Curtis C. Chen's Blog, page 23
February 7, 2014
Making Book: A Great Reason to Throw a Party
(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)
Time for some numbers! Are you ready? As of today--Friday, February 7th, one week after Thursday's Children officially went on sale--here's how many copies have been sold:8 Kindle eBooks13 paperbacksOf course, that doesn't count the 15 copies I purchased to give away as gifts--10 of them at last week's launch party--or the free downloads: 120 PDF and 11 plain text. (Creative Commons wins, amirite?)
There are now over 160 copies of the book in the hands of readers, and that's fantastic.
None of this is at all record-breaking, but it's not bad for a single-author short story collection by an obscure writer, with no marketing budget and no promotion aside from a handful of Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail messages.
Besides, this was never about "sales velocity." (I'm a terrible salesman, and I learned years ago to just stop trying.) It's not even really about sales. Honestly, nobody who doesn't know me has any reason to care about this book, and not even all of my friends or family will be interested in it. I appreciate all the congratulatory messages I've received, but I don't expect anyone to rush out and buy the book just because I wrote it.
I wrote these stories because I wanted people to read them. You can still find all of them online, but most people prefer their reading material packaged in some kind of book format--because that process implies editorial intervention and approval. Presenting something as a book is the publisher telling the reader that people who care about its content have looked at it, reviewed it, curated it and made it the best they could before actually publishing it.
When you pick up a book, you're trusting that its author and publisher have worked for months or years to ensure that the book you're about to read is something you'll enjoy. And that's why it feels like a betrayal when a book doesn't fulfill that promise.
Thursday's Children is not for everyone. (I pointed out to one friend that his grade-school-aged daughters should definitely not read it until they're older.) I hope the variety of stories included will appeal to a wide audience, but like I said, I'm a terrible salesman. I have no idea how to identify those "leads" and "target" them for "acquisition."
I'm playing the long game here, hoping that by putting my stuff out there for free, the people who find it and love it will help spread the word. (If you happen to be one of those people, the best thing you can do to support the book is to tell two friends about it, and ask them to tell two friends, and...) It might be a very long game, but I can wait.
Meanwhile, I'll keep writing.
Time for some numbers! Are you ready? As of today--Friday, February 7th, one week after Thursday's Children officially went on sale--here's how many copies have been sold:8 Kindle eBooks13 paperbacksOf course, that doesn't count the 15 copies I purchased to give away as gifts--10 of them at last week's launch party--or the free downloads: 120 PDF and 11 plain text. (Creative Commons wins, amirite?)
There are now over 160 copies of the book in the hands of readers, and that's fantastic.
None of this is at all record-breaking, but it's not bad for a single-author short story collection by an obscure writer, with no marketing budget and no promotion aside from a handful of Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail messages.
Besides, this was never about "sales velocity." (I'm a terrible salesman, and I learned years ago to just stop trying.) It's not even really about sales. Honestly, nobody who doesn't know me has any reason to care about this book, and not even all of my friends or family will be interested in it. I appreciate all the congratulatory messages I've received, but I don't expect anyone to rush out and buy the book just because I wrote it.
I wrote these stories because I wanted people to read them. You can still find all of them online, but most people prefer their reading material packaged in some kind of book format--because that process implies editorial intervention and approval. Presenting something as a book is the publisher telling the reader that people who care about its content have looked at it, reviewed it, curated it and made it the best they could before actually publishing it.
When you pick up a book, you're trusting that its author and publisher have worked for months or years to ensure that the book you're about to read is something you'll enjoy. And that's why it feels like a betrayal when a book doesn't fulfill that promise.
Thursday's Children is not for everyone. (I pointed out to one friend that his grade-school-aged daughters should definitely not read it until they're older.) I hope the variety of stories included will appeal to a wide audience, but like I said, I'm a terrible salesman. I have no idea how to identify those "leads" and "target" them for "acquisition."
I'm playing the long game here, hoping that by putting my stuff out there for free, the people who find it and love it will help spread the word. (If you happen to be one of those people, the best thing you can do to support the book is to tell two friends about it, and ask them to tell two friends, and...) It might be a very long game, but I can wait.
Meanwhile, I'll keep writing.
February 5, 2014
I Dream of Google
Three things you should know about me:
I still hand-code my HTML (yes, even this blog post)My favorite Autobot is Jazz (voice of Scatman Crothers)I used to work at GoogleAnd I have only ever dreamed about one of those things. (I guess that's actually four things. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!)
I worked at Google for a little over four years. Yes, I started before the IPO; yes, I had stock options; yes, I was a paper millionaire for, like, two seconds before I had to pay the taxes. I'm not rich, and I haven't retired (unless you count moving to Portlandia).
The first two years were the best. I started when the company only had about a thousand employees. I was hired into a team of four people--I was the fourth--to build internal tools for the Online Sales and Operations division (Sheryl Sandberg's group, for what it's worth; I saw her pretty regularly around the building, and briefly met her at an internal book club meeting once, but even then, she had no idea who I was).
When I dream about being at Google, I dream about the good things. The intelligent and passionate people there. The opportunities to solve interesting problems. And, of course, the various free and subsidized personal services, which helped keep employees "on campus" as much as possible, to maximize the potential for unplanned collaboration (and exempt overtime). All the crazy perks depicted in that movie The Internship ? All true, and not half of what was available when I was there. Who knows what else they've added since then.
There were a lot of good things that would have kept me at Google, but in the end, I had to move on.
By the time I left, in early 2008, the company employed well over ten thousand people worldwide. My team had grown by an order of magnitude and was on the brink of being politicked out of existence. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that even though Google may be the best workplace in the modern world, it is still a commercial corporation: a machine built to produce profit. It's a big company. And no organization grows to that size without picking up a few parasites along the way.
Those last two years were, to be sure, still better than the year I spent at my previous employer, working with one of the worst managers I have ever endured. But since I can make the comparison, I have to say that it may--may--be better to struggle against incompetence than to fight active malign intent. Easier, in any case. No villain ever thinks he's the bad guy, and when he has more powerful allies than you do, the battles can be very discouraging.
I stopped fighting, at some point, because I simply didn't know why I was bothering to do it any more. I had come to Google with the romantic notion that it would be the last place I ever worked--how could any workplace ever get better than this?--and that's probably why it hurt so much when the truth of it slapped me in the face, metaphorically.
I didn't belong there. I didn't want to work for a big company. I didn't want to work for any company, really. Even though I appreciated all the support systems offered by the organization--the free food, the flexible work hours, the on-site massages--and even though I still believed in the cause, I simply couldn't stay after having seen how ruthlessly some would pursue a brass ring. I would always be wary of being betrayed again.
Maybe I was lucky. Maybe it's a good thing that I learned, before I turned forty, that I was not fitted to be a salaryman. Maybe it's better that I moved away from the endless one-upmanship of Silicon Valley.
Maybe I'm happier now than I would have been otherwise.
Sometimes, at night, I dream about being back at Google. But I always wake up.
I still hand-code my HTML (yes, even this blog post)My favorite Autobot is Jazz (voice of Scatman Crothers)I used to work at GoogleAnd I have only ever dreamed about one of those things. (I guess that's actually four things. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!)
I worked at Google for a little over four years. Yes, I started before the IPO; yes, I had stock options; yes, I was a paper millionaire for, like, two seconds before I had to pay the taxes. I'm not rich, and I haven't retired (unless you count moving to Portlandia).
