Matt Weber's Blog, page 14

That story is not the story I’m telling today.

“That Story Isn’t the Story,” John Wiswell, Uncanny Magazine.

To every path its season

I’ve written before about how lifting is good practice for writing: It teaches you the value of consistency and incremental progress, it shows you how long it really doesn’t take to do more than you ever thought you could when you began. I’ve written a number of books, rarely on more than 1000 words a day; a couple weeks ago I broke 300 pounds on the deadlift at the age of 42, when I’d hurt myself more than once on much lower weights in my 30s. If you go up by 5-pound increments long enough, you’ll get there.

Unless, of course, you won’t. Data people love a linear regime, at least those of us who came up before the age of the Rectified Linear Unit. But ultimately, in real systems, figuring out where the regime is linear is at least as much art as science. The ability to hit a word count consistently is a key tool for a long-form writer, but it won’t get the book done on its own; that requires the extremely nonlinear and basically unmeasurable process of editing. The exercise science people are much more systematic and quantitative in how they adapt to the ceiling on linear progress, but ultimately they have to go nonlinear as well. At that level of your practice, you start thinking in cycles, in seasons; to have a season of abundance, you need a season of rest. The number doesn’t lose its meaning — it’s still some kind of measure of strength, of progress — but, when it can’t just go up, you’re forced to consider what it really meant that it was going up in the first place. What were you really after? Did you get it?

This is how people think about their own practices. The pandemic, it seems, has accelerated the quantification of work. When work gets quantified, managers learn to understand it in terms of data exhaust rather than the actual work product. It’s so easy to let the number be the most important thing, when it’s not you it’s measuring.

I worked at a company that calculated a quantitative score for the “operating capacity” of the employees in my division. Massive effort was devoted to “business intelligence” around this: Complex, configurable, high-throughput data pipelines for each team, bespoke KPI catalogues for tasks created by statistical sampling.

The output was widely known to bear an inverted U-shaped relationship to performance: It was high for median performers and low at both extremes. This is because median performers devoted a lot of time to the kind of tasks that were readily measured by the business intelligence instrumentation; poor performers might or might not put a lot of time in, but one way or another they didn’t complete many of those tasks; and the really good performers were put on more complex tasks whose output was hard to measure.

The solution was just to badger the high performers to measure their tasks better. Operating capacity had become too big to fail; there’d been too much investment in data engineering and measurement to just scrap it.

Every so often someone would get a brainwave: Many of the high performers were usually being put on technical tasks, some of them actually writing software. Why not just go to the engineering division and ask them how they measured people’s productivity? Surely they’d have some good ideas.

Of course they fucking didn’t. The engineers got paid way too much for anyone to sap their precious time with any of this shit.

I’m a data scientist; I love quantification, I love a linear regime. But I’m here to tell you, if someone tries to turn the single thing you spend the plurality of your waking hours on into one number? No matter how high it is, they do not value what you do.

The blazes make the trail

I’ve been shifting my online life away from socials and back to RSS. One thing I discovered a while back on Twitter was Cory Doctorow’s threaded versions of his essays on Pluralistic; in today’s, about a hacker jailbreaking a John Deere tractor, was a link to an old essay on “the Memex Method,” which is less a method for anything in particular than it is an apologia for blogging. Writing frequently and publicly, the argument goes, is a way to make a daily practice of rigorous thinking, to blaze landmarks on your mental trajectories, and to attract an audience who likes the way you think.

It’s a convincing argument. Like, I definitely would have forgotten there was a rap battle in the 14th-century Chinese classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms if I hadn’t written it down. And if I hadn’t decided to write a post referencing “the Memex Method,” I probably wouldn’t have gone back and verified that, yes, “memex” sounds familiar because I read it in the Laundry Files.

Anyway. I’m not a full-time writer, and I still have a lot of little kids to take care of and actual books to write; this isn’t yet another doomed declaration of a daily practice. But it is to say that you might be seeing a little more from me here, if only in the name of placing a few more waypoints in my memory.

