This sums it up nicely.
anxiety vs panic: do you know the difference?
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Author Archives: Andrew Butters
I’d Buy That For A Dollar
After an unplanned hiatus, I am back, hopefully with some consistency. Mother’s Day, the long weekend at the cottage, and the fallout from the big garage sale / birthday party sleepover have occupied my last few Sundays, but I think things are back to normal now.
The garage sale actually got me thinking about this week’s blog post. As I stood on my driveway in front of tables upon tables of our unwanted or not-so-useful stuff (seriously, we had a set of fireplace tools – and we don’t have a fireplace!) the goal was simple: get rid of it. ALL of it. If it was in the garage sale pile there was a 0% chance it was making it back into our house. Anything that didn’t sell was to be immediately packed up and donated to Value Village (who support local nonprofits in our city).
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| Photo by Stuart Miles at http://freedigitalphotos.net |
When you’re in this situation it’s important to keep your eye on the goal, which is to get rid of your stuff. The goal is not to make as much money as possible off your stuff. If there was anything that we thought we could get real money for we put it aside and are going to sell it on Kijiji. This is a situation where everybody wins. We make a little bit of cash for our stuff, lots of people get things they think they want or need for really cheap, and Value Village gets a bunch of donations (where they are turned around and sold for really cheap, with the proceeds helping local organizations).
One thing I noticed about the garage sale shoppers was they almost all had the same thing in common, and that was the desire to get whatever they wanted for as cheap as they could without it being considered stealing. As such, a whole lot of things sold for one dollar. It didn’t matter what it was either, a buck was the magic number. In some cases, it was four things for a dollar (like books) or two for a dollar (like RCA cables for a stereo), but the magic number was clearly a dollar.
That got me thinking about books.
A very popular price point for books on Amazon is 99¢. Which, if you’re buying a full-length novel is a spectacularly good price. More popular still though? FREE. Yup, as it turns out giving stuff away for free is still popular with consumers. It won’t pay the bills, but it could end up working in your favour in the long run. If you have a series of books, for example, having the first one free is a great way to get people hooked on your product and coming back for more, dollars in hand. Drug dealers have been using this tactic for decades except writers are selling a different kind of fantasy. Robert Chazz Chute is taking this approach for his Hit Man books (great stories featuring a hit man by the name of Jesus Diaz) and I’d recommend you read the first in the series Bigger Than Jesus and see if it strikes your fancy (I downloaded the first one for free, bought the second one right away, was a beta reader for the third, and I loved them all).
Another way to get people hooked on your stuff is to write a serial. As Will Van Stone Jr. explains on Kate Tilton‘s website, a serial can be a great way to highlight your creative storytelling ability, and more importantly, your character development (things much more difficult to do in short fiction). This segues nicely into one of the other reasons I’ve been quiet on the blog lately. I was picked up by the OCH Literary Society to write for them. My task, aside from some occasional blogging? Serial fiction. *gulp*
Well, as my last post (and my first blog post for OCH) mentioned I had an idea so it was time to have the rubber hit the road (or fingers to hit the keys, as it were) and get started on it. I spent the first half of the month working on it and as I got deeper and deeper into the first installment I began to see, in a practical sense, what Will Van Stone Jr. explained in his article. People who read this blog have an idea of my writing style, but what they’re reading is mostly first person non-creative stuff. With the OCH serial, I have been given an opportunity to not just hone my skills in the creative fiction arena, but also showcase my style, storytelling ability, and character development to a larger audience. As nervous as this makes me, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t totally pumped.
I’ve got stuff that I’ll sell you for a dollar later in the year (and the years that follow), but for now, have a read. It’s a few thousand words every few weeks, and its’ free. The only thing I can’t promise is that it won’t be addictive.
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| The Book of Good: Installment 1 |
~ Andrew
The Book of Good: Installment 1 by Andrew F. Butters
And so it begins…
That’s Why I’m On This Oil Rig
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| (c) Agência Brasil – Reprinted under the creative commons license |
Last week I wrote about karma. Some people think it’s bunk and others are all on board with it. I’m a baptized Anglican who gave religion an honest-to-goodness chance, more than once at different points in my life I might add, only to land on Atheism as the thing (or lack of a thing) that makes the most sense. At the same time, I am drawn to the notion of there being a balance to the Universe as well as some sort of Order of Things. Or maybe it’s simply my mind playing tricks and if I stare long enough at the randomness maybe patterns will appear?
