MCM — Blog

Dogs and Seizures

Sun, 16 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

So we foster dogs, which I think I’ve mentioned. This came about because, after my wife’s accident, we were forced to ride the bus on day — not an easy feat for someone with a brain injury — and on that bus ride, she saw a service animal. Something in that moment made her realize that she wanted to take care of animals the way animals took care of humans in need, and so as soon as we were able, we started fostering.

These days, we focus on palliative dogs who don’t have long to live. One of our current fosters, Peppa (so named because she snorts like a pig) has recently started having seizures, and… yikes.

OK, slight diversion: long ago, I wrote a story and mentioned a character had Tourette’s. Someone who had actual experience with Tourette’s wrote to me and told me how I was actually 100% wrong about the condition, and pointed me at some resources. I think I was more like 200% wrong, and I have made a point of never making that kind of mistake since. Or, well, as much as I can.

The same thing is currently happening for seizures. I mean, I still don’t have a ton of experience with human seizures, but dog seizures are pretty damn terrifying all on their own. Peppa will be in a deep sleep on her bed and then suddenly she’s making these strange, jerky breathing sounds that you’d mistake for choking if it weren’t accompanied by desperate flailing.

The seizures last less than a minute, probably, but it feels like ten thousand years have passed before she finally starts to gasp and grunt properly, and you can see she’s come out the other side.

She’s usually calm for about five minutes, just catching her breath again, so I can hold her and try to convince her she’s fine. Apparently dogs don’t actually know they’ve had a seizure when it happens, so as far as she’s concerned, she just came out of a deep sleep with her heart racing for no reason. So we get a few minutes of calm before she starts to think of ways to burn off that energy.

And then we have what I like to call “all night disco derby”, which consists of Peppa, half-blind and disoriented from the seizure, running around the house at full speed, trying to do… something. She’ll run straight into walls and furniture without slowing down, no matter how hard you work to stop her. If you put down padding, she’ll push through it. If you try to hold her, she’ll squirm free.

Keep in mind this usually starts at around 9:30-10:30PM. At least once a week. And the disco derby lasts for around 4 hours.

So as you can imagine, I spend half my time being not-quite-awake, and the other half worrying about the next time I will be not-quite awake.

That said, she’s the cutest little thing in the universe, so she gets a free pass.

All of which is to say: I don’t make fun of Tourette’s anymore, and I don’t make fun of seizures, either. Sure, it’s limiting my off-colour punchline opportunities, but at least I don’t have to feel bad about laughing at this kind of misfortune.

The Thing About Hours

Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I do a lot of things. I do more things than I even talk about online, because if I talked about all the things I’m doing online, people would hate me (and/or be upset that I was getting distracted from doing whatever it is they thought I should do first). But since I can usually handle too many things at once, I have the privilege of not having to worry so much about such things.

Then again, there are only a limited number of hours in a day. And thanks to my new a wonderful gallbladder condition, I can’t eat a lot of food at a time, or I end up hurting — which means I’m working on reduced energy levels, and constantly in danger of going zzzzz mid-blog post.

So how do I manage my time? With hours. And I know what you’re thinking: uh oh, he thinks he invented hours. Don’t worry, I know that was Steve Jobs.

But how I count hours works differently than a lot of people, I think. See, when I say “I can get that done in an hour” I mean “at the end of an hour, I know I can finish that in a fraction of an hour, which leaves me time to be distracted/hungry/tired/busy on other things.” One of the benefits to working really damn fast is that you can work “slow” (for you) and still get things done on time.

So what do I do with the extra minutes in my hours? Easy: a little bit of everything. One day I will make a proper “to do” list that takes this into account, but basically my projects are broken into steps, and the steps are broken into sub-steps, and even those are sometimes broken down further. In programming terms, it’s like components, classes, functions, maybe. Or sub-functions.

So let’s say I have to write a chapter of Bytown (oops) and it needs to be done by the end of the day. I probably don’t write that chapter contiguously: I’ll write a few paragraphs, then switch projects. When I come back, I’ll sketch in another section with light detail, and then switch projects. When I come back again, I’ll start filling in those sections. Repeat that enough times, and I’ll get the chapter done in “1 hour” that’s spread across an entire day.

Why do it this way? Because I find that, even if I don’t want to, my day is broken up against my will anyway. Someone will call me, a website will break, a dog will have a seizure… nothing’s even linear. Instead of fighting it, I’ve adapted: I’ll work until something else interrupts (or I interrupt myself) and then come back later.

I don’t let myself get thrown off-course, and I always hit my deadlines, but these days, I almost never work a full hour at a time. If I did, I’d be going backwards instead of forwards, and Steve Jobs didn’t invent time for those kinds of shenanigans.

Thinkings About CSS

Wed, 12 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Here’s a thing that will get me intro trouble: I don’t think most developers actually understand CSS. Now, sure, you can argue that most developers don’t need to understand CSS because they’re not front-end developers, but the issue kinda goes beyond the immediate use of the technology, because I have this awful feeling a lot of related tools are being created or shaped around perceived weaknesses in CSS that simply don’t exist.

(I should say that I am in the early stages of a migrane so this may veer into abject incoherency at any moment)

The thing about CSS is that it’s Cascading Stylesheets, right? Cascading. Attributes trickle down where possible, and if you put a bunch of elements within another element, you can talk to those sub-elements by referring to their parent. It’s a very simple concept, but also very powerful. Intuitive, even.

But then I see things like developers re-defining fonts and font sizes through each successive child element, and I wonder how intuitive it actually is. If I say tell the parent its font is Lato, all the sub-elements use Lato too — unless I override it. Wasting keystrokes re-writing the same font definition is nonsensical, no?

OK, so you know how in Typescript or React or most other languages how you define a component as, say, a <Fish/>, and all the variables you assign therein belong to the Fish and nothing else? Like if we say:

export function Fish() {
    const banana = "abc";
    return (
        <div>{banana}</div>
    )
}

… we know that banana means abc in this one case only, yes? Nice and simple, yes? The stuff dreams are made of, right? Every time we use a Fish, that banana is instantiated. It’s logical. So why do we have so many frameworks and libraries dedicated to preventing CSS from doing this:

.fish {
    background-color: #fff;
}

We’ve made a component and we’ve defined a variable within it. If we want to re-use .fish, all we have to do is assign the class to an element, and it instantiates with all the right variables baked in. If we had sub-classes like so:

.fish {
    background-color: #fff;

    .taco {
        font-size: 2em;
    }

    .lemon-pie {
        color: green;
    }
}

We can be fairly certain that every instance of .fish is going to style the sub-elements appropriately. What we’ve created is a re-usable component in CSS — if we want to extend it via .fish.pike{} then we can adjust sub-values quickly and easily. But at a baseline, we have a definition that can be used almost anywhere, and is functional and useful on its own.

The thing about Cascading, though, is that it works best if the definitions are logically grouped and called in order. Redefining the background color of .fish is pointless if .fish doesn’t exist yet. But that’s exactly the kind of thing that happens when you bake your CSS into your class components in many modern frameworks: you’re defining each piece in isolation, so you need to redefine a lot of the same things multiple times to accomplish extremely elementary things.

If I have a style defined for lists on my site, that style should be as portable as writing .list-style-1 on anything I damn well choose. I love Tailwind, but between it and React, it sometimes feels like they’re doing everything they can to keep you from solving simple problems simply. I can figure out how to “domain” my classes so they don’t pollute each other — why do I have to find workarounds to make that happen?

All of which leads me to this nagging feeling that these solutions are being dreamed up by people who fundamentally misunderstand how CSS works. Yes, if you make sub-classes irresponsibly, you can create a mess in any application. But if you approach it like the component-based logic it actually always has been, it will let you write much less code for much greater impact, and save you oodles of suffering along the way.

Yup. None of that made sense. But I stand by my assertion: CSS doesn’t need saving. Developers just need to learn how to write CSS.

My Kid Made Music

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I am pretty relaxed about releasing art online, because I’ve been doing it for a long time. Since 1999, in fact, when I was doing art and stories for fun. At this point in my life, putting something out into the world is more a function of having time, not being brave.

And yet I am currently overwhelmed with anxiety because my oldest daughter just released her first song for sale/streaming, and suddenly all the worries I have been immune to are rushing in and making me very very tense.

It’s a very good song — I can say that with certainty because I thought it was a good song before she told me she wrote it — and it’s done in the odd 5/4 as a kind of challenge — so evidently some personality traits are genetic — and yes, go listen to it, or else.

It’s called Safe Haven in 5 by Kiko A and if you leave it on endless repeat for a few days, I will not blame you.

Oh hey! A production slate!

Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

This is not my first production slate, and it won’t be my last, but it’s currently fresh so I’m going to talk about it, and why I made it, and how likely it is I will stick to it in any capacity whatsoever.

Working backwards: this will be out of date by Tuesday. I always make big illustrious plans, and then find a shinier object along the way. I used to try to rationalize this behaviour, but ultimately, it is what it is: I’m doing this to have fun, and if my definition fun changes month-to-month, I won’t stay glued to a schedule of meh for no reason.

That said, there are definitely some things on this list that I can’t avoid, which brings me to point #2: why I made it. Back when I started writing books, I used to say I had this plan in mind that I borrowed from comic books wherein characters and events cross over between series, eventually culminating in a huge crossover event that would shake everything up. In the old days, nobody quite understood what that meant. But now that the Avengers are a thing — especially Infinity War and Endgame — I think I can safely explain this again…

Virtually all of my stories intersect in some way. Monitor City exists in Dustrunners, Fission Chips and Liberty Bell; UFIT connects to Arkady and Kain, Utopian Hit Squad, and Dustrunners. Even Bytown loops into all this in ways I can’t explain yet — stay tuned in the very near future for a fairly obvious reference — and that, in turn connects it in with everything else. I do this not because I enjoy puzzles (although I do enjoy puzzles), but because I’m building toward an Endgame of my own. There are hints in the text already, but you won’t be able to see them quite yet. Or if you do, you won’t be able to make sense of them.

That’s why I have to write a production slate from time to time: to remind myself of what needs to be done, and to make sure I not only get it all written, but that I write it in the right order. Bytown Season 1 needs to come out before Shell Game, and Archivists needs to come out before Recovery. There’s a sequence to the madness, because if you read them all in order, you’ll start to see things that might otherwise not make sense — and hopefully suss out the next steps in my plan before I slap you in the face with it.

So that’s why this page is here, and why it will change, and why I will do my best to adhere to its general shape over time. You are free to browse it and pester me to write a particular story over another, and I may just oblige.

But yikes. Over 3M words to write before I die. That’s a lot of sleepless nights.

Best get started, eh?

Mid-Mortem: Bytown

Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Quick recap for those joining the story a bit late in the game: in March 2020, I started writing a series called Bytown, which was made up of 9 episodes of 13 chapters each, releasing on a MWF schedule. And then a weekly schedule. And then a monthly schedule.

And then I stopped releasing it on schedule at all, mostly due to my needing to learn to live with a malfunctioning gallbladder. Then, once I was starting to feel more myself, something semi-expected happened: through an intermediary, a publisher showed interest in turning Bytown into a series of books. That process took a long time and ultimately went nowhere, but it gave me some distance from the story…

And that distance allowed me to see how to fix the ending.

Now, the ending I had planned is still in there, and I still like it a whole lot — but stories are about momentum, and the momentum of the last episode was very halting. Maggie (the protagonist) took two steps forward, then three steps back, over and over again. The torment helped make you need her to emerge victorious at the end, but it made the journey a bit excruciating in ways I probably didn’t want to do.

So last week I started reworking the last episode, restructuring things so the end would be just as full of torment and suffering, but in a more reasonable build-up. And the trick to pulling that off is something I talk about often: making the peaks peakier by having the valleys valley-er.

Durr…

Yeah, I know. What do I mean by all that?

Without getting into any spoilers, let’s look at it like this: we want Maggie to emerge victorious at the end, right? That should be the highest high of the entire series, when she defeats her enemy once and for all. For that to land properly, she needs to lose everything directly before she wins. Now, she’s been through a lot already, so there are very few things for me to take away from her. I mean, without it seeming unreasonably cruel.

But there’s more than one way to hurt someone. We’ve already physically hurt these characters, and morally compromised them all over the place. But the one thing they haven’t lost is each other. Their cohesion has — even when they’re separated — kept them strong.

And that, I realized is what Maggie needs to lose before the end. She needs to lose her family — her whole extended family — the very thing she has been fighting to protect. Without them as a crutch, she will have to confront her nemesis one-on-one with no more excuses left to hide behind.

That solution meant shifting things around. At first, a little…then a lot. Now E9 is looking very different than before, and I think I may actually get it done before the end of the month…which will be a good thing, because I have to start my next project on June 1.

So yes. If, in the future, you wonder why Bytown shook out the way it did — today was the day I decided how much Maggie was going to suffer.

You can thank me later.

Cœur de pirate: Perséides

Wed, 05 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

One of my absolute favourite singer/songwriters is Montréal-based Cœur de pirate, whose songs, if you live in Canada, you’ve probably heard several thousand times. Her voice is incredible, her lyrics (in French or English) are brilliant, and every time she releases a single or album, my mind is twisted in exciting new ways.

(How much do I love her music? No less than 5 of my projects are inspired by her songs. I can’t even think about Recovery without listening to Drapeau Blanc)

But then, earlier this year, she had vocal cord surgery and lost her voice. I don’t know where I read that first, but I remember a terrible dread washing over me, since Julie Andrews had similar surgery and lost her singing voice. That’s gotta be a terrifying prospect for any singer, and doubly so for ones as gifted as those two.

