SpiralTruth

Just another post-modern quest for meaning.

Browsing SpiralTruth blog archives for January, 2009.

The Publishing Odyssey IV: Reject!

This is what a rejection letter looks like:

Thank you for your query. I regret I have to pass on many interesting projects due to time constraints. I urge you to query widely of course!

It’s pretty simple, and you can see how it’s been honed through the years to be inhuman enough to discourage you from trying to persuade the person afterwords – which would, of course, necessitate a much harsher shut-down. It feels a lot like a date gone horribly wrong. You know that it’s not really about time constraints. If they really liked you, they’d find a way to fit you in. And you sort of want to know where you went wrong. What can I do so this doesn’t happen again? But you don’t want to be one of those jerks who just won’t take a hint. So you suck it up and try to figure it out on your own. Or you could take the other extreme and rant about how dumb this person was to not recognize such genius! That’s what Gerard Jones does on his site, www.everyonewhosanyone.com. (more…)

The Publishing Odyssey IV: Reject! was published on January 29th, 2009, with the tags , , , , , under the getting published category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Woody Norris – Advice to Inventors

I watched Woody Norris do a fascinating talk on TED last night. He’s invented a device that focuses sound like a laser focuses light. Speakers are messy. They send the signal out to anyone near the speaker. Woody’s device effectively “beams” the sound to whoever it’s pointed at. So yes, if you start hearing voices in your head, you might not need to call the psychiatrist just yet…

After watching this, I found an interview with Woody Norris on Makezine that I thought was interesting. In particular, I found his advice on patents interesting:

I think a lot of inventors are paranoid about sharing their work for fear that it will be stolen. This is a near pathological problem among inventors. File a patent and get over it. You can file a provisional patent with an attorney for $1,000, or you can do it yourself for $80 if you can’t afford an attorney. Then you can talk about it. Expose it. If you are not willing to do this, you don’t really believe in your invention–you are just kidding yourself. I have never had a company steal one of my inventions in over 40 years of doing this; companies are scared to death of being sued. So do your work, get your patent, and then sell it. Stop making excuses.

The patent system can be downright ridiculous and I think it needs major reform. However, Woody Norris talks about it here in a way that reminds us of its purpose: to encourage inventors to publish good ideas by offering them a legal entitlement to receive compensation when others use those ideas. I wonder if start-ups like Cambrian House might end up eventually replacing the patent system. They solve exactly the same problem in a way that seems much more responsive and fair.

Woody Norris – Advice to Inventors was published on January 28th, 2009, with the tags , , , under the into the great unknown category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

How to Write a Book

Steven Johnson wrote a great post about how to write a book on BoingBoing today. I like how he gives himself a lot of time to play with ideas and how he manages that play with Devonthink. I think maximizing creativity isn’t necessarily about putting more effort into thinking creatively as it is about properly handling and recording the flashes of insight that we all have. Having a wide range of tools at your disposal, and especially having one or two that you can access often, will go a long way in allowing creative moments to be properly managed, perhaps avoiding the much feared disease that is writer’s block. I wish I had had a system like this when I started writing. I think the entire process could have been a lot easier than it turned out to be.

How to Write a Book was published on January 28th, 2009, with the tags , , under the the craft category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Wonderful World of ASCII Art

One of my first memories of computers had to do with my parents meticulously entering a program into a Franklin 2000 that did an ASCII representation of the guy from MAD Magazine. Since then, graphics have gotten a lot better, and you’d be considered a lunatic for spending so much time trying to reproduce a single image, but ASCII art itself still holds its primitive yet inventive charm. Check out Smashing Magazine’s retrospective on ASCII art here. My favorite is the 1964 ASCII version of the Mona Lisa. Far more interesting than seeing the actual – incredibly small – painting.

The Wonderful World of ASCII Art was published on January 25th, 2009, with the tags , , under the images category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Has President Obama opened a Pandora’s Meme?

Most of us know the story of Pandora’s Box. Girl gets box and is told not to open it. Girl opens box. Much badness occurs.

