For Certain Values of Censorship

The recent move by financial institutions to restrict how people use their money has garnered a lot of attention lately. PayPay seems to be taking most of the damage when it comes to public relations , but if the PR department is to be believed, it's just following the guidelines established by the credit card companies with whom it does business. Specifically, the banks don't want to do business with people who sell certain types of erotic fictions, i.e. anything with incest, bestiality, rape, or underage sex as the central theme. That's their choice, and probably their right under the law.

I'm not even going to pretend that I have some kind of deeper understanding, or access to knowledge that may not be available to others, but I think the claims of censorship are verging on the hysterical. These companies don't want to censor, they just don't want to be associated. That being said, these actions are, effectively and for certain values of censorship, censorship.

That's why I was so interested to see an article on TorrentFreak this morning about copyright and patent law, and how it stifles innovation. It reminded me that one of the corollaries  to the 'censorship' arguments I've heard lately relates to how companies like Amazon and Apple use copyright and patent law to keep competing products out of the market place. They use tools like DRM and contracts to retain (restrict) consumers--to force those consumers to keep coming back, instead of seeking other markets. They do this with music; they do it with video; and they do it with ebooks. They use piracy as the excuse to censor, and so are encouraging piracy with their short-sighted actions.

The activist John Gilmore claims that the internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it.  So far that seems to be true, and that means that these censored markets won't go away, they will simply change. If the financial systems continue to use their economic power to censor markets they don't like, maybe these markets will find another economic system, and something like bitcoins will take off and take over.

Maybe PayPal and it's masters will have to change or die.

Lessons in Self Publishing

One of things that self publishing can give you is control, but there are limits to that control, and those limit aren't always obvious. For me, the most obvious example is Amazon's price matching policy. They don't do this for the author or the publisher, they do it for Amazon. They want to sell ebooks that only work on the Kindle, and if someone tries to sell an ebook cheaper somewhere else, Amazon will lower the price without asking--even if it has a different ISBN. No matter what they say, this isn't about being fair to the consumer, it's about staying competitive. It's almost predatory, in my opinion. The only control you have is to not publish with Amazon.

Another example of limits, one which is not so obvious until it happens, is how much control you have over the sites which are distributing your books. I chose Smashwords.com because they provide an amazing service for  independent authors. They make it about as easy as it can get to publish a book. They have free formatting guides, and will use that formatted document to automatically convert your book and distribute it to several other ebook stores. They will provide a list of editors and cover artists if you need help, and they will even give you a free ISBN.

The problem is that when the site goes down, you lose control over your entire distribution channel. Smashwords.com has been down for two days now, and I haven't had any control over the ebook stores to which they distribute. I can't even tell them to stop selling my books. This made me realize that, because of all of the drama about piracy these days, the government gets to seize any domain they want, and shut down the site. If, for some reason, they decide to do that with Smashwords, I suspect it would take months to straighten out the mess, and I might not see any of the profit from the sales which occurred while I wasn't in control.

You also don't have any control over your readers. I don't give out one star reviews because if I don't like a book, I don't finish reading it. And if I don't finish reading a book, I don't rate it. Now that I've experienced a bad rating, it seems obvious that not everyone thinks that way. There are people out there who won't like your book, and they won't tell you why. They will read the first page, or the first chapter, and then give it a one star rating. (That makes more sense than reading an entire book which you don't like.) They have that right, and anything you do to try and control them will only make you look like an idiot. I was surprised by a bad rating, but I really shouldn't have been.

You do have a lot of control over advertising. All of it, in fact. What I've discovered though, is that advertising online probably won't be a good return on your investment. I was given a small advertising budget by my web hosting company, so I gave it a try. If I had spent real money, I would have been very very disappointed in the results. Maybe I'll have more to say about that adventure at another time.

Peace.

Painting Out the Door

I had this dream last night. I was sitting with an older man, and we were at work, having a general conversation about work and ourselves in relation to it. He was a new employee, while I had been working there for a while.

I made this observation that I often had an impulse to throw something, and that several times a week I had to restrain myself. He said something along the lines of, "I often wonder if I'm painting out the door just so I can pay for my internet connection."

I got out of bed just so I could Google that phrase. I feel like 'painting out the door' has something to do with art, but I found nothing. Where did I get that? What could it mean? I'll have to make something up.

