Follow Friday Yes, #FF No

Posted on January 30, 2012 by José Iriarte
Twitter By Post-It

Photo by Colm McMullan (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A few weeks back I changed how I approach Follow Friday on Twitter. I still try* to pass on a few good recommendations, but I’ve never been a fan of #FF posts that feel more like noise than signal. So I’ve tried to follow the advice implied by this comic at The Oatmeal and highlight one or two people per week and reasons why those who enjoy my tweets might enjoy theirs.

But the other thing I’ve done—and it’s something I haven’t seen anybody else suggesting out there—is ditch the #FF hashtag.

If you really get hashtags, then skip this paragraph and the next one. I don’t mean to condescend, but it’s also clear to me that many of my friends and acquaintances don’t get what hashtags are really about. A lot of us use hashtags as a form of ironic metacomment on our own post, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of people on twitter also use hashtags to tell the world what they’re doing (eg, #amwriting and #amreading) without an awareness of the fact that there are actual online communities that follow these hashtags. But the real point of hashtags—and I say this is the real point, or else why would hashtags be clickable?—is to allow us to cross-pollinate our twitter experience. Hashtags allow us to talk with people who aren’t already our followers, and possibly meet cool new people. If you’re a writer, click on the #amwriting hashtag sometime, and you’ll see a bunch of people all tweeting about their writing experience. Some of them will actually be cool and worth interacting with.** Instead of automatically following back every spammer who follows you with no intention of ever actually interacting with you, you can use hashtags to find the people who are genuinely using twitter as part of a giant conversation.

You can find an excellent breakdown of how to use hashtags well in this terrific post from Kristin Lamb. Among other things, you’ll learn why you should use a client like TweetDeck to get the most out of Twitter, and why you should strip the hashtags off of tweets when you retweet them dagnabbit! ::breathes::

Anyway, since hashtags are so wonderful, why am I so down on #FF?

As I see it, the purpose of Follow Friday is to let my friends know who else I like, and thus, by extension, who else they might like. What purpose, then, does the hashtag serve? My friends will see the post either way, because they follow me. People who don’t follow me aren’t interested in who I think is cool.

But let’s suppose for argument’s sake that I’m wrong about that, and that #FF isn’t just about telling my friends who they might like, but literally about telling the world who to follow. Let’s try a little experiment then. This Friday—and this works best if you use Tweetdeck or something similar—click on the #ff hashtag the next time you see it pop up. Don’t come back to this post until after you’ve done it. 😉

I’m sorry; that was a dirty trick to play wasn’t it? How long did it take you to delete that column on Tweetdeck? Or have you still not succeeded in deleting it? If so, here’s the trick: grab Tweetdeck by the bar at the top of the window and drag it down on your screen until the little X to close the column is no longer covered by the constant stream of little popups in the upper right corner of your screen. Or you could just wait until it’s Saturday for most of the world.

The point? Even if we grant that Follow Friday can be used to tell strangers who to follow, it’s clearly broken by the fire-hose-like stream of tweets, most of which actually say nothing about the people listed.

Who can read that fast?

Other than spambots, that is.

When you stick the #FF hashtag on your Friday recommendations, you’re not really increasing the likelihood of gaining legitimate followers for your friends. I don’t know for sure that it increases the likelihood of your friends being spambait, but I do know that I can’t tweet the word “iPad” without immediately attracting spambots, so it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to suppose.

In any case, I can’t see any possible upside. so why bother?

* “Try” because I’m not always on on Fridays.
** Alas, at least 50% of the people on Twitter are at the toddler stage of mental development, and thus not actually interested in communicating with anybody else, but just in promoting themselves. They don’t play “with” others so much as “in parallel to” others. But that’s a different post.
Posted in tech geek | 6 Comments

What’s in (40% of) a name?

Posted on January 24, 2012 by José Iriarte

I’ve recently undergone a name change. I didn’t have to fill out any forms, and my driver’s license hasn’t changed, but legal forms hardly represent the reality of day to day life anyway. This change has only taken effect at home, but it’s a pretty striking one nonetheless—I’ve lost 40% of my old name.

Somewhere in the last three or four months, I stopped being “Daddy” and became simply “Dad.”

It was a gentle transition. I would hear the occasional “Dad” and wonder, “Did I hear right? Ah, wait, now she called me ‘Daddy’ again. I must have heard wrong.” Gradually the ratio shifted, until now I’m only “Daddy” when my kids really, really want something. Luckily for me, the credit card is still in Daddy’s name.

I wouldn’t dream of trying to stop this change, anyway. My kids are thirteen. Past a certain age, who calls their parents “Mommy” and “Daddy” anymore?