I’m sure some government officials are feeling that way about the Citizen’s Briefing Book. Check out the opening page here, where some of the people in charge give responses to the more popular issues. Nothing strange about that – until you dig a bit deeper and find out how to list the issues with the most popular ones on top. And what’s the most popular issue? That’s right, as of January 23, 2009, it’s still marijuana reform.

Now, I’m not saying that President Obama needs to end the many silly years of drug prohibition as his first act of office or even at all. I think we can all agree (even those of us who support an end to prohibition) that he has much more important issues to deal with. And President Obama has made it clear that he does not support an end to prohibition himself, despite having experimented in his youth. He sees it as just that – something dumb he did when he didn’t know any better. Agree or disagree, that’s his opinion. Given that he doesn’t support it himself and it’s so entrenched in American policy that he’d make a ton of enemies if he tried to push any sort of reform in this area through, I don’t think we’re really justified in expecting this to go anywhere. The time for freedom over our own bodies is still to come. Let’s be happy for now with the breath of fresh air we’ve gotten.

However, if President Obama really wants to put his money where his mouth is on “transparency in government”, he should at least recognize the popularity of the issue on the platform his people set up. For anyone who put so much faith in President Obama’s willingness to listen to the people, it’s got to be kind of troubling to see the responses from his staff address the other “top issues” while dancing around that one most popular issue. As embarrassing as it may be, it’s sticking out like a sore thumb when officials are addressing, via video, other top issues which actually received fewer votes. Yeah, it’s a bit of bad PR to recognize that this is what the people used your new democracy tool to bring up, but you’ve got to take the good with the bad.

I still think this will be an age of enlightenment in leadership, thanks to President Obama, and wish him the best of luck. Seeing him win on November 4th of this year hits near the top of my list of favorite moments. But I will be nevertheless a bit disappointed if he does not continue this meme of openness and transparency that he has unleashed and at least recognizes the top issue in his Citizen’s Brief and explains his reasons for not pursuing it.

Has President Obama opened a Pandora’s Meme? was published on January 23rd, 2009, with the tags , , , , under the politics: a love story, this just in category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Rush Limbaugh, “Doctor of Democracy” – AKA The Grinch Who Stole Inauguration Day

Could you imagine anyone who didn’t light up even just a little during President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech? And even with all the speculation, can you imagine anyone who would be 100% certain on the very first day of the new presidency that it is doomed to be a complete failure? How about if the prospect of failure was actually the only thing that gave such a person any joy, even if failure meant this already bad economy going completely into the shitter? Strange days indeed when, instead of the expected cartoon villain, we find out that such a person actually exists in the form of the delightfully belligerent Rush Limbaugh, the self proclaimed “Doctor of Democracy”. Check out his Tuesday address to his equally pig headed fans.

My favorite part is the beginning where the caller says the speech was boring because he couldn’t follow what the President was saying. Meanwhile, the rest of us are thinking: “Finally, a President whose policies and speaking ability aren’t at a level that Rush Limbaugh’s fans can handle!”

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Bloomington, Illinois. Floyd, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.

CALLER: Yeah, Rush?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Yeah, mega dittos, sir.

RUSH: I appreciate that.

CALLER: Okay, Bo wanted me to talk about the speech? And provide my feelings on the speech?

RUSH: Yeah, yeah, that’s why we took your call.

CALLER: Okay. I found it very boring. You know, I wasn’t following what he was saying, you know, and everything. And I found myself a couple of times actually drifting off and not paying attention, it was so boring. Also, did you notice at the beginning, maybe I was hearing things, but at the beginning, was the crowd saying, “Obama! Obama! Obama!” Did they do that little chant thing when he stepped up to the microphone?

