Behind the Lines

Yes, I've Moved

2013-02-04T23:15:00.001-08:00

If you follow this blog, I apologize for the hugely late notification. And if you're stumbling here from a Web search, well, hey -- thanks for looking me up! Allow me to redirect both groups to what will hopefully become my semi-permanent home on the Internet: http://www.williamvanwinkle.com/blog.html Blogger was a quick and easy way to get up and running with something, but now I'm to the point where I need a little more capability, and Weebly seemed to have the best blend of convenience, features, and affordability. So there I am.

Thanks for stopping by my Blogger space. Please feel free to bookmark the new digs at www.williamvanwinkle.com. Hope to see you there!

Short Shorts Review: Bradbury 13

2012-11-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

Wow, I totally spaced on posting my last Sci-Guys podcast spot. Many apologies. But...better late than never, yes? So without further ado, the text from my most recent appearance as found on Sci-Guys Podcast #110...

Hey, Sci-fans. Sorry I missed Halloween, but I was tied down with this 99-cent ebook called “The Ghost Story Megapack: 25 Classic Tales By Masters.” I figured, hey, if I can find just two or three decent ghost stories in the collection, it’ll be a steal. What I didn’t anticipate was that nearly all of the stories would be from the 1800s. But I thought, “OK, these are the roots of modern horror. This is good to enjoy for its literary value and erudition and—”

No. You know what? It was boring. Beyond boring. Mind-numbing in the endless descriptions of sprawling estates and cloudy skies and on and on and just about everything except anything resembling an actual story! I took a Victorian Horror class when I was in college, and the only thing scary was how much time I blew being bored off my ass!

Maybe I’m uncultured. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to appreciate fine literature. Whatever, but I’m sorry. I just couldn’t do that to you listeners.

Instead, I stumbled across a rare treat at the library called Bradbury 13. If your library doesn’t have it, you can pick it up on Audible.com or Amazon. Before I get into it, though, I have to tell you that I’ve been a rabid audiobook fan for over twenty years. I have a huge collection, especially of sci-fi and horror, and I’d say that in the last few years, I’ve listened to ten, maybe fifteen books for every one I’ve read on paper. I listen when I’m walking to the mail, washing dishes, making coffee, and any other time I have at least a few minutes of quiet, non-social time. I keep half a dozen different audiobooks on my phone, carry a Bluetooth earpiece in my pocket, and while yes, listening is slower than reading, I get so many more listening minutes than I do minutes to concentrate on a book that I end up consuming way more literature through my ears than my eyes.

OK, end of audiobook pitch and back to Bradbury 13.

This is an adapted collection of Ray Bradbury tales from the ‘50s and ’60s. In fact, the first Short Shorts review I ever did, for Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” is in this collection. There are time traveling hunters who have an unfortunate meeting with a T. Rex, a machine just guaranteed to make anyone happy…until it doesn’t, a team that makes supposedly first contact with a new planet one day too late, and more – thirteen stories total. NPR ended up pouring $120,000 into making this into a fully casted production, complete with sound effects and musical score. I’m too young to have enjoyed radio dramas, but that’s exactly what these are. They originally debuted on radio, with one story in every 30-minute segment. I only found one story in the set, “The Screaming Woman,” that I found disappointing. Sure, many of the stories sound quaint and archaic. Bradbury is prone to his bouts of gee-whiz, Golden Age of Sci-Fi sentimentality. You can’t survive in space with just an air helmet. There are no abandoned cities on Mars. We know all these things now. But if you can set that aside and let your imagination roll back and see such things as fantasy more than science, then the humanity and symbolism that Bradbury excels at so deeply shines through.

The CD version of Bradbury 13 sells for $16 and change on Amazon, $11.95 as an Audible download, and $13.95 from the publisher, Blackstone Audio, if you like supporting the little guy. Search YouTube for “Bradbury 13 The Ravine” for a free and probably not-so-legal preview. I could swear that at one point I found the individual stories available to download for three bucks each, but hell if I can locate the link now. No matter what, I can’t recommend this collection enough. It’s nostalgic, fun, inspiring, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll spark in you the same passion I have for reading by audiobook.

Until next time, this is William Van Winkle, and thanks for checking out my short shorts.

Short Shorts: Of Zombies and Missing Pieces

2012-08-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

I have always been a chronic over-writer. In high school, back when dot matrix printers and fanfold paper still reigned, classmates would grab the first page of my English paper, drop the rest out of our second-story window, and let my text blow in the breeze to see how far my latest opus reached. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands of extra words I've written in my life? The thought of all those hours I might have reclaimed if only I were more concise gives me productivity nightmares. Yet I seem powerless to stop this overkill at the keyboard.

Thankfully, the world has editors that impose limits. With the Sci-Guys podcast, the powers that be tell me to keep things under three to four minutes. The first draft of my piece on Scott Nicholson's Missing Pieces came in at almost five and a half minutes on my first reading. Ugh... So I set about slicing and dicing. You can hear the results starting at about 32 minutes and 40 seconds into the new Sci-Guys podcast #105.

Some people have longer attention spans when reading than listening. (Just ask my wife.) I started out with the Sci-Guys crew months ago talking about zombies, and I think there remains a lot to say on the subject. Unfortunately, zombies are the new vampire -- or they were a year ago. I sense that the public's sense of zombie fatigue is growing, and that's to be expected. Fascination with this or that sort of monster is bound to ebb and flow like any fad. When AMC cancels The Walking Dead, we'll know that this zombie wave has run its course. Apparently, the show now has its own Facebook game, so it shouldn't be long.

Anyway. See? I'm doing it again.

Without (much) further ado, I'll only say that below is the original version of my review script rather than the abridged version I sent in for the podcast. (And can anyone tell me how to minimize those hard "s" sounds in Audacity? Please?) Also, I want to emphasize right up front that if you love horror lit and enjoy supporting independent authors, you need to check out Scott Nicholson. Read through his Web site and sign up for his ebook giveaway projects. Try a few. You won't be disappointed. I mean, how can you not love a guy who does his press photo as a vampire in a casket?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Why do we love zombies?

This is a tricky question once you dig under its flaky, rotting surface. I thought about this a lot as I was writing my Civil War zombie story, “The Followers.” I mean, monster tales and the horror genre in general work on different levels. If we think of slasher flicks, where things suddenly jump and scream and scare the bejeezus out of you, there’s not much depth here, right? It probably has something to do with the fight or flight response and how that little adrenaline pop stimulates our hindbrains. There’s no intellect involved; it’s just primal. And primal is fine. Primal is how we make kids, after all. But a great story demands more.

So...zombies. Let’s recap. What exactly is a zombie? Well, usually, a zombie is a human that has been attacked somehow and rendered into a mindless, devouring corruption of its former self. I’m picking these words carefully: mindless, devouring, and corruption. Mindless is important because we identify ourselves with our minds. The mind defines us and makes us human. It’s the fence around our ego. Without mind, we’re nothing but a sack of meat in an empty universe. Here’s the key to horror: Nothing terrifies us more than loss of identity. We laugh about zombies craving brains, but did you ever wonder why the brain? Why not the heart or something else? Because the brain contains the mind. Zombies are about the destruction of the mind.

Now back to devouring. Zombies aren’t scary because they’re carnivores. I’m all for bacon and baby backs, OK? Zombies are cannibals. Murder is taboo, but it’s ordinary. It happens every day. Cannibalism? That’s something else. It’s not just an offense against an individual, it’s an offense against the species, and that threatens us at a deeper level.

Corruption. I remember reading Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant fantasy series when I was a kid, and the one quotation that’s stuck with me all these years is this: “There's only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.” In a zombie apocalypse, where we as a world have lost everything, the real horror isn’t the loss of power or food or any other external factor. It’s that we get back our loved ones broken and corrupted. They are mindless, rotting, empty reminders of corrupted love.

Good literature tells the story of ourselves. Through the characters, we see our own faults and dreams. Zombies – the best kind of zombies – appeal to our fear of losing ourselves. Because we all stand on this cliff every day. The ground under our feet feels firm. We have money, food, family, and most of all a sense of who we are, the identity that defines our place in the world. But just one step, one bite, one little crossing into death and back again, and we tumble off that cliff into corruption and lose everything that really matters. We become entirely, terrifyingly alone.

Scott Nicholson has written many stories about zombies, but one of the most haunting is titled “Darker With the Day.” It’s about a man named Lt. John Sorenson, who was one of the first victims of the zombie apocalypse accidentally unleashed by the military. In a really clever twist, Nicholson gives his zombie full recall of who he is and was so long as he has recently fed. The more hungry he gets, the less he remembers. And Lt. Sorenson has only one wish: to get back home to the wife he loves with all his soul.

There are a lot of Christian images and references in “Darker With the Day,” and at first this bothered me. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw how well it fit into the zombie archetype. If religion is one of the ways, maybe the biggest and most profound way, that we as thinking humans cope with the universe’s emptiness, then Nicholson is adding another layer of loss and corruption on his zombie. It’s not only about loss of identity. Lt. Sorenson is battling the loss of his faith and spirit. It’s subtle and clever and really helps sink this story into your subconscious like few other zombie tales I’ve read.

“Darker With the Day” alone is worth buying, but it appears in a collection of ten stories titled Missing Pieces for only 99 cents. Scott Nicholson has written more than 30 books, and he has a very bad habit of giving them away for free. I honestly feel guilty when I download his promos. But he can turn from backwoods hick humor to dark poetry on a dime, and when his stories hit home, they hit hard.

Scott Nicholson, Missing Pieces, 99 cents to download. Don’t miss it.

What Price, Entertainment?

2012-08-14T14:13:00.001-07:00

"What price should I set for my ebook?"

If you're a self-published author, this question persists like a bad flu. Just when you think you've put it to rest -- bam! Back it comes again, more vexing than ever.You can read the Romance Writers of America's survey showing that $6.13 is the "fairest price" for a romance ebook. You can skip to any of influential indie author Dean Wesley Smith's discussions about ebook pricing, probably starting with this one that ties prices to word counts. You could take inspiration from the many authors who have found success pricing their works at 99 cents, hoping to trade near-term profits for long-term popularity. Or you could throw up your hands in exasperation and go with your gut, saying, "I spent eight years working every night on this 250,000-word epic, and it's every bit as good as any other $11.99 best-seller on the Amazon Top 100, so pony up, people."

Today, I'm so far from being a best-selling author that the distance of my career from "here" to "made it" has to be measured in astronomical terms. But I'm as entitled to an opinion on the pricing question as the next guy. Trouble is, I don't know enough to have an opinion. That's the curse of being a journalist. I feel like I have to be surrounded with case studies, data, and a burden of evidence before I can feel confident in having an informed opinion.

If I had years of experience under my belt and a fleet of self-pubbed novels I could price this way and that, perhaps I could pass judgment on price points with some authority. But I don't. I could probably reach out and find a few, but they'd probably get so annoyed with my statistical haranguing that we'd never reach a conclusion before they sent me to blacklist banishment, that filtered layer of Hell reserved for shady pharmaceuticals, overly optimistic marital aids, and fawning journalist fanboys.

But we can't all wander around blindly. There must be some objective yardstick for gauging how to price ebooks, right? RIGHT?!

I and many others have tried comparing ebooks to movies in the past. Theaters sell $10 movie tickets by the millions, and most movies don't last anywhere near as long as a novel. Some counter-argue this point, saying that whereas a novel gets produced by a handful of people, movies require hundreds or thousands. Nobody spends $50 million to produce a novel. Think of the cost disparity. Shouldn't this translate into consumer prices?

No. That fallacy plays only into the hands of those who would spend more to make more, with nary a thought for the quality of the consumer's experience along the way.

That's the key: the quality of the consumer's experience. I don't care that it cost over $200 million to make and market the new Total Recall movie. I've paid 99 cents for ebooks produced on essentially zero budget that gave me far more entertainment for a longer time than the 135 minutes I sat yawning through Sony's botched remake. The question every consumer might ask is, "How much is this entertainment worth to me?"

More importantly, can we reach general conclusions about the value of entertainment?

The movies vs. ebooks pricing comparison can't stand on its own. It's a number in a vacuum. We need additional context so that the number becomes part of a pattern. With that in mind, I went into a Googling frenzy and emerged with some very interesting finds.

#1. Gaming

I'm not much of a gamer, but I'm surrounded by people who are. In 2011, video gaming was a roughly $16.5 billion industry just in the U.S. In comparison, 2011 movie ticket sales edged just over the $10 billion mark for all of North America. I took an informal poll of my friends, and the general rule seems to be that men in my demographic (30- to 40-somethings) buy a handful of top titles each year bolstered by several more "filler" titles -- mostly older games found in the virtual discount bin. Some games get played for days, some for only a few minutes before being tossed aside. Back of the napkin figures placed the price of gaming among my friends at about 50 cents per hour.

Not content with such informality, I went searching for harder data. One lucky find surfaced at http://howlongtobeat.com/stats.php. Among other things, the site maintains a list of how long it takes people to complete games. Here's the list of ten most-submitted titles and the average of how long users took to complete them.

1. Mass Effect 2 – 35h 56m

2. Portal 2 – 9h 00m

3. Mass Effect – 27h 00m

4. Portal – 3h 27m

5. Batman: Arkham Asylum – 15h 17m

6. Assassin’s Creed II – 25h 46m

7. Bastion – 7h 26m

8. Deus Ex: Human Revolution – 28h 03m

9. Half-Life 2 – 13h 36m

10. Dragon Age: Origins – 56h 51m

All told, this gives us an average completion time of about 22.25 hours.

Next, we need to know how much the average game costs. While top titles now frequently sell in the $60 range, one reputable source showed that the average selling price in 2011 for new titles was (converted to U.S. dollars) $40.

Do the math, and what you get is an average gaming price of $1.80 per hour. However, this ignores the rising tide of smartphone and tablet apps, such as Angry Birds, which might cost a buck and deliver dozens of hours of jaw-clenching challenge. In accounting for this, we might skew our final figure downward by...half? Maybe more? Let's figure half and call gaming a 90 cents per hour affair.

#2. Movies

It's the knee-jerk example we all reach for, but just how much does a theater experience cost? Two quick searches yield good info.

First, Hollywood Reporter claims that the average price of movie tickets now stands at $8.12, an all-time but totally not surprising high. Finding the average movie length was slightly harder, but I like the data compiled by Peter Sciretta, stating that the average length for the top 50 movies of 2008 was 110 minutes.

Divide and multiply and we see that cinema outings average $4.43 per hour -- not counting gas, concessions, and so on.

But here's the tough part about movies. In my home, we ditched our cable over two years ago (best. decision. ever.) and now watch most of our movies via Netflix or Redbox. I'd estimate that we watch five movies at home for every one in a theater. With subscription and rental costs averaged out, I'd peg the price of our home movies at about $1.50 each. Factored in with the cinema viewing, that drops us down to $1.42 per hour.

#3. Bowling

Why not? It's entertainment, yes?

Our local lanes are pretty representative of an average bowling alley, and the place charges $4 per game during open bowling. Let's figure that it takes an average person 15 minutes to bowl one game. If you bowl with one partner, the two of you will complete two games in an hour. Ignoring shoe rental, you're out $8 per hour.

#4. Concerts

Sad to say, but I haven't been to a concert in years. Partially, this is because we had kids, but it's also because ticket costs for the bands I like have become stratospheric. I know that artists often depend on concerts rather than album sales for their real income, but...holy cow.

I found some excellent data at Pollstar and selected bands starting with the letter V as a sample set. Average ticket prices for those bands ranged from $3.72 to $108.81, but the average was $37.50 per ticket. If we include opening acts and figure three hours per show, which is probably being generous, then we get a concert entertainment rate of $12.50 per hour.

#5. Books

Pegging entertainment value on reading is tricky. Different genres gravitate to different novel word counts. To keep things simple, I wanted one number -- one giant average for the entire literary field -- and I found it in a Huffington Post story. The magic number is 64,500. How long does it take to read a book of this length? The most-cited statistic says that the average U.S. adult reads about about 250 words per minute. Reliable studies seem few and far between, but one interesting Syracuse University paper reported rates of 231 and 189 words per minute, so I'm fine with leaving 250 as a reference point. With these averages, a normal person should be able to read a book in 258 minutes, or 4.3 hours. If this seems fast to you, adjust accordingly.

One problem, though: Most books only report their number of pages. Word counts have only started to come into vogue with ebooks, which render page counts meaningless.