Thankfully, it seems as though Cœur de pirate’s lost-voice situation is temporary — and in the meantime, she has just released a new instrumental album called Perséides, which… well, it’s hard to explain, but I’m starting to realize the thing I love about her music isn’t necessarily her voice or her lyrics, but the personality that envelops all her individual gifts and makes them uniquely her.

This is a fantastic album — 25 minutes across 10 tracks — that are light and moody all at once, and have been relentlessly filling the back of my brain with ideas for the last few days. Every piece feels like Cœur de pirate, even if her voice isn’t there. It’s not that I don’t miss it, but I don’t… feel its absence the way I thought I would.

There are very few musical acts that I follow religiously, but there’s a reason Cœur de pirate is at the top of that list, with no signs of slowing down.

Milestone: New Site is Live

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

One thing I learned after reading through all my old blog posts is that I very rarely mention when I actually improve various things around the site. The crazy part is, I change my website really bloody frequently, so I’m basically losing a huge chunk of history by being lazy.

(there was one version of the site from ~2010 where everything was in 3D-ish cards on a long timestream that went diagonally, I think, and that was 50 kinds of awesome, but I have no evidence it ever existed)

Today I shall attempt to rectify that situation. Here, then are the new features of the modern version of mcm.1889.ca…

It’s running on NextJS (Nuxt was a close second, but I invested too much into the menu to port it easily).
It has 626 blog posts (including this one) which does not include a bunch of PTTBT posts that I wanted to recover (but can’t, yet) — but 626 is a favourite number of mine, so I’m not complaining.
It is entirely static, except where dynamic content is needed. It’s running on Digital Ocean’s spaces apps, which are quite zippy and fun.
Unfortunately, I just discovered some of my dynamic redirects do not work under such arrangements, so I will need to fix those up. If you find dead links, assume I am kinda sorta probably working on it.
Getting REALLY techy, but the site is running TSX instead of JSX, because I realize I have a hard time not thinking in Typescript now. Sigh.
This is also my “I am reluctantly addicted to Tailwind” build. I have kept a Tailwind mirror version of my site for quite some time, always refusing to push it live for fear that it will mark me as a convert, but dammit I can’t resist it anymore. Stupid utility classes.
There are a few more surprises to be unlocked soon, but not quite yet, so be patient.

And for the sake of completeness, here are two screenshots of how it looks on May 3, 2021:

Stay tuned for my next big update, probably coming in about 14 days when I get bored of this one.

Canadian Content, Again

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

First of all, I want to say I very much like all the people I know in the Canadian TV and film industry. With very few exceptions (very few) they’re all incredibly talented and very awesome people who work far harder than most people realize to produce world-class entertainment for us to enjoy.

And, well, that’s kinda my beef with the recent news that the federal government wants to regulate social media to ensure there’s enough Canadian content available.

There are two issues here, the first of which is probably best handled by Michael Geist, in terms of freedom of speech and absolutely asinine it is that the government would have a say over what people post to their social media accounts. The first priority for all social media platforms should be to surface and promote good quality content, regardless of where it comes from. I don’t get the impression Canada is a laggard when it comes to meme creation, so why even bother going down this road? It’s only asking for a future government to start regulating speech based on “Canadian ideals” or something equally daft. And/or sinister.

Invest in Canadian Content

But the second part, and to me the most irritating part, is this continuing notion that new Canadian content rules are somehow saving us from the evils of Netflix et al. As if our entertainment industry is somehow under siege from foreign tech companies. Because that’s patently absurd, and kinda offensively so.

Netflix is not the enemy here. Many of the bigger Canadian broadcasters are. Over the last few years, fewer and fewer TV series have been greenlit and produced in this country without Netflix’s involvement to the point where, if you don’t have an American co-producer on your show, you’re probably not actually making your show. With few exceptions — CBC and TVO, most notably — you either work on a Netflix-backed series, or you work on an international production with no ties to Canada whatsoever.

In other words, Netflix and the American streamers are keeping the lights on for Canadian artists. They’re paying our bills and giving us credits. The Canadian broadcasters who insist on spreading Canadian content rules to the internet? They’re barely greenlighting anything anymore — or trapping artists in this little game where you’re made to produce a pilot episode out of your own pocket before they’ll even consider you. These are companies who benefit from the idea of Canadian content, but refuse to invest in it for fear of taking up a primetime timeslot reserved for an American show.

Would it be better if Netflix greenlit shows created by Canadians, produced by Canadians, in Canada? Yes, of course. But if I had to choose between two evils, I’m going to have to choose the “I can afford food” version with Netflix rather than the “we can’t buy any more shows because we have a six year backlog of produced series that still haven’t premiered” from the so-called champions of Canadian content.

The solution here isn’t to create new rules to regulate Canadians into watching their own media. The solution is to enforce the rules already in place, and force the Canadian media companies to produce Canadian content on a scale that matches the boatloads of money they make from this country every year. We do amazing stuff in this country. We’re just not given the chance to show it most of the time. Fix that first, then we’ll see how much of a boost we need on social media.

Dreams Come True

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I apologize in advance for the techy post — and worse yet, a techy post that probably won’t be relevant a few months from now — but I just had to mark this occasion properly.

Today I finally got the Transfire browser tech to work properly, after 21 years of trying.

Alright, that’s not entirely true…I’d forgotten about Transfire for about, y’know, 18 of those years. But it’s still a big deal.

What is Transfire? OK, let’s take a deep dive into the history of my brain…

Liberty Bell, Ahoy!

Way back in 1997, I had this idea for what would have been webfiction, if such a thing really existed in 1997. It was kinda more like a moody graphic novel with fewer pictures, and was called Shock on the Wire — about a city of hackers turning itself inside-out while trying to cope with a world-changing secret.

I never actually figured out what the secret was, honestly. Heh.

But then, a few years later, in the ashes of the first iteration of Dustrunners, I revived SotW and renamed it Liberty Bell. And this time, I knew what it was about.

Long story short, it was about a city of hackers (Monitor City, which factors into all iterations of Dustrunners and also the Fission Chips books and more) coping with an explosive secret, and it centres around a guy named James Garamond, who is probably the world’s most infamous programmer.

Free as in Beer, and Speech

This was all being envisioned in the (relatively) early days of Open Source software, when there was a huge amount of debate and conflict about compatibilities between licenses and the free transfer of information. Poison pills were a really serious concern — the idea that someone would put an OSS license into closed-source software, or vice versa, and “pollute” a code base in a messy, expensively-legal way. I remember getting yelled at for using an OSS-licensed code snippet in a proprietary system. Tensions were high.

So James Garamond’s infamy relates to exactly that: he invented the free and open source browser called Transfire, which was really just a regular browser wrapped around a piece of tech that made navigating sites more efficient. In a nutshell: rather than building a menu into a website, the website would serve a sitemap to the browser, which would render a tree browser (in various forms) overtop the content. It would let you skip to a deep page with a few quick clicks, but the browser also guessed where you’d want to go next, and re-arranged content to make your browsing even faster.

Now, I know that sounds kinda lame in 2021, but in 2000, barely two years after Google was founded, information navigation was a very tricky issue for web developers. So in my mind, James Garamond saved that day with a simple-yet-satisfying piece of technology that quickly took the world by storm.

Good Intentions Gone Wrong

And here’s where the licenses come into play: Garamond’s invention was quickly adopted by all the open-source browsers, and soon became a de facto standard for the web. People built plugins to extend Transfire, whole ecosystems existed to extend it, and pretty soon it was indispensable to the world.

And that’s when Garamond’s former employer, Illiayson Technologies, dropped the bomb: since he had started the project while employed by them, they owned the codebase. And Illiayson (being a handy stand-in for Microsoft) began suing companies and projects that didn’t pay its licensing fees. Some were crippled by the costs, some just folded, and some tried to fight back — but the result was the same: in the end, everyone had to strip Transfire out of their systems piece by piece. It was not a happy time.

James Garamond “retired” at 32 to Monitor City, trying to stay anonymous in a town full of shut-ins. And that’s where the story picks up…

But Never Mind That

What’s important now is that I have finally built Transfire’s navigator. Or, well, a cheap imitation of it.

If you’re on the right version of this site, you should be able to double-click anywhere (try it!) and bring up a menu. Click through, swipe back if you need to, and generally have some fun. That’s what I was envisioning, all those years ago. I mean, it looked more like The Matrix in the old days, but whatevs.

Technically Speaking…

The key thing about this menu is how it’s drawn, which I kinda think may actually have some relevance for modern web development: rather than wasting UI space and energy creating a menu system with dropdowns etc, this sucker uses a JS library to load a sitemap (JSON) and draw it, on request, as a menu. In theory, all you need to do is include that JS in your header, keep a sitemap.json file in your root, and voila, instant navigation.

Why bother? Well, in its current iteration, there’s not really a compelling reason to bother, I admit. But some handy features would be better SEO, easier accessibility (if wired correctly for screen readers) and overall, a common UX standard across websites that would make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

Then again, the current code is deeply tied to my React website code, is probably the most inefficient design I’ve ever imagined, and has very little value over a regular menu beyond being nifty.

But the potential is there. Somewhere.

Mostly I’m just really excited I finally got to make the thing that ruined a man’s life. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

Oh Oscars...

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

This isn’t me picking on the Oscars last night, I swear. I totally get the impulse to craft a cathartic ending to an awards show — especially one happening in the middle of a pandemic, on the heels of the George Floyd verdict feeling more like holding one’s ground instead of a true step forward…

But yikes, that went a bit wrong.

To recap for my future self, trying to figure out WTF this post is about: the Oscars re-arranged the awards at the tail of the ceremony, so instead of ending with Best Picture, they ended on Best Actor. This was clearly done because they were 900% sure Chadwick Boseman was going to win for his final performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (which really, he should have). But as Oscars tend to do, this one went to Anthony Hopkins instead — who wasn’t even there — so instead of a beautiful moment, you got a really awkward acceptance by Joaquin Phoenix, and then ROLL CREDITS!

It’s not that their intentions were wrong, and I can’t even fault them for being crass and calculating, because honestly, it was exactly what everyone wanted, after the year we’ve had. But there’s that part of your brain that, as a professional in whatever field you’re in, should say: “My heart says yes, but my brain (and years of experience) says HELL NO.” Anyone listening to their brain would have known that whatever benefits they lost by putting Best Actor second-to-last, those benefits were nothing compared to the damage of not giving the award to Boseman.

Hope for a miracle, plan for a disaster.

On a totally unrelated note: it was so great seeing Chloé Zhao win for Nomadland, and even though I winced when Tyler Perry mentioned the police (not so much because I disagree, but because I know the world doesn’t want to see nuance right now), I thought his speech was exactly what was needed for this moment. I’m always terrified he’s going to be Me Too’d (or Joss Whedon’d) because I cannot think of another industry professional who doesn’t just do the work, but goes so above and beyond that if there isn’t an award named after him in the next 20 years, I will be incredibly disappointed in the Academy.

I mean, beyond the disappointment over the whole award order thing.

Sigh.

Why I was hiding

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

About 18 months ago I was asked if I blogged. It’s a big part of own-name branding (as opposed to ghostwriting) and all successful writers do it.

“Do you blog?” the would-be manager asked.

I hesitated. I hesitated because in truth, I was never all that into social media. I blogged when I had to for 1889, and most of my 7.5k tweets are really just #3D1D questions, not actual content. I’m a social hermit, and I’ve always been this way.

“Would you be willing to try?” was the question. “Or at least put some of your old writing online?”

Reluctantly, I agreed to search my archives for old posts, to see what I might be able to resurrect. But what I discovered was… well… bizarre.

The old me

I started blogging sometime in 2003, back before I think the term “blog” properly existed. The earliest posts that I can find (and that are even vaguely coherent) were written shortly after the original Dustrunners had ended, and I was just about to launch a project called Liberty Bell — which was an animated webseries with a crowdsourced business model. Plus ça change, right?

From there, I talked about RDC36, where some friends and I created a series pitch package in 36 hours; and then I was ranting about copyright, and creating RollBots, and preparing to write Fission Chips, and—

And I discovered, to my amazement, that I was reading the words of someone who really enjoyed what he was doing. I was posting several times a day, sometimes, and getting into scuffles with other people online in the form of long, rambling posts. When I launched The Pig and the Box, I was already dealing with a decent-sized audience that I was clearly interacting with.

Me, online, interacting.

I had no memory of it at all. It felt completely alien.

So what happened?

Too much of a good thing

The Pig and the Box was part of a project called “12 Books in 12 Months”, which was promoted by Creative Commons Canada and brought in a decent amount of interest. The buzz that clearly gave me eventually led to the creation of 1889 Labs, which started publishing books by other authors, too. I do remember that 1889 was absolutely the most fun and the most rewarding experience I’ve ever had, professionally, but wow was it hard work.

As the “processor” of things, I was in charge of building the print books, the ebooks, the websites, the marketing materials and all that. The more titles we took on, the more their schedules overlapped, and the busier I got. Going by the records, I stopped working on my own projects around this time, and soon seemed to give up on Twitter, too. I imagine it was because I was just too busy.