Adventures in Advertising

I've been experimenting with Facebook ads. It's really amazing how much they know about people, and what they can tell advertisers. The problem is that it's going to expensive if I decide to go all out. They charge by the click, and I set a low limit. Even that is bringing in likes, but I could easily double the amount I'm spending and probably not sell enough books to cover the cost, so I'm torn between dumping in some real money to see what happens, or going for a slower but less expensive approach.

Adwords next...

On Sol

We flicker like flames
Life and death and love and hate
On the skin of Sol

Bred is Available . . .

My new book, Bred, is now available at Barnes & Noble, and on iTunes.

Demel was bred for power, born into slavery, and lives in the city of sorcery. His talent for remaining unnoticed allows him to grow into, and master, his power. But when he frees himself from a powerful control curse, he releases a storm of events which threatens all of Lyn. Demel, and his sometimes reluctant allies, are the only ones who can stop a thousand years of violence and oppression.

Write for Yourself

In June of 2005 I started writing a science fiction blog as a simple exercise. It was, in part, inspired by the Cassini mission and the Huygens lander, but it grew into a years long project that surprised me in many wonderful ways. The story eventually out-grew the format, and so I stopped working on it. Until now, I've only told a handful of people about it because it was, all along, something I did to make myself happy.

Is it a complete novel? I'm not sure. It's just a series of blog posts by a fictional character, writing about his life aboard a space station which orbits Saturn. It is, possibly, a space opera. Each post is self-contained, or at least as self-contained as any random blog post, but there is a overarching exposure of the world, and the troubles faced by the people who live in it. There is no ending, as such. The main character simply signs off one day, making vague promises of future postings.

I hope to expand on the story of Fort Falling some day, but even so, I'm currently editing the story so I can publish it as a free ebook some time within the next couple of months. I intend to use it as a promotional tool. It's already free on the web, but a free ebook might gain me some name recognition.

Name recognition can be good, but it can also be bad. Self-promotion seems to be a fine line between obscurity and infamy.  If I constantly spam social media sites with ads trying to get people to buy my new fantasy novel, Bred, I'm more likely to turn them away than to make any sales. I know those constant spam posts irritate the crap out of me.

I'm even hesitant to publish this post, but I do want to sell books. I want to sell books so I can write more books faster--so I can do more of something which makes me happy.

Geneva and the Nature of Virtual Reality

The International Committee of the Red Cross is investigating video games. Specifically, they are concerned that gamers are violating humanitarian law by . . . gasp . . . playing war games wherein they might commit war crimes. Doesn't this organization have more important things to do?

There is no solid evidence which points to violence in video games making people more violent. Or, more accurately, there is just as much evidence supporting such play as a positive influence as there is evidence to support the opposite. And these guys want to talk about what they should do about it.

Here's an idea: Think of video games as fiction. They are not real. Real people do not suffer inside of a game. They are bits of code and imagination, not people. I can summon a demon and let it loose to kill a whole room full of people in one of my video games. I can't do that in real life, and even if I could, I would have to have a real good reason for doing so. Even then, I'd probably look for another way to handle it first. How can you apply humanitarian law to fictional people? How does that even make sense?

Can we argue, honestly, that these fictional acts have a negative impact on the real people playing the game? I don't think we can. Some people will be affected, but I suspect that most will not. Some people will act in reprehensible ways, and they will enjoy it. But I believe those people, if not for the game, would have found other ways to achieve those feelings, and maybe something bad would have happened in the real world. If that is true, then what's wrong with letting the evil bastards of the world work out their problems on virtual people?

We can point to a violent person, and we can say they played video games, and we can say they would not have done what they did if not for the game. I don't believe that, be we can say it. But, if we can say that, then why not point to the 600 million gamers who don't commit real war crimes after playing the same game, and then say, "They would have killed a lot of real people if it weren't for that game!"?

*This opinion was inspired by Claire Connelly's article, which can probably be found here.

NaNoWriMo Winner

I  won #NaNoWriMo with 50,032 words. I'm only about two-thirds of the way through the story, and I have only a vague idea of how to end it, but I made the total word count.

