Above my desk I have a notecard with the words “DON’T TAKE WRITING ADVICE” written in fat blue sharpie. Just in case I forget myself.

Also don't hit that light switch

Advice is called ‘advice’ rather than a ‘solution’ because it doesn’t address a specific problem, and in that sense advice is worth less than a blank piece of paper. At least the blank piece of paper has the potential to say something that isn’t murky bullshit. Most writing advice ends up as a vicous slurry of anecdata, opinion, woo-woo, tough-talk and feel-goodery.

Which is the doom of any description of an enigmatic process.

I noticed the Sorcery for Writers and Readers (and those who love them) article over at the Tor/Forge blog. It highlighted for me the perfect storm of writing advice.

The author, Steven Barnes, invokes the amateur, unpublished writer, the favorite audience of authors with writer’s block. Go to any bookstore and notice the piles of books with titles like “HOW TO WRITE SO THAT YOU’LL HAVE MORE SEX AND SHIT DIAMONDS” scattered about the reference section. The amateur, unpublished author represents the permanent underclass of the fiction writing field. They buy what amount to woo-woo-filled self-help books and their existence strokes the egos of “professional” writers.

You may have only sold three copies, and all of them to your mom, but at least you’re not like them; those filthy, unwashed amateurs!

These amateur, unpublished writers, make so many mistakes and “will not read, for fear that she will accidentally imitate this or that writer.” Because no professional, published writer has ever avoided the work of his or her contemporaries while writing a story.

Oh, wait.

Permit me to quote a long exchange that I found on Neil Gaiman’s website, featuring quotes from a moderated discussion with him and the unassailably brilliant Terry Pratchett (source):


Moderator2: What writer or kind of writing to you find now draws you the most?

Terry: And no one else reads them now, except us...


Like any artist, Gaiman and Pratchett have their faults, but there cannot be any dispute that they are commercially successful.

Mr. Barnes then goes on to say that, rather than avoiding the works of others, the amateur, unpublished author should study the masters and experts that have come before. Not just their works, but also their beliefs, because “what you are looking for is the DIFFERENCE between the beliefs of successful people and the beliefs held by…well, not to put too fine a line on it, failures [original emphasis].”

Okay, we just did, and they’re telling us something quite different.

And now we have “failures” diminished to nothing but a throwaway noun. Good thing that we can ignore them, because they’ve failed to make a buck at their writing.

An axiom underlies everything in this article: a successful writer, according to Mr. Barnes, lies at the opposite pole from an amateur, unpublished one, no matter his or her brilliance or personal satisfaction with their craft.

I don’t pay my rent with my art, but my writing is one of my jobs. I am an indie author – none of the employees at Tor/Forge know who the fuck I am. So what? Some readers like my work and that makes me successful.

The author finishes up with the phrase “life is too short to reinvent the wheel every day.” I don’t agree. Art, and life, require us to re-invent and re-create every day. Life is too short to say and read the same things over and over again.

As the site’s grown, it’s been running into the walls of its cage, and so I’ll be starting to roll out enhancements at a blistering pace of “when I get a free evening and an open beer.”

Here’s what I have in mind:

1. Enable comments with Disqus. I resisted it because I like to roll my own and I’m the sort of guy who uses NoScript and encourages others to do the same, but as I’ve gotten involved in the web fiction community I’ve had to manage all sorts of logins myself and it’s making my ass tired. This is the first post that should have them enabled. Please give it a spin and tell me how I fucked up the implementation!
2. Fix CSS bugs around the site. I’m embarrassed about these so please forgive me if I don’t paste my list of CSS glitches here.
3. Organize and expose the stories more better-er. Some are everywhere, some are buried, and the only constant is that the hierarchy is rather unintuitive to everybody but me. Don’t worry: those of you reading via RSS won’t have anything change. I will always always always keep what I can available via RSS.
4. And finally, the issue that I’ve wrestled with the longest: money, donations and merch. The Guide to Moral Living in Examples (and by extension, all of my writing) does not pay for itself. The cash has come out of pocket and it’s been difficult to balance the expenses against the needs of my wife’s grad school, pet expenses and my addiction to barbecue sauce. Don’t get me wrong: I tell stories because I have to – when I don’t, I am grouchy and crappy and horrible to be around. You would be, too, if you had tiny gargoyles banging with hammers on the inside of your head trying to get out. And I am lucky enough to have an excellent day job that enables me to have this mighty fine site. But I have to get over my pride of asking for help.

Change is terrifying but we can handle it together because, remember, this site usually holds court with SPOOKY VAMPIRES AND HAUNTED ALIEN MUMMIES, so a little change don’t mean shit.

A pineapple gummy bear. Ick.

Pandora says that it “play[s] only music that you like.” And through feedback from the listener, it will ostensibly learn what attributes you enjoy in music and make guesses for future songs. I’ve had good luck with it – I’ve managed to craft some narrowly-focused stations that, while crossing genres, manage to capture a specific type of sound.

Pandora includes a skip function to avoid stinkers, but it’s a limited one (and when you invoke a skip beyond the limit the program shrugs and says that their music license “forces” them. A separate issue but one you can guess my feelings on if you go look at the list of stories that I have accessible online). If you upgrade from the free service, you get more skips.

What occurred to me today, though, is that Pandora’s pricing scheme incentivizes playing what the listener hates. But only sometimes; most of the time the songs have to be good. It’s like taking a bag of chocolate chip cookies and replacing a handful with cookies containing dried salami chips. Damn straight you want those skips.

Unless you’re some sort of salami masochist.