Going to Mars presents a number of problems for us, both in transit and in the ways Mars is inhospitable (Mary Roach, author of Stiff, has a great new book on the subject). Mars, for example, has weather which will make some of the lessons we learn from a Lunar colony hard to cross-apply. But it does have soil, which Luna doesn’t. Either way, if we’re gonna live there a long time, it’s gonna have to get an oxygen atmosphere and an ecosystem.

Terraforming–big word for a big operation. How would we even begin to do it?

Turns out, Charles Darwin was at the back of the world’s first experiment in terraforming. With the help of the Royal Navy, he created an artificial ecosystem. New Scientist has a great article on it.

Specifically, the word “conspiracy” came up a few times, as in “Do they really expect us to believe scientists are in a conspiracy about the Big Bang?”

So why would I, someone who publicly fancies himself a fairly rational fellow, post something that smacked of conspiracy thinking and call it “interesting?” Because I think there’s a difference between a conspiracy and a paradigm, and it starts with understanding how scientific theories work.

Scientific Theories

In common parlance we use “theory” in the same kind of way Spock uses it on Star Trek: i.e. as an idea that gets troublesome problems out of your hair. For example, “I have a theory, Captain: in order to save the Enterprise, you must seduce the alien’s girlfriend” is not a theory, it’s a policy recommendation designed to remove something troublesome (i.e. Kirk) from the speaker’s (i.e. Spock’s) immediate view, perhaps permanently (i.e. when the phaser-weilding alien catches Kirk boinking the girlfriend).

The closest we get to this kind of thing in science is an hypothesis—“hypo” from the Greek meaning “deficient” or “underdeveloped” and “thesis” meaning “idea” or “argument.” A hypothesis is a guess phrased in such a way that it can be proved wrong if an experiment or discovery goes the wrong way. As an explanation, it doesn’t yet have a good body of experiments establishing that it’s likely correct. If you have a guess about how plants grow, but can’t yet offer supporting evidence, you have a hypothesis.

A “theory,” on the other hand, is what happens when hypotheses grow up. A theory is an explanation for a group of related facts that has withstood (or been changed by) a great deal of experimentation. Because theories are always constructed in a way that makes them vulnerable to contrary evidence, no theory is ever “proved,” it is only “established.” In other words, a theory is what happens when you fail often enough, and learn from it.

One quick note on facts: when it comes to science, facts are almost worthless. It’s not that they’re irrelevant, but rather that all of science exists to explain facts. We’re at no loss for facts, the problem is the opposite: we’ve got too many of them, and they don’t make sense unless we can establish the relationships between them. Theories are the tentative maps of those relationships.

Thomas Kuhn and the Fastest Gun In The West

There was a philosopher in the 1960s who caused a big stink by taking this basic premise (that theories are only “established” and not “proved”) one step further and arguing that theories were essentially fashions, having no dependable relationship with either facts, good theory, or the truth. His name was Thomas Kuhn, and he made this argument in a paper (and book) called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

These fashions, he called “Paradigms,” and he argued that they are enforced by the academic and scientific establishment, which squeezes out competing theories and contrary data until enough contrary data exists for younger scientists (i.e. the ones without an investment in the status quo) to come along and wreak havoc. Thus, he argued, science is a socially constructed and socially determined endeavor, not a search for truth or a method for discovering and minimizing error. As a sociologist at the height of the social determinism and constructivism movements, he makes an ironic poster child for his own argument.

So, by Kuhn’s lights, the only time science ever advances (and it doesn’t really ever advance, it just changes fashions) is when enough young hotshots gun for the old coots that they succeed in overthrowing the old dominant theoretical structure and replacing it with a new one. This phenomenon he called a “Paradigm Shift.” And yes, he invented that term.

Kuhn’s notions have permeated deep into popular culture, which already had an erroneous idea of science as THE TRUTH and the source of CERTAINTY (capitalization intentional). As you can guess, it helped make the whole scientific enterprise deeply suspect. Kuhn’s thesis has become an under-girding element of postmodern epistemology and philosophy, and has had a number of other interesting knock-on effects.

It turns out that most of the history Kuhn relied on to make his arguments was incorrect–he was, after all, a sociologist and not an historian, and as Rodney Stark demonstrates, it’s very easy for a very good sociologist to get himself into trouble when he makes sweeping arguments based on a naive understanding of history. The book Thomas Kuhn in the Light of Reason goes through Kuhn’s work with a much-needed critical eye, and is very accessible. Kuhn greatly exaggerated his conclusions and was wrong about some of its mechanisms, but he does deserve credit for spotting a legitimate social dynamic at work.

So, stripping it of some of the bullshit that Kuhn’s over-ambition imbued it with, a paradigm is a collection of theories that comprise an overarching model of the world. And Kuhn was right about something important: Science advances because researchers try like hell to poke holes in the existing theories. Shooting the old fastest gun in the west is a great way to make a name for yourself, or get a Nobel prize. Stephen Hawking made his name paradigm busting, and he helped the same kind of thing.

Conspiracies

Where a paradigm is a structure of theories, a conspiracy is a collusion of people to suppress or obscure the truth, or to frustrate attempts to reveal the truth. Denialists often invoke the language of conspiracies to explain why their ideas are not accepted by the mainstream. Some examples:

The film Expelled posits a widespread conspiracy among scientists to suppress the fact that the theory of Evolution is contradicted by almost all of the facts, and to punish scientists who believe in God. The conspirators allegedly do this in order to advance a utopian social vision.

Holocaust deniers posit a widespread conspiracy among veterans, historians, the media, and others to pretend that the holocaust happened, in order to provide a public justification for the existence of the state of Israel.

Climate denialists posit a nearly perfect collusion of scientists across a wide variety of disciplines in order to whip the public into a frenzy, secure funding, and (depending on who you talk to) transfer national sovereignty to the United Nations.

All these theories, and all other conspiracy theories, depend on three notions: 1) A large number of people have a vested interest in lying about information that is publicly accessible, 2) that vested interest is directed toward a set of articulable ends, and 3) despite the thousands of people involved, they maintain near-perfect discipline and informational control.

Pretty damn unlikely.

That’s not to say conspiracies don’t exist — they do. A conspiracy assassinated Abraham Lincoln, another one led by Deitrich Boenhoffer failed do assasinate Hitler. Read properly, the dealings that brought the U.S. Constitution into existence could be plausibly described as a conspiracy. But the problem with conspiracies is that people talk. Information control is difficult, and becomes exponentially more difficult the larger the conspiracy gets.

History is littered with failed conspiracies (such as the Watergate cover-up) because, as one of history’s most successful professional conspirators and revolutionaries said, “Three may keep a secret, so long as two of them are dead.”

(That was Ben Franklin, by the way, in Poor Richard’s Almanac).

Gunning for the Nobel Prize

So when you’ve got stories about scientific revolutions happening–and there are a lot of them going on right now, it’s an exciting time–don’t mistake the excitement of a paradigm-buster who’s trying to prove the old guard wrong and experiencing social resistance for a paranoid conspiracy theorist. They can sound similar on the surface (in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Climate Denialists and Climate Skeptics can), but when you dig deeper, you’ll discover this distinction:

The Paradigm-buster or skeptic is interested in fixing an outstanding (and often a very widely acknowledged) problem with the state of scientific knowledge.

The Denialist or Conspiracy Theorist is interested primarily in fomenting paranoia and discrediting an existing social power structure by any means necessary (including character assassination, dishonesty, and intimidation).

These categories aren’t ironclad–humans are complicated. Sometimes legitimate skeptics get so angry they act like denialists. And sometimes Conspiracy theorists are really slick and can maintain for a long time the illusion that they’re only interested in the science. Eventually, though, people do tend to sort themselves fairly dependably into one category or another on a given topic.

I’d love to carry on the conversation–please post your comments below!

P.S. For those of you wanting more background on yesterday’s article and the topics it’s addressing, check out Lawrence Krauss giving a lecture on contemporary cosmology, and you can get a multi-perspective quickie overview on this BBC Horizon Documentary about the current cosmological revolution. In both cases, the scientists involved are quite open about the problems posed by Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and other X-factors. It is these X-factors that the article I linked to yesterday is attempting to address.

Sometimes, though, the exciting stuff happens in the sciences. When the incentive system works, the new kids on the block go gunning for the old theories–you make your name by going after the Fastest Gun In The West. With all the fun stuff going on recently with Dark Matter and Dark Energy playing havoc with Inflationary Cosmology, a lot of people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop: at some point, some young and hungry cosmologists are going to try like hell to blow up the Big Bang.

Well, it happened. Whether it will prove a better model, it’s too early to tell. But it is a hell of an audacious theory-in-progress, and lots of fun to read about, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. Enjoy!

So, you may ask, what did I learn from writing 123k words in 50 days?

Plenty.

What do you need to know if you’re gonna try for this kind of marathon?

Try these on for size:

First, as you can read in my post about the health problems I developed as a result of crappy Microsoft workmanship, ergonomics are everything. You can actually seriously damage your arms, hands, and wrists if you don’t move around regularly, have a comfortable keyboard, and pay attention to your body. Being in a groove is no excuse.

Second, food. I tried a variety of different styles of eating throughout the ordeal, mostly motivated by whatever I could think to put in the kitchen that week. What I wound up discovering surprised me. I expected to want junk food—pre-prepared high calorie, high density, high-protein, ultra-tasty nibbles supplemented with fruits and finger-friendly vegetables. However, it turned out that I gravitated toward made-from-scratch fare. I actually learned to make wood-oven pizza, sourdough from scratch, knishes, and a few other things during this time, and not just because they were tasty. It’s because it gave me something else to do.

If I was doing anything but writing, I felt a lot of pressure to get back to work. But if I was cooking or cleaning, I was holding up my end of the household. Pouring creativity into the cooking also gave me a chance to spoil my partner rotten in return for the tremendous support she was giving me as I tried to see just how far I could push my productivity. There was a lot of culinary experimentation, and between the quality of the food, the physical activity in preparing it, and the fun of creativity without pressure, it seriously boosted the quality and quantity of my output.

Third, exercise. I didn’t get enough of this, really. I can’t write very well at the walking desk—too many typos—so I was only getting on it two or three times a week. When I did get on, though, I went for the long haul. A couple hours at a stretch, and then within an hour of stopping I’d have a new creative flood. Activity helps supply the brain with oxygen—it also flushes lactic acid out of the system, and when you’re sitting that much the cellular waste sits in your muscles and makes them sore. Like bedsore-level sore. It makes you never want to move again, but once you start moving, it feels SO much better.

Fourth, massage. I’ve been doing massage for a long time now, and I have a friend who’s a pro who I trade with. Lifesaver. Getting them kept my RSI from crippling me before I fixed my ergonomics problem (and I did fix it, resulting in a heavenly experience for the last couple weeks here). Giving them helped me relax and remember there were other kinds of touch in the world besides typing.

Fifth, socialization. Weekly gatherings with my nearest-and-dearest, some festivities surrounding my birthday, impromptu meals with friends, all very important. Getting out to help build a retaining wall or join a moving crew for an afternoon was also lots of fun. All of it kept my mind limber.

Sixth, as Number Five said: INPUT! NEED INPUT! Keep your mind ticking over. Hrab’s new album was wonderful for this (you can buy Trebuchet here—it’s a mind-blower, though not for the easily offended). My weekly doses of P&T’s Bullshit!, True Blood, and The Pillars of the Earth kept me thinking in nicely twisty ways that helped the story. My Region 2 DVDs of the British quiz show QI kept me laughing and distracted during the long hours. Reading a Kellerman novel and Mary Roach’s STIFF during down time when I just couldn’t write, and listening to Steven H. Wilson’s Peace Lord Of The Red Planet (which I plan to review soon) kept me smiling and remembering the larger world outside my little projects.

Seventh, pay attention to what motivates you. For me, sitting at the keyboard wasn’t the hard part; it was keeping the juices flowing so my time at the keyboard was effective that I found difficult. Yes, I put in long hours–tortuously long, sometimes. But it wasn’t to hit a word count–I’ve found that doesn’t work for me consistently. It was to finish a story chunk or an article or a topic-based chapter. I wanted to find out how it ended, and I wouldn’t let it go till I did.

What motivates you might be different–figure out what it is and then keep it in the front of your mind.

At the root of all of this (and the plans I have for the rest of the year) is the realization that my backlist is too small. By lifetime word count, I’ve hit pro level. I now have over 900,000 words under my belt (that means 13.6% of my entire life’s writing output has happened in the last fifty days). But the number of properties I have on the market (everything finished piece since the 500,000 word mark) is simply too small, so I’m changing that. And, I suspect, I’ll keep changing that as long as I’ve got the fingers for it.

Telling stories is life for me. Even this one. Hopefully, if you like telling stories too, you’ll find some of these lessons useful.

Happy writing!

For the first half of the duration, I did it by accident. So, I thought it might be worth something to those of you who write or want to if I documented the experience.

It started off with a chat with another author who asked me some questions about guns for a book she was working on. Over the last couple years, this sort of thing has gotten pretty common as I’ve inadvertently acquired a reputation as something of a level-headed gun nut.

I got to thinking that much as I enjoy the excuse to talk shop with other authors, the volume of conversations I’d been having on this topic should tell me something: A lot of the current generation of authors simply don’t have first hand experience with firearms, but almost all of us use them in our fiction. Wouldn’t it be handy if there were a special podcast episode that went over the basics?

It seemed like a harmless enough project when I posted my first call for questions on June 22nd.

The questions came in fast, and in a large volume. By July 5th I had an outline for a fifteen episode podcast series, each episode being roughly fifteen minutes covering information on a single topic. So, on July 8, I started writing.

By July 15, I knew I was writing a book. The chapter list had grown to forty, and I’d split it into two books. I decided to write the first now, and the second in a couple months when I had a break.

On August 4, I finished the book. At fifty-five thousand words, plus illustrations, tables, and references I thought it would shape up to be a very nice e-book release. A companion podcast goes without saying.

But I was also on a roll, drunk on my power over the English language. I’d just done over fifty thousand words in a few weeks. Some of those days I put out more than ten thousand words, others only a few hundred. I had terrible RSIs, I was having trouble keeping up with other stuff (particularly paperwork), and I nearly missed an article deadline, but the words were still coming.

I needed to get back to fiction though. For one thing, if I wrote one more word about firearms I was going to want to use one on myself. For another, I desperately needed to finish Free Will so I could get on with my next projects.

But Free Will wasn’t ticking over for me. It was going to take a lot to get back into it–a couple hundred pages of reading to get back into the characters. I needed a good short story to get my fiction juices flowing again, so I pulled the pilot project for a new series of mystery shorts up and started working on it. Those of you who were at my reading at Balticon remember this one–you were all laughing pretty hard. For those of you that weren’t, think Douglas Adams writes Chinatown.

It was just supposed to be a nice little story, about six thousand words, pleasantly twisty with an appropriately bizarre solution. That was my idea, anyway.

The story itself had other ideas. In the last few weeks, I’ve written it twice. Once as a 20k word novella, and then (after being told it was far too dense) as a nearly 60k word novel (which I finished today). I suspect it’ll grow by another 10-20k over the next couple weeks as I revise and polish it.

Which is, I suppose, a long way of saying “Projects have a way of growing on me like a fungus.”

So if you want to do something this ridiculous and write this fast, how can you do it? Click here for a list of the lessons I learned from this little adventure that might make it replicable!

Most of us have moments in films or books that put us in tears, and for a lot of people, those moments are pretty predictable. Tell someone Old Yeller made owning a dog painful for you when you were a kid, and everyone understands.

But sometimes, it’s the unexpected moments that get you. Reach up and bite you out of nowhere in an otherwise frivolous film or book that’s not meant to do anything other than thrill or amuse you. I’ve had a few of these, and I bet a bunch of you have too.

So here’s what I want to do: I’d like those of you with something to pimp–a book release, a podcast, an album, a transmedia project–to send me your story. Give me a thousand words or so (or less) on the most unlikely movie, story, or song that made you cry, and what it taught you about your own preferred artform, if anything. Include a short bio with links to your work. I’ll put the stories up as guest blog posts, and hopefully we can generate more traffic for your projects while giving our audiences a unique glimpse into our bizarre creative processes.

I’ve been writing and hacking since the age of four, though I don’t hack much anymore, so I need an ergo keyboard to keep my wrists functioning properly. The only ergo on offer was the Microsoft Natural Pro 4000, so I paid through the nose for it ($60) and took it home.

It looked gorgeous. The spacebar was sticky as if the tolerances were a little too close, but I figured it would work out. Unfortunately, I never got to see if it would–the keyboard failed in about sixty days.

A return trip to Best Buy, and some carefully measured profanity coupled with very complimentary sweet talk, got me a new one of the same model for free.

Fast forward six months to tonight. I’ve written 70k words in the last five weeks. The first 20k were on my laptop keyboard, which is a very comfortable, light-touch HP. Unfortunately, it’s not versatile enough for the amount of moving around I have to do during marathon writing sessions–and the ergonomics really don’t work for writing on the treadmill. I had two books backed up in me that wouldn’t wait, so I grabbed the Microsoft Ergo off the audio workstation, and started smashing away.

Over the next 50k words, I acquired the single worst case of RSI I’ve ever had. Crippling tendonitis from the fingertips to the elbow on my right hand, to the point where I couldn’t even raise my tea glass without shooting pain. I still managed my weight workouts, regular chores, helped one friend move and some others build a retaining wall, but I paid an unexpected price: Any time I wasn’t actively writing or working on a task, I was so fatigued I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I’ve got a nice high pain threshhold, so it took me about two weeks to figure out that the ongoing pain was sapping my energy.

Massages, vicodin, and anti-inflammatories didn’t help much beyond making it bearable for everything but driving (driving is currently searingly painful–even holding my companion’s hand is enough to make part of me want to curl up and die).

A couple days ago, I finally got fed up and set off on a quest to find out what was going on. After a couple hours paying attention to every movement I was making, I realized that the spacebar on the Microsoft keyboard was doing it. Turns out that it is so poorly designed it took a *very* hard hit to depress the spacebar if my thumb hit even a half inch off center. Fifty thousand words of this over a very short space of time had simply worn out all the muscles and tendons in my right forearm (imagine hammering a nail with your thumb approximately 60,000 times, day and night, for two weeks, and you get the idea of what it might do to your hands). Bad juju for something that cost $60.

Nothing a little re-engineering couldn’t fix, right? I tweaked the sway bar, shaved the edges, added some silicone lubricant to the guide posts, and loosened the thing up a little bit. I gave the keyboard a thorough cleaning while I was in there.

