Matt Weber's Blog, page 12

You told me, Sleep. I’ll wake you in the morning.

I know you’re supposed to put hiatus messages before the hiatus rather than after; this way makes you look unprofessional, not very put together at all. So, you know, fair play to me for transparency.

Anyway, NONA THE NINTH has destroyed my sleep schedule for the last week. I finished it Friday while literally falling into microsleeps between the paragraphs. I’ve been writing in the notebook, but I’m probably four days behind on transcription, and obviously I’ve just left this thing to scratch in the gutters for rat bones to suck the marrow out of.

At some point I should write a thing on why Tamsyn Muir’s writing works so well for me. It’ll probably be wrong, but any progress in understanding it is going to be helpful.

One thing I’ve sometimes thought, and even said, about the success of the Locked Tomb trilogy is that it’s interesting to watch how Tor has approached marketing much more like an indie than a traditional publisher. It’s of course tough to apportion credit to marketing when GIDEON THE NINTH was a unicorn and Tamsyn Muir is a genius, but consider:

GIDEON THE NINTH is free on Kindle Unlimited (although non-exclusive as far as I can tell, which isn’t an option for most indies);The first two chapters of GIDEON THE NINTH are free on tor.com;I’m old enough to remember when the first act of HARROW THE NINTH was released for free on Amazon, a few months in advance of the book;The first chapter of NONA THE NINTH is free on tor.com;Tor offered a free ebook of a short story, “The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex,” as some kind of reward for doing something in advance of HARROW THE NINTH, maybe pre-ordering; it’s now free on tor.com, and I still pore over it for clues;Tor emailed the poem that begins NONA THE NINTH out to their mailing list subscribers during, IIRC, National Poetry Month; And free, again, on tor.com, is “As Yet Unsent,” a short story released a couple months in advance of NONA THE NINTH.

This is in addition to the kind of stuff they do for a lot of their books, like author interviews and chapter-by-chapter rereads.

Tor is a well-resourced publisher with a massive mailing list, a huge blog, and a great reputation in science fiction. They are surely also using advertising and otherwise throwing money at promoting the Locked Tomb series; Tommy Arnold’s covers are also pulling at least their weight. But the content marketing that they are doing is (a) nearly free minus the costs of producting fiction, (b) deeply intertwined with the appeal of the books themselves, which are twisty mysteries as well as body-horror gorefests and hilarious meme vectors, (c) from the vantage of this reader, crushingly effective and massively appreciated.

For my own mental landmark, I should probably also write down that my first nephew was born two days ago! He is a very serious nugget with a very distinctive nose, or at least that’s how he looked right after he was born. My son was a little bummed because he was hoping they’d share a birthday, but he’s still happy to have another boy in his cohort of cousins. (We’re trying not to emphasize the fact that he will be 16 by the time the baby is his age. Oh well.)

Currently reading: Spook Street, Mick Herron

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.

Heatstroke Heartbeat progress, 2022-09-18

I added the raw word count deficit (i.e., total minus target) because that feels like potentially a motivating data point; rate to finish is cool, but this early in the project, it won’t move much unless I get ahead or behind by an enormous amount. Whereas moving the deficit below zero (i.e., getting ahead) is something I’d like to do–and, in principle, could do–any day.

You can in principle extract the deficit from the top chart, but in practice it’s hard to get a feel for it because you have to subtract out these two linear-ish trends (total and target) with very similar slopes. It’s easy to identify where they cross but not what trends in the difference look like, especially as the magnitude of the difference is small and decreasing relative to the accumulation of both total and target words.

Anyway, the bad news is my deficit is positive; the good news it’s small and not getting bigger with time. If I end the year with 57,700 words instead of 60,000, I’ll still be pretty pleased.

The overall picture here is I’m a few dozen words over rate to finish basically every day. This hasn’t been enough to overcome the few-hundred-word deficit I accumulated in a couple of missed days, but it’s been enough to keep that deficit pretty small.

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.

Why streaming doesn’t pay

I know Cory Doctorow has loomed large over this blog in its resurrected form, but anyone distributing art and music through platforms like Amazon and Spotify should at least think hard about the analyses of those platforms he and Rebecca Giblin present in CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM. I’m not an Audible member and don’t want to sign up for a trial, so I’ll have to wait until I get the book to read their chapter on Audible, “Why None of My Books Are Available on Audible: And Why Amazon Owes Me $3,218.55”; but anyone can listen to their chapter on Spotify and streaming, embedded above.

I’m not all that plugged into the indie author community, but I just don’t hear this stuff being talked about all that much. Even the more thoughtful and knowledgeable voices lean Big Tech-positive. And, look, it’s probably not going to stop me distributing my books on Amazon, at least in the short term–which is probably a big piece of why people don’t have the conversations. Then again, one of the loudest voices in the indie author community is Joanna Penn, who is both very enthusiastic about Big Tech and crypto and very enthusiastic about authors getting more money faster through direct sales. People are allowed to be complicated, I guess.

Couple of links, non-exhaustive:

Cory Doctorow on CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM

Joanna Penn on selling direct

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.

What are neurophysiologists doing?

