Stepping Up my A Game--Well...My B+ Game, Anyway.

The Prometheus post just overtook my grammar potpourri post last night, so it's now the most page views I've ever gotten on a single post.  This is cool, but it has some implications.

In general I've watched my page views creeping up.  Nothing has gone viral or anything, but I now wake up to more page views than I used to get all day.  And even though I'm going to get fewer page views this month than last, that's because I stopped posting something every day, and started taking weekends off.  In terms of views-per-post, I'm still crawling upward.   Each time I get more views, I kind of start taking the whole blog project more seriously.  So a bellwether like "most hits for a single entry" kind of has the effect of 80's power chords in terms of motivation.  Somewhere between validation of the past and responsibility to the future, I feel a second wind to step up my efforts.  I know my "A game" is probably going to take more than triple digit page views and a hundred dollars a year to coax out, but I do kind of get inspired to take it up a notch.


I need to:

-Kick off the last few reliquary topics I've been thinking about adding
-Finish the Glossary
-Get more than two or three products on the resources review
-Flesh out the "lists" that are only two or three things long.
-Stop getting distracted by summer and actually write out ahead of myself so I can be better about proofing and stuff
-Clean up my short fiction and put some of it up here
-Stop talking about it

Introducing my new lappie.

Six men came to write with me one time.  And the best of 'em carried this*.

It's a MacAir full-bore auto-lock.  Double USB. Customizable Apps. 4GB Memory and 128 flash storage. A magnetic seal power cord. Weighs less than three pounds, and is renowned for how fast it comes on from sleep mode. It is my very favorite laptop.

This is the best laptop made by man.  It has *extreme* sentimental value.  It's miles more worthy than what you got.

I call it Vera.

*Pencil shown so you can see how mind-bendingly sleek it really is.

The damage from the data corruption through MS programs is bad.  Most anything I didn't save some version of in the last year or so is corrupted beyond my ability to open it with any word processing program.  I can AT LEAST read it on my iPad with some viewer programs in between a bunch of goobldy gook characters.  I can't really edit, but reading it is something, at least, and much MUCH better than the error message I get from Microsoft based programs.  That's what made me kill all the sand people in the entire village and then go back for some youngling stew.

Eh, only one short story wouldn't have need a complete revision anyway, so this will just force me to do what I needed to as part of the process.

My main concern now is that this never happens again.  Or I really will cry.  Lots of writers swear by Macs and I can't help but notice that while Microsoft programs were making 15 years worth of writing (including every college paper and most of my pre-degree manuscripts that I wanted to come back to) completely unintelligible, it was Mac stuff that actually came through for me--even in what limited form it could.  It was the Mac stuff that did what it was supposed to.

That's what I need.  Shit that works when I turn it on.  If it doesn't work, I need a new one.  Instead of if it doesn't work...."have you tried Googling coaxial cable trinton frask and then rebooting from a save point six steps back while reinterpreting the main tachion burst into a harmonic resonance with the ion flow?"  Cause I'm pretty sure people asked me if I'd done that.

I don't really understand the product feud over computer brand loyalty.  You don't see people who like Cheerios claiming that the Corn Flakes guys are all part of a crazy cult or the Corn Flake guys rolling their eyes, putting on their matching robes and going to the local Corn Flakes store to commiserate on how off base the word "cult" is.  And you don't see the news wondering if every new turbo charged Nissan Skyline is going to be "A Mustang Killer."

I don't see why computers have to be this issue that requires people to jettison their brains before they discuss.  If you are a computer whisperer, and you can make those fucking boxes of circuits and shit do what you want them to do, get yourself a PC of the MS or Linux variety and spend countless hours fixing things every time your different softwares have tantrums about their codexes or whatever and don't get along with each other.  If you get hives at any step beyond the ON button, and generally LIKE when your computer pats you on the head and tells you what you want and what don't want, enjoy your Mac.