The result? It was worse. Other keys were now binding up (after a routine cleaning). The spacebar was slightly smoother, but the effects faded after a couple thousand words. And then, the keyboard died.

Or, more specifically, the spacebar gave up the ghost. The membrane switch simply went dead.

I’ve cleaned, fixed, and even rebuilt a lot of keyboards in my life. Never have I seen one fail irreparably as a result of removing the keys and blowing out the dust.

Never. Once. In 28 years of using, cleaning, and repairing computers.

I was a Microsoft repair monkey for a chain of computer stores, and then on my own, for fifteen years during my misspent youth. I am pleased to report that the Microsoft Natural Pro 4000 keyboard lives up to all the expectations instilled in my by fifteen years of making my living off Microsoft’s engineering and quality control.

If any of you up in Redmond are listening, please communicate to the moron who designs your keyboard my sincere, earnest desire that he meet an untimely end during a sexual encounter involving a wolverine and copious amounts of PCP. Fuck you very much.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go order a proper ergo keyboard, and ice my aching arms. I got a book to finish and an article due.

It may surprise you to learn that Babylon 5 has never turned a profit. Not a cent. In fact, according to an internet post earlier this year by creator J. Michael Straczynski, his most recent royalty statement informed him that the entire franchise is still $80m in debt. For perspective, all 5 seasons, plus 5 movies, plus the spinoff series, plus the follow-up Lost Tales special, cost under $200m to produce in aggregate. The franchise’s total revenues now totals in excess of $1.2b.

And, according to Warner Brothers, it’s never made a profit. Not a cent.

Babylon 5 is not alone in this. The Lord of the Rings films are, according to New Line Cinema, massive money pits. In fact, most movies, particularly the big money-makers, never officially break even. All of them “lose” money, despite being spectacularly successful, year-over-year, raking in long-tail revenues from streaming, reruns, home video, cable, spinoffs, merchandising, and remakes.

How is this possible?

For the same reason that Enron always turned a profit, and housing prices always go up: Because the bookkeeper said so. Welcome to the world of creative bookkeeping.

“So what?” I hear you cry. “Who gives a damn if Hollywood fat cats are cooking their books? Isn’t that a problem for the IRS?”

Well, yes it is. But it’s also your problem if you’re in business with an outfit that pulls these kinds of shenanigans—and in creative industries, there are a lot of companies that make their living pulling shenanigans like that.

How do they get away with it? By subtly tweaking the basic business model to their advantage, in the hopes that no one will notice.

Business Models
The Intellectual Property business is made up of creators, secondary creators, middle men, retailers, and audience.

The creators are the writers and their analogs who produce the property (a manuscript, screenplay, sourcebook, script, musical score, etc.).

Secondary creators are writers, directors, film editors, cinematographers, programmers, graphic designers, and game designers who take the primary property and transmute it into packaged products and/or derivative works ready for market. The principle thing that distinguish these folks from the next category is that these folks create derivative works as part of their job and (by law) they retain the rights to some part of those works.

Middle men are book editors, copy editors, producers, marketing folks, sales people, and all others involved in actually bringing the product to market, but who do not create additional intellectual property.

Retailers are companies like Amazon, your local movie theater, or anyone who makes the products of middle men directly available to the audience.

The audience, of course, is the ultimate customer toward whom all this rigmarole ultimately directed.

Creative industries have a few basic business models. The most popular is the publisher model.

Whether a production company, a record company, a traditional publishing house, a game company, or a graphic novel company, the business of a publisher is to license intellectual property and try to make a profit from it. Money flows to the creators through the middle-men who give them access to the market.

When you license your property (intellectual property is normally licensed rather than sold) to another party, you do it because either

1)you don’t want to take it to market yourself, or
2) you think you gain more money and prestige by letting someone else do the legwork.

In either scenario, the party to whom you license your work has (at least) better market access, better marketing people, a loyal customer base, and a secondary creative team that can package your product.

In this business model, the creators supply the product, and the middle men are their customers. The other links in the chain are hands which the product passes through on the way to market.

The second major business model is that of the indie producer—authors, independent filmmakers, many new media artists, and other such folks fit here. In these, the creative and production jobs are conflated and handled in-house. Specialty labor, such as marketing or graphic design, is subcontracted out, and those subcontractors work either for a fee (work for hire) or for a share in the property as a whole. In these instances, the indie producer maintains control of the project, and the subcontractor is accountable to the producer to perform to the contract’s specification.

The third business model is the work-for-hire. In this instance you (the creator) are the subcontractor, working either for a fee or for a percentage of the property.

These are the three major legitimate business models in the creative arts. Notice which one isn’t there?

That’s right. Profit sharing. With profit sharing, the creator gets a share of the net profits, after expenses are deducted. Imagine, for example, that your film rights or graphic novel contract entitles you to, say, 60% of the net profits. Pretty good deal, right?

Not really. In the creative arts, there is no such thing as profit sharing. There is only revenue sharing and graduated revenue sharing. And the reason why is bound up closely with the how you define “net.”

Defining “Net”
Net is pretty simple, right? Everyone knows what it means, right?

Not really. Net is one of those terms that means whatever the contract says it means—and only that.

Take, for example, this clause in a graphic novel contract I saw recently:

[transmedia publisher] shall pay to [author] a royalty of sixty percent (60%) of all net sales received by [transmedia publisher] for [property] licensed hereunder or subsequently created by [author] under this Agreement and funds for which have been received by [transmedia publisher].

The contract then goes on to define “net” in these terms:

[transmedia publisher]’s expenses to be deducted from gross sales receipts before net sales revenue is calculated and royalties distributed to [author] include, but are not limited to advertising creative, media buys, third-party vendor fees, printing, travel, lodging, typical office supplies & equipment, clerical support, consultants, convention registration fees, entertainment, advances paid, graphic design, photography, subagent commissions, applicable taxes, collateral materials, etc, incurred at [transmedia publisher]’s sole discretion to benefit the marketability of the [property].

At first glance that might look reasonable–after all, if you put yourself in the publisher’s situation, you can legitimately see why all those things are business expenses–and business expenses subtracted from sales receipts equals profit, right? If you’re sharing in the profits, it seems reasonable that this is what profits mean, right?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but no.

How Does Profit Sharing Work?
With profit sharing at, for example, a tech company, an employee earns a salary and/or a share of the company in exchange for his time. In addition, the employees receive bonuses based upon company profitability. The profit share is a bonus, not the salary. Notice how this is different from the contract clause above? Except in cases of work-for-hire, a creator doesn’t get much, or any, money for the license, so the profit sharing becomes her whole salary. Deals like this are a big no-no.

This doesn’t mean you can’t participate in a product’s success, you just don’t do it through profit sharing. You do it through revenue sharing.

Revenue sharing divides proceeds as they come in, with nothing taken off the top. Each member of the creative team who has earned a share of the revenue receives it out of the gross, because each member of the creative team actually owns a piece of the property (even if they don’t control the property) by virtue of their creative contribution to it.

Graduated revenue sharing is a modified version of the revenue share, in which the production costs are accounted separate from the creative costs. This generally occurs in situations, like indie films, where the controlling party is cash-poor but is still investing her own money in the project, as well as investing creatively. The non-controlling parties invest as well, but only with their creativity. In this case, a dollar threshold is set. Before that threshold, the non-controlling parties receive diminished or no residuals, and after that threshold, they receive full shares in perpetuity.

There are some other legitimate variations on this later scheme, but one thing remains constant through all of them:
It’s all done on gross revenues. There is no “net.”

For the purposes of contract negotiations in the creative industries, there is never any such thing as “net.”

Why not? For two reasons:

1) Profit sharing inverts the business model.
2) Profit sharing gives
cover to creative bookkeeping, which is an industry euphemism for “fraud.”

Inverting the Business Model
With clauses such as the one above, the burden of risk shifts from the middle man to the creator without compensating the creator for it. It’s the middle man’s job to take risks on creative properties, and he gets compensated handsomely for that risk when the gamble pays off. Shifting the burden to the creator (who has already maximized his risk exposure by creating a property without guarantee of compensation) is a snake’s move.

This kind of behavior isn’t just found in the creative industries. Illegitimate risk shifting was at the root of the recent mortgage crisis, and it’s at the root of the crash of a lot of businesses. The kind on display in the clause above is typical of how it happens in creative industries.

It amounts to the creator paying for access to the market, which is the root of every single scam run on creative people by savvy operators without a healthy sense of ethics.

This is important: A creator does not pay for access to the market, ever, unless he is also a producer (in the “production company” sense of the word, which is how I use this word throughout this post).

The above clause tries to have it both ways. It tries to preserve the licensure relationship of the traditional model with regard to creative control and reward, but shift the burden of risk toward a co-producer type relationship.

As you can see from the phrase incurred at [transmedia publisher]‘s sole discretion to benefit the marketability of the [property], the clause above removes the creator from the production and marketing while making his income hostage to the business decisions of his customer.

If you’re looking for a co-producer’s relationship, you should make sure you share in the rewards and the control. Otherwise, stick to licensure. In no wise should you enter a relationship where the other party tries to have it both ways, while shifting the burden of risk on to you.

Which brings us to the way such arrangements guarantee that no creative property returns a profit: Creative Bookkeeping

Creative Bookkeeping—What is it?
Creative Bookkeeping is a euphemism for “cooking the books.” It’s an organized crime trick that got Al Capone sent to jail and allows businesses and individuals to cheat on their taxes and other financial obligations.

It boils down to the tried-and-true technique that traveling sales people everywhere use: ripping off one’s business partners (or boss) by padding one’s expenses.

There are a few ways this is done:

1) count ongoing overhead as a project-specific expense. Rent or property taxes on the office or studio space can get counted against the project on the grounds that, without it, the production company would have to go out of pocket to rent it for the project. The monthly salary of all employees who spend a few minutes or hours on a project can get billed against the project for the same reason.

2) Pad legitimate expenses in an untraceable manner. I use the word “legitimate” loosely, meaning “anything you can possibly get away with under the terms of the contract.” In the clause above, for example, the “office supplies” provision is a rat hole down which large amounts of money could be shoveled. How many paper clips, reams of paper, pens, pencils, computers, etc. does this project need? And how much do those supplies cost? And how much of an obligation does the office manager have to get the best possible deal on them? It doesn’t matter, because such expenses are untraceable, and they’re based on judgment calls. There’s no way to account for them. The Pentagon uses this very trick to hide funding for illegal black projects. If the Pentagon can get away with it despite dozens of GAO audits, your chances of catching someone out at this game are precisely zero.

3) Create ghost expenses. These are false billings from fictitious “consultants” that the books pretend are legitimate expenses. Of course, real people are easier to produce in a pinch than fictitious people, so it’s sometimes easier to pay real people a small fee to keep quiet, while paying them orders of magnitude more on the books.
Furthermore, the “consultant” could be a salaried employee, or even the producer himself, who takes a bonus on the books for “consulting” on the project. “Consulting” can, and does, mean anything the person doing the books wants it to.
After all, the clause above specifies that all expenses are legitimate “at the [transmedia publisher]‘s sole discretion.” The person actually paying the expenses (the creator) doesn’t get a vote.

4) If you thought it couldn’t get dirtier, think again. The final common creative bookkeeping technique is to count overhead from other projects as applying to the most profitable project. Every production company and publishing house has its turkeys, and these turkeys really do lose money. Shifting a percentage of expenses from one of the turkeys (which has negative cashflow to spare) to one of the profitable projects protects a production company from being in the dangerous situation of showing much of a profit even on it’s biggest, most popular properties.

There are a lot of other arcane techniques bookkeepers use, but these are the four that are easiest for us laypeople to understand.

But why would anyone do this?

To hold on to the money. The creative industries attract high-risk gambler personalities, and gamblers like a sure thing. Just as people cheat at cards when then can, so they also cheat on the books when they can get away with it.

These tactics are not uncommon or rare—it happens even in print publishing, which is arguably the cleanest game in this field (mostly because publishing now operates almost entirely on a revenue sharing model, not a profit sharing model). Creative bookkeeping is almost impossible to catch on an audit unless the bookkeeper is very incompetent or the auditor has access to independent inside information–like, for example, a court-ordered report from the print shop that they printed 10,000 units more than the publisher said they did–that is hidden on the books.

So Why Do People Fall For This?
Creators fall for this because, like producers, they can get greedy. Unlike producers, creators tend to be myopic, not thinking through the ways someone could cheat them if they put their minds to it. Often, new creators are happy just to have their work published, and they assume that since they created the thing, they get a piece of the profit, so they don’t look too closely at the fine print.

Other times, they take “net” because it’s what they can get, and the project is worth all the trouble of the inevitable lawsuits. Often, they’re getting something out of the project that’s more important than the money.

Peter Jackson did this with the Lord Of The Rings films, and eventually won the litigation. He also had some very good lawyers and investigators. J. Michael Straczynski did this with Babylon 5, because he wanted to tell the story enough that he was willing to knowingly take the risk that Warner Brothers would screw him (which they did, royally). In both cases, these men did deals that wound up with themselves ahead even in the case they got screwed: they didn’t just get theoretical royalties out of it, they got salaries up front, and they got reputations that have given them enough power to never have to take a bad deal again.

Sometimes, in situations like that, it’s worth it.
Most of the time, it’s not.

But Why Should I Care?
A lot of you reading this series are authors, and might be wondering “If publishing is the cleanest business, why should I care?”

Well, just because it’s the cleanest business doesn’t mean it isn’t filled with sharks and snakes, it just means that there are fewer in the publishing world because publishing is a low-margin business. But there are other reasons, too — SFWA, MWA, RWA, and similar associations worked long and hard to flush a lot of the snakes out of the business, and that’s one of their principle ongoing utilities (and this model is one of the big reasons I’m putting time into ANMAP).

You should care because, if you do well, Hollywood may eventually come knocking at your door for film rights.

You should care because your properties are exploitable for any number of transmedia applications, and this is where the real money comes from in the writing business.

You should care because many of the new companies coming up in the publishing world, particularly those poaching podcasters and other online new media artists, are writing contracts based on the Hollywood model.

I’ve seen a few of them. In this post I’ve quoted one that an ANMAP member handed me last week for comment. These contracts are out there, and the more you get into graphic novels, games, film rights, and other spinoffs, the more you’re going to run into them.

You should care because this is where your living comes from. If you’re a content creator, your residuals are all you have. Protect them.

There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “1% of gross is a thousand times better than 100% of net.” That’s because net is almost always $0, no matter how much money the project generates.

In the creative
arts, “nothing but net” means one thing, and one thing only:

Nothing.

Next time: The Market Awareness Principle

Some of the contract stuff has reminded me of a topic that I’m going to bump to the front. The next post in the Contracts series will deal with defending yourself against creative bookkeeping, which is a concept that’s starting to leak from Hollywood into the New Media and Publishing worlds.

Stay tuned!

“Trustworthy! Dan, what country are you living in?” I hear some of you cry. “The American courts are kangaroo affairs stripping us of our civil rights, legislating from the bench, is a racist, corrupt tool of criminal violence against the underclasses, and is nothing more than a puppet of the special interests and elites in this country.” I hear some of you say that (every day, all around the blogosphere), but I also can’t help but notice that you’re reading a blog series about best practices for contracts, and that upwards of 80% of you reading it live, work, and do business in the United States. This isn’t a coincidence.

A well-functioning economy works because the trust quotient is high, and the reason isn’t too difficult to see: If I can’t trust you to live up to your end of the deal, and you can’t trust me to live up to mine, then why in the world would we do business together?

Negotiation and Personality

Different people come in different personality types. Some of you reading this, maybe the majority of you, are decent people who would rather make a bad business deal than hurt someone’s feelings. Others are sharks-in-the-making who think “Greed is good” is a perfect motto as a way to do business. And the rest of you might be neither of those, but sit somewhere on the spectrum between.

Even if the only contract you run into in your life is a rental agreement, you’re going to run across a fair few contracts in your life. When you sit down at the negotiating table, the person across from you will, like you, sit at some point on the nice guy/shark spectrum. Unless you’ve dealt with them before, you’ll have no idea where they sit on that spectrum. You have to make some assumptions about their motivations in order to proceed. They’re going to be making similar assumptions about you.

Depending on who you’re sitting opposite, your natural inclination can work seriously against you. As a nice guy, you are at serious risk of being taken for a ride. As a shark, you’re at risk of scaring off the other party. As someone in the middle, you’re likely going to be dancing emotionally between a whole raft of emotions, none of which are productive, and all of which can incline you to screw up the deal. Despite the adversarial nature of negotiations, your enemy at the negotiating table is not the other party. It is almost always yourself. In my experience, I’ve rarely seen someone get taken advantage of for any reason having to do with the other party. It has almost always happened due to the person’s failure to understand their own interests in the matter.

Different Sorts of Self-Interest

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” -Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Anyone who’s been through an Econ101 class has read the Adam Smith quote above – most of the rest of us have too, at one point or another. The sentiment it embodies is in a bit of popular disrepute at the moment, due to the recent real-estate and banking crises. After all, saying that self-interest, looking out for number one, etc. is a good thing for society seems a bit like saying “Greed is good,” doesn’t it? And greed and selfishness are bad, aren’t they? They caused the oil spill in the gulf, the financial collapse, and all other manner of social ills, right?

Not exactly. Self-interest is a graduated scale, with narcissism on one end and ego-free transcendence on the other end. If you’re ego-free, you’re probably meditating somewhere. If you’re in business, or even if you have a job, you’ve got a healthy stake in your own interest, and recognizing that doesn’t make you a selfish bastard. It also doesn’t mean that the way you’re dealing with your self-interest is the most effective way.

A successful negotiation depends on having the right priorities. If you’re in the game for your ego (for example, if you’re a writer with your first publishing contract), you’re likely to fail to ask for enough money. If you’re desperate, you’re likely to make concessions you can’t live with. If you’re in it for approval, you’re likely to do things to please the other party that foster resentment later on.

On the other hand, if you’re greedy, you’re likely to focus too much on the short term, to fail to consider contingencies, and to fight for concessions you don’t need that makes the deal untenable for the other party. Greedy thinking fosters a short-term mindset, leading to ill-advised high-risk behavior. After all, if you’re expecting to take the money and run, you’re unlikely to think about what might go wrong, because you won’t be around to bear the consequences.

Self-Interest, and Ethics, and Trust

“The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self interest.” -G’Kar, Babylon 5

Enlightened self-interest is the middle road between being greedy and being a sap. You know what you want, you know what you can bend on, and you know what your deal breakers are. You approach business deals with a long view, you consider possible unforeseen (or unforeseeable) consequences, and cover for them as best you can. You treat the parties in your contracts as partners, and you create a deal where your interests line up. You trust that they can state and defend their own interests, and you treat them like adult parties by allowing them to take responsibility for their mistakes.