Absolutely. Also see this paper from @mattweberphd and Thompson-Schill for a nuanced take on this issue: https://t.co/AIVxK3RXgV

— Marc Coutanche in (@MarcCoutanche) September 15, 2022

I had something else lined up for today, but it’s humbling and fun to be cited (“cited”) 12 years later for a 2010 comment on a methodological issue in cognitive neuroscience that’s apparently still polarizing researchers today. (Marc is a former labmate, of course; no one ever said #networking wasn’t a thing in science, or post-science.) Fun for obvious reasons, humbling because these humans are all deep thinkers at the top of their game working in a very complex field. The question presents as tedious because the relationship between brain activity and brain function has been acknowledged as lethally tricky at least since it was possible to measure hemodynamic signals in the brain, and it’s hard not to feel like we should be over it by now. But sometimes truth isn’t obliging.

I haven’t gone through all the discourse secondary to the tweet of origin, but anyone who’s interested in getting a better understanding of the relationship between the kind of colorful brain maps you see in popular science articles and what the brain might actually be doing could benefit from a skim through the replies.

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.

This strange, despondent land

The beggar had crept closer as I watched. He pointed at the old man, and said, “Still come from north and south to study here. Someday we are great again.” Then I thought of my own lovely country, whose eclipse–though without genetic damage–lasted twenty-three hundred years. And I gave him money, and told him that, yes, I was certain America would be great again someday, and left him, and returned here.

I have opened the shutters so that I can look across the city to the obelisk and catch the light of the dying sun. Its fields and valleys of fire do not seem more alien to me, or more threatening, than this strange, despondent land. Yet I know that we are all one–the beggar, the old man moving among the machines of a dead age, those machines themselves, the sun, and I.

“Seven American Nights,” Gene Wolfe (1978)

Fun fact (?): As well as anticipating the worst and dumbest slogan of the early twenty-first century, “Seven American Nights” arguably also anticipated deepfakes.

Questionable animal husbandry

We’re not quite twee enough to actually own a bearded dragon, but more than twee enough to send our kids to the kind of school that would ask us to foster one for the summer.

With the kids, I lean really hard on the idea that the lizard is a guest and not a toy. But I’m not too good to take a picture.

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.

Grasshopper, but make it steampunk.

Eastern Lubber grasshopper, Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, SC.

I had no idea what it was when I first saw it, but I showed my 8-year-old son a picture and he identified it immediately. I assumed he had mistaken something else for the word “lubber” but no, as usual when it comes to R. and animals, I was just wrong and he was right.

In explaining to the 6-year-old that it was “lubber” and not “lover” I learned that the word “landlubber” is not, as I had always assumed, a charming pirate rendition of “land-lover”; instead the word “lubber” seems to have come from Old French or maybe Swedish, meaning roughly “lunkhead.”

Brookgreen Gardens is an absolute treasure of a sculpture garden, by the way.

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.

“Witness increases the cost of ignorance.

It increases the cost of sabotage and blamelessness, which might bring people to your side who would enter awareness if the cost had not been made so high, and which raises the ideological overhead of blameless people whose main goal is avoiding the lower costs of repair so they can profit from the higher cost of brokenness.

A. R. Moxon, Sabotage: Part 5 – Neutrality & Witness

Typing this out, it all does seem a little abstract without the context — Moxon lays a lot of conceptual groundwork about “the blameless society” in the many thousands of words (over several newsletters) that precede this passage, and the whole thing is a meditation on sabotage and repair as they characterize the US and global society. But that first sentence is really the key anyway.

Not unrelated, the Office of Justice Data dropped a bunch of data on internal affairs cases at New Jersey law enforcement agencies.

Not not unrelated, I’ve got a book coming in the mail.

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.

Accountabilipost

I put myself on a regimen after Labor Day: 60,000 new words of Heatstroke Heartbeat by the end of the year. (Heatstroke Heartbeat is the third installment in a quartet about the illegal underground dragon-racing scene in the city of Yemareir; the first two books, Brimstone Slipstream and Windburn Whiplash are awaiting cover art before I publish; 60,000 words should be enough to complete the draft.) The chart shows progress. I started behind and remain so. But I haven’t gotten more behind! Much.

The progress piece of it (red line, blue bars) is pretty standard, you can get this in Scrivener and other writing software: Linearly increasing daily target based on how many words you need to write in how many days, actual progress plotted against it. And this is important, but I think the metric I’m most proud of is actually that purple line. “Rate to finish” just means, based on current progress and days remaining, how many words do I have to write each day to hit the target word count by the target date. It’s going to be very stable in the early part of the project because even entirely missing a day means I can distribute the 500-ish word target over 100 days or so. As I get closer to the finish line, big misses (or big surpluses) are going to make it swing a lot, because there’s less time to make up the words.

Anyway, I like it because it gives me a precise target for the day accounting for what’s already been done. As long as I exceed the rate to finish, I’ll finish early. On the days when I don’t, I’ll at least know exactly how much more I need to do.

My aspirational daily target is 600 words, for a cushion. I haven’t hit that yet. But I’ve hit rate to finish for three days running now — so even though I’m below my target total, in a very meaningful sense I’m still on track.

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.

Strawberry Blonde

Tonight’s writing fuel. Part of a mixed-four pack procured from Capitol Cider House at the DC Farmers’ Market on our way back from Myrtle Beach. It’s hard to find actual dry cider in New Jersey; this is it, and it’s good. “Strawberry Blonde.”

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.