Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

Reunion

Tonight was the “BBSer Reunion GT” — or whatever they’re calling it. If you don’t know what a BBS or a GT is, just pretend it’s a party.  The word ‘reunion’ I assume you know – in this case, most of the people in attendance hadn’t seen one another in 10+ years, and we mostly knew each other from when we were teenagers / young adults.  I Twittered about it briefly, stating that, while I have no interest in attending a High School reunion, when I heard about this get together there was no question whether I would attend.  I generally don’t make plans in advance, and this was a ‘sure thing’ that I turned down many other opportunities for in the last six weeks.  As opposed to the people I went to High School with, these were my real friends.  (Note to friends from the actual high school I attended: the few of you who exist were also, generally, BBSers and, as you know, we’re still in touch and good friends.  No reunion necessary.)

As I expected, more than half of the people there I didn’t recognize – either at first, or, in some cases, at all.  It’s been 10, 12, maybe more years since I saw these people, and some of them I only saw for a few hours, here and there.  Others I spent a lot of time with over my teenage years … and some of those I still forgot the names of – though I recognized their faces, voices, and characters.  A few of them looked like they had been somehow stuck into a time capsule after the last time I saw them; nearly identical to my memories, what memories I have.  Which was eerie.  Much more eerie than that most of their personalities seem to have likewise been frozen in time; that I’m used to.  People tend to stay largely the same, beyond a certain stage of psychological development.

It was good seeing them again.  There were missing faces.  A lot of missing faces.  It’s hard to get hold of people after so long, especially when no one knows their last names or … much else about them that might help find them, because when we were friends none of that stuff mattered.  But those who showed up it was good to see.

Continue reading Reunion

New iMac

So, my flat-screen/round-base iMac (the first flat-screen iMac, ordered within hours of being announced) died last year.  And my iBook (the last update before they switched to intel processors – which I received barely in time for NaNoWriMo 2004) is growing weary under the weight of being my full-time work computer.  It crashed a couple of times during NaNoWriMo 2008, literally going completely to off without warning, and has been slowing down & giving trouble more and more lately.  I need to take the strain off it – perhaps if I put it back to light use, primarily for word processing and web browsing, it will survive?

So last November, I started shopping for a new Mac.  The decision between a Macbook Pro and an iMac has been (still is, to an extent) a difficult one.  On one hand, the Macbook Pro costs more while giving less (less screen being the biggest point against it, but less processing power, less HDD, less powerful graphics are all factors, too), but on the other hand, a laptop is portable & is what I’m currently used to for my primary computer.  Portability is important to me, and if my iBook actually does die, the only portable I’ll have is my several-years-old Walmart-black-friday-sale HP laptop which has pretty much been relegated to staying plugged into the TV full time so we can watch Hulu & Netflix on TV – this has been its only task for so long that I recently cleaned off so much dust from its screen that it had literally been opaque and unusable with dust.  Anyway… I’d get another lower-end laptop, like I have in the past, and probably be served well by it, but Apple didn’t put a single firewire port on the current generation of Macbooks.

I need firewire.  The audio and video equipment I bought last year for my business all connects via firewire.  I have at least two external HDD enclosures that connect via firewire.  (Although apparently I have one that can do both FW & USB.)  So the decision, last Fall when I started shopping, was between the Macbook Pro and the iMac.  Preferably the 24″ iMac – more screen real estate seems very, very welcome after my primary computer for the last 4+ years being a 12″ iBook with a fixed resolution of 1024×768.  The Macbook Pro was looking to be over $2k by itself (all prices excluding tax & including education discounts) well-configured.  I could configure an “okay” 20″ iMac for under $1.5k and really wanted the 24″ iMac which brought the price up between $1.8k & $2k.  A lot of money.  An opportunity cost.  But the iMac line hadn’t been updated in a long time, so – because that’s how Apple does it – the value of the iMac line was going down all the time.  I knew Apple would update the line with new hardware, keep the prices the same, and the old models’ prices would drop… soon.  So I decided to wait until either: Apple updated the iMac line & I either couldn’t resist the exciting new updates or the old models became more affordable, or my iBook died & I literally had to get a new Mac ASAP just to keep working.

Apple updated the iMac line 9 days ago.  I spent a full day studying the new models & reading forums to try to get a handle on the differences between the old models & the new models, thinking about pricing & money & configurations & how differences would effect the work I do and would like to do.  (ie: I do a lot of audio work, but haven’t been doing video because my computer nearly buckled under the strain of it – I would like to be doing a lot more video)  I considered rumors going around.  Before the new hardware was announced, there was speculation that Apple would announce new hardware on March 24th. Since which time, new iMacs, new Mac Pros, new Mac Minis, new iPod Shuffles, and updated Airport & Time Capsules have come out, and Apple has officially stated that on the 17th they’ll be showing a preview of the iPhone 3.0 software.  Maybe there’s still going to be an announcement on the 24th – speculation points to a software announcement (my research & brain says probably Final Cut Studio 3 will finally be announced/released on the 24th, if anything – which is why I didn’t add Final Cut Studio 2 to my cart last night), but there’s no way to know except to wait.  There’s the possibility that it will be something to do with Snow Leopard, their next OS upgrade, but that’s not expected to ship until summer.