In a healthy business relationship, it’s good for everyone when you defend your turf with an eye toward preserving the deal. You get what you want out of the negotiation, and you do your best to concede what you can to the other party so they find dealing with you profitable and pleasant.

This is a different kind of ethics than the ones we employ with family and friends, where the rule of mutuality and self-sacrifice dominate. When dealing with contracts, mutual benefit and self-interest are the rules of the game, and when considered together they are compatible. The trick is that, if you want the business relationship to work in a way that makes your partners honorary friends, you must fight hard for the things you need when you’re structuring the deal.

Business and contracts are not a zero-sum game. They are a positive sum-game. You get what you want, I get what I want, and everybody wins. But for that to happen, you have to know what you want in the first place, you have to understand how the thing you want works, and you have to be willing to do a deal, trade, and compromise to make it happen. Business relationships are consensual – nonconsensual business relationships are called “slavery.” Approach your dealings as if you’re entering into a consensual relationship and you’re likely to get farther than if you believe you or the other party has no choice.

Negotiation need not be an unpleasant process, but it is always an adversarial one in some measure. Expect that. Roll with it. And stick up for your interests.

After all, if you don’t stick up for what you want, who will?

Next time: Market Awareness

Don’t delay — read for yourself the story of the woman who loved the Blues so much that, when the world ended, it was the only thing she still wanted.

Me? I think I’m going to go celebrate. Where is that Leadbelly album?

Seldom, if ever, have the words above been truer than when negotiation a contract. In a contract, the narrower your wording, the better off you are. Why? Because (with a few exceptions which I’ll get to later) you cannot be obligated to actions that are not specified in the contract – and neither can the other party.

As we learned in The Third Cousins Rule, a well-written contract will define terms to minimize confusion.

This is its chief corollary: It’s not enough to define your terms, you must also be careful to use the correct terms. Doing so is one of the key things that makes a difference between an artist who makes a living off her work, and one who perpetually gets taken for granted.

A properly-worded contract can construe a full-cast audiobook as different from a single-reader audiobook, and both as different from a dramatic adaptation for radio. It can define internet video as a separate rights domain from that same video distributed on DVD or BluRay. It can define a non-profit enterprise (transcription for the blind or deaf, using your music as part of a fundraiser for charity, etc.) as different from for-profit enterprise (playing that same song on the radio).

How? Simple. Your intellectual property is yours to divvy up as you like.

Even if you’re not the creative force behind a project, you might have intellectual property rights to the work you help produce. Are you a model, a voice actor, an actor, a cinematographer, a lighting designer, an audio engineer? You contribute creatively to the works in which you participate, and your contract/release enumerates the terms under which the project’s producers may use the material you helped create. While it’s true that a number of industries have customs about what wording goes into a release, and in some cases there is very little you can do to alter it, in other cases negotiations present a wide range of possibilities.

In either case, narrow wording protects your interests and reserves to you the rights you do not wish to license to the other party. However, if your contract is worded too broadly, you can wind up giving away the store without intending to.

There is nothing wrong with broad wording if you understand what it implies. There are some times when it’s absolutely appropriate. The trick is to word your contract exactly as broadly as you need it to be, and no broader.

To provide some examples, I’m inventing a contract clause based on the current problems going on around e-books in the publishing world. Now that some reading devices (such as the iPad) allow for books with embedded multimedia content, the line between game, book, and movie is getting blurry. A lot of authors (and agents) I’ve talked to this year are nervous about diluting their (or their clients) film and television rights.

The problem is this: How can one word a contract so that Hollywood won’t take one look and run away screaming for fear of lawsuits? How does one avoid accidentally signing movie rights over the the publishing company who demands multimedia e-book (or “vook”) rights?

So, keeping in mind that I’m not a lawyer, that my publishing contract experience does not, as yet extend to novels,and that I am in no way giving advice on how to word e-book contracts, let’s dive in. What follows is a procedural compare/contrast of how one might go about narrowing the scope of an over-broad clause.

Example #1
Let’s start simple, with something like this:

[Author] grants [Publisher], its heirs and assignees, the right to produce electronic edition(s) of the property, from which the author shall receive [royalty rate] share of net income.

Seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? If you were signing a book deal that included print books, you might be tempted to sign that clause. Of course, if you did, you’d wind up regretting it. Why?

Because the definition of an “electronic edition” is in flux. It could mean a Kindle-style book, where the contents of the print version are reproduced in a machine-readable form that includes text and graphics identical to those in the print novel. Or, it could mean an enhanced e-book, which could include sound or video extras, extra graphics, and other bonus features. This latter definition treads on the territory of multimedia rights, game adaptations, and even some kinds of film adaptations, and this could create confusion over who holds what rights.

The clause also does not limit the length of the license, and if that isn’t addressed elsewhere in the contract the publisher could assert a perpetual license (to the extent allowed by law), and that claim might stand up in court.

Finally, this clause includes the sucker-punch of all contract terminology: “net income.” You might hear that and think “oh, that makes sense. We share the profits.” Don’t believe it.

“Net income,” unless otherwise defined in the contract, always means one thing: “You’re gonna get squat.” Why? Because anyone with a Jr. High level proficiency in bookkeeping can arrange for any creative project to show no profit. I’m going to do a whole post on this subject later in the series, but for now, let’s take it as red that if you sign a contract with the otherwise undefined word “net” in it, you’re giving up your royalties.

Example #2
Moving on, let’s assume that your intent as an author is to allow the publisher to make an e-book in the Kindle fashion (i.e. text and illustrations only). To accomplish this, you’d want to define the clause more narrowly, like so:

[Author] grants [Publisher], its heirs and assignees, the right to produce editions of the book consisting of text and any supporting graphics that appear in the print edition, for use on e-reading software and hardware devices. [Author] shall receive from [Publisher] royalties totaling [x%] of the list price, payable quarterly. [Author] shall also receive from [Publisher] a quarterly report on sales.

This second formulation limits the right granted in a clear fashion, so it’s a superior clause. But it still has a few problems.

First it still doesn’t limit the length of the license, and that’s a problem. For a writer in a non work-for-hire situation (independent screenwriter, musician, songwriter, freelance nonfiction, short story, novel), every grant of rights should be accompanied by a reversion clause (though contracts are often organized so that the reversions are in one section and the rights grant is in another).

Second, it doesn’t specify geographic scope. Even if you’re selling world-wide rights, you should specify this to eliminate a potential point of ambiguity later on.

Third, it doesn’t include a grant of exclusivity. Although the lack of presence of the term usually implies non-exclusivity, it is this kind of technicality that can wreak havoc in a relationship between creative partners. It’s best to state outright whether the clause is an exclusive or nonexclusive grant, to prevent problems in the future. It also hedges against objections by other potential partners, as we will see in our next example.

Example #3
For this one, let’s say you want to sell rights for a multimedia-enhanced e-book. You’re excited, because your publisher is going to throw the kitchen sink at the project, commissioning embedded audio, video, and additional artwork. In the end, they essentially turn the book into something resembling an immerse reality game.

At this point, “e-book” is a paltry description. What’s really going on is that they are creating derivative multimedia works based on your property. Your contract should be worded in a way that clearly grants this right, while being careful to limit the license so that it can’t be construed as a license to create a dramatic adaptation. For example:

[Author] grants [Publisher], its heirs and assignees, the right to produce editions of the book for e-reading devices and software, consisting of text and any supporting graphics that appear in the print edition. Additionally, may, at its own expense, produce value-added derivative materials for such an addition consisting of music, puzzles, and video segments not to exceed ninety seconds in length. This right is non-exclusive and shall be construed to apply only to materials bundled as an integral part of the e-book. Such materials may not be sold or made available in any other format, or marketed in a manner separate from the e-book, except for promotional purposes. Any such materials provided by shall be provided under terms to be negotiated separately. This clause constitutes the sum total of e-book rights granted, and shall serve as the definition for the terms “e-book,” “vook,” “enhanced e-book,” and “electronic edition” found elsewhere in the contract and in relevant correspondence. This rights grant is subject to conditions in the reversion section of this agreement.

Notice how the above clause grants the publisher precisely the rights she’s seeking, and no more. It references the section of the contract that provides for reversion, specifies acceptable formats, grants the right
to promotional use, and it contains all the relevant definitions for the contract and supporting documentation so that the potential legal gerrymandering is minimized (in this way The Narrowness Principle dovetails nicely with the Third Cousins rule).

Also, by strictly limiting the terms of the contract it ensures that rights not specifically granted can’t be later construed as implicit (this is a regular problem with contracts, and publishing and music companies are particularly bad about making post facto rights grabs based on vague language).

Wrap-up

Please bear in mind that I am not recommending the above clause for your publishing contract – I am not a lawyer and you should never accept legal advice from Internet weirdos like me. I’m using a made-up example to show you the sorts of things you need to watch out for when negotiating your contracts, whether you’re doing a book deal, a film deal, a record deal, a rental agreement, or a franchise agreement for pet rocks.

Also, as mentioned earlier, the law places certain limits and definitions on some contractual terms. You must know the relevant law in your field to know what’s worth fighting over and getting nit-picky about. Look for more about this in an upcoming post in this series.

So, in summary: Keep the terms narrow, use as many clauses as you need, follow the Third Cousins rule (this means defining your terms within the contract, particularly when they are terms without an established body of case-law behind them). Doing this will keep your obligations clear, your expectations reasonable, and put you ahead of the game when it comes to negotiating deals that lead to mutually beneficial, profitable business relationships.

Well, I’ve been writing and producing an album. Wish there was a sexier answer, but there it is. And it is fun

I’m going on pod later today to record some special episodes – one will contain Down From Ten bloopers!

The other one is the occasion for the post. I’m going to be recording a special episode about guns. Particularly, about how to deal with guns in fiction, geared for people who don’t have extensive first-hand experience with them. I’m going to be covering vocabulary, safety, different types of firearms, popular myths that come from movies, and other stuff that can shoot your credibility in the foot. To this end, if you have questions, please post them to the comments here, so I can be sure to answer them.

See you on pod soon! And fear not. The Balticon Adventure and Principles of Contracts both return next week.

At this point in the narrative, I’m forced to chose between one of two roads. I could go along the chronology, skipping the boring and blackmail-worthy parts along the way, or I could chose a theme and tell its story…or I could jump back and forth between each as my fancy strikes me.

Guess which one I’ve picked?

It wasn’t until my appearance on Litopia last December that I began to realize the Power of the Hat ™. First, there was the encounter I recounted last time with Kim the Comic Book Goddess (who insists she’d have recognized me without the hat, but I have my doubts). Then there was the fact that Scott Roche and Sidfawu accosted me based solely upon the Power of the Hat, and we wound up sitting in the bar for several hours on Friday night talking Down From Ten, writing, and what passes for politics in my demented corner of the universe.

But before all that boring stuff, you’ll want to hear The Good Parts.

Much to my surprise, I arrived in time for my appearance as a guest troublemaker…um…panelist on The Good Parts, during which time we talked with great seriousness and deliberation about the influence of Catholicism on Erotica, Erotica markets, why Erotica writers are more conservative than mainstream fiction writers, and why J. Daniel Sawyer can’t resist telling a bad Vatican joke whenever he gets the chance (ok, we didn’t talk about that, but I’m sure that’s what you’ll be wondering after you listen to the ‘cast). The terrifyingly intelligent Kathryn Lively of Logical Lust/Mundania Press joined me as a guest and mutual foil to Nobilis and Cynical Woman’s normal crosstalk. It was a lively session indeed (pun intended), but I did manage to escape with my politically-incorrect (from any point of view) skin intact to take refuge once again in the bar, where I was accosted by the aforementioned shady characters. Gail found me there, drowning my sorrows in iced tea and talking epistemology, and while she and I sat talking Mur Lafferty wandered by.

The host of I Should Be Writing and editor of Escape Pod — drawn by the power of the hat (okay, the fact that I had her favorite ever show guest on my arm probably didn’t hurt, but it’s my hat and I can fetishize it if I want). After a delightful introduction, Gail and Mur flitted off with the New Yorkers to talk shop, while Nathan Lowell and Scott Roche introduced me around.

And this, dear reader, is where the Hat shows its true power. I was shaking hands with…Mae Breakall, I think? I can’t remember who, honestly, because I heard behind me “Oh my god it’s Dan Sawyer!” I turned around just in time to catch a short grey-shirted bundle of energy running up to hug me to death. Once I was satisfied that death was not in the cards, I collected enough of my wits to introduce myself to, it turns out, Heather Welliver, whose voice (I’m proud to admit) stole my heart in the intro to Pieces, and who graciously appeared in Predestination as Shayna Takahashi, and who is every bit as fabulous in person as she is on pod.

My welcome the rest of the con was similarly warm (thankfully, not in the thermal sense – the air conditioner was a life saver) and shocking, but none of it was matched by the dirty, foul, evil prank played upon me by podfather Tee Morris, he of the shameless self-promotion. Tee, in what I can only assume was an attempt to keep me on my toes, put out a twitter bounty on my hat. Over the course of the con, a number of people hunted me down specifically to STEAL my hat.

Let me say that again.

THEY STOLE MY HAT.

And then forced me, when I had a camera handy, to take their picture while wearing it. Theft and extortion, all in one package. And I have only one thing to say about this:

Your ass is mine next Balticon, Ubernemesis!!!

And yes, I’ll be posting more pictures from the Great Hat Heist in coming blog post.

Believe it or not — this only covers up through Friday night. Saturday was a whole other adventures.

Next time: Ponfication, Panels, and Parties

It’s scared me since I was 12, when I read Writer’s Digest religiously at the library every day (which, in retrospect, was my first mistake). To my twelve year old mind, it described a world full of arcane rituals, secret handshakes, nepotism, and strange protocols – and a game at which nobody made a dime to boot.

Of course, I’ve learned better in the meantime, but the terror never quite went away. For years I’ve coped by doing other things I needed to do anyway in order to go pro – focusing on craft, learning to network at cons, podcasting and learning about how to interact with an audience, building my platform, and romancing the occasional agent, but I’ve hit the point in my career where I’ve got a hell of a backlist piling up (at least, for someone at my point in their career), and a handful of fiction sales that prove that my terror (which is largely born of the sense that I don’t understand a goddamn thing about the fiction publishing culture) is well past the point of being about 75% bullshit.

So, this summer, in addition to bringing you Free Will and working on the other projects I talked about at Balticon, I’m sending everything out that is not currently under contract — and I do mean *everything.* And I’ve got a pile of treatments in front of me to keep the pipeline full once all the existing stuff is in the mail.

I was going to just do this quietly and wear my glory or shame quietly, but after some conversations at Balticon and then reading Mur’s blog post this morning, I’ve realized I’m not the only person in this boat.

I’m getting off my ass. And I’ll put up ten bucks against anyone who wants to race me. Let’s make this a proper horse race. Here’s what I’ve got in mind:

We’ll go from now till the end of the year (or perhaps we should go to next Balticon?). Everyone bets $10. Every story we submit gets 3 points. Every novel proposal we send in gets 4 points. Every nonfiction submission/query gets 1 point. Every sale – of any fiction – gets 8 points. Every sale of nonfiction gets 3 points. Any sale that pays money and has a contract counts. Non-paying and/or clickthru and/or under-the-table markets do not count.

At the end of the year, the person with the most points wins the pool (which will operate on the honor system – those of us that lose will paypal our $10 to the winner).

We can keep a running tally for this and a forum at ANMAP. We prove our submissions and sales by posting photos/scans of the query and acceptance letters.

Thoughts? Should I formalize this, start a forum dedicated to it, and get this rolling? Any ideas for how to make it better/more useful? Chime in in the comments!

—Edit—
We have a few participants, so I’ve officially opened things. You can find the rules and competition forum here.

I normally travel with carry-on baggage only, but it’s not because by the end of a plane ride there’s nothing that gives me greater relief from coach seat-cramp syndrome and DVT than sitting down in another small seat in a moving vehicle. Nor is it that the prospect of walking around an unfamiliar building filled with carousels from deSade’s worst dreams fills me with nauseating dread.

The reason is that if I’m traveling by air, I’m interested in getting where I’m going. Car trips are for taking in the scenery – plane trips are for getting somewhere as fast as possible. Airports, with a few exceptions, are incredibly dull places. Let me put it this way: When was the last time you fond a jacuzzi full of literary intelligentsia well-plied with alcohol in an airport? If you’re anything like me, it’s been a while, and when I’m traveling from home to a convention (two locations highly likely to involve the aforementioned flavor of decadence), there’s precious little an airport can offer that I find the slightest bit interesting (aside from, you know, the plane).

This time, however, I was going to a my first general interest science fiction con entirely as a pro (rather than as a part-time fan), so I thought it important to dress up. I brought a nice sport coat, a pullover or two, some mandarin-collar semi-formals, and threw a mess of more knock-around clothes in for good measure. This put me well over my bag limit, so I had to concede to the eventuality of baggage claim.

I should have brought scuba gear instead.

You see, the eastern seaboard of the U.S. is one long swamp stretching from southern New Jersey right down to the tip of Florida, and swamps are peculiar places. Where most land environments have an atmosphere of air with a little bit of water dissolved in it, the atmosphere in a swamps is basically an above-ground lake with a higher-than-average dissolved oxygen content. The reason H.P. Lovecraft set his stories on the East Coast is because it’s the only place in the U.S. outside of Bayou country where Cthulu could breathe above the ocean surface.

As such, the humidity content on Friday afternoon was such that I could have done far better with gills than I did with lungs, and walking out of the sliding doors at Dulles into the afternoon heat I felt rather like a cheerio left in the bowl overnight on the counter top as the milk curdled around me.

Fortunately, I had swimming alongside me the equally bedraggled Gail Carriger (whose book we found in the Dulles bookshop as well – no wonder she hit the bestseller list!). Despite Gail’s public reputation as a genteel woman of breeding, she gives me a run for my money in the obscenity department when dealing with suspiciously titled “customer service” reps at rental car agencies. At such times she is a veritable font of snark, which more than made up for the sanitized films on the flight. Between that and the silly sing-alongs on the Beltway, one couldn’t ask for a better traveling companion.

An hour and a bit later we rolled happily into the hotel parking lot, both changed clothes in situ in the cab of the teeny rental car, and strolled triumphantly through the gathering dusk to register as both hotel guests and program participants, meeting Kim The Comic Book Goddess on the way in. This was the first of many instances that night where I was identified primarily by my hat — bur more on that later.

