by “Seven American Nights.”) I racked up a few rejections for the completed stories I have on the market, but I left months between each rejection and the next submission; neither is on the market right now. Actually, my records show only 6 submissions of these three stories, almost all in the first half of the year. This I think wasn’t inevitable; submissions don’t take much time, I could have been more consistent. I’m not what you’d call an Atticus power user, but I’ve mastered it enough to create EPUBs that look pretty good and meet the requirements of the platforms, which is the level of power that I need right now.

Next year’s writing goals could be even more boring:

Put Windburn Whiplash up for preorder in JanuaryPublish Windburn Whiplash in Q1 (current target: 2/14)Complete a draft of Heatstroke Heartbeat by Q2Commission a cover for Heatstroke HeartbeatPublish Heatstroke Heartbeat (date TBD based on cover completion; this could be a 2024 goal)Maintain monthly newsletter correspondenceMaintain #5amwritersclub 4-5x/week

I think there’s room for goals outside of these – for example, if I can hit a 2023 publication date for Heatstroke Heartbeat (or even put it up for preorder in 2023), it may make sense to run a paid promotion for Brimstone Slipstream; if I can finish editing Heatstroke Heartbeat by Q2, it may make sense to target the draft of Wildfire Riptide for EOY. 

Based on last year, I’m not currently going to put in any goals regarding short fiction. I could imagine wanting to bang out something between finishing the draft of Heatstroke Heartbeat and starting editing, or finishing editing and starting the draft of Wildfire Riptide; but I don’t want to commit to anything right now.

Hmm, this also reminds me that I’m on the hook for a prologue novella for Wildfire Riptide. I know what the subject matter will be based on events already written in Heatstroke Heartbeat, but this is interesting for a couple of reasons: First, because it’s a smaller chunk of writing that should be achievable next year; second, because it reminds me that part of the strategy with these prologue novellas is that I can release them early as teasers for the full-length novels, and that should be part of the planning for the publication of Heatstroke Heartbeat. (Heatstroke Heartbeat is probably 20-40,000 words from being done, but the prologue novella is done now.)

Writing: Lessons learned & ignored

So much for the crunchy minutiae of goals and plans. Did I learn anything about craft or process this year? A partial list:

600 words a day is hard to sustain without some kind of larger systemic time-use change.There’s no silver bullet: Writing longhand is slow and introduces further delays due to transcription; typing on the computer is distraction-prone and requires the computer, which is more of a pain to tote around than the notebook. For now I’m sticking with longhand.Printing the story before editing is actually not that helpful because the discipline of cross-referencing the marked-up page to the computer file is almost impossibly annoying. I think I literally spent a week or two hand-editing Windburn Whiplash this year and then basically didn’t refer to those edits in the following like 6-8 weeks I spent editing on the computer.And the computer edits were better; I can’t be bothered to try to cram in whole-paragraph rewrites or chapter restructuring on a printed draft. The good parts of these stories – the character moments or even characters, the worldbuilding stuff, the twists – don’t really turn up in the outlines. They’re a product of being in the story at the word and sentence level. This is as true of micro-outlines – course corrections I’ll scribble down in a few minutes while I’m thinking about what’s next – as it is of the bigger outlines that I’ll create beforehand.Which doesn’t make the outlines useless. I really do need to know where I’m going. Or at least to have a trajectory where I could be going. But it does justify not going harder on outlining.Instagram has been serving me up videos where artists start with meaningless shapes – paint splashes, a pattern of mostly-randomly-placed boxes – and then nudge them gradually into cityscapes. I think this is like that. But I may have to come to terms with the fact that Heinlein rules / Writing Into the Dark may not be my process. Which is a pain, because revision is a timesuck, but I don’t think I can revise as I go to the level I need. A piece of boring discipline that I do actually need to be better at is: Tracking the small things I’ve created. Who and what is in each precinct, where they are relative to one another. What gods do people invoke in what circumstances. Health

CN: diet, weight loss, perhaps champagne problems more generally

This has the potential to be even more boring than the writing stuff, actually. 

Anyway, 2022 was the first full year back in the gym, and it brought a couple of modest accomplishments; most of my big lifts are up, and I hit 315 on the deadlift on Festivus, which is absolutely a lifetime record. (For people who are not stupid gym people: 315 is a milestone because it’s the 45-pound bar plus three of the big 45-pound plates on each side.) 

2022 was also the year I embraced, or at least cautiously sidled up to, a couple of ideas I’ve been resisting:

Carbs aren’t the problem.* If a high-carb food is problematic, it’s usually (a) hyperpalatable and/or (b) also high-fat; fat has more calories per gram than carbs. Consistent low-intensity cardio (walking) is probably better than every-so-often HIIT or a five-mile run once a week. The caloric impact of 5000 extra steps a day every day is surprisingly comparable to one of those tougher workouts, and I have yet to give myself a calf strain while walking. It’s also easier to recover from, which is important if I want to prioritize strength, which I do.Eating a lot of protein is hard but probably worth it, at least in terms of my ability to continue to get stronger.

