I am completely innocent. Don't listen to the old man.

I don’t want to imply that when you have a small human to take care of, you can’t get anything else done, but I (at least) tend to let non-essential systems atrophy. Navel-gazing (which, I will be honest, is often what this blog is about) drops off tremendously, twitter accumulates a cobweb or two, the elliptical machine gathers some dust, our front yard…

My god, guys; the front yard. Seriously. If it weren’t for the pallet of wine-in-a-box I sent the planning committee last Christa McAuliffe Day, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to paper our family room in letters from the HOA.

None of that implies I’ve had nothing going on. On the contrary, I’ve been a busy little beaver, even on the internet, just not here. Contracted writing gigs. The slow push towards book publication (more on that soon(tm)). Basically, since I don’t find I have the mental bandwidth for rumination and musing aloud, I focus on concrete writing tasks meant to ensure that I’m hitting the keyboard every day. For instance, I’ve been writing articles for a number of gaming sites and, when said sites are inevitably swept under by a wave of spambots and turned into the internet equivalent of a Brood Mother from Dragon Age, I come back to my gaming related blog and write stuff there.

Indirectly, that’s what I wanted to talk about.

Four months ago, as the little man started to release us from the iron grip of Infant Sleep Schedules, I took a look at what I’d been writing since his arrival and found that examples were a little thin on the ground.

“I need to get my fingers back on a keyboard,” I thought to myself. Then I sighed, because the very idea seemed kind of exhausting. What to write?

“Baby steps,” I replied to myself, then giggled madly, because… you know… ‘baby’… and I have a baby… and…

Still needed a lot more sleep at that point, I think.

Anyway, what I decided to do was just write about what I was doing in this MMO I was playing. That’s it. I found the situation I and a couple of my friends had put ourselves in to be kind of compelling and interesting and dammit even if everyone else in the world thought it was boring as hell, I didn’t.

That was the key, really; it interested me, so I wrote about it without needing to be prodded. Hell, it was something I looked forward to every day and as a result, I was putting a thousand or fifteen hundred or two thousand or sometimes three thousands words down, every day.

What I didn’t worry about at any point was is someone going to read this? Hell, I assumed that no one was reading it (except Kate, who always reads everything, because she’s wonderful). It was always kind of a surprise when anyone I knew mentioned it. One friend who didn’t play took the time to tell me that he enjoyed the stories, even if he had no intention of checking out the game. De went so far as to try to figure out why I liked the topic so much that I was writing about it every day, because it was curious.

In any case, that didn’t happen that much, and honestly, I didn’t care. Throughout the whole thing, I’ve been writing for me. Partly to remember; partly to just be writing something; mostly to entertain myself.

And a funny thing started happening.

People started leaving comments. Asking questions. Asking for more. Telling me that I wasn’t allowed to stop, and in fact needed to post more frequently.

That was kind of nice.

Then, a few days ago, I logged into a website that — if you do the sort of things that I do in that game I’ve been writing about — is pretty much the single most important website to have on speed dial.

And at the top of the page, before any of the important stuff that you actually come to the site for, there’s a note that says “Hey, if you’ve got a few minutes, you should really go read the posts being written over at this blog here,” and it was me they were linking to.

Easiest example of what that was like would be if you were really really into knitting, and you blogged about it, and one day you went to Ravelry and found a link to your little blog on the front page.

It was kinda cool.

Now, I’m not telling you any of this to brag (because that would be… incredibly ridiculous) — the point here is that I wrote the thing I wanted to write and (observing the constraints of the topic) wrote it well.

That’s it.

I didn’t network. I didn’t “promote my brand.” I didn’t “find my audience”; I did a thing I enjoyed, and an audience found me.

Are We Even in the Zipcode of your Point?

NaNoWriMo is here once again, and a lot of writers are revving up their engines for another fifty thousand word sprint. I’m watching it all happen with what is, for me, an uncharacteristic silence, because it’s an interesting thing to observe. A lot of excitement. A lot of nervous energy.

A lot of people wondering if what they’ll write is going to be marketable.

What? Really?

I feel like this is where I should mention Chuck.

Chuck Wendig will be the first to tell you that writer’s write, and that is absolutely true, but I want to point out what they don’t do, so they have time to write.

They don’t seek their audience. They don’t fuck around with SEO. They don’t network.

Alright: yes they do, but not while they are writing.

I don’t want to make it sound like professional writers can ignore that kind of stuff but, in my opinion, thinking about any of that (or, god forbid, if what you’re working on it “saleable”) while you are supposed to be writing is the worst. possible. thing.

When I was a kid, I used to go fishing with my dad and granddad. (I was generally terrible at it, because I over-thought it, but if I remembered to bring a book along to read I usually ended up catching the biggest fish, because I left the line alone.) One of the things that always used to confound me about river fishing in a boat was the tie-line. It didn’t matter how I pulled that line into the boat in the morning, or how I coiled it up, or how well I’d avoid disturbing that coil during the day — when we got back to the dock in the afternoon, that fucking rope would be tangled up.

I would pull at it, and frown at it, and start to work through the knots and twists, but whenever it seemed like I was making any headway, I’d look at the parts of the pile I wasn’t working on and realize that the whole situation had only gotten worse.

The closer we got to the dock, the faster I’d work (because tying up was the one cool boat-thing I got to do), and the worse it would get.

Then we’d pull up about ten feet off the dock, and my dad would look down at this colossal fuck-up I’d managed to assemble in less than ten minutes.

“Just throw it all in the water,” he said.

“But –”

“Throw it in and let it float there for a minute,” he’d continue. “It’ll sort itself out.”

So I did.

And it did.

Every time.

That’s what I’ve found in writing. Do the thing you want to do. Do it as well as you can. But don’t get ahead of what you’re doing and start thinking about what this thing will do.

It has to be before it can do anything.

Throw it out in the water. It’ll sort itself out.

There are things I want my kids to understand about me — what I think about the Big Questions like life and death and religion and Faster Than Light Travel and why it’s important that Han shot Greedo first. I hope I get the chance to have those conversations, but maybe I won’t, so I’m going to write them some letters.

And I figure I’ll put them up here, so there are as many redundant copies as possible.