1889 was doing great, and I think everyone involved was having fun — at the rate we were going, maybe I might’ve been able to hire more help and give myself a bit of a break, but sadly, life went sideways…

The accident

My wife’s accident was sudden and abrupt, but the fallout was like hitting a patch of ice on the road: I knew things were going wrong, but I didn’t appreciate how bad they were about to get until I was completely out of control.

This is where my memory becomes clearer: in the days after the accident, the team at 1889 stepped up in ways I cannot even begin to describe. Schedules were kept, projects powered forward, and the machine we’d all built over the last year-and-a-bit seemed like it was going to be OK. But the personal fallout from the accident was only getting worse, and slowly overwhelming me. I couldn’t maintain the workload necessary to bankroll the company, and pieces started to splinter off in really terrible ways.

I still feel insanely guilty about this period. I messed up other people’s lives because I couldn’t get a handle on my own. I know it wasn’t my fault that the accident happened, but it was my fault that I didn’t have better systems in place to mitigate the fallout.

Part of that guilt manifested as, well, hiding. It’s hard to be sociable and happy online when people are still nursing the wounds you inflicted upon them. What was I going to do, write a blog post about a fun new project I was planning in the ashes of 1889 Labs? The logical part of my brain told me that the 1889 folks would be happy that I was coming alive again, but the irrational part told me I didn’t deserve to try.

And into that delicate state came the phrase that screwed me up completely:

“Reflect poorly”

As part of my recovery from the accident, I took on more TV and novel-writing work for producers around the world. Part of that process involved talking to a would-be manager, who laid out for me the key elements of a successful career in the 2010s. Smile, be personable, never say anything negative about anyone, and most importantly, make sure your social media presence won’t reflect poorly on the productions you want to join.

I’d heard a similar thing, pre-RollBots: nobody wants to work with a headache, so stay light and fluffy in any venue a potential employer might check. Back in the RollBots days, I explicitly ignored that advice and published ranting articles about the evils of copyright and how the Canadian TV industry was inept — but thankfully nobody much cared about blogs in those days. Five years later, it mattered.

Suddenly, the guilt about 1889 stopped being my biggest concern: what was safe to post about? What would get me in trouble? I took down all my old blogs and attempted to nuke all my old tweets (but gave up because I’m lazy). The only things I dared post online were the kinds of things I very broadly suck at: marketing posts. (Marketing posts are good! They show you’re a team player!)

Except it’s hard to live like that. Interest wanes, posts get more sporadic, and eventually stop. I gave up on social media because I had been bad at it for so long, I forgot I’d ever enjoyed it.

Then, 18 months ago…

…I was asked if I had a blog, or a social media presence. I said “no, no I do not.” Would I be willing to dig up some old writing and post that instead?

Sigh. Sure.

It was a chore, to start. I dug through everything I could find, from hand-coded HTML to self-made CMS systems, to Blogger and Wordpress and other weird variants like Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee and, and, and…

…and the more I read my blog posts, the more I realized I actually enjoyed my old self — the version of me who posted random, rambly thoughts about copyright and business models for experimental fiction. He seemed to be having a lot of fun! So as I converted the old posts over to a new format, I started adding new content here and there. A movie review, a post about a song I liked, a brainstorm about the nature of reality.

I was blogging in secret, and it felt weirdly good.

I kept doing it all through Bytown last year, happily secluded from the outside world, until I finally finished converting the old posts last weekend. Over 500 entries, going back almost 20 years.

And I thought to myself: why am I hiding? Why can’t I be happy again? I had more fun and more success when I didn’t worry so much, so maybe the answer has been staring me in the face all along: go bananas, and when the fallout comes, turn it into a witty blog post and move on.

So that, in the end, is why I am done with hiding. For those I wronged: I’m sorry, and I will try to make it up to you with entertainment. For those who might judge me for the things I write: hi, I don’t care.

And for the future me, looking back on this post in 10 years: I’m sorry about mangling the timestamps, but there’s no way in hell I’m going through 18 years of data again to fix it. Ask your personal AI to do it. Sheesh.

Publishing Polyfill #2: Market Research

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A few days ago, I rambled incoherently about the state of the publishing industry, and then theorized that the answer may lie in the creation of a new kind of manager. There were four distinct elements to that theoretically manager role:

Market Research;
Packaging;
Publicity;
Audience Relations.

As with any issue in the 21st century, you can solve these problems with web services (duh), which is what I’m going to propose today for the first item, Market Research.

If you’ve never seen market research in action (in a creative industries sense) then you are really missing out. For just about any niche you can imagine, there are detailed reports available, breaking down a potential audience by race, age, gender, sexual orientation, education, career, income level, propensity to spend money — with the ability to look at subsets of each demographic as they intersect with each other. Asian stay-at-home moms between 30 and 37 who are planning to return to the workforce within the next 5 years? Yup, we got that number right here.

The thing about market research is that it tells you how many people want something, how many don’t, and how many might be interested under the right circumstances. If you’ve got a widget you’re trying to sell, you can find out who to target; if you’re looking to build a widget to suit demand, you can see where the best opportunities lie. Either way, the numbers help guide your decision-making process — which is exactly what our prototypical managers need.

The issue with market research is that, like most things, it is a gated community. The best outfits are run in-house at large media companies, operating either through surveys or just the company’s own internal analytics. Every time you watch a Netflix show, they record absolutely everything: your demographic information, the genre and style of the videos you stream, how you stream, where you stream, when, how long you go before pausing, what you do when the show is done. All that information tells them how to customize their next production to suit taste trends — and they don’t share the data with anyone, only the abstract conclusions.

Getting access to quality market data is a difficult thing for an up-and-comer, and without that data, they’re really just making educated guesses. That can get you a long way, of course, but it’s only really effective in the big, broad categories like romance or thrillers: yes, those are popular. Everything else is murky.

Building a Market Research System

There are two basic ways to get information out of people: analytics and surveys. Analytics work by extracting data from people’s behaviour as they interact with the world — Google knows everything about you because they’re tracking every site you visit, and can make inferences based on the content you see. Surveys, on the other hand, ask you to voluntarily hand over your data with the understanding that in most cases, you’ll stay relatively anonymous.

The privacy rights side of me dislikes the analytics angle on principle, added to which it’s very hard to get into the analytics game if you’re not already a massive corporation. That leaves surveys, but surveys have extremely limited scope most of the time.

I don’t remember if Goodreads started off this way, but they have definitely become a survey system for Amazon (their owner). What started out as a distributed rating and review site turned into a voluntary analytics engine (and has since turned into a Katamari-esque trashball). “Tell me what you like,” they said, “and I will tell you what you’ll enjoy.”

That nugget isn’t all wrong, but it needs a slight re-alignment, because if this new system is going to be useful for managers, it needs to be more about the future than the past or present.

Here is the proposition of the new market research site: tell me what you want, and I will help you get it. For readers, the system would look like this:

Capturing niches: Users can choose genres and subgenres from a list, or input book titles directly. Either way, market data is being generated in a deliberate way.
Risk tolerance: Users can also set their risk tolerance (either globally or in specific niches). Some may only want to read books by marquee authors, and others might be keen to try undiscovered voices, too.
Spending habits: Users can also set their estimated monthly budget on books, because recommendations both to the reader and the manager can change greatly depending on this variable.
“I want more” tokens: Users can give a certain subgenre a boost by allocating one of, say, three special tokens that say “I would read more of this if it were available”.
Genre/subgenre pages: All this data would be rolled up into special collection pages where the likes and preferences of the like-minded community would be aggregated and displayed, to help readers find new content that doesn’t just fit their tastes, but their budget and risk tolerance as well. Lists would include sections like “most liked”, “newest” and “trending”.

Now, rather than creating a site that pretends to be something else (while still devouring personal information) this site would be upfront with its mission: to gather reading preferences and feed that data back to the creator community, so they can identify and reach niches more easily.

How does that happen? A few elements are at play:

Open statistics: As data is input, reports will be automatically generated showing not just which niches are most popular, but information about likely market size, purchasing power and risk tolerance. Any registered user can review this information and use it to craft business decisions.
Manual listing: Authors or their representatives can manually enter their titles into the system, targeting their specific subgenres and preferred audience type. This won’t necessarily make them popular, but it makes them discoverable.
Direct contact with early adopters: Users will have the ability to opt into “early adopter” status, which will give them access to drafts, ARCs and other special content. For the readers, this is free content; for authors, it’s audience-building, targeted at the readers most likely to support them.

None of this is revolutionary — I know there have been versions of this that have come and gone over the years — but once it’s up and running, the mangers we’ve talked about will have the data they need to make informed business decisions…at which point they can concentrate on the second part of their role: packaging.

In a separate post, naturally.

Ramp Up Starts...Now

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I almost never start a year without a Really Bad Idea to pursue, but this year — between covid and gallbladder fun and just a general sense of blargh — I have been putting it off. There are some things that are almost-but-not-quite in the works, and I didn’t want to jinx anything… but yeah, it’s time to formulate a plan.

2021 will, I think, have a few moving parts, but the primary theme will be this: all experimental, all the time. I really enjoyed things when I was trying strange new methodologies and wring postmortems once a month, so I intend to try that again.

So here is my smorgasbord of options, from which I will pick some crazy:

Utopian Hit Squad needs to be released this year, because I’ve been sitting on it for far too long. Since this one is done, my experiment will have to be something to do with marketing. Something longer-term with a late summer launch date, maybe? I’m not sure. Must ponder.
Shell Game would be a month-long livewritten spy thriller project, with a twist: it would work like an RPG, where the characters’ key decisions would be chosen by the audience — with their success rate determined by the distribution of votes. It’s about a team of spies fighting terror plot that’s playing out on three continents at once, with no one certain where the real threat lies.
One Loves would be another month-long project, but not livewritten so much as audience-influenced. Surveys would go up (and stay up) to shape the upcoming chapters, but they would be written and released without direct input. This one is a romance with a twist, and probably one of my favourite projects in recent years. I can’t even describe the premise without giving too much away.
Goodnight Kiss would be a much more basic romance novel that would last, again, a month. It would be a Prism project, so you’d be able to define the characters however you like. The protagonist is on a mission to kill a shady billionaire for very good reasons, only to get tangled up in a spidering set of lies that could cost them everything.
Jacked can and should be turned into a book, and have a crazy idea to make it more interesting: I’ll write the book as scenes — chronological or not — and then, at the end of each scene there will be a “what comes next?” question where you get 2-3 choices to continue on, do a flashback or a flashforward. As people make their choices, the list will rearrange itself to promote the most popular answer — until it reaches a certain threshold of adoption, at which point the choice will disappear and the top choice will become the choice permanently. Jacked is a thriller where information is both plentiful and confusing, so this fits perfectly.
Oki and Nobbin 2 has been bubbling up in my brain a lot recently, and I’m inclined to make it my NaNo this November — but with a proper livewriting system in place to let it really sing. The big change this time would be micro-chapters written throughout the day, with users randomly assigned one of the slots to influence, so you can only mess up 1/3 of the story at a time.

Of course, Oki and Nobbin 2 being on that list suggests Oki and Nobbin 1 will be edited and out, which brings me to the second part of my Great Challenge for 2021: I really need to clear my To Be Edited pile. Some of those suckers have been there for years, and make me feel bad every time I think about ‘em. The list of likely candidates looks like:

Bytown, depending on the results of this current round of shenanigans. If they go nowhere, I would put this at the top of the list for a burst of editing in anticipation of a fall release of all 3 volumes.
Oki and Nobbin needs a heavy revision after 2019’s NaNo, but I know exactly what to do, so it shouldn’t be too hard.
Arkady and Kain really needs to be finished. It’s about halfway through revisions, but the last half is a doozy. If I could fix that one up, I would be so happy.
Polarity needs fixin’ if I’m ever going to be able to write the third book to the Dustrunners saga. Though to be honest, this one is the least likely to happen. My brain is just not that strong :)

How realistic is it to plan to write and/or edit 6-10 80,000-word experimental novels in roughly 8 months, in between ghostwriting, TV writing, web developing and the occasional nap? Possssssibly not very realistic, no.

So I need to narrow my list, focus my attention, and hopefully not die.

It’s gonna be an interesting year, that’s for sure.

dal-bo

Publishing Polyfill #1: Managers

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

In my last post, I outlined the state of the publishing industry and the unfortunate gaps that have arisen in all areas and levels therein. One thing that seems consistent across all types of author is the need to be seen — not in terms of ego, but on a practical/promotional level. You can’t sell books unless you’ve got traction, and unfortunately most authors aren’t social creatives on the level needed to make this work.

I’ve said before (but maybe not in a blog post) that the gap in the publishing ecosystem is invested marketers. Yes, you can hire a publicist or a virtual assistant to promote your work, but that dynamic tends to be a one-sided arrangement: efforts are made, results are middling, but invoices flow all the same. In that scenario — whether you’re a midlist author or a KDPer — the author is the customer, which usually ends up with a huge debt with nothing to show for it. It’s the old predatory self-pub companies in a new shell.

(This is not to say that all publicists are evil — many are swimming against the tide and doing their best. But the fact remains that they get paid no matter the outcome, which puts authors at a disadvantage in a market where they’re already highly likely to drown.)

What’s needed are publicists — meaning people with the social skills and social media know-how to create actual buzz — who aren’t just chasing their next billable hour. We need publicists who have something at stake, and something to gain: if they represent a client who has a crap month, they have a crap month, too. If their client tops the charts for six weeks in a row and lands a huge payday, they have a huge payday, too. The harder they work to promote their client, the greater the odds that they’ll get rich off the effort.

