The God Shortage

If you’ve only got one God
(I’m lookin’ at you here Abraham)
then there’s not enough of him to go around.
So people fight over God.

For example,
A Christian, a Muslim and a Jew
all pray to God to save them.
Since they are all praying to the same God.
How do they imagine God will choose?
By flipping a three-sided coin?

In a way, holy war makes sense.
If somebody doesn’t agree with you
and they are busy jamming the intercessory help-line
with their prayers,
It makes sense to silence them,
and clear the line for your supplications.

But what if there were enough gods to go around?
A god for everything and everyone.

Our Lady of Blessed Acceleration.
The slow-moving God of technical support calls.
The funny-smelling god of tennis balls.
The god of Letter Carriers and dial-up modems.
(in fact, the god of annoyed dogs)

A god of plumbing.
The pasty god of bookbinding.

The left-handed, unlucky god
of weed dealers who get high on their own supply.

The cruel god of college admissions
The crueler gods of compound interest.
The minor demons of paper cuts.

Open the door and there’s no end to them.
There’s one for every one and every occasion
Pray to the one you need, when you need.

I don’t expect this idea will go over well in Jerusalem.
But, for the rest of us
it’s gotta be worth a shot.

(This is an introduction to a series on minor and largely irrelevant imaginary deities)

A Time for Pruning

Last summer was hard on the trees
it was very hot and dry
the rhododendrons didn’t make it.
but this spring, the leaves are back
as if it never happened.

But I can see that dead branches
And I remember the heat.

If this were an action movie,
the trees would be back for revenge.

But this is life.
This is spring.

A time for pruning old branches and moving on.

The Pollen Latitudes

In the spring, the pollen gets so thick around here
you’d swear it’d kill horses
and cows and chickens
and anything else without a filtration system built into it’s shell.
The air gets so heavy with the stuff it weighs down the birds.
They fall from the sky
pelting the strong men who wear yellow foam on their lips.
as if they had been savaged by some rabid, yellow dog of Spring.
While, miles away,
in their hermetically sealed labs
the makers of allergy medicine breathe in recycled air
and breathe out laughter.

With Sticks

My son has shown a real aptitude for poking things with sticks
Although this is not a highly marketable skill
He goes at it with gusto and takes pride in his work

He is happy and carefree at the end of the day
He’s able to put the job down
and sleep just like a baby

If I could speak one-year old
I’d ask him how he got this gig
and if they were looking for some part-time help.

Buddha, Terra Cotta from Target $29.95

As I write, the garden statue of the Buddha says to me
“Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.”

That’s a fine religious principle you got yourself right there.
But how the hell are you supposed to sell books
fill pews
whip the masses up into a lather
with an attitude like that?

Where’s the merchandizing? The recurring revenue stream?
The catchy hook for the talk-show circuit?

Terra Cotta Buddha just smiles.
He’s just like that.

The Last Minute

There’s something to be said for the majesty of deadlines.
For the drama and energy that pressure lends
to the most mundane of tasks.

Say, delivering a pizza.
If there’s no deadline, the transaction is dull and gluttonous.
But 30 minutes or less?

The Driver’s screws tight to the steering wheel,
the Buyer watches the clock down to the second
and to his gluttony he gets to add a side of greed
like a free order of breadsticks
to his extra-large, extra cheese, pepperoni and anchovies on half.

Sure, it’s the same thing
Pizza A gets to Stomach B
But it’s not at all the same.

If you’re a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
Mickey Spillane

Try This With a Kindle

On vacation
halfway through a paperback by Stephen King
he meets a pretty girl who asks
“Is that book any good?”

Without hesitation, he tears the book in half
hands her the first part
saying, “I’ll give you the rest when I see you”

She laughs, takes the book, and continues her vacation
knowing she will never see this strange, sad, sweet reader again

But days later, after finishing his half
He sees her again.
And gifts the rest of the book.

they talk, laugh, drink, bed
rejoining what has been put asunder
and spoiling the ending.

That’s an excellent (if somewhat vulgar) question and I’m glad you asked. There are three reasons poem-like objects have started appearing on my site.

1) The Web is a Content-Hungry Monster.

I’m at a point in my life where’s simply no way I can produce something like a Seanachai episode every week. But I feel the need to ship work. Because if you don’t feed the Monster, the Monster will get hungry and eat you.

So what am I supposed to do? Link posts? 12 ways to duct tape butterflies for fun and profit. Bah. Like George Carlin said , “It’s all bullshit and it’s bad for you.”

The world (and the world-wide web) needs another stream of disingenuous, bullshit web content like it needs a hole in it’s head (or router, as the case may be).

2) The Monster is huge, but has a very short attention span.

A question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately, is how can I strip something down to its barest, fastest most essential parts. I’m not claiming that all art should be like this, but, for the purposes of posting on the web page, it’s a powerful question. In other words, how do I do what I do, but strip away all the parts that aren’t needed? How do I rip everything off the frame that isn’t engine, drivetrain or steering? (yes, I left out brakes on purpose)

When you do that with writing, you get poetry. Well, if you do it well with writing, you get poetry.

3) As an Antidote.

Seriously, the digital world is driving me a little nuts. Introspection, reflection, focus, true connection — many of the things that life worth living are getting harder and harder to come by. I think it’s time to play hardball with this shit. Start throwing elbows. Or, in this case, poems.

So, twice a week, I will be delivering fresh bits of oddment, insight and, if I do it well, poetry in both written and podcasted form. I post them to feed the beast. I post them because they are as essential and focused as I can make my writing. But I’m writing them to defend and preserve my sanity.

An Antidote of a Poem

I am trying to write a simple poem
something durable that I can use as antidote
for the poison of an inner life, overrun.

Where a browser window is only a click a way.

Conan, Stuck in Line at the DMV

Stuck in line at the DMV
time sliding by like a methadone drip
I am overwhelmed by the certainty
that life wasn’t supposed to be like this.

We are the spawn of survivors,
a hardy race, bred for running distances,
fit for toppling kingdoms,
building empires,
and jetting the stuff of more arrogant republics.

My people, we have not survived these centuries to become herd animals.

So I stand on a chair and I intone these sacred words,

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis
and the rise of the sons of Aryas,
there was an age undreamed of.
And unto this, Conan,
destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow.

It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga.
Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!

Not only does no one join in,
they ask me to leave.
Snobs.
Even if they don’t have the blood of heroes running through their veins,
How can they not love poetry?

If you do not wish to accept this transfer, simply ignore this message. Nothing else will occur except for the graceful passage of time.

I don’t know who wrote that email, but bravo. Way to not phone it in.

Those boys at the Roundtable Podcast do it up right. Just listen to Dave’s intro. I wasn’t kidding when I said it turned my whole day around. Best of all, they crammed it all into 20 minutes.

http://www.roundtablepodcast.com/2013/03/20-minutes-with-patrick-e-mclean/

I don’t drink and I don’t play video games.

I love the sentiment. In a profession where nobody is looking over your shoulder, a lack of discipline will certainly destroy you. But I take a little exception to the exact content. And not just because I’m Irish. I think more writers should play video games.

There are two reasons for this:

1) Video games are the only original art form of our time. While they draw on the strengths and possibilities of other mediums, they can achieve powerful artistic effects that nothing else can. Screw a cross floating in a vat of piss. Not to be familiar with the medium of games is to be disconnected from the real advance of human art. [1]

2) If a writer isn’t excited enough about what he or she is making that it’s more interesting than a game, then he or she shouldn’t bother. To say it another way, if you aren’t more excited about writing something than you are about playing a game, maybe you shouldn’t write it.

It is not a question of talent. It’s a question of passion or sincerity. If a writer doesn’t enjoy the work (to be sure, it can be a perverse enjoyment) they probably shouldn’t devote the tremendous amount of time and energy to it that writing requires. (Even shitty writing takes a lot of work.)

It is  a question of competition. Reading and gaming aren’t the same thing and they don’t target the same audience, but books don’t compete with other books. Books compete with other forms of entertainment. Especially e-books. So if your  book can’t deliver a powerful and unique and magical experience — one that has more importance and meaning than cutscenes and sprite animation — save everybody some time and trouble. Seriously. It’s like building a boat that doesn’t hold water.

This is the litmus test for me, if I don’t care about something enough to put down the controller to write it, how can I expect anyone else to care about it enough to read it?

It takes a Herculean effort to become a good writer. You must read voraciously, write endlessly and edit ruthlessly. 10,000 hours easy. But more than that, you have to have something worth writing. So, if the idea you have isn’t good enough, read books, walk the dog or play video games until it is. Your subconscious is working all the time. Give it some space.

You what’s not so nice? A kitchen filled with smoke and hot aerosolized grease. I’ve never really had a good exhaust hood. And now, I’ve got one of those downdraft fans in the center of my range. Useless, I tell you. Useless.

Until now.

In all it’s glory I present my custom-made, aluminium kitchen exhaust manifold system. Yes, a strategically positioned piece of foil (folded lengthwise) is so simple and so effective I can only call it magic. Seriously, the world should know about this. Don’t you think?

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.

Today is the winter solstice. That means, in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the day we get the fewest hours of sunlight. It’s the darkest day of the year.

It’s an observation that fits the times, in more ways than one.

Every day since September 22nd, the days have been getting shorter – literally darkness is winning.

Darkness is Winning

A quick Google search will reveal all kinds of precise, geometric explanation of how the motions of the Earth give rise to the seasons, but I think that’s the easy stuff to understand. Or easier to understand than what’s going on inside us.

Every culture in the Northern Hemisphere has a celebration around this time of year. Yule comes from Pagan Scandinavians. The early church founded Christmas on an older festival of the God Mithras and celebration of the Saturnalia.

Temple geometry of every kind, from the pyramids, to Stonehenge to Chichen Izta to St. Peter’s to the Washington Memorial, shows us the passage of the seasons. It allows us to tell one day from the next, and mark the passage of time with precision. Stonehenge is a very, very, very heavy device for determining, among other things, the solstice.

Why?

Agriculture depends on knowing the best time to plant. So knowing when winter is really over is an important survival skill. The first step in that is knowing when the days start getting longer. And key to having hope is verifying that they actually are getting longer.

If you’re very primitive, and you don’t have any kind of writing or a calendar or a ’Henge, then the only way left of recording and transmitting the knowledge is through the elders of the tribe. Basically, the Madmen and the Mystics.

Because… SCIENCE!

Today we know that the world is not ending because of science. We’ve got writing and telescopes and calendars and spreadsheets and digital watches – we even have the Internet (and on computers no less!) We’re very impressed with ourselves and not easily fooled.

This is clearly not a time of year where we would ever:

*Rush to be with loved ones, huddle around fires and display the few plants that remain green in winter as a reminder of growth and hope and things eternal.
* Make phone calls and send out messages to distant friends and relatives letting everybody know that we’re okay -– and seeking that same message in return.
* Lay out a feast, and throw parties and convince ourselves and others how good we’ve got it, and how everything is going to be okay.
* Turn to religion. (Christmas Eve is the highest church attendance of the year. )

How scared and frantic we all act around the solstice. How frightened. Today is the darkest day of the year. And, for all our intelligence and achievements and self-congratulations, on some animal level, we still freak out about it, even though we know better.

But there’s another thing I’ve noticed about this time of year. Christmas doesn’t fall on the solstice. Neither does New Year’s. If we’re being rational about it, isn’t the Solstice is the logical time to declare a new year? The whole cycle is starting up again.

But if you don’t happen to have a Henge…

If you were watching the sun and you didn’t have a Henge, or one of it’s more portable, technologically advanced versions, how long would it take you to confirm that the days were getting longer? That things were getting brighter? That the darkest day of the year was behind you? 4 days? 12 days? Something like that.

Today is the darkest day of the year. But it’s not the end. Tomorrow will be brighter, and the day after that, and the day after that – all the way until June.

It’s an inarguable physical fact. But, as I said, I’m not all that interested in facts. I’m interested in a higher order of ideas. What we do with the facts. How we use the facts to tell ourselves stories that create meaning.

So you know what I make of this time of the year? I think this is how nature teaches us hope. Sometimes the days are dark and then they get darker. But that’s okay. It goes the other way, too.
Just as sure as the turning of the earth.

So here’s my solution. I promised myself that for December I would spend at least 25 minutes (that’s one pomodoro, for those in the know)¹ writing everyday. But I wouldn’t constrain what I was working on. In fact, I would open it up to write any piece of any idea I have ever had.

This is important. I have a tremendous backlog of things I’d like to write. I have three books outlined right now. And a list of book ideas that’s 35 items long. It takes a long time to write a book. But it takes much less time to have ideas for one.

Some of these ideas cry out to be written. It literally hurts me that I can’t get to them. But my December experiment is very liberating. I get to play where ever or with whatever I want. It’s like an ADD kid’s paradise.

Here are a few of the ideas I’ve been working with:

• A retelling of the last 1/3rd of the epic of Beowulf called "Beowulf and the Dragon"
• A story about how all Fairy Tales originated from con games called "The Brother’s Grift."
• A story about a detective who pretends to be drunk in the same way that Columbo pretended to be stupid.
• A reworking of a story I did on the Seanachai called "The War with Santa."
• A classic dungeon hack-type story, told from the perspective of the greedy and cruel merchant who runs the store. Working title, "Dungeon Pawn Stars."

I am having a blast. And I’m making good progress. The hardest part of any project is starting. And, this way, I just pound through it, liberated by the knowledge that it’s just an experiment, the quality of which I will judge later.

As of yesterday, I’m averaging 967 words per day for the month of December. And I haven’t spend much more than 25 minutes a day. Happy. And Holidays. How cool is that?

Two weeks ago, I flew to Newport Beach and locked myself in a room with the rest of the Wasteland 2 design team. In this room was a three foot high copy of the complete game script, parts of which each person in the room had been writing for the last three months[1]. To give you an idea of how much material this really is, a movie script is an inch, maybe two at the most. To say that Wasteland 2 is going to be deep and interactive is an understatement.

We sat there for four days as all of the designers read through their levels. I have to tell you, these long days in the conference room at the Newport Beach Radisson – a room that looks and feels like the official corporate headquarters of the year 1984 – were absolutely magnificent. It was the creative process at it’s best. Good ideas got better. Bad ideas got reworked. And through it all the excitement in the room never flagged.

So here are my thoughts on a few of the elements that made it such a good experience.

What Made for Great Collaboration

1 – Everybody Listened

This is incredibly important. You can’t help make an idea better if you don’t understand it. And any feedback you might give without understanding is worthless.

2 – Everyone was Generous

Coming up with ideas is hard work. So when someone else takes their brain and helps you with your problem (not merely trying to make it there own) it’s very generous. And very magical. And you know when you are in this environment when the work gets better, but you can’t remember who’s idea it was.

3 – Everybody was Good

Sadly, this is not always the case. One of the primary reasons there’s not more great books or movies is that there is a shortage of talent in the world. People who are both talented, hardworking and play well with others aren’t as readily available as you might think. How wonderful it was then, that everybody involved had real talent, regardless of what they had or hadn’t done.

4 – Everybody took it seriously

I’m not going to say that we didn’t have fun. We did. In fact, we laughed our asses off. But throughout all of it, everybody had the sense that we engaged in the making of something that is going to be both good and (in the sense that this word can be applied to an entertainment product) important. The nature of the game and the kickstarter funding gives a tremendous freedom from corporate bullshit and a tremendous responsibility to the fans themselves. The people who funded this effort are the smartest, best, most demanding audience for this kind of game there is. To his credit, Brian Fargo takes this responsibility very seriously. And so did everybody else.

To Sum Up

I don’t believe in magic. I believe in process. If you’ve got a good process, you are going to have a good product. And I can report with full faith, that this process has been awesome. My only regret is that I’m not going to get to discover this game by playing it for the first time in perfect, child-like wonder and ignorance. But you will. Lucky you.

I’d like to say that the meteoric rise of this anthology was due to the fact that one of my stories is in it, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Here’s the complete list of authors. It’s quite a cast and I’m flattered to have been asked.

J. Daniel Sawyer, Edward W. Robertson, Matthew Sanborn Smith, Brand Gamblin, Jason Andrew Bond, Patrick McLean, Nathan Lowell, Jake Bible, John Mierau

The premise of Walk the Fire is that certain people can walk through certain fires, effectively granting them a teleportation power. The idea was John Mierau’s brainchild and he gave us a great deal of freedom in how we executed it. Basically, he said, use the power, and set it anytime in history.

Contrarian that I am, rather than set it far-off in space, far off in the future, I picked Victorian England, and wrote something that John described as Oscar Wilde, Action Hero. As hysterical as the thought is, is an apt description. It’s Arthur Conan Doyle type story, one character recounting fantastic events to another that breaks into resolving action at the end. It was a blast to write.

With what little spare time time I have this Sunday, I’m settling down to read Walk the Fire. I am very excited to see what other writers did with the same setup.

Have a look for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-The-Fire-ebook/dp/B009GQYF6E

If you think story isn’t important, may I submit Crush the Castle. It’s the same mechanic as Angry Birds but with a different story. My iPhone and I killed many a listless hour playing it. Crush the Castle is a solid game and has 17,000+ likes on Facebook. Angry Birds has 21,408,810 likes, five sequels and has been on the Today show.

Of course, the story isn’t the only difference between these two games. Angry Birds also has more personality (literally, compare the games side-by-side and you will see that Angry Birds has more color) than Crush the Castle. Just like a whole movie can be made or broken on a single line of dialog, very small design touches can have a huge effect on the experience of a game.

I think there are at least two levels of story going on in any game. The first level is the story that the game designers are trying to tell. For most games, these stories are pretty bad. They have plot holes, the dialog is terrible, and the execution generally makes the story feel like an artifact tacked on to support the gameplay.

Sometimes, story is transcendent and integral with the gameplay. Rockstar is, well, Rockstar at this. So is Valve. In Portal 2 they told the story of one man’s hubris and collapse with a whole sequence of retro levels and brilliantly written dialog. “I’m the man who’s going to burn your house down… with the lemons!” Everyone remembers the line as funny. But the line, the sequence, the reaction from GladOS, the dismal wreckage of your surroundings – all of it combines to create a tremendous effect in the player. It’s sad, it’s funny, it’s beautiful, it’s elegiac. It’s as complex and powerful in the way that films and novels can be.

Or this bit from the beginning of the first Half-Life Between reading the sign and the elevator drop, there’s a whole story. And it can be interpreted a number of ways. Were the scientists trapped? Did the scientists read the sign and try to use the elevator anyway?

This is a nice segue to the second level of story: the story the player creates on top of the game. As a species, we have to know why. We have to know why so badly that, in the absence of a why, we will make one up. Lightning? Well, that’s uh, Zeus, yeah, throwing his spear.

This makes the player’s story of playing a game, the most important story. The player creates while playing the game is really what adds depth. For example, when I introduced my wife to GTA IV she (non-gamer that she is) had trouble with the controls. Whatever mission she was on required her to park near a hot dog vendor ( who was totally unrelated to the mission). Every time she attempted to pull up at this location she would hit the wrong button and instead of stopping, she would open fires on the poor, unfortunate hot dog vendor. Hilarity ensued. And each time she repeated the mission and made the same mistake, it got funnier and funnier and funnier. In my mind, Niko Bellic has forever become a man who hates, HATES, hotdog vendors.

Everybody does this. It’s why procedurally generated games work. If you played SimCity, you had some kind of story for your city. You imagined what kind of people lived in this town. When you built a messed up road, you imagined some poor slob driving to work trying to figure out what kind of idiot city planner built such a messed-up road.