Next Time: The Saga Of The Hat

I’ve often suspected that “JetBlue” is so named because of the color your legs turn in coach. Turns out that, like so many other things in the universe, I was completely wrong. They had more leg room than I’ve experienced on any flight in years – so much that I didn’t even get bruises on my knees from the seat in front. All this for the cheapest available tickets? Luxury, I say!

They also had personal televisions mounted in the back of each seat, ostensibly piping in Sat TV for our viewing pleasure. It was a special kind of SatTV, though, one designed to be suitable for children. Attempting to watch the G-rated cut of Fight Club was probably the most surreal experience of the entire weekend (which, in any weekend that contains people like Tee Morris, is saying a lot).

After an hour hop to Long Beach, we walked across the tarmac at the very retro 1940s airport to a trailer park masquerading as a passenger terminal. Once I had satisfied myself that I was not about to encounter dueling banjos and half-consumed kegs of Budweiser, I relaxed and took in the finer points of the architecture (what else does one do when waiting for airplanes?).

The Long Beach airport designers have put a lot of thought into constructing a homey space. Like my bedroom when I was seven, they hung model airplanes from the ceiling at just-over-collision-hazard-height. Also, in an attempt to maximize their budget while maintaining the homey feel, they had joined six mobile homes together, generating enough floorspace for everyone to stand around waiting for their planes in the finest possible Winnebago style.

The flight East proved equally roomy – hats off to JetBlue for the leg room. And the endless replays of G-rated Fight Club. Did you know that when Tyler Durden gets pissed off in kindergarten, he describes himself as “peeved”? Neither did I.

And now, I shall write a sentence that should never see the light of day: I am SO glad that I saw Die Hard 2. Looking out the plane window as we landed, I suddenly understood why a light afternoon sprinkle created a 40 minute landing delay: The ground crew naturally had to make sure the rainstorm wasn’t a terrorist plot. You never can be too careful (in fact, while I was in Baltimore the Insecurity threat level went from Lemon to Orange. They tell us if they make it all the way to Cherry, we get a free box of Fruit Loops. Me, I’m hoping the threat level makes it all the way up to Tangerine so that I can get a free pack of Starburst candies next time I fly).

Besides, no amount of G-rated Fight Club could prepare me for the experience of landing at Washington Dulles on a stormy afternoon. Exiting the gate and finding baggage claim was essentially a walking tour of one of the most expensive “things go boom” movies in history, and really, who needs a plot when you’re riding on an escalator that you personally watched Bruce Willis shred with an Uzi when you were in Jr. High?

Things were looking up…until we got outside.

Next time: Scuba Gear

As a die-hard Monopoly fan I found the notion of Balticon rather tawdry. Baltic Ave is one of the two smallest, cheapest properties on the board – of course, wielded well, that little dark purple property set can leverage the whole game. Any con named after Baltic must be a chintzy affair – or it’s named after the Baltic Sea, in which case I was unlikely to pack enough SCUBA equipment to properly enjoy the experience (ironically, SCUBA gear did turn out to be a terrible omission, but more on that in a later post).

On the other hand, there is BALTICON, which the podcastery part of my brain expected to be the grand land of golden microphones forcibly pried from the fingers of Rush Limbaugh and re-purposed for nobler ends, filled to bursting with legions of immortal vocal talents, new media devotees, boundless opportunity, and rampant hedonism.

Unsure of which of these possibilities to put my money on, I took the plunge and went to Baltimore to find out. What I found there was somewhere in between the two.

To begin somewhere in the middle, after an obscenely early morning following a night of kid-at-Christmas sleeplessness, I blundered forth with Gail Carriger in tow. The two of us muddled through the various security checkpoints, scandalizing a wide variety of minimum-wage employees by the flagrancy with which we practiced our preferred co-conspiratorial black market activity: tea smuggling.

SFO TSA foot-soldiers, personable and polite though they are, seem convinced that SEMTEX can be hidden inside 6 oz of Irish Breakfast tea bags. The tea bags were forced to make a second trip through both the x-ray machine and the explosives detector before the inspectors were satisfied that they were unlikely to cause lasting damage to the airplane.

Airports are, as you may have guessed, unusual pockets of the universe that have entire sub-disciplines in special relativity devoted entirely to them. Sometimes, as when we happened upon Gail’s “Changeless” displayed prominently in the SFO bookshop, these rules work entirely for the cause of the righteous corruption of the indecently innocent. Other times, they’re just irritating, as they create a situation in which the words “on time” have no lexical content whatsoever. To explain:

When you go to a cinema, the movie is scheduled to start at a certain time, and that certain time is always eight to ten minutes after the time posted on the marquee (during which time they remind you how lucky you are to be watching the film in a room full of odd-smelling, cell-phone weilding strangers who have inexplicably forgotten that slasher films are not pleasant experiences for their three-year-old children). That start time is a universal constant if one allows for a five-minute margin of error on either side.

However, if your flight is scheduled to depart at, say, 0600, the proper way to decide when to arrive at the airport is quite involved.

Step 1: You must examine the unwashed entrails of four diseased goats by the light of the full moon, searching for Dan Brown’s signature (you’re certain to find it eventually). Once you figure out the precise position of the signature, you write the number (measured in fortieths of a furlong) on a piece of paper, and proceed to step two.

Step 2: In your front yard, during a heavy rainstorm, perform an impromptu full-length interpretive nude dance to the Whitney Huston version of “I Will Always Love You.” When the lawn dries, you’ll need to hire a priestess from a local Macumba group to do the sacred geometry. When she measures the progression of angles of your footprints against the Zodiac and does her divination, she will give you another, more confusing number. Write this one down on the piece of paper as well.

Step 3: Divide the bottom number by the top number. If the result is four digits long, that’s the time you must arrive at the airport. If it’s less than four digits, add zeroes until you get four digits. If it’s more than four digits, you didn’t pay the priestess enough, and will need to re-do the dance part.

As complicated as this is, it’s far preferable to a blind guess based on the time the plane will allegedly depart. If you arrive two hours prior (which Homeland Insecurity insists you should), you’re guaranteed to encounter no lines at security, no lines at the gate, a flight crew that was out the previous night drinking and are thus not legal to fly, and a cabin crew that appears pleasantly stoned and only vaguely aware that they aren’t animatronics stolen from “It’s A Small World” at Disneyland.

On the other hand, should you tempt fate and arrive merely an hour and fifty minutes early, you will be subjected to strip search, reversible vivisection, long lines, a plane that’s departing early, and a baggage clerk that insists that you can’t check your luggage because the plane is already locked down, and a gate crew that insists that you must check your luggage because there is simply no room under your seat for a laptop computer (often this is because every available seat is occupied by members of the Portugese royal family and their souvenirs).

Gail and I, needless to say, did not know about the goat and dancing procedure, so we showed up early and wound up having a very pleasant breakfast and watching the sun rise over the East Bay Hills to kill time.

Embarkation…well, that’s tomorrow’s misadventure.

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

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.

Disputes in contractual matters usually arise for one of two reasons: either one party failed to live up to their obligations specified in the contract, or the two parties disagree about what the provisions in the contract mean.

The former case isn’t something you can do anything about, other than making sure you live up to the contracts you sign your name to, and taking legal action against those who fail to live up to their end of the deal if they fail to respond to more civil communication (when it’s worth the bother to you – lawsuits are a pain in the ass).

The latter case is a nightmare. The possibility of a nasty dispute caused by an honest misunderstanding is a major reason for the proverb “never do business with friends.” This kind of dispute causes drama, factionalism, and fractured relationships and communities. It happens because two people talk through a deal and agree on the terms, but they figure that they’re doing a trade with a friend, so there are some unspoken-but-well-understood conditions to the deal. For example, if George is having a bad week and blows a deadline with Fred, he figures Fred will understand. After all, Fred is a friend, and George would be similarly understanding if the situation were reversed.

Contingencies often wind up ruling the deal. A publishing contract, for example, does not obligate a publisher to publish your book, it only grants them the right to do so under very specific circumstances. Publishers can, and do, kill books after part or all of an advance has been paid, for contingent reasons. They may be dissatisfied with the final manuscript, their staff might turn over, or their offices in the World Trade Center could collapse during business hours (this is the reason that Scott Sigler wound up podcasting his work. His publisher was in one of those towers, and the parent company decided not to continue the imprint. All the authors were left hanging, with no recourse but their reversion clauses).

It’s bad enough when contingencies ruin a deal legitimately, but things can get worse. Boilerplate contracts often contain contingency clauses that are obfuscatory, or that appear to say one thing but, due to a later sentence, mean another thing entirely. Worst of all are contracts where the contingencies and specific details of the deal don’t make it into the contract at all.

This last case is pretty common in the world of freelancing, particularly among friends. The contingencies and fine details are discussed verbally, but never made part of the inked contract. Later on, when disputes arise, each party remembers a version of events that is most convenient to them. This can happen even when both parties are entirely honest, when they care about the relationship, and when they share similar goals for the project.

It’s human nature to shade memories to conform to bias, and the memories themselves are paraphrases of the past, not quotations from it. It’s a limitation of our brains that we have to cope with.

For example, let’s say that you and I discuss a delivery date for a graphic design project, and it’s a last minute job. It’s Friday, and you need the project by Tuesday, but I need certain materials to do the job. Let’s say I need a two-day lead time, and I say so verbally. You might hear “two days” and forget the part where I say “once I receive the materials,” so you might start your mental stopwatch from the time you mail the supplies, not the time I receive them. You’re more likely to do this if you’re someone who only hires graphic designers occasionally and you’ve never done a deal like this before.

Now, let’s say that the contract we sign hash a 48hr clause, but it escapes my notice that the contract doesn’t specify which 48hrs we’re talking about. What’s likely to happen when the mail gets delayed due to inclement weather? Of if the usual mailman is sick and misdelivers the package?

You see how easily problems can snowball from minor mistakes into friendship-ruining arguments?

Protecting Yourself and Your Partner From Drama

We see that verbal understandings – or worse, nonverbal understandings (i.e. assumptions) – make for fiascos. However, if you’re pedantic and specific in a contract it can leave you and your partner(s) feeling straightjacketed, mistrusted, and threatened (because most people are intimidated by contracts and legal language). So how much specificity is really necessary? Is the amount different with a stranger vs. a friend?

The woman who taught me contracts hammered into my head something that solves this impasse. She calls it the Third Cousins Rule.

It goes like this:

Let’s say your family and mine are both having family reunions in the same public park. It’s a perfectly pleasant afternoon until a meteor hits, killing everyone except for our third cousins, who were both not invited because they’re fairly stupid, annoying, or malicious. These third cousins inherit everything, and they have to complete the deal drawn up in our contract. They can’t ask us about verbal or unspoken understandings. They have only the contract to go on. Obviously, they can only proceed if the contract is drawn up in such a way that they will be able to understand every part of the deal, and if the contract protects each of them from the other’s less-than-honorable intentions.

Of course, nothing like that happens in the real world. Contracts are executed by the people who sign them…aren’t they?

Don’t I wish! That meteor strikes all the time. Every time a company merges, or goes out of business, or management changes; every time a freelancer gets sick, or folds; every time a client goes bankrupt and his debts are adjudicated by the court, this situation happens. Somebody’s unqualified third cousin inherits the mess. Sometimes, the contract ends up in court in front of another kind of third cousin: a judge. The judge, who has no context except for the contract itself and whatever conflicting stories he hears from the parties to the contract, must decide what will happen to the deal.

The Third Cousins Rule means simply this: Your contract should be as specific and all-inclusive as possible. It should outline the basic structure of the deal, outline contingencies, pedantically spell out the niggling details, and be structured so that the average person can understand the plain meaning of the deal without consulting a lawyer (this last part isn’t always possible, but it is nonetheless something to strive for). Above all, it should have the minimum possible level of ambiguity.

Following the Third Cousins Rule doesn’t just help you out in court, it can help keep your relationship with your business partner from deteriorating when a minor dispute arises. If you’ve negotiated and signed a contract that conforms to the Third Cousins Rule, the chances are very good that you will be able to pull the contract out, read it through together, and find the resolution to your dispute in its pages in plain language. It also ensures that everyone is signing the same deal in their minds, as well as on paper. Everyone is, so to speak, on the same page. Minimizing confusion is a simple and vastly underutilized way of maximizing good will – and it also shows respect for the other party.

Best of all, the Third Cousins Rule provides maximal protection without impugnment. By explaining that you have to protect yourself from your partner’s third cousin in the event of death, catastrophe, or hostile takeover, and that he should seek to protect himself in the same measure, you establish a base for negotiation that defuses a great deal of the adversarial nature of negotiations. If your partner thinks such things are silly to worry about, remind him that more people die in car accidents every year than were killed in the entire Vietnam war. If you’re freelancing long enough, you will do business with someone who dies, or someone whose company is bought out or goes bankrupt, before the contract term finishes. You should be protected in that eventuality. So should your prospective partner.

Next time, we’ll explore The Narrowness Principle.

That part is important, and it’s probably the single least-understood things about contracts, so I’ll say it again. Everything is negotiable. Most people don’t read or understand the contracts they sign, or don’t know enough about the relevant laws to understand the contracts they read.

There is a word for what happens to artists who can’t read and/or understand contracts: screwed.

When you put your pen to a dotted line and sign your name, you can be held to your agreement in court. You can be forced to fulfill terms that you later decide are unfair. You can be forced to pay reparations for not living up to your end of the bargain. Sometimes, though very rarely, you can be sent to prison for fraud when you are merely guilty of poor judgment.

I am not a lawyer, but I have seen my fair share of contracts and have learned a few good tricks to help you get your head around what you’re reading.

Know What You’re Signing

There is no substitute for a familiarity with the law and an eye for detail. Your agent is not a substitute. The integrity of the person you’re negotiating with is not a substitute. Having a good lawyer helps, but not even that is a good stand-in for knowing what you’re doing.

Why not?

Your prospective business partner, client, or publisher (henceforth: partner) might be a person of the highest integrity – but it’s not his job to look out for you. He might be very generous and help you through a contract here and there, but he has a set of responsibilities that have nothing to do with you (for example: the representative of a company is responsible to his boss and shareholders, the owner of a company is responsible to his employees, a friend is responsible to his family and employer, etc. All these priorities, and a few more, come before you, even in the best of relationships). If your prospective partner, client, or publisher can’t trust you to look out for your own interests when you negotiate, how can he trust you to behave professionally in other ways? If you’re a newbie, he might give you the benefit of the doubt, but that only goes so far.

Speaking as someone who’s been on both ends of this situation, working with someone who doesn’t know how to read a contract or negotiate for their own interests is a worry. It often (thankfully, not always) means that such a person doesn’t know what they’re signing up for, and a person in that position is the one most likely to screw up the deal and cause a lot of drama. This doesn’t happen through malice most of the time, it happens through misunderstanding, and it erodes trust to have that cloud of doubt hanging over a deal.

Trust is the central component to all business deals, and when it’s shaky, it’s very easy for the deal to blow up. When it comes to contracts, trust has a few important parts: you must be able to trust your partner to stick up for his own interests negotiating the deal. You must trust that he will only agree to terms he can deliver on and live with. You must trust that he will not take it personally if you hold him to the terms of the contract. You must trust that he will act in good faith to deliver on the terms of the contract, that he will not break the law or implicate you in criminal activity in the course of fulfilling the contract, and that he will work in good faith to settle any disputes which may arise. He needs to trust you in all the same ways.

If that trust isn’t there, then you’ve got a good chance that you’re in for some serious headaches and misery before the deal is done.

Compounding the issue of trust is the basic problem of human nature. Perhaps most people are decent, and certainly you and I always try to do business with decent people. But it’s human nature to take the easy road (emotional blackmail, equivocation, laziness, theft, and emotional blackmail are all common hazards of doing business) as much as it is to behave decently. Even if most people are mature enough to suppress or channel their dishonest impulses, not everyone is. Sooner or later, you’re going to do business with someone who’s incompetent, or worse, someone who’s a snake and is interested in rigging the game to take maximal advantage of you.

Taking advantage of an artist is a pretty easy thing to do. It’s almost, but not quite, as easy as scamming an elderly widow (of either sex) or the parent of a young child. All three of these groups have something extra at stake in the deal, and that thing makes them easy to leverage into making bad decisions. With the elderly who don’t have close family or communities, the promise of community can (talking on averages) provoke them into parting with their money or valuables very rashly. For young parents, push the button that promises prosperity or safety for their offspring. For artists, all you have to do is pull the approbation lever – flatter them, promise them fame, and they’re yours.

Every con artist in the business knows this, and over the years more artists than can be counted have fallen for it, from musicians to authors to actors to screenwriters to photographers. This basic fact about our emotional makeup makes us prey for the dishonest.

Porcupines are also prey, but they’re not easy to catch and hold on to. Learning good principles of contract negotiation is the artist’s equivalent of growing porcupine spines: it makes us unappetizing prey.

It also makes us better business partners.

Next time, The Third Cousins Rule, and why it can save your ass without pissing off your partner.

The Concert
In the early part of this century, I participated in a charity event to benefit the family of a dead hippie. It was an exemplary example 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.

The trouble came after the event, but to understand the trouble, you first have to know the culture. Hippie culture, much like the close-knit podcasting culture, is an in-group. Everybody’s family, deals are done on a handshake, hospitality is the expected norm. The notion that this way of doing things might not be appropriate in all venues is a pretty foreign one – it’s the main reason that the hippie in question died bankrupt instead of dying a multi-millionaire (he had, after all, launched the careers of some of the biggest names in rock-and-roll history).

So, the trouble started with about half of the raw footage being stolen due to a lack of physical security (the mere suggestion of locking up the footage for safety provoked sniffs of indignation from the event organizers). Then there was the problem with a lot of the footage not being legal to use, because the organizers didn’t think it was important to post the legally-required notices that video recording was happening backstage and on stage. Problem after problem materialized, over basic procedural things, and the problems derailed the project for months at a time.

For several months, as the problems materialized, I was mystified. I’d worked on a fair few productions by that time and none had run into such a series of obstacles as this one charity event did. Then the time came for the editing to start, and I was tapped to do part of it. I did what one does in such situations: I asked for the boilerplate contract.

I’d be hard pressed to accurately describe the firestorm that followed, let alone the uselessness of it. After all, I was not asking for money – this was a charity event. Rather, I wanted to make sure that I released the correct rights to my camera work, still photographs, and editing labor, to ensure that I got credit for my work, and that I retained the right to excerpt small portions for the purposes of self-promotion. When I explained this, the event’s organizer said “I don’t have a problem with any of that,” so I again asked for the contract, knowing that he would *need* the contract on file in order to release the DVDs through Sony, as the original plan was.