While the number of words on an average page will vary based on a host of factors, we can take 350 as a fairly solid ballpark estimate. Using this, let's check out Stephen King's indescribably awesome 11/22/63, a behemoth weighing in at 880 pages, and figure that it has about 380,000 words. That works out to 25.33 hours of reading time. As of this writing, Amazon lists the hardback of 11/22/63 for $21. That's 83 cents per hour for some of the best literary entertainment I've enjoyed in decades. If we opt for the $12 paperback, that number drops to 47 cents per hour.

I wanted a top 20 title and found out that Catching Fire (book 2 from The Hunger Games trilogy) is 101,564 words, making it a 6.77-hour read. The hardback sells for $10.79, yielding $1.59 per hour. If we take the $5.99 Kindle version, we can follow the adventures of Katniss for only 88 cents per hour.

Putting It Together

I think of books, movies, and gaming as "everyday entertainment." Bowling and concerts are much less frequent activities. It seems accurate to draw a correlation between frequency and hourly entertainment cost, doesn't it? The more of a "treat" the entertainment is, the more we're willing to pay for it on an hourly basis.

Looking at everyday entertainment, if we take the paperback of 11/22/63 as a low (47 cents/hour) and movie consumption ($1.42/hour) as a high, an author can feel totally justified in pricing his or her novel at $1/hour. At 250 words/hour, I'm reading 15,000 words/hour, which means a 90,000-word novel is smack on target at $5.99.

Where this starts to break down is with shorter fiction. If we have a 30,000-word novella, that's two hours of reading for a $1.99 price point. Dean Wesley Smith would have us pricing this length at $4.99 or $5.99. I'm not saying that this is excessive. I'm only saying that such a price is skewed way out of line with the kind of hourly averages we're seeing for everyday entertainment. Believe me, as a writer, I'd love to be able to charge $3.49 for my 13,500-word historical horror novelette, "The Followers." But my sales have narrowed to a trickle even at $2.99, and that's with a bonus short story included. My slight amount of personal evidence combined with the data detailed here tells me that the market won't accept what most would call a short story for $3.49.

But by this $1/hour reckoning, all short stories should be 99 cents. In fact, you wouldn't even think of graduating to Amazon's key 70% royalty price point at $2.99 until you crossed the 45,000-word mark. I don't think that's feasible. There has to be some bend in the graph. The shorter the ebook length, the higher the entertainment value per reading hour. Again, if we take a loose range of $0.50/hour for the very longest works and $3.00/hour for the shortest, we might see results like this:

Short story (5,000 words): $0.99, 20 minutes @ $3/hr

Short story (10,000 words): $1.49, 40 minutes @ $2.25/hr

Novelette (15,000 words): $1.99, 1 hour @ $2/hr

Novella (30,000 words): $2.99, 2 hours @ $1.50/hr

Short novel (45,000 words): $3.99, 3 hours @ $1.33/hr

Novel (60,000 words): $4.99, 4 hours @ $1.25/hr

Novel (90,000 words): $5.99, 6 hours @ $1/hr

Longer novel (120,000 words): $6.99, 8 hours @ $0.87/hr

Jumbo novel (over 180,000 words): $7.99, 12 hours @ $0.67/hr

Again, I'm not saying if this scale is right or wrong. It certainly slants against writers of shorter fiction. But in comparison against other forms of everyday entertainment and the value that people seem to place on it, these numbers seem fair. We have to resist the temptation to see value in terms of the hours and expenses needed to produce fiction and weigh pricing in terms of the only metric that matters: what the market is content to pay to be entertained.

Sci-Guys Review: Total Recall, Konrath, and the Three-Titter

2012-08-10T11:42:00.003-07:00

Here's my latest Sci-Guys Short Shorts piece as it appeared in Sci-Guys podcast #104:

I’m recording this before the Sci-Guys do their podcast. For all I know, they might love the new Total Recall. I didn’t. I saw it last night with my wife and another couple. For me, the entire movie was summed up in the fact that both my wife and her friend dozed off repeatedly during the film.

I’ve got a long list of stuff that’s wrong with the new version, starting with my favorite complaint, that there isn’t a single sympathetic character in the movie to connect with. In the 1990 Total Recall, you really felt bad for the oppressed mutants, which in turn made you despise the evil Cohaagen, which in turn made you root for Douglas Quaid. In the new version, I didn’t care what happened to the Australians...or Quaid.

In 1990, the female characters, Melina and Lori, were sexy and playful. I mean, go back and watch Sharon Stone. She was on fire in that movie. So how do you take two foxes like Kate Beckinsdale and Jessica Biel and drain virtually all of the sexy awesomeness out of their screen time? It’s freaking criminal.

And that’s what’s really wrong with Total Recall in 2012. It’s not fun. Yeah, Schwartzenegger comes off like a lumpy, bumbling oaf with dialog timing so bad that not even post editing could save him, but at least he was fun. His world was fun. There is no fun in the 2012 version. Amidst all of the endless explosions, the story has bled out and died, and that’s why my wife fell asleep.

Now bear with me. I want to coin a new phrase here, which never works when you try to do it on purpose but here goes. There was an element in the new Total Recall I want to describe as a “three-titter.” You remember Mary, the three-breasted mutant from the first movie. She had three breasts because she was a mutant, deformed by the radiation that was a key element in the movie’s backstory. Now, tell me why there’s a three-breasted character in the new movie when there are no other mutants. It’s a gratuitous, senseless nod to an earlier version of the story that’s simply there to tickle your nostalgia and make you think better of the current travesty in front of your face. It’s not just stupid, it’s insulting. I hereby christen this device a “three-titter.”

Which finally brings me to my short fiction recommendation. Betcha thought I forgot all about that. I recently discovered a three-titter in a story called “The Screaming” by Joe Konrath in his collection called Horror Stories. “The Screaming” is about two strung out bums in 1960s England who make their way to an abandoned countryside mansion in the hope of finding some loot they can sell. What they actually find chained up in the cellar is a wasted, suicidal, and vampiric Abraham Van Helsing.

I wouldn’t quite call this a perfect three-titter. At the end of Dracula, Van Helsing becomes a sort of grandfatherly mentor to Quincy, the son of Jonathan and Mina Harker. Konrath picks up the story by having other vampires wipe out the remaining humans from Dracula and then convert Quincy, who in turn converts Van Helsing, who now seems to be the last surviving vampire in the world. It’s not a bad premise, but let’s ask the question: Did it have to be Van Helsing? Not really. Any stranded vampire would do. But we get Van Helsing to tie in the original story and hopefully convey some of the famous tale’s mojo through osmosis. In Konrath’s defense, “The Screaming” was written for an anthology called The Many Faces of Van Helsing, so the fate of having a three-titter was sort of built into the assignment.

“The Screaming” isn’t a great story, but it’s not bad. And it’s not bad because Konrath knows how to keep things fun. He specializes in gore and sick, guilty laughter, and there’s plenty of it in this three-dollar story collection. Despite the three-titter, Konrath is the horror genre’s equivalent of 1990’s Total Recall. I’ll spare you the long story, but Konrath is also the poster boy for ebook-era self-publishing. His blog details his rise from obscurity to grossing six figures per month, and he offers a lot of advice on how to do the same. But if there’s one bit of wisdom I can pull from this Horror Stories collection, and maybe Konrath and Total Recall in general, it’s that fiction doesn’t have to be epic to succeed. It doesn’t have to be immortally crafted and painstakingly perfect. It just has to give people that one thing they want, and more often than not that one thing is fun.

This is William Van Winkle, and you can check out my short shorts again in about...two weeks.

Off Topic: On Horror and Fear

2012-07-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

Last night was the mass shooting at the midnight Batman showing in Aurora, CO. Another terrible day for America. We can all only read the news and find ourselves imagining what it must have been like to be in that theater, in the smoke, feeling the concussions, the panic, the fear. In the long run, I think fear is the worst for us as a society. How many of us planning on seeing Batman this weekend (including me) now wonder if it's safe? Is any crowd safe anymore? The randomness of terror is debilitating.

In reading through comments posted online, I see a lot of people my age and older mourning for decades past when America was a different, better, healthier place. We remember being able to walk anywhere when we were kids. There was no thought for staying in sight or even earshot. You only had to be home by dinner. I remember disappearing for hours, just walking and walking, and it was glorious. Ah, the safety of the early '80s.

To those who need some shred of reassurance, I suggest this: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/ As it turns out, violent crime in America peaked in 1991-1992. In Oregon, there's actually 25% less violent crime now than when I was my oldest son's age. These are the hard, sometimes counter-intuitive facts of statistics.

As a parent, I guard my children far more rigidly than I was ever guarded. And why not? It seems that every week, I see headlines of some new travesty streaming across my homepage and many more through my Facebook feed. Thanks to the Internet and my constant connection to it, I've been exposed to an ever-increasing awareness of just how dangerous and terrible the world is right outside my door.

Except it's not. My perception is flawed. The fear that fuels my protection of my kids stems from conditions present in the early '90s. While the danger of those conditions have declined in reality, my perception of that danger has increased dramatically because of the media and related information I absorb every day.

It's the fear. Fear is dictating my actions. Fear is changing how I behave as a parent and thus how my kids behave and perceive their world. And in reality, despite today and despite the grim tidings surrounding my daily awareness, I have less reason to fear now than any time since 1973. When we live in fear, we harm ourselves by denying ourselves joy and give others the ability to control us.

I'm going to Batman tonight. I will not let a random occurrence, no matter how brutal and tragic, make my knuckles whiter or my mind more clouded. Because we, all of us, have to fight the fear. Could it be that we see so many of these shootings, from Columbine to today, being perpetrated by youth because they were raised inside a haze of such negativity? Could our increasingly unfounded fear itself be helping to spawn these horrors?

I have no desire to participate in such a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My Kingdom For a Good Character!

2012-07-18T10:33:00.002-07:00

Critic reviews for the new Amazing Spider-Man movie have been generally positive; I found the flick decidedly underwhelming. Is it just me, or do other people agree that the film's big bad monster looks like it evolved from a Halloween costume rather than the other way around? Honestly, though, that didn't bother me as much as Lizard's half-hearted and quickly ignored character reversal at the end. (Sorry, was that a spoiler? Meh, not really.) More to the point, the whole opening of the movie involving Peter Parker's parents could have been entirely dropped, leaving Peter to find his father's old work file in the basement, and nothing else in the story would have changed. All he has to do is find the file. The events of his childhood have no other bearing on the plot.

Even forgiving that Parker was somehow able to create web-shooting devices in his bedroom in days while it took the mighty Oscorp presumably years and untold millions of dollars, how is it that Emma Stone's Gwen character (I think of her as "not-MJ") as a lowly intern has all of this high-level access and ability to whip out a world-saving serum in 10 minutes? Anybody? Anybody?

The Amazing Spider-Man is simply poorly written, with story and logic holes as wide as a sewer main. You even see this reflected in comments by at least one of the producers, Avi Arad, who said, "We were working on what we called Spider-Man 4 and it was the same team [as with the first three films]. The problem was we didn't have a story that was strong enough and warranted ... another movie. And Sam Raimi ... realized we [didn't] have a good reason to make another one. And between [him] and [star] Tobey [Maguire] and obviously the studio, we all went into it not feeling good about the next story."

I've always found this phenomenon befuddling. How is it that a Hollywood production team sitting on a story concept likely to gross a billion dollars (The Amazing Spider-Man did over $500 million worldwide within two weeks of the U.S. premiere) can't find and develop a decent script? For an even more extreme example, look at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. How on earth did that travesty happen? Is it that the scripts are decent, but they just get butchered during production and editing? We see this over and over, and it strikes me as a terrible, heart-wrenching waste.

How can it keep happening? Well, that's easy. I can think of about 500 million reasons for starters. We get what we settle for.

Yesterday, I finished a short story called "The Plagiarist" by Hugh Howey, author of the WOOL series. Here is Howey's blurb: "Adam Griffey is living two lives. By day, he teaches literature. At night, he steals it. Adam is a plagiarist, an expert reader with an eye for great works. He prowls simulated worlds perusing virtual texts, looking for the next big thing. And when he finds it, he memorizes it page by page, line by line, word for word. And then he brings it back to his world."

There's a core concept in "The Plagiarist" that's key to the ending, so I can't describe it to you. I will say that this concept is the same idea found in a completely (and justifiably) overlooked 1999 movie called The Thirteenth Floor. By bizarre coincidence, I happened to stumble across this movie on Netflix Watch Instantly only a couple of days before buying and reading "The Plagiarist." Like The Amazing Spider-Man, The Thirteenth Floor was a big screen production (backed by Columbia Pictures) wrapped around a solid idea with a script that turned out to be one part captivating, two parts crap.

I emailed Hugh Howey yesterday and asked if he'd seen The Thirteenth Floor. He said that he hadn't, although a reviewer had once accused him of ripping off a movie -- presumably this one. And I believe him. As Howey said, "Had I seen the movie, I would have been powerless to write the story!" Yes, the ideas are that close.

But this is the point. Howey's short story is so much better than The Thirteenth Floor. Hollywood felt compelled to take the core idea and gussy it up with a bunch of intrigue and action, most of which only served to make the plot meandering and occasionally incomprehensible. This pushes us back to character. The protagonist in "The Plagiarist," Adam Griffey, is a schmuck. He's pathetic and largely unlikable, which I normally view as a story deficiency, although it can occasionally work, as it does here. In The Thirteenth Floor, there is virtually (ar-ar) no character development for the protagonist. If we can't identify with the main character, we can't bond with the story...and the piece fails. Every time.

At least there is enough meat to the new Peter Parker to sustain a tenuous thread of interest. I found his shift from confused, rebellious teen to noble superhero rushed and unconvincing, but he was still likable and sympathetic enough to keep me engaged. With Howey's Griffey, had the protagonist been likable and less pathetic, the whole story would have fallen apart; none of the action would have made sense. The reason why "The Plagiarist" works and these two films don't (for me) is because the writers ignored the essential relationship between character and plot. The two must dovetail effectively. When they don't, well...you've never heard of The Thirteenth Floor before, right?

Why, oh why, can't Hollywood figure this out on a consistent basis?

Short Shorts: Peter and the Vampires

2012-06-26T22:29:00.001-07:00

From the Sci-Guys #101 podcast:

At age 41, I’m not above enjoying a good young adult story. Look at Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or, my own favorite, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series. The good ones are like Pixar movies; there’s something there for everybody of any age. Reading for yourself is great, but there’s also nothing quite like enjoying a great story with your kid.

This week, I wanted to bring you a young adult recommendation, and I found one that’s awesome. As soon as you’re done listening to this podcast, hit up your favorite online book vendor and search for Peter and the Vampires. It’s by Darren Pillsbury, and it’s free.

Peter is a grade school kid who finds himself forcibly moved into his crotchety grandfather’s creepy mansion. He befriends the neighbor kid, a cowardly troublemaker named Dill, and the duo soon embark on a series of accidental adventures pitted against all kinds of chilling enemies. There are four novellas in Peter and the Vampires, and each chapter is only two or three pages long. To be honest, I read it on my phone’s Kindle app, mostly in the bathroom. Maybe that’s too much info, but the point is that I found myself increasing my water intake — always a good thing — just so I could have an excuse to read the next chapter. These stories are a blast, and there were several times I actually laughed out loud at Dill’s dialog. Be aware that people asking why you’re laughing in the bathroom can be awkward.

I interviewed Darren Pillsbury, and you can find the whole Q&A [below]. But he says that he modeled the hero, Peter, after himself as a kid, although Peter is the braver of the two. Sci-Guys fans may appreciate that Darren as a kid wanted to be named Peter after Peter Parker. Unfortunately, his parents had considered the name but rejected it because it would have given him the initials “P.P.” Dill started out named after Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird, who was also a humorous troublemaker, and the name just stuck.

Pillsbury confessed to me that Stephen King books were forbidden in his home when he was a kid. So starting about the time he was ten, whenever his mom took him to the store for shopping, he would sneak off to the book aisle, grab the latest Stephen King, and start digging.

“That’s who I’m writing these books for,” says Pillsbury. “The 10-year-old kid in the grocery store aisle, the one looking for ‘the good parts.’”

