9 Things Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me About How to Write (Part 1)

More like Dungeons and Dentists, amirite?
Image description: Badass fighter about to cut a red
dragon in the teeth.

Ah the sweet nostalgic nerdery of Dungeons and Dragons.

Dodecahedrons. Thac0s. Saving throw charts. Mountain Dew. And the tension building question: "What did you say your armor class was?" The hours and hours (and hours and hours.....and hours) we used to take for granted that are now just so fucking hard to coordinate. ("You can only do every other Monday, but only maybe? What the fuck is that even???")

And all of it so very, very good for writers.

It's not just Dungeons and Dragons either. It's Ninjas and Superspies, Rifts, Robotech, Nightbane, After the Bomb, Beyond the Supernatural, Pathfinder, Twilight 2000, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Star Trek: The RPG, Elfquest, Paranoia, Star Wars RPG (West End, WoC, and Fantasy Flight), Mechwarrior, GURPS, Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, Changeling, Hunter, Aberrant, (plus I've Live Action Role played a Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, and Hunter) and at least half a dozen one shots that I can't even remember what we were playing. However, for the sake of not listing all that out, I'll mostly use D&D for short.

1- Character is absolutely everything. Character is the story.

There's a reason every one of those games starts with how to create a character. Not magical items or monsters or how to adjudicate the rules for a fight. Building a character. The character is the throbbing pulsing core of the story. Without a character you have nothing, and the character makes all the difference.

When I first became a little D&D nerdling in the late 70s the game was far more focused on a character as a collection of stats and abilities and the series of encounters that gave experience points and treasure which enabled the characters to get into bigger encounters so they could get more experience and bigger treasure. It played a lot more like a very involved and intricate board game. Modules were painstaking descriptions of rooms, monsters, treasure and, if your Dungeon Master was playing hardcore mode, random encounters, things that could catch you off guard and end the evening.

"What happens if we get past the city walls and then take this
caravan we're supposed to be protecting for ourselves?"
Image description: Voldemort as my party's wizard.

Then people, as people are wont to do, began to break out of the mold of playing modules like DLC for a video game. They started caring about the character as more than a collection of stats and numbers and vague abilities and started wondering what they were like. Were they good? Evil? Selfish? Did they care about law and order?

"Why are we here?" they began to ask. "Why are we in the same party? Why would we work together? Do I even like you? Why do we ever leave the tavern in the first place?" People started investing in who their characters were and what they wanted and suddenly you had a very different experience when six evil thieves were told they could make some money by leaving the city's portcullis up on Thursday night than the party of paladins.

In the mid to late eighties role playing games exploded in several directions. The pen and paper heavy versions with the calculators and the hit points for your left arm were still around, but there were versions that were practically improv theater, focusing much more on the drama. There were versions where your entire character was comprised of 1-10 stats in the four elementals. Even live action role playing came into ascendence during this time.

The point is the character always always ALWAYS became the story. A story about a dude with 45 hit points in his left arm was about as interesting of a narrative as you might expect, and mostly became a board game in terms of interest, but a war torn vet who wants to rest but is drawn into a local conflict became intensely interesting. A group of scoundrels and gamblers with nary a brash pilot among them defanged the Death Star by running a heist that took out all the Kyber crystals and blew up the hangar bays–it was still floating around a very intact Alderaan, completely defenseless, when the rebel fleet showed up–having been signaled by the character who (disguised as an officer) won three minutes on the long range transceiver from the radio guy in a poker game and persuaded everyone to give her some privacy because she was calling her girlfriend on Nar Shada.

2- Whatever the rules are, they actually change the story. 

For a while there everything was trying to do gothic horror, and even Palladium got in on the action with Nightbane. Nightbane was neither particularly gothic nor horrific, but they tried to reproduce those elements and even had a pretty compelling backstory filled with cultists, corruption, a mysterious day of total darkness, and things that go bump in the night.

The problem was, they tried to be gothic horror in the same rules universe where a sonic speed hero with Muay Thai Kickboxing could attack 15 times in a fifteen second round. A universe where basically every character you ever played took boxing "for the extra attack" rather than for some sort of exploration of the human psyche. Everyone was just...boxers.