Another great example of that is Dwarf Fortress. It’s a game that is so deep that it’s learning curve is a cliff. If you can manage to scale the cliff, and make your way past the impenetrable user interface, the game is quite good. Not because the graphics are good, but because the player co-creates a story with the game. And it’s usually a really entertaining story. As BronzeMurder illustrates.

So how can Game Designers make their games fertile for this second level of storytelling? I don’t pretend to have an authoritative answer to this question. A) I’m not an authority and B) Games are so young as an art form I’m not sure that even the authorities can be all that authoritative. But here are my thoughts.

1) Choices must matter. If your game design is just a series of linear gates, it is going to be harder for me to get involved. Not only must choices matter (when you murder the hot dog vendor in GTA IV, the cops show) but the more of them the better. And the more that your choices ripple through the causality of the game, the better.

2) In the absence of choice, game designers can use craft. This is how a linear narrative takes on depth – it’s really well made. Novels and movies can feel huge, but only when every bit and part is carefully crafted to create the desired effect in the reader or viewer. When games screw this up, I think it’s because they focus more on the programmy and designy bits than they do the story. I’m not saying that particle effects aren’t cool, but they are essentially special effects. The special effects in first Star Wars movies are ancient technology, but nobody really cares because the story is still good. And speaking of Star Wars…

3) The Han Solo Theory – If you create a fantastic world, remember that the audience isn’t going to buy into it just because you made it or made it look good. Leave room for their reactions and opinions. Better yet, put a skeptical character or perspective into your creation to give people someone to identify with. This is one of the things that Han Solo does in the Star Wars movies. He’s the character who doesn’t believe. He’s a guy up to his eyeballs in debt, driving a beater car who wants to get paid, get laid and save his ass.

McLean’s 1st Law of Lists (which I just made up for this post) states that any list in this post with exactly three elements is obviously unfinished. I know you have thoughts on the subject, so please add them in the comments. As I’m working on Wasteland 2, I’m thinking about this kind of stuff a lot. So, expect more on the subject.

That’s right, if you want How to Succeed in Evil on Kindle, it’s free all weekend. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell people you don’t even know. Get it right here.

Wasteland 2 work-in-progress

I’ve been hired to help write and develop Wasteland 2. If you’re not a gamer, or you haven’t played the original, some explanation of why this is so cool is in order.

Wasteland was a seminal game and one of the best RPG’s ever made. In 2000 it was still ranked as the 24th top PC game of all time by IGN. That’s 12 years after it came out. In video game years that puts it back in the Sumerian era of gaming. Think the Nintendo Entertainment System. Think 5.25″ floppy disks, running on an IBM 8088. The entire game fit into less than a megabyte of memory.

Yet it was magnificent. This is the first game (and still one of the very few) I ever played where, the decision tree was so deep, I felt like I could do whatever I wanted to. Choices mattered on a macro and micro level throughout the game.

To be sure, there were a lot of  innovations in this game, but it was the sense of depth and freedom that were (and still is) most remarkable. It was exceptionally well-written and had a darkly wicked and well-managed wit. Which starts to answer the next question.

How’d You Get Involved?

Well, it started with Kickstarter. The developer, Brian Fargo put it up for $900,000 and said, if the contributions hit that, he’d throw in a 100,000 of his own money. When it closed, the kickstarter hit 2.9 million.

Of course, I chipped in. But I also called Mike Stackpole (NY Times bestselling author and one of the original designers) and said, that I would be happy to pitch in some time as an in-kind Kickstarter. So I did some work and they really liked it.

Taking the Curse off of Video Games

I’ll be posting more about this game, this process, what I know and am learning about game design, but to wrap it all up – there are two reasons why this game is very, very, very likely[1] to be mind-blowingly amazing.

1) It’s kickstarted.

Which means that Brian has a chance to make a very unique game. The gaming industry is, well, an Industry. So it’s hard to make things with flair, passion and craft. Watch the video on the kickstarter site and you see what I mean.

2) Everybody involved is serious about taking the curse off.

Games, especially RPG’s, feel stalled. Worse, some genres seem to be moving backwards. You can argue that there is less role-playing in RPG’s now. They may look better, but the core mechanic and the core beats of the story haven’t evolved. (Seriously, you another resource-gathering quest?)

In television writing there is a term called taking the curse off. There are certain scenes and set pieces that have been used so much that they are “cursed”” (clichéd beyond repair). So if you get to one of those moments, you have to do something fresh and new, otherwise it winds up being horribly boring.

Joss Whedon is a master of this. And here’s one of my favorites. It’s in the 1st or 2nd episode of Firefly. And it’s a classic, set up the recurring nemesis scene. When I first watched this show, as this scene happened, I was deciding I hated the show. I mean really? I gotta put up with this stereotypical, tattooed, ’roid freak as the nemesis for the rest of the season. And the speech is such a cliche. But then, the magic happened:

To sum it all up.

If I have anything to do with it Wasteland 2 is going to be awesome. And y’know what. I do. I can’t believe it, but I really do. Which means I need to get to work.

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/

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.

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.



View all my reviews

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?

Some of you have waited since 2005 for a sequel to the original How to Succeed in Evil. You’ve waited when it looked like there was no hope. You’ve waited through those small hours of the morning when courage falters and even stores that claim to be open “24 hours” close so the guy working the night shift can mop the floors. Most of all, you’ve waited for me to get my shit together.

But now I can say, your wait was not in vain.

On sale, right now, carefully proofed by the meticulous Deborah Bancroft and rendered into the highest quality zeros and ones for your digital enjoyment I offer:

How to Succeed in Evil: Hostile Takeover

In the meantime, it won’t spoil it to tell you that the book gets it’s title from Topper rebelling against Edwin and taking over the company they started, Omdemnity Insurance. Nor will it ruin it to share with you this lovely bit excerpt in which Topper works to win over the hearts and minds of the people. Enjoy.

“Edwin used to say that Omdemnity Insurance was like a family. But lemme tell you about family. Family Sucks.

“You show me a family and I’ll show you a group of people who are lucky if they can keep their shit together long enough to make it through a Christmas dinner.

“I don’t want to work with my family, or anybody’s family. You know who I want to work with? Genghis KHAN. ‘Cause, if I’m going to show up everyday and work hard, then in exchange, I want to take over the world.

“When people in other cities hear our name I want them to quake with the fear that we might show up and burn all their shit. I don’t want to work with somebody’s daffy, judgmental, Jesus-freak Uncle. I want to work with tireless, talented, unmitigated badasses. The kind of people who work together so well that if they ever took a vacation to Europe together they would scare other firms so badly that the Pope himself would proclaim them the scourge of God, soldiers of the Antichrist and the sure sign of the fucking apocalypse!”

Topper paused and mopped his forehead. He didn’t need to, it was pure showmanship. Give it all a little time to sink in.

“It should be pretty obvious to you that I wasn’t the popular kid in high school. College? Nope. They even tried to kill me in Law School. Right from birth I was boxed out from living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse. So, if I’m destined to die short and ugly, then I’m damn sure gonna be a rich badass. I don’t care who I have to uppercut in the balls to get that money, you understand? And I want to do it working with people so talented and ruthless and dangerous that if I wheeled them through a parking garage when they were hot they would set off all the goddamned car alarms.

“Do you know anybody who wants to work with that kind of crew?”

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.

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.

See that up there? That’s work-in-progress for the cover for the sequel to How to Succeed in Evil. And you know that that means? Yes, work, is in progress. Covers are begin made, drafts are being proofed and perfected, physical editions are being prepared – progress!!!

I could tell you that that the book will be out in the next couple of weeks, but, undoubtedly that would just come ’round to bite me in the ass. So I’ll just say, it will be available for Kindle (at the very least) by the end of June.

Now what’s up with the cover?

It’s looks like a small child or a dwarf chained to a chair. Well, that doesn’t bode well for Topper. What the hell is going on here? I’m glad you asked. Because for you, I have a preview of the first chapter.

Hostile Takeover — Chapter I

A small man sat manacled to a metal chair in a dark room. He was wearing the tattered remnants of a child’s superhero costume. The skin-tight suit was not flattering. The cape was torn and there were burn marks in several places. Clearly, the recent past had not been kind to Topper Haggleblat.

The present wasn’t holding much promise either. Topper didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know how he had gotten there, but he knew what was coming next. As a criminal defense attorney, he knew all the tricks the law dogs used when they had a man in an interrogation room. All two of them.

The point of an interrogation isn’t to learn something new. Topper knew that they didn’t even start asking questions until they had their story figured out. That makes the point of an interrogation to break a suspect.

There was a time in his life when Topper would have cursed and spit in their eye. Told them in colorful, high-pitched shrieks where they could put their questions and which way they could twist them after they had been properly inserted. There was a time when Topper would have fought them so hard that at the end of the day the guy asking the questions would have gone home to his fat wife feeling like he had been beaten with clubs, while Topper would have gone back to his cell and masturbated just to make his jailers uncomfortable.

Throughout his entire interrogation, he would have told them, again and again, that they better let him go. Because his employer was Edwin Windsor. And nobody crossed Edwin Windsor ever got away with it.

But that wasn’t true anymore. Those days had passed. Edwin had been crossed, and Edwin had been killed. And Topper, well, this was all that was left of him.

The little man hung his head, and wiped away tears. If you had asked him why he was crying, he would have snarled, “Take your pick.” It was the lowest moment of his life. Well, so far.
On the other side of the room, Topper heard a door open. This sound was followed closely by the scrape of a wooden chair on the cold concrete floor. That would be the interrogator, thought Topper. But he wasn’t the person to worry about. Somewhere in this dark room there was a mirror. And behind that mirror was a guy. The guy behind the guy. If Topper cared, that would be the guy he was worried about. But Topper didn’t care.

When the bright spotlight flooded his face Topper thought, “Ah screw this. They’re all a bunch of douchebags anyway.” Why should he let them have any fun?

“I confess,” said Topper. “I confess to it all.”

“Confess to what?” asked the interrogator.

“Whatever you got,” sneered Topper.

“We want you to tell us what happened.”

“You know what happened. And if you don’t, then go screw, I’m not here to entertain you.”
“I have lots of time,” said the Interrogator.

“You think I got someplace to be?” asked Topper. “You think I got a girlfriend or cocktail party or a bowling league or a bar mitzvah I’m missing? You think my Mary Kay sales are really gonna slump this quarter? Pfaahhh! Just lock me away. Quit wasting my time.”

“Do you know what we can do to you?” asked the Interrogator.

“I don’t know and I don’t care. Just lock me in a hole in the earth. There’s nothing you can do to me that’s worse than what I’ve done to myself.”

“Then tell us what happened to Edwin Windsor.”

And that’s what tore it. With the mention of Edwin’s name, Topper convulsed with sobs. The interrogator waited patiently. After a time Topper said, “What happened with Edwin? His heart died with Agnes. All the rest was inevitable.”

We’ve passed some kind of strange, pop-culture milestone beyond which post-apocalyptic small talk has become acceptable. I think the war is over, and we geeks have won.

So I find it odd that there’s one answer to the In-The-Event-of-A-Zombie-Apocalypse questions that I have never encountered in fiction, film or casual conversation.

Mattock, double-barrel shotgun, flamethrower, armored personnel carrier, private island – these are all good things to have at the end of the world. But the first thing I’d reach for? The most useful thing I can think of? The seed from which the flower of a new civilization can blossom and grow amid the ashes of the old?

Bolt Cutters.

In the event of the Apocalypse, the first thing I’m grabbling is a pair of bolt cutters. With a pair of bolt cutters and a little persistence, you can get anything else you want or need. Here are some routine Post-Apocalyptic tasks at which bolt cutters excel.

1. Cutting through fences.
2. Cutting through padlocks.
3. Bashing in windows.
4. Bashing in skulls.
5. Extracting information one finger at a time.

Sure, a tank is heavily armored, but the box in which the tank keys are kept is probably just padlocked. Sure, that box may be in a very big safe, but the hardware store where they keep the dynamite isn’t.

So why haven’t we seen or read more about bolt cutters? They are a supremely useful implement. One deserving of heroic names and songs of praise. I’m tempted  to prove this by writing a story how a boy and his pair of bolt cutters avert the end of days. And not magical bolt cutters, either, just ordinary bolt cutters, ’cause they’re magic enough all on their own.

The world will probably end before I write that story. If it does, remember: showing up to the end of the world without a pair of bolt cutters is a rookie move. I’ve got mine. Do you have yours?

This thing is a beast of a book. Really quite amazing. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all of these, but I can’t say they are my favorite novels ever. Without question they are unlike anything else I’ve ever read. You can argue that War and Peace has a greater sweep in a single book, but since this story is five books already and is projected to go to for two more, it is easily among the longest, most complicated works of fiction ever written. The man’s endurance is incredible. To say nothing of his imagination.

I have no interest in making a companion guide, or plotting out the whole series in bullet points. But what I am interested is in his technique. How he achieves and sustains such long books. And generates such interest. Great characters are a kind of magic. But structure isn’t. So here, hopefully made easier to see, is some of the structure of the first book in the series, Game of Thrones.

There is also a breakdown of POV characters by series character in the Wikipedia Entry. I’ve also made a PDF version of the Game of Thrones Storymap in case you want better resolution for reading the fine print.

So now it is with the proofer. Give it about a month and it will appear for Amazon. Now I have to figure out how to promote it. Maybe a blog post telling the world that I’m done with it?

I’m happy to say that this really kicked into high gear in July of last year. I’ve added more coaches and have launched [2] a dedicated good words (right order) website.. The website is now ready for prime time (they aren’t bugs, they’re features!) so please check it out.

In keeping with my beliefs about how the world and the web works, I’m giving away everything I know. Most of what I’ve learned as a professional, rent-paying writer, I learned the hard way. Why not go to school on my mistakes?

My approach does not focus on grammar. While grammar is an excellent tool for studying language, it’s not well suited to teaching the task of writing. Writing is something that people do, so focusing on human performance (rather than linguistic mechanics) makes more sense to me. Thankfully, it also get better results.

At its most basic, the work I do helps people make the writing process easier and the writing product more powerful.

I’m going a little infographic crazy this weekend, but I think I’m on to something. It’s really hard to pay attention to the structure of a story while you are reading it. Especially if the story is any good. The whole point is for the reader to be seduced into the flow of the narrative. At any moment, if the reader is thinking “What nice way to handle that exposition” the illusion is shattered and the work falls flat.

HOWEVER, if you are trying to learn how stories are made, that’s exactly the kind of thing you have to pay attention to. The most important and least obvious choices are about pacing and timing — Where a story starts, how it jumps around with point-of-view and flashbacks, what the story includes and what it leaves out.  I know of no good source for this kind of information, so I’m making one.

I’m not much of a designer, but I’m trying to find a form with which to map stories. I’m sure that each one will have to be a little  different (stories can differ wildly in structure) as you can see from looking at my first attempt with Richard Stark’s The Hunter.

I found this great interview with Darwyn Cooke about adapting the stories. In it he talks about visualizing the story. This is particularly interesting to me because not only is he a brilliant illustrator, but he’s a great graphic designer. So he compresses a lot of the story into the awesome and stylish informational graphics. You don’t need to list everywhere a character drove and everything he did, when you can draw an annotated map.

Annnnway, in the interview he remarked about the discipline with which Westlake structured his stories. He switches perspective or jumps time every 7 chapters or so. And evidently he did it in ALL of his books. I had to go check it out for myself. So I mapped out the first Parker Novel, the Hunter, Like this:

It’s 64,000 words and it has 4 parts. The average chapter length is about 2,000 words and a graph of the chapter lengths is in the upper right hand corner. I’ve also indicated the major action that each of the parts is devoted to.

This kind of stuff is fascinating to me. I believe that the discipline of a form is one of the things that can help a creator make something great. All hour-long episodes of television, no matter what the content of the show, are all structured basically the same way. (either four or five acts, depending on how you slice it.) Think of it like this Tease (Act I) – Commercial – Act I – Commercial – Act III – Commercial – Act IV – Commercial – Close (Act V).

I can’t imagine what a similar diagram of Game of Thrones might look like, but if I ever write any epic fantasy, I’ll probably make one. XKCD made this interesting chart of movie narratives  but it’s pretty useless for my purposes. Where the characters were isn’t quite as important as how the story is parsed out. That’s what makes the plot-magic go.

Anybody else out there have a way  to visualize the structure of a story?

Everything happens 5 minutes at a time.

In fact, most important things happen in even smaller intervals. Disagree? Go out and time a few marriage proposals, car accidents or heart attacks.

Big change is a myth.

The idea that you have to devote your whole life to do something great (or 10,000 hours) is a lie. If you look closely at big changes you can see that they are good PR (or whopping lies) around a collection of very small changes. You know what a mountain is? It’s a bunch of spoonfuls of dirt.

We focus on the mountains because they are big and sexy. But we don’t think much about the spoonfuls: those little packages of time in which the real work gets done.

Like training for a marathon. You know what the hardest part is? The marathon? Hell no. That’s easy. You’re amped up. People are cheering you on. And, if you’re not a complete idiot, you’re well-prepared. But the preparation? You know what’s hard? Early morning training runs. Especially when you’re cold and lonely and you just want to stay in bed.

In fact, it’s the five minutes it takes you get out of bed and pull your shoes on. That’s the five minutes that count. That’s the five minutes in which heroes are made.

For writing, the first five minutes when you sit down to write is what counts.

Those minutes when you clear everything else out of your head and soak in the suck. These are the five minutes of the blank page, the blinking cursor, of feeling hopelessly inadequate to the task at hand. It’s the five focused, uninterrupted minutes it takes for your brain to catch up with your intention. What separates the writers who finish from the writers who don’t? You got it. Five uncomfortable minutes.

If you can take feeling like a hack for five minutes, then the words and the ideas will come. Sure, the next time you sit down to write you might think they suck. And they may suck. But the only way to get to the words that don’t suck is by going through the first five minutes again and again.

That feeling like there’s no hope? That’s there’s nothing you can do to make your pile of words better? Everybody has that feeling. And it’s only strong for five minutes.

The first five minutes always suck

Tolstoy wrote War and Peace five minutes at a time. J.K. Rowling wrote all those gigantic Harry Potter books five minutes at a time. And the first five minutes always suck. As the man said, “Writing isn’t hard, it’s the sitting down to write that kills ya.”

Normal people, civilians, the kind of people who stay in bed and away from keyboards, they cheer for the end, the last five minutes, the victory. Sure, victory is nice. But me? I cheer for the first five minutes. Because those are the minutes that count. The five minutes in which the game of writing is won and lost. The five minutes that always suck.

Sure, writing is a complicated skill. But all of the choices you can make and the skills you can employ bottleneck at the first five minutes. It’s just this simple: if you make it through the first five minutes you’re a writer. If you don’t, try again.

All my words are seem inadequate to this moment. Sure, I’ll write about it. (In fact, the KidPocalypse may be live blogged) But not just yet. I want to let this sink in for a little while.

More pictures here.

For me, what a mystery gives you is a number of ways to pull a reader through a book. And that’s an important thing to be able to do for all genres except crappy, postmodern literary fiction. And, as you might have guessed from that last sentence, that is not a genre I careto work in.