Still, being a Daddy was nice. There’s a lot more affection carried in that word than in the short form. It’s amazing how sometimes you can hear an eyeroll in “Da-ad.” Nobody but Sylvia Plath could make “Daddy” sound like an epithet.

Being “Dad” now makes me conscious of how, in five to ten years, give or take, my kids will be grown-ups. Equals, more or less, and looking back and judging the job I’ve done. I hope they’re more lenient judges than I was with my parents.

“Daddy” doesn’t have to worry about being judged. “Daddy” is a god, who knows everything and can do no wrong. “Dad” is much more fallible, so I guess it’s time to step up my game.

Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

At the risk of being sappy, this transition has me remembering an old Harry Chapin song:

Posted in close to home | 6 Comments

So you think you’ve defeated SOPA . . .

Posted on January 21, 2012 by José Iriarte

SOPAIn the wake of Texas Representative Lamar Smith pulling the Stop Online Piracy Act from consideration yesterday(and Senator Harry Reid doing the same for the Protect IP Act), I saw a lot of jubilant tweets saying that censorship was defeated and so forth.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I live in Florida, y’all, and so I have lots of experience with legislation proposed by Voldemort’s minions. I don’t know how much national attention our Senate Bill Six got a couple years ago, where Florida legislators proposed a lot of the same union-busting measures first pioneered in Wisconsin. (Bear in mind that Florida was already a Right-To-Work-Without-The-Burden-Of-Strong-Negotiating-Position state, so it’s not like unions were perpetrating any great evils here.) In Florida the bill was directed more squarely against teachers, under the theory that the reason Florida education lags behind has nothing to do with cutting funding (like the 10% funding cut we enjoyed last year) and nothing to do with a transient population and low socioeconomic status and ridiculous paperwork and days lost to testing, and everything to do with the unions protecting incompetent teachers from being fired. Oh, and somehow Florida’s woes apparently stemmed from teachers being paid too much.

Yeah, I still haven’t figured that one out.

Anyway, teachers and students got out in force and lined the streets, protesting the bill. At the end of it all, Charlie Crist either sacrificed his political career or concluded his career was already over and decided to go out on the side of the good guys for once, and killed the thing. And the villagers rejoiced, right?

Well, no. Or yes, but the celebration was premature.

Instead of everybody living happily ever after, the anti-union, anti-teacher bunch waited a couple of years and pushed the same measures through again, spread out among more bills. Where was the outrage the second time around? Nowhere. People had outrage fatigue. We’d already fought this fight. It was fun and all, but doing it again? Bah, that was so last year.

Speaking of, remember how that brouhaha in Wisonsin ended? Governor Walker got his rebate, his budget cuts, and his union-busting rammed down everybody’s throats, and life went on. Walker is eligible to be recalled now; I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out. In the meantime, though, the non-Wisconsinites who fund Walker got their way.

Which brings me back to SOPA. Public hew and outcry is a fleeting thing. People jump on bandwagons when it seems like fun, but it’s not nearly exciting to fight the hydra again after her head grows back. Most people aren’t really educated about any issues and react to everything knee-jerk fashion. (Note that anti-SOPA sites had to provide links to allow visitors to determine who their congresscritters were, and whether or not they supported SOPA/PIPA. They also had to provide links making it easier to email those same congresscritters. Most people woulnd’t have bothered if they had to do any of that legwork themselves.)

The money behind SOPA and PIPA, though—the RIAA and the MPAA and such—doesn’t view this as a football game. They care about getting their way today, and they will continue to care about it tomorrow, when everybody’s done congratulating themselves over defeating censorship. They’ll be back, and they’ll push through all the same provisions, possibly spread over several otherwise-popular bills. And when they do, it’ll be harder to drum up all this opposition.

Look, obviously I’m not neutral here. I don’t see any reason why I should be. I have a point of view, and reasonable people of goodwill can have different points of view from my own. So let me bring this back around to something maybe we can all agree on: Regardless of where you stand on SOPA, PIPA, unions, or education, if you’re not paying attention to what congress does in your name, you’re part of the problem. Because you can bet that lobbyists, who are paid to pay attention, don’t forget about the things they want just because they suffer a setback.

Posted in rants, teaching, this I believe, tinfoil hat talk | 3 Comments

What you won’t find on a blog or in a book: Direct instruction from a pro

Posted on January 17, 2012 by José Iriarte

In my last post, I linked to some good online resources for writers, pointing out how in many instances these were as good as (or better than) some books you might dish out a small pile of money for in a bookstore. What neither a book nor a website can compete with, however, is having a pro actually share their knowledge with you directly, answering your questions and clarifying their points. Kind of like how in my day job, no textbook, however great, can substitute for a good teacher in the front of the room.