Building characters for a story

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Cras nibh odio, efficitur at blandit ac, molestie sit amet neque. Proin euismod, nisi eu sodales porta, dui lacus convallis lorem, vel tristique turpis ipsum eu sapien. Aenean nec aliquam purus. Morbi viverra ipsum nec mi ultrices, id cursus urna suscipit. Nam urna dolor, dictum at odio vitae, iaculis faucibus nunc. Sed facilisis mauris ac malesuada blandit. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Integer lacinia velit odio, eu tincidunt eros fringilla eu. In suscipit, ex posuere ornare fermentum, augue purus tincidunt erat, id fermentum dolor ipsum at ipsum.

Inspirations for my books

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Praesent in varius felis, non accumsan lorem. Nunc consectetur metus feugiat, ultricies erat eget, tristique felis. Aliquam lobortis congue consequat. Vivamus tristique sapien at tincidunt scelerisque. Curabitur felis lacus, luctus id velit nec, luctus porttitor lacus. Morbi quis diam pretium, pellentesque metus eu, suscipit quam. Ut urna neque, elementum sit amet tortor et, ornare venenatis nulla. Nam orci enim, condimentum ullamcorper leo ultricies, dictum volutpat dolor. Aliquam quis enim arcu.

Maecenas blandit pulvinar metus id rhoncus. Suspendisse potenti. Aliquam erat volutpat. Quisque ligula ligula, dapibus scelerisque ipsum quis, tempor tristique lectus. Pellentesque eu placerat ligula, in rhoncus nibh. Etiam id nulla scelerisque, pellentesque odio nec, aliquam tortor. Aliquam erat volutpat. Donec placerat neque malesuada, ultricies eros sed, faucibus quam. Aliquam lacus turpis, dictum facilisis tristique posuere, fringilla in erat. Integer nec laoreet nunc. Donec ultricies volutpat justo, vel volutpat nunc. Cras sodales facilisis lacus, eget facilisis ligula venenatis quis. Morbi vulputate enim arcu, eget convallis dolor consectetur eget. Mauris quis imperdiet ipsum, non dapibus libero.

How to do effecting writing

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Nullam sed venenatis diam. Proin in ante eu

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One free solution for landing pages in WordPress

For something that would seem to be of keen interest to a lot of people, the top Google results combining the word “landing page” with “WordPress” have a lot of noise. You get a bunch of best theme lists (e.g.), 95% of which are variations on a generic image with a CTA button scrolling down to 3-4 icons denoting competencies and you get the idea. I guess this is because these themes are themselves “landing pages” of a sort? You also get Book Landing Page, which looks fabulous and is impossible to use.

Anyway, if you take the next most desperate expedient of Googling something like “how do I make a landing page in WordPress,” you get a bunch of tutorials for “page builder” plugins like Elementor and Beaver Builder, which seem great until you see them slither quietly around the fact that you have to pay for these things to use the features in the tutorial.

In their free incarnations at least, Elementor and Beaver Builder work within the confines of an existing theme — so if you’ve got a header, footer, sidebar, &c, this isn’t going to add up to a good landing page. However, it’s not hard to build an asymmetric two-column layout with an image, text, and a button that looks pretty much just like Book Landing Page; it’s just in the confines of the theme. So if you blank out the rest of the page, you can make something pretty nice.

This, I found rather too late at night, can be achieved with the Blank Slate plugin. So if you don’t mind (or, like me, would prefer) doing the design of the page yourself, Blank Slate and Elementor will get you a landing page that looks however you want without the need to FTP into your WordPress install and modify code, or even the need to change your theme.

[repost] “why does it matter if the best books have white protagonists?”

NB: This essay is reposted from my old blog. The original post was written when Una was almost 1. Now she’s 5, and I have another baby daughter. My opinions have not budged; and the American left’s internal crisis over “identity politics” would appear to lent them fresh relevance.