The contract never happened. Instead, what followed was the four day fight from hell, during which I was schooled in Hippie economics. I learned that asking for a contract was an insult to the integrity of the deal, that nobody would ever care, that I had nothing to worry about because it was a charity event, and that my mind had been twisted into knots by my time as a small businessman, and that I would never amount to anything because I didn’t trust anybody. All this because I asked for a legal document that told me what rights the producer needed, so that I could grant them without compensation for the sake of a charity and to help out a friend.

I walked away, all the while shaking my head at the uselessness of the whole situation. It was the only sane thing I could do

Of course, the distribution deal with Sony fell through because Sony wouldn’t touch such a poorly documented deal with a ten foot pole due to liability concerns. It wasn’t just me that the organizers had no contract with, it was everyone – the musicians, the tech people, the grunt labor, the concessioners, the photographers – all the while trying to claim eminent domain over all materials, music, photographs, and interviews produced at the event (for those of you unfamiliar with copyright law, this rights claim is illegal).

The unfortunate consequence is that the DVD release was delayed several years, and then only happened on a very small scale. The concert organizer, who sunk tens of thousands of his own dollars into the event in order to help a friend’s widow, lost a lot of money. Those of us that contributed our time, talents, and intellectual property lost all that too. The whole enterprise involving thousands of man-hours, thousands of people, and boatloads of goodwill didn’t accomplish a thing. And the widow whose pension this was supposed to build? She didn’t get anything either – and at this stage, it’s likely she’ll never see anything substantial other than the concert itself.

The Prevailing Logic

In the intervening years, I’ve seen the Hippie attitude about contracts recapitulated all throughout the DIY culture. The logic is simple: We’re friends, we’re artists, we’re trying to help each other out. So why should we worry about paperwork? Why should we bring the state into it? We know that it’s a one-in-a-million that any of us will get lucky and get a big deal out of this, and if it happens, we’ll make it good then. Right?

It’s seductive logic.

Ironically, this reasoning, intended to protect relationships and community, is a very good way to sabotage careers, cultivate exportability, and destroy friendships.

And, of course, there’s the emotional factor. Contracts are intimidating for those of us who aren’t lawyers. They’re obscure, filled with technical language, and frightening. Many of us have had people use contracts and/or the law to bully us at one point or another.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. Contracts don’t have to be scary, they don’t have to be threatening, and they don’t have to be adversarial. They can be documents that clarify, that head off disputes, that simplify complicated-looking problems, and that enhance trust and community.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to run through the basics on the nature of contracts, the ethics of doing business with friends, and some techniques that can help make things clear, easy to understand, and advantageous for all parties.

Aside from a few broad principles, I will not be discussing specific matters of law, as I’m not a lawyer. For the basics of copyright law, see this excellent book put out by NoLo press. If anything I say contradicts that book, believe the book, not me.

Next time: What is a contract?

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!

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

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.

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.

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!

And now, Episode 25, in which all is revealed.

And now, Episode 24, in which Amos gets cold.
Story So Far by Gabrielle Harbowy.

And now, Episode 23, in which Sarah faces her fears, Katy braves the snow, and Amos states the obvious.

This episode’s Story So far by Justin Macumber

Enjoy!

And now, Episode 22, in which Sarah picks a movie, Kevin throws a pillow, and Katy finds a clue.

This episode’s Story So far by Abigail Hilton

Enjoy!

And now, Episode 21, in which Amos shows his skills, Sarah sings a song, and Katy has a dream.

This episode’s Story So far by P.C. Haring.
Bumper by Brian D. Clay of Kingdom Crisis.

Enjoy!

And now, Episode 20, in which Sarah makes a discovery, Kevin does some painting, and Edelle blushes a lot.

This episode’s Story So far by Chris Lester.
Bumper by Jack of WNDR Radio.

Enjoy!

And now, Episode 19, in which Katy has a secret, Kevin finds a mystery, and Kevin deals with international relations.

This episode’s Story So far by actress, author, and wit extraordinaire Christiana Ellis.

No aftershow this week — but lots of cool news coming in ep20 this weekend.

Enjoy!

Due to some unforeseen production hiccups, some involving my own life, some the lives of our rocking cast members, DF10 isn’t finished yet and there hasn’t been an episode in seven weeks.

This situation is now about to change.

In my hot little hands are two near-complete episodes – 19 and 20. 19 will drop tonight. 20 will drop either Friday or Saturday. If all goes well, I’ll be able to drop two more episodes next week, and then the final 3 the week after.

For those of you waiting eagerly for Free Will to return, don’t worry — it’s coming too. I’m making good progress on the manuscript and am anticipating a relaunch date of May 1 – enough time for me to get the book done and get enough audio pre-produced that I can keep up even with Balticon and other early summer craziness coming up.

My many apologies for the delays – I hope the story turns out to be worth the wait!

-Dan

…between the execrable puns that had me wailing in pain and laughter simultaneously (“Not with a whim, but a banker” — you should be utterly ashamed of yourself in the best possible way. I doubt I shall ever have the guts to do *that* to my readers), and the glorious moments of beauty and mourning, it is the best read I’ve had in quite some time, and will, I daresay, be one I re-read just as I do the rest of the best Heinleins on my shelf.

I discovered Robert A. Heinlein when I was twelve, literally on the day he died. I caught my father crying on the porch – not something he was given to doing in public. I asked him what the matter was, and he told me that Heinlein had died – and then he stared at me slack-jawed when he realized I hadn’t a clue who the man was. He took me to the garage, had me pull a box off the top shelf, opened it up, and produced Tunnel in the Sky. He thrust it toward me and said “Read. And when you’re done with this one, read the rest of them in this box.”

I found in Robert’s books exactly the kind of bitch-slap I needed to begin learning to take responsibility for myself, and the beginnings of my formal training in critical thinking, as well as permission to fall in love with life without embarrassment. It felt like mourning the passing of a well-loved uncle when, in 2001, I closed the page on The Star Beast and realized that there was nothing new left – I’d read them all, even Grumbles and Tramp Royale.

For the last few years, I’ve had Variable Star and For Us, The Living sitting on my shelf, waiting for a rainy day. Two weeks ago, after a long stretch of 12-18 hour work days, I took down Variable Star and nursed it for as long as I could, savoring all the echoes of my favorite author coming through the pen of the man he, from what I understand, considered his best successor.

It was a fabulous duet.

Thank you, very much, for having the courage to take it on. There’s one song left on my shelf, and I’m saving it for another rainy day, but for my money you’ve produced a near-perfect elegy in Variable Star.

Damn you for having the balls to quote Ulysses at the end. And thank you, so very, very much, for giving me one last grumble to treasure.

-Dan Sawyer

With all the talk of the podcasting revolution a few years ago, I wonder how many people truly grasp the potential enormity of what we’re doing. Just like good old Mr. Ballantine who invented the paperback, we podcasters are creating new kinds of intellectual property. However, unlike Mr. Ballantine, we don’t fully appreciate what we’re up to.

As a culture we value the Creative Commons, which is (in my opinion) a net good for both our work and for the broader markets we’re trying to engage. However, viewing the CC as the whole picture of intellectual property is, in my estimation, an error.

More importantly, as those of us who have been in the game get more sophisticated about how we do things (using custom-composed music, guest voices, licensing music from other commercial sources), we’re wading into more complicated legal and business territory. Some of us, such as Philippa Ballantine, have gotten broader distribution deals on Internet or satellite radio – others of us struggle ever to get noticed beyond the very niche podcast fiction community.

The bar-raising we’ve been doing is pushing podcast fiction, and perhaps podcasting in general, out of the realm of a hobbyist community and into the realm of being a true grass-roots industry. There will always be hobbyists, of course, and I think we should encourage them every inch that we can. But the last couple years have opened up vast new creative, legal, and business territories that few of us are properly equipped to deal with.

This leaves us vulnerable to the kind of exploitation that went on with musicians in the 1960s. At the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, most of the groups we identify with the hippie movement were signed to record deals. It was, for them, a dream come true – they suddenly had distribution – someone was paying them for their art! The community’s revolution was going mainstream, and the days of begging and busking and eating brown rice to get by were over!

Except that the hippe community, much like our own, had always worked on family trust and handshake deals, so when faced with something on a larger scale offered by people who spoke the right language, they signed up. And most of them got taken. They generated fortunes they didn’t get to participate in, they got locked into indentured servitude-like obligations, and they lost creative control of their own work and catalogs – and they had no one to blame but themselves. They signed the contracts without doing due diligence, and they were so happy at any opportunity for exposure that they literally didn’t look at the fine print.

We don’t want that kind of thing to happen to members of our community/industry. Whether friends or rivals or enemies, I know of nobody on whom I would wish that kind of misery, and I suspect most people in the industry feel the same.

At the same time some of us are scaling up to other opportunities, the gulf between those who have established audiences and those who are new to this is getting pronounced, and it’s getting harder (very subtly) for new voices to find the coaching and advice they need on anything but the most basic issues. Sure, there are a lot of resources about how to use Audacity, or where to find a good USB mic, but there’s very little newbie-accessible information on nailing down advertising deals, or improving one’s mic technique or audio engineering, or making the leap into full cast audio, or creating good working relationships with beta readers or voice actors. Or what about a place to get boilerplate contracts, or marketing strategies, or (for those faced with opportunities they’re not prepared for) good basic business resources?

I think the time has come for us to create an industry association for New Media creators, starting with podcasters. Over the next couple months, both Allen Sale of Astral Audio and I will be working on pilot projects and keeping hold of the resources we generate from them – contracts, tutorials, strategizing, a compendium of podcasts that are friendly to publicity interviews, basic legal and business information that we learn or employ along the way – and we will start packaging them for use by other content creators. When we’ve hit a critical mass, we’re going to look into forming a non-profit with the aim of becoming the SFWA of podcast fiction and YouTube video.

Some very good resources, such as the Podiobooks Mentorship Program, already exist, and what they do is vital. But it’s not enough, not if our industry is to grow beyond its little ghetto and more reliably generate opportunities for us in the broader world. We’re looking to augment what already exists, rather than replace it, and create a resource available to everyone to enable them to play in this sandbox at whatever level they want to, whether it’s as a hobby, a podiobook author, a multimedia producer, or a serious powerhouse transmedia content business. Our community has gotten big enough that it has the potential to get in its own way, and our visibility is still rising and generating opportunities many of us simply aren’t prepared to negotiate.

I think we can do better than the hippies did. I think, if we put together a definitive educational resource pool, the individual artists in our community might be able to transition upward without getting ripped off.
As Allen told me when we talked about this project: “We don’t want to fit in – we want to find ways to stand out so that we can’t be ignored.”

Let’s rock.

Related post from Allen Sale

[Correction: MWS chimed in in the comments to correct my misapprehension of his current attitude toward podcasting, which is considerably more complex than the paragraph above makes it seem. My apologies for inadvertently misrepresenting him.]

The two of them are generation one podiobookers who appeared in the space hot on the heels of the three founders, and seeing them throw in the towel has a lot of other creators wondering: “Are we all just being idiots giving stuff away for free?” And it’s got a lot of fans wondering “What’s going to happen now? Are all my favorite writers going to give up?”

The Gospel of Free has been pinging around the internet for a while now, it’s even got its own official book. There are folks in the fiction space – like Doctorow and Sigler – that have made it the cornerstone of their publicity strategy and turn a consistent profit at it. The use of free content in career building is a well-established promotional strategy, but it’s a difficult tool to use, and suffers from the reductio ad absurdum that most people hear when they first encounter the message, no matter how subtly it’s preached: “If you build it, they will come.”

So if I just put my stuff on the web I’ll find an audience? Well, no. You might find an audience, if you get yourself seen by the right people (and by “right people” I mean people who are prone to telling everybody they know about their latest new and great thing). You might even find a good audience – but you have to bear in mind, “Free” doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Let’s take what I do for free (well, free to my audience): I use a segment of my professional time as a writer and as a sound engineer to produce full-cast audiodbooks. I pay for this – billing my professional time out at normal rates, and factoring in what I pay my actors in trade (whether they’ve collected on it or not), my cost (not including what I should be paying the author) is in the neighborhood of $10-15k. Now, am I out of pocket that much? No. I do go out of pocket a little bit, but not a lot – however, that’s all time stripped out of my life that I could be billing at that kind of rate. If you’ve wondered why I do less in the way of publicity than some other podiobooks authors, now you know – the time is my main expense, and I have a life and a business. I intend, eventually, to have my writing income make up a greater-than-fifty-percent share of my household budget, but I’m not there yet. I’m nowhere near. This is what is called a loss-leader.

In business terms, a loss-leader is the bait on the hook – the hook is what gets the audience to spend money. Matching the right bait to the right hook and fishing in the right water is a learned skill set, and it relies somewhat on how fast one learns from experience, how lucky one is, and (in the writing game) how good a lawyer one is and/or has. There’s a reason more than 75% of authors wash out of the game after their first book contract runs out, and why only a minuscule percentage of people with authorial ambitions ever get even that far – being a good writer is not the same as being a successful author. It’s even possible to be a successful author without being a good writer (for example, Dan Brown), but I wouldn’t bank on it and I know damn few successful authors who would, particularly over the term of a career. Craft does matter – it’s just not all that matters.

If podcasting is your loss leader, what’s your endgame? If all you’re trying to do is get your voice heard, podcasting or blogging your novel is a perfectly fine idea. If you’re looking to get published, it might help, or it might be a distraction or a detriment, depending on your approach and a host of other variables. If you’re looking to build a sustainable long term career as a professional author, it’s time for you to stop and think about a few things before you go into podcasting:

1) What will podcasting give me?
2) What is my professional time worth – and if I were to bill myself for this, how much of a loss will I be taking?
3) What kind of author do I want to be?
4) Why do I think “getting published” is a worthwhile goal?

Why should you stop to think about these things? Because I guarantee you that your answers to at least one of those questions is wrong enough to set you up for some serious disappointment.

What will podcasting give me?
Podcasting will, if you stick with it and actually produce a decent product with broad enough appeal, give you an audience ranging anywhere from a few hundred to maybe twenty thousand regular listeners. If you’re very innovative in evangelizing your product beyond the established fiction podosphere, your chances for good numbers go up. If you host in a high visibility place like Podiobooks and leave your content there for a few years, your numbers will climb over time due to the long tail effect.

Podcasting may also help you learn the market in terms of audience. This is the primary reason I started fiction podcasting: Market research. I was looking to find out what kind of people would enjoy the stories that I’m interested in writing, so that I could figure out how to find and deliver to that market that, in the long term (and I’m talking about a time scale of decades) I will be able to consistently turn a profit on. Notice I said “stories”, not “books” – that will become important later.

Podcasting may give you a creative community – this isn’t something I was looking for, but I have made some friends through the process as well as more than a few good business contacts that have been helpful along the way.

Podcasting (if you’re good at it) will win you respect and accolades as well as the adoration of at least a few fans along the way, and this feels really good. Just remember that, as encouraging as it can be, it’s a limited kind of street cred. Audience tastes change, and what they love about you today they may hate about you tomorrow. Glory feels wonderful, even in small doses, and can put an extra bit of shine on a life well lived, but it will never make up for insecurity or the need for the kind of relationships you can only have with people who really know you.

Podcasting may give you pleasure – if you enjoy the process and enjoy interacting with people, it’s something that you might like even as a hobby.

But unless you are supremely lucky and very canny, there is something podcasting will not deliver: a paycheck of any substance. If you’re expecting to be have your audio audience put you on the bestseller list once you get that book deal, good luck to you. A few people have pulled it off. Those people are, without exception, people that – by chance or by cleverness – wrote exactly to market. They were selling stories that resonated perfectly (or at least well enough) with the public that a larger-than-average segment of their fan base wanted to own a physical copy, and the same larger-than-average segment went out of their way to pimp the shit out of the books to their friends, family, and strangers who might not even own iPods. A few others have pulled it off by their books being noticed on a site like Podiobooks, and subsequently selling film options.

If you want your book to perform well enough to get to your next contract, you need a publishing house that will throw its weight behind you, a print run that is realistically scaled to your book’s performance, and a property that is going to sell in the current market. If you don’t have at least the latter two of these three things, then (again) good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

How Much Is My Time Worth?

I hate to sound like a schoolmarm (or worse), but time that you’re podcasting is time that you’re not doing four other things, all of which are arguably more important. It’s time you’re not making money at whatever your profession is, it’s time you’re not spending with friends and family building the memories that make life with living, it’s time that you’re not learning, and it’s time that you’re not writing.

If you intend to write fiction for any significant fraction of your life, you need to be doing all of those things. You have to write to grow as a writer, and you have to make money to be able to live while you’re writing. But if you have a life that isn’t worth living – say, a life without significant relationships or learning and enrichment – then it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have anything interesting to write about (and you may be too depressed to write about anything at all, except stories about depression).

Every hour you spend podcasting is billable time – somebody’s paying for it, and it isn’t always just you. Don’t cheat on your mental accounting sheet – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Even in a down economy, your time has a dollar value attached to it – figure
out what that value is, and then keep track of what you’re spending. If nothing else, being aware of the cost will help you keep from feeling cheated at the far end if you wind up not getting a good return on your investment, because you’ll be spending on purpose.

What Kind of Author Do I Want To Be?

If you’ve been in and around the writing business for any length of time, you’ve heard the old saw “you can’t make a living as a writer unless you’re in the top 1%.” This bit of conventional wisdom is what lies behind the blockbuster mentality on the part of authors: you want to have a brand name, you want to be the biggest thing ever, and you must relentlessly self-promote (the blockbuster mentality of some publishing houses is another animal entirely, and Charles Stross and Dean Wesley Smith have both covered it very well on their blogs recently).

If you’ve heard that and are still intent on trying, then you are either mind-numbingly stupid, a heroically-minded risk junkie, a hobbyist, or someone who actually has a clue about business and doesn’t listen to the conventional wisdom of creative people (in which case, good for you).

So you want to be the next Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer? You’d be better off going to Vegas – that kind of trend really is a game of chance, and depends largely (though not entirely) on unforeseeable market forces. That said, there is a whole swath of writers who make a living on their names, which they worked very hard to establish, and who aren’t blockbusters (and yes, Scott Sigler is one of them. He might be a blockbuster by our standards, and his ambition is to be the next Stephen King, but by broader market standards he’s a respectable front-lister, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that).

But blockbusting is not the only way to win this game, and here’s why:

Most authors who make a living at it don’t make a living on their book advances. Oh, the advances help, but they’re not even close to the whole pie. Subsidiary rights sales, foreign rights, royalties from the long tail, article sales, and commissioned work for other commercial ventures (such as being tapped to do a Star Trek or a Dragonlance novel) make up a large part of the income flow, with investments helping keep the rent paid during lean years. These authors generally (though not always) sit solidly on the mid-list, and some of them write under a variety of names for different markets. I know and have known (personally) at least a score of authors who make their living with their words, and the two qualities that distinguish them from the authors I know who haven’t been able to pull it off are: 1) insufferable, bloody-minded perseverance, and 2) continual growth in craft and breadth. In other words, these authors actually treat it like a career, rather than a brass ring.