Rush Limbaugh, “Doctor of Democracy” – AKA The Grinch Who Stole Inauguration Day was published on January 21st, 2009, with the tags , , , , , under the politics: a love story, this just in category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Publishing Odyssey III

I received a response from the publisher I was forwarded to this morning. Very exciting stuff. So exciting, in fact, that before I hurriedly sent off that manuscript, the musician in me, who has been screwed over so many times he’s lost count started to speak up and say, “Hey, this isn’t so different from the music world, and nothing good comes without the feeling that you’ve smashed your head against a billion brick walls.” And so I whipped out my google-fu and did a quick check on this “traditional publisher”. Aha… they are under investigation in Florida and also on at least one “Writer Beware” page. I also found some forum posts from people who have submitted queries to them where the initial responses seemed very similar to the one they sent me. People who went further, were recommended to pay for professional editing. The editors chosen were also associated in some way with this network of companies and were presumably getting kickbacks from referrals. Basically, they seem legit in the sense that they’re not completely scamming you, but more in the sense that you’ll probably end up paying as much as you would if you went the self-publishing route, plus you’d be under contract with them. The warnings also mentioned that the company’s track record of commercial book or script sales is not known. I double-checked on Amazon and found that every title I searched for was indeed listed and they were listed as the publisher, but I wasn’t able to find any book with more than one review, which makes me wonder how much these books are pushed. (more…)

The Publishing Odyssey III was published on January 20th, 2009, with the tags , , , , , under the getting published category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Publishing Odyssey: First Blood, Part II – Trouble in Thailand

I find myself with mixed feelings about being a writer today. On the one hand, I heard via BoingBoing that poor Harry Nicolaides has found himself in a Thailand prison for the crime of – get this – insulting the royal family. Hell, he didn’t even throw a shoe at them. He just made some harsh remarks in a book hardly anyone had read. Reading the comments I was, on the one hand, inspired by the Western rally cry of free speech, one person after another taking shots at Thailand’s royalty. On the other, I wonder how brave we’d all be if we were in Thailand right now. Hell, even CNN is silent about the actual insults, due to the fear that any correspondents in the country could get similar treatment. And here’s the real kicker. Only fifty copies printed. Fifty. He sold seven. That’s gotta suck. On its own, not so bad. I’ve found that it’s a difficult thing to even write a complete novel, and I remember every so often, between the nail biting of and self criticism that comes with knowing others are (or will be) reading it, to give myself a pat on the back for getting it done. But to write a flop is one thing. To have it come back and bite you in the ass like that (three years in jail!) is insult to injury. Funny thing is, he might very well sell a lot of books this way. I’m certainly interested in seeing what the fuss was all about… and whether it’s any good. (more…)

The Publishing Odyssey: First Blood, Part II – Trouble in Thailand was published on January 20th, 2009, with the tags , , , , , , under the getting published category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Nobody Did It! And blogging before blogs.

A friend of mine used to do street art, sometimes outdoors and sometimes in a studio. I ran into a street artist today on Twitter with some really cool stuff that reminded me of my friend’s work. My friend has since moved onto other things, which I think is a shame, because some of his stuff was really good. Check out The Me Nobody Knows on his site for some great examples of street art. You can also see some of his stuff on flickr. Here are a couple of things I really like about this artist. 1. His message. From his ebay page, I found this, which I find inspiring as a fellow artist: “To you I may be nobody. Okay, then undeterred and unaffected, I say to you – Nobody did it! (and so can YOU.)” It’s so easy to lose faith in yourself as an artist, to feel that you are just one in a crowded room of many hopefuls. Stuff like this to me is like the desiderata for artists, and I’m feeling better already after just reading it. 2. The thought he puts into his pieces. The picture above that I’m linking, for example, is based on the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp. It makes me wish that every graffiti artist left a description so I could understand why he did what he did and it ought to make you stop and think a little more before you write something off as pure vandalism. And here’s another thought that seeing TMNK’s stuff provoked: street art was the original blog. Now that we have the internet, even with no technical expertise, we can sign up to a blogging site for free and have a small corner of the world where we can share our thoughts with absolutely everyone. We kind of take that for granted. Looking at TMNK’s stuff reminded me that you used to have to fight a lot harder for a space in the public dialog. You used to have to take to the streets with a can of spray paint and risk arrest. You had to believe in yourself enough to take that risk, one which didn’t provide any sort of monetary gain, only the satisfaction of being heard. And, of course, some still do have to do it that way, for whatever reason. Those of us who feel we have a legal voice, let’s be thankful for that and realize how new it actually is for almost anyone (barring those in more repressive areas of the world) to be able to broadcast to the public without fear.

