Let’s Talk About SOPA

So, most of the people who come to this blog are writers — in the parlance of people who create nothing but billing fictions, “creators of content”. Many people in our shoes are worried about piracy; about people taking copies of our stories and other work, and making them available for free without our permission (maybe without alterations, maybe with).

And make no mistake, this is a problem. As writers, we have the right to choose how and whether our work is distributed, and to make contracts with others to distribute it. Copyright is a grand bargain — nobody has the right to our work except us, until long after we’re dead, at which point it belongs to everyone without hindrance. Pirates rob us of our moral and legal rights, and they depress the market for our work. We ask people to respect our rights in no small part because we write stuff that’s worth preserving.

The thing is, the Internet is worth preserving, too. It’s one of the best things that our society has ever built, and people are using it to spread knowledge, freedom, and happiness across the globe. It has made life measurably better for millions, going on billions, of people. Yeah, it has its flaws, mostly the result of selfish and nasty people trying to score points or making a quick buck, but on balance the Internet and the Web are good things. I have very little patience for people who want to tear it down for their own selfish ends, nor for those who want to reserve the right to arbitrate what can or can’t be here — because that’s basically the same thing.

My day job is in network security. I do research into making the Internet more secure, and I write software that supports the folks who do the day-to-day work. In other words, as an author I have a stake in this game, and as a techie I have the knowledge and experience to judge proposed fixes. On both of those bases, I am firmly against SOPA.

I oppose it for two basic reasons: First, it’s not going to do a damn thing about piracy. Most of the Internet is out of the control of the US, and most of it is in English. Consider the spotty success of the famed “Great Firewall of China” — a more draconian, hands-on approach to the problem of limiting the ingress of “undesired” information. It leaks like a sieve, despite the fact that they’re putting much more manpower on it, are allowed to block “just in case”, and are mostly dealing with the smaller part of the Internet that’s written in Chinese. In other words, they’re throwing much more effort at a much easier problem, and still having limited success.

Nobody (well, almost nobody) in the SOPA fight claims to want a Great Firewall for the United States… but it would take that much or more in order to “solve” the piracy problem they claim SOPA addresses. The best SOPA will do is raise the bar a little, make it tougher for casual pirates to get what they want. For a little while. It used to be hard to order shoes and find flight information on the Internet, too. Streaming radio used to be a real pain in the ass, and streaming video used to be limited to high-speed laboratory networks and only after fifteen minutes of downloading codecs and buffering. I’m pretty confident in saying, then, that SOPA won’t fix the problem it purports to fix.

The second reason I oppose it is that it opens up the Web as we know it to a number of abuses, with little oversight. Nobody with a site of any modest size will be able to know FOR SURE that they have not fallen afoul of this law without a) deleting every link visitors post, b) following every link they don’t delete, c) reading every post to make sure it’s not discussing circumvention. That’s like demanding that brick and mortar stores monitor their bathroom graffiti. If nothing else, comment spam means that almost every web site that accepts comments will eventually be an offending site under this act. And how long will it be until warring sites start trying to slip SOPA violations into posts to get disliked sites shut down? Sure, that’s not the *intent* of the act, but the courts have repeatedly said that the intent of a law does not need to be taken into account when applying it. Which means that the authorities will basically be able to shut down any site they want. Maybe we trust them to only want to shut down the worst of the worst, but we won’t know who it is we’re trusting, and we won’t know what instructions they’re given, and we won’t know what the penalties are for them for getting it wrong. We won’t know how overworked they are and how much they’re relying on outside lists of “offending sites” provided by who-knows-who.

We’ve been here before with the DMCA, and we’ve seen that the power to send out take-down notices has been abused, not least because there’s no real penalty for a slipshod, scattershot, “better me safe and you sorry” approach. We’re not coming at this situation de novo, we’re coming at this having already seen the kind of abuses that get perpetrated with even less authority than is being asked for.

So, for you writers who’ve been tempted to support SOPA to protect your own work, let me boil it down for you:

1) It won’t work even for the major multi-billion dollar copyright holders, let alone for you

2) In exchange for a broken hair-brained scheme, one of the major accomplishments of our generation (a free and open Internet that has already improved the world more than Hollywood ever will) will be seriously endangered.

Read more over at the EFF site.

