Because we do things like reason and use language and make digital watches, we like to think of ourselves as very complex and enlightened creatures. It’s vanity. And I believe it’s totally unjustified. We’re really very, very simple creatures (with pretty specific limitations) who like to trick ourselves into thinking that we’re not. We often overlook the obvious things and pass up the simple truth in favor of a more complex falsehood. Like the Mayan Apocalypse.

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So ScanSnap gave me a free document scanner And it’s friggin’ awesome. In return, I am going to provide them with a few guest posts about it and how it helps my workflow. Here’s the opening of the first one:

Ideas are like Ninjas. They appear out of nowhere, they wreak havoc, and disappear as quickly as they came. Sometimes you can think an idea is really good, but later on it turns out just to be a fat guy in a silly costume. Since you don’t always know what you are dealing with when you get jumped (or, if you insist, inspired) I have found that it pays to take all ideas very seriously.

Whole post here: http://scansnapcommunity.com/features/7633-the-detritus-of-a-creative-life/

As a guy who has been the victim of a shooting, it seems incumbent upon me to make some kind of comment about the horrible events in Colorado.

It’s a big deal, and the media is going to make it the biggest deal possible, because that’s how they make money. But there is nothing exceptional about what happened. There is nothing wrong with the world. This is simply the way the world is. Sometimes really awful things happen. But they don’t happen very often.

In fact, they happen way, way, way, less than the amount we fear them. As a species we kid ourself that the things we do a lot are very safe and things we aren’t familiar with are very dangerous. For example, driving a car, or taking a shower is way more dangerous than flying. But what do we really fear? Flying. Spiders. Public Speaking. What’s going to kill us? Driving. Stairs. Fixing a Sump Pump. CDC Leading causes of Death in the U.S. for 2009

Cancer, heart disease, suicide these are things to fear. You are four times likely to kill yourself than you are to be killed. Keep a close eye on that guy in the mirror, will ya?

For me, the thing to worry about is fear, not maniacs. We don’t have an epidemic of maniacs. But we are a people fed on a steady and consistent diet of fear. And it is the fear of terrible things happening that destroys our lives.

I know a man who has a Ph.D. in Psychology and studies fear in conjunction with warfighting and special warfare tactics. He made the most amazing observation. A few generations ago a family would take a wagon out on to the frontier and build a house with little more than an axe. Not only did they not have health insurance, they probably didn’t even have a doctor. And chances are, that facing all of these very real dangers, (and looking forward to an early death by our actuarial tables) that they felt less anxiety about life than somebody working in a present-day office.

It is a hell of an observation, and I think of it often. I’m not sure I can fully apply the wisdom of it to my life. After all, baby needs a new pair of shoes so Daddy got to hustle. ( Buy a book will ya? The paperback of How to Succeed in Evil is now available ) But I’m learning.

To any survivor of the shooting in Colorado, or any other such event, I would have many things to say. They would be about recovering your life after being a completely random victim. About being patient with yourself. About acknowledging and coming to grips with the fear. About how tough it is and how important it is for the healing process. But the most important thing I have to say to anyone who has been a victim is about forgiveness.

It is important to forgive your attacker. Especially to put the fear behind you. Forgiveness involves understanding, and I don’t think we fear what we understand.

This is not a turn-the-cheek platitude. I’ve got no particular problem with the idea of killing a person who’s bent on killing you or any innocent. (You are an innocent, aren’t you?) I would do what I could to avoid it, if only because there is evidence that killing another person (especially at close range) does a lot of psychological damage to the killer. [1] But if it had to happen, so be it.

But none of this is my point. My point is you don’t forgive someone who has wronged you for them. You do it for you. So that you can return, free and unencumbered to the rest of your life. So that you can live fully and well, and experience moments of transcendent joy.

As George Herbert said, “Living well is the best revenge.”

So if you feel any sorrow in your heart, if the wrongness of anything that has happened weighs on you in any way, then I encourage you to revenge yourself by living well. As a person who has been a victim, I think it’s the only thing you can do.

Embassytown by China Miéville

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This would have made a very interesting and thoughtful short story. Unfortunately, it’s a novel. There are some interesting ideas about language. It is a very good attempt to render something truly alien, but I can’t see how one cares about any of these characters. Most damningly of all, the main character. She’s so two dimensional that more a of a camera than a character. China writes a marriage as if it is some kind of roomate/timeshare arrangement. None of the characters touch emotionally – or have emotions.

He’s brilliant with aliens, and creating another world. But the thing is, the only reason anybody cares about any of that is that it has something to teach us about what it means to be human. China has technical prowess, but there isn’t any humanity in this book. I literally stopped reading it halfway through, saw it was nominated for a Hugo and and finished it just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I have regrets in my life, and finishing this book is one of them.

I think you can think yourself into getting excited about this work, but I don’t think anyone can love this book. I appreciate his audacity– If you’re going to miss, miss swinging for the fences– But I’m pretty sure this is a book no one can love, or will read more than once.