I clearly fall into the later category.  I need my shit to work every time I turn it on and if it doesn't I have to kidnap ship engineers and tell their bridge crew "We look for things.  Things to make us write."  And when someone fixes something on my box of circuits--usually Uberdude--I nod and say "He is smart."

So as I salvage what writing I can, and start the painful process of rewriting everything else, I do so on Vera.

Trashing Prometheus is the New Black (Blogging About Blogging)

It's been less than a week and my post on Monday about Prometheus has gotten the second highest hits of anything I've ever written--even stuff with "slow burn" popularity like 5 Things You Can Do to Be a Better Writer Almost Overnight.  The highest ever was my grammar themed potpourri, but I think that had a lot to do with all the images within it.  I put images in Pintrest, and when they're funny little comics like that, they always get a couple of clicks back.  Since that post had a LOT of images, it picked up a lot of Pintrest traffic.  But mostly that traffic is stopping by to see if I am a vast repository of lulz, which I'm not.

Most pages get 90% of the hits they're ever going to in the first 24hours, but the movie reviews tend to keep a trickle going.  The Disney Movie reviews bring in a glimpse or two every week. It's entirely possible that the Prometheus review will pull into the #1 position in the next month or so.

Of course the other posts that consistently do quite well are the ones I post about conventions, though they are more likely to do very well right when I post them, and never really be heard from again.  I think most people are just interested to see my perspective of mutual experiences, and storytellers want to see what kind of insight I might have into their games.  So this has made me think a little about what gets hits and how to incorporate that in going forward.  I figured the Prometheus review wouldn't do well because it was so long, but that didn't seem to be a factor.

Something to consider when I'm dumbing down and shortening up the next thing because I don't want it to be too monolithic or I think an audience will tune out.

In some cases, I really have to redraw all the maps of Bloggerville that have come before me because I'm not taking the paths they have pioneered.  Quite a few people (friends who are bloggers themselves in many cases) have ponied up some truly spectacular advice about trying to get more traffic and what I could probably do to make Writing About Writing more popular.  I don't want to seem like I'm ignoring those people, or that I'm ungrateful for the advice.  I know how I feel when I give someone my heartfelt input and they basically say "Wow that's really great, but I'd rather strap myself with C-4 and jump off a very tall building onto some spikes while shooting myself in the head with an explosives-detonating-plunger bullet than listen to your advice.

It kind of stings.

I wanted to mention here why some of that advice is on hold and some of it is on long term hold.  I don't want to seem unreceptive.  I'm not.  The fact is that I'm listening to every bit of advice. But after I get that advice I have to put it through the "priority file" and see which of four boxes it lands into.

1-Ideas to incorporate now; 2- ideas that need to wait until my site is really off the ground; 3-ideas that are ideologically different than what I want to do here; 4- ideas that are too divorced from writing.

Some ideas are simple, elegant, and easy to incorporate.  Ideas like reviewing movies from the perspective of their writing or talking about fiction that's all the rage. I give them a shot like throwing spaghetti at a  wall.  Whatever sticks, I keep doing.  In some cases this information exists, suggesting what to write about to get more traffic, but a lot of THIS stuff is passed over for the more technical tactics, which leaves me in the position that the information I'm most interested in is least available and I have to struggle through myself.

There's also a big chunk of low-effort steps that I'm GOING to do...but not yet.  I've actually been doing my homework, and I have some ideas, but the blog is still in the proto-stage.  I need to finish up the glossary.  I'd like more than one or two items on the lists in the Reliquary.  I would like a couple of dozen products reviewed.  And before I "get serious" about the blog, I'd like to have something more than one of the Google templates as my background.  I tend to step up my game each time I get more people reading, but that's a slow feedback loop, and mostly I intend to focus on finishing up the foundation before I start trying to build upwards.

