Once Upon a Dot Com

I was at Barnes & Noble last week.

Actually, I was at Barnes & Noble five times last week.  It’s my happy place.

Anyway, I was looking for a book on iPhone App development.  I browsed through half a dozen or so, picked the one I liked best, and checked the price.  I was not pleased.  On a whim, I checked the Barnes & Noble Store app on my own handy-dandy iPhone.  That's how I discovered the book was eight bucks cheaper from B&N online, shipping included.

*Sigh* Of course.  They have to do that to compete with Amazon.  Amazon, Amazon, Amazon.  Some days it seems like everything comes back to Amazon.  Well, it’s not as though they didn’t warn me...

The year: 1999.  Everybody’s got a job.  Everybody’s got stock options for their job.  Everybody’s got options, period.

I’m practically a veteran after only two-and-a-half years at my consulting firm, but I’m burned out on ninety-hour work-weeks and hundred-percent travel.  I’m lonely.  I’m also dead certain I can make more money.

A company called Amazon.com flies me to Seattle to interview for a developer position.  Amazon is THE dot com.  It’s THE dot com when every business wants to be a dot com and every one actually says “dot com”.

Its stock price is famously overvalued.

The recruiter who meets me is named John.  He’s wearing a T-shirt that helpfully informs me a life with Amazon is what I need to “Make Friends. Make Money. Make History.”

I roll my eyes while his back is turned.

My technical interviews go well, but they can tell my heart isn’t in it.  John wants to know my concerns.  I tell him I have a new house on half an acre back in Ohio.  “Oh, you’ll never have that here in Seattle,” he says.  I tell him I’m worried the stock options won’t be worth anything by the time they vest.  He’s visibly offended.  I tell him I’m a little sad about moving away from all my friends.  He wonders if I can handle the stress.  He tells me that Amazon dot com is so very important that if a problem arises on Friday and it takes until Tuesday to fix it, no one goes home until Tuesday.  I try to tell him I’ve spent two years doing really important stuff under a lot of pressure, but he seems to think I don’t understand the definition of the word.

I’m still in Seattle the next day when he calls.  “We’ve decided not to go ahead with you.”

“Yes,” I say, “I agree that’s best. Thanks so much for-“

“I don’t think you understand what you’re giving up here!  This is where everything is happening,” he says, “this is the future!”

I try to keep my tone even.  “John, with all due respect, if you aren’t going to extend an offer, what difference does it make?”

He’s quiet for a moment.  “I just can’t understand why you would want to go back to Ohio.”

I don’t tell him I’ve decided to accept the offer from Microsoft.

Anyhoo, I put the iPhone book back on the shelf.  I decided to order it when I got home, then forgot, and then decided I didn’t really need it after all.

You Just Have to Read It Yourself

Another delightful report from THE INTERN.

Daydream

I spent most of this morning in a conference room.  It's a nice room, clean and cool with two walls worth of windows overlooking the sunny Dallas skyline.  Working from home as much as I do, I actually enjoy the occasional meeting.  (It helps that I love the people I work with.) This meeting was particularly pleasant because the agenda gave me plenty of intervals to daydream.

I imagined I was in a meeting about my novel.  For the purposes of revision, I had spawned an entire organization of Mini-Mees, and now the department heads for Character and Pacing were negotiating the fate of a back story.  The Director of Plot, flanked by the Conflict and Action Managers, worked out some problems with the Language Committee.  Meanwhile the Show-Don't-Tell (SDT, not to be confused with STD), and Does-It-Make-Sense (DIMS) Leads were trying to reconcile their cost-benefit spreadsheets.   The Director of Dialog was muttering to herself; the Punctuation Counsel frowned.

Clarity of Night Short Fiction Contest

My entry for the current Clarity of Night Short Fiction Contest is now up here.  I hope you'll take a moment to read it along with some or all of the other entries.  Plus, there's still time to enter yourself if you're game!

I'm really excited about this contest as I'm a little desperate for feedback right now as I start the second draft of the novel.

