Hands up, who “won” NaNoWriMo this year?  Heehee.  Oh, I’m sorry, I just love this joke, so much – and I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t actually get that it was a joke until a couple of years back.  Seriously, I was one of those people who cringed and tsked every time someone posted their exciting wordcount, and I was quick to list the unhealthy habits and ideals the “competition” encouraged.  And then one day I actually took a look at the site, and it is dripping with so much delicious irony that I finally caught on.

It is just not often that you see a work of satire so brilliantly crafted, and so delicately balanced that an audience continues to participate in the joke year after year after year.

Some of you think I’m being sarcastic, but I’m really not.  You don’t even have to take my word for it.  Here, I’ll cut and paste directly from the NaNo site.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

So. Delicious.  And since the post-modernists aren’t usually self-aware enough to pull off a statement of intent like that, I realized I had to be looking at the sly wink of a cunning trickster.  Or, rather, tricksterS, as I’d soon find out.

It took about a year of asking the right questions and proving my trustworthiness (hah!) through complicated trading games and moonlit ritualistic sacrifices to get to the origins of NaNo.  Which is silly, because all I probably needed to do was ask one of my friends – but I really can’t deny my fondness for the occasional complicated ritual sacrifice.  What I’m about to reveal to you will very likely get me a stern talking-to by hooded assassins, but I assure you, it’s worth it.

The truth must out.

You see, back in 1998, the internet was a wild-wild-West of untamed AOL accounts and blinking Geocities pages.  A handful of professional writers had made their way online, thinking perhaps this new land of connectivity would serve them well for networking, but those foolish enough to have left their email addresses public soon found themselves inundated by misspelled and confusing mails from fans and mental patients alike. The common threads running through many of the more whining or angry letters were some variation of the following: “I want to write novels.  Will you read my novel? I should be writing novels instead of you but I don’t have the time that you do because I am very busy.  I hated your last novel and I would have written a much better one if they’d paid me what they paid you.  Novels are just words, and I can make words, so how come you’re famous and I’m working at a gas-station outside Alameda?”

That last may sound a bit specific, but there really were a lot of gas stations outside Alameda in ‘98.

Anyway, it was weird and more than a little creepy, you know?  These were folks that were used to death-threats when they slowed between volumes, but this was an entirely new sort of entitled crazy. The authors asked their friends in the medical and machining professions if they were getting the same sorts of whines and sniffles: were people saying they’d be great doctors if they only had the time but they were stuck instead with a useless degree in advance basket-weaving? But no – it seemed to be a writing-specific phenomenon. 

And something needed to be done.

Here the history gets a little hazy – I’m uncertain if the first NaNoWriMo (allegedly held in the summer of 1999 in the Bay Area) is a bit of invented history to add to the perceived authenticity of the hoax, or if the shady shadowy cabal of those early internet pioneer writers (if you’ve assumed they were mostly SF writers, then you’ve got good instincts, because those guys are pretty mean) just rightly assumed that the Bay Area was going to drive internet memesites for the next decade, and talked some poor suckers into beta-testing the joke.  All I know is that the premise of the confidence game was simple and brilliant, with a fantastic payout: If all the folks that would be sending them annoying emails were otherwise occupied writing miles and miles of absolute crap in an invented competition with no cash reward, that’d be a month of peace and quiet for the real writers to get some work done.

And it worked better than they could have dreamed. 

As LiveJournal rose in popularity, the folks with a whole lot of nothing to say quickly circled their wagons and word of the competition spread like frontier herpes. Soon there were entire easily-avoidable communities of folks exchanging tips and tricks to make it through the month of pointless distraction.  And as more pro writers found their way online, they were quietly briefed on the con so that they could endorse the month and further the con with a cheerful “Good Luck, Everyone!” before settling into their own month of relative peace. Of course, there was the tiny unforeseen side-effect of a few annoying word-count widgets and twitters, but those are easily blocked and forgotten. 

But it gets better, as all the best jokes do:  Although the original intent was simply a stealth-variation of the classic “if you think you’re so clever, then you give it a try. Test your strength, win your girl a bear!”— well, it turns out that the crippling defeat of failing to spew out 50K in a month causes some people to be so embarrassed that they actually stop talking about wanting to be a writer until the next October!  And even some of the “winners” are so caught up in attempting to edit what essentially comes down to a brick of Lorem Ipsum that they’re out of the blog and email circuit for months, too.

It truly has become a gift horse that keeps on giving.

