Servusamanu.com

Why Authors Have Websites or How I Grew To Love The Web

I happen to be rather lucky.  I’m trying to be an author and I’m already alright at web design.  (This web page is not exactly my best work, but it’ll be getting tweaked soon.)

Websites really are a necessary resource these days.  Authors in particular need a medium to communicate new projects to their audiance.  For authors that stay within certain genres maybe it’s less vital, but any author that has books in a few different sections of the bookstore needs some way of pointing their audiance where to work.

In the case of George RR Martin and Michael Stackpole (the two author’s whose sites I visit the most consistantly) they always have some note on what their doing, what conventions their going to, writing samples, outside projects etc etc.  As a fan it’s fun and informative and kinda cool.  For the author’s it’s building up a brand, just like every other product and service.

This morning I was all about social networking. I threw a couple of status messages at facebook. Over the course of the day I probably assaulted twitter two or three dozen times with assorted minutae. This blog got a post. I was reading other people’s blogs, twitters, and facebook. Basically, I spent the day enjoying the sights and sounds of our mirror, digitized, society. I should probably be writing, but, hey, my story is set in the future. I have to have a healthy grasp of the current…

Anyway, via twitter, I was informed of Audioboo. (Specially via StephenFry. (Yep, of Jeeves and Wooster fame, among other things.))

AudioBoo is an application for the iphone that lets you record short messages and post them to audioboo. It’s a form of audioblogging, similar to twitter for recorded voice. It seems to be a happy medium between the lillipution delivery of twitter, increasingly commercialized facebook, and vain absurdly of videoblogging.

Already, audioblogging seems to be a positive direction for authors and people in general to communicate. StephenFry has his AudioBoo. Michael Stackpole has The Secrets Podcast and some other things.

Web 2.0 has been the catch all cliche for new technology, but…it’s exciting. I’m all about democratizing media. The days of New York Times and the Evening News have ended and a new world of open communication is taking place. The worst critics of social media deplore the overall quality of the writing. A valid criticism, one I fall under, but social media also solves its own problem. There are pieces of quality out there to be found. Compare: the number of tv channels with uninteresting content vs. the number of websites with uninteresting content. By percentage tv might win (5 channels out of 50, 10%, 100 websites: billions <1%), but by sheer number the internet wins handily. It’s not the medium, internet carries video just fine, but the openess. WordPress, twitter, myspace, facebook, xanga, now audioboo are all opening up the available mediums that can be utilized. The popularity of forums and newsgroups, even in the early days of the internet, show the general desire for open communication, regardless of ‘quality,’ and these new technologies are only giving greater means to an already present market.

Sadly, I don’t have an iphone, but Servusamanu might dabble with audioblogging in the future. I’ll be on the look out for other interesting programs that might pop up.

I wrote an article about the Kindle way back when. There’s a new one coming out and it’s not really that much better.

Gizmodo has an article here.

Too slow, too small, too expensive.

$489? Make it $150 and I’ll start to look at it. It should at least be competitive with an ipod, which can hold significantly more (and play musics, music etc etc. Why can’t the kindle combine all of these features?)

No panning, no zooming, no scrolling. Bah? The bigger screen is really nice and the textbook deals could make it great for students (maybe…a big maybe), but these half-hearted readers are just not enough to make way for a digital revolution in books.

As soon as they can halve the price, get it to at least 20 GBs of space, and add at least one non-reader functionality (music, video, file storage, wireless, email, web browser, etc etc), it’s just not enough.

IMHO as always.

Here’s a video.

Since Christmas I’ve been watching episodes of the old 1960s-70s Mission Impossible series on dvd.  I’ve worked through the first two seasons already, about 50 episodes, and there are five more seasons remaining.

Each episode is roughly the same : team leader gets a briefing via tape recorder or cleverly hidden speaker, he chooses a handful of repeating team members, they discuss the plan in quaintly decorated apartment, the plan is then set in motion to be completed with clockwork precision.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  It’s a simple, repeating pattern, and it’s the big difference between writing now and writing fifty years ago.  Mission Impossible, like Perry Mason and Flash Gordon and a thousand other shows, comic books, and serial novels was episodic, but not at all organic.

