Author Archives: Andrew Butters

Continued Tales…

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… from the other, other Cambridge

… from a bar

… from Rhode Island

… (and from the road, again)


This is the thrilling conclusion to my 2000 km solo road trip to the North East United States (and back). What began with an absolutely fabulous Pearl Jam concert in Buffalo and a visit with one of my favourite writers in a wee town so far out of the way in New York that Ithaca can be heard saying, “Where is that place anyway?” continued on without incident and spectacular weather – until the border and my last 90 minutes of driving.

First, after visiting Gordon Bonnet I was treated to a 6 hour drive to Cambridge, Massachusetts – some of it along I-88. Where’s I-88 you ask? It’s a good question, and one I received a lot (apparently not many folks make the Binghamton to Schenectady run these days):

There’s our friend Ithaca way out on the left. Bahsten sitting wicked awesome on the right. Thanks to Google for the map.

Honestly, with most of the drive along I-90 it wasn’t too bad, especially when you have scenery like this to stare at the whole way:

Yellows were prominent along I-88. I dub thee “The Golden Highway”.

Anyway, on with the travels. I was visiting a lifelong friend of mine in Cambridge, MA (I can’t possibly keep typing that state out in full) and every time I visit we go do a few touristy things that I haven’t done before. I love museums and history and such, but being Columbus Day there wasn’t a lot open. We went to Walden Pond where I could have stayed taking pictures all day and then some.

A lone maple leaf floats at the edge of Walden Pond.

The afternoon was filled with more fun and excitement as I got to fill my sports and history void all in one shot with a tour of Fenway Park! It wasn’t a game day but Major League Baseball had control of the field so we weren’t allowed in the dugout or on the field, but the view from atop the Green Monster is something to behold.

Panoramic view of Fenway as seen from the Green Monster

For those keeping track, I promised fun times and beverages with some pretty awesome writers on this trip. Do not despair! My first full day in Cambridge, MA ended with a trip to the Cambridge Brewing Company with none other than the author of The Prodigal’s Foole, R.B. Wood. This is a guy I’ve only interacted with on Facebook and Twitter and meeting him in real life was a thrill. I’m not just saying that because he bought me dinner.

Richard likes beer and was drinking a dark ale, I believe.
I’m the pretentious ass at the beer place drinking red wine.


Tuesday was a pretty laid back day hanging with my bud and his 14 month old son. No need to go into much detail except to say that it was great to spend some quality time with my friends in my favourite city in America. Oh, we went to the aquarium where I managed to take this picture:

Please caption it!

Wednesday brought a short drive into Rhode Island. I’d only ever driven through it once before and happened to blink so I didn’t really see much of it. Make no mistake, even though people like to use “… the size of Rhode Island” as an expression it’s actually pretty big (you’re welcome, RI tourism).

While the state is small in size and population it is home to at least one seriously good writer, and I got to meet him! Alex Kimmel is a native Californian that through a series of interesting events has ended up in a quaint little town in the middle of Rhode Island. If you’re looking for a scary book to read check out The Key to Everything. Right now it’s sitting at #4 in its genre on Amazon, after two Stephen King novels and ahead of another King and an Anne Rice. I told you he was good.

A great guy, great writer, and #4 on the Amazon horror list – and me on the left.

So there you have it. Wednesday night was spent staying at a cousin’s place in Connecticut and Thursday was a looooooonng drive home. With no tolls and no stopping for food and gas and no border crossing and no traffic Google says it’s 7 hours and 58 minutes. It turns out that not many people live in this Utopian Google Land of Perfection and it took me a full 10 hours. Again, with the awe inspiring beauty that are the fall colours of New England and upstate New York it felt like a lot less.

Wishing you all happy travels and good writing!

~ Andrew

Tales…

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… from the road!


This week I’m at the beginning of a mini vacation and whirlwind meet ‘n greet tour of a number of wonderful places in the northeastern United States… and Buffalo. With special Fan Club tickets to the Pearl Jam show in Buffalo on Saturday night, airline tickets being what they are, and me with my new fuel efficient Mazda 3 (Sport, with SkyActiv™ technology), I made the executive decision a few weeks ago to drive from Buffalo to Cambridge, Massachusetts while making a stop in upstate New York to visit my friend and fellow blogger/writer Gordon Bonnet (his twitter handle is @TalesOfWoah and his blog is Skeptophilia).


But before that I had a few things to sort out. Step one is getting across the border. Last time I made the trip I was harangued at the Peace Bridge by an overzealous guard. In addition to the usual “What’s the purpose of your trip? Where are you staying?” questions the following exchange occurred: 

Guard: “How do you know your friend?

