Also, with ShoStoWriMo going on, I probably won’t get a whole lot done this month, so if things are quiet here, you know the reason.

Last year it went quite well, with a number of good stories coming out of it, and this year I’d like it to be even better, so you should go and sign up! It’s open to everyone and quite a bit of fun.

In other, more personal news, things have been going well here. I have a Horizon story that needs some work but that will probably be ready sometime in May, and a Broken Shores story that will be ready sometime after that. In any case, I’ll keep you up to date on everything as it happens.

After the series is finished, imagine a massive e-book edition of ASoIaF (call it the Perfect Collection or Ultimate Edition or something) that contains all of the books. Now, let the fans remix the books. Not rewrite them or modify the text, but rather the ability to rearrange the chapters. Imagine reading only the Tyrion chapters or the Jaime chapters, with no interruptions, or only the chapters of peripheral characters. I realize that you could do this with paper books by skipping the chapters that you don’t want to read, but it would be a pain in the ass. In addition, fans could release ‘playlists’ of the book that other people who have purchased the uber edition could then view.

Of course, this wouldn’t need to come cheap, say $50 or $100 per license. Imagine everyone who has already purchased the entire series going out and buying the whole thing over so that they can remix it.

Personally, I don’t actually expect the publishing industry to do anything like this. They will almost certainly say that it is too difficult or too expensive, if they consider it at all. Fortunately, what we are talking about here isn’t video or music, but text, which is notoriously hard to control (or as Cory Doctorow says: “Behold . . . the typist!”), so whether or not Bantam wants my money, I’ll be able to get it.

Books

• Ashes, by Ilsa J. Bick – A YA book that combines zombies and an EMP pulse that wipes out much of civilization. It was fun, but be warned, it feels like a prequel. It made me want to write a story where zombies come and do a lot of damage and then die off, leaving people to rebuild.
• Feed, by M.T. Anderson – Another YA book, this one a look at a dystopian post-literate society. The first half was fun, and the second half was depressing, mostly because I didn’t feel that the main character was making any attempt to change things that he knew were broken. The audiobook production of this was phenominal.
• Just My Type, by Simon Garfield – A book about fonts. More fun than it sounds, really. My only complaint was that it was a bit light on the history (for example, I would like to know a bit more about the history of serif and sans-serif fonts or why the letter J was eventually added to the alphabet).
• Animal Farm, by George Orwell – I wasn’t really expecting to like this one, but I ended up loving it. I had expected it to be a critique of socialist ideas, but in the end I took the message to be: Once you stop struggling forward, you start to slip backward. In addition, this book is a prime example of why you shouldn’t read forewords or introductions, I don’t like being told what to think about something before I read it.

Articles

• Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the US – Depressing but relevant.
• Why e-books cost so much – Interesting article that argues that the main cost in books isn’t paper, but rather marketing, editing, art, etc. and therefore e-books are being underpriced. There is probably some truth in this, but until I see evidence of publishers maketing (when was the last time you saw advertisement for something that wasn’t already a huge hit?) or editing (how often do you read a new book by a popular author and wonder why an editor didn’t request a rewrite?), I’ll remain skeptical.
• The rise of e-reading – Pew just released a study indicating that people who read e-books read more (e-books and paper books) than people who read only paper books, which is heartening.

For next week, I am in the process of reading The Art of Memory, which is just as dense as it sounds, so I may not have much for you. Be warned.