Personally, I thought Pillsbury’s monster descriptions were just a pinch more than my 7- and 10-year-olds are ready for, but 12 and up should be fine. There are now 18 Peter stories out, and most are collected into three larger volumes. Many of the individual stories are $2.99, but so are the collected volumes, so...you figure it out. If you’re an old geezer with a young heart that still enjoys witty banter and genuinely classic B-movie thrills, don’t miss Peter and the Vampires. It’s free, and it’s a blast.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

WVW: Where did the characters of Peter and especially Dill come from?

DP: I wanted to write horror novels, but I didn’t want to have to start over again every time with new characters, new settings, etc. I thought, “Man, wouldn’t it be great if I could do something like a television series, sort of like THE X-FILES, with established characters and a different monster of the week?”

And BAM, that was the genesis of the series.

To answer the main question, Peter is basically me at that age – a good kid, doesn’t misbehave too much, sweet-natured. Peter’s a lot braver than I ever was, but hey, that’s why he’s the hero. Interesting side note: I actually wanted to be named ‘Peter’ as a kid, after Peter Parker (secret identity of Spiderman). My parents told me they had considered the name, but because my initials would have been P.P. (Get it? Pee-pee? Pretty awful nickname for a first-grader), they decided against it. So, of course, my hero had to be named ‘Peter.’

I wanted to give Peter the best friend a kid ever had – somebody funny, somebody who misbehaved, somebody who pushed him to break the rules. I immediately thought of Dill in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, who’s an instigator, a troublemaker, and downright hilarious. I hadn’t read the book in 25 years, so I just started writing based on my vague recollections. I used the name ‘Dill’ as a placeholder as I wrote the first story, figuring I would rename him later…but after I finished, ‘Bob’ or ‘Steve’ just wasn’t going to cut it. He was Dill to me by then, so I left him that way.

Incidentally, Dill in MOCKINGBIRD is based on the author Truman Capote, whom Harper Lee knew as a child. Dill in my books? Not nearly as smart.

WVW: As you’re writing for a YA audience, how do you tweak your prose for that audience? Is there a particular reader you’re writing for?

DP: Interestingly enough, I’d say 80-90% of my fans are adults – college age through early 50’s, mostly. People who are young at heart.

I’ve tried reaching kids, but it’s extremely difficult. There aren’t that many trolling Amazon or BarnesAndNoble.com, and the ones who are typically want THE HUNGER GAMES or something similarly famous. So if you know the secret to marketing to teens – please clue me in.

When writing the PETER books, I limit my vocabulary a little – not dumb it down, necessarily, but not bust out the 50-cent words when a 25-cent word will do. Also, I’m aware of the gore. I keep it PG or PG-13. Mostly I try to creep my readers out, not gross them out.

I grew up in a pretty conservative household, and Stephen King was absolutely forbidden. When I was ten or eleven and had to go with my mom to the grocery store, I would sneak off to the book aisle, find the latest Stephen King book, and start flipping through to find ‘the good parts.’ That’s who I’m writing these books for: the ten-year-old kid in the grocery store book aisle, the one looking for ‘the good parts.’

WVW: Your “About” says you’ve been writing since high school. Ghostwritten scriptwriting aside, have you had much experience with traditional publishing? If not, is this something you regret?

Nope, no experience with traditional publishing. I tried to get an agent, but one of my greatest faults is that I don’t handle rejection very well. I get easily discouraged. After the first 50 agents saying no to my query letter, well, that was it for me.

Do I regret not being traditionally published? If it were an automatic ticket to Richville, I would. But in reality, a very small percentage of traditionally published authors actually make a living at writing books. The vast majority teach or do something similar to supplement their incomes.

Right now in self-publishing, I’m getting 70% royalties instead of 10-15%, I have 100% say over the content of my books, and I’m making enough money to live on while reaching hundreds of new fans every month. So I’m pretty happy. In my opinion, the Kindle and the Nook are the best. inventions. ever. Well…after the Internet. Gotta give credit to the Internet.

Would I take a traditional publishing deal? Yes, but only if A) the advance were unbelievably huge OR I got to keep the ebook rights, and B) I retained full editorial control.

WVW: How much of your early work did you give away through your blog? Do you feel this approach gained more in readers than it cost you in sales?

DP: The very hardest thing in publishing – whether traditional or self-publishing – is promotion. It’s TOUGH. It’s much harder for me than actually writing the book. And with a blog, it’s the exact same problem – how do you get people to read your stuff? After three years, I had maybe 200 core readers. And that was after advertising sporadically on similar blogs and webcomic sites.

Through the blog, I gained some great fans who spread the word, pointed out mistakes in the stories, and encouraged me for years. For that I’m extremely grateful. But the number of people who found the blog over a three-year period was fairly small compared to the number who stumble across me by accident every month on Amazon and BandN.com.

By the way, giving away the first book in a series will help an author immensely, and I can prove it. By jumping through some hoops, I was able to get Amazon to continually give away the first volume of stories for free. Before that happened, I was selling maybe $25 worth of books a month. Total. Five months after Amazon started giving away the first book for free, people have downloaded it over 20,000 times, and I’m selling over $1000 a month combined of all the other volumes.

WVW: I can see how the Peter series could become addicting. Now that you’re – what? Seventeen novellas into the series? What sort of writing pace do you maintain?

DP: Ha! This will be a big dilemma over the next year. I published the first 13 novellas in three multi-story volumes on May 5, 2011. Those 13 stories took me about four years to write, from 2007 through 2010.

Starting in February 2012, I began publishing a new novella every month – but I already had #14 through #18 written. Now, for the first time ever, I’m faced with a deadline.

Normally I take anywhere from one to three months to write a hundred page novella, but since I quit the day job to write full-time, I’m trying to speed up that process. I wrote #21, PETER AND THE ORGAN GRINDER, in a single month, but I’m also trying to expand into other genres with pen names. So I’m either going to have to start writing my butt off (which is unlikely – I’m kind of lazy), or I’ll go to a bi-monthly schedule with the PETER stories as I try to expand into other genres.

WVW: You have one non-Peter book, Imaginary Friends. Are you working on anything else? How far do you see the Peter series playing out?

DP: Yeah, I’m trying to diversify – I keep hoping for that one break-out hit that will allow me to eat something more than Top Ramen for dinner. (I kid, I kid…but not by much.)

I have an adult horror novel out under a pen name, with a second coming out soon. I keep it separate, though, because it’s a hard R-rated book. I don’t want anybody who treasures the innocence and fun of the PETER novels to read it and be traumatized. I’m not just writing for that 10-year-old in the grocery store book aisle, I’m trying to protect him, too.

I’m currently writing a science fiction/military action series. Hopefully the first book will be out by Christmas 2012.

As for the PETER books, there’s an overarching storyline that concerns a curse on his family that ultimately binds all the stories together. Like HARRY POTTER, I want to take him up to age 17, where the series will end once and for all. But that could be anywhere from 60 to 100 stories total. I’m at #21 now, and I would need at least 40 more to accomplish what I want. It’s going to get a lot darker as time goes on. More than anything, I want to show him struggling through his teenage years, falling in love, getting his heart broken – all that real-life, gut-wrenching stuff. But, y’know…with monsters.

WVW: Having written a few magazine columns over the years, I know how hard it can be to sustain a series, and you’ve been writing Peter a long time now. How do you keep the series fresh, both for readers and yourself?

DP: I really, really love the PETER stories. Especially Dill. Dill alone makes the stories fun and enjoyable to write. I love the other characters, too, but writing Dill is like getting to watch a favorite TV show - I never really know what's going to come out of his mouth. And if have a fun villain to write, especially one with snarky dialogue or moral ambiguity, that's icing on the cake.

In my first attempts at writing books years and years ago, I wrote a lot of 'serious' books. Not much humor. At its heart, the PETER books are as much comedies as they are horror, and that's why they stay enjoyable for me. If I'm smiling while I'm writing, I'm having a great time - and I think that translates over to my readers. The adult horror novel I wrote? Very little humor. It was a slog to get through.

Also, I really wanted to write a werewolf novel, a vampire novel, a ghost novel, a zombie novel, etc. ALL the classic monsters. When I approach one of those classic stories, I usually just think, "What's the most badass scene I can think of with this villain? And how can I tweak it so it's slightly different from all the other versions I've seen or read?" For example, story #20 is PETER AND THE DEMON. Dill gets possessed. The touchstone for all possession movies is, of course, THE EXORCIST. I wanted to do something along those lines, minus the horrific language and sexual material. So...who's the exorcist in my version? I thought of a Father Merrin/Max von Sydow character - but the exorcist is always a guy (a priest, naturally). Often an old one, at that. We already have Grandfather. Two old men is boring. "What if it were a nun?" I thought, and from there I had to come up with why a nun is doing the exorcism. Then we were off to the races with an exorcism story that, I think, is fairly different from other stuff out there. And it's quite possibly the scariest story I've written so far in the series.

Also, taking an off-the-wall idea and running with it is a way to keep things fresh. For instance, #21 PETER AND THE ORGAN GRINDER has a monkey rodeo as an integral part. That's the kind of thing that makes me excited to write more.

Getting Hot Art for a Cold Story

2012-05-31T01:13:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I released a new short story called "Stay Cold" on Amazon and Smashwords. As with two of my other stories, I was fortunate enough to have Andria Cogley of A. Cogley Design supply the cover art. I've written here before about how important it is to get professional help when producing ebooks, but to illustrate the point, I wanted to show you the process we went through on the cover for "Stay Cold" and how a good designer's intuition will usually trump a writer's best graphical ideas every time.

Long before I went to Andria with the story, I started with this image:

This copyrighted shot was supplied to me by a photographer friend, the immensely talented Gary Wilson. I instantly fell in love with the drama of the approaching snowstorm and how it seemed to warp the sun's light. Especially viewed at full size, the photograph is incredible, and it seemed to encapsulate this sense of impending disaster. I sent the picture to Andria, told her I thought it was the greatest thing ever, and asked her to do something with it. This was the initial result:

I know Andria is probably cringing while reading this, as she strongly encouraged me not to share the image while the cover was in progress. (Sorry, Andria...but we're good now...right?) She was very up front about indicating her dislike of this draft. I'd noted that the concept of melting figured into the story, so she gave the sun a warmer tone. And since that warm sun would be revealing some unsavory elements buried in the storm, she threw a hand into the foreground as a sort of conceptual placeholder.

But as Andia had insinuated, the whole cover just flopped. The colors weren't right. Nothing popped out visually. Why was there textured ground after a blizzard that flattened everything? And most of all, where was the approaching storm? I tried to futz with the composition myself and just couldn't get the storm back into the frame. It was a bust.

That takes us to draft number two:

At first, I resisted this version. I missed the storm, most of all. But the longer I looked at this draft, the more I recognized where Andria was going. Now, we had a bloody hand that looked to be trapped under thawing ice. That lent a drama to the scene that was wholly absent in my design. Was the owner of the hand alive or dead? Why was there blood? Most importantly, this new urgency now gave fresh, intriguing ambiguity to the title. If someone was trapped, why should it "stay cold"?

At this point, I hadn't finished the story, and Andria couldn't read my mind. I had to tell her that there was no ice in the tale. We needed the snow back. Also, I missed the big, blocky font from the first draft, which struck me as more dramatic and imperative.

So we went into draft number three:

When this popped out of my inbox, my breath caught in my chest. I'm going to start calling that "The Andria Effect." I had never even mentioned frostbite to her. There is no mention of frostbite in my story. But she thought that up independently, and it completely made the cover. OK, I'll be honest. I'd never seen frostbite before and didn't know that it would turn finger extremities black. I had to look it up in Google Images, and that was no treat on a full stomach, let me tell you.

I loved damn near everything about this cover. You get the snow, but it's a texture, not distracting detail. There's blood, so you know something possibly violent has happened, but the blood takes a back seat to the frostbite, which in turn visually pops against the pale background. (Note that it's the same hand as was used in the second draft, only dressed up in a lot of Photoshop layers. I really wish I knew how to create effects like that.) I got my big font back, and I even dug the way she sort of set it into the snow.

The only thing still needed was cleaning up some of the oddly placed snow texture and frostbite/blood stains that looked more like ink than damaged tissue. Andria also added some puckering to the skin to simulate desiccation. That took us into draft 3.5 (right).

I'm finding that both the art and text in my self-publishing go through three major drafts followed by one or two touch-up mini-drafts. Some writers do two or only one major draft; some will edit and re-edit for years in the hopeless pursuit of perfection. If I can get to 90% to 95% of perfection in three drafts plus spare change, I'm a happy camper. That's a schedule I can live with and feel acceptably productive.

In any event, there you go -- another cover evolution that shows how something awesome can emerge from good intentions gone horribly wrong...with the proper professional help.

"Stay Cold," Spawn of Monkeys

2012-05-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

The three questions I get most often from people about my writing are:

1. Where do you come up with the ideas?
2. How do you find the time to write?
3. Where'd you learn how to self-publish?

In reverse order, #3 is easy to answer. There's really nothing to it, at least there isn't when you're publishing ebooks through Amazon. Pretty much everything you need to know, at least for getting started, is here: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2VHRJZXET0TWT.

As for finding the time to write...what can I say? It feels like there's never time to write. I usually take an hour in the morning, between getting the kids off to school and starting my day job at 9:00, to work on my novel. But sometimes that gets hijacked, as when a critical rush happens on my day job or, as happened this morning, I'm publishing a new story and minor issues need to be fixed before I can promote the new work.

Where do ideas come from? Anywhere. Everywhere. Stephen King has joked about this several times. It's one of those impossible questions to answer. I had a Religious Studies teacher in high school who, when discussing meditation, said that the mind was like a monkey, constantly swinging and bouncing about inside your skull. The object of meditation is to still the monkey.

If I twist his metaphor a bit, thoughts are like monkeys. We all have these crazed troops of monkeys constantly performing their gymnastics in our heads. Some monkeys sit munching on grass in the background. Some swing right up to the glass and beat on their chest, demanding your attention. And sometimes, monkeys will be monkeys and do the Wild Thing. I find that most monkeys are private and carry on their hot monkey love out of sight in the bushes. But they do commingle, and every so often -- bam! There on the ground you've got a new, steaming baby monkey.

New ideas are like new monkeys. Most will never amount to anything. Oh, sure, they're fuzzy and cute, but it's not like they'll master sign language, compose Hamlet on the monkey exhibit typewriter, or lead an ape insurrection that wipes out humanity.

Except every so often, under a blue moon on a third Thursday, one does. One in every million or so conjugal visits between concepts yields the stem cell of a story. Like the swapping of monkey DNA, the process is largely random and unpredictable. But it happens. The trick is to be paying attention when that special baby monkey hits the ground, because the primates in your skull are an inattentive, rambunctious lot. No sooner is that new idea spawned than they're off banana hunting or foraging for fur lice, and little junior is long forgotten.

A writer will recognize a special baby monkey on sight. It creates an electric jolt in the hindbrain unlike any other. With the story I just published today, "Stay Cold," one such jolt literally arrived out of nowhere. I was at my desk, working on some article about computing. I'd been reading zombie lit for a few weeks while working on "The Followers," but I wasn't thinking about it then. Perhaps my eye fell across the weather report (it was March), and I thought about how unseasonably warm the winter had been. We'd had no snow. Wouldn't it be weird if my kids got snow on Spring Break?

And just like that, the baby monkey smacked to earth with a wet plop. As I sat here looking at my computer screens, I imagined a kid making a snow angel in a massive amount of snow -- so much snow that virtually everything had been buried under it. And frozen inside all that snow, just a few feet under the kid making his snow angel, there were bloody zombies, waiting. Just waiting...for the weather to get a bit warmer.

The image struck me as sublimely creepy. This monkey was special. I just knew it intuitively.

Central Elementary School in Roundup, MT

In any case, I immediately started poking at the idea. I needed a setting, someplace small and fairly isolated but still with modern amenities. A few minutes on Wikipedia led me to Roundup, MT, with a population of about 2,000. Thanks to Google Maps Street View, I was able to click through the streets and confirm that the hospital and shops where single-story. Central Elementary fit what I was looking for exactly. I found the house I wanted in the southeast corner of town. As happens so strangely often with writing, when the story is meant to be, the details all seem to snap into place with eerie convenience. Special monkeys do that.

However, not everything comes easily in those initial stages. By the time I finished first draft, I was left with a kid who had no purpose. He was just there, in this crazy, terrible environment, yes, but otherwise he was just floating through the events. I hadn't really asked myself who Tommy was or what he wanted.