Just kidding!  I'm a writer, therefore I'm desperate for validation.

The Feel-Good Lie

Sometimes I have a problem separating how it feels to write something from whether or not I think that writing is any good.  Do you know what I mean?  Sometimes the words flow with such ease and satisfaction that I can't help but associate them with good; these are my darlings.  Likewise, I look upon the words I struggled for with a jaundiced eye; these are the red-headed stepchildren.  In reality, there is no correlation between first-draft effort and quality, so the feel-good lie just leads to bad self-editing decisions.

The obvious solution is to set the work aside until the emotional memory fades into a more objective perspective, then revise, then repeat.

When to stop revising is another question.  While time and exhaustive, iterative revision invariably improves my writing, it sure isn't improving my throughput.  But this gets better with experience, right?  RIGHT???

We Must Start Thinking of Content as Service

My new nook, successfully rescued from its polycarbonate chinese puzzle box of a package, has brought one of my pet subjects to the fore.

Look around you. You probably use less than ten-percent of the objects you own on a daily basis.  I bet a third of the mass you bring in to your home goes right back out as trash.  Meanwhile, the consumer culture of mostly-unused objects is breaking economies and wrecking the earth.

So I'm going to put this bluntly.  In the future, we won't pay for things.  We'll pay for the use of things.  We'll pay for the service that things provide to us.

Specifically, we won't pay for books; not even e-books.  We'll pay for the privilege of reading them.

My Nook Arrived!

I hold my brand new Barnes & Noble nook in my lap.  Unfortunately, I'm having trouble removing it from the packaging... despite having illustrated instructions on how to remove it from its packaging.

Do You Have a Lot of Books?

I estimate our family has around 3,000 books.  We made our entire formal living/dining room into a library, and still every shelf sags three rows deep in book.  We love every tome, but we frequently repurchase books we lost, thought we lost, can't remember who we lent them to, or forgot we ever purchased.

If you read this blog, you probably have a lot of books too.  So I would really like to know: do you have a system of keeping track of them?  What is that system?

The Problem of Uniqua

The Backyardigans is a very popular TV show for preschoolers on Nick Jr.  Its popularity is well-deserved; I could easily list fifty fantastic things about it.

But there's one interesting little problem.  Every episode involves the same five charming characters: Tasha the yellow hippo; Austin the purple kangaroo; Pablo the blue penguin; Tyrone the orange moose; and Uniqua the pink... lady bug?  slug?  alien?  They never say. 

Here we have a show in which every item, setting, and situation is imaginatively rendered but essentially recognizable.  Four out of five regular characters are known, reality-based types.  And then for no reason that is ever explained, the fifth is something completely different.  After online debates as to her species raged to the point of ugliness, Nick Jr. finally stated on their website that Uniqua is both her name and her species and she is the only representative. 

Uniqua entirely defies labels.  This fact is wonderful, healthy, and in a way, it's possibly the most realistic thing on television.  But it drives people crazy.  It's the elephant in the room.  It makes no difference to the stories, certainly no difference to the other characters, and probably no difference to the target audience of tiny children.  But to adults, whose brains are wired to quickly categorize, compress, and dispose of information, anything that defies our personal taxonomic systems gums up the works.  It's like that thing someone gave you but can't figure out where to put it, so it sits in the front hallway tripping you up every time you pass.   Eventually you'll see it as part of the decor.  But for a long while, it's hard to ignore.  And that makes it ingenius.

And... We're Back!

Hello one and all!  I hope you all had fantastic holidays and I wish you a truly wonderful 2010.

I've had a lovely break myself, but am more than ready to get back into the groove.  In fact, you'll see a quite a few changes here over the next month.  But for the sake of tradition, let's start with the New Year's Resolutions, shall we? 

Actually, I dislike the work resolution because it sounds very permanent - like closing doors - and I like to keep my options open.  So instead, here is my list of 2010 goals:

1. Finish revising the novel.
2. Spend more time doing things that make me happy.

There you go.  Simple, right?