I have a wishlist of writing courses/programs I’d love to attend someday, if timing and finances work out . . . Viable Paradise, OSC’s Literary Boot Camp, Clarion, Writer’s of the Future, etc. VP is always during my school year, though, and at six weeks (and around four grand) either Clarion is a bit of a stretch. Maybe once the kids are out of school.

Thanks to living in the future, though, I may have found the next best thing. Author Cat Rambo, who has sold nearly a hundred short stories, been shortlisted for various awards, and served as editor of Fantasy Magazine as well as several anthologies, is offering a series of writing classes through the magic of Google+ Hangouts. Before now, when was it ever so easy for people all over the country—heck, all over the world—to learn directly from a successful author, face to face?

Here’s a direct link to more information about the various workshops Rambo is offering in the near future. I’ll be taking the Flash Fiction one on January 28th, since writing tighter is something I’ve been focused on for some time. (My computer is not actually equipped to do hangouts, since I don’t have a webcam or mic, but I’ll be borrowing one for the occasion.) Why don’t you join me—or take some other workshop?

Posted in writing | Leave a comment

The best resources for writers are online—and free!

Posted on January 15, 2012 by José Iriarte

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything writing-related, so if you’re not a writer, hopefully this post won’t bore you too much.

I cringe inwardly every time I hear about someone dropping $20 or more for the latest big fat book purporting to give you all the contact information for all the markets for your writing. For that matter, even though I blogged here about the best books on writing craft, I noted in that same post that most of the writing books I’d read weren’t very good, and that there’s tons of great writing advice online for free. With notable exceptions, most of the books I’ve read seem to be vague and padded out, as if some author decided they had enough platform now to crank out an easy work of nonfiction and rake in a bit of cash from it.

HTTP

Image by Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo

Paradoxically, the free stuff online is often better because, I think, if the motivation for putting it out there isn’t money, it’s much more likely to be having something to say. Also, in a blog-like format, there’s no need to pad your one little nugget of insight with fifty-thousand empty words.

Whatever you think of my reasoning there, there really are a wealth of terrific resources online. Here are some of my favorites:

Let me begin with market information. Mike Resnick once wrote in his “Ask Bwana” series in Speculations that the big fat (expensive) market compendiums are no good because they’re quickly out-of-date—often before they’re published, and often knowingly so. He related the story of when he edited a short fiction venue that accepted unsolicited manuscripts. Eventually he changed the policy, or the venue closed down altogether, but the listing stayed the same year after year. In his analysis, he noted that there really was no incentive for them to correct their listing, and particularly no incentive for them to remove it: people buying the big fat book paid for names and addresses of markets, and that’s what they got. Removing listings would only remove their main selling point.

Even if you discount deliberate chicanery, a book that comes out once a year can’t keep up with a website that is constantly updated. So here are three of the best:

QueryTracker.net: A searchable database of agents, and a separate one for publishers. You can customize your list  to only those agents or markets that fit your criteria, and then it will keep records for you of when you queried, what response you received, who asked for a partial, who asked for a full, etc. Can that big fat book do that?

Duotrope.com: Most novelists I talk to have heard of QueryTracker, but I’m always surprised by how few short story writers have heard of Duotrope. Duotrope is the same thing more or less, but for short fiction. It’s searchable by genre, pay rate, word count, you name it. And it also will keep records for you on what you’ve submitted and when and what the result was. Also cool, it will (if you want) exclude already subbed markets or markets considering your other stories from a search.

Both of the above keep statistics voluntarily shared by their members, so you know how soon to expect a reply, what percent of members get rejected, etc. On Duotrope, I sort my search results by response time rather than by pay rate (after excluding the markets that don’t pay pro rates), because not waiting a year for a reply is more important to me right now than getting paid an extra penny or two per word.

Ralan’s SpecFic & Humor Webstravaganza: Another short fiction collection, specifically for the genres noted in the site’s name. Duotrope is easier to search and has the advantage of tracking your submissions if you wish, but Ralan’s is still the source that most sci-fi writers swear by.

Now onto my two favorite writing websites:

The Other Side of the Story (with Janice Hardy): As far as I’m concerned, this is the best site out there for people learning how to write novels. I have learned so much from Janice that any advice I give is more likely to come from her than not. Just go over there and poke through her backlog of posts; you won’t be disappointed.

A Place for Strangers and Beggars: This is sci-fi writer Jim Van Pelt’s LiveJournal, and he blogs about anything and everything going on in his life: teaching, parenting, jogging, reading, writing, and more. But the specific entry I’ve linked to is a “table of contents” of his fiction-writing posts in particular. Jim is a geat short story writer, and reading through his posts on craft are an excellent Short Fiction 101 course, and again, all free!

