I will soon have more physical books of The Marinara Murders, and hopefully of The Saints Go Dying shortly after that. This was a proof that I autographed and labeled #001. It was a prize at last night's Social Media Club.
Who knows, if I write enough of these books, maybe it will be worth something some day? But for now, it's the only physical copy in existence. That's kind of awesome to think about.
It cost me $15 to create, and more than half of that was expedited shipping, to get it in time for the Social Media Club. It's still kind of amazing to me that a single copy of a physical book can be produced so cheaply, and look so good when you get it.
This morning as part of a park conference, Rick Steves was the keynote speaker. It was a really interesting looking at public spaces and parks. Mary was excited to join me for it, and she took away this nice souvenir.
We both enjoyed the book, so it was great to get it signed!
Flipping through Facebook last Thursday and Friday, it felt like a series of pictures of downed trees and branches. I talked to Joe Brady, Metro Parks' Natural Resource Manager, about how Metro Parks did since we, you know ... have a lot of trees. Our developed parks came through it pretty well. Some downed branches, of course, but no major issues that we've discovered so far (and assessments are still ongoing). Metro Parks regularly prunes its trees in the developed parks--and by developed I mostly mean the parks with a lot of grass, playfields, Wapato Lake, Wright Park, etc.--so many of the limbs that were likely to fall had already been taken care of. Still, there were plenty of branches on the ground, as I noticed in Wright Park on Saturday, and crews are actively cleaning up those parks. The assessment of the natural areas--Point Defiance, the gulches, the forest at Titlow, Swan Creek--is also still ongoing, but right now it looks like we lost a lot of trees. This is probably to be expected. Those trees are not individually managed like the ones in the more developed parks. They are part of nature, and last week, nature knocked a lot of them down. As Joe told me, it is "normal ecological behavior" to lose trees weighed down by ice. It's important to note that some of these downed trees are in "critical areas," which means because of their proximity to the Sound, to a stream, wetlands, or some other important environmental issue, Metro Parks has certain regulations it has to comply with before doing anything to the downed trees. So if you're going into one of the forests, exercise a lot of caution, and have a little patience as we clear things up. If I learn of anything new at the board meeting tonight, I'll update this post!
I have a general interest in the--dare I say the word--philosophy of technology. Maybe trends is a better word than philosophy. Or just effects. Either way, I try to read a lot about what it all means and where it's going. Part of it is in relation to my work on a sci-fi novel 90 years in the future. Bu again, part of it is that I'm just interested. Previously I posted about Moore's Law, and the fact that if it holds, we can expect computers to be millions and billions of times faster than they are now. (" The Back Half of the Chessboard") (again, Moore's Law holds that every 18 months, the processing speed of a computer doubles, which has held true for at least 50 years.) Here's another point about Moore's law, made in the book You Are Not A Gadget: Moore's Law helps push radical social change. Google, Twitter, Amazon ... all couldn't have existed 20 years ago. No one really even dreamed them, and their effects have been massive. But in the same way, Moore's Law has helped slow other changes. The author of You Are Not A Gadget, Jared Lanier, points out that we have Moore's law to thank for some rapid increase in lifespan. And one of the things he suggests is that longer lifespans mean that we are not turning over the culture of one generation to another as fast as we used to. If you go by music, film, books, fashion, and general style, you can't find another time in the last 100 years that culture has been so static. Look at a photo from 1992, and those people don't look terribly different than people do in 2012. Dated certainly, but not like they would look if in 1992 you looked at pictures of people from 1972. Or being in 1972 looking back at 1952. Or 52 and 32. Etc. People used to change like crazy every ten or twenty years. Music changed like crazy. Everything in culture changed like crazy. But recently, that's really slowed. It suggests that to blame are the pace of the world, a remix culture, and big business. But Lanier's suggestion is pretty compelling, too. A single generation is exerting more influence over more time than they have before, slowing over the turnover of cultural ideas and norms, even at a time of rapid technological change. That generation is, probably, the Baby Boomers. It was the Baby Boomers who shaped a lot of the 60s, 70s, and 80s culturally. They also were pretty instrumental in creating PCs, Internet companies, etc, so they pretty well shaped the 90s, 00s, and today as well. Here's a more humorous way of looking at the cultural impact of the Boomers. This graph from xkcd sorts the 20 most played Christmas songs by the decade they were released. There are a lot of outstanding questions about this, if it's even true. As technology changes faster and faster, but social change happens slower and slower, there are going to be some real conflicts. Perhaps the social unrest internationally and nationally in 2010 and 2011 is part of that. Will a new culture quickly arise as the influence of the Baby Boomers start to wane, resulting in rapid change in fashion, taste, music, etc? Or are the microcultures here forever with a slow moving, or even static globalized pop culture? Interesting food for thought.
