Announcing ANMAP

If you’ve been following my activities around for the last several months, you’ve noticed a growing theme in my activities. Starting with my blog posts If You Build It, Will They Come? and It’s Time to Bust It Open, I’ve talked more about the intersection of business with podcasting, writing, and new media.

The response has been overwhelming. I’m now doing more interviews talking about business than I am talking about my actual work, I’m getting more private messages about this, and the blog traffic has climbed exponentially.

This is a topic that others have obviously been thinking about, so, as I said before, it’s time to bust it open. Today, the Association of New Media Artists and Producers (ANMAP) is open for business. It’s a site I’ve set up to hopefully grow into the SFWA or RWA for podcasters, video podcasters, web comic artists, and practitioners in other new media that I’m not familiar with yet.

This foundation is about you. It will rise or fall based on what happens with the community over the next year. I’d like to see it become a resource for hobbyists and pros to encourage professionalism, facilitate networking, and serve as our voice in the upcoming cultural conversations about what, exactly, our kinds of new media are in the eyes of the law. Those conversations are coming, and fast. We want to have a seat at those tables.

So, head on over, read the manifesto, check out the resources, and start talking on the forums. Everything there is up for grabs – what’s there now is what I could come up with. What you come up with as a community will be more complete. Already, the help of Allen Sale, Christiana Ellis, Joanna Penn, Rhonda Carpenter, Kitty Nic’Iaian, Justin Macumber, and Scott Roche has been indispensable in helping to figure out how to even get this started.

-Dan Sawyer

Principles of Contracts: The Third Cousins Rule

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Previous Chapter: What is a Contract?
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Disputes and Contingencies

So, contracts are legal documents that obligate the signers to particular courses of actions in the event of enumerated contingencies. What about disagreements? After all, as a legal document, it’s always possible contract could wind up in court – one of the reasons that disputes are hell, particularly if not tended to immediately.
Continue reading ‘Principles of Contracts: The Third Cousins Rule’

Principles of Contracts: What is a Contract?

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Previous Chapter: Introduction
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A contract is probably not what you think it is. It’s not an ironclad dictate that you must sign or die. It’s not something that strips you of your rights. It’s not even a piece of paper (although the paper is an important part of it). Faustian bargains to one side, a contract does not entitle someone to your soul. Believe it or not, it’s fairly difficult to sell your creative work in a matter where you won’t eventually gain the rights back (this doesn’t mean a bad contract won’t hurt you–it will, a lot, in any field of business).
Continue reading ‘Principles of Contracts: What is a Contract?’

Principles of Contracts: Introduction

Why Contracts Matter

Money is truthful. When a man speaks of honor, make him pay cash.
-Robert A. Heinlein, speaking as Lazarus Long, Time Enough For Love, 1973

The Concert
In the early part of this century, I participated in a charity event to benefit the family of a dead hippie. The event was an exemplar of the DIY spirit, with dozens of multi-platinum musicians sharing a stage and donating their time for a free concert for the public, with the proceeds from the concessions and DVD sales destined to build a pension for the widow of the hippie.

It was a beautiful day, and a day I’m proud to have been a part of, working as I did on the video and troubleshooting crews.
Continue reading ‘Principles of Contracts: Introduction’

Balticon, Here I Come

I’m going to be at Balticon next week. Those of you attending will probably see enough of me to make you sick, but such is the cross you must bear for attending science fiction conventions.

For the truly masochistic among you, you can find me in the following places:

10pm Friday — Chesapeake

“The Good Parts” Live
Live version of Erotica Writer’s podcast
with Nobilis and the rest of The Good Parts crew

9am Sat — Derby
Master’s Session: Audio Excellence in Podcasting
Presented by professional audio engineers
with some other very talented fellows

1pm:00 Sat — Derby
Is There Room In the Fridge, Hon?
The use of women as characters instead of plot
Should be a spirited debate as we talk the techniques of treating our characters as something other than plot objects.

5:00pm Sat — Chesapeake
Live Metamor City show
This cast could get messy.

7:00pm Sat — Maryland Foyer
Anthony Stevens and J. Daniel Sawyer Autographing
In case you want to have your Podthology autographed
* Stevens, Anthony
* Sawyer, J. Daniel

9:00pm Sunday — Pimlico
J. Daniel Sawyer Reading
In which I subject you to some never-before-heard selections.

Hope to see you there!

Predestination Posters update

Hellooooo everyone. The posters are due to arrive at lovely ArtisticWhispers Studios on or about June 15, at which point we will start signing and numbering and sending them out. At that time, they will be available for immediate purchase here and at other fun places around the web.

