I’ve done enough last-minute marketing about the book. Rather than do that here, I’d rather just talk honestly about it. Four quick lessons from this project:

1. I didn’t want to do it.
When the idea was first pitched we had about three and a half weeks to pull it off. Honestly, I’d had the same idea months earlier but I kept it to myself. Why? I don’t know. It seemed like something we could do eventually. I knew it would come down to a rushed project and I dreaded that. I think deep down I wanted someone else to come up with the driving vision and make it happen. Let someone else take the responsibility. That’s about what happened. (Confession: I’m not a leader.)

Now that’s it’s over, I’m glad we did it. We’ll see what the results are, but I think it was a smart move. It’s well-timed to be a good resource.

2. Fast is good.
This project happened fast. Like, 20 days fast. That’s a little crazy. But sometimes I think we need that. Too often we over-think ideas and turn them into these big huge things that can’t stand up on their own and collapse under all our expectations. Sometimes it works better to shut up and crank something out.

3. Help is good.
We had a lot of great people helping on this project. We had a team of three people giving editorial direction. We had more than a dozen contributors. We had someone do the layout. Someone else did the design. Someone else got the ebook working (long story). Collaboration is an amazing thing. Sometimes I wish we had more. (Marketing plan? Oh yeah, I guess we could use one of those.)

4. Scared.
I’ve published several books now. I’ve got a once-a-year streak going that’s kind of fun. You think I’d be used to this by now. But to be honest, I’m scared. I’m a little panicked about how people are going to respond to this book. Are they going to hate it? Did I forget something? How many horrible, ridiculous typos are there? Did I make some huge mistake and I should be embarrassed to call myself an editor? Will they be mad because it’s too short? Will they be annoyed that the content is available elsewhere? Will it be worth all the effort? So many doubts. So many fears.

I think that’s part of being a writer. I think that’s part of being creative and putting yourself out there. It’s scary.

It’s a Robinson Crusoe type story where an astronaut is abandoned on Mars. But he’s a mechanical engineer and botanist who puts his know-how to work to stay alive and wait for rescue (which will take years). He has to use spare parts, his own excrement and controlled explosions to create water, grow food and keep himself going. It’s an incredible work of seat-of-your-pants engineering, and yes, duct tape plays a role.

The main character, Mark Whatley, has a self-effacing, sarcastic style and records his experience in a journal. We also get glimpses of Mission Control back on Earth trying to sort things out and the crew that abandoned him. Much of the story is Mark figuring out how to do things, like create more water from the chemicals on hand so he can grow food. Just when the explanation starts to get too scientific, he cracks a joke and moves on. I have no idea if all the science know-how would actually work, but it sounds totally believable to a non-scientist like me. Andy Weir did some incredible research. Even if he’s wrong, he does a great job faking it.

While cataloging how much air, water and food he has and thinking through how to grow a garden on the harsh environment of Mars could potentially be boring, it’s not. It’s gripping, has plenty of ups and downs and is funny enough that it’s not at all a story about a loner on Mars trying not to go crazy.

It’s a pretty sci-fi heavy book (uh, Mars, hello!), so I’m not sure what kind of mainstream appeal it would have, but the sci-fi folks are going to love it.

And you better act now to get it. The book was picked up for major publication, which means the digital version is going to disappear soon. Soon as in April 30. You’ve got less than a week to grab the digital version, otherwise you have to wait until the print version comes out in February 2014. As if you need any further prodding, the digital version is only 99 cents right now. That’s an absolute steal. But get it now (even if you won’t read it for months), cuz it’ll be gone April 30.

Yay for awesome books that got their start and attention through self publishing.

It’s always difficult marshaling my thoughts in the wake of these tragedies. Everything is a little scattered and disjointed.