Plus they had these weird charts of characteristics that weren't exactly.....horrific. Some of them were reasonably grotesque, but in typical Palladium style, they made massive random charts and threw in the kitchen sink. It was kind of like Nightbreed (you knew Nightbane sounded familiar, right?) characteristics but there were a few that were just...well....they were just absurd. Leading of course to the biomechanical and automobile Nightbane's lament song:

I was a motorcycle centaur.
I had a TV for a face.
I had hedge-clippers, not a left arm.
I was a Nightbane disgraaeeaaeeeace.
But as bad as I was, I wasn't bad as I could be.
At least I didn't roll and get tank tread feet.

Well...you get the idea. Not exactly overwhelming gothic horror. Plus you know I'm going to need a year of therapy and some really good MDMA to embarrass myself like this again....ever. (Holy fuck what was I thinking.)

And if your story has overpowered yahoos running around with hedge clipper arms and getting into fights that level small neighborhoods, you're probably not going to strike the gothic horror tone you wanted.

The system in place–the rules that governed the ambient universe–prevented any actual game of Nightbane from being horrific. They quickly became combat-fests with vaguely more gore and spiny monsters than an average Heroes Unlimited or Ninjas and Superspies game because the game wasn't designed to make players weak. Whether the initial attempt was survival horror or political intrigue or an origin story, eventually someone picked up a car, stood up from getting shot multiple times, or did a "Shadow blast" that did enough damage to vaporize a cop in full riot gear. And then things were less gothic horror and more you-got-your-S&M-gear-in-my-overpowered-superheroes-game.

Not that heroes in S&M gear is all bad you understand....

Writers have to realize that when they lay out the rules of their universe, they are freeing and constraining themselves simultaneously. A medieval fantasy with spectacular magical power levels is going to be implausible if the villagers one town over are worried about easily fixable shit like a couple of bandits with swords or this season's rainfall. You can't scare people with a creaking door or mysteriously returning ball once the ghost definitively IS a ghost and you've lost your what-ever-could-THAT-be? element. And if your pulp detective's entire interest as a character is based on the audience joining them in their slowly trying to piece together the mystery of the psychic aliens that ride corpses and try to determine the difference between nature and nurture, you probably don't want a voice over (or a prologue in the case of writing) that says exactly what's going on at the beginning.

#OhYouBetYourAssI'mLookingAtYouDarkCity

Old school.

3- How to describe things.

In a role playing game it's the DM's (or GM's) words and the player's imaginations. That's all you get. You don't have spectacular CGI animation. You don't have Ian McKellen to voice your lines. If you don't take yourself too seriously and have practiced making noises you can maybe do some "Shiiiing" sounds when swords are drawn or "Pkshhooooo!" of explosions and some decent Sean-Connery-as-the-dragon impressions, but mostly you have to describe things.

You can't just say "You see a dragon" because the first question will be "What else is around me?" You can't just say Canebries is a dwarf because someone will want to know what Canebries LOOKS like. You don't get to just say, "It's an elven city," because people will want to know if they're looking at the Ewok wood elf village from Kelethin or the stonework of Rivendell or the some crystal palace shit with 300 yard vaulted arches.

Like so old school, the school has been torn down
for having asbestos and radon.

And it takes about two minutes to realize that the players will fall asleep at the most clinical descriptions of distance and space. No one cares how big the room is according to a tape measure, (and the only people who do care about that level of detail are about to throw a fireball and mostly just want to check that they're not going to pan fry the cleric in the backwash). No one cares how tall every dwarf is or what color their facial hair is or how it's braided (unless they're big for a dwarf or their meticulously braided beard reveals something about their character). No one cares about the circumference of a buckler shield or if it is folded steel or bronze unless those details are somehow meaningful.

This method of description serves writers well. What an audience wants are the significant details. And just a few of them. They can be precise and quantitative (if, say, your main character is a ship's computer in a body who would notice that sort of thing), but what a character first sees creates a significance of its own. And they still serve to quickly form a bridge with the audience.