I have an asterisk on “the problem” above because my health and fitness inputs have been very bipolar this year; on the one hand I’ve discovered a lot of useful material from fitness YouTubers like Paul Revelia, Mario Tomic, and Jeff Nippard, and on the other I also read Aubrey Gordon’s book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and am now a regular listener to her podcast with Michael Hobbes, Maintenance Phase. In general I’m working through how to separate my own received anti-fatness, which I do very much want to mitigate, from my hopes and wishes w/r/t reshaping my own body, which on the one hand are absolutely shaped by cultural anti-fatness and on the other are things that I feel like I have a right to. 

So that’s the asterisk on “the problem”. My default diet is only a problem relative to my own hopes for physical transformation; but of course you could fairly reverse it and say my hopes for physical transformation are a problem relative to the not at all insane goal of a peaceful and happy relationship with food. 

There’s a whole second tier of anxieties I could talk about with respect to strength, basically of the form “is it really OK to consume all this extra protein, which is pretty thermodynamically expensive, just to increment strength and lean body mass at a level I don’t necessarily really need?” But we’re just not going to do that here.

Art

I spent a decent amount of time playing guitar this year and actually got pretty good at the picking for Shawn James’ “Through the Valley.” I don’t know if I did any drawing at all, though, which is sad. Drawing is tough because I generally need a chunk of time for it; I can pick up the guitar and get some meaningful practice in 5 minutes, but it’s hard to do that with drawing. Maybe I need to figure out how to do quick sketches. 

One thing I realized in the period of more regular drawing I did in early 2021 was that everyone talks about knowing what to leave out as a skill in writing, but no one talks about it in drawing, and it’s critical. I have absolutely ruined drawings by trying to cram too much detail into certain sections and realizing I couldn’t carry it through the entire picture. This is part of what paralyzes me when I’m trying to think of things to draw; selecting a random object from around the house is actually kind of fraught. Looking at the kitchen table right now I see a glass jar (full of interesting light play that would be easy to get lost in), a vase full of flowers (so many petals), a cake box (basically just a prism), an empty fruit bowl (basically just contours)… where are my Goldilocks objects with the just-right level of complexity? Obviously “lack of Goldilocks objects” is not the problem here, the problem is I need to get my head on straight. 

Work and family

These get their own section as “things I’m not talking about online.” There’s a fair bit to say, but not here, I think.

Maybe the one thing that’s worth saying, vaguely, is that the kids are maturing into people with talents and enthusiasms, and figuring out how to honor and develop them is perplexing but also fun. U, who is 11, got into baking this year, thanks in part due to The Great British Baking Show and a cookbook full of one-bowl cake recipes (Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Cakes), and is producing an underground newspaper with some classmates; R, 9, is getting very into the Pokemon TCG and games more generally; K, 6, is working on ballet. It’s all pretty cool. 

I know the older two kids at least have stories they want to turn into something more concrete, and weirdly, that’s been the hardest thing to figure out how to make progress on. Maybe I’m too many millions of words removed from that feeling of mystery around the blank page; I don’t really get why they can’t just put some words down, see how they like them, and go from there. 

Coda (?)

Is that a fitting mission statement for 2023? Find the beginner’s mind again, bring the mystery back? It sounds pretty good, but maybe not really in keeping with the objective of going more pro on the writing front.

But this was never going to be a polished statement of purpose. It’s just an interim report. More than anything else, this is for me to look back at when 2023 is drawing to a close and see how far I have or haven’t come.

If you’ve got accomplishments from 2022 or objectives for 2023 that you’d like to share, it’d be an honor to see them in the comments. Stay warm, and take care of yourselves.

,

Matt

“I believe at this point they changed their language”

My doctor told me that sometimes pregnant women get itchy, it’s normal. That seemed like a banal description of my experience, so I trolled around the Internet, eventually finding a website called itchymoms.com. Here I learned about a condition called cholestasis of the liver, in which bile leaks into your bloodstream, slowly poisoning your bloodstream, causing a terrible itch; and, more important, it can immediately kill the babies.

I went to see my doctor. He assured me I did not have cholestasis of the liver. “It’s very rare,” he said. “But I have all the symptoms,” I said. “How do you know?” he asked. “Itchymoms.com,” I said. Doctors are not terribly interested in the online research of anxious patients, or in websites like itchymoms.com, which had online memorials for stillborn babies, but he said he would do a blood test to reassure me.

It took a week for the blood test to come back. In the meantime, I itched. I went to a hypnotist. For a wonderful hour, he convinced me that I did not itch. The hour was up. I itched. A week later, my test came back, positive for cholestasis of the liver.

Now, rather than seeing the tolerant, kindly faces of doctors indulging their anxious patient, I saw the stern and compassionate faces of doctors trying to make life-and-death decisions. “Every three days,” they said, “we will do an ultrasound to make sure there is still fetal movement. We cannot promise that in the intervening days the fetuses will not expire.” (I believe at this point they changed their language from “baby” to “fetus.”) They made sure I knew that they could make me no promises about the safety of the babies while trying vaguely to reassure me that everything would be all right.

Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

I forget who put me on to Sarah Ruhl, maybe Austin Kleon? Anyway, I should say most of this book is not parenting-related, and Ruhl has some great insights on storytelling in these mostly very brief essays; but the parenting material has hit hardest for me so far.

The journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking. More than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals.

“The Lost Thread,” Robin Sloan

Found via Robin’s newsletter, whose most recent edition contains links to his recent short fiction, notes on a writing collaboration with an AI assistant, thoughts on discoverability, and some other high-quality material.