In that first draft, Tommy was ten years old, which seemed natural because my eldest is currently that age. But my best friend and editor, Baron Schuyler, astutely pointed out that ten was too young for some of the actions in this story. Tommy had to be more like 12 or 13. The idea of 13 sparked another bout of monkey business in my mind, and only seconds later, I knew that Tommy was Jewish. He'd just turned 13. These events weren't just random; they were his trial of manhood. Suddenly, I had a real story about a real kid in an unreal, incredibly terrible situation.

Enough said. I'll be back soon with a look at how the cover for "Stay Cold" evolved. For now, I hope you'll bundle up, give the tale a read, and have a good shudder.

Sci-Guys Short Shorts: Lacuna and Serial

2012-05-15T22:27:00.001-07:00

Wanna hear four guys rip Dark Shadows a new one? Then check out the newly posted Sci-Guys podcast #098. And if you want to stick around for my Short Shorts reviews of David Adams's Lacuna stories and Blake Crouch's "Serial," look for it to start at the 41:00 mark. If you happen to be challenged of hearing or simply impatient, here's what I had to say:

* * *

Hey, this is William, and something’s been bugging me. You know how everybody says that self-published ebooks are junk? Well, here’s some news. Remember Hugh Howey’s Wool, the self-published Kindle book I talked about last time? It turns out that 20^th Century Fox is now turning Wool into a movie, with both Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian, the guy who won an Academy for his Schindler’s List screenplay, attached to the project. So for all those who think that short fiction ebooks are crap, think again. If you keep your ears and eyes open, you’ll find loads of awesome fiction out there – no big publisher required.

Case in point, check out this 27-year-old guy from Darwin, Australia named David Adams. He’s a software programmer by day who’s been writing Star Trek fan fiction for years – just for the hell of it. Last year, he started cranking out a story series called Lacuna. Check it out at lacunaverse.com. Long story short, you’ve got aliens blowing away 50 million people because humans developed a technology they’re not supposed to have, and this is the story of humanity fighting back. Now, I haven’t read the two Lacuna novels that Adams has out, because I’m ridiculously busy. But I did buy the two 99-cent short stories, and this is my point. His short stories told me two things: Adams can spin a good tale, and this Lacuna universe is a place I want to explore. I now have his books on my wish list because I was impressed with his short stories, which functioned as sort of a teaser. This is something you rarely saw in the old world of print. You don’t have to risk 5 or 10 bucks on a paperback blurb anymore. Put a dollar on the table. Take a chance. You might just discover a new voice and a new world filled with adventure, moral dilemmas, great science, and badass aliens.

Now, out of the thousands of new ebook authors out there, where else do you start? Usually word of mouth, just like me to you, right here. But I also keep up on several ebook-related blogs and forums. Through one of these, I found Blake Crouch and the short story "Serial," which he co-wrote with Joe Konrath. In a nutshell, we know that hitchhiking can be dangerous. The guy who picks you up could be a serial killer. But so could the hitchhiker, right? This story asks: What happens when the driver and hitcher are both serial killers? For five bucks you can get Serial and nine other short stories in Crouch’s insanely good collection, Fully Loaded. [Edit: It's four bucks. What is it with me and ebook prices?] You might call this suspense or thriller fiction rather than horror, but I would argue that monsters come in all shapes and sizes. To me, the unsuspected monsters strolling right next to you on the sidewalk can be more terrifying than anything covered in slime. Horror can happen wherever you find cracks in reality.

So... Sci-fi. Suspense. Horror. Self-published and totally awesome. Go get it. Again, this is William Van Winkle, and thanks for checking out my Short Shorts.

The Road Trip That Became a "General Invasion"

2012-05-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

I met Baron Schuyler when we were high school seniors, way back in 1988. It was at a poetry workshop at Reed College (I think). I remember absolutely nothing about this workshop except sitting at a conference table with Baron on the opposite side of it. He was even skinnier and paler than me (no easy feat back then), long-haired, and clearly the only kid at the table with a clue how to string five decent words together.

Because we each seemed to make some impression on the other, we gravitated together two years later as Portland State University freshmen majoring in English, and we've been close friends ever since. He was the best man at my wedding, and we've been witness to each other's victories and stupidities for over two decades. Early in our college career, we started making an annual trip from Portland to Ashland, OR to take in two or three plays the town's Shakespeare Festival and work on our respective -- or joint -- fiction projects. Over the years, we've started a lot of such projects, and some of them remain simmering on the back burner, too good in concept to fade completely into the night. Like so many other would-be writing teams, we've spent years getting together, enjoying the collaboration process, but inevitably getting derailed by the other time demands of our lives.

Figuring in lunch, the trip from Portland to Ashland takes about five hours each way. Our traditional pattern is that four of these five hours will be spent bitching about work and women troubles, and about one is spent on writing, which explains why we've never published anything. But we've sure had a lot of good times along the way.

Our 2011 trip was different. For one thing, it was the year we hit middle age and I got serious about self-publishing fiction. ("Good God, I'm 40 years old with no novels to my name," blah blah blah.) I don't think either of us had an undue amount of complaining to do about women on this trip. The stars lined up a certain way as we sped southward down I-5, and something slightly magical happened. The story that would become "General Invasion" (originally called "General Contact" until Baron thought of the better twist) was born.

I'll let Baron describe it...

I don't remember exactly what made me think of this concept, but I'm pretty sure it was after seeing a snippet of the movie Battle Los Angeles. I remember thinking to myself something along the lines of, "Another alien invasion story where everybody tries to blow each other up. It's always that or mysterious abductions." It seemed to me that almost all alien contact stories fall back on one of these two motifs, with only the very occasional exception. Star Trek had a classic exception in its first contact between Humans and Vulcans.

But even Star Trek wasn't immune to the allure of the cliche. I recalled an episode in which aliens were abducting Riker for medical experiments. (IMDB identifies this episode as "Schisms" from season six.) But I also recalled another episode with Riker, where he took on the role of alien invader. Fans of the show will recall that Federation officers often had minor surgery to make them blend in with unsuspecting alien populations, allowing them to obey the Prime Directive. In this episode ("First Contact" from season four), Riker is injured and his human anatomy is discovered by the alien civilization. He tries to escape captivity and he is offered a way out by a lascivious nurse who will help him if he agrees to a sexual tryst with her. This was done rather comically, but as a throwaway line.

Later, I somehow had reason to think about all of this in relation to online pornography. I can't remember why exactly. But it may be because I work at the library and we occasionally have people with poorly defined boundaries come in and view pornography on our public computers. (I mean, c'mon. Really? In public?) We have the annoying task of requesting that they not view it in the library. (Or else.)

At any rate, I wondered, "What if the alien abductions were not for medical experiments or ultimate world domination, but were the work of intergalactic pornographers making stag films?" This seemed rather comical to me. As such, I mentioned it jokingly to William.

Surprisingly, William thought this might make a good story, a sharp and irreverent comic piece. We spent most of our annual trip to Ashland trying to hash it out. Our first attempts focused on a female main character. We kept trying different permutations, but everything came off as crass or tasteless or politicized or politically correct, etc. Most of all, none of it was especially funny.

Just when I was saying that maybe it was best as a passing joke (and not a story), William hit on the brilliant idea of having the main character be a guy. And not just any guy -- a general in the US Army. This struck me as hilariously funny. The idea of it had me laughing so much that I am glad I didn't wreck the car as I was driving us home. He had been working on a story with Roswell connections and linked it to that. It all seemed to fall into place.

William did the hard work of creating a first draft. I had the easy task of doing the first rewrite. It went smoothly after that, with only minor changes and edits.

While most of our rides home tend to be a bit morose -- no one likes ending a vacation -- we laughed almost non-stop for 300 miles. I used the voice-to-text function on my Android smartphone to try and dictate notes into a Google Doc, and only later did I realize how much of the file was gibberish. But enough of the phrases were sufficiently intelligible to trigger my memory a few months later, and I wrote the initial draft in awkward 15- to 60-minute blocks over several weeks. If the final draft strikes you as funny and coherent, you can thank Baron, because those elements were largely absent in my initial sprawling mess.

Honestly, I don't know if "General Invasion" works or not. I'm too close to it to judge objectively. I still believe that humor and horror are the two most difficult genres in which to write well, because you're trying to elicit a more visceral emotional response from the reader. I'll let you decide whether or not we were successful.

For me, even if the story never sells a copy or gathers positive reviews, I'll consider it a glowing accomplishment that's been 20 years in the making. Baron and I finally completed a piece of fiction that (I hope) was ready for a widespread audience. Friendship has no requisite purpose. No two people ever say, "We're going to be friends in order to..." But if there ever were a purpose behind Baron's and my friendship, I think we would agree that it would be to write together. There's an inexplicable joy in the collaborative process that helps keep us together decade after decade. Being able to turn that collaboration into something tangible, something that can be shared with the world, may not be essential, but it sure feels great and long overdue.

Here's to hoping the next one won't take as long...

Sci-Guys Short Shorts Review: Hugh Howey's Wool

2012-05-01T22:39:00.001-07:00

It's that time again! If you're interested in some lively, crass, and hilarious discussion about this summer's upcoming movies, give Sci-Guys Podcast #96 a listen. Of course, if you want to skip straight to my quick Short Shorts review of Hugh Howey's awesome sci-fi story, Wool, then please either fast forward to 45:20 in the podcast or, well...here it is:

~ ~ ~

We all love post-apocalypse stories with nuclear monsters, roving zombies, or packs of rabid marauders out to pillage and destroy. Wool, by Hugh Howey, is not one of those stories. In this post-apocalypse, the world, as visible through four surface cameras, seems to be a seething, gray, toxic nothing. What’s left of humanity lives in underground missile silos, and these cameras are the only views onto that world. But the cameras grow filmy and obscured over time. The few who are banned from the silo are tasked with cleaning the cameras with wool before they wander off to die...maybe.

This is the story of the silo’s sheriff, Holston, who still mourns for his wife. She discovered secrets about the silo’s past that had to be investigated, even if it meant her death on the outside. Now, Holston has to see if she was right about the outside, because he can no longer stand to be on the inside.

We all enjoy getting lost in worlds of fiction. Look at The Lord of the Rings. That’s an amazing, fascinating world, right? But in terms of character development, Middle Earth may not be a zero, but it’s really close. The genius of Hugh Howey is that he builds the world of Wool through character. In science fiction, it’s easy to get caught up in the big concepts, the sweeping time scales. But without character, without real people who reflect you, every world is flat.

Hugh Howey is my hero. He’s just an ordinary guy who started self-publishing the stories he felt compelled to write. The story he had the least faith in and practically ignored was the one that caught fire with the public, spawned a series, and is now courting offers from the BBC and movie studios. And this guy is so down to earth and cool in a really quiet, caring way. I defy you not to love Hugh Howey.

Start with Wool 1 and see for yourself. ~~Like every Wool installment~~, it’s 99 cents. [Edit: The first three are 99 cents. They edge upward after that as novella lengths increase.] If you’re really cheap or don’t believe me, all of Wool 1 is contained in the free sample of the five-part Wool Omnibus. Read it. You’ll be addicted.

I am William Van Winkle, and thanks for checking out my short shorts.

Sci-Guys Review: Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt"

2012-04-23T22:37:00.001-07:00

I posted before about the interview I did for the Sci-Guys podcast. What I didn't mention at the time is that I've always wanted to be a reviewer. Well...I mean, I am a reviewer for CPU magazine and such, but I really wanted to be more in the vein of movie reviewer extraordinaire Roger Ebert. I've long believed that part of Ebert's enduring popularity hinges on his intelligence and perspective. He brings decades of both professional and human insight into his reviews. Often, they're as much about life as they are about movies. This is what sets Ebert apart. Any keyboard monkey can spin a snarky put-down, but very few can achieve elegance, humor, and wisdom all while writing "just" another review.

That's what I've always wanted to do, but computing doesn't allow much leeway for humanity in its media coverage. The best of my efforts in this direction can be found in my Architects of Tomorrow, Volumes 1 and 2 ebooks. But yeah, I get it. How much humanity and perspective can one inject into a Wi-Fi adapter review? Not much.

After the Sci-Guys interview, I had a crazy idea. I dropped a note to the guy who'd interviewed me, Sci-Guy John, and asked if there was any chance that I could do little reviews of short fiction ebooks on the show. He floated the idea around his group, and they agreed to give it a spin.

My first attempt at this appeared in Sci-Guys podcast 094. (You know they're geeks, because only nerds who survived Y2K would think to put a "0" in front of their otherwise two-digit show numbers.) My little segment appears about half-way through the show, and it got edited in just before going live, so there was no time to work with the audio levels and such. That's I sound like I'm French kissing the mic.

I'd encourage everyone with a funny bone and a strong stomach to enjoy the show, but if you just want the text of my review, here it is:

William’s Short Shorts: “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

One day in sixth grade, in the middle of this otherwise godawful anthology of short stories for young readers, I found “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury. And my head exploded. It was my first taste of speculative fiction, that dark area of literature where the creepy and fantastic collide. Speculative fiction is as fascinating as it is disturbing, and it’s usually most disturbing when it makes you question your own humanity.

On one level, “The Veldt” is a parable about modern man and our love of technology. George and Lydia Hadley are recent purchasers of a Happylife Home, something straight off the Street of Dreams and then filtered through The Jetsons.

This Happylife Home’s main feature is its nursery, which is a dead ringer for the holodeck. Keep in mind that “The Veldt” was originally published in 1950, almost four decades before virtual reality and the holodeck arrived in Star Trek: The Next Generation. So when Bradbury describes the nursery as a space where 2D walls are able to simulate an African veldt grassland and its animal inhabitants with incredible 3D realism, and the environment is created from scans of the imaginations of the Hadley’s two children, this is science fiction at its forward-looking finest.

But “The Veldt” doesn’t focus on technology. Rather, it’s about how the Hadleys have become crippled by their dependence technology. The father needs more sedation at night. The mother is a nervous wreck. And their two children are spoiled brats who want to spend every waking minute enveloped in their video games—I mean, Happylife Home nursery. Faced with the shouting and pain of ripping their kids back into reality or letting the obsession continue, the Hadleys keep their kids on the electronic teat. The African environment grows increasingly real as the parents’ panic escalates.

So, when would you try to pull the plug? I mean, we just want our kids to be happy, right? It’s so easy to let technology lull us to sleep. But sometimes happiness goes too far. And don’t we all worry, deep down, that we might wake up just be a little...too late?

Even now, reading “The Veldt” still sends a shiver up my back. You can find it in Bradbury’s story collection, The Illustrated Man. This story opened my eyes to speculative fiction and changed my life. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and it seemed a great piece to kick off an ongoing series of short story reviews here on Sci-Guys. With the rise of ebooks, people are gradually rediscovering how incredible good shorter fiction can be. Not only can it pack the same punch as a novel, it’s often a better fit for people with busy schedules, and you can pick most stories up for less than a buck.

For now, don’t miss “The Veldt,” spelled V-E-L-D-T. I don’t see it on the Kindle or Nook yet, so this one time, please look for it on paper first. But whatever you do, don’t miss this story, and thanks for checking out my short shorts.

My First Interview as an E-Publisher

2012-03-12T13:18:00.002-07:00

I've listened to loads of author interviews over the years, and I've certainly conducted quite a few as part of my journalism career, but I've never been on the receiving end of things...until now.

If you enjoy speculative fiction, especially on TV, and you like your banter a bit salty, I'd encourage you to check out the Sci-Guys podcast. It contains my first-ever interview as an author, and the four guys who run the show were generous enough to dedicate almost 18 minutes of the show to me and my thoughts on e-publishing. If that's not enough, you can also stream/download the even longer version here.

If you follow indie publishing, much of the discussion may seem like old news. But if you're a fledgling writer or haven't decided to get serious about finding alternatives to traditional publishing, I'd encourage you to give it a listen. I sure had a blast doing the recording at the Sci-Guys Crawlspace Studio. It's literally a crawlspace, complete with gravel floor and a space heater we had to unplug in order to run my laptop. In this terrible picture I snapped with my smartphone, you can see the plywood walls and insulated ducting wrapped in holiday lights.

Humble beginnings, perhaps, but it was a blast, and I'm looking forward doing more with the Sci-Guys in the near future. Meanwhile, grab a drink, put your Netflix stream of "The Walking Dead" on pause, maybe dust off some of your old Star Wars action figures, and give the Sci-Guys podcast a listen. It's like enjoying the antics of your favorite class clowns in high school, only now they're grown up. Kind of.