I didn't black out this blog today, but I think SOPA and PIPA and bad solutions to a trumped up problem. The SOPA and PIPA laws attempt to correct piracy in a really counterproductive way. Here's a good run-down on why that is: For me personally, when I think about my books, there are worse things than having my books pirated. Like, obscurity. I have not enabled digital rights management on my books (when given the choice). I freely enabled it for as many sharing options as possible. I have willingly emailed the ebook file to book reviewers. I'm not afraid of being pirated. If I am being pirated, it means I'm doing really well.
Mary and I headed east for a weekend in Plain, Washington. My goal was to get a lot of writing done. I figured that the snow and the quiet would motivate me.
And it did! I wrote about 5,000 words this weekend, and things are really moving along.
I also enjoyed the beautiful snow. We got several inches over the weekend (of course, had I known that Tacoma would get dumped on too, we probably could have just stayed here for the same experience).
The snow dragon was from an afternoon trip into Leavenworth yesterday. And the colorful fiber is from my makeshift writing desk. We were at the Grunewald Guild, an arts center, and I did all my writing in the "Fiber Arts Building" which was peaceful, warm (thanks to a nice wood fireplace), snowy, and filled with looms and spools of thread. It was a great place to write.
One of my favorite mystery authors, Reginald Hill, recently died at 75. His Dalziel and Pascoe series were always a treat. Funny, literary, thoughtful, compelling ... they were fabulous.
I didn't read them in order, so allow me to recommend one from mid-series: Pictures of Perfection. I don't know what it would be like to read this one first, but it's one of my favorites of his. It's a book that few authors could pull off: the central mystery is trying to figure out if a crime has even been committed.
Reginald Hill taught me a few good things about writing a mystery series.
1) Try not to write the same thing twice. Some of the mysteries are grim and disturbing, some are light and hilarious. Some are both. Sometimes the bad guy gets a way with it. Write compelling characters, and people will enjoy seeing them in whole new situations.
2) Don't be afraid to swing for the fences. He writers some mysteries and scenes that a lot of writers might have shied away from. Sometimes he fails (I couldn't stand The Price of Butchers Meat, an audacious experiment in narrative, voice, and finishing Jane Austen's unfinished book). But he tried.
3) I appreciate his comments about "aging" your characters. He estimated that his characters aged 1 year for every three "real" years. This meant that he could have characters age and grow, but he didn't have to worry about the fact that one of his lead detective wears a denim suit and bell bottoms in early books and now has a smart phone. It's convenient and feels "right" to me.
He taught me a lot more but those two, especially the first two, really stand out.
If you get TVTacoma, you might see me on CityLine this week, talking about upcoming programs at City Club. We taped it this morning, and it was a lot of fun. Shortly thereafter I was a panelist at the Women's Council of Realtors lunch, where I talked about using social media. Co-panelists included Realtor-extraordinaire Marguerite Giguere, Tessa Miller of the Business Examiner, and Matt Sweet, who handles social media for Ticor Title. We had an interesting panel discussion about good uses of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. I mostly talked about how I used social media for the election last year and talking about my books. I also realized during the lunch that I'm coming up on 7 years of blogging! That really surprised me. So quite a day!
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