We basically need managers.

I mean managers in the entertainment industry sense: they’re like agents, except they are a bit more function-focused. Agents tend to view your career as a reputational concept, where managers are nuts-and-boltsing you to stardom. Or, put another way: managers take an assortment of tools and build you a career, either by opening doors, or making doors where none existed before.

Yes, there are managers like this for authors already, but they generally only work with marquee names (or up-and-comers) and are far too few in number to make a difference. We need to increase the odds that the diamonds in the rough get found, which means adding more managers into the rough itself.

Let’s imagine a new kind of manager, someone who has as much “right” to their career as the authors they’ll represent. An independent operator whose sole focus is promoting their authors and boosting their sales. They would need to handle, at a minimum, the following elements:

Market Research. Good authors write what they want; smart authors write for the market; brilliant authors now how to tune “what they want” for the market. Managers need to know what’s hot, what’s not, and how to focus on the gaps effectively.
Packaging. This is a catch-all to describe editing, cover design and file formatting. The manager themselves wouldn’t do this, but would ensure standards are being met, because there’s no better way to kill a good book than with bad production values.
Publicity. Most authors are terrible at self-promotion — not because they can’t produce content, but because they don’t know how or what to do. A manager would have to devise a strategy and either handle its execution, outsource it, or make it easy for authors to play along.
Audience Relations. Once you get readers, you need to keep them at all costs — but that’s not easy when you’re feverishly writing your next book. Managers need to keep the dialogue going, to create incentives for the audience to stick around.

Notice how I didn’t mention “negotiating film rights or international market deals”? It’s because these managers aren’t agents: they are functional, not ethereal. Whether you’re a midlist author being told to promote your own work, or an absolute newbie trying to break in, a manager should get you where you need to be — and benefit from your rise.

How would it work, on a practical level? I imagine managers would have two distinct career phases: one, where they’re scrappy and new and hunting for the Next Big Thing. In that phase, they’ve probably got the skills or the contacts to launch a great new author, and are trolling KDP and wattpad for the perfect candidate. A lot of their efforts will be stitched together from disparate services, but they’ll work hard to succeed because it puts food on their table, too.

After they get a few hits under their belt, the second phase will likely involve prospective clients coming to them for assistance. This has a bit of a gatekeeper-y vibe to it, so I’m less excited about it, but ultimately it’s a purer kind of gatekeeping, because authors will be seeking out a concrete benefit, rather than the key to a door that shouldn’t be locked in the first place. (ahem. grr. cough cough.)

If one of the objectives of the Ameri-Protestant-capitalist system is that hard work should be rewarded with riches, the key to achieving that goal needs to be to build a framework that allows newbies to rise through the ranks — not just once or twice, but as a repeatable pattern. It’s no good if the elder statesmen got rich climbing a ladder, but then pulls it up to keep others from following. The next generation of writers need the next generation of managers, which means the tools need to exist to make that possible.

Tools.

Just like Smashwords, wattpad and KDP help writers overcome the obstacles that kept them out of publishing in the past, there need to be tools and services in place to make promotion as seamless for would-be managers as selling a novella is for authors. Some of these already exist, and some only exist in expensive “for professionals only” products — but if we want to revolutionize publishing for real, we need to define these needs, build these tools, and smooth out the adoption process.

Which will happen next time, because I need a nap.

On Validation

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Wil Wheaton posted today about the concept of validation, and how the only kind of validation that matters is the internal kind — external validation is fleeting…

And there’s a lesson there that I’m going to billboard: the external validation we crave from others is never as satisfying or lasting as the internal validation we give ourselves.

I know I come at external validation very differently than Wil did: he’s been processing that concept since he was a kid — and in Hollywood, too — so it’s probably a very mixed-up sorta experience for him. But I 256% agree with his assessment, because validation is a kind of tool that can be wielded in many different ways, and many of them are Seriously Not Good.

My own realization about validation came a little over a decade ago, when RollBots was in production but not yet airing. I had a stint there where everyone I met was telling me how brilliant I was, how awesome a script was, how genius my concept was. And I might’ve believed them — boy was it tempting to believe them — except I was working with an actually brilliant team of writers (led by the indefatigable Vito Viscomi) whose work made it crystal clear that I was really nothing special.

It wasn’t imposter syndrome — I still have that, and I know its qualities intimately — it was something more sinister: the truth. I got extremely lucky, and was able to play with people operating so far above my pay grade that I’m still amazed it happened at all. But the more people told me how great I was, the more I realized the things they were saying didn’t line up with reality.

Which meant they were either consciously lying to me, or that their own sense of genius was askew.

Once you start to see compliments as a sign of malice and/or mental instability, life gets…interesting. You see an asterisk beside every accolade, a best-before date on every congratulations. You’re waiting for people to either realize you’re kinda dumb, or to reach that magic point where they no longer need to pretend.

So while I waited for that to happen, I worked really damn hard to actually be half as good as people said I was. I had external validation that I knew to be untrue, so I was trying to figure out what internal validation felt like.

I remember the moment it happened, because it has a tweet:

#3D1D #c39q2 Stop or go?
— MCM (@1889ca), October 8, 2009

I was livewriting for the first time and desperately short on sleep, but in that moment, I knew that I was good at what I was doing. I was manipulating emotions through prose, and that was all that mattered. Was it brilliant? No, still nowhere near brilliant. But I had gotten to place I needed to go.

After that, validation was more of a practical thing: you need word-of-mouth/reviews/awards to live as a writer, so a certain amount of effort needs to be made to make your mark. And every so often, someone would come at me and try to reverse-validate me by claiming I was less-than. Those moments still amuse me, because as I say to those who try: I created a TV show that aired worldwide. I have nothing left to prove.

External validation is tricky because it’s nice when it happens, but its absence feels ten times worse. If you spend your life chasing it — even from friends and family — you’re going to be miserable for a not-insubstantial amount of your life. If your happiness depends on other people’s praise, you are signing away your freedom to a fickle beast.

All of which is to say: Wil is right. Internal validation is all that matters. It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to feel significant to you. Once you find it — and maybe you already have it and just haven’t realized — keep it in a safe place, because you’re gonna need it when times get tough.

Protip: memorizalizing it in a tweet definitely helps.

Day of Pink

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Today is the International Day of Pink, which is about calling attention to and helping to create a more inclusive and diverse world. To steal from their website:

April 14, 2021 is the International Day of Pink!

Discrimination takes many shapes, whether it’s based on race, age, disabilities, gender or sexuality. The 2SLGBTQIA+ community is no stranger to the bullying and violence that stems from hateful beliefs. While progress has been made towards removing these social barriers from our society, discrimination still persists. So, every year, on the second Wednesday of April, we urge people around the world to put on a pink shirt and stand in solidarity with the 2SLGBTQIA+ community to continue fighting for equality and acceptance.

I’m always stunned by how far and how fast things have changed in even just the last 10 years, but that is still just a tiny slice of what needs to be done. We need to lock in the advancements made, and push even further until everyone can be their true selves without fear of discrimination or abuse.

Toward Another Next Kind of Publishing

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a long time since I wrote a post theorizing about the future of the publishing industry — a decade, in fact, which is all kinds of shocking — but the last few years have been pushing me toward this idea that we’re still not quite done innovating in the novelsphere. This time, though, I won’t be taking so much of a “burn it all down” approach as I have in the past. I mean, I have a lot of friends and colleagues who work in the entities I’d be setting on fire, so I’m kinda inclined to do the good ‘ol internet trick and route around damage instead.

Last time I talked about all this, ebooks were just starting to become a thing, and there was a theory that Old Publishing would implode under the strain of so much competition from the unwashed masses. Apple and Amazon (and to a lesser extent Kobo) were driving prices down, the market was being flooded with half-baked garbage, and it was only a matter of time before Random House declared bankruptcy.

Not entirely surprisingly, none of that happened. Yes, the landscape is changed and yes, people in Old Publishing look back on the pre-internet days with blissful nostalgia, but all in all, the market stabilized and everyone came out in one piece.

The current state of affairs seems to be, from the perspective of someone who kinda treads around the fringes of the industry, this:

Marquee authors do just fine. I get the sense they’re on more of a grind than before, but their releases still hit the lists and from what I hear, their advances are more than enough to live off of. The turbulence may have rocked them a little, but in the end, popular fiction is popular for a reason.
Fewer in-betweeners. I assume this has always been largely true, but the impression I get from formerly-midlist authors is that they are constantly on the knife’s edge between having a career, and packing it in for good — and it’s not because tastes are changing, it’s because there is much less midlist to be a part of. These are people who have sizeable followings and a good-sized back catalogue, but they’re terrified of falling on the wrong side of a tipping point where they’re just not worth the investment anymore. It’s like the industry is saying they either have to dig deep and become a marquee writer, or else get replaced by…
A fantastic churn of newbies. And by “newbie” I don’t mean “not good”, I just mean they’re coming at the industry totally fresh, usually out of nowhere, and very very fast. Some may be wattpad darlings cashing in on their existing success, but others are just the more-traditional diamond in the rough, picked out of obscurity, given a book deal and a social media plan, and thrown off the cliff to see if they can fly. Very few of them do.
Big publishers do just fine and I suspect it’s because they’re exploiting the technological change they used to wail about, and good for them. Workflows seem to be closer to efficient, processes are optimized, and they’re doing demographics research that would make Netflix swoon. I used to strongly dislike big publishers on account of their luddite tendencies, but I think the luddites have all retired or something, because the operations I’ve glimpsed are very 21st century.
Smaller publishers are suffering. This isn’t a huge surprise, because these were always the ones in the crosshairs: they don’t have the resources to upgrade technologically, and they don’t have the market heft to push through regardless. In a lot of ways, they’re operating at the same level as direct-to-KDPers, which is not a great place to be when you have offices and staff to pay for. The worst part is, I see authors either getting or feeling neglected by these publishers, and looking for a way out. That’ll only bring about the end even faster.
Book packagers are picking up that slack. There are more than a few of these hyper-digital book packagers out there now, and they are sharp. They have carved out a clever niche in the market: they pay slightly more than most authors will earn in an advance in exchange for a full buy-out, which lets them run the long tail without the administrative hassle of paying out royalties. They move fast and in bulk (several ghostwriters working on the same series at once) and are armed with next-level market data. If you’re a small press sitting in a viable market, look out. The packagers are coming for you.
Micropresses live and die like fireflies. 1889 Labs was a micropress of this modern era, I think: lightweight on the admin side (often virtual), they don’t promise huge print runs or press tours, but they provide the editing, production and distribution most authors can’t manage on their own. Some pay advances — and I’m not one of those people who say “don’t work with someone who won’t pay you an advance” — but either way, micropresses give authors enough of a leg up that they stand some chance of standing out in the sea of…
The KDP battle royale. It’s only gotten worse since I last ventured into it, which is saying something. Between offshore content farms and repackaging classics (or pirated books), and between semi-literate folks hitting “publish” after ignoring spellcheck and actually-talented writers putting their all into a title with a kinda meh cover, self-publishing still isn’t the cesspool of mediocrity that publishing snobs liked to make it out to be — it’s even worse, because it’s just so noisy there’s no way to tell the good from the truly terrible.

All of which brings me to my unfortunate conclusion at this stage of the game: authors are interchangeable widgets who don’t mean a thing unless they’ve got momentum, and momentum is a fickle thing.

Now, one thing that seems to have stayed static in the past decade is the authors’ need to be seen. Not in terms of ego, I mean in practical terms, you can’t be an author of any kind if your name doesn’t ring any bells. Whether you’re being asked by a big publisher to spend half of your advance on a marketing team, or you’re a micropress hiring virtual assistants to drum up press, or you’re an indie author working your brains out to push your Facebook likes into the thousands, authors need to be seen. And by and large, they’re not — not without insane amounts of work that I have actually seen ruin people’s lives. Chasing retweets at the expense of your actual, paying day job is not a great idea, but it’s an infectious one that the industry actively promotes to people.

And, well. There needs to be a better way — a system that doesn’t replace the structures that already exist, and isn’t trying to be another wattpad or similar aggregator, or a crowdfunding alternative like Patreon. What we need is something that connects into the gaps in the system to provide the insight and assistance that makes this whole situation so perilous.

In programming terms, we need a polyfill: a set of instructions that help bring advanced features to an outdated system.

But that’ll have to wait for another post :)

Journalists and the Mob

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

As a follow-up to my post about The Nevers I want to ramble incoherently for a bit about the burden and responsibility that journalists bear in the profession they chose.

To start, let me define the term “journalist”, because my definition is probably broader than most people would assume. To me, you’re a professional writer if you write and release your work to the world. Yes, the internet makes that so easy that basically anyone can do it, but that’s exactly the point: anyone can be a writer if they try. The gatekeeping of yesteryear did nothing but amplify a subset of voices at the expense of potentially brilliant minds, so this current state of affairs, while still imperfect, is much better overall.

But with that freedom comes responsibility, especially for those writing for larger sites. Fox News and MSNBC have created this weirdly ambiguous journalistic state where opinion is mixed into actual reporting: the football players weren’t kneeling in protest, they were [valiantly/unpatriotically] kneeling in [valid/invalid] protest. The story is given a spin, and suddenly facts stop being neutral, so it becomes reasonable to assume you can shop for your preferred facts the way you shop for your preferred soft drink.

