Event Horizon

Mama's leaking.

Leaking smiley face stickers and Forever stamps. Leaking envelopes with the post office bar codes and the address labels with wooden shoes on them. Leaking that precise 1950s penmanship, though the letters are wavy and shaky now, like Sparky's lines and text before he died. This week alone she's sent two photographs – one of me fat in a BYU t-shirt, standing next to Dad in his sunglasses, standing next to Albert who looks like that kid in “The Phone Call,” the one who played the bassoon; the other of me and my younger brother but really young, he's got a bottle in his mouth and I'm skinny and look like my six-year-old. And she sent a letter I sent to Santa, asking for something or other from the Sears catalog – I gave him page number and price – plus a tank for my fish.

I wondered why I didn't get the tank. Now I know. Santa never got the letter.

Stopped at her house today. She just got out of the hospital, where they drained fluid from her lungs and gave her heart a shock treatment so it would beat more regularly.

She gave us a box of stuff.

Inside the box: a composition book I had in college, filled with blank pages. I don't remember if I cut them out, or maybe if Dad did when he inherited the book somehow. Another book, all in Dutch, about the little city in Holland where some of Dad's cousins live. I don't read Dutch. And there are three unsharpened number two pencils. And a box of bobbins and such for the sewing machine she gave Sherri. “Michelle sews,” Mama says. “She can use them.” Copies of typewritten blessings given to her mother and father. Copies of certificates. “I thought you might like those,” she said. A book on country ways I remember pulling from the shelf as a kid. And being bored by it. I'll read it now.

Mama's leaking.

When Dad was alive, we teased him. We teased that his idea of increasing the value of his property was by increasing its weight. That explained the ton and a half of landscape rocks he sneaked out of the woods at Kilgore, the eighty-seven trees on the third of an acre, the buckets of rusty nails underneath the workbench.

Dad's been dead ten years now. He wanted to be buried on the property. To make it heavier still, we teased. But he's in the Lincoln cemetery, underneath a pine tree.

Ten years now.

And Mama's leaking.

At her house today I saw on her desk – I went into the office to get a photo album for her; she wanted to show my six-year-old something because he brought his own scrapbook to show her – a pile of envelopes with more smiley stickers and more Forever stamps and more wavy handwriting, ready to go to other members of the family.

She left the room to use the bathroom, and the six-year-old climbed into her chair. “That's Oma's chair,” I cautioned. “She'll want it back.”

Then the ten-year-old came in.
“Where'd Oma go?” he asked.

“She disappeared,” Michelle joked.

“Yup,” I said. “It's time to take stuff from her house. What do you want?”

He didn't answer.

I didn't push the issue. Because Mama's leaking. It'll all flow out eventually.

“Do you have wooden shoes at your house?” she asks.

Yes, we do. You gave us two the last time we were here.

“Did I give you two, or a pair?”

Two.

“Take a pair, then,” she said. There are five lined up on the fireplace hearth.

They're hers. I don't want to take them, because I don't want to acknowledge that Mama's leaking.

“I don't know where we'd put them,” I said.

Later: “Do you have a penny jar,” she asked.

Oh yes.

“There's this one,” she said, holding up a jar of Dutch coffee.

No one in the house drinks coffee.

“And I've got more up there,” she said, pointing to the shelf above the stove.

Later: “Do you have any Dutch pictures,” she asked. “I've got too many. I don't have room for them all.”

We've got pictures of our own we don't have wall space for.

“Do you have enough pineapple? Fruit cocktail?”

We're heading out the door: “This is a big house, Oma,” the six-year-old says. And there's only one person living in it.”

“I know,” Mama says. “But I have the cat.”

“Our old house used to be so full,” she said. “Ten people, one bathroom. But we did it.”

She starts to cry.

Mama's leaking. I hug her for a while. But we have to go.

We take the box. We drive home.

There's another letter from her in the mailbox.

A photo of me in a striped shirt, with my brother and sister. All three mugging for the camera.

A Writer Writes. Right?

Dad, third from left, and his brother, first on left, visiting their old school in Holland, circa 1950. Not the wooden shoes and Oompa-Loompa headgear.