And finally, the best site I’ve found on online networking—blogging, twitter, and so on—with occasional great posts on writing as well:

Kristen Lamb’s Blog: Kristen has a ton of commonsense insights (that are only common sense after she’s pointed them out) on the right way to blog, how to use Twitter effectively, how not to be a noisy, oily online jerk, etc. Little things like how to expand your audience by using hashtags on your tweets, and how to not clog up the stream when you retweet, by removing hashtags from your retweets. Man, I wish everybody on Twitter knew that.

There are a lot more excellent writing sites out there, but these are my favorites. I’ll probably post at another occasion about other blogs that ought to be in your feed reader—You do use a feed reader, right??—but at nearly a thousand words, this post has probably gone on long enough.

P.S.: I’ve pointed out that reading these sites is indeed free, but if you find value in them, you can pay it back in various ways. QueryTracker has a paid level which provides more exhaustive analysis features. I didn’t find them necessary, but if I ever found myself querying again I might join up just as a way to repay their awesome free service. Duotrope accepts donations. Janice Hardy and Jim Van Pelt are both great writers, and you can repay their generosity, if you find it worthwhile, by buying their books. Kristin Lamb also has several books out there which you can track down to have many of her best insights collected in one place. As I mentioned in this post, when you run across something worthwhile online, you really should try to reward the creator. Unlike the big fat books in the bookstore, though, these sources are all nice enough to let you try the goods out first and see if you like them.

Posted in link soup, writing | 4 Comments

Fifteen Years: A Shared Dream

Posted on January 10, 2012 by José Iriarte

Fifteen years ago tonight, my best friend Lisa and I made official a journey that we’d begun months before. On an amazing (but freezing) night, in front of all our closest friends and relatives, we shivered through our vows and then celebrated until the wee hours.

Fifteen years isn’t a jaw-droppingly long time, I know, but we’re still going strong, in an age where lots of marriages don’t last. I think a big part of why is that we don’t have to retreat from each other when we dream—we have the same passions and the same aspirations, so we each have, in the other, a partner who understands.

These days it’s a lot easier for people who march to the beat of a different xylophone to find each other—and, in fact, uniqueness seems to be genuinely celebrated in a way that it wasn’t when I was much younger. But back before the internet allowed us nerds to figure out we weren’t alone, things were different. That I found someone in my daily life who shared my love of reading in general and science fiction in particular, and even someone who shared my decidedly unhip appreciation for Disney . . . is little short of miraculous.

Lisa has a ferocious pride in the things that make her an individual—I’ve learned a lot from her in this regard. We’re just a couple of happy freaks, and if you don’t like it you can go be sour somewhere else.

But our shared interests—which most people find mind-bogglingly coincidental—pale beside our shared passion for writing. I know so many writer couples where one spouse won’t read the writing of the other. More than that, I know writer couples where one spouse has to feel vaguely ashamed of not having left silly dreams of being a writer back in childhood where they presumably belong. Lisa and I never have to hide our dreams, never have to feel ashamed. Instead, we’re always cheering for each other or egging each other toward the next accomplishment. And if one of us lets the dishes or the laundry slide so we can get more writing done, well we both understand. Would we both be as close to realizing our dreams if we didn’t have each other?

I don’t know how other people do it. All I know is I’m incredibly lucky to have found someone who gets what makes me tick, and who values what I value.

I still feel like the best years of my life are in front of me. I can’t wait to share them with the woman I love.

Wedding (Reception) Picture

Posted in artist's life, assorted nerdom, blargety-blog, close to home | 15 Comments

Meme + Award = Blog Post!

Posted on January 9, 2012 by José Iriarte

This morning I was tickled pink to learn that I’d won the Nobel Prize been awarded the “VersatileVersatile Blogger Award Blogger” Award by Carrie Daws (or perhaps it was the “Inspiring Blogger” award, I’m not sure). I immediately updated my Wikipedia page and called my employers and told them they could take this job and shove it. Then I read the fine print and discovered that the Versatile Blogger award doesn’t come with a large honorarium/endowment like I’d assumed. Several awkward phone calls later, I sat down to figure what this honor actually entails.