A journalist’s job is to inform the mob, not be of the mob. They have to look at the world with an investigative eye and report what they find as if they’re not actually a part of the same society at all. That self-imposed distance is the closest thing we can get to true impartiality — an imperfect solution to the problem of “being human” — but it needs to happen all the same. Journalists report the facts, the mob interprets them as they see fit.

It’s not easy, or likely fun. As a human being with skin in the game, it can be incredibly hard to detach oneself from the goings-on of the world, especially if you’re personally affected by it. It’s the same as doctors or lawyers: you’re asked to set your sense of right and wrong aside to do the function society asks of you, even if you’d rather not.

You may hate the creator of a TV series to the point of being sick, but when it comes time to write a review of that TV series, you need to put your feelings into a box and analyze the work with a critical eye, not an emotional one. If the emotions are too strong for you to do that, you need to hand the assignment to someone who can, and write an opinion piece instead. Or, hell, even if you can be objective, you can still write a separate opinion piece, too.

Is it fair? No, not at all. Is it giving someone undeserving a free pass? Potentially, yes. But journalists — true journalists, regardless of their affiliation or standing — are in charge of documenting reality. Even for something as trivial as a TV review, the rules need to stay in place. The alternative is the further fragmenting of “fact” into isolated niches, and the erosion of whatever trust is left in the world.

The Nevers and Joss Whedon's Shadow

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

First, I should say I haven’t seen The Nevers on HBO yet, and it may indeed be hot garbage that makes you want to die upon watching it. This post isn’t, strangely, about the quality of the show, it’s about the reaction to the show, and the reaction to that reaction.

I’ve been an occasional Joss Whedon fan. I was never much into Buffy, and I only saw Firefly after the fact, so he didn’t have the same godlike status in my mind that he did for a lot of people. When Dollhouse was announced, I remember thinking: “Aha, now I can get in on the ground floor!”, only to be kinda in and out of love with the result. He obviously had a gift for dialogue and twisty plots, but never quite to the degree that his legend would suggest.

Whatever Whedon touched turned to gold, basically, in the minds of many of his fans. His very presence made things good, even when the execution didn’t necessarily match the expectations. People were blindly loving his work (and usually anyone involved with it, too).

And cool, that’s what fans are all about. It’s not logical, it’s emotional. I totally get that.

But now that it’s pretty well established that Whedon is kind of a terrible human being, people are reconsidering their love of him and the works he’s produced. Suddenly, Firefly isn’t a flawless work of art anymore, but a near-heretic piece of faux-feminist garbage; Buffy isn’t just not cool anymore, it never was cool, and anyone who said otherwise is clearly a degenerate. Hating Joss Whedon has become just as trendy as loving him had been.

And, again, cool. Someone who does what he’s alleged to have done doesn’t really deserve the pedestal he’s been perchin’ on these last 20 years. Should we “cancel” great artists for their personal flaws? That’s a whole other issue, and for now I’m gonna boil it down to a simple: “yup!” In my opinion, Whedon shouldn’t be making any more movies or TV shows or even YouTube videos until he learns to treat others with kindness and respect. I think kindness and respect should be the baseline for anyone existing outside their covid bubble, and especially for those who are in a position of power.

However, I have this terrible feeling the Whedon Hate Train has become just as blindly deranged as the Whedon Love Train — with people tagging everything he touches as garbage out of the gate. Take, for example, this review on Mashable where Alexis Nedd says:

Thus outlined are Joss Whedon's creative sins with respect to The Nevers on HBO. This show is derivative, self-plagiarizing, and boring. Whedon's personal sins are greater and more pressing. Since 2017, when his ex-wife Kai Cole penned a letter accusing him of using his credibility as a "feminist" showrunner to manipulate women and engage in numerous affairs, the trickle of information suggesting the fan favorite director is abusive and dangerous has become a flood.

The review reads very much like someone who (again, very appropriately) hates the everliving crap out of Whedon, but seems to be having a hard time not letting that hate colour their impression of The Nevers. Just like Whedon was never infallible before, it’s also unlikely he’s completely talentless now. Bad people can write good scripts. You can hate the man and love the words, especially when it’s in a filmed medium where so many other people have a hand in its production.

Why does that matter? Look at the fallout: yes, you hate Whedon, so you light his new show on fire in the press. The bad word of mouth tanks the series — regardless of whether or not it deserved to be tanked, quality-wise — and suddenly the cast and crew are collateral damage. Some won’t get another shot to star in a series because of that — not the white male cast, mind you, but the women and POC. They’ll be saddled with this failure for years.

Worse yet, I worry this is going to muffle the Me Too movement in the industry. There have already been grumblings about it in other contexts: if you speak out about a headline director/producer/whatever before the run is finished, people will boycott the show to hurt the offender. But then you are responsible for damaging the livelihoods of everyone involved, creating a lot of enemies in the process. The obvious solution is to grin and bear it until you’re done with the series — except then the offender has potentially years to walk free and wreak more havoc.

This isn’t theoretical: there are actors out there right now, watching very closely to see how things like this play out. If they see a good show crash and burn because of the bad behaviour of its creator, far too many of them will do the logical thing and keep their mouths shut when they really shouldn’t.

Now, if The Nevers really is a flaming pile of garbage, then that’s a whole other matter. But regardless, responsible reviews of this show shouldn’t be framed as Joss Whedon hit pieces — as blindly hateful as his earlier reviews were blindly gushing. If the show sucks on its merits, judge it on its merits. Whatever you do, don’t burn down the family home because the father is a bastard.

Update: Watched it and it’s a fun and silly show that really truly doesn’t deserve the vitriol of that review. Once more, Whedon = terrible, but the folks making this show deserve kudos for what they’ve accomplished.

Mortal Kombat Theme? Gah!

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Like many people of a certain age, I have an involuntary, visceral reaction to the sound of the Mortal Kombat theme. I wasn’t even a huge fan of the game or the first set of movies, but that theme with the New Line logo in theatres was just… yeah. Les bumps de goose sont strong.

So when I saw on io9 that there’s a new version of the theme for the upcoming reboot, I was both intrigued and highly skeptical. The last thing we need is a faux-Skrillex version of a baby-techno legend, right?

Nope! It’s exactly what we need!

A very very very big tip of the cap to Benjamin Wallfisch for adding layers to that song that I never would have dreamed of. You have made my weekend, sir.

Wild Ottawa Hyperlapse

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I just saw this on Reddit and felt the need to archive it for future generations of me: a hyperlapse video of downtown Ottawa by Pat Gloor. Words won’t do it justice.

View Pat Gloor’s original post.

Using CSS Vars to Colour Objects

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

While I was building Blockville out of SCSS and bloody Typescript, I encountered a whole host of issues, but the one that required the most reworking was the question of colouring the buildings themselves. Take a look:

When I started, I had a set of 10 colours that were randomly assigned to each building, and the buildings themselves were just flat blocks at funny angles — no shading. At first, I convinced myself that was a creative choice, and that I preferred the simplistic effect. I wasn’t lazy, I had a vision!

But then I started adding fancy stuff to the roofs, and suddenly the issue of colour came back to the fore. Each one of those little doodads is its own block of divs, customized to behave a certain way.

The issue was: if the colour was randomly-assigned to the parent object, how was I going to apply it to the child objects too? It’s one thing to assign a CSS value to a single element with javascript, but crawling down the tree to hit the kids, too? Yikes.

(side note: that sentence sounds very wrong)

The answer was CSS vars. If you don’t know them, you define them like this:

--thisVar: 10px

and then use them like this:

padding: var(--thisVar);

Pretty simple, right? Define some key vars up top, and use ‘em with reckless abandon. It’s like Sass, but at runtime! But how does that help with the buildings? By tapping into one of my favourite things:

Inheritance!

Here’s the wonderful thing about CSS vars: they are available to all children of their parent object. So, for example, if we did this:

.parent {
    --thisVar: 10px;
    padding: var(--thisVar);

    .child {
        padding: var(--thisVar);
    }
}

Then the parent and the child will both have 10px padding. The inheritance carries on until you override it somewhere down the tree (if you are so inclined).

Now in terms of Blockville, this lets me do the following bit of magic (psuedo-code follows for clarity):

.building {
    --bgCol: #ff0000;

    .wall-left, .wall-right {
        background-color: var(--bgCol);
    }

    .roof {
        background-color: var(--bgCol);
    }
}

And now all these pieces are using the same colour as the root colour. Swap that first variable, and the rest automatically update. And since in Blockville, there are lots of fiddly little pieces on each building that may or may not be the base colour, this allows me to target exactly what I want without using JS to do the updating.

And that’s the best part…

Colourizing with reckless abandon

What the CSS does is allow us to set all colours in a building at once. But how do we set that colour in the first place? Easy!

document.getElementById('building1').style.setProperty(`--bgCol`, '#00ff00');

Now that we’ve redefined —bgCol to green, the whole building will change accordingly. Abstract that out a bit:

const colours = [ '#ff0000', '#00ff00', '#0000ff' etc];

for (i = 0; i < 16; i++) { 
    document.getElementById(`building${i}`).style.setProperty('--bgCol', colours[i]);
}

…and now you’ve got a bunch of buildings with their base colours defined at runtime — either from a list, or randomly, or (in Blockville’s case) derived from user input.

Seems simple and obvious, but it took me about 900 years to figure it out. Don’t judge me, I was tired.

Blockville Lives

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Well, all my hard work has finally paid off: I own a building. Sixteen of them, in fact. The only catch is they’re made of CSS, so I probably won’t be moving into them any time soon.

Since my brain is in recovery mode after a year of absolute creative writing blitzing, I have been focusing more on technical adventures lately. I’ve built and rebuilt a few sites in ReactJS and Vue, converted a few of my personal projects into pure Typescript, and thrown together a generative art engine or two.

But I had this thought in my head: I want to try drawing cute little structures in CSS. I know, I know, everyone has that dream — but I had to make it a reality.

So here it is: Blockville. A 4x4 grid of generative buildings, floating in nothingness, waiting for input. See, when you type into the box at the top of the image, the Blockville engine takes you input and turns it into an sha512 hash, and then for each character of that hash, it gets a base-16 number, which it feeds into an algorithm to create a unique stricture for each square in the grid.

So for instance: the frontmost building’s height, colour, window size, shape, divisions and on/offness (at night) are all derived from your input. The roof, the door, everything. If you change even one character of your input, the buildings all re-draw into something new.

Why does this matter? It doesn’t. But it was fun, and I learned a lot about how to use and abuse CSS variables in the process. Give it a spin, and if you enjoy it, please don’t tell me all the bugs you found.

Thank you and goodnight.

Robin Skouteris' Daft Punk Megamix

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The news that Daft Punk was splitting up was pretty traumatic (especially for those of us hoping for a follow-up Tron album) but this makes it a lot more bearable… Robin Skouteris (of PopLove fame) has made a megamix of Daft Punk songs, blending them all together so addictively that I’ve been listening to it on loop for hours now, with no escape in sight.

Belgravia: Opening Titles

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

We just started watching the series Belgravia (because my wife only reads about WWII and only watches shows about time periods before 1930, apparently) and while it’s very obviously a Julian Fellowes show (the kind where you cynically think “nah, I won’t care about any of these people” and then somehow do, very much) the thing that really impressed me was the opening. The way the art turned into textured elements — I mean, I’ve seen that trick before, many times — it’s just captivating and elegant.

Mark my words, a month from now, I’ll be grumbling about how Fellowes tricked me again. But at least I’ll have this intro to comfort me in the meantime.

Why Does "This Is Us" Kick My Ass So Easily?

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Just about everyone watches the NBC show This Is Us, and our family is no different. Well, no, Kid 2 stopped watching it after Randall fell from his pedestal, but still, you get the point. Everyone in the family watches it for different reasons, but for me, I’ve been obsessing about how this show manages to push the emotion buttons so completely so often.

I mean, even Kate — and god, I strongly dislike Kate and her vaguely self-righteous self-destructiveness — manages to star in episodes where I find myself tearing up near the end (right on schedule) because the writers have somehow crafted the perfect story — again! — to make me care about whatever it is they’re doing in this 44-minute slice of life.

From a writery POV, I think this somehow relates to promises, and how they layer those promises into the story. I’m kinda spitballing here, but this is how I think it works…

Making a Promise

Formulaic stories use promises a lot. And when I say “formulaic”, I don’t mean it in the bad way you probably assume — formulas are what makes drama happen. Our brains are wired to detect patterns, so when we see things we recognize, — even just subconsciously — we also start to anticipate the next step in the process. Chekhov’s gun is a good example: you see a gun on the mantle and your brain knows that must mean something, so you expect it will go off sometime soon.

If you look at a sitcom, or a preschool show, or something where formula rules the day, you’ll see the same kind of structure: the writer presents a problem with an obvious solution — protagonist wants X, but can’t/won’t achieve it because they refuse to do Y. If they just got over their problem with Y, they’d get X right away… but the journey to accepting Y is the purpose of the story.

As far as I can tell, This Is Us is just really damn good at making promises. They set up a problem at the start of the episode — Randall being bottled up about his birth mother, or Kevin deciding what to do about Madison, or Kate… ugh, I dunno, Kate looking for something that will cause her unhappiness—

(I love Chrissy Metz and how she plays Kate, I just strongly dislike Kate’s tendency to blow up her own happiness over and over again)

—and once the show establishes what those issues will be, we know the general shape of what the payoff will be: Randall will vent his pain. We don’t know how, exactly, or exactly why, but we know it’s coming, even if Randall doesn’t.