The first two years were the best. I started when the company only had about a thousand employees. I was hired into a team of four people--I was the fourth--to build internal tools for the Online Sales and Operations division (Sheryl Sandberg's group, for what it's worth; I saw her pretty regularly around the building, and briefly met her at an internal book club meeting once, but even then, she had no idea who I was).
When I dream about being at Google, I dream about the good things. The intelligent and passionate people there. The opportunities to solve interesting problems. And, of course, the various free and subsidized personal services, which helped keep employees "on campus" as much as possible, to maximize the potential for unplanned collaboration (and exempt overtime). All the crazy perks depicted in that movie The Internship ? All true, and not half of what was available when I was there. Who knows what else they've added since then.
There were a lot of good things that would have kept me at Google, but in the end, I had to move on.
By the time I left, in early 2008, the company employed well over ten thousand people worldwide. My team had grown by an order of magnitude and was on the brink of being politicked out of existence. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that even though Google may be the best workplace in the modern world, it is still a commercial corporation: a machine built to produce profit. It's a big company. And no organization grows to that size without picking up a few parasites along the way.
Those last two years were, to be sure, still better than the year I spent at my previous employer, working with one of the worst managers I have ever endured. But since I can make the comparison, I have to say that it may--may--be better to struggle against incompetence than to fight active malign intent. Easier, in any case. No villain ever thinks he's the bad guy, and when he has more powerful allies than you do, the battles can be very discouraging.
I stopped fighting, at some point, because I simply didn't know why I was bothering to do it any more. I had come to Google with the romantic notion that it would be the last place I ever worked--how could any workplace ever get better than this?--and that's probably why it hurt so much when the truth of it slapped me in the face, metaphorically.
I didn't belong there. I didn't want to work for a big company. I didn't want to work for any company, really. Even though I appreciated all the support systems offered by the organization--the free food, the flexible work hours, the on-site massages--and even though I still believed in the cause, I simply couldn't stay after having seen how ruthlessly some would pursue a brass ring. I would always be wary of being betrayed again.
Maybe I was lucky. Maybe it's a good thing that I learned, before I turned forty, that I was not fitted to be a salaryman. Maybe it's better that I moved away from the endless one-upmanship of Silicon Valley.
Maybe I'm happier now than I would have been otherwise.
Sometimes, at night, I dream about being back at Google. But I always wake up.
January 31, 2014
Making Book: Happy New Book!
(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)
Today's the day! You can now buy Thursday's Children in paperback or Kindle editions:
Attack of the stacks of paperbacks
My friend Kenna checks the eBook
I know traditionally published authors may wait as long as two years from the time they submit a finished manuscript to when the book actually goes on sale, and I imagine that's rather torturous. It's been maybe five months since DeeAnn and I started working on Thursday's Children, and though I'm very happy with how much we accomplished in such a short time, this final week has been a real crunch, and I'm ready for the production process to be over. (Mostly. I still have to produce an EPUB file to push to other, non-Amazon eBook distributors, but that's always been lower priority.)
Today is also the the start of the Chinese New Year, traditionally a time for celebration and hope (and red envelopes). It's now the year of the horse. In Chinese, the characters for "horse" and "mother" are very similar, and in fact, they're near-homophones in Mandarin, differing only in inflection. I don't know why I mentioned that. It's not really relevant. I may be a little punchy. Did you know my mom worked for many years as a public librarian? It's true.
One last thing... I may not have mentioned it before, but I'm releasing Thursday's Children under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. (You can download PDF and plain text versions of the entire book for free, and re-share them as much as you like. Please. I'm begging you.) I started the 512 Words of Fewer project with the same license, and I still believe it's a good idea. Because I am pretty much a nobody in the wider writing world, and making a name for myself is more important than making money at this point.
Sure, my friends and family and other acquaintances who like me are extremely supportive, but the few hundred people I know personally isn't a big enough audience to build a career. If I ever want one thousand true fans, I'm going to need an even greater number of casually interested readers, and I want as few barriers as possible between them and my content, for that fraction of a second between pictures of cats with pork products adhered to them.
Hi! I'm Curtis Chen. I write science fiction and fantasy. Would you like to read some of my stories?
Today's the day! You can now buy Thursday's Children in paperback or Kindle editions:
Attack of the stacks of paperbacks
My friend Kenna checks the eBook
I know traditionally published authors may wait as long as two years from the time they submit a finished manuscript to when the book actually goes on sale, and I imagine that's rather torturous. It's been maybe five months since DeeAnn and I started working on Thursday's Children, and though I'm very happy with how much we accomplished in such a short time, this final week has been a real crunch, and I'm ready for the production process to be over. (Mostly. I still have to produce an EPUB file to push to other, non-Amazon eBook distributors, but that's always been lower priority.)
Today is also the the start of the Chinese New Year, traditionally a time for celebration and hope (and red envelopes). It's now the year of the horse. In Chinese, the characters for "horse" and "mother" are very similar, and in fact, they're near-homophones in Mandarin, differing only in inflection. I don't know why I mentioned that. It's not really relevant. I may be a little punchy. Did you know my mom worked for many years as a public librarian? It's true.
One last thing... I may not have mentioned it before, but I'm releasing Thursday's Children under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. (You can download PDF and plain text versions of the entire book for free, and re-share them as much as you like. Please. I'm begging you.) I started the 512 Words of Fewer project with the same license, and I still believe it's a good idea. Because I am pretty much a nobody in the wider writing world, and making a name for myself is more important than making money at this point.
Sure, my friends and family and other acquaintances who like me are extremely supportive, but the few hundred people I know personally isn't a big enough audience to build a career. If I ever want one thousand true fans, I'm going to need an even greater number of casually interested readers, and I want as few barriers as possible between them and my content, for that fraction of a second between pictures of cats with pork products adhered to them.
Hi! I'm Curtis Chen. I write science fiction and fantasy. Would you like to read some of my stories?
January 29, 2014
I Just Want the Damn Screeners
Very rarely does moviegoing feel like a chore to me, but it does happen once in a while. (Like the time we decided to watch all three extended-edition Lord of the Rings movies in a single day... but that's another story.)
The 2014 Oscar nominations were announced on January 16th. The awards will be handed out on March 2nd. That's just forty-five days--barely a month and a half--for Academy voters (and interested civilians like moi) to make their decisions. And once again this year, there are nine Best Picture nominees. Nine! DeeAnn and I have seen three of them. The least depressing ones, apparently. More on that later.
I don't have a horse in this race, but suppose--just suppose--you're a conscientious Academy member who wants to actually watch all the nominated films before voting. Well, you've got your work cut out for you. Ballots are due back to PricewaterhouseCoopers for final tabulation no later than 5:00 PM Pacific Time on February 25th. And in the worst-case scenario--i.e., you haven't seen any of the nominees--you've got fifty-seven movies to watch in just forty days.
(ASIDE: it's not actually that bad, since fifteen of those nominees are short films--five each of documentary, animated, and live action--and you could cheat on original song by voting for a song without having seen the film in which it's featured, and you may not actually be eligible to vote in some categories because of your specific profession. But for the sake of the thought experiment, let's examine the absolute worst case here.)
