Micah Joel

On Goodreads, I reserve a 5star rating for books that change my life or way of thinking, or books that demand that I re-read them before I die. Ratings can and to change from time to time, so if your favorite book isn’t on the list, don’t worry, be happy (and go write your own list).

I’m on target to read maybe 114 books during calendar 2012. This is an uptick, largely attributable to increased frustration with driving and subsequent use of public transport (coupled with my relative failure to get work done on the train).

The fiction list

• Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry) Oh, Gus. If you’ve read it, there’s not much I can add here. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Thanks to Miranda for the recommendation.
• Life & Opinions of Tristam Shandy (Laurence Sterne) Not for everyone, but if you can get past the digressions in the digressions, it’s a rewarding read.
• Movement (Nancy Fulda) Short story with a powerful perspective on the autism spectrum.
• Dune (Frank Herbert) OK, I’ve seen the weird movie, several times (and I still don’t think I get it). Last year, I even watched the Sci-Fi (SyFy?) network version, which is better in some ways, worse in others. Happy to say, the book is better than either. I bought this on paper and can’t wait to re-read.
• Selected Stories (Philip K. Dick) I’m kind of a Dick-head, by which I mean huge fan of all things PKD. This is some of the best. Must re-read.
• Lightspeed: Year One (John Joseph Adams editor) I don’t read as much short fiction as I should. Ashamed to say, sometimes a month would get by without me reading any Lightspeed. This collection proved that to be a mistake. I received this book as a Goodreads giveaway.
• American Fairy Tales (L. Frank Baum) This is just off-beat enough to resonate. If you’ve read any of Tolken’s shorter pieces, there’s a lot in common, but this has a different flavor. Not a mistake that they put ‘American’ in the title. This one is worth looking up. My library had it as an online-borrowable book.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig) Maybe it was the environment–I read this while actually on a road-trip (non-motorcycle, and during stretches of someone else driving, thank you very much) but this book made me think more deeply than any other in recent memory.
• Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome) I came to this by way of Connie Willis, and it’s still a contender for funniest book I’ve ever read. Listened to this in audiobook format during the aforementioned road-trip.

I’m trying to read a little less (and write a little more) now. We’ll see how that goes.

On Goodreads, I reserve a 5star rating for books that change my life or way of thinking, or books that demand that I re-read them before I die. Ratings can and to change from time to time, so if your favorite book isn’t on the list, don’t worry, be happy (and go write your own list).

First, nonfiction.

• The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Microeconomics (Roderick Hill, Anthony Myatt) The real-world is complex, as is human behavior upon which all of economics rests. This book includes cheeky ‘questions to ask your economics professor’ and is right up my kicking-the-sacred-cow alley.
• Armageddon in Retrospect (Kurt Vonnegut) (Do I need to say more?)
• Python Algorithms: Mastering Basic Algorithms in the Python Language (Magnus Lie Hetland) Meaty, deep coverage of some of the most important algorithms in comp-sci in a language surpassingly expressive for this sort of thing. This one requires multiple readings just to digest everything.
• Succeeding When You’re Supposed to Fail: The 6 Enduring Principles of High Achievement (Rom Brafman) Something deeply inspiring about stories where people triumph against the odds and succeed where they’re supposed to fail. Simply inspirational.
• Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (Francine Prose) Brimming with examples of masterful writing, largely from genres I don’t often read. I want to re-read this, slowly, soaking it in.

I’ve been an ardent fan of hypertext for about as long as I can remember, even before I’d ever been exposed to the web.

I’ve had this Salon article on hyperfiction open in a browser tab for a full year, wanting to write about it. I think it gets the sentiment largely right. “Then nothing happened,” and that’s a shame. I still can’t figure out why hyperfiction isn’t a bigger thing by now.