Me: “We grew up together.” 

Guard: “So you’ve lived in the United States?” 

Me: “No he used to live in Canada?” 

Guard: “So why is he living in the United States?” 

Me: “He went to grad school in Wisconsin and then got a job in Chicago. He switched jobs and moved to Cambridge. Met a nice girl and got married.” 

Guard: “So is that why you’re visiting? To get a job?” 

Me: “No sir. I have a job. I just want to visit my buddy.” 

[Handing me back my passport] 

Guard: “Have a good trip.”

Seriously?


This time the trip across was a lot smoother, even if it did take 45 minutes to complete. With it being the long weekend and with there being a Bills game on Sunday it was amazingly busy. The border guard did rummage through all my stuff and check the wheel wells of my car for contraband but other than that it was uneventful. Oh, a lady a couple rows over was detained for reasons unknown, so I guess that was exciting.

Saturday night was spent in a packed arena in the armpit of America watching one of the most exciting bands of the last two decades. Pearl Jam has graduated from 1990’s grunge to good old fashioned Rock and Roll and they put on a show that I certainly won’t forget. Smart phones being what they are I managed to capture a few things. Here’s a taste (oh yeah, I caught myself a Mike McCready guitar pick too):


Sunday brought a quick 90 minute drive down to see Gordon. It was everything I hoped it would be, and then some. I’ll admit it, I have a serious man crush on him and he did not disappoint. Aside from writing a thoroughly entertaining blog, he’s written some thoroughly entertaining books, and he’s a SCIENCE TEACHER! Anyone who knows me knows that science is my favourite -ence. 

We chatted about writing. We talked about art and creativity. I got to see his son working on his art (glass blowing and other assorted glass creations). He made me a cheese and bacon sandwich. He even let me see his writing hole… er… workspace. He probably has the best window ever for looking out of. The picture doesn’t do it justice:

 

So it’s been an eventful weekend to say the least. Tune in next week as I continue my quest to meet as many writers as possible. With any amount of luck I’ll get to tell you what Richard B. Wood drinks at the pub, what kind of flooring is in Alex Kimmell’s house, and where A.J. Aalto’s favourite place is to dump a body.

Stay tuned!

~ Andrew

The Great Distraction

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I am not giving you parenting advice. I’m going to repeat that just so I don’t get a mass of overly defensive wingnut parents ripping me a new one on my blog or on Reddit: I am NOT telling anyone how they should raise their child. Okay, now that we have that out of the way I’d like to share an observation about something I have noticed over the years:

There are some people out there who are remarkably good at keeping children distracted.

I was thinking about this at swimming lessons with the kids last week. Neither child was in an area of the pool that I could see particularly well so I’m on my iPhone just jotting down ideas for future writing and waiting for one of my kids to come into view (my kids are a little older so I’m not sitting with my face pressed to the glass and quiet clapping / waving / thumbs upping at every fart bubble they produce).

A small child, probably 3 or 4 years old was bored out of her mind waiting for her older brother to finish his swim lesson. The viewing area was absolutely packed with parents and this child was clearly seconds away from pitching a fit of epic proportions. I mean this kid was about to seriously explode. I’ve seen that look before. Every parent has. My first instinct was to plug my ears and duck.

Then, an amazing thing happened. The older woman wrangling the child, cool as a cucumber, pulled a pencil and random scrap of paper out of her purse, handed them to the child and said, “Hey sweetie, can you help Nana? I need lines drawn all over this piece of paper. It’s really important. Can you draw lines all over this for me?”

I’ll be damned if the kid didn’t just sit down right there in the middle of the floor and start scribbling all over the piece of paper. She did this for a solid ten minutes, every so often looking up and showing her work to Nana, who would smile and pat her on the head and say something like “Wonderful! Keep going! You’re such a good helper.”

Based on my observations at swimming, and throughout the last decade of hanging out in places where there are a ton of small children (Gymboree, the library, various parks & playgrounds, the mall) I have identified the two main groups of people that are insanely good at keeping a restless child sufficiently distracted: teachers and grandmothers.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a whole host of other people out there who are capable of keeping a child occupied for a few minutes when you need them to, it’s just that this is a particular skill that you’re either professionally trained in, or have honed over decades on your own.

The rest of us, well let’s just say that many have difficulty channelling it into anything productive. What not enough people realize that you’re exercising the same muscle group in procrastinating as you are in keeping a child occupied.