Think back on the best writing workshop you ever attended. And while you're thinking, I'll tell you a story.

I don't have much to think back on when it comes to writing workshops as, in my academic career, I attended only one, with Raymond Federman, who never actually got around to reading the story that got me into the workshop in the first place. For the morbidly curious, the story may be read here.

I then entered the world of community journalism, foolishly thinking my mediocre skills as a storyteller would be put to good and profitable use. And while for the most part I was right in that assumption, I never really did get to write the kind of stuff I really wanted to write. So I made the leap into technical writing and really, really never get the change to write the kind of stuff I really want to write. So that's why, in the past year, I turned my drive to post inanities to this blog into a drive to actually turn the inanities into a book, which I have done. I'm now polishing the first book and working on the second one, and I'm happy.

That brings me first to the picture I use to introduce this post: Dad and Sjaak were getting ready to leave the country and come to the United States, so they went on one last little visit to the places of their youth, figuring they'd never see them again. But Dad, I know, got to go back to most of them, because he took us there (I wish I'd taken better pictures of that trip). I now find myself in kind of a similar position, as in about a month I'll be conducting a writing workshop.

That's kind a scary. As far as authorial chops go, I have a constellation of dim journalistic stars on which to sculpt a tapestry of competence, as Dilbert's boss might say. I have my unpublished book and the unified rabble of other started but unfinished ideas, plus a slightly shinier collection of Uncharted bits to show for my long minutes of writerial toil. But do I have what is necessary to inspire other writers?

No.

So I'm going to rely on them finding inspiration in other authors, and in themselves, to push them along.

If you're interested, a draft of the workshop is here:

I Should Have Written It Down

I hope through the exercises I've outlined here to help our Explorers more fully capture their experiences and to offer them strategies for putting those experiences on paper. I'm not sure if any of this is going to work, but I'm hopeful.

Internet Behemoths

Taken from Laughing Squid's Flickr profile, used under Creative Commons licensing.

Back when the Internet and I were first introduced, the Internet was kinda cute.

Using server space provided by the University of Idaho, and encouraged, by of all people, a rather dyed-in-the-wool French teacher, I put together some very simple web sites including, of course, the inevitable mid-1990s "home page." It looked like this (thanks again, Wayback Machine). I had the obligatory self-promotion. The obligatory pop culture references. And, eventually, the obligatory fan boy pages (for more, go here).

It was all hand-built. I learned by sneaking peeks at others' source code, and then by copying and tweaking.

But you know what, today's Internet ain't the Internet of my youth.

We're now in the age of Internet Behemoths. Sites like, say, Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, which just recently joined that exclusive club of sites with a billion page views a month. That would have absolutely broken the little "visitors meter" I had on my page for decades, and which you can still find on pages in odd little corners of the web where the Aughts have never seeped.

And we're now in the age of rebellion against these behemoths -- and not merely against those who became behemoths thanks to bricks-and-mortar money.

Soon, I predict, there will be preservationists on the web interested in protecting mom-and-pop Internet ventures against the big boys who want to swallow them whole. And not necessarily because mom and pop are more willing to protect personal data -- there is no privacy any more -- or react in a more agile fashion than their ginormous competitors, but simply because of the romance of the Lycos Age, (who knew they were even still alive?) the Bronze Age of the modern Internet. There will be people who prefer to surf a web walled off from modernity, a Wayback Machine-level net where Lycos is king and everybody has a site visitor counter and where e-mail was about the only way to keep up with your distant e-mail compatriots because no one had even fathomed the idea of allowing people to make live comments on the stuff you were posting. Guestbooks were about as sophisticated as we got back then.

I'm not saying Web 1.0 was better. But then again, since I used that technology to build my own web sites, rather than merely using someone else's technology to babble on about my inadequacies, maybe it was better. I certainly knew more HTML back then. It's a pity I didn't keep up with it. Then again, I don't have to pay for server space here at Blogger, so let's not take the nostalgia too far, shall we?

One Tweet Away

They say in space that nobody can hear you scream.