What I Think About Space and Traveling Faster than the Speed of Light

Hey kiddo,

I think you’re probably going to be around me long enough to know that I like science (and science fiction) stuff that has to do with space. There are lots of reasons for this, and many (maybe even most) of them have to do with the fact that I think space is pretty amazing. The way the planets move through the solar system, the way the solar system moves through the galaxy, and the way the galaxy moves through the universe — it’s all pretty awesome. The universe is very big — “vast” is the word that lots of people like to use — and while that can be pretty scary to some people (sort of the way it can be scary to stand on top of a really tall building and look down), it can also be exciting, because there’s so much to see. People have been on the Earth for a pretty long time and we still haven’t figured out or learned everything to there is to know about this world; and there are so many more worlds out there, full of things to learn, that we will probably never run out.

Think about that: there will always be something new to learn, for the rest of time. I think that’s a very good thing.

(I’d hate to know everything — I’d get bored.)

But there is something that comes up when people talk about space that I wanted to write about. It’s called Faster Than Light travel, which is what people call flying in a spaceship from one planet to another at a speed faster than the fastest thing we know about in the whole universe: light.

There are a couple reasons people talk about faster than light travel, and I wanted to explain them.

Reason #1: Space is Big
I know I already said this, but I think I need to give an example, because I didn’t really understand how big ‘big’ was until someone gave me an example, so let’s talk about just the solar system and how big that is.

I know you’ve probably studied it in school, and while I’m very proud of the model you made with all the planets and the sun, it might make you think that the solar system will fit onto one big piece of white cardboard, and that isn’t quite true, so we’re going to make a model of the solar system in our head.

First, we need a sun. The sun on the model you made for school was probably about the size of a baseball, so we’ll use that: take a baseball and put it out in our front yard. That’s our sun.

Now we’re going to walk out to where the Earth would be in our little model. To do that, you have to take about ten giant, dad-sized steps down the sidewalk on the way to the mailbox, then stop. Look back at the baseball. That’s how far the sun is from the earth. Now look down at the sidewalk. See if you can find a grain of sand down there. That’s how big the Earth is, compared to the baseball sun.

If we wanted to walk out to Pluto at the edge of our model solar system, we’d have to walk three blocks down the street. If you looked back, and the trees weren’t in the way, you probably couldn’t even see the baseball anymore (unless someone held it up for you, and it would be hard to see even then). While you’re all the way out there, don’t bother looking for Pluto — it’s much smaller than our sand-grain Earth.

And if, on your three-block walk, you spotted a fairly small marble lying in the gutter, that would be Jupiter, but you probably won’t see it, because that marble could be two-and-a-half blocks from our baseball sun in any direction — not just the direction we walked.

Space is REALLY Big

If you wanted to stay in this model of the solar system that we made and walk to the closest star from our sun, that would be Alpha Centauri. To keep everything kind of close to the right distance away, we would have to get another baseball and mail it to Aunt Barbara out in New York, and then you’d have to walk from our house to hers. (That’s actually not quite far enough away, but to make it far enough away we’d have to swim out into the ocean after our baseball for about a hundred miles, and I don’t want to do that, so let’s just say it’s at Aunt Barbara’s.)

Reason #2: We Travel Really Slow

Let’s say we actually wanted to walk all the way to Aunt Barbara’s house to visit the Alpha Centauri baseball. People all walk different speeds, but if you’re a grown up, and you’re in pretty good shape, and you have enough food, and the weather stays nice, it would probably take you about two and a half months to walk that distance. That’s something like 15 or 20 miles of walking a day.

And that might seem like it would take a really long time, but if we actually could fly to Alpha Centauri in two-and-a-half months, scientists would be pretty amazed, because that’s MUCH faster than it takes light to get to the real Alpha Centauri, and light is the fastest thing we know about. If you were traveling at the same speed as the speed of light, it would take you about four and a half years to walk to Aunt Barbara’s house, because you could only walk a little less than two miles every day. (And that doesn’t mean that light is slow — light is not just fast, it’s fastest — it’s that space is so big.)

And four and a half years is how long it would take light.

We aren’t nearly as fast as light.

In fact, if we walked to the Alpha Centauri baseball at Aunt Barbara’s house at the same speed as the fastest ship we’ve ever sent out into space, it would take us seventy thousand years to get there, which would be like only taking about nine giant, dad-sized steps every day. It would hardly seem like moving at all.

Reason #3: We Really Want to Go to Other Worlds

I kind of tricked you — I said there were only two reasons, but this one is also pretty important. The thing about other worlds and other stars is that when we get to thinking about them, we get really excited and we want to go see them. Humans like to touch things, to make sure that they’re real and see how they feel, and there’s probably always going to be a part of us that won’t really believe in something until we can hold it.

And that’s probably the biggest thing that makes science fiction writers (and scientists) write things about faster than light travel: we really want it to be possible, because if it isn’t (and it probably isn’t), that means we will never get to go visit other stars in person.

That’s the important thing I hope you understand, because it’s easy to get confused about this if you see me reading a book or watching a movie or playing a game where the heroes are flying from planet to planet in a few seconds; you might think that something like that is possible, or at least that I believe it’s possible.

I don’t.

I think that for as many lifetimes as our brains can really imagine, humans are going to live on Earth (and maybe a few of the other planets and moons in our solar system), simply because it’s impossible for us to get anywhere else. I think faster than light travel is kind of like fairies and ghosts and dragons — something that’s fun to read about, or something I’ll use in a story when I need something kind of special or magical to happen, but not something that exists in any kind of useful or useable way.

Now I’m going to tell you why that doesn’t matter to me, and why I think it’s important for scientists to keep studying space and other stars and planets.

Staring at the Stars

There are a lot of stars in the galaxy that are close enough for us to get a pretty good look at with the telescopes we have today, and every couple years our ability to look out into the galaxy gets better — we get better at seeing things, we get better at figuring out what it is we’re looking at, and that tells us more and more about the galaxy, which turns around and tells us more about our own world, and about us.

Right now, we’re getting to the point where we can really start to tell if there are any planets around other stars that are like Earth; the kind of planets that the life that we understand would grow. In a few years, we’ll probably even be able to tell that about the moons around big planets like our own Jupiter. That’s going to be an incredibly interesting and exciting time.

But what do I mean when I say it will tell us something about us?

Well, I live on Earth. If I want to, I can tell you how the air smells, and how bright the sky is today, and how cloudy it is; how warm, how cold, and how windy. I can tell you about the birds I see flying around, or the prairie dogs looking at me out of their burrows as I drive home, or how great it is to see you smile when I pick you up from school. I’m not a scientist, but I’m kind of an expert on some parts of the Earth.