Combat as a broad sword stroke (see how I cleverly avoided a mixed metaphor?) rather than described with every painstaking weight shift or riposte. Sex in terms of a few intimate details rather than a meticulous recount of every thrust and moan. Disaster told through the eyes of a few horrible details rather than a list of every terrible effect. From either side of the DM's screen, there is a sharp but valuable learning curve on how much is not enough, how much is too much, and the Goldilocks zone of significant details.

This covers the basics but you can google "Hero's journey" and
see how variations on the theme can get more complex.

4- The hero's journey.  


With a few exceptions (survival horror one shots come to mind where everyone ends up dying eventually–whether it's knifed by a cultist or gouging your own eyes out at the sight of an old one), when you play a role playing game, the characters gathered around the table are the heroes of the story. The more you fundamentally edge away from Very Complicated Board Game™ and approach something more like collaborative storytelling, the more each player sees their character as the hero of their own story and each will come to work for an arc that looks like the hero's journey–sometimes called the Monomyth.

At first there's a lot of resistance to the hero's journey as a template because people think it's literal and actually can't believe that human storytelling with all its infinite complexity could boil down to anything so simple. (How dare you suggest that it's all been done before!) They have trouble with the literal vs. figurative elements. Like there will not always literally be a call to adventure. Literally a supernatural aid. Literally a threshold guardian. In some stories there certainly is (Star Wars) and many even come out directly and use this LANGUAGE to describe these characters (The Matrix), but in many, these aspects are more figurative.

Want to continue on your journey? You have to get past us.
Hope you can fence, wrestle, and win a land war in Asia.

There are other stories. (You've heard there are only seven stories, right? Well The Hero's Journey really only matches up with two of them....maaaaybe three).  There are stories of tragedy, romance (comedy), rags to riches and rebirth that are just not as common in most role playing games. But things like "The Quest" or "Overcoming the Monster" are the stuff of RPG's. And so they're filled with hero's journeys. ("The Voyage and Return" is kind of on the edge there.)

And so your games have to be an infinite recombination of the hero's journeys. Players will want to fail. They'll want to be tempted. They'll try to refuse the call. All of this is straight out of our most primal storytelling archtypes and as a player and a dungeon master, you'll quickly learn both how to bend the rules of the hero's journey into infinite recombinations and to bring the familiar elements to those stories.

Duck Shaped Bigotry

You know, if you pour liquid into a shaped glass, it takes on the shape of the glass, but that doesn't actually make it that shape. (Shatter the glass and it would flow everywhere.) So if you had water in, say, a duck-shaped decanter, it would still be water. It would not be a duck, or even *actually* duck shaped itself. It's just held into the shape of a duck temporarily.

Bigotry is the same way.

People pour it into containers (like "economic anxieties" or "deep concerns about electronic security" or "children's safety") so that it looks like something other than racism or misogyny or homophobia or transphobia–and then they claim it is whatever shape it's taking at the moment.

It's not that those things aren't real. (Real ducks DO exist.) It's just that that's not what the bigotry really is, even if it's being held in that shape.

"That?" they gasp, clutching their pearls. "That's not bigotry! That's a DUCK. My goodness how could you possibly accuse that of being bigotry! You are the real bigot here trying to impugn my duck as anything other than absolutely ducky!"

And then they set about giving their duck a name like Howard and printing it out a little birth certificate from the farm and equipping it with galoshes and rain gear and buying it a little bed and adding feathers to it. But "duck" is still just the shape that is holding together what's inside–and that is their bigotry. Even years later when they can barely remember it's not really a duck or when they give it to their children with strict orders that they must never let anyone question its duckhood, examine it too closely, or themselves think too hard about what is sloshing around inside....

....even then, it is still not actually a duck.

Best Modern Fantasy by a Woman or Gender Variant Author of Color (Don't Forget to Vote)

What is the best modern fantasy book (or series) by a woman or gender variant author of color?  

We assembled the poll from your nominations, but now we need you to vote.

Only a week remains on this poll, and then we're going to start gathering nominations for our next one (and trying to claw our way back to a poll a month schedule). Don't forget to take a moment to vote for your favorite.

Everyone gets three [3] votes, but as there is no way to "rank" votes, you should use as few as you can stand.

