News You Can Bruise

1. Paperhouse (1988)
2. Grosse Point Blank (1997)
3. Quick Change (1990)
4. Born Yesterday (1950)
5. Sinners (2025)
6. After Hours (1984)
7. The Iron Sheriff (1957)
8. Minbo: The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (1992)
9. The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
10. Claudine (1974)

Paperhouse isn't the kind of film I usually watch, but it was so creative and such a pleasant surprise that I had to give it the nod.

Games

The Crummy.com Game of the year is my new anti-doomscrolling game, Lost For Swords. It's a real hidden gem of tactical positioning. Apart from that I haven't spent much time playing new games. I'm glad Caves of Qud made it to 1.0 though.

Literature

The Crummy.com Book of the Year is Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe. I'm not wild about the plot but the worldbuilding is amazing and he's so damn good at putting sentences together. I've had the tetralogy on my shelf for a while and will probably read the other two books this year.

Runners-up:

• Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. Another banger from another master of sentence construction. The detective novel is a perfect match for Pynchon's sensibility and I'm glad he's found it.
• Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, the original novelizations by screenwriter Shigeru Kayama. The Godzilla-worshiping death cult was an interesting idea that didn't make it into the movie.
• Gaming the Iron Curtain by Jaroslav Švelch. This very readable academic work combines two of my top current interests: old computers and surviving a repressive regime.

My accomplishments

I dunno, not a lot, it feels like. I kept the lights on. I sold a Ravy Uvana story, "People of the Consortium of Worlds v. Rax, God of Misery", to Analog, and it was published in the final issue of the year. Two already published Ravy Uvana stories ("Stress Response", and "Meat") appeared in Chinese translation in Science Fiction World.

My procedural work appeared in Output, edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort.

I now work full-time at Bookshop.org and in 2025 I worked on a couple big projects, primarily the ebook store and reading system.

Thanks to the deadlines of my writing group I finished three new stories: "The Spare", "The Arcade, The Marble, The Door", and "We're From The Help and We're Here to Government". The Constellation Speedrun is still sitting around waiting for me to get an agent. I've got two new novel ideas but it's a struggle to get anything on the page.

"He's in love with Daisy," said Jordan, with as much certainty as if she'd added the tags and written the content note herself. "Maybe Tom," she hedged, "but Tom's an asshole. Daisy's nice enough." This belief of Jordan's — that Daisy was any less obnoxious than Tom — was the first of many alarms I missed as I dropped like a flipped coin on the unalterable trajectory of my relationship with her.

Available for cheap as an EPUB or PDF!

When writing the final scene, I also came up with a brilliant game idea: a robot-programming game in which the programming language used by the robots is procedurally generated on every run.

Surprisingly, the answer is—primarily—models trained on something other than English prose. Of the twenty-four stories in The Hallucinating Detective, I think the most interesting is "The Adventure of the Rapid-Fire Squirrel". The rift-coder model, trained on Python and Javascript repositories and programming problems, starts off thinking that figuring out whodunit is as simple as writing a solve function, but then starts interrogating suspects and exploring the imaginary crime scene. Many of the other models can't get past asking the suspects why they just said whatever (randomly selected) thing they just said.

I tried to vary up the prose styles in the prompts, from hard-boiled to comedic, but rarely did a model pick up on the request. I will say that em_german_mistral—a model presumably trained on and designed to output German text—not only produced very good English, but picked up that Sherlock Holmes could be a character in a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery: see "Sherlock Holmes and the Draining Pen Affair".

Finally, I want to highlight a beautiful, melancholy poem I discovered in the random Project Gutenberg selections that drive the dialogue in The Hallucinating Detective: "To His Brother Hsing-Chien, Who was in Tung-Ch'uan", written in the year 815 by Bai Juyi.

You are parted from me by six thousand leagues;
In another world, under another sky.
Of ten letters, nine do not reach;
What can I do to open my sad face?
Thirsty men often dream of drink;
Hungry men often dream of food.
Since Spring came, where do my dreams lodge?
Ere my eyes are closed, I have travelled to Tung-ch'uan.

Tommy stared at a blank concrete wall painted hospital green. He heard the hot-air hum of a projector starting up behind him. He squished his eyes closed, but the headband gave him an electric shock that jolted them open.

I did not expect to ever sell this story, because its satire skates so close to the edge of being simply bad. "The Procedure Sign" was directly inspired by an item in the ancient Strange Horizons "Stories We've Seen Too Often" list:

A mysteriously-named Event is about to happen ("Today was the day Jimmy would have to report for The Procedure"), but the nature of the Event isn't revealed until the end of the story, when it turns out to involve death or other unpleasantness. [Several classic sf stories use this approach, which is one reason we're tired of seeing it. Another reason is that we can usually guess the twist well ahead of time, which makes the mysteriousness annoying.]

More seriously, the story was also inspired by the experience of my own mysterious Event: being baptized into the LDS church when I was eight. Assuming the story has any real emotional edge, that's where it comes from.

As a fan of high-quality 2012 releases, I'm sure you also enjoy Subset Games' FTL, a death-in-space simulator that inspired certain bits of Situation Normal. Now I'm closing the circle with an fanfic called Try, Try Again, where I used the gallows-humor style of Situation Normal to tell a story in the FTL universe.

Wherever you find yourself today, I wish you a happy new year, and happy reading and writing!

The oven hissed as it turned rain to steam, moving less than a living thing would, but more than an oven ought to move.

“I suppose you should come in,” said Berl. It was a royal gift, and well-meaning, if a little patronizing.

This is my pandemic baking story, written in the depths of despair, a time now known only as October 2020. It came from Sumana's request to write a sweet story about a robot oven, as opposed to the grimdark-lite atmosphere of Situation Normal, which was about to be published. I think I did a good job, but Sumana still holds out hope for a gentler, more Bob Ross type of robot-oven story.

████ is a blackout piece made from the text of my unpublished novel, Mine. I've redacted every word that shows up in one of my two published novels, Constellation Games and Situation Normal. You'll see lots of names, places, technical terms, odd digressions on Cleopatra and zucchini, punctuation, and (I assume) typoes. That's it.

This is an appropriate source text since Mine is a story about people preserved as the things around them are erased, and then juxtaposed without context. But really, I could tell you it was about anything and you'd have to believe me... for now.

The big change I made after my writing group critiqued "Stress Response" was explicitly explaining why the stress response happened; no one got it and without that crucial piece of information the story feels like watching someone else's vacation slides. Many, many times my writing group has told me "Leonard, you need to explicitly explain the thing instead of expecting us to figure it out."

Two more stories of mine are coming up in Analog: "Meat", the first Ravy Uvana story I ever wrote; and "Race to the Bottom", a flash piece that explains why everything is so terrible. Both coming out next year, I guess? I've deposited the checks!

The first draft of this story was much more complicated, with a time loop and a parallel universe, plus with Dr. Miew denying to the end that there was any time loop at all. Way too complicated! A lot of writing the first draft is throwing ideas at the wall, and a lot of the second draft is seeing which ideas stuck to the wall and picking up the others.

"Two Spacesuits" has a heavy focus on one of my big writer themes: cognitive dissonance and the defense mechanisms we deploy to deal with it.

“You’re still doing it! Oh my God! You make up these stories to explain your behavior to yourselves. When one story falls apart you just switch to another one.”

As a writer I hope I don't come off solely as an observer of human frailty, but this is one of my favorite kinds of human frailty to observe. There's a bit of this in Constellation Games when Ariel and Dana are talking about Curic's ambivalence:

“We'd pick an option at random and create post hoc rationalizations,” said Dana. “Humans do it, too.”

In Situation Normal, Evidence causes this behavior as a side effect (this is why Evidence is called that!), and this is most clear in "We, the Unwilling," the SN bonus story, where Evidence pushes the POV character into ever more extreme states of cognitive dissonance:

“You ask the Internet about Captain Jim Kirk,” said Nor firmly, “and then we can do business based on a shared understanding of the facts.”

“I don’t want to,” said Kenta. There was nothing else to say. The only possible next step towards completing the mission was to avoid certain pieces of information.

Can readers expect a respite from further explorations of this concept in The Constellation Speedrun? My sources say no.

I have relentfully made fun of Analog in this blog over the past 15 years, but one thing I really like about the magazine is its tendency to publish clever humorous SF. My main regret is that Analog doesn't do those super-generic story blurbs anymore, so "Mandatory Arbitration" didn't get one. No problem, I'll just reuse an old blurb, let's see here. Yes, the blurb from Carl Frederick's "The Long Way Around" in 2010 will do nicely: "The ways a tool was designed to be used are not the only ways it can be used...." It seems the same is true of blurbs!

Now's also a good time to mention that I've sold a second story featuring Ravy Uvana, the space-bureaucrat heroine of "Mandatory Arbitration". I hope/assume "Stress Response" will appear in print next year. The character's really fun and I keep coming back to her. I've got a formula set up, sort of like Columbo. In fact, if I ever write an out-and-out Ravy Uvana murder mystery, it'll be from the murderer's POV and structured like a Columbo episode. That's a non-binding promise!

Brutus and Cassius, at the close of the scene is the first English novel written in the Tamarian language. The data comes from a bot I was working on when I decided a) this bot was going to be a ton of work for almost no reward; b) corollary, I'm kind of done making bots. Works great as a NaNoGenMo though! It's really fun to read.

(Cover art is by Brittany Hague, who did a fake book cover as part of Thoughtcrime Experiments way back when.)

My elevator pitch for Situation Normal is "the Coen brothers do Star Trek". It's a military SF story where no one is incompetent but everything goes wrong. Situation Normal is a direct sequel to my Strange Horizons story "Four Kinds of Cargo", but the crew of the smuggling starship Sour Candy is now only one thread of a plot that includes weaponized marketing, sentient parasites, horny alien teenagers, and cosplaying monks. It's the result of a lot of work for me and Athena Andreadis, and I hope you love it!

Here's our Christmas card photo. I impulsively volunteered to wear the Patience suit for an NYPL photo shoot that I don't think ended up being used for anything? I would not repeat this experience, but I'm glad I did it: I got a taste of what it's like to be the weirdo in Times Square everyone has decided to ignore. So let's start this Review of Things off right, with:

Books

The Crummy.com Books of the Year are the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirsten. I can't say enough good about these books: how they're fantasy and science fiction at the same time; how tight the integration is between worldbuilding, character development, and plot; and how varied the pacing is. I'm so glad that the Internet has let the books come out of midlist purgatory, find their audience, and give Kirsten a way to finish the series.

Some other notable books I read in 2019:

• Lifelode by Jo Walton (Sumana's recommendation for a Steerswoman readalike)
• The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre
• Minitel: Welcome to the Internet by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll
• Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson
• Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot by Vera Tobin (Of huge interest to writers but not, according to reactions when I talk about it, to anyone else)

I finished volume 3 of Mark Twain's autobiography, as promised. He's the Twainiest! Also, I recently learned about the incredibly sleazy tactic UC Berkeley used to keep copyright on this book until 2047, when it would have otherwise expired in 2003. The best I can say is that, judging from the contents of the autobiography, Twain himself would have approved.

I've been reading Bleak House for most of the year; it's slow going! But not for the reason I expected: there's a whole other subplot in here that I don't find super engaging.

Games

The Crummy.com Game of the Year is "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead", an open world zombie survival game that's also run as a modern open-source project, with pull requests and code review. Not only is this great for keeping gameplay fresh in these kitchen-sink roguelikes where wealth of detail is really important, it's really good to see on its own. This could be the gaming gateway that gets The Kids interested in software development best practices!

Other fabulous 2019 games I played include "Baba Is You", "Untitled Goose Game", "Dicey Dungeons", and "Super Mario Maker 2".

Writing

I wrote four short stories in 2019: "Meat", "Mandatory Arbitration", "User Error", and "The Scene of the Crime". Three of those stories feature a character who in one of my luckier future timelines becomes my Sherlock Holmes, a character who is remembered long after I and all of my other work have been forgotten. Very positive about this character, is what I'm saying. Really fun to write.

I assembled a NaNoGenMo novel: Linked by Love.

I'm getting much more aggressive this year about placing my fiction, so hopefully we'll see some sales. In terms of novels, there's good news and bad news and for now I'm gonna have to go with a big NO COMMENT.

Bots

I created only one bot this year, Secretly Public Domain, and I made it for a specific activist purpose which is more or less seeing results. As per NYCB passim I had some additional bot ideas, did the fun part of the work, and let the code sit in the programming/2019 folder of my archive.

I decided not to keep Almanac for New Yorkers going in 2020. There's one more year of life in the project, thanks to 1939, and the 1938 almanac for San Francisco, but the project wasn't super popular and 2020 isn't the year. Maybe later.

I do have two "just for fun" bot ideas that I'm gradually seeing through to completion. One of them is going to have to wait until I'm sick or otherwise mentally impaired and have nothing better to do than go through a huge amount of text, but you're gonna love it. And by "you" I mean "Allison".

I originally had a much different book planned, something that would take a single individual on a universe-shifting journey, but it proved very difficult to determine the relationship between the referent of a sentence and the gendered pronouns in the sentence. Gender is very important to romance novels, so instead I let the proper nouns do the work and left the precise relationship between Carlotta_n and Carlotta_n+1 a mystery for the reader to fill in.

Speaking of bots, the second package is Botfriend (PyPI: botfriend). This takes care of all of the boring parts of bot-writing (coding to the Twitter and Mastodon APIs, picking items from a backlog, scheduling posts), allowing you to focus on the fun of creating playful interventions into your friends' depressing social media experiences, bringing joy to all!

I've been using Botfriend to run my personal bots for about a year now. I recently packaged it, improved the docs greatly, and made it really easy to run from within a virtual environment. All you have to do is write the creative bit and put your publishing credentials in a config file. I hope it's useful to you!

Thanks to Allison Parrish for helping me through the realization that I could exploit the pip installation process to install Botfriend's user interface. It feels like an exploit, anyway.

First up is The IF Reader of Science Fiction, edited by Frederick Pohl in 1966. Not a lot of memorable stuff here, unfortunately. There's a Retief story ("Trick or Treaty") but it's not one of the better ones. Jonathan Brand's "Long Day in Court" provides more of the civil-service fun of a Retief story, but also has an unhealthy dose of the 1960s sexism that's generally kept on the back burner in Retief. I guess the best thing in this anthology is Fred Saberhagen's "The Life Hater", which is short enough to coast to a pleasant stop on its setup and its twist.

Honorable mention to Fritz Leiber's "The 64-Square Madhouse", a pre-dramatization of the Kasparov-Deep Blue match. This story was probably really fun in the 1960s but not so much today. But check this out. When I hear "3D chess" I think of Tri-D chess, the game Spock plays on hors-d'oeuvre trays. I've never thought of anything else as being "3D chess". But, this story mentions another way to do "3D chess" that's obvious in retrospect: a game with a stack of eight standard chessboards and pieces able to move in three dimensions. This sort of "3D chess" variant has been around since the nineteenth century, so Leiber didn't invent it, but he did come up with a cool detail where astronauts and Air Force pilots play 3D chess to show off their ability to think in three dimensions.

Next up: Sinister Barrier, Eric Frank Russell's first novel (first serialized in 1939). I love Russell's later stuff, Wasp and Next of Kin, and this is... a first novel from twenty years earlier. Not great. But I did really like its dramatization of the difficulty in determining whether someone has been mind-controlled into opposing you, or whether they just disagree with you.

Russell shows up again in Groff Conklin's 1965 anthology Great Stories of Space Travel, with "Allamagoosa", a nice story of bureaucracy. Other highlights of this anthology include Ray Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope", and Isaac Asimov's "Blind Alley", another tale of bureaucracy. Really solid stories, but each is exactly what I would have expected from those three Great Men.

In non-predictable news, Damon Knight's "Cabin Boy" is truly a Great Story of Space Travel. I had no previous opinion of Damon Knight's fiction but this story's way ahead of its time. Knight gets you into the mind of the alien POV character by translating the alien part of the story into a different type of genre fiction, and switching between sci-fi cliches and the cliches of the other genre. These days such postmodern techniques are common, but by 1951 standards it's really damn innovative.

You can read "Cabin Boy" on the Internet Archive. Its original Galaxy blurb was: "If you believe you can write a blurb for this story, go ahead. In all science fiction, it is perhaps the weirdest encounter of alien races!" By coincidence, this was also my proposed back cover copy for Constellation Games. I hate writing blurbs, is what I'm saying.