That isn’t to say I’ve not enjoyed watching my show.  The plots are occasionally quaint ingeneous and it’s entertaining to see how 1960s american solved problems that would take a few minutes on the computer, a rocket engine, or a SWAT team these days.   Still, each episode the characters have a new plot, but the same haircut, same nonexistant backstory, same changeless, ageless history and future.  There is no grand story arc, no characterization, and no link in time between one mission and the next.  Each episode is exactly what modern episodic fiction cannot be.

In my opinion, the last great non-dyanamic television series was Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Since then each new show seems to have a larger, more dynamic story arc culminating with shows like 24 and Lost.  The mini-series format has become the minimum expectation.

It’s no different with writing.  The lone novel remains a venerable and successful format, but within genre fiction (fantasy and science fiction) the trilogy and shared world are by far more popular.  Just as with television the expectation is on changing characters and a plot of ever-expanding scope.  In fact, given that the written word can carry so much more detail than a television show, these demands are exponentially greater.

I say this in relation to my constant pet-project: micro-fiction.  Short writing pieces can’t just tell entertaining vignettes.  There must be a greater story being propogated (I think X-files) and also characters that change and grow (and die) in relation to the demands placed upon them.  The expectations upon a story have just flat changed.  Pure escapism has given way to intellectual exploration.  Readers and watchers who run into brick walls stop paying attention;  the age of Dick Tracy is dead.  Even Batman is no longer the ever-vigilent Dark Knight returning night after night to foil the Joker.  Stories today are more complex, more vibrant…and for all the neat gadgetry and clever plotlines, have the potentially to be a thousand times more exciting.

Cartoons, that venerable section in the newspaper, home to Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, Beatle Bailey, and a thousand others…are dying. The entire newspaper industry is flailing, struggling to go online and capture readers.

News and shopping will always havean obvious home. People will actively search for information about the world and for items to buy, but what about comics? It’s not a necessity. It’s entertainment…it’s art. It has to compete, not with better comics, but with television, online video, music, video games, animation…etc etc etc.

And so our fates are intertwined. Fiction writing and comics are two industries that have classically been rooted in print publications that are moving and will have to continue moving to digital distribution methods. Newspapers are going to die faster than books will though, so the publishing industry should be watching closely. If cartoonists can succeed in setting up a subscription model to send comics to iPhones/iPods, there will be room to push fiction writing into the same domain. Looking at a picture and reading are not the same by any means, I’ve said before that I don’t think the technology is completely there for e-books to be popular, but it’s a path to follow.

As you can tell, I’ve made a couple of changes to Servusamanu.  Nothing too major, just some artistic modifications.  Tell me what you think!

December 23rd. The first modern Coelacanth was discovered in South Africa…or so says Wikipedia. It might not be the best source of factual information, but for ideas it’s great. Sadly, I’m still at a loss for what to write about. Sometimes the block sets in, but I’ve learned over the years that it provides a great opportunity to write about whatever comes to mind. Skip the plans and the outlines and jump into whatever impromptu inspiration strikes.

I recently finished Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat for the Xbox 360. It never ceases to amaze me how cinematic these games are becoming. Pacmac, not exactly known for its literary merit, is barely even recognizable as a video game these days. Modern games come with long and complex back-stories, sharp and unexpected plot twists, and gorgeous environments that can inspire as well as any Cezanne.

Call of Duty 4 is maybe not the best example, but any author that could capture combat half so viscerally would have Tom Clancy on the run. The story itself is not as implausible as any generic movie script. I very much look forward to the day when the literary merits of this new exciting medium mature completely.

There are certainly some games that push the envelope. Knights of the Old Republic has one of the best stories told in the Star Wars universe, vastly outstripping its source material (Cough episodes 1-2-3 couch) in quality. Bethesda, responsible for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, is responsible for creating worlds as vast and complex as anything made by Tolkien or Frank Herbert. The Baldur’s Gate computer game, which is related to Dungeons & Dragons (home to a great deal of brilliant writing itself) is a fantasy epic in its own right. Grand Theft Auto 3, San Andreas, and Miami Vice each tell a sardonic and cavalier crime story. GTA 4 went for grittier story and succeeded at least in some small measure.

Just as radio and movies have failed to negate literature games are always going to be a secondary medium for story-telling, but their emergence as a means of distribution and, more importantly, as yet one more way of immersing a reader is fascinating. Radio forced improved dialogue and movies lead to more realistic action. What will games give back to the literature that inspired their plots and backgrounds?