My determination on the new hardware was, mostly: if I can get a good deal on previous-generation hardware, I’ll still be satisfied.  The new hardware is better in a few small ways, but none of them are knock-your-socks-off ways.  If I ordered a new iMac, I could configure it with a 1Tb drive, for example, or put an optional ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB into it for another couple hundred bucks.  Apparently the mid-line card (ie: the one I could actually afford) is simply the old top-of-the line card with a new name – I haven’t been paying attention, lately, but it seems nVidia is trying to confuse people my intentionally re-branding their video cards in confusing ways and re-releasing them.  Regardless, I’ve been watching for a refurbished previous-generation iMac in a configuration I’d be satisfied with for the last week or so, while watching for new announcements/rumors.  Apple changes the options in their refurbished computers listed online as their stock changes (it literally changed while I was posting this, from the 4 iMac configurations listed last night to 7 different configurations right now – there’s a pretty reasonable 20″ model for about half what I paid on there, right now…), so it’s good to have a level head, know what you want and what you’re willing to pay, and keep yourself updated.

Last night they had a configuration I wanted at a price only a teeny bit higher than I would have liked (but certainly in range of what I’ve been considering), and I applied for their 12-months-same-as-cash offer … and was approved.  Which is weird, if only because I reported my income at the new, lower, effectively-single-income level & they ran a credit report on me… Still, I was approved & could either order immediately or hope the card arrives within the 30 days I had to make the order & still get the same-as-cash offer.  So I ordered the following:

Refurbished iMac 24-inch 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

24-inch glossy widescreen display
2GB memory
500GB hard drive
8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS with 512MB memory
Built-in iSight Camera

$1,599.00

The processor is slightly faster than the current top-of-the-line iMac, I’m about to go shopping for 4GB of RAM for it (if I can’t find it for under $50-$60, I’ll just wait and use the 2GB it ships with until the price drops), 500GB should be enough room for a while, especially if I can get the HDD out of my dead iMac and into an enclosure, and that graphics card is the old top-of-the-line; it’s the one I would have wanted in a new iMac.  I tossed a Mac Box Set Family Pack (Leopard, iLife ’09, & iWork ’09 for up to 5 Macs – the new one will have Leopard, but not the ’09 packages, and the other 2 Macs in the house don’t even have Leopard yet) into my cart & some new headphones for my iPhone (I broke mine a year ago, yesterday), so they’d be 12-months same-as-cash, too, and according to apple.com, the whole thing is already “prepared for shipment”.  In a few days I’ll have a new work-horse in the house.  A tax-deductable one, since I literally only expect to use it for work, right now.  It’s very exciting.

And, yes, I know I just wrote around 1300 words that could have been summed up in a sentence or two.  Something like: “My old iMac died last Fall and I decided to wait for the iMac line to be refreshed, which they did about a week ago, before making my decision. Last night I ordered a refurbished previous-generation iMac which is comparable to the new top-of-the-line, but $500 cheaper, at $1599.”

Productivity, Profitability

Still having trouble with staying focused. I feel like I’m not productive enough, almost daily. Things are getting done; the podcasts are all running on time, I’m doing two or more Art Walks/Fairs/Detours a month & I’ve painted a dozen new paintings since the first of the year. I’m even blogging semi-regularly, which you already know, reading this. But I could be doing more.

Yesterday I only did three or four hours of audio work, and even though I know I worked on other things, it feels like I didn’t get anything done, since it’s harder to tally the hours and to quantify what’s work and what isn’t. Does Twitter count? Reading publishing & other blogs? Blogging? It’s all part of connecting with people, with building an audience and building myself as a “brand” and educating myself about what’s going on, what’s working, and driving ideas forward. So in a way, yes. Then there’s the oft-repeated idea that everything an author does and experiences is a sort of reasearch for future books; this is somewhat true, but feels like a sort of excuse.