Library Work: In 2016 SimplyE went from a two-developer team with me as backend guy, to a seven-developer team with me as architect. We launched the SimplyE reader for NYPL patrons and started work on rolling it out to other libraries across the country. We also launched the Open Ebooks project, which led to our brush with power.

I'm not comfortable bragging about the SimplyE product because it needs a lot of improvements, and I feel like saying how nice it is will lead to people thinking (or at least asserting) that I'm okay with the status quo. But if you compare it to the status quo ante, it's really damn good. We took checking out an ebook from a 17-step process to a 3-step process. And I'm totally happy bragging about the team, which is incredible. For the first time I ran a bunch of job searches and decided who to hire, and I think the past year's work has proven I made good choices.

At the end of the year, NYPL recognized our team with a Library Leadership Award! To the right is our official team photo (two of the developers are not pictured). I think this is an incredible achievement for a team that basically didn't exist a year ago.

Writing: Late 2015 I pitched a number of novels to my agent and we decided on Mine, a Rendezvous with Rama type political thriller. Lately, though, I'm haunted by the pitch I wrote for Nice Things, a novel about the fascist takeover of the Federation. Sometimes when I sit down to write Mine I feel like I should be writing Nice Things instead, but most of the time I'm glad I'm working on absolutely anything else.

Progress on Mine is slow but steady. But slow. My increased responsibilities at the library haven't been good for writing time.

Short stories I wrote in 2016 include "Quest For Boredom" (which I... supposedly sold??? but haven't heard back), "The Girls Boys Don't Notice" (possibly the best title I will ever come up with), "Fool, Professor, Peasant, King", and the unsellable "Unicode Changelog", which I might self-publish.

Situation Normal is still on the Desks of Editors.

Bots: I've drastically scaled down my use of Twitter because I don't like what it does to my brain. As a corollary, I don't really like that my whimsical software encourages people to spend more time on Twitter. So I've stopped putting bots on Twitter. Also, Twitter randomly suspends my bots without telling me. After the completely innocuous Vintage Groaners was suspended, I decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

I've thought about taking down my bots in a fiery cataclysm, rather than letting Twitter pick them off one by one, but a lot of people get happiness from Minecraft Signs, Hapax Hegemon, and (finally!) Smooth Unicode, so I'll commit to keeping the big ones working at least. I have a solution in mind for my computational creativity going forward, but I'm pretty damn busy so it's going to be a while. I've been doing this stuff since 1998 and it's still something I like, so consider this not a goodbot, but rather au botvoir.

Here's the 2016 robot roll call:

• The Lonely Dungeon, my fave of 2016.
• That's Life!
• Anniversary Gifts, inspired by my and Sumana's 10th anniversary.
• The aforementioned Vintage Groaners. Location: Bot Heaven.
• Ingsoc Party Slogans. I admit that Twitter really is the best medium for this particular idea.
• A Time of the Day

I don't like prologues for the very reason I'm trying to write one: they're introductory infodumps. I usually skim them, unless they look like the Law and Order style prologues where the POV character dies at the end of the scene. But this book has so many POV characters already, I don't think I should go that route.

I talked it over with Sumana and she gave me the idea of pacing the prologue as though it were the first scene of a short story. That's something I've done before, so I know I can do it again, and it doesn't mean big infodumps, just more internal monologue.

I'd like your suggestions of genre fiction books with effective prologues. Prologues that made you say "yes, I want to read a whole book about this stuff." I can't think of many examples but I admit I'm blinded by prejudice.

The two site-specific installations that I hinted at earlier were custom scripts displaying variants on Ebooks Brillhantes and Hapax Hegemon. The text corpus comes from a scrape of everything linked to from Free Speculative Fiction Online. The software is a heavily modified version of Bruce, modified a) to stream data from a flat text file and create the slides on the fly, instead of trying to load 20,000 slides into memory at once; and b) when restarted after a crash/shutdown, to skip the appropriate number of slides and pick up where it would be if it had been running continually.

Unfortunately I never got a picture of both displays running side-by-side; if you have such a picture, I'd really appreciate it if you could send it to me.

Just after I set up the ebooks display, I met Greg Bear, who was at Foolscap running a writing workshop. We walked over to the screen and I explained the project to him. He said "I'd better not be in there." AT THAT MOMENT the screen was showing the quote "We zoomed down eleven" from this free sample of Blood Music. It was pretty awkward.

1. On Sunday I saw the 1926 Howard Hawks film Fig Leaves. I'll publish a full review in the roundup at the end of the month, but I couldn't wait to mention the dinosaurs! This movie (briefly) features two very cool-looking puppet dinosaurs. There's Adam's pet Apatosaurus, named Dobbin:

   

   Exactly as depicted in Genesis 2.

   More amazingly, there's also a budget-busting life-sized Triceratops that pulls a bus!

   

   Awesome! Not gonna spoil the review, but the first reel of this movie used all the good Flintstones jokes, thirty-four years before The Flintstones even premiered. Except for the unfortunate bus dinosaur saying "It's a living." in a morose voice. And I'm sure that's just because the joke would be really awkward if you had to do it with title cards.

   

   (Screen image simulated.)

2. If you share my belief that dinosaurs are the most interesting part of any movie that includes dinosaurs, you'll love Kevin Maher's deleted scene from King Kong.
3. A recent Ureddit course on narrative structure in short fiction used "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" as one of its example stories. I thought this was a) a good choice, and b) pretty funny, because I deliberately wrote "Dinosaurs" to be opaque to traditional analyses of narrative structure.

   If you'll forgive me being serious about a very silly story, here's what I mean. Nearly every plot event in "Dinosaurs" is a red herring. It's actually a New Yorker type story, in which a series of insane infernokrusher interventions leads to Entippa's epiphany that humans are exploiting dinosaurs' tendency to get involved in insane infernokrusher interventions for their own entertainment. (Those humans including, in a bit of Hitchcock-type moralizing, you for reading the story and me for writing it.)

   I wrote the first scene to have something very close to a literal Chekhov's gun. It's Tark's gun, or at least his desire for a gun. Later on, Chekhov's gun goes off: Tark gets his gun! But as soon as the literal gun goes off, Tark discovers that literal guns are loud and painful, and he throws it away. The Chekhov's gun was fake. Sort of like the keys in my old text adventure Degeneracy, which don't unlock anything—you're supposed to melt them down for the metal.

   But! In the Reddit thread dissecting "Dinosaurs" and the other example stories, the person running the class proves my intellectual superior. It turns out there was also a real Chekhov's Gun in that first scene: Tark's "killing claws", which are in fact used to kill someone later in the story, just like they would in a regular story about dinosaurs killing humans.

   I didn't even notice that. I'd assumed the human-killing scene worked because everyone knows meat-eating dinosaurs have claws. I didn't even realize I'd made a big deal about the claws in the first scene. You win this round, literary analysis!

PS: Never forget.

In fact, there's one subfield (profiles) where you could argue this book is premature. The way RESTful Web Services was a little premature in describing an OAuth-like system before OAuth was released. But I don't think we can wait any longer.

Back in February I discussed the differences between APIs and Services. That hasn't changed much, though we have added more stuff:

• A chapter on Linked Data, the Semantic Web approach to REST.
• A chapter on CoAP, the fabled "RESTful system that doesn't use HTTP", designed to connect embedded systems over low-power networks.
• An appendix that explicates the Fielding dissertation from an API designer's perspective.

This post is mainly my way of asking you to pre-order your copy of RESTful Web APIs through my O'Reilly affiliate link. That's a hypermedia-driven change in resource state which will get you the book in a couple weeks, and get me some extra cash. (I estimate about $1.70 extra. Don't do this if the shipping charge on a physical book is prohibitive, or whatever.)

But this post is also a back-door way for me to brag about what a great book Mike and I have written. You don't have to take my word for it. Here's the blurb we got from John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.

A terrific book! Covers a lot of new ground with lots of valuable specifics.

Here's Steve Klabnick of Designing Hypermedia APIs:

The entire time I read this book, I was cursing. I was cursing because as I read each explanation, I was worried that they were so good that it would be hard to find a better one to use in my own writing. You will not find another work that explores the topic so thoroughly yet explains the topic so clearly. Please, take these tools, build something fantastic, and share it with the rest of the world, okay?

You get the picture. I've tried to recreate the relevatory experience a lot of people got from RESTful Web Services, on a higher level, in a way that gives access to more powerful tools. Time will tell if I've succeeded, but I don't think I, or anyone, could have done much better. I'm really proud of this book, and I hope it helps you.

I think a lot of incipient poets get caught in the idea that poetry is somehow about free self expression, and that the best poetry is that which most freely expresses the self—which, of course, isn't true. Poetry is a genre that you have to be literate in and a toolbox that you have to learn how to use.

If reading a bunch of poetry is too much work for you, you should at least take the time to reverse-engineer the findings of this paper by Michael Coleman (also via Adam), which uses machine learning to model the differences between poems written by members of the Academy of American Poets, and poems written by the general public. It gives some clues as to how the genre works and what's in the toolbox. e.g.:

The negative association with the PYMCP variable ‘Rhy’—a proxy for the extent to which words elicit other words that rhyme with the stimulus word—indicates that professional poets use words that are somewhat unusual but not necessarily complex. Professional poems have fewer words denoting affect but more words denoting number. Professional poems also refer less to the present and to time in general than amateur poems.

Run your stuff through Poetry Assessor until you start getting good scores. Now you're a poet! Well, sort of. The machine-learning algorithm can reliably tag crappy poems as crap, but it mainly looks at vocabulary and I don't think it knows about scansion at all. I ran the first paragraph of Bleak House—three ponderous Victorian sentences—through Poetry Assessor and it got a 1.8, making it a decent twentieth-century American poem. (And it's a very good paragraph, but you see the problem.)

I formulated my "read a lot of poetry" advice because that was also the techinque I used to figure out if I had any more specific advice to give. (I don't.) While reading a lot of poetry, I got really into the work of former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Collins has written a number of what I would call "NPR poems", poems that you could imagine him reading aloud on NPR, some of which he probably did read aloud on NPR. He's on NPR a lot. And at first glance the NPR poems have more in common with stand-up comedy than traditional or contemporary poetry.

I think it's best to think of the narrator of a Billy Collins poem as a fictional poet named "Billy Collins", a man whose bouts of incompetence and perpetual lack of inspiration are exploited by the real-world Billy Collins. Stand-up comics do the same thing. I became very interested in how Collins is able to use this persona to do serious poetic work through poems that aren't serious at all—again, something analogous to what a good stand-up comic does.

Some examples. I'm gonna start with Cheerios and Litany, two poems I don't really like. These poems are about as confrontational as Billy Collins gets, but it's not because of their subject matter: it's because they're poetry hacks.

"Cheerios" has a Poetry Assessor score of 0.8--barely professional quality. In "Cheerios" the incompetent poet "Billy Collins" keeps trying to launch a flight of poetic fancy using the overwrought abstract language associated with amateur poetry: "stooped and threadbare back", "more noble and enduring are the hills". But he can never get it off the ground because the engine keeps stalling on concrete imagery--the objective correlatives associated with professional poetry. The problem with that is the concrete imagery consists of nothing but different breakfast foods ("waited for my eggs and toast", "that dude's older than Cheerios", "illuminated my orange juice"). So it's deliberately bad amateur poetry interrupted by deliberately bad professional poetry. Just saying it's a bad poem isn't enough. It's bad in a very interesting, bathetic way.

On the other hand, "Litany" has the incredibly high Poetry Assessor score of 4.4. (The maximum score given in the Coleman paper corresponds to a PA score of 5.2.) What's his secret? Collins spends the entire poem blasting out objective correlatives at high speed. Some of them are taken directly from other poems ("the crystal goblet and the wine"), some of them are allusions ("the plums on the counter", "the burning wheel of the sun"), some are original ("the boat asleep in its boathouse"). But as he shoots those images out, he classifies them, like he's working on an assembly line, or brainstorming the poem he will eventually write. "Litany" is the opposite of "Cheerios". Collins is hacking the part of your brain that evaluates poetry, pushing all your buttons with free-floating imagery. It's a bad poem because you don't know enough about the people in the poem to understand what the imagery means.

Some other NPR poems, arranged roughly in ascending order of seriousness:

• Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House
• Child Development
• Nostalgia
• No Time
• Marginalia
• Candle Hat
• Print

Pay special attention to "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House" and "Nostalgia", two hilarious poems that are literally highbrow stand-up comedy. "Gun" is Seinfeld-esque, employing the tricks of modern poetry to take an exasperating everyday situation and blow it up into series of escalating fantastic images. (In case you were wondering, its Poetry Assessor score is 2.2, squarely on the "professional" side.) "Nostalgia" (1.3) is more of a Steve Martin kind of comedy, presenting logically flawed arguments and the dumb things people say when they're arguing on autopilot.

"Nostalgia" escalates not to a punchline--a funny kind of absurdity--but to a reductio ad absurdum, a logical absurdity. That makes it a good transition to two Collins poems that, although they deal with ephemeral topics, are more serious and less jokey. They both deal with words, the relationship between words and reality, and the fact that we're always putting words into boxes that themselves have no relationship with reality:

• First Reader
• American Sonnet

"First Reader" (2.9) is my favorite Collins poem. I feel like "American Sonnet" is the most professionally composed of his poems, and Poetry Assessor agrees, giving it the highest score (3.2) of any of the poems I tested. (Apart from "Litany", which is a poetry hack.) I tried writing down some analysis but these two are easy poems to appreciate, so I'll spare you. I want to close with two poems that I'm not crazy about as a whole, but which do a really interesting thing in the last stanza: they anthropomorphize individual words.

• Paperwork
• Thesaurus

"Paperwork" shows fictional poet "Billy Collins" not being able to write a poem, dreaming in the end of gaining inspiration from an "ancient noun who lives alone in a forest." "Thesaurus" is all about anthropomorphizing words, but it's not until the end that the words leave "the warehouse of Roget" and take on independent lives, "wandering the world where they sometimes fall/in love with a completely different word."

Anthropomorphizing words is how Collins deals with the fact that poetry is a lonely business: writing things down all day, making sure to use exactly the right word all the time. Who else needs to be that careful about individual words? Stand-up comics, that's who. A punchline and a poem both rely on an unexpected word at exactly the right time. That word, when it comes along, is your best friend.

PS: Minor error in the Coleman paper which confused me when I was trying to convert between the paper's scores and Poetry Assessor scores.

For example, Robert Hass has two poems in the corpus, The Image and Our Lady of the Snows, which score in the high to very high range of .72 and .94, respectively.

Those numbers should be reversed. "The Image" has a score of .94 (PA: 5.2), and "Our Lady of the Snows" has .72 (PA: 1.1)

The Banks novel I read most recently was The Algebraist, and it was a mixed bag for me. The epic scope of Banks's imagination has always been a big inspiration to me as a writer, but The Algebraist is dominated by Banks's "normal human" characters, who channel that epic scope into activities I have always found really boring. I mentioned this in my commentary for "The Time Somn Died", and I assumed it was a side effect of the fact that there's just nothing to do in the Culture. But The Algebraist isn't a Culture novel. Its "normal human" characters don't sit around all day being post-scarcity. I'm just not interested in most of what they do.

Fortunately, eventually the spectacle and the aliens spin up and save the book. I speak mainly of the Dwellers, aliens who make their way onto my list of SF favorites for the way they combine Bertie Wooster joie de vivre with a complete disregard for the value of individual lives, including their own. Great stuff. I loved it. Colonel Hatherance: another awesome alien.

(The other flaw in The Algebraist is one I am perhaps too quick to notice in other writers. There's a puzzle, and a solution to the puzzle, but no explanation as to how the solution--which, by necessity, can be explained in a few paragraphs to a reader who's only been immersed in the universe for a few hours--has evaded all the in-universe people who've been desperately trying to solve the puzzle for thousands of years. That has nothing to do with this post, but I thought I'd mention it because it's a tricky problem, and if you start looking for it you'll see it a lot.)

After Iain M. Banks's The Algebraist, I naturally turned my reading eye to A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Communication Sciences (1925-1980), by Iain Banks. No, just kidding. It's a corporate history published by Bell Labs in 1984 to keep track of all the stuff they'd invented over the years. My copy used to be in the library of the Union Presbyterian Seminary in Virginia--not sure why they had a copy in the first place.

You might think these two books have nothing in common, but one commonality was clear as soon as I cracked the latter tome: they both start out super boring.

