Author: J.S. Bangs

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Economic inequality is created by the very same things that most make life enjoyable: family and friendship. Therefore, a radical egalitarian ethic is necessarily inimical to family and friendship.

Well-off parents make their children better off even if they don’t give them money (though money certainly doesn’t hurt), by teaching and modeling behaviors that allow their children to thrive. Well-off friends make their acquaintances better off even if they don’t directly give them money or influence, by providing networks of information and access. Think: do you want to prevent parents from teaching their kids to sit up straight, shake hands, and dress nice for an interview? Do you want to prevent people from mentioning to their friends that there’s a job opening at the bank they work at? A parent who failed to teach his kids how to behave would be a bad parent, and a friend who failed to pass a tip along to an acquaintance would be a bad friend. Yet these very actions create the systemic, inter-generational inequalities that we all observe around us. The aristocracy and the old boys’ network are merely the fully-grown, mature forms of the systems of inequality that we all participate in.

There is a certain amount of systemic inequality that we may have to live with. The cure would be worse than the disease.

(Inspired by Megan McArdle’s provocative, tongue-in-cheek defense of a 100% estate tax.)

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I really enjoy almost everything that Alan Jacobs writes, but I found myself in special agreement with this post about the triumphalism of some YA writers:

Laurie Halse Anderson’s comments are typical in this regard. “Books don’t turn kids into murderers, or rapists, or alcoholics. (Not even the Bible, which features all of these acts.) Books open hearts and minds, and help teenagers make sense of a dark and confusing world. YA literature saves lives. Every. Single. Day.” See? Salvific power, no danger. Even penicillin is dangerous for some people, but not YA fiction!

I was excited for a moment when Libba Bray acknowledged that “Books are dangerous.” Yes! But, oh, wait: “Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways.” And, it seems, never in the wrong ones. So, not really dangerous at all. Not in any way.

(Another interesting theme in these comments is how much more trustworthy YA writers are than parents. Apparently, while books can only be good, parents are often bad.)

You’d do well to read to the end of his post, which covers most of the obvious ripostes. And really, it’s important to keep your head about this. In general I’m in favor of reading broadly and deeply rather than limiting yourself and your kids to “safe” texts. But it doesn’t follow that reading anything is automatically virtuous, or insisting that a book can never have a negative effect on a reader. In fact, if we take seriously the notion that books are powerful, we have to accept that books are a power which can be used for ill, and which can damage those who read them.

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So all this talk about self-publishing has gotten me curious about alternate publishing models. As I see it, the main thing that traditional publishing still offers that self-publishing and vanity publishing lack is quality control. A book from a traditional publishing house will have been professionally edited for both content (plot, character, etc.) and mechanics (spelling, punctuation, etc.) It’ll have a professional cover and professional typesetting. The book that emerges from a traditional publisher may not be earth-shaking literature, but at least it will look good and be free of the grossest errors.

Self-published books, on the other hand, are stereotypically full of bad prose and grammatical errors stuffed inside a hideous cover made in MS Paint. Not all self-pubs fit this description, of course, but enough of them do to give the entire model a bad name.

So I says to myself: couldn’t you do both? And I dreamed up a kind of writer’s collective that would try to get the best of both worlds:

  1. Writers pay the collective for most of the cost of producing their book up front.
  2. The writers’ collective ensures that certain standards of quality are met. It requires that all books are professionally edited and fitted with a professional cover design.
  3. The collective acts as the nominal publisher for the book, but under terms that give most of the rights to the author.
  4. The collective takes a small portion of the receipts and uses it to pay for things like distribution and publicity for the entire company, things that cost more money than any one author is likely to be able to afford individually.

I brainstormed/daydreamed a few different ways of paying for this, including a “reverse advance” (the writer pays 100% of costs up front, and gets 100% of receipts until they recoup their costs, after which it’s 85/15) or a milder split costs model (writer pays 50% up front and splits receipts 50/50 until costs are recouped, etc.) There are a variety of possible problems with this, but really, it seems like it should work, right?