Following "The Followers"

2012-02-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

Who knows how stories really start? Polished ideas begin like bits of interstellar dust, floating around random and formless. But add in gravity and time -- lots and lots of time -- and eventually those tiny motes will collide, stick, accumulate, and, at the key moment of critical mass, ignite into a star.

For my new novellete,"The Followers," that first mote appeared when I came across this photograph. It was part of a Yahoo! news story about the Medford Historical Society displaying a new collection of rare Civil War photos. I was struck by this scene of marital normalcy in the midst of America's most tragic and bitter war. Cute little kids at Daddy's feet, wife doing the laundry. Oh, and somehow the family is tagging along behind Daddy's regiment as he marches 15 miles or more per day and occasionally has to go fight in the midst of unthinkable carnage.

Around the time I found this photo, I was also working through another story idea, a near-future piece about bioengineering and zombies. I'd been putting notes together for weeks and had zombies constantly gnawing in the back of my mind.

Two specks of dust in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, they collided in my imagination...and stuck.

I took U.S. History during my junior year of high school. Typical of most history courses, I found it immensely dull and forgettable. If you think about it, making history that boring is pretty difficult. History is one long epic saga filled with intrigue, battles, sex, human sacrifice (figuratively and literally), double dealing, great loves, the bitterest betrayals, and ultimately the fate of the world. How could anyone not love that? Turns out, pretty easily so long as you reduce it to a bunch of sterile factoids crammed into an emotionless textbook that you stare at for 50 minutes while trapped in a little plastic desk. U.S. History was turned from a thing of vibrant fascination into this desiccated, lifeless, but somehow still shambling shell. What more appropriate backdrop, then, for a zombie story?

On an impulse, I turned to Wikipedia and searched for the Battle of Gettysburg. Apparently, there was enough of junior year U.S. History still hidden in my subconscious to lead me toward another dust mote that was compatible with the accretion still gathering mass in my imagination. Detail after detail clicked into place. At a time when we remain increasingly nervous about Iran's nuclear intentions, thoughts of weapons of mass destruction are never far from the headlines. Add that speck into the mix.

What if zombies were such a weapon? What if one side had been able to wield that weapon at the most pivotal moment of the most pivotal battle in American history?

I opened my "Ideas" file on Google Docs (virtually all of my in-progress files now live in the cloud) and typed this:

July 1863, outside of Gettysburg, PA. Union army commander General Meade has his back against a wall, his forces having failed to defeat the Confederate leader, General Robert E. Lee. After two days of death and retreating to higher ground around Cemetery Hill, the Confederate forces have the Union surrounded on three sides. Then comes word that Union reinforcements are nearing. The Confederates must smash the Union army the next morning while they can.

The story starts with one of the camps under Confederate General Longstreet, who controls the western forces. Longstreet knows that Meade is a weak, indecisive general prone to not pressing an advantage when one materializes. Meade has not allowed General Grant’s ideas about total war to dominate the Union army, but Longstreet actually agrees with Grant. Longstreet knows that they need a total victory across Pennsylvania, and Lee, the eternal gentleman, may not have the guts to be merciless. Look at all of the prisoners they’ve taken. Longstreet wants a knockout blow and is weighing options with his officers. Longstreet calls for a 10-minute pee break, goes outside, and is approached by a private. The private wants to show him something. He takes Longstreet back to a tent behind the camp -- one of thousands of such tents typically inhabited by the families of soldiers who follow behind armies. The private beckons Longstreet to follow him inside of the tent. At first, Longstreet refuses. Then they hear a low, ragged moan from inside the tent. It sounds like a woman, but...not quite.

I visualized the ending scene of the story as clearly as this beginning, and I loved it instantly. Thirty minutes later, I'd put holds on every Gettysburg-related book in my local library's collection, kids' books included. The best of the bunch by far was Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears. If you have an interest in the subject, I highly recommend it.

You might think that the moment of critical mass and story ignition came today, upon the story's publication. I don't see it that way. The real moment happened during my research when I found out that General Longstreet had lost three of his children to scarlet fever less than two years before Gettysburg. Instantly, I went from having a cardboard prop to a real man, filled with pain and loss, trying every day to hold himself together in the midst of this Civil War insanity. With that one last speck, the story reached its tipping point, and today's publication became inevitable.

I started writing the first draft on April 23, 2011, almost ten months ago, and finished on September 3rd. The story weighed in at over 12,000 words, and I thought, "Good Lord, will people actually read all the way through this?" I had originally envisioned the story at half that size. But every time I read it over, the more I felt that, if anything, I was skimming and leaving way too much out. Rather than keep second-guessing myself, I decided to bring in an alpha reader or two and start gathering responses.

Right off the bat, it was clear that the story had a fundamental flaw in logic: why not simply have the zombies attack before the battle? Events were happening because I needed them to happen for the plot's sake, not because they were byproducts of characters' desires. (A solid plot derives from character, not the other way around. This is why action movies with no attention to character development fall flat and why, come to think of it, history classes are so dull. All of the character has been stripped away.) The second draft's mission was to remedy this, and by third draft, I think the bugs were worked out.

One of my editors from CPU magazine, Vince Cogley, volunteered to be a beta reader. He applied his editing skills and (hitherto unknown to me) gift for imagination in speculative fiction toward draft #2 and proposed a different ending for the story. Originally, the scene with General Meade was the final clincher. Vince's feedback resulted in draft #3 tossing out this scene and replacing it with the final Longstreet scene you have in the published version. The trouble was that each had its own merits and reasons for being present, but you can't have two endings in one tale. I fretted over this for two weeks, unable to decide which ending I liked better. Then, one night while putting the kids to bed, it struck me: this wasn't like picking a prom date. With a slight bit of twisting, I could keep both, capturing the plot and back story benefits of Meade's scene while preserving the emotional impact of Longstreet's final actions.

And that, y'all, is how "The Followers" came to be. I hope you enjoy it and will pass the good word on to your friends. Please check it out at Amazon or Smashwords. If you see fit to leave a review, I'll be doubly obliged, and my hunger for human approbation will be satisfied...for a while.

Evolution of a Killer Cover

2012-01-25T11:39:00.000-08:00

I'm a firm believer in paying for professional services. My CPA costs several hundred dollars per year, but he's got decades of experience and knows how to trim thousands of dollars off of my family's tax bill every year (legally!) in ways that I couldn't hope to grasp. When you need legal representation, you don't try to muddle your way through a court case; you hire an attorney. Almost invariably, good professionals will return several times over the cost you paid for their services. This begs the question of why I've been so slow to take my own advice when it comes to publishing ebooks. Judge for yourself if I've made a smart move...

* * *

When you sell a novel to a traditional publisher, the publisher typically takes responsibility for producing cover artwork. But when you're a small, independent publisher of your own material, you often start out with no budget for artwork and no prayer of generating enough revenue to have such a budget. As a result, the fledgling self-publisher does the best he or she can manage for virtually free. The trouble is that the results generally look free. Since we all inevitably judge books (and also short stories since we're talking about ebooks) by their covers, this does not bode well for sales and success.

A little over a year ago, I released my first ebook title, a poetry collection titled Rough Crossing. The photograph was donated by a friend, the ridiculously talented pro photographer Gary Wilson.

As you can see, it's not much of a cover. I have very little experience in graphical design, and it shows. The photograph itself is outstanding, but as a book cover this image fails almost completely. The text is illegible when the image is seen at thumbnail size -- which is how people will see it 90% of the time on ebook retail sites -- and all of those steel beams look like a tangled mess. Now, I know that nobody reads poetry, plus I'm giving the book away for free through Smashwords, so I don't lose much sleep over this early experiment.

Fast forward one year. I've now released a free collection of technology essays, two ebooks of fascinating "celebrity" interviews, and a short but sweet horror tale called "The Sound of Autumn Night." In each case, I've done the covers myself. For the short story, I bought two images from a royalty-free photo service. The total cost to me was $10 or $12 and an hour or two of Photoshop time. You'll probably agree that the cover's appearance matches its cost.

Heading into 2012, I've set myself a much more aggressive self-publishing schedule. First up on my to-do list is a short story I've been working on since last spring, a Civil War-era zombie story called "The Followers." Now that I'm into the home stretch on revisions and preparing to publish, I had to make a decision about the cover art: go big or go home? I've done the home thing up until now, and the results have been...well, they could be better. Ready or not, I think it's time to take my game up a notch.

One of my magazine editors volunteered to help on the story editing, and his input has, I believe, helped to improve the tale considerably. More to the point, though, his wife, Andria Cogley, is a design professional. We worked out a deal that my budding budget could manage, and I sent off an initial cover concept based on two royalty-free images pulled from iStockphoto.

Because cannons figure prominently in the story's battle scene, I thought that having a cannon on the cover would be pertinent to the content and convey the Civil War setting. As for the zonbi (an older alternate spelling that I use in the piece), I knew there was no way I could portray my key monster as I'd described her, bound and gagged on the floor of a tent. The makeup, modeling, photography, and time are far beyond my capabilities at this point. So I wondered about the one key standout characteristic of my creature and decided it was her eyes. With that, I was able to locate a piece of photography that could serve. I threw together the image you see here and sent it to Andria.

She requested a little time to sketch something out, and I expected a doodle, like something you'd do with a Sharpie pen and a cocktail napkin. This is what came back to me a couple of days later:

I was stunned. An electric thrill went through me the moment I first opened the image. I suppose that feeling you hear about when authors receive their very first copies of their first book in the mail might be more intense or fulfilling, but I'll tell you what. Every time I looked at this image, I couldn't wipe the grin off my face. Still, I knew it was a first pass. I replied back, noting my amazement as well as a couple of criticisms. One, I wanted the title to be bigger. I'd learned my lesson about readability at thumbnail sizes. Second, I thought the eyes were too sexy. The zonbi needed to be roughed up a bit. She was decaying, after all. My wife commented that she looked like a green version of the Na'vi chick from Avatar.

That was when my editor friend replied that his wife, Andria, had done the photography herself -- from a self-portrait. Ah. Awkward.

A few hours later, this revision came back. So much better! I confirmed that the text was indeed legible at the tiny size Smashwords shows for search results. I loved the scar running down the left eye (our left, not the zonbi's). But in doing the texturing, I felt the left eye had become oddly darker than the right. There was also a gap in the right eyebrow that had mysteriously crept in. Speaking of which, I commented that those were some very well-maintained eyebrows and lashes for a a Civil War-era corpse.

Andria did another version, lightening the left eye and patching the right brow. However, I now felt that the scar running down the eye looked too pale, making it look more like a Photoshop effect than a wound. Quickly and without complaint (at least that I could hear from 2,000 miles away), Andria issued a fourth revision, and I couldn't be happier.

I made this the background image for my triple-display Windows desktop. I still get a thrill every time I see it, and the constant reminder keeps my mind churning on what should be the final text revision now in progress. Hopefully, you agree with me that this is a kickass cover, and now I feel even more pressure to make sure that the story itself lives up to the incredible artwork.

The moral of the story, of course, is that it really is worth the money to use professional services, especially when you're trying to build a business. I'll be extremely curious to try and assess what impact the cover image has on sales over the coming months.

It's OK Not to Know

2012-01-19T15:33:00.000-08:00

In high school, I had a teacher/mentor named Tom Collins (no, not the drink) who taught me history and comparative religion but also a bit about human perception and life in general. His influence on my thinking was immense. One of his most oft-repeated mantras, spoken reverently like a Zen koan and always enunciated for emphasis in his slight Southern drawl, was this gem: "It's OK not to know."

Now, I went to a top-shelf private school, and one of the things on which you pride yourself in such places is having the intellectual tools necessary to find the right answer -- to anything. If you don't know something, you research, research some more, and keep researching until you figure it out. Getting this message drilled into me for four years was probably a key component in my future career as a journalist.

Being told "it's OK not to know" made no sense. What the hell do you mean it's OK? It's not OK! Not knowing is no better than being wrong! In fact, it's worse because at least if you're wrong it shows that you probably tried to get the right answer. I'd like to think that after two years of intensive study with Tom I finally understood what he was getting at. In reality, though, I probably didn't. Not entirely. Because here I am, over 20 years later, still trying to put the wisdom of those five words into practice every day.

As a culture, we hate not knowing. "Is is better to spank your kids or not? You don't know? Seriously? Don't you want to be a good parent?" "How are you going to vote in 2012? You don't know? Well, clearly you're an uncaring and ignorant sop who's content to leech off of society." "What are you gonna do with your life? You don't know? Well, that sounds like a recipe for failure. You're screwed."

It feels better to have an answer, any answer, than this terrifying chasm of ambiguity in front of us. The trouble is that when we jump to conclusions and reach for answers prematurely, we burn precious resources. Consider all of the people in college who don't really know what to pursue, but their parents are spending tens of thousands of dollars for them to be there, and everybody expects them to have a major, so they pick Psychology. Two years later, some epiphany hits, and they change to Materials Engineering. Now they know (or at least think they do) and are on a positive, motivated path. In the meantime, though, they've burned all that time and money going in the wrong direction because they felt an answer was necessary immediately. Not knowing was simply unendurable.

Knowing takes time, and unfortunately it usually takes more time than we're willing to wait. I'm reminded of my ridiculous dating career, in which I went through a succession of girls/women who were clearly wrong for me. I was flailing about, making terrible choices because I just didn't know what I wanted. After all, having made some decision was surely better than the loneliness and embarrassment of no decision at all...right? Then I met the woman who would become my wife, and I knew. How could I be so certain? I can't articulate it for you. It's like the difference between building a log cabin with tree stumps compared to accurately measured and cut timbers. You can see when it's right. You can feel it. You just know.

Knowing takes patience and fortitude. You have to understand that not knowing now is an essential part of the process of knowing later.

Which brings me to this blog. I follow several blogs, and they all seem to know what they're about. They keep tightly focused on their given topics, and each post clearly furthers that author's agenda. I think that's what a blog is supposed to do. Otherwise, why spend the time on it? I have mouths to feed, and if I wanted to wallow in my own thoughts, I'd talk to myself in the shower.

I originally envisioned this blog as a sort of "DVD extras" repository, a showcase of leftovers from my day job, thinking that this might benefit my journalism career somehow. For some people, I'm sure this approach works. It doesn't for me. I can feel the drafts and crazy tilting of that log cabin made from tree stumps. Flailing about, I've wandered through topics on education, low-carb dieting, and who knows what else. Clearly, I don't know what I'm doing here.

But that's OK. I believe it's OK not to know...yet.

There's the rub. The difference is the "yet." If you don't know what you want to do with your life, that's fine as long as you're working on it. We've got to make effort toward understanding. We can't just throw up our hands, say "well, I tried!" and watch more TV. That's just asking to fall into the pit of ambiguity and never be heard from again. When you don't know and you stop trying to reach answers, you're effectively dead weight.

I'm going to flatter myself and say that I think I've been experimenting with this blog rather than simply casting about aimlessly. With each post, I'm trying out new things in my mind, waiting for different ingredients to gel. I am "actively waiting" to know, if that makes any sense.

Over the last few months, I've seen glimpses of the direction I want to travel, and I'm very excited to see a path emerging under my feet. How will this blog fit into that path? I don't know...yet. I do know that I don't want to be a mouthpiece and repeat the works of others, nor do I want to offer yet another voice of commentary on current events. I just don't think I'm that unique or clever. But I'm not afraid to wait and keep experimenting, because when the answer arrives, I'll feel it, and hopefully you will, too. The timbers will stack neatly, the drafts will be plugged, and that cabin is going to be awesome.

Five Ways Your Old PC Can Help Create Super-Kids!

2012-01-12T17:14:00.000-08:00

Being someone who works with and reviews a lot of computer gear, I have a fair collection of ~~old, junky, really freaking slow~~ entry-level PCs. Those nettops and netbooks that seemed like such a great idea when they debuted a few years ago? Got those. Old dual-core desktops in an age of quad- and six-core? Check. The Logitech Google TV unit that totally tanked here in the U.S.? Installed and in use. I've even got three VGA LCD monitors. Not DVI, not HDMI, not DisplayPort. Just old school VGA. You know what the difference is between VGA and VHS? Me neither.

However! I've also got two elementary school-aged kids, and they don't need to run eight browser windows alongside Photoshop, the entire MS Office suite, two more instances of OpenOffice, and iTunes, all while running active ripping software in the background. (Yes, that's my usual app load every day.) All they want out of their computing lives is to run browser-based games, and for that most of my secondary systems will work perfectly.