Unlike The Algebraist, A History of Engineering and Science... is boring most of the way through. There's a lot about switched telephone networks, radio and fiber-optic cables. That's actually why I got this book; I wanted to do research for an alt-history story about phone phreaking. But the details were so dry I'm either gonna give up on the idea or just read Exploding the Phone instead. Here are the interesting parts of that book:

• Bell Labs used questionnaires and statistical models to map 25 two-person relationships along four axes: (p444-448)
  1. equality/inequality
  2. competition and conflict/cooperation and harmony
  3. intense/superficial
  4. task-oriented and formal/socio-emotional and informal

  For example, the relationship "business partners" is characterized by equality and cooperation. It's slightly on the intense side of intense/superficial, and slightly on the task-oriented side of task-oriented/socio-emotional. The relationship "siblings" fits squarely into equality/competition/intense/socio-emotional.

  Bell used this breakdown to conduct market research, such as when trying to figure out how to sell PICTUREPHONE service.

• At Bell Labs, Béla Julesz invented random-dot stereograms, (p451-453) cousin to the Magic Eye puzzles that ravaged the countryside in the 1990s. Since you can only see the stereogram if you have binocular vision, Julesz et al used stereograms to demonstrate that infants get binocular vision at 3.5 months. By reproducing common optical illusions in stereogram form, they were able to demonstrate that most optical illusions happen in a part of your brain further down the line than the part that combines the separate images from your eyes.

  I'm not 100% sure what Bell thought it was getting out of this research, but it probably also pertained to figuring out why no one wanted PICTUREPHONE.

• And of course Chapter 9, "Computer Science" was pretty interesting. It had a lot about early analog computers, and the predecessors to Unix. A few choice quotes:

  p367:

  An open shop for scientific computing, available to all comers, evolved around these machines. R. W. Hamming's epigrams, "It is better to do the right program the wrong way than to do the wrong program the right way," and "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers," which stressed the role of computing as a servant to science, gained universal assent.

  p381:

  The low cost of film production on the Stromberg-Carlson recorder suggested using it for movies. R. M. McClure made the first computer movie at Bell Labs, a classified film of a cloud of incoming ballistic missiles and decoys.

  That would be an interesting film to see, because Bell Labs got its microfilm printer in 1961, so it probably predates 1967's Hummingbird (the first film on Wikipedia's timeline of computer animation) by quite a bit. But I can't find it online. It's probably still classified.

  p390:

  Curiously, the Bell System was sometimes required by law, as well as by engineering needs, to solve the minimum spanning tree, Steiner, and traveling salesman problems. In certain jurisdictions network rates have been based on these criteria.

Hopefully you see the problem. Nothing about those quotes, or about stereograms or classifying two-person relationships, is intrinsically more interesting than the stuff about circuit-switched telephone networks. It's all subjective. When I reached Chapter 9 of A History of Engineering and Science... I had the feeling of encountering the Dwellers in The Algebraist. "At last, this is my chapter!" But there's obviously an audience for that earlier stuff. I'm just not it. So... there must be people who really enjoy the human-centric parts of The Algebraist, right? Perhaps those people even enjoy the human-centric parts of the Culture books?

What madness is this? I knew that interestingness was subjective for nonfiction. As the author of a novel about alien video games, I am familiar with the idea that a reader might decide a novel is just not their thing. But it had escaped me that the same logic might apply within a novel. This made me re-evaluate the parts of Banks I don't like. However, I came to the same conclusion: I still don't like them, and I'm gonna try to avoid writing that sort of stuff. But it's not so strange anymore that there'd be an audience for it.

Last week I went to the Met and checked out an exhibit of prints from the Civil War. There's a Thomas Nast print from Harper's called "Christmas Eve", divided into two halves: the woman at home with the kids on Christmas Eve, praying for her husband, and the soldier in camp looking at a picture of his wife. It's a moving piece but at first glance there's not much to distinguish it from other "war sucks" pieces of the time.

But if you look in the left and right corners of the print, you'll see Santa Claus with his reindeer. On the left he's climbing down the chimney, and on the right he's driving through the camp, tossing out gifts. The cover for the same issue of Harper's shows Santa giving toys and socks to Union soldiers. These prints are the origin of the modern image of Santa Claus.

Nast first drew Santa Claus for the 1862 Christmas season Harper’s Weekly cover and center-fold illustration to memorialize the family sacrifices of the Union during the early and, for the north, darkest days of the Civil War.

Which are the interesting parts? How do you tell?

I went to law school, started a new job, and kind of gave up on writing for a while due to a supreme act of stupidity. I wrote this one story that I really loved, but no one would buy it. Instead of writing more stories and subbing them, as those wiser than I was would have told me, I obsessively revised it and sent it back out, over and over, until I eventually gave up, concluding that I was never going to be published again.

And then, in 2009, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson bought that story, "Single-Bit Error," for their anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments. The premise of the anthology was, in the editors' words, "to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy."

I can't tell you how much that sale meant to me. The fact that someone liked that story after years of rejections made me realize that I just had to find the one editor, the one reader who got my story, and it was enough. Instead of trying to divine what some mythical ur-editor or "the market" wanted, I felt free, after that experience, to just try to tell stories that I wanted to see told and not worry so much about selling or not selling. I got back into writing—and amazingly, my stories began to sell.

Case closed, I'd say.

Here's my announcement of RESTful Web Services from about six years ago. You can see how far we've come since then.

In 2008 I came up with the now-famous "maturity heuristic" (aka the "RMM") for quickly judging the quality of an API. If you go back and look at RWS through the lens of the maturity heuristic, you'll see that it spends a lot of time trying to get the reader to grasp the concepts behind Level 1 services: that URLs identify resources, and that resources are the proper targets of HTTP requests. That's because back then, Level 1 was about the best you could expect from a "REST" design.

RWS spends a whole chapter treating Amazon S3 as though it were a great example of RESTful design, because in RMM terms it made it all the way to... Level 2. RWS spends another chapter arguing for the legitimacy of REST against a thriving part of the industry that's content at Level 0.

We don't live in that world anymore. I'd say the modal RMM level of a new "REST" API today is 2. Most of the 2007-era arguments have been rendered irrelevant (SOAP vs. REST, the usefulness of PUT) or been given generally accepted best practices (URL formats). Restful Web Services was the first book-length treatment of REST; there are now over ten books on REST from O'Reilly alone. There are lots of development tools that make it really easy to crank out a Level 2 service.

In short, a lot of gravel- and rock-sized problems have been excavated, revealing two boulder-sized problems. I mentioned these two problems in my QCon talk "How to Follow Instructions" (available as video in hour-long version and in a half-hour condensed version presented at RESTFest; see also my QCon slide deck and speaker notes). Now I'll state them explicitly as the two major problems I want to address with RESTful Web APIs.

Duplication of effort

Here's an article from May on Programmable Web, a great site that tracks the world of public APIs: "53 Microblogging APIs: Twitter, TwitPic and What The Trend". Fifty-three was really the number of organizations publishing microblogging APIs, and some of them are utility APIs rather than "microblogging APIs" per se, but after doing some spot checks I do believe there were approximately fifty-three distinct APIs.

Should there really be fifty-three distinct APIs in this field? What if there were, like, five? We're not talking about something complicated, like insurance policies or regulatory compliance. We're talking about posting a little bit of text to a user account. Can we at least get down to ten?

No, apparently not. Like I said, that number was from May. There are now fifty-seven microblogging APIs. Well, damn. What if we got together and hammered out a standard, interoperable microblogging API? Sounds great, except nobody's interested. Evan Prodromou tried that with OStatus, and nothing came of it. You could use AtomPub as a microblogging API, pretty much unmodified, but nobody seems to want to.

The original RESTful Web Services sets out a design procedure for taking your problem domain and turning it into an API. But there's a big problem with this procedure: it doesn't consider the possibility that fifty-six other people may have already done the work for you.

Back in 2007, that possibility was remote. There was one microblogging API. I had to scrape the barrel pretty thin to find enough quasi-RESTful example APIs to fill Appendix A. Now the big problem is too many APIs. When you design the fifty-eighth microblogging API you're limiting your audience and wasting your users' time.

This is a really huge problem and we won't solve it with a book. But we can point out that it's a problem and take the first step towards mitigation. In RESTful Web APIs we present a new design procedure that focuses on reusing existing designs, coming up with new stuff to fill any gaps, and then publishing the new stuff for the benefit of a) your users and b) API developers who come after you.

Hypermedia

Whatever influence RESTful Web Services has had, it stops dead at RMM level 3, the hypermedia level. In 2012, the modal new "REST" API is at level 2. It has been level 2 for a while, and will continue to be level 2 unless something changes. Most architectures don't support hypermedia very well (or at all), and a lot of developers still don't understand it.

That's understandable. To the programmer brain, hypermedia is weird. When you read RWS it's possible to just skip the parts about hypermedia, and I get the feeling a lot of people did. There's stuff in RWS that is now outdated, and stuff that was useful for dealing with 2007's problems but that I now consider just plain wrong. Most of that stuff has to do with hypermedia.

RESTful Web APIs is tightly focused on hypermedia--you will not be able to skip the "hypermedia parts"--and it deals with 2013's problems. Some specific shortcomings of RWS we'll address:

1. We as developers have a strong desire to export our server-side object models as APIs. This is the idea behind JAX-RS. It's the idea behind lazr.restful, the framework I developed to make the Launchpad web service. But it's also the idea behind SOAP, and it's how we got fifty-seven microblogging APIs.

   This desire isn't technically at odds with the use of hypermedia, but it does tend to use hypermedia only to describe safe state transitions (i.e. to link resources together), and RWS didn't really go further than that.

2. In 2007 there were no hypermedia formats based on JSON, but JSON-based representations were becoming overwhelmingly popular. RWS does not offer advice for this scenario. Developers either made up their own one-off hypermedia formats (as I did with the Launchpad web service), or, more commonly, ignored the hypermedia constraint. Today JSON has a number of general-purpose hypermedia formats (like Siren, Collection+JSON, and HAL), and we'll cover them in RWA.
3. In RWS I was very dogmatic about avoiding overloaded POST. I felt strongly about this because I really needed to yank people out of the SOAP-RPC mindset. But I've come to accept that overloaded POST exists for a reason: to convey state transitions that don't map naturally onto one of the other HTTP methods.

   These state transitions are legitimate if they are described by hypermedia controls, as they are on the Web. They're not just hacks to get around the fact that HTML can't describe PUT and DELETE methods. Prohibiting overloaded POST in the name of the uniform interface forces designers into complicated workarounds to minimize the difference between their application semantics and the protocol semantics of GET/PUT/POST/DELETE. Those workarounds usually reflect the object model the designers already defined for their CRUD databases. Or, the designers give up, use overloaded POST without using hypermedia to describe the state transitions, and feel guilty about it.

   Besides which, forbidding overloaded POST means that you can't use HTML, the world's most popular hypermedia format. That's a big problem.

The title

As I said, this is a brand new book, not a second edition of RESTful Web Services. The only major things we're reusing are the appendices dealing with HTTP headers and response codes. To signify the handoff, we're changing the name.

RESTful Web Services was a great name in 2007, but it's not so good now. See, when SOAP went down, it took the term "Web Service" with it. "Web Service" is now an enterprise software term. Everywhere else it's all "API API API".

As I mentioned last year, this is backwards. The SOAP approach is to make a remote service look like a local library. (This idea is not limited to SOAP, of course.) Whereas the RESTful believe that a remote service should look like the Web. (Whatever that means.)

But I'm not gonna re-litigate that argument. "Web Service" is dead, we're stuck with "API", and the name of the book needs to change. "RESTful Web APIs" is a direct translation of "RESTful Web Services" into 2013-speak. It keeps continuity with the old book, but it's a new title for a new book.

Interested?

If you want to be a beta reader, let me know (via comment or email to leonardr@segfault.org). I'll get in touch with you around the end of March, or possibly earlier. Update: We've got a lot of beta readers and we're no longer accepting applications.

Once in a while I add a section to a chapter called "The Hypermedia Zoo", which takes a not-too-detailed look at a lot of hypermedia-aware data formats to demonstrate their diversity. I'm always on a low-level search for more hypermedia formats, and if you name your favorites in the comments I'll take a look. Don't worry about duplicating my list; I also want to see what springs to mind when you think "hypermedia format".

There's also a shorter section called "The Semantic Zoo" which talks about interesting domain-specific data standards. I'm mostly interested in reusable profiles (the IANA registry of link relations, microformats, schema.org microdata, Dublin Core), but I'm also interested in pointers to standalone data formats like Activity Streams. There's a whole lot of stuff out there and I'm not confident that I've seen even half of it.

Lisa sent me some pictures once she was done, and I got permission to host a PDF of the book on the "Awesome Dinosaurs" story page, under the same BY-NC-SA license as the story itself. Check it out--the story is now fully illustrated.

Artist's commentary:

The cover displays the tragedy inherent in how any time we put someone or something on a pedestal we are only yadda yadda it’s dinosaurs on motorcycles, okay.

I especially like this understated piece:

More news of my writing coming soon!

My actual point here is that while working on "Carnosaur" I discovered a Tumblr full of fan art for "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs", done for a school project! Most of the story is illustrated: the gun store, the motocross race, the news interview, Cass's accident, the capture, talking with the lawyer and going back to Mars. A "cover" was promised but never posted.

"Dinosaurs" got a lot of links when it was published, but no actual reviews, so I was surprised to find two reviews of "Four Kinds of Cargo". First, from Locus: "A lot of silliness and absurdity that ends surprisingly on a heartwarming note." You could review almost any piece of my fiction as "A lot of silliness and absurdity that ends surprisingly on a ________ note."

Tangent's review is longer, more reserved but overall positive:

“Four Kinds of Cargo” is a science fiction story about science fiction characters basing their lives around a science fiction story and its characters. It’s metafiction in a neat, innocuous disguise... Its major drawback is an unavoidable one – the prose simply isn’t very good. But to succeed as the kind of multi-referential system it sets out to be, I don’t think this story could have been written in any other way. The cleverness of the premise and the recognition of what’s been pulled off both explain (if not demand) and make up for the lacklustre prose. This one made me want to grimace as I started reading it; by the end I wanted to applaud.

I'll take it.

Send me evidence that you voted today (or earlier than today), and I'll send you the first chapter of Situation Normal, my novel in progress. Situation Normal is a direct sequel to "Four Kinds of Cargo". It tells the story of the third and possibly final war between the Fist of Joy and the Terran Extension, with the binational crew of Sour Candy caught in the middle. If you want a taste of what's to come, this is your chance.

My email address is leonardr@segfault.org. I will accept any kind of evidence that you voted, including blind assertion, but it's on your conscience, mate. See original announcement for more fine print, and see you at the polls!

Update: Steve Minutillo pointed out that this contest violates federal law, so I need to amend the rules a little bit. You can also get the preview chapter by sending me email in which you deny having voted. This also makes things easier for non-Americans and people who refuse to vote on principle. (37% of the population stands with you!)

The new novel covers a lot more ground than Constellation Games, and because there's a whole lot of people who only show up in one scene I'm making much heavier use of stock characters. I never paid much attention to stock characters because... you're not supposed to. They move the plot forward and they go away. You're not even supposed to have them in short stories, because word count is so precious. But now that I'm writing a lot of them I've discovered something interesting. With one line of dialogue you can break the stock-ness of a stock character, in a way that serves a larger story purpose.

An example of a stock character in Constellation Games: the goldbricking rules lawyer running the BEA counter in chapter 18. What a jerk. But imagine if during his one scene, he had had one line of dialogue expressing curiosity about what Curic is like. This guy works for the BEA, his whole job is passing messages between humans and ETs, but he's never talked to an ET himself and never will. He's still a jerk, but now he's a sympathetic jerk, like Ariel.

I didn't do this because a) I didn't think of it, and b) I accomplished that story purpose earlier, when Krakowski bitches about not having the same clearance to visit Ring City as the people it's his job to monitor. But one line of dialogue could have turned the stock character into something more closely resembling a real person.

In the new novel I needed a scene with one of those stuffy Starfleet admirals who are always chewing out Captain Picard in ST:TNG. So I wrote this stock character and he started chewing out one of the main characters, but then something odd happened:

Stuffy admiral: Why didn't you do [plot-specific detail]?

Main character: [Plot-specific explanation.] It would have been suicide, sir.

Stuffy admiral: Our analysis agrees with you. But you're discounting a long service tradition of glorious suicide.