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“When A Popular List Of 100 ‘Best-Ever’ Teen Books Is The ‘Whitest Ever'”

Read the article and the comments. I’ll wait.

In place of what I actually want to write next, just imagine a big guy with a red face yelling a lot.

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Let me explain myself in a more measured way.

I have this daughter. She’s real cute. I don’t hang out with her as much as I’d like, but enough that I can’t really tell whether she can pass for white. I think maybe she can’t — though she’s changing every day, so in the long term, who knows? But even if you don’t know her mama, she does, and she’ll figure the genetics out, like you do.

It’s going to be some time before she can read at all, and some more before she can read with any sophistication. So there’ll be a period in there where she doesn’t have any idea whether “race/skin color [is] important to the context of the stories being told,” or whether a story is “ABOUT being black or Indian or Asian-American and how tough it is.” But she will have some idea whether there’s anyone who looks like her, or like her mama, in the book. And if there isn’t, and there isn’t in the next book, and there isn’t in the book after that or the book after that, she’s going to notice.

Beyond that? I’ve probably spoken too much for her already. But I’m guessing she’s going to wonder why. And I’m guessing she’s going to wonder if there might not be something weird, or off, or not quite right, about being the way she is, since no one seems to want to write about those sorts of people.

I’m white. I’m not going to pretend I know how that feels. Maybe it’s not that bad. But I’m also not going to pretend that “I’m so special that no one will write about me!” is a likely outcome.

The brain is a statistical engine. Our conscious minds are shit at probability, but unconsciously, we soak it up. We automatically notice what’s amiss.

The brain is a social engine. What’s talked about — what’s in other people’s brains — is attractive and valuable. What’s ignored and hidden is shameful and worthless.

Is this difficult? Have I said anything anybody doesn’t know?

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And, by the way, what is with all this speculation that maybe a huge chunk of kid’s books contain racially ambiguous protagonists? Did you ever notice that characters have a weird way of having names? My daughter, for example, one of my own movie’s main characters. Shin-Yi and I agreed (and here, by the way, I refer not to Shin-Yi O’Shaughnessy of Cork County, Ireland, nor to Shin-Yi Kvaratskhelia of the Republic of Georgia, but to my wife, Shin-Yi Lin, whose ancestry, it may shock you to learn, is mostly Han Chinese) way before she was born that, whatever her name was, it’d be part Chinese and part Western. And we loved Una for a first name, so her last name is Lin. So, go ahead, speak to me about how Hermione Hussein Granger was really Kenyan all along. (2016 update: Obviously I got this one wrong; quite pleased to have been made a fool of.)

While we’re in Q&A time, I’d also like to understand how “Making such a big deal out of things like this keeps racism alive and well.” I’d like that explained to me in meticulous detail. Is the KKK marching in the streets outside the publishers’ offices in New York, burning crosses for greater racial diversity in YA literature? I did not receive that telegram. Perhaps there was a paper jam in my fax machine.

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I couldn’t give a shit about basketball, truly I couldn’t, but I gave a shit about Jeremy Lin. (No relation.)

Look, I don’t get to pick who my daughter is. She gets more of a say, but she, too, is not without constraints. When I hear people being too cool for school about Jeremy Lin my fucking brain-pan overheats, because it matters if my daughter has a pro athlete for a role model. Not in my ideal world, maybe not in the world that will be, but in the world of weird wobbly possibility that obtains when your little girl is 11 months old and might, just might, find herself able and hungry to do literally any given thing at all, IT MATTERS.

I would have blown off Linsanity a year ago as well. Being a dad has made me hella more political, in the “identity politics” sense. I have probably jumped at shadows once or twice. I’m not sorry. Protip: Do not get me started on sexism.