News Coverage
As has become the norm, this is another event I learned about through social media. I saw the first comments about an explosion at the finish line of the Boston Marathon (my first thought: They run the Boston Marathon on a Monday?) on Facebook. I hopped over to CNN for details, found the barest sentence of an update and went back to social media for all kinds of updates. Seems like it took less than 20 minutes for photos and video of the blast to surface. Vague details, misinformation, ridiculous speculation and stories of the triumph of the human spirit were all flowing.

I turned on network TV coverage for only a few minutes, just to watch the president’s address, and was quickly pushed back to the Internet. I can’t stand the unending footage of shaky cam footage of carnage. I much prefer the news online where I can pick and choose what I want to see, decide for myself whether that video is worth watching, get the warning about gruesome photos and decide if I need to see that.

It’s a different experience. Though the need to know something, anything, is pretty much the same.

ContextRight now this attack feels huge. It will be interesting to place this event in context once we have some distance. It’s not Sept. 11 big, but it has that kind of feel to it. While the number of injuries is enormous, so far the deaths are, thankfully, relatively low.

I think the manner of the attack rather than the impact is what makes it feel so large in my mind. It wasn’t just some random bombing, it was targeting a major sporting event that draws half a million people. It’s also the first major attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11. While we still don’t know much about the attacks, the manner of them—what appears to be IED-type bombs like what our soldiers face in Iraq and Afghanistan—in some ways brings those conflicts home. It’s too early to know if there are any connections, but it’s a similar style of attack.

Finally what makes it feel larger in my mind right now is perhaps the way I’m experiencing it with almost immediate social media updates. The 1996 Atlanta bombing at the Olympics would be pretty comparable—major sporting event, two dead, more than 100 injured. Though my experience of that event was extremely limited. I would have been in high school at the time and would have paid minimal attention to the news. I knew it had happened, but I don’t remember following the updates. While the Olympics was obviously covered pretty heavily, we didn’t have the civilian photos and videos like we do now.

For better or for worse, that allows us to experience these violent events more intimately. It gives us a small taste of what some people around the world experience on an almost daily basis.

I Want to Run
One thing I do feel after the Boston bombings: I want to run. I’m not much of a runner, but I’ve been getting into it, slowly trying to build up my endurance. I don’t know if I could ever run a marathon (I don’t think I’ve even run five miles at once yet), but at times I think about it. I usually run on Tuesdays, so running today isn’t anything special, but it is important that we get up and keep moving. In my own little act of defiance against our attackers and in a show of support for those hurting in Boston, I’m going to run.

Update: I ran five miles this morning (and didn’t collapse).

Mark always has cool stuff up his sleeve. Now there’s an Indiegogo project to fund a documentary about Mark’s work and a social game to help fight homelessness. It’s a cool concept and more than just a movie about Mark, there’s a smartphone game that can get people involved and push them towards real activism.

They’re trying to raise $100,000 in 37 days, which seems like a tall order. They’ll need to raise $2,700 a day. Yesterday they raised $396. So they need your help.

It’s also backed by a nonprofit, so it’s tax deductible.

Check it out and consider supporting the @home campaign:

The good news? She didn’t like Episode III (who does?).

The bad news? She liked Jar Jar Binks.

You win, some you lose some. I guess. Lexi became a Star Wars fan last year when she watched the original trilogy with me. It seems the defining question of our generation is in what order will you let your kids watch Star Wars? Though it’s more a question of fandom. I’ve never met a Star Wars fan who wanted their kids to watch the prequels first. My nephew watched the prequels first (and as of last year had no idea who Luke Skywalker was!), but my sister-in-law is no Star Wars fan.

As much as I dislike the prequels, it is fun watching them with my kids. Just entering the Star Wars universe with them is enjoyable, even if I groan every time Jar Jar speaks while both Lexi and Milo bust a gut. For all the failings of the prequels, it’s still Star Wars. The music still crescendos just right even if the kid on screen can’t act (in all fairness, Luke was pretty whiny in Episode IV). While I’m leery of what Disney will do with a new batch of Star Wars, I’m also excited to see more of it in the theater again.