And lo and behold Google tells me that it’s been done, and with a certain level of success. The Writer’s Collective linked here has a higher price point than I was imagining—they say that an author could expect to pay $18,000 over the course of the year their book is in production, which is, um, steep—but the basic model is the same. And they do say that they began with a low-cost model similar to what I was imagining, but had to scale up to the higher-cost, high-return model that they use now. Perhaps I’ll contact then to discover the particular reasons for that. Nonetheless, a glance at their books on offer suggests that they’re hitting a much higher level of quality than most e-book publishers, and way higher than most self-pubbed books.

I have no intention to act on any of this in the near future, as I have neither the money nor the time to pursue it right now. But it’s a strange new world in publishing, and who knows what will happen in another 5 years?

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Like virtually everyone in the writing world, I’ve been following The Business Rusch for a while, with varying degrees of optimism and trepidation. Kristine Rusch has a largely pessimistic take on traditional publishing, backed up by an impressive amount of business and writing experience, and she’s been developing the thesis that the day is fast approaching when most writers will be better served by self-publishing than traditional publishing. Her most recent salvo on this front was Writing Like It’s 1999, in which she suggests that the publishing business is becoming more like the music business, in which a tiny number of top-tier artists make millions, and everyone else gets screwed. Hooray for us, we’re playing with the big boys now.

In that vein, I also read about an established SF writer doing an experiment self-publishing one of her books as an e-book, with disappointing results. Here’s the money quote:

I signed up with Amazon, B&N, and Apple’s self-pubbing programs, put together a cover, and put it out there. I’ve since also signed up with Kobo and ePublishing Works (an aggregator which can get it on Sony’s ebookstore), so the book should be in those places Real Soon Now. I broadcast the news on my blog, to all the fans who have ever sent my a nice e-mail on my books, and on Facebook. I put in a couple guest interviews on posts where I flogged the book. I asked everyone I knew to mention it.

Let me tell you this about my experience with self-publishing: it’s damned difficult to break out past the circle of your friends and family. That’s evident from sales, which over the first month, totaled a grand 25 copies.

I am totally blowing the e-publishing world wide open. Amanda Hocking, look out!

I read this thinking, “Yeah, that sounds familiar.”

See, my horror ebook The Taint, while not self-published, is published online and seems to have fallen into the same trap. The sales of the book were pokey from the start, and as the months since the release have passed new sales have slowed to a trickle, much to my disappointment. And this was with the support of the Lyrical Press team, who I don’t fault in this at all, since they provided me with tons of pointers of ways to promote and got me a review in at least one venue that I would never have heard of otherwise. And the promotion that did happen seemed to have worked, since I got the most sales right after the book came out, when I was heavily invested in promotion for a few weeks. But this rumination, in conjunction with Rusch’s writing got me thinking: maybe I can do something about this. The internet is nothing if not an advertising platform—so what if I just tried buying an ad to promote my book?

The advantages of doing this online is that online advertising is cheap and measurable. I decided to make my initial foray into the advertising world with Facebook ads, and Facebook provides me with a very comprehensive set of metrics telling me how many impressions my ad has gotten (how many times it’s been shown), and how many clicks have resulted. At the end of the month I’ll get my royalty statement and I’ll be able to discover exactly how many sales resulted, and determine whether my brief ad campaign actually paid for itself in terms of increased sales. And the cost of the experiment was relatively trivial.

The ad went live two days ago, so I don’t have anything to report yet. I intend to blog the results as they come out, though. Watch this space for future updates.

Update: Results are here.

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We’ve bought a house.

The last four days have lasted approximately 3.7 million years, as my wife and I have done all of the following:

  • Closed on the house
  • moved in
  • gotten most of the utilities turned on
  • been informed that the gas (and thereby the heat) can’t be turned on until Monday
  • discovered that in this part of the country the first of May is an excellent time for a snowstorm
  • spent a few nights at Grandma’s due to said snowstorm in conjunction with lack of heat
  • bought a new wireless router
  • bought what seems like an absurd amount of food
  • planned how to redecorate the house
  • replanned how to decorate the house after a few minutes thought revealed the problems with our first plan
  • discovered a Trapdoor of Mystery in the floor of the upstairs bedroom
  • (I can’t tell you where the Trapdoor of Mystery goes, because then it wouldn’t be a mystery)
  • drove all over this town and the next on roads made icy by the snowstorm, and
  • slept, but not much.

