Author name: max

Coffee is a beautiful beverage, whatever the Memoir from Antproof Case has to say about it.  More tannins (and thus a more complex flavor) than wine, plenty of antioxidants, plus caffeine: it probably kills you, but tastes good as it does so.

For some reason offices insist on serving the kind of coffee that might better be described as battery acid mixed with raw carbon.  The bitterness and scorch overwhelms the flavor, and while the caffeine rush comes through the experience is far from pleasant.  But what are the options?  Starbucks?  Barely passable drip coffee.  Dunkin’ Donuts, down the way?  Great when I want a coffee with so much cream and sugar it qualifies as a milkshake, but not so good for a pure cup of joe.

After struggling through office coffee for the last seven months (the only part of my job that’s been a true chore for me) I’ve finally bought a three cup French Press for my desk.  I’m actually drinking less coffee now – the need to prepare the press and wait for the grounds to steep means I have to really want a cup before I grab one – but every bit of coffee I do drink is at least good enough to savor.  A small difference, maybe, when set against the vastness of the world, but a pleasant one.

Speaking of which, my four minutes are up.  Time to go press down the plunger and appreciate my afternoon.

Organization Land is a fascinating place.

In Organization Land, I have a database on my phone.  Whenever something occurs to me, or I get an assignment, I store it in this database.  The database has fields for locations: when I want to know what to do at the office, I look at the “office” tab, at home I look at the “home” tab.  It has fields for projects (like, currently, “wedding” or “work” or “Blood & Tumult”), so whenever I want or need to work on a particular project I click over to those tabs.

The true advantage of this system is its clarity.  Whenever I think of something to do, I put it in the to do list and assign to it a due date.  Then I meet my deadlines, or try to.  What I mean by “clarity” is that, whenever I think of something I have to do, I can do something about it: namely, put it on the to-do list.  I’m not a worrier by nature but I do like to think of myself as responsible, and when I forget things, I get down on myself because I’ve failed to live up to the example set by Edmond Dantes, Francis Crawford of Lymond, and all those other supremely competent fictional characters that populate my fictional universe.  This way, ideally, the recrimination disappears.

Anyway, that’s how Organization Land feels 24 hours in.  Let’s see if I can keep it up.

All lives are chaotic; some are more chaotic than others.

Mine falls in the latter category, and usually this works out just fine.  I like my days to have a madcap feel, as if I’m jumping around in one of those Doctor Who episodes where the hero has to solve seven different problems simultaneously within the next five minutes before the credits start to roll.  I love the sense that I’ve beaten something at the end of the day, even if that “something” is only my own slowly growing madness.

Recently, I’ve begun to realize that while this method is pretty awesome, it’s not ideal for my current lifestyle.  I have, as of this writing, a job to do, a wedding to plan, two novels to write (concurrently!), and a graphic novel project to develop.  There are too many things I must do at any given moment to keep track of, even in my usual too-caffeinated fashion.

My friend @dandelionjar uses OmniFocus for this purpose, and I’m giving it a shot.  No promises about managing the full Getting Things Done lifestyle, but with some luck I’ll be able to keep that heroic feeling – off the to-do list it goes! – while actually getting things done closer to when I should, with fewer reminders from concerned friends and loved ones.

At least, that’s the idea.  Let’s see how well it works out.

io9 ran an article on the Google Books settlement today.  I skimmed the article when I realized it was trying to take an unequivocal stance on legally and morally hazy ground, and read the comments.

There I found an example of one of an argument I’ve often found dogging the heels of people who want to make a living by art: “you should do it for the love, not for the money.”  “Never make your passion your business.”

Gah!

Let me put on my ranting hat for a moment.

*finds hat*

The fact that a writer wishes to be paid for her work does not mean that money is the sole motivation for that work. Artists make art for the love of it; they’ll write, act, sing for free, and the world will starve them as they live and celebrate their greatness after they’re safely dead. Arts unions exist for precisely this reason – at their best, they protect artists from people who will take their life’s work without so much as a “thank you.”  Sure, a writer shouldn’t write or a composer compose or an actor act  for money (these fields are rarely well-paid), but nor should they allow themselves to be exploited.