Sidebar: There could be a thousand lessons of what not to do from the prequels, but one thing I realized from this recent watching is I wish the light saber battles would get sane again. In the original trilogy they were pretty basic sword fighting. But with the prequels basic sword fighting was too old school and we had all kinds of ridiculously choreographed fight scenes. It got to the point where you couldn’t even tell what was happening. And it got non-sensical: In one scene in Episode III Count Dooku (I still laugh at that name) is fighting Obi-wan and Anakin with a single light saber. How is it that two light sabers can’t beat one? Never mind the lava-hopping ridiculousness of Obi-wan and Anakin’s showdown that comes down to who has the higher ground. It makes their final showdown in Episode IV look like a geriatric duel. Light saber battles are pretty sweet, but I hope in the new movies we can go back to sane light saber fights and not try to come up with zanier choreography.

Another thing that I love about the originals (and is only now standing out to me in contract to the prequels) is Luke’s insistence that there’s still good in his father. Those lines have become so commonplace that it’s hard to recognize how controversial they are. The scary, evil bad guy who chokes people from across the room, seemingly for fun, somehow has good buried under that creepy mask? Not only does Luke insist on it, he lays his life down to prove it. And he’s right!  A hero who throws down his weapon and refuses to fight? A villain who can be redeemed? I don’t think I’ve ever considered that Star Wars delivers a pacifist message, but there it is.

The best news from watching the prequels? Lexi’s favorite episode is the original. All is right with the world.

And a few fun links that always come up when I talk Star Wars:

• The profanity-laden Harry Plinkett reviews: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith
• R2-D2 and Chewbacca as leaders of the rebellion
• Troops, the Star Wars cops parody is one of my favorite Star Wars fan videos.
• Speaking of Star Wars fan videos, these sexy light saber fights crack me up: Original, sequel and a third one.

Writing that kind of a genre-specific book in that kind of a literary-focused environment, you learn a thing or two about genre shame. Much of Roth’s post talks about the writing end of genre shame.

But she also starts with the fact that genre shame kept her from enjoying reading for years:

The last time (excluding the past three months) that I remember loving to read was eighth grade. That’s right: eight years ago. What happened, you ask? People told me I was too smart to read what I liked to read. They said I should be reading “college-level books.” I started to feel ashamed of what I wanted to read, and I tried to read what I was “supposed” to be reading. But the problem was that I didn’t enjoy those books, and I couldn’t force myself to enjoy them, and I hated feeling like I was stupid for not liking them, so I stopped reading altogether.

That’s complete and total crap.

A book has to be snooty enough to be worth your time? Please. We should read because we enjoy it, not because we have to. Not because it’s good for us. Not because it’s labeled a classic. There are so many classics that have ruined reading for people because they were forced through an awful book. If I had to read Tess of the D’Ubervilles again I probably would give up on reading.

I can’t finish a Hemingway novel.

I hated Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

I have zero interest in Charlotte Bronte.

But you know what? That’s OK. Read what you love. It’s OK to read that smut novel. Or yet another vampire story. Or more space marines. Whatever floats your boat.

Go ahead, it’s OK.

Don’t waste your time being ashamed of your favorite genres. Don’t feel like you have to read the classics because they’re the classics. Whatever. Find your own classics (I’ve started my own list).

I love reading young adult fiction with teen characters struggling to find out who they are (13 Reasons Why).

I love reading realistic space sci-fi, light on the aliens, heavy on the application of big ideas (Old Man’s War).

I even have a soft spot for a good zombie novel (Zone One).

And I’ve mentioned my love for post-apocalyptic sci-fi too many times (Wool).

If you like the classics, great. But don’t force them on the rest of us. Read what you love, and don’t be ashamed.

Duh.

OK, so this isn’t ground-breaking territory. But I’m seeing the implications in my daily life much more than I have before.