I was not expecting to write that, but I like it. This guy still has a stick up his ass, but now he also has a sense of irony and he's willing to let it show. It's not something you'd get in ST:TNG, but I could imagine Admiral Kirk saying that to, say, a Captain Chekhov. With that line, not only does the admiral stop being a total stock character, but his willingness to talk that way to his subordinate says something about their relationship. A conversation that might have only advanced the plot now also develops one of the main characters.

This is the first draft, so there's no guarantee that line or that scene will make it into the completed novel, but now that I've seen how that works I'm trying to do something similar with all the one-shot stock characters. Maybe I'll overdo it, who knows. I'll also be looking to see if/how other writers do this.

I think this technique might only work in a comedy. Even when the stock-breaking bit isn't a joke, it's a surprise that works like a joke. It gives you that wait a minute... feeling.

"The Day Alan Turing Came Out" is short and bittersweet. I've licensed it under CC-BY, the most permissive Creative Commons license. It doesn't have much in common with Constellation Games, but I've been wanting to put it online for a while, and this seems like a good time.

Retro Spec has lots of other F/SF set in the past (one of my favorite subgenres), so check it out.

(First in the series.)

Beautiful Soup work has mostly focused on trying to get easy_install to work, working around a Launchpad bug--I'm still not totally sure if it's working. Last Friday I was in Dallas for work, so tomorrow will be a BS development day.

I seem to really like writing fiction about small businesses--"Mallory", "Awesome Dinosaurs", Constellation Games, and this new story all revolve around business partnerships. I'm just doing my part to boost the economy--did you know that stories about small businesses are responsible for most of this country's stories about job growth?

I'm still reading that space-astronomy book and I'm saving up more interesting bits to tell you. I'm also reading the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography and it's awesome—he's just dictating random stories as they occur to him, and, like Groucho Marx, he's always in comedy mode. I don't think the printing of this autobiography will create many new famous Mark Twain quotes, if only because Mark Twain never said the existing "famous Mark Twain quotes". But this cubical advertisement for e-books is to me as America: the Book was to Sumana: every few minutes I'm disturbing her with some new weird kind of laugh.

(The novel has one more writing group date, but I'm feeling good enough about the manuscript to call it "done" and send it out. Big thanks to Kirk, Sumana, and the Cabal.)

Some data points: The first draft was 96,500 words. Halfway through the second draft I'm at 112,400 words. This is due to characterization and such. I don't think I'll be adding another sixteen thousand words to the second half of the novel, but it could go up to 120k or so.

This anthology includes my short story "The Day Alan Turing Came Out", which Locus described as "A moving vision from a happier world." This is probably the only time anyone will ever describe my fiction that way, so act now.

It's a mixed bag. I like slipping in a new scene where there was no scene before—the secret history of the second draft!—and I really like fleshing out a sparse exposition-heavy scene into a full drama with characters and dialogue and jokes. But I really don't like when the thing I need to say next is scattered across three chapters throughout the book, three chapters that are ultimately pointless because they don't significantly advance the plot. Such that I have to come up with a brand new framework and then snip off bits from those three chapters to decorate my tree, discarding everything else.

But, once I finish this bit, the revision will be about one-quarter done. And once we get to the halfway mark, we'll see about finally making it possible for you to start reading this sucker...

Bonus link: REST Fest 2010. I don't think I'll be going, but it looks cool.

For instance, recently people in my feed reader started writing about Lost. This has happened on and off for a few years and I always tuned it out, but this time the chatter didn't go away, and soon enough I learned that the series finale was approaching. Now, I don't own a TV, since I have more important things to--no, just kidding. I do own a TV, and I even watch a couple shows. But I've only seen one episode of Lost (the Allison Janney one, which I saw in Utah with Susanna and John).

When the show started, I didn't watch because it sounded like a boring soap opera. Over the years I heard faraway rumors of fantastic and science fictional elements being added to the show's world, but it never really stuck with me. When I saw JJ Abrams do something nerdy like guest-edit an issue of Wired or get hired to direct the Star Trek reboot, I'd think: wow, what a weird choice, like: "You know who would be great for this? The guy who created House, M.D.! He's busy? Okay, we'll settle for Lost!"

But recently things heated up. The tor.com weblog started doing a Lost roundtable every week, and a lot of people whose weblogs I read turned out to be Lost fans who'd simply been waiting until the end was in sight to post about it. Within the space of a couple weeks, the show's cred was hugely enhanced in my eyes. The Allison Janney episode was lackluster, but every show has bad episodes. I found myself eager to vicariously experience everyone's reaction to the finale.

And then the finale happened and the excited people in my feed reader became really disappointed. Not Battlestar Galactica disappointed, but pretty bad. Disappointed because almost none of the fantastic or science fictional elements introduced into the show had amounted to a hill of magic nanobeans. In terms of closure, it could have just been a regular soap opera.

Except, wait, why am I saying "soap opera"? That's kind of a disparaging term, but it's exactly how I was thinking of my novel: a story about more-or-less ordinary people who have weird interrelationships and complicated backstories. And achieving any kind of closure in a soap opera is nothing to sneeze at, since soap operas, like life, are not designed with stopping points.

But given that a show is gonna end, generally better to pay off any outstanding plot-loans. I went to a fan wiki to check out these fantastical elements that didn't participate in the closure. Honestly, I was blown away. There is some great, evocative stuff here, especially in the DHARMA Initiative region. I was sold on the cheesy orientation films alone. If you dig deeper into the worldbuilding it decoheres, the same way the Star Trek movie makes less sense the more you think about it, but that's television SF for you. The worldbuilding was entertaining enough to get me to spend an hour browsing a fan wiki for a show I've only seen once.

But yeah, what happened to this stuff? In fantastic fiction the constructed world is a character. In Lost it's the most interesting character by far. And that character didn't get any closure. If you're Stanislaw Lem you can get away with this--I don't have a pressing need to know what "really" happened on the Lost-esque planet in "Eden". But you're not Stanislaw Lem.

But I can't stop there anymore, because I now see the same flaw in myself. My novel contains elements that advance characterization or plot within the context of a specific chapter, but which someone looking at a wiki page afterwards might say "Why didn't that go anywhere?" Well, it didn't go anywhere because it was a flashlight designed to illuminate something else. That's just a technique I use to avoid infodumps. But what if this whole time you thought the flashlight was a gun I'd carefully placed on the mantelpiece?

I'm pretty happy with the ending I'm writing. It won't be perfect, but I'll get better with practice. I hope I'll stay happy with it, but the more I complain about other peoples' work, the more problems I see in my own. Moral: stop complaining??

I wanted to write down something I thought of about fiction, and what better time than when I'm exausted and delirious. I'm writing the end of the novel, things are coming together, there are so many callbacks to concepts introduced earlier it's not even funny (not that it would be terribly funny if there were fewer). And I get these great epiphanies: one line from character A ties together their main motivation with two of the minor plot threads, and I realize I can build a scene leading up to that incredible line--a scene I need to do anyway because I need a scene between characters A and B. In that scene I can advance the plot entirely through callbacks to earlier in the novel. Remember this piece of technology I've been mentioning throughout, on and off? Character B wants to use it to rectify the injustice perpetrated in chapter N, and it's possible because of what happened for a totally different reason in chapter N-k, but B needs A's help, and thus--conversation!

And I know that the scene is not just using up callbacks; I'm setting up one more callback that will be used in the climax. It feels great and I gotta wonder, do real authors feel this way all the time? I was just messing around, dumping things into the story but so, so much of it is being reused.

(On the downside, in a recent chapter I resolved a subplot in a clattering climax and then my writing group said "Where is this subplot going? When will the payoff arrive?")

Back when I first heard about this project, I mentioned to editor Rami Shal'heveth that the story's title is a riff on a phrase originally in Hebrew, but he probably already knew that. Actually, no: "Ben-Sira's book is one of those canonical texts that everybody knows of, but nobody reads."

I always have a difficult time at events held in bars, but Sumana is very good at introducing me to people. For instance, I met Saladin Ahmed, who along with Nora was nominated for a Nebula this year. And then comes this SF Signal interview with Saladin, Nora, and many other Nebula nominees. "If your work couldn't have been on the ballot this year, what work would you have liked in its place?" Saladin:

I'd also have been happy to see more two-fisted fun on the ballot. Two of the absolute best stories I read this year were "Zeppelin City" by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, and "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" by Leonard Richardson. Both were ridiculously enjoyable and Nebula-worthy to my mind.

I'm encouraged!

He messily ate the sandwich.

But you can replace a generic verb with a fancy evocative verb that does the work of an adverb.

He assaulted the sandwich.

In fact, you can replace a whole clause (often including adverbs) with an evocative verb that conveys the same information.

He walked aimlessly around wandered the room.

Except when the generic verb is "said". Using fancy versions of "said" is "said-bookism", also considered undesirable.

"Just as you wish," he preened said.

And you can't use adverbs here either.

"Just as you wish," he said obsequiously

Hypothesis: by preventing you from describing the way someone says something, these rules force you to write dialogue that explains how it should be read.

"Just as you wish, O most esteemèd lord."

vs.

"Well," he said, "if such is my lord's wish..."

Yesterday I found two amazing HTTP resources, both probably via BoogaBooga, which make it much easier to write about the ISS: Bruce Sterling's interview with astronaut Nicole Stott, and Michael Barratt's video tour of the entire ISS, which apparently underwent spring cleaning recently because he's very proud of how tidy everything is.

In the interview, Nicole Stott says "The main tool we have for communicating with our family friends (aside from email) is an IP phone." So my space-to-ground-radio solution is officially non-canon.

I try somewhat hard not to contravene established facts, but I'm not gonna change this, because 1) it's too messy for fiction. Why do they have an IP phone but no Web access? I'm sure there's a reason, but in writing group that would get me dinged for inaccuracy. The whole reason this phone conversation is happening is because the offworld Internet gateway isn't working, so the IP phone wouldn't work either and they'd have to fall back to something like the solution I came up with. But my POV character doesn't know any of this and I only have 20 words to set up the phone call. This is the slippery slope that gives us magic movie computers that do things computers can't really do.

2) I set my 'realistic' works in alternate universes, precisely to give me some Finux-like wiggle room. In "Mallory" I reinvented the whole history of the personal computer. In the novel, the space shuttle was retired after the Columbia disaster, and there's an abandoned moon base. I've got room to play around with minor things like phone systems, without feeling the guilt I'd feel if I introduced psychic powers or faster-than-light travel.

Anyway, check out the interview and video. It's like an early Christmas gift to me--the gift of worldbuilding!

"This is the phone company! We have you surrounded!"

There's a novel I want to write that could have that as the first line, but it's #3 on the list of novels I want to write, and will probably be novel #3 for the rest of my life and never get written. So just dump that into your NaNoWriMo novel whenever you next get stuck.

Let me know what you do, and I'll put up links on the story page.

The story so far: Dave sends a link to "Awesome Dinosaurs" to his friends, and Bernard says he likes it, but Sid is confused:

Fuck! Would someone please give me the moral of the story? I read the final paragraph again and I can't quite put any specific type of person in the role of the dinosaurs or some movement or government or anything. Just fucking explain this stupid story.

I guess Sid mostly reads political cartoons. Bernard attempts to help him. (I've truncated his analysis and the quote from the story.)

Hmmm...well, I think if you're looking for a moral I'd look in the last section:

"We set her up," said Entippa, "when we came to Earth..."

But you don't have to read it as a parable or an allegory or in any way "making a statement." But I do think the fact that the dinos don't fit into the normal image of "dino" is significant. It ties into the idea that people USE history...to tell themselves stories that address and satisfy their own inner drives and desires...

And then Dave decides to just give Sid what he wants:

While Bernard's reading of the story was very closely aligned with my own, and the major themes that he addressed were very similar to those that I took away from it (but were laid-out and summarized much better than I probably could've done), I will cave-in to Sid's deep-seated love of Animal Farm and indulge his guilty-pleasure for unsubtle and overbearing direct allegory.

The dinosaurs represent (in actual personage as well as in the effects brought about by) the countryless, liberal intelligentsia displaced by the rise of major European Right- and Left-leaning autocracies that came to dominate the continent in the first half of the 20th century. Mars is the old-world--representing to the dinosaurs a people and culture they loved and, under ideal circumstances, would prefer to live in--that they were compelled to abandon because of coercive externalities.

Cass the T-Rex, is, of course, both the fearsome, existentially-devastating Atomic Bomb, and the foreign nationals who worked in its development; a body of people representing the full spectrum of dis/agreement with both the weaponization of this new technology, and with the ideological and political alignment of the United States itself.

Tark, the carnivorous protagonist, is Wernher von Braun; compelling and mercurial, hot-tempered and prone to fits of slightly-deluded and juvenile persecuted melancholia--also possessing a past history of actions that are regarded as culturally unacceptable, as well as a record of personal ethics that has to be accounted for before he could claim the limited amount of personal respectability that would make him superficially benign. Entippa, the even-tempered herbivore, is Albert Einstein (for obvious reasons), and in some cases acts as a stand-in for the entirety of the Jewish intelligentsia displaced by European fascism.

Misunderstood by their new audience (the human motocross fans/the American public) Tark/von Braun and Entippa/Einstein are forced to subdue their own personal research preferences (jumping the Grand Canyon/Space Exploration/Highbrow Quantum Physics) to parade themselves to Americans by participating in some vestigial/plausible exercise of same (motocross/ICBM development/castrated academia). They are disillusioned and sad because they are fully aware that they are being presented, not as artists or intellectuals, stunt-men or heroes, but as gleaming war trophies gathering dust on a shelf--being cheered by an audience superficially supportive, but entirely ignorant.

The violent end of the Destructoraptor represents the horrible events that were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tark/von Braun and Entippa/Einstein are each shaken by this in their own ways... electing to cope by constructing petulant and misdirected revenge-fantasy, and beleaguered resignation, respectively. This is made more poignant in the minds of these men because this horrible event and all of its terrifying implications are regarded as a blasé non-event by their new, erstwhile countrymen.

The exploitive television host is, naturally, the profit-minded and sociopathic American industrialist. He cares not for the individual humanity of the two dinosaurs, nor for the implications of their sentience or for their desires or personal genius. Ignoring the myriad uses to which these two unfathomably unique creatures could be applied, it is decided--reflexively and axiomatically--that the best thing to is to do what is most obvious and most apparent; a conclusion reached--tautologically, perhaps, but squarely in the most revered and dogmatic logic of capitalism--simply because the best thing is de facto the most obvious thing, and that when their preferences are allowed to sort-out and stabilize policy, (those people that we qualify as) individual agents (non-marginalized U.S. Citizens, in this case) acting in their own rational self-interest will trend towards bringing about a panglossian utopia. We will pit the varied cultures and traditions and ideologies of Europe against one-another because, in our disaffected cosmopolitanism, we suppose we're marginally interested in it enough to see it. Preferring to watch the Pole fight the Italian than to understand their maths or learn their dances. The expediency of using it to eliminate a perceived menace is just icing on the cake.

Now: Tark/von Braun killing and eating the television producer... that was 9/11 (I trust this is clear without further qualification), the two human children? They are Ralph Nader and tennis legend Boris Becker (think about it).

The ending (the spaceship ride back to Mars) is a one-to-one, direct analogy to that fateful day when the U.S. Government had "had enough" and forced von Braun and Einstein to board a ship to go back to Germany because they were involved in killing and eating a guy. The exchange between Tark and Entippa was lifted--word for word--from a transcript of a conversation between Einstein and von Braun that was recorded by a Life Magazine reporter during that trip.

The motorcycles are iPods.

As usual, I've put up a clearinghouse page about the story on my web site. I'm also trying something new with this story and putting up a deleted scene. I toyed with the idea of doing this for "Mallory", but the deleted scene from "Mallory" was deleted because it was boring. This is a fun scene that I had to delete because it became non-canon.

I was really tempted to use the image described here on my clearinghouse page, but that would have been tragically misleading. No mere words could ever be that awesome.

The contract I signed gives the story exclusively to Strange Horizons for 60 days, but after that I plan to release the story under a CC license. I'm working out the details with the editors now to avoid any confusion later.

Now some behind-the-scenes. My friend Kate Lascoutx, student and tutor of classical literature, came up with many of the dinosaur names in the story, especially "alethinosaur" ("truthiness lizard") and "bradupeithid" ("slow-stepper"). She also came up with an incredible name that I couldn't use ("Diopteron" - "brilliant flyer"). I asked Kate for these names and came up with my own (Thymomenoraptor is mine, thanks to an online Greek dictionary) to avoid the impression that dinosaur evolution stopped dead when the story's dinosaurs left Earth. New names that are still obviously dinosaur names accomplished this to my satisfaction without making it a huge plot point.