In addition to feeling that perhaps I’m not being productive enough, I also think a lot about my not being profitable enough. Even with the reduced up-front costs of doing business the way I am, not a single one of my books has even reached break-even, yet. The art, comparably, has been doing great – not bringing in enough to live on, but if not for the cost of going to Tools of Change in New York (ie: if not for a big, extra publishing expense), I’d already be profitable this year on art sales alone, with only bluer skies on the horizon. The margins on the art, even with prices basically cut in half & then frozen since 2004, are great – not just in money, but in time. It takes me hundreds of hours to produce a book, and somehow it’s harder to sell a copy of the book for $14 (or less) than it is to sell a painting (that took me less than 10 hours to create) for $150.  Lately I’ve been creating a lot of “Mini Paintings”: 8×10″ for $20, 5×7″ for $15, and 4×4″ for $10, right now.  Most of them are done in under 1 hour of work (though admittedly, some have taken up to 3), and they earn me as much as or more than a book does, usually without having to try to sell them at all.

Obviously, the art sales can only scale to the limits of my creativity & time to produce original works – I’m not sure what the upper limit is, but perhaps dozens a month. Certainly not hundreds.  Whereas the book sales can scale without proportional extra work on my part – Lightning Source prints however many copies people order, whether it’s dozens a month or thousands.  If/when I “hit it big” the books will quickly win in this regard.  Not to mention I can sell a book more than once, and without doing prints (something I am currently opposed to), I can only sell an original work of art once.  So it takes orders of magnitude more work to produce a book, but I can keep selling it over and over again forever, instead of just once.

If only my sales numbers were orders of magnitude better.  Did I mention not a single one of my books has yet earned back the costs associated with its production, yet?  That’s with $0 value associated with my time, no less.  Which is to say: if I were more productive (of books), I’d perhaps only be digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole.  Being more productive of art is good, but when I really need to figure out is how to be more productive of profitability.  I need to produce more book sales.  That’s a hard one.  The podcasting thing is meant to be helping with that – it certainly puts my writing in front of a lot more minds than everything else I’ve been doing, even if it is for free, right now.  Something approaching five hundred times as many people have downloaded Dragons’ Truth from Podiobooks.com than have purchased a copy of the paperback (not counting sales to family) – that’s a huge multiplier.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated directly into interest in my other podiobooks or in sales of my paperbacks or eBooks.  Gotta keep it up, though.  Gotta keep working on it.  Gotta get back to work, right now – I’m supposed to be editing together next week’s episodes of Forget What You Can’t Remember, right now.  Gotta go.

Failure to Follow Through

I was working on another idea I’ve got (it can wait – it doesn’t require any action until 2013, so posting about it here a few days later won’t make a difference), and I went back and was reading my blog posts from Fall of 2003 and I re-discovered something I’d forgotten. Now, if you go back and try to look at the original posts for yourself, please keep in mind that there were some problems converting the site from MoveableType to WordPress last year that I haven’t taken the 100+ (estimated) hours it will take to go through and fix, yet. So, some posts are just a mess, right now, and some are almost entirely missing. Still, from what’s there, I was able to piece this together:

I started recording and posting my first Podiobook online 16 months before the word “Podiobook” was coined.  Heck, it was two months before the word “Podcast” was suggested, according to Wikipedia.  (Consequently, I wasn’t trying to podcast it at that point – I was simply blogging about it & trying to sell it through my blog.)  I had even found a way to monetize it from day one, with a now-defunct micro-payments system called BitPass – at 25cents per chunk or about $1/half-hour (ie: about the same price for the whole thing whether you buy it all at once or a little at a time).  My plan, according to this post from September, 2003, was to simultaneously release the book in paperback, electronic format, and as MP3s (and possibly CDs).  By the first week of December, 2003 I had the first four files recorded and available for purchase, right from this post (broken links now removed).

I was testing the waters, trying to see if anyone was interested in an audio version (trying to see if anyone was willing to give micropayments a try, too).  The plan, as of December 11, 2003, looks like it was to post the rest of the audiobook serially, for micropayments, but also to offer options to buy the whole book as MP3s together, an MP3 CD, and possibly a set of audio CDs (since the MP3 Audiobook was unheard of at that point, I thought I should at least offer it in the old way).  Unfortunately, no one bit.  No one even commented to say they were interested.  According to my posts about stats, my blog was getting between 10k and 30k “unique visitors” per month (in the months I mentioned stats) from September 2003 through February 2004, and had fewer than a dozen regular commenters.  By March 2004, thinking there was no interest and it was taking WAY too much work to not be heard, I’d given up on the audio version of Lost and Not Found.

I didn’t persist.  Well, I did keep working, I kept writing, I kept creating, I just didn’t try to do audio again until 2008.  And by 2007-2008, when I looked into it, I discovered that what I’d thought of doing 4-5 years earlier had taken off and now I’m late to the party.  In the intervening time, I’d never given up on the idea of someday recording audio versions of my own books in my own voice, but in the insulated world I lived in I didn’t know anyone else was doing it.  And since I was working full time and splitting my off hours between having a life, writing, painting, and more, there wasn’t time to be doing the audio versions.