Karmic principles can be boiled down to the most basic of concepts: Balance. Put good out, get good in return; put bad out, get bad in return. Finding (and explaining) the order among the chaos, however, can’t be reduced to anything as simple. At least I haven’t been able to do it, and on a few occasions I’ve tried.
Does everything happen for a reason?
That’s the big question, isn’t it? My brain tells me, “Nope. It’s all random shit. If it’s working out for you then it’s just dumb luck, and if it isn’t then deal with it,” but my gut tells me something else. Maybe it’s as simple as making as many good decisions as possible in an effort to obtain the best possible result. Then again, I’ve certainly made my fair share of bad decisions and things have come up roses more often than not so maybe it doesn’t matter.
What does it all mean?
Ugh, these conversations annoy me. I don’t know. I’m fairly convinced it doesn’t mean anything; it just is, and when it’s done there is nothing. But then stuff like this happens:
Back in 2013 I was gearing up to participate in NaNoWriMo and decided that I would start a Facebook support group for the month long event. I had been a member of one such group a year earlier and it was a big success. Having befriended many writers on Twitter and Facebook I felt that there would be good uptake, and there was. A good sixty or seventy people joined and many of us went on to make our 50,000-word goals.
When NaNo finished I kept getting asked if I would keep the group alive as a writers’ group. It seemed like a great idea so we conducted a poll and “Writers Without Borders” was formed. The group became private shortly thereafter (too many non-participants and riff-raff selling stuff) and now members add friends and acquaintances as they feel is appropriate.
Leap ahead (from then, but about a month before now) and a friend of a friend of mine makes a comment about Chuck Wendig. I can’t remember where, but I think it was on Facebook. Anyway, since I have a big man crush on Chuck and this person was mutual Facebook friends with something like 39 people I had to friend her. I’m not sure why, but I just felt compelled to click the “Add Friend” button. So I did, she accepted, and shortly thereafter I invited her to WWB.
Turns out she was in the process of starting the OCH Literary Society and she put out a call for writers. So, I submitted the first 1,000 words of the novel I’m currently editing for consideration. A few days later I got an email saying I was accepted. The site needed fiction writers, but I could blog if I wanted. I said I would do both and we landed on once a month blog post and some serial fiction with installments every couple weeks.
This reminds me of the show Connections, in which the host James Burke would walk you through a whack of seemingly unrelated events only for you to end up learning that a poem written in the dark ages is the reason we have indoor plumbing today.
My connections went like this:
- 2011 – NaNoWriMo (failed writing No Known Cure with WAY less than 50,000 words)
- 2012 – joined random NaNoWriMo Facebook group (won with No Fixed Address – the prequel to No Known Cure)
- 2013 – started my own NaNoWriMo Facebook group (won with The Book of Good“)
- 2014 – NaNoWriMo group becomes Writers Without Borders
- 2015 – Andrew invites Allie into WWB
- 2015 – Allie founds the OCH Literary Society
- 2015 – Andrew submits 1,000 words to Allie for consideration
- 2015 – Andrew becomes a staff writer (serial fiction) and occasional blogger for OCH
You can read more about my first OCH blog post, We Are Writers, over at their website. It focuses on “community” origins of my connections as opposed to the existentialist beginnings of this post.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veaJCc0Z41w]
Oh, and remember those 1,000 words I sent my new friend, Allie, that got me into OCH? They were the first thousand words of my first (and first failed) NaNoWriMo in 2011.
And the serial novel I’ll be contributing to OCH? Well, it’s none other than my successful NaNoWriMo after the creation of what would become WWB in 2013, which I had shelved after 56,000 words because I didn’t know what to do with the second half of the story.
How about one more…
Allie’s last name is Burke. Same as the host of the show Connections.
Strange things are afoot, Ted. Strange things indeed.