The poll itself is in the lower left at the bottom of the side menus.

If you're on mobile you can scroll ALLLLLL the way to the bottom and click on"webpage view" to see the side menus and get to the polls.

Shattered Dreams (Personal Update)

https://222maya.deviantart.com/art/Shattered-dreams-527849256
Artist: https://222maya.deviantart.com/

The Day the Music Died: On Quality, Quantity, Facebook Followers, Fans, and the Return of a Drab Little Crab. 

It seems that in my last mailbox, I spoke too soon.

But first a story–not entirely as unrelated as it may first appear: This week something wonderful happened that almost never does.

I woke up to an email from a reader who just dropped me a line to tell me that they really appreciated my writing and my blog and they hoped I got better. (At the time I was still recovering from being sick.) Around here 99% of the emails I get are either questions or some level or another of "I have a problem with something you posted...."and if they are positive they are weirdly gushing in a I'm-not-sober-but-here-are-some-pictures-of-me, "Stephen-don't-you-think-I'm-pretty" kind of way It's nice to sincerely hear the good stuff once in a while.

Facebook recently changed its algorithm...again. According to them, they're trying to give the average user more of their friends and family to "enhance their experience," which amounts to fewer pages even though most of those pages are exactly what the users have clicked buttons to see.

Facebook frames everything like they're doing a big ass favor to their users because they are the bringers of magnanimous joy and only a LITTLE bit of Russian psyops, but what Facebook really wants is another round of squeezing their page admins to finance the Payola scam that literally is the Facebook business model.

At first, I didn't think it was going to hit me. Maybe it was just publishers. Maybe it was just news organizations and such that only ever posted links to their own page. Maybe my page, with its funky blend of memes, macros, puns, and articles from all over would be spared.

Narrator's voice: "It wasn't."

I watched my numbers collapse over the course of a week like the wind slowly going out of a massive sail. At first it was possible to convince myself I was imagining it. Then that it was just a bad run of articles, and I would bounce back. Then that I was doing something wrong–posting at the wrong time of the day or not writing a provocative enough intro.

But then, around March first on this chart, I realized what was happening, and I couldn't do much but watch in horror. Blog cried, "We're never going to make ten million now!"

"We were never going..." I started. "Eh, you know what. You're right."

Blog was inconsolable.

And so I took a deep breath and I kept on writing.

I'm guessing we're back to 2016 numbers,
but maybe things won't be that bleak.

The last time my numbers went way up it was also because of Facebook. My page took off into the stratosphere, cresting a hundred thousand followers and growing by thousands every day, and I got a thousand hits from posting anything. Everything I touched was going viral. It was lovely to imagine the days of struggling for 100k hits a month were behind me, and that all that lay ahead was a J curve of readers, fans, fame, and fortune. I figured it was nothing but brand name peanut butter as far as the eye could see and maybe even a studio apartment a mere three hour commute from The Contrarian (where such things could be afforded).

But then things went back to being drab.

You lie in bed when shit like that gets yanked away without you even having made a poor moral decision that sets you upon a redemption arc. You stare at the ceiling and you wonder how long it's going to take just to get back to where you were. Years maybe? You feel like a failure. You wonder how much of anyone who ever cared has only to do with some social media algorithm spinning away in a supercomputer in Menlo Park that can taketh away and even be destroyer of worlds.

But then I remembered that letter.

And I remembered my patrons.

Numbers are fun. The burst out from tens to hundreds of thousands was exciting and watching my hits climb is an easy bellwether to track. It's disappointing to see those numbers go away. I've got a plan to start shifting energy over to my tumblr page, and to tweak a couple of knobs that'll hopefully pull in more traffic. Hell, I've even thought of trying to figure out instagram. Someday soon, you might be swiping right on my sexy, sexy listicles.

I like walks on the beach, reading Jane Austen, and 7 ways to be a better writer.

But that's not why I write.

More to the point, that's not what keeps me going. Whether I have 4,000 hits a day or 24,000, what keeps me writing is 150 people who have generously donated their financial support to keep Writing About Writing going.