Nobody Did It! And blogging before blogs. was published on January 16th, 2009, with the tags , , , under the indie shoutout category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Happiness Project meets the Getting Published Project

I’ve been using Twitter a lot lately as a way to find out about some of the stuff that’s brewing out there just a bit outside of the mainstream. It sort of reminds me of when I’d go into a record store and browse heavy metal CDs, just looking for a band with an interesting name or a great album cover or song names that sent my imagination running. Like anyone else, I still listened a lot to whatever was being played on the radio, but I also enjoyed the excitement of actually finding something myself, without the help of big advertising. Then I’d mercilessly harass my friends about this great band that they absolutely have to hear! My friends are probably very grateful that the Internet has been so successful and I now have an outlet other than them. Feel free, my millions of anonymous friends, to click on to something else, but I’m telling you, you’ll be missing out on me giving you the details on a pretty cool author I ran into on my random Twitter treks… Meet Gretchen Rubin. She’s a writer who, for a while, was stuck in a lawyer’s body. Post-freedom, she’s published four books and has one on the way: The Happiness Project. That’s the one that drew me in to find out some more about her. The premise is pretty cool. It’s a memoir of a year spent trying out all the various tips and tricks, from gurus and scientific studies alike, that are intended to make us happier. Now, there are A LOT of books out there about how to make yourself happier. Hell, there are entire “self help” sections dedicated to it. What makes this one different? Well, I think the really refreshing thing about it is that Gretchen isn’t a guru or a psychologist or a scientist or anyone else you’d expect to be writing on the subject. And she doesn’t pretend to be. Instead, she’s made herself the guinea pig and is giving us her insight on how these ideas work for someone who isn’t trying to sell them. (more…)

The Happiness Project meets the Getting Published Project was published on January 15th, 2009, with the tags , , , under the into the great unknown, the craft category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Last Drug – Delayed

My German isn’t that great, but with the help of Babelfish and this update, I gather that the reasons we are not currently enjoying the first Creative Commons licensed, full feature length HD film already are as follows: (a) The December 2008 date was intended more as an internal deadline, not an absolute release date. They now have 2009 advertised as the release year on their site. If you’re like me, and have been waiting 15+ years for Chinese Democracy (finally released this November), it’s not a really big deal to miss a release by under 12 months, so I say we cut them some slack. (b) Sounds like they still need a bit more funding, possibly via sponsorships. They also have a donation form set up on their site that is currently $9K short of their expenses for the film. So if you want to see the movie out, a donation would probably help. That said, I think if this sort of model is to actually flourish, it can’t rely completely on a donation model, so hopefully other forms of funding, such as sponsorships pan out. Perhaps they could also offer to list all the people who donate in the credits of the movie. Let’s face it. Pure altruism is hard to come by and there’s nothing wrong with trying to find a win-win situation for people donating to your project. The economic crisis isn’t helping, of course. Isn’t it a shame that we’re bailing out all these companies who have been mismanaging like crazy and yet these guys are actually making something cool and can’t get their hands on a few thousand. (c) Time needing to be spent on other projects by the same people working on this one. I imagine those other projects are likely ones that pay. Sounds like things are coming along, though, and I think we really have to give these guys props for even attempting a project like this for a Creative Commons release. I’m looking forward to more news and the eventual release.

The Last Drug – Delayed was published on January 15th, 2009, with the tags , , , under the indie shoutout category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Ending the War on Piracy