The folks who pioneered this in the 80s and 90s are brilliant people, both in technology and literary chops. Such is the logic of technology–arrive too early to the party and miss the boat (to fuse two metaphors by way of blunt force trauma). Today the market for hyperfiction is thinly populated, I can confidently say as one who’s shopped hyperfiction around. The wonderful exception is Eastgate, perhaps the single company I most admire. But even there, obvious signs tell the story that this isn’t a thriving marketplace of ideas. Hypertexts sell for full retail–there’s not much of a secondary market, or anything like mass market paperback pricing. Those based on StorySpace still aren’t compatible with the two latest verisions of OSX. A few libraries have the classics of the hypertextual genre, but often these are treated as part of the “media” collection–more like a DVD than a novel–and may not be available for interlibrary loans. All of these combine to make it difficult for new readers to get up to speed with what’s been done in the field.

You’d think there’s a natural fit between speculative fiction hangouts (where I’m likely to be seen) and hyperfiction. It still seems more of a theoretical idea than an actual thing though. For instance, the submission guidelines for Strange Horizons state:

We like the idea of hypertext fiction, but we have not yet published any. If you want to send us a hypertext story, query us to discuss how to submit it.

Ideomancer’s guidelines state:

 We are especially interested in non-traditional formats, hyperfiction, and work that explores the boundaries not just of its situation but of the internet-as-page.

Though to my knowledge, they haven’t published any yet. UPDATE: yes, they have–see comments.

Technology has moved a great distance in a short time. Everyday browsers now common on every desktop have much better rendering and scripting engines than the dedicated hyperfiction-reader-apps of a few years ago. There’s some encouraging signs, for example the open source Undum engine, which works in any “HTML5″ browser and is readily customizable. Modern browsers can do a ridiculous amount of cool stuff.

I have this crazy dream of getting a new generation of technologically-savvy readers (many of whom weren’t even yet born when Michael Joyce’s seminal Afternoon, a Story was published) hooked on hypertext. I want to see YA and middle-grade hypertexts getting published. Horror and skiffy and fantasy and literary and humor and westerns and you name it. I want there to the a dozen different online hypertext magazines per genre, all thriving. I want the basics of hypertext to be taught in grammar school.

As a small initial step, I’m happy to announce that one of my hypertexts has been published, Through the Mirror, Darkly at TheNewerYork magazine, also featured in their Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature. My fellow Viable Paradise alumni Jake Kerr wrote the story initially, and I get the blame for carving it up.

Go read. Go write some nodes and link ‘em up. I want see what your brilliant mind can come up with.

P.S. If you want to read more hypertexts, check out Eastgate’s reading room and the Electronic Literature Foundation. For a more academic treatment of hypertext, Eastgate’s collection Reading Hypertext is hard to beat.

How do you get better at self-promotion? Practice, practice, practice.

Along those lines, earlier this year I published Large Feline Collider on Lulu. It’s a quick read, it’s got great cover art from Puss in Boots, and it’s free–you should go download it now.

As far as self-promotion goes, how would I rate this project? I haven’t the foggiest clue. How many downloads did I get? No idea. Lulu’s reporting system doesn’t tell me. It only gives “revenue”, which for a book with a price tag of $0 is not terribly useful information.

So I have to conclude that Lulu’s platform, as great as it might be, isn’t so hot for measurable self-promo. So in the next few days, I’m going to pull it from distribution and try something else. As numerous others have said, the best advertising for a self-pub ebook is having other titles available, so likely it will be part of a bigger push. Will it still be free? It’s so short that it would be tough for it not to be, but then again I might want to experiment with changing the price tag and/or promotions (hence having it around for free on other markets might cause problems.)

So, go get it while it’s there. More soon.

November was rough on the tidiness of my desk, and lo, of my whole office. I’ve lost track of how many little scraps of paper are here. Besides that I have a few pens, and a DVD about linguistics of sign language. That and a bunch of the usual clutter–xylitol, yerba mate, and chocolate mainly. I fear that the camera crew for Hoarders might show up unannounced.