~ Andrew
P.S. You might be wondering about the title I chose for this post. Sorry, I couldn’t resist that little inside joke, which I’ll let you all in on now:
Back in the winter of 1994 I was wrapping up my first year a the University of Waterloo and a bunch of us were in Kirby’s room (because he had cable – stolen from the study room across the hall, but he had it nonetheless). Someone was flipping through the channels (a practice which drives me completely nuts. Just choose something to watch already!). Flip – something stupid. Flip – something uninteresting. Flip – some British dude standing in the middle of the ocean saying, “That’s why I’m on this oil rig!” Flip. By the time we flipped to the next channel everyone had processed the absurdity of what we had just heard and started laughing out loud. None of us knew what the show it was or who the dude on the oil rig was and that phrase would be forever used whenever any one of us encountered a non-sequitur.
Jump ahead to the summer of 1996 and my pot smoking, guitar playing, physics genius (but socially awkward) roommate and I were on the couch watching re-runs of the show Connections, with the aforementioned James Burke. He was doing what he does and jumping us through time and leading us toward the ultimate connection when the scene cuts to him in the middle of the ocean and he says, “That’s why I’m on this oil rig!”
Well if I didn’t just jump off the couch and point at the TV and scream, “Ah ha!”, like I had just caught someone in the act of a heinous crime. My roommate just sat there completely confused, guitar in one hand, joint in the other. He’ll never know how awesome I felt at that moment.
After two years of waiting, the connection was made.
Karma Chameleon
Karma:
“Good intent and good deed contribute to good karma and future happiness, while bad intent and bad deed contribute to bad karma and future suffering.” [1][2]
Wikipedia’s two sources sum-up this notion quite nicely. I know many people that don’t believe in karma, but personally I like the idea of it. I’m not keen on the idea of a prime mover or god that keeps a tally and ensures the proper cause and effect, but for some reason I can totally get behind a Universe that is constantly attempting to keep itself balanced, with its entropy increasing, but at the same time keeping some order within the disorder.
I know I’ve experienced moments where I’ve put something bad out and received something bad in return. I’ve also put a lot of good out into the world and received a lot of good in return. Now, I don’t do good things with the expectation that good things will come back to me, but I do try to make sure I’m putting more good out there than bad. I find that the reward for doing a good thing comes from simply seeing the impact it has on someone else. So I suppose I’m greedy in the sense that I really like seeing other people smile.
Once, I tried to fill the karma tank on purpose and it worked out for me, but generally speaking I try no to abuse the system. It was near Christmas time and I was in Toronto with a car full of people on a really busy street on our way to Ikea. The roads were pandemonium. About two blocks from the store, I stopped short of an intersection to allow a few cars to get into my lane. Someone in the car made a comment about that being a nice thing to do and I responded with, “Have you seen this place before? I need all the parking karma I can get!”
At that exact moment, a truck pulled around the corner with “KARMA” written in big brown block letters on the side.
We all just kind of sat there in traffic with our mouths agape as we inched our way closer to the parking lot. Upon entering the craziness that is an Ikea parking lot at Christmas, I drove to the closest row to the door. You never know, right? Well wouldn’t you know it, someone in the closest non-handicapped spot by the door pulled out just as I was approaching. Boom! Wish granted.
We’ve all had personal experiences just like this, regardless of whether or not you chalk them up to karma or simply coincidence. Either way, there’s no denying that there are ebbs and flows in everyone’s lives. It’s not too often, however, that you get to witness these ebbs and flows for a complete stranger. I’m talking about karma in action. I mean, actually seeing it unfold before your eyes in all its glory. To witness this as an unaffected third party is remarkable.
This train of thought all started one day at the office a little while ago. Someone in one of the back rows of the parking lot had pulled in a little too far and their front tires sunk into the swale (because we have one of those eco-friendly parking lots with grass swales instead of concrete barriers). He asked for help from a couple co-workers, but they weren’t getting him out. As the saying goes, he was done stuck good.
On the surface, this looks like a terrible situation, and it would be if not for the fact that after refusing to allow someone to call him a tow he proceeded to grab his things from the car and then leave our parking lot on foot and walk to the building next door. You see, his lot only had spots at the back and he didn’t want to walk so he parked in the back of our lot, closer to his building. I should point out at this point that this is not allowed. He was parking illegally in our lot to save him a few steps on his way to the office. Well, that’s what you get, buddy. If that’s not a perfect example of live-action karma I don’t know what is.
