My Name is Chris, And I Use Two Spaces

Worst character defect ever.
Bigotry. Sexism. Genocide.
Nothing compares.

I have a deep, dark confession to make. Some of you probably already have noticed this vast and personal failing, but to those who have not, I assure you, I am not attempting to get away with anything. I will lay it all bare.

My mother taught me to type when I was six. What I didn't learn from her, I learned in my high school keyboarding class in 1993. We still used typewriters back in those ancient days of yore. It was a different time--a time of innocence. Back when sending troops to Iraq was new and fresh and not the tired cliche of today. A time before computers and automatic formatting.

Before the dark times.

Before The Empire.

Yes, by now, you probably know the deep horror to which I'm about to admit.

I am not a good person. I am flawed...frail...all too human. But the brightest lamp among my glaring faults is that I sometimes use two spaces after punctuation. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I learned skills and reinforced them day after day for years--decades. Who knew that we would end up with auto-formatting computers? We were just happy back then to not have to run from saber toothed tigers on our way to school.

As you can see from Farhad Manjoo this is an ugly error, and according to Damian Thomson it is an atrocity. I had hoped it would be enough in my life not to commit genocide or become a serial killer.

But I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

Of course, like most such arguments, there are huge camps, debating even the very history surrounding the controversy. Lines were drawn. A typographical civil war rages with brother pitted against brother. There is a side out there that agrees with me makes pathetic excuses to justify my moral failing.

But I have no illusions that the two-spacers are morally depraved to their space bar tapping cores and on the wrong side of history. And so I can only ask you for your humble forgiveness that I am a human who has such a horrific and terrible practice ingrained deep within me as habit. I can only ask your clemency and mercy when I stray.

When I falter.

I am pretty good when I pay attention, and getting better, but when my fingers are flying, sometimes...I don't think about the hurt they can cause until it's already too late. I forget about the suffering. I don't think of the children.

I am weak. Please forgive me.

The Trouble With Short Stories

"What are you dying to write," Janusprof asked me.  

My answer blurted out immediately, before I'd even consciously thought of it. "Longer things. Novels. Series."

"That's not an answer!" he insisted. "I mean what do you really want to write?"

I knew what he wanted. He wanted some touchy-feely internal conflict that had torn my soul apart and drawn me to the blank page. He wanted my "true" pain or some artistic cliché. I probably could have given him a shlocky answer like "redemption" and talked about how many of my stories explore someone struggling to be good when they don't even really know what that means. That would have given him a fine-arts boner.

Unfortunately, he didn’t really get how genuine my answer was.

The pedagogy of most writing programs seems to focus on this imaginary "true" reason that a writer is dying to write. It’s born of a “high-art” ideal about the nature of inspiration and expression and what “counts” and what doesn’t (and seems to be the reason that most MFA programs produce a laughably huge outpouring of literature about the horror of white, middle-class childhoods with mild drug experimentation).

Because, you know...that's pretty edgy.

Somewhere along the line, while the “high-art” instructors are wringing out their souls for inspiration, passing judgment on what isn’t art (perhaps with the scathing invective of “popular”), and excusing the fact that they spend an inordinate amount of time focused on what to write instead of how to write it because they are "academics in the school of humanities," they forget that most students attend college to learn a marketable skill set—not to be molded into a cookie cutting of the same bourgeoisie aesthetic and told what to enjoy.

The real fuck of it is that the question could possibly have been a valuable one from one in the position of mentor. It was clearly the sort of Dead Poets Society, search-your-soul moment he was gong for. But those only actually work if said mentor does not have a predetermined sort of answer in mind. Janusprof obviously did.

I, in stark contrast, was being quite reflective and sincere when I said it. I learned something about myself in the alacrity of my answer, whether he approved or not.

The short story is the format that is most convenient both for reading and writing in college. It fits tidily into a classroom structure. If you take on a novel, it has to be a big chunk of your curriculum, and writing something longer would take an entire semester. So when the lessons are coming once a week, the realistic format to work with is the short story. If the students want to take the tools they learn into something that goes beyond the scope of 45 hours of lecture, they can.