• Sauerkraut Station, by Ferret Steinmetz – Described as Prarie Home Companion in space, this story was a lot of fun. Plus, GigaNotoSaurus allows you to download epubs of their stories, which makes them much more readable.
• A Web of Air, by Phillip Reeve – After enjoying Fever Crumb, I thought that I would give the sequel a try. I was disappointed. First, the audiobook had a different narrator (the author did the first one, and was fantastic). Second, the simplistic view of spirituality that it portrayed (summed up as religion always hinders progress) annoyed me. Third, the most interesting part, birds with human intelligence that had decayed since their creation (but with the possibility of redemption) weren’t very well explored. Finally, the main character shoots someone by clamping a bullet in a vice and setting it off. Since the character is trained as an engineer, she should know that the bullet would need a barrel to achieve any sort of velocity. I won’t be reading the next one.
• A Planet of Viruses, by Carl Zimmer – An excellent introduction to the world of viruses. Informative without being dry.
• Palimpsest, by Charles Stross – This novella makes me look at every time travel story I’ve ever read and think that the authors lacked in ambition. I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this book.

Articles

• Real Spending, Real Dollars – Our spending priorities are just scary.
• The $30 Billion Social Security Hack – I imagine that we will see a lot more of this in the future.
• The Inadmissible Assumptions – Like a tiny Jaron Lanier sitting on my shoulder.
• Not an April Fool – You know that saying about never attributing to evil what is more easily explained by stupidity? Well the corollary is that there is no functional difference between stupidity (or ignorance or incompetence) and evil.
• It’s the Economics, Stupid! - Interesting look an energy prices and politics, although I think that he doesn’t take into account the effect of staring at a pump for a minute or two as you pump your gas, rather than simply seeing one number one time each month when you get your natural gas bill.
• What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter – Namely that readers want to be your advocates, and that perhaps abject fear isn’t the correct response.

Comics

• Cadbury Eggs – XKCD
• Tumblr – EverythingIsTheSameSize “dot tumblr dot com”

Books

Last Week: The Statues That Walked, Ship Breaker, The Quantum Thief, The Third Reich, and One Way Forward. Of these five, my favorites were definitely The Statues That Walked, which made a rather persuasive argument that rather than polluting themselves to death/killing each other, the people of Easter Island were both peaceful and remarkably good stewards of the environment, and One Way Forward, which was one of the most hope-inducing political book that I’ve read in a long time.

This Week: Ragamuffin, Fever Crumb, and Dark Life. All of them were good, but nothing really bit me.

Articles

• E-Books, Paperbacks, and Authors – A future of publishing.
• Can A Local Currency Improve Resilience – It looks like the short answer is yes.
• Alternative Currencies In Greece – More on alternative currencies, this time from Tobias Buckell.
• Drones That Operate For Years On Their Own -
• Why High Gas Prices Are Here To Stay – The title may say it all, but worth a read. Then again, I check oil-price.net every morning because it seems to be the best single indicator of what will happen in our society, so I may be a bit biased on this front.
• A Writing Experiment – Basically, using Apple’s Siri to capture dialogue and a keyboard to capture the rest of the story. I’m not sure how well this will work out, as real speech makes terrible dialogue. Of course, I am still planning on writing a story that involves a group of people sending frantic status updates via text message, which I plan to frantically type into my phone to capture some of the autocorrect hilarity.
• Locke Lamora Read-Along Bonus #4: YOU SUCK, LYNCH – Lynch provides some fascinating insight into what it means to not go back and fix the things that you wrote years ago, when you lacked the skills you currently possess.
• Using copyright to keep kids from reading – I realize that there is another side to this, but really? Way to shoot yourself in both feet, publishing industry.
• E-Books’ Uncertain Future at Local Libraries – I realize that this is a tough time for publishers, but I fail to see the rationale of not selling to libraries at all.

Turn on your TV set (or imagine that you are). Find a show that you like that is not a sitcom or news and takes place during the modern era. Now wait for the protagonist to sit down and watch some TV. Chances are, you will be waiting for a while. Those doctors, detectives, scientists that you like so much don’t really watch TV, or if they do, it is to catch the big game or to watch a news snippet. They don’t go home every night and plunk down for an hour or two of TV.