In fact, because I was riding a bit of a mean streak that day I went down and took the picture you see above and pasted it all over the Internet. I also left him a note on his windshield with nothing on it but the word “Karma.” On top of all that our building leaseholder is going to bill him for the repairs to the eco-friendly swale. That seems like a lot of negative kick back for a minor parking infraction, but who am I question the Universe?
Call it what you want or call it nothing at all. You don’t need to be religious or spiritual to see that you should try to minimize the bad things you do. In other words, don’t be an asshat. As a corollary, you shouldn’t do good things expecting good things to happen in return. The return will take care of itself in due course.
It’s really quite simple: if you do good things then it stands to reason that others are more likely to do good things as well. Everyone benefits and we don’t have to keep track of the quid pro quo exchanges. Be content to let karma (or whatever) take care of the math.
It is said that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. I think of karma as the luck portion of that equation. The preparation piece is the practice of doing good things. Opportunity is obviously the situations you put yourself in where you can do good all those good things. The more good you’re willing to do and the more chances you give yourself to it, the luckier you’ll be.
In summary, be excellent to each other.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bTvDKcxZuY]
~ Andrew
A Tradition Unlike Any Other
In March of last year I was exchanging text messages with a friend about how twice in the last five years my birthday was cursed. My brother-in-law died on my birthday back in 2009, and that year, 2014, while away on a cruise with the family our cat died on my birthday as well. After the usual “I’m sorry to hear that” / “That sucks” type comments that two friends such as the two of us would exchange, he sends me this: “We have to get you a new birthday.”
He tossed out a few ideas including the Sunday of The Open Championship, which has some sentimental value to me as the weekend of The Open is the time when a group of guys from university all gather at his cottage to just be guys and drink, golf, water ski, and eat steak (and unhealthy amounts of Peanut M&M’s). Realizing that July was a tad too removed from my March birthday he found the solution: Masters Sunday.
Masters Sunday was perfect. I LOVE The Masters. Love it. The Masters means spring is here. It’s usually warm enough to get up on the roof and take down the Christmas lights. The NHL playoffs and the quest for the Stanley Cup are but days away. The Masters is home to some of my favourite golf memories (watching, not playing, obviously). Going to see a round at The Masters is on my bucket list.
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| I’m claiming fair use of this logo but if that doesn’t fly, Augusta National, please don’t sue me. |
I would still celebrate my birthday in March, of course, but since 2009 it lost a bit of its lustre. My friend’s thought was that if I received a text message wishing me a happy birthday on Masters Sunday that some of the lustre could be restored. He was right. The afternoon of Sunday, April 13, 2014, while I was watching Bubba Watson on his way to his first Masters victory I received my first Masters birthday text. I should have taken a screen capture or saved the text or something, but for some reason I didn’t. The memory will have to suffice and I’m documenting it here, now, before my memories one day fail me.
Jim Nantz once famously said of The Masters, “It’s a tradition unlike any other.” He was right, too.
This whole thing got me thinking about some of the other traditions this particular tournament embraces and how this wasn’t always a good thing. Keeping things positive for a moment we have the tradition of the amateurs invited to the tournament and how they get to stay on the grounds in the famous Crow’s Nest. I can only imagine the feeling of being a teenager or newly minted twenty-something amateur golfer and getting to play that course and stay on-site.
Another famous tradition is the Par 3 Contest. Held the Wednesday immediately before the first day of competition golfers play the Par 3 course at Augusta National with their kids as caddies. Players without children often use a parent or sibling or sometimes a celebrity they happen to be friends with. There’s a prize awarded to the winner of a crystal bowl but many of the players forego their chance at winning by letting their kids putt out on some of the holes. Aside from the awesome father / child experience this creates, taking themselves out of of the Par 3 competition has other advantages as no winner of the Par 3 Contest has ever gone on to win The Masters in the same week.
Of course, traditions are all fine and dandy so long as we’re not doing them because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” or out of bigotry, racism, or fear. When this happens, at best, we end up as a bunch of monkeys that won’t go up a ladder and don’t know why.
Augusta National’s membership is by invitation only (it’s a private club and there is no application process) and for a long time invitations were only extended to powerful or influential men. White men (their caddie policy was spectacularly racist until 1983 as well). That changed in 1990 when invitations started to go out to black men and other non-whites as well.