I'm willing to compromise with the kids on their computer time. They can have their gaming time, yes, but in return I want them to learn. There are so many gaping holes in their education, it's appalling. I'll try not to get into my long-winded rant about our K-12 educational system here, but suffice it to say that a) I think most parents are on their own when it comes to filling in these holes and b) after so many years of personal computing, most of us now have at least one or two such secondary systems laying about and gathering dust. Here are five uses I've found for such "mostly dead" machines that could make a world of difference in your youngsters' lives.

1. Typing.

I don't know about your school system, but mine still seems to think it's 1986. Cursive gets taught to third-graders (and promptly discarded by fourth grade). Fifth graders have never even heard of PowerPoint. Students can't construct blogs for class projects because the district bans all student access to such sites. So far, the only purpose I've seen for the computers in my kids' school is to help quiz them on standardized tests. The machines aren't supposed to teach them anything, only help the school meet its state benchmarks...which, by the way, it fails.

I have always deplored handwriting, especially cursive. It's slow, untidy, laborious, and open to misreading. Compared to computer-based typing, it's simply an inferior method of written communication. Even worse, it's a bottleneck. Of course, all writing is a bottleneck. You have ideas in your head that need to get to the page, but there's this translation thing in the middle that has to happen, and sometimes that translation happens so slowly that you get bored or frustrated. This happens to my boys constantly. Handwriting stifles their creative development because it's so inefficient. People have told me that "some studies" have shown how the constant motion of handwriting helps to stimulate a certain region of the brain. Last time I checked, typing involved equally constant motion of the fingers. I bet no one tested that, though.

Solution? At the end of 2010, I paid $10 for a downloadable copy of Typing Instructor for Kids Platinum. (The price has gone up to $20 since then.) Ever since, I've had my boys practice with the software two or three times per week, 15 to 20 minutes per session. It's a fun mix of basic skills building plus video games. I wish the designer would update the software with more current-looking and challenging games, but the software suffices as it is.

The result is that, one year later, my nine-year-old can type at 30 WPM and my just-turned-seven-year-old is hitting above 25 WPM. [Correction: Thirty minutes after posting this, the little one also passed his 30 WPM challenge. Nothing motivates quite like sibling rivalry.] I have an incentive system for them to help with motivation, but the bottom line is that they're both now skilled enough to make typing their primary mode of written communication -- and both of them enjoy it! They think it's a blast to express themselves through a keyboard. In contrast, neither of them has had a kind word to say about handwriting as taught by their school. Ever.

2. Music.

Unless you're studying track mixing, it's obvious that nothing can replace learning to play music on a real instrument. Still, any musician will tell you that there's a lot of theory that goes along with true musical understanding, and this is where the Web can help.

As an example, check out Theta Music Trainer. Rather than try to chain your kid to some boring music textbook, why not let him learn the theory intuitively through game play?

Alternatively, don't underestimate the power of YouTube and streaming video. There are untold numbers of how-to videos on YouTube, but they can tend to be a bit scattered and haphazard in their quality. For something more systematic, look for subscription services, such as the one offered by Next Level Guitar. Compared to a one-on-one tutor at $30+/hour, such videos can't provide the same sort of personalized feedback, but if you're on a budget, getting all-you-can-watch lessons for $29/month or $75/quarter is not a bad deal.

3. Foreign language.

The same idea holds true for foreign language studies. I grit my teeth every time I think about my boys doing colored paper cut-out projects rather than learning Spanish or Mandarin. Once again, it falls to the parents to fill in the skills our children will need later in life that the schools are blatantly ignoring. Can that old PC help? If it can play YouTube, absolutely.

One of the best free sites I've found so far is SpanishDict. Short of having a live classroom or shelling out major money for a package such as Rosetta Stone, SpanishDict's collection of sequential videos, flash cards, reference resources, and more make this an excellent starting point for Spanish learning. I'm sure similar sites must exist for other languages, and if they don't, they will soon.

4. Math and science.

If you've followed or known me for any length of time, you know I'm a die-hard Khan Academy fanatic. There are many, many other sites for learning math and science, but this is far and away my favorite, with the cleanest interface, most effective lessons, and best management tools. The site is so good that, with only a $5 investment in a pair of small whiteboards and dry erase pens, both of my kids were able to complete arithmetic and move into pre-algebra long before their peers. My youngest boy even asks to pull up random Khan Academy science videos as a reward for good behavior. Last night we watched the video on whether the real universe is smaller than the observable universe and both of them found it interesting. Can you imagine an elementary school kid being exposed to ideas like this in the classroom? And there are literally thousands of videos and exercise modules -- all free, all for you.

5. College preparation.

Imagine if your child could get a free pass to sit in as many MIT classes as she pleased. You'd freak out, right? "A free MIT education?! No way!" But that's exactly what MIT's OpenCourseWare effort provides. There are over 2,000 courses from the eminent school's catalog, many with videos of every lecture, course notes, reading lists, on and on. The only things missing are the tests and homework feedback. And the labs. OK, and the parties. But you get the idea.

No employer is saying, "So you watched all of the course work necessary for a degree in Biology, but you didn't do the work? Well, that's good enough for us." But if you were a high school kid wanting to build expertise in a field and you had some spare time, or even if you were an adult wanting to bolster your knowledge in a field that could impact your income, wouldn't you take the time to study some of this material? Could you possibly find a better or more authoritative source?

If MIT doesn't suit your taste, check out the list of other institutions involved in the OpenCourseWare initiative: Tufts, University of California, Paris Tech, Kyushu University, on and on. And again, all it takes to participate in this mind blowing, world class educational opportunity is a cast-off computer with enough horsepower and Internet bandwidth to run YouTube.

You know how competitive and globally "flat" the economic landscape is becoming. My children's prospects for the job market in 10 years or so are daunting to say the least. If our kids don't have these skills and knowledge, rest assured that their international peers, all of which will be able to telecommute over the Internet just as easily as we can, certainly will. Most of us have the gateways to these digital assets sitting idly in a corner or closet. Brush them off, plug them back in, and turn your kids loose into a world of learning that none of us had the chance to enjoy and leverage when we were young.

Top Reviewer Tackles "Architects, Vol. 2"

2012-01-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

You never really know if a given strategy is any good until results start to arrive. I sent a copy of my recent ebook, "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 2," to Amazon top reviewer (currently #114 in the world) BigAl for his perusal. He'd read and liked Volume 1 well enough, but would he find Volume 2 repetitive? Would the shorter length seem lazy rather than accommodating? Would the interviews be as interesting? I had no idea...until now.

BigAl posted the review on his Books and Pals blog, giving Volume 2 four our of five stars and this conclusion: "Anyone with an interest in technology, where it has been, and where it might be going, should enjoy this new volume."

I couldn't ask for better than that. Thanks so much, BigAl! And for those of you who've also been kind enough to download the new book, if you could spare two minutes to leave a quick review on the title's Amazon page, I'd be immensely grateful!

How to Make a REAL New Year's Resolution

2011-12-30T13:54:00.001-08:00

“Resolution. A course of action determined or decided on.” —The American Heritage Dictionary

I used to make New Year’s resolutions, but none of them ever came to fruition. In the same vein, I’ve spent a lifetime making wishes when blowing out birthday candles. I don’t recall any of those wishes ever materializing. Why?

I suspect the key lies in one word of the above dictionary definition: determined. But there’s a twist. Yes, a course of action must be decided, but the far greater element is whether you, the resolution maker, have determination. Why do you want this thing? Is it an idle fancy or does it spring from a need so deep that not achieving it would constitute an unbearable failure?

“Wish. An expression of a desire, longing.” —The American Heritage Dictionary

My best friend and I started writing novels when we were 19. Started is the key word. I don’t think any of our projects ever made it past the 10,000-word mark. Some of our ideas were damned good, and I still think they have the potential for great success. As a writing team, we work very well together. We’ve shared in a lot of fun and built many happy memories over the years. But there’s obviously a missing component somewhere. We were wishing to be authors. We were not resolved. There was never a sense of fighting against unbearable failure, nothing compelling that said “this must be done,” and without that our pursuits went where nearly all such birthday and New Year’s wishes go: nowhere.

I have another friend with whom I’ve spent two years (so far) writing a book on personal finance called Where Does It All Go? He’s been a successful accountant and CFO, and he’s one of the most amazing, inspiring people I’ve ever had the honor of knowing. Now entering its third draft, this book encapsulates and expands on a lecture seminar that he ran for many years and that has helped thousands of people. Working on this book changed me. Most of the initial writing was done in 2008 and 2009, when the recession was at its most bitter and all of my financial hubris and ignorance was coming back not just to bite me in the ass but to carve it up with a fork and kitchen knife. A large section of the book deals with establishing one’s values and goals. This is a prerequisite to personal progress. If you don’t know why you want something, you have no foundation from which to build.

Consider weight loss, a topic near and dear to me during 2011. Why do so many of us try and fail to lose weight? First off, the principles and methodologies recommended by most “experts” are inherently flawed. More important, though, is the matter of resolve. Losing weight—making any life-changing behavioral modification, in fact—requires a foundation of deep-seated resolve. A desire to “look better” is superficial. Even wishing to “feel better” is too nebulous. As I detailed in my earlier blog post, my own resolve springs from too many years of painful memories spent watching loved family members erode and become crippled by diseases that could have been prevented.

In my 40^th year, officially entrenched in “middle age,” I resolved not to force such memories on my own children. The thought of doing so filled me with despair. It would mark an unbearable failure, and this became the foundation from which I was able to achieve my goal.

In Where Does It All Go?, we detail how to construct such a foundation through the identification of one’s values and goals. In a nutshell, values are the core principles we hold that define who we are by shaping our thinking and actions. Goals are the things we plan to achieve. (My use of the word “plan” rather than “wish” is not accidental.)

Now, here’s the key idea: it is almost impossible to achieve your goals when they are not in harmony with your values. This is part of why dieters stay fat when they lack values that will inspire a healthy lifestyle. This is why people who wish to be rich rarely become so, because they lack the values that align with deep success and the accumulation of wealth.

In working on the chapters that dealt with this material, I quickly realized that I had no idea what my values and goals were. No wonder I was 38 years old, in a financial tail-spin, depressed, aimless, and without a single book to my name despite having proclaimed my ambitions of authorship ever since grade school. I’d spent 30 years wishing to be an author and had no clue why I wanted to be one or why being one would matter.

The months I spent writing and rewriting these chapters reflected my own soul searching. Who was I? What did I really want? What difference would it make? Where was my foundation?

Slowly, I found answers. Motivational author Tony Robbins often says that to get good answers we must start by asking better questions. I finally started asking them and forced myself not to shy away until I had answers that could withstand constant scrutiny and cross-examination. With my life’s gas tank at the statistical half-full/empty mark, I was increasingly aware of the need to find the right answers before even more years slipped away.

What was the result? At the end of my 39^th year, I self-published my first book. Sure, it was a book of poetry, and I don’t aspire to be a poet in the professional sense, but it was a start. In my 40^th year, I self-published three non-fiction books. Proud as I am of these, I still view them as a warm-up, a learning experience. I’m stocking my writing shop with the tools necessary to build bigger and better works to come. This type of one-step-at-a-time thinking was totally alien to me in my youth, and I believe it’s a vital component in successful goal achievement.

Naturally, everyone has different values and goals. Here at the dawn of a new year, I wanted to take this opportunity to share mine with you in the hope that they might inspire you to find your own answers. Don’t let your New Year’s resolutions be another idle toast at midnight, another wish that vanishes into the air like smoke from a blown out candle. We are not here to dissolve into particulate nothingness. We are here to build, achieve, and realize our individual potential.

My Values and Goals

My collaborator recommends keeping your values and goals lists down to five items or less. I’ve found that a longer list of values can usually be consolidated. The simpler and more foundational the concept, the more it encompasses. In my list, I strove for a mix of near- and intermediate-term items. Usually, goals with a longer time horizon will necessitate the establishment of shorter-term mileposts. This is why I used the word “plan” earlier. Without a plan, nothing ever gets accomplished, which is why so many wishes fail. Not only do they lack a value foundation, they also lack a defined strategy of steps that leads to achievement.

I maintain a Google Doc that serves primarily as my daily to-do list, but it begins with the following values and goals lists so that I can see and review them several times each day. Many people believe that such reinforcement has significant psychological benefits.

Value #1: Following my bliss.

As a big fan of Joseph Campbell, this key bit of advice from the master of comparative mythology and religion resonates deeply with me. Today, I can point to virtually every major failure or mistake in my life and see how it stemmed from not following my bliss. I failed to pursue that which brings me true and meaningful happiness and elicits harmony in my life.

As an example, not too long ago, I spent two years studying how to day trade financial options. I thought I had the brains and will to be successful at it and thus find a shortcut to the riches I desired. This goal did not align with my values. Deep down, I know I’m not a financial whiz. The pursuit cost me many thousands of dollars, and in the time I spent trying to master day trading I could have written a novel...perhaps two.

Value #2: Nurturing and elevating those around me.

As an only child, I grew up with a sense of selfish entitlement. It took a long time, parenthood, and the influence of my sublime wife to shift my world view. Now it’s clear to me that lasting happiness derives from helping and sharing with others, not from things one consumes or hordes. Sometimes, old habits die hard, but I combat them as best I can and believe that building up others is the surest way to improve oneself.

Value #3: Educating and entertaining the world through writing.

Why do I love to write? If I’m honest, there’s probably an element of narcissism to it, but the years have shown me that I derive little satisfaction from writing that does not somehow positively impact the reader. I’ve been paid thousands of dollars for writing projects that I found boring and meaningless, and invariably I finish such projects feeling empty and unsatisfied. It’s not about the money, which I both need and appreciate. It's something else. For me, writing is one of the few tools I have for realizing value #2. I discovered when involved with theater in high school that I derive immense satisfaction from entertaining people, but I’m a better writer than an actor (I hope). And to my mind, educating people is one of the best ways possible to nurture and elevate them.

By now, you should see that these three values are complementary and interlocking—a sure sign that they are harmonious facets of a single entity.

Value #4: Relentless pursuit of increasing effectiveness.

Of these four values, this is my greatest weakness. I’ve historically been a poor scheduler, and I’m prone to diversion. In recognizing this, though, I understand what I can and should improve.

More broadly, how can one become more effective in the achievement of goals? Whether the answer is time management, knowledge accumulation, practicing skills, or any number of similar things, I believe it’s fundamentally important to strive constantly for better tools and practices with which to attain our objectives. Again, this value is complementary with the preceding three.

Over time, I’ve experimented with having other values on this list, but they inevitably strike me as being personally irrelevant or just more complex iterations of these four ideas. So for now, the list stands at four items.

Goal #1: I will be a full-time book author by my 50^th birthday.

And to think, once upon a time, I wished to have my first best-selling novel on store shelves by the age of 25. The irony is that in my early 20s, I had far more time and far fewer responsibilities than I do now, and it would have been much easier to write that novel. But because I didn’t recognize (or hadn’t yet cultivated) the four values described above, I was invariably distracted by pursuits that were not in harmony with my own best interests.

Today, I understand that the term “best-seller” is loaded with factors and connotations that no longer interest me. Seeing my name on a list in The New York Times won’t fulfill any of my goals, nor is it relevant to my values. It would be some sort of ego-based affirmation from an external authority rather than a validation of internal achievement.

Much as I find some aspects of my career in journalism and freelance writing rewarding, it’s virtually impossible to retire in my line of work. There is no residual income stream. Every new dollar must be generated with work that starts from scratch, and I haven’t seen a per-word rate raise in over a decade. Needless to say, this doesn't make things any easier as I get older. Thus it’s imperative to begin cultivating passive income streams with works that will continue to offer value to readers and generate income over the long-term. With a little luck and a mountain of hard work, my plan is to have these passive income streams at least covering my basic living expenses by 2020. This is a finite, measurable objective.

Goal #2: I will have amassed a $100,000 cash cushion by my 45^th birthday.

Why not? I’m nowhere close to this amount today (although I could have achieved it already if not for the value-less blunders made in my 30s). But I believe that if I live each day in accordance with my values and direct my efforts accordingly, this is feasible. Again, this goal is a finite, measureable objective that lends itself well to periodic mileposts.

Goal #3: I will send my children to Oregon Episcopal School.