Even fewer realize that it’s the same skill you need to get some ideas down on a page and start writing. If being wrong looks a lot like being right, then distraction looks a lot like discipline. This is what sets successful writers apart from all the rest of us. It isn’t a particularly new concept, but it is one that you can easily grasp by comparing the kid that wants to pitch a fit with the ominous blank page staring you in the face:
Goal:
Stop Kid From Pitching Fit
Goal:
Write Something
Problem:
Kid is bored!
 Problem:
I am lazy!
Solution: 
Distract the kid
 Solution:
Distract your mind (huh, what?)
Application:
Find something, anything, to get the kid’s mind off of whatever boring non-event you’ve dragged them to
 Application:
Find something, anything, to get your mind focused on whatever writing you need to accomplish 
Why It Works:
You have given the child a purpose. Kids like accomplishing things: “Look what I did!” They also like pleasing grownups: “I helped Nana!”
 Why It Works:
You have given your distraction a purpose. You like accomplishing things. You also like pleasing yourself… er… never mind

It’s surprising how simple this is to accomplish. Here’s a quote from Henry Ford:

“Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.”

You see, it’s all about the end goal. A while back I made my goal “idea generation”. With this in mind I watched two consecutive hours of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee but the whole time I had the goal of “idea generation” at the front of my mind. Watching creative people interact in a humorous way got my creative juices flowing. By the end of it I had blog topics mapped out for the rest of the year.

Distract with the right intent and you’ve turned procrastination into dedication.

Apply the same logic to whatever you need for your work in progress. If you need a crime to occur then go to the internet and read about some of the best unsolved capers. If you need a way to kill someone, go to YouTube and search “epic fail”. The list goes on and on. Just make sure that you’ve got your WIP handy and ready to go. Soon, you’ll find that you’re not paying as much attention to your distractions. You probably won’t even notice it’s happening, but what you will notice is that you’ve got a nice messy page filled with words, and you’ll feel good about that.

You can even work in a little reward system. For me, once I had my ideas all jotted down I flipped to some Louis C.K. stand-up for nothing but a cheap laugh. You can make the reward whatever you want, just don’t make the reward the goal. The goal is to get your work done. The goal is the main course and the reward is just the nice little treat at the end of your meal. Besides, everyone knows that if you listen to Nana she might just have a treat for you hiding in her purse.

~ Andrew

Thanks to http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ for the use of the following images:

Raiders of the Lost Art

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A couple weeks ago my writer and blogger friend Gordon posted about a couple of wing-nuts who were making him shake his head. One particular woo-woo of interest was Starre Vartan who was writing for the Mother Nature Network and has serious issues with the decline of cursive writing. Among other thoughts on the matter she had this to say: 

 “They [children] won’t be able to read the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or anything written during the Civil War.  They’re missing an entire portion of our country’s history.”

To which Gordon had a few things of his own to say. His thoughts are best summed up by the title of his post: There’s this thing called “reality.” You might want to check it out.

Given that a large portion of the history of writing has religious significance I’m actually quite surprised that Ms. Vartan didn’t take the “if you don’t write in cursive you’re the spawn of the Devil” route but then again, maybe she’s not quite a full-fledged member of the Tea Party.

There was no app for that.

At any rate, we’re not here to discuss how the lack of cursive is ruining the world. Or are we?

The art of writing goes back thousands of years. Longer if you consider things like hieroglyphs (which we won’t). There is some debate surrounding this but let’s just say that the first novel ever written was Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory and published in 1485. The thing is, by this time the printing press was well established and while the book may have been written in script it was published using typography.

The way I see it, all cursive writing did was draw a line between the classes. If you couldn’t read and write then you were worthless; either dirt poor or a slave, or both. If you could read and write then there was hope for you, but you were likely just part of the working class. If you could craft a beautiful line of perfect cursive text though, well, then you were extremely well educated and most likely well off financially. After all, you could afford to practice, practice, practice. All those quills, paper, and ink weren’t cheap you know.

When public education became more prominent the whole idea of writing as a discipline made sense. Everything was written and everything had to be read. There needed to be a system in place to keep it all in order. Cursive writing to the rescue! Plus, it had the added benefit of giving the children a fabulous exercise to assist with their dexterity and develop part of their brain that would not normally get this much attention. My daughter was still being taught cursive writing a couple years ago, but I’m not so sure it will be around for my son a couple years from now.

I dream of the day I never have to practice this with my kid

I say good riddance.