 

For those of you visiting from outside the US, I can only apologize for the fact that our Congresscritters are such miserable whores and morons that we have to go through this rigmarole. I can offer only the small condolence that I won’t be voting to re-elect any of mine.

 

2011 In Review

2011 has been an exciting year for me as a writer. I had my first fiction sale, my first podcast sale, and went to my first convention (Boskone). I won a Codex contest, and did respectably well in another. I signed my first autographs, at Readercon. I bought way too many fountain pens.

In terms of the actual writing, I submitted 13 stories a total of 38 times (twice as many submissions as in 2010) to 20 markets. I sold three stories, got four personal rejections (again, twice as many as in 2010) and have two outstanding. I did not manage to keep to my goal of at least one submission each month, but I came very close (missing only November). To keep myself honest, I posted my Duotrope listing for the year below, under the cut.

I made enough from those sales to buy myself a respectable dinner with a glass or two of wine. I haven’t kept as close track of the number of words, but I figure it’s around 100,000 — a longish novel’s worth. That includes the zombie novella that I shelved, which I plan to get back to, and a healthy start to a novel, which I may not.

My goals for the year ahead are pretty modest: I want to at least repeat the performances that are within my control: finish another 10 stories (or, say, 5 stories and a novel?), get the whole batch onto the market at least 40 times. I plan to attend Boskone and Readercon again.

Happy 2012, everyone, and thanks for being around in 2011!

 

A Very Short Seasonal Story

Here’s a quick one for you, apropos of the holiday. Lots of people have drawn this connection before, but I’m not sure too many of them really considered how deep it goes. Enjoy!

 

Suspension of Disbelief

Over on Whatever, John Scalzi pokes a little fun at the folks who (are? profess to be?) thrown out of the Lord of the Rings by the viscosity of the lava in Mount Doom. He makes an excellent point that the suspension of disbelief is a highly personal thing, subject to much head-scratching by observers (and especially by writers, who may veer into hair-pulling and sobbing). My comment there started to get overlong, so I’m posting it here.

First, I take his point that the fires of Mount Doom are set up as being magical and important, and are presented in a context where trees walk and orcs are born from mud. He is perfectly correct that it would have been reasonable to have magical or otherwise nonstandard lava in Mt. Doom. And if Jackson had made the lava blue or sparkly or put little morphing orc faces in it or otherwise made it obviously magical, I would have bought that without blinking. But a difference of viscosity is a useless, thoughtless difference, especially in comparison to the more overt differences he mentions, like the shrubbery being alive or the landscape giving birth to orcs, that border on the metaphorical. Subtle differences aren’t always a bad thing — not at all! But subtle differences are more likely to be mistaken for errors.

Those changes he mentions don’t come out of nowhere, either: there are plenty of hints given that we’re about to see something weird: spooky forests where orcs disappear, enough cobwebbing to put a Halloween house to shame, the presence of Christopher Lee, etc. When something comes as a surprise, the work is more vulnerable to booting the viewer/reader out of their suspension of disbelief than at other times, and it takes skill and preparation to avoid that, plus the knowledge of the degree to which disbelief needs to be suspended. If Peter Jackson knew how viscous lava really was but still wanted this particular visual effect, surely he is savvy enough to know how to clue in his geologist viewers that this is what he was doing? Because he can do it well, when he fails we suspect a deeper failure.

Anything that can be done well can be done badly, of course: surely you can envision a version of the Lord of the Rings in which the Ents are presented in such a way as to guarantee that the audience bursts out laughing at the sudden appearance of talking trees?

Perhaps a better comparison would be, not to Ents, but to horses. Writers are always getting horses wrong, treating them like hairy motorcycles. Add hay, drive all day, add more hay, drive all night! Most readers will never know the difference, but people who know horses get thrown out of stories by that sort of thing. If a fantasy writer *needs* to treat a horse like a motorcycle, then that writer needs to prep the reader — by, for example, praising this particular breed of horse, or having a set of magic horseshoes, or… well, that’s getting a little silly, isn’t it? In order to know when it’s actually necessary to treat a horse like a motorcycle, the writer needs to know an awful lot about horses, I should think.