Like most blogging awards, this is more like a facebook meme than an actual award—it’s really a way for bloggers to get to know more bloggers. Which, I think, is pretty dang cool. In a couple months I’ll come up on my fourth anniversary of blogging (yes, I’m counting my old blog), which is a lot of time to spend babbling about whatever to an audience of maybe a dozen regular readers. It’s been nice to chronicle my (ongoing) journey toward becoming a published author, and to have a record to look back on of some of the exciting moments along the way, along with some of the discoveries I’ve made. But it does get lonely from time to time, and sometimes it feels like I’m talking to myself, and so it’s really nice to hear that somebody who visited my blog appreciated what I had to say and felt like passing it on. So thanks, Carrie. I’m flattered that you thought of me. 🙂

So according to the rules, my responsibilities include thanking the person who awarded me and linking back to her blog (check!), sharing seven things about myself, and (gulp) passing the award on to fourteen others.

So seven things about me . . .

  1. I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was like eighteen or so. I didn’t get out much as a kid, and eventually I reached the point where being seen crashing around trying to learn would have been too embarrassing. Then when I was a teenager I reached a point where it occurred to me that I could drive far enough away that nobody would know me, and practice there! Win!
  2. I can’t stand LED lights because the flicker bothers me. I’m very sensitive to flickering lights, like old CRT monitors, or when someone idiotically places a ceiling fan under a light fixture. I don’t know what I’ll do when old-fashioned light bulbs become impossible to get.
  3. I’m in my second year of biking (!) or walking to work every day, instead of driving. It’s not that big a deal, though, since I only live around two miles from work.
  4. I’m a night owl by nature, but I get up between 3 and 5 on workday mornings. Not so I can write, but so I can do my take-home work. I find it too depressing to work at night, and getting up early lets me give myself permission to write at night instead.
  5. My father was the cook in my household when I was growing up—and a damn fine one, too—so when I moved out for the first time, I decided I was going to learn to cook as well. I threw myself into it, and eventually got pretty good at it, but not before I’d ruined my roommate’s pans by stirring stuff with a metal utensil, and not before I’d served him food that was very nearly raw. It only took me a month or two to start to learn what I was doing, but by the time I got a clue, my roommate wouldn’t eat a damn thing I made (and wouldn’t let me use his pots and pans either), so he never got to eat anything good I ever made.
  6. My first story submission to a magazine, when I was a barely adolescent teen, was a fairly unmitigated act of (unintentional) plagiarism. In hindsight, it’s a damn good thing it didn’t get bought.
  7. Most of my friends would think I’m being falsely modest here, but it’s true: I am actually a rather slow thinker. I’m not saying I’m dumb—still waters run deep and all. But I am not remotely quick-witted. I can fake it pretty well though, especially when it comes to math—again, I am not quick with numbers, but I appear quicker than I am because I know a lot of shortcuts that most people don’t know.

*whew* That wasn’t as hard as I thought I would be.

Now onto passing it forward. If you read my blog, then you should check out these other folks, because, as I noted above, it means so much to have somebody read your thoughts. The following are all people whose blogs I’ve enjoyed in the last month or so. Some of them are new, and I hope they’ll keep sharing their insights and points of view.

  • M. K. Hutchins – M.K. is a published science-fiction writer, who has one of the coolest ideas for a blog series I’ve ever encountered: once a week (or so) she writes about both a game and a book that have a thematic connection between them. Isn’t that awesome?
  • Jason Runnels – Kind of similar to the above: Jason is a puzzle nut—and a Rubik’s Cube fanatic in particular—as well as a writer and a reader. In his blog, he makes some cool connections between puzzles and stories!
  • Andrew Buckley – Andrew is a writer who shares some of his funny short stories on his website, along with a fairly regular podcast. Andrew is also one of the funniest and most entertaining people I follow in Twitter.
  • Sarah Nicolas – Sarah is an up-and-coming YA novelist, who writes speculative fiction. She will go far, and you can say you heard it from me first!
  • Lisa Iriarte – Yeah, that last name might sound a bit familiar. 😉 Lisa is my wife and a hell of a more prolific writer than I am. (Although not a more prolific blogger. Hmm . . . maybe she’s onto something.) She writes stories about kick-ass Xena-esque women—IN SPACE! What’s not to love?
  • William Henry Morris – (No, not that William Morris) is one of the smartest bloggers I know, even though he’s wrong wrong wrong about cliffhanger endings.
  • Julia Lizz – Julia is someone I just recently started following on Twitter. Along with random interesting bits of information, Julia is blogging about her experience growing out dreads!
  • Wendy Sparrow – Wendy is a fellow insomniac and writer. Judging from all the manuscripts she has completed, she puts those extra waking hours to ridiculously good use!
  • Jessa Lynch – Jessa is another one of the funniest people I know on Twitter. She’s also a Giants fan, so she’ll need cheering up after they inevitably choke this week—dropping by her blog will probably help!
  • Dawn Lajeunesse – Dawn is a study in perseverance and an inspiration to anybody trying to make it in publishing.
  • Pamela Findling – Pamela is a brand new blogger, a former computer programmer, and a freelance writer. Go give her blog some encouragement!
  • Suzanne van Rooyen – Suzanne is like half my age and has accomplished like ten times as much. Check out her blog for links to some of her short fiction published online!
  • Angela Quarles – Angela is another cool tweep. In addition to blogging about excerpts from her own writing, she blogs about hot men who read. So, um, yeah.
  • Lori Dyan – Lori is a writer with a great sense of humor—just make sure you keep her on your side, as her letter to the owner of Fancy-Pants Restaurant shows!