If you wanted to watch every single one of the nominated films before voting, you'd have to watch an average of three movies every two days. That in itself is not a hardship--people pay to sit through much more than that at film festivals--but the catch is that many of these movies are only playing in theatres. If you're an Academy member in Los Angeles, your card will get you into any number of screenings for free, and you've probably also got a stack of DVDs at home sent to you by the studios. So it's just a matter of making the time.
But what about the aforementioned civilians, like myself, who are interested in the big pageant and want to have informed opinions at their viewing parties? That's a lot tougher. Of the Best Picture nominees, only one (Captain Phillips) has been released on DVD so far. A few years ago, Shorts International started packaging each year's nominated live action and animated shorts for limited theatrical runs (and sells some of them on iTunes, though availability there is spotty). Some of the foreign films might never see an American release. The only good news, I suppose, is that all the Documentary Feature nominees are available for home viewing, and four out of the five (The Act of Killing, Cutie and the Boxer, Dirty Wars, and The Square) are on Netflix streaming.
Which brings me to my point: why don't movie studios want to distribute their films more widely? It would seem to be to their advantage to let people buy--or even just rent--movies during awards season, when the media is all fired up about reporting on the races, and even smaller films can get a lot of exposure. Sure, I can pay to see all the Best Picture nominees--but I'd have to drive to at least three different theatres, and plan my day around whatever showtimes were available. If those movies were available to rent from Amazon Instant Video
(not iTunes, because their rental interface sucks eggs), I would be all over that--and I'm sure a lot of other people would be, too.
The studios aren't making any more money by limiting my viewing options. They're actually losing money, because many of the films I would see now--while they're Academy Award nominees--I will forget about later, because most of them won't actually win an Oscar, and then I'll lose interest.
It's not the money that's the issue; it's convenience. I will totally spend as much as ten bucks on a movie rental, but I won't spend the time required to find a showtime and location that fit into my schedule. Because at the end of the day, it's just entertainment, and I have lots of other, more convenient options for fun things to do.
The 2014 Oscar nominations were announced on January 16th. The awards will be handed out on March 2nd. That's just forty-five days--barely a month and a half--for Academy voters (and interested civilians like moi) to make their decisions. And once again this year, there are nine Best Picture nominees. Nine! DeeAnn and I have seen three of them. The least depressing ones, apparently. More on that later.
I don't have a horse in this race, but suppose--just suppose--you're a conscientious Academy member who wants to actually watch all the nominated films before voting. Well, you've got your work cut out for you. Ballots are due back to PricewaterhouseCoopers for final tabulation no later than 5:00 PM Pacific Time on February 25th. And in the worst-case scenario--i.e., you haven't seen any of the nominees--you've got fifty-seven movies to watch in just forty days.
(ASIDE: it's not actually that bad, since fifteen of those nominees are short films--five each of documentary, animated, and live action--and you could cheat on original song by voting for a song without having seen the film in which it's featured, and you may not actually be eligible to vote in some categories because of your specific profession. But for the sake of the thought experiment, let's examine the absolute worst case here.)
If you wanted to watch every single one of the nominated films before voting, you'd have to watch an average of three movies every two days. That in itself is not a hardship--people pay to sit through much more than that at film festivals--but the catch is that many of these movies are only playing in theatres. If you're an Academy member in Los Angeles, your card will get you into any number of screenings for free, and you've probably also got a stack of DVDs at home sent to you by the studios. So it's just a matter of making the time.
But what about the aforementioned civilians, like myself, who are interested in the big pageant and want to have informed opinions at their viewing parties? That's a lot tougher. Of the Best Picture nominees, only one (Captain Phillips) has been released on DVD so far. A few years ago, Shorts International started packaging each year's nominated live action and animated shorts for limited theatrical runs (and sells some of them on iTunes, though availability there is spotty). Some of the foreign films might never see an American release. The only good news, I suppose, is that all the Documentary Feature nominees are available for home viewing, and four out of the five (The Act of Killing, Cutie and the Boxer, Dirty Wars, and The Square) are on Netflix streaming.
Which brings me to my point: why don't movie studios want to distribute their films more widely? It would seem to be to their advantage to let people buy--or even just rent--movies during awards season, when the media is all fired up about reporting on the races, and even smaller films can get a lot of exposure. Sure, I can pay to see all the Best Picture nominees--but I'd have to drive to at least three different theatres, and plan my day around whatever showtimes were available. If those movies were available to rent from Amazon Instant Video
(not iTunes, because their rental interface sucks eggs), I would be all over that--and I'm sure a lot of other people would be, too.The studios aren't making any more money by limiting my viewing options. They're actually losing money, because many of the films I would see now--while they're Academy Award nominees--I will forget about later, because most of them won't actually win an Oscar, and then I'll lose interest.
It's not the money that's the issue; it's convenience. I will totally spend as much as ten bucks on a movie rental, but I won't spend the time required to find a showtime and location that fit into my schedule. Because at the end of the day, it's just entertainment, and I have lots of other, more convenient options for fun things to do.
January 25, 2014
Making Book: The Mythical One-Man Band
(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)
Just in case it wasn't clear before: THURSDAY'S CHILDREN is self-published. Yes, I said self-published. I know some writers prefer the term "indie author," but I don't feel the need for that bit of dress-up. Let's call a spade a spade. This one book will not bring me any sort of fame or fortune. Nobody in the history of the world has ever gotten rich off a frickin' short story collection.
The main reason I'm publishing at all is to commemorate a personal milestone, and to share it with my family and friends. I've written more than two hundred and fifty stories, y'all. That's a hell of a thing. I want to celebrate it, and you're invited to join me. That's all.
So I'm self-publishing this book for fun. I am doing the work mostly by myself, but I'm not doing it alone. What's the difference? I'm not alone, because I couldn't do any of this without the infrastructure and systems that others have already built.
It's like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/joebehr/6170035291/
There is an entire Internet of resources that I've taken advantage of, and which have been absolutely necessary for this project. I don't begrudge any of those other individuals and organizations the money I've paid for their tools or the time I've spent learning how to use them.
Here's a short list of just some of the software, sites, and services I've used in the creation of this book: Scrivener, Microsoft Word, GIMP, Emacs, Lulu, Createspace, Amazon, BookBaby, Blogger, Gmail, Chrome, Flickr, and PayPal.
(By the way, that list doesn't include all the standards—file formats, network protocols, and more—that make it possible for me to turn my raw data into something humans will want to look at. For example: HTML/XHTML, CSS, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, DOC/DOCX, MOBI, EPUB, and ZIP, to name just a few.)
And then there are the people, actual human beings, who helped me with the production process: DeeAnn Sole, my redoubtable editor; Laura Mixon, who wrote a fantastic introduction; and Natalie Metzger, who created the amazing cover art and interior illustrations. Plus there are all the 512 readers who gave feedback over the last five years, and my fellow writers who offered invaluable publishing advice. (You'll find a more complete list in the Acknowledgements section at the back of the book.)
I could have made the book without these people, but it would have been a much inferior thing.
Nobody creates in a vacuum. If nothing else, any artist needs an audience for her work; sometimes it's an audience of one, but in most cases, we want a plurality to see and enjoy our work. At the very least, it's asking yourself: "Will anybody else care about this?" And in a world of seven billion people, the answer is probably YES. Then it's a matter of crafting your work so that it's meaningful and appealing, to whatever degree satisfies your sensibilities, commercial or otherwise.