The main trigger for "Awesome Dinosaurs" was a certain class of rejection letter that corresponds to about #11 on the Context of Rejection: "This story didn't quite grab me." Or its less positive sibling, "Nice story, but it didn't work for me." I get this rejection letter a lot, and at one point in a Jamsetji Tata-esque fit of pique I said, "I will write a story about dinosaurs who drive monster trucks! Maybe that will grab you!"

"Write what you know" is a common cliche, and writing what you know will get you a coherent story but not, I find, one that goes around grabbing editors. I find my stories do much better when I write what I love. I know a thing or two about politics and asteroid mining and secret societies, but my stories on those topics aren't selling, and I'm starting to think it's because I don't love those things as much as I love the Internet, or video games, or dinosaurs.

The other influence, as I've mentioned before, was my disappointment that de Camp's classic story "A Gun For Dinosaur" is not about a dinosaur who buys a gun. I'd pictured it as a children's story, like "A House For Hermit Crab". The first scene of "Awesome Dinosaurs" is what I was hoping for from that story.

Finally, big thanks to my writing group for workshopping the story back in October, and to Jed for his editing comments.

Calca 1: One of my favorite Amar Chitra Katha comics is the one about Jamsetji Tata, founder of Indian megacorp Tata. It repeats a story (the accuracy of this story has been disputed) about an "unsavoury incident" that spurred Tata to build the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai around the turn of the 20th century (you may know this hotel as the one attacked in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks). I'd give you a picture of the panel, but Sumana has the digital camera, so here's a transcript.

Sign: ENTRY FOR EUROPEANS ONLY
Random Guy: Can't you read? You are not allowed in this hotel!
Jamsetji Tata: I will build the best hotel in this country!

Two panels later he's buying land for the hotel, and still going:

Guy #1: This is a good piece of land.
Guy #2: Yes! Beautiful view, fresh air.
Jamsetji Tata: I will build the best hotel in Asia.

The great thing about this attitude is its applicability to a wide variety of situations, not just to foreigners building foreigner-only hotels in your country.

My favorite ACK of all time is the one about Suyya, aka Annapati Suyya, a civil engineer and early proponent of crowdsourcing. I'll write about him later, but that's definitely a comic book worth owning.

Another data point I'm not sure what to do with (see Dada Chess weirdness passim) is that both stories I've sold had their origin in weblog entries I posted to NYCB. "Mallory" was the end result of this bizarre entry, and "Awesome Dinosaurs" was the end result of this more-obviously-an-idea entry. I sold both stories to the first market I sent them to, though for both I had to do a revision and resubmit. If a story didn't start in this weblog, I haven't been able to sell it.

Matthew McClintock of manybooks.net has made it possible to get TE in the weird-ass ebook format of your choice. Thanks, Matthew!

The process of creating a POD book is extremely slow by Internet standards, but if all goes well you should be able to buy a print copy by the end of the week. We'll be selling the print copies at cost.

Now, a bunch of boring numbers. TE got a huge amount of traffic today, almost all of which came from three big-name weblogs and one I'd never heard of. Boing Boing posted first and has sent us about 900 hits, John Scalzi posted later and so far we've got a huge 3600 hits from him [Update: this number is totally inaccurate because Scalzi included our image inline. The real number of hits is more like 200], and tor.com posted even later in the day and has sent us about 100 hits. We got 60 hits from Grasping for the Wind, a weblog I'd never heard of but which sent us more hits than higher-profile sites like Twitter.

Also of note are 1200 hits of unknown origin through Google Reader, and 900 from Livejournal friends pages. Add in other sources and the total number of hits is about 69003500.

Why did Scalzi send us so much traffic despite not having the first-mover advantage? Probably because his audience has a higher concentration of print SF fans than BB. [Update: this speculation is moot; see above.] BB readers are more likely to use feed aggregators, which hides their allegiance. Scalzi also simply posts less, so we'll stay on his front page longer. And I bet most of the people reading tor.com had already read BB or Scalzi by the time they saw the link on tor.com. Needless to say we appreciate all links and publicity and appreciation, those being our only payment. I'm not trying to min-max you guys.

How do hits translate into readers? As of this writing the PDF has been downloaded about 1150 times, the master OpenOffice document has been downloaded 120 times, and the zip archive of the website 90 times. By the crudest metric imaginable, about 1/6 1/3 of the people who visited were interested enough to download the anthology.

People seem to prefer downloading the whole anthology for later, but a significant minority are reading the stories online. Stories nearer the top of the TOC get more hits. The first story has 350 hits and the last story only has 50.

The art pages are much more popular than the story pages, which I was expecting. The most popular artwork (with the attention-grabbing title of "Pirate vs. Alien") has 450 hits. "Bio Break" (my personal favorite) has only 200 hits, but that's more hits than most of the stories.

The "random story" feature has only been used 75 times, which I find a little disappointing.

Comparison: usually the most popular thing on my website is Beautiful Soup. During the same period, the most recent version of BS was downloaded about 300 times, and version 3.0.7a (the non-lame-parsing version) was downloaded about 750 times. The documentation was retrieved 500 times. I find this hard to believe, but I never paid attention to BS downloads before, so I gotta go with the data. I think most of these are automatic downloads done while installing some other piece of software with a BS dependency.

I was talking to Brendan about this yesterday and he gave me a good analogy. When people read a long work of fiction they're willing to fuel up on worldbuilding at the beginning of the story, but then they expect to coast on that fuel to the climax of the first act. Only after there's a big payoff are they willing to start refueling again. What I'm writing is very heavy on the worldbuilding, and people I've shown it to enjoy the worldbuilding but they're starting to get antsy.

I thought I could write a bunch of self-contained worldbuilding essays with a plot arc in the background, but everyone's focusing on the plot arc. So I need to integrate the worldbuilding essays more closely into the timeline of people doing things, advancing the character development if not the main plot arc.

• From one of my notes to Sumana: "It was refreshing to read a story about Christianity that wasn't all Ben Hur or Xenogears."
• If your story starts out as standard SF, the dead should not abruptly rise from their graves 80% of the way through. Yes, more than one story had this. Even more strangely, one person made it work, indicating the general presence of exceptions to rules.
• If you come up with an awesome title, use it, don't just mention it. That is, the title should have some bearing on what happens in the story. It should not just be the title of something else within the story. Like, imagine if A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again was not an essay about a trip on a cruise ship (truly a supposedly fun thing David Foster Wallace will never do again, in more ways than one), but in sooth an essay about the recording of a rock album called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. You'd feel ripped off.

  Although if ASFTINDA really was a rock album you'd have no cause for complaint, because we don't expect rock album titles to relate to their contents unless it's a concept album with a narrative. Look, why are we arguing about this?

I thought I'd take the opportunity to publish some of our hard-won Slush Pile Tips(tm), amazing rules that, if followed slavishly, will launch your fiction into some metaphorical orbit. Rules marked with an asterisk are ones that we still consider to be good advice even though we're publishing a story that violates them.

A lot of the things we've noticed are small things, but just fixing them won't necessarily fix the story. These are more like code smells: signs that something is wrong at a deeper level.

• When writing science fiction about particle physics, take special care to correctly spell the names of elementary particles.
• Is there a gun in your story? Do you feel a need to mention the exact make and model of the gun? The gun may be too important to your story.
• Long scenes that take place inside hallucinations are tiresome. Also symbolic dreams outside of fantasy. Nothing in this scene is really happening!
• Don't put the full name of the POV character at the start of your story. This didn't even make sense in the 1950s. It makes your POV character seem like a pompous ass who thinks in newspaper articles describing their exploits. Obvious exception if pompous asshood is your intention. Sumana says: also an exception if character's name is incredibly awesome.
• Memory erasure/recording is overdone.
• Also people throwing up in bar bathrooms.
• Also airport bathrooms.
• * There is an oversupply of SF stories with a noir style or detective mystery theme. We got a lot of really good ones, but we didn't feel like we could publish more than one. I've written one I think is really good that I can't get published. Now I think I see why.

  It's kind of strange, if you think about it. Traditional hard-boiled noir is pretty much dead, but traditional hard-boiled noir that's also SF is alive and kicking.

• If no one in your story is British, do not call any female a "lady".
• Sumana says: unctuous businessmen should either be over-the-top funny or more understated and realistic.
• * Leonard says: do not use "thumb" as a verb meaning "interact with a handheld device."
• * Any reference to Pandora or Pandora's box is a bad sign. Doubly bad if it's in the title.
• Some infodumps are worse than others. If the premise of your story is laughably ridiculous, an infodump will call attention to the fact. The absolute worst is the gratuitious infodump, which painfully restates that which has already been adequately shown, just to make the reader suffer.

I was hoping we could make TE an April 1st project, but it looks like it'll be at least a few days beyond that. Hopefully we can get it out in April, though, because I want to launch my secret writing project in May.

I'm here to tell you that TiddlyWiki is the solution. I spent most of today organizing my notes, and the story is correspondingly clearer in my head. Tiny ideas have a place to live, and I've got a workshop for developing them into fleshed-out ideas.

Tiddlywiki lowers the barriers to capturing a fleeting idea better than any other software I've used. Since it's a Javascript app that runs in the web browser, rather than a client-server thing, Tiddlywiki is fast. Since it displays your entire edit trail on one page, the snippets don't feel isolated from each other. I can split out a section that's getting too long without losing it.

I've known about Tiddlywiki for a long time, and it's not that I resisted trying it until now; rather, I never really needed it until now. It delivers.

• "Goldenseed" by Therese Arkenberg
• "Quantum Tropics" by William Highsmith
• "Friar Garden, Mister Samuel, and the Jilly Jally Mints" by Carole Lanham
• "Single-Bit Error" by Ken Liu
• "Jump Space" by Mary Anne Mohanraj
• "Welcome to the Federation" by Mark Onspaugh
• "The Ambassador's Staff" by Sherry D. Ramsey
• "Daisy" by Andrew Willett
• "The Last Christmas of Mrs. Claus" by Alex Wilson

Barring unforseen catastrophe, that's the lineup. (A couple of the titles are working titles and might change, but I wanted to announce this ASAP.) These are the stories we couldn't say no to. They've all got great originality and execution. I'd put this anthology against an issue of a pro mag any day.

I'm surprised by the variety in the stories. I was expecting to publish maybe two fantasy stories; we're publishing four. Four of the stories are really funny, but none of them are "funny stories".[0] We're publishing a freaking cat story. A cat story that will kick your ass!

Sumana deserves enormous credit, not just for reading the slush pile and sending out over 200 mostly-personal rejections, but for working with me all the way to the final selections. She pulled one way, I pulled another, and the result was a balanced selection.

In addition to the stories, we've also commissioned pieces by five artists. Our instructions, such as they were, were "draw something awesome." The artists delivered. Here's what we've got:

• "Gaia's Strange Seedlike Brood" by Patrick Farley
• "Bio Break" by Brittany Hague
• "Times Square" by David Kelmer
• "Pirate vs. Alien" by Erin Ptah
• "Ninja contra Robot" by Marc Scheff

Go to the Thoughtcrime Experiments homepage for a teaser that includes a low-res version of "Gaia's Strange Seedlike Brood". David Kelmer also put a low-res version of "Times Square" up on his weblog.

[0] I originally wrote that I don't think "funny stories" are funny, but then I thought of some really funny stories we rejected in the final rounds, and realized I was being snobbish. A story can be incredibly funny and still suffer the "funny story" stigma, if there's not a strong plot. That's why Wodehouse's books blend in one's mind into a homogenous mush of hilarity.

Update: Oh yeah, something I forgot to mention earlier. I have not done a statistical analysis of the prior publication credits of the people who submitted stories to us, because that would be insane. But in general it looks like there is no correlation. We liked and antiliked stories by people who've sold to any given pro or semi-pro market, and by people with no previous sales. But! I did notice two positive correlations. I was more likely than average to enjoy a story by someone who'd previously sold a story to Futurismic or to Adbusters (?!). So there's my taste in science fiction right there.

As a writer, I used to feel like I didn't have a good picture of the short genre fiction market as a whole. You send stories in, they come back. You can get together with other writers in a writing group and commiserate, but there's no way that's a representative sample. One reason I started this anthology was to take a good look at a real slush pile and get some sense of what it really takes to have a story worth publishing.

This is a taboo subject, judging from how little editors talk about it. I've been told superficially encouraging things like (not a direct quote) "If you can write grammatical English and tell a story, you're above average." Okay, but that's just saying that baseline competence is relatively rare. How big is "above average" and what does it look like? Magazines don't publish above-average stories, they publish the best. How many people are the best?

It's a truism that the slush pile is huge, that there's a vast oversupply of terrible science fiction. I started Thoughtcrime Experiments partly to test the hypothesis that this oversupply masks a similar oversupply of high-quality science fiction, endlessly circulating from editor to author to editor like some action-packed Sargasso. With no prior fiction-editing experience, can I take a core sample of the slush pile and grab a bunch of good stories that no one else wanted to publish? All for rates that, while decent by industry standards, are penurous compared to the effort it takes to write a story? Is the problem with the slush pile that too much of it is bad, or that too much of it is good?

There were 241 total submissions to Thoughtcrime Experiments. A couple more might come in, from people of whom we asked another story, but they won't affect this general analysis. There were so many stories we've forgotten about most of them by this point, but we have recorded information about our opinions at the time, which I put into a database. My goal for this entry is to try to draw some conclusions about stories in the aggregate.

Here's our review process. A story comes in. Sumana reads it and sticks it into one of five tiers, A through E. A story goes into one tier or another based on how well it satisfies the following fitness function: Would we regret passing up the opportunity to publish this story? From A to E the tiers are "absolutely not", "no", "eh", "yes", and "yes!" In retrospect, we probably only needed three tiers ("no", "yes", "yes!"), but having five does make the graphs you're about to see more interesting. And at the beginning we didn't know we would get any "yes!" stories. We thought we might have to publish "yes" stories with some "eh" for filler.

In terms of the world-famous Context of Rejection, I'd say tier A corresponds to 1 through 5, tier B is 6 through 8, tier C is 9 through 11, tier D is 12 and 13, tier E is 14. There's some overlap and it's not a perfect match, since the CoR is for novels, but you get the picture. The inflection point is between 11 and 12, the difference between "I could see someone publishing this" and "We should publish this".

Getting back to the process: Sumana flags certain stories in tier C for my attention, and I also read all D and E stories. Sumana and I have many differences of opinion but we've never differed by more than one tier. We talk about the stories. The fruits of our discussion get turned into feedback for the authors. Sumana makes occasional passes over the pending stories and sends out rejection letters.

Currently we've sent out rejection notices for tiers A through C, and for most of D. We've bought one story and we're left with about 25 that we really want to publish. Now is a good time to mention that we're going to publish more stories than the originally-planned five, but not too many more. Certainly not 25. So we need to cull that herd. We're trying to decide on a good mix of stories, which might mean sacrificing an E story for a D--and we're not going to be able to publish all the E stories anyway, as you'll see if you look at the graph below.

The fitness function works well for focusing quickly on the relatively small number of stories that really stand out to us. But it's not so good for scientific purposes because it conflates a lot of variables: technical skill, inventiveness of plot, vividness of character, adjacence to our personal tastes in spec-fic, etc.

For instance, all the terribly-written stories ended up in tier A, but so did most of the horror stories we got, regardless of quality. I said in the submission guidelines that I was open to horror if it was clever, but it turns out I wouldn't know clever horror if it rose from the grave and bit me in the ass with decaying teeth held together only by metal-amalgam fillings. Some especially well-written horror got into tier B, and one really funny zombie story clawed its way into tier C. Long story short, there'll be no horror (the genre, not the emotion) in TE. It turns out that's not what we want to publish.

Another example: we got an extraordinarily well-written story that had no fantastic element in it at all. It went into tier D, not because we wanted to publish it, but because it seemed like a wasted opportunity not to publish something by this person. We made inquiries and got a less mainstream flash story from this person, which we're considering offering to buy for half price. So really, that should have been a tier A story, but we used tier D as a shorthand for "do something about this."

So here it is, the graph you've all been waiting for. How many stories went into each tier? What does the slush pile look like?

This is going to get really unscientific, because what we start out with is our subjective opinions of the stories. But I think there's some interesting stuff in this graph.