Here’s the review I posted on goodreads. I’ll add one more thing to it here. The other major influence on Edwin Windsor is Salvador Hardin from Asimov’s Foundation series. He’s kind of a blip in the whole thing, but I’ve never forgotten him. Especially his magnificent quote, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” If I was a great writer, I would have stolen the quote, word-for-word and put it in Edwin’s mouth. As it is, I’m just a good writer, and still have some sense of shame.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have a lasting love of this book for several reasons. The relationship between Nick and Nora is wonderful, yes, the dialog sings, but there is a real relationship there. This is a guy solving a murder with his wife. Hammett has unlimited tough-guy noir cred (try his Red Harvest) but this is one of the only books that I know of that manages captures a relationship in this way. (and if you know of some more, please message me.)

The second thing I love about this book is how Nick operates as a social animal. There’s remarkably little violence. Nick handles himself with poise. He’s a tough guy, sure, but he’s doesn’t have to prove it. And most of the interactions he has, he gets the edge because he’s friendly, or respected or known. This is the detective as social animal. As opposes to the solitary, duty-bound detective of much (if not all) of Hammett’s other work, Nick is part of a fabric of larger society and is more effective as a detective because he is.

For those two reasons, I cite this book as something remarkable in all of detective fiction. And maybe all of literature. Seriously, how many stories do you know where husband and wife have a good and entertaining relationship.

For full disclosure, I have to say, that Nick Charles was one of the inspirations for one of my own protagonists. Edwin Windsor, from How to Succeed in Evil. He not a detective at all, nor is married, but he solves problems by being smart, rather than being strong or violent.

If you haven’t, read this book.

View all my reviews

I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

And since it is my birthday today, I think I will cuff my pants and walk around confident that nobody will have any clue what’s going on.

Here’s another little age-related gem from Prufrock.

I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And, in short, I was afraid

 

And then you open the card and it says: Enjoy your birthday while it lasts. Love & Agnst T.S. Eliot. Hallmark woulda fired his melancholy ass on the spot.

It’s a novella-length prequel to the first book. Agnes is alive and Topper, well, he’s still Topper. The set up is this: Edwin is approached by a vampire for advice on how to deal with the constraints of the modern world. Y’know, he wants Edwin to help him use unique powers to their best end.

It’s a pretty fun satire of the vampire genre in general. Which, c’mon, you gotta be just a little sick of, right? As Agnes observes in this story, “You live for hundreds of years and the most fitting consort you can find; the creature that fascinates you; Who you cannot bear live without is a teen-aged girl?” There’s plenty of stuff to poke fun at in this genre.

In addition to having some well-deserved fun with what I think of as ‘modern’ vampires, I wrote this story to work with Topper as a more central character. In the first book he was fun, he was over the top, but he was also little one-dimensional. Not anymore. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still absurdity and obscenity galore, but with this story you’ll get to know the manic little lawyer a little better.

I hope you’ll check it out. And I hope it will tide you over while I finish editing How to Succeed in Evil: Hostile Takeover.

UNKILLABLE is the story of a young man named Dan who is killed and brought back from the dead for a shot at revenge. He doesn’t have superpowers or supernatural forces on his side. He can be hurt. He can be maimed. The only thing he’s got going for him is that he is Unkillable.

It’s a zombie story with a thoughtful zombie. A tale about a person who doesn’t know what his life is worth until he loses it.

Kindle Edition

Free AudioBook (podiobooks) Edition

iTunes Edition

Icepick Says:

I really enjoyed this story. Although I find it difficult to separate the writing from Patrick’s silky smooth storytelling, I think I would have had fun with it even if I had to do the heavy lifting of decoding words from a page myself.

It reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” in tone and genre (if that makes any sense). Does that make it “urban fantasy”?

This story, I think, has a deeper context using the more mythical aspects for color only. It certainly lends itself to sequels, I hope they get written.

TJGeezer Says:

This is a very engaging tale and Mr. McLean is a very good narrator, expressive and not prone to stumbling. I decided this one required instant gratification and, since he provided a link, clicked and bought at CDBaby.

He says at his site that any tale capable of sustaining his interest is one of self-discovery. That sense of story shows in Unkillable. It was worth the reasonable price to buy a copy, IMO. A fine story.

Brandon Says:

Just found this last night. Must say, I’m quite pleased. Story is very interesting, quality of audio and narration is excellent and the chapters are nice and short so I don’t have to worry about being forced to stop and leave halfway through one.

(thought, I say nice and short now cause there are plenty ahead of me so I’m not having to wait week to week for a short chapter)

Regardless, I look forward to the rest of the story.

It’s really hard to write that many words while editing. I ran into some pretty serious problems along the way, but came up with some pretty good solutions. That’s great for the work, but not so great for the word count.

I call it a good month. I’m inches from being done with “A Consultation with a Vampire” a How to Succeed in Evil short story that throws Edwin into the tropes of the whole Vampire mythos. (Yeah, it’s fun.)

I’ve also put up 30,000+ words on a piece of non-fiction. It’s the companion book  to the good words (right order) class I teach. My method for helping people improve their writing is like nothing I’ve ever encountered, so it has been an exciting and humbling exercise.

Any way you slice it. National Non-Novel Writing Month was pretty productive for me.

They are all exciting projects and I’m finding that when I’m procrastinating on fiction, I’m making headway on non-fiction and vice versa.

Here’s a live graphic from my writing log. The blue is my daily word count. The red is the total. It’s log scale so variations in the data are easier to see. Right now, I’m at 21% of the monthly total and 5% ahead of schedule, but this graphic will update, so enjoy my very public commitment. It will stay frighteningly up-to-date.

NaNoWriMo is such a good thing, I can’t resist. I wrote 1,800 yesterday, so I’m off to the races already. But there’s a twist. I’m not going to write a novel. Which makes it NaNONNoWriMo for me.

I’m going to put up 50,000+ words in November. And I’m going to count editing the HtSiE novel as 33% writing. That is, if I edit 1000 words, it’s like writing 333.33. (Don’t ask me how you edit a third of a word.)

I’ve still got 15-20k worth of writing to do on Hostile Takeover, so there’s plenty of word count to get to in the revisions.

The real reason I’m doing this is that I’ve got a couple of non-novel, non-fiction writing projects that have languishing. If the Seanachai taught me anything, there’s nothing like a scary, audacious public goal to the get the juices flowing. It is amazing how fast you can run when you can hear the baying of the wolves behind you.

If you don’t already know, November is National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Sure, that’s not exactly a novel. Sure, after you’ve written the first draft then real work begins, sometimes years of it. Yada yada yada — don’t be a jackass about it, NaNoWriMo a good thing.

The reason NaNoWriMo is good has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the process. It’s about practicing the fundamental skill of writing, that unglamorous skill upon which all others rely — sheer, stubborn, leatherass’d keyboard pounding. Whatever else that can be said about writing and writers, a writer’s gotta put in the time.

NaNoWriMo is, if nothing else, a chance to practice that skill. And, as such, is extremely valuable. The person who writes 50,000 words of utter dreck in November is much closer to being a good writer, an accomplished writer, an acclaimed author than a person who snarks about other people’s hard work. As Theodore Roosevelt said with some beauty, some semicolons and many words:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

I’ve been in fights. I’ve written novels. And let me tell you, the emotional strain of the two is more alike than different. Fear is fear. If you don’t think a draft of a novel can beat you up that only means you haven’t written one.

Say what you want to about crappy novels. They abound. Many will be written this November. Many can be found on rapidly disappearing bookstore shelves and in ebook format. But speak no ill of NaNoWriMo around me. ‘Cause, brother, as far as I’m concerned, them’s fighting words. 

Then, and only then, having vented your spleen and most of your bodily fluids, you will be overcome by a wonderful feeling of peace. Which is fitting because that’s what ataraxis means — a state of serene calmness.

Which is where it all falls apart for me. I mean really. Is NOBODY in charge around here? ATARAXIS? Just say it out loud. Pronouncing this word is like somebody putting a crystal vase in your mouth and then slamming you in the face with a tire iron. ATARAXIS? This is not a peaceful sounding world.

Watch.

It’s the end of a long day. We’re in a rich lady’s bathroom. And as she’s sliding into the fabled, proverbial and otherwise cliche’d bathtub — as the nearly scalding water releases every inch of tension from her body — as it all slips away, she gives voice to the wonderful feeling of peace that has overcome her by sighing, “Ataraxis.”

No she does not.

You know what Ataraxis should be good for? Let’s say, you’re down upon a defenseless village. And next to you are a couple of screaming, half-naked guys with blue paint on their skin and hate in their hearts. And next to them there are a bunch more guys wielding torches and warhammers and swords. The rape and the pillage knobs are turned up to 11.

But everybody’s waiting for you to give the signal, because you’re in charge. And you need to let them know that you want them to destroy this village so utterly that no other village on the face of this earth will ever think about resisting you. To do this you need a word. A really good word. Do you cry Havoc? Nah, you throw back your head and in the raspy voice of a man who’s thirst can only be slaked by the blood of the vanquished you cry ATARAXIS!

That’s what ataraxis should be good for.

But it’s not. Ataraxis is spelled like it sounds, but, sadly, it’s not meant like it sounds. It sure does sound badass doesn’t it? So it’s easy to see why it’s a word Patrick likes.

In it’s unstretched, virginal state, fungible is useful enough and there is no harm in it. It is a legal term that denotes a class of items each member of which is perfectly capable of being used in place of another. For example, a gallon of a particular grade of gasoline. One gallon is as good as another and you don’t really care which one you have in your tank.

And it’s true, any dollar in a suitcase full of cash can be exchanged with any other dollar in the world without anyone being the worse off, or even noticing. But it is not true that each dollar in the suitcase is the same.

For the purposes of exchange one pound of wheat may be equivalent, but each grain of wheat is, like the proverbial and cliched snowflake, unique. As the meaning of words have changed, shifted, leaked, blended and melted into one another, Fungible has Funged us up but good.

As much as I love this very useful term of exchange, I must testify as an artist and one alive to the world — One thing is emphatically not another. The same suitcase of money may be used for the illegal purchase of a stolen Carravagio or it may be used for the illegal purchase of rocket-propelled grenades. The various dollars in the suitcase may be used, in subsequent transactions, to buy machine parts, t-shirts, radios, hot dogs, cocaine or a baby stroller.

While each dollar is functionally the same, it’s individual path through the world renders it unique.

If it is true of grubby, inanimate bits of paper currency, how much more true must it be of people? This is the dark patch where the idea of fungibility has bled into humanity. I submit that it is a stain and should be removed.

No matter how much we might try to grade and certify, two people with equal qualifications are not equal. No matter how convincing a structure of procedure or regulation that one may erect, people are not fungible.

All of what is best and worst in our modern exchange economy (and a battle for the very idea of a unique soul) is tied up in the word fungible. And that’s what makes it, well, not exactly a Word Patrick Likes, exactly, but one that’s pretty damn important.

A flange is a raised circle or collar used to make something easier to turn. Like, for instance, a valve. So when someone asks you to turn the flange, the are asking you to turn the knobby little bit that twists a shaft and ultimately opens or closes a valve.

A valve is a device for controlling the passage of a fluid through a pipe or duct. As such, your heart has valves. But it has no flanges. Unless you are very, very ill or have undergone some seriously wierd surgery.

This is the virtue of precision. Unless you’ve really needed precision, you might not have noticed how lacking this virtue is in language. To turn the steering wheel is not the same as directing the motion of the car as any desperate fool in a skid can tell you.

All of these distinctions seem semantic and trivial right up until the point that you need them. But it is the distinctions that give our writing, thinking and living meaning. That is why words like things and stuff are to be avoided. They are hollow, hold little or no meaning and provide no distinctions.

Even as a synonym for that brontosaurial ancestor of modern transistor — the vaccum tube — flange is precise in all it’s senses. And that’s why it’s a Word that Patrick Likes.

Sadly it is the ideal word to illustrate a truth of language. None of us are masters of language — all of us are just swimming within the larger current. So it is that my happy little word has come to signify an endpoint on the severely limited continuum of modern American political discourse. To the far left we have moonbat and to the far right my helpful, joyous little word, wingnut.

I guess that’s what happens when you fall in with a bad crowd, the kind that thinks that politics is important, and is worth talking about. And somehow, through an unknowable machinery of graft, bribery, corruption and bullshit that politics can make the world a better place.

Yes, the word wingnut is loveable for what it really is, yet serves as a reminder that anyone who uses the language works with a shared tool the ultimate direction of which is beyond any individual’s control. And that’s why it’s a Word that Patrick likes.

As a writer raised by Economists, I have some perspective that other’s don’t have, and maybe don’t want. (There’s a reason it’s called the dismal science after all.) But when approaching the question of how to price an e-book, sound economic theory (not that macroeconomic crap that everybody is currently lying their ass off about) can lend some interesting perspective.

Price vs. Cost

A price is only part of what a good or service costs you. Especially a book. In the economic sense, the true cost of something is what you give up to have or consume it. In the case of the book, you spend some money on the book, but the bulk of the cost is in the time you spend reading it. So book price + time cost = the true cost of the book.

So let’s say I buy an e-book for $3 ($2.99) and it takes me 8 hours to read it. Apply some guesstimate for what my time is worth (say $30 an hour) and you get to a true cost of $243 dollars for me to read a book. A little over 1% of which is the actual price of the book.

This is fascinating. And moves me to ask.

Does it matter what the Price of a Book is?

If my estimate of the cost is correct, are people really that sensitive to a change in price? Or, more importantly, if I double the price of my ebook (a 1% rise in the true cost of consuming a book) are sales going to change at all?

Economic theory cannot answer this question for us. The only way to know the answer for sure is to try it for a specific book at a specific time. And even that is not a true experiment in the scientific sense because there are too many factors to control. All we can know it what happened with that one book for that one period. So here’s what happened when I raised the price of How to Succeed in Evil from $0.99 to $2.99 –

Sales went up. I was averaging about nine books a day. Now I’m up to fourteen.

It’s crazy to think that an increase in price causes and increase in sales. I think if I had left the price at 99 cents I would now also be at 14 e-books a day. I don’t think price matters that much. Especially within the accepted range. Economic theory can really say nothing about this particular case, but it can help us understand the forces at work. And before you discount this, please consider, this is really more help than it may first sound. To draw an imperfect analogy, even if you don’t know what the gravitational constant is, it is still very helpful to know that gravity sucks.

The Elasticity of Demand.

The Law of Demand states that the lower the price of a good or service, the more of it any one person will buy. For example, When cars are expensive, a family only has one. When cars are cheap, everybody gets their own car.

The question is, how much does the price of something have to rise or fall to make a difference. That’s the Elasticity of Demand. For example:

Cigarettes have very inelastic demand curve. They are addictive, so when you want them, you want them. Price goes up, still gonna smoke. Kidney Dialysis is inelastic. Unless you get another kidney, dialysis is perfectly inelastic. You get dialysis or you die.

So what about books?

Fans and the Elasticity of Demand.

By definition a fan is somebody who is addicted to an entertainment product. They have a highly inelastic demand curve for whatever that product is. For example, people who are fans of Game of Thrones or Harry Potter. When the next book comes out, they simply HAVE to have it.

Creating Inelasticity

First, you’ve got to be able to write well. That’s price of entry. If you can’t do that, no knowledge of economic theory (or any other kind of theory) will make up for lack of talent. But assuming you are a fair hand at pushing a noun against a verb there are a couple of conclusions we can reasonably draw.

Be unique. If there aren’t any other good substitutes for what you put out, then people have no alternative but to buy from you. I think that well-written fiction is a pretty inelastic thing. When somebody wants a Stephen King novel, pretty much only a Stephen King novel will do. Because he’s the only guy who sees the world the way Stephen King does.

Create rich characters. This is pretty obvious. You can put a character in the most interesting suspenseful situation you like, but if the reader doesn’t care what happens to them, why continue? I think this is why mystery is such a popular genre. It lifts a lot of weight off the characters. People can either like the character or need to know how it turns out.

Don’t screw up the plot. There’s an eternal tension between character and plot. And, in the larger sense, story construction is a gigantic, difficult subject. But the fact remains, if you plot well, you suck the reader in. They want to know what happens next. They need to know what happens in the next book. Which leads us to the last point.

Write a series. When a reader is bought in, they want more. They want more of you as a writer and they want more of the characters they have invested so much time in. It is not a coincidence that the best-selling Kindle authors, the ones that are really putting up some numbers have series. As a personal note, this may be kinda hard for me, as the number of ideas I have are always threatening to draw me off into new challenges. I believe that I, you and everybody needs to follow passion — that’s what keeps us working — but, if your bliss allows it, a series is a good way to create that inelasticity which all authors crave.

To sum it up

I can’t pretend that common sense won’t get you to all of these conclusions. But having names for things allows us to think about them more clearly. The elasticity of demand is no exception.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2032057/Laser-assisted-water-condensation-used-create-rainfall.html

If you’ve read How to Succeed in Evil, you’ll know I spend a bit of time tearing this idea apart. I never thought such a think would actually happen. Although it’s nice to see an Evil Scientist using a giant laser in space for something useful. Instead of, say, blowing up an otherwise useful city.

Very much so.

I’ve practiced a couple arts in my time, and there is a commonality between all of them. Progress equates to learning. When I realized this I became very interested in things like teaching and learning and practice. No matter how gifted you may be, to be very good at something, you have to practice your ass off. Even the most expensive diamond came out of the ground looking like a hunk of dirty, white-trash quartz. It’s only after careful cutting and endless polishing that its true worth and beauty are revealed.

So, the book works. People like it. But just because I wrote it doesn’t mean that I know why this is so. For example, the basic idea of the book is that Edwin gives advice, in a consultant role, and people don’t listen to it. On the surface, it seems that this is a pretty niche audience. People in a consultant role. But as the book has reached wider and wider audiences, I have learned that the pain and frustration of trying your best to help someone and having them ignore your advice is universal. It’s the deeper pain and frustration of not being heard. I have learned that this is frustration is as universal as the need to breath.

But I have just learned/noticed something else. I didn’t write a thriller. On it’s face that sounds pretty stupid, I know, but it’s very interesting to me that a great number of the authors who are doing well in e-books are writing thrillers/mysteries.

Sure, How to Succeed in Evil has a plot. It moves along. People want to know what happens next. But it doesn’t depend on brute force to drive it forward. The people who like it, like the characters. Sure, they like the funny bits, but many people go out of the way to talk about the parts where Edwin is thinking. For me, this is what is interesting. How someone’s mind changes as result of there experience. And how their experience changes as a result of changing their mind. And the drama (and it is often very dramatic) of ideation and problem solving. But when I was writing ‘Evil, I didn’t know if it would play or not. To my surprise, it has.

You learn something new every day, I guess, but only if you are paying attention.

In Latin it literally means, “from the window”. And it is used, quite logically, to describe the act of throwing a person or object from a window. But here’s the interesting part: in and of itself defenestration is not usually enough to kill people. And especially not in the 1600′s (when defenestrating was all the rage) before the advent of steel framed building.

Oh, sure, getting thrown out of a window hurts, But, if the fall is less than five stories, you stand a pretty good chance of living through it. Which leads to an interesting practice. In many cases of defenestration the victim was stabbed or shot and THEN thrown out the window.

This act is so fraught with wrath and frustration it deserves its own word. Think about it. You’ve killed somebody. They’re dead. Instead of cooling off or running away or hiding the body, or are so moved that you must you heave it out a window into the town square for everyone to see.

No matter what page you open to in the book of history you are certain to find someone killing somebody. But defenestration? well that’s rare. It takes some creativity, some style, some planning and a window. And that’s why it’s a Word Patrick Likes.

• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,123 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #61 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Comic
  • #64 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Science Fiction
  • #67 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Humor

Now, an overall Kindle rank of #2,123 might not seem like it’s that great. But it’s hanging out there. In fact, I think it’s picking up steam. (I haven’t been monitoring it all that well, I’ve been writing another book and generally living life at a frantic pace.) But consider, there are over 765,000 books available in the Kindle store. That means that How to Succeed in Evil is in the top 0.003%. Toto, I don’t think we’re in the Long End of the Tail anymore.

Look at the company I’m keeping!

I’m 8 spots higher than Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on the humor list! My mouth is hanging open. Honest to God I teared up a little when I typed that. I’m also right below the FRIGGIN FOUNDATION novels by Isaac Asimov on the general science fiction list!!!

Y’know, this isn’t the big time by a long shot. Asimov is sitting over there at 59 on the list with a work that was first published in 1942! And it will be there long after HtSiE is gone. Rightfully so, because if you asked me which book of these two books you should read first, I would say you gotta go with Foundation every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

In fact, Salvador Hardin was one of the characters I drew on for Edwin Windsor. And the Foundation novels were always in my mind when I was writing ‘Evil. Those books are about people being SMART. (That’s capital SMART) People solving things with their brains rather than ray guns or fisticuffs. For how riveting those books are, it’s remarkable how little action there is in them.

But still, I think I just crossed some kind of threshold. And I am overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude. Thanks to everybody who bought the e-book, listened to the podcast and told a friend. I might have written the book, but you made this happen. And based on the way things are going, it doesn’t look like my ‘Evil saga is over yet.

Anyway, back to writing. With a little luck I’m going to cross 100,000 words on the sequel today. I’m certainly fired up enough to do it.

The rest of the world was trapped by jobs they hated, choking down bad coffee and stale donuts while tripping the lights florescent, and punching the time card interminable. And I, lucky bastard that I was, was tracking fresh trails through unexplored dew by the light of morning.

It was at the height of my realization that my friend turned to me and said, in a mockingly English upper-crust accent, “I wonder what the peasants are doing today?”

“Shall you be lopping off ‘eads today, sire?” I asked.

“I know, let’s play a round and then decide!” he replied.

To appreciate how funny this was, you have to understand that we were playing golf on what was perhaps the worst public golf course within a 100-mile radius, but that morning, it conveyed a feeling of ineffable nobility. In spite of the fact that several golfers had recently been mugged on the number five tee.  We had no fears on that account, because they can’t steal what you don’t have.

No heads (or empty wallets) were lost that day, among the commoners or the gentry, but I have never forgotten that use of the word peasant. And it so it has remained, A Word Patrick Likes.

There’s a lot to be said for rebellion, both in favor and against. No matter how unjust a state of affairs may be, rebellion means that quite a lot of people must die. And death, as should be obvious, is almost always worse than injustice. Timid words and the dusty pages of history are cast in new light when one realizes that a rebellion consists of people who abandon their settled way of life for the uncertain chance of revolution because they feel it is the best option they have.

But whatever the terrible consequence that rebellion and it’s foment may have, the word raises an interesting linguistic question What’s the antonym of foment?

Does it mean to dry out a wound? To unapply a poultice? There really isnt a word for that. And there really isn’t a word that means the opposite of foment.

This happens a lot with language. Very often, we find that there isn’t a precise word for something we want to describe. Reality is continuous and unlimited. Language is discrete and finite.

But I think we really need a word for the opposite of foment. Because all over the world, people are very, very unhappy right now. Many rebellions are fomenting. And many people are trying to unfoment them.

See, see how nasty that is not to have a word for that concept right there? But not just nasty, in terms of the flow of the prose, it is also intellectually troublesome. Because if you don’t have a word for something, it’s really hard to deal with it or understand it. That’s why most of the scientific enlightenment was devoted to classification of things.

So let’s go to the next best word. Pacify maybe. Mollify. Appease. Appeasement might work. Saudi Arabia just tried appeasement when they paid off their citizens. Maybe douse. Douse is probably the closest word. And, in the sense of things, related. Both words relate to the employment of fluids.

Foment a rebellion or douse one. One thing is certain. These are fomentous times we live in. There are riots in London. There are riots in Egypt. There are riots in Paris and Greece. Rebellion is fomented in many places around the world. But will it be doused? I cannot say. But in these uncertain times we live in, I take my pleasures where I can. And one of them is foment itself — A Word Patrick Likes.

Edwin making a video.

As rule, Edwin avoided the spotlight, but as CEO and primary owner of Omdemnity Insurance, there were certain figurehead roles that he needed to fill. You learn many things when you run your own business and the first one that Edwin learned was, “use a figurehead.” As he sat in a chair an endured having his face dabbed with make up, he reflected on this lesson now.

“There you go, you’re just beautiful.”

Edwin cocked his head like a bird and looked directly at the thin, sickly looking man who applied the make-up. It only took a moment of Edwin’s uncomfortable gaze and he went away. Beautiful? Edwin was concerned with far more important things than beauty. Beauty was fading. Beauty was fleeing, but capital — ah, capital lasted. Built fortunes, companies, countries.

It was not Edwin’s stare that drove the man away, but rather the utter calm behind it. When a normal person stares at you, you get these little flickers of transitory thoughts and fears and doubts — but when Edwin stared at the makeup assistant, the assistant saw nothing. An endless, clear calm stared back at him from the depths of Edwin’s eyes. For one who’s mind was absorbed with the endless trivia of the tabloids and talk shows and fashion magazines the experience was horrifying — like encountering an alien. “Oh my God, what is that in your head?” his eyes seemed to ask before he ran away.

A thought, Edwin’s gaze answered, there is a thought in my head.

Suitably prepared, Edwin buttoned his coat, tugged his collars into place and moved into position.

“Are you ready, Mister Windsor?” asked the director? Edwin merely nodded.

The newest employee of Omdemnity Insurance, a fresh-faced lad of twenty-three, dressed in a cheap, ill-fitting suit, took his place next to Edwin and the Director called action. Edwin looked into the camera and said, “Welcome to Omdemnity Insurance. As a new employee, there are many policies and procedures you will need to master. This video will help. But all of them boil down to just two things. Trust –”
Hearing his cue, the young man turned his back towards Edwin, crossed his hands over his chest, closed his eyes and fell backwards exactly as he had been instructed. He believed, with the faith of a small child, that Edwin was going to catch him.
He was wrong.

When he hit the floor, he learned an important lesson about trust. Edwin continued, “– and common sense.” The camera followed Edwin as he walked behind his desk. The sound of a young man attaining wisdom, which sounded exactly like a mildly concussed person trying to catch his breath after having the wind knocked out of him, did not take too much away from Edwin’s performance.

“At Omdemnity Insurance, our clients trust us to insure and otherwise indemnify them from a range of risks that only yesterday were thought to be uninsurable. So you can take pride in the fact that you are part of an organization on the cutting edge of risk management.
“We do not do our work recklessly or because we are rash. It is our prudence, more than anything else, our common sense, that allows us to grow and thrive.

In closing, I ask you to pay careful attention to the policies and procedures that have made this company great. Follow the rules and together we will all succeed.” He sat at his desk and picked up a stack of papers, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s plenty of work to be done.”

The director said, “CUT!” Two production assistants quickly ran in and scooped up the injured young employee. As they helped him from the room, he managed to turn and ask Edwin, “Why?”

Edwin gestured to a black man in a suit who was standing on the edge of the room. He quickly interposed himself between Edwin and the recently concussed young man and escorted him from the room.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”

The abbreviation e.g. means ‘for example’ but for me, the term is far, far cooler than that. It’s short for Exempli Gratia, which literally translates as free example. And what I love about that is the connotation it gives the term. It’s as if when you use e.g. you are saying, “Hey, I’ll give you this example for free, but the next one is gonna cost you. So pay attention numbnuts.”

E.g. a drug dealer handing out crack to a 5th grade class to hook them on the product. I.e. Baby, they’re free the first time.

E.g. is often confused with it’s Latin cousin i.e. but to interchange them is incorrect. I.e. is short for ‘id est’ which means “that is.”

Let me illustrate with an example that I won’t charge you for.

A politician e.g. Ted Kennedy

A politician i.e. that semi-veterbrate, parasitic eel clamped lamprey-like on the soft-underbelly of the American public as it gorges itself on the seemingly limitless blood-red dollars of soulless lobbyists.

I don’t think it’s a major sin to confuse i.e. with e.g. In fact, I think you can go your whole writing life without using either of them. But there is something dashing and magnanimous about the idea of giving someone a free example. Something which is made inexpressibly cooler by saying it in Latin. And that’s why Exempli Gratia is a term Patrick likes.

That, and this scene from ‘Get Shorty’

But language and class warfare aside, death by inches is a hell of a concept. And if you’ve ever tried to kill off credit card debt you know just what I mean. It only goes little by little.

Amortize is the way you complete a journey of a thousand miles. The way you eat an elephant. It’s also the way you write a novel. A little bit at a time. For me there is a tremendous power in the idea of the increment. The little by little. Behavioral scientists call this “chunking”, when you break a large task into smaller steps so that it’s easier to accomplish.

Want to be President of the United States of America or climb Mount Everest? Then start training early and amortize it. I don’t recommend either of those goals. I believe in you and know that you have great and useful things to do with your life. You are too smart to trudge to your death (one step at at time) and too smart to doublespeak your mind into annihilation (one lie at a time.)

But whatever path you choose, whatever goals you may seek, recognize that amortize, with it’s incremental, financial connotation, holds one of the great truths of our existence — whatever you get you have have pay for — one way or another. Most usually, one way AND another. I don’t like the fact, but the word captures it so perfectly, I cannot deny that it is a Word Patrick Likes.

Not to cast the scope too wide or too profound, but what’s happening with books is really the nature of all human progress. We all have wants and needs. We really don’t care how they get met, we just want them met as cheaply and easily as possible.

People need transportation, so they use horses. The Henry Ford comes along with the Model T. Sorry there Trigger it’s the glue factory for you.

Same thing with books. Sure, people will still have books. The same way people still have horses and enjoy them. They’re just not going to be using horses to get to work, haul cargo or plow a field.

How many college students want to hold onto their textbooks? What happened to the vast industry that developed around writing and producing Radio drama? How about all those guys who used to shovel coal in the boiler-rooms of steam-powered engines?

The need for story and entertainment is eternal. All the rest of it falls somewhere on the obsolescence curve.

As cute as Kerfuffle sounds, (I mean really, doesn’t it sound like it should be used to describe a laundry basket full of kittens wrestling over a dryer-fresh argyle sock?) it has a fine, strong, useful meaning.

Ker is a Gaelic word which means to twist or bend. And fuffle means disorder or confusion. The two were first combined by wily Scottish wordbenders in 1813.

A kerfuffle then is most directly defined as a bent confusion. And that’s awesome. Like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, a kerfuffle is a screw-up bent around a misunderstanding. It’s the bacon-wrapped scallop of interpersonal mayhem.

It’s the two guys, saying the exact same thing in slightly different words, who are about to come to blows, because nobody will shut up long enough to listen. Add alcohol and shake, and you’ve got a fight. But just shy of that, you’ve got a bent confusion. A Kerfuffle.

How can that not be a Word Patrick Likes?

Literally, sitting is killing you. If you are not familiar with this, I give you this infographic from Medical Billing And Coding (references at the bottom.)

But what to do about it? The helpful infographic suggests that walking around the office as much as you can is a solution and I’m not saying that doesn’t help. But it doesn’t really counteract the stuff that sitting does to your hip and lower back flexibility. It doesn’t really counteract all of the stuff that goes catawumpus with your circulatory and lymphatic systems.

When I first started writing professionally 18 years ago I immediately developed back problems. From incessant sitting, my core muscles started to weaken and then my lower back muscles had to strain to hold me upright. This turns out to be pretty common.

From that time until now, I have sought out ways to counteract the harmful effects of sitting. But there is one thing that EVERYONE has the time, capability and equipment to do to reverse the harmful effects of sitting.

Roll around on the floor.

I’m not kidding. At all. Get out of your chair, lie down on the floor and roll around. Any way you feel like it. It’s a massage. Depending on how you move, it’s a stretch. And, boy oh boy is it good for strengthening your tendons and core muscles.

You really don’t need any more instruction than that. Move around on the floor. Crawl. Roll. Walk on your hands and knees. Walk on your hands and feet. Belly crawl. Do a couple of push ups. Do whatever you want. Do whatever you can.

You’ll get bonus points for putting your feet above your head and heart, but, really, any movement you do down on the floor will help you. And it will all work much better if you don’t hold your breath.

Yes, you might look a little silly. But go ahead, give it a try and see if you don’t feel much, much better.

For me, it’s the antidote for sitting.

The bowels of hell. The bowels of night. The bowels of Uncle Frank. The bowels of New Jersey.

Combine the word bowels with almost anything else and you get an instant emotional response. Also an instant physiological response.

The word bowels rattles around in your nether regions like a 54 ounce steak through Jackie Gleason’s colon in 1958.

By the bowels of Greyskull. By the Bowels invested in me. Bowl at the moon.

In ancient times it was believed that the bowels were the seat of the more violent passions in the body. Love, hate that kind of thing. In fact, it’s the same nexus of meaning that gives the word ‘guts’ its tough-guy connotation.

Guts is another great word, by the way. It’s all fine and good to have courage when you are up there, riding a horse and protected by thick shiny armor, but when down here in the trench — when it’s just man to man — you gotta have guts. You gotta have that fortitude that prevents your bowels from turning to water.

You need, quite simply, the fire in your belly.

Combine all that with the fact that Bowels is one of the more entertaining two-syllable words you can say, and it’s easy to see why Bowels qualifies as a Word Patrick Likes.

Anyway, the sequel is coming and it’s title is ‘Hostile Takeover.’

I won’t spoil the plot, but I can give you this. The main character is TOPPER! And, in the course of the novel, he winds up in charge. With hilarious and extreme consequences. Of course, Edwin is a major character, but Topper tells the tale. It’s much like Watson telling us about the exploits of Sherlock Holmes.

It’s already very funny. And it’s also proving to be very moving at points. After all, we’re going to proceed deeper and deeper into the unlikely friendship between these two men. Of course, we’ll meet a new host of outrageous, super-powered characters, and we will resolve the unfinished business with Excelsior once and for all.

So for everybody who has been hanging in there for the next installment, it’s one GIANT step closer. Or, more to the point, 50,000 tiny little steps closer. Thanks, as always, for your support and stay tuned for more.

Hamper is a funny sounding word, which in its verb from means to hinder or impede the progress of. It gets this sense from hampren, another 14th century word, which means to imprison or confine. And I would venture to say, that it is this sense of the word that creates my personal difficulty with the basket designed to hold dirty clothes in my bathroom. I’m not much on confines you see, and have never been able to reconcile myself to the idea that my clothes should have to endure a cruel imprisonment without due process of law. Especially after they have given me such good service. Surely, my habit, schmatta as it may be, deserves better than that.

So if you want my personal definition of Hamper, I would describe it as:

that barbarous relic of torture and imprisonment around which I scatter clothes as a way of honoring all those who suffered the injustices of rapacious 14th century government.

Why my wife wants to keep a reminder of benighted ages — a wicker woven equivalent of an Iron Maiden in our lovely home — I may never know. But whatever the reason, hamper remains a Word Patrick likes. If for no other reason than it’s funny-sounding.

Even on vacation, say, in the Carribean. At one of those of those poolside bars where they dispense the rum drinks with the funny little umbrellas.

Like this.

“Excuse me, Coconut publican, I’ll take a rum drink with a funny little hat and a croquet mallet…

“What? Look,

“I don’t care that you don’t have a Croquet court. I just want the mallet. Cmon, This is a full service bar. An all inclusive resort. So I want  my drink and I want my croquet mallet.

“Look buddy,

“If I don’t get a croquet mallet here I will go find one somewhere else. And then I’ll return to you fine, thatch-covered establishment. And I’m going to suck down about three hundred of those fruity drinks. And then I’m gonna heft my mallet in the air and  and demand satisfaction from you Mr. Resort Bartender. All because you wouldn’t do your job and get me a croquet mallet when I asked for it.

Yes sir. See mallet comes in handy just about anywhere. And that’s why it’s a word Patrick likes. Or maybe it’s just because he needs a vacation.

And if you’ve caught that Agnes reference. If you’ve listened to all the podcasts and versions. If you’re a true fan, then take a moment to write a review on Amazon, won’t you. The ebook version is tighter, tauter and another iteration better — but it’s the same story with the same wonderful characters that you’ve known and loved. If you are so moved, please gush with confidence. Your kind words will help others find it, and help me attract a bigger audience.

99 cents, right here.

You know those “About the Author” blurbs that begin with poignant details from the writer’s childhood? The ones that quickly move through a series of credentials and accomplishments so impressive that they make you feel that if you don’t buy a book then everyone will recognize you for the uncultured Philistine that you are? Yeah, this is not that kind of author blurb. This is the other kind.

This is an about the author blurb that actually tells you about the author. If you stick with this blurb it will tell you that Patrick has been shot, has fallen off a mountain, was once framed for a crime he did not commit. That he has gambled with his rent money and knows how to replace the water pump in a 1966 Chrysler. And, much like a feral boy raised by wolves, he was brought up by economists and can interpret the strange dances and guttural utterances of their dismal tribe.

But most of all this blurb wants you to know that Patrick can write. That he puts words and concepts and characters together in a way that will make your synapses light up like an accident in an unlicensed fireworks factory. Yes, a substance that powerful should be illegal. But now — before the BATF raids your house and seizes all copies of this, the World’s Most Dangerous “About the Author” blurb —  you’ve got a chance to get his writing and find out for yourself.

If you don’t use this chance, Patrick won’t hold it against you. After all, he’s a nice, easy-going kind of guy. But this Blurb will know. And believe me, this is one “About the Author” blurb you don’t want to cross.

Anyway, part of this brochure was supposed to encourage people be safe while using ATMs (oh yes, those had been invented, so it was like 1994 or so.) I wrote a bit of prose that went something like this, “Be on the lookout for suspicious characters lurking around ATMs.”

Sadly, my choice of adverb did not survive contact with the client. They thought that lurking was far too scary of a word. I agreed that it was scary but that was the whole point — to bring a heightened awareness of the risks of getting mugged, so that bank customers would be more cautious while using ATMs. In the end, my logic fared no better with the humorless bank clients than did the word lurking. It was dead. Dead. Dead. Dead Oh, the heartbreak of the professional wordslinger.

But now that I am older I have achieved, well, not wisdom exactly, but a philosophical distance from the passions of my youth. I can now admit that the bankers were right.

Lurking is a terrifying word. You might not think so, but that just because that you are young and foolish (or old and lucky) and have been lulled into complacency by your life of lurk-free encounters. That does not mean that things are not out there lurking. In fact, they are probably lurking very close to you now.

This, in and of itself is not scary. It was lurking implies — or must inexorably evolve into. At some point the lurking must become pouncing and gnashing and clawing and tearing (or perhaps just mugging) but in any event, no good can come from lurking. To lurk is to set in effect a powerful chain of events that cannot be stopped. Not by the lurkee. Not by the lurker. And certainly not by banking brochures.

Lurking is an action and a word with the suspense baked in.

And that’s why it’s a word that Patrick likes.