I didn’t participate in NaNo this year but I did achieve goals. I finished main edits on what I was working on going into the month, including one beautiful editing session with a word count of negative 700. That story’s down to marination before one last look, and one final pass by beta reader(s). I also cranked out 15k of backstory for one of my novels. This was less than the “20-3ok” I had dreamed about, but it’s fine–word count wasn’t the goal. Incidentally, 5k seems to be my daily limit. Progress on a few other small pieces.

I also realized this month that my contest win earlier this year puts me formally into the qualification zone for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Accordingly, I updated my bibliography page. It’s still not beautiful, but it does the job of providing information. That page non-specifically mentions a pending acceptance I have with an audio market, but doesn’t mention at all another exciting acceptance I’ve gotten recently.

My novel submissions will all cross the six-month marker before the next MDR. Nary a response on any of them.  Idea for the next novel is well into outline stage.

I need to do more with self-publishing, even if just to try out the waters. The best marking tool for self-published stories is having more self-published stories available, so I’m weighing my options and trying to figure out when to bundle short story collections and when to split them out.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a writer in possession of a first draft will think it sucks.

And it is true. First drafts feel like terrible writing because the ARE terrible. Look on any writer’s blog for confirmation of this. It’s a testament to sheer noble sticktuitiveness and dedication toward getting stuff done that anything gets finished at all. Thus, the common wisdom is to power through a first draft at all costs. Let the words flow, and worry later about making them beautiful.

Perhaps doubly so during NaNoWriMo.

Yet, it’s possible to go too far. Is it better to super-productively crank out thousands of words in a draft that’s such crap that you end up tossing it, or is it better to work at a more deliberate pace that results in something at least editable? Charlie Jane Anders had some good thoughts recently about this.

Writing is, in the end, an intimate process, and you have to work out for yourself what works and what doesn’t. Within the scope of what works, you need to figure out what’s optimal. As of this writing, I’ve cranked out three consecutive 5k days, which falls short of writing a novel in 3 days, though that’s not the point. If I don’t have to dayjob, 5k is a good pace for a day. I’m still figuring out my process, seeing what works, and what works better. NaNoWriMo was super helpful for me in past years as I figured out my limits, but it seems less useful now, and that’s OK.

Accumulating word count isn’t what’s important. Telling stories is.

P.S. According to WordPress, this posting consists of 283 words. That’s totally counting against my day’s wordcount…

Turns out my little brother was right, in a way. I am a liar. Fellow Viable Paradise alum Anaea Lay has been accumulating these hilarious whoppers, and now it’s my turn.

Check it out.

Putting the ‘no’ into NaNoWriMo.

Lots of things going on right now, including work-related chaos that make arbitrary commitments against arbitrary timeframes less useful at the moment.

Don’t get me wrong. NaNoWriMo has helped me greatly. It’s made me better at writing-fast and recalibrated my sense of how much I can get done. I like to push myself, and that’s one way to do it.

Already, on the first day of the month, I’m getting pulled into the day job vortex. I’m in the middle of hot & heavy revisions on a different longer piece, and putting that aside for 30 days wouldn’t be helpful either, so I’ll press on. What I will commit to, though, is trying the write-a-novel-in-three-days process described on this site (except my ‘novel’ I’m aiming for is only 20-30k words). Should be interesting.

My desk: at some point, I seem to have developed a compulsion for saving little receipt-sized scraps of paper and writing stuff all over them. The library is good for these. (On my recent trip, I had two holds, with one pagelet each, one return receipt, and one check-out receipt.) Some of the writing is doodles. Lots of graph theory this month, particularly cubic planar graphs. Some todo lists. One crudely sketched calendar of November.

Besides that: pens, chocolate, yerba mate, xylitol, my Kindle Fire running the Nook app (which I discovered doesn’t work well with auto-shut-off), an unwatched Netflix movie, and a sealed packet of buffalo sauce.

The wonderful Miranda Suri tagged me in her Next Big Thing blog post, which means I get to talk about my WIP and pass the baton to other writers for their chance.