It's okay to make art for art's sake, and not expect to reap a dime of financial reward. I mean, hell, I spend who knows how many hours making at least a dozen free puzzling events every year, and even spend my own hard-earned money (and precious time) to subsidize their creation. I do this because I want to share those fun things with other like-minded people. If I get something tangible in return, great. I'm not expecting it. That's not why I do the work.
All that is to say that I don't expect to break even on self-publishing THURSDAY'S CHILDREN. (You know the old joke: How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Well, you start with a large fortune...) I don't expect to sell more than a hundred copies of the book—if that many—and that's just fine. I'm doing this for love, not money. And we will do things for love that we would not do for any amount of money.
Just in case it wasn't clear before: THURSDAY'S CHILDREN is self-published. Yes, I said self-published. I know some writers prefer the term "indie author," but I don't feel the need for that bit of dress-up. Let's call a spade a spade. This one book will not bring me any sort of fame or fortune. Nobody in the history of the world has ever gotten rich off a frickin' short story collection.
The main reason I'm publishing at all is to commemorate a personal milestone, and to share it with my family and friends. I've written more than two hundred and fifty stories, y'all. That's a hell of a thing. I want to celebrate it, and you're invited to join me. That's all.
So I'm self-publishing this book for fun. I am doing the work mostly by myself, but I'm not doing it alone. What's the difference? I'm not alone, because I couldn't do any of this without the infrastructure and systems that others have already built.
It's like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/joebehr/6170035291/
There is an entire Internet of resources that I've taken advantage of, and which have been absolutely necessary for this project. I don't begrudge any of those other individuals and organizations the money I've paid for their tools or the time I've spent learning how to use them.
Here's a short list of just some of the software, sites, and services I've used in the creation of this book: Scrivener, Microsoft Word, GIMP, Emacs, Lulu, Createspace, Amazon, BookBaby, Blogger, Gmail, Chrome, Flickr, and PayPal.
(By the way, that list doesn't include all the standards—file formats, network protocols, and more—that make it possible for me to turn my raw data into something humans will want to look at. For example: HTML/XHTML, CSS, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, DOC/DOCX, MOBI, EPUB, and ZIP, to name just a few.)
And then there are the people, actual human beings, who helped me with the production process: DeeAnn Sole, my redoubtable editor; Laura Mixon, who wrote a fantastic introduction; and Natalie Metzger, who created the amazing cover art and interior illustrations. Plus there are all the 512 readers who gave feedback over the last five years, and my fellow writers who offered invaluable publishing advice. (You'll find a more complete list in the Acknowledgements section at the back of the book.)
I could have made the book without these people, but it would have been a much inferior thing.
Nobody creates in a vacuum. If nothing else, any artist needs an audience for her work; sometimes it's an audience of one, but in most cases, we want a plurality to see and enjoy our work. At the very least, it's asking yourself: "Will anybody else care about this?" And in a world of seven billion people, the answer is probably YES. Then it's a matter of crafting your work so that it's meaningful and appealing, to whatever degree satisfies your sensibilities, commercial or otherwise.
It's okay to make art for art's sake, and not expect to reap a dime of financial reward. I mean, hell, I spend who knows how many hours making at least a dozen free puzzling events every year, and even spend my own hard-earned money (and precious time) to subsidize their creation. I do this because I want to share those fun things with other like-minded people. If I get something tangible in return, great. I'm not expecting it. That's not why I do the work.
All that is to say that I don't expect to break even on self-publishing THURSDAY'S CHILDREN. (You know the old joke: How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Well, you start with a large fortune...) I don't expect to sell more than a hundred copies of the book—if that many—and that's just fine. I'm doing this for love, not money. And we will do things for love that we would not do for any amount of money.
January 22, 2014
I Hate the Word "Tribe"
Just to be clear: this is not a rant against Seth Godin. I actually think he's got some pretty great ideas about leadership, as shown in his TED talk from 2009 (worth watching for the vintage Kindle 1 prop, if nothing else).
My problem is with the word "tribe" and all it implies: exclusion, small-mindedness, and bigotry.
I know. You're probably thinking that tribe is a positive concept, as Godin argues in his book; that it signals connection and camaraderie, often across great distances; that it can be a lifeline for those who feel isolated by their unusual interests. And that is all true and good, ideologically speaking. My specific problem is with terminology, and the unfortunate etymological baggage that comes with calling something a "tribe."
Try this. Do a Google Image Search for the word "tribe." I'm guessing your entire first page of results will be photos of primitive-looking, possibly aboriginal peoples:
And that, I believe, is the first thing that comes to mind when anyone says the word "tribe:" it's not some noble grassroots movement petitioning for political change, and not some far-flung collective which has self-organized over the Internet. No. It's a bunch of crudely dressed people of color standing around a jungle, forest, or other wilderness. In a word: savages.
I know how people want to use the word, as a rallying point--perhaps even subverting that prejudicial, historical meaning--but it's difficult for me to get beyond it. Because the concept of "tribe" is explicitly discriminatory. People talk about "finding their tribe" in a good way, but I'm always painfully aware of the flip side: that by identifying yourself with one group, you are also willfully segregating yourself from others. If only a select group are "your people," then everyone else in the world is, by definition, not your brethren. And that puts you one step closer to thinking of them as your enemy.
Even if you don't go that far, one could argue that these tribal distinctions are necessary and unavoidable. We could talk about the Rule of 150 (a.k.a. Dunbar's number), but it's more fun to discuss...
...the Monkeysphere!
Because, you know, monkeys.
If you haven't yet, go and read "What is the Monkeysphere?" by David Wong. Yes, it's on Cracked.com, but don't let that fool you--the tone may be flippant, but the issues it addresses are serious, and his conclusions are sound.
(BTW, "David Wong" is the pen name of Jason Pargin, executive editor of Cracked.com; he's also written two comic horror novels, John Dies at the End and This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It . I did not make up any of this.)
Wong's basic argument is the same as Dunbar's, Gladwell's, and any number of other social scientists: that there is an upper limit to human beings' cognitive ability to maintain stable social relationships, and that limit is about a hundred and fifty people. But Wong distinguishes himself on page 2 of his article, where he offers this advice:
In this case, however, it's not about science or technology or engineering; it's about changing the way we think of ourselves and others, and that is a tough, long-term, cultural conundrum. It's not something we can cure with a pill or a device or legislation or even a good story. It's something that has to happen to every person, individually, as he or she grows up. You've got to be carefully taught and all that.
I hate the word "tribe" because it implies we're still restricted by that cognitive limit, and we can't get beyond it. And that's just not true. Maybe I don't personally know every single one of the hundreds of people I'm connected to through Twitter or Facebook or other social media, but I know a little bit about each of them. And every small piece of information makes those names and tiny pictures more human to me.
It's not about who's in which tribe, or whether I share all (or any) of their likes or dislikes or political views. It's about people, and understanding that diversity is good. I want to be friends with smart people who disagree with me (as long as they're not jerks about it)!
The thing I'm really interested in is community. (I know some people don't like that word either, and I can understand where they're coming from: again, it's all about usage and intent. Prefixing anything with "the" can assign it an undeserved weight--for example, consider the difference between one show called "Following," versus another called "The Following".)
To me, "community" implies openness and a willingness to embrace new members. Fandom is a community. The Internet is chock-full of meeting places for all sorts of virtual communities, new cultures whose only entrance requirement is a shared interest in something. Create an account and you can immediately start posting and commenting and participating.
