And A Meme is Born

Until about noon this morning, I had never heard of Kirby Delauter.

Nor would I have reason to. He’s a member of the Frederick County, Maryland, county council, and matters to me here in Idaho not a whit.

But apparently Kirby Delauter has had a tiff with a local news reporter and is threatening her and her paper with legal action if she/they dare use his name, Kirby Delauter, member of the Frederick County, Maryland, county council, without permission in their paper.

And never mind what else this man has forgotten. He’s forgotten the First Commandment of Dealing with Local Newspapers: Thou Shalt Not Piss Off People Who Buy Ink by the Barrel. Seriously. You know how much those itty-bitty ink cartridges cost for your printer, right? Well, the folks at the Frederick News-Post buy it in 55-gallon drums. They’ve got a right to be pissed.

The Frederick News-Post has published a righteously juvenile editorial, calling councilman Kirby Delauter out for his shenanigans, which have not gone unnoticed by others in the newspaper arena.

The Kirby Delauter debacle flared over this article (typical of small-town newspapers inordinately fascinated with petty minutae in local government, as are local government officials). Because seriously, who needs a 1,088-word article about parking and parking-related shenanigans at the county office? This reminds me of the many boring stories I wrote on municipal government during ten years as a newspaper reporter. Trust me, there is NOTHING more boring than municipal government, especially as done by inexpert, small-town journalists such as myself.

But I recognize the signs: Elected officials having their petty squabbles, including with the local newspaper, and letting those squabbles bleed over into the ink.

But there’s apparently a “hit piece” out there somewhere that Kirby Delauter likes even less than the brief mention he receives in this article, which first fanned his flames of hatred against the reporter in question and the newspaper.

I have not yet hit the level of Kirby Delauter fascination that would require me to search out this hit piece article. But ten years’ worth of working in newspapers tells me there’s probably a whisper of hit piece in the hit piece that’s been blown up by typical local government member stooginess and local newspaper busybodiness and prelediction for dull articles. 

Kirby Delauter had better not go to Google Earth. Because the world is a nightmare.

Glut Glut Glut GLUUUUUUUUUUT!

Here’s the shocking news: Even for self-published ebooks, it’s the better writers who are finding the audience and getting the money.

Shocking, I know. But the way some people are reacting to the marketplace and the glut of both good and bad writing out there is puzzling.

Take this reaction against Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, a book-rental free-for-all that lets folks gobble up as many books as they want for $9.99 a month. You know the authors are going to get the shaft on this kind of deal, but it’s kind of funny to see how many people were surprised at the fact.

Here’s the thing, from this article: “Kindle Unlimited is not mandatory, but writers fear that if they do not participate, their books will not be promoted.”

Guess what? Maybe they don’t get promoted. Maybe they get lost in the wash. But outside the program, every book sold earns money for the author. Here we see Amazon, champion of the downtrodden, simply turning into a traditional publisher of ebooks, taking on the marketing side and then cutting the amount paid to authors for the work. What never authors have to act surprised.

From the article:

“Does Amazon want to become a legacy publisher like we all are fleeing from and they seem to disapprove of?” the horror writer Kathryn Meyer Griffith asked in an online forum, adding, “They’re doing a good job of recreating that whole unfair bogus system where they make the money and we authors survive on the pennies that are left.”

Well duh.

I’m hoping to self-publish a book this year. I know I keep saying that. But I’m getting closer. This is going to be my year, I can feel it. And I’m already cognizant of the fact I’m going to have to do much of the marketing on my own if I want the book to fly. It probably won’t go anywhere, but at least I’ll have done it. And to me, that’s what counts.

I’m reminded what Robert Newton Peck wrote in his book “Secrets of Successful Fiction,” wherein he says even in the print era, he was the best promoter and marketer of his books. Relying on the publishers to do so wouldn’t work at all. So he worked hard at it. He wanted his books to sell so he did the work for it. That’s going to be my model.

Reading in 2014

I fell a bit short of my 1,000-page-a-month goal, but I'm having a hard time feeling bad about it. I read some good books this past year. I re-read some excellent books as well. The best one? Hard to tell. Certainly "Little, Big" by John Crowley was the worst. I'll try to avoid reading stuff like that in 2015.