My current goal (to the left) is trying to make up for the cost that my insurance is going to jump up since I'm technically a freelancer and I have to buy my plans out of pocket. The ACA subsidized a lot of what I paid because my income is so low, but even the insurance companies think the tax changes are going to send their premiums up.

As little as a dollar a month can help and get you in on back channel conversations, polls, info of upcoming projects, and insider info into what's going on with my blog schedule. In fact, right now I still have way too much pressure on only a handful of donors (over half my entire Patreon amount comes from fewer than a dozen folks) and I could really use a lot more low level patrons to help develop a donor "ecosystem" that can survive if a big donor can't keep a big donation going.

Yes, numbers are fun, but I write because without writing I would die. And I write as much instead of working three jobs or 40+ hours a week on side gigs because 150 people help keep me going.

Those 150 people and occasionally a letter.

[As always if you want to help this post, but can't spare a dime right now, one way to do so would be to "like" or "comment" or otherwise engage it on social media so that more folks can see it. And if a monthly donation isn't your speed, you can always make a one time donation at My Paypal.]

February's Best

The highest page viewed, non-poll posts from last month that will go on to fame and renown in our Greatest Hits menu.  February was a tough month with busy side gig weeks and illness, but we got a few diamonds plucked from the rough.

Actual Protip: Don't Do This
Terry Goodkind decided to drag his cover art without talking to the artist that did it or being clear that it wasn't about the art itself. And the results were...fairly spectacular.

J.A.Q.ing Off in the Comments (Social Justice Bard)
Someone, who (of course) was just asking questions, wondered about a post I'd written earlier about being tall. I tried my very best to answer these questions in the spirit they were asked.

Writing About Writing Needs Your Help
We face a lot of trials and tribulations Writing free web content and finding even more of it, and if you're hoping to help us out, here's one way.

Some Questions From And About Facebook (Mailbox)

Where do you find the time to write? Any good online promotions. How to get a big page? Have I been hurt by the new algorithm? Does the page make it easier or harder to be a writer? 

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer a couple a week.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  I think five question posts might count as two posts.]   

Daniel asks:

How do you find time to write while manning this page as well, is it the wine? Enquiring minds were wondering.

My reply:

Pffffft. Who needs wine. I limit my addictions to ADD meds, thankyouverymuch.

I mostly find time in the couch cushions. Along with change with which I am able to order avocado toast. I'm just kidding. I can't afford avocado toast. I'm basically a millennial–at least since having lost a decade playing Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid.

It's a job, Daniel. I put in the hours because if I don't, it doesn't get done and then my hundred and fifty bosses will call me into a meeting with the Bobs who will ask me what I would say I do here.

Besides making 18 year old movie references, of course.
Image description: "The Bobs" from Office Space

Running my Facebook page takes me about an hour to 90 minutes a day. I don't have to sit down and give that entire effort at once (in fact, it doesn't work like that even if I want it to), so I can often slip a few minutes here or there while I'm on my phone at the grocery store, but the total is somewhere between one and two hours. That's everything from finding the memes I post on Pinterest or Tumblr or somewhere to logging on to post several times a day to skimming the comments and making sure no one needs to be banhammered. It may not seem like much (or conversely it may seem like I'm always on my @#%&ing phone if we're hanging out), but it adds up easily to about 10 hours a week.

MJ-"I thirst for the blood of dudebros."
Image description: Moljinar 

Writing itself runs me 4-8 hours a day most days. Occasionally less or more if I'm really struggling or on a roll respectively, but that's a good guestimate. It includes a blog post almost every day, probably some work on something longer I'm currently tackling, usually some kind of political or social freeform on my personal page (proto-blogs I call them since many end up being retooled into full posts) and a little bit of my fiction.

I don't really have a "typical" week for watching The Contrarian. It might average around 15-20 hours a week but that A) varies greatly from week to week and sometimes comes in at six hours and sometimes comes in at 30+, and B) could be three eight hour days spread across the week or five days in a row of driving him home from school and just hanging out for an hour until someone gets home.

When I petsit, I usually only spend a few minutes a day doing the feeding and cleaning up (and maybe the walking) that is required, but occasionally a pet requires more or takes me an hour or so of driving a day to get to and fro. Plus the day I show up and the day I leave basically require shopping and packing for however long I'm going to be there.