It's not a bad thing, mind. Most writers (including me) could stand to learn how to be concise rather than verbose. And I appreciate the short story as an art form probably more than the next guy—unless I happen to be standing next to a Pushcart editor or something. It just suffers from being convenient. Short stories also tend to be the medium of foot-in-the-door in traditional publishing. A few short story publishing accolades will get your manuscript a more considered look by an agent. At the time I did not know I would be passionate about non-traditional publishing, so I figured more short stories were in my future.

But what calls to me, what I yearn for—both in reading and in writing—is longer works. That is my inner fucking urge, and everyone hoping that my step-dad diddled me or that my teenage angst at being a D&D nerd cut me to the quick of my soul is just going to have to be fucking disappointed.

I love reading novels. I can’t even remember a time when I would feel the girth of thick books and marvel at their potential to suspended me within another world for as long as possible. I didn't want to read a book so much as crawl inside them and be someone else for as long as possible.

Perhaps not quite that thick...

I read Gone With the Wind before I had acne, just because it was the thickest book I could find in the A.E. Wright middle school library. I gathered cans from around town for two days to scrounge up the money to purchase Stephen King’s It, mostly because I was aware that it clocked in at over a thousand pages. I even tried my hand at War and Peace just because its heft felt so....comforting to me—although I must admit that one never got finished. My principle complaint with my Kindle is that I can’t hold a book like 1Q84 and feel its heft against my palms.

I particularly enjoyed series books. I could stay in a world and with a character for weeks. More than once I blew months worth of allowance on a run of novels because I’d enjoyed the first and I wanted (needed?) to be able to pick a new one up as soon as I was done with the old. No interruption was acceptable.

It is then, with Ben Stein caliber lack of shock, that I discover my proclivity toward writing the same.

I imagine full and developed arcs based on childhood books and movies, and sometimes even picture epic quests that I cannot tell outside of a trilogy (or more). One of my bucket list works (writers bucket lists don’t involve places they should go; they involve things they should write) is an epic high fantasy chronicle that sits firmly ensconced in my head that would be no less than five or six volumes.

I was always “writing books” from about nine or ten on. I sent more trees to their doom commandeering notebooks and legal pads in order to begin some opus or another on than I will ever admit to a nature conservationist. In high school, my successes and my failures finishing manuscripts all began as "novels." It never even occurred to me to write a short story outside of an English assignment.

When I got into college, I wrote a lot of stuff I didn’t want to write including essays on the effect of nonoxynol nine on latex and fifty page research papers on "the model minority," but I always brought my "A game" and wrote my heart out  because I figured every lesson that put a tool in my toolbox was a lesson worth having as a writer. If I was going to stop working a "real job" in my thirties to give that much time and effort to something, I was bloody going to suck the marrow out of it. I even worked around the “no genre” pedagogy with nothing but an eye-roll. I wanted to be there. Bad.

However, whenever I read a successful writer's advice almost all say some variant of the following: write what you would want to read. 

Forget the snobby lit sommeliers that haunt the Humanities buildings of college campuses and concern themselves with how “literary” a work isn’t, uttering phrases like “worthy of fiction” in a way that makes it clear they are imminently qualified to determine such things. Forget the promotional guru who has come up with a Venn diagram outlining various demographics and where the most “accessible” story possible would be located. Ignore the well-intentioned family members who tell that you should totally do a book just like Harry Potter/Twilight/Da Vinci Code/Whatever’s Selling Like Mad. Ignore them all.

Write what you would want to read.  

Word!

For me, that is books, trilogies, epics. I want to create worlds. I want to make people regret turning that last page like they would regret saying good-bye to an old friend.

Janusprof shook his head and turned away from me. In his mind, I had failed. I was Luke and I just couldn't get the X-wing out of the swamp. He paid a lot more attention to his nachos after that. His replies became curt.