But on Twitter, even though you’re pretty much shouting into the darkness, the darkness is full of lots and lots and lots and lots of people who don’t really care what you tweet until you tweet against their sensibilities.

That’s what retailer Kenneth Cole may learn this week.

Funny thing, I’ve never heard of Kenneth Cole until the story of the inappropriate tweets broke.

Now I know about them, but – alas for them – in an unfavorable light.

This won’t turn into a Cooks Source debacle, but still you’d think that the president of a company would know a little better than to tweet about a massive demonstration like what they’re seeing in Cairo this week and turn it into a sales opportunity.

Then again, given the amount of snark and sarcasm and other silliness on the Internet, you’d think this would be one tweet lost in the forest. But it struck a nerve, and the company will have to do some damage control to fix things.

Just more evidence that you need to think before you tweet. Or comment. Or post. Or open that big fat yap of yours. I’m learning that, too.

CNN Flubs an Easy One

 

Oh, I feel their pain.

I’ve done this: Turned in what I thought was a simple story I thought was just fine. Then, when it appeared in print, its flaws magically appeared.

CNN.com is taking a lot of guff today because of a flub in their report on Punxsutawney Phil (emphasis mine):

(CNN) -- Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his hovel Wednesday and saw his shadow, which -- according to tradition -- means that spring will come early this year.

Phil, whose first name comes from the Pennsylvania town where he lives, emerged at 7:20 a.m. ET and hung out with the well-dressed gentlemen presiding over the event without retreating inside.

Tuesday's Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney marked the town's 125 celebration of the annual event.

Phil's prediction is likely welcome news for residents in the path of a monster snow and ice storm stretching from Texas to New Hampshire.

Of course, anyone who’s familiar with groundhog weather predictions or the film “Groundhog Day” knows that when Phil sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter (as verified by Phil himself).

Phil, of course, didn’t see his shadow this morning, meaning that spring will come early. CNN got it wrong. Oops.

The AOL Way

“Double the taxes! Triple the taxes! Squeeze every last drop out of those insolent – musical – peasants!”
Prince John, from Disney’s Robin Hood

What I find interesting about all the Internet blather about “The AOL Way,” a leaked document that outlines how the gigantic content company plans to increase the amount of content it produces while optimizing its use and discoverability through search engine optimization is that the reactions to it are pretty much summed up in one paragraph written by Anthony Ha over at venturebeat.com:

Not surprisingly, this document has provoked a lot of comments from the VentureBeat editorial team. A couple of writers are dancing a happy dance that we’re not working at AOL or an organization with similarly straitlaced guidelines. But my boss Owen Thomas reports that he’s taking copious notes.

Both reactions are easily understandable and demonstrate some of the difficulties that many media companies are facing as they either try to shift their focus from print to online, or are trying to build a profitable online enterprise in conjunction with or independent from any print operation.

In a nutshell, AOL’s “way” includes increasing the number of articles their in-house writers write, from what number I don’t know to 5 to ten “quality” posts per day. Find me any newspaper or magazine writer willing to churn through that much copy in a day and you’ll be presenting me with a very short list – and thus the exultation on the part of Ha and his cohorts that they’re not currently employed by AOL.

But looking at how AOL wants to optimize its content and ensure profitability for whatever is produced – to the point that they won’t authorize an article that’ll cost $250 to produce if it can’t produce at least $500 in income – combined with a drive to push in-house writers and freelancers to think more along the lines of current topics, revenue potential with each story, and the potential to drag in more eyeballs with each and every story and you can see why Ha’s boss is taking “copious notes” from the document.

All of this number-crunching, of course, is going to scare the hell out of the average writer. When a story has to be pitched – and pitched quickly – with not only editorial considerations in mind but also revenue considerations and a ballpark estimate on how many eyeballs the story will attract – and it can’t be just a number pulled out of a hat; AOL has fancy algorithms they’ll churn any story idea through to ensure the numbers are right – writers are going to be thrust out of their zones of comfort and, likely, zones of ability. They’ll regard such efforts – well, most of them, some might rise to the challenge – as akin to Disney’s Prince John squeezing the peasants for more money just because he can.