If money disappears from arts, we’ll end up in a world where there are no artists, where the most creative people are dilletantes who scribble a measure or two at night after they return from their bank job, building one symphony in 70 years. What a loss for the world.

Borders thinks I want to seduce Mr. Darcy, or at least that I want to read about people who do.

Let’s back away from the question of what kind of heartless moron would want to stand between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, and examine the facts:

In their ceaseless Pellenorian quest to understand the Customer, e-retailers have turned to a set of software tools that monitor customers on a transaction level: what they buy, what they review, what they recommend to friends. Most people know this as the “Today’s Recommendations for You” line on Amazon — things that people who like what you like, like. In most cases it’s great: the more you buy, the better Amazon, or Borders, learns what you want to buy.

Until, that is, the system gets polluted. A year ago, invited to a friend’s bachelorette party, I purchased for her a copy of “Seducing Mr Darcy” by Gwyn Cready, which is a romance novel about a woman who gets trapped in Pride and Prejudice (the non-zombie version) and falls desperately in lust, to judge from the ebullient back-cover copy, with Mr. Darcy. The friend in question is an Austen buff and one of our earliest prolonged conversations was about the peril of falling for guys like Darcy (because so often tall dark and brooding is brooding because that’s the way he is, not because he needs someone to make it all better), so I thought it was a great purchase. I bought the book without reading past the cover, gave it to her, and she (being a romance-reading type of lady) loved it.

And now Borders thinks Mr. Darcy is my ideal man. I get e-alerts from them when he shows up, or when time travel romances peak in the bestseller list, or when Gwyn Cready publishes a new book. Props to Gwyn Cready, of course, it seems like she’s making the career work for her and her concepts sound like a lot of fun, but I’m a Zelazny/Crowley/Lynch/Mieville/Bujold/Dunnett kind of guy and I like my romance next to a nice glistening fire-seared cut of international (or interstellar) intrigue.

My fiancee, who gets many of her course books off Amazon, has a similar problem: she’s taking a class in the Islamic tradition now and she took a class last semester on American Fundamentalism, and recommendations for books on those topics have by far eclipsed whatever might be her personal preferences for pleasure reading.

Eventually, I think there should be a check box you can press at Amazon (or Borders) if you don’t want an item on your search history — not for privacy, but for convenience. But for the nonce, I’ll take my moments of zen when they arrive in my inbox on a Monday morning.

Every time the subject of self-publishing is raised on the battlefield that is the internet, partisans appear, hundreds of miniature Robert Jordans (the Hemmingway character, not the author) racing behind enemy lines to blow up their bridge for the Greater Cause.  There are two factions, roughly: the New Kids, the great unwashed, the publishing equivalent of the webcomic crowd (“build an audience with content, promote the hell out of yourself, rock the platform & sell t-shirts”), and the Wonderful System, in which an interlocking cosmos of agents, publishers, editors, publicists, etc. spin about one another like the crystal spheres of old astrology, ensuring the happiness of the literary world.

There’s a surprising amount of vitriol from some members of the Wonderful System toward self-publishing, which they see not as a generative technology but as a last resort for people who can’t succeed in any other way.  Maybe they’re right; I haven’t read many self-published books, so I’ve got no sense of their overall quality (though I have read many self-published comics, some of which are great and some of which are less so and some of which are crap).  However, I find these protestations funny, because they’re delivered overwhelmingly on blogs.

What is a blog, dear readers?  There are no covers, no dead trees, but make no mistake, blogs are self-publishing at its purist: self-publishing generally of nonfiction and of ideas and of criticism and of links to neat things my friends have done, but self-publishing nevertheless, and some bloggers succeed (measured by readers or by financial reward) through this model.  The modern nonfiction bookshelf is full of ex-bloggers and collected blog books, and even fiction has begun to make the transition (though I’m aware of fewer success stories there).

That’s what I find funny about the whole exchange: the fact that these arguments about self-publishing could not take place save for the very medium being discussed, and that neither proponent nor opponent tends to take pause to consider this fact, and what it means for the world of media as a whole.