In 2002 there was a famous disagreement between then Augusta chairman Hootie Johnson and Martha Burke regarding the exclusion of women from the club. The dust up between the two resulted in The Masters airing commercial free for two years to avoid putting the sponsors in the position of having to pull their support for a tournament that was not gender inclusive. In spite of this, sponsors were on board again in 2005 and the club still didn’t have a single female member (citing other such clubs as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America, college sororities, and the Junior League as examples of other gender specific organizations). However, in 2012 Augusta National invited two women into its club: Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore.
So, Augusta National changed (albeit at a glacial pace, but they changed) and is still filled with many traditions that can be appreciated by golfers and golf fans all over the world.
Happy Birthday to me!
~ Andrew
One Day Closer
Time. It moves in one direction: forward; and for every living thing on Earth, there’s only a finite amount of it. Time passes whether we like it or not and if you’re not careful it’s an easy thing to waste.
People nowadays are always so busy. At least they appear to be. When folks hear about all the creative endeavours I undertake, and all the things I do outside of work, the most common question I get is, “Where do you find the time?” Along the same lines, when I listen to people talk about all the things they have to do in their day one of the statements I hear most frequently is, “I don’t have enough time!“
Well, I have an answer to the question and I’m calling bullshit on the statement right now.
Let’s look at the breakdown of a typical year for someone like myself. First, here are some high-level things about my post-secondary education life that will help give you an idea of how I got to where I am today:
Two years after I graduated in 1997 I married the girl I met in the first week of University. We now have a son, a daughter, a house in the suburbs, and two cats. I’m on my fourth office job/career since 1997 and my fifth house since 2001. It doesn’t take a genius to see that in the last twenty-something years, I’ve spent a lot of time husbanding, working, parenting, and apparently moving (I guess I was making up for spending the first nineteen years living in the same house, sleeping in the same bedroom, and mooching off my parents).
Wow, has it really been that long since I graduated? I suppose that’s a nice segue into another common question, “Where does the time go?“
Where does the time go, indeed? With a little bit of hindsight and a spreadsheet, we can sort this all out. So let’s take the time and have a closer look. With finances, if you delve deeper into where you’re spending your money it becomes quite easy to figure out where you can save. Time, as it turns out, works the same way.
There are 8760 hours in a year.
- I spend 8 hours a day sleeping (or trying to).
- I spend about 1 hour a day cleaning, grooming, going to the bathroom, and performing other solo activities (I suppose you could shower with somebody but I can guarantee you that you run the risk of it taking even longer than it would on your own, for various reasons I’ll leave up to your imagination).
- I spend another 1 hour per day preparing and eating meals.
- I spend about 260 hours in the year on family commitments like taking the kids to sports or driving them places or helping them with their homework.
- I spend about 182 hours in a year on health and exercise (yoga, walking, shooting hoops out on the driveway, etc…).
So out of my original 8760 hours, I only have 4668 remaining (or roughly 53%).
That means 47% of my time, right out of the gate, is spoken for. That’s okay though, all those things I have spent it on are important. I’d probably be better off if the health number was higher and my kids would be better off if their homework/activities number was higher too, but in terms of committed time, non-negotiable time, I’m doing okay. Plus, I still have more than half a day to work with, right?
“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day. You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.”
Roger Waters
As you can see from my background I have an office job. That job is a 30-minute drive in each direction from where I live as well. So what’s that worth in terms of time?
Well, if you count from when I get in the car in the morning to when I pull into the driveway in the evening my job takes 10 hours per workday out of the total. If you take out weekends, statutory holidays, and vacation/days off I end up working roughly 226 days out of the year. That’s another 2260 hours.
Now, where does that leave me?
My total remaining time for the entire year is 2408 hours.
That’s a titch more than 46 hours a week.
That’s an average of about 6.5 hours per day.
I have TONS of time. I have all the freaking time in the world!
But wait for a second, those averages assume a 365 day year. As mentioned, I don’t work on some of those days, and as you’ll see in a second they are bringing up the average considerably.
If we split my life into days in which I work and days in which I don’t work here’s how it unfolds:
- On workdays, I am left with about 1 hour and 48 minutes per day “free time”.
