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.

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.

hot, bloated Thursday ripening in the foul sun of the dred Sargasso

But, y’know, close enough. Do I really need an excuse to talk like a pirate? The answer is no.

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/

That said, if the problem is not resolved by this weekend, I’ve got a workaround planned. So, one way or the other, two chapters of Unkillable will drop this weekend.

Thanks for bearing with.

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.

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#7 Burggggggggurp

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• 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.

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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.

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http://bigthink.com/ideas/20807

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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?

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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 <---

http://tinyurl.com/DRSep121

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

There is a lot of hype about the iPad. I am skeptical for many reasons, but all of my fancy arguments were just trumped by an email Apple just sent me. At the very top was this:

After reading this sentence I have become afraid for Apple. It smacks of sales-ly desperation. Because if that’s the best thing that Apple can say about what’s supposed to be a game-changing product, then they are in trouble. Let’s examine why.

Carl Sandburg wrote, “The I older I get the more suspicious of adjectives I become.” This bit of marketing is a wonderful example of why you shouldn’t trust them either. In this sentence, it’s not clear that the adjectives mean anything. Let’s break it down.

One of the best ways to see if a sentence has any sense to it is to cross out all of the adjectives and adverbs and see what you are left with. If we do that with this gem we have: “Our technology in a device at a price.” Totally underwhelming. Compare this to the words Jobs used to introduce the iPhone, “a new iPod, a new phone and an Internet communicator” — all in one.

If we use this logical structure to describe the iPad it becomes, “a new iPod and an internet communicator.” But that sounds underwhelming, so somebody tried to cover it up with deceptive adjectives. If you want to argue that this is a new category of device that changes everything, I will disagree with you. But that’s not why I’m scared. I’m scared because Apple is scared. And the fear is manifest in those bullshit adjectives. If that’s the best they can do to explain why the iPad is a game changer I’m not buying it.

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/2009/11/why-is-this-doll-winking-at-me/feed/ 3 http://www.patrickemclean.com/2009/11/the-toughest-trees-ever/ http://www.patrickemclean.com/2009/11/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:

Anyway, I’ve put it online as a free, serialized audiobook. And I want you to listen to it. Because the more traffic I generate for the book, the better my real-world publishing chances become.  There’s was recently a great article in Time about this new path to breaking through. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1872381,00.html

So to help me out, just follow this link. It will pull open iTunes and subscribe you.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=309010761

Episode Script

Azizulluah’s Vault

INTRO:

The world is large. And it’s interconnected in ways we can’t even imagine. Ties of technology, community, culture — boggles the mind in this digital age.

And if there is one thing that has brought people together since the dawn of time, it’s commerce. trade. business. money.

It’s an odd thing to consider, but the Greeks learned geometry from the Egyptians. And they used it to keep track of who owned what land each year after the Nile flooded.

We’re connected through the centuries and across the globe in ways we can’t even imagine, and the Seanachai this week is a story about one of those connections.

It’s called. Azizullah’s vault. For the Seanachai, I’m Patrick McLean.

Somewhere North of Jalabad there is a town called Nangalam. In this town there is a banker. Not, however, the sort of banker you might be familiar with. But then Nangalam is probably not the kind of town you are familiar with. The streets are dirt, raw sewage drains on to the ground, yet this town is a hub of regional commerce.

And our banker is a young man named Azizulluah. We will call him Ziz. Ziz is not the bank president. Ziz is more like a clerk. A clerk in what might be the most secure bank in the world. You see the bank that Ziz works for has a vault, or more specifically, a cave high in the Hindu Kush. And to rob this vault, not only would you have to find it. You would have to convince every tribesman along the way that you belong there.

For, in this region of the world, they are not much enamored or impressed by invaders. In 1219 the Mongols laid waste to the entire region. And when compared to that, the Russians and the Americans, well, they just dont measure up to the standards of Genghis Khan. And to take and hold the high passes and deep caves of these mountains, one would have to do substantially better than the troops of Genghis Khan. Even they stayed away. (from this part of town) These mountains have always remained closed to strangers. Or perhaps thats not the right way to say it. Theyll let you in. Youll just never make it out alive.