Dan Mitchell, writing at fortune.com, has a more scathing assessment of “The AOL Way”:

[T]he company seems to care far more about appealing to search engines than it cares about appealing to readers, and that it is desperate. So desperate that it's instructing editorial managers to increase traffic by eye-popping amounts in a very short period of time.

"The AOL Way" sounds a lot like "The Bloomberg Way" – the set of heuristics the business-news service has operated from for years. But the similarities stop with the title. While Bloomberg has a reputation for its highly disciplined and demanding (some would say despotic) approach, "The Bloomberg Way" is mainly aimed at producing high-quality business journalism. "The AOL Way" is mainly about ramping up volume and, largely through technological manipulation, squeezing out as much profit as possible from each "piece of content," regardless of its quality.

His criticism may be a little harsh, focusing too much on the drive for numbers and not for the “quality/integrity” that AOL also mentions in the document. He points out that Bloomberg uses a similar approach, albeit one that focuses on quality business journalism. There’s nothing to say AOL couldn’t take a similar approach. Then again, he quotes a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta that criticizes AOL’s current content as “piffle.” Then again, AOL is investing heavily in citizen journalism, at the same time the crown prince and the court jester of our new anyone-can-publish Internet Age.

But consider what most people go to their local papers for: chicken-dinner journalism. That means they want the basics, they want to know when the fire department is holding their chicken-dinner fundraiser, what the scores were from the local high school games, who is dead, who crossed lines with the police, and such. A lot of the rest of what goes into your average paper goes through a story pitch, but it’s hit and miss as to whether readers will read any of it at all. I’m reminded of the “megaturds” that Dave Barry writes about: the stories that editors and publishers love because they win journalism awards, not because their readers love them.

So the idea of inventing a successful process that gauges the expected profitability and appeal of each story pitched in balance with the writer’s desire to do the story has got to be attractive to editors. Editors can immediately turn to the numbers to show writers that they’ve got to do what they’re being asked, because what they’re being asked to do is going to help them earn their paychecks.

As both a writer and an editor, I can see the advantages and disadvantages to what AOL wants to do.

The Daily -- The Future of Tablet News?

(Borrowed from Electronista.)

Here's how one of my tech-happy, Apple-centric cohorts put it:

We are witness to history.

Watch and learn as Apple DOES what everyone's been talking about for years: Making big money selling digital fishwrappers (Also known as online news).

At 99 cents/week, there are more than 15 million iPad users out there who will be able to view The Daily.

If 10% of iPadders subscribe for one year, that's $700 Million. More than enough to pay the bills. And then there's ad revenue... Should be at least a $1Billion/yr business.

It's projected there will be 30 million more iPad users by year's end. I'll be one of them, so I see this working out well.

It will be fascinating to watch what happens. Every online news organization will be watching closely and taking notes.

I'm not sure, personally, how much of this will pan out, not knowing the specifics beyond what's been blabbed online, and not having an iPad – nor the inclination to subscribe for 99 cents a week for that matter. But what my friend says in his last sentence is absolutely true: This'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

We've all seen how newspapers and magazines have struggled in transitioning their products to the online realm, so I'm not really holding my breath on this one.

What may be the saving grace of this effort is that by targeting iPad users through Apple's App Store, they're hitting an online, mobile community that is -- and this is very important -- warmed already to the idea of paying for online content.

But there are lots and lots of questions.

Will this be cross-platform? If I buy a non-Apple tablet, can I subscribe? And given that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is behind this effort, that right there will scare off some potential subscribers. But then again with News Corp behind all this, this is one company with extremely deep pockets and lots of reporterial resources. I'm not sure they can count on brand loyalty as we've seen with the online-only versions of the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with the iPad's current audience, but they've certainly got the journalistic chops to pull it off.

How advertising-intense will the product be, and will users support the advertising? Yes, they don't have the overhead of printing presses, paper, and such -- but staffing and salaries have always been the most expensive parts of news production. To pay one staffer a salary of $60,000 (admittedly high in the journalism biz) will take 60,000 subscribers if the $1 a week is their only income.