“If only, if only…” If only I’d followed through on my idea.  If only I’d finished recording it, despite an apparent lack of interest from my audience.  If only I’d heard of Creative Commons (founded in 2001?  Who knew?  Not me!), or thought to give away my content instead of insisting on trying to sell every copy in every format.  If only I’d somehow thought of podcasting prior to its adoption and…  umm.. yeah.  ((I was SO reading RSS specifications in 2003/2004, and was only thinking of enclosing files for my online comics and my occasional “audioblog” posts, not for books.)) So.  I have a long history of thinking of things a couple of years before anyone else, and then losing interest in them and setting them aside long before they suddenly hit it big.  I need to work on my follow-through, and I need to work on persistence, even in the face of adversity.

I have good ideas, I even often know what to do with them, and I need to get myself to actually follow through.  To carry my ideas to fruition.  So that the next time I invent the next big thing, maybe I’ll be at the center of it instead of on the outside, looking in.

ForgetWYCR is Not a ‘Zombie Book’

Originally posted at modernevil.com:

Forget What You Can’t Remember is a book that has zombies in it, but it is not a zombie book. It is not a horror book. It is not a science fiction or a fantasy book, either, despite the existence of a flying city, robots, and elves in the world where it takes place. It is not an action book — in fact, it may be the antithesis of an action book, when you step back and look at the whole experience. What is Forget What You Can’t Remember, if it is not these things?
 
It is a novel about people. Some of the people in the novel encounter zombies and, in fact, survive a full-scale zombie outbreak in a major US city. Some of the people in the novel, after becoming rescued rescuers, find there are gaps in their memories; whole swaths of their lives and their histories that are entirely lost. Suddenly given limitless possibilities for the future and robbed of their pasts, each charater reacts -and interacts- in different ways. Some follow their dreams, some try to continue living in the past they’ve had to leave behind, and at least one loses his grip on sanity.
 
The bulk of the story is told, not through description of actions, settings, and characters, but through the dialogue those characters have about the settings they find themselves in and the actions and events they’re experiencing and planning. This is simultaenously so intimate that a reader can lose track of the boundaries between characters and so distancing that it can give the impression that you are only experiencing the story second-hand. That feeling of being both present and distant at once mirrors the way more than one of the main characters’ minds reacts in the wake of tragic, traumatic events. In the scene in chapter 17 which inspired the cover image, two characters discuss this experience which could probably be diagnosed as depersonalization disorder:

“Huh.” Paul couldn’t identify personally or exactly with Brady’s experiences, but somehow understood him, in a way. “Are you experiencing this disassociation from reality right now?”

“No, I,” Brady paused to consider whether what he was saying was true. He stopped walking, and stood in the street for a moment looking down at his body and back up to the world around him. He held his right hand up in front of his face, staring intently at it. “I’m trying to decide if it feels like I’m staring at my own hand or if I’m watching me stare at my own hand.” Paul was now also staring intently at Brady’s hand, trying to more consciously notice his own awareness of perception. “Though just being present enough to be able to think about the difference is probably both a sign that I’m not experiencing it, and what truly surreal experiences even its memory allows me now to have.”

“Truly.” Paul was now staring at his own hand and contemplating the separation between perception and awareness as though for the first time. “Consciousness itself is clearly not mere eyes and ears and instincts, but the thought of being able to be conscious of one’s own consciousness is a sort of Klein bottle with no boundary, zero volume, and which despite seeming to be immersed in the visible world always keeps some critical part in a higher plane of being, beyond our grasp.”

Brady now took his turn to stare at Paul, though more like an examination of another’s sanity than one’s own perceptions. Brady stood there, staring at Paul staring at his own hand, apparently deep in thought, then spoke. “I have no idea what you just said.”

 
Then, when the narrative takes a dramatic turn toward long description and to action, the character experiencing and initiating the action is turned increasingly away from it by his own apparent memory loss and the philosophical line of thought it takes him down. A strange and difficult twist near the end of the book then seems to erase all evidence of his action -of everything described in detail rather than in dialogue- from the book, leaving nothing behind but the second-hand and the distant. The reader, if they realize this post-modern slight of hand at all, is left in the same situation as the characters; what you thought happened hasn’t, and what has happened is at least out of arm’s reach.
 
In trying to create this meta-experience paralleling that of the characters, the book loses the ability to easily serve the expectations of mainstream readers. It loses the ability to meet the expectations of readers looking for a traditional zombie book. It loses the ability to serve those looking for it to fit neatly into a genre slot, any genre at all. Instead, it serves the mind. It encourages thought. It attempts not just to describe a thing, but to deliver it into the reader’s consciousness. Forget What You Can’t Remember is not a book for everyone, and it may not be what you expect, but it may be the only book you read this year that is what it says.