So there are a few ways to get entertainment content, which vary slightly depending on medium:

• Experience – You go somewhere and you experience your entertainment. This happens primarily with music and movies. You go somewhere and either watch a movie or see a concert. You’re paying for a one-time experience. I suppose this method has pre-dated all technology.
• Broadcast – The entertainment is free, but you have to watch ads. This is the commercial-supported model of TV and radio. Again, you’re only getting a one-time experience.
• Ownership – As media has become cheaper and smaller, ownership has become a relatively recent option. You can purchase your entertainment in your preferred medium and enjoy it as long as you like.
• Subscription – This is the newest model championed by Netflix and Hulu Plus for movies/TV and Spotify for music, among others. You pay a monthly fee and get access to a nearly endless archive of on-demand music, TV and movies.

Now I’m horribly simplifying everything. I’m ignoring cable TV, commercial-supported on-demand options like Hulu, public radio, etc. It’s also interesting to see how books fit in, since there’s no real book broadcast or experience situation, though there is a free subscription option (the library!).

I think generationally we find ourselves in different spots on this continuum. My parents tend to be primarily in the broadcast camp. While my dad will go to the movies still and does own his share of DVDs, he primarily watches broadcast TV. He’s more likely to watch whatever movie is on as opposed to picking a DVD he owns.

I’ve always found myself in the ownership camp. I don’t like watching TV or movies on a broadcast schedule. I’d rather own the TV show and watch it whenever I feel like it. I want to watch Star Wars when I feel like it, not when SpikeTV decides it’s a Star Wars holiday.

I have friends who are in the subscription camp. They see no need to own anything when they can have instant access to it through a subscription. For them, it’s simple math. They get way more entertainment from a subscription than if they spent the same amount buying content to own.

I’m rambling on about all of this stuff because I’m seeing myself begin to question the ownership option and consider subscriptions. I’m a cheapskate and I hate spending money on monthly fees, but for the past month or so I’ve been listening to Spotify (the free version, where I have to listen to minimal commercials). I found myself wondering why I should bother buying songs when I have them here at my fingertips. Access is a primary issue with subscriptions and those barriers are starting to come down. Spotify at my desk is only so helpful, but getting access on the go through my phone makes it a lot more appealing.

This all raises a lot of questions for me, and that’s really where I’m going with this:

• A big question with all these options is sustainability. Can content creators continue to make a worthwhile living as people transition through these options. In other words, if people stop buying CDs or digital downloads and just subscribe to Spotify, will your favorite musician still get paid enough?
• In short, is subscription a sustainable business model?
• If an artist gets paid every time their song is played on Spotify, I wonder if I should play my favorite artists through Spotify instead of buying their stuff. Initially they’d make a lot more with the ownership model, but overtime, as I play a song hundreds of times, would they make more with a subscription model?
• In short, which option is the greatest benefit to the artist?
• One of the reasons I’m in the ownership camp is because things change and I want to be in control. If I own the content, I’m in control. What happens when your subscription service jacks up the price or goes under? Is that just the price we have to pay for access to everything?
• Ownership is beginning to feel limited in the realm of TV and movies. Music is pretty transferable, but you can’t [easily] rip a DVD or play your Blu-Ray disc on a regular DVD player. As technology changes, it’s hard to keep your library of content current. Especially when the DVD of your favorite movie gets scratched up. Will ownership ever become format agnostic? Could I ever just get a new copy of the DVD because I own the movie (ownership of the content itself as opposed to the format)?
• In short, will I ever be able to own a piece of content and have access to it in the format of my choice? (i.e., buy a physical book and have the ebook and audiobook as well, or buy the DVD and get the digital and Blu-Ray versions) There’s currently some experimentation with this, but it’s still limited to a few formats—will it ever become future proof?
• This gets especially interesting with books, since there’s much less need to read a book multiple times (it happens, but not nearly the way it does with music, movies or TV). You’d think an on-demand subscription service would have a lot more appeal because of that. Amazon offers a limited version of this through their Amazon Prime membership model were you can borrow one Kindle Select book for free per month. I wonder if there’s a greater future in book subscriptions with ebooks?
• How does our free time and daily schedules play into which option we land on? Broadcast works best for people with standard 9 to 5 lives. I wonder if subscription and/or ownership have become more popular not because of ease of use, access or other reasons, but simply because of schedule?