Besides, we as readers and viewers can generally tell the difference between “someone thought this through and decided it should be this way” and “someone was lazy or thoughtless.” Let’s say that I set a fantasy story in rural Ohio and, in among the unicorns and magic wands, describe all the people there as having Southern accents. If all the wonderful folks who know the region then complained that this threw them out of the story, it would be ridiculous of me to counter with, “What, but the unicorns and orange Congressmen were OK?” I could argue until my face turned blue that this was actually a deep philosophical statement about the realignment of culture in a magical world, but would you ever really shake the feeling that I’d just never been to Ohio?

 

Through Other Eyes

One of the real joys of writing is getting to see your work interpreted by other people. Cover illustrations are always wonderful — getting to see how a talented artist viewed your characters and world is a real treat. Audio recordings and adaptations are also fun, especially when the production values are as high as, say, Drabblecast’s. And I mention that particular venue because I had the enormously good fortune to get a Doubleheader episode this week with two of my very short stories, Unintended Consequences and Expired. I love the cover art, and Norm did an amazing job with the audio. It was enjoyable hearing the musical selections in the background: I thought the use of music in Unintended Consequences was particularly good and really added something to the ending of the piece.

How about the rest of you out there? Have you had a similar experience of getting to see or hear your work through the eyes and ears of another artist?

 

In Praise of Super-Short Fiction

While I haven’t been blogging lately, I’ve had quite a rush of productivity. I wrote a Halloween story that was quite well-received by beta-readers, and I’m about 8k words into a (probably 20k word) novella that I expect to have finished by the end of the month. Rather than do NaNoWriMo this year and wind up with 50k words I’d need to either expand (80k seems to be the minimum spec-fic novel length these days) or vastly cut, 20k seems like a perfectly reasonable tradeoff between writing long and not burning out. It’s a hard length to sell, of course, but I’m extremely happy with my results so far. If push comes to shove, I’ll publish it here.

I have also been experimenting with extremely short fiction (100 words exactly) at the suggestion of one of the masters of the art. I’ve been posting my favorites over on the Drabblecast forums (one of which appears in this week’s Drabblecast, Episode 222!) It’s been an interesting experience — fiction at that length is very pared-down and tends to turn on a twist. It’s difficult to get right, and very easy to botch. There’s not a lot of room for complication and nuance, but it’s surprising what you can do with some carefully-chosen verbs and adjectives. In particular, it’s been good practice at word tactics, trimming all of the fat in a piece, learning how to change a few words into one while preserving the punch so that more story can be fit into the same number of words.

For example, compare:

Pitr rationed out the precious crimson fluid, fingers tight on the control knob. One drop. Two… Oh, good lord, dare he?

Yes! Three!

Hands trembling, he twisted the knob to stop the drip. The bottom of the tube bulged oily red liquid.

He took the jar from under the drip, carefully mixed it, then threw away the stirrer. The jar felt warm; it seemed to faintly glow. He dipped a carrot into the sauce. It hissed.

The student’s eyes bulged. “Are you sure you don’t want to try it first, Professor?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I don’t even like spicy food.”

to:

Pitr rationed out the precious crimson fluid, fingers gripping the control knob. One drop. Two… Oh, good lord, dare he?

Yes! Three!

Hands trembling, he stopped the drip. The bottom of the tube bulged oily red liquid.

He took the jar from under the drip, carefully mixed it, then discarded the stirrer. The jar felt warm and glowed faintly. He dipped carrots into the sauce. They hissed.

The grad student’s eyes bulged. “Don’t you want to try it first, Professor?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I dislike spicy food. Wait, stop!“

The student relaxed.

“Don’t eat until the camera’s going. OK, now.”

I’m not saying that either one is genius fiction or even worth more than a chuckle. But you can see some of the process there, how I decided that the ending wasn’t quite satisfying enough, I wanted a slightly more complicated ending, adding a dozen words of story without increasing the word count. So I went back and removed and rephrased. For example, changing “he twisted the knob to stop the drip” to “he stopped the drip”, or even pluralizing “carrot” so as to remove its article and save one word. (Here’s a challenge: Can you cut that second version to 90 words? 80?)

The best thing is that as exercises go, this really has a tremendous bang for your time buck. The result isn’t always (or maybe even usually) a good story, but the practice of going from idea to execution and then to polish really is worthwhile.

This is the kind of exercise recommended by Ken Rand’s The Ten Percent Solution, which is basically advice on cutting down any story to make it leaner and clearer, and as a result, stronger. I’ve tried it on a few short stories, and while it can be a real pain to do right, the results is almost always considerably better. Every now and then I think to myself that I’ll try it out on one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, or an early Lovecraft, just for fun. If I do, I’ll put the result up here for you all to laugh at me.