Of my five goals, this one is the least specific and the one that gives me the most concern. I went to OES for my four years of high school, and it was arguably the most influential, positive, and transformative stage of my life. I have always wanted the same opportunity for my two boys. Ideally, I wanted them to begin in middle school (grades six through eight). However, annual tuition at OES middle school is now $23,540. The upper school (grades nine through 12) is $24,230. This year, my boys are in first and fourth grades. The clock is ticking, and I’m no closer to making this goal a reality today than I was five years ago.

Like many self-employed people, on paper, I make too much money to qualify for financial aid (which was how my dad was able to send me). If I ignore amassing a cash cushion, this goal becomes more feasible, but I can’t sacrifice immediate financial security, especially in the current economic climate, for the more questionable necessity of a superior education. You don’t build a gazebo when your home’s roof is leaking.

So for this goal, I don’t have mileposts or definite dates, which makes it uncomfortably close to being a wish. The difference is that this goal is founded on my values—specifically #2 and to a lesser degree numbers 1 and 4. Also, in my mind, not sending my kids to OES or an equivalent school (of which there’s really only one in our area) would constitute a profound failure on my part.

Goal #4: I will be able to do 10 consecutive pull-ups by my 42^nd birthday.

Now we come to the short-term items. Last year, my goal was to lose 40 pounds by my 41^st birthday, and I made it. The fact that I achieved this pales beside the fact that I was able, largely through my writing, to educate others about my methods and inspire them to pursue similar life changes. Clearly, this aligns well with my values.

This year, I’m ready to progress beyond weight loss and into general fitness. Obviously, there are many ways to measure fitness, but in the interest of keeping things simple, I’ve selected a simple goal: 10 pull-ups. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I haven’t been able to do a complete pull-up since junior high. As a child, fitness was never a priority in my family, and it shows.

On the surface, pull-ups doesn’t seem to mesh with my values, but I know that to be able to achieve this goal, I will have to cultivate a bed of learning and discipline, some of which I will hopefully be able to pass on to those around me.

Goal #5: I will publish my first novel by my 42^nd birthday.

Here it is, set in stone. There is no more time for dilly-dallying. I have a good idea already under development that I think is both entertaining and, to a lesser degree, educating. More importantly, in the hour each morning during which I work on this book, I can sense how right it feels to be working on it. In that one hour, I am pursuing my bliss.

The book may bomb. It could end up sucking. It is, after all, my first novel that will be completed, and I have no illusions about the odds of hitting a home run my first time at bat. But to achieve goal #1, goal #5 must happen, and it should assist in the pursuit of goals #2 and #3. Again, cooperation between goals is important.

Your Turn

That’s it. The perhaps scary and long-winded peek inside my head is over, and you now understand the process I went through in creating feasible goals rather than idle New Year’s resolutions. I hope you can do something similar.

Many people are afraid to make real goals because we fear failure. I sure did...and still do. But that’s OK. What if I’d only lost 30 pounds this year instead of 40? What if I only save up $50,000 for a cash cushion rather than $100,000? Will this constitute failure? Of course not! I’d still be down 30 pounds! Having $50,000 in the bank in a lot better than lying awake in bed knowing that you have zero financial breathing room. When goals are in alignment with your values, any progress is good and worthwhile. Letting fear take hold and doing nothing is the only real failure.

Don’t just blow an idle wish into the breeze when that big ball drops. Make a plan...and make it happen.

What to Eat? My "Nine Necessaries" List

2011-12-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

After the terrific interest in my recent post about my low-carb lifestyle success, the top question people keep asking me is, "What should I eat? I have no idea what to do!"

I faced the same problem. Before I made this change, my idea of cooking in the morning was making a quad raspberry mocha. The night before I started low-carb, I went to bed thinking, "I have no clue what I'm going to eat for breakfast!" Bagel? Out. Cereal? Out. A freaking banana and some raisins? Out. (Remember that most fruits, especially bananas, have a high glycemic load and are thus heavy on carbs.) I had to do something I'd never done for a weekday breakfast: cook. I beat three eggs, salt, and pepper, then scrambled them with chopped up baby spinach, tomatoes, ham, and some salsa. This might have been the first time I'd ever voluntarily eaten vegetables for breakfast in my life. And it was good! As it turns out, I lost four pounds that day.

Of course, all that extra food preparation takes time. We're not big cooking types in my house. Any meal that takes longer to prepare and clean than it does to eat strikes me as a very skewed value proposition, and I know many of you share this feeling. You're busy. You've got better things to do than chop and rinse and fold and whatever else those kitcheny types seem to relish so much. My philosophy on cooking: get in, get out, lose weight -- period.

With that in mind, I'd like to recommend our nine favorite low-carb menu items. If you have no idea where to start, try these.

1. Breakfast: Mini Frittatas

This is my favorite low-carb breakfast recipe, lifted from the Food Network HERE. Essentially, you make up a big batch of scrambled eggs, only you're going to cook the eggs in a muffin pan rather than a skillet. I use a 12-muffin pan, and with nine eggs rather than the recipe's eight, it works out exactly right.

Note that I use spinach, tomato, and a few dashes of Tobasco sauce rather than the recipe's recommended parsley. If I'm having trouble getting past a weight plateau, I'll also drop the recommended milk out of the mix.

I'll make the pan up on Sunday night and put them all in the fridge. Eating three per breakfast, that's four breakfasts made in 30 minutes with only one load of dishes to clean. Now, that's what I'm talkin' about.

2. Breakfast/Snack: Primal Blueprint Nutty Blueberry Protein Balls

I mentioned in my prior post about what huge fans we are of Mark Sisson and his books. Here's proof. This recipe comes from his Primal Blueprint Quick & Easy Meals cookbook, which, in our opinion, is even better than his The Primal Blueprint Cookbook. If you only invest in one cookbook, make it the Quick & Easy title.

You'll find the nutty balls recipe -- always good for a few guilty snickers during casual conversation -- scattered in various incarnations around the Web. Here are two good examples from PALEO MADELINE and NOM NOM PALEO. Obviously, you can change the type of nuts and fruits to suit your taste. Keep in mind that the blueberries are for flavor, but most of the sweetness is coming from the dates, which are much higher in glycemic load, so don't go overboard with them. No matter which specific ingredients you pick, though, two or three of these balls will keep you running. They pack well if you're on the road. Better yet, they're pretty dry and thus great at making you thirsty. If you're like me and procrastinate drinking your water, two of these nutty balls will have you chugging down an eight-ounce glass in no time at all.

3. Lunch: Salad With Low-Carb Dressing

Not much to report here. Pretty much every non-cheat day meal around here is a salad. We use baby spinach in place of lettuce almost without exception, but that's a change we made years ago for better health and nutrition. Naturally, you can put whatever you want on a salad. Hard boiled eggs and any kind of meat, especially leftovers, are fair game. For some crunch, I use a sprinkle of sunflower seeds. Again, go really easy on the shredded cheese, and remember that Parmesan is preferable to any of the softer cheeses. If you do pick up the Primal Blueprint Quick & Easy Meals Book, my wife is particularly fond of the Greek Salad recipe.

Historically, I've always preferred my salads without dressing, but there's nothing like a few dozen salads in a row to inspire a need for diversity. We've grown fond of a few low-carb honey mustard and vinaigrette dressings from the store. Start reading the labels and find one or two that will work for you. It's not hard to find yummy dressings that don't rely on carbs for adding flavor.

4. Snack: Nuts and Beef Jerky

Snacking is essential on a low-carb diet. The object of the game is to keep your insulin and blood sugars at steady, moderated levels throughout the day and get off the pattern of massive dips and spikes that are so typical of high-carb/low-fat diets. Nuts are great for this. Two or three times a day, I'll take a drag off of my jar of unsalted, bulk food peanuts and go about my way. (Beware of the salted varieties. Read the label and you'll likely find that the substances used to make the salt stick to the nuts contain carbs.) My wife, Knico, prefers pistachios, but she can destroy a bag of those things like nobody's business. We've found that more than about a half-cup of shelled nuts per day will sabotage weight loss, so read the labels and gauge accordingly. If necessary, use snack-sized Ziploc bags and create pre-sized rations for use throughout the day. When the bags are empty, you're done for the day.

Nearer and dearer to my heart is the beef jerky recipe found in the manual for Smokehouse's Little Chief smoker (manufactured here in Oregon). You'll go broke trying to fund a jerky habit from the store. (And store jerky is stupid high in carbs!) It simply must be homemade, and homemade tastes so much better! We got our smoker from Amazon for about $100, but you'll find them available elsewhere. I buy five pounds of sirloin per batch and find that if you only use about half of the recommended salt, the recipe is about perfect.

Interestingly, the wood you use is very important. The hickory chips that come included with the Little Chief are OK but not great. Alder does nothing for me. Hickory is so-so, but mesquite is outstanding. My granddad used to swear by apple wood chips, and I find that a blend of mesquite and apple yields results that are to die for. (You can buy wood chips at places such as Lowe's or Home Depot as well as online.) Slicing the meat about 1/4-inch thick, I'll smoke a batch for three hours, reverse the trays in the smoker, add another load of chips, then smoke for two more hours. It's better to undercook than overcook. The manual also has a great recipe for smoked salmon and many other variations.

I literally don't know how I would get through a week without this jerky. It fulfills my carnivorous cravings and keeps me sane when carbs start to sound like a really yummy idea. One batch lasts me about two weeks, and it's money very well spent.

Ah, one other bit of wisdom from my granddad: You can buy insulating covers for these smoker, which will help assist in the smoking process by retaining the heat. This will cut down on the total smoking time. However, rather than spend the $25 or $30 on the factory's recommended cover, simply take a knife to your smoker's retail box so it looks something like mine. I recall that Granddad's smoker's cover was blanketed in duct tape, and, after 10 or 12 uses, I can see that mine is heading for the same modification. With duct tape, the cover should last for years provided you keep it dry.

5. Lunch/Dinner: Bunless Burger or Club Sandwich

Whether you love or hate the company's TV ads, you gotta give credit to Carl's Jr. for being the only fast food chain (I've found so far) that will wrap your sandwich order in generous amounts of leaf lettuce rather than serve your bunless entre to you in a humiliating plastic bowl. Some days when we want a treat, Knico and I will hit the Carl's drive-thru and get a couple of sandwiches along with an unsweetened iced tea and a packet of Splenda. Having the ability to order your favorite fast food sans bun is one of the great pleasures of the low-carb approach. Meats, a slice of cheese, mayo, tomato, lettuce...it's all good.

For the record, McDonald's is among the worst of the fast food chains in this regard. There's nothing like seeing the chain's small, pathetic patties in a bowl to make you appreciate just how much such restaurants rely on buns in order to sell the product.

6. Lunch/Dinner: Chicken Chorizo Patty Melt

Some close friends who've joined us on the low-carb plan swear by this Food Network recipe. To make it low-carb, of course, simply get rid of the bun and either substitute with leaf lettuce or eat with a fork and knife on a plate. Depending on where you're at with your goals, you may also want to back off on some of the cheese.

7. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner: Paleo Pizza

Knico is also a big fan of Sarah Fragoso's Everyday Paleo cookbook. One of the recipes in there is for "paleo pizza." I know this sounds like an oxymoron, but it makes sense once you examine the ingredients and assess them in the context of what paleolithic-era humans would have been eating. Fragaso has a breakfast pizza recipe in her book in which the "crust" is mostly eggs, and it's an interesting alternative to the usual scramble, but she also has a more conventional pizza HERE.

Of course, being a pizza, you're free to mix and match whatever topping ingredients you please. We've found that our kids are more tolerant of "weird" vegetables when presented in a pizza format, so this is a double-win recipe.

I will warn you that the almond meal crust will most likely be drier than what you're expecting. Again, I'm fine with this since it inspires more water consumption. It is more crumbly, though, and you may need to eat with a fork and knife rather than being able to lift up a whole piece and wave it around, as with conventional pizza.

8. Snack: Low-Carb Chocolate

At least once per month, the impulse to consume chocolate in my home becomes a medical necessity. If you're like us, you've found most sugar-free chocolate over the years to taste like something between tree bark and pigeon poop. My mother-in-law had us try this bar from Simply Lite, and we were floored by how good it tastes. Seriously, it tastes like chocolate. We now pick them up at Trader Joe's, although you can find them online.

Simply Lite uses sugar alcohols rather than straight up sugar. The net effective carb amount per serving is like 1 g. It's nothing. That said, be aware that many low-carb pros caution against such candies because they're so easy to abuse. As with Splenda and other artificial sweeteners, your body is still going to perceive that something sweet has hit your system, even if, chemically, the carbs aren't there. This perception of sweetness will trigger an insulin response. Now, I'm guessing that the insulin response isn't as pronounced as from real sugar, but it must be significant, otherwise we wouldn't see so many fat long-term diet soda drinkers. If we only eat a couple of squares from the Simply Lite bar -- just enough to let it melt in the mouth and kill the chocolate craving -- we can have one bar last a whole week...sometimes less, depending on the, um, lunar phase.

9. Dessert: Skillet Brownies

You gotta have a few good, low-carb dessert recipes on hand to help you through life, and THIS ONE is our favorite so far. We ignore the flourishing touches with salt, Zinfandel, and cranberries, both of which would only add carbs and perhaps detract from the primary objective of having a chocolate dessert, but feel free to experiment.

These brownies are moist, easy, and, as the author points out, cheaper than most low-carb alternatives. Divided into 16 servings, each piece works out to just under 10 g of carbs, and that's with sweetening it up with a 1/2 cup of coconut nectar in place of the honey. With no cheats on your day, you should have no problem handling the relatively few carbs in this, especially if you want to bust out a couple minutes of air squats before partaking.

Warning: If you try these brownies before weaning away from sugar, they may not taste sweet enough to you. Those of us who've grown accustomed to a low-sugar diet find these brownies plenty sweet. In fact, they're even more enjoyable because your senses are relishing the true taste of the chocolate and aren't just craving that big sugar rush. If you still find that you need a bit more sweetness, consider adding just a few carbs more by drizzling on a low-carb ganache such as THIS.

New "Architects of Tomorrow" Ebook is Available!

2011-12-21T22:58:00.000-08:00

The average American reads at 300 words per minute. My newly released book of interviews with a dozen fascinating high-tech luminaries, “Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 2,” is roughly 55,000 words. That’s over three hours of awesome brain food for only $1.99. The average U.S. movie ticket price is now about $8. So seeing, say, Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 would only “entertain” you for half the time, cost four times as much, and might even leave you feeling temporarily lobotomized. In contrast, AoT Vol. 2 is an awesome value for anyone even mildly interested in the history of technology, the online sites and devices that now fill our world, or our technological future. Whether as a treat for yourself or a gift for someone(s) you know, please consider my ridiculously low-priced yet undeniably thought-provoking Kindle ebook. Any social media recommendations and/or reviews on the book’s Amazon page would be like a special holiday present and fill my heart with yuletide joy -- thank you!

The interviewees in Volume 2 are:

Nolan Bushnell, Founder Of Atari
David “Dadi” Perlmutter, Godfather Of The Modern Processor
Shari Steele, Executive Director & President Of The EFF
Jon S. von Tetzchner, Co-Founder & CEO Of Opera Software
Gordon Bell: Inventor, Minicomputer Designer & Microsoft Researcher
Peter Rojas, Co-Founder Of Gizmodo & Engadget
Mark Re, Seagate’s Senior Vice President of Research
Tim Westergren, Founder Of Pandora
Jaron Lanier, Virtual Reality Pioneer
Noel Lee, Founder Of Monster Cable
Ken Huang, Father Of The Small Form Factor PC
Professor Kevin Warwick, The World’s First Cyborg

The Best Present...of Your Life

2011-12-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

The Good News

Today is my 41^st birthday. Ever since reading The Lord of the Rings, I’ve been fond of the idea of giving away presents for one’s birthday. This year, I’d like to give you an experience I’ve had for the past six months. I believe it's saved my life. Perhaps it might do the same for you.

On June 20, 2011, I weighed 234 pounds. Today, as of this morning, I weigh 193.5, for a net loss of 40.5 pounds. In the interests of honesty and scientific accuracy, I'll confess that I normally weigh in at night, and 193.5 was this morning's weight. But my goal was to lose 40 pounds in under six months—specifically by my birthday—so if you'll cut me a few hours of slack on the measurement methodology, I'll feel no qualms in declaring victory.