There are those who think that the business of the law is conducted in the open air of the courtroom. That every discussion and decision is held in the hallowed halls of justice amid august assembly — wise fathers in togas chiseling words in stone so that Justice might be preserved through the ages. But it is not so. That’s the nickel tour. That’s civics class. That’s the “Babies-come-from-Storks” explanation. And just like the miracle of birth, the reality of the manufacture of justice is much, much messier.

He is praying, to whatever committee of dark gods bureaucrats pray to in their secret, inefficient hearts, that Gus will pull through.

He wears the Red, White and Blue, and is sworn do defend the US of A. Even the cold, flat parts that everybody moves away from when they get out of high school.

In some ways, it’s not funny at all. I was did some work with a company in Buffalo, NY. As the GM was driving me to the airport, he said, “This is our new airport. The joke is it’s where we take our kids to say goodbye to them.”

I said, “That’s really not very funny.” But hey, at least I made some funny out of it in the book.

“To this end, Gus is authorized to use whatever methods he see fit. Flattery, bribery, football metaphors, even appeals to reason —- anything, just so long as it keeps the big guy in the game.”

Authorized to use football metaphors. Something is either very wrong with me, or very right with me. You decide.

So I wrote it on the spot, set up the shot, rehearsed it twice and then the magic happened. And by magic I mean Seriously Brilliant Acting. It’s pre-5d, so excuse the picture quality. No budget for film.

I know this because one morning many years ago, I actually wore up with ringworm. It was a little red splotch on my left arm that itched. The next time I looked at it, it was all over my arm. Being a reasonably hygienic citizen of the first world, I had no experience with this condition. It is, in fact, a fungus like athlete’s foot, not a worm. Although, in the most perverse of ways, having it be a worm would be so much cooler. As it is, you slather a little cream on it for a few weeks (yes, weeks and it’s gone)

I contracted ringworm while doing Brazilian Ju Jutsu. I have many funny stories from years of doing Martial Arts but this is not one of them. As it turns out, ringworm is pretty common among grapplers. One of my training partners showed me a fresh burn on his arm. He explained to me that whenever he found a tiny spot of it, he would just burn it off. If you think this is nuts you are not entirely wrong, you’ve just never had ringworm.

So when I tell you that I am thinking about burning myself to get some of this busy off of me, please don’t think I’ve gone completely nuts. I’ve just reached the “GET IT THE *@#! OFF ME!” point. And here’s why:

1. The second part of Unkillable ( insert brilliant sequel title here ) is inches away from a complete first draft.
2. I’ve outlined the sequel to How to Succeed in Evil. (Working title: How to Succeed in Evil: Force Majeure. Go ahead, Google ‘Force Majeure.’ It’s cool.) I’m eager to get on with it. Not only is it really, really good, but I have some guilt to expiate. I’ve cliffhangered the faithful for years now. They’ve warmed up a special circle in author-hell for me for that, I am certain.
3. I’ve got a bunch of edits on the draft of the first How to Succeed in Evil and as soon as I get them done, it will be on Amazon.

So if you are frustrated that all I am giving you is a preview of coming attractions, if you are frustrated because I’m not giving you any dates, if you are frustrated because I’m mortaring clauses together with commas in the style of 18th century essayists as I extend this sentence into a mighty wave of paragraph that breaks itself on an ironic and postmodern dash — I’m here to tell you, I’m frustrated too.

But soon. Soon we will both find satisfaction.

The Teardown is a mini-series of 10 questions on the nature of podcasting, put to 10 well-known podcast authors. The questions are the same. The answers might just surprise you.

John has written and podcasted a couple of books himself so he knows how to ask a good question. It was a fun interview, but I’m really interested in the rest of the series. He’s got a great lineup and I’m interested in stealing all the ideas I can Seriously, if you have any aspirations or interests around podcast, check out some of these. I think it’s a brilliant idea.

http://johnmierau.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/the-podcast-teardown-2-patrick-e-mclean/

The “National Enquirer” question of what happens after you die is of little or no interest to me as a writer. It’s a question that I can easily answer. The only problem is, after I do so, I will have no way to transmit my report back to you faithful reader. One way or another, I will have an answer. The question isn’t interesting to me, because I can’t do anything about it in a meaningful sense.

What is more interesting to me is how I (and people in general) come to grips with life. See, death is easy. Especially for a writer. Most of the time, you kill a character and you’re done with them. Death is also, neat (after the initial cleanup) irrevocable and perfectly democratic — it gets everybody in the end. Life is the tricky part.

And, for me, that’s really why Unkillable is a thing worth making. Because it’s about a young man’s relationship to life. How he figures out it’s worth living, but only after he’s dead. Or quasi-dead. For me, that’s not only an interesting question, but also practical one. Life is often very difficult. How do you find the the enthusiasm, elan, strength of spirit — whatever you want to call it —  to continue on in dire straits?

If, in the final reading, Unkillable was nothing more than a revenge story with some good characters then I would have failed. I would have created something that is smaller than the sum of it’s parts.

The good news is that I didn’t fail. Unkillable is a good yarn, and in it I think I managed to deal with essential spiritual questions without resorting to simple answers or crass fundamentalism.

What do you think?

So the fact that Terry Pratchett exists at all (and is the #2 selling author in the UK) gave me hope. But when I realized I couldn’t enter his contest because of the accident of my birth, my hopes were dashed.

So to protest I entered anyway and sent the following letter. I am an American, there’s really not much I can do about that. But that means that not following English rules (or understanding Cricket) is in my blood.

Dear Sir Terry Pratchett

I was overjoyed to hear of the Pratchett Prize, but, upon examining the rules of your contest, my hopes were dashed, for you have excluded the United States and with it 36% of the world’s English-speaking population.

I implore you to make an exception. If possible, a general exception to include all former colonies, but I will settle for a personal exception for any or all of the reasons given below.

1) Turtles — You and I both know it’s turtles all the way down. Which makes national boundaries seem even more foolish and arbitrary than they already are.

2) Literary Asylum — I have written a nuanced satire involving the tropes of the superhero genre. And, in the United States, both nuance and satire have a rough time of it. I send my book to you in the hopes it might find a better life in a foreign land.

3) Historic Precedent — I submit this work from land which was originally conveyed to the 1st Earl of Shaftsbury by King Charles II. It was known as the Province of Carolina. So, while not meeting the exact letter of your contest’s rules, I do meet the spirit. (far more so than if I was submitting from say, the vapid, overpopulated desert of the Los Angeles Basin.)

4) Technological — If it is true that you have excluded the United States from your contest because our harsh Americanized spelling of words like color and flavor are too jarring to your English sensibilities, I am happy to run my manuscript through Google Translate.

5) Lend-Lease — While it is true that in 2006 your then Economic Secretary of the Treasury (and still unfortunately named) Edward Balls, made the final $83.3 million payment on the WWII lend-lease funds, it does not seem too much ask to allow the United States into your contest in exchange for the favorable credit terms which we extended you.

6) Ex Post Facto Residency — If I win the contest, I’ll move to London for at least two weeks. Maybe three.

7) Dignity — While there was the unpleasant business of the revolution (and the more recent debacles and embarrassments of American foreign policy) it is not in keeping with the high honor of a Commander of the Order of the British Empire to hold a grudge. How would one illustrate a grudge on your Coat of Arms? Besides retained grudges can become infected in a way no poultice or pill may cure.

8 ) Kafkaesque — Havent’ we all had our fill of senselessly applied procedures and rules? It is your contest, Sir Terry. You can change it.

9) For the Empire — You can make the admission of my book, “How to Succeed in Evil” a powerful message that you are reclaiming all former British colonies in the New World. Yes, it’s a long shot, but if it works you will most certainly be advanced to a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. Then you will get to wear that purple dressing gown thingee. Mantle is it? Which I hear is lined with grey silk and provides great relief during the drafty winter months.

10) Rhetorical — If you do not grant me admission to your contest it can only mean that words have no power to move the hardest of hearts. If this is so, how can any good cause hope to sway those in power to the side of right? Chivalry will have been dealt the final blow by your hand. Sir Terry, how could you?

11) Civility — I asked nicely. Hopefully humorously and eloquently, but I most certainly asked nicely. That has to count for something.

But they’re not always that strategic. It might even be correct to say that they are *rarely* strategic. Hence, my response below.

For our message to be compelling it needs to be about them, rather than about us. Right now it’s all about us, like an adolescent boy bragging about his non-existent sexual prowess. “We’ve got THE answer.” “I’m THE man, baby.” That message does not get the girl, no matter what benefit we put in it.

“Ah come on Baby, I’ve got EXPERIENCE!”

“Seriously, you need to spend some time with me, because I’ve got the QUALITY you need.”

“I give the best CUSTOMER SERVICE, you know what I’m sayin’ heh, heh, heh.”

But if the adolescent boy would take a moment to put the message in her terms it might stand a chance of working “You look really pretty today. Do your eyes change color depending on what you’re wearing?”

Or get an ebook at Smashwords or Amazon

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

I think the reason we read fiction, watch movies and make and consume stories of all kinds, is because we want to understand ourselves. Fiction is the best tool for this job, because it allows an author to crack open a character’s skull and show us what’s going on inside. In this way we can develop a very sophisticated idea of what the other strange creatures who get in our way on the sidewalk are really like. Instead of obstacles or objects of desire, they can become people.

I did this skull-cracking thing pretty literally (complete with disturbing sound effect) in the 4th installment of Death of a Dishwasher. { link } The struggle for Dan to understand himself in the midst of unimaginable circumstances is what I feel makes Unkillable { link } more than just another murdered-guy-brought-back-from-the-dead-by-a-rat-and-given-a-shot-at-revenge story.

The first time this truth about stories really clicked for me, I was watching this scene from Lawrence of Arabia. Self-discovery is the heart of the whole movie for me. In this scene, it is literally screamed at you.

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is  the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes  eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to  the west.

I swear, if eating were a faster way to really get a great book inside of you, I would do it. But as the man says, reading well takes time. And it’s work too.

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

#7 Burggggggggurp

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

• How to get started with social media.
• How to write effectively for the  online world.
• How to generate consistent content.
• How you can use new media tools to reach your real-world goals.

This is a hands-on, small format class. By the end of this three-hours, you’re going to have a working personal blog, integrated with Twitter and any other online presence you might have or want to set up.
Most importantly, this class includes two kinds of support and follow-up. First, Patrick will work with you to develop a content strategy and plan so you don’t run out of things to write about.

Class Requirements:
A laptop, an email account and an enthusiasm for new media.

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

If you don’t know about Ignite, you should. It’s a collection of short talks, 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide. I defy you to find a better way to spend next Wednesday night. Please come.

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

http://bigthink.com/ideas/20807

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Off the top of my head I came up with three other kinds of time. They are:

1) Closing time. ( 15 minutes ahead of the rest of the world )

2) Hammer time. ( 1980-89 R.I.P. ),

3) CLOBBERIN’ TIME! ( measured by the number of stony fist impacts )

What other kinds of time can you come up with?

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Strip it all away for a moment. Superbowl ads, text messages, billboards, emails, tweets, FB posts and ransom notes — throw them all out and what is fundamental to communication remains. There is a sender, a recipient, and a message. Lose any one of these three things and communication does not take place. All media exist so that a person can communicate with another person. And the way that people attempt communicate is through story.

So, why don’t we all start with the story? Sure, you can use Powerpoint or Keynote to help you communicate, but if the story you are trying to tell isn’t very good then, no matter how many animations you add, your presentation is going to be crap.

This equally true for an ad, a book, a twitter stream, a conversation on Facebook or a phone call with your long-lost college friend. If you don’t have anything to say, technology can’t make it better. As Exhibit A, I cite the entire Internet.

If you work with me, we start with the story and find manifold ways to exploit your story to it’s maximum advantage.

And if you are not working with me, you should start with your story anyway. Because nobody cares about the bells and whistles. Nobody falls in love, goes to war, changes their mind or buys anything because of a medium. They do it because of a message.

1) Old projects have to end for new projects to begin.

2) A 10 minute funny/interesting little audio bit on the internet can’t really evolve. It will only ever be a 10 minute funny/interesting little audio bit.

3) The name was a problem, as so eloquently pointed out by Scott Sigler ==>Sigler

It’s called “Stories I Told Myself” and it features the best of my work on the Seanachai Podcast. It also includes two never before released stories. “Getting Shot” the story of me, well, getting shot when I lived in L.A. and “The Rhetoric of Audio” which sums up everything I learned about writing for audio while creating “The Seanachai.”

So go ahead and buy one… for everyone you know.

BOOK PROMO MP3 —> Stories I Told Myself Promo <---

Download promo
So, I’m driving home one night and I get shot. Twice with one bullet, actually. It’s not a joke, it’s a true story. And like all true stories that don’t end in death, it is ultimately a comedy.
On March 24th at 9 pm I am going to read this story live on Stickam.com and I hope you’ll join me. It’s the story I have been trying to tell every since I started the Seanachai. And now that I finally got it on the page, it seems only fitting that this is going to be the last Seanachai episode.
Yes, the Seanachai is ending. It’s not the end of me producing and releasing content on the internet for free, but it is time to bring thispodcast to a decent and honorable close. Send it off in style. Give the auld storyteller a proper wake.
P.G. Holyfield is going to help me. We’ll take questions and calls, reminisce about times and episodes past. I hope to have a few special guest appearances. And I promise that I will have a couple of exciting medium-sized announcements about the future and what’s next.

March 24th, 9pm until, well, until we’re done. I hope you’ll join us at Stickam.com for a “Wake for the Seanachai.”

I believe we just entered what I call the Third Wave of Literacy. It’s tough to pinpoint this occurrence exactly – it’s not like anybody blew a whistle – but as I look back from the dizzying technological height of 2010, here are the divisions I can see.

The First Wave

In the first wave, only a very few people could read and write. The ones who could were scholars, priests and magicians. I add Magicians because, if you are in a pre-literate culture, really, what’s the difference between a priest and a magician? (Okay, maybe Magicians get cooler hats.)

The Second Wave

Around the 14th and 15th century the masses started to read. Dante made the very unusual choice to compose the Divine Comedy in Italian rather than Latin. In 1382, John Wycliffe was heretical enough to translate the Holy Bible into English. And to cap it off, in the 15th century, Gutenberg cranked up his printing press.

The Third Wave

As dramatic and world changing as the Second Wave was, it was still limited. Sure, everyone could read, but only a few could publish. As much as communication media have multiplied throughout the 20th century, a few people were in charge of what got produced/published/broadcasted/distributed. Around 2002, that all changed.

We are living in a time when everyone can consume media and everyone can create and distribute media. In essence, a six year old kid is on the same footing as the Pope, the President of the United States and a book editor. The next email you send can be forwarded to everyone in the world in under a second for free.

The opportunities and the perils of communication have never been greater. Welcome to the communications tsunami that is, the Third Wave of Literacy.

Okay, boys, this is the week we knock over the barn.

Uh boss? Why a barn again?

Because that’s where the blue bag is, you idiot. Remember: everyone wear suits, so we’ll stand out in a rural setting. Then we’ll meet up right under the big metal grain chute.

And there it is, “Why a barn again?”  The reason I wrote How to Succeed in Evil was to try and find a motivation for a villain that made a little sense to me.

Many more comic covers and commentary here:

http://www.lileks.com/institute/funny/07/45.html

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Judges 12:6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce [it] right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

This is the oldest example that I know of where the the quality of a person’s language is used to single them out. And as strange and bloody as this passage from the Old Testament is, the use of language as an identifier, or Shibboleth, is still very much with us.

Consider what would happen to a candidate in a job interview who, in deadly earnest, said, “Lemme axe you a question.” Unless the interview is for fry cook at McDonald’s, this non-standard use of language would put a serious dent in the interviewee’s chances. It’s not worth trying to argue with this linguistic prejudice. It exists and we all have to deal with it. We are judged by the way we speak and write.

Sadly, there ain’t much rational about these kinds of judgements. You know exactly what I meant by that last sentence, but, chances are, you had an emotional reaction to my use of the word “ain’t”. To write well requires a sensitivity to these nuances of language. Ya’ll know that. In fact, most of us manage our spoken diction very well. We don’t swear in church. We don’t curse around small children.

I favor a kinder, gentler, more forgiving, New Testament approach to language. I appreciate people who are direct and clear in all of their communications, and try very hard to pay more attention to the substance of any message than the wrapping. To me, that’s the only sane way to look at business communications. In a more perfect world, that’s how I think things would be. People who spoke and wrote correctly, yet had nothing to say would be ridiculed.

But the world is not like that. In fact, I’m not sure people have changed much since Biblical times. Trip up on one of these Shibboleth terms and you probably won’t get killed. But your career might.

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

At this rate I’l have no story at all by the end of the week and I’ll be free to move on to another project.

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

Some fine folks that I don’t know posted this video to YouTube of their adorable child. In the comments, they mentioned that the audio in the background was Patrick E. McLean’s “How to Succeed in Evil.”

I’m not sure how to feel about my voice screaming obscenities and hilarities at a child, so I will default to AWESOME!

Posted via email from PatrickEMcLean’s Posterous

It occurs to me, how much of my life I have spent in the practice of an art. As I write it, the word ‘art’ seems ladened with incorrect connotations. It seems more correct to describe the process as a craft. There is, to be certain, an art of writing. But to get to the art requires a tremendous amount of craft. So much craft that I find it misleading to talk about the ‘Art of Writing.’

As long as I have worked as a writer, I also have trained in the martial arts. When I set this fact into words, it seems such an odd contradiction to me that I have never been able to write about the martial arts. But the longer that I work in both arts, the more I come to believe they are the same. This may be an illusion of perspective. I may be making them the same through my work.

But whatever the reality may be, the question of why to practice any art remains. There is, I suppose a practical aspect to all things. One may build furniture because one needs a place to sit. One may also build furniture to sell because one needs money. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What compels someone to perfect the craft of building furniture? Another way to ask this question; why am I still trying to improve my writing?

For all practical purposes, my writing is good enough. And it’s been good enough, for practical purposes, for years. But still, I push to do new things. I explore new forms. I reach for longer and bigger stories. I try to convey ideas more simply and powerfully. At all times and in all ways I attempt to do more with less. This is difficult, uncomfortable and it doesn’t pay anything. Writing ads is easy and it pays well. Why don’t I just do the easy stuff?

I’m not sure I have a simple answer to this question. I don’t think that large questions, questions of the spirit, questions of deeper motivation have simple answers. There are no soundbites that can describe what drives us. I’m sure ego has something to do with it. I think greater things lie within me and I would let them out. But the ego-answer is the closest I can get to solving this riddle — the more I practice, the more I learn about myself.

In the end, I think that’s the only profound reason to do anything. Or as Edmund Hillary said of climbing mountains, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”

So, in lieu of a post or a podcast, I offer to you the first of what I hope will be many e-books on writing, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Adverbs.”

Posted via email from Patrick’s posterous

Fifteen Kinds of Snow that It Would Be Useful to Have Names for:

1. The damp, back-killing snow that’s a bitch to shovel.
2. The snow that increases your chances of getting laid while falling on you while you are in the hot tub.
3. The snow that falls in response to children’s prayers for school cancellation.
4. The heavily compacted snow of mall parking lot snowbergs that lasts well into the spring.
5. The snow that culls the weaker pine branches from the forest.
6. The cunning, kamikaze snow that finds a way past your scarf to die sizzling on the bare skin of your neck.
7. The snow that falls in Minnesota and is blown into Wisconsin.
8. The tough Manhattan snow that gets pushed around, driven over, stepped on, brushed off — but never gives up its dreams of a minor role in a Broadway production of A Christmas Carol.
9. The snow that thinks it’s special and unique when it’s falling, but realizes, when it hits the drift, that it’s just like everybody else.
10. The Mighty Snow of the Rockies — enough to close the pass, strand the travelers and convince families to make a holiday tradition of cannibalism.
11. The snow that covers the climber who failed to reach the summit.
12. The sudden snow that makes a fool of the weatherman.
13. The snow that falls on the just and the unjust alike.
14. The snow that the dog tracks into the house.
15. Snow cone snow.