Okay . . . wow, that took a lot longer than I thought it would. Hopefully, though, now that you know a little bit about all these cool people, you’ll check out their blogs!

Posted in assorted nerdom, link soup | Leave a comment

Knowledge for Its Own Sake

Posted on January 7, 2012 by José Iriarte

Several weeks ago I stumbled across this interesting interview with Professor Brian Cox, who hosts the BBC/Discovery Channel show Wonders of the Universe. I haven’t watched the show itself—while there’s a lot of excellent programming on television, it’s just not something I have time to partake of while chasing my writing dreams—but the article suggests that it’s kind of like a modern take on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. That show was certainly very much on my radar as a teen during the 1980s*.

While Professor Cox sounds like an interesting person all around, I was particularly taken with what he had to say about funding science when the applicability of the information gathered isn’t immediately obvious.

You look at how much it costs and you find out, for example, the entire Space Shuttle program costs about the same as the U.K. spent bailing out its banks two years ago in one year. So, in one way, you look at it and say, “Well, that’s expensive.” It’s not expensive relative to some of the other things we spend money on. A Mars mission would’ve been possible by the U.K. on its own before we got into the mess with the financial sector. That just tells you that the money is there, but it gets spent on other things. It also sounds like science fiction, or that it’s ludicrous naïveté to think that these things should be priorities. When there are so many problems on Earth, why should we explore the universe? But our point, which is how we started this interview actually, is that by exploring the universe we have delivered modern civilization. It’s that way around. Reduced childhood mortality rates, increased life expectancy—all those things—they all come from people who are curious about how the universe works and finding things out.

There’s a very famous quote from [Alexander] Fleming, when he discovered penicillin, he said something like, “On September something 1928, I didn’t expect to wake up and revolutionize medicine.” He woke up playing around with little bits of mold in his kitchen, basically. He was just interested in moldy things. [Laughs.] And he revolutionized everybody’s life. Everybody. Virtually everybody who is over the age of about 40 or 50 is alive today because of antibiotics. Virtually everybody would have died if it hadn’t been for that. And it wasn’t someone trying to discover antibiotics that did it. It was someone exploring nature. So, the argument, “Couldn’t we just spend our money making everybody’s lives better?” We are doing that. That’s what exploration actually does.

Cox then regales the interviewer with specific examples of things the world takes for granted that we have as a result of the much maligned Hubble Space Telescope, CERN (of the Hadron Collider fame), and pure science as a whole: HTTP [the protocol that allows you to read websites in the way you do now], modern medical imaging technology, radio and television, transistors, computers, cell phones, etc.

That got me thinking about how we’ve created this phony cult of utility. I see this a lot in education: When am I going to have to use this? And most modern pedagogy buys into the idea that knowledge must be defended on these grounds, but I don’t. I think maybe instead of making up bogus examples of bakers who set up systems of equations to figure out how many ingredients to buy—examples that kids always see right through, incidentally—we should cite examples like the above.

In my writing experience, story ideas don’t tend to come when I sit down and say, Now I’m going to have a story idea. Instead they come when I’m pursuing something totally unrelated. Then I can sit down and flesh them out on purpose. I suspect science can be similar. While a lot of things are discovered when we actively search for them, I suspect a lot of those discoveries come because we were already close, because we already knew there was something to find. And I suspect that as often as not, what pointed us in a particular direction in the first place was not looking for a cure for common diseases or for a more efficient medium for storing data, but a pure desire to understand how the universe works.

Girl looking into microscope

Photo by Thad Zajdowicz

Let me come right out and say it: just about every damn thing that makes life nice, just about every thing that keeps us from living in medieval squalor, has at least some of its roots in a love of knowledge, in science pursued for science’s own sake. So when kids ask, “Why should I learn this,” why not answer, “You should learn it because learning enriches your life and your thought process. You should learn this because loving knowledge is what separates us from the animals who can’t look past their next meal. You should learn this because you have absolutely no way of knowing which of the things you learn will make your life better, or when, or how, but they will.”