- On non-work days that number spikes to 10 hours and 30 minutes.
So that’s how much time I have. As you can see, when I am working I have WAY less time than when I’m not working. This makes sense as someone else is paying for me to do things for them. Since I happily take their money twice a month it only seems fair I don’t spend most of my time doing other things.
If I want more than 1 hour and 48 minutes on a workday then it has to come out of one of those other (supposedly non-negotiable) allotments. Lately, it’s been the exercise portion of the program. But how have I filled that time? Well, 60% of the time (about half an hour) has gone to writing or editing or some other creative endeavour. This is a decent substitution. The other 40% of the time has gone to watching Netflix or Facebook (or both). This might be a fine substitution for someone else, but for me it’s anything but, especially when you consider that a good portion of my 1 hour and 48 minutes at my disposal already goes to stuff like that.
Non-work days tend to fill up with various obligations so the 10.5 available hours are a bit misleading. Long weekends are family weekends up at the cottage. It’s a two-hour drive each way (typically getting there on a workday and obliterating my hour and forty-eight, and then some). Soccer tournaments, family outings, birthday parties, yard work… you see how this goes. Perfectly reasonable things start taking up the time, and meanwhile, time keeps on slippin’… slippin’… slippin’… into the future.
But here’s the best part, there should always a little bit left. Try it. Get out your spreadsheet and write it all down. You’ll see.
A good number of you will look at your list of Things I Do and you’ll notice that you work too much, or don’t sleep enough, or sleep too much (lucky jerks). Another thing you will notice is that the list will easily divide into two categories: have-to-do and want-to-do. Once you’ve captured all the things you absolutely have to do, you can shift the blocks around and allocate a little more here and a little less there with all the things you want to do.
Here’s an interesting exercise:
List your job hours in the have-to-do column at the minimum you are contractually obligated to work (a more difficult task for self-employed folks and entrepreneurs, but do your best to quantify the minimum). If career advancement is something you desire then you put that in the want column, attach time to it, and then prioritize it.
You see, the time is there, accessing it is just a matter of prioritization. If you allocate time to one block make it a conscious decision and be aware of what other block pays the price. Want everything you want exactly when you want it? I hope you can adjust to getting a lot less sleep (Pro Tip: not recommended. Sleep is really good for you). Another approach would be to ensure time is always taken from lower priority items – the want-to-do stuff. If you can do that you’ll be surprised at how much time you actually have.
Remember, there are only 8760 hours in a year. Use them wisely. You never know when you’re going to run out.
Jeepers Flipping Cripes!
For those of you in writing circles you have no doubt heard about CleanReader. Much hullabaloo has been raised over this app in the past week and due to (justified) outrage from the author community this abhorrent app/reader has decided to remove its entire library completely and make some modifications to its app based on “feedback”.
For those who may not be aware, CleanReader is an app that (until recently) sold books and allowed the user to set a “cleanliness” setting. Once that setting was established the app would scan through the book and replace all objectionable words at that cleanliness level (e.g. “fuck” would likely be eliminated at a low setting but you’d have to jack it up to squeaky clean levels to get rid of the words less objectionable to puritan eyes).
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| Image courtesy Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net |
Once authors knew this was going on a great many of them went completely bat shit crazy for a bevy of reasons. In the link from the previous sentence Chuck Wendig talks about consent. This comes in a couple of flavours.
First, authors/publishers weren’t even asked if their works could be sold in conjunction with the app. Not so much as a single email saying:
“Oh hey there content creator/owner! We have this app that’s going to materially alter the text in your work and we’d like to sell your varying levels of offensive literature alongside it to maximize the efficiency of the bowdlerization process. Is that cool?”
Anyhow, once authors/publishers started to find out the floodgates opened and requests, nay, demands started pouring in for books to be removed. The popular indie author website Smashwords demanded that ALL its titles be removed. Legally the app company had to comply, and to their credit they did so in rapid fashion. Not to their credit, however, is the fact that they had to do it posthaste because they didn’t do any of the appropriate consultation to begin with.