One thing I don’t know, though, is if there’s anything else out there in the whole universe like us, and that would be a kind of amazing thing to know, I think, no matter what the answer is.

Imagine if you and your family lived on an island in the middle of the ocean, too far away to travel to any other islands. Now imagine if you knew for sure that you were the only people on any of the islands in the whole ocean — think about how special and amazing you would feel — also, think about how much better you might treat that island that you’re on if you knew that it was the only island you were ever going to get, and if you screwed up your island there wouldn’t be anyone else on any other island to keep going. You might feel kind of lonely in the great big ocean, all by yourself, but at least (maybe) you’d have a purpose.

Now imagine the other answer: if you knew for sure that lots of other islands had people on them. Maybe not people (at all) like you, but still living people who are going through the same kind of island-experiences as you. You will never meet them, and you’ll probably never really even get to talk to them, but just knowing that they’re out there would make you (well, me) feel like part of a much bigger Thing than anything we (I) have ever been a part of. People aren’t so good at being part of all the living things on Earth, but maybe we’d be better at being part of the living things Everywhere. For me, at least, that would be a pretty amazing feeling too. Maybe we’d feel less ‘special’, but we might not feel so alone.

(Also, maybe we’d act better if we knew other people were watching. I know that works on me when I’m at the movies.)

But of Course That Isn’t All of It

Even if we weren’t able to find out about other living things on other worlds, and even knowing that we’ll never travel anywhere but here, I still think that studying the stars and planets beyond our own is important simply because right now, it is one of the only ways in which we (people) look for knowledge just because it’s out there.  No company is going to make a billion dollars if we find out there’s life on one of Jupiter’s moons; no one is going to win an election if we find an underground lake on Mars. When we look out at the stars, we are (almost always) looking just to look; just to learn.

We are looking just because there is Stuff We Don’t Know out there, and We Want to Know It.

That wanting to know things — that desire to understand everything that isn’t us — is (I think) one of the best parts about people. I think it’s the thing that makes us people, and it’s maybe the thing that helps make us better people.

It’s noble.

You probably won’t hear me use that word very often, so I’ll tell you that it means “better than we usually are”, which is a pretty good thing to be.

We will probably never fly to another star at speeds faster than the speed of light — doing that is probably impossible, and even if it isn’t, it’s so far past the science that we understand today that the only way we can even imagine it happening is with silly-but-fun things like warp drives and hyperspace drives and jump drives and all kinds of magic wands that people like me bolt lights and buttons onto until they look like machinery — but that doesn’t matter.

I don’t think it’s about traveling to other stars. It’s about understanding them (and us) better.

And that’s always worth it.

Love you, kiddo.

Dad

There are things I want my kids to understand about me — what I think about the Big Questions like life and death and religion and Faster Than Light Travel and why it’s important that Han shot Greedo first. I hope I get the chance to have those conversations, but maybe I won’t, so I’m going to write them some letters.

And I figure I’ll put them up here, so there are as many redundant copies as possible.

What I Think Happens When We Die

Hey kiddo,

Wow. I started out with a pretty big topic, didn’t I? Pretty scary one. There’s a whole lot of STUFF wrapped up in this kind of subject; things like religion and people’s belief systems and lots of things that make people get very emotional, because thinking about dying is pretty scary stuff for a lot of folks.

I think that’s what most of it boils down to, though: fear. Dying is scary. For the people still standing around after someone dies it’s pretty sad, too. We look at this person who died and think “They aren’t doing anything anymore. They aren’t breathing or talking or laughing or crying or playing or reading or writing or anything.” Those are all very nice things to do, and not being able to do them anymore seems very sad to those of us who can still do them, so death seems sad and scary, because it seems to us that dying takes those things away. (Plus, we’re sad because we liked the person who died, or loved them, and we don’t get to do things with them anymore: in that case, we’re sad for us, because we lost someone we love, which is probably a pretty good reason to be sad.)

Now, is it sad for the person who died? I’m not an expert in every kind of belief out there in the world, but based on the ones I am familiar with, and what I think myself, I believe the answer is “no.” The reason that it’s ‘no’ depends a lot on what you think happens after you die, but the answer itself is usually the same, and generally when pretty much everyone who believes different things about something scary like death can agree on something (or anything), the thing they agree on is probably pretty close to the right answer. So let’s say no, the person who died is not sad anymore.

So what did we figure out so far? Dying scares a lot of people, and it’s sad for a lot of people (though probably not for the person who died), and because it’s sad and scary, people usually have very strong feelings and beliefs about what happens when we die.

But I’m kind of dancing around the question a little bit, aren’t I? The question is, what do I think happens when we die, and I’m kind of avoiding the answer. I’m sorry about that: I’ll stop.

The short answer, kiddo, is that I don’t think anything happens when we die.

To get your hands around the longer answer, you need to understand what other people think happens. There are a lot of religions in the world, and every one of them has an Official Answer to this question. (In fact, I think it’s probably fair to say that the main reason any religion exists is just to give people an answer this one question — they just tend to branch out into other areas over time.)

Many folks think that when you die, if you’ve been good, your spirit (or soul) gets to go to heaven, which is supposed to be a very nice place where (eventually) pretty much everyone you love also ends up (if they’ve been good too). The person who decides if you’ve been good enough to get into Heaven is usually given a name that translates to ‘God’ in whatever language people speak in that part of the world. The general idea is that you want to be good while you’re alive, so that you can go to heaven after you die.

Other pretty large groups believe in reincarnation, which means that when you die, you get to come back to the world as some new living thing. If you were good in this life, in your next life you get an even better life to work with, and if you were bad, you come back as something worse (like a spider or a beetle or something like that).

And as I already said, I don’t personally think either of those things; I think nothing happens. I think that when you’re born, you grow into a complete person over time, and you develop your own personality and you do all the things that you decide to do, and you live your life, and when your body eventually fails (or you choke on a ham sandwich), you die, and the personality that was alive in your brain is gone.

Now, I don’t necessarily think anyone else who thinks something different from me is wrong — or at least, if I do, I keep it to myself, because it doesn’t necessarily matter if they’re wrong, so long as whatever it is that they believe isn’t hurting other people. That’s my first criteria: is their belief hurting anyone else? No? Then we’re cool.

Not everyone feels that way. Some folks think that if you don’t believe the same thing they believe, that that’s the same as hurting other people, or the same thing as being a bad person. I don’t agree with that.