I learned a few things along the way:

    1. I find it a lot easier to write if I have a solid idea or scene already formed in my mind. If I have a good solid scene in my head, I can whip out 500 words in no time at all, but if I only know I need to write a scene or two to get to that solid idea, it takes me a lot longer.

    2. But if I don't have a good idea of what to write next, I'm often pleasantly surprised by my own creativity. It's not unusual for characters or tidbits of information to seemingly come out of nowhere, and these surprises are often the most interesting thing I wrote that day.

    3. Short term goals are easier to achieve than long term goals. I've been hearing variations on this for years, but I now have solid, personal experience which proves it, and which has led to a shift in my thinking. NaNo showed me how to write 50,000 in 30 days by breaking it down into a daily word count. I'll will probably continue to approach my writing in the same way.

    4. I don't need to turn off my editor. I've heard that a lot. It seems to be one of NaNo's common bits of advice--turn off your internal editor, and just pump out the words. I'm not sure that advice is completely valid. I think it should be something more along the lines of, "Learn to work with your internal editor." If you work with that editor, your writing will be better--unless you listen to everything he or she says, and then you'll just want to stop writing. Listen, but you decide if it can wait until you know how to fix it, or if you can fix it now without interrupting your flow.

    5. Support systems help. It doesn't have to be much. Just tell your friends and family, especially that nosy aunt who will ask you about it every day. Or join a group online, or in your local community, and offer support to others. You'll be surprised how much positive motivation can come from this.

    6. If you want to be a writer--just write. Don't worry about what. Buy a journal and a pen, and fill a page every morning. Start a blog, and spill random chatter all over it--frequently. Or annoy your friends on Facebook and Google+ with your lousy poetry. Maybe you'll loose some friends, or maybe random strangers will want to read it. What matters it that you wrote something.

    7. You can't write all of the time. You shouldn't try. It you are stuck, and sitting there wishing you knew what to write, play a video game or watch a movie. Take a break when you need to take a break. Or, if you want to write, but don't know why you can't, write something personal--something you would never admit to another person--and then destroy it if you need to.

----------------------

NaNoWriMo, Part Two

Well, I'm still on schedule to 'win' NaNoWriMo, and I have my writing done for today, so there's only five days of writing left. It's been an interesting experiment, and I wish I could say that I would keep writing every day, but I don't think I will. Motivation is increasingly becoming a problem, and I'll be lucky if I can squeeze five days of writing out of whatever is left of my tattered outlines.

I started the month with one main character, and full of intentions to carry on with her story all the way to the end, but I ran out of useful outline about half way through week two. I had more ideas, but they were wispy things, hardly complete, and only suggestive of outline material.

Fortunately, I had an outline for another main character in the same world, and their stories overlapped in the timeline, so I stirred in a second plot line, and that kept me going for another couple of weeks. That outline, plus integrating the two plots, offered more creative opportunities than either outline would have given me on their own, so I'm much happier about combining the two stories than I thought I would be when I made that decision.

Now I've got something with meat on it, but I only have a couple of solid scenes in mind right now, so I suspect that last few days are going to be a struggle. On the other hand, I've only got a few days left, and then I can put the story aside for a bit, and to let the ending coalesce in my subconscious--because I'm still not sure how it ends. It won't be a cliff hanger though. I hate to read books that don't end, and I never want to write one.

Awakened

Memories of dreams
are wandering through my mind
like broken whispers.

Social Options

    I've been trying to define the differences between Facebook and Google+ for a few months now, and I think it comes down to control. 
    On Google+, I have transparent and almost complete control over my stream. I can circle someone, or uncircle them if I'm not interested in what they have say. I can even block them if they keep sharing things I don't care about.
    On Facebook, I can 'like' and 'unlike', but Facebook wants to control my stream. They decide which are the top stories, or whether that post from a friend is important enough to show me. They have added controls to enable me to change the level of importance I want to see from each person or page, but they still decide the importance of each post.
    Sure, people can and do block me on Google+, but that is still about putting control into the hands of the users. Maybe that's a subtle difference, but for me, it's all the difference required to put Facebook in second or third place.

NaNoWriMo

That's my excuse for not writing more here. It's the only one I have. I'm on track to 'win', but barely keeping up.