As far as I can tell, the tablet computer is pretty much bringing an end to all of it. It only took 500 years to get from that first printing press to having a printing press at the fingertips of anyone who knows the alphabet. In the grand scheme of things, that’s a pretty impressive achievement.

We’re supposed to be moving forward, not the other direction. Teach kids to print neatly and recognize printed letters and you’re teaching them to interact and understand the world as it is now and as it will be tomorrow. I’m a tactile guy and ideas flow more freely when I physically write them down. Plus, I tend to absorb more if I write it (apparently there’s a reason we remember what we write), but it’s a personal thing. There is absolutely no need for me to be concerned about the quality if I have the means to put it into some readable format for others if I need to.

The Tenth Circle of Hell: Cursive Writing

What I find more absurd is how the battle between touchscreen and qwerty came and went so quickly. Given people’s history of digging their heels in on similar issues, I was sure this debate would rage much longer and much more furiously than the whole cursive writing thing. It would appear that our friends at Blackberry appear to be the only ones still clinging to hope that the qwerty ship won’t sink.

Have you ever seen a teenager on a touchscreen smartphone? We don’t need to be teaching them cursive; handheld computers have taken care of that. We don’t even need to be teaching them how to spell; autocorrect and overly relaxed (i.e. stupid) online dictionaries have taken care of that. Put cursive in art class where it can receive proper attention because the other classes need to teach them how to live in the modern world. Now, all we need is a class teaching them how to look someone in the eye and have an actual conversation.


Peas in a Pod

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One of the things that I think makes writing such a solitary activity is the fact that more often than not it’s something that’s done alone. Of course there are exceptions: the occasional novel has more than one author, but to say it happens once in a blue moon would be remarkable understatement; non-fiction often has more than one contributor; research papers can be found with scores of names underneath the title; and if you’re a fan of comedy, some of the funniest bits have been written by a comedy duo.

You have to go back a long way to see the beginnings of the double act, and even though it was more than 80 years ago you’ll probably still recognize the names – they were that good:

  • Laurel and Hardy
  • George Burns and Gracie Allen
  • Abbott and Costello

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=airT-m9LcoY?rel=0]

    Probably one of the funniest bits of all time. Pure comic genius.

    As we move into the golden age of television some equally familiar names start to appear:

    • Bob Hope and Bing Crosby
    • The Smothers Brothers
    • Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner 

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGTPPrkgovw?rel=0]
    Funny men for more than half a lifetime. They’re in their 80’s now and still got it.

    The list goes on and on:

    • Dan Aykroyd & John Belushi
    • Gene Wilder & Richard Pryor
    • Mike Myers & Dana Carvey
    • David Spade & Chris Farley
    • Cheech & Chong
    • Jay & Silent Bob 

    Granted, some of the pairs listed to this point are another class of comedian altogether and never had to rely on their audience being fantastically high to get a laugh, but they all leveraged the concept of a comedic duo to fantastic success.

    So what is it that makes a the double act work so well?

    In my assessment it’s because everyone needs a life partner, someone who provides those things that you happen to be lacking yourself. Life, in all is frailty, requires balance. Unfortunately, what this means is that at any given point in time one of you gets to be the idiot, and if any of you have seen my talk “I See Dumb People” you’ll know that it’s usually the dude.

    Image courtesy Linda Ryan

    For better or worse, I’m the idiot in my relationship with my wife. We’ve known each other for more than twenty years, been together for more than eighteen, married for almost fourteen, and I am unable to count the number of times I’ve heard her say, “It’s a good thing you’re cute.” That’s just how it goes. I married my straight man. Um… you know what I mean. Stop judging me, it’s legal in Canada and some part of the U.S.

    Comedic duos feed off each other and the good ones have that chemistry that just clicks. They never miss a beat and the audience in turn feeds off them and are ultimately able to relate to one or the other. In relationships it’s slightly different: instead of serving up jokes, the straight man is there to keep the idiot alive just long enough for the insurance money to matter.

    ~ Andrew

    Frame of Mind

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    I find it fascinating to watch people in the process of creating. I don’t know why this is but I think it has something to do with the fact that I have my own special brand of “getting in the mood” and I’m looking for some sort of validation that I’m normal.  More and more lately I suspect that I am not.