And thats thing with robbing a bank. Youve got to make it back out. Alive and with the money. And with this bank that’s just not going to happen.

Another interesting thing about Ziz is that where other clerks spend their time counting money and carefully rechecking the count, Ziz banks by weight. Ziz is simultaneously a clerk and a mule packer. He runs a Mule Train from Nangalam to his vault high in the mountains. At certain times of the year the mountains become impassible, and Ziz takes a vacation of sorts. But most of this young man’s life has been spent walking uphill or walking downhill.

Oh yes, and beating mules. He has 12 of them. To make this mundane workaday task more enjoyable he has given his mules special names. There are two mules named Bush, (George and George W) one named Brown, another named Blair, and a few of them have Russian names. Will he name his next mule Obama? Certainly, now that a fresh round of troops have been sent to Afghanistan. Not that it will make a difference. It will never makes a difference. There is simply nothing that Ziz can do to make a difference.

In fact, he couldn’t even kill George Bush when he had the chance.

To understand how this could be so, you must realize that the skill of Mule Packing is in fact a highly refined and technical art. It involves attaching regular parcels to an irregular animal in a balanced way. The better you are, the more you can fit on the mule, in a way that keeps the mule, well not happy, but at least less grumpy, and healthy.

But when you’re cold and tired — When a storm is coming in and you are in a hurry to get moving, well, Sometimes you cut corners. Sometimes you make mistakes. So on one trip, when Ziz realized that he was in danger of losing a bundle of money, he made his way back through the train, to adjust lashings. This no easy feat, because it meant he had to squeeze himself between the mules and a sheer rock face — a task made more difficult because on the other side of the mules was a 3,000 foot drop. It was also difficult because the mule with the loose pack was grumpy from carrying an uneven load. And as Ziz tried to fix the problem, the mule tried to stomp on his feet.

Ziz cursed and punched the mule. The mule spit and kicked. But eventually, Ziz got his hand on what he thought was the right knot.

But when he pulled on this knot. 160 pounds of twenty dollar bills landed on his feet and legs. This hurt Ziz, but it was nothing compared to what happened to the mule. With the sudden unbalancing of load, the mule named George Bush tipped violently to the left and went over the cliff.

What goes through George Bush’s mind when he faces certain death tumbling through the sky? To be sure, this has happened before, but below that George Bush there was ocean. Below this George Bush there was nothing sharp rock. And instead of a parachute strapped to his back there is a pack full of money, 1.48 million dollars that batters him each time he rolled and bounced down the 3000 foot rocky slope.

On the way down, George Bush brayed out in pain and fear to whatever stubborn God mules complain to. And halfway to the bottom the Mule God had slight mercy. The straps holding the remaining pack let go. And money was released from the mule and thrown into the air to rain down, gracefully, onto the ravine below. Far more gracefully than poor mule.

“Surely, George Bush is dead.” Ziz thought to himself. But in the same instant, he also calculated how much money had been lost.

—

On the return trip, Ziz had collected what dollars he could find. In the course of salvaging nearly a million dollars, he found George Bush, chewing on a bit of scrub grass. He was scratched in a few places, but otherwise, none the worse for wear. As it turns out, George Bush is hard to kill.

Ziz packed the salvaged money up the mountain. Leaving some half a million dollars of the great Satan’s filthy money scattered and decomposing in a hidden valley of the Hindu Kush. It was demoralizing trip, but ultimately necessary. You see, as surely as a flame needs fire, terrorism and the international narcotics trade needs ready, untraceable cash. And for the men who use Azizullah’s unique bank – it is always, always cash and carry.

—

On the other side of the world, wrapped in the concentric circles of bureaucracy known as Washington D.C., there is a wizard. He is not, however, the sort of wizard you might be familiar with. He does not work in a high tower. The air around him does not crackle with eldrich magic. It is, however, cooled or heated as the season requires. And raw sewage is whisked from the building through the marvel of indoor plumbing.