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I am actually not fussed at NPR’s response, by the way. I think the article was badly titled, the solution of flagging the popularity-contest nature of the thing with a better title is easy and obvious, and the matter can more or less rest there. No need for NPR to distort reality, as long as they call it what it is. The top sf & fantasy list was called “Your Picks.” I wasn’t happy that NPR’s audience couldn’t bring themselves to upvote a single author of color, or that NPR was too oblivious to notice that fact, but that’s what it is. NPR listeners’ picks, which elevated a piece of STAR WARS companion merch over Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, but there you go.

It’s the self-satisfied complacency of the commentariat that’s nasty. Race is done, am I right? If you didn’t hear about it before it was cool, then it’s lamestream. (That’s right, you fuckers, I just called every one of you a hipster Sarah Palin.)

I don’t like the concept of “derailing.” I don’t like sniping over “privilege.” But I am starting to get where all this anger is coming from.

jack and the apples

Art first; context later.

Jack was Adam John First the Third,

As hale a lad as you’ve ever heard

Run over the brook on a rotting log

With an apple in his pocket and a loose-skinned dog;

And V was Valentine Eve Vereen,

As sharp a lady as you’ve ever seen

Sew pockets in the chimney of her old top hat

For pencils and books and apples for her cat.

Now Jack and V and Dog and Cat

Had something in common (did you guess at that?) —

For Cat and Dog and V and Jack

Were joined in their love of a red sweet snack.

Yes, Dog and Cat and Jack and V

Loved apples in every variety…

I wrote a story once. It was about stories, and how they can be dangerous, and about a father who is losing his son; and in it I name-checked a fictitious children’s book called JACK AND THE APPLES. The name-check itself is later, but the description comes first:

Kelly and Kieran, Madonna and child, that voice like coffee with cream poured into those words like tiny perfect cups. She always hated her writing, but for once she could forget it was hers, just giving him that voice, those words, that slight simple story built up from symbols so old and commonplace you wouldn’t think anyone could do anything with them any more. Apples, trees, a dog, a girl, a boy. But balanced, like calligraphy, flowing in this stately dance out of a spiral notebook that looked like an elephant’s bung-wipe. Light mother and dark boy, a book, a couch, a lap, the sun before naptime. All mine. Can you imagine that?

… I won’t quote the rest — I’m too proud of that story, even if no one would buy it, you can read it if you like what you saw.

The point is, more or less as soon as the story was done, I started thinking about JACK AND THE APPLES. Now, I’ve written a dissertation in neuroscience; I’ve written dozens of scientific articles and short stories; I’ve written a couple novels in the 50-60K range and a couple in the 160-170K range. Footprint-wise, in comparison, a kid’s book is like… well, a kid’s foot. But I tried a few times and it would never come out. I was trying to write it more or less like a comic, with a descriptive mise-en-scene for the artist and the words, and I just couldn’t get anything that would go where I wanted it to go (or even somewhere else interesting).

But tonight, after a weekend of furious editing on THE EIGHTH KING and somewhat less than furious recovery from a really awful cold, I was lying in bed with Rowan and the words just started coming.

I’m not saying the doggerel above will ever measure up to the impossible bar I set for this book in “Keynote Speech…” But I’m very interested that this is starting to take something approximating shape.

THE EIGHTH KING acquired by Curiosity Quills!

People of the Internet: It is with considerable delight and non-negligible bemusement that I announce the corporate takeover of my creative alter ego. The fine folks at Curiosity Quills Press have made the questionable decision to acquire my epic fantasy, THE EIGHTH KING. Publication date isn’t firm yet — you’ll hear more about that. You’ll hear more about a lot.

Speaking of which. There will definitely be book news posted here, especially the stuff that works better in long form. But for moment-to-moment updates, you’re probably going to want to follow me on Twitter or my author page on Facebook. Wattpad and Goodreads are also options, but I function more naturally in FB and Twitter, so there’ll be more action there.

When I was 7, I resolved to have my first novel published by age 10. Better late than never. Here we go.