Next there’s the obvious objection from authors that the words in the books are precisely the words that were intended for the reader. No others. Order from what’s on the menu please. No substitutions! Writers take their words very seriously, and they should. Words are our art. Manipulating them (and manipulating them for profit, no less) without consent is illegal (it’s more legally grey in the US but it’s black and white pretty much everywhere else. It’s the literary equivalent of the metric system. Take a gander at Moral Rights).
“But you can buy a copy of a book and mark it up all you want.”
True. If someone wanted to buy a book and cross out all the “fucks” and write “darn” over top, that’s fine with me. So if this app had a setting that let the user say something like, “If you encounter the word “fuck” in this book please replace it with the word “darn”. If you encounter the word…” you get the idea. It would be the digital equivalent of taking a pen to a book they bought. I’d have to be okay with that. Of course, that’s assuming that the digital copy of they book they have is actually theirs, and get this, it’s almost always not.
In just about every instance you’re not actually buying the ebook outright. You’re buying the privilege, by way of a licence, of reading said ebook on a personal device. In this case, it’s tough nuts fuckknockers, you get to read it as is, just as if you borrowed a physical book from the library. First sale doctrine does not apply.
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| Image courtesy adamr at freedigitalphotos.net |
In summary, the not asking permission to bundle up book sales with this piece of shit app pisses me off. The fact that they’re manipulating an author’s words without permission pisses me off. The fact that some self-righteous app creator just up and decided what words were “bad” REALLY pisses me off. Sure, there are tolerance settings, but by whose assessment? The self-righteous app creator, that’s who. They’ve decided not just what words to replace (and the tolerance level at which to replace them) but also what to replace them with. Chuck Wendig has a nice round-up post here with some fabulous examples. By my assessment it is censorship, and as we learned two posts ago I’m not cool with that. This debate even started a glorious pissing contest between Jenny Trout and I on Twitter in which she went all arms-waiving-bonkers (it was good times).
So, if you’re one of the very few who think CleanReader is just the type of thing for you and you want books that appeal to your “sensibilities” I suggest you just go find some books that meet your morally high standards and then you can save yourself the app purchase.
Alternatively, and I’m going to borrow a wonderful turn of phrase from Chuck Wendig here, you can jolly well fucking write one yourself.
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| Image courtesy nattavut at freedigitalphotos.net |
~ Andrew
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Word Worms (and those other things)
Perfunctory.
This word has been rattling around in my head all on its own for two days now. I can’t shake it. Worse than an ear worm (where that song you just heard has you humming the melody all day as you walk around at work) this word worm is taunting me. Taunting, I say! Those familiar with the word will notice just a wee bit of irony with the fact that I’ve been unable to escape it:
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It’s as if my muse decided to implement guilt in the most creative way possible (as muses are wont to do):
“I couldn’t help but notice that you’re being a bit of a slacker. So, rather than bestowing great inspiration upon you I’m going to stick this one word in your head, and nothing else, until you get the damn point. Fifteen pieces of flair ain’t gonna cut it in this Chotchkie’s, pal! Now get writing.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg-6wbETtbo]
To which, on most days, I would tell my muse where to stick it much like Jennifer Aniston’s character in Office Space did to her boss a few scenes later. This week is different though. Off the heels of my controversial (at least in some circles) post on freedom of expression (not freedom from consequences) last week, it turns out I was in dire need of a post topic for this week. So here we are.
Not as frequently as the dreaded ear worm, but likely more frequently than non-writers, I find myself with one particular word bouncing from ear to ear literally begging me to use it properly (see what I did there?) Most of the time I can’t uncover an explanation for it, with perfunctory being the exception. It’s usually a random word that I have no recollection of hearing in conversation or reading in print. Eventually it finds a crack in my head (there are many) to slip out through and I’m left wondering what exactly it was and why I gave a damn about it for so long. I think I’m going to start keeping a list.
List of Andrew’s Word Worms:
- Perfunctory
Now that I’ve managed to use perfunctory more times on one page than I have in the entirety of my writing career it has transitioned from a word worm into something else. Have you ever typed a word so many times that it starts to look like you’ve spelled it incorrectly? That’s where I am now with perfunctory. Blogger isn’t giving me a squiggly red line underneath the word so I know I’m okay but it still does’t look quite right.