Theme of the Week

The big chunk of story in the middle is about weaving in subplots that all related, thematically, to the purpose at hand. What this show does brilliantly is that it lets those subplots tie tightly into the main character’s life: 40s Randall is struggling as we see teenage Randall struggling, too.

Even if the two threads feel independent — or even if, say, the flashbacks are about Kevin and not Randall at all — they’re working their way toward that moment where Jack, in a flashback, will sit someone down and tell them the nugget of wisdom needed to solve the main storyline’s problem. They’ll say it outright, out loud, for the audience to hear, so that promise you think you felt at the very start of the episode is suddenly explicit. Now it’s real. It’s tangible. It’s like Jack said: “And there’s a gun on the mantle, and it’s gotta go off sometime, you know.”

The Payoff

And with all that behind us, we’re finally ready for the Mega-Catharsis. Again, it’s about patterns: I know Randall has a problem, I know, vaguely, what he has to do to solve it, and I see him resisting it for 30-some minutes until a flashback lays it out for me. My brain knows Randall needs to accept the flashback truth before the 44 minutes are up, so he’s gotta get moving. I start to get impatient, because Randall seems to be moving in the wrong direction, until — oh!

The promise is kept. Randall swims into the lake and screams, and suddenly I’m feeling emotional, because I was brought on a journey through Randall’s baggage, and I’m just so relieved that he finally saw the truth I recognized all along. I’m so happy for him, finally catching up to where I’ve been for 35 minutes, that I tear up.

And then I get really damn angry that they tricked me again.

Writery Bits: Rise and Fall

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Writery Bits are little nuggets of writing insight I occasionally share in the hopes that someone out there finds them useful. They’re mostly things I’ve learned the hard way over the years, so consider this your shortcut if you need one.

Rise and Fall

If you know your Save the Cat structure, you’re aware that there’s this pattern that happens near the end of any story: the hero is finally getting things right and everything looks good, then they have a tremendous fall (dark night of the soul), and then they rise from the ashes to save the day.

Rise, fall, rise. Pretty simple, and most people understand it — but maybe more as a trope than a logical sequence. I’ve seen a bunch of writers dismiss that dynamic as a rule to be broken, but they’re looking at it from the wrong angle. It’s not a prescribed rule meant to create cookie-cutter plots, it’s an actual tool that you can (and should!) use as much as you can.

Let’s look at it backwards: you want your character to win, to have a victory, to come out on top. The bigger that victory (no matter what the underlying stakes are) the better the audience is going to feel. They can’t just win, they need to have a momentous win. But if you’re telling a small-scale story where this “win” is, say, not losing their house — how do you take something so neutral and make it the peak of your happiness graph?

That’s where the fall comes in. Your peak is only a peak in relation to the valley that precedes it. You want your hero to climb out of that pit of despair and achieve greatness, so you need to dig that hole as deep as you can. If your “all is lost” is to incidental — say the cheque to the bank was lost in the mail, so they may lose the house after all — then the rise back to victory doesn’t have the same impact. Instead, you need to lay on the badness as thick as you can make it: someone stole all their money, the bank manager is corrupt and they missed the deadline. You want your hero in a hole so deep that it almost seems impossible that they’d climb out of it — because when they do, it will feel so good to the audience.

OK, so now we’ve got a rise and we’ve got a fall right before it, so we’re giving our audience emotional whiplash, which is good. But just like the valley gives the peak more definition, another peak before the valley helps the badness feel worse. Our hero has been fundraising and against all odds, it looks like they might just save their house. They have a big event where the whole neighbourhood shows up to support them, and they finally feel like they belong. It’s smooth sailing from here to the conclusion…

And then you drop the valley on them, and it feels so much worse. And because the audience is still reeling from that sudden drop, the perceived awfulness of the fall is more pronounced, and hurts more — and so when the character climbs back to victory, it feels even better.

This is why you have rise/fall dynamics: because they create the contrast needed to amplify emotions. And they don’t need to be on a macro level, either: in your big boss scene at the end of the story, create ripples of rise/fall moments as the hero fights to win. “We’re almost at the engine room!” just before they get knocked off-course. “Use the shut-off key!” before the key falls down a vent. The moment where the bad guy is inches way from killing the hero, only to lose in a sudden reversal? Micro-uses of rise/fall dynamics.

So, in summary, consider this: whatever the situation, wherever you are in the story, look at what you want to accomplish in a given moment, and see what you can do to add a rise/fall to it. It’s quick and easy and it hooks readers like nothing else.

Amanda Gorman: Pure Genius

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t generally like poetry; I like poetic language. Not rhyming exactly, but cadence, flow and rhythm are like catnip for my brain. Lin-Manuel Miranda does it effortlessly, and apparently so does Amanda Gorman, the US National Youth Poet Laureate. Her poem from Joe Biden’s inauguration pushed every button I ever need pushed, all at once.

I mean…wow. Just wow.

Bridgerton Followup

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I feel I should add a clarification after my earlier post about Bridgerton wherein I went a bit bananas in critiquing the way the series played out. This part in particular haunts me:

After the Queen's Gambit, I was starting to enjoy my "predictable but sharply done" Netflix fare. Bridgerton reminded me that not all good ideas just naturally turn into good series. Even the best of the best can faceplant at the finish line.

I realized after posting it that I was breaking my own rules about commentary: promote, don’t attack. The people who make art for our enjoyment put a lot on the line to get things done, and it doesn’t always work out as perfectly as they’d intended. Trashing them for a near-miss isn’t helping anyone, and can in fact do real damage to their careers. If you liked something, tell the world; if you were meh on something, talk about the good parts; if you hated it, stay silent.

(Obviously, this doesn’t apply to media critics whose job it is to disassemble things for a living. Their responsibility lies elsewhere.)

I screwed up with my piece, and I feel bad about it. So here is my attempt at reconciliation: the good things about Bridgerton!

Daphne and Simon: As individual characters, as actors and as plot devices, I loved the everliving crap out of those two — but never more so than when they were scheming and chatting together on walks in the park. I kinda would’ve loved an entire season of them just chatting and flirting like that, manipulating the whole world for funsies. Both actors are absolutely brilliant, and the writing was spot-on every step of the way.
Marina: Ruby Barker did an astounding job of turning the show’s punching bag into someone we really cared about. Lost lovers, lies, scheming that starts off despicable but then turns heartbreaking — and then heartbreak and heartbreak again. It’s the kind of role that a lesser actor would mangle, but Barker kept Marina consistent throughout.
Anthony: His character is, from what I’ve read, quite different than in the books, but from what I’ve read, this new version is a much better take for a first season of a TV show. He starts off being the obnoxious brother intent on obstructing Daphne’s happiness, and then turns into a tortured but sympathetic character who has issues of his own (to be solved next season, I presume).
The Casting: I mean, everyone is just perfect, from Golda Rosheuvel to Adjoa Andoh to the every-wonderful Polly Walker and especially Luke Thompson as a character I didn’t think I’d like, but somehow did. This show looks gorgeous, and the actors make it all seem so seamless, it’s kinda dizzying at times.

All of which is to say: Bridgerton was a great and fun show, despite my (writery) issues with the ending. It deserves a gold star, and also every bit of acclaim it’s had so far.

And now I feel slightly less awful about myself.

Slightly.

What Is the State of Our Union?

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Project status update for future reference, and for my own amusement, because as I go through old blog posts in various formats, I am reminded that I rarely explain what happened when — and the ambiguity makes it really damn hard to pin dates down.

Bytown

This is currently with outside parties, based on the suggestion that it could turn into something somewhat interesting if the cards were played right. And so the waiting game commences. I expect to hear back by the end of April, at which point I can continue making a mess of things.

One Loves

This is a story I desperately want to tell, but my current energy levels do not suggest I will be able to pull it off in acceptable fashion. It’s very near the top of my hit list, though. I just need to find a way to focus long enough to get it done.

Utopian Hit Squad

I will write more about this in a few weeks, but I am straddling this strange state of being certain it could go a more conventional (publishing) route, and wanting to do it all myself because I can’t bear to see it done wrong. That said, my ability to do things right is greatly in doubt, so…

Shell Game

Is my next big “this year” project. It’s a spy thriller with a nifty twist, but once again, I’ll need more energy than I currently have to pull it off. Recent innovation on this front: tying it into covid. And hopefully in a good way.

Sprint Series

This might just loop back into the above-mentioned energy-deprived projects, because I am toying with an idea to, instead of writing a book over a series of months or livewriting a book over a series of hours, to do what I do for ghostwriting (write a book in 4-6 weeks) with my audience as the “client” — so basically interactive NaNo, repeatedly.

I want to get some tech stuff in place first, and I need to seriously learn how to live with gallstones and nutritional deficits, but I have this odd feeling this could turn into something kinda fun for 2021.

More later, once my brain wakes up.

Bridgerton: I mean WTF?

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Up front, I’ll say this: I write romance novels, so I get romance novels. And I have been a Shondaland fan for as long as there has been a Shondaland. Also, I like the vaguely subversive way they’ve made a version of Regency England where there are POC roaming around in positions of power.

(I won’t comment on that one scene where they try to make it historically accurate, because I have bigger fish to fry right now)

The thing is: the story is an absolute muddled mess and it made me increasingly angry the further into the series we got. The aloof bad boy nobleman who hates love? Yes, perfect, go. The naïve but not-naïve debutante who skillfully devices a ploy to keep her out of a bad match-up? Excellent, more please. The fact that they’re bound to fall in love and have a happily-ever-after? Perfect. Yes. Do it.

But then we run into this truly WTF element of Daphne not understanding where babies come from — which, sure, is a thing that happens and could be a legitimate issue for someone in her position. But the series somehow decides to use that as a pretext for throwing a curveball into the happily-ever-after in a weird kind of late-stage twist. Oh no! She doesn’t love Simon after all because he… is… not interested in having kids, which is exactly what he said to her from the start.

So OK she’s upset because she finally understands that he WON’T have kids as opposed to not BEING ABLE to, but then they continually end up in scenes together where neither one says anything about the issue at hand, which could have been either a) amplified to the level where drama might actually legitimately ensue; or b) resolve their differences and shave 2 episodes off the season.

See, this is my problem: lots of good stories are anchored around the idea that two people don’t say what needs to be said (for one reason or another) and so things get more complicated for everyone involved. It’s like 99% of Shakespeare and everyone before and since. The thing is the pattern is supposed to go like: both sides refuse to communicate, but then one side slips up and admits the truth, and the other side gets furious with them and now you’ve gone from cold war to hot war, and you have lots of story twists available to you.

But what happens in Bridgerton is that neither one of those two fools says anything to one another, and when they do, they each react in ways that positively reek of someone trying to force the plot in a direction it doesn’t want to go. Simon won’t have kids and Daphne is upset about it? Great, have her poke that bear and then Simon can go nuclear on her and threaten to abandon her — and while working through that drama, we can finally resolve his longstanding daddy issues, and they can return to their HEA.

All of which is to say: you can get way with a lot in a melodrama — especially in a period romance — but that doesn’t mean you should push your luck. When there’s a way out of your plot pickle that seems overdone, the solution is to spice up the conventional — not to run smack into a wall and call it genius.

After the Queen’s Gambit, I was starting to enjoy my “predictable but sharply done” Netflix fare. Bridgerton reminded me that not all good ideas just naturally turn into good series. Even the best of the best can faceplant at the finish line.

History Moments

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

There are these moments in your life where you sit there and watch what’s happening and think: “Yup, this’ll be in a history book some day.” I imagine people my parents’ age have a lot of those moments, given what happened in the ’60s, but I can really only thing of maybe two or three things in my own conscious lifetime where I’ve been 100% certain nobody is going to forget this soon.

The first one was 9/11, obviously. That was a “WTF is reality anymore” moment on a truly epic scale. And despite the many huge catastrophes that have happened since, the only other two that register the same way are the Fukishima nuclear accident (remember: my wife is from Japan) and the start of covid-19. Those things just shook the snowglobe of the world a little too vigorously, and are impossible to ignore.

The thing is, I was getting used to the idea that earth-shaking events happened in 10-year intervals. 2001, 2011, 2020 (er, well, ok). But then today, in Washington DC, a mob of deranged psychopaths amped up by a frankly criminal would-be despot of a president, stormed the Capitol in search of, I guess, insurrection?

I mean what would have happened if they’d actually found someone important in there? And if they found one and killed them, what would have happened next? Those are dominoes that can fall in very dangerous ways, very easily. “The rioters killed a congressman” turns into “the national guard is using live ammunition” turns into “militia groups are invading the capital” turns into… what, exactly?

Trump clearly didn’t want to stop this from happening, despite (or evidenced by) his tepid and late responses, but I can’t help but think this has got to be one of those moments in history where things change for the better, right?

Because if not…yikes. I think January 20th is going to be a very dark day indeed.

Well Now...

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

An odd thing just happened. It’s an event that’s happened before, but not often, and not usually on such good terms.

A bit of background: there have been three projects I’ve ghostwritten where the rights reverted back to me. Generally speaking, contracts are ironclad things where, the second I’m paid for my work, the rights are assigned to the client, and I’m not even allowed to talk about the book from then on. If you see me recommending a book, you can be 100% certain I didn’t ghostwrite it :)

But sometimes (three times, to be exact) the client fails to pay for the work, and we enter into this weird period where I offer (completely unnecessarily, I should add) to give them a few extra weeks to get the funds together. If, after that time, they just don’t have the money (or at least a hefty down payment), as per the contract, the rights to the book revert to me — even if I was working from an outline.