Bred is for sale at Smashwords.com, but it will be a week or two before it's available at other online retailers. I've had very good responses from the few people who have read it, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. I may lower the price a bit, but I think I'm going to just make a bunch of coupons for promotional posts, and keep the normal price at $4.97. I picked that price just to give my 2 cents worth to Apple, who thinks every price should end with .99.

Bred is available.

I pushed the publish button. Here's hoping it wasn't too soon.
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/102694

A Lesson in Publishing

My first adventure in self-publishing a novel started a few months ago, and I've learned one very important thing. If the editor or artist can't give you an estimate on initial contact, contact someone else. The reasons for this reluctance to offer solid prices are specious, in my opinion. They're usually something like, "I don't want to scare people," or "They might want the moon for the price of cheese." If someone is going to get scared away by a price, they aren't going to be happy about it, even if they pay it. And if someone knows the moon costs $1000, and the cheese costs $100, they won't be surprise if they get charged $1000 for the moon. It's not rocket science.

An editor knows how much it will cost to edit, so there's no reason not to be open. If an editor doesn't want to be open about it, don't waste your time. Someone who can't even give you a range of possible costs is not someone you want editing your project. Don't pay for an estimate either. If an editor doesn't post prices on their web-site, and won't even offer examples of pricing unless you send them money first, find another editor. There's a lot of them out there, and many of them are clear about what they charge for specific services. Find one of those--or just contact Anna.

The same idea applies to artists. You can't charge by the word for images, but if the artist doesn't know how long it will take, and can't offer even a general range of prices, they should hire someone who can help with the business side, and they should concentrate on the art. If you trade four or five emails with an artist, over the course of a month, and you still don't have any idea how much it will cost, stop wasting your time. If you send an artist an idea of what you want, and they can't tell you something like, "I can do that for $100 - $500," find another artist. Or contact Chuck. Or DigitalDonna.

If the professional you've chosen to contact can't put a price on something right away, find another artist or editor. Just move forward with your project, no matter how much you wanted that first choice. And for goodness sake, don't sign anything until you are sure.

Social Discussion

If you look at social media through the normal lens, the 'user profile' glasses, it all kind of looks the same. One of the things writers do is swap out the lenses. So what are the alternatives?

I thought maybe a chicken farm, or maybe an egg farm. I have no idea if or how much difference might be between those, but to use some marketing terms, I put Google in the 'free range' category, while Facebook is more like 'caged'. I'm not sure about Twitter... game hens maybe.

But now I think these social media sites are about conversation. Maybe you want a debate, with rules or such, or maybe you want to hang with friends and be in the now. And I think that's why users get upset when the rules of conversation change.

The whole point of social media is participation, and there are rules. You have 'like' or 'follow' before anything happens. You converse by those rules, and then they change, just a little bit, and it's no longer the same conversation. That can be very annoying.

Govern

Government actions matter less then their willingness to admit them.

Executing an innocent man is wrong, mistake or not. Maintaining a secret prison is worse, no matter how comfortable the prisoners.

Bombing an innocent village is wrong, no matter the reason. Covering it up is worse.

If my government is keeping secrets from me, do I have real representation? What does taxation without representation mean? How much say does that give me? How can I know which secrets should be kept if I don't know what they are?

Royal Balance

The Seelie Court would say, "May the divine winds carry you to paradise."

The Unseelie Court would say, "May you suffer a painful accident and die."

Those two statements mean the same thing, but Unseelie only say it when they mean it and are willing to make arrangements. Seelie would never admit such a thing had ever crossed their minds--would you like an apple?

Or maybe it's the other way around. You can never tell with faeries--at least not until someone's heart has been ripped out.

Both courts would say, "The thing about humans is you can always find another side to be on."

Comforts

Can something in life be both crappy and comfortable? The life partner or the life coach or the traffic light or the shopping mall--can they be comfortable, and still have a loose spring?

Or maybe life is only comfortable if you don't struggle against the bindings?

Is that sort of comfort a reason to be happy? If you aren't in pain, and no one is trying eat you right this minute, is that enough to be happy? Sheared or slaughtered, what does it matter tomorrow?

Obsessions

Why is it always the stupid thoughts circling in my mind like a pack of wild dogs?

How do you scare away the dogs when it's too dark to find the fire?

Why are the dogs wild?

Why not vultures?

How can it be too dark to see fire?

What does any of this have to do with obsession?

Will these questions ever be answered?