Nowhere is this more evident in the use and abuse of language. Language of any kind is a slippery, imperfect instrument at best. And if we want to get good use out of the tool of language, we should take some pains to see that our language stays in good condition.

This is George Orwell’s first point in his wonderful essay “Politics and the English Language”

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

To be sure, this essay is a source of wonderful, practical advice for anyone who wants to use, as he puts it, ”language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.”

And to this end Orwell offers these six rules:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

But as you can see from the first quote, for George, the stakes are considerably higher than the marks on your next term paper. Or the stylistic considerations of your next memo. He points out that allowing this kind of sloppy language to advance unchecked also allows people to defend the most horrible of acts.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

We can easily come up with additions to Orwell’s 1946 list of atrocities (to both persons and language). Most obviously, the President of the United States is to receive the Nobel Peace Prize while his country is engaged in two wars. One of which he has just escalated. More generally, the United States has a “defense” budget that is 48% or almost half of the world’s combined military expenditure. Observing that offense is more costly than defense, and that the United States spends 71% more than Russia, China, Korea, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Syria combined, one is moved, at the very least, to begin the search for a different adjective to couple with that use of the word budget. More subtly, Social Security is bankrupt. Those who place their trust in it will find no security at all.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

To appreciate the timeless insight of George Orwell, you only need to remember that in Saddam Hussein’s interview with Dan Rather,  Saddam claimed that he was the democratically elected leader of  Iraq. He proudly told Mr. Rather that he had received 100% of the vote. Dan was skeptical of the percentage. But what he couldn’t do was refute Saddam’s claim. For there is no agreed definition of the word democracy.

Ideas have consequences. And insofar as each of our words is an idea in a more crystalline form, we should take care with them. Orwell understood this and argued for it with brilliance and passion in his essay “Politics and Language.”

The complete text of “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell is available here: http://langs.eserver.org/politics-english-language.txt

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

Here’s what the creator of the Pomodoro Technique, Francisco Cirillo has to say on the subject:

For many people, time is an enemy. The anxiety triggered by “the ticking clock”, in particular  when a deadline is involved, leads to ineffective work and study behaviour which in turn elicits the tendency to procrastinate. The Pomodoro Technique was created with the aim of using time as a valuable ally to accomplish what we want to do the way we want to do it, and to empower us to continually improve our work or study processes.

That feeling of the ticking clock is the feeling that we should be further along in our writing. This anxiety has been very useful to me in my professional life. Writing ads or even brochures is like sprinting. Faster! Faster! Faster!

But a book is a marathon. Aserious article has to be a 5k. And for both, there is certainly something to be said for pacing. And limiting anxiety. For me, the anxiety gets in the way. All those thoughts of, I should be faster, I’ve got to hit this word goal,  I’ve got to make sure that these words are good enough to keep or I will fall behind and I really really suck at this are counter-productive.

As writers, I’m not sure any of those worries are within our control. Or any of a thousand other worries that beset us as we are trying to go about the business of getting words on a page. All we can really do is control our focus. And the Pomodoro technique helps me get better at that.

The Real Distractions

Sure, distraction is the enemy. Everybody knows that. Facebook, Twitter, googling random things — the productivity that a computer can grant us is easily counterbalanced by the interrupts that it offers. But the real interrupts aren’t digital. They are psychological. The thoughts that you have while trying to write that have nothing to do with writing. Here’s how the Pomodoro helped me with distraction:

Every time you have a thought about or desire to do something else, yI write it down and continue with my work.  At the end of the Pomodoro (25 minute interval) I would review the things that had attempted to derail me and see if any of them needed doing, or had merit.

For example, “take the dog for a walk” has merit. I should take both the dog (and my fat ass)  for a walk at some point during the day. But “need to look up commas because you are using them wrong” has no merit. Maybe, I, am, using, commas, wrong. Who cares. Fix it in the rewrite. No reason to let one misplaced comma get in the way of 500 good words.

There are a billion worries and criticisms that can get in the way of getting the first draft down on paper. If we are unaware of them, then were are powerless over them.

Quality versus Quantity versus Progress

There’s probably not much we can do about the quality of our writing in the first draft. It is what it is. If we write enough first drafts and then rewrite them, we will become better writers. The more you work at something, the better you get. But what the Pomodoro Technique has done for me is give me an atomic unit of effort. A first draft is a rough number of words. But to get there I will have to spend X amount of quality, focused time. Not X amount of anxiety. Not X amount of times putting it off. Nope, X amount of time actually at the keyboard (or pad, completely focused on what I’m trying to write)

So the measure of a draft becomes X Pomodoros. Not words. Not quality. The psychological relief of this is immense. It gives me a way to just show up and do my part of the job. I put in the hours, I get the result. But if I worry about the result while I’m trying to put in the hours the process becomes much, much harder.

Here’s an example. I now have a progress bar for a 50k(ish) word story that I’m working on called “Unkillable.” Each box is a pomodoro’s worth of effort.

The Illusions of Quality

I’m not sure anybody can judge what they are making while they are making it. At least, not in the first draft. If you’ve been at this game for a while you’ve been over the moon excited about something you’ve written, only to go back and discover that it’s not that good. Likewise, you’ve cranked on something you thought was total shit and when you’ve gone back to re-read it, you realize that it’s not that bad. While you are giving birth is not the time to critically evaluate your children.

Estimation

So give yourself over to your writing for 25 minutes. And then another 25 minutes. Do this for N trials. Say N > 30. And you’ve got a statistically valid sample of how fast you write. How fast YOU write. Not how fast you should. Not how fast someone else writes. But you. Average those suckers together. In the next 25 minutes you might write more or less. But now you are able to estimate your progress. Now you have a production process. The more I turn the lever, the more words come out. I have a measure of control over the creative act that I did not have before.

Sure, sure. Sometimes you get lost. Sometimes you get nowhere. But over time, that’s not the case. Otherwise writers would never finish anything.

Treating Yourself Like a Dog

Another interesting facet of the technique is the sound of a kitchen timer in the background. After a little while, it become a powerful reinforcing device. Just like Pavlov could ring a bell and get his dogs to drool, the sound of the kitchen timer now causes me to focus. It also reassures me that all is well. It’s an audible signal that I’m working and things are as they should be. This is not a feeling that many people encounter naturally while writing. Especially not while writing fiction at the limits of your ability.

And let me tell you, I’m not above treating myself like a dog (or marmot, or ibex or prairie dog) to get good work done. Really, whatever takes. And anything that can make the passage of time reassuring — sign me up.

Check It Out for Yourself

You can download Francisco’s excellent book and find out everything you want to know about the Pomodoro Technique (including why it’s called Pomodoro) here http://www.pomodorotechnique.com If you put the technique to use. Leave a comment to let me know about your results.

So this little guy is the original weeble-wobble. His name is Daruma and this is his home on my desk. There is a weight in his paper-mache base, so if you knock him over he stands back up again. He is modeled after a legendary monk named Bodhidarma. Like all legendary characters, there are a number of tall tales about him. (They’re has to be, right? He’s got his own action figure.) What is most consistent in the tales is that Bodhidarma was the man who brought the practice of Zen Buddhism to China from India.

It is said that because his students lacked the strength to withstand long hours of focused meditation, that he taught them martial arts. The story goes that he sat in meditation so long, his arms and legs fell off. But whattya gonna do? Lots of things are said. Few things are done.

So why is he winking?

The wink is about doing things rather than saying things. In Japan it is tradition to buy one of these doll at the start of any large endeavor. Like opening a business. When you get it, both the eyes are blank. So you take a pen and ‘open’ one of his eyes. When you reach your goal you open the other eye  and then burn him.

So, when I started working on How to Succeed in Evil, I got this intense-looking Japanese doll. And for nearly five years now this little red-robed bastard has been winking at me. Many times, he’s been unbearably cocky — seemingly secure in the knowledge that I had started a project that I would never finish.  But if you look very closely, you can see that he’s scared. That’s why he’s trying to look so tough with those angry eyebrows.

Daruma is scared, because I now have an agent for How to Succeed in Evil. Which means the book is going to publishers in a highly purchasable fashion. Which means, he’s that much closer to seeing the world in stereo. And, shortly after that, in sterno.

What you really need to write a book.

I believe that the Daruma doll is also  related to a Japanese proverb: “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” For me, that captures  what you need most when creating something of scale, like a novel. There’s not a precise word for it in English, so I’ll call it a mix of endurance, perseverance, persistence and blind, mule-headed, stubbornliosity.

Daruma is a constant reminder of this. Any time I get frustrated, I can knock him over. And then watch as he rights himself. Might sound silly, but I assure you, anything that gets you through the day and keeps you on the path is nothing to scoff at.

So when I get a book deal, this little doll goes up in flames. And if I ever get a movie deal, what the hell, I’ll burn the Jade plant too.

]]> http://www.patrickemclean.com/why-is-this-doll-winking-at-me/feed/ 3 http://www.patrickemclean.com/the-toughest-trees-ever/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-toughest-trees-ever http://www.patrickemclean.com/the-toughest-trees-ever/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:11:38 +0000 Patrick http://patrickemclean.com/?p=850

I’ve become fascinated by trees. I’ve always liked them. But David Allen Sibley’s “Guide to Trees” has really sparked my interest. If you see me out and about, and I’m staring at a tree, it’s not because I’ve gone any farther off the deep end. It’s my new curiosity.

So the other day, on my way to a meeting, I’m stopped dead in my tracks by a tree that has very distinctive leaves. They have to be distinctive for me to remember them. I’ve just  figured out how to tell the difference between an Oak and a Maple. So there I am,
late to a meeting, staring at this tree.

When I get home, I look it up. Turns out it’s a Ginkgo tree. They’re often used in cities because they are very ‘hardy’. And hardy is a horticultural term which mean ‘hard to kill.” But when it comes to the Ginkgo, it should mean, ‘damn nigh impossible to kill.’ Don’t take my word for it. Here’s a tree that was half a mile away from the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

This Ginkgo tree is called Hosen-Ji, because anything that lives through an atomic explosion gets a nickname in Japan. Hosen-Ji survived, but the temple it was planted next to didn’t make it. When the temple was rebuilt, it was suggested that the tree might be transplanted to make construction easier. This suggestion was quickly shot down. Instead of moving the tree, they designed the temple around it. This might be because they were Buddhists and revered life. Then again, it might be because anything that is tough enough to survive a nuclear explosion is something you don’t want to mess with. It’s been exposed to Gamma Rays. Who knows what happens when it gets angry?

But the weirdness of the Ginkgo tree does not end there. It’s a profoundly odd plant. So odd, in fact that it’s in it’s very own Division in the Plant Kingdom. And the Ginkgo Biloba is the only member of it’s of Division. So where the Willow Oak in my back yard is classified like this:

Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Magnoliophyta (pop. = 230,000)
Order: Fagales
Genus: Quercus
Family: Fagaceae
Section: Lobatae
Species Phellos

The Ginkgo has this odd classification:

Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Ginkgophyta (pop. = 1)
Class: Ginkgoopsida
Order: Ginkgoales
Family: Ginkgoaceae
Genus: Ginkgo
Species: G. biloba

It’s as if the world Ginkgo meant “I dunno”, in Latin. Because botanists don’t have much of an idea of how this tree is related to other trees. They call the tree a living fossil, because it’s the only one left of it’s kind. Or rather, the only kind left of it’s kinds. It would be like jumping forward in time 270 million years and finding that all the cultures and nations we know now had been wiped out. Except for the Finn’s. And they’re weird to begin with. Oh sure, you’d find some records of the Swedes and the Danes and the Norse. But, for some reason, only the people from Finland would have survived.

And let’s consider what it means for these trees to be 270 million years old. Dinosaurs only appeared 230 million years ago. Which means, by the time the Dinosaurs did show up, the Gingko tree had 40 million years under it’s belt already. Not only are these the kind of trees that can survive an atomic blast, they are tough enough to look at a T-Rex and say, “You think you’re hot shit? We’ll see.”

160 million years later, a meteor slammed into the Earth. And the dinosaurs, and most everything else on the planet, died. But not the Gingko. Oh no. The Gingko tree lived on. In my head, the wise old Gingko Tree turns to the T-Rex and says, “Told you so.” And as the T-Rex looks up into the Gingko tree with wide, fearful eyes, seeking some kind of solace from a fellow land creature in the face of certain oblivion, the tree adds, “Yeah, and your great, great, great, great, great, great, Grandaddy was a punk, too.”

These trees aren’t nice. These trees are survivors

By scientist’s estimates, an impact big enough to create the layer of black ash found in the K-T barrier in the fossil record (and wipe out the dinosaurs) would have to have the energy of 100 trillion tons of TNT — that’s two million times greater than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever tested. That means that the Gingko tree that got bombed at Hiroshima would have been legitimately entitled to say, “Is that all you got?” Oh, if these trees could talk, the smack they would talk.

Surely, the Gingko Biloba are the toughest trees ever. Maybe they had saber-toothed ancestors that were tougher? I’m not putting anything past a tree that can survive a meteor strike.  But those ancestors weren’t survivors. So, I feel that we must convey the Eye of the Tiger, tree-division, to the Gingko Biloba.

Not everyone feels this way. Wikipedia reports that the Ginkgo listed as an endangered species. Not critically endangered, just middle-of-the-road endangered. It may be true, but I find it hard to comprehend. When there’s ten or twenty of them planted as ornamental trees around an office park in Charlotte, NC, I figure they have to be doing okay.  That, and the next time I walk past one, I know I’m going to hear it say, “You think you’re hot shit? We’ll see. You punks haven’t even made it to your first million years yet.”

Anyway, here I am bright and bleary:

When she asked me to help her write her book, I jumped at the chance. And I wound up coaching the coach.  I helped her outline her material, edited and rewrote chapters and generally stayed in the trenches with her. She was a little shy and timid about writing at first. But soon came out of her shell. Now you can’t keep the woman away from the keyboard. She’s even writing a weekly column for the Charlotte Business Journal.

I didn’t really expect her to put my name on the cover, but she felt like it was appropriate. So here we are, the first published work with my name on it.

I’ve encouraged her to make the full text of the book available in pdf. I will make it available as soon as she does. I’m also advising her on her website http://www.interactskills.com She’s got great, real human content, and her website can do a much better job of reflecting that. It’s time for an update. But, for my new media friends, don’t let the website wrapper fool you, the content that Lou has is GOLD.

So, in the interest of making sure everybody gets all the Seanachai they can, I thought I would make an announcement. Shooting an Elephant is one of my favorite essays. And, truly, one of the inspirations for the Seanachai. But if you’ve missed the one before that, Floor Pirhana, you should give that a listen as well. I can say it is as good as Orwell, but it’s a fine, light diversion, that may make you snicker.

January 09:

Yeah, that’s my dog.

I like technology. A lot. But I’m not too sure how technology feels about me. It may be my faithful friend and boon companion — then again, it may just be pretending to be my friend so it can date my sister. Especially when it comes to writing.

I’m writing a book. And for all the romance and immensity that phrase can contain, writing a book is also, simply a production process. I am in the process of assembling 75,000 to 100,000 words. And, after writing 50,000 of them, I’ve become convinced that the first draft is the hardest part. Hemingway famously said that the first draft of everything is shit. For what it’s worth, I agree. So, my question, becomes, what’s the easiest way to get through the hardest part.

And to my surprise, the easiest way, turns out to be writing longhand. Not printing mind you, but composing with a long, flowing, and delightfully irregular script that fills the page like a river of words. I sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and a thousand words roll out in a flash. And not only does it often take less time than typing, I think I write better longhand.

Now realize, I am not a hunt and peck typist. I type very fast. And when I type on one of those thin little laptop keyboards that have about 3 millimeters of travel, my typing speed approaches the absurd. Like Glenn Gould, the wonderfully talented and eccentric pianist, who remanufactured his piano, shortening the action on his keys  so that he could play Bach faster. Beautiful, yet a little insane.

There is obviously more to writing than typing.

What I’m really doing is composing.  Composition requires focus. It is, like most acts of creation monotasking. And as much as I love technology, it drives us to distraction.

A pen and paper has but one functionality. It captures the marks I make so that they can be referred to at a later time. It doesn’t ring, it doesn’t bother me with an incoming chat or IM. It never asks me to plug it in so it can get more power. It doesn’t crash, it never needs an upgrade and it is unlikely that someone will snatch my pad and bolt from a coffee shop with it when I turn my back.

Sure, paper is perishable.

But it is predictably perishable. Data turns to noise in all kinds of unpredictable ways. Like hard drive crashes. And if an IT person tells you that there is a way to archive a file, not touch it for 500 years, and guarantee that it will be useable – they are lying to you. If you think I’m wrong, I’ll email you some WordStar and AppleWorks documents just as soon as I can figure out how to get them off my five and a quarter inch floppies.

But I can go the national archives right now and read a copy of the Magna Carta that was handwritten 793 years ago. No format or version issues here. It is fitting for this essay that, Magna Carta literally means “Great Paper”

But, to paraphrase Emerson, all of this is small account compared to what lies within us. And that is the struggle to organize and communicate our thoughts clearly with the beautiful, yet horribly imprecise instrument of language. And it is in this struggle, I believe that the beauty and power of writing longhand is discovered.

In a way, the problem with writing is, the same problem of hitting a golf ball. Both the page and the ball just sit there. And when you write you have (theoretically) a lifetime to rewrite it until you get it right.

But all that time is simply a field day for the critical part of your brain. Just the time it needs to jump in and muck everything up. This part of the brain needs something to critize. After all, that’s it’s job. But the critical function is not creative. You be critical about anything. And no matter how absurd you are being, you will find ammo to support you. Try running Hamlet through a Microsoft Grammar check.Try running Hamlet and leaving all the scenes in.

But the point is, there’s no possible way to get it right, if you don’t first get it down. And as much as I know this — I mean know it in my bones, as carpenter knows his measuring tape — it still doesn’t help.

The critical part of my brain is telling me, right now, that this sentence is horrible.

That the entire device of anthropormophizing the critcal side of my nature in this essay is a bad idea. And that I just mispelled critical. And I shouldn’t have started two sentences in a row with “and”.

But when I write longhand, the experience is different. I think it is because that critical part of my brain is busy picking apart my handwriting (which truly is horrible) instead of my prose. It tells me that my handwriting is atrocious. And it gets the satisfaction of being right. But who cares? While it’s busy the words are just rushing out. And they’re not henpecked or second-guessed before they’ve had time to cool. They exist in a flawed, but pure state. This kind of prose has a feral power that seems to be lacking from the things I type. Maybe that’s not it, maybe it’s just harder to get my head in that effortless writing space when I use a keyboard. But whatever the case is, writing longhand makes it easier for me to reach a writer’s high.

And if you’re still not sold on the idea that writing longhand might help you write better, consider this. Until the 20th century, books were written by hand. I would argue that the best writing in history was composed by hand. The entire process is much easier now. But, would you like to argue that the increase in the power of our technology has led to a corresponding increase in the quality of our writing?