But, look.  I’ve been so on about creativity and Making Things that I cannot, in good conscience, fail to at least give you the chance to right your course.  And I haaaaate that, because NaNo is so funny, and I’d really rather just keep laughing at… sigh.  No, I’ve got to stick to my intent, here.  Stupid intent.  You’d better be worth it.

So, okay, fine, you’ve been had by (perhaps the greatest, at least for November) bit of farce on the net.  And now you’ve got fifty words, or 50K, of absolute crap — and you’re either feeling completely dejected because it sounded so easy to finish, or completely overwhelmed because you did finish… but it doesn’t look so much like a novel and you’re afraid that means there’s going to be even more work and no one said anything about any more work.  But, really, it’s all going to be all right.  I mean, first off, you gave me a good laugh, and that’s a worthy result right there.

But, ahem, right, helpful: you did, at least, crack open that word-processing program and start something.  And whether you got 50K words in or fifty, you did have An Idea, right? That’s good. We’ve talked about this: that’s your start.  However far you got, the simplest way to finish (and, again, really, those of you with 50K are a waaaays away from finished.  Seriously.  Is that middle section even a real language? Or were you so hopped up on sleep dep and caffeine at that point that you were just smacking keys with your face?  Yeah, thought so), the only way to finish, in fact, is not to stop now that November is (almost) over.

Oh my god, I know, but you’ve just got to keep going.

Yes, even with the holidays coming up.  Oh, I know it’s impossible to find spare time in December, but you’re just going to have to do it anyway.  If you can’t or won’t, or if you think I just made all this up, then you’re a hilarious example that proves their and my point.  Because guess what writers do?  They write.  Every day.  Even on national holidays.  And when they finish writing one thing, they start on the next, or they’re already halfway into it.  And then they write some more.  If you do that, and only if you do that, then you’ll get there too,

And it’s not as glamorous as it sounds, and it doesn’t sound very glamorous, no.  But if it’s what you are, then you already know you haven’t got a choice in the matter.

But again, you know, I’m sure you’re right if you think this has all been a work of fiction.  Absolutely.  I’ll see you next year when you start NaNoWriMo 2010.

(Hahaha.)

---

Not entirely related, but speaking of long-running-or-soon-to-be jokes on the internet: Warren’s and my TOTW just went live. And, oh, this week’s made me grin. Go take a look.

I realize it’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted, so this is just to say that I didn’t stop the planet and get off or anything. My mornings have been occupied by day-job work (as per usual), but yesterday afternoon I jaunted down to the Emerson Salon to get my hair done; and today I moseyed over to the Science Fiction Museum (its offices, rather) for an interview with a marvelous woman from a marvelous magazine.

(I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet, though, so in deference to caution I’ll just be vague and conspiratorial.)

Anyway, each of these events took several hours including travel time to-and-from,* and the rest of my writer-work days have been occupied with the usual time-whittling business emails, phone calls, bill paying, and errand-running. So there are no new words to report on Ganymede, and no one is more rueful on this point than yours truly.

But the night is still young.

______________________________________________________________
* Yes, several hours for the hair. I think it’s worth it, once every five or six weeks, to have awesome peacock tresses. The day will eventually come that I change my mind, I’m sure; but for now I’m happy for an afternoon wherein I am not responsible for anything except holding still while the nice man paints up my ‘do.

PDF-mag, this issue focussing on Parisian alt.culture. 4 euros a pop for this one, previous issues are free downloads.

THE DOSE magazine – Issue 3 (Paris) TEASER

• Extremely Bad Advice: Harassment Resources – National Post
  just fucking genius, really
  (tags:peopleiknow funny )

And I am having the best birthday, ever! Thank you to everyone who has wished me happy birthday on the Twitters, and if July 29th is your birthday too, happy birthday to you!

(Image by Chuck Gamble, found at WIRED's GeekDad blog.)

Photo by Ben Corrigan.

Ryan Francesconi‘s wonderful music has been lilting around the edges of my life since 1995 when we briefly worked together with Dan Cantrell in the Toids, an experimental folk group that riffed off various Eastern European idioms in tandem with Francesconi and Cantrell’s eclectic compositional styles. Back then, Francesconi was one seriously intimidating guitar/tambura/bouzouki shredder! He reveled in playing faster, smarter, better than anybody. He’s a shredder still, and no one can approximate his style… but over the years, wisdom seems to have smoothed over some of the sharper, more Malmsteinish edges of his virtuosity. Lately, the music he makes has deepened into an expression of something far more present, and pure.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on a quietly stunning record Francesconi released earlier this year, called Parables. A series of songs for solo acoustic guitar, it reflects his interest in American bluegrass, Bulgarian folk, jazz improvisation and Baroque lute music. Recorded live (no overdubs!), the music is graceful and green with nods of kinship to everyone from Nick Drake to Herman Hesse to the forests of the Pacific Northwest– which is where Francesconi lives when he’s not trotting the globe.