The truth is that most people who get counted as “authors” in surveys of author incomes are people who publish a single book, or who have a book they haven’t sold. They’re not career writers. They don’t count screenwriters, ad copy writers, stage play writers, or other such folks. In other words, this bit of conventional wisdom is horse shit because it counts every dilettante, aspiring amateur, and washout as an “author.” Authors such people may be, but professionals they ain’t. Some of them will become professionals (I must hasten to add, I’m on this tier — I’m not prolific enough or churning enough cash enough yet to be called a professional, but I’m heading deliberately in that direction) – others are hobbyists. I daresay that if such a survey were taken of all the auto mechanics in the world, with hobbyists and people that change their own oil counted with the same weight as ASE certificate holders, the numbers for auto mechanics wouldn’t be dissimilar to what we hear about with writing.

If you’re looking to do this for a living, writing is a professional business (i.e. a business that relies on being an expert in a particular domain), with all the problems that implies: It relies on individual expertise, a broad skillset, at least a vague awareness of market dynamics, a certain legal acumen, the ability to adapt to contingency, a high tolerance for risk and uncertainty, and a little bit of luck. You know, just like any other non-franchise business.

Why Do I think Getting Published is a Worthwhile Goal?

More than any other question, the answer to this gets to the heart of the matter for an author who is thinking of podcasting their work, because in answering this you’re probably going to answer a significant portion of all the other questions.

My answer to this one is simple: It’s a step on the road. I got a huge thrill with my first short story sale – now, after only a couple more, it’s an exercise in contract negotiations and another tick on the scorecard. It’s fun and exciting, but it’s not the life-affirming experience that the first sale was. Why? Because my sights are on the next set of goalposts, and I need to get to those so I can see the next set, and so on.

But my self-worth is not wrapped up in this. This is business. If I can’t make it work one way I’ll make it work another, and if, in the end, I turn out not to have the chops, I’ll shift my focus and continue writing as a hobby to whatever extent I can justify it. Yes, I am one of those rare people who will write no matter what – it’s the reason I’m making a go of turning it into a profession. But that doesn’t mean that everything I do will be available for free. Some things will, some things won’t – just like, right now, some things are and some things aren’t. My time is billable hourly, and my free stuff is there so that I can 1) build my audience, and 2) learn how to navigate in my marketplace(s). It’s an investment I’m making because it seems sound to me – I know what it costs, and for me the price is right.

Is the price right for you? Think hard about it. I daresay there will always be hobbyists in the podcast fiction space, but if you’re a pro or an aspiring pro, look at it as a business investment. It’s not a magic bullet, and it’s not a shortcut. Even podcasting’s biggest success, Scott Sigler, doesn’t see it as either of those things. Scott needed a platform to prove that there was a market for cross-genre horror, so he essentially invented one. His focus now is on figuring out where the next place to grow his audience is, and what books will be best to write next. There’s a reason he’s made this work, and it goes a lot deeper than “he writes in a popular genre” (although that also is very important).

Wrapping It Up

The Gospel of Free is a pernicious little meme that’s burned out some talented people and seriously burned others, but it’s not a new one. Every get rich quick scheme, every investment bubble, every motivational speaker that comes along has the same basic blend of bullshit and wisdom: “Look at this new thing – it’s no-lose! Look at its merits! Imagine how much you could do with this!” Network marketing, real estate flipping, dot com stocks – there’s always something, and it nearly always takes a pretty clever idea and isolates it from all good business sense.

Don’t fall for it. Free has always been with us, and it’s always been good business when done right. New tools, new media, and new toys are great, but excitement about the opportunities they present can easily obscure the most basic thing about business: supply and demand must meet, and they must trade. If they don’t, then at best what you’ve got is a rewarding hobby, and at worst you’re in a financial disaster. There is no such things as a fast buck except at the craps table, and there is never any such thing as a free lunch.

Me? I’m in this for the long haul. I’m building a business, with all the risk that implies. Right now, my business model includes podcasting. Will it in three years? It depends on what happens between now and then.

So, in sum, my advice to other writers and podcasters, for what it’s worth: Podcast what you will. Keep track of what it’s costing you. Cut your losses if it’s not returning what you need for it to be worthwhile. Above all, don’t buy the bullshit that motivational speakers and other sharks shovel. Celebrity status might be useful, but it’s like Monopoly money: not negotiable currency outside of the small circles that generate it.

For fans of mine and other’s podcast fiction: remember that while this is free to you, it’s not free for us. Your feedback, your cash in the tip jar, and your evangelism are much appreciated. We podcast authors know that we’re being wasteful and reckless – and not all of us will stay in this space forever. For now, I at least am getting what I want out of the bargain, and I do enjoy entertaining you all.

For everyone reading, remember: Life is precious. Don’t forget to enjoy whatever it is you’re doing, and treasure the memories it gives you. Treat your time like an investment, and savor what you buy with it. In the end, the moments are the only thing we have to make a life out of.

It’s been two years since I started putting my fiction out into the aether through podcasts, selling stories, and otherwise subjecting the universe to my…shall we say “colorful” mental meanderings. My readers and listeners have been good enough to send me feedback throughout the endeavor, which is excellent market research as well as great motivation to keep on.

If there is a single topic – beyond “you cliffhangering bastard” – that I get hit with most, it’s about how I deal with sex in my stories. There are the occasional “that’s really hot” comment, but more often there are the complaints, such as “I can’t stop listening, but do you really have to have so much sex/homosexuality/eroticism/etc.?” I find it fairly ironic, in these post-Heinlein days populated by paranormal romance, vampire erotica masquerading as everyday fiction, and abstinence porn, that treating sex merely as a normal part of life could raise so many hackles, but there you are.

More interesting than that, though, is how little I hear complaints about the violence, which is every bit as unflinching (or, in the words of one reviewer, clinical), as the sexual content. There are moments in Predestination or The Man In The Rain which turn my stomach
reading them, and yet they pass with relatively few comments compared to, for example, the sex scene between Joss and Cassy toward the end of Predestination or pretty much anything in Down From Ten.

As an American, I’ve been hearing about the double-standard between sex and violence most of my life – over the last two years I’ve been able to see it in action through my audience and through the eyes of non-American colleagues such as Philippa Ballantine, who once quipped to me: “On American TV sure, we’ll show murder and mayhem, but God forbid you show a boob!”

We all know this, right? Or at least we’ve heard it before. Most Americans ignore it in one fashion or another. Toward the conservative end of the cultural spectrum it can even look like a good thing: Robert M. Price once told me in an interview that he found Hostel powerful because it shows that the trivialization of sex through pornography and prostitution leads directly to slavery and torture (he’s not alone in this assertion – there’s a broad coalition of feminist and fundamentalist philosophers who share the same general conclusion, though their core values otherwise differ).

Normally I keep my trap shut about things like this, unless someone asks me about it directly, because it’s the kind of topic on which people tend to be partisan. That changed this week, though, when I watched through a TV series called Harper’s Island – a nice little mystery thriller made for CBS last year. The premise is simple – it’s Ten Little Indians done in the style of a slasher film, and it’s remarkably effective. It’s effective, well-executed (no pun intended), and deeply twisted.

I had a lot of fun watching it until it occurred to me, sometime in the middle of the series, that this was done for broadcast TV – not cable, not satellite or premium channels, but broadcast. This series which features the kind of gore that, even today, would earn it a hard R rating in the theater, was broadcast on American TV.

You know, American TV, where three frames of breast exposure is enough to cause a national crisis? Where Bono saying “fuck” on an awards show costs the network hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines? Where the word “piss” is bleeped out of Mythbusters episodes that air on cable? America, the land of the free that banned Carlin from the radio? The America that is so culturally brittle that it can’t stand the freedom of speech enshrined in its own constitution for fear of what might happen to the children?

There was a time not too long ago when you could expect the similar levels of sex, violence, and “bad” language on TV. Quality adult programming required a wink and a nod sometimes, but a good writer could do it – and recently there’s been a flowering of really good adult entertainment as broadcast has had to compete with cable and the Internet. It was censorship, and appalling, but there at least seemed to be a consistency about it – a sense that some level of intensity (about anything) was for adults, and thus not okay for broadcast where anyone of tender years might be watching.

Now, the situation seems to be changing, and in a bad way. Harper’s Island features some of the most grisly violence I’ve seen this side of a slasher film – done well enough to make the makeup artist part of my brain goggle in wonder, to be sure – frosted by a sense of calculating sadism and paranoia worthy of the villains (or heroes) of Thomas Harris. It’s not an exploration of violence, it’s merely a thrill-ride, and a remarkably effective and occasionally nauseating one.

Does it feature the kind of language people might use when being stalked by a serial killer? Does it show anything sexual beyond the briefest acknowledgments that its characters have some kind of sexuality? Of course not! Children might be watching.

Growing up as I did on the cultural right wing, I long considered the American double-standard to be harmless and quaint. I understood the fears that lay behind it, even though I thought they were ridiculous. I chuckled at the amount of effort certain groups put into the mind games behind sexual purity, and the money they waste on meaningless political and cultural campaigns. I thought it was understandable, and maybe silly, but not really harmful.

It took seeing Harper’s Island to realize how much my views have changed. The cultural conservative picture of sex, and the double-standard it dictates isn’t just quaint, silly, or something that can be condescendingly shrugged off as the product of too much insularity. It’s an insidious, destructive lie that is now so baldfaced that we can watch dismemberment on prime-time broadcast while anthropology documentaries censor tribal nudity (I kid you not).

A basic part of adulthood is the ability to deal with the world as it really is. Every social creature – including every human – has sex organs, sexual appetites, and sexual inclinations. The bonding impulse is as foundational to life as the need for food. Everyone touches, everyone eats, everyone dies, and virtually everyone has orgasms. To pretend otherwise is unbecoming the dignity of an adult.

It’s also genocidal. That’s because there is, after all, a link between sex and death and violence. The lack of willingness to deal realistically with sex is something that endangers the lives millions of people every day. In the age of AIDS, the price of childish delusion and the illusory comfort it brings can be measured by a metric once used exclusively for strategic warfare: Megadeaths.

I have a very high violence tolerance. I believe that violence in art and entertainment can be life-affirming and useful as it caters to our visceral natures. It helps us cope with the prospect of death. Violence can even be a social good (though such circumstances are far fewer than they once were). It can help us feel keenly alive in ways that we in civil society can’t access in any other way without harming those around us. But in no way is it more life-affirming than our primary bonding impulses, or touch and pleasure, or the difficulties of love and friendship.

And now, Episode 4 of Free Will and Other Compulsions. Story So Far by Steve Riekiberg, host of Geek Cred.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):
Nathan Lowell as Senator William Shelley
Miss Kalendar as Ali Hartman
Kitty Nic’Iaian as Fugitive and The Answering Service
Andrea Fender as The Moon Girl
Michael Lemonjello as The Fish Man
Mark Smith as The Jet Pack Man

And now, Episode 18, in which Sarah knows the rules for life, Edelle gets a hug, and Jeremiah gets religion.

This episode’s Story So far by author Blake Charlton, bumper by uberfan Mildred Cady.

Enjoy!

Twitter is a mischievous little meme. On that innocent network yesterday, I noticed fellow podcast novelist, and fabulous debate opponent Scott Roche say of science and religion: “the two are examining different things.”

Naturally, being unable to keep my mouth shut on religion, sex, or politics (this is, by the by, why I never stay long on the east coast – I have to leave quickly before I’m shot for violating public decency laws), I retorted immediately saying: “Science and religion can not meaningfully be said to be examining different things.” Hello, fundamental conflict (and, consequently, hellooooo blog content)!

On Scott’s blog he wondered whether we were operating on different definitions of religion, so was kind enough to define religion as “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices” that, in his estimation, addresses only things that do not belong in the natural world. In other words, religion deals with spirits, gods, angels, demons, and any other supernatural beings which may or may not exist, and its purpose is to put us in touch with whatever we believe about the supernatural.

Science, he goes on to argue, deals with that which exists in the natural world and is (at least in theory) measurable. It is the method by which we divine how one thing is related to another.

Scott’s division of labor between science and religion seems to me to accurately reflect how most people think about the issue, and even on the basis of this postulated Non-Overlapping Magesteria (pace Stephen J. Gould).* History does not reflect this view – it is actually a relatively recent definition arising form the intellectual ferment of the late nineteenth century – so on the face of it I find it suspicious. Frankly, it looks to me like an epistemic** dodge than a genuine description of historical reality – but I’ll leave that aside for now, simply because one of the realities of history is that words do change definitions. I may get back to the history of science and religion in a later post, but for now, I’ll stick to the current situation, and whether or not it matches the definitions Scott proposes.

Sticking strictly to the current state of the world, I think Scott’s argument fails in two important respects.

First, in a practical respect, religion currently serves a number of functions that have only a tangential relationship to the supernatural. It propounds a theory of human nature, and it provides a cosmogony (a set of metaphysical beliefs about things within the universe such as the ultimate nature of reality, the origin and destiny of life, the universe, and everything, the construction of consciousness). It also serves as a platform from which to make pronouncements about morality, relationships, and human flourishing. On every one of these points, religions differ among themselves as to the nature of their claims and functions, but most religions are concerned with most of these areas, and some religions concern themselves with all of them.

Taking them in no particular order, the fields of knowledge and understanding which religion currently claims authority are now well within the purview of the following sciences:

On every score, scientific research confirms some points of religious dogma and contradicts other areas, forcing religions to adapt by either synchronizing or radicalizing on any given point (which, by the by, is why theologians exist – to cope with the discrepancy between received doctrine and contemporary reality).

Continuing in the practical vein for a moment, religion also provides social cohesion and cultural continuity for a large number of people on this planet, including a dependable power structure. On these final two practical points, as well as on issues of morality, religion’s focus is very much on the things of this world (and, often, on securing and/or maintaining power – sometimes political, sometimes military, sometimes interpersonal, and sometimes cultural – in this world). The hegemonic ambitions, large and small, are justified by appeal to the supernatural, but are always, in practice, concerned with controlling the behavior of beings in the temporal world.

Second, on a basic philosophical level, if a supernatural world actually has an intercourse (either perpetual and ever present, as in Hinduism, or incidental and historical as in the monotheisms), then it is at least in principle accessible to natural science at the point of intercourse, and therefore science and religion are both aiming once again for the same territory.

Thus, in both the practical and the philosophical cases, religion and science are very much fighting over the same territory. The nature of this conflict is missed by religious liberals, who have inherited the syncretic mindset and tend to read their scriptures with modern cosmopolitan glasses that retrojects their late, quasi-deistic conception of God back onto times with a far more definite and robust theology. Nonetheless, push hard enough and in the right place, and you’ll find the points at which even liberal religion is on the defensive in the face of scientific inquiry. Need it be this way? That’s a topic for a future blog post, but I can tell you it has not always been this way. Once upon a time in the west, the natural sciences were seen as the handmaiden of theology rather than the other way around.

So, to wrap up, I’m confident in standing by my tweet which opened this conversation. Although religions can (and often do) preserve wisdom worth paying attention to, and often raise questions worth investigating, they are in almost no sense concerned with different things. Now, it may be possible to create a religion that is completely immune to territorial impingement from science forever, but it would not then be legitimate to argue that religion as a phenomenon was free from such a conflict.

Besides, I daresay that a religion which made no claims about reality, made no demands on its patrons, promised no rewards (temporal, eternal, or existential), and said nothing substantive about human nature would maintain a hold on parishioners for very long. Don’t believe me? Look at the thin attendance of liberal protestant churches compared to moderate and conservative ones.

Back to you, Scott!

*magisteria meaning “area of authority”
**epistemic meaning “having to do with one’s theory of knowledge” – in this case, an epistemic dodge is redefining what one means by “knowledge” in order to get around a problem with what one considers “true”

Buried Alive In The Blues is the story of Irene, a widow who finds herself trapped by a months-long rainstorm that’s drowning the world, but she doesn’t care, because she’s got a pass to see the best blues band in the world play at an old speakeasy in the neighboring town. But when the bass starts thumping and the lights hit the stage, she realizes she may get more than she bargained for – but that’s okay, because the blues are worth it.

If you haven’t heard the story and would like to, you can find it here. Definitely not work safe, it contains explicit sexual situations and a heavy dollop of the blues, Buried Alive is a southern gothic romance that will keep you guessing right up to the end.

I’ll keep you all posted on publication dates for the anthology!

First, the coolest biomedical news this year: Synthetic arteries have arrived.

Second, some really cool news on dog evolution from two fronts. There’s an article discussing the stray dogs in Moscow, and what selection pressures have done to them over the last 100 years. Then there’s the new BBC documentary on how dogs shaped human development, and vice versa – and answers the question “Are dogs smarter than Chimpanzees?” Check out the video here .

Finally, the single most mind-blowing introduction to Chaos Theory I’ve seen or read. Goes into the history, the development, and the implications of the most radically disturbing area of mathematics ever to come around. See it here and prepare to be astounded.

Enjoy! And stay tuned in the next few days for new episodes!

And now, Episode 3 of Free Will and Other Compulsions. Story So Far by Blake Charlton – find his book Spellwright, forthcoming from TOR at his home page.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):

Miss Kalendar as Ali Hartman
Stephanie Sawyer as Cassy Orinthal
Kitty Nic’Iaian as Fugitive and The Answering Service
Kim The Comic Book Goddess as Val

And now, Episode 17, in which Kevin and Jeremiah explore the uses for Vasaline, and Gerd has a secret.
Story So far by J.R. Murcodk of V&A Shipping.

Enjoy!

You that listen here regularly know Tee from his starring role as Amos in Down From Ten, or perhaps you heard his voice as Marian’s boss in Predestination or from the Predestination exit interview, but the story of Tee Morris is quite a bit more colorful. Tee invented podcast fiction, co-founded podiobooks.com, and is thus created the industry which launched the careers of myself, Chris Lester, Philippa Ballantine, Nathan Lowell, Scott Sigler, Christiana Ellis, Mur Lafferty, Nobilis Reed, and many others. He’s also directly helped many of us, and many others, with encouragement, advice, and lending his voice to our worlds. He’s also become a good friend to many of us, apart from a professional association.

Odd as it sounds, there are three things in this modern world that are more expensive than any other – being born, dying, and death. Natalie Morris’s death was sudden and unexpected, but it has left Tee with a raft of expenses he must meet immediately, and this as an unexpectedly single parent. Because of this, I have a special request for you – if you were planning on sending me a tip in the next week or three, send it to Tee instead.

