I Bought New Speakers

Maybe I should talk, first, about the new desk. No, wait, let's talk about my old monitor. Look, it's all related, so you have to understand the pieces.

Way back whenever, at some point when I was replacing a computer, I got a monitor (a nice monitor) that came with speakers that attached to it. The only problem was that once the speakers were attached, they couldn't be taken back off. It was a permanent attachment. It was nice, though, because I didn't have speakers in the way or being knocked over or any of a number of other issues that come with having speakers sitting around your computer.

It was nice until the monitor quit working. Which was after some years, but it was the first monitor I had that just quit working. I think. I can't remember any others, at any rate. But, see, here was the problem, my speakers weren't removable. I ended up with a new monitor that sat in front of the dead monitor so that I could continue to use those speakers -- they were still perfectly good -- which was still actually better than loose speakers banging around on the desk.

But, recently, we built a new desk system, which I have been intending to post about and of which I have pictures. Or did have pictures of. Might have pictures of, but I'll get to that. Anyway...
When we moved to the new desk, my wife didn't want the two monitors cluttering our space, so I ditched the one that didn't work even though it had my speakers. And, yes, I did try to get them off, but I would have had to break them to do it.

With the new desk system, my wife and I sit (or stand, because the desktop is standing height (we have bar stools for sitting)) next to each other. It's cozy. Which is beside the point of what I'm talking about although not beside the point of the desk. The point is that, for a while, we tried to share speakers. Mostly, I don't need or use speakers. Meaning, in general, I keep the sound on my computer turned off. However, occasionally, I want to watch a movie trailer or listen to music when I'm doing something like cooking. On the other hand, my wife keeps her sound on and uses it a lot. It began to be a hassle to switch the speakers to my computer and back every time I wanted to use the speakers for five or ten minutes.

I went out and bought some speakers. No, nothing expensive. I think they were $15. Maybe it was $10, but it wasn't more than $15. That was just a few weeks ago.

Now, I'm sure, at this point, you're wondering why you should care about my speaker purchase. Honestly, you shouldn't. This isn't about the speakers, though. They're just an example of my point, which isn't really anything you need to care about, either. It's just one of those, "Well, of course!" things that people find amusing, so, well, be amused. Or something.
When I get to the point.

At the old desk, my computer was hard-wired into our router, but the new desk is too far away for that (especially since we were actively trying to cut down on cords), so I had to switch to wi-fi. It could be completely unrelated, but I'm going to guess that it's not. After we moved everything to the new system, my computer started having "issues" with staying connected to the Internet. Then, right after buying the speakers, which I'm sure was just coincidental, my hard drive came down with a squeak. My wife said it sounded like a frog.

Two things about this:
1. My previous computer did basically the same thing before it died, but the squeak lasted more than a year before the hard drive finally actually died. So, you know, I thought I had more time.
2. When we moved the computers, I misplaced my flash drive.

So, yeah, I knew I needed to get everything backed up, and I started looking around for my drive, even was considering just going out and getting a new one, but it's summer, and it's busy, and, yes, I thought I had more time.

But I didn't. The hard drive crashed and burned (okay, it didn't literally burn, although we did have a computer once that did actually melt down the hard drive and emit smoke). Hard. So hard that my computer couldn't even read that hard drive existed. And, well, I may have lost everything on it; I'm still waiting to find out about that.

Mostly, my documents are fine. I have those backed up through March or April and everything is recoverable through other means or reproduce-able (like my current novel which I just started typing up in June; so, though I may have lost all the typing, I still have my handwritten copy). Except for some notes about project ideas, but, well, I guess those are just notes.

The hard thing is my pictures. All of my pictures were solely stored on that computer, and I may have lost all of them. I'm still adjusting to that thought. It's painful to think and knots up my stomach. So far, the news is not good, but I haven't had definitive word, yet, so there is still hope.

Does anyone need a cheap set of speakers?

The Weekly (Pat) Report #2: The Finale

As often happens with these kinds of things, they just sort of fade away. At least to all outward appearances. After a huge explosion after last Wednesday's post (and it was epic, let me tell you), Pat offered a truce, which covers fixing the things he did but not the things his sister did. As it turns out, his sister is willing to offer her brother up as a sacrifice for a vendetta that isn't hers just because it's fun to do mean things to people (that's a paraphrase of her actual words, not something I'm just saying). Pat, though, is doing his best to counteract what his sister has done, since she's unwilling to retract all of the fake ratings she threw at me.

And that's where it stands and where it will stand unless something else happens. I'm hoping that nothing else happens.