Some people (sometimes the same people) believe that if you don’t have an award at the end of your life (like getting to Heaven or getting to reincarnate as something even better), then there will be no reason — no motivation — to be a good person in this life, so when someone like me says “I don’t think anything happens after we die,” they sort of assume that I’m a bad person, or that I can’t be a very good person if I don’t have a religion (what people sometimes call a ‘belief system’) that tells me how to be good.

I disagree with them, and maybe that’s because I do have a belief system. I learned it from Abraham Lincoln (someone I hope I lived long enough to tell you about — and brag that I have the same birthday). The system works like this:

If I do good, I feel good.
If I do bad, I feel bad.

That’s it. What it means is that, when I go through the one life I get, I want to do good, because that makes me feel good. Maybe it’s something big, like giving someone something they really need, or something really small, like shoveling someone else’s walk in the morning when I go out to do mine. It doesn’t matter: my life — the only one I think I get — is better if I do more good with it.

So: here’s what it means to me when I say “I don’t think anything happens after we die.”

I don’t think we get a second try. I don’t believe that I’m going to get a second (or third, or fourth) lifetime to do and say all the things that I’d like to do and say that I never got a chance to this time around. So if there’s something I want to do, or a story I want to tell, or someone I want to say something to, I try very hard to do that thing, because this is the only life I’m going to get. (Making sure I say everything I meant to say is one of the reasons I’m writing you this letter.)

I think that the memories that other people keep of us are the only way in which we will continue after our death. For instance, I love my Grandpa very much, and I miss him every day, but I don’t personally think that he’s looking down on me from heaven to see how I’m doing — I believe he’s gone.

Except in my memories of him and the stories I tell about him, that is. In that way, I think that his personality will last far beyond his own life, and (if I’m very lucky, or a very good storyteller) maybe he’ll be remembered for a much longer time. There are people who lived thousands and thousands of years ago who told their stories (and the stories of other people) so well that people still tell them today. That’s a wonderful way to be remembered. I suppose it’s important for me to be remembered well, especially by my family.

I have one life, so every moment is important. When you come in and ask if you can talk, or sit on my lap, or read you a story, or read me a story, you may see me hesitate. Maybe I was already doing something, or maybe I’m working; it doesn’t really matter. The reason I’m hesitating is because I’m deciding how I’m going to spend That Moment. There will be more moments after that one, but of That Moment, there is only one, and I will never get it back, so how will I spend it?

Give me that second to hesitate and think it over, because when I do that, I almost always decide that I’d rather spend that moment with you. (It took me a long time learn this, but lucky for me, I had it mostly worked out before you were born.)

And that’s it, kiddo: that’s my answer to one of the Big Questions. Because of what I think, I try to do the best I can with the life I get, and I hope that when I’m gone, the memories I helped create and the stories I made (or lived through) will help you, or give you some kind of hint about the best thing to do when things get tough, or at least make you laugh.

Love you,

Dad

From that, I’ve projected things like the demise of chain bookstores; their failure slowed but not stopped by stubborn publishers clinging to DRM in a vain effort to make digital books work like paper books, and as a result making ebooks not more ‘secure’, but less attractive for early adoption by the casual consumers who (understandably) prefer to actually own the shit they buy.

It’s just fucking math, guys.

In 2001, we got the iPod. Three million iPods were sold in two and a half years.
Nine years later, the number of employees of music stores has dropped from 80,000 people to 20,000.

Three million iPods were sold in two and a half years.

Three million Kindles were sold in two years.

Three million iPads were sold in eighty days.

Three million iPhones were sold in three weeks.

Just do the fucking math.

I’m thankful there’s a fifteen foot trench in the floor of my basement, because it means we’re truly committed to making Kaylee’s new bedroom a reality.

I’m thankful there are no proper supports for the wall that trench is next too, even though there should be, because it means that this bedroom project, once a simple frame-in, will also make our house (which I love) about fifty times more structurally sound… simply so we can cut a bigger window in the wall.

I’m thankful this revelation about the foundation support for our house is interrupting our bedroom project. We could be finding out about it due to some kind of serious structural failure, and nothing could be further from the truth.

I’m thankful my back hurts, because that usually only happens when I sleep a really long time, and I totally slept a really long time this morning.

I’m thankful I don’t have a regular job right now, because it’s given me time to work on more writing projects and most importantly be around Kate a whole lot more just before we hit a stretch where time (and sleep) will be in short supply.

I’m thankful my family lives too far away to visit easily, because it makes me realize how much I miss them, which makes me call them and appreciate my memories of them more (it’s all I have to work with right now).

I’m thankful my throat is sore and swollen, and my sinuses are full of crap, because it means I remembered to get my flu vaccination a couple days ago.

I’m thankful my dad is a cancer survivor, because his experience has made me take much better care of myself than I would have, otherwise. Also, you know, cancer survivor.

I’m thankful I’m at ninety thousand words on my current story, but still nowhere near the end. It’s exciting to be writing something so big. It’s already bigger than anything I’ve ever done before, and still seems to be holding together.

I’m thankful that my wife has no idea what she’s gotten herself in for with this ‘baby’ thing. The best part about going on a ride you love is taking someone who’s never been.

How about you? Anyone out there thankful for a ‘bad’ thing?

I, feeling helpful, said, “Dude. Ninjas.”

And she was like, “Wait, what?”

And I was like, “Ninjas. They attack. Problem solved. The end. You’re welcome.”

And she was like, “Dude. I write YA Romance. No ninjas.”

And I was like, “DUDE. Genre-Appropriate Ninjas. GAN. The GAN in YA Romance is Kissing. ATTACK!”

And then she was like, “Whoa… that totally works.”

So let’s talk about Genre-Appropriate Ninjas and how they make everything better.

“Have somebody come in guns blazing, and figure out who they are later.” — Raymond Chandler

Man… Chandler. There was a guy who knew about ninjas. Am I right? Chandler had a method with his stories that make them — at least for me — kind of breathless. There’s no fat there — no time when the main character gets to just sit still for a little bit and simply ruminate like a thoughtful cow. No. He might get a moment or two, and then boom, something happens. There’s no downtime — there’s always something that the MC needs to react to.

All those things are what I like to call ninjas.

It isn’t all throwing stars and bullets

Put simply, a genre-appropriate ninja attack is any sort of event or piece of information that requires action (and often a significant choice) from one of your characters. (A particularly fun G.A.N. attack is when that’s all true, and you don’t already know what they’re gonna choose.)