• Blonde Bombshell, by Tom Holt. 387 pages.
• Cronkite, by Douglas Brinkley, 819 pages.
• DeeDee Divine's Totally Skewed Guide to Life, by Diana Estill. 228 pages.
• Diary of A Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck. By Jeff Kinney, 217 pages.
• Diary of A Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, by Jeff Kinney. 217 pages.
• Finding Your Way in the Outdoors, by Robert L. Mooers, Jr. 275 pages.
• Fine and Pleasant Misery, A; by Patrick F. McManus. 209 pages.
• Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett. 377 pages.
• I'll Mature When I'm Dead, by Dave Barry. 254 pages.
• Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett. 295 pages.
• Invisible Gorilla, The; How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Danie Simons. 306 pages.
• Invisible Man, The; by H.G. Wells. 128 pages.
• Little, Big, by John Crowley. 627 pages.
• Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, The; by Don Marquis. 477 pages.
• Long Earth, The; Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. 336 pages.
• Medical Detectives, The; by Berton Roueche. 404 pages.
• Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett. 351 pages.
• Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett. 254 pages.
• New Spoon River, The; by Edgar Lee Masters. 325 pages.
• Non Campus Mentis, by Anders Henriksson. 160 pages.
• Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson. 117 pages.
• On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King. 288 pages.
• Original Handbook for the Recently Deceased, The; by Claude Needham PhD. 132 pages.
• Owl in the Attic, The; by James Thurber. 113 pages.
• Perennial Philosophy, The; by Aldous Huxley. 312 pages.
• R is for Rocket, by Ray Bradbury. 184 pages.
• Scoutmaster Handbook, The; BSA, 202 pages.
• Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem. 204 pages.
• Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. 146 pages
• Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The; by Robert Louis Stevenson. 102 pages..
• Tale of Two Cities, A; by Charles Dickens. 238 pages.
• Tartarin on the Alps, by Alphonse Daudet. 161 pages.
• The Whole Truth: The Watergate Conspiracy, by Sam J. Ervin, Jr. 320 pages.
• Thulsa's Gate, by Robert Shultz. 566 pages.
• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. 183 pages.
• Ze page total: 10,279 pages.

Happy Birthday, Fritz

Dear Dad,

I still have the bricklayer's tape measure. And the trowel. and the hat. There are other bits of odds and ends of yours that I have -- a handkerchief, your father's railroad horn, just to mention a few.

But more importantly, I have what you taught me. Or at least I'm working toward having it:

Compassion. You saw a lot in your life, many things that have made people hateful and bitter. You saw your homeland taken in war. You saw prisoners of war and refugees. You knew hunger and fear. But they never drove you. You came out of your experiences the better, wanting to help those in need, even when you didn't have much yourself. I'm sure I don't know all the sacrifices you made providing for eight children. I have only three, but I know what I've done for them. And I know what I have done for them, I learned from you and Mom.

Desire. I look at my own kids reading, learning, growing, and sometimes, it's frustrating. Especially the reading -- they get so buried in books I can't get their attention when I need help. I was probably like that as a kid. Buried in books. Always wanting to learn something new. Because you did. One of the things you provided in our home was books and a desire to learn. I hope I pass that desire on to my children, because in them I see reflected the upbrining I had, and that is a monument, I hope, you enjoy seeing.

Faith. I know you grew up in a different religion, and even after you joined the Mormon church, had many things to say about the furvalente Mormonjes. But I recall that day in the temple when we were there with you -- your four sons. What a fine day that was. Ad I recall you saying that you felt like church was the only place where the devil couldn't get you. I remember that, sitting in the chapel, walking the halls, seeing all the familiar faces. I feel like I'm at home. And I know it's my job to bring that feeling home to my own family. Just like you did.

Love. You never gave me reason to doubt  you loved me, my brothers and sisters, or my mother, no matter what inventions my teenage mind might have come up with. Maybe I look back with rose-colored glasses -- but that's as it should be. Because maybe there were times you thought I was a real pain in the butt. But I never heard you say it. And I don't think I ever felt it.

Patience. What goes for love goes for patience. I wish I had your patience. That's one I'm still working on the most -- maybe it's the one I lack the most. But I have wonderful role models in patience in you and Mom.

Hard Work. Yes, I moaned a lot about work as a teenager, working with you and then Al in construction. You put up with me far longer than you should have. And even after I left construction for what I thought I wanted to do, it took me ten years to figure out that even work I enjoyed doing is work if I go at it with the wrong attitude. You worked at a job you knew you could do and that kept us in a house and in clothes and food and books and pretty much everything we wanted, and I rarely heard you complain about it. You probably complained a lot on the inside, as I do now, but you rarely said it aloud. And that left an impression on me. And it's something I hope I can pass on to my kids. I'm grateful now for the boxes and buckets of nails and screws and other bits that I keep, following your lead. I'm grateful for the tools you left me, but I'm far more grateful for the opportunities you gave me to use them and to learn from you. I'd be far less handy around the house, in my own bumbling way, if you hadn't caught me by the neck and taught me a few things when I probably wanted to do anything else in the world but be there.

Parents put up with a lot. Maybe they think that if they can thump the skulls of their thick children long enough, they might learn something. I know that's the attitude you had. And you were right.

I love you Dad. And I miss you.

"The Place You're Going to, thre's Somebody in it you Really Love. . . "

"That's What Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."

Commenter vs. Commentator

Commentator:

1. A person who discusses news, sports events, weather, or the like, as on television or radio.
2. A person who makes commentaries.

Commenter (form of comment):

(Def. 4) A user response to published content on the Internet, written in a designated comments section, often below the published content.

Folks, if you’re making comments on the Internet, you’re a commenter. If you’re the paid professional announcer, news anchor, host, essayist, unpaid amateur blogger or what have you, you’re a commentator. Comments, made by commenters, follow what is said by the commentator. If the commentator follows up by making a comment on his or her content, then he or she is a commenter in the comments on his or her own work, for which he or she is the commentator.