Not me. I’m too busy scribing away.

My favorite comes from Hannah.

hi ppl santa is real we havent got a chimney but santa has this special key so he can get into our and your house so haha

I think we should all chip in and get Hannah a chimney for Christmas. Check out the rest of the comments.

http://www.theseanachai.com/2006/01/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-santa/

The post presents a bit of work in progress. It’s a draft of a screenplay from 1999 called 86 Nickels. It was the start of what originally became Death of a Dishwasher. From a movie standpoint, it’s not really very good. Screenwriting is a pretty intricate, structural art. And the more TV spots I’ve done, the more I realize how different (and constrained) visual storytelling is. Audio is wide open because you can use the tricks of visual storytelling, but still dip into all the cool stuff that prose can do that film, just can’t

Anyway, there are some great scenes and lines in the script and it’s well worth a peruse if you liked Death of a Dishwasher (here’s a link to that Parsec Award-winning series) or you are interested in process at all.

A tip of the hat goes to John August for developing the Scrippet plug-in that I used to display this page of the script. He’s an awesome screenwriter (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and his blog (www.johnaugust.com) is tremendous. He really goes out of his way to answer questions and help people understand his craft. In an industry known for the freaky and the mean, he’s a class act. So if you have screenwriting questions, check out his blog.

And check out this badass little formatting plug-in.

[scrippet]

INT. APARTMENT KITCHEN
The dishwasher struggles with a child-proof cap. After a valiant fight he opens the bottle,
pours the entire thing in his mouth and chokes it down with a glass of water.
A long beat. He is at a loss for what to do next. This was not in the original suicide plan. He checks his pulse.
And then the phone rings.
DISHWASHER
Hello?

GEORGE
(through the phone)
Hey man, I’m glad I caught you. Cisco just called me from jail. So he can’t work. Can you make it to wash dishes?
The dishwasher struggles to get a hold on the moment.

GEORGE (CONT’D)
I know you’ve got plans, but I’m in a real bind here. I’ll give you time and a half? Can you help me out?
DISHWASHER
Uh, sure.

[/scrippet]

86-nickels-11_23_99

Some things to know:

1) if you’ve donated, and you are registered on the site, you should have member status. We’ve migrated all the donations we’ve received to the new membership system. Members should see, in the right-hand-side of the header graphic, text that reads “Thanks for donating! Your membership expires on…”; if you’ve donated and don’t see this text, post a comment and we’ll figure out what went wrong.

2) Members hath their privileges. Now that we have the model and the technology all figured out, there will be member-only content and episodes; there will also be time-delayed content. That is to say, a multi-part series might only come out once a month, but if you are a member, you’ll get all the episodes much, much faster (probably all at once).

So a great big “Thank you!” to all our members current and future! If you’re not yet a member and would like to become one, first register on the site using the links at the top of the page; once you’re registered and logged in you should see a “Become a Member” button appear on the top-right of the header graphic. Click it to become a member!

What’s lacking, of course, is fiction. And I’ve got lots of that coming. I’ve been working on something with PG Holyfield (of Murder at Avedon Hill) and I’m really happy with it. It’s a multipart series that’s got everything really. Golf, Death, Honor, friendship, betrayal,  the Mayan Apocalypse and a vengeful god disguised as a pickup truck. Scott Sigler’s even helping us out with one of the voices.

It’s called Flinchy and the Mexican Show Truck.

I’m also working on something called Unkillable. It’s a tale of revenge told from the perspective of a guy who is killed and turned into well, basically a Zombie. I’m really happy with it as well.

So, friends of the Seanachai, here’s the question — how do I roll these multipart series out? All at once, or do I alternate episodes between a little one-off or essay and an episodic piece?

What about making them available for purchase before they’ve all gone out on the feed? That is to say, if you listen and you just can’t wait until next week (or next month) you can buy the rest of the episodes right then and there.

So if I’ve left out a favorite, or you think something else should be included, please mention it in the comments.

STORIES

The Vampire in My Attic — It’s the first and still one of the best. Very short.
Candy — but then, there’s Candy.
A Wolf in the Park — A good tale and some of the best sound design and music.

ESSAYS

Blame Abraham — because there’s only so much insanity you can watch without trying to understand it.
A Change in Orbit — I cried when I wrote it. I cried when I read it. It’s good.
The Han Solo Theory — a big light bulb went on when I figured this out.
St. Patrick’s Day

SERIES

In many ways, I feel like I failed the original purpose of the Seanachai by doing series. It was originally supposed to be all short stories. But, as it turns out, short stories are murderously hard. Which is okay, these turned out to be really good. 

The War with Santa — I still laugh when I listen to this, and I made it!
Death of a Dishwasher – Won a Parsec. Pure Restaurant Worker Catharsis.
How to Succeed in Evil — It has to be on the list, even though it’s got it’s own website now. Start at the beginning.

SATIRE

Outsourcing A Chicken — Because you just can’t have too many reasons to dislike chain restaurants.
The Redneck Expeditionary Force — People seriously thought they could find this game online. I wish.

JUST NUTS

Sometimes, you just gotta blow the bugs out of the engine.

A Scary Story — The best cautionary tale told by a “sailor” since the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Rock, Paper, Scissors — This one also cracks me up every time I listen to it. Best voicing I’ve done.
Truth is — who doesn’t like a good Zombie love story.

103 Subscribers

Podpress : 1914 downloads of the Relaunch Episode 

9026 unique visitors 

$193.42 in donations

October 2006 reported 16054 visitors, but I no scared. It’s a rebuilding year.

It’s not that it wasn’t great, but if you have a little time to think about a subject, say, volleyball, you realize that there are better ways to play than with your face. But in on the day, in the moment, there’s no time for that kind of thought. You just do what you have to.

(I may have lost control of that analogy in mid-sentence.)

Anyway, I’m opening the question up. What would you like the Seanachai to be like? More is the obvious answer. But what else? And don’t be afraid to  think wildly. Changes to the site are fine. But what would take the Seanachai to the next level?

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” — Goethe

Comment away. Be bold.

So please bare with us and pardon our dust while we work; we promise that the new site is going to be awesome.

It’s a paraphrase from one of my favorite parts of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. And even though I haven’t been podcasting, I have not abandoned well, the faith, let us say.

The book proceeds. Such arrogance to attempt such a long work, but it goes well. I can’t say that knowing what I know right this minute that I would attempt it again, but I will finish the thing if’n it kills me. Surely, the next one will be easier.

But mostly, what’s been keeping me hopping is paying work. Too much of it in fact. I outsold my ability to do work. And I didn’t have the structure in place to make me more efficient. It is very much a transitional time for me professionally and creatively. And, as exciting as it is, it’s not too conducive to podcasting. What can I say? A couple of things really.

1) Sorry, a man’s gotta eat. And given the current economic climate, this squirrel is going to store as many nuts as possible whilst he can.

2) All this work now, means money hoarded (like nuts, man this analogy just won’t quit) for more writing later.

So, for everybody who’s hanging in there, thanks. For those who aren’t, well, you’re not reading this post now are you?

Here’s the Whitman. I’m knuckling tight.

I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm;
How he knuckled tight, and gave not back one inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
And chalk’d in large letters, on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you:
How he follow’d with them, and tack’d with them—and would not give it up;
How he saved the drifting company at last:
How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves;
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men:
All this I swallow—it tastes good—I like it well—it becomes mine;
I am the man—I suffer’d—I was there.

So the old email box has been flooded in the last week. And everybody is asking the same question. What in the hell is going on?

The only thing I find lacking in your work to date is the lack of quantity. I enjoy Edwin, as well as the short stories of yours I came across in Voices: New Media Fiction. Do you currently have any ETA or status update for your loyal fans?

Yes I do. I’ve completed the first draft of the novel. And I’m about a third of the way through the rewrite. I’m good for about a chapter a day. And I’m on chapter 14 now. That’s about 26,000 words rewritten out of a target of 80ish. The beginning has gone a little slower than I would have liked because I’ve added a couple of charcters and an entire subplot.

I am also rather curious about how much progress you’ve made in the last three months.

Me too. Or curious as to how hard it got there for a little while. I’ve found that if I try and put the hurry up on it (like I sometimes do with my shorter work) it always, always comes out bad. But if you just plug away at it every day at the same time in a workmanlike fashion, it comes together faster than you expect. Mostly, I had to clear my head from all the garbage of previous incarnations to write this clearly and well.

I was highly entertained and can’t wait for any other items that may off shoot from this story.

You know, I could easily spend my time doing more audio episodes. And I have no end of ideas for off-shoots and spin offs. But I feel that would mean that this is as far as the story will go. No, it’s time for a more communicable form. So the time I can spare from my life (which there’s less and less of) is devoted to the novel.

So I have a question for all of you. I’m thinking about podcasting the novel as I work on this rewrite. I have some reservations about this, not from a media standpoint, but from an artistic standpoint. The episodes as they exist are more along the lines of notes. Thoughts on toward a character and a story. What I’m trying to do by writing the novel is have a full and complete, fully realized story. But there’s a difficulty with this

What if the story changes?

Sure that sounds stupid, but, believe me. It’s happened to me more than once as I’ve written this novel . It started off in the direction I wanted, then it changed dramatically. And for the better.

And I don’t know if my fear makes any sense. I’m just looking for some way to get this thing done and appeal you slavering (and much loved) fans. Thoughts anybody?

http://www.succeedinevil.com

Technorati Tags: How to Succeed in Evil, Patrick E. McLean, TagCloud

and this was it.

The file was lost in the hard drive crash that inspired the “Scary Story” pirate episode. And I don’t really play piano so I don’t remember what it was. It was in F minorish.

And somewhere along the way I discovered a piece of music called Ether by the Flavor Foundation. It has an inexorable sense to it. Downtempo but moving forward. And that’s what I’ve been using for the title music. You can find it on iTunes. Highly recommend the whole CD.

And if you want more tracks I consider in the evil vibe try Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy and Super Bon Bon by Soul Coughing.

Thanks for all your feedback. It means more than you know to have your support. Trying to break through is lonely, demoralizing work. You guys make it easier and a hell of a lot more fun.

Part of the contest is judged and part of it involves visitor votes. So go vote already.

http://www.publicradioquest.com/node/629

And while you’re there, go through a few more entries. They’ve got them set up on a random system you just click and it serves up a fresh one to your critical ear. Check out the competition and help them weed through the entries.

Thanks again.

This Saturday I’m going to be on Matthew Wayne Selznick’s (author of Brave Men Run) new podcast. It will me and Scott Sigler (Author of Earthcore and Ancestor) talking, among other things, about how the publishing industry is changing.

Sure, I like the sound of my own voice, but I’m deeply interested in what Sigler has to say. He’s gruff and scrappy and he just scared the absolute piss out of the “establishment” by having Ancestor’s debut crack the Amazon top 10. I can’t wait to hear all about it.

And since we’re doing it through TalkShoe you can listen in live. May 5th 5:00 EST.

The nature of this whole thing.

I’ve learned that this is very much a work in progress. I think I might have treated ‘Evil in it’s podcast form as a finished things – and it’s really just elaborate notes, for a later draft. I don’t know if that’s big news to any of you, but it’s a pretty big thing for me to realize. That being said, we’re going to see some changes pretty soon.

The Comic

So I’ve an outline for a 4 issue run. And I’ve had some interesting conversations, but the road to comic publishing got shifted back a burner because a guy at a company the arm of an independent comic company that produces movies (some with staggering budgets) was interested in HtSiE as a TV show.

Naturally I became exited. So I labored feverishly to write a pilot of an hour-long live-action TV show. It does not suck. But it needs one more rewrite before I think it will truly shine.

The awful truth

And as I wrestled with the TV pilot and the outline I realized I had no idea what Edwin was like. In the podcast, he’s not really a character. He’s more of a force of nature. He has no foibles, no weaknesses and worst of all, I can’t hear his voice in my head. The awful truth is, I had no idea who my main character was.

Actually, it’s worse than that – I had no voice for Edwin. Topper? I wind him up and he goes for days. I could start Topper telling a story and I don’t think he’d ever shut up. But Edwin has been strangely mute.

This is a problem. (to say the least) But I think I have solved it. And it solving it is key to having a comic that doesn’t suck, a TV pilot that doesn’t suck and making the podcast better. And I really appreciate everybody who’s coming along for the ride.

The question

So I’ve been going back in time and writing stories that occured before the first 10 podcasts. Prequels (if you care to look at them that way) but I’ve gotten a few emails from of people who want the main (if you care to look at it that way) storyline to continue. So how about a little feedback?

Which hoop should the podcasting monkey jump through next?

The problem is that I don’t have time to do everything. I have several friends who would gladly do some announcing for the Seanachai (bumpers, tags, promos, intros), but I just can’t seem to get around to scheduling them. It’s very hard for me. But it has to happen. If I’m ever going to get this ‘cast back on a weekly schedule, I need to delegate. The real absurdity of this is that I even have people to delegate to. So, I’m sitting down and making a plan. A schedule even. And I thought I would share my plan with you and see what you thought.

Patrick’s Five Point Plan that Will Allow the Seanachai to Take Over the World (pfppwalstow)

1. Weekly episodes.
2. Alternate short episodes (essays, stories, funny bits) with 30 minute pieces.
3. The 30 minute pieces will be serialized fiction. ( the first one I’m considering is Typhoon by Joseph Conrad. ) This gets me out of the content bind, and really let’s me study some great writers up close and personal.
4. When the 30 minute pieces are done, they are collected as high-quality audiobooks. Sold here, podiobooks, itunes, audible, wherever.
5. Actively encourage donations. Sell CDs of collected episodes. In short, generate some revenue.

Have I been looking at this all wrong?
As I dilligently scribble away with an eye on filthy moneys from a comic deal or a TV deal, I wonder if I haven’t been making a terrible error in judgement. Some maths for us. Let’s say I have 3,000 listeners. (It’s difficult to know for sure. One of my stat’s progams says I had 77k hits and 10897 unique visitors?) Now of those 3,000 listeners 1,000 of them are kind, decent, helpful, loyal, brave and financially solvent enough to donate $20/year to keep the Seanachai a going concern. (brace yourself for some multiplication) that’s $20,000 a year in revenue.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we have a production budget license music. Now we can spend some time on the sound design. Now I won’t fear starving to death if I really spend some time on an episode. And, with a little work, listenership will grow. It’s more like patronage than traditional publishing to be sure. But that’s okay. Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t have a revenue model. He had the de Medici. The cynical, but well-minded, are already saying to themselves, “Well, you can’t count on people to pay.” To which I say, “people”, “them’, “those guys” I’m not interested in. I’m interested in you. The one person reading this post. ‘Cause the thing they never tell you about ‘them’ is they don’t exist. Like “them’ vs. “us”. There’s just “us”.

And I don’t think I’m crazy. The best radio stations (in terms of content) already work on this model. It’s called public radio. But what do you think? Am I crazy? Wait, that’s not really important, am I mistaken?

technorati tags:Patrick E. McLean, Monetizing, Monetizing a podcast, TheSeanachai, The Seanachai Podcast, us vs. them

technorati tags:Japan, TheSeanachai, photos, Frog, Drugs, WTF, Patrick E. McLean

Which translates – “Tiny Japanese people. Listen to me! You are very strange.

In Tokyo people rush to work with the an intensity that is only seen in other countries when people flee national disasters. Yet what makes rush hour so errie is that it is surprisingly quiet. There are a lot of footsteps, but no voices above a whisper. No laughter. No one talking on cellphones on the train. There is a thumb-joint ruining level of text messaging. Just footfalls.

I was walking around early in the morning. Before the trains were running (jet-uu lag-uu- I don’t remember the exact phrase for this in Japanese, but the literal translation is “time stupid”) and
Even the alarm is polite here. My alarm at home produces an angry honking noise designed to vibrate the brain stem directly into a fight/flight/shower and go to work response. Here the hotel alarm chirps politely as if to say, (Excuse me. It might be time to wake up if you would like to wake up now. Excuse me. You round-eyed and frighteningly hairy beast, time stupid beast. It is time to arise and spread your rude ways and easy laughter throughout our quiet orderly country.)

So I have no real conclusions, but I am having a fun, if time-stupid time.

technorati tags:PatrickEMcLean, theseanachai, seanachai, japan, nihon, vacation, time stupid

Well, sure. But things are going pretty well now. New podcast episode is written and should be up within the week. (Barring attack by flying monkies or someone throwing gobs of money at me to write something else)
The big news about evil is there is interest in making it into a TV show. I like the way John Rogers put it at his blog Kung Fu Monkey.

Although the bite-sized stories are intriguing, the interesting bit concerns How to Succeed in Evil, Patrick’s tale of a business consultant in the world of supervillains. He developed it first as a podcast primarily to get interest in the comic he was planning — it zoomed past that, though, and is being developed for television by actual Suited Humans with Bags of Filthy Monies. All from wee three minute, well-produced podcasts.

I have yet to see Bags of Filthy Monies yet, but I also have yet to sell out.
If you have a spare minute, read this post of John’s.

Brilliant writing. Clear thinking. Hillarious. We’ll not get into my political views either here or in the Seanachai. But this post is a wonderful example of using a story to get a point across. And as we edge on over into an election year, I would hope that all pundits and politicians take this to heart: political discourse can be entertaining. And speaking as a person who’s made an ad or two, you’re ads don’t have to suck.
Anyway, I’m, scribing away furiously on pilot episode. When it’s done, perhaps I shall have the courage to record my 7 minute pitch. But as for now, I’ve got the act outs in the right places and I don’t hate the story.

technorati tags:Patrick E. McLean, How to Succeed in Evil, Seanachai, TVpilot

Check all of the out on YouTube.

technorati tags:Patrick E. McLean, Copywriting, hockey, commericals, Seanachai, Charlotte Checkers, animal control

In my book Catastrophe: Risk and Return (2004), I examined the issue of scientific literacy briefly, pointing out that only a third of American adults (adults, not 15-year-olds) know what a molecule is, that 39 percent believe that astrology is scientific, that 46 percent deny that human beings evolved from earlier animal species, and that almost 50 percent do not know that it takes a year for the earth to revolve around the sun (many do not know that the earth revolves around the sun). These are amazing statistics, and yet, according to the materials I consulted, the scientific literacy of the U.S. population actually exceeds that of the European Union, Japan, and Canada.

This is an excerpt of Richard Posner from the Becker/Posner blog. It’s not important that you know who these guys are, but they are big brains in the fields of Law and Economics. They kind of guys who have theorems named after them. http://home.uchicago.edu/~rposner/biography.

Sure, the “ignorance of the masses” is horrifying in this passage, but what really struck me is the thought that if youtake any one of these scientifically illiterate people — and even the ones who are also just plain ol’ vanilla illiterate — I bet they’ll catch a false moment in a story. You tell them a story that doesn’t make sense, or have doesn’t have internal consistency and they’ll be on it in a moment.
They’ll pop right up with, “But wouldn’t do that — he hates his father!” or “No, Robin Hood wouldn’t do that. He gives to the poor and scientifically illiterate!”