Don’t get me wrong, I like throwing stars and bullets, but the Chandler quote up there highlights only one small part of the larger Ninja Toolbox, and let me assure you he used the whole thing — why should we do any less?

You know the thing in the noir detective thriller where the main character is like “Damn, I need to talk to Sarah McHotness and get some answers out of her, but no one knows where she is… ahh hell, I’m just gonna go back to my office and sack out for a couple hours, I’m beat.” Then he gets back to his office, and who’s waiting in his office chair? Sarah McHotness herself, of course; the one person it couldn’t possibly be, it is, so now what do you do, hotshot? The cops want to talk to her, the mob wants to kill her, anyone standing near her is probably a dead man, and she’s hiding in your office. Go!

You know what he isn’t going to do? He isn’t going to take that nap he’d planned; he isn’t going to ignore the girl in his office.

Sarah is totally a ninja attack. Sure, so is the guy who comes in guns blazing a few pages later, but that’s the obvious ninja attack; one thing we know about ninjas: the subtle ones are the most dangerous.

Chandler uses the HELL out of these things. Every time the story pacing starts to lag — hell, any time the speedometer drops below fifty — he attacks the scene with something unexpected that the MC has to react to: guy with gun, lady with a problem, married lady making with the kissy-face, dead partner, cops show up for a chat, mob shows up for a chat, cops and the mob show up for a chat at the same time, automotive homicide, et cetera. That’s what I mean when I say his stories are kind of breathless — he never lets up.

(Complete aside: As a result of this method, his stories — and many if not most good stories from that era and somewhat later — are lean, mean, storytelling machines that rip right off the page and tear down your eye canals in about 150 pages or less. They are whip-thin racing greyhounds, and the bloated 750 page couch potatoes clogging up bookstore shelves today could do with a big dose of the cardio workout that the previous generation of writers gave their books. But I digress.)

Now, Chandler’s novels are short by today’s standards, but that’s okay for us because NaNoWriMo novels are short by today’s standards. (It is so hard for me not to put standards in air-quotes. Rant for another day.) We can totally use this pacing trick to keep the story zipping along and to make sure we have something fun and interesting to write.

Also, if your story’s wrapping up too fast, GAN attacks are great for throwing a monkeywrench complication that stretches things out some more.

What Is it About, Then?

So here I go repeating myself. A Genre-Appropriate Ninja attack is:

• Something happens that cannot be ignored and which demands some sort of response.
• [Bonus Points if:] You’re not entirely sure what your protag is going to decide to do.

And, just in case you missed it, every scene should have something like this – a conflict – going on. Any scene that doesn’t is pointless cruft.

The benefits of these things are:

• They keep things into motion.
• You’ll learn something you didn’t know (or weren’t entirely sure of) about the character when they make their decision about what to do.

Character and Conflict. Character and Conflict. Lather, rinse, repeat. That’s the story.

Speaking without any sort of genre specifics in mind, I think you can break your GAN attack down into a few types.

Dilemma: You grab two Important Things and make up a situation that forces the character to make a decision between those two things. Finding the Important Things is pretty easy – take what you know or think you know about the character, pick two things that seem to be roughly equal in importance, and set up a situation where somebody’s gotta choose. This sort of GAN might result in the character losing the thing they didn’t choose, but this isn’t necessary, and it might be better (read: more incredibly awkward and painful for the character at a later point in the story) if that doesn’t happen, and the un-chosen thing/person comes back to confront them with a heartfelt “What the hell?!”

J’accuse!

Be ready: your character may decide to pull a Batman and change the situation: they don’t accept that they can’t get one thing without losing the other, so they put a third thing at risk, trying to save both of the original things. This is awesome. Go with it.

The cool thing is you can start out with a small either/or decision and continue to revisit that choice, gradually amping up the tension.

“Oh, you decided to go with her over him, huh? Well what about now? Oh yeah? What about now?!”

Which leads us to:

Escalation: this is essentially returning to some previously-introduced Dilemma, upping the stakes. Basically, you take the unselected option from a previous dilemma and make it more important or more endangered. Maybe before the choice wasn’t life or death, and now it is. Maybe it affects more people this time.

Maybe now there’s a giant flame-throwing bug. Whatever.

Identity Crisis: Someone thinks they’re one thing, and they find out they’re something or someone else.

“You totally suck, man!”

Something Totally Weird: Exactly what it sounds like. Something really weird happens which can’t be ignored because it’s so… weird. With no particular clue about a solution, what we learn about the character (hopefully) is how they try to address the event.

Maybe they go a little crazy.

Actual Ninjas: You’re kind of out of moral dilemmas, but you still need to get the action going. It’s at moments like these that we give the floor to the Reverend Raymond Chandler. Boom. Bang. Kiiiyah. Fzzzwap. Kaboom. Kapow. Braaaaaaains. Whatever.

Take this guy. Give him a knife. Oh yeah. Good times.

Does your guy fight or run? Do they freeze? Are there innocents to protect? Valuable stuff that needs to be kept from harm? Watch, learn, and write it down.

Every story has ninjas

I thought I might go through a list of genres and list out specific Genre-Appropriate Ninjas, but I like this idea better: Think about it for about 60 seconds, and then tell me in the comments what kind of ninja attack ideas you came up with for your story. Alien abduction? The authorities show up? The authorities don’t show up? The deal falls through? The jock asks her out before the cute nerd has a chance to?

Let’s hear it.

The first five days were kind of wild and crazy — you didn’t really know what was going on in the story — the characters were sort of running around going “Look what I can do! No, me! Look!” and you let them have their head and run it out.

The next seven or so days, we got a sense of what was going on and where the thing would take us, and that sense of purpose and vision imparted a lot of fire and motivation to the writing. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to ride that right down to the point in a few days when you realize that a bunch of your favorite people need to die.

However, that’s if you’re lucky. In other cases, you’re at this point where… well, things are happening, but you’re not sure if they’re going anywhere. In fact, you’re not sure if the story is going anywhere. Your loved one comes into the room where you’re sitting and looks at you for a few seconds and then says “how’s the story coming, hon?” And you’re like:

You sit down at your desk to get another couple scenes down, read the last line you wrote, think about what should happen next, and:

Pretty soon, it’s time to go pick up the kids and you’ve written all of a forty word paragraph in which the main character sits around thinking about how he doesn’t know what to do next.