I found it enlightening, personally. My answer was firm and immediate. It came out of me almost before the question was finished, burbling up from some place that didn’t even have time to mull it on a surface level. My gut knew something I didn’t. I don’t think, until he asked me that question, if I knew just how much I was really tired of being forced into the square pegs of short stories or how much I really yearned to get back to some of the unpolished and half-finished manuscripts and even some new stuff that had bubbled to the surface over the years I was stuck in school.

He reminded me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place.

[This article has been revised from an earlier version. If you are interested in the original, you can find it here.]

Recognize Real Opportunities

Photo by Jason Tester

While you don't want to get quagmired in the sort of writing you don't want to do, you also don't want to let good opportunities pass you by.

So I'm writing for another blog.  It's not just a guest post situation; I'm actually a blogger there.  Today was my first post (and yesterday was the launch) of a blog called Grounded Parents. While some of you who've written in requesting the deets of my personal life (multiple times and as though you are auditioning for the role of the tough-as-nails investigator on the new CSI: SF/Bay Area) might relish the opportunity to gain another piece in the puzzle, the blog really isn't about writing, and so I won't do a lot of cross posting here.  I'll probably put a link in my Folks Worth Checking Out page but otherwise you won't see much unless I write something there that also applies particularly to writing.

However I do want to use it to make a point.

Writers will have lots of opportunities to write.  From skeevy offers for unpaid freelance work to professional opportunities like tech writing and freelance writing that aren't creative. They can always go on Craigslist and end up writing scat fetish porn for a penny a word. But while writing opportunities are everywhere, a writer wants to be very careful which ones they pursue. Many of these opportunities are unpaid, and the ones that are may quagmire a writer in an unfulfilling, non-creative loop. A career writing electric toothbrush instruction manuals might allow a writer to light their cigars with five hundred dollar bills, but it would be an empty and hollow life of alcohol, drugs, and double-jointed prostitutes. There would be no real fulfillment. One of the toughest choices for an unpublished writer with a career path that is still unmanifest is to walk away from something that's not going to be worth their time.

However, especially if you are in on the e-pub/blogging/self promotion side of the business of writing, it is equally important to be able to recognize a really good opportunity when one comes along. You don't want to be so focused on your own shit that you never write for anyone but yourself.  The world of social media is a tricky beast and sometimes the best thing you can do is be seen outside of your normal circles doing what you do. Every advice column out there on how to get more traffic recommends doing guest posts and just being SEEN writing in other places--even if it's just commenting.  Any writing that you might be interested in doing anyway, done on major blogs, actually can be great exposure, even if they're not tipping over wheelbarrows of money into your cash pool.  Writing About Writing has already had a dozen referrals from Grounded Parent and it's only the first day.

Unfortunately I've known more than a few writers, some far better writers than I, who asked for signal-boosting without giving any back, wouldn't collaborate, and never did anything for which they were not paid, and they have all inevitably had a very difficult time expanding beyond their own ability for self-promotion. You have to recognize the importance of other people in this industry--especially if you are going the e-pub/self-pub/blogging route. But even in the incestuous world of traditional publishing, if you are always looking out for number one, no one will ever put their neck out for you either.

There isn't a hardline for judging this.  Just know that bullshit is probably going to smell like bullshit, and if you recognize the name of a blog without looking it up, you're probably looking at a great opportunity.  In the vast ocean between these two extremes, it's going to be up to your best judgement.  If you feel like your career is going well and you need to push hard in that direction, you may want to pass on more of the middle-of-the-road propositions. If you are just starting out, you might err on the side of getting the experience.

Just don't be afraid to flip them off with both hands and say "NOPE!" if it turns out to be something that isn't good for you.

You always want to beware of bullshit, snake oil salesmen, dead ends, and careers where you can "be a writer" but that aren't really the type of writing you'd like to do, but at the same time you don't want to be too good to write for anything but yourself, too focused on self promotion to realize the benefit of having your name shouted from a few new towers and too mercenary about pay to miss a good opportunity.