You might still have to kiss some frogs, but keep trying and you will find a place where you belong. And if that's taking too long? Start your own community. Plant the seed and see what happens. You have nothing to lose but your loneliness.
My problem is with the word "tribe" and all it implies: exclusion, small-mindedness, and bigotry.
I know. You're probably thinking that tribe is a positive concept, as Godin argues in his book; that it signals connection and camaraderie, often across great distances; that it can be a lifeline for those who feel isolated by their unusual interests. And that is all true and good, ideologically speaking. My specific problem is with terminology, and the unfortunate etymological baggage that comes with calling something a "tribe."
Try this. Do a Google Image Search for the word "tribe." I'm guessing your entire first page of results will be photos of primitive-looking, possibly aboriginal peoples:
And that, I believe, is the first thing that comes to mind when anyone says the word "tribe:" it's not some noble grassroots movement petitioning for political change, and not some far-flung collective which has self-organized over the Internet. No. It's a bunch of crudely dressed people of color standing around a jungle, forest, or other wilderness. In a word: savages.
I know how people want to use the word, as a rallying point--perhaps even subverting that prejudicial, historical meaning--but it's difficult for me to get beyond it. Because the concept of "tribe" is explicitly discriminatory. People talk about "finding their tribe" in a good way, but I'm always painfully aware of the flip side: that by identifying yourself with one group, you are also willfully segregating yourself from others. If only a select group are "your people," then everyone else in the world is, by definition, not your brethren. And that puts you one step closer to thinking of them as your enemy.
Even if you don't go that far, one could argue that these tribal distinctions are necessary and unavoidable. We could talk about the Rule of 150 (a.k.a. Dunbar's number), but it's more fun to discuss...
...the Monkeysphere!
Because, you know, monkeys.
If you haven't yet, go and read "What is the Monkeysphere?" by David Wong. Yes, it's on Cracked.com, but don't let that fool you--the tone may be flippant, but the issues it addresses are serious, and his conclusions are sound.
(BTW, "David Wong" is the pen name of Jason Pargin, executive editor of Cracked.com; he's also written two comic horror novels, John Dies at the End and This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It . I did not make up any of this.)
Wong's basic argument is the same as Dunbar's, Gladwell's, and any number of other social scientists: that there is an upper limit to human beings' cognitive ability to maintain stable social relationships, and that limit is about a hundred and fifty people. But Wong distinguishes himself on page 2 of his article, where he offers this advice:
[R]eject [the] binary thinking of "good vs. bad" or "us vs. them." Know problems cannot be solved with clever slogans and over-simplified step-by-step programs... take the amount you think you know, reduce it by 99.999%, and then you'll have an idea of how much you actually know regarding things outside your Monkeysphere.It's not about denying our biological deficiencies. It's about acknowledging and accepting those limits, and finding ways to overcome or bypass them. Can't run fast enough to chase down that prey animal? Try riding a horse, or domesticating dogs, or inventing projectile weapons. Not sure when it's going to get cold again or when's a good time to plant crops? Invent the calendar and keep track of annual weather cycles. The history of human civilization is all about us giving Mother Nature the middle finger and saying "screw this, we can do better."
In this case, however, it's not about science or technology or engineering; it's about changing the way we think of ourselves and others, and that is a tough, long-term, cultural conundrum. It's not something we can cure with a pill or a device or legislation or even a good story. It's something that has to happen to every person, individually, as he or she grows up. You've got to be carefully taught and all that.
I hate the word "tribe" because it implies we're still restricted by that cognitive limit, and we can't get beyond it. And that's just not true. Maybe I don't personally know every single one of the hundreds of people I'm connected to through Twitter or Facebook or other social media, but I know a little bit about each of them. And every small piece of information makes those names and tiny pictures more human to me.
It's not about who's in which tribe, or whether I share all (or any) of their likes or dislikes or political views. It's about people, and understanding that diversity is good. I want to be friends with smart people who disagree with me (as long as they're not jerks about it)!
The thing I'm really interested in is community. (I know some people don't like that word either, and I can understand where they're coming from: again, it's all about usage and intent. Prefixing anything with "the" can assign it an undeserved weight--for example, consider the difference between one show called "Following," versus another called "The Following".)
To me, "community" implies openness and a willingness to embrace new members. Fandom is a community. The Internet is chock-full of meeting places for all sorts of virtual communities, new cultures whose only entrance requirement is a shared interest in something. Create an account and you can immediately start posting and commenting and participating.
You might still have to kiss some frogs, but keep trying and you will find a place where you belong. And if that's taking too long? Start your own community. Plant the seed and see what happens. You have nothing to lose but your loneliness.
January 18, 2014
Making Book: Inspirations and Introductions
(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)
Before I get into this week's behind-the-scenes stuff, a quick announcement:
Now, let me tell you about the notable science fiction author who wrote the introduction for Thursday's Children. (TL;DR: it's Laura J. Mixon, and she's awesome.)
As you know, Bob, I attended the Viable Paradise (VP) science fiction and fantasy writers' workshop in 2008. See how excited I was when I got the news of my acceptance? I was not disappointed by the experience. A bit overwhelmed, perhaps; VP packs a lot of stuff into a single week. And Thursday night... well, we don't talk about Thursday night.
I met a lot of great people at VPXII. My classmates included the amazing Claire Humphrey, munchkin wrangler Marko Kloos, "the other Asian guy" Anthony Ha, and more.
And then there were the instructors: the distinguished Nielsen Haydens, Uncle Jim & Doctor Doyle, Scalzi, Bear, Steven Gould, and Laura Mixon.
Every one of these people had something important to teach me, and even if I'm still figuring out how to apply many of those lessons, the time I spent on the island was invaluable.
In particular, Laura Mixon offered a refreshing, analytical perspective on writing, which resonated with me—we're both engineers by training, and I love it when there's actual data behind a presentation. (Laura even has research to back up her use of the gender-neutral pseudonym "M. J. Locke." PREACH.) At VPXII, she lectured about a cognitive model of the writing process. "There's a study," she said more than once, before explaining the science of it.
The example I remember best involved two creative writing classes: one was told their work had to be perfect; the other was graded by word count. The result? The second class actually produced, instead of agonizing over whether they could produce for each assignment—and their final work was of comparable quality to the first class' output, plus there was much more of it. More practice was better. Quantity trumps quality.
For a time when I was younger, I hated the word "practice," because it meant sitting in front of the piano and playing the same piece or passage over and over again, with very little variation, until I got it right or made some measurable improvement in technique. It was tedious, and as a child, there were a million other more interesting things I wanted to do.
It takes great discipline to have a long-term goal in mind, and to work tirelessly toward that goal. It helps if you enjoy what you're doing along the way, because plans changes, and you may end up in a totally different place than you originally targeted. And here's the thing: you don't need to be good at something in order to enjoy it.
As Laura explained at VP, there are four stages of learning a new skill:
unconscious incompetence - you have no idea what you're doing, and you're not very good at itconscious incompetence - you're trying real hard, but you still suckunconscious competence - you're getting better, but you don't really understand how or whyconscious competence - you know exactly what you're doing, and you're good at itIt's important to note that reaching that fourth stage is not the endgame. You may be good, but you're not great. At this point, the ten-thousand-hours rule applies—especially in "cognitively demanding" fields like playing the piano, where competence is a long way from mastery. Writers often talk about the million words of crap (give or take) which you need to get out of your system before you're producing stuff of publishable quality. And even at that point, it's still a buyer's market. It's good to be good, but it's better to be lucky.