Doubts start to creep in. Maybe 50 thousand in 30 days is just too much. Maybe you already told the one good story you’re going to tell. Maybe you’re brain is broken. Maybe this thing is going to be no good. Maybe it’ll be actively bad — the kind of bad where you give the finished draft to some friends to read and their feedback is basically:

I’m not going to make you feel better about that. It’s (theoretically) possible that all those doubts you have are grounded in indisputable fact — maybe one of your friends is one read-through away from a horrible disfigurement — I just can’t say.

But here’s the thing: none of that matters.

I’m going to have to get a little Midwestern on you now; that’s just who I am.

When I was growing up and going through junior high and high school, I was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities. A lot. First chair in band. Marching band. Jazz band. Choir. Swing choir (yeah, glee, whatever. shut up). Oratory/Debate. Drama. Newspaper. Yearbook. Football. Basketball. Wrestling. Track. Was there more? I think there was, but it’s all kind of a whirling haze.

In the parlance of the region, I “kept busy”.

You might say I dabbled in a lot of things, and you’d be right: with the exception of the music stuff, everything just kind of came and went with its appropriate season. My folks had a very simple rule for any of these projects: I could try anything I wanted, but if I decided (after the first serious introduction) to keep going with it, I had to finish it. Period. No exceptions. Every time I signed up for something, it meant rearranging schedules, figuring out who was going to get the car when, and generally bending everyone into pretzels to make it work. You want to do wrestling? Fine; you’re in it til the end of this season. Yearbook? No problem – but you’re not done til this year’s edition goes out the door. It didn’t matter if I lost every fucking match I ever competed in (I did), or if my particular style of prose was often very wrong for the yearbook (it was) — I was in, by god, and I wasn’t getting out til the bell rang.

So let me lay this out for you now: you’re in til the bell rings. It doesn’t matter if the story stinks, or you can’t think of an ending, or everything seems to be coming apart at the seams; you’ve asked your friends and family to bend around your schedule for the last three weeks, and if you quit now, you’re basically giving them a silent but nonetheless profound “fuck you” and walking off down the street, whistling a carefree tune. In short, you’re an asshole.

And, come on, you’re not an asshole. You’re tougher than a little bit of story ennui. You’re the kind of person who wants to finish up a story and set it in front of all those people who helped you get through the rough parts and say “This is for you. Thank you. It’s a little busted in places, but I think it’s a good start, and I can fix the rest.”

You can’t fix something you never finish.

You don’t really know if you like the game unless you stay in a full season.

A Few Tricks

All these “hoo-rah, you can do it” speeches are fine, but how about some actual concrete stuff to try?

If you’re feeling like you don’t like what you’re writing or where things are going, there’s things you can do.

• If things are sort of sans direction, make something happen that your protag has to make a decision about — not just react to, but actually make a tough decision about: do I save the bus full of children or my sister? Stuff like that. Hard decisions, preferably ones you don’t already know the answer to.
• Are you over-describing stuff? Stop. Switch to nothing but dialog for awhile. If you’re protag doesn’t have anyone to talk to, FIX THAT RIGHT NOW.
• Is the scene boring you? Drop it and skip to the next. Flag it with a [finish this later] and move on.
• Are you stuck on how to get through the current scene, but you’re writing a solution anyway? STOP. Go write some other scene — that reluctance is your brain telling you that you’re writing something stupid and that it will give you something not-stupid LATER. Write some other bit, and maybe that’ll even explain how to fix the other scene. Hindsight is actually useful when you can jump back and forth in time.
• If all else fails, attack the scene with genre-appropriate ninjas. I am totally not kidding. You’re writing a romance? Then genre-appropriate ninjas (GAN) might be an unexpected kiss from an unexpected person. Boom. Ninjas. Every genre has ninjas.
• Finally, every scene has conflict.

Get back in the game.

Don’t worry about falling down.

The best smile in the world is the grin on the player who’s covered in mud.

Furtive. Furrtive. FURTive. FURT. Heh.

Yeah. I’m twelve.

ANYWAY. Over on terribleminds, Chuck dropped some great advice on how he fights the distraction monkey of himself. As I mentioned yesterday, we are our own worst enemy when it comes to getting anything done, and Chuck takes my vague directives and supplants them with some concrete-solid examples of what focus looks like. I totally recommend you go read it.

Okay? All caught up? Good.

Now, Chuck’s post is awesome for a number of reasons; the most valuable bit of advice is simply that we need to trick ourselves into paying attention. It might be as simple as putting “the internet” on another computer from the one you’re doing your writing on, or in another room. It might be something like Scrivener’s “writing mode” or WriteMonkey’s… umm… entire interface — that blanks out the rest of the screen and reduces the chance you’ll be distracted. Those are all good tricks.

There’s only one problem, and it’s a relatively tiny one: Chuck’s a full-time writer — man’s a pro (in more ways than one) and as such, there’s the teensiest possibility that some of his tricks aren’t things a part-time writer will find applicable.

So let’s go through the day of a Furtive Writer and add a few things to Chuck’s list of focus-tricks.

Morning

Wake up 30 minutes before you need to be at work. Snoozebar got a workout this morning, didn’t it? Send spousal unit to get The Child dressed, and throw yourself into the bathroom, shower, and closet, hopefully in that order.

Thank god for Oatmeal Squares.

Arrive at work only five minutes late.

Check email for all your accounts (work and personal). Catch up on Twitter and Newsreader. Do work stuff. Maybe get 300 words down in a 15 minute sprint, but probably not.

Lunch

Go back out to your car, hit the nearest drive-through or pull out your brownbag and wolf a sandwich and soda. This leaves you 45 minutes. Pull out your laptop and get typing. You should be able to get roughly 650 words out in this time, assuming you don’t fuck around. Don’t fuck around.

If there’s some kind of wifi near where your car is parked, hook up to it ONLY in the last five minutes of your lunch break — just long enough to save your WIP and let Dropbox sync.

Back to the office. If you were using your work laptop to do your writing (not recommended if you have any alternative), reconnect it to the network and let Dropbox sync up.

Afternoon

During your entirely legitimate 15 minute afternoon break, knock out another 215 words. Otherwise, use your time-wasting allotment to look up stuff you needed to know at lunch, but couldn’t look up then.

After work

Pick up The Child. Arrive home. Make supper.

If you’re a super-parent, do nothing but hang out with the child until bedtime.

If you’re a pretty-good-to-all-right parent, alternate between some quality child/spouse time and pasting that stuff you looked up this afternoon into the spots in your WIP where you left text like [GDP OF SLOVAKIA HERE]. This will add about 100 words.