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This is the last paragraph of an article by Eugenia Williamson entitled “The Dead End of DIY publishing”

But whom does it benefit if J.A. Konrath sells a lot of books? J.A. Konrath, that’s who. No young mystery writer will be the indirect beneficiary of his sales figures. Nobody will. In the new regime, unpaid bloggers write gushing reviews of books that authors have paid to publish. Occasionally, one of them gets rich, the rest get their hopes up, and the cycle continues. Who profits? Some lucky ducks and Amazon, the biggest corporation of all.

Eugenia forgot the reader! Ultimately, the reader benefits when J A Konrath (or anybody else) sells a lot of books. The book is produced, a reader enjoys it. All readers are better off when this process costs less. That she overlooked the entire point of an industry in her attempt to analyze it is intellectual slovenliness of the highest order.

Sure the airline industry was hard on Pullman car attendants. A few people in a dying profession suffered. But the rest of us can travel farther and faster than any other people in history.

The same thing is happening with publishing. As the cost goes down, more books will be read and more books will be produced. They may not be books that Eugenia Williamson or I like. It may not happen in a manner that either of us will approve of, but it will happen. I am not a fan of John Locke’s books. I’m a huge fan of his success and the sea change in publishing that made it possible.

And here’s the upshot. A Harvard Business School study found that Amazon reviews are just as likely to be good as those of professional newspaper critics AND they are more likely to give a favorable review to debut authors.

I’m sorry, but there’s just no nice way to say it, Eugenia Williamson was very lazy when she wrote this. She obviously didn’t do any research, and didn’t think about her subject matter. How do you forget about the reader?

Ray Bradbury is dead at 91. But that’s not my measure of the man. As a writer, I notice that he died at 27 novels, 600 short stories. That’s a full writing life. A very full life, indeed.

Ray has had a tremendous impact upon me. He managed to be both entertaining and wise. When I started the Seanachai, I was afraid of running out of things to write. Of running out of juice, of passion, of ideas.[1] So I taped these words of Ray’s to bottom of my screen.

I claim no victory, but there was blood on my gloves when I hung them up.

He believed in things, not in a trivial or partisan way, but in a way that got to what was fundamental about being human. And when he got all fired up, he wrote about them, eloquently and in way that conveyed some measure of wisdom. Lots of people hate TV. Very few people write the Veldt.

That story is so prescient that it reads us better and better as a culture with every passing year. How many parents do you know who raise their children by putting them in front of a television screen? How many of our personal relationships would be better off if we’d just turn off our screen-centric gadgets for a few more hours every day?

Did he win against the trend he so accurately identified? No. But there was blood on his gloves when he hung them up.

He also hated, I mean HATED, the internet. He called it “a scam perpetrated by computer companies.”

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. "They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

F**k you and the fiber optic pipeline you rode in on! How do you not love that? I look forward to being so old that I get to say whatever I want.

As I close this strange little epitaph, I have another line of Bradbury’s posted to my computer. And I think about it every time I lace up my gloves.

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.


Rest in Peace Ray Bradbury.

Why do we tell stories? There’s no singular answer to this question. But here’s one of mine. It has to do with how I found out my wife was pregnant.

You’ve seen this moment in the movies a thousand times. The mother drops some kind of hint, which the husband always misses. For example, she’s knitting booties, or one of those little baby hats. Dad (circa 1950) cracks a joke about the hat being, “a little small for me.”

Then he is overcome with emotion. His pipe drops from his lips. His strong jaw starts to quiver. His eyes fill with tears as he falls to his knees and embraces his wife’s belly like some primitive Druid worshiping an idol of pagan fertility.

That’s not exactly how it happened with me.

The Truth

I’m having one of those weeks. I’m writing a book. I’m teaching a course. I’m holding down a full-time load of freelance writing. This week is nuts. And I’ve let something slip until the last minute.

So I get up about 5 am and start working. I’ve got like six hours worth of work that I’m going to blow through in about three. Sometimes, when I really have to, I can do this kind of thing. But now, I really really have to.

It’s been like this for days. The wolves have been breathing down my neck every minute. Throughout this, my lovely wife has been difficult/irritable/emotional. So there I am, hunched over the laptop, plate of cold chicken at my side (breakfast of champions) just hammering away on the keyboard.

Enter wife, freaking out. “I took a test, I’m pregnant,” she says. My response was as immediate as it was… well, decide for yourself how best to describe it. And I say:

“F**K you! You don’t know how to read that thing. Bring me the instructions.”

I mitigated this blow by quickly saying something sensitive, like,

“Jesus, couldn’t you underreact every once and a while? I’m on a deadline here. You want to be helpful, throw this five-day old roast chicken in the microwave while I write another tagline for some stupid product nobody wants to buy.”

My wife and I laugh about this now. A lot. She owns up that she had been acting crazy all week because, as we now know, she was pregnant. But at the time, it took a lot of yelling before either of us got our act together. (Well, mostly me with the act gathering.) The momentous, wonderful truth of it crept out from under the couch like a dog afraid of being hit with a broom.

Later, it was magical. Later it was sweet. But the moment of finding out – gah, it was ugly.

So what am I going to do when my son asks me, “What was it like when you found out Mom was pregnant?”

I’m going to lie.

We tell stories because sometimes the truth just isn’t enough to do justice to the really important things in our lives. To say nothing of saving yourself the embarrassment of the brutal truth.