    I was on the phone with my wife and she was telling me to get some words done while she was out and the kids were asleep. Sage advice from a woman who knows me very well and wants me to finish this damn book. The only problem was that I was exhausted from a week of working the day job and I wasn’t in the mood to write. Plus, with only 13,000 or so words left in the novel I was beginning to realize that an outline would have been a good idea. These were some of my notes for unfinished chapters:

    • Insert some stuff about the police in here doing police-type things
    • Hint a bit more about extreme nefariousness
    • Peter and Dana come across some disturbing shit

    This is going to win me Kafka Prize, I can feel it.

    Kafka1906
    Franz Kafka

    As someone with a history of traumatic brain injuries I can attest to the fact that sometimes the best ideas are the ones that come to you when you’re head is not on straight. Out in the real world they are usually called “bad ideas” and people end up losing their jobs, or their loved one, or their friends; but for creators a bad idea is still salvageable – it’s just going to take a little bit of creativity.

    A while back I did a post about giving birth to ideas; a process that in my opinion is significantly less interesting compared with what actually happens when someone starts to work on that idea and begins to flesh it out and bring it to life.

    For most people, getting into a creative mindset is nontrivial, and for some finding the Creativity Zone is almost as elusive as finding the G-spot (only the Creativity Zone actually exists). You may be thinking, “But it looks like people do it effortlessly” Well these people are few and far between. They are amazing to watch and invaluable to interact with to be sure, but they are definitely a rare breed. For the rest of us schleps, finding the right frame of mind is a fair amount of work – just like anything else.

    Frame of Mind (I know, I know…)

    Even one of the most creative minds on the planet will tell you that there’s a process to it, that it doesn’t just appear out of thin air like a catapulting cow that’s just been hurled over the wall of a castle. If you have 36 minutes you should watch the John Cleese on Creativity video. It completely changed the way I approach things. If you don’t I’ll sum it up for you:

    If you’ve got a nice quiet place to work, about 90 minutes, and access to some like-minded creative people then you’ve got what you need to foster a good amount of creativity.

    This brings us to my problem from the second paragraph of this article. Exacerbating it is the fact that there are very few moments in a day where I have all those things at the same time. The best I can do most days is have the kids asleep, a couch to sit on, the Internet on my laptop, and 120 minutes before I go to bed. The other night it turns out that this was close enough.

    What I did then, was sit by myself with my manuscript open in one window and YouTube and Facebook in another. My cursor was set to the part of my story that was in need of attention. Then, I watched a good half an hour of Louis CK stand up comedy. This guy is really funny and I find that laughing out loud has a way of relaxing the mind. Then I hit up a friend on Facebook who had a few minutes to spare. We chatted for a bit and just tossed random silly ideas back and forth. The last one I came up with went something like this:

    “I think I’ll write a story about a window washer. A transsexual window washer who doesn’t use scaffolding but instead floats down from the roofs of buildings on one of those big Cirque du Soleil velvet ropes, squeegee in hand, washing the windows and winning the hearts of big city Dallas.”

    All he needs is a squeegee

    What?!

    I had been reading something about transsexuals recently and my story takes place in Dallas. There was that Cirque person who tragically died a while back during a show, so that was probably in the back of my mind as well. As for the window washing, I can’t explain it. I think I just like the word squeegee.

    Squ-ee-g-ee.

    SquEEEEE-gEEEEEE.

    Once I hit that point I was off to the races and I flipped over to my MS and just started typing. I guess it worked because 24 minutes later I had more than 700 words on the page and was still going strong (anyone who has done NaNoWriMo knows that this is a pretty good clip).

    So there you have it. One example of what it took to get from “I’m not in the mood to write” to real life words on a page. I hereby dub it The Squeegee Process™. Is is fascinating? Probably not to most people, but it works for me, multiple concussions and all.

    If you have a creative process you’d like to share please comment below. I’d really like to know that I’m not alone.

    ~ Andrew

    Once Upon a Hashtag

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    LOL, OMG, SRSLY, #WTF

    Between text messaging, social media, and dictionaries adding the most absurd “words” it is clear that the English language is changing at a torrid pace. If I’m being honest, I can say that I purposefully avoid anything to do with all this gosh darned newfangled hogwash poppycock. My text messages contain full words only interrupted by the occasional smiley face or ampersand (to convey a specific emotion or provide a more logical grouping of words) and the same goes for my social media posts.

    Listen up: I’m a writer. If I can’t say it using Oxford English Dictionary words from before the year 2000 then I am failing miserably at my craft and should feel embarrassment and shame.