If you’re going to make up for some bad parenting at Christmas, drop your kid in front of Backyardigans, hand them a sandwich, and disappear til bedtime.

The Child’s Bedtime

Read to your kid. Steal ideas from their chapter book.

Blessed Silence of Night

You have gotten anywhere from 600 to 1300 words down. Assume it’s 600. Also assume you want about 2000 for the day, so you need about 1400. That’s two 700 word (roughly 3-page) scenes. Get to work. If you’re lucky and the words are flowing, you’ll be done by about 10 pm. If you aren’t, you’ll be done around 12:30 am.

1 am

Stagger to bed. Set the alarm for an hour before you have to get ready for work, so you can get some writing in. (This will never work, but it can’t hurt to try.)

GOTO: MORNING

—

Sound familiar? I expect it does.

So here’s a few extra tips I’d suggest.

Good Batteries

Make sure whatever laptop you’re using has them. Nothing sucks more than really getting on a roll and having your laptop go dead.

Good WiFi

This seems really counterintuitive, but you probably want to make sure that any ‘out of the house’ writing you do is somewhere with a decent internet connection. You don’t want to have it on all the time, but WHEN you need it, you want it to connect easily, quickly, painlessly, and you want it to be super-snappy-fast.

Why?

Simple: if it fails to be any of those things, you will fuck around with it, which will waste a lot of  time. A lot. I’m just saying.

Good Notebook

Have analog means of writing available. Sometimes the laptop isn’t an option. Sometimes you just want to write something down for later. Sometimes you’re someplace where people will look over your shoulder at your screen, but would never DREAM of looking at your longhand notes — society is a weird like that.

Back up early and often
I use Dropbox. Use whatever you want, so long as you use something. This is not. fucking. optional.

Don’t bring an external mouse with you

The harder it is to use your laptop to browse the internet, play Farmville or Torchlight, or scroll back to correct your previous work, the more likely you are to focus on writing. You. Keyboard. Screen. That’s it.

—

Personally, I do almost all of my writing on my little “triple e” — a netbook I bought awhile back as an award for meeting a tough goal. It’s comfortable to type on for long periods, has about a six to seven hour battery life for writing purposes, and when I combine it with a Logitech lapdesk, I can use it damn near anywhere (I mention this because the netbook itself is too small and too top heavy to really ‘work’ on your lap for more than the most desultory use, in my opinion). The netbook technically has all the same distractions available to it as my desktop (which, if I’m honest, is 90% a gaming rig), but they aren’t as easily accessible, aren’t as fun to use on the netbook, and generally just aren’t worth the effort — I don’t even like using my newsreader on the smallish screen. When I sit down with the netbook, I’m working; one keystroke disables the wifi, another opens either Word (for revisions) or WriteMonkey (for first drafts), a third shuts down my touchpad (so I don’t do something stupid by accident) and off I go.

For whatever reason, I’m shit at writing in the morning — I seem to have engineered my life so that interruptions occur in the A.M. — even when I try to get shut of distractions before lunch, stuff just happens that I HAVE to deal with. I’d RATHER write in the morning, and maybe eventually I will shift things around so it’s possible, but right now? No. That’s me. Your mileage may vary.

How about you? What tricks do you use to leave yourself NO OPTION but to write? Give me something I can steal.

First: the Internet. Yes, you, Internet. This is you:

Didja vote yet? Didja vote yet? Didja vote yet?

I voted days ago, Internet. STFU. Seriously.

Second: the folks who are trying to help you stay motivated for NaNoWriMo.

They’re like: “How’s it going on that, umm… Nah No Wree Mo thing? All done?”

And you’re like:

...

Seriously. You got six thousand words done on your first day — what did they do?

(Also: if you seriously got six thousand words done yesterday, I hate you a little bit — just a little. I’m still doing revisions, so I haven’t actually started NaNoWriMo yet. Soon. Soooon…)

The final thing on my short little list-of-dislikes today?

Ideas.

WHY is it that I always get a pile of good ideas for new stories when I’m already working on one two three other things?

OMG! Bakelite-punk! Awesome!

If you’re having this problem (and I’m going to guess that you either are, or will very shortly), get a notebook and keep it handy by your writing desk. Or writing space. Or wherever you do your thing. Writing Jacuzzi. Whatever. Keep a notebook handy, and when you get a shiny, new, distracting idea for a story, open up your notebook, write the idea down…

… and then slam that notebook shut as hard as you can. Punish those little bastards. They are not your friends right now: they’re like those exes who ignore you until they hear you’re dating someone new, then suddenly call you up and want to hook up for drinks. They have ulterior motives, is what I’m saying; do not trust them.

You know what I love, though? Two things.

1. Biting off more than I can chew.

Me.

Seriously, I think that’s my second favorite part of November: the insanity of it. De wrote a few weeks back about how we should always challenge ourselves to do more than we did the last time — I was pretty busy last November, but I do have a pretty good idea for what I’m going to accomplish this year; we’ll see how that turns out. I think that she really nailed one of the best things about NaNoWriMo: the opportunity to really push yourself. That’s good stuff.

2. Hanging out in the madhouse.
Kate said to me once “You’re really good at November,” by which I think she meant that I’m super productive during this month and often really struggle to stay focused a lot of the rest of the time. She’s right, and I think the reason for that is the simple fact that I’m like some kind of vampire creature who feeds off the collective creative energy oozing out of every tube on the internet this month.

Also me.

It’s heady stuff.

How about you? What do you love/hate about this time of year?

Those of you familiar with the ins and outs of publishing might be aware of Konrath as a mystery/suspense writer who’s become something of an evangelist for independent epublishing via markets like Amazon where an ‘unsupported’ author can play on a more level field with the Big Six of publishing. His arguments swivel on the dual pivots of sales numbers for his not-inconsiderable backlist and regular pillorying of the publishing industry for its poor choices.

(Which, to be fair, is pretty goddamn easy to manage when publishers make the decisions they do.)

Now, Joe makes a lot of good arguments. His analysis — both of his own numbers and the sales for other independent authors selling through Amazon — is usually pretty solid. And based on that analysis (and what I can only call common sense) it’s not hard for him to point out mistakes being made by big publishing simply by pointing out the stuff that individuals are doing that works, and the stuff that publishers are doing that yeilds less profit for their authors and more ill-will from consumers.