Those of you who pre-ordered, thank you very much for your patience at this, our first foray into ransom publishing. You don’t have much longer to wait.

Very excited!

Coming Soon: My Balticon Schedule

Lost in the Noise?

May 19, 2010 is an interesting day in the history of the world, though its significance passed by unnoticed by most people – even people who watch for momentous events. But today, two thing happened that will, in their knock-on effects, change the world in ways every bit as profound as the discovery of DNA.

One of them comes to Scientific American belatedly (it was originally published on May 16) from the atom smasher at Fermilab, which may just have answered the fundamental question of existence: Why are we here?

I’m not talking metaphysics, I’m talking physics. There’s been a problem in fundamental physics that goes like this: Matter and Antimatter are both created out of the probabilistic churning of the quantum foam in the vacuum all the time – and then they annihilate one another. It’s this kind of probabilistic interaction that produced the Big Bang, but if matter and antimatter annihilate one another, then why should there be anything at all?

Well, after crunching a couple decades worth of data from Fermilab, it looks like occasionally, in special circumstances (like those that prevailed at the time of the Big Bang), the quantum foam produces about 1% more matter than antimatter, so when all the annihilation happens, there’s a residue.

Assuming that the data holds up, we now know with quite a lot of surety why we’re here: because we, and the rest of the universe, were in that one percent of matter which didn’t get annihilated.

But more important than that is the scientific paper today out of AAAS from the lab of Craig Venter, the man who invented shotgun sequencing, the method of DNA sequencing that is now the most widely used in the world. In a modest paper entitled CREATION OF A BACTERIAL CELL CONTROLLED BY A CHEMICALLY SYNTHESIZED GENOME, Venter and his team announced something that will change the world every bit as profoundly as the printing press once did: The creation of an artificial organism.

Let me reiterate: Humans have now created, from scratch (the genome from scratch, that is), a life form that can reproduce, metabolize, and respond to stimuli. An artificial, designed genome runs the show. The ability to do this is something we’ve been seeking for centuries, and now that it’s here the implications are astounding. We now have the ability to, for example, resurrect extinct species, create designer organisms to dispose of pollution or convert electricity from sunlight, and that’s only the very, very tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Remember this date. In twenty or thirty years, when nothing in the world is the same and never will be again, you’ll have Craig Venter to thank for it, and May 19 will be the day on which you remember that it was today (well, yesterday now), that the human race became the author of an entire biosphere, rather than simply the usurping editor of the one in which we arose.

Minor Milestones

[amazon-product align="right" bgcolor="#99CCCC" height="240" width="120" frameborder="1"]189749209X[/amazon-product] These are the milestones which I know, from experience, will seem piddly small in retrospect, but for me at the moment they represent surmounting a ridgeline and seeing the valley beyond. The valley might be filled with swamps, marshes, and tangles under the trees, but from here it’s gorgeous.

I can’t sit here. There’s thousands of miles and hopefully countless vistas to hit before I run out of steam. Even today, I’ve got a few thousand words and a recording session to plow through. But waiting at my door this morning was my first ever author’s copy of a fiction publication – which somehow feels far different from authors copies for a non-fiction publication. Tonight, if I make my word count, I’m going to make up a shelf devoted just to my publications – seems like a good way to celebrate.

Thanks to all of you who read this blog, send feedback to the podcasts, buy LinuxJournal and the new anthology, and have stopped by to help me with a friendly kick upside the head in the last few years. It’s been glorious – and I daresay that after another fair amount of sweat and blood, it will be even more glorious.

The Pod Complex

[amazon-product align="right" bgcolor="#99CCCC" height="240" width="120" frameborder="1"]189749209X[/amazon-product]It may be a minor thing in retrospect, but today it’s tickling my socks off. My first fiction print sales are now available from Amazon. The Pod Complex is an anthology of the best stories from the podosphere in genres ranging from mystery to horror with all stops in between. My own stories Cold Duty, The Man In The Rain, and Angels Unawares feature, and they’re joined by other authors like Podfather Tee Morris, Dark Overlord Scott Sigler, Dead Robot Justin Macumber, Night Terror-inducer Phil Rossi, and a host of other creative folks like Jared Axelrod, Jack Mangan, Emerian Rich, J.D. Williams, and at least four others whose stories I haven’t read yet (but, judging by the general quality of the anthology, should be page-turners).

It’s a handsome trade paperback with pretty cover-art, and will sit handsomely on your bookshelf or coffee table. Hours of entertainment – and, in my case, new and improved versions of stories you love, now available to enjoy at your own pace instead of at mine.

Share and Enjoy!