Got it?

Just another public service from the Grammar Nazi. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Oh Tra La-La-Lally . . .

I’ve been listening to some old Clay Shirky videos on YouTube, and have stumbled across something I’m sure I’d heard before but now has great implications for me as I want to write and publish books.

He says the following in a presentation he gives on cognitive surplus, arguing that the Internet is leading people to use their surplus time and brain power to share, create, and collaborate in ways we’ve never seen before.

First, there’s this:

Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

So, how to include readers in the worlds I write about? I don’t know.

Then he says this:

We’re going to look at every place that a user or a reader or a listener or a viewer has been locked out, has been served up a passive or fixed or canned experience and ask ourselves: If we carved out a little bit of the cognitive surplus we now recognize we can deploy, could we make a good thing happen? And I’m betting the answer is yes.

Again, reinforcing that a shared, collaborative environment is going to be part of any creative endeavor.

But not any creative endeavor.

First, I think a creative endeavor has to have a critical mass of followers. Until that mass is achieved, writers can get by easily with Amazon and GoodReads reviews, occasional presence there, as well as presence on blogs and social media. When the audience reaches a critical mass – and I have no idea what that mass might look like – the writer has to create his or her own space for the mass to congregate. Creating Rivendell will have to wait until there are many elves to populate it. And if they ever come at all.

There’s A Peck Here with A Hyphen Pointed Right at Me!

Every writer has his or her own tick. Yours might be the run-on sentence. The one-word paragraph. Mine tends to be dashes – I love dashes.

But what about if someone doesn’t like your tick? Up until now, they could rail against the machine futilely, seeing as your books went through professional editing and were printed and unless it’s a non-fiction book you made up entirely, there’s almost nothing that’s going to get your book pulled from the shelves.

Yes, I said until now.

Per this blog post (warning, naughty words ahead) UK author Graeme Reynolds’ book “High Moor 2: Moonstruck” was pulled from Amazon after the company received a complaint from a reader that too many words in the book were – gasp – hyphenated.

Reynolds sez:

Apparently Amazon had received a complaint from a reader about the fact that some of the words in the book were hyphenated. And when they ran an automated spell check against the manuscript they found that over 100 words in the 90,000 word novel contained that dreaded little line. This, apparently “significantly impacts the readability of your book” and, as a result “We have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers.”

Reynolds seems to think everything was entirely automated, from complaint processing to hyphen-counting, if I’m reading his post correctly. Or some of it comes from humans reading from scripts. Nevertheless, through a thicket of f-bombs Reynolds outlines his understandable frustration about having to explain basic English punctuation rules to someone relying on a complaint, an algorithm, and a script to resolve the issue, all rolled in with a polemic about the questionable writing that Amazon doesn’t seem to bother about in the Kindle universe.

Reynolds’ plight (the book was eventually restored for sale on Amazon, hyphens intact) has attracted some attention.

And that attention’s a good thing, as it helped get his book back on track – though it’s unclear if the eggheads at Amazon finally recognized their part of the confusion and just fixed things; though you’d think they’d be bragging about it/apologizing for it if that were the case.

So there’s something else to think about. That a big meanie faceless corporation run by a bald man messed with the livelihood of a writer is only part of the story – the bigger part is that one complaint from who knows who got a book derailed and that derailler seems to have walked off anonymously. Was it a sincere, if punctuationally-inept reader, or a competitor to Reynolds? Do grammar Nazis wield such power in this new publishing landscape? Apparently, we don’t get to know. Reviews at Amazon only mention the hyphen situation in high-ranking reviews, so there’s no good going there.

But unmasking the culprit isn’t the end game here – that one person had such power is, however, amazing and a bit creepy. What other complaints are slouching toward Bethlehem, set to derail the progress of another book? I live in fear of dash-haters.

Has it Finally Happened?

For the last few years, we’ve heard report after report that Voyager 1, launched from Earth in 1977 to explore the Solar System, had left the heliosphere, the invisible magnetic and charged particle bubble in space dominated by the Sun, and had encountered the heliopause, the point in space where the Sun’s influence ends and interstellar space begins.

That may have finally actually happened, thanks to data recorded by the probe in 2012 and 2013:

Per the folks at Space.com:

The density of the particles around Voyager 1 was 40 times higher than scientists had previously observed when the space probe was still in the outer layers of the heliosphere, the giant bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields that surrounds the sun and the planets in our solar system. Voyager 1 team members concluded that the spacecraft had exited the heliosphere and entered a new cosmic realm. After researchers went back and looked at old data, they concluded that Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space on August 25, 2012.

Cool stuff.

Also, consider this: The data coming back to us from Voyager 1 is recorded on old-fashioned magnetic tape, then relayed to Earth. Magnetic tape, capable of recording up to 64 megabytes of data. How robust must that little probe be? Damn robust. The recorder is set to shut down in 2015, leaving only direct communication with Earth possible – until the probe’s plutonium power source dies out in about 2025.

It’s part of a small club of man-made objects that have either left the Solar System or will within my lifetime.