I’m very tired, and now I’m going to bed.

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So I’m trying to read The Fairy Gaol over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and I’m not liking it. It’s not poorly written, or badly plotted, or any of the other things that typically turn me off of a story, but for some reason it’s just not working for me. After forcing myself through the first thousand words, I realize that there are better things to do on Easter Sunday than read through a story I don’t like, so I get ready to close the window, still not able to put a finger on what didn’t work for me.

And then it hits me like a ton of bricks: I just hate the fae.

You occasionally meet people who arbitrarily dislike one of the standard fantasy creature types. There are those who won’t read anything with vampires, or zombies, or spunky pirate princesses. (That last one is hypothetical, as I’ve never heard anyone cop to it, though I’m sure there’s someone who hates spunky pirate princesses). I had previously thought myself above such petty tropistic prejudice, but it turns out that I do have one such bias of my own. I don’t like faery stories. And coming out and admitting it is very liberating, as I will no longer feel obligated to sit my way through yet another bleeding story about selkies or brownies or the Unseelie Court or God knows what else just because I think I ought to like it. Instead I’ll just say, “I don’t like faery stories,” and move on with my life.

I have no explanation for how I acquired this prejudice. It doesn’t apply to actual medieval tales of the fae, for example–just their modern counterparts. The only theory that I have (and this is a pretty thin theory, for the moment), is that a modern literary style is incompatible with the things I actually like about faery tales. The close third-person POV in a modern discursive style, as illustrated by the story linked above, strips the fae of their numinous aura while keeping their specific abilities, making them seem merely arbitrary and weird rather than otherworldly. This is especially true if the protagonist is a fae, as the entire point of the fae in older literature is that they are inscrutable, incomprehensible, and dangerous, and the only one of those qualities that is compatible with a fae POV is banal danger.

In support of this thesis, I note one faery story that I actually liked recently: The Baroness Drefelin over at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. Note here that the voice is deliberately archaic, and the fae is not the protagonist. In fact, what’s most striking about this story is that it feels like an actual medieval tale–which may be the only thing that makes it tolerable.

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This was a superb article, as the lede shows:

My message to the 200-plus participants was an attack on the philosophic bases of modern economic theory: utilitarianism and the fact-value and positive-normative distinctions. I asserted that justice was necessary for the both liberty and economic order, and that the bases of a sane economy were justice, property, and strong families. Indeed, the whole purpose of the economy, as Aristotle noted, was to provision the family, and not merely to pile up wealth.

However, the real money quote is from about halfway through the article, from whence the titular quote is culled:

As near as I can recall, he said, “You are trying to drag us [the economists] off the pedestal of science into the mosh-pit of the philosophers.” Of course, he is absolutely right, and my only regret is that I do not have the wit to devise that metaphor myself. For it was a witty remark and instantly conjured up a vision of Aristotle throwing an elbow into the ribs of the sophists, of Plato poking the eye of a positivist, and Thomas Aquinas, that sumo-wrestler of the philosophers, tossing bodies out of the ring as if they were rag dolls.

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Last night, I plotted.

Plot has always bedevilled me, especially when writing novels. I find short stories to be simple to plot out: the action is (usually) straightforward, and the number of threads, events, and characters fit easily into my head. They have to fit into my head, because if I can’t keep track of everything that’s going on in a short story, then my poor reader has no chance.

Novels, however, are an entirely different matter.

I was able to plot out the entirety of The Taint (see link at left) in my head, but that story is only about 75 pages long, and even it pushed the limit of what I could reasonably handle without needing an external crutch. I got as far as I did because The Taint is structurally more like a short story: there is only one protagonist who always has POV, the cast of secondary characters is limited, and there weren’t very many cases where offscreen or backgrounded actions by secondary characters were crucial to the plot. I could plan out that novella by simply following my protag around, without needing to coordinate a tangle of related subplots and secondary characters.