Speaking of– if you’re a fan of Joanna Newsom, the name Ryan Francesconi is probably already familiar to you, since he’s been one of her key players for several years, leading her live touring performers in the Ys Street Band and arranging/playing on just about every song on her new triple album, Have One On Me. They’re kicking off their summer West Coast tour of the States tonight in San Diego, California. Newsom had this to say about Parables:

“Ryan Francesconi is one of the most awe-inspiring musicians I’ve known. On “Parables,” he distills his many realms of artistry [...] into a beautifully minimalist, poetic, intricate, emotionally realized study of themes, variations, organic counterpoint, and such devastating forays into fractal-metric out-lands that it is nearly impossible to believe he’s picking those strings with just one hand. This is solo music that sounds like an ensemble, an ecstatic and measured reconciliation of West African / Balkan / Baroque / bluegrass influences, which ultimately resembles nothing I know.”

Pick up Parables on vinyl over at Drag City (they’re currently sold out of the CD), or in Mp3 format from CD Baby or iTunes.

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Post tags: Events, Faboo, Music, Personal Style

"…nobody should be older than Warren Ellis except maybe Alan Moore."

Courtesy of crisper (many thanks!) four graphs of the pulp publication data:

And since some folks are asking for further breakdown and I can't do that right now, I've uploaded the original spreadsheets:

• Total list of the pulps
• Romance pulps
• Saucy/spicy pulps
• Science fiction pulps
• Sports pulps
• Western pulps

And, yeah, I know there were probably a lot better ways to do these spreadsheets, both mathematically and aesthetically.

Norman Spinrad just emailed me this link to what appears to be the first of a series of posts about The Publishing Death Spiral, the core of which is this:

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called ?order to net.?

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120….

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you?

Read the whole thing.

Jess Nevins never fails to amaze me.

…if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that? Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet (Yes, I’m a stat wonk, I guess)…

And, at the link, you will find the link to said spreadsheet, as well as all the relevant history, explanations and details.

Title:The Devil You Know
Word: starch
Challenger: @annie_kathleen
Length: 200 words exactly

My twenty-second reboot this year, apparently.

Apparently, of course, because I've no memory of previous reboots. That's the deal: for an incredible amount of money, you sign away five years. And one day you wake up, it's five years later, and you have only the guarantee that there are no outstanding warrants for criminal activity.

But reboots regularly wipe your memories. I know I'm more muscular now and I have dark hair instead of blonde. No idea when that happened; could be yesterday, could be two years back. According to the labels in my room, I insist on no starch when my shirts are laundered. Why? No idea.

I stand in front of the machine, pondering. It's always my choice, you see. They make that very clear.

I could decide not to reboot, say I've had enough. I'd forfeit the vast majority of the fee, but I could do it.

I'd have my old life back.

Or I can press the button, hope like hell that the reboot goes wrong, that it wipes out memories from prior to joining up.

I'm told I've pressed the button eighty-three times previously.

I ponder, decide which is safer.

Then I press the button.

� Lee Barnett, 2010

This story is part of the 2010 Fast Fiction Challenge. A list of the first fifty stories in the challenge can be found here. New challenges can be made here.

The Fast Fiction Challenge - The Book; now available from lulu.com and, if you're in the US, via Amazon.com here; 180 of the best fast fiction challenge stories from the first three years' challenges...

I like to think that if Cranes had formed last month rather than 20 years ago, this is what they’d sound like. "See Birds," Balam Acab.

This is, perhaps, the geekiest thing I?ve done in many a month, but it does help me answer a question that?s been bothering me for a while: if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that?

Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet. (Yes, I?m a stat wonk, I guess).

So, here you go. The link brings you to a spreadsheet I created, covering the years 1896-1960, with seven categories: Overall, Detective Pulps, Romance Pulps, Saucy/Spicy Pulps, Science Fiction Pulps, Sports Pulps, and Western Pulps. (I?d present the information as an easy-to-read table, but?-embarrassingly-?I never learned how to make them). Each entry is for the number of magazines?-not issues?-in that category published that year, so for 1898 there was only one pulp published, in 1931 there were 150 pulps total published, including 28 detective, 24 romance, 8 saucy/spicy, 8 science fiction, 2 sports, and 33 westerns. The number in the Overall category won?t equal the sum of the other categories because I omitted smaller pulp genres (boxing, weird menace) and pulps publishing general pulpy adventure fiction and because some pulps, like Western Rodeo Romance, fit into two categories.