But make no mistake, this man is a true Thaumaturge. From his marble sepulcher that squats and broods in a fetid swamp alongside the Potomac (a swamp that has long since been drained and paved over, yes, but still a swamp in spirit) he manipulates his symbols and mystical formulae to affect change in the wider world. And all of his sinister devices are pieces of paper.

Now, gentle reader, it may be that you are stout of heart, or thick of thew and the kind of person who is not easily scared by pieces of paper. But let me assure you, fear is the only correct response here. Because the pieces of paper through which this Wizard will work his magic are the pieces of paper that you know as money.

You see this Wizard has the power to rob the safest bank in the world. To plunder Azizullah’s vault without ever leaving his office. Without even uttering the magic phrase, “Look Ma, no hands.”

All the wizard need do is wave his magic pen, [mutter a few arcane phrases,] and sign a few mystic slips of paper. And when he does this] and dollars will created. And these dollars will go out into the world to as faithfully as the broom in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And just like the broom in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, these dollars will multiply. As the banks lend and lend and lend these newborn dollars will increase 10 fold.

And when this happens, there will be no spell that can call the pieces of paper back.

So if the Wizard works his magic too vigorously and too often, we all be drowning in sea of rapidly devaluing dollars; The unhappy consequence of meddling with forces that no one man, or committee of men should attempt to wield.

But what of Azizullah, banker to terrorists and drug dealers, with his his train of mules and his mountain full of ready cash? What will happen to him? What will be the worth of all the steps he has taken, all the mules he has beaten and the storms he has braved? Will they all have been for nothing?

Will the dollars become so worthless, that they won’t even be worth the trouble it would take to haul them back down the mountain? Will they, at last, only be fit for use as fuel in sputtering dung fires in the thin air found high in the Hindu Kush?

Only time will tell.

But for now Azizullah trudges on. Beating George Bush with a stick he tore from an Apricot tree.

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.

Is technology really my friend?
Or is it just pretending
to be my friend so it can date my sister?

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.

The Crash Course by Chris Martenson http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse

EPISODE SCRIPT:

Pinball is a great game. There’s something about playing a game where the operating system is the same as the visible universe. Dress it up as much as you like, add all the animatronic figures, blinky lights ramps and rabbit holes, but at the heart of it, pinball remains the ultimate physics-based game engine.

Because when you get down to it, it’s just a ball bearing and gravity. From there you get acceleration, momentum, spin — a percussive and ballistic drama trapped safely under glass for your amusement.

Which makes pinball seem like a very honest game. It’s easier to suspect that the complicated mechanism of a computer could tip things one way or another. And, if you’ve played a first person shooter online, then you’ve yelled at the screen because you know you got cheated.

Pinball can’t do this. We know the game can’t change the laws of physics for it’s convenience.

So it seems honest, until you start looking at the score. Or, more precisely, the way pinball is scored over time.

1964 – Majorettes, produced by Gottlieb — capitalized on a new feature. (add a ball) if you scored 2000 points, you got an extra ball. You got another one at 5000. The score only went up to 9999, so if you managed to roll it, I’m sure the free balls would kick in again.

1976′s Disturbingly named Capt’n fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy ( which was featured in the episode “Lather, Rinse, Repeat” )  also had a top score of 9,999.

In 1983 Gottlieb Amazon Hunt, which marketing copy cleverly described as a Jungle of Fun – had a top score of 999 million points. What the hell call it a billion And to be sure, Amazon’s are big game. But you have to admit that’s quite a jump in points. 20 years, 100,000 % inflation.

Now, part of the explanation is that pinball games moved from electro-mechanical ( that is, dials in the scoring mechanisms that physically rolled over like an odometer ) to Solid State. Which meant that pinball companies could inexpensively add another decimal place to the score. Or as many as they wanted.

Which brings us to 2003 and the Lord of the Rings pinball game. Which features the highest ever score multiplier of any pinball game. Through an interlocking complexity of modes and objectives that defy comprehension, a player can get whopping 84x score multiplyer. Which helps, because the maximum score is theoretically infinite.