Apple did something interesting this Tuesday with its removal of DRM from most of its digital music catalog. Not only was the DRM removed from new music, but you could also get it removed from music you had already purchased – for an “upgrade” fee. I’ve bought a few tunes on from Apple’s music store because it was so easy, and at the time, I saw DRM as a concession we’d just have to make in order to coax the record industry into the 21st century. Yes, I was willing to pay extra for what should have been there (or not there) in the first place. Paying the “upgrade” fee to remove DRM from previously purchased music didn’t make me feel like a complete sucker, though, because I was also getting tracks that were encoded at a better quality. Now the quality is still not CD quality. It’s just closer than what I had before. It’s also closer than the files that I ripped from my CD library when I started the shift towards a hard disk based music library – at a time when storage space was slightly more expensive and I just couldn’t justify taking up more space for a gain in quality I could hardly hear. But here’s what I think is really cool. My “upgrade” was actually a format shift, not unlike the format shift from records to tapes and from tapes to CDs. A file type and encoding is analagous to a tape or CD in that it is a container to make transporting that idea that came from some artist’s head easier, with an acceptable fidelity. The difference is that this format shift was able to happen on the same medium.
(more…)

Ending the War on Piracy was published on January 8th, 2009, with the tags , , , , , under the into the great unknown category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Jaydiohead?

gurj on Twitter just posted a link to a cool Jay-Z/Radiohead mashup by Minty Fresh Beats. It’s even got a kickass name! Check it out here. Now, I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think either Jay-Z or Radiohead have released stuff under any sort of Creative Commons style license, so make sure to grab this mix before the record companies and their lawyers swoop in to save the day.

Jaydiohead? was published on January 5th, 2009, with the tags , , , , under the indie shoutout category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Publishing Odyssey: First Blood

I figure the process of getting published might be an interesting thing to track, so here we go with the first of many posts about it. I’m starting with one approximately 82K word manuscript that has been steadily written and revised in my spare time over the last few years. I like to have many projects on the go, and in addition to my day job, I’m also a musician who’s put out a couple of albums worth of material with my band as well as a number of solo recordings in the same time period. Plus this blog. Plus whatever else I think up. So, that’s why it’s taken a few years and why the project of getting the final draft published will probably take longer than it normally does. Where to start? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself over and over for the last few days. To add to an already daunting task, there’s the current recession, thanks in no small part to Mr. Bush and the Wall Street gang who figure reality does not have to factor into economics. And the book industry is not immune, as this article suggests. The one thing I’ll note is that, for all the talk of pre-recession excess, the article does not mention that any of the major book publishers are looking for a bailout, so I’d say they’re handling it better than some (cough, cough) out there. (more…)

The Publishing Odyssey: First Blood was published on January 5th, 2009, with the tags , , , , under the getting published category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Cultivating a Writing Habit

Chris Brogan just wrote a great post on writing habits. I just finished the final draft of my first novel, Leaving Wonderland (preview here), and I think he was pretty bang on. His emphasis on structure is key. I wrote Leaving Wonderland in chunks. A scene here, a scene there. Sometimes I didn’t know where something would even fit as I wrote it. But even writing in this sort of haphazard way, I always had the major plot points in mind. The beginning and the end were never in question. This novel was also the last in a long line of false starts. None of those false starts were particularly bad ideas. It’s easy to come up with great ideas for a novel. The problem was that I simply ran out of steam. And I ran out of steam because I hadn’t written enough to know how to keep motivated on an idea. The only cure for that is, of course, to keep writing. Chris takes a much better approach than I did originally, by writing in many different formats and on many different subjects. Always writing about something allows him to hone his skills and get valuable feedback about finished works while he chips away at the longer pieces. One of my karate senseis told us that the only secret to karate is repetition. Same goes for writing. You just have to do it over and over again until it gets to where you want it to be.

Cultivating a Writing Habit was published on January 5th, 2009, with the tags , , , under the the craft category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Motivational Posters from Dr. Gonzo!

Check out this awesome post from rtcrooks on sloshspot.com. With motivational posters like the following, how can you go wrong? ;-)

Motivational Posters from Dr. Gonzo! was published on January 4th, 2009, with the tags , , under the images, words category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

The Lost Generation?

Stuff like this always makes me very proud of and hopeful for my generation. I think both versions are true. The forward version gives a pretty good summary of the world we feel we have been handed. And the reverse version gives a pretty good summary of what the more hopeful among us think we can do with it.

Thanks to Erin for pointing me to it.

The Lost Generation? was published on January 3rd, 2009, with the tags , , under the indie shoutout, into the great unknown category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

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