One great challenge will be to ensure that content produced for The Daily is unique to The Daily – because it's been proven time and again that if readers can find what they want online for free, they're not going to go behind any paywall, no matter how flashy the content behind that paywall may be. The presser says a companion site will offer about 10 percent of The Daily's content for free, but will retain the rest for its paying customers. That's well and good. But for this to work, The Daily not only will need unique content, but content that's valuable enough to its readers to make them fork over the 99 cents a week. That sounds odd in an industry where people already fork over for subscriptions, but we've seen how well subscriptions have done online. There's so much free stuff out there, the reasoning is why pay for stuff?

Lots of questions. It WILL be fascinating to see what happens.

Everyone's Writing A Book

Everyone, it seems, is writing a book.

And I mean everyone.

The guy the next cubicle over is writing a book, something or other about a distant relative’s experiences in the Civil War. I’m writing two books, well, three at the moment. And over at Nathan Bransford’s blog, we’ve just seen the results of his annual first paragraph contest, which saw nothing short of 1,500 entries this year.

Needless to say I’m not one of those who won or even earned honorable mention in the contest, else I’d be bragging that up. But I am here to say I am learning a lot.

And I finally got noticed in one of his contests, by fellow contestant and entrant Deniselle, who fingered my introduction to the Hermit of Iapetus as one of her favorites, thusly:

Mister Fweem - this begins with Amundsen and how the narrator feels he lied about something. It might feel random, but I loved it. It says a lot about the character and the way he relates to the world.

Random. That’s what I go for a lot in my stories. So that makes me feel pretty good.

But still: Everyone out there is writing a book, bamboozling the public for a measly buck, as Thor said in Johnny Hart’s BC. But like Thor, I took Peter’s advice (Why don’t you write one yourself) and am enjoying it all.

But still: Everyone out there is writing a book. And I’m not so sure that having a bang-o first paragraph is the definitive clincher in getting noticed by an agent. But I have learned this: Maybe Nathan Bransford isn’t the agent for me – or at least his blog followers aren’t generally my kind of people – because I’m not writing in the style or genre they like. There are enough published mediocrities out there to make me think I can get published as well. Just finding the right book/agent fit will be the clincher.

File Under: Poems, Craptacular

US 91

Dusty gutters and sagging lines
tattered books stacked on the shelf
next to the highway
sinews and sews the clots together
under the radar eye of the policeman
in the blue and sliver squad car
Towns and mascot agricultural products welcome you
and call to visit long enough
to spend a few
minutes
dollars
at the tables of the Dutch Treat
or in the seats of the Virginia
or on the steps of the library book
glassy faded brown
building and tree
road dust and citizen
do not betray the promise
of the solid yellow stripes

US 91/Business I-15

Rainclean in the desert heat
holding back the waving wheat
shrugging shoulders at silo and shack
bleary eye of stoplight
dead grade up the railroad track
Arrows stabbing left and right
calling to the gathering flight
beckon off the widened path
to engulf among the trees
manicured, and flowered too
grass growing green
but at the feet of the ancient remnant
fit for witch with a child to eat
the maw swifly slurps at
the fading yellow stripe

NOTE: I like that last little bit. But as for the rest, I'm with you -- I have no idea what I was babbling about. So dies another college poem.

Cold

It's supposed to be in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 degrees below zero, with the wind chill, in the morning. Not looking forward to that.

Neither is the truck. I did get the oil pan heater plugged in, but still, nobody likes to get up and go at 4:40 in the AM when it's that butt-cold outside. I swear, the next house we have is going to have a garage. I don't care what else it doesn't have, but it is going to have a garage.

Just so you don't think we're wusses here:

I'll be on the bus in the morning, heading to work. The INL does not close down at a mere bone-chilling wind chill. And the kids will likely have school too, since the school district here won't shut down unless the wind chill drops to 45 below or colder.

Still, I don't like it.

Michelle and the kids got the woodpile at the back of the house restocked, so we'll have plenty of fuel to burn. And, thankfully, it looks like the worst of this little burst of cold will be over by Wednesday.

I still don't know how the Leaning Snowmen of Sugar City can handle the cold:

It probably helps that this one in particular was made of November snow, which just doesn't stick around here.