It illustrates how hard making a good story really is. Story is inculcated into us at a very early age. Science, it seems, is not.

technorati tags:Patrick E. McLean, Seanachai, Story Construction, The Nature of Stories, Story, science and storytelling

But things are bubbling. I swear they are. For one thing, we’ve got a colorist (the Mighty Myron Macklin) and he’s awesome. And we’re almost, almost, almost, so close I can taste it, done with the color version of the book.
And of course, if you’ve caught up with the latest installment. We can expect many interesting things from Topper in what I’m going to call Season Two of How to Succeed in Evil.
Here’s a peek at the color (unlettered)

technorati tags:How to Succeed in Evil, Patrick E. McLean, comic book, Graphic Novel, Edwin Windsor, Nic Rummel, Myron Macklin

But things are bubbling. I swear they are. For one thing, we’ve got a colorist (the Mighty Myron Macklin) and he’s awesome. And we’re almost, almost, almost, so close I can taste it, done with the color version of the book.
And of course, if you’ve caught up with the latest installment. We can expect many interesting things from Topper in what I’m going to call Season Two of How to Succeed in Evil.
Here’s a peek at the color (unlettered)

technorati tags:How to Succeed in Evil, Patrick E. McLean, Myron Macklin, Nic Rummel, Comic Book, Web Comic, Podcast

It was on this day in 1452 that the first section of the Gutenberg Bible was published in Mainz, Germany. It was the first book ever printed with movable type, Gutenberg’s revolutionary idea. At the time, all existing books were copied out by hand, and in order to be as efficient as possible, scribes had developed a way of writing that was full of abbreviations. Words were written in a dense cursive script, and there was very little space between letters or even words on the page.It was Gutenberg’s genius to imagine an entirely different way of writing, in which all the individual letters would be distinct from each other, rather than connected. That way, he could produce individual blocks with letters on them. He fitted these letter blocks into a frame, coated them with an ink made of linseed oil and soot, and then used an adapted wine press to print text on paper. The revolutionary effect of movable type was the ability to print an infinite number of pages from a small number of letter blocks simply by rearranging them.Within three decades there were print shops all over the European continent. It is estimated that more books were produced in the 50 years after Gutenberg’s invention than scribes had been able to produce in the 1,000 years before that.Today, about four dozen copies of the Gutenberg Bible survive. One of the most recent copies to come on the market was auctioned in New York in 1987. It consisted of only the first volume, but it was in good condition, and it sold at auction for more than five million dollars.

http://www.elabs7.com/functions/message_view.html?mid=25571&mlid=499&siteid=20130&uid=731c61ee4d

The last time I was in New York I was blindsided by a Gutenberg Bible. I literally backed into it while checking out the New York Public Library. It affected me tremendously. And perhaps most of all because it was still perfectly legible.

But a few facts not noted here.

1) When John Jacob Astor, one of the main patrons of the library, brought the Bible into the United States he made the Customs officers remove their hats.

2) Shortly after printing his Bible Gutenberg went bankrupt.

Happy birthday moveable type!

technorati tags:Gutenberg, patrick mclean, Seanachai, NYPL, New York Public Library

SHATNER: So you want Paramount to say we’ve made enough money?

NIMOY: Let’s stop making money. Yeah.

SHATNER: Yeah, yeah.

NIMOY: The stockholders won’t mind.

SHATNER: No, and we’ve –

NIMOY: We should stop making money.

SHATNER: Folks, we’ve made enough money, we’re walking away –

NIMOY: We’re going to take a break –

SHATNER: Yes. It’s been a wonderful ride –

NIMOY: We’re going on vacation –

SHATNER: And no more money.

NIMOY: Right. Off to an island someplace and just …

SHATNER: We’ll just handle the books in a different way and make it look like we made something.

NIMOY: Watch the sunset and forget about money…

SHATNER: Yes.

NIMOY: And your investment? Oh, don’t worry about it, you know.

SHATNER: It’s going to be OK.

NIMOY: We’ll get around to that someday.

SHATNER: You’ll have some other shows.

NIMOY: Yeah, we don’t want to make any more money. No.

CNN.com – Shatner, Nimoy and 40 years of ‘Star Trek’ – Sep 7, 2006

technorati tags:Patrick E. McLean, Star Trek, Paramount, Money, How to Succeed in Evil

The average length of what I write is about two pages. Which means I started writing something new about 200 times last year. And as you’ve probably experienced, starting is the hardest part.

Hell, starting an email is hard. I write for a living and starting is hard. But if I don’t start, I can’t finish. And if I can’t finish, I can’t get paid. And when I really get stuck, this is what I do to avoid starvation:

I write longhand.

Seems silly, but, for me, this is the gold standard of all writing hacks. The problem with writing is, in many ways, the same problem as hitting a golf ball. Both the page and the ball just sit there. And when you write you have (theoretically) a lifetime to rewrite it until you get it right.

But that gives the critical part of your brain time to jump in a muck everything up. It needs something to critize. That’s it’s job after all. But when I write longhand, instead of giving me a stream of, “you’re writing sucks, it sucks, it sucks, sucks, sucks and you just changed tenses you eggsucking loser” it pours forth with “you’re HANDwriting sucks, it sucks, it sucks, sucks, sucks, go back to those huge pencils you had in kindergarden you loser.”

This is a huge difference. Because now the critical part of my brain is no longer in the way of the creative part of my brain. The critical function is necessarily and naturally secondary to the creative function. Something must exist before you can start whining about it.

In fact, the more I focus on the quality of my handwriting, the easier the process seems to be. So when you’re really stuck – go low tech on the problem. Bust out the paper and pen and start scrawling away.
And let me know if it works for you.

technorati tags:writing hacks, Patrick E. McLean, writing, writing tips, Structure of Story, Seanachai

Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White
Perry FergusonVan Nest Polglase
A. Roland Fields
Darrell Silvera

Best Cinematography, Black-and-White
Gregg Toland

Best Director
Orson Welles

Best Film Editing
Robert Wise

Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture
Bernard Herrmann

Best Picture
Orson Welles

Best Sound, Recording
John Aalberg (RKO Radio SSD)

Citizen Kane, the film that many pick as the greatest of all time, didn’t win a single one of these awards. Not one. The only Oscar that it garnered was for Best Screenplay.
Connect the dots as you like, but that’s how I try to put award shows in the proper perspective.

technorati tags:Parsec Awards, Patrick E. McLean, Succeed in Evil, Death of a Dishwasher, Seanachai, Seanachai podcast

Seriously, Edgar Allen Poe’s dialog is horrible. You quickly discover this when reading A Cask of Amontillado aloud. But it’s not enough to stop Cask from being a brilliant short story.

Bad dialog is not enough to wreck a story. But there is a mistake that is made with dialog will tank a story. And to understand it, you need to buy into an observable fact about people.

People rarely say what they mean.

Listen to what people actually say. Better yet, record what people actually say.

Chip – How are you?

Larry – I’m good.

We all know Larry’s not good. Larry got up this morning and he’s got a pain in his leg. It’s the end of the month and it looks like he’s not going to meet his sales quota. Furthermore he’s in a loveless marriage, his kid just wrecked the car and he’s realized that nothing in his life has prepared him to deal with middle age. In short he’s in pain, broke, sexually frustrated and afraid of death.

But he says, “I’m good.” And if anything really was good in his life, he wouldn’t say, “I’m good” like the rest of us poor slobs, he’d say, “I’m great. I’m fantastic. This is the best day of my life.”

Here’s an example from real life. I’m standing outside a movie theatre waiting for a friend. A father comes along and drops his son 15 year old son off to work at the theatre. And as he’s saying good bye, he calls his son’s attention back to him and asks him what he thinks about the game tonight. A game that the boy is obviously going to miss.

The boy hunches over, the dad leans awkwardly across the seat and the talk about this game for a good five minutes. Traffic outside the movie theatre is stopped. Stopped because they are talking about basketball. Or are they?

I don’t think so. Whatever words they were using, I think the father was saying, “I’m scared. You’re growing up so fast. Tonight we don’t get to watch the game, but soon you’ll be out of the house.”

And I think the son was saying, “It’s okay Dad. I’m scared too, but I’m growing up. And it’s going to be okay. They’ll be other games. I’m still your son.”

In essence they were both saying the same thing. “I love you.” Only guys don’t say that. They talk about basketball. And hold up traffic. And the words don’t matter.

In fact, to get someone to really say what they mean, you generally have to put them in an extreme situation. And the reason the exact dialog doesn’t matter is that story doesn’t turn on dialog. It turns on action. Another example, from the second Godfather movie

KAY

I’ll bring the children up now;

they want to say goodbye.

MICHAEL

Kay, I told you…

KAY

Goodbye, Michael.

MICHAEL

I won’t let you leave! Christ, do

you think I’m going to let you leave.

KAY

(meekly)

Michael.

MICHAEL

No, I don’t want to hear anything.

There are things between men and

women that will not change; things

that have been the same for

thousands of years. You are my

wife, and they are my children…

and I love you and I will not let

you leave, because you are MINE!

KAY

Oh, I do feel things for you,

Michael; but now, I think it’s pity.

For the first time since I’ve known

you, you seem so helpless. You

held me a prisoner once; will you

try again?

MICHAEL

If that’s what it takes; then yes,

I will.

KAY

At this moment, I feel no love for

you at all. I never thought that

could happen, but it has.

MICHAEL

We’ll go back tonight. Bring the

children.

KAY

You haven’t heard me.

He moves to her; he does love her, and is tender with her.

MICHAEL

How can I let you leave; how can I

let you take my children away?

Don’t you know me? You understand,

it’s an impossibility. I would

never let it happen; no, never, not

if it took all my strength, all my

cunning. But in time, soon, you’ll

feel differently. You see, you’ll

be happy that I stopped you. I

know you. You’ll forget about

this; you’ll forget about the baby

we lost… and we’ll go on, you and

I.

KAY

The baby I lost…

MICHAEL

I know what it meant… and I’m

prepared to make it up to you. I

will make changes; I can.

(he clenches his fist tightly)

I CAN change; that I have learned,

that I have the strength to change…

And we have another child, a boy…

and you’ll forget the miscarriage.

KAY

It wasn’t a miscarriage. And you

with your cunning, couldn’t you

figure it out! It was an abortion;

an abortion, like our marriage is

an abortion, something unholy and

evil. I don’t want your son; I

wouldn’t bring another of your sons

into this world. An abortion,

Michael… it was a son, and I had

it killed, but this must all end!

VIEW ON MICHAEL

He had no hint, not in his wildest imagination could he have

guessed that she would do such a thing.

KAY

And I know that now it’s over; I

knew it then, there would be no way

you could ever forgive me, not with

this Sicilian thing that goes back

two thousand years.

He is silent, though raging — then, with all his passion, and his strength, he raises his arms, and strikes her across her neck, literally knocking her down to the floor, and hurting her badly.

There is no bit of dialog that could possibly have the impact of Michael striking his wife. And if you watch the scene that made it into the movie you will realize that a fair amount of the script that goes missing on the editing floor. It’s the dialog that’s non-essential.

So, in the final bit of ranting analysis. If you get the story right, any dialog stands a better chance of working. If you get the story wrong – no matter how brilliant the dialog may be – it won’t save the story.

technorati tags:Patrick E. McLean, Storytelling, writing, Story Construction, Seanachai, plot

Because if writing is a game, the reader’s expectation is the ball. If I can put some spin on that ball and move it around well, I feel like I’m doing my job as a storyteller. If I can’t I’m probably just wasting a reader’s valuable time.

Say I describe a character who’s an ex-drill instructor. Crew cut. Ramrod straight posture. The kind of guy who irons his t-shirts. You develop expectations about this guy. He probably doesn’t suffer fools gladly. You expect him to swear a bit and not back down from a fight.

And if tell a story where he swears and gets into fights, well, it’s probably going to be pretty dull. I could be colorful about how I describe the fights and invent all manner of interesting oaths, but that’s really fighting an uphill battle. All that stuff is the window dressing on the story itself. And if there’s no story beneath it, it basically has to be the best window dressing of all time. (Who wants to perfect window dressing when you should be building houses?)

But let’s say I tell you that this guy is scared. In fact, it’s been so long since he’s been afraid, he’s having trouble placing the sensation. It not what we expect from this character. Now it gets interesting. Why is he afraid? What is scaring him?

It could be a fierce monster. Or a guy pointing a gun at his head? But that’s what we expect. What if it’s a 9 year old girl? Now we’re curious about the girl. Why is he scared of the girl? She could have the power to start fires with her mind. But that feels kind of expected. What if she’s just an ordinary girl? No powers what so ever? What about an ordinary girl could scare a hard-ass Jarhead. And I mean really scare him.

Let’s make her Ebola Mary — a carrier of a fantastically lethal disease.
And what does this leatherneck do when confronted with a horrible, inglorious death. He could run away. He could talk big. He could break down crying. He could attack. He could whistle a happy tune. The entire universe of human action is open to us really. But which one is the least expected and why?

Because if everything happens as we expect it will, a story becomes dull as paste.
To be sure, this is quite a simplification of story construction. Some conventions must be adhered to. And paying certain things off creates a very enjoyable experience. But being aware of the expectations that story creates really helped me understand writing in a new way. In the next post I’ll test my analytical tool on a few well-known tales.

technorati tags:patrick e. mclean, Story, writing, The Structure of Story, Plots, Story Construction

High Noon – Bad guy returns to town on the day of the former Sheriff’s wedding. We expect the Sherriff to get married and leave town. But he doesn’t. We expect at least some of the townspeople to help him – but they don’t. We expect his wife to stand by him, but she doesn’t. (Do not forsake me oh my Darling…)

Rocky – Even though the conventions of the boxing story demand that the underdog win at the end, the story creates expecations that Rocky is a bum. That he doesn’t stand a chance. Further, we expect the guy who’s a boxer to be brutish and rough. But the plot with Adrian defies that expectation by showing him to be surprisingly tender and gentle.

To Kill a Mockingbird – We expect Boo Radley to be a monster. He winds up saving Scout.
Don Quixhote – We expect the good Don to take the first good beating and go home. We expect Sancho Panza to wise up and desert the old fool.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – We expect Indy to get into a huge brawl with the guy with the sword – but he just shoots him.

I’m not saying unexpectedness is the gauge of a good story – but there appears to be something going on here. You give me a good story and I’ll show you that a big part of it is unexpected.

technorati tags:Patrick E. McLean, Structure of Story, Story, Writing, Story Construction, Plots

“Your hat is on fire.”

“Yes, but I bought it on sale.”

If you just agree with the other person, the tension is dissipated. If you say no, you really have to know where the story goes next. You have to take the ball and run with it for a while, and you reduce the possibility of the other person bailing you out. But “Yes, but…”? “Yes, but…” is magic.

“You’re wife has run off with another man.”

“(Yes, but…) I’ve been trying to be rid of that battleaxe for years.”
The very same thing is what I think of as the cardinal rule of drama. A character can never get what they want. Or if they do, it must turn out to be something very different than what they expected. (be careful what you wish for. Because If they get what they want the story or scene is over.

For example:
Guy walks into a bar and orders a drink. Bartender refuses to serve him because he’s a Sneech with only one star on his belly, and everybody knows this is “Two star on thar’s” town. But our Sneech is thirsty. So he demands a drink. Patrons of the bar try to throw him out. The Sneech beats them down. Sheriff comes in and breaks it up. The Sneech appeals to the Sherriff for justice. The Sheriff tells the Sneech to get out of town. As the Sneech walks out, he defiantly grabs a shot off the bar and downs it.
Replace the Sneech with Danny Glover and you’ve got a wonderful scene from Silverado.

For my writing, I try and extend this rule. Not only can the character never get what they want, but whatever the reader/audience expects to happen can’t happen. Maybe it’s that I’m a masocist and I just like playing tennis with two nets. But that’s another post.

technorati tags:writing, Patrick E. McLean, story, story construction, drama

The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.

This is the insight of Lester Dent, the pulp writer who created Doc Savage. This was a guy who would regularly churn out 90,000 to 100,000 words a month on a manual typewriter. There’s no two ways about it, he was a monster. (Carpal Tunnel? Try micro-fractures in your fingertips.)

So, naturally, I’m interested in anything he has to say about story construction. And it makes intuitive sense to me. I have an above average opinion of my prose style. Me makes pretty wordses. But for a long time, when I tried to write a story, it would suck. Literally, the thing would fall down when you were reading it.

My stories had no foundation, the walls weren’t square and the roofs leaked.

But when I started paying attention to the structure and the rules of story. Magic started happening. And I went through a fundamental change. Instead of just enjoying the experience of a story, I started to also enjoy how they were made.

For a while I outlined obsessively. (I still do, only less obsessively.) I felt like there was a dearth of information about story and story construction. And that most of what was out there was written by people who weren’t writers. Who weren’t involved in the often messy business of writing stories. In short, dilettantes.

I’ve come to realize that it’s just the opposite. There is a wealth of story information out there. It’s just locked up in all the stories and films we love so much. It’s just that the first time I read or watched them I was too busy enjoying them (not a bad thing) to learn how they were put together. Because a story, if properly constructed, becomes invisible. You don’t say – “What an elegant subplot.” You say, “Aw man, look what happened to Billy.”

So instead of keeping all these notes and thoughts in my head. I’m going to blog them.

The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.

This is the insight of Lester Dent, the pulp writer who created Doc Savage. This was a guy who would regularly churn out 90,000 to 100,000 words a month on a manual typewriter. There’s no two ways about it, he was a monster. (Carpal Tunnel? Try micro-fractures in your fingertips.)

So, naturally, I’m interested in anything he has to say about story construction. And it makes intuitive sense to me. I have an above average opinion of my prose style. Me makes pretty wordses. But for a long time, when I tried to write a story, it would suck. Literally, the thing would fall down when you were reading it.

My stories had no foundations, the walls weren’t square and the roofs leaked.

But when I started paying attention to the structure and the rules of story. Magic started happening. And I went through a fundamental change. Instead of just enjoying the experience of a story, I started to also enjoy how they were made.

For a while I outlined obsessively. (I still do, only less obsessively.) I felt like there was a dearth of information about story and story construction. And that most of what was out there was written by people who weren’t writers. Who weren’t involved in the often messy business of writing stories. In short, dilettantes.

I’ve come to realize that it’s just the opposite. There is a wealth of story information out there. It’s just locked up in all the stories and films we love so much. It’s just that the first time I read or watched them I was too busy enjoying them (not a bad thing) to learn how they were put together. Because a story, if properly constructed, becomes invisible. You don’t say – “What an elegant subplot.” You say, “Aw man, look what happened to Billy.”

So instead of keeping all these notes and thoughts in my head. I’m going to blog them.

technorati tags:story construction, writing, Patrick E. McLean, plot

My primary interest is how sound is used to convey effect and carry a story. In this sense the term rhetoric is used to indicate the persuasion of an audience that story which it patently fictional is in some sense true or real. Hopefully more true and real than everyday experience. And if we don’t feel this way about stories on some level, are they really worth anything?

Tentative (and Partial) Outline

Why does Sound have meaning?

The Uses of Sound

Sound as symbol

Sound as action

Sound as setting

Sound as character

Sound as emotion

Sound as closure

Sound as unknown

Storytelling vs. Story Reading

A broader definintion of reading
Voice technique
Towards a manual of style

A few questions for you

What if the Seanachai was less audio and more text? By making a podcast, I’m adding four hours, minimum to the production process. And I’m adding to the time it takes you to assimilate the story. (Ah, got to use the BorgWord there.)

So how many of you check the ‘blog or read this thing in a newsreader? And how many people would rather have an interesting post or story every couple of days, and audio once a month?
Read or Listen?
It’s the mournful refrain of the Econ tribe, “Tradeoffs. Tradeoffs. Tradeoffs.”