 

It All Makes Sense Now…

I think it’s reasonably clear that The Flintstones doesn’t take place in the past, it’s actually far-future bio-engineering science fiction. They’ve got resurrected dinosaurs with lots of genetic tinkering to make them useful as cars and garbage disposals, engineered to understand commands (and, inadvertently, to make smart-alec remarks). Thanks to advanced climate engineering, they can walk around barefoot all the time, indeed be barely clothed. They’ve eschewed plastic and electronics technologies, and proudly ushered in a new simple Stone Age, a kind of ultra-Mennonism.

Or maybe it’s a dystopian future, a warning about the horrible lengths we’ll have to go to once there’s no more petroleum, and we’ve used up all the trace metals needed for modern electronics?

When I brought this up on Twitter, the subject came up too about where The Jetsons takes place with respect to The Flintstones. Might they take place on the same planet at the same time? Hmmm…

 

Fifty Out, Year in Review

According to Duotrope, I just hit a new milestone: 50 short story submissions! That’s 11 short stories written, completed, and submitted at least once in the last two years. I had at least one submission a month for the last year. Five stories are currently out on submission.

All but eight of those submissions were in the last year — it is not a coincidence that one year ago this week marks my getting home from Viable Paradise XIV.

Looking at what I’ve been writing, this past year has seen me branching out a lot more. I spent a lot of time on a zombie novella that isn’t ready to circulate yet (and may not be for some time), but I’ve also got a very promising fantasy short making the rounds, and a Halloween story just hitting its first markets this week. I’m still writing mysteries (and have a great one on back burner while I think through the minor characters) but I’m much more comfortable now outside that very narrow subgenre. I’ve been experimenting with style as well, with 1st person narration, stronger voices, and more heavily stylized prose. Moreover, I do think that each new story has been in some way an improvement over the stories that went before.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to, and what I’ll still be up to. And! I finally found my copy of Toulmin’s argument book, so I’m looking to proceed on that series of blog posts soon.

 

Forever a Student

One of the things I like most about the Writer Lifestyle is just how accepted it is to spend a great deal of time doing research just for the sheer hell of it. (The rest of your time should be spent writing, naturally) Lately I’ve been reading up on WWI-era submarines and trying to brush up on my Japanese. (If you want to learn a language, by the way, Rosetta Stone is on sale with pretty deep cuts at Borders right now; I’ve been very happy with their system so far.)

So now I’m going to ask a horribly gauche questions (of writers and non-writers alike): where do you get your sources? When you want to just generally learn about stuff, where do you go? We all know about the easy places like Wikipedia, and we know about our local libraries (even when we scandalously neglect to use them) but what else is out there?

Here are a few of my current favorites:

TED talks are great little snippets ranging from a few minutes to half an hour or so. Weird stuff, like hey, you’re probably tying your shoes wrong.

The Economist magazine, specifically their Science and Technology section.

Khan Academy, which is making an effort to put a whole slew of high school- and college-level course lectures online for free, ranging from basic math to a lecture series on the bank bailout.

Podcasts such as Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, which is a weekly hour-long show on pretty random academic topics ranging from the Minoan civilization to the graviton to the Sturm und Drang movement. All of those are available on the site, by the way, and Bragg takes care to include a number of authorities on the subject in question.

iTunes U has been an excellent resource, though of spotty coverage and very difficult to search. I listened to a course on game theory out of Yale that was very good (though occasionally tedious during classroom management sorts of activities)

 

So how about you? Where do you go to further your education?

 

Do You Write In Books?

I was going through my old textbooks and reference books, trying to tidy my office a bit (an only slightly less hopeless endeavor than writing fiction) and found myself looking al all the notes I’d written in them. Now, I do not highlight, as that is an abomination, but I used to be in the habit of reading any sort of non-fiction with a pencil in hand. These days I tend not to do that, except when reading technical articles, because often I intend to give away the book afterward or sell it to a used bookstore: I’ve been trying to keep the number of books in the house down so that I don’t get overwhelmed, but in the process I wonder: am I getting less out of those books that I read, including the ones I keep?

So now I’m curious what habits other people have in terms of annotating books. Do you do it at all? Non-fiction/fiction? Do you write more or less than you used to?