Continuing Adventures in the "Air/Fuel" Mixture

I haven't needed to worry much about spending too much time on my blog in the last couple of weeks because of the data corruption issues I faced back in May.  But I've been pricing Macs (since writers swear by them, they aren't supposed to do shit like this, and a Mac machine [an iPad] is the only thing I am able to see my old writing on because it was the system that did what it was supposed to) and today is the day new releases that everyone told me to wait for.  Well, I waited, and now I'm going to buy a laptop dedicated to writing.

That means I'm back to old issues of trying to find the sweet spot of turning down the volume here, so I can turn up the volume on writing other places--mainly fiction.  If I made more than ten dollars a month, I'd be happy to plow on, but I'm still spending 20-25 hours or more on the blog, and that just has to come down a bit.  Perhaps if I didn't have a day job (which you can put scare quotes around if you wish, but I spend 3-5 hours a day doing it and usually get no days completely off) or I could add the time I spend housekeeping to the end of the day, I could do both without having to choose, but my pleas for a thirty hour day go cheerfully ignored by all I proposition.

So here's my latest plan.  I've been watching my page views pretty carefully since I started the blog to get a sense of who reads what and when, and even what X-posting gets me traffic. Weekends here are kind of crap in terms of page views.  Hits on weekends are notoriously low, even when I put up stuff that is really popular.  The hits just end up trickling in throughout the following week.  People really liked the grammar themed potpourri, for example, but most of the traffic to that page came in the following week.

So I am going to take weekends off.

I'm going to move Potpourri to Friday, and focus on propping up my guest bloggers for Wednesday, and putting up one solid article on Monday.  It seems like over time I'm getting more traffic on solid hit efforts than by putting something up every day, so I'm going to focus on that.

Turning the Page, What's Next For This Blog, And Why I'm So Afraid

Part 1-  Turning the Page

Yesterday I took a walk .  It was about a three mile circuit around my neighborhood.  I started the walk just to get some exercise.  Writing About Writing has eaten a lot of other time sinks while I launched it, one of them my health and fitness goals, so I figured I'd get back into that by starting to kick off a daily walk.

It turned out to be just what I needed.  I've been a little bit afraid of the next few steps.  Maybe "afraid" isn't the right word, but I've been trying to psych myself up for what comes next and feeling like my sticking place was melting into jibbering goo instead of being a solid anchor for my courage to screw.  Then again, maybe "afraid" is exactly the right word.

The reason I have a Summa Cum Laude degree in English (Emphasis: Creative Writing) covering up a hole in my drywall is because I tried the whole "just writing" route about a decade ago, and it ended with a number of people telling me not to quit my day job. Some did so with as much politeness and gentleness as they could muster, and others did so with the tact of a jackhammer welded like a piercing ram onto the front of a bulldozer, driven full speed into my soul.

Now...well, now I can tell you a hundred things I did wrong back then.  I can tell you craft elements that weren't working, and how to fix (most of) them.  I can tell you the ideological difficulties my work was having being didactic. I can tell you major, fundamental process issues I had--primary among them giving out a first draft, and giving it to anyone who would read instead of people I trusted and respected to give good feedback.  I can even tell you that I hadn't cultivated the kind of thick skin that one needs to be able to get "Go back to the farm, kid," caliber feedback and just keep right on going, and that now I know feedback that nasty is just part of the price of doing business.

But what I can't do is forget how much it hurt.  God, did it hurt.  Wisdom teeth, root canals, pulled muscles, internal bleeding from a car crash--I've never hurt like that before or since.

I slunk away from that encounter with my tail between my legs, enrolled in school with the goal of a creative writing degree, and buried myself in being the best student I could.  For seven years I had a great excuse for why I couldn't expose myself to that again.  I still had "things to learn."  I wasn't done yet.  I'm not even a hundred percent sure that starting this blog wasn't partially a way to put off that inevitable moment just a little longer.  Oh I had my legitimate reasons for it, but of the legitimate choices I could have made, it might also have been the path of least resistance.

But here we are...