    Keep in mind that I am also human, which means I am also imperfect. A quick search of my Twitter feed for the two most common non-words that are now words (LOL and OMG) came up with the following:

    (The tweet at the top links to this particularly funny cartoon, the second tweet from the top is a conversation between myself and Christine Reid – that makes absolutely no sense to me today, the second from the bottom links to this old blog post of mine with a shout out to Wren Emerson, and the bottom tweet links to an old Hockey News article I dug up in my archives)

    I think that’s a pretty damn good track record. Out of more than 7,600 tweets there are exactly 4 that use stupid acronyms (none in the last 18 months when, arguably, I started to get more serious about writing). If you’re into percentages, that’s somewhere around 0.05% I think I’m going to start creating badges to put on blogs and profile pictures:

    Like anyone else I have my vices and whether it’s on Twitter or on Facebook I have a habit, an addiction really, to all things hashtag. Hashtags, as they kids are saying, are all the #rage.

    For those not so well versed on the nuances of social media here is the definition from our friends over at Wikipedia:

     Hashtag

    A hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol #.[1][2] It is a form of metadata tag. 
    Short messages on microblogging and social networking services such as Twitter, Tout, 
    identi.ca, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Google+ or Facebook may be tagged by putting “#” 
    before important words, as in: 

    #Wikipedia is an #encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

    Hashtags provide a means of grouping such messages, since one can search for the hashtag
    and get the set of messages that contain it.

    Well that clears that up.

    It’s probably best to look at a few examples of what the hashtag provides in terms of added value. I took the liberty of doing a hashtag search on the most popular site for hashtags (Twitter) and one of the newest sites to start incorporating the hashtag (Facebook). Naturally the hashtag I chose to use as my search was #hashtag:

    If you take even a cursory glance at the results you’ll be able to see that some people are using the hashtag #hashtag in their posts for no other reason than to have a hashtag in their post. I wonder if they think they’re being clever? #lame

    So what’s wrong with just searching for any old word? Context. Not that there is a lack of context, but plain text searches tend to give you more of it than you need. The hashtag acts as a consolidator to group similarly contextual posts together so that not every one that contains that word shows up in your results (though Twitter will often return search results from all the other text in the tweet as well. #sigh)

    For a while, Facebook refused to get on board the hashtag train. In fact, some people would get downright angry if you happened to drop a hashtag into a status update or comment. When it was introduced a few months ago there was a flood of hashtag use and I have to admit, even this hashtag lover was mildly #annoyed. What’s more, I did a quick check on searches for hashtags of a questionable nature on Twitter and Facebook and the latter is censoring their search results to a much higher degree (not cool, Facebook. Not cool at all.)

    That aside, in my tweets and Facebook statuses, and yes even in the occasional text message (this is how you know you have a hashtag problem) I will continue to use, and advocate the use of, hashtags. Right or wrong, for better or worse, it’s the path I have chosen. #YOLO

    As far as this post is concerned I just can’t take it any more, so I make this promise to you now: you won’t see any hashtags in future posts or formal writing of mine ever again. Never mind the fact that I won’t feel at all bad if someone catches me breaking my promise. That just means someone is actually reading my stuff, and I’m perfectly okay with that. Cleverness #FTW!

    ~ Andrew

    Your Comment Is Awaiting Moderation

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    Pre-moderating: sensible thing to do or petty censorship?

    When it comes to pre-moderating comments on blogs I have to say that I’m a little bit baffled. If you’re a site for children I totally get it; and the same for a news or media outlet, but if you’re just one of a boat load of blogs out there, from the big name to the small time, what’s the rationale for pre-moderating comments?

    News sites tend to moderate the hell out of their comments. Given that they are in the business of spreading news to hundreds of millions of people it behooves them to keep a tight reign on the content below their headers. The last thing they need is for some wingnut to fly off the handle in front of an audience the size of most nations.

    For most things corporate I understand as well, though I do find it refreshing when the big players don’t turn every web page like a giant legal cover-your-ass exercise. The Google Blog doesn’t moderate their comments – at least it doesn’t pre-moderate them (it’s possible they just delete anything that doesn’t meet their standards for submission after it’s posted). While Google isn’t exactly a small time company they’re also well known for being a little more relaxed about things so I’m taking the absence of pre-moderation of comments for what it’s worth.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8gCV0KYdJc?rel=0]

    As for my little corner of the blogosphere I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that a comment would need my approval before I allowed it on my site. It smells a little bit like censorship, don’t you think? Besides, who the hell am I to say what people can and cannot say about something I fully intended the entire Internet to read (or at least a few hundred people)?