At which point they’ll roll their eyes and go right back to texting about how lame their teacher is.

* Thirty years later, I still pretty much can’t say the word “billions” without thinking of Sagan.

Posted in assorted nerdom, math, teaching | 5 Comments

Perspectivefail

Posted on January 3, 2012 by José Iriarte

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
-David Foster Wallace

Last night I was participating in a hashtag chat on Twitter with a YA editor when I was struck, not for the first time, by how hard it can be to recognize that our own experience is not universal. First the topic of YA cover designs came up, and several tweeters expressed their preference for illustrated covers, as opposed to the photographic covers that are ubiquitous in YA these days. One of the editors in the chat mentioned that illustrated covers come across as very dated, which elicited some dismayed protests–until a Language Arts teacher chimed in with the observation that she found it difficult to get her students at all interested in books with illustrated covers.

You know, I kinda like illustrated covers myself, but her comment really drove home a point to me: we’re not the target audience. (By “we” I mean people in our thirties or thereabouts writing books for teens.) Sure, lots of grown-ups read YA. And, frankly, there is so much amazing writing in YA that there’s no reason not to, no matter what your age, and even if you’re not an aspiring author. Read it all you want, but remember that it’s not, at the end of the day, your literature. We may look around and see a lot of people our age reading YA and think that we’re a significant market, but we’re a drop in the bucket compared to the actual target audience. Publishers would be fools to put our preferences over those of teens.

More or less the same realization struck again later on in the chat, which is when I figured out what my next blog topic would be. 😉 The question of promotion came up, and the sending of ARCs to book bloggers was discussed. The same editor from before noted that her data suggested that book bloggers did not drive sales as powerfully as was often assumed. This led to at least a half hour digression, with people talking about how their blog had generated so many sales, or how they personally bought so many books based on blog recommendations.

“Anecdote” is not the singular form of “data.”

The folks who were trying to convince the editor of how powerful book blogs were couldn’t seem to understand that just because they buy based off blogger recommendations does not mean  this is how most teens select books to read. (It also made me think about how books make it into my wish list; it’s not through review blogs for me either.) I’m not sure what starts the buzz train rolling, but I suspect publishers are likely to have better data than bloggers are.

The same thing comes up in education. I see a lot of pedagogical theories that seem rooted in the notion that all kids are basically like we (teachers) (probably) were when we were kids. All kids are naturally curious. All kids want to learn. All kids benefit from taking notes using this particular format (and so we’re adopting it for the whole school). All kids benefit from “prewriting” papers to be written in this manner (and so we’re adopting it for the whole county). If all you know is how you were as a kid combined with your experiences with your own children, then it may be very difficult for you to accept, but your observations are not universal.

I wonder if the internet makes us more myopic in this way than we may have been a generation ago. (Not when it comes to pedagogy, of course. We’ve always been myopic there. 😉 ) One of the wonderful things about the internet is how it shows us that we are not alone–no matter how odd we are. For a lifelong nerd like me, finding out that there were people like me was a revelation. And I have this perception, in my day job, that quirky intelligent kids of today are empowered more than they’ve ever been before. But maybe it makes it too easy to forget that what we’re into isn’t what everyone’s into.

Are you a Browncoat? Me too. 🙂 When Browncoats rose up in outrage over the cancellation of Firefly, were you pretty sure they’d get it back on the air? When Serenity got the go-ahead, did you feel like vindication was at hand? Were you dismayed when it barely earned back its budget in its initial US run? You know we all supported “our” movie.

The problem is, nobody else cared. Astonishing as it was to believe, the rest of America did not share our fascination.

I think this is an important thing to remember for writers. I make no bones about the fact that I try to write stories I’d want to read.  I think this is pretty typical, but then maybe it makes us more susceptible than most to thinking that of course everyone wants what we want out of a story.

I don’t have any answers on that score. (Jeez, I hope you’re not coming around here looking for answers!) Maybe there isn’t really a way around that, when you’re writing. Or maybe if you’re enough in-tune with your target audience, you can internalize what they want. Or maybe it’s enough to write for you but not go around pontificating as though your tastes are everybody’s tastes.

Or you’re going to the special hell.

Posted in bookish life, teaching, writing | 6 Comments

Fundamentally, We Deliver Ourselves

Posted on January 1, 2012 by José Iriarte

If you look toward the right and down a bit, down where it says “Currently Reading,” you’ll notice that I’m reading a work of nonfiction. Unlike most people, apparently, I read way more fiction than nonfiction; in fact, other than writing books, I read almost no books of nonfiction at all. If you ever see me reading a book of nonfiction that’s not a writing book, it pretty much means one thing and one thing only: I have just had my socks knocked clean off by a work of fiction, and I can’t read any other fiction until I’ve reset my brain and my heart.