And so yesterday, I walked.  While I'm sure that just getting some blood pumping and working some atrophied muscles was a good experience, and that just the meditationesque mind-floating that happens on a solo walk was good for clearing out some cobwebs in the corners of my brain, what really did the trick wasn't just the pedestrian benefits of a good walk.

I was passing Oakland Technical High School right when they were getting out for lunch.  There's an energy that swirls around high school students gathered en mass--especially in the second half of May--because so much of the trajectory of their life is yet undiscovered.  It isn't exactly tablua rasa, but it's one of the closest things we'll ever really get.  Individually there may be exceptions, but as a a group, there's less tragedy, more youth, and a sense of unbridled optimism (even through the emo filters of some) that the world has yet to beat out of them.  A twelve year chapter of their life is finally coming to a close, and the next part is unwritten.

At that moment the theme song for Dragon: The Bruce Lee story came on.  This is not only a gorgeous and moving song, but it came out right around when I graduated, so I've always associated the two.  At my own graduation rehearsal, instead of being a good little line walker like I was supposed to, I was running a pair of headphones up under my gown and listening to this very song.  Try hitting the pavement right at the fanfare of this song during a coronation if you ever want to have a peak experience.  Not. Even. Kidding.

With all that optimistic teen energy around me, and this song blaring in my ears, nostalgia hit like a hammer.  I didn't really enjoy or hate high school--I liked the structure and seeing friends each day, but I pretty much thought the class part was slow torture. But I do remember the idea that I was stepping into a world of possibility and wonder.

I became, in that moment, that young little Chris once again.  Eighteen, and looking out on the world for the first real time.  Not quite yet realizing that I couldn't actually be anything I wanted.  I was held in that split second--that suspended moment right before the roller coaster tips over the edge of the first hill--just before you realize that your life won't really be shaped by your fantastic string of awesome successes, but by instead by how you handle your innumerable failures.

And that turned out to be exactly the perspective I needed.

I don't know if what I'm planning is going to work, or if I'm going to fall flat, but let's crank up the Bruce Lee soundtrack and say, "What the hell!"

Part 2- What's Next for this Blog

When I was young I didn't know what was going to happen in the publishing industry.  I grew up with the same formula every other writer hopeful did of short story publication, agent, publisher, book deal, win.  I couldn't have predicted that this strange machine that a few of my tech-savvy friends had--a machine that made a lot of weird noises and let them go into "chat rooms"--would be upending everything within the publishing industry right about the time I felt ready to have a serious go of it.  I couldn't have predicted the longest recession my generation had ever seen would make everyone gun shy to take a chance on arts.  I just knew I thought it would be the coolest thing in the world to be able to write fiction for a living.

I've watched the industry carefully.  I've watched the popularity of e-readers explode.  (Even Uberdude bought one, and two years ago, he was sure I was personally contributing to the destruction of bookstores.)  I've watched a lot of writers make a go of it in unconventional ways, and I've listened closely to those who are in the right kinds of places to hear the wind blowing.  I've watched book stores, small presses, and major houses have to change their business model to keep up with the times.  And even some of the local mom-and-pop, brick-and-mortar stores have done so with aplomb.  I've watched writers I like increasingly eschew the traditional routes of those first few steps in favor of pioneering their own paths of monitization.  They might not run screaming when Random House stops by with a fat check and an offer, but they begin the journey on their own terms.  More and more success stories that involve blogs, zines, e-publishing, show up every day.  (Cory Doctorow, J.A. Konrath, Grammar Girl, Fifty Shades of Gray and on and on and on.)  These aren't one-time flashes in the pan.  The frequency of these non-traditional routes to writing success is increasing.