The three projects I’ve reclaimed have each gone on to different fates. One, I didn’t much like the concept to, so I shelved it. In the second case, the client actually came back three months later and paid me in full, and so amended the contract and they were on their way with no hard feelings. The third guy decided to pick a fight with me after evidently lying about his financial resources, so I packaged the book myself and put it up for sale (under a pseudonym) on KDP, and have very nearly made back my fee on it (despite zero marketing whatsoever).

But now we have a fourth project, and this one is a very different beast. The client, you see, hired me to write a series of romance novels with a frankly awesome hook. I did two of them, and she trialled one online, and then got — for lack of a better word — spooked. It’s an oddly intimidating thing, putting your name to a romance novel — even if it’s just a pen name. People judge you for romance in ways they wouldn’t if you were writing sadistic horror books. The fear of being found out made her ask me if I’d take the books back.

(I should say the client is OK with my writing about this here.)

So here’s the predicament: If I do take the books back, what will I do with them? They are very much not in my usual wheelhouse (under my own-name books, that is) so there’d be a certain WTF quality if I were to add them to my collection. But creating an entire persona to own and promote these titles — and I am absolutely writing more in the series, no matter what — would take a lot more brainpower than I have at the moment.

So that’s where I stand. No nearer to an answer, but in a very unexpected spot all the same.

More on this as it develops (and/or nothing more on this as it doesn’t develop).

On Diversity in Historical Dramas

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This is a regular topic of conversation around my dinner table lately: diversity in recent historical drama productions. And not in the Hamilton sense, where a diverse cast is playing obviously-not-diverse historical figures — I mean things like the upcoming Bridgerton, where we have POC as dukes and duchesses in 19th century England, where diversity wasn’t so much a thing.

Which is not to say that there weren’t Black people in London in the 1800s — there were, and in great numbers, and not just impoverished wretches (as a lot of other shows would have you believe). But they weren’t noblemen, either, and I dare say even the highest-class of POC in those days were treated pretty terribly by the White establishment.

However, we do not live in the 1800s anymore, and media produced and consumed today really needs to reflect the demographics of our world. As Geena Davis said: “If she can see it, she can be it.” Meaning it’s our duty, as creators, to give people positive representation in the content we create — not just as the cynical stereotypes that come easiest, but in aspirational roles. Having a dashing Black nobleman as one of the romantic leads in a period piece isn’t just a gimmick, it’s essential to teaching people (of all kinds) that yes, this is good and fine and normal.

Except… is it, really? That’s where I get stuck, because while you and I and other clever people know that a dashing Black nobleman romancing his way around Regency England wasn’t actually a thing, a lot of people might actually believe it’s a kind of docudrama, and completely misunderstand history. Yes, Queen Anne was probably mixed-race to some degree, but slavery wasn’t properly abolished in Great Britain until 20 years after Bridgerton is set. By creating these aspirational characters, are we inadvertently waving off the very real atrocities that were happening in that time period? Should a viewer, today, be fooled into thinking life was actually better back then, and that somehow we’ve devolved as a society in the centuries since? Or should we skip the fantasy-history and stick to realism, and make it as hard-edged as it should rightly be?

Well, here’s the issue: while I and all other White people should have that hard-edged brutality seared into our brains at every given opportunity, doing so repeatedly and without mercy means creating content that almost always traps POC in a nightmare they’re already living. Escapist fare is meant to be escapist: you get to live the life of the rich, in a castle with melodrama and intrigue, but no real consequences. If we say “all stories depicting historical POC have to be technically correct” then we’re leaving POC out of proper escapist entertainment — effectively punishing them for our sins.

So what’s the correct answer? I don’t think there is one. Or if there is, it’s something like this: escapist fare with proper representation is good, but you should make an effort to explain, in peripheral materials, how the real world wasn’t so rosy. It’s an imperfect solution, but on the whole, I think we need more diversity in our entertainment now, even if it skews reality a little.

My Opinion Policy

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This post will be a catch-all for pieces relating to my opinion on things; I’ll point to it whenever I say something that I feel might be treading into iffy territory in some way.

The long and the short of it is: I am tremendously aware that I do not have the proper insight to comment on a whole slew of subjects that are outside my lived experiences. As a straight white cis male now 2/3 into my life, I can’t comment on matters of race, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia and all kinds of other issues — except as an outsider, which rarely benefits anyone.

In situations where I find think pieces written by someone who does know about the subject first-hand, I will link to them in lieu of rambling on my own. In other cases, I just won’t comment on the subject — not because it’s not important, but because I don’t see the value in adding noise to an already noisy conversation.

Buuuuut in some situations, I will actually have something to say, and I will do my best to be coherent and constructive while doing so. When reading these posts, please keep the following in mind:

As a general rule, I treat everyone with kindness, respect and empathy. I do my best to not only not “punch down”, but to not punch at all. I know from experience that life can damage you in very particular ways, and that damage can exhibit as a kind of fiendish PTSD out of context, which can rub some people the wrong way. I try to assume that everyone has good intentions, even if they’re not expressing them clearly;
That said, I have no patience for cruel people. If you kick a sack and it yelps, you might not have known there was a puppy inside, so you get the benefit of the doubt. If you kick it again, you’re a monster and you deserve all the terrible things coming to you. Intentionally ignoring the yelp does not absolve you of your sins.
I tend to see things in a “big picture” sorta way — unintended consequences and all that. It’s my writer’s brain at work, probably. So in a lot of situations, I wind up worrying about a subject that seems tangential to the issue at hand. It’s not meant to — and should not — distract from the core problem. It’s just a question of “the more data points, the better prepared you can be”.
At the same time, it’s very possible my data points are completely irrelevant and/or wrong. Again, I am coming at most things as an outsider, so I could be missing something vital, or assuming something wildly incorrect.
If you see something that is wildly incorrect, feel free to tell me so — or not. You are under no obligation to educate me about my wrongness and I won’t ask you to add more stress to your life by doing so. I have pretty smart and articulate kids, so I generally end up on the right side of things eventually.
Conversely, if you are going to throw nastiness at me for no discernible reason — no matter which side of the argument you’re on — I can say with some confidence that I really don’t care. Your opinion may be right, but I tune out vitriol aimed in my direction, so you’re just wasting your time.
I reserve the right to change my opinion about just about everything as time goes on. In cases where I discover I’ve been on the wrong side of something, I won’t self-censor my earlier work, but add a note linking to a clarification. People change, see, and trying to hide that fact doesn’t do anyone any good.

And so with all that in mind, go back and read whatever it was you were reading before you followed this link. If you want to further the conversation, I’m always available at mcm@1889.ca or sometimes on Twitter or elsewhere.

Stay safe, be happy, and be kind, please.

Lower Decks: Chris Westlake You Mad Genius You

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

OK, so my love of Star Trek: Lower Decks is already well established, and especially composer Chris Westlake’s incredible work with the theme and it various uses throughout the series… but today’s episode just broke my brain in all the right ways.

Entitled Crisis Point, it’s about Mariner hijacking Boimler’s holodeck program so she can star as the villain in her very own Star Trek movie. You’re already thinking “oh, this could be good and meta” and yes, it’s very good and very meta. They successfully abuse basically all the Trek memes and themes with reckless abandon.

Anyone who has watched any of the Trek movies knows this sequence, but the way Westlake converts the Lower Decks theme into a James Horner tribute (with hints of Goldsmith too!) is just… it makes me happy in ways I cannot express.

I cannot wait for this soundtrack. Pure joy.

Bytown Update

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Bytown is possibly going on a bit of a break, but I won’t be able to tell you the exact timing for a bit. Episode 7 was a fight to the finish (after episode 6 was late) and Episode 8 is only halfway done, with less than 2 weeks until its scheduled release day. Since it’s so much longer than anything before it, I don’t think I’m going to make it in time.

Monthly readers are currently just shy of 4,000 visitors, which is awesome. I hope everyone’s having fun and looking forward to the bigger twists about to happen. I will do my best to make the wait for E8 as short as possible.

Sorry for the chaos. We all knew it was coming, but this is on a whole other level.

Bytown: Three White Candles

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A quick note to say Episode 7 is out and ready to torment you. A special thing to know when reading it is the meaning of the title, which I have revised a thousand times over the last few weeks: the three white candles represent three characters who will meet their end in the course of the episode. Not random background characters, either: named, known characters.

It’s gonna be a bumpy ride, folks. Ready to place bets on who makes it out alive?

Bytown e6: Ugly Rabbit

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Semi-automated announcement: Bytown episode 6 is live! Here’s a preview…

It was a wolf track. Walking, not running. In the night, sometime after the last snow. The edges were soft, but still distinct. Working in an arc, off through the forest, slowly making its way in toward…something.

Aisling kept low to the ground, listening carefully for the key to the mystery she couldn’t quite see yet. Her ears stung from the cold, but she couldn’t afford to raise her hood. She had to be sure. If wolves were nearby, she had to be ready.

Somewhere far above, animals moved through the trees, knocking bits of snow free that disintegrated into nothing before it reached the ground.

A twig snapped, echoing for miles.

And nothing followed.

She gave the area one last check, and then carried on.

The temperature was dropping fast, the blue sky turning grey and windy, as another storm approached from the west. The daytime birds moved from perch to perch, trying to find the better spot to shelter for the night. A crow watched her from high above, its head tipping every time she made a sound, like it wanted her to know that it saw her, and was not scared.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is...Good?

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I was kinda meh on the idea of a new Star Trek series, what with Discovery having some wild flail-around moments last season and the general DCEU-ness of the current Trek universe (“let’s do everything with no regard for planning!”) — so when I heard about this new series, Lower Decks, I was possibly next-level meh, approaching Warp Meh.

And then I actually watched it.

The first thing that struck me was that the dialogue was my kind of dialogue: very quick, very sharp, and with really absurdist tangents out of nowhere. I knew this was going to be a comedy, but it’s a comedy, and it does not let up.

Next thing, and possibly most important, was the music. Composed by Chris Westlake, this show has (and with all due respect to Jeff Russo on Discovery) really mindblowingly-good music. The theme is like a kind of parody of the Goldsmith TNG-era intro, but not. It’s its own thing, and really addictive. So addictive, I replayed the episode twice just to listen to the music again.

(side note: release that soundtrack. now.)

The new crew aboard the Cerritos are fun and funny and probably destined for all kinds of suffering in the next few weeks, and even if we can be fairly certain there are no life-changing stakes in the offing I seriously cannot wait for the next episode to drop, because I felt joy while watching this show, and I have not had a lot of joy in my life lately.

A++ Mike McMahan. You have done incredible things.

I am not an artist (What is reality?)

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Here’s a ritual of mine: every so often, I apply to the Canadian Council for the Arts to see if I’m still not an artist. Good news: no change since last time!

(this may sound bitter, but I’ve passed clear into the world of absurdist comedy at this point, so don’t worry)

Here’s the thing about me: I have hours of produced TV shows under my belt (including two I created/co-created); I’ve written a few million words as a ghostwriter, and have published a handful of books of my own. I’ve been flown to a foreign country to livewrite at an arts festival. I’ve been running experimental fiction projects online since 2001, with Dustrunners.

But none of that apparently qualifies me as an artist.

Part of the problem is, I’m sure, because I work in a niche that straddles media in not-quite-logical ways. I’m a writer, but I’m not writing a standard novel. I work in new media, but I don’t create imagery. I do experimental art, but not in a way that lets me check boxes on forms. I sit very firmly between genres, so every time I ask the Canada Council if I can register as an artist, they say nope.

I should explain: this isn’t me asking for money for a project. This is me asking to be qualified as an artist, which is the first step to being able to request funding. You can’t submit a proposal until you’re officially recognized as an artist, but I have spent the last… wow, probably close to ten years being stuck at the gate.

Last time I tried this and failed, I asked for special help from the Canada Council, and after writing a fairly detailed message about my predicament in terms of who I was and what I did, I got a reply that boiled down to: “Hi! The first step to qualifying for funding is to register as an artist, which you can do by following this link!”

Why does any of this matter? Why do I want to be an artist anyway?

Because I have a project I desperately want to do that has very little hope of ever being commercially viable, and the only way I will be able to carve out the time to do it is if I get funding. And so I try. Again and again, until the heat death of the universe.

What project?

It’s called Retcon and it is, in a nutshell, a novel that rewrites itself. It’s about a young woman named Kari with the ability to rewrite people’s memories on a whim. What did you eat for breakfast? If she thinks: “Waffles,” then you ate waffles for breakfast, no question. Her mother tries to keep her from abusing her power (keeping written notes helps!) but Kari wants to live a normal life. So she sneaks out one night to see her friends— and screws everything up horrendously.

While trying to cover her tracks by rewriting memories after the fact, Kari inadvertently erases the memories of eyewitnesses to a crime that may very well be a murder — but nobody knows for sure anymore. Worse still, her meddling is framing obviously-innocent people as the prime suspects. But every time she tries to fix things by nudging reality a little here and there, the unintended consequences snowball even more. Pretty soon, she’s not sure which way is up — or if the killer even remembers what they did at all.

The story is a novel, but using the Prism technology I used for The Anti-Anti-Anti-Christs. As you read, Kari will rewrite someone’s memory to suit her needs. But if you flip back the pages to the section where those events took place, you won’t be seeing the original text, you’ll be seeing Kari’s new reality. The more she meddles, the more disjointed the past starts to be — and, if you look closely enough, the clearer the truth becomes.

