Side-effect of not having had the time or energy to write down any of the spiderwebby thoughts that built up in my head over the holidays: I may burst waaaaaaay off seed topic and ramble on for a couple of pages about Other Stuff that really doesn’t have a whole lot of relevance in the sentiment unless you’re in my head.  Which is why two hours after I hit publish on yesterday’s post, I remembered what set me off on that train of thought in the first place, and realized I’d never quite gotten there.

So: What does your blog do?

Now, with that question I’m doing something that I hate: I’m saying “blog” when I really mean “homepage.” The page that you link in user profiles.  When you sign up for a new social network there’s usually a homepage url field.  It’s the link that shows up inn your twitter sidebar, and an optional bit of information you can link from Lulu or Cafepress.  It’s the thing some folks stick in email and forum sigs.  You get what I’m saying.  The url of the page that’s supposed to link to something essentially yours out there on the web, because sometimes you can’t sum up yourself in a 200 word bio.

For most people, at  this point, that just happens to be a blog.  Sort of.  At least, for most people, that happens to be a page that links to a blogging system of some sort.  (And twitter, tumblr, and flickr do all count as blogs, in that they are Web Logs.  They do log things, and they do it do the web.  That wordpress, twitter, tumblr, and flickr can all serve dramatically different content doesn’t really matter in terms of the origin of the word – they’re all, at the backend, chronological logs of web data.  There’s an entire other post in there, I know, so try not to argue that point too much, because it’s not the point of this post, okay?  All right, back on track.)

So, yes: What does your blog do.  Or, more importantly: What does your Thing With RSS tacked on do?  Because RSS is a huge and important tool in online communication.  I’d argue that it’s more important to have an RSS feed of your current content than it is to be easily crawlable by search engines.  Because your RSS feed is, more than your page URL, your broadcast frequency.  It’s the thing people can plug into their own RSS readers LONG after they’ve gotten tired of hitting actual pages every day.  For those of you that don’t update daily, it’s the only thing that’s going to alert some of your readers when there is new content.  And, again, I’m segueing into another post.  You see?  There’s going to be plenty here in the next few weeks.

So, finally back on track: if someone who doesn’t really know who you are or what you do wanted a link to your online content that they could plug into Google Reader – how would you describe what your site does?  How, in fact, would you make someone WANT to add your site’s RSS feed into their daily/weekly/whatever reading habits?

That’s apparently a difficult question.

There are a metric fuckton of creative people on Whitechapel, right? I know this because we’ve got artist and photography threads, we’ve got people constantly lamenting the “no fiction” rule, we’ve got musicians and comic writers and people that want to make magazines and all sorts of things.

And, so far, we’ve got six of them linking their blogs.

Whoa.

And, okay, there’s a little of what sounds like snark in that link.  It does look like I made a lot of really mean rules, carefully crafted to keep people from just posting: “Hi, my name is [name] and this is my blog.”  Which, yes, I did.  But that’s not mean of me:  that’s helpful.

Because, look, how many of you have made something, are in the process of making something, or trying to make something, or trying to think of something to make? Quite a few of you.  And of those quite a few, how many of you are going to want to tell people about that thing what you made?  I’m going to guess quite a few. Where on earth do you think those imaginary people that are interested in your Thing What You Made are going to come from? 

Yes, in a perfect world, you could quietly toil on your creations, and when you finished you could just put up a link and people would magically appear to buy it.  Unfortunately, the internet is not a perfect world.  The internet is a noisy and hectic world where, very likely, when you finish your creation and put up a link, you’re going to have to shout VERY LOUDLY to get the attention of ten real people.

If you want to sell something online, you’ve got to make a network online. You’ve got to go places and talk to people, yes – but unless you are struck by lucky lightning, you’ve also got to give those people something they can link and remember and pass along to other people.  And, for most of us, that “business card” if you will, is our homepage.  In theory, that homepage should be something people can bookmark to remember us by – but if it’s a static page there’s a very good chance that people will forget why they bookmarked it in the first place.  So most of us – by accident or with some thought – have created a blog of some fashion.

And then a lot of those blogs very quickly turned into “well it’s the place where I kinda collect stuff that’s cool, or that’s where mostly twitter updates and delicious links feed in automagically, but I haven’t really updated in forever and I know I should but I never know what to say so it’s not really current or relevant  or even MINE anymore.”

And yet (and we’ve done this in the past on Whitechapel and I’ve seen it in many other forums, so I know it’s true), whenever there’s an open “link your blog here” thread anywhere, that’s still the site most of us plug.  We just happen to do it with some variation of “My name is [name] and there’s really nothing interesting here, but you can follow it if you like, I guess.”

So, then, back to the Whitechapel thread I just opened:  for my own selfish sorting purposes, yes, but also in an attempt to get people thinking about those poor neglected blogs, I made some hard (and a little mean) rules.  Think about how you would like to sell your blog (your homepage, your web presence, your business card).  Think about how you would get a complete stranger, not someone who already knows and likes you, interested in who you are and what you’re doing.  Refine that down to an easily digestible paragraph (or picture, because I do know that some artists really speak better in images, and that’s fair).  Polish up that idea of what your homepage does into something short and informative, and then put yourself out there.

There’s only six up so far, right?  But they all look incredibly interesting, don’t they?  That’s the sort of thing that you could do if you wanted to.  And if you’ve got a book or some art or a shop or even if you’re just feeling a bit bored with whatever you’re doing online right now, that’s the sort of thing that you maybe should do.

Of course, for some folks, all their homepage really is is a notebook-lifestream-junkdrawer-thingie.  There’s nothing really wrong with that.  Nor is there anything wrong with a page that really is just a personal rambling journal that happens to be public-ish, and it doesn’t really matter that its not locked because no one read is, anyway.  I’m not going to tell you how to use the web, because I’m not you and I don’t know what works for you.  If you honestly have no desire to make your site into a destination, or your RSS feed into a must-read… then, hey, that’s cool.  If your tumblr is something you use as a scrapbook for web-thoughts just for you, or your flickr is just your own personal album and you’d just as soon no one pay attention to it, anyway – again, that’s your call and that’s totally cool.  Hell, almost my entire Delicious account is private, because the links are really just for my use.  maybe your wordpress blog is all just Delicious links that you want to keep sorted in that particular archival system.

In no way am I saying if you don’t have a site to link that there’s something wrong with you.

What I’m saying is: if you do have a site that you want to link, if you sometimes sigh that your Analytics account never tops twenty readers, if you wonder how you’re going to go about reaching the people that you think would like your new magazine, if you’re a step away from being a bit surly about how hard it is to get attention online – basically, if you’re looking for interesting people to be interested in you and what you do… Well.  Then you might want to think about how to tell people about the site you want them to remember and visit and share with their friends.

And if you haven’t got one of those sites yet, well, it’s January 2010 – now’s maybe a good time to start one.

When you figure it out, seriously, come tell me (and the other nearly 8000 people on Whitechapel) about it.

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.

---

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.