I've also watched people doing the more traditional route smash their head into one proverbial wall after another. Writers of true excellence who simply can't find an agent in this environment.  Or if they find an agent, they can't get a book deal.  Agents are increasingly quagmired in anachronistic submission processes that paint a picture of their deliberate, calculated ignorance of industry changes which are already upon them.   Small presses and literary journals fold one after another like the characters in an Agatha Christie novel with the death knell of, "The smell of books!" on their lips.  Yesterday's publisher sneering at the Kindle as ridiculous, today puts a "For Sale" sign on their store with a bewildered scratch of their head.  The publishing industry has practically ensured that it will be irrelevant by not adapting.   The old guard seems to be collapsing in on itself and the writers who allow the decades-old stigma of vanity press, and the more recent contempt for zines, or online publication to influence their decisions are dealing with options decreasing even as they watch.  They too sneer at the coming of the new age and then wonder why competition is so tough for  the dwindling number of spots the industry can still handle.

So this is what I decided...

1- I'm going to write out ahead of myself, so that I can take W.A.W. up a notch.  If I get week or two ahead, things like dental appointments will be less likely to alter a decorum of professionalism.  Cause it's really professional around here.  Oh yeah.  That will also give me more time to copy-edit since that is one of my weaknesses, and it takes me longer to do.  Basically, I'm going to try to take W.A.W. to the next level.

2- At the suggestion of a few of you, and given some calculated predictions regarding the industry, I'm going to put some of my short fiction up here.  I don't know if that's the "right" decision, but it's something.  If that works, then I'll keep doing it.  If not, then I can go back to other directions.  But scoffing at the past while being unsure of the future was just one more way I was avoiding taking the first step, so I'm just going to take some first step and let's see what happens.

Gone Fishin'

I'm going to try really hard not to post ANYTHING here on the weekends.  Not even a little link to something that I think is interesting and writers should see.

I'm going to try really, really hard, but I will probably fail.

The main thing to know is that I'm going to stop holding myself to post on weekends.  The scheduled "productivity report" is going to be scrapped for the time being since it had very low readership (Google analytics shows me which pages are being read) and no one was joining me. The Sunday evening"prompts" are a bit more popular, but I think I'll incorporate them into the rest of the week, and actually give myself the day completely off.  I haven't really had one of those since January's glut of post-graduation do nothingness.

I will probably fail to not post...just so you know.  I'm very bad at not posting.

Actually, that's not even true.  I straight out suck at not posting.  Some people bemoan how long it's been since they posted.  I do too, except I bemoan how short the time has been.

I sometimes want to post two or three times a day, and I have to remind myself that most people find that sort of thing annoying.  It's not just that I'm a page view whore (though I am); it's actually that I really like writing, and I really like writing about writing (that's the action not the blog...though I like that too).  And I have a hard time when I see something or think of something with not immediately sharing it with everyone who might have the slightest interest in writing as well.

Sometimes, though, it just makes all the difference in how you look at it.  An obligation to write three posts in a weekend was a chore.  Not having that obligation makes anything I choose to do a little more footloose and fancy free. I won't wake up thinking "Okay, I have to do my laundry, clean the cat boxes, do the dishes, and set aside three hours for the blog." Sometimes just knowing you can do something for three hours or three minutes or not at all makes all the difference in the stress it brings to our lives...even if we end up choosing to use the three hours in the same way.

Anyway, so that's why weekends are getting a make over.

Art, Life, and Support Mechanisms

Just make sure YOUR "penguin" is your social life, an iPad, or a car,
and not health insurance, rent, or food.

Dear Writers,

I'm going to give you all a little unsolicited advice based on the harrowing adventures of my last week or so, and the younger you are when you take it, the better life will probably go for you.

I've met a lot of people who want to be writing fiction to pay the bills.  It's a tough way to make money.  It's even a tougher way to make enough money to pay the bills.  Most of us have day jobs.  Yours truly is a teacher of English and a househusband.  There are a lot more lucrative ways to make money writing--freelance writing, tech writing, content writing, or editing.  If you want to pursue creative writing as anything other than a hobby, you should be ready to cobble together income streams from all over the place, and you should be ready to spend your life not having as much stuff as other people.

That's probably easier to think that you're cool with than to actually be cool with.  We all want to be the non-materialist zen types who don't want to be the "stuff" lovers from the old George Carlin routine.  But when we feel like losers because we have to get picked up from a BART station or can't go somewhere out of the way, it gets a little harder. When we are in our thirties renting a room, it doesn't feel quite so awesome.  Or even if just want to be able to impress our would-be partners with the fact that we have good prospects and can chip in on the American dream of "building a life" together, it can sting to fall short.