These kind of questions fascinate me, both as a content creator and a content consumer. I think it’s especially interesting to see which option people tend to choose and how they justify it economically.

As an ownership person, I have no problem paying $30 for a DVD of my favorite TV show because I’ll watch it endless times whenever I want to.

A subscription person will laugh at me because for the same amount, they can watch almost any TV show or movie they want for three months.

And a broadcast person will laugh at both of us because but over a season they’ll see all the episodes I just paid for without spending a dime.

Finally, I wonder how thoroughly entertainment companies have explored these different options and what happens when one option declines and another rises? Surely they have to have studied these things. If broadcast dies will an increase in subscribers allow the price to stay the same, or will the economics change somehow? And is that better for us as consumers or the content creators themselves or the gatekeepers?

These kinds of lists are always hard and weirdly defined and vary greatly from one person to the next. So you’ll have to bear with me. I stuck to fiction and a sense of longevity, which I’ll try to explain next.

It seems that some of my favorites are books I keep coming back to. Either I remember the plot even decades later or the ideas the stories brought up just keep coming back to my mind. To be a real favorite it needed to have that kind of longevity. There are books I loved, but years later I couldn’t tell you what happened. Those are still good books, but they didn’t quite make my vaguely defined cut.

So here are some of my favorite fiction books from throughout my reading life:

• Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar
• From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
• Earthseed by Pamela Sargent
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
• Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
• Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
• Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
• Holes by Louis Sachar
• About a Boy by Nick Hornby
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Ask me tomorrow and I’d probably come up with a different list, but there you go. Oddly enough, few of my favorite authors ended up in the list (such as Anne Lamott, Barbara Kingsolver, Madeleine L’Engle, etc.), perhaps because while I love their writing, often their stories either don’t stand out or blur together because I’ve read so many of them. I couldn’t tell you plot points in Crooked Little Heart or Prodigal Summer, but I did love those books when I read them. For whatever reason, they just didn’t stick with me (perhaps candidates for a re-read?).

So what are some of your favorite books (regardless of how you define ‘favorite’)?

“It’s like that dude Journey says, ‘Don’t stop believing.’ Unless your dream is stupid. Then you should get a better dream.”

You might as well stop and watch the video now. It’s that awesome:

But the real story behind Kid President is even more awesome. Kid President is 9-year-old Robby Novak of Henderson, Tenn. He has osteogenesis imperfecta, a disease that makes his bones brittle and break easily. The move-busting Kid President has had more than 70 broken bones in his life, 13 surgeries and steel rods inserted in his legs.

“I’m broken right now, but I can still dance,” he says in his “True Story” video.

Robby’s positive attitude has always been infectious and he started creating videos with his older brother-in-law, Bradley Montague, just to goof around. They started just sharing the videos with family. But in July of 2012 they started posting the videos online and tweeting at @IAmKidPresident (the Twitter bio describes it as a “family project”). Three months later the videos were noticed by Rainn Wilson of The Office and became a part of his online venture and YouTube channel Soul Pancake.

Kid President is well loved in our house. Not only have we picked up on one of his best catch phrases (“Not cool Robert Frost!”), but there are some awesome similarities: Robby is adopted and has a sister named Lexi. Every time I get another glimpse of his real life, it’s as good as another Kid President video.

It’s fun to see kids doing this kind of online awesomeness. It’s this kind of thing I was hoping for (but couldn’t possibly imagine something like this) when I was working on the Kids Creating Stuff Online ebook.