Does any of that discourage me? No. Because I love what I'm doing. I spent 4.9 years writing (or at least editing) a new piece of 512 flash fiction every week. That amounts to a grand total of roughly 130,000 words, and maybe 1,000 hours of practice. During that same time period, I also spent a lot of time writing other stuff—short stories, novels, non-fiction, puzzles, and more—but 512 Words or Fewer was the one thing that demanded regular, deliberate effort, and I am confident it has done more than any other single project to improve my skills as a writer.
None of that would have happened without VPXII and Laura Mixon, and I'm elated that she agreed to write a brief introduction for Thursday's Children. Her intro is the source of the blurb at the top of the 512 book web page, and you should also go read her most recent novel, because it's damn good.
Before I get into this week's behind-the-scenes stuff, a quick announcement:
Thursday's Children, the 512 book, is officially launching on Friday, January 31, 2014 (less than two weeks from today), in eBook and trade paperback. Mark your calendars!
Now, let me tell you about the notable science fiction author who wrote the introduction for Thursday's Children. (TL;DR: it's Laura J. Mixon, and she's awesome.)
As you know, Bob, I attended the Viable Paradise (VP) science fiction and fantasy writers' workshop in 2008. See how excited I was when I got the news of my acceptance? I was not disappointed by the experience. A bit overwhelmed, perhaps; VP packs a lot of stuff into a single week. And Thursday night... well, we don't talk about Thursday night.
I met a lot of great people at VPXII. My classmates included the amazing Claire Humphrey, munchkin wrangler Marko Kloos, "the other Asian guy" Anthony Ha, and more.
And then there were the instructors: the distinguished Nielsen Haydens, Uncle Jim & Doctor Doyle, Scalzi, Bear, Steven Gould, and Laura Mixon.
Every one of these people had something important to teach me, and even if I'm still figuring out how to apply many of those lessons, the time I spent on the island was invaluable.
In particular, Laura Mixon offered a refreshing, analytical perspective on writing, which resonated with me—we're both engineers by training, and I love it when there's actual data behind a presentation. (Laura even has research to back up her use of the gender-neutral pseudonym "M. J. Locke." PREACH.) At VPXII, she lectured about a cognitive model of the writing process. "There's a study," she said more than once, before explaining the science of it.
The example I remember best involved two creative writing classes: one was told their work had to be perfect; the other was graded by word count. The result? The second class actually produced, instead of agonizing over whether they could produce for each assignment—and their final work was of comparable quality to the first class' output, plus there was much more of it. More practice was better. Quantity trumps quality.
For a time when I was younger, I hated the word "practice," because it meant sitting in front of the piano and playing the same piece or passage over and over again, with very little variation, until I got it right or made some measurable improvement in technique. It was tedious, and as a child, there were a million other more interesting things I wanted to do.
It takes great discipline to have a long-term goal in mind, and to work tirelessly toward that goal. It helps if you enjoy what you're doing along the way, because plans changes, and you may end up in a totally different place than you originally targeted. And here's the thing: you don't need to be good at something in order to enjoy it.
As Laura explained at VP, there are four stages of learning a new skill:
unconscious incompetence - you have no idea what you're doing, and you're not very good at itconscious incompetence - you're trying real hard, but you still suckunconscious competence - you're getting better, but you don't really understand how or whyconscious competence - you know exactly what you're doing, and you're good at itIt's important to note that reaching that fourth stage is not the endgame. You may be good, but you're not great. At this point, the ten-thousand-hours rule applies—especially in "cognitively demanding" fields like playing the piano, where competence is a long way from mastery. Writers often talk about the million words of crap (give or take) which you need to get out of your system before you're producing stuff of publishable quality. And even at that point, it's still a buyer's market. It's good to be good, but it's better to be lucky.
Does any of that discourage me? No. Because I love what I'm doing. I spent 4.9 years writing (or at least editing) a new piece of 512 flash fiction every week. That amounts to a grand total of roughly 130,000 words, and maybe 1,000 hours of practice. During that same time period, I also spent a lot of time writing other stuff—short stories, novels, non-fiction, puzzles, and more—but 512 Words or Fewer was the one thing that demanded regular, deliberate effort, and I am confident it has done more than any other single project to improve my skills as a writer.
None of that would have happened without VPXII and Laura Mixon, and I'm elated that she agreed to write a brief introduction for Thursday's Children. Her intro is the source of the blurb at the top of the 512 book web page, and you should also go read her most recent novel, because it's damn good.
January 15, 2014
I Enjoy Hunting for Puzzles
The statement above should come as a surprise to exactly no one, but I thought I'd use this space to clarify the spectrum of my liking for various puzzle and presentation types.
But first, just in case you've wandered into this blog totally at random:
Hi. I'm Curtis Chen, and I'm a puzzle gamer. I first played The Game at Stanford University in 1996, and I ran my first Game in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001. Since then, I've run or helped run more than fifty different puzzling events, including:
the Hogwarts Game (2006);annual Game Control Summits (2007-present);Puzzled Pint (2010-present);the JoCo Cruise Crazy puzzle hunts (2011-present); andWarTron (PDX 2012, Boston 2013).
You could say I have a bit of a Gaming habit. Possibly even an obsession. (Sadly, not a career; I have been paid less than half a dozen times for doing puzzle-hunt-related things.) But I don't love all puzzles or puzzle events equally.
To the layperson, all puzzlers may appear very similar, but--as with any special interest group--there are many fine distinctions and gradations within our ranks. Certainly, there are those who love any kind of puzzle (broadly defined), whether it's a logical brain teaser or something math-related or pure wordplay. Some people just want to SOLVE ALL THE THINGS. But I suspect most are like myself, with definite preferences and dislikes.
I've been credited with coining (or at least popularizing) the term "underwear puzzles." I'm not a big fan of puzzle events that are just a bunch of puzzles you could have solved by yourself, at home, in your underwear; i.e., which don't take advantage of real-world interactivity. I prefer Games that actually get me out of the house and put me into unusual situations to have new experiences. I'm not really into the great outdoors per se, but if you tell me there's a puzzle hidden somewhere in the forest, I may spend a ridiculous amount of time searching for it. Because that's something I would probably never do otherwise, and I might never visit that location ever again.
It's all about the reward. I've tried a couple of "conference room" puzzle hunts--of which genre the granddaddy is, of course, the MIT Mystery Hunt--and they're just not my bag, baby. I do enjoy the intellectual challenge of any given puzzle, but I get bored very quickly. And for me, getting more puzzles to solve is not really a compelling reward; I want something else, like a new location to visit or a new bit of story or even an amusing video clip. Just give me a break before dumping another bucket of puzzles on my head.
Related to that, I enjoy team-play events more than solving by myself, but I prefer "linear" hunts to the "batch" model. (BTW, I'm just making up words here; feel free to suggest better terminology in the comments.) In a conference room hunt, you may have a huge team--say twelve people--and a large number of puzzles "unlocked" at any given time, which means that very often you'll end up with sub-teams of two or three people working on different puzzles. It then becomes impossible for any single person to solve, or even see all the puzzles, since you're racing against all the other teams to finish first. (Or possibly second, to subvert the tradition of the winning team running the next event.)