Below you’ll find a widget for the chip-in account that Philippa Ballantine has started to help get Tee and Sonic Boom through the crisis time to calmer waters. Please click on it and toss a couple bucks in if at all you can.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Sometime in November, new cast member Andrea Fender (playing the as yet unnamed “moon girl”) contacted Dan after her first recording session and said something along the lines of “That was fun! Let’s do some more!”

Since Dan didn’t have any more of Free Will written at the time, it was decided that a holiday themed poetry reading, to be posted on Christmas eve, like a Christmas present, would be just fantastic.

Which is just what they did.

Directed by: Andrea Fender

Performed by:
Andrea Fender
Dan Sawyer

Works performed:
The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill – Robert Service
The Cremation of Sam McGee – Robert Service
A Visit from St. Nicholas – Clement Clarke Moore

Music used:
Jingle Bells
Carol of Bells
Away in a Manger ]]> http://jdsawyer.net/2009/12/24/special-christmas-episode-goes-live/feed/ 0 http://jdsawyer.net/2009/12/07/hormones-as-neurotransmitters/ http://jdsawyer.net/2009/12/07/hormones-as-neurotransmitters/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:00:49 +0000 admin http://jdsawyer.net/?p=794 For those of you not following along, in the current book of The Antithesis Progression, one character is using a hormone cocktail on another as a chemical leash. I’ve gotten some questions about what these weaponized chemicals are supposed to accomplish, how they’re supposed to work, and whether they’re a good choice for the purposes described in the story, so I thought I’d give you guys a peak behind the research curtain.

At the end of Predestination we learned that Joss had dosed Ali with Oxytocin – in Free Will we learned that he’s also giving her Vasopressin. The hormones are described as “weaponized,” but we haven’t gotten a lot of solid details on what that means yet.

Basically, Oxytocin is a hormone which, when acting as a neurotransmitter, increases trust and social risk taking behavior between people, with the most profound effects being felt between strangers and/or people who don’t know each other well (though, of course, some people simply are born insensitive to these effects). Vasopressin is a hormone that, when acting as a neurotransmitter, increases aggression towards non-bonded others (the effects are stronger in men than in women, and in men it also acts as a bonding-reward circuit, an effect which has not been documented in women).

A cocktail of these two hormones, administered across the blood-brain barrier rather than intravenously, will have the dual effect of increasing the formation of groups and loyalty, and of increasing the subject’s suspicion towards those in the outgroup.

These effects are short-term – a single hit of these hormones degrades in a few minutes. In order to have sustained effects one of three things must happen: 1) the body must be fooled into creating its own supply of bonding hormones (through sustained sexual and/or social interaction), 2) memories formed while under the influence of the hormones must be positive and persistent, providing a foundation for later trust-based behavior, 3) a delivery mechanism that will keep the levels of these neurotransmitters at the desired level (this latest is impossible right now, but the success of other time-release and dosage-self-regulating drugs make positing of this for 129 years from now a very safe bet to place on the table, futurism-wise).

It’s also worth noting that these two hormones can be hugely dangerous when used in high doses as drugs. Oxytocin is used to stimulate labor, for example, and Vasopressin is a blood pressure regulator which, in large doses, can keep a heart beating during hemorrhage but has a lot of nasty side-effects in the cardiovascular system under prolonged exposure. However, in the Central Nervous System, acting as neurotransmitters, these hormones have well-documented, profound (but subtle) effects at small doses. These effects are fairly well known in psychiatric circles, and I’m banking on the notion that they will become a staple for psy-ops and con artists when better delivery systems are developed – in the Antithesis universe, this is exactly the case.

The following is a short lecture (29 minute video) from Paul Zak, the founder of the field of neuroeconomics who did the some of the seminal research in this area.

For the super-geeky among you, here are some more papers on research in this area:
How could MDMA (ecstasy) help anxiety disorders? A neurobiological rationale
Brain basis of early parent-infant interactions: psychology, physiology, and in vivo functional neuroimaging studies.
Oxytocin, a mediator of anti-stress, well-being, social interaction, growth and healing
Dopaminergic-neuropeptide interactions in the social brain.
Neurotransmitters and peptides: whispered secrets and public announcements.
Opposite effects of oxytocin and vasopressin on the emotional expression of the fear response
Effect of arginine vasopressin and oxytocin on acetylcholine-stimulation of corticosteroid and catecholamine secretion from the rat adrenal gland perfused in situ.

And now, Episode 16, in which Katy teaches a class, Amos has a fan club, and Gerd gets a sore throat.
Story So far by Mur Lafferty of more things than I can ever hope to name.

Enjoy!

And now, Episode 2 of Free Will and Other Compulsions. Story So Far by J.R. Murdock – find his books at Podiobooks.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):
Andrea Fender as The Moon Girl
Michael Lemonjello as Search Party Leader
Mark Smith as The Third Search Party Member
Miss Kalendar as Ali Hartman
Derek Moore as Jim Hartman
Stephanie Sawyer as Cassy Orinthal
George Chlentzos as Douglas Reeves
Kim The Comic Book Goddess as Val

The dictionary defines terrorism as “the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion”. In political terms, terrorism is is characterized by non-strategic but politically-motivated violence conducted against civilians. When used by an outside or revolutionary force, it is an attempt to destabilize or undermine a regime, culture, or system by eroding the trust that makes the system works. It can also be used by a sitting government against its political enemies, in which case it’s generally called “tyranny” or “totalitarianism” depending on the degree to which it is practiced.

That’s it. That’s what terrorism is. Intimidation, harassment, or political wrangling isn’t terrorism. Expulsion for running afoul of academic standards isn’t “terrorization.” Civilians who die while caught in the crossfire of a war are not “victims of terror/terrorism.”

And, most importantly, soldiers and representatives of a military or political authority are not victims of terrorism. They’ve run afoul of another phenomenon that we have a perfectly good term for: they are casualties of guerrilla warfare.

Guerrilla war is war conducted by military irregulars against strategic and military targets. Oklahoma City Bombing? Conducted by a revolutionary against a government building housing paramilitary administration in revenge for earlier actions by that paramilitary organization — that’s guerrilla warfare. Ditto for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and the RPG attack on my friend’s tent during the Iraq war (don’t worry, he was outside watching a movie at the time).

Then there are a whole slew of things domestically that are neither terrorism or guerrilla war, but get called “terrorism” by pundits and public officials and radicals. A peaceful protest at a WTO event isn’t terrorism, it’s dissent. When that protest turns violent (as they frequently do) it’s not terrorism, it is either a riot (if it’s spontaneous escalation) or it’s a revolutionary attack that rides the line of guerrilla warfare but usually doesn’t qualify, as it’s not well organized enough. Columbine wasn’t terrorism, it was a killing spree (there was no political motive). Fort Hood still seems up in the air – it might have been a guerrilla attack with substantial collateral damage, or it might have been a killing spree (but it wasn’t terrorism by any classical definition).

These categorizations can sound pretty meaningless – or worse, callous – because they are all ways of saying “people got killed/hurt for no very good reason.” But they are important because they all point to fundamental moral issues about violence. When we don’t make such distinctions, we lose the ability to make ethical distinctions between necessary violence and gratuitous violence. This distinction makes the difference between murder, manslaughter, and self defense. It also makes the difference between police work and police brutality, between crime and treason, between warfare and war crimes, and between disagreement and terrorism.

And, of course, in the grey areas where the categories overlap, there is lots of room for exploring moral ambiguities through fiction.

To conclude, I quote the immortal words of George Carlin:
“Please pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on.”

To tide you guys over this week, and for those of you who might not have heard it, here’s the show where Philippa Ballantine, Chris Lester, and I podjacked Podioracket. Much silliness ensued — enjoy!

• 1: Download and print these bookmarks.
• 2: Cut along the dotted lines.
• 3: Take to your local libraries and bookstores.
• 4: Leaving a stack near the checkout gets you one point. Put a bunch inside books by Robert A. Heinlein, Stephen R. Donaldson, Philip K. Dick, George R. R. Martin, and Charles Stross for two points. (Do be sure to respect local laws and private property rights).
• Take photos of each instance of bookmark distribution.
• Email photos of your nefarious deeds to me at dan at jdsawyer.net.
• Each point will count as one entry of your name in the hat – so repeat as often as you wish to enter before December 20th.

The winner will be drawn December 21st.
Prize: Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time 2009 Memorial Calender, full of gorgeous artwork.

Here’s your chance to double-dip. Check out Digital Magic and Metamor City for their versions of this same contest. Everyone who enters all three contests will automatically be entered into a second drawing – the prize this time being a package of local edible goodies from San Francisco and New Zealand!

And now, Episode 15, in which Jeremiah gets snowed, Edelle gets curious, and Amos reveals the truth.
Story So far by Jennifer Hudock of Polyamory Weekly

Episode 16 coming this weekend – I hope.

What to look for: Blog posts containing printable PDF bookmarks at Digital Magic, Metamor City, and Literary Abominations.

What you can win: A free book, maybe two or three! (Prize details for each contest will be available at each author’s website).

Your Mission:

• Download and print the bookmarks
• Cut along the dotted lines
• Take to your local libraries and bookstores
• Leave a set near the checkout (1 pt for a stack) or put a stack inside of similar books (2 pts ea – Philippa, Chris, and Dan will each provide a list of authors to target)
• Take photos of each instance of bookmark distribution
• Send photo(s) to the author
• Each point will count as one entry of your name in the hat – so repeat as often as you wish to enter before December 20th.

Winners will be drawn December 21st.

Anyone who enters all three contests will have their names automatically entered into a second drawing – this time for a basket of tasty treats from San Francisco and New Zealand!

Philippa Ballantine’s DIGITAL MAGIC, J. Daniel Sawyer’s FREE WILL AND OTHER COMPULSIONS, and Chris Lester’s METAMOR CITY SEASON 2 have been unleashed upon the world. You’ve heard the first episodes, now talk to the authors. We will all be live on Talkshoe this evening, 6pm PST, taking your calls and chewing the scenery. Contests will be had — prizes will be given — insanity will rule the day.
Here’s the timeline for the rest of the Triple Threat (so far):

Thursday, 11/12/09:

6 PM Pacific Time: Dan Sawyer & Pip Ballantine begin the LIVE Triple Threat Launchcast event at TalkShoe <–link leads to the show.
8 PM Pacific Time (est.): Chris Lester joins the Launchcast.

The Launchcast will include…
* Live call-ins from fans
* Trivia contests
* Prize giveaways
* Sneak peeks at the upcoming podcast seasons

Sunday, 11/22/09:

7 PM Pacific Time: Chris Lester, Dan Sawyer, Kitty Nic’Iaian and Gail Carriger record the first feedback show of the new season of Metamor City! Send in your responses to the new episodes and we’ll include them in the show.

It’s all on- so hope you can join us!

(some text pilfered from Philippa Ballantine)

And now, Episode 1 of Free Will and Other Compulsions.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):
Stephanie Sawyer as Cassy Orinthal
Kim The Comic Book Goddess as Val
Mark Smith as Nineveh Docking Control

Part three of three of the live call-in show that launched Down From Ten — this one plays almost like a Reprobates Hour episode on the history of the podcast novel. A change of pace from the previous episodes, and a very interesting one.

Featuring the voices of Georg Chlentzos and Miss Kalendar

Want to see the artwork? Click here (NSFW)

Download Subscribe

Part two of the live call-in show we did for the launch of Down From Ten, in which we take your calls, talk about the craft of writing and podcasting, and argue about what makes for a good story. We also take more saucy calls from listeners.

Part one of the live call-in show we did for the launch of Down From Ten, in which Tee Morris impersonates John Woo, Chris Lester gets flogged live on mic, we learn the story of Philippa Ballantine’s questionable ancestry, and we take a number of saucy calls from listeners.

And now, Episode 14, in which Jeremiah notices, Sarah remembers, and Gerd does some heavy lifting.
Story So far by Cunning Minx of Polyamory Weekly

Episode 15 coming this weekend.

[In honor of her new book Soulless, which impressed me with its groundedness in the Victorian world, I asked author Gail Carriger to blog about the art of finding good research sources for Steampunk writing. This is her contribution - thank you very much, Ms. Carriger! -JDS]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: nothing beats primary sources. I hate to be a traitor to the Author Guild’s justifiable objection to the Google Book settlement, but Google books does already have a number of good primary sources from the 1800s available.

* One of my personal favorites, with recipes and other interesting tidbits about domestic management in 1876, is Things a Lady Would Like to Know

* Floote’s Medical Common Sense is another wonderful resource for a historical perspective on the Victorian attitude towards medical science, not to mention a window into scientific, social, and psychological theory. This is an American classic (if non-fiction can be called such).

There are other useful primary sources as well, that you might be able to order through Amazon or a rare books dealer. My two favorites are:

* Baedeker, Karl. 1896. Baedeker’s's London and its Environs. (or any Baedeker’s dated to the Victorian era) for maps, railroad time tables, popular museums and visitors areas, not to mention names of shops, clubs, restaurants, news papers and more.

* Edwards, Amelia B. 1877. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. For language and the Victorian adventurer abroad feel.

As for secondary sources, what you need may depend upon what you’re writing. I write comedy of manners, so my needs reflect this more pedestrian interest level, someone with a more military bent probably has a different list. Never the less, I find myself constantly reaching for the following:

* Pool, Daniel. 1993. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. For the basics.

* Cunnington, C. Willett. 1990. English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. For anything to do with women’s clothing

* Flanders, Judith. 2003. The Victorian House. For domestic life questions. The information is not well structured, but it is there.

* Farwell, Byron. 1972 Queen Victoria’s Little Wars. For the quickest insight into the Empire Building mentality and military history of the age.

Aside from Wikipeda, which can be an okay place to start, there are some good, if not particularly well organized, research tools dedicated to the Victorians online as well.

* By far the biggest and the best is the Victorian Web which is a great spiderweb of all sorts of useful information

* The Victorian Dictionary offers up primary newspaper articles on different topics

And here are a few interesting individual offerings online.

* Victorian Slag Dictionary

* Victorian Etiquette

* The Illustrated London News (starting in 1842)

* Victorian servants

* The Ladies Journal

* Godey’s Lady’s Book

* Naval Ships of Victorian times

* Nick Names of Cavalry regiments

* Some ways to tie a cravat

* La Mode Illustree LiveJournal group

Other tips:

* If you have a DVR or Tivo trigger in keywords pertaining to your topic of interest. You never know what the history channel might be dealing with next. It will at least give you a jumping off point.

* Watch BBC costume dramas, and or, rent the DVD and check out the extras, they often have interviews with historical experts.

* Having a really hard time answering a research question? Cold call a local university history department. Experts love to talk about their expertise, perhaps there is someone in the history department you can ask. They may at least give you a book or article to read.

Lastly, of course you can keep an eye on my website, I often put up bits and bobs I’ve discovered around the net.

And now, Episode 13, in which Gerd makes a discovery, Katy makes a point, and Amos reveals a dark secret.
Bumper by Brian D. Clay, author of The Kingdom Crisis.

Episode 14 coming sometime in the next 5 days

And now, Episode 12, in which Amos has a nightmare, Jeremiah has fridge issues, and Sarah sings a song.
Story So Far by Helen E. H. Madden of Heat Flash Erotica.

No aftershow this week — but lots of news next time. Episode 13 coming next weekend.

And now, Episode 11, in which Sarah puts her foot down, Amos has a secret, and the shadows have an agenda.
Bumper by Chooch and Viv of Into The Blender. Story So Far by Rhonda Carpenter of Podioracket and Mark of a Druid.

Episode 12 coming next weekend.

— — — —
Earlier this year a brilliant Vancouver surgeon, Dr. Andresz Busczowski,
helped Hugo- and Nebula-winning science fiction writer and zero-gravity
dancer/choreographer Jeanne Robinson beat back a rare and virulent form of
biliary cancer. But it¹s so rare even he can¹t say how much time heŒs bought
her, how soon it might recur‹and her latest blood tests have been so
discouraging they¹ve now decided she needs to start chemotherapy as soon as
possible. Besides the prescription drugs to counteract the chemotherapy, she
needs special therapies and supplements, counseling, and extensive diet and
lifestyle changes, to reduce her stress level and the strain on her liver to
as close to zero as possible. All those things are expensive…and like many
artists today Jeanne and her writer husband Spider Robinson were already
running on fumes financially.

But Jeanne, a Soto Zen monk, has been spreading love and kindness in all
directions for a long time. So her Buddhist sangha in Vancouver, her
neighbors on Bowen Island, and friends as far away as Florida have all
spontaneously come together to raise funds to help keep her around as long
as possible. Your participation is welcomed. A Bowen benefit concert, ³WE
DREAM FOR JEANNE,² will be held at Cates Hill Chapel at 7:30 PM on Friday
Sept 18 details here; goods or services can be donated for eBay auction by
contacting Jan Schroeder at , and PayPal donations
can be sent to this website.

You can read Jeanne¹s recent blog entry, The Third Act, to get a sense of
how she¹s feeling at this link.

Jeanne and Spider both warmly appreciate your help, support, prayers or just
good thoughts. So does one of the newest visitors to this planet: their
first grandchild, Marisa Alegria da Silva. (seen at Jeanne’s blogsite.)
=====================

And now, Episode 10, in which Edelle and Carol compete for the poetry prize, Amos has an opinion, and Katy has a secret.
Bumper by Beq of Metamor City. Story So Far by composer Danny Schade of his own demented, but delightful, domain.

Episode 11 coming this weekend.

Now, a month and a bit on, after much labor and much laughter, I am pleased to present all of you with the world debut of the first chapter of Gail Carriger’s Soulless in full-cast audiobook format (complete with music, soundFX, and soundscaping). This sample offers you a taste of the romp you’ll be in for when you read the book.

You can pre-order Soulless from Amazon, and read Ms. Carriger’s ever-entertaining blog as well.

Cast (in order of appearance)
Angela Vernon as The Narrator
Chris Lester as The Unexpected Vampire
Miss Kalendar as Alexia Tarrabotti
George Chlentzos as Lord Conal Maccon
J. Daniel Sawyer as Professor Lyall

Directed by J. Daniel Sawyer
Produced by ArtisticWhispers Productions

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Finally back on the air after a number of major tech problems which I’ll detail next week.

And now, Episode 9, Jeremiah has a secret, in which Sarah makes a discovery, and Amos gets an irresistable urge.
Bumper by Wander Wolf of WNDR Radio. Story So Far by Abbie Hilton of The Prophet of Panamindorah Podcast.