This has more than a passing resemblance to a normal curve. Of course, if it were a normal curve, there's a missing tier to the left. It would look more like a normal curve if we split tier A into two tiers, one for terribly-written stories and one for stories that were just extraordinarily incongruent with our tastes. I'm glad we didn't do this, because the correct response in both cases is prompt rejection, but it's an interesting observation.

It's a category error to try to do statistics on the tiers, but what the hell. Let's assign a tier A story 0 points and a tier E story 4 points. Then the mean tier is about 1.54, halfway between tier B ("at least it's grammatical...") and tier C ("might be publishable, but not by us"). So, yes, indeed, if you write a story that is grammatical and tells a coherent story, your story is above average.

What's the interpretation of this graph? Is the "slush pile" really an endless flood of terrible stories? Well, that's a writer's way of phrasing the question. Writers try to write "good" stories and think that "good" stories should be published. But the editor's fitness function is a lot more complex than "good". A lot of stories published in big-name mags in the 70s and 80s couldn't get published today.[0] Did they become "bad" over time, or did the fitness function change? I think a lot of boring stuff gets published, but clearly the relevant slush readers and editors found those same stories "good".

But however you slice it, most of the 241 stories we were sent did very poorly on our fitness function. Only 39 made us think "it would be cool to publish this" for any extended period. So I would say that going through the slush pile is indeed a chore, just as editors say. For Sumana it was a demanding full-time job. But it's not an unrewarding chore. It's not some post-apocalyptic wasteland where you scrounge for a precious tin of canned meat. There's a lot of really good stuff in the slush pile.

Let's take a look at the good stuff. Here's a graph of the 39 stories in D and E, after our first round of culling. After this point, the boundaries between D and E grow fuzzy. Objectively speaking, we have a resistance to rejecting any more of these stories, because we've been dithering over it for a while now.

This is saying nothing more than "we've rejected about half of the tier D stories", but it's nice to have a visual. Sumana and I really liked all these stories, but a lot of them haven't even made it this far, and the vast majority of the remainder will ultimately be collecting another rejection note. By the principle of reversion to the mean, the next editor they're sent to probably won't like them as much as we did. It's possible that some of these stories will never be published. So I think my hypothesis is confirmed: not only is there too much science fiction, there's too much good science fiction.

Maybe we're softies. Maybe these stories aren't really that good. Well, we can do cross-checks. The Context of Rejection says 60-75% of the submissions will be in CoR levels 1-7. We're not an established print market like Tor, we're not in those big "writer's guide" books, so we didn't get as many crazies as Tor does. Maybe that's why only 50% of our stories are in tiers A and B. But maybe we were too lenient and a lot of tier C stories correspond to CoR 6 and 7.

CoR says 95-99% of the submissions are at 10 or below. Well, only 84% of our submissions were in tier C or below, so again, maybe we were too lenient. Maybe we should only be considering the stories in tier E. That's the top 5% of the stories. So maybe we're softies, maybe the rules are different for stories vs. novels, maybe the incredible technical sophistication required to use the Internet filtered out all but the most forward-looking writers. In any event, we're not off by orders of magnitude. We're about 10 percentage points off from the guidelines given in the Context of Rejection. And since we started having difficulties after rejecting 90% of the stories, we're in compliance with Sturgeon's Law.

5% of 241 stories is 11 stories. That's twice as many as we originally planned to publish, and more than we're going to publish even now that we've expanded the anthology. There are way too many stories we don't want to publish, but also too many stories that we do want to publish. Or to look at it another way, there are not enough well-paying markets, and not enough editors with different tastes.

This is why I specifically asked for stories that had been rejected multiple times. I wanted to see whether there were stories that I would really like, but that get consistently overlooked. This is also (one reason) why I ignored people who said my choice of Creative Commons license, or some other aspect of the way I was doing things, would scare away all the talented writers. Honestly, I think the Creative Commons thing scared off more untalented writers than talented ones.

I can see how editors might not want to go this deep into the analysis with aspiring writers. I don't want to do anything that would discourage people from submitting stories. But it seems quite possible to write a great story, send it to twenty editors who all love it, and get twenty rejections, because there's too much good stuff. A great story will get nicer rejections than if you'd sent in a scrap of paper on which you'd written in pencil "MAN HAVE SPACEGUN. explode!! NOW IS SAVE"[1] But from a monetary and publication-credit standpoint, it's the same.

Next time: what to do about this. Assuming I can figure out what to do about this. Anyway, back to work. Editors with more experience can tell me if I'm out of line.

PS: I will not tell you which tier we put your story in. Seriously. It can only cause pain for everyone to act like two peoples' sorting mechanism is some reductive measure of your story's worth. If we have specific critiques, we offer them when we reject the story. Use the feedback or ignore it, and try to sell the story to someone else with different opinions. Tier data is only interesting in the aggregate, as a measure of how we responded to the slush pile as a whole.

Example of how subjective this is: someone sent us a tier A story. I don't remember what story or what we didn't like about it. Rejected. They sent us another story. Again, I don't remember anything about the story--I just saw this pattern when running random queries on the submission database. Tier B. Better than the first, but still not what we want. Rejected. Then they sent another story. Man, how long is this person going to torment us with stories we don't want? Tier E. It's an awesome story and we're very likely to buy it. So what right do we have to imply that their first story was "bad"? Because I can put in all the caveats I want, but that's the message that will come through. More pragmatically, would we have gotten the third story if we had implied that?

[0] Sumana would frequently say of a story, "This would be a great story for Asimov's in 1981." That is, someone else (in another time) might publish it, but not us. Tier C.

[1] I figured I might as well publish this online, since Analog wouldn't take it.

When you're a writer, even a writer in a writing group, you only have a small picture of the market. Editing this anthology is giving me a much wider view, and it's also making me a better writer. So basically, if you have the time, I think you should liberate some stories and put out your own anthology.

On the TE website I say that TE is an experiment "to see how difficult it is to find five stories I like enough to buy." This is true enough, but it's only part of the story. As in any experiment involving human beings, the subjects (you) were not told the full purpose of the experiment. The goal of Thoughtcrime Experiments is to test the truth of certain things I've been told about the market for short science fiction. I don't yet have the data to talk about this in more detail, but I do have some raw numbers and some initial impressions, which I'll share with you.

This graph shows submissions per day.

We got our first submission on December 30th, 2008. Between then and the end of yesterday ("the end of yesterday" interpreted rather liberally), we got 240 submissions from 202 authors. The mean number of submissions per day was 5.0 in January and 6.7 in February. 24 people submitted two stories, five people submitted three, and one person submitted four. (Persistence paid off: story #4 is under strong consideration.)

There were three peaks in submissions. The first happened just after we were listed in ralan.com on January 1st. The second happened just after I posted to the specficmarkets community on Livejournal. Our busiest day was, as you'd expect, the last day we were open, when we got 16 submissions. This isn't Strange Horizons territory; they get over 500 submissions in a month. But it's more than I expected.

Was it enough? Enough to get five really good stories? We don't have all the data on subjectively determined story quality--we still have to evaluate 25 stories starting from the 14th--so I can't put up a graph right now, but the answer is yes. About twenty of the 215 submissions we've evaluated are stories Sumana and I have a positive desire to publish--not "someone else might like this", not "could be great with some work", not "could go in if we don't get anything better." Damn good stories that need some minor edits or a thousand words cut, if anything.

In one sense, that's a very small number--about ten percent. But it's much higher than what editors' horror stories had led me to believe. I was expecting a deluge of random crap from crazy people written in HTML crayon, hilariously bad Eye of Argon type stories, stories that had been sitting in the author's desk drawer for twenty years. In actual fact we got one crazy person, one Argon-class story, and near as I can tell one desk-drawer story (and it was pretty good!).

In maybe a week, once we've got all the stories evaluated, I'll put up more objective data on our impressions of the stories (which are of course, subjective; I mean "objective" in the sense that there will be graphs).

Oh, another thing I didn't tell you. The anthology will have art! We went to some of our favorite artists and told them, basically, "draw something awesome." It's still in flux so I don't know how many pieces there will be, but we're hoping for at least five, and we've already bought finished pieces from Internet faves Patrick Farley and Erin Ptah. Unfortunately a number of my other Internet faves were too busy or didn't respond. (Josh Lesnick, if you read this, there's still time!) But the stuff we've commissioned already will BLOW YOU AWAY. Or, more accurately, will DEPICT YOU BEING BLOWN AWAY.

PS: Props to the friend of ours who sent us a story in LaTeX format.

Update: BLOWN AWAY.

Dear Money Guy,

Sorry, I've had it out the arse with boring, yet professional, cover letters. And since the worst thing you can say is no, I figured what the hell. I hope you enjoy my 3500 word submission. But, if not, I look forward to hearing no from you soon. And feel free to be as brazen as you like. It's refreshing, I promise.

(I didn't buy the story, but I did publish the cover letter.)

Update, much later: Here it is.

So we're giving you some time to get a rejection letter for your most recent story from a publication that doesn't know what it's missing, and then pirouette around and send the story in to us. Besides which, a definite date feels right, in a way that "sorry, we're closed, didn't you hear?" doesn't. Once again, here are the guidelines.

Seriously. I never agonize over my cover letters when I send out stories, I keep 'em nice and generic, but I always mention my sale(s, hopefully) and my VP attendance, thinking they'll count for something. Now I feel like all that is vanity.

On the guidelines page I say that if you want, you can mention stuff like publication credits and your name. Some people are taking this way too far! I'm getting multi-page cover letters. I don't need this information. I'm buying a story, which you've thoughtfully attached to the message. I'm not hiring you to run Accounts Payable.

But you could shrink the cover letter down and down to the length of my typical cover letter ("Hi, here's a story; one time I sold a different story; well, gotta go!") and it would still have more information than I need. Because stuff in the cover letter is stuff that's external to the story. (Hopefully.) There will be plenty of time for that kind of thing after I buy your story.

One thing I've found I do like in a cover letter is when you show that you've read the submission guidelines. I mean, most of us are used to sending form cover letters in with our stories and getting form rejection letters back. It's nice to be reminded that there are real people on both ends of the process. But on the whole it seems a semi-archaic practice, like calling cards. Maybe I'd feel differently if I ran a regular magazine and had a chance to build up long-term relationships with authors.

Speaking of which, while reading slush I got a rejection email from an anthology I'd submitted to. So... yeah.

I wrote an alien invasion story set in 1994, and sure, there's some sense in which it's "inaccurate", but also a sense in which it's more accurate than a similar story set in 2014. I know what 1994 was like, and we all know the aliens I made up are not really going to show.

I chose BY-NC-SA for Thoughtcrime Experiments for three reasons: 1. that's the license Cory Doctorow uses, and it works out pretty well for him; 2. translations and adaptations to different media are prohibited under BY-NC-ND, and I want those to happen; 3. if you say it fast it sounds like "By NCSA", which makes whatever you're doing sound high-tech.

I also have a philosophical problem with BY-NC-ND which is that it doesn't enrich the commons beyond decriminalizing the act of copying. Imagine if it were suddenly okay to copy all those orphan works from the 20th (and by now the 21st) century. That'd be great news because large organizations could legally digitize all that stuff and we wouldn't lose it to Stanislaw Lem's paper-eating bacterium. But you still couldn't really interact with it until the copyright expired; it'd feel like it was behind glass. That's what BY-NC-ND feels like.

(Actually I'm being a bit hypocritical here because I originally put "Mallory" under BY-NC-ND, but I think I've talked myself out of that now, so I'll change it unless someone talks me back into it soon.)

So that's why I chose BY-ND-SA for Thoughtcrime Experiments. I'm interested in hearing additional arguments pro or con. Also note that I'm okay with negotiating the license even on the level of individual stories, though BY-NC-ND really is the baseline (otherwise it gets really confusing).

Pragmatically, I think most of the hypothetical undesirable uses of your work take place in a copyright grey area anyway, and won't be deterred by your choice of ND instead of SA. But I understand that pragmatism is not the main driver of peoples' (including my) feelings about this.

Alas, the day job returns on Monday, and the frenzy of writing will slow, but 2009 is looking a lot better for my fiction career than it seemed just a few days ago.

Unrelatedly, this entry prompted me and Sumana to Bookmooch about 15 books we're not gonna read/don't really need to keep, and I've put ten more in the equivalent of the proposed box.

Another way to stop the cycle of reading the books you suspect you won't enjoy enough to keep, is to choose your next book at random. But I've tried this in the past and it wasn't very satisfying. I did enjoy the brief experiment where you told me what books to read, and I'd actually like to re-open that experiment, so let me know which of these books I should read next. With the caveat that I need to finish The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and then I'm going to take advantage of my new bookshelf space and finally read Rules of Play, so it'll be a while before I get to your demands.

As my Christmas present to the Internet I'm soliciting submissions for a new speculative fiction anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments. Sumana will read slush, I'll select and edit the stories, and we'll publish online under a Creative Commons license.

If you're a spec-fic writer, and there's some story that people you've shown it to have liked, but that you've been unable to find a publisher for, send it to me. If I like the story enough to spend $200 on it, I'll buy it for $200. I hope to buy five stories. Details at the anthology page. Rationale follows.

I've been in a writing group for over a year, and read about thirty stories and a novel because of it. I've mentioned before that half the stories are "a rewrite away from publication quality". What does that mean, really? It means I could easily imagine reading those fifteen stories in a magazine or anthology. But of those fifteen stories, there are only two I want to buy for three cents a word and publish myself.[0] It's different when it's your own money.

Thoughtcrime Experiments is an an experiment with my own money. How hard is it to find five stories that I really want to buy? Given those stories, how hard is it to put together an anthology people will want to read? At the tor.com holiday meetup I cornered Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Joseph Adams, and asked them whether my plan was feasible.

My takeaway from those conversations is that the toughest part of putting together an anthology is A) getting some "name" writers to promise to contribute stories to anchor the anthology[1], and B) getting a publishing deal.[2] Well, I don't need either of those to consider this project a success, so let's do this. Send your best unpublished story to thoughtcrime.experiments@gmail.com. I'll start promoting this anthology more in the new year, when people come back from vacation and start paying attention again, but it's open for submissions now.

I'm also going to try to write a story for John's current anthology, "Federations", and a pro market wants me to do a rewrite on a different story (yes!). So, busy vacation.

[0] I think one of those stories has sold, as has the novel.

[1] At VPXI Elizabeth Bear told the story of how she broke into the relatively-big time by filling in for a name writer who'd flaked out on an anthology promise. And then eventually found herself being the name writer and flaking out on anthology promises of her own, leaving room for other up-and-coming writers.

[2] Anthology creation, at least the way John does it, seems like you nail down the name contributors, pitch the book to a publisher using the name writers as collateral, put everything together, send out the checks, and submit the manuscript. For some reason I always imagined someone at the publisher coming up with the anthology idea and gathering the stories. But it's more like a novel that you subcontract out.

Update, much later: I was wrong.

Why do the markets pay so poorly? That's the natural result of massive oversupply. Why is there so much bad free stuff online? My portfolio shows the problem in miniature. My old crappy stories are online because I didn't know any better. My dynamite new stuff circulates endlessly through snail and electronic mail. Sure, I'm bitter, but it seems pointless to complain about this because the solution is obvious.

Seriously, what am I doing? I don't care about money--there's not enough to care about. If I wanted an audience I'd split my stories into RSS-feed cliffhangers and put them in syndication once they passed writing group muster. All that's left is the feeling that there are dues I ought to be paying. I've got a bad case of professionalism.

Who needs it? Life is too short. I know what position I'm sliding towards and I keep resisting it. Maybe I'll start writing novels instead; those take a lot longer to crank out, at least.

In semirelated news of things happening to my stories, my bizarre short-short "Panspermia Cannon" was reprinted some time ago in an online mag called Infinity's Kitchen. It's in issue #1, in case you want to see the same words laid out better--and really, why else would you be reading this entry that's all about format-shifting?

Oh, also, my former writing group colleague N.K. Jemisin sold a story to Baen's Universe, except it's hardly worth mentioning compared to her three-novel book deal.

The pitch!

In March 2006, while Ruby Cookbook was in the editing stage, I had some phone conversations with Michael about doing another O'Reilly book. He tried to get me interested in various projects that existed in potentia, crystallized from some neural net in Tim O'Reilly's brain. However I'd already done such a project and I wanted the next one to be my own idea.

Lots of people have ideas for technical books they want to write (I've heard many pitches myself), but the animal-cover part of O'Reilly is pretty conservative and won't do a book project unless there's a good-sized market for what the book is talking about. At one point I suggested an in-depth book on ncurses programming, but that never happened because it would have sold about four copies.