This happens with even the simplest of words too. I was writing a software “how to” document another lifetime ago and after every action I needed to instruct the user to use the mouse to click on “Exit”. After typing that word dozens and dozens of times my eyes started playing tricks on me. Every time I looked at it I was checking to make sure it was spelled correctly. Exit. Exit. Can I get the definition please? Can you use it in a sentence? Exit. E-X-I-T. Exit.
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| http://www.oddee.com/item_96509.aspx |
I tried Googling for the name of this and came up dry. We need a name for this. Any ideas?
Also, what are your favourite word worms? Let me know in the comments below, and for the record I’m looking for more than a perfunctory effort.
~ Andrew
Consequences of Freedom
I wasn’t going to use her name because I didn’t want her to get any more attention, but I feel quite strongly that if I sit here twiddling my thumbs and complaining to the couch cushions that that’s the same as condoning what she’s doing.
So here we go…
Until two days ago I had never heard of Jenny Trout. That’s actually a lie. I had heard of her but only in the context of a blog post by Chuck Wendig a couple months ago. He mentioned how he liked her blog (but didn’t agree with one of her positions). Aside from that, I couldn’t have told you two things about her.
Then, two days ago Anne Rice posted a comment on Facebook and Twitter about her support for the website Stop the GR Bullies (GR refers to Goodreads). It’s a website dedicated to calling out authors who bully other authors (for reasons other than a negative review, which I’ll take up in a future post). Anne’s comment was this:
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| If you click the image it will take you to Anne’s original Facebook post |
Attached to this post was a link to an article on STGRB on Jenny Trout, who has taken it upon herself to become the self-appointed literary moral compass of the Internet.
The summary: a (once) best selling author is actively encouraging the banning and/or pirating of another author’s work.
STGRB does not link directly to Jenny’s website but there is a screen grab in their post that contains the URL. I typed it in manually and read Jenny’s article and two things happened:
- I felt sick for giving her the site traffic
- I gave her a very unflattering nickname. One I’ve been talked out of using for a variety of good reasons (as an aside, I have wonderful writer friends)
In her rant Jenny freely admits that she hasn’t even read this highly-offensive-it-must-be-banned book. She claims it is about the glorification of racism and rape and how this subject matter has no business on the shelves of your local bookstore or on the hard drives of your personal e-readers. It contains BDSM erotica (because that’s all the rage now, with Ms. Trout even penning titles under a pseudonym). It’s also about an actual President of the United States and his actual slave mistress. Oh, and in the book the characters are vampires and/or werewolves. And one more thing: this story is just one in a series with the same underlying characteristics: #BDSM, #erotica, #POTUS, #mistress, #vampires, #werewolves. (hashtag: not my thing).
Ms. Trout rightly points out that since the offensive work is protected under the First Amendment there is no legal recourse for removing the book from shelves (digital or otherwise) so she’s taken it upon herself to start a crusade.
She’s demanding her fans and readers demand Amazon, B&N, Kobo and the like remove this content immediately. If that doesn’t work, and you feel you absolutely must read this book, then go pirate it so at least the author and publisher don’t get any money.
Um…. excuse me?
I wonder, what would Jenny Trout’s publisher think if another author from another house took issue with one of her books and started a campaign to pirate them?
Let’s be perfectly clear: racism and rape are bad. Together they comprise the Daily Double of humans at their absolute worst. However, in a free society, no one person / group / organization / government gets to take away the right for someone else to write about it – and by my assessment that’s exactly what Jenny is trying to do.
Express your displeasure with the book to your heart’s content. Tell people it’s not worth reading, that it’s a glorification of All Things Terrible, that they are bad people for even reading the synopsis. But don’t you dare go down the road of book banning. Book banning is half a step removed from book burning, and we all know what history (and Ray Bradbury) has to say about that, now don’t we?
Free speech does not mean you are free from the consequences of saying or writing things to which others object. For the book and author Jenny Trout saw fit to attack, the consequences will be determined by the reviews it receives, the number of sales, the number of future sales or publishing deals for the author (or lack thereof), and so on… The system is already set up to self-regulate in this regard. Time and reader response will tell.
As for Jenny Trout, her consequences appear to be the ostracizing of a whole swath of readers (and probably publishers) that aren’t going to touch her books or her blog with a ten foot fishing pole – myself included.
~ Andrew