But with that said, Konrath’s points (or the tone they’re delivered in) do have a tendency to grate after awhile, and I say that as someone who thinks he’s ultimately correct; someone who’s predisposed toward ebooks and the technology behind it; someone who’s currently reading The Stand for the first time (finally), on his phone, unabridged.

I think he’s arguing the wrong point.

Yeah, he’s making good money selling his books at $2.99, at least in part because the lowered price means more people will buy his stuff; the simple fact is that a reader will buy five three-dollar ebooks in a clump, but balk at paying fifteen for one… and even if they ‘only’ buy one or two of those three-dollar books, that’s still more money spent than the fifteen-dollar non-sale.

But who cares? Those are just numbers, and (in my opinion) there are only a few numbers that big publishers care about:

24.
99.

“We sell hardbacks for 24.99, and readers have to pay that price for at least a year before they get a cheaper option. Our industry is built on that model, and we will cut a child before we accept anything that substantively affects that.”

You can find individuals in publishing who don’t feel or act that way, yes. But I tend to think actions speak a lot louder than words (especially when those words are muttered over drinks after work, where their bosses won’t hear). Look at the actual moves the big fish are making, and I don’t think you’ll see strong evidence against my assessment.

“Fine. You think he’s arguing the wrong point,” you say. “So what’s the right argument, smarty?”

In a word: History.

All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

Unless everyone in the publishing industry was born after 1990 (I’ve met quite a few of them — they weren’t), none of them actually need to crack a history book or dig into the wayback machine to recall a historical precedent for every single thing that’s happening in publishing today — they’ve lived through them.

I’m not the first person to point out the similarities between what’s going on today in publishing and what happened to the music, movie, and even television industries when digital formats became commonplace enough to penetrate the market. But I don’t think it would hurt anyone if I mention it again, because I will be fucking gobsmacked if anyone making decisions for the big publishers are paying attention.

And I’m not saying “there are a few indicators and patterns you can find in the painful (and painfully mismanaged) changes to, say, the music industry that might work as a kind of vague oracle for some of the stuff happening in publishing.”

I’m saying the changes are identical; each of those ‘predecessor’ industries provides flawless mimeographed blueprints in which we can see big companies working themselves into an obsolescence matched only by… mimeographs.

So here’s my call to everyone in publishing — not just publishers, but agents and writers and most of all readers:

Forget the numbers. Forget the price points and distribution methods and however things have been done in the past. Also, give up on arguing for change based on the numbers — no one other than the converted are listening.

Instead, look at your predecessors. Think back to the time when the music industry howled about cassette tapes and the fact it let kids tape music off the radio… and then howled about burnable CDs… and then unencrypted MP3s. Or think back to television broadcasters howling about VCR tapes… then DVRs.

Did it do any good? What happened?

Think back to the format wars in [pick your industry here]. 8-track. Cassette. Betamax. HDDVD. The fifty file formats mp3 annihilated. Did the money spent by companies trying to introduce their own, brand-specific, copy-protected, file format turn out to be money well-spent?

Think back to the birth of independent artists working without Big Industry Backing in those industries. Were people convinced that there was no way they could make a living — hell, even that there was no way they wouldn’t end up going bankrupt? Was industry backing touted as the only way to be seen as ‘legitimate’? Was electronic distribution seen as a fad? Was pirating of unprotected electronic copies seen as the Ultimate Poison Pill?

What happened in those industries? What continues to happen? Were the big boys ever right? Ever?

I’m going to make some predictions about publishing now, and since I think they’re pretty damned obvious, I will present them as absolutes. Some of them are negative, and some of them are positive, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which. I’m basing every single one of these predictions not on publishing, but on the industries that have already gone through what publishing is facing today, while publishing was snickering into its sleeve and making jokes like “How many formats does PAPER have? Heh heh heh.”

• Most publishers aren’t going to change much. Most — almost all — of their money will be spent on their superstars, and their midlist creators will be seen as (and treated like) dead weight, despite the fact that they make up 99% of authors and most of their revenue. The big names will increasingly become known as vapid pop-culture hit machines.
• At least one — probably several — big publishers will try to introduce their own ebook reader or ebook format that only works and is only distributed for their products, despite the fact that popular formats exist and are already being whittled down to a few survivors. These specialized formats and branded readers will suck huge amounts of money that could have been spent partnering with existing solution providers and solving the problem with already-adopted tech.
• A very few traditional publishers will figure out what’s going on and adapt to new models.
• New publishers will spring up. Almost all of these publishers will be boutique-type studios (sorry, I mean publishers), founded by AUTHORS or AGENTS who figured out how to do everything that needed doing with the new technology, and who decided to turn around and provide those services to a select group of fellow artists they chose to work with… often while teaching them all the same stuff they’ve learned.
• Artists will continue to produce their own stuff and distribute it through increasingly easier-to-use and easier-to-access avenues. Ninety percept of it will be crap (for each consumer’s own values of crap), but those with enough drive and (obviously) talent will reach their audience and grow a really devoted group of supporters. The writer-equivalents of Jonathan Coulton or Julia Nunes or Pomplamoose are out there.
• Fans will continue to not give a damn whether someone is promoted by some big publisher or if they did all their own stuff on a Macbook in their basement, because readers don’t give a fuck about publishers and infer no added quality from a pub’s stamp on the spine — most of them don’t know who the ‘big six’ are anyway.
• As electronic distribution (and web-based shopping) becomes more and more prevalent, and the percentage of electronic vs. analog versions of the same products continues to move toward electronic, brick-and-mortar stores will become progressively obsolete. Physical bookstores already account for less than a third of all book sales — in ten years Barnes and Noble will be the publishing equivalent of Sam Goody and Blockbuster.

Generally, all of this will be better for both the author and the reader.

For everyone else, it depends on how willing they are to see the clear and (as far as I can see) utterly unvarying patterns that came before, and how able they are to do something about it.

What I’m saying is this:

If you’re a reader looking at the options out there for ebooks, worried that the whole thing may be a flash in the pan, don’t — the growth of digital format text is inevitable. Unless you have a stunningly bad track record for selecting new technologies to back, it’s probably okay to jump in the pool now.

If you’re an author looking at the possibility of independently producing your stuff, don’t worry about Joe Konrath’s math. Look at one (or all) of these other industries that have been here already and see what kind of artists make independence work for them. Ask yourself if you can be that kind of artist. If you think the answer’s yes, then that should be answer enough.