My wife, Knico, is down 43 pounds in the same period. When we hug now, we can feel our ribs pressing together. We can’t remember the last time that happened. It’s funny and invigorating when little things like that strike you. This is about the shape we were in when we got married, before two kids and 15 years of stress and bad habits.

Odds are nearly seven in ten that you’re in the same boat I was in. Sixty-eight percent of Americans are overweight or obese, and the numbers keep getting worse. At the same time, 90% of us believe that we eat healthy diets. Are people deluding themselves about what “overweight” is? You bet. Are people in denial about their true eating habits? Probably.

But there’s another possibility that is rarely explored: What if most of the information we’ve been fed about “healthy” eating for the last 40 years is wrong?

Think about it. From early grade school on, we’re taught the merits of the USDA’s food pyramid. Look at the pyramid’s base, the level we’re supposed to eat six to eleven helpings of per day: bread, cereal, rice, and pasta. This is the foundation and most prevalent component of the American diet (not to mention the Midwest farming economy). Right above this, at two to four servings per day, is fruit. Meanwhile, above this at only two to three daily servings are meats, eggs, and nuts, those “bad” foods that are so rich in obesity-causing fats and artery-clogging cholesterol.

Now, I’ve always been a contrarian sort of guy, and by last June I obviously had a growing weight problem. So one day when I stumbled across two separate sources that said this pyramid was dead wrong, that it practically needed to be turned upside-down, I paid close attention. Why?

Ah, that takes us to...

The Backstory

Few images stick in one’s childhood memory quite like seeing your mom wheeled past you, her skin yellowed from iodine and her body bloated after having been cracked open down the middle and pried apart during bypass surgery like a holiday turkey. Ultimately, it wasn’t the coronary condition that took her down. Nor was it the diabetes or the hypertension. Mom died from cancer. Her final 20 years were a fascinating study for anyone wanting to learn just how many ailments one body can sustain.

My grandfather also had a heart attack in his 50s, followed by a mammary artery bypass. The veins in his legs were shot, and he was never able to walk without pain again. My father is still alive. After two heart attacks, he now has seven stents near his heart forcing open bloodways that had become almost entirely choked by countless thousands of small, unfortunate life choices. He also has Type 2 diabetes and can barely feel his toes. His two brothers and sister now have diabetes, as well.

The trend for me is not encouraging.

In looking back, much of my life has been punctuated by watching the people who raised me die one hospital visit at a time. Now that I'm 41 and my two boys are at the age I was when all of these memories of illness began, I have decided that this is one legacy I do not want them to share. I do not want to be the pot-bellied dad who ends up seeing his grandchildren mostly at his hospital bedside.

It’s easy for anyone to say, "Well, I’m not going to be like that. I'm going to be different." I've sure said it enough times. But my expanding waist and vanishing chin said more than any plumped up promises to the contrary.

Let’s Talk Numbers

At 6' 0", the charts say I should weigh about 175. Personally, I think I would look emaciated at 175. Over a decade ago, I felt pretty good about myself in the 190 to 195 range. Recently, at age 40, I topped out at 234, and the scale readout kept creeping upward. My triglycerides, cholesterol, and blood pressure were above normal even in my mid-30s. The writing was on the wall. I was headed for the same fate as the rest of my family.

Something had to be done...but what?

You know the answer, of course. It’s what we’re all taught: exercise more, eat fewer calories, increase your grains, and load up on fruits and vegetables. Dietary fat is the enemy.

We all know this. It’s what we’ve heard all our lives. There’s only one problem.

Like the food pyramid, it’s wrong. And I have 40 missing pounds to prove it. Not only that, I have several friends who have adopted all or parts of my new dietary regimen in the same time I have. All of them have lost at least 20 pounds. One friend from high school has lost 47. My cousin lost 49 pounds in 17 weeks. None of us went to a meeting or bought any special foods or products. There were no injections. Everything I needed to know I got for free from the library.

Unfortunately, I didn’t exercise much during these six months. In fact, for nearly four weeks, I was laid out in bed with vertigo. But I didn’t need to exercise in order to lose weight. I still ate a fair amount of pizza, burgers, and desserts. Compared to the rigorous starvation of calorie restriction, my diet was a cake walk. I should point out that I use the word “diet” here to mean simply the food I eat on a daily basis, not some temporary plan to hit a goal and then be abandoned. The diet changes I’ve made are meant to be sustainable for the rest of my life.

Three weeks into this process, I had a blood draw and a lipid panel worked up. Prior to starting this new lifestyle, I had the following lipid levels:

Glucose: 93
Cholesterol: 192
Triglycerides: 228

Only three weeks into this diet, with no other changes in my activities, my blood results showed the following:

Glucose: 87
Cholesterol: 153
Triglycerides: 106

No, that’s not a typo—228 to 106 in three weeks, and that’s with feeding my face full of eggs and fatty meat (and piles of vegetables). As a point of comparison, statins such as Lipitor will only reduce triglycerides by about 20% over 18 months, and they come with a host of dangerous side effects. My biggest issues now are increasing my HDL levels with more exercise and improving my daily water intake.

The Breakthrough

There are many ways to diet. Virtually none of them work in the long run. According to the National Association of Physical Activity and Health, “231 million people in the European Union attempted a diet in 2002, but less than four million will succeed in keeping their new, trimmer figures for more than a year.” That's a 98% failure rate.

Most diets encourage you to take in fewer calories through food and burn more calories through exercise. This message is so ingrained that we never question its validity. But fill in the blank: “Wow, I just jogged five miles and really worked up an __________.” Does this seem counterproductive? I’m running to burn calories, but for hours my body is screaming at me to compensate and consume more calories. So perhaps a glass of apple juice (roughly 200 calories) and a whole wheat bagel (300 calories) with a smidge of lowfat cream cheese (50 calories) is all I need to feel better. Exactly how far do I have to run to burn off those 550 extra calories?

If I don’t eat them, I will starve—literally. My body will start consuming both fat and muscle to compensate for the caloric deficit, and I will be hungry...constantly. This is why calorie-based diets almost always fail over the long-term. Yes, you will lose weight for a few weeks, maybe even a few months if you’re really determined. But eventually, the odds overwhelmingly show that you will fail. You can’t fight how your body is built to operate and expect to win.

I found this out the hard way. In 2010, at an all-time high weight of 236, I promised myself that I would drop 20 pounds before my 40th birthday. I dieted for six months, using a phone app to count calories. At the very end, I piled on a last burst of extreme self-denial—and I made it!

After three months, I’d gained 18 pounds back, just as I’d done with every other diet in my life. All of that trouble and suffering for nothing. I felt like a dope. My wife had stopped describing me as thin. I was ashamed to take my shirt off around my children, and I shunned having my picture taken.

Then two little miracles happened courtesy of the Washington County Library.

The first was The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, a book I’d reserved because I’d enjoyed his “The 4-Hour Workweek” several months before. Ferriss spends a few chapters discussing what he calls the Slow-Carb diet. The science and research he cites are fascinating, but essentially his plan boils down to five points (borrowed from here):

Rule #1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates. Don’t eat bread, pasta, rice (brown or white), grains, potatoes, breaded fried food, or dairy on your slow-carb days.

Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again. Meals should include protein, legumes, and non-starchy vegetables. Eat as much as you like three to four times per day.

Rule #3: Don’t drink calories. Avoid milk (including soy), sweetened soda (no more than 16oz of diet), and fruit juice. One or two glasses of red wine are permitted.

Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit. Tomatoes and avocados are okay (the latter in moderation).

Rule #5: Take one day off per week. Go nuts and eat lots of calories to keep your metabolic rate (thyroid function, conversion of T4 to T3, leptin) up. Do at least five days of rules 1-4 before following rule 5.

Ferriss is a self-styled rule bender who has no qualms about blowing his own horn and abusing himself to make a point. His tone can seem a bit extreme.

At this time, I was also writing an article about library lending of ebooks. I was testing out the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color, and while I’d been on the Washington County Library2Go site (the library's vehicle for digital content lending), a book called The 6-Week Cure to the Middle-Aged Middle had caught my eye. I’d never read a health book in my life, but hey. I was 40. I clearly had a middle-aged middle. So I stuck it on the NOOK and promptly forgot about it. Then I read Ferriss’s book, remembered this Dr. Eades title, started reading it, and realized that these two guys, coming from radically different approaches and backgrounds, were saying essentially the same thing.

The message was loud and clear: carbs will slowly kill you, and the worst offender of all is sugar. The evidence detailed by these authors paints an increasingly damning picture of carbs, not fat, being a primary culprit in our society’s worst ailments, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer—all of the main killers in my family.

From these two books, I started reading several more of Eades’s books, including his groundbreaking title, Protein Power. I also highly recommend his blog. It didn’t take me long to find Gary Taubes’s article on sugar in The New York Times or Taubes’s own book, Why We Get Fat. Knico found Mark Sisson’s blog, Mark’s Daily Apple, and his Primal Blueprint series. Once you dig into the low-carb subject and its various offshoots, such as the paleo diet, you discover that there is a huge amount of good information available and a quickly growing body of scientific study showing that most of the conventional “wisdom” we grew up with is little more than a fallacious fabrication that began around 1970. We have been living a lie, and now it’s killing us by the millions.

I won’t drag this out with a long discussion of these resources. Over a few weeks, I modified Ferriss’s rules with some advice from Eades and others, and it’s a mix that works for my wife and me. For example, we’ll eat a handful of berries every other day or so in a protein smoothie. (Berries have a lower sugar load than most other fruits.) We don't eat the same foods every day. Actually, Knico has bought several low-carb cookbooks, and the food, including the desserts, is downright tasty once you stop expecting a mouthful of sugar. Occasionally, we’ll indulge in a little espresso with cream (not milk, since it elicits a higher insulin response). As Ferriss advises, we do air squats around bad “cheat” meals. If you’re interested, you now have the links, or you can email me. But rather than bog us down with more theory, I’m going to show you my own daily log.

My nearly six months of measurements are HERE.

I’m pretty bad with spreadsheets, and I don’t know how to properly format Google’s system in particular, but the data is all there. Red denotes “cheat” days, as per Ferriss’ plan, and I’ve tried to make notes about the cheat foods and other miscellaneous items along the way. If you just want the key points, here they are:

1) Weight loss starts fast and then tapers off as you get closer to your “ideal” weight.
2) Air squats and wall pushes around cheats will cut your upward weight bounces significantly.
3) There will be plateau periods and times when your weight ratchets up for no apparent reason.

Don’t pay too much attention to individual days; focus more on week-to-week measurements. If you’re stuck in a rut, look for trouble spots. My snag tends to be dairy. Ferriss cautions against it for a good reason.

Here’s how this data looks in chart form:

Of course, pounds only tell part of the story. Nobody can see how much you weigh. They can see your measurements, though. Here’s what happened to mine: (Note that variances in tape measurement position will often account for minor fluctuations.)

Measurements

Date	Neck	Belly	Waist	Hips	Thigh
6/21/2011	16.5	42.5	38.5	44.5	25.5
6/27/2011	16.5	41.75	38.5	44.5	25.5
7/7/2011	16.5	40.75	38.5	44	24.5
7/17/2011	15.75	39.5	38.5	43.5	24
7/24/2011	15.5	39.5	37.5	43.5	24
8/1/2011	15.5	39.5	37	43.25	23.75
8/9/2011	15.75	38.75	37.75	43	23.5
8/14/2011	15.75	38.5	37.5	42.75	23.5
8/21/2011	15.5	38.5	37	42.5	23
8/28/2011	15.75	38	37	42	23.5
9/8/2011	15.75	38	37	41.75	23.5
9/19/2011	15.25	38	37	41.5	23
15-Oct	15.25	36.75	37	41.25	23
26-Oct	15.25	37	36.75	41.25	22.75
31-Oct	15	36.5	36.5	41	22.5
8-Nov	15	36.25	36.25	41.25	22
23-Nov	15	36.25	36	40.75	22.5
12-Dec	15	36	35.75	40.5	22.5

You Can Dooo Eeeet!

I can’t count how many times I’ve told people about my dietary change and heard in reply, “Well, I can’t do that.” Really? Could you do bypass surgery instead? I hear they’re fun, especially for your kids.

You can do that. I’m doing it, and I plan on doing it forever. There is no “suffering” or deprivation. If I’m desperate for pizza or a luscious chocolate dessert, I have it—once a week. While I desperately need to start exercising and increase my fitness level, this is not necessary for losing fat. Exercise will help you be healthy; it will not make you thin. Read Eades and Taubes for the many well-researched reasons why.

Let me reiterate how comparatively easy this system is. I lose weight consistently while eating whenever I’m hungry. I eat big meals loaded with delicious food. I can eat a breakfast of ham, three eggs, beans, spinach, tomatoes, and salsa, be hungry two hours later, snack, have a big lunch, chow down another mid-afternoon snack (often peanuts, homemade jerky, or a berry fruit smoothie), and pile on a big dinner, sometimes even followed by another sweet, low-carb snack before bed. And I lose weight. Honestly, the only difficult part of this process was the first three days or so, when I experienced the lightheadedness, hot flashes, and weakness symptoms common with carbohydrate withdrawal. By the end of the first month, most of the sugar and bread cravings had gone away.

All of this works because I watch the carb counts. By and large, I’m eating the food that the human body evolved to consume over two million years of evolution, not the synthetic crapfest we’ve devised over the last few hundred years. I keep within a range of about 80 to 100 grams of carbohydrates each day. (Once I'm satisfied with my weight, I'll simply step up to 100 to 120 grams of carbs per day for maintenance.) I’m not interested in that 20 grams or less Atkins crash course “induction” business. Who needs that kind of punishment? I have a balanced diet that’s low in carbs and relatively high in fat. Does that mean my blood serum cholesterol and triglycerides are shooting to the moon? Obviously not. The lipid panels don’t lie.

Moreover, aside from weight loss and improved blood serum levels, there are plenty of other benefits to a low-carb/low-sugar lifestyle. There is slowly mounting evidence that the principles of this diet will combat and prevent cancer. Low-carb can similarly thwart diabetes. Unlike a low-fat diet, it will reduce the amount of inflammation in your body, which is increasingly thought to be at the heart, if you will, of coronary disease. The huge energy swings that used to plague my afternoons have vanished. Apart from the fact that it takes longer to cook a meal than pull it out of a box, there isn't a single downside to this system.

Mark Sisson (Primal Blueprint) at age 56.
I know: shut up, right?

So...do you need to get healthier? Are you interested yet? I promised myself that I would make this information public when I hit my goal of losing 40 pounds before my 41st birthday. I barely made it, and others doing this along with me have easily surpassed my mark. Forty pounds is nearly twice the weight loss I saw in 2010, achieved in less time and with far less trauma. This is literally the only sustainable, sensible diet system I've ever seen in my life, and the only thing you need to buy is regular groceries.

It works. Consider following my suggested reading links or feel free to send me questions. What you find out just might save your life.

Being Deaf to Negativity

2011-11-28T23:46:00.001-08:00

My Granddad encouraged me to read the classics of self-improvement during my teen years: Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, etc. Somehow, Napoleon Hill was omitted from his roster. I'm finally reading (listening to) it for the first time now in the abridged version, although I'm liking it more than enough to go back for the five-volume work that was originally commissioned by Andrew Carnegie in 1925.

I came across a story in the book tonight that I thought I'd share with all of you. It's timely for the holidays. The author, Hill, was in a department store one day, standing in line at the customer service station. Before and behind him were mostly women, blazing with rage about some product or service that had gone bad. Hill describes the vitriolic hate that these patrons were heaping upon the lone customer service rep tasked with addressing their complaints. One after the next, these patrons would be hateful, irrational, and outright insulting, but the service rep met each of them with a smile, responded with care, and attentively sent each patron on her way to get a resolution. While each patron was busy spewing forth with her tirade, another employee sat behind the service rep taking notes. At some point before the end of the exchange, the note taker would pass a sheet to the service rep.

This greatly intrigued Hill, who admired the service rep's grace, charm, and patience. He sought out the manager and inquired about it. The manager explained that the service rep was stone cold deaf. She couldn't hear a word anyone was saying to her. The woman sitting behind her was taking notes on everything each patron was saying -- minus all of the invective and expletives. It was this note that the rep was using to guide the patron to a final resolution. Choosing a deaf person for the job was necessary, explained the manager. No one else could do it.

We all can benefit from more patience and willingness to hear the real story rather than the emotional obfuscation layered on top of it. I in particular need to take this lesson to heart, but perhaps it's something that all of us can keep in mind during the month ahead.