Just a few days ago I wrote an article on the g-speak, a computer that responds to hand motions. It seemed like a bit of science fiction come alive.

Well, here’s some more. (No that top picture isn’t real…yet). Now that we have laser weapons we’re presumably well on our way to having phasers set to stun, warp drives, and alien bartenders.

Once lasers become prevalent, what will futuristic warriors use in their world conquering adventures? Heinlein’s combat suits aren’t quite there yet and robot armies always seem to be out for revenge. Singularity and the bridge between AI and sentience is going to be an on-going drama for sure, but surely there’s room for humanity (and thus war) for at least a few more centuries. There may, perhaps, be a non-or-semi-sentient-robot-warrior niche to be filled soon. Presumably missiles would still be the most logical form of combat in actual space, but oddly enough you don’t tend to see them as often in space combat novels. And what about terraforming? Last time I saw that was Star Trek…

Before there was Servusamanu there was…well a lot of things, but also The Secrets!

The Secrets is both a few seasons worth of (free!) podcasts and a series of pdfs dedicated to becoming a better writer, getting published, and, perhaps most importantly, having a career as an author. Both are written and presented by Michael A. Stackpole, perhaps best known for his Star Wars novels. Personal instruction from a highly regarded and highly successful author is usually hard to come by, The Secrets is easily the single most complete resource I’ve found for all aspects of writing from designing worlds, creating characters, pacing a novel, getting it edited, finding a publisher, negotiating the world of agents, and having a…career…doing the whole process over. The podcasts do tend towards fantasy and science fiction writing (No surprise there), but I’ve found the advice invaluable even outside of so-called genre fiction.

As someone interested in the future of writing and reading, Stackpole’s opinions on trends in the industry are especially noteworthy. I intend to post in the future on using technology like facebook/craigslist/twitter/ipods-iphones-Kindles as a means of delivering writing. In the mean time I suggest listening to the fifth series of podcasts: on the future of publishing .

I do not own a Kindle. I also don’t have an Iphone, Touch, Blackberry, Sony PRS-505, or any E-books on my Ipod. All in all I’ve completely neglected the electronic book market. Old stick-in-the-mud that I am, I’ve largely refrained even from books on tape. For me there is nothing better than the feel of paper as I curl up in a nice lounge chair or against a creatively arranged cushion of blankets.

During the height of the dotcom years the e-book market was predicted to be huge. This article from 2000 quotes an estimated market of 2.3 billion dollars in e-book sales by 2005. However, this article from last year estimates the market to be around 230 million this year…but within five years to get to between 3 and 5 billion.

While it’s true that e-book sales are slowly going up (and the number of books available digitally has increased significantly), it seems to be a running trend to predict billion dollar revenues and see far more modest returns in reality.

This could be somewhat discouraging, but I think that is a niche to be exploited. Text messaging, instant messages, blogs, the iphone/ipod/touch proof that people are comfortable using small portable devices to read and receive entertainment. The failure of this market has been a combination of a market that has not exactly fostered adventurous purchasing. (Especially not right now. The dotcom boom seems a hundred years ago). Also, only now are e-books really available easily. Amazon’s push with the Kindle is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sadly, in my mind, three things really stand in the way. First, these devices are too specialized. The kindle is an e-book reader and not much else. No one really wants to carry around an extra device and if they’re going to, it needs to do more than just e-books. The phone, music player, radio, video player, test messenger, camera, web browser, email is on the way. If it has e-book capability as well, it’ll get used.

Second, these solo devices are too expensive. If they are going to be e-book readers they need be priced realistically. When faced with buying an ipod or a touch or a Blackberry vs. an ebook reader for the same price, the multi-use (and flashier) tool is going to win every time. Considering that buying books will likely outstrip the cost of most data/phone plans, the Kindle turns into a money pit.

Those are both technological concerns. For writers though, there is one thing they have control over. The works themselves. The few people I know who do a lot of reading on portable devices enjoy reading newspapers and blogs. They prefer short works that they can finish in 15 minutes. Right, wrong, or otherwise the market is changing. Micro-fiction and episodic fiction, like the old serial novels, have an exciting future in the world of electronic books. In a way it’s sad that the epic novel is such a niche pleasure, but there’s a great deal of creative potential in shorter, digital fiction that I, personally, look forward to exploring.