It might seem a little harsh to tell you that if you want to write, you might need to give up on having your own car or owning a home. It probably is a little harsh.  Aren't their success stories of writers who penned together their first novels in the cracks of real lives?  Sure.  But for every success story I've read of some successful author who pursued a career so that they could afford life's amenities and/or a family while never giving up writing, I have personally witnessed a hundred more who simply do not have the time or energy to give to serious writing once they pursue a career. Many blog casually. A few do fan fiction. But whenever I check back on these people after their "real" career has taken off, they sort of lament their inability to really dig into writing the way they used to. Their careers just eat up too much of their time.

And don't even get me started on kids. It's no wonder writing has long been an art dominated by voices of high privilege; the independently wealthy are the ones in the best position to pursue it.

The other thing to understand about those success stories is that they maybe didn't give up having a job that paid the bills, but they did give up SOMETHING.  Whether it was that peaceful zone out on the subway to work, time with their family at night, or an hour of sleep each morning, they all sacrificed something.

I made a decision long ago that losing my writing to a "real job" would not be me. I would rather write unpaid and pursue the things in my life that bring me real meaning than pursue the things our materialistic-as-fuck society says are important.  This hasn't always been a painless choice. The reason culture has such a strong current is not because we can't look at it and see it's flaws; it's because we know what the consequences are for not playing the game.  You can imagine (perfectly) the way people will look at you when they hold your life up to their bellwethers of success (a nice car, a nice place to live, maybe a house, a plasma screen TV and iPad...etc...) and find you to be lacking.  Really going against the grain isn't something you do for thirty seconds when you wear your unique Jordash style through a commercial of shocked looking preppies.  It's knowing that most of the people most of the time pretty much think you're wasting your life, and dealing with the not insignificant number of those willing to tell you so "because they care."

However this is my advice to you about eschewing our cultural values of commercialism and materialism: 

Don't go crazy with it.   Bathwater has a strange way of having babies in it.

The poor bohemian artist who cares nothing for society's bullshit is fine and well, but don't let that become your excuse not to take care of yourself.  For you are not really a frivolous thing, and neither is your health.  Not having a car is one thing.  Fine, you walk more and have to bum rides.  Not having health insurance is something else.  I've seen a lot of artists, especially YOUNG artists think that they can get by on on a wing and a prayer, and that usually goes about as well as you might expect when something bad happens (and something bad always happens...eventually).  They end up with long term health problems, chronic injuries, or a mouth full of missing teeth.  I even know one person who ended up with thirty-thousand dollars of hospital bills because an infection they could have fixed for 100 bucks worth of antibiotics a month earlier.  They chose to ignore their infection due to cost; it went into their heart, and very nearly killed them.

I tell you this because recently it was me.  Last week I battled with an increasingly bad mood.  I didn't want to write.  I wasn't feeling cheery.  I was a little hard to get along with personally.  What I didn't know is that underneath my skull right above my upper teeth on the right side was the beginning of a massive infection, and those toxins were flooding my bloodstream with their evil ju-ju.  By the time my face swelled up and the pain took over that whole area, I knew there was a problem. Fortunately I have dental insurance and the support mechanisms in place that I know problems like this are covered.

I need a triple root canal across three of my front teeth, and even though I'm not afraid of dentists, that sounds positively horrible. More to the point, it would have been about $4,500 out of pocket or I would have had to extract the tooth right next to my right incisor, and if I'd ignored it, I'd have died in the same horrible way of many of my evolutionary ancestors.