Retcon is a book that you’re meant to get lost in, re-read in fits and starts, and try to disassemble as you go. It can’t exist as anything other than a website or app (not even on Kindle!) and since really understanding it depends on putting in so much work, it’s not something that’s ever going to be commercially viable. It’s an art project studying the nature of reality as a function of memory.

If only I were an artist. Then I might be able to make it.

Well, there’s always next year.

Bytown Episode 5 Postmortem

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Bytown episode 5 is finally out, and as a warning, this will probably be my last postmortem for a while. Partially because I’m seriously underwater on things, but also because the stats aren’t changing enough to warrant a monthly breakdown. In a good way! Let’s see what we’ve got…

Numbers Numbers Numbers

Remember how I said I was afraid that the change in schedule would turn people off? Apparently I was wrong, because we just broke 3,000 monthly readers (that is to say: unique visitors who have read Episode 5 in particular). It’s kinda shocking, but also kinda great. I assume there’s a site somewhere linking people to Bytown, but I haven’t found out where it is yet, and I’m honestly a bit too panicked to investigate further.

At this rate (and given the lack of a business model) I’m pretty comfortable just cruising along until the end. People seem to be enjoying themselves (based on feedback) and really truly honestly, that’s all I really want anyway. Happy and/or tormented readers.

Chapter Sizes

Episode 5 comes in at a whopping 35,594 words, making it the longest chapter yet. It’s kinda surprising to me, honestly, because it’s an episode centred around Liam of all people — everyone hates Liam. Or so I hear. Regularly.

From where I’m sitting now, it seems very likely that Volume II is going to juuuuuust miss the 95,000 word mark I was predicting, meaning it will be a lot more manageable in terms of book length, especially if I distribute the B-Sides between the two volumes in a strategic way. That said, Volume III might blow all my strategies out of the water, because it already looking like it’ll be a mammoth of a compilation.

Writing Pace

The cruel fact of the matter is that I’m contractually obligated to deliver my ghostwriting materials on a certain schedule, and that schedule is ironclad. But given my limited number of coherent hours in a day, and my general wooziness when starving myself (to prevent gallbladder attacks) I am definitely going to miss my next delivery, and possibly the one after that, too. My ghostwriting duties locked in until early next year, so there’s no chance I’ll get a reprieve before Bytown concludes — or worse yet, I’ll actually get the surgery I need, and things will get delayed because of that instead.

Regardless, expect delays, and I’ll do my best to not need them.

Conclusions

I mean, despite the general doom and gloom of these postmortems, I am really quite enjoying this story, and I think the readers are too. The characters are all coming alive, the plot is nice and twisty, and you all still have no idea where I’m going next, which is really all I ever wanted out of life :)

I will go on blog-posting hiatus for a little bit, but when I come back, I promise to have better news. And/or a huge cliffhanger to laugh about.

Meet Peppa!

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Recap: we are fostering dogs, which brings a strange assortment of chaos into our lives. Lucky has been with us for over a year now (which is something of a miracle because she wasn’t supposed to live more than a few months!) so we thought we’d mix things up with this little lunatic, named Poupoune.

The thing is, she grunts like a pig when she’s excited, so we’ve taken to calling her Peppa. In a nice way.

Peppa is ~7 years old and unfortunately recently determined to be palliative, so she won’t be up for adoption. But we’re still VERY excited to have her in our home — even if Piko and Lucky aren’t quite sure…

Bytown e5: You Broke Me

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Semi-automated announcement: Bytown episode 5 is live! Here’s a preview…

The market was in full bloom, bursting with spoils of the late summer harvest, and the mood was nothing short of jubilant. All down the stalls, farmers had their best produce on display, calling out to passersby to come around, pause a little, have a taste before the sun set closed out the day. French and English and other tongues besides, it was a beautiful cacophony, and the perfect antidote to the world beyond its borders.

The beautiful young woman in the blue dress skipped through the crowd, her basket already heavy with cucumbers, radishes, and tomatoes. Men tipped their hats to her purely on account of her smile. Women politely ignored her youthful exuberance. Her smile was addictive and contagious, and spread to everyone around.

“Hello, Monsieur Roy,” she said in French, pausing in front of a weathered wooden stall near the north end of the market. “Glorious day, isn’t it?”

Mr Roy, an older gentleman with a sizable moustache and a balding head, couldn’t help but laugh. “But Sophie, it’s almost over!”

She flashed him a grin. “Maybe for you. But for me…there’s so much left to do!”

Bytown Episode 4 Postmortem

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Bytown episode 4 was late, and as expected, things are starting to fall apart. The surprise is that they’re falling apart for really stupid reasons to do with internal organs.

Numbers Numbers Numbers

Marketing has all but stopped, mostly because it wasn’t having a noticeable effect. I checked the bounce rates for new visitors off the ads, and it was 95% on average, which is just silly. So we’re working with the goodwill of the existing reader base now, which is possibly a dangerous idea, but probably not all that bad.

I expected to lose a certain amount of readers after switching to the monthly release model, but the reader base actually increased to a reliable 2,100 visitors per week. I assume that’s people just stopping by to see if I’ve released anything new, but it’s still nice to see. It gives me the guilt I need to carry on.

Chapter Sizes

Episode 4 is the longest chapter so far, at 29,963 words. There was a lot of ground to cover in this one (literally and figuratively) so every word counts. Here’s the tricky part, based on where I am in writing the next few episodes: the total word count for the theoretical Volume I is 85,693 — a respectable number and a good-sized novel. The way Volume II is shaping up, it may break 95,000 words. I generally try to keep the books in a series the same approximate length, but this will be harder to smooth over. It means I either have to seriously beef up Volume 1, or… well, I don’t think I actually can trim back Volume II too much, given what has to happen.

This is going to be fun, is what I’m saying. Fun in a bad way.

Writing Pace

This month was punctuated by gallbladder catastrophes, which have made it very hard for me to function in a reliable manner. There are strategies for dealing with ths pain, but they tend to leave me extremely drained of energy, which makes it even harder to write. That said, I’m still able to function well enough to do paying work, so it’s not as bad as it could be.

The end result, though is this: Chapter 4 was very nearly late, and Chapter 5 is 100% going to be delayed. There’s no way around it, I’m just too far behind. I’ll let you know the details as soon as I can put my finger on ‘em, but at this point the only question is “how many days”, not “if”.

Conclusions

When I initially planned Bytown, it was going to be a fun and possibly buzzy little project (at least in Ottawa) with an addictive hook that would give me the energy to do something fun for a year — a kind of vacation, if you will. What happened instead was a pandemic and health issues that made it next to impossible to get my footing back, and now I’m in a battle to reach the finish line in one piece.

Depressing? Maybe. But one thing keeps me going: you still have no idea how much episode 5 is going upset you…

Happy Graduation Day

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Today is the day Kid 2 was supposed to graduate from high school.

A lot of you know her from the days of Typhoon, when I had to go to a cello concert in the middle of livewriting, and I shared a photo (that I can no longer find) of me holding said cello — and it looked like a blood violin, because Kid 2 was so small.

Well, she’s not small anymore, and she’s officially done with schooling (except for, you know, the next 4 years at university). But what’s kinda sad about this whole thing is that she’s ending her high school career having spent the last few months (and arguably the most fun months of the entire stay) in lockdown, learning virtually over Zoom.

She is super-smart and has lots of good friends, and I am 200% certain he will kick ass in university, but it’s still a bit of a crappy situation, and I feel bad for her missing out on… well, not so much the prom or the graduation ceremony, or any of the associated—

Oh, Cadenza, that’s what I’m sad about. Cadenza is this thing the music students — because she went to Canterbury, the arts school, for cello — do at the end of their last year. It’s a fancy concert at a fancy hotel in downtown Ottawa, and everyone dresses up nicely and spends the entire day watching some truly (and I mean truly) incredible performances. We did it with Kid 1 when she graduated (violin!) and we were looking forward to doing it again.

I don’t like to wallow in “what might have been”s because that’s a good way to hate the universe. I don’t much care for this coronavirus thing to begin with, and now it’s pooping on one of the highlights of my decade, and yeah. I wanted to mark the occasion.

Bah, we’ll just celebrate her university graduation doubly hard when it comes.

That’s the spirit!

Bytown e4: Cruel Chivalry

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Semi-automated announcement: Bytown episode 4 is live! Here’s a preview…

The sky was an odd shade of lavender, strewn with fog and hazy shafts of sunlight as the new day broke. A breeze sent the reeds swaying side to side, side to side, as the water lapped at the shoreline. Frogs and birds and insects filled the air with a cacophony of queries—the theme to a quiet summer’s day.

The raft moved slowly; a weak paddler fighting against a weaker current. It was barely a raft, too: a bundle of wood held together with soggy rope, wobbling with each shift of the feet, daring the waves to take it under. The paddler looked just as ragged, with his filthy shoeless feet, his tattered clothes and wild beard. He navigated the shallows with a stick a little thicker than his own arms—though that wasn’t saying much—and kept a wary eye on his surroundings.

“Y’here to kill me?” he called, in a feeble voice, to the shore. “I see ye there.”

Bytown Episode 3 Postmortem

Sat, 30 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Bytown episode 3 is finally done and I think we can all agree that it ended with a bang. (spoilers, btw, because whee!)

Numbers Numbers Numbers

Marketing continues apace, though it isn’t making as much of a dent in the stats as it used to. The current readership is floating somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 weekly visitors, though that’s an imperfect statistic because I had been trying to track people who read, say, chapters 1, 2 and 3 within a single visit, but negelected to account for episodes starting mid-week — so basically all my stats are wrong and always have been.

In terms of pure analytics, this is a respectable place to be for a project with no real marketing strategy being released during a pandemic. Did I want it to do better? Sure, but I also thought 2020 would have fewer…distractions, y’know?

One thing I still see (and now feel bad about, given the release schedule change) is that people are visiting in bursts around Thursday night and Friday — presumably to catch up on the week’s events. Since the episode was released all at once, mid-month, they may have been a bit cranky about the absence of new material. Especially since B-Sides is on hiatus. It will be interesting to see if there’s much of a drop-off in readership because of this.

If I knew how to plan properly, I could have avoided this. Alas.

Chapter Sizes

The strangest thing happened with Episode 3: it’s the shortest one yet at 28,105 words. I think it’s safe to say the chapters are packed with revelations and punchy scenes, but they don’t last as long as they used to. That’s something I will probably fix in post (aka editing) but for now it’s an interesting observation.

This is, broadly, an issue for me. I write fast and I write tight, so my word counts tend to be on the leaner side. I can compensate when I ghostwrite, because I’m adopting someone else’s voice, and most other people are verbose — but when I get back into my own mode, I write 70,000 word novels that need padding or brand new C-plots woven in. Oops!

Writing Pace

Unfortunately, my gallbladder issues continue to plague me, and when combined with my intense ghostwriting schedule and other extraneous projects, it conspires to knock me even further off my goals. I’m still looking like I might actually make it to the end in time, but it will eventually turn into my frantically scribbling chapters the day before the monthly release, as opposed to a carefully-calibrated manuscript that’s been edited for weeks beforehand.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know this was coming. I jsut didn’t expect it to happen so soon :)

Conclusions

Based on my analysis of a non-business model for Bytown and my utter lack of marketing skills, I think it’s safe to say that my primary goal right now should be to survive the year, and then loop back to worry about details later. Even the proposed Bytown Volume I (episodes 1-3) is on hold for the time being, because the last thing I need right now is to add more complications to my life.

Looking Ahead…

Episode 4 is still on track to land in the next few weeks, so stay tuned. After the cliffhanger you just witnessed, I can say with absolute certainty that you won’t expect where we go next…

Bytown Cover Alternatives: Choose One

Fri, 29 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I like the cover to Bytown, but it was mostly created as an ambiguous placeholder to keep people from knowing what happened at the very start of Episode 1. Now that things are rolling, I’m exploring options for an alternative cover I could use for the print edition of Volume I (if/when that ever happens).

Here are a selection of options I’ve been working on recently. Take a look, see what strikes you as “good” and let me know which way the wind’s a-blowin’.

Historical

This one uses an actual oldschool image of Ottawa from near the time of the story, and merges with some dramatic fire phoros to make something that’s not quite real, but not quite dry.

Abstract

I like this one mostly because it uses wintry trees sideways with a colour palette that I actually barely manipulated. It doesn’t say a damn thing about the series, but it’s pretty.

Abstract + Maggie

This one takes those trees and uses them as a negative mask, along with some other images (smoke and a knife) overlaid over an image of something who might very well be Maggie. To me, this feels like the cover to a graphic novel, which is probably not a good idea, but whatevs, it’s pretty.

Maggie and the Sunset

Same Maggie, dramatic lighting. I like the forest in this image,and although I kinda amplified the colour contrast, it’s not too far off the original. Maggie standing alone in the snowy hellscape feels pretty nice to me, though it may feel a bit too much like a YA novel (and/or romance)?

Solo Maggie

Same as before, but this time with a stark wintry background instead of a happy romantic feel. I like the simplicity of this one, though I worry that Maggie is cold with her exposed arms and all :)

Tree Shots

And if people aren’t your thing, how about these two similar shots of a winter forest from above? It’s nondescript but impactful, I think. I’m just not sure it’s selling the series so much as looking pretty.