Shit, maybe I should start drinking.

[Note: I added the link to Daniel's question]


Anon* asks:

How do you do a successful online promotion?

Hell if I know. Let me know if you find out.

The only "promotion" I've ever really run involved a Kickstarter AMA (ask me anything) that I don't think led to a single person pledging anything. It was a fun and interesting evening, but the only people who asked me anything either had already given me money or were really excited to help, participated to help, but couldn't really afford to spare any cash. I didn't see any new pledges that day or for a couple after, so I think it was pretty much a bust. Interesting experience though.

If you mean as far as spending money through Facebook to "Promote Your Post," I did a few of those back before I moved out on my own when I had a lot more money to burn, and they were okay, but never really worth how much I was spending. I would drop a chunk of cash, get hundreds, maybe even thousands of likes on that one post, and a bunch more followers on the page, but both analytics would be concentrated in places like Egypt or Indonesia (where FB promises us they aren't just paying for "Like farmers"). And if I tried to limit the audience to countries like the US and England, the price would skyrocket for the estimated engagement–like five dollars per 80 people who just SEE the post.

I've no idea how that ranks compared to regular ol' advertising, but it seemed super spendy for what was either just a FEW more eyeballs or a lot of people who weren't good about any further engagement.

Since I moved out on my own and had to cover rent and shit, I've promoted like two posts. Both were set to promote to only people who had already liked the page–essentially paying Facebook it's Payola scam to show my own followers the content they asked for–because I had important news that I wanted to make sure got seen, and both were something like $10. Neither one did particularly well, and it is clear that FB wants me to fork over thousands even just to promote to the people who've already liked the page.

Frankly, I get about ten times more reaction just by politely asking people on the occasional post to engage with it if they don't mind–that way more people can see it.

[*Note. This question wasn't really anonymous. It was from a pile of questions of which I lost the names. Long story but the short version is that I thought I would be able to get back to the source questions when the time came, and then several months went by, and they are hopelessly buried.]

Celeste asks:

How did you get your page so big? I'm trying to grow my own page and I can't even seem to get to 1000 followers.

I understand. Everyone is always super into my big, throbbing d....


.....ata analytics.

Technically this is in my FAQ, but I suppose being specifically about the size of the Facebook page is kind of new.

I don't really know much about social media or how to promote things. I'm not up on SEO. I've never taken a correspondence course on social media manipulation. I just kind of get a feel for what's working and do that again and again. Here's what I can tell you that I learned about Facebook.

1. A very small business with a very small audience should do a personal profile instead of a page. The max friends an account can have is 5000 (though with infinite followers), but FB will show a lot more of a profile's posts to its "friends" then they will a page's posts to its followers. If you think you are going to grow over 5k, get a page, but if you're just the local bakery or something, a personal profile might be a better choice.
2. FB's analytics are essentially useless. They may accurately track how many followers you have, but the data they are providing you beyond that is essentially always intended to entice you into purchasing a promotion because wouldn't you like more people than this to see your fine post?

   

   Fuck Voyager entered a temporal distortion again, didn't it? Half this status is from twenty minutes in the future.
   Image description: A picture of FB analytics where a post that has
   8 reactions and 7 shares, FB somehow claims has only been viewed twice.

3. If you do open a page, the majority of your posts should not be what you're promoting. They should not be YOU. This is where you sell your soul a little. Facebook is essentially trying to make money from you and they can't do that if you're happy, so they throttle all the content you post, PARTICULARLY if your page is only posting one page (or website). Their algorithm can smell whatever it is you really want to put out there, and that's what they'll hold hostage.  SO....if you want develop a robust page, you have to be putting up comics and memes and other people's writing and whatever you find that has anything to do with the topic, essentially drawing eyeballs to your page so that your self-promotion hits as many of them as possible. It may mean you're digging through pinterest at 4am to find "Funny Writing Memes" but the price of being internet famous is not one everyone can pay. (*breathes on and rubs fingernails on vest in case that "internet famous" bullshit was too subtle*)
4. Spread out your posting. If you post six memes in a row and then nothing for the rest of the day, people will get annoyed and think you are just clogging up their precious feed. If you post the same six memes spread out throughout the day, people will think your page is "on fire" and "lit" and other synonyms for immolation. I don't know where the perfect balance of things are, but on a good day I post a new post at least one but no more than two hours after the last one and include NO more than three posts of my blog per day (usually two). That seems to work.
5. People are savvier than you think about being jerked around for the sake of your numbers. You post that shit that is designed almost exclusively to be provocative and it will quickly have the opposite reaction that you were hoping for. Link bait, clickbait, missing persons (with no specific info), that shit where it's like can you name a word that starts with A and ends with E. Or if every single post is begging for likes, shares, and comments. All of that gets old quickly.