Update: This is how the kids spent today’s snow day:

I finished reading Tell Me a Story by Scott McClellan this week. It’s good stuff (you can read my review for more). Something Scott talks about in the book that I resonate with is the idea that telling stories can be healing.

I’m not a particularly good storyteller—that’s probably why I’m a writer. I like to edit and rework and figure out how best to tell a story. I work better in the written word than the spoken word. But I think part of what draws me to the word is telling stories. It’s self-indulgent, but one of the things I like to write is simply telling stories about my life. In some ways, I think that’s because there’s healing happening there. The telling of stories allows me to process, to figure things out, to think things through and find meaning or comfort or grace.

That’s probably why, in my moments of greatest distress, I turn to writing. I tell the story. Some of those stories aren’t meant to be told to anyone but myself, but still I tell them.

In adoption, I think this is why it’s important that we tell the stories. It’s easy to gloss over what could be uncomfortable details and avoid those stories. But by telling those adoption stories, we give voice to them, we shine a light on any “messy” details and we find a way to embrace them. A story gives us the narrative to do that. It gives us a voice and something to cling to when we’re confused or fearful.

That’s powerful.

Not Telling Stories
Not everybody finds stories to be therapeutic though. I think of my grandfather again. He never talked about his experience as a marine in the Pacific during World War II.

Right now I’m reading Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, a book I started right after Tell Me a Story, that has a relevant passage for this discussion (one of the benefits of reading lots of books). The author, Avi Steinberg, is talking about his grandmother in a sidebar that has nothing to do with libraries or prison, but a lot to do with story:

“I would have to beg her to tell me about her life in Poland,” my mother once told me. “She would begin to tell a story, but as soon as she mentioned anyone’s name, she would cut it off and say, ‘But what does it matter? Hitler killed all of them.’ Every story was like that.”

For my grandmother, who escaped Poland as the clouds gathered for the Nazi invasion, storytelling was something worse than painful. It was a simple impossibility. As far as she was concerned, there were no stories. Stories develop, move in some direction. Stories have endings, need endings. Tragedies have a final act that implicitly allows the storyteller and the listener to believe that even cruel death retain some value–namely, their worth as a story for the living.

“I am dead, Horatio,” says the tragic Hamlet. “Tell my story.”

My grandmother did not believe in this. For her, murder ended more than life. It ended the possibility of telling the life’s story. “He has my dying voice,” says Hamlet, “the rest is silence.” Even in life my grandmother didn’t have a voice, just silence.

Avi describes his grandmother as detached and unloving. Silence pervades her life to the point that she can’t even tell the stories of the greatest tragedy and escape in her life.

I think that’s a second tragedy.

Of course I’ve never had loved ones murdered, so what do I know?

Silence vs. Story
But I have experienced pain and anguish. And for me at least, I find comfort in telling the stories. Perhaps not always publicly to a crowd or on a blog, but at least going through the process of telling the story and letting the healing begin to do its work.

More than just for my own grace, storytelling allows our pain and tragedy to become a teacher for others. The holocaust teaches us of the importance of standing up to tyrants and protecting the minority, the dangers of scapegoating and stereotypes, and the depravity that exists in all of us. The firsthand horrors of war would have other lessons for us, if we only we had an opportunity to learn them. My own experience with adoption (both good and bad) offers lessons, when I’m ready and able to share them.

Silence can be dangerous. We’re certainly not comfortable with it, and we often fill that void with something, anything rather than the silence. That can often be fear.

Sometimes silence is good. Sometimes our trauma and pain may need silence. But other times I think silence is a way to hide, a way to continue avoiding the pain and a way to give into fear. Story can offer a way through.

It’s why the work of Mark Horvath on InvisiblePeople.tv is so powerful. He gives voice to the voiceless, inviting homeless people to share their stories. Through the simple act of listening and allowing them to tell their stories, Mark gives them dignity.