I approach puzzling events from more of an audience perspective, as opposed to a competitor perspective. When I'm reading a book, or watching a show, I want to enjoy the experience as it's happening--and if I'm really in love with it, I may not want it to end. I rarely watch a show or read a book just to be done with it, and I certainly don't compete with others to read faster or more than anyone else. Similarly, when I'm playing a Game, I don't care too much about my team's ranking relative to other teams (as long as we're not last!)--I care about whether we're all having fun. And it's more fun to solve puzzles at our own pace, without the added pressure of an artificial competition.
"But wait!" you may say. "Isn't Puzzled Pint exactly the kind of sit-around-and-solve event that you hate?" Well, first of all, I never said I hated conference room hunts; they're just not my favorite. And Puzzled Pint does get people out of the house, albeit to just one location. I don't know if I would play Puzzled Pint if I weren't on GC, but I support any attempt to draw puzzlers out of their shells to meet and interact with each other, and PP has certainly done that in Portland, Oregon.
Let's face it: we puzzlers are mostly just the kids who were good at homework, all grown up and looking for more problem sets to do. We may not all be introverted xenophobes, but we're all socially awkward to some degree--and even if that describes most of the human race, we may be more painfully aware that our particular hobby is way, way outside of the mainstream. It usually takes me five to ten minutes to explain puzzle hunts to any given stranger, and the two most typical responses are either "I could never do that" or "what do you win?"
And that's why I support all puzzling events, even if they're ones I wouldn't personally play in. Do you want to run Puzzled Pint in your city? Talk to us, we'll help you get started. Are you opening a new puzzle-related business? I will pimp it as hard as I can.
Because we're all in this together, and encouraging more people to have fun by exercising their minds will make the world a better place.
We few, we happy few, we band of puzzlers;
For he to-day that solves this Clue with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This Game shall gentle his condition!
(with apologies to William Shakespeare)
But first, just in case you've wandered into this blog totally at random:
Hi. I'm Curtis Chen, and I'm a puzzle gamer. I first played The Game at Stanford University in 1996, and I ran my first Game in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001. Since then, I've run or helped run more than fifty different puzzling events, including:
the Hogwarts Game (2006);annual Game Control Summits (2007-present);Puzzled Pint (2010-present);the JoCo Cruise Crazy puzzle hunts (2011-present); andWarTron (PDX 2012, Boston 2013).
You could say I have a bit of a Gaming habit. Possibly even an obsession. (Sadly, not a career; I have been paid less than half a dozen times for doing puzzle-hunt-related things.) But I don't love all puzzles or puzzle events equally.
To the layperson, all puzzlers may appear very similar, but--as with any special interest group--there are many fine distinctions and gradations within our ranks. Certainly, there are those who love any kind of puzzle (broadly defined), whether it's a logical brain teaser or something math-related or pure wordplay. Some people just want to SOLVE ALL THE THINGS. But I suspect most are like myself, with definite preferences and dislikes.
I've been credited with coining (or at least popularizing) the term "underwear puzzles." I'm not a big fan of puzzle events that are just a bunch of puzzles you could have solved by yourself, at home, in your underwear; i.e., which don't take advantage of real-world interactivity. I prefer Games that actually get me out of the house and put me into unusual situations to have new experiences. I'm not really into the great outdoors per se, but if you tell me there's a puzzle hidden somewhere in the forest, I may spend a ridiculous amount of time searching for it. Because that's something I would probably never do otherwise, and I might never visit that location ever again.
It's all about the reward. I've tried a couple of "conference room" puzzle hunts--of which genre the granddaddy is, of course, the MIT Mystery Hunt--and they're just not my bag, baby. I do enjoy the intellectual challenge of any given puzzle, but I get bored very quickly. And for me, getting more puzzles to solve is not really a compelling reward; I want something else, like a new location to visit or a new bit of story or even an amusing video clip. Just give me a break before dumping another bucket of puzzles on my head.
Related to that, I enjoy team-play events more than solving by myself, but I prefer "linear" hunts to the "batch" model. (BTW, I'm just making up words here; feel free to suggest better terminology in the comments.) In a conference room hunt, you may have a huge team--say twelve people--and a large number of puzzles "unlocked" at any given time, which means that very often you'll end up with sub-teams of two or three people working on different puzzles. It then becomes impossible for any single person to solve, or even see all the puzzles, since you're racing against all the other teams to finish first. (Or possibly second, to subvert the tradition of the winning team running the next event.)
I approach puzzling events from more of an audience perspective, as opposed to a competitor perspective. When I'm reading a book, or watching a show, I want to enjoy the experience as it's happening--and if I'm really in love with it, I may not want it to end. I rarely watch a show or read a book just to be done with it, and I certainly don't compete with others to read faster or more than anyone else. Similarly, when I'm playing a Game, I don't care too much about my team's ranking relative to other teams (as long as we're not last!)--I care about whether we're all having fun. And it's more fun to solve puzzles at our own pace, without the added pressure of an artificial competition.
"But wait!" you may say. "Isn't Puzzled Pint exactly the kind of sit-around-and-solve event that you hate?" Well, first of all, I never said I hated conference room hunts; they're just not my favorite. And Puzzled Pint does get people out of the house, albeit to just one location. I don't know if I would play Puzzled Pint if I weren't on GC, but I support any attempt to draw puzzlers out of their shells to meet and interact with each other, and PP has certainly done that in Portland, Oregon.
Let's face it: we puzzlers are mostly just the kids who were good at homework, all grown up and looking for more problem sets to do. We may not all be introverted xenophobes, but we're all socially awkward to some degree--and even if that describes most of the human race, we may be more painfully aware that our particular hobby is way, way outside of the mainstream. It usually takes me five to ten minutes to explain puzzle hunts to any given stranger, and the two most typical responses are either "I could never do that" or "what do you win?"
And that's why I support all puzzling events, even if they're ones I wouldn't personally play in. Do you want to run Puzzled Pint in your city? Talk to us, we'll help you get started. Are you opening a new puzzle-related business? I will pimp it as hard as I can.
Because we're all in this together, and encouraging more people to have fun by exercising their minds will make the world a better place.
We few, we happy few, we band of puzzlers;
For he to-day that solves this Clue with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This Game shall gentle his condition!
(with apologies to William Shakespeare)
January 10, 2014
Making Book: 1,024 Words or More
(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)
Remember that surprise puzzle hunt my friends organized for my birthday last year? (Yeah, no, I'm never going to stop talking about it. Because awesome.) Well, that same weekend, our friend Natalie sent me this "Cowboys and Aliens" fan art as an early birthday gift:
That was also completely unexpected and wonderful. And it got me to thinking, since DeeAnn and I had already decided to publish a collection of 512 stories: we're going to need a cover. Why not hire Natalie to draw it?
(The image above is also what I used for
I'm not precisely sure when I first met Natalie—it was probably during one of the JoCo cruises or at some kind of Doubleclicks-related event in the Portland area, where we both live. But I knew she was quite an accomplished artist—she was one of five finalists in Scalzi's Redshirts fan art contest—and her illustrations had a cartoony, whimsical style that I liked a lot.
So, back in November, I asked her how she was at drawing vehicles. She said she could handle spaceships and dirigibles and probably more. And away we went.