My current WIP is another beast entirely. I have three protagonists and three POVs—something that I haven’t attempted before—and managing the interactions and intersections between them was driving me, frankly, nuts. The sketchy outline I had held in my head only brought the protagonists together in a few key places, and the movements of the characters between those pivot points was vague and undefined. When I began to fill in the blank spaces in my outline, I discovered I had enormous plot problems. Two of the protags were sidelined for a big chunk of the middle of the book while a third got all of the action; later developments required one character to be in two places at once in order for the timing to work out; the third protag’s character development hit a brick wall at one point; and I spent entirely too long getting the pieces into place for the finale.

My mechanism for finding this out, by the way, is very low-tech: I write a one-sentence summary of a scene or chapterlet on a notecard, and then spread the notecards around on a big flat surface in something vaguely resembling chronological order. To keep track of POVs, I write the first letter of the POV character for that scene in the corner of the card in huge print. (I’ve also heard of people using different colored inks or notecards for this purpose.) At the end, I can see everything that’s planned for the book in a easy-to-digest visual layout format, with gaps, omissions, and digressions clearly called out.

And this made it clear that my plot was a mess. It was a very familiar mess, though, as I had a lot of the same problems with my last novel attempt. In particular, I had a large number of scenes where I had written, basically “Something happens here.” For pacing reasons I realized that I needed to break up two events with a lull, but I didn’t have anything actually planned to fill in that space. Last time I tried to do this, the chapters in which “something happened” were the first ones to get cut since they were BORING. Instead, this time I played with ordering, bringing some events into the lulls and out of the climaxes so that the whole construction was less lopsided. I discovered some excellent places to have characters’ actions impinge on each other–one protag’s actions precipitate a crisis for the other protag in the next chapter, though without either of them knowing it–which really knits the plotlines together. And so on, working alone at night at the kitchen table until the whole thing began to hang together.

It’s done now. I have a thick stack of notecards sitting next to my laptop, just waiting to be turned into one chapter apiece. And to my delight, when I actually counted the chapterlets alotted to each character, I found that I had divided them up 10/10/11, meaning that the balance between protags is as perfect as it can be, and all without me having to distort the plot to get it that way. And when I read the chapters leading up to the climax, I can feel the rising tension and eucatastrophic catharsis, even though all I’m going on is one-sentence summaries scribbled on scraps of paper. This suggests that I’m getting it right.

Now all that remains is to actually write it all.

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Via Baste Me With Your Corrosive Saliva, I find out that someone is complaining that straight male gamers don’t get enough love in Dragon Age 2.

That sound you just heard? That was my head exploding.

As one of these aforementioned straight male gamers, it has never occurred to me that the problem with gaming is that I’m not catered to enough. The entire genre is practically defined by its catering to the straight male gamer. Seriously, next time you go to a game store, pick one of the big-name games off of the shelf at random. Any one, it hardly matters. That game you picked? Caters to the straight male gamer.

The specific complaints leveled at DA2 in this case are twofold: (1) there’s too many men who are ready to get their lovin’ on with you, and (2) the female romance options are too “exotic”. Option (1) is easily remedied: shut them down. If Anders annoys you, then be an asshole to him. (This is how I recommend dealing with Zevran in DA:O.) Option (2) is akin to complaining that your food has too much delicious flavor and you’d like something more bland and predictable, but if that really is a problem for you then I guess I agree that you might not like the game. What’s really astounding, though, is the level of blatant entitlement that these complaints display. It’s not enough to have romance options for your particular preference. It’s also necessary that your specific expectation of straight, white feminine sexuality be met–a sultry darkie and an elf are not good enough–and that the options you don’t want to see are completely removed from the game so you don’t have to think about them.

Tycho ended his post with these words:

I just want to shake these people sometimes. Hey. That feeling, the one that you’re feeling?

That is the game.

Indeed.

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Via First Things, I find a wonderful article about Tolkein, the anarcho-monarchist:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people. . . .

Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. At least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediaevals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you dare call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that—after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world—is that it works and has only worked when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. . . . There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

I find myself in warm, wistful agreement with Tolkein in this regards, though such is a lately developed feeling. I wish I could say that I had gotten the idea from him (it would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had), but alas I arrived at this simple, old wisdom through a much more torturous route.