Because this is related, I recently (last week) started reading The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha; you probably know it better simply as Don Quixote, but I just love the full title. Now, just in case you don't know, this book is 400 years old and is one of the first examples of a novel in Western literature. Yet, in the prologue to the book, Cervantes felt compelled to write the following:

Idle reader, you need no oath of mine to convince you that I wish this book, the child of my brain, were the handsomest, the liveliest, and the wisest that could be conceived. ...if a father should happen to sire an ugly and ill-favored child, the love he bears it claps a bandage over his eyes and so blinds him to its faults that he reckons them as talents and graces and cites them to his friends as examples of wit and elegance. But I, who appear to be Don Quixote's father, am in reality his stepfather and do not intend to follow the usual custom, nor to beg you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to pardon or dissemble the faults you may see in this child of mine. You are no kinsman or friend of his; ...all of which exempts and frees you from every respect and obligation. So you may say what you please about this story without fear of being backbitten for a bad opinion or rewarded for a good one.

So... There you go. 400 years ago, Cervantes was saying, "Review the thing however you want to. Be honest. You won't get a response from me one way or the other." Evidently, he was the exception in his time period, not the rule.

I suppose this is just an example of how people don't really change all that much. 400 years later, we're still struggling with the concept of allowing people to honestly receive our work.

The Serial Bowl Is Empty

Well... here we are at the bottom of the bowl. One bite left and some milk to sip from the bottom.

This whole thing has kind of reminded me of when I was a kid. Every once in a while, we would just have cereal for dinner. It wasn't one of those kinds of things where my mom would just decide not to cook and we just ate whatever we wanted; it was an actual, declared cereal night. Yeah, it seems kind of weird to me, now, too, so I can only imagine those happened because my mom or, possibly, my dad wanted the cereal. Specifically. Like, "I want cereal tonight." Anyway...

When we had cereal nights, my dad always used one of the great, giant salad bowls to have his cereal in. All the rest of us would be using normal bowls, but there would be my dad with this huge bowl that was bigger than all of the other bowls combined. He'd pour in, like, half a box of cereal and something like a quart of milk. Maybe, it was closer to half a gallon? I don't really know. I think I'd probably have to experiment by making a bowl that big, but I'm quite sure I wouldn't be able to eat all of it.

And I could never believe that my dad could eat that much either. It was so much cereal! But he did always eat all of it. Amazingly. It was rather... impressive. At least it was to me when I was eight.

At any rate, the Shadow Spinner serialization has been more than a bit like one of those giant bowls of cereal, and being here at the last chapter is somewhat reminiscent of watching my dad take that last bite and, then, tilting the bowl back and drinking the last of the milk with whatever crumbs were left behind.

I can't believe it's over... but, here we are at the end.

Not that I haven't given my thoughts previously on the whole serial experience, I figured, now that it's actually over, I should probably sum it up or give final thoughts or... something, so here are some final thoughts (but, really, if you want it all broken out by points and stuff, go back and read that other post):

I think one of the things we're going to be seeing as we transition away from traditional publishing (and, yes, we are transitioning away from it, at least as it is in its current iteration) is more shorter works and more frequent publications. Rather than indie authors writing full-blown novels, we'll see series of novelettes and novellas. Sure, there will still be the occasional epic fantasy piece, and long, literary pieces will probably continue as they are for quite a while (they are the most resistant to change), but I think we're moving toward things that people can sit down and finish in a sitting or two. People just like that.

And, no, I have no data to back that up. It's just my feeling of how things are going. I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. This will continue our move, culturally, away from physical books, because the expense of printing tiny 20-30,000 word pre-novels will just be too high.

Personally, I've been pretty happy with the experience. It's a lot of work releasing a book chapter by chapter, especially when if you devote a significant amount of time to author's notes the way I do, but I think it was worth it. I know that I brought in a lot of readers and made many connections that I never would have if I had only released Spinner as a single book.

Yes, I have another serialization some time in the future. But that's the future...

For now, here's the last part of Shadow Spinner along with the list of all of today's FREE! offerings.
"Part Thirty-four: Uri'el" (also FREE! tomorrow, Tuesday, October 1)
"Part Thirty-three: Justice"
"Part Thirty-two: The Gate"
"Part Thirty-one: The Serpent Strikes"
"Part Twenty-four: The Serpent"
"Part Twenty-three: The Harlot"
"Part Eighteen: The Angel"
"Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light"
"Part Sixteen: The Dark Tree"
And that's that. Nine FREE! parts today, which, granted, is not as many as on some days, but, well, I've used up all of my free days for a while. Still... Look for something special coming up round about Halloween. No, I mean it. Something special and not just from me. But that's all you're getting out of me for the moment about that.

For those of you that have been following along with Tib's adventures, I hope this brings this (first) story to a satisfactory conclusion. I'm not saying there will be another story about Tiberius, but there could be. One day. Maybe. Mostly, I'm toying with the idea of the origins of Michael and Edward; I'm just not sure I'll have time to get them down on "paper."

Flash (in