At the time of this article, the current high score reported for Lord of the Rings on Pinballhighscores.com was 4.2 billion. But don’t expect it to last. I have it on good authority that underfunded colleges in India are starting to use refurbished Lord of the Rings Machines to help them in their search for large prime numbers.

So my question is. What happened? Why did the scores of pinball games inflate to the point where you get a couple million points just for successfully finding and pressing the start button. And also closely linked question: why has this phenomenon not attracted more attention? Sure it’s not AIDS or the unrest in the Middle East, crushing sub-saharan poverty, but isn’t it a little odd how normal, how matter of course this tremendous inflation has been?

I mean, basketball hasn’t gone from 2 points a basket to 200? It’s not like touchdowns are somehow cheapened by only being 6 points. And one point, one simple point in soccer is enough to incite riots.

I think that part of the answer is that it’s difficult for people to comprehend inflation of any kind. But with pinball, it’s easy to see that the bumper hit that got you 5 points in Majorette, is physically the same action as the Balrog hit in Lord of the Rings that awards you more points than the gross domestic product of Micronesia.

Points are cheap in Lord of the Rings. And points have become worth less and less over the history of pinball.

And this is point inflation.

So what about currency inflation?

It’s a terribly important question. And as I have spent more time reading and thinking about our current financial troubles, I have come to believe that they are fundamentally and inexorably linked to systematic currency inflation.

That is to say, the appearence of higher prices, when in fact, the dollar is just worth less. It’s how the 5 and dime store becomes the dollar store. How a game of pinball goes from costing a nickel to costing a dollar.

One of the reasons I’m interested in this is that I come from a family of economists. And if you think being a writer in family of jocks would be difficult, consider what it would be like to be an artist among the utlitarians. It’s kind of like being a boy being raised by wolves.

But it’s okay. They are very loving according to their savage customs and I would not trade my family for anything. And it has given me an insight into things economic that most writers just don’t have. On long nights when the moon is full, I know what causes packs of economists to howl, and what their strange music means. And, every once and a while, I can translate their savage language into English. I can read the signs that the econ tribe leaves in the wild.

And if I were to pick a subject to write about that had the highest degree of difficulty, it would be economics. History, mathematics, physics, almost every other subject  has had great popularists. People who have written interestingly and intelligibly about their subject matter. Not so with economcs.

Don’t get me wrong. Freakonomics is a plesant diversion. I’m sure there are few other works out there that I’m missing. But Economics has no Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawkings.

Which, in and of itself is fascinating to me. Black holes are interesting. No two ways about it. Where the universe came from and how it was formed, there’s some deep magic there. But a black hole isn’t going to eat your house. And an economic downturn just might.

So I thought I would write a little bit about things economic.

And right now I’m fascinated, or terrified, by inflation.

And the entire point of this wandering little essay is to point out that number of points in a pinball game and the number of dollars in a economy are set by the same rules. They only go up. And when released, the game designer pretty much loses control over them.

You see dollars can’t be exchanged for a fixed amount of gold at Fort Knox, or anywhere else. The only reason dollars have value to you or me or anybody else is that  people will take them in exchange for, well, a game of pinball or a cup of coffee.

Now difference between pinball inflation and money inflation is that money inflation has some pretty serious and unpleasant consequences for all of us. And, in the last three months, the federal reserve has practically doubled the monetary base. That’s kind of like the pre-multiplier points in Lord of the Rings. You can find a link in the show notes to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website that will show one hell of a hockey stick curve.

Now to attempt to explain the full ramifications of this monetary expansion would take a lot. Pictures would help. So would a PhD. And I have neither. But I know a guy who has both.

In the three years this podcast has been running, I don’t think I’ve recommended another podcast or blog or bit of online media. And not because they’re not out there and not because they’re not good. But because plugs and promos just didn’t seem to fit into the format. And, quite honestly, I was living in my own frantic little world.

But I’m going to recommend one now. It’s a series of short videos by a man named Chris Martensen. It’s called the “Crash Course”.  And he does a brilliant job of explaining all the stuff that every citizen should know about the economy, in terms that every citizen can understand. My admiration for the job he has done cannot be understated.