Hassan asks:

Has the new algorithm hurt you as much as other businesses?

Should I eat toast tomorrow morning?
Image description: A flowchart algorithm

My reply:

Not much that I've noticed. At least not yet.

It's always hard to tell if I just posted something that didn't stick to the wall or if FB is yanking me around, so I tend to look at analytics in bigger chunks like entire weeks. So far I can't see much difference.

Not that FB isn't a bucket of sphincters trying to squeeze another round of ad revenue from the stones of page admins, but the hardest hurt pages seem (this time) to be publishers. And this time it's rapacious eye seems to have passed over the likes of me.

Specifically pages like news sites that only have a FB page because every major business has a FB page, but that publish no other content but links to their own material have gotten throttled way back. So a meme page that drops a link every ten posts (like mine) is probably okay, but a page like Huffpo (that only ever posts links to their own articles) has found their FB engagement reduced by something like 90%. Some online blogs that have gotten their traffic primarily through Facebook have essentially shut down, and basically gone out of business.

Someday FB is going to tweak something that hurts me or enough that I'll have to revisit the cost/benefit analysis or some dudebros will use their tears to fuel the Zuckerberg "community standards" engine and then I'll be trying to act cool on tumblr where all the new generation hang out and make fun of our gum-toothed voices over on Facebook.

Rachel asks:

Does running a page make it easier or harder to be a writer?

My reply:


What a spectacular question!

I've been trying to read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird to write a review for this month (though I haven't gotten much further than the intro, and may have to stop reading it before bed if I want to finish it in a reasonable timeline), and your question reminded me of something I read night before last that must have gotten through even though I was already drifting off.

While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

This might be true for Lamott, but I've been able to hear them boo me right away, and I think anyone writing in the modern era is going to hear them too. Sometimes the booing starts within just a few seconds of hitting "Publish." That is tough to adjust to and a rough maelstrom in which to try to find one's authentic voice, but it also means your skin starts to resemble a smooth, polished armor exoskeleton when it comes to feedback.

Running a page gives me reach and I honestly think a lot of artists who are a lot more talented than I am (and should be doing better than I am by every conceivable bellwether), but they lack reach. I've had a professor who was writing literary caliber prose, and he doesn't make a dime that isn't from teaching because he considers the whole online promotion to be really distasteful and promoting other people's work as an exchange beneath him. But whether they don't want to self promote at all, don't like non-traditional routes, or simply don't care for being expected to do a song and dance number in addition to their writing, they haven't been able to find their audience. (An audience I know would appreciate them if they could find each other.) Many are beside themselves with frustration when they see my numbers or find out that I'm a working writer these days.

I'd say the page makes it harder to be a writer in some gestalt sense of the word but much easier be a writer in terms of worldly success bellwethers.

I lose a lot of time moderating comments or looking for silly macros to fill in the space between self promotion. I have to deal with a lot of negativity and manage an aspect of "The Business of Writing" that can consume a lot more writing time than I am happy with, but I can trace back 75% of my current writing income and 90% of my blog's traffic to Facebook, so I think, given the choice, I'll pick the reach.

Double dose tomorrow.

Hi everyone,

So here we are at 9pm and I think I just got a little too ambitious with today's post. It's a mailbox, but it's like five questions long and I need another hour or two on it.

Rather than slap up a post at like 10pm here on the west coast, I'll get it as soon as I can in the morning, and we'll call five questions two mailboxes (which it probably should have been anyway).