Then I came up with the idea for RESTful Web Services, which was better, but in March 2006 still kind of a hard sell. Michael's initial response was: "I agree it's a book we need; I don't think it's something we need quite as much as Scriptaculous and Prototype". I argued for starting the book ahead of the curve, but see above re conservatism. Ultimately Sam and I got the book deal, as you know, but I think that's the reason underlying the drama we had in November with some factions wanting to stick "with Ruby" on the book's name.

Time management

Near the start of Ruby Cookbook I went from full-time at CollabNet to working three days a week. I was really bored with my job but I didn't have the confidence or the money to just quit. Three days a week at the job worked out well for my writing, and to this day 25 hours a week is the maximum amount of time I prefer to spend in the corporate world.

My one piece of advice, if you'll only listen to one, is to rearrange your job so that you have one or more days off every week to work on your book. The writing will go faster and you'll take some of the pressure off your evenings.

Later in 2005, Sumana moved in with me and eventually I felt like I could quit and work on Ruby Cookbook full-time. That's also how I did RESTful Web Services, and it's by far the best arrangement if you can manage it. Writing a book is approximately a full-time job, so treating it as a full-time job lets you live a normal life.

Outlining

As a book with 350 short "chapters", Ruby Cookbook had a pretty detailed outline from the start. My daily goal was two or three recipes, depending on how many I needed to meet the next deadline. Longtime readers may remember recipes going green on my webpage for the book as they came in. Because the project was so clearly specced out, I sometimes had the luxury of being done by 2 in the afternoon and being able to take the rest of the day off. Ruby Cookbook is the only book project where that happened.

Baron suggests approaching the prose of your book by outlining in more and more detail, rather than jumping into prose that you'll always be mentally editing. That's a good approach, but my outline for RESTful Web Services never got that detailed. old_outline.txt is 5000 words. Some parts (Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 8) are very detailed and the rest is pretty skeletal. To keep a steady flow, if I felt myself unable to express some thought, I would just stick a TODO in the text, like when coding.

External dependencies

I was able to get a small budget for paying Ruby Cookbook recipe contributors, I think by giving up part of my advance. Contributors were my major external block. I started recruiting contributors as soon as I announced the project and my goal was to get all the contributions in before the second-to-last deadline, giving me a buffer time of two weeks to write any recipes that contributors couldn't deliver. This did not work completely, but it did keep the last-minute scrambling down to one or two instances.

For RWS we had some coauthors in the last chapter talking about Django and Restlet. I don't remember the details but there was some last-minute scrambling to get one of those sections in under deadline. I'm going to go ahead and call this a general rule.

Revision

Baron writes that he did a lot of revision and that every editing pass found a bunch of errors. I can second most of what he writes, but this section in particular rings true for me; I know too well the seemingly endless TODO list. However, my books didn't go through as many editing passes as his did, leading me to think that O'Reilly will skimp on copyediting to get the books out in time for whatever conference they've scheduled the release for. (I found this conference-centrism strange, but it shows up in Baron's entry as well: "[D]on't feel bad if the book doesn’t come to the [MySQL] conference: it will be at Velocity which is directly related, and at OSCon.")

The result is that the first printings of my books have lots of typos, as the more unkind Amazon reviewers have noticed. I've spent a full day plus a cross-country plane trip going through my copy of RWS finding missing words and other minor errata. I haven't seen the second printing yet, but it should be a lot cleaner.

Unlike with Wrox, with my O'Reilly books I had to find technical reviewers on my own. I actually think this was a net benefit for both books, because the reviewers I found were domain experts who were interested in the book, and willing to respond to requests for clarification. I wrote and rewrote whole sections of RWS because a reviewer said "you forgot this" or "this is wrong, you idiot", things I don't think a hired gun would have caught, and RWS is a much better book because of it.

The downside is that I had to coordinate the reviewers myself and there was no money to pay them (they got free copies of the book, which didn't cost O'Reilly much). There were a lot of technical reviewers who just found typos, and while that wasn't the best use of their time, I'm not going to say it was a waste of time, given the number of typos that got past everybody.

Formatting

Ruby Cookbook was written using RedCloth-like wiki markup, and kept on an experimental internal wiki called Aardvark (which doesn't exist anymore). I describe the doctest-like way I tested the recipes in Unit Testing Your Documentation. This was a very convenient format for me, but it's not the format used for the final edit or to typeset the book, which is going to cause big headaches when it comes time to do the second edition.

RWS started out being written in wiki markup and then I converted it to Docbook about a third of the way through. Docbook was great. It's like writing HTML, except the tag names are longer. Plus, Docbook is what O'Reilly uses internally, so if you're writing a book for O'Reilly and someone tells you you have to use Word, make a fuss.

Docbook did have a couple shortcomings. Although I could do a cross-reference to another chapter fine, doing cross-references to a section within another chapter resulted in just the section name with no indication of what chapter that section was in. (This was a problem with O'Reilly's stylesheet; you can see a couple instances of this problem in the first printing of RWS). And I apparently use too many footnotes. But the major problem was the code samples.

Code starts to decay as soon as it's taken out of a file that can be executed as code. That's why I wrote the doctest-like program that executed Ruby Cookbook entries. But Ruby Cookbook looked like a set of unit tests: a bunch of self-contained little demonstrations of what you can do with code. The code in RWS looks like integration tests, full of interacting parts. There's a whole Rails application in there. And Docbook is less flexible about inserting code snippets than the wiki markup was.

So instead of putting the code in the text, I left the code alone and wrote a preprocessor that folded it into the text as necessary. Here's a random example, from my version of chapter 7 (implementation.xml.in):

    <para>
      At this point I know enough about the dataset to create the
      database schema (see <xref linkend="bookmark-schema" />). I
      wrote this file as
      <filename>db/migrate/001_initial_schema.rb</filename>, created
      my <literal>bookmarks_development</literal> database in MySQL,
      and ran <command>rake migrate</command> to create the database
      schema.
    </para>

##ruby/bookmarks/app/db/migrate/001_initial_schema.rb|The bookmark database schema as a Rails migration|bookmark-schema

    <para>
      Now I can create the database schema by running this command:
    </para>

(You can see one of those problematic cross-references in there, though that one's OK because it links elsewhere in the chapter.)

My preprocessor goes through a .in file and replaces that double-hashed line with a Docbook example:

   <example id="bookmark-schema">
      <title>The bookmark database schema as a Rails migration</title>

      <programlisting>class InitialSchema &lt; ActiveRecord::Migration
        ...
      </programlisting>
   </example>

Some files are explained in multiple sections. If you look at the RWS sample code you'll see some lines that just have a double hash.

example 1
more example 1
##
example 2
more example 2

Once the preprocessor runs, I've got an implementation.xml file that unifies text and code, and my book.xml file sews all the chapters together. Not as clumsy or random as a Word doc; an elegant toolchain for a more civilized time. The files did get a little out of sync near the end, in the final editing stage, which again will cause headaches come second edition time. But it won't be nearly as bad as Ruby Cookbook, and honestly most of the code in RWS will need to be replaced anyway.

That sordid subject, money

I'm not comfortable going all John Scalzi on you and showing you my royalty statements, so let's talk in generalities. I earned out my advance for both Ruby Cookbook and RWS in the initial buy. (The technical term for this is "my advance was too small".) That's Amazon buying a bunch, and Borders and B&N stocking a copy in each of their stores. And Waldenbooks, I dunno. The initial buys are probably the biggest sales I'll ever make, and they're almost entirely due to the O'Reilly brand name.

My advances were in the single-digit thousands of dollars. Subsequent to earning them out I've earned single-digit thousands of dollars for each book, quarterly. I'm the primary author on both books and I get the majority of the royalties. If I let someone else do the second edition, my share of the royalties will go down.

It's problematic for a number of reasons to try to convert book royalties into an hourly wage. One big reason is that much of the income hasn't come in yet, so who knows how much it's going to be and the time value of money etc. Each of my books took about a year of my life. My estimated earnings are more than the sub-minimum-wage figure commonly thrown around, but they're a lot less less than what I'd have earned working for those two years as a programmer. In fact, it's less than I earned at my first real programming job back in 2000.

Now, these are incredibly successful books. RWS is a year old and has an Amazon sales rank between 3k-5k. Ruby Cookbook's rank is between 20k-40k at two years old; a year ago it was 4k-10k. Beginning Python probably had just as many man-hours devoted to it, but it never cracked 14k. The fundamental author's fallacy is to make a connection between Amazon sales rank and number of sales, but think about what sales rank really means: that's the number of books that are doing better than mine on Amazon. That's approximately the number of people in the United States who are making more money from their books than I am.

So, as I said in in another context, writing is not the most cost-effective use of your time. But unlike writing science fiction, writing technical nonfiction can help your career in other ways that Baron and others have covered ably.

The wall

I want to write something about the feeling I get halfway through a book where I'm just sick of writing, but I've been writing this big weblog entry and I'm... sick of writing. So I'll just mention it. There's a point where you think "what the hell, why am I doing this, this is killing me", but at that point you've signed a contract and how are you going to feel if you flake out. I imagine some people actually do flake out at this point. To get through this I find it helps to get into the submarine mentality, and to not have a job that's killing you on top of the book project that's killing you.

The first book I worked on (Beginning Python) has not been very successful, but it's in a very crowded space. (It's a very distant second among books with that title!) My experience working on Beginning Python was much like the one Baron describes. I wrote my chapters nights and weekends, using all my free time. The publisher expected documents in Word format, which was a big pain. I wrote in Emacs and once my draft was done, spent a day pasting it into OpenOffice and setting the styles manually. I didn't have any problems incorporating reviewer feedback into the text, but there was only one review pass. The publisher hired technical reviewers to go over my chapters, but I couldn't even email them to ask for clarification--they'd already done their job and gotten paid.

I wrote three chapters for Beginning Python which translated into me busting my ass for a couple months on top of a full-time job. I think I wrote good stuff, but I got very little directly to show for it--a couple thousand dollars of an advance that will never be earned out. This is the fate of most books. All I can say by way of encouragement is that your chances are a lot better writing technical books than writing fiction. But, looking at it long term, Beginning Python was my apprenticeship. I showed that 1) I can write well, and 2) I make deadlines instead of slipping them or flaking out altogether. My work on this project opened the doors for other projects, which were much more successful. I'll talk about those later.

I inquired how Sumana thought I might have known this, since like a magician preparing a trick I had booted up my laptop in full view of her and ostentatiously not looked at Anacrusis before telling her my idea. She said maybe I'd talked it over with Brendan beforehand.

Anyway, here is my totally different Anacrusish story. I like to call it...

Ogilvy

"Ho ho ho," says Santa, "permanently."

"We're here to help, Santa," says Ogilvy. "Don't you miss your core identity?"

"I'll stuff your stocking—permanently!" Santa roars, but there's that flicker of doubt.

"You know what comes after 'beloved symbol reenvisioned as evil'? Semiotic nullity. You merge with the collective unconscious. This is the last stop, old man."

Santa busts a strap.

"Nurse, sedative," says Ogilvy. "We'll walk you back through modernity. Have you ever been a facile metaphor for quantum uncertainty?"

"I see it!" says Santa. "Naughty and Nice, superimposed in every soul."

"Treatment successful!" observes Ogilvy, just as Santa suddenly disappears.

What to do? There's the de rigeur Emacs RTF plugin, but all it can do right now is read some RTF documents. I've found the process of manuscript conversion is pretty automatic as long as you distinguish poetry from prose. That means I should be able to write a script using Ruby RTF to do the conversion. (It's missing some features but I can just hard-code the corresponding markup.)

I'm mainly posting this to find out if anyone else is in this same, admittedly only slightly leaky, boat.

Realistically it's not going to happen, if by "career" you mean "source of enough money to live on" and not "thing you're primarily known for doing". In fact, if I may speak from experience, writing in general isn't going to do it. John Scalzi (he of the unorthodox career trajectory, of which more anon) made $67k last year as an SF writer. That's really good for an SF writer, but it's about entry-level for, say, a computer programmer.

The telling detail for me came during the discussion of conventions. Many fans who are heavily involved in the SF community are perfectly capable of writing professional-quality SF. They don't do it because they're happy making 10 times the money as theoretical physicists or sysadmins. In other words, they're rational.

But of course lots of people, including most of the VP instructors, devote big chunks of their lives to and are best known for writing science fiction. How do they do it? Here are the tactics I discerned.

• Don't need a lot of money. Live in New Hampshire or Nevada. Don't live in New York unless you're an editor on salary.
• Have another job. Laura Mixon works at a game company. John Scalzi (who was, I should mention at this point, not teaching at VP this year, but he makes a good test case for a lot of things) does some sort of contract work for AOL Journals. Cory Doctorow reduces overhead by tying all of his work into a media empire (weblog, science fiction, speaking engagements, teaching, etc.) each part of which reinforces the other parts.
• Publish a lot. Elizabeth Bear has published eight novels since 2005. James MacDonald and Debra Doyle have published thirty-five novels together. Charlie Stross, to pick another useful non-VP test case, was able to quit his lame job and become a full-time writer, but he did this by selling fourteen novels in six years.

  James was talking about how you can get paid for the same story multiple times (anthologies, basically) and how that money adds up, but I can't see it adding up to very much unless you constantly write stuff for anthologies. Which, of course, you can do.

• Marry another writer. James Macdonald and Debra Doyle are espoused; so are Laura Mixon and Steven Gould. You can collaborate with your spouse to get stuff written faster, or you can trade off such that one of you is working full-time and the other is writing full-time. (Sumana and I have been doing something similar, which is how I was able to write my two O'Reilly books.)

One thing that doesn't work is selling movie rights to your book. Steven Gould's Jumper has been turned into a big-budget Hollywood movie (I hear tell it takes place in a world) and he certainly got a chunk of money from that, but it's not life-changing money. It's money for paying off a big one-time expense like a kid's college education. Selling one set of movie rights is not fundamentally different from selling one novel. If you want Hollywood money you should go into Hollywood proper.

The short form is the natural experimental form for science fiction, and I think it's the one where you can really advance the state of the art. But one of the less controversial things you can say in this troubled world is that the market for short-form science fiction is pretty bad. Subscription numbers to the big three print fiction magazines are in decline. So are the pay rates: a story published in 1930 might have netted you the 1930 equivalent of $1000; today the same story might fetch you $300. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm going to talk generally about money in a bit but tonight I want to focus on what's the deal with short stories. You can't blame piracy because nobody even bothers to make unauthorized copies of short stories. The audience is just gone.

At VP I heard things to the effect of: the short story is the farm team, the garage music of science fiction. It's a mechanism for editors, writers, and fans to keep abreast of developments in the field. There's your problem: that's a really small audience! I've been an SF/F fan since before I could read on my own, and I like the short form, but I only started reading the magazines when I became serious about getting my own stuff published; ie. took the field itself as an object of study. For these purposes the market is drastically oversupplied.

The short form is ideal for evaluating new writers: you have to concisely demonstrate the quality of your counterfactuals and psychological treatment. But the market is based on the outdated premise that their core audience wants a certain thrill every month and that a print magazine is the best way to deliver it.

I've said before that the vectors of change are online magazines like Strange Horizons, but after VP I see why. It's not just generic "online is awesome", though that's part of it: the people who want the thrill that SF provides (inc. me) are starting to want it online. The other part is that online magazines are making it possible to regard modern short SF/F as an indexed body of work, the fictional equivalent of a field of science: the study of thought experiments. (Remember that the web was originally designed, if I may quote myself, "to schlep project notes around a physics lab.") As a bonus, for those interested in short SF/F solely as entertainment, it's easy and permanent access to the entertainment.

This is why I keep linking to the old science fiction that shows up in Project Gutenberg: it fills in the enormous gaps in the indexed body of work. This is why it's so bad that the Sci Fi Channel claims they've taken down their archive of new and classic stories (it looks like they haven't actually done it yet): it brings into the online world a taste of the impermanence that is completely standard in the print world.

Lying in wait like an unwelcome subtext to this discussion is the topic of my own humble contributions to the field. Post-VP I've been editing my stories for submission to the big-name print magazines; but really, why am I doing this? Well, there is the blood oath I took on Friday. But what do I want out of it? At any time I could short-circuit the whole boring process by publishing my stories online. The money's really bad either way, and my online readership over time would approach the basically-one-time print readership.