Now, think of how you relate to those characters. At some level, you probably want to be as smart, funny, or interesting as those people. It would be cool to do interesting things, wouldn’t it? So what does that have to do with the amount of TV that they watch? Two things. First, watching someone watch TV is about as interesting as watching them go to the bathroom, less so even, since we see a lot more of the latter. Second, they don’t have time. If they went home and watched TV every night, they wouldn’t have the time to do all of the things that their fictional lives require of them.

What I’m saying is that by spending a lot of time watching fictional characters do interesting things, you pretty much prevent yourself from doing interesting (or heck, useful but boring) things, by definition.

Last year, the New York Times ran a story reporting that in 2010 Americans watched an average of 34 hours of television per person, per week. That sounds like a lot, but it sounds like more when you do some math with it. There are 168 hours in a week. Assuming that people sleep eight hours per day, that leaves 112 hours. Now, if you work 9-5 five days a week, and have a half-hour commute each way (and many work longer and commute farther), that leaves 67 hours. That means that Americans spend 30% of their waking hours watching TV, and over 50% of their free time. Another way of putting this is that Americans watch 4.85 hours of TV per day. On a workday, that would leave you a little over two hours each day to do things like eat or raise your family. Most people probably aren’t that determined to watch TV on weekdays, however, probably clocking in closer to three hours (a guess on my part), which would then mean that they spend 19 hours watching TV on the weekends.

You probably get my point by now. People in the United States watch a lot of TV. Maybe next time my neighbor comments on how much yard work we get done over the summers I will just point to the ever-present blue-white glow of their TV visible through their front window.

I’m going to go do something interesting, maybe you should, too.

This week, I finished reading Richard Matheson’s Other Kingdoms, Sherman Alexie’s Flight, Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain, Tamora Pierce’s Tortall and Other Lands, Jonathan Hickman’s Red Wing, and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera’s What If Latin America Ruled The World. Of these, Crystal Rain was by far my favorite, and you should read it.

Articles

• The Disappearing Virtual Library - An article examining the demise of library.nu. Particularly interesting because it deals with the phenomenon as a failure of publishers to meet demand.
• Publishers Oppose Bill on Scholarly Open Access – . . . because they feel that we have no right to research that we have collectively funded. If they can’t make enough money from work that was taxpayer funded, that sounds like a them problem.
• Siri’s big brother from Google – I don’t care how shiny it is, I don’t want to talk to my phone.
• States’ Rights? – I really wish the government would stop curtailing my right to curtail other people’s rights. An excellent analysis of how most of the people calling for states’ rights are doing so in the interest of discriminating on a local level.
• Locke Lamora: It came from Burger King! – Some cool meta about one of my favorite fantasy books, which you should read if you have not already.
• You Don’t Need a Cyber Attack to Take Down The North American Power Grid - Security Theater is the best kind of theater.
• US Attn General Eric Holder on The US Killer Drone Policy – More disturbing news from DC.
• Playing the Game in Afghanistan – A glimpse into the Afghani psyche as well as a suggestion for a strategy that actually has a chance of succeeding. My favorite bit was her talking about “buzkashi, in which mounted horsemen vie for possession of a dead goat or calf. . . . Journalists compared the game to polo, apparently never having seen a game of polo.  Take my word for it: it is not like polo.”

1. In attempts to make books “Adult” writers often seem to mistake graphic sex and violence for maturity. Making a book suitable for only adults does not make it mature, it is more like an adolescent trapped in an adult’s body. I realized this while reading Crystal Rain and realizing that the characters actually felt like adults (this shouldn’t be so rare, but it is). Remember, sex and violence are tools, and to use them in service to something other than the story is to waste them.
2. Science fiction writers can be like raccoons. Sometimes they write about concepts and technology so shiny that they get transfixed, and forget that they are supposed to be, you know, telling a story.
3. A story needs to be anchored in time and space. This isn’t to say that a story needs to begin with a timestamp and GPS coordinates, but that the story’s environment should be defined in some way early on, as should the main character’s attitude towards it.

Enough of that. I’ll stop complaining now.