    Back in 2005 I had a different blog and one particular asshole starting commenting and causing a ruckus. For a time I just didn’t allow comments in hopes he would find someone else to hassle but realizing that it wasn’t fair to other readers who did want to comment I turned them back on. It was at this point that I tinkered with the idea of moderating the comments. In the end I chose not to, but had my finger on the “report” button just in case he got out of hand. He never did. Contrary to some beliefs, there are a lot of problems that will just go away if you ignore them.

    A brief poll to a few friends who blog and a little bit of research on the web dug up the following nuggets of extrememly precise data:

    • A large number do not moderate their comments
    • Many only moderate for spam
    • Some use a form of word verification
    It would seem that for those who moderate spam is the biggest concern. No one wants a slew of ads and unrelated links clogging up their comments section and this is where I think the word verification comes in. That was one thing I ended up implementing myself, and as far as a security feature goes; forcing a person to enter in a couple words just so you know they’re not a robot isn’t much, but it does keeps the spam down and in my case also allows anonymous comments (while I prefer people stand in front of their comments by putting their name on them, I can understand that some people may have concerns over privacy and things like that).

    There’s lots of comment plug-ins for the popular platforms like Blogger and WordPress and both have at least a couple variations on moderation. Another one is Disqus, which I used for a while but abandoned for reasons I don’t remember.

    But to the question at hand, is it just best practice or are we making it out to be worse than it is? As far as my blog goes, I’ve decided that until I actually have a problem I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I like to think of it as giving the public an opportunity to disappoint.

    So far, they have not (except this person).

    ~ Andrew

    For those interested, here’s a sampling of a few news sites and their moderation policies:

    NY Times
    Click this sentence for just the policy text

    CBC
    Click this sentence for just the policy text

    Huffington Post

    Size Matters

    4 Replies

    When I started writing my novel I had a grand idea that it would be at least 100,000 words. Before I had even determined the full arc I knew I wanted to write 100,000 words. It was a nice round number and as far as I could tell it would make a pretty decent length book. The problem was that as much as I wanted the 100k the more I wrote the more I discovered that it was either going to be a stretch to get it there or it would wind up being a 150,000 word marathon.

    So what’s the right number? If quantifiable numbers are your thing you can look to the Smashwords article from May 2013 for a very telling answer. A book’s success can be directly tied to its sales and the average length of the top 100 books on Smashwords is a hair over 115,000 words. Of course even Smashwords says flat out that most authors would be thrilled to be in the top 500. So, if you look at their top 500 the average length is just a bit over 77,000. Double the ranking and it only drops a couple thousand words. So, if the top 100 is any measure (which it should be) you’re writing a good length novel. If you’re happy sitting in the top 1000 (which you should be) then you can probably do with 40,000 words less – almost an entire novel – and still be doing just fine. Of course, when you look at the same Smashwords data you’ll see that the top book (#1) outsells #50 by a margin of 7 to 1 and #50 outsells #500 by another 5 to 1. I’m sensing a trend here…

    That same Smashwords article also had a price point comparison and it looks like FREE and 99¢ are the big winners, but $3.99 seems to be the magic number, which if you’re an indie author could mean a serious advantage over someone who’s traditionally published and has all that additional overhead – and cost – associated with their book (that, or the author is taking a serious cut when it comes to royalties).

    So what about the short story? Is it doomed? The numbers seem to suggest that short stories don’t sell very well at all. To me, this seems counter-intuitive, especially in the digital age. They make perfect sense, and all for one very simple reason: time! With every device under the sun capable of displaying a book, and in today’s go-go-go world I would think that it would simply be easier to pick up an anthology or collection and read a couple short stories and then move on as opposed to having to invest hours and hours of reading chapter after chapter (and if you’re reading Dan Brown, chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter…)

    My theory seems to hold especially true for short story erotica. You may be asking, how is it that people can sell erotica for $2.99 or even $3.99 for a 10,000 word short story and get away with it? That’s the same price as an average length (and commonly priced) full length 115,000 word novel! Well, in addition to the time factor the the answer also lies in re-usability. You’re not likely to re-read that 400 page novel over and over, but any time you’re in the mood for a quick… um… “break”, you’ll bust out that erotic short story quicker than a prisoner on conjugal visitation day.

    Now, as the writer of a blog (a new post every Sunday here at Potato Chip Math) I’ve been long curious about the optimal length for a blog entry. Now, it seems that if you go looking for this information you’ll find almost as many answers as you find experts. One recent article I found was particularly interesting. It basically says that people value longer copy over their shorter counterparts. While I think there is definitely some truth to that statement I think that the author goes out of his way to over-simplify. At one point he simply compares length of post (greater than or less than 1500 words) to number of tweets and Facebook “likes”. The posts greater than 1500 words got more of both. The scientist in me is going absolutely crazy over this. How many other variables are in play? Too many to be able to say with any degree of certainty that this is a result you can hang your hat on.