Really what I want out of it is recognition from my would-be peers. Right now that comes by voluntarily going through an established gatekeeper instead of self-publishing. This is important because the traditional career trajectory for a science fiction writer (insofar as such a thing can be considered a career, which as I'll claim later is not very far at all) starts out with you building a name for yourself in this increasingly misaligned short story market. I don't particularly want a trajectory right now, but I would like to have something of a name in the field, so I press onward.

When I asked Patrick Nielsen Hayden what new career trajectories he saw taking shape, he said "If I knew that, I'd be rich." Well, nothing's going to make you rich in this field, but if he knew this it'd be a lot easier for him to find people he should sign for novels. I'm coming up with alternate schemes for advancing the state of the art, schemes based more around peer review, but they tend to reduce to starting my own online magazine.

In semi-related news, someone at VP wrote a constrained story based on the premise that teleology was a real science. I didn't read this story but I'd really like to.

Your name might be uneuphonic, difficult to spell or pronounce, or very long. The same reason a lot of performance artists use stage names.

You might use different names when writing in different genres. Genre readers are pretty picky, and if you put the same name on all your books, bookstores may not stock as many of your titles. Publishing imprints work on this principle.

If you get caught in the midlist death spiral (which is definitely caused by an algorithm, though I'm still going back and forth on whether it's a bad algorithm even by the shortsighted standards of big business), changing your pseudonymn can be an effective way to fool the algorithm and reboot your career. Publishing imprints also contain elements of fooling bookstores' algorithms.

Finally, you might want to avoid prejudice. Still common is the girl cooties theory of literature which holds that certain genres are intrinsically less macho than others, and has as a subtext the idea that hard SF written by women can never achieve the synthetic-diamond hardness of hard SF written by men. So a lot of women use their initials or gender-neutral or male pseudonyms. (Attempting to defeat the GCToL can also lead to overcompensating within the story.)

Through the workshop I got wildly varying assessments of my story's position on the Mohr scale of science fiction, and I'm pretty sure this had to do, not with the GCToL directly, but different readers' perception of the mass market's perception of the GCToL.

Despite the not-terribly-surprising fact that the vast majority of people who write SF under their initials are women (there was a survey on this topic but I can't find a link), readers tend to assume that unless the writer's unambiguously feminine name is spelled out for them, the writer is male (different survey, ditto on link). I guess even thinking about it requires confronting the prejudice.

It's still a little early for me to be picking out my science fiction pseudonym, but I'm considering writing under my initials 1) out of solidarity with female SF writers, and 2) to avoid confusion with the two nonfiction books already published under my full name. However, it's difficult for me to pass up an opportunity to sow confusion.

I'm still not crazy about the story, but I like it better than I did the first day. Mainly because the ending I wrote is less heavy-handed than the one I intended to write. Of course when I do that, I run the risk of making the ending incomprehensible to everyone else.

Sumana, reading my outline: "Don't Bogart the Benefits of REST"? Is the Dude going to make an appearance in this book?
Leonard: No...
Sumana: Why not?

Update: Just to be clear, the month of work is work Sam and I have to do. Then there's a couple months of work O'Reilly has to do, on top of that.

This is great news for me as it demonstrates that I can write fiction people will buy. Look for it sometime next year, probably a little before the REST book is published.

There are lots of books about Big Web Services: complex distributed-object systems that reproduce the mechanics of method calls over HTTP. The problem is 1) these systems are way too big for what they do, and 2) they're on the web but they aren't of the web. They don't use any of the web's features, or interact with anything else on the web. They just use HTTP as a transport protocol. They could just as easily run over TCP and get better performance.

These un-weblike systems were able to take the name "Web Services" away from the competition because the competition is... the web. Just writing programs that interact with the web. Sounds pretty sketchy! The web may be all right as a platform for serving movies, or selling books, or trading stocks, or democratizing publishing, or coordinating huge volunteer projects, or searching much of the information currently in existence, but there's no way it's up to the task of managing Accounts Payable! For that you need... Web Services!

As Big Web Services gathered steam, the pro-web forces rallied behind the banner of REST: a name for the design philosophy that made the human-visible web so successful. They preached simplicity, addressability, statelessness and the uniform interface of HTTP. They also got into lots of heated arguments about what REST really meant.

Some organizations created services that claimed to be RESTful, and others critiqued those services and said they weren't RESTful really, and is "RESTful" even a word? Meanwhile the world's programmers started finding options in their IDEs that generated code for Big Web Service clients and servers, so they wouldn't have to do so much programming.

I got the idea for a REST book when I started seriously trying to figure out what was and wasn't REST. I noticed that though certain best practices showed up repeatedly in REST folklore, they never really progressed beyond that point. I decided to write a book that would set down the folklore and hopefully create some new canon, some common ground. I got Sam Ruby to agree to do the hard parts. And when I started work on the book I discovered a basic rule of thumb, a framing device that really focuses on what's important about REST, and makes it easy to tell what's RESTful and what's not.

We call this framing device the Resource-Oriented Architecture (we're not the first, but the other uses are compatible with ours), and I'm going to be writing about it a lot more in NYCB. It's too good to keep hidden in a book along with a bunch of implementation details.

Some people might say, "Leonard, why are you guys even writing this book? There already are lots of books about the web, and REST is just the web, right? That's the whole point! We wrote those books back in the 90s."

To them I say: "Some people, think about Ajax for a bit. Ajax, as a technology, is only about two years old, but it's composed entirely of technologies that are much older, like Javascript and XMLHttpRequest and the browser DOM. So why are there all these books about Ajax? (Including Christian Gross's Ajax and REST Recipes, coming out later this month and seemingly the only other book to mention REST in the title.) Why does Ajax excite people when DHTML was a big yawn? Because Ajax is a way of framing these old technologies so that people can do awesome things.

"There's nothing on the market that explains what REST really means and how to make it work for you. Nothing about programming the web in a way that's more structured than screen-scraping without falling into the pit of Big Web Services. This is a way of framing preexisting technologies that lets people do awesome things."

Then I add, "Speaking of Ajax, did you know that an Ajax application is basically a REST web service client that runs in your web browser? That's why Christian Gross's book is called what it is, and that's just one of the amazing reality-twisting facts you'll learn from my new book, Jon." Because I'm talking to Jon Stewart! I'm on The Daily Show, plugging my new REST book! It's a dream come true! But wait--I'm not actually on The Daily Show! I'm just on a clip from The Daily Show that someone uploaded to YouTube! And now someone is sending a DELETE request to my URI! I can see the Authorization request header, its value is "DMCA Takedown Notice", and nooooooooooo

Then I wake up. Whew! It was just a regular dream, not a dream come true. I get up and go back to work on my REST book.

Ruby is awesome and the Ruby Cookbook was a lot of fun to write, but it wasn't my idea. It's part of a high-profile O'Reilly series. There was destined to be a Ruby Cookbook, written by somebody, from the moment Rails strapped an E motor to Ruby and hit the igniter. This book was my idea, and Sam and I are driving it. In the coming months I'll be writing a lot more on this topic. There's a lot of work we need to do in the real world, in addition to writing stuff down in a book.

PS: I say this on the homepage for the book, but in case you haven't clicked through and you're interested in REST, please email me or Sam. We'd love to have you help us with the folklore and best practices, and we need lots of reviewers.

This happens within a sentence too. I'll start a sentence, then go somewhere else and tack something on to another sentence. Then, considering the start of the sentence to be a trivial corollary of the thing I just tacked on, I'll get right to work on the subordinate clause. Fortunately, the problem bottoms out here; I don't start writing a word and then go running off to write another word somewhere else.

I bring this up by way of introduction to this sentence I found just now in a book chapter, lying at the end of a paragraph like a gnawed bone:

If we , and , then when

Thanks a lot, prior self.

Brendan wrote his own version of "The Fungi From Eris", based on my prelimenary notes.

In related notes, I recently tried to catch the science fiction zeitgeist by writing a transhumance story, but it didn't work out well.

I think this technique is pretty interesting and I'm really happy with the quality improvements and extra confidence I got out of it. I even considered going to RubyConf and giving a talk about it. But going to RubyConf to give a talk costs me money, money I don't have, whereas writing an article on the same topic would earn me a pitifully small amount of money. I decided to write an article. This is the sort of business acumen that has made me the financial giant I am today.

Now the article's been published: "Unit testing your documentation". Original title was the less-prescriptive "Unit testing a book", which got changed to the even-less-prescriptive "Unit testing the Ruby Cookbook" but now it seems I'm prescripting away! Whee!

All day I gnashed my teeth trying to figure out how to get that damn scene into its chronological place in the story. So many dependencies, so many facts it establishes that I need later. I finally just dropped the scene into the right place and started hacking at the dangling references. The guts are still showing, but amazingly the story now has a plot. One thing happens, and it makes another thing happen, and things cause other things until the story ends, and that's a plot. There are no random notes from the future coming in and obscuring the connection between things x and x+1.

Maybe it's not that strict a rule, but I'm a well-known anti-fan of flashbacks, so for me it's chronological order or totally disassociated sequence of images. It can't be half and half, it can't be now and then.

If I may self-analyze, I think my biggest fiction failing is a pathological fear of writing infodumps. I relentlessly avoid explaining anything except in sidelong glances. The result is a pointillistic story that you can't understand without reading it multiple times. To make you want to read the story multiple times I cram it full of ideas. Which must be explained. In sidelong glances. My stories look like flip books. You have to work to see the plot.

Does anyone else have this problem? (Especially published writers whose work I can look at?) I'll let you know what strategies I can figure out against it.

First a note about pages like that, which as a good IF writer but a middling static fiction writer, I find kind of frustrating. The page is oriented towards beginning writers. Like most web pages that allege to help you be a writer, it's heavy on "don't misspell words" and less heavy on "don't have a hackneyed plot" and "don't create puzzles that make no freaking sense" and things I don't know or can't articulate. Such pages turn bad writers into readable bad writers, but won't get anyone's work up to really good quality. As I've found out the hard way, good ideas and a good grasp of English don't automatically translate into readable stories. There are additional skills.

These pages chop the head off of a Sturgeon's Power Law that says the vast majority of bad writing is bad for obvious reasons (scroll down to the handy "context of rejection"). With static fiction I can routinely hit the midway point on this particular ring-the-bell carnival game, but I haven't found many good resources for getting higher. I have found one extremely useful page, but the higher-level craft seems to be something you have to learn one-on-one with someone who already knows, or something subjective you learn with practice. Or something that no one has written about because existing documents are enough to get the unintersting people out of your hair.

The problems in the first-timer list are divided into problems of fiction and problems of game design. I'm not going to discuss the problems of fiction because I don't find them very interesting. I can, however, tackle the problems of game design because much less work has been done exploring elementary problems in game design. Because this entry is already huge I'm going to cover one item at a time, over a period of several centuries.

Item 1: bad point systems. There are actually two possible problems here. The first is a poorly-scaled point system where you get 100 points for finding a key. The second is an overgenerous point system where you get 5 points for getting out of bed.

If a piece of IF has a scoring system, it imposes a limit on the score. I don't know of any counterexamples. In general, your score goes up when you do a one-time action that progresses you toward the conclusion of the plot. Your score at any given time is a measure of your progress (Zork III is a notable, and obnoxious, exception).

But if a video game has a scoring system, it imposes no limit on the score (except any imposed by the hardware). Again, I don't know of any counterexamples, though I can conceive of games where your score is represented as a percentage. The score of a video game has nothing to do with the game per se: your advancement towards the end of the game is measured by things like stage numbers. It's just a way of keeping... score. I think this problem is caused by treating a piece of IF like a video game.

It's fine to give the player 100 points for finding a key in a video game, but ridiculous to do the same thing in a piece of IF. This is because people don't handle big numbers well. If your maximum score in an IF game is a big number, it's difficult to tell how close you are to the maximum, and how much 100 points really contributes towards the maximum. A big inscrutable number is cool when you're claiming to be an awesome dude, but it's not as cool when everyone who completes the game gets approximately that same score.

By the same token, you shouldn't give out points for actions that don't advance the plot or don't involve any cleverness. If you do, the score will cease to have meaning as a way of measuring the state of the plot and your cleverness so far.

Phyla

"We are the whales," says Phyla. "the ocean's voice. Keepers of the deep eternal secrets." She strokes the fishbowl of warm seawater.

"We want krill," she says, surprising herself. "You have boats. Go north. Bring us krill." Even this crowd hoots and leaves. A few stay.

"Prepare to be boarded!" says Phyla, still translating. "Drop nets, me hearties!"

"Good job," say the whales. "Now..."

Then, Phyla gets another radio in her head: one eye's made of crystal. "Fishing craft, change course ten degrees."

"I know who you are," she says, "and why you're here."

To her crew: "Load the cannons."

"I'll teach you how to make cheese," he said. It was a lie. "My hand slipped," he'd say. "It's thermodynamically impossible." Always something. She'd had enough of the excuses, the anthills left by unfinished projects on the back porch.

It had to stop, so she stopped it. With biscuits. The sour milk, the sawdust. She cleaned it all up, not the way a woman usually does, but for the first and last time.

"Look," she said then. "I've invented fiberboard."

The constraints were:

1. The comic must be non-linear
2. The Xth panel of the comic must contain a character who's name starts with letter X of the alphabet. See below for a full list.
3. The comic must be a murder mystery, and for every character in the comic there must be an ending where they are revealed to be the murderer
4. You and I must be in the comic. I couldn't find any pictures of Jack, so I represented him by the kangaroo from the movie "Kangaroo Jack".
5. The comic must advertize WHAMMO, made by satan's minions

Sumana requested a suggested order for the panels, to deal with the non-linearity. The best I can do is 4-9-5-1-11-12, and then 7 as the PSA at the end. The rest of the panels are just possible endings.

List of characters: Adam (played by Adam Kaplan), Beelzebub, Cerberus, the Devil (in snake form), Eve (played by a character from the video game Parasite Eve; probably not actually named Eve), Furfur (look it up! I did!), Giant Anthropomorphic Pineapple, Hastur, Imp, Jack Masters, Kraken, and yours truly.

First, the apple test. Bang! As you can see, I have fulfilled mankind's eons-long dream of accelerating apples to escape velocity. With luck, that apple will land on a foreign planet and take root there. This device makes me the Johnny Appleseed of the cosmos!

Now, the plum. The cannon is now aimed directly at Mars. The Martian terraforming process begins now, with this plum! Bang!

What is it now? It seems my overzealous assistant, Behemoth Radix, has loaded the panspermia cannon with marshmallows. You fool! Marshmallows are not the seed of interplanetary life! Except perhaps in the ammonia clouds of certain gas giants... yes, yes. Behemoth, your progress astounds me. Let the cosmos be filled with gaseous marshmallow balloon-creatures! Bang!

What? Who dares disturb my demonstration export of picturesque Earth life to the universe? Ah, General, your question please. Yes, I suppose it could be used as a weapon, if the enemy lived on other planets, and if more than anything they hated having fresh fruit delivered through space to their door. I find your obsession with militarizing each of my inventions disturbing, to be honest. First it was my "fun bomb", which you thought could be modified to deploy munitions other than fun. Then, your ludicrous plan for my top-secret stealth glider. Frankly, your naivete astounds me. But keep those checks coming!

Tomorrow flying to Utah for John's graduation. Taking the train back means lots of time for reading, and for writing fiction. Ah, sweet fiction, where you can make up random stuff and no one can say it's wrong.

Almost Immediate Update: Perhaps I spoke too soon; the original author is going to try to make time for the revisions.

However the publisher sees them as big books, so the copy editor went through my chapters (essays) removing the "I" voice because the "I" for this book has multiple personality disorder. I use "I" a whole lot, because my nonfiction writing style is "Hello, allow me to tell you stuff". My "I'll show you x" became "You'll learn to x", and "I think you should do x" became "You should do x". The latter I'm a little uneasy with. It's just, like, my opinion, man.

Speaking of which, the copy editor also took out my Lebowski homage (changing "parlance" to "terminology"), but left "encroaching ennui" and all of my jokes intact. Not a bad trade.

Silas

God has bent the spectrum over His knee. A rainbow goes from red to between yellow and green, then back down to red. Grass, if there was any, would look sick and brown. Silas's arms have mainly lost their highlights, but his rubber gloves are as black as before.

Silas wipes at his face for suddenly appearing goggles. Is it his brain, his eyes? The room, the world?

"The blue wire!" shouts Detective Rogin from behind the vault's door. "Cut the blue wire!"

Silas looks down at the package and tries to remember. Clearly someone does not want him to succeed.