With no more than the median quantity of ado…

Ten Interview Questions for The Next Big Thing

1. What is the title of your book?

Devise

(The title has been shrinking as I go. At one point it was Devising of His Hands. Then Devising. Then just Devise. I don’t know if it can get any shorter still, but if you see a novel titled i, it’s probably this one)

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

I had been slaving away on a (now-abandoned) project and getting quite burned out on it. November crept up on me, and it was NaNoWriMo season. I wanted to try something completely different, and so I started researching and writing.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Ancient Urban Fantasy? Realistic time-travel superhero? Stonepunk? No less than Patrick Nielsen Hayden said it has all the trappings of Science Fiction.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’ve avoided thinking of this up to this very moment. Yes, I’ve seen other NBT posts and knew this question was coming, but deliberately blocked thoughts of it from my mind.

The modern-day main character is kind of like me. Geeky, but capable of deep frustration with technology. I’m going to go with Wil Wheaton.

The ancient shepherd/sidekick is younger, with a sense of wonder about the world. And superpowers, kind of. Maybe the lead kid from Super 8.

There’s a powerful and progressive priestess, for which I’d have to go with Noomi Rapace, or maybe Tilda Swinton.

Hey, this is kind of fun.

Hot on their trail are an unlikely pair of evil archaeologists. Gotta go with Sean Connery for the older gentleman. For the female, Cate Blanchett (or if Joss Whedon is directing, Scarlett Johansson)

5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?

A modern-day shepherd abandons technology to go live in the desert, but gets thrown back in time a few thousand years and has to re-establish technology to survive.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

At the moment, I’m talking to a few select publishers directly. An agent is not out of the question.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

The first draft, or at least 50k words of it, were done during a NaNoWriMo. Subsequent drafts have taken much longer. I brought the first 8k words to Viable Paradise and had it ripped to shreds by the above-mentioned  PNH as well as several people you may have heard of.

8. What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?

Too many time-travel stories to mention them all, but A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is at the front of the list. Harry Turtledove’s Between The Rivers has a similar setting, but opposite premise. Robert Silverberg’s Gilgamesh the King (and of course the original Gilgameš epic) were pivotal. In the realm of nonfiction, the remarkable Sir Leonard Woolley’s Ur of the Chaldees and Thorkild Jacobsen’s The Harps that Once… (Sumerian poetry in translation) are a must-read. I have a soft spot for Cass Dalglish’s loose translation of Enheduanna’s Nin-me-sar-ra in Humming the Blues. Somebody stop me, I could go on and on and on and on…

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

In one sense, it’s a response/rebuttal to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which was the first introduction to the Sumerians that I actually read. I got fascinated by the culture and the sense of invention (cities! agriculture! writing! beer!) and wanted to create something in this setting, without resorting to making Enki an actual character.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Did I mention superheroes? I’m always looking for an angle for “realistic” superhero stories, and this one’s a doozy. You’ll want to believe. And the Sumerian language I use is all plausibly real.

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

Yes, Miranda Suri tagged me, and I’m tagging the following people because they are awesome and have each taught me something valuable.

Vincent Jorgensen

Julia Dvorin

Amy Sundberg

Emily Jiang

That’s your notice guys. In maybe a week or so, go check out their blogs and see who they’ve tagged. Hurry, because mathematically this can’t go on for too many more generations before every human being in the universe is on the hook.

September, where did you go?

Oh, yeah, one week of crushing “crunch time” at work, followed immediately by a week of crushing travel, one day each in three cities across eight time zones, followed immediately by two weeks of (relatively) computer-free vacation time.

Not much happened in my writing world, though I did squeak off two submissions. My sub pile is looking pretty sad. Five of the ten things on it are late enough to have been queried on.

And my desk is really, really messy. Once again, the layers have layers.

But vacation was nice, and it’s left me feeling rather better. Looking forward to October. Wait, what day is it?