You can find the course at http://www.chrismartenson.com/crash-course

These are scary times we live in. The kind of times that no one has ever seen before. And, if you’re like me, ignorance of a subject makes it 10 times scarier. I don’t know why it is so, but if I were being by a pack of lions, I would find some comfort in being able to identify the different kinds of cat teeth.

What I’m suggesting to you with the pinball analogy is the very tip of a nuanced argument about the nature of money, currency manipulation and the business cycle. But my point is very simple.

(pinball sound effects)

When the way we manage our currency like our economy is a game of pinball, should anyone really be surprised if one day it goes on tilt?

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.

You know, with all the visions and version of distopian, statist, cybepunk fantasies that I have dancing around in my head, I have to admit, I’m the first guy who’s a little reluctant to stand up and be counted.

But the simple fact of the matter is, sometimes it has to happen. And this is one of those times. It’s time for you fine people to make yourselves known and knowable. I promise I won’t spam you. And I promise it will make it worth your while.

And hey, it’s not like I’m asking you to get a barcode tattoo. Click the picture or this sentence to make yourself known.

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.

If you’re interested in getting involved, here’s 60 minutes of our musings. Give a listen and post your reactions and suggestions.

Brandon’s blog is http://www.webbusinessfreedom.com. And don’t let his self-deprecating manner fool you, his blog is awesome. Go have a look.

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?

She’s just had surgery to remove a growth on her side, and wears a plastic collar around her neck to keep her from the stitches. The pathos of this collar is immense and surreal. As she moves through the house, the collar catches on drawer handles, chairs, the back of my knee. When she eats, she seems a combination of dog and vaccum, when she barks, it’s as if she’s been fitted with a long-abandoned piece of technology designed to allow dogs hail other dogs on passing clipper ships.

She’s deaf, nearly blind and a tremendous pain in the ass. Caring for her is difficult. Worst of all she barks, loudly and at random, Perhaps just to remind herself that she’s alive. I don’t get much sleep.

At first, my fear is that she might die while my parents are traveling. But soon, the real fear bubbles to the surface. The fear that this is all just a dress rehearsal. That one day, I will be measuring medication for my parents, waiting patiently as they go to the bathroom, and praying, as I listen to their labored breathing, that it’s not as bad as it seems. And I won’t not be surprised if I have to watch my hands around Dad’s mouth. He’s been known to snap at people. I don’t mean to insult the man, just don’t reach for his plate while he’s eating.

And this realization, makes it easier to take care of the old dog. Sure, she’s a bitch. But then so’s getting old. And all in all she handles it with a great deal of grace. I sure hope we can do the same.

Love is weird. I’m not talking about the kind of love marketers shove down your throat every Valentine’s day. I mean the real day to day act of showing someone that you care.

For example, every time I go home, my mother sends me away with food. I suspect that all mothers have this instinct. If we had evolved from wolves, I’m sure she would insist on regurgitating something for my lunch.

This last visit home it was Cherries. It’s just me and Mom at the kitchen table. And it’s during a quiet moment — one of those moments in which all children secretly hope Mom will lean in and say, “I’ve always loved you best.” That she holds up a sinister-looking Ziploc bag filled with small dark pellets. “I want you to take these back to Charlotte”, is all she says. And honestly, it feels like she’s asking me to open up SouthEast distribution for whatever illicit substance is in the bag.

So I ask. What’s in the bag.

“Tart dried cherries from Michigan. They cost a fortune if you buy them in the supermarket. If you like them, I’ve got more where that came from. I ordered four pounds.” Okay, this is still weird. She found a source in Michigan and repackaged the Cherries into (what appear to be) carefully measured and weighed Ziploc bags. I’m a little uncomfortable with it, but I say, “Okay Mom, thanks, I guess.”

She also gives me a 3lb sack of onions. There’s really no logic to this behavior. But, today, that’s what real love looks like, a quarter bag of dried cherries and a 3lb Sack of Onions. Go ahead, put that on a greeting card.

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