Now, admittedly, this is a hasty and imprecise collection of data-?what would be more useful would be a) the number of pulps published broken down by month as well as by year (can?t be done-?that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps) and b) the sales figures (someone may have some of that data, but, again, that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps). But we can draw some tentative conclusions from this.

First, the pulps didn?t die around 1950. That was the peak post-WW2 year for them. The death of the pulps was a gradual thing, although by 1955 the end of the medium and its replacement by the digest format must have been obvious. Nonetheless, I think it?s fair to say that the death of the pulps and the transition to digests took a while. One obvious precursor was the transition from dime novels to pulps in the 1910s. I don?t have the data to do a similar spreadsheet on dime novels (although, hmm, I could put one together using Galactic Central), but I know, based on the western and detective dime novels, that their death and replacement by the pulps in the 1910s was gradual and not sudden. I think the death of the pulps was like that.

Second, and I know this will be hard for the sf zealots to read, but...sf wasn?t the most important genre for the pulps. (And, please, never write the phrase "the pulp genre." There was no such thing. The pulps were the medium, not the genre). Until 1939 there were more spicy pulps published every year than sf pulps. (Why the number of spicy pulps declined is another question, one I can?t answer). From 1937 to 1951 there were more sports pulps published every year than sf pulps. Westerns clobber sf. And romance pulps...well, this will gall the geeks, but romance pulps were more important to the industry than sf pulps. (And the average pulp romance story was approximately eight times better written than the average pulp sf story, but that?s another issue).

Third, take a look at the saucy/spicy list. The first one came out in 1912. That?s before detective pulps, before westerns, before sf, before romance, before everything except general fiction, adventure, and railway. The saucy/spicy pulps are criminally understudied, not least because they are much less available to scholars than even the romance or sports pulps, but they were around for a long time and deserve further study. Hell, from 1915 to 1924 they made up at least 10% of the entire industry.

Fourth-?the number of Westerns! Criminy! For such a formulaic genre (with a few exceptions) it was remarkably popular. In terms of market share, from 1936, Westerns were the heavyweight of pulps, never making up less than 25% of the entire market.

Fifth, look at the overall numbers for 1929-1931. You?d think that the first three years of the Depression wouldn?t have been a good time to enter publishing or increase the number of pulps that you were already publishing, but clearly people thought it was. I don?t have numbers to hand, but I suspect the economy took a substantial dip from 1931-1933, which would explain the decrease there, but after 1933 the numbers resume increasing.

I?m sure other conclusions will occur to me later, but that?s what I?ve got for now.

I occasionally do these. And today's an occasion. So why not?

A - Act your age? Like most other people, sometimes I act younger than my age, positively childishly in fact.
B - Born on what day of the week? Monday, so I'm told. I don't remember it all that well. I'd put money on the fact that I cried like a baby though.
C - Chore you hate? Filling out memes.
D - Z See answer to C

Interesting though, sparked by something Antony Johnston wrote.

I wonder who I've known the longest online, i.e. who, that I now often interact online with, I've known the longest.

I'm excluding people where the only online contact is by email or IM, because that's just replaced letterwriting or the phone. So that takes out Ian, my oldest friend, because although we email each other, he's not on Twitter and doesn't use Facebook.

And I can't include Laura because although we occasionally "like" something each other has put on Facebook, or chat on IM, it's not exactly as if that's a large part of how we communicate with each other. Similarly, I'm excluding my younger brother because... well, I've known him for 44 years. It kind of skews the results.

OK, so lets set some parameters.

I'm not including anyone I've known for more than 15 years, because I got online in August 1995. I'm limiting it to people I have interacted with, or still interact with, via a message board, forum, Twitter, Facebook or chat rooms.

Obvious answer is people like Warren, Neil, Dave... comics pros with whom I was fortunate enough to become friends after we first met at Compuserve's Comics/Animation Forum, and other friends from Compuserve like Rich Johnston, Alan Porter and Elayne Riggs. (I'm excluding Tony Isabella and Dez Skinn because, although friends, again I only ever really speak to them by email these days)

Despite Colin Murtagh being a close friend, I'm pretty sure we didn't meet for a few months after I got online, and I didn't meet Tony Lee until this century. (Always surprises me, that one - that I've only known Tony that relatively short space of my life.)

So yeah, Warren, Neil, Dave. It's all your fault, mates.

It's genuinely astonishing to me how many people who are important to me as part of my life now... have only known Philip as a fact, i.e. they didn't know me before he was born.

From the Straits Times of Singapore, 23 July 1928.