If I wanted to get the maximum number of hits, I would start a site with porn on it.  Seriously.  That's what gets crazy traffic.  I'd post homemade porn only available on my site and watch my views skyrocket.  But...that's not writing, or if it is, it the internal conflict and central themes usually involve the forgetting of one's pants.  So a large part of my initial moments of creating this blog were actually focused on some pretty hand on forehead soul searching about what I wasn't going to write and what I wasn't going to let myself get caught up in.  As many jokes as I make about being a total page-view whore, like the kiss-on-the-mouth rule, I have some pretty serious boundaries around what I won't do.  I want to stick to the writing, and many of the gimicks.

One of the things I'm interested in with the blog project is finding ideas to write about that are popular without getting too buried in the "web marketing" end.  I joke about being a total whore for page views, but honestly there are some things even this whore won't do.  As I did my homework, researching blogging and how to get more traffic and stuff, the thing I noticed right away is that you could get really caught up in a sort of internet marketing stuff.  Gimicky ways to get page views, fretting constantly about SEO's, and trying to pimp out your pages to dozens of other pages so you ascend the ranks of a Google search.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying this wouldn't work.  I'm sure it would.  But it's also not writing.  It seems analogous to those guys (who DO exist) always out there networking with agents and publishers, but who don't really have a lot written or spend a lot of time writing..  I'd rather do less of that, have fewer visitors, and focus on the writing.  I'm still interested in the sort of content that people want to see, which is why I am watching closely to see what posts are popular, both right away and long-term.

I've seen some people I know go way too far down that rabbit hole.  For every hour they spend writing, they spend three trying to get that writing it's maximum possible exposure.  That's a slippery slope, especially if you prefer to focus on the writing end.  So I'm being very careful to weigh some of these suggestions against their This-Is-Not-Writing factor.

Is it a good balance?  I don't know yet.  Could I be incorporating something small that would make a big difference?  Almost certainly.  But what I do know is I'm watching the analytics closely, and learning more every day, and it seems almost certain that I'll be trashing more bad movies' writing in the future.

Television: The Anti-Writer (Thursday's Three)

I've been watching too much TV lately.  I don't have cable, so what TV usually entails is being sequestered by Unsupportive Girlfriend to watch a dozen episodes of Scrubs on Netflix or something. I always walk away from days like that feeling mentally sluggish, and so grateful that we don't have real television.  But I can't blame only her; I usually watch something while I'm cleaning house, but I've been doing a little more watching than cleaning lately as I re-watch the Alien movies.

I like having Netflix.  Netflix you have to consciously queue up each new episode of something.  The TV won't keep running if you DON'T turn it off.  There also isn't a recursion process where the "must see" shows keep multiplying until you have two hours of absolutely crucial TV each day.

I don't think everything that comes on Television is bad, just like I don't think every published book is good.   There are good shows with good writing, good acting, and good direction that are art forms worthy of being watched, not because one wants something to do when they kick off their shoes after a long day of work, but because these shows are actually GOOD.  There are also crap shows that rot your brain.  But throwing out all offerings of a given art or entertainment is usually a little self-sabotaging.  Back before Internet could pick up the slack, you could always tell if someone didn't have Television because they seemed tragically out of touch most of the time.  They couldn't catch pop culture references or follow a conversation with real people.  If that's the kind of writer you want to be, by all means ban all forms of television from your life, but it is probably better for you as an artist with an art form that is eternally seeking to connect with and relate to people if you find a few shows with snappy writing and watch a little once in a while.

Just don't get carried away.  NEVER EVER EVER forget that the entire purpose of most television is to bring together an audience, usually to look at advertising.  This is art and entertainment that is formed around the liquid center of commercialism.  At best it will be forever constrained by that limitation. You will rarely find a show that bucks this system the way other media will--even film.  (One of the reasons shows on HBO or Showtime are often so spectacular is that they can maneuver free of these constraints.)

Also, never forget that television can inform your work, but it is an audio-visual medium, not a linguistic one, so you are just NOT getting the same benefit to yourself as a writer when you watch even the best, most well written TV as when you read a book.  It should be a side dish in your artistic fare (maybe even a spice), but reading should always be your staple.

Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Robert MacNeil

People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.

Joss Whedon

I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

Steve Jobs

Guy Goodman St.White Discusses Plato--Genre Hack

Good evening.  I'm Guy Goodman St.White, your quite British sounding host, and this evening I would like to take a moment to discuss a rather prolific author instead of a single work.  That author would be Plato.  Along with his mentor Socrates and his student Aristotle, Plato laid much of the Western tradition for philosophical and scientific thought.  He is perhaps most well known for the allegory of the cave and his theory of perfect forms.  We can probably also blame him for twenty-four hundred years of people who think "I believe X" somehow makes it true.

Whatever grudging nod we must give Plato for his work laying the bedrock of Western philosophy, it is eviscerated, however, if we observe him through a literary lens, for he insisted on being a prolific speculative fiction author.  Every time those Greeks turned around, Plato was scratching out some new manuscript that embraced a total lack of realism.   Honestly it give us pause to wonder if something wasn't very wrong with Plato that he couldn't keep his head out of the clouds of his own rampant imagination.  What he needed to do was stop visiting the world of make believe so often where he wrote down all that speculative stuff, and focus his attention and due diligence on creating philosophical thought.  Certainly it is not as if the two are related or anything.  He easily could have given us more philosophy if he'd stopped devoting significant measures of his time to such tomfoolery.  

Instead we are subjected to his nonstop deluge of genre.  Plato delights in writing alternative histories where he portrays conversations with Socrates that never actually occurred.  Such debased lack of realism might be forgivable if he placed the historical character into gritty and banal situations of deep characterization with which to explore the human condition and the "greekness" of their love, but instead--in a profound example of everything that is wrong with alternative histories--he uses the interaction only to explore the philosophical and social issues of the time...and get preachy about them.  

Were this the extent of Plato's dabbling into speculative fiction, we could almost forgive him his trespasses, but he insisted on also penning Utopian fiction.  Perhaps the best well known of these is The Republic, in which Plato goes on at length about his perfect wonderful island that doesn't exist.  And of course, a less well known work of Plato, Timaeus, is where we see the first sighting of one of, if not THE, most recognizable and oft-recurring single element in speculative fiction's absurdly unrealistic portrayal of Earth, Atlantis.  Oh yes.  You can blame Plato for every terrible Atlantis movie you've ever seen, for this ridiculous glob of drivel, from which thousands of horrible speculative fiction works have spawned, was his brain child.

I told you western philosophy wasn't worth it in the final analysis.

So thank you very much Plato for all your ideas about morality and politics, but we'd just as soon you didn't come back to the cave if all you were ever going to rattle our chains with was your new sci-fi paperback about magical-land.

Wallpapers of Awesomeinity

40+ Best Wallpapers of 2009

Some of these wallpapers have amazing panoramas with really interesting subjects.  It's hard for me to look at them without immediately thinking of the stories that are trying to jump off the page to be told.

Inspiration

Though writing fiction is a technical skill, which requires a huge and unforgiving skill set be all but mastered, it is also an art.  While we have the tools to encourage the flow (with things like reading constantly, writing every day, and writing at the same time every day), sometimes we still find inspiration on foreign shores. A strain of music, a beautiful film, or a picture may spark something in our creative process that kindles a fire.

I cannot promise that every bit of art I find will be as inspirational to you as it is has been to me, but here are some things that move me.

The Little Things
Moana
Hamilton
Inspiring Instrumental Music
Look at Everything Upside Down
I Can Go the Distance
Beatles: Paperback Writer
Dante's Prayer
Wallpapers of Awesomeinity         
Carry On           
A Brand New Day                       
Technomancy and Angels
Shakespeare's Sonnet 23--My Forbidden Love
Totally Inspirational Quotes...That Aren't Real
Seize The Day (Or Pluck It.  Whatever.)
Vater Unser: The Rhythm of the Words
Streisand: Putting it Together