    That being said, there was one interesting statistic that it mentioned which did make me go “hmm”: Google search results. Here’s a quote directly from the article and the graph they had to support it:

    “The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2000 words.“

    So maybe there’s something to a post or article with a bit more meat to it. As for all my posts, as I eluded to above, views to word count isn’t a direct comparison because so many other factors go into each one. Did I tweet about it more often? Did I post in a comment thread on another blog or article? Did I try to engage my audience or just pump out noise? Ding! Ding! Ding! Here’s a pro tip for you: engagement works but it takes work! Frankly, I’m okay with the traffic I am getting for the amount of work I’m putting in. I know when I try to do more with it I get more impressive results, and sometimes that’s just what I do, but I have to be realistic with my time. Blogging isn’t my full time job. Heck, it’s not even a job at all. It’s a tool and like most tools, it’s all in how you use them.

    So, size does matter but the experts agree, content is king. I don’t think this should come as a surprise to content providers and creators of the world. I know I like to ask, “Aren’t people impatient; with the attention spans of small children?” The answer is generally yes, but I have found that this doesn’t hold true for people who actually like to read. Sure, we all like snazzy infographics and quick information, but people who are looking for reputable information and who want to learn and explore new things and are generally curious will usually go beyond the fold to get what the’re looking for.

    At the end of it all, and as far as my novel is concerned, agents and editors will have a better sense of what changes are needed to achieve results. That’s why they do what they do and why I’ll gladly pay them to do it. What this means means for me is that I should take as many words as I need to tell the story. No more, no less.

    As for this post, well, by the time it’s done there will be 1,171 words on the virtual page. I’m already curious to see how many views it gets.

    ~ Andrew

    From Russia With Gay Love

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    A while back there was some news coming out of the Supreme Court of the United States regarding a ruling on marriage equality. I shared my thoughts on the topic in a very well received blog post. Well it seems that our cold war adversaries on the other side of the Bering Strait have a few thoughts on this as well.

    Unless you’ve been severely news deprived over the last month you will know that Russia has passed anti-gay laws that could land a person in jail if they are caught promoting a “non-traditional” lifestyle. There have been protests, there have been riots, and more than a couple countries (Canada and the U.S. included) have waggled a mean finger in their general direction. Now, there’s a movement (albeit a small, and from what I can tell, largely ineffective one) to have nations boycott the Olympics taking place in Sochi Russia in February 2014.

    While I think that it’s a nice notion, I don’t happen to think it would have any real impact on the situation. If every nation failed to show up then we’d have a story, but we all know that that’s more fantasy than the idea of a Beatles reunion. At least one reporter has an opinion on this and goes into great detail about past boycotts and their utter ineffectiveness. So, given that a boycott won’t happen, and  even if it did it wouldn’t make a lick of difference, what can we do?

    Well, I suggested in the comments on that article that the Canadian (and American) governments make a slight change to our respective flags – temporarily, of course – such that whenever a medal was won the Russians would have to hoist something like this to the rafters:

    Oh, Canada!

    As unlikely a scenario as this is, I thought that this would produce the absolute best results. It would mean that the Russian Olympic Committee would have to willingly display gay propaganda – to the entire world no less – and it would not put any one athlete at risk.

    For a brief moment I thought that I was a genius. Until it occurred to me that there was about as much chance of that happening as that aforementioned Beatles reunion. In mentioning it to a co-worker he had an even better idea: change the equipment! Can you imagine the entire men’s and women’s hockey teams staking around with laces on their skates and tape on their sticks that look like this?

     
      

    Regardless of what form of protest would be considered the best, one thing I know is that if everyone stays silent on the issue then we fail. Individual athletes will step up, I’m sure of it, but they will be a very small voice in a raging sea of white noise and Russian propaganda – and they will be putting themselves at great personal risk. As much as those small voices matter, this needs to be tackled on a much larger scale.

    In his inauguration address in 1961 John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” My fellow humanitarians, I’m turning that quote around and asking my country to show a little courage and do something for us. If they won’t, then I’ll turn and ask the Olympic Committee to step up. If they won’t then we’ll just have to see how many of those small voices we can get together so they can show the leaders of the world how to actually make a difference.

    ~ Andrew