Well consider my socks blown pretty much across the room.

Please Ignore Vera Dietz

Image shamelessly stolen (though NOT hotlinked!) from the good folks at the other end of this link.

I’m pretty sure it’s going to take me a while to unpack all the different emotional reactions I had to this book, so I’m not sure I can be coherent in telling you about it. My first observations as I began reading were that Dietz had a great quirky voice and that King kept the reading experience unpredictable with things like the occasional vignette from the point of view of the pagoda in town, or from the point of view of “the dead kid.”

This doesn’t belong here, but since I’m about to make this book sound really heavy, here is where I’m going to put it: (See what I mean about being left babbling incoherently by this novel?) Vera is clever—more than that, she’s funny. Even when she’s pissed off and bad things are happening to her, she can zero in on the absurdity of all the self-important and cruel people in her life, and on the hypocrisy she sees in the adults trying to mold her while nowhere near done dealing with their own demons.

As I worked my way to maybe the quarter point or the third-of-the-way-through point, I was thinking I should mention this to my agent as a possibly good comp title for Vanishing Act: it’s predominantly a work of realism with a major emotional throughline, but it also features a supernatural element understated enough that you could wonder if it was a figment of the protagonist’s imagination. (It’s definitely for older teens than my book, though.) But as I closed in on the end of the book, I was devastated and inspired by the sheer magnitude of what the protagonist had to deal with.

And here’s where I start to doubt my ability to do Please Ignore Vera Dietz justice. How to tell you what it’s about, and what Vera has to deal with? Well let me punt a bit and begin by quoting from the description at Indiebound.org:

Vera’s spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie Kahn. And over the years she’s kept a lot of his secrets. Even after he betrayed her. Even after he ruined everything.

So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera knows a lot more than anyone—the kids at school, his family, even the police. But will she emerge to clear his name? Does she even want to?

When I first picked up Please Ignore Vera Dietz, it sounded reasonably interesting, but this blurb doesn’t begin to do justice to the emotional journey King takes her readers on. There are a fair number of YA novels already out there that hinge on unearthing what happened That One Fateful Night. That’s the structure of this book too, but it’s about so much more than that.

For me, (surprisingly) more powerful than learning what happened to Charlie Kahn was watching Vera and her father work through the damage caused to their lives when Vera’s mother left them. Watching Vera’s father move past his lifelong feelings of inadequacy and feeling unloved. (When was the last time a YA book showed you not only a teenager’s emotional journey, but an adult’s too?) Watching Vera figure out that not living out your “genetic destiny” isn’t about a checklist of superficial Thou-Shalt-Nots but about believing in your own worth and doing what you know is right even when it’s hard. Watching her learn that the adults that love her aren’t hypocritical, they’re flawed.

Hmm. I think this is what’s reduced me to a puddle: This is a book about flawed people getting better.

[Sounding heavy again, so let me remind you: This book is often funny. This book also portrays teenagers like they are, not like some parent’s wish of what teens were like.]

This is also a book about—to steal a phrase from the novel itself—dealing with the baggage other people may have packed for you. I’ve spent years telling anybody who would listen that Ordinary People saved my life. I have no doubt that Please Ignore Vera Dietz will do the same for somebody else, if it hasn’t already.

That said, this book might not be for everybody. There’s a lot that’s triggery here. Offstage pedophilia. Bad things happening to an unspecified number of animals. And, of course, teen death. The sorts of things some misguided parents or educators might want to pretend their teens don’t need to know about, yes, but also something that could be a trigger for a kid (or adult) who’s already had some rough experiences. (Or it could be cathartic, like it was for me. I don’t know.)

I do also have some quibbles. The portrayal of high school—specifically what classes high school seniors are enrolled in and what books they’re assigned—didn’t quite ring true. Jenny Flick also struck me as a bit, um, extreme. But then, really bad shit really does happen in real life, so maybe I’m the naive one for thinking she was over the top. Finally, I wondered if the contents of the cigar box, at the end of the day, really counted much as evidence in the legal sense. They seemed to amount to merely one kid’s side of the story, unless I missed something.

But my reaction to this story was centered not on these details  but on the emotional journey. Please Ignore Vera Dietz is a moving, powerful book. I wish I had the reach to put a copy  in the hands of everybody who happens to read this blog; two copies, actually—one for you and one to share. Failing that, I wish I knew how to be convincing enough when I say this: you should read this book. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will want to be a better person. And you will value the flawed people in your life that love you and are loved by you in return.

Posted in books you might enjoy, close to home | 12 Comments