As with many things in life, there is a sweet spot between extremes. You want to ride that sweet spot.  Yes, you're probably never going make big bucks.  But don't get so wrapped up in anti-materialism that you forget to take care of yourself.  Things like health insurance, dental insurance, and some kind of retirement plan aren't really luxuries in the strictest sense.  They might mean you have to budget a few hundred dollars for something other than Raman and "party favors"--which might mean you need more of a day job than you think--but as soon as you you stop looking at it as optional, you'll surprise yourself with how many solutions you come up with..  (Man if I could tell you how many people say they can't afford insurance but spend a couple hundred on useless crap every month....)

Take care of yourselves.  That artistic brain of yours needs a healthy host body to sustain it.  There are a lot of unimportant things out there you can make a decision not to give a rats ass about, and you will probably be a better artist for it.

Your health isn't really one of them.

If you're in this for the money, do something else!

This was a red letter day in terms of page views. This is what I make on a red letter day. There are lots of better ways to make money--even by writing. Don't do it unless you love it. Don't do it unless not doing it makes you sick.

You can click the picture if you can't read it on the page. It won't take you to e-Narnia, I promise.

My Name is Chris and I Use Two Spaces

Worst. Character Defect. Ever.

I have a deep, dark confession to make. Some of you probably already have noticed this vast and personal failing, but to those who have not, I assure you, I am not attempting to get away with anything. I will lay it all bare.

My mother taught me to type when I was six. What I didn't learn from her, I learned in my high school keyboarding class in 1993. We still used typewriters back in those ancient days of yore. It was a different time--a time of innocence. Back when sending troops to Iraq was new and fresh and not the tired cliche of today. A time before computers and automatic formatting. Before the dark times.

Before The Empire.

Yes, by now, you probably know the deep horror to which I'm about to admit.

I am not a good person. I am flawed...frail...all too human. But the brightest lamp among my glaring faults is that I sometimes use two spaces after punctuation. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I learned skills and reinforced them day after day for years--decades. Who knew that we would end up with auto-formatting computers? We were just happy back then to not have to run from saber toothed tigers on our way to school.

As you can see from Farhad Manjoo this is an ugly error, and according to Damian Thomson it is an atrocity. I had hoped it would be enough in my life not to commit genocide or become a serial killer.

But I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

Of course, like most such arguments, there are huge camps, debating even the very history surrounding the controversy. Lines were drawn. A typographical civil war rages with brother pitted against brother. There is a side out there that agrees with me makes pathetic excuses to justify my moral failing.

But I have no illusions that the two-spacers are morally depraved to their space bar tapping cores and on the wrong side of history. And so I can only ask you for your humble forgiveness that I am a human who has such a horrific and terrible practice ingrained deep within me as habit. I can only ask you to forgive me when I stray.

When I falter.

I am pretty good when I pay attention, and getting better, but when my fingers are flying, sometimes...I don't think about the hurt they can cause until it's already too late.

I am weak.

First post

This is the first post. It is basically no more than a test.

I'm going to hit "Publish Post" now, and see if I blow up the Internet.

ETA: The internet survived.  I must try harder.


Further ETA: 

On several social media when I share posts, I share whatever post I'm writing for that day, and one "rerun." I don't share every tiny post I ever make, but I filter through more than just the best of W.A.W. too.

At one post a day, eventually my reruns catch up to where I am currently. It takes longer each time (for reasons a moment's thought should make apparent) but eventually I will always get to the point where I feel like, "Man I JUST posted this."

And that's when I go back to the beginning of Writing About Writing--2012.

Remember that this blog isn't just a collection of articles on writing advice. It also exists as a living, breathing "real-time" template. It's advice in deed as well as in word. It can give writers a realistic sense of everything from how much effort it takes to launch a full fledged writing career, to how their audience can improve over time, to how they can improve the quality of their prose with daily practice, to how much they can expect to make, to how difficult it can be for a working writer to grind out the time and energy some days, and working the ball down the field is much more important than the hail Mary.

So as we return back to the earliest posts of the blog, a careful reader will notice how the writing quality is lower than what I write currently. They will notice I make less than a penny a day rather than a few dollars a day. They will notice I'm excited about a few hundred page views instead of a couple of thousand. There are lessons here beyond the ostensible. A deeper level of writing about writing (about writing).