Episode 10 coming this weekend.

Anyway, Brian has this to say about the words of your humble narrator:

“The current novel Down from Ten which has been describe as The Shinning meets “Clue” is a great story and the cast is doing an outstanding job. Warning – it is an in-flight podcast so when you catch up with the episodes you will be dealing with “cliffhangers”!

Though it is his other podcast novel I really wanted to mention, The Antithesis Progression: Predestination and Other Games of Chance, first the title is just plain awesome, I am aware that for the sake of “selling” the novel the title will be tweaked to be more approachable, which is only sensible; however, the Lit geek in me states firmly that the title is perfect and should be left alone. Okay, that said the title isn’t the only awesome thing here. The story is fantastic, driven by a cast of characters with powerful agendas that makes this space – spy – political – thriller come to life unlike any other podcast novel I have listened to. Take the time to check it out.

Something to keep in mind both novels are definitely for adults, not kid or office safe content.”

Thank you Brian, for the review. Those of you who don’t read Brian’s blog, it’s worth a gander. Check it out.

Finally back on the air after a number of major tech problems which I’ll detail next week.

And now, Episode 8, in which Katy has an opinion, Jeremiah has a problem, and Carol has a plan.
Story So Far by Miss Kalendar of Brass Needles.

Episode 9 and 10 coming next weekend.

In an article on Beliefnet this week, Michael Ruse argues that the “new atheists” are a “bloody disaster.” He argues using a mixture of caricatures, complaints, and criticisms, so before I go into why I think the man is full of organic fertilizer on the broader issues, I will address the salient ones:

[Cut for opinionated rantings that might irritate some readers]

Caricatures:
1) “…the “new atheists” – people who are aggressively pro-science, especially pro-Darwinism, and violently anti-religion of all kinds, especially Christianity but happy to include Islam and the rest.”

Among the “new atheists” he names Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, P.Z. Meyers, and Jerry Coyne. Notably absent from this list is the movement’s galvanizing voice, Sam Harris, whose book The End of Faith busted the market wide open for everyone else. Harris is familiar with a number of religions, and in The End of Faith and in his lectures at the Beyond Belief symposiums makes nuanced arguments about the relative merits and demerits of different religions and different flavors of different religions, all while insisting that faith must no longer be socially sacrosanct. He argues that not all false ideas are equally destructive, and it may be that not all religious ideas are equally false, but that it is dishonest, dangerous, and foolhardy to continue to behave as if religious ideas are especially immune from criticism when compared to political, moral, ethical, economic, philosophical, scientific, or artistic ideas. His arguments may have problems – anthropologist Scott Atran has given them an extensive critique – but they do not fit the brush Ruse is painting with in the slightest.

A call to level the intellectual playing field by practicing what Harris calls “conversational intolerance” of religious ideas is the central program of the New Atheists. It’s what Dawkins, Dennet, and Hitchens explicitly advocate, and it’s what Meyers and Coyne deliberately practice. Dawkins frames it as “let’s have an argument.” Dennet frames it as “let’s break the spell that makes religious ideas specially immune from criticism.” Meyers desecrates communion wafers and pulls other provocative stunts to raise discussion and demonstrate that, when it comes to inquiry, nothing is sacred.

The charge that the New Atheists are violently anti-religion is, to put it frankly, a lie. None are in favor of any form of violence towards religion – all advocate argument. Nor is it true that their ire falls especially on Christianity. While Dawkins and Dennet talk about Christianity more than any other religion, neither says that “Christianity is the worst” – quite the contrary. In both cases, being raised in Christian environments, they focus on it simply because they are more familiar with Christian history and theology than they are with, say, Confucianism. On the other hand, Hitchens and Harris are familiar with a variety of western and non-western religions and single out Islam and some of the other more easterly religions out for more severe criticism than they level at Christianity.

Ruse is engaging in well-poisoning on this one. Shame on him.

2) “Francis Collins has been incurring their hatred…since Collins is a devout Christian.”

Ruse is here referring to the controversy over the recent appointment of Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, as head of the National Institutes of Health, but Ruse’s characterization of the controversy is disingenuous. As the head of the NIH, Collins will have influence in areas where he has a dogmatic ax to grind: embryonic stem cell research. At no time that I’ve seen (granting that the web is a big place and I can’t be everywhere at once) have any of the New Atheists impugned Dr. Collins’ scientific credentials, even when directly attacking some of the less scientific things he’s said in print. Check out Michael Shermer’s blog entry on the topic for a quick, representative summary. The question at issue is not Collin’s credentials, and it’s not Collins’ religion. It’s whether his non-rational dogmatic commitments compromise his ability to do the job of overseeing research budgets, and it’s every bit as legitimate a question as asking whether a Quaker or a Jain is an appropriate pick for Secretary of Defense.

Complaints:
1) Ruse complains that the “new atheists” are terribly mean to him – meaner than they are to the religious folks.

To be perfectly frank, I think Ruse’s complaint that the New Atheists have insulted him in their writings is more than a little childish, and also more than a little hypocritical.
First, as demonstrated by the depths he sinks to in this essay, he’s not above reckless and dishonest ad hominem attacks himself – complaining that someone is mean when you’re dishing it right back and worse is gradeschool behavior.
Second, he doesn’t publicly hold the people in the creationist community he considers friends (Gish, Dembski, Johnson) who are even ruder in print and in public (see Dembski’s nasty little cartoon about the Judge in the Dover case for an example).

It should also go without mentioning that, in the war of ideas, people can and do say very aggressive, hard things while telling the truth as they see it. This is an adult world, and Ruse should have learned at University that science and philosophy are not disciplines for the timid.

That said, let’s put this complaint in context, and consider the charges that the “new atheists” level against the priesthood(s). Religious leaders are, according to Dawkins and Hitchens, “child abusers” for their promotion of the doctrine of hell and of infant circumcision. Hitchens further characterizes the Catholic Church’s youth outreach activities as “No Child’s Behind Left.” They all accuse Imams of fostering an environment that might lead us to nuclear war, and Dispensationalist Christians of breathlessly searching for a silver lining (i.e. The Rapture) in the prospect of Manhattan going up in a mushroom cloud.
Whether these accusations are defensible or not is not at issue here. What is at issue is that Ruse evidently thinks a book review calling his ideas “so nonsensical that only an intellectual could believe them,” a book calling his condescending attitude towards religion “appeasement,” and a blogger labeling him “a clueless gobshite” is worse than being called a pedophile, a child abuser, a genocidal warmonger, and a fanatic.

I must say, his semiotic score-keeping system mystifies me.

2) Ruse complains that the New Atheists are mean to him because he doesn’t think all believers are evil or stupid, and that science and religion do not have to clash.

If Ruse honestly believes this is the source of the invective he’s found himself on the receiving end of, he is sorely mistaken. The book Jerry Coyne reviewed is stunning both in its ambitious scope and, more importantly, in its lack of intellectual rigor. The book in question, Can A Darwinian Be A Christian? might be a worthy subject for a book, but Ruse’s method in the book is blinkered toward both religion and with science. Its methods and hermeneutic are only applicable to a very small minority of Western Liberal Protestants and Catholics – the rest of the religious universe (including well over 80% of the world’s Christian population) is unaddressed by his argument, which tries to show the God-of-the-Gaps as the starting point for making Christianity and evolutionary biology mutually reinforcing.

Contrast this with a religious scientist that the New Atheists do not attack, Ken Miller. A conservative Catholic teaching at Brown University, Miller is the author of Finding Darwin’s God, perhaps the most nuanced and well-argued defense of theistic evolution ever written. In his book and arguments, he refuses to give short shrift to science in order to give comfort and shelter to his doctrines, and does not engage in the normal “God of the Gaps” or “NOMA” nonsense. He is an unapologetically religious man who has the courage of his convictions, both religiously and scientifically, and is very much respected by both his peers and his adversaries for that fact.

Criticisms:
1)“Their treatment of the religious viewpoint it pathetic to the point of non-being.”

Unfortunately, with the exception of singling out Dawkins for being philosophically simplistic (a criticism that is, to my mind, pretty near the mark), Ruse provides nothing to back up this assertion. He certainly doesn’t engage any of the arguments offered up in the New Atheist books, nor does he seem to notice that the “new
atheists” are in dialogue with believers. The notion that the New Atheists are boxing with a straw man is belied by the fact that believers in Islam and Christianity overwhelmingly pay lip service to scriptural inerrancy, prophetic infallibility, and a whole slate of other doctrines that the New Atheists are aggressively attacking.
Judging by his comments about Christianity in other contexts, it seems that Ruse considers as straw manning arguments that do not engage liberal theologians such as Bultmann, Tillich, et. al. These men are eloquent writers, and theologically subtle, but such men hold a position in the borderlands between religion and atheism, being held to their religion by personal spiritual experience but utterly unable to defend with argument a single doctrine, not even the existence of God. They are of interest to the academy, but not of much interest to the average pew-sitter. When it comes to the culture war, they are largely irrelevant.

Dennet, of course, isn’t engaging in this kind of argument anyway. He raises questions about how religion got the way it is, how it might have served an adaptive function, what is it that, if we discover parts of it are false, should we hold on to and learn from?

P.Z. Meyers and Jerry Coyne are interested in scientific education and intellectual rigor in that field, and make precious few forays into arguments against religion except when directly addressing the Intelligent Design crowd.

Harris and Hitchens are the only two left, and both have come under a goodly amount of fire for generating more heat than light. However, Ruse’s notion that they are philosophically naive or religiously uninformed is bogus – that they differ in outlook from him is certain, but disagreement does not idiots make. In The End of Faith, Harris articulates an entire epistemology that dialogues with Kant, Bacon, Descartes, addresses postmodernism, and takes heavy account of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.
Hitchens, on the other hand, is highly conversant with all of the great socialist thinkers, and references many of them directly in his book, as well as A.J. Ayer, C.S. Lewis, Bertrand Russel, and many others that would take too long to list here. There may be places where their arguments are sloppy or just plain wrong, but to dismiss the entire crowd as “poor quality,” “pathetic,” “a disservice to scholarship,” and “knowing nothing” of the subject matter is calumnious.

2) “The new atheists are doing terrible damage to the fight to keep Creationism out of schools.” Ruse develops this further, saying that “if science generally and Darwinism specifically implies that God does not exists, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment.” He goes on to say “This is the claim of the new atheists.”

Ruse again proves himself aptly named by gracing his audience with a rhetorical ruse. Taking these items in reverse order, the new atheists do not say that science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist. The closest you can come, other than statements of personal conversion moments (such as when Christopher Hitchens relates his childhood revelation that our eyes are adapted to the environment and not vice versa, or Dawkins’ lack of ability to comprehend how someone can believe in a god that would ordain a bloodthirsty process like evolution), is Dennet’s observation in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that the idea of natural selection acts as a universal acid, dissolving away our common-sense notion that things are designed from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Now, that may imply that the God promulgated by religion is less likely than not, but let’s not confuse weak implication with necessary conclusion.

Secondly, Ruse is manifestly wrong on the question of Constitutional law. Children are exposed to facts in school which contravene their religious heritage all the time. From Galileo onward, the western world has been inundated with facts that strongly imply that some religious doctrine or another is false, from the corruptible heavens to the expanding universe, from the realization that species can go extinct to the discovery of geologic strata, from the atomic theory of matter to the heliocentric solar system expanding universe, from the discovery of female gametes to neurologically embodied mind, from plate tectonics to ancestral genetics to evolutionary theory.
We forget now, because we don’t realize how profoundly these scientific discoveries affected the doctrinal development of different religions – we assume that the religions we have today are as they always were. But that’s not the case. Each one of the above accepted scientific paradigms either threatened to unseat or completely obliterated at least one accepted religious doctrine that was, at the time, considered fundamental to the faith of Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and/or Jews. The Constitution does not protect believers from inconvenient facts in a government-run school, it protects everyone from proselytization by anyone representing the government. Saying “The Grand Canyon was formed by geological forces over millions of years” is not a religious dogma, even though it specifically gives the lie to the Genesis creation and flood accounts and, if the evidence is followed down the geologic column, eventually calls into question the foundations doctrines such as original sin and biblical inerrancy.

This criticism, the ultimate point of Ruse’s entire essay, also turns out to be wrong on both the facts and the logic, and thus the whole of his article amounts to little more than vacuous grandstanding.

For myself, the thing I find most disturbing about Ruse’s little diatribe is the lack of intellectual honesty (the same problem I have with Gould’s NOMA nonsense). The epistemology Ruse espouses in this article is highly unethical, as his strategy (again, like NOMA) is a bait-and-switch con game with believers. Does this sound unfair? How else can you describe someone who says “We must not tell people that Darwinism implies that there is no God, because it endangers science teaching.” [paraphrased]. If Darwinism does imply that God doesn’t exist, then telling religious folk that “only a few cranks think that” is a lie. If Darwinism does not imply that God does not exist, then all that need be done is argue with the people who say that it does. In neither case is it necessary for an honest person to perpetrate a confidence trick upon people whom he’s trying to sway to his side.

In the article, he also conflates two disparate concerns. First, the scientific:
While what people believe about the universe is their own business – I certainly have my own weird handful of notions – if one wants to play in the science classroom one must adhere *at least* to the doctrine of falsifiability. Thus far, all creationist hypotheses have proved false on every testable point. This is true of even the strong version of Intelligent Design, known as irreducible complexity, whose original examples of irreducible complexity (the immune system, the bacterial flagella, etc.) have since been proved reducible, thus falsifying the hypothesis.

Of course, the weak version of ID (“There must be some designer somewhere out there”) doesn’t make a falsifiable claim, which makes it a philosophy without even an hypothesis. It is not even bad science. To quote Wolfgang Pauli, it’s “not even wrong.”

Second among Ruse’s conflated issues is the sociological:
People love their pet beliefs, particularly when it comes to notions about creation or design, which most people erroneously conflate with metaphysical notions of purpose. Fortunately, affection doesn’t give one the right to have their beliefs coddled in a science classroom, nor should it. Science has always, and (so long as it continues to progress) will always be a philosophically and theologically unsettling enterprise – not just for the religious, but for all of society. As our data about the universe changes, our ethics, philosophy, beliefs, laws, and values change in reaction to it. Sometimes it’s subtle – sometimes it’s hugely traumatic. In neither case may one claim an exemption from coping with that fact because it conflicts with something someone taught in a church or read in a holy book.

The argument over the teaching of evolution is one of four major arguments now brewing that effect the whole of the scientific endeavor. The others are neurology, biogenetic research (particularly, but not exclusively, on human embryonic stem cells), and nanotechnology. All three of these fields profoundly threaten a variety of doctrines from a variety of religions in ways at least as profound as evolutionary theory does – and all of them are indispensable in dealing with climate, famine, pollution, disease, and a host of other engineering challenges that either loom on the horizon or are already with us. Ruse’s strategy of accommodationism didn’t work in the last 50 years of the 20th century – it seems that a different set of tactics are needed. Direct confrontation and argument is a more honest and, quite possibly, a much more productive mode of engagement in the culture wars of all sorts than is ingratiation.

In every form it has been hitherto proposed, creationism is either a falsified hypothesis, a con game, or an assertion without
any content. We scientifically literate folk should treat our adversaries in this culture war with the dignity that they’re due as adult human beings and be clear that, in so many words, we’re fairly certain that they’re full of shit. It is both dishonest and insulting to pat them on the head and point at the sandbox in the corner and say “over there we have a little room for your theology, and we promise not to wreck your sandcastles – at least not today.”

Of course, there are different levels of pugilistic engagement – P.Z. is a provocateur, and proud of it. So be it – the world needs people like that, lest we all get so afraid of offending someone else that we lose our willingness to participate in the arena of ideas. A free culture needs its assholes like a pond needs water.

Friends arguing philosophy over beer in a pub have the option to be kind – that’s the kind of forum I participate in at Apologia, and I’m proud to do it. But friends don’t generally take kindly to being treated like children by their peers, and there is a difference between kindness and mealy-mouthed passive aggression; practicing the latter in a friendly conversation might well get you snubbed at the next get-together, because it displays both cowardice and condescension.

However, intellectual pugilists in the arena of ideas do not have the option of sparing the feelings of the other side. It is possible for one side to be completely wrong on a given issue, and in such circumstances, seeking a middle ground is dishonest. So, I say “Hooray” for the new atheists, and wish more people, especially those who think they’re assholes, would actually read them. I’ve known more than a few Christians (including very conservative ones) who find the new atheists refreshingly honest and who can make common cause with them in the matter of intellectual ethics, even as they disagree completely on matters of theology, morality, politics, et.al.

Let us stop honoring opinions as sacred, and instead honor those who are willing to have an argument – regardless of what they believe.
And let’s honor them by informing ourselves and actually engaging the argument, rather than complaining that they don’t like us.

*** Appendix ***

In the comments below, Todd Stark points out a basic dichotomy of approaches to intellectual arguments – how some see them as a fight, while others see them as a conversation. He’s right about this, but his comments point up that I wasn’t clear enough about the basic premise from which I was operating.

I don’t think “argument” equates to “fight” – but then, I also don’t think “adversary” equates with “enemy.” There is a place for the friendly conversation (for example, Apologia). There’s also a place for the boxing match. Both are an argument, defined well by Michael Palin in the Monty Python sketch “An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.” It’s not “the automatic gainsaying of something the other person says,” neither is it abuse. In such a sense, both are conversation, fraught with all the normal difficulties you point up in conversations.

In other words, The fact that open societies exist shows that people can be pragmatic about their irreconcilable differences. Argument separates the substance of the opinion from the person holding it for the purposes of understanding – you may think I’m batshit crazy for thinking it’s worthwhile to have humans living on mars, and I might think you’re batshit crazy for reading a horoscope, but I know from arguing about those things with you that you’re ethical in the way that you think, so we can still have a business relationship, or a friendship.

I think the whole reason to have an argument is to ferret out the substantive differences from the semantic ones, whether that argument is friendly or adversarial, the basic structure remains: I’ll stack my facts and logic up, you stack up yours, and we’ll critique each other.

Some particularly colorful arguments, particularly those between public intellectuals like Ruse and Meyers (or William Dembski and anybody, or Christopher Hitchens and anybody), can contain abuse, but if abuse is the entire argument, then there’s nothing to see. My objection to Ruse’s paper is that it consists of very few facts (almost all of them wrong), with the balance spent abusing his opponents while complaining that they abuse him. He has jumped into the boxing ring and is complaining that he’s getting hit, which seems, to me, childish.

Thanks for the comment and the constructive criticism, Todd!

—Also check out the responses to Ruse by two of his targets. Jerry Coyne’s reaction is here. P.Z. Meyers’ reaction is here.