We met just once in person to discuss concepts, and everything else happened by e-mail. Her first set of sketches included two designs with elements that clicked right away, including the astronaut-not-loving-her-EVA:
I had already thrown out the idea of using interior illustrations to break up the 117 stories into thematic sections—one character per theme—and asked if she could find some way to incorporate those same characters into the front cover. I sent her some feedback on those initial sketches, and she came up with this:
That's pretty much the final layout, as you'll see below, with one character showing through each of those portholes. I was impressed with how quickly she dialed it in, and well how the rest of it all came together.
For reference, here are her finished pencils and inks:
We also went through another, somewhat parallel process to figure out the six theme characters. That also went very quickly, except for making sure that a small picture of a female superhero would read correctly and with the right amount of gravitas.
Here are some "super-lady" designs that didn't quite hit the target, for various reasons which I could only articulate after seeing them:
Once we got the characters nailed down, it was just a matter of picking which three should appear in the portholes. We also went back and forth on fonts and engine colors for a bit, but I'll spare you those details and just show you the final cover art:
Long story short: I love it. It's far better than anything I could have imagined or produced on my own, and I think it conveys the perfect tone for this collection.
I look forward to working with Natalie again, and next time, I'll do my best to give her some more monsters to draw. :)
Remember that surprise puzzle hunt my friends organized for my birthday last year? (Yeah, no, I'm never going to stop talking about it. Because awesome.) Well, that same weekend, our friend Natalie sent me this "Cowboys and Aliens" fan art as an early birthday gift:
That was also completely unexpected and wonderful. And it got me to thinking, since DeeAnn and I had already decided to publish a collection of 512 stories: we're going to need a cover. Why not hire Natalie to draw it?
(The image above is also what I used for
I'm not precisely sure when I first met Natalie—it was probably during one of the JoCo cruises or at some kind of Doubleclicks-related event in the Portland area, where we both live. But I knew she was quite an accomplished artist—she was one of five finalists in Scalzi's Redshirts fan art contest—and her illustrations had a cartoony, whimsical style that I liked a lot.
So, back in November, I asked her how she was at drawing vehicles. She said she could handle spaceships and dirigibles and probably more. And away we went.
We met just once in person to discuss concepts, and everything else happened by e-mail. Her first set of sketches included two designs with elements that clicked right away, including the astronaut-not-loving-her-EVA:
I had already thrown out the idea of using interior illustrations to break up the 117 stories into thematic sections—one character per theme—and asked if she could find some way to incorporate those same characters into the front cover. I sent her some feedback on those initial sketches, and she came up with this:
That's pretty much the final layout, as you'll see below, with one character showing through each of those portholes. I was impressed with how quickly she dialed it in, and well how the rest of it all came together.
For reference, here are her finished pencils and inks:
We also went through another, somewhat parallel process to figure out the six theme characters. That also went very quickly, except for making sure that a small picture of a female superhero would read correctly and with the right amount of gravitas.
Here are some "super-lady" designs that didn't quite hit the target, for various reasons which I could only articulate after seeing them:
Once we got the characters nailed down, it was just a matter of picking which three should appear in the portholes. We also went back and forth on fonts and engine colors for a bit, but I'll spare you those details and just show you the final cover art:
Long story short: I love it. It's far better than anything I could have imagined or produced on my own, and I think it conveys the perfect tone for this collection.
I look forward to working with Natalie again, and next time, I'll do my best to give her some more monsters to draw. :)
January 8, 2014
I Always Keep My Promises
As I write this, it's after midnight on Tuesday, less than ten hours before this post is supposed to go up. I briefly considered not taking the time to finish this, and instead just posting a "sorry, try again next week" message—but only briefly. Because I don't do that anymore. I don't fail just to see what the consequences will be.
It took me a long time to realize that I was doing this. Any time I got into a new project or started a new job, I would always blow a deadline early on, or oversleep and show up late for work, or otherwise fail to meet expectations. I would never do it consciously, but looking back, I'm pretty sure there was subconscious intent. It wasn't just random happenstance that caused me to underperform in such a predictable manner.
I suppose part of me thought this was a valid, even scientific thing to do: how will you know the consequences for failure in a particular situation, whether professional or personal, unless you test the waters a little? And isn't it better to miss a small deadline than to completely screw up a bigger project later?
Perhaps it was also an immature defense mechanism, a way of telling people not to depend on me because I might let them down. But whatever caused me to behave that way, it was pretty stupid. And I don't do that any more.
I'm proud of the fact that while I was doing 512 Words or Fewer , I did not miss a single one of the 256 consecutive weeks of posting flash fiction every Friday. True, sometimes it wouldn't be until Friday afternoon, and sometimes I would schedule posts ahead of time—when I knew I would be traveling or otherwise engaged on Thursday—but even that required planning and dedication. I made a promise, and I kept it.
But even more than the promise, the 512s were something that mattered to me. And I guess that's the real lesson here. I've always been willing to slack off when it came to things I didn't feel very passionate about, but when it's something that really matters to me—The Game, NaNoWriMo, family and friends—I don't make excuses for not getting things done. I figure out how to finish the job.
That's a whole lotta words, but maybe Ryan Gosling can say it more succinctly.
The other part of this is that I've learned how to budget my time better and how to say no. There's a lot of really cool stuff in the world I could do, but there are only so many hours in the day. If I don't think I can do something—and do it at least competently, if not perfectly—I won't commit to it. That's not to say I won't still overreach now and then, letting my enthusiasm overrule my analysis. But I do it a lot less than I used to.
It's easy to fail. It's easy to say you'll do something, and then do nothing. But in the long run, doing stuff is better, and reliability is a hugely underrated talent. Marshmallows!
It took me a long time to realize that I was doing this. Any time I got into a new project or started a new job, I would always blow a deadline early on, or oversleep and show up late for work, or otherwise fail to meet expectations. I would never do it consciously, but looking back, I'm pretty sure there was subconscious intent. It wasn't just random happenstance that caused me to underperform in such a predictable manner.
I suppose part of me thought this was a valid, even scientific thing to do: how will you know the consequences for failure in a particular situation, whether professional or personal, unless you test the waters a little? And isn't it better to miss a small deadline than to completely screw up a bigger project later?
Perhaps it was also an immature defense mechanism, a way of telling people not to depend on me because I might let them down. But whatever caused me to behave that way, it was pretty stupid. And I don't do that any more.
I'm proud of the fact that while I was doing 512 Words or Fewer , I did not miss a single one of the 256 consecutive weeks of posting flash fiction every Friday. True, sometimes it wouldn't be until Friday afternoon, and sometimes I would schedule posts ahead of time—when I knew I would be traveling or otherwise engaged on Thursday—but even that required planning and dedication. I made a promise, and I kept it.
But even more than the promise, the 512s were something that mattered to me. And I guess that's the real lesson here. I've always been willing to slack off when it came to things I didn't feel very passionate about, but when it's something that really matters to me—The Game, NaNoWriMo, family and friends—I don't make excuses for not getting things done. I figure out how to finish the job.
That's a whole lotta words, but maybe Ryan Gosling can say it more succinctly.
The other part of this is that I've learned how to budget my time better and how to say no. There's a lot of really cool stuff in the world I could do, but there are only so many hours in the day. If I don't think I can do something—and do it at least competently, if not perfectly—I won't commit to it. That's not to say I won't still overreach now and then, letting my enthusiasm overrule my analysis. But I do it a lot less than I used to.
It's easy to fail. It's easy to say you'll do something, and then do nothing. But in the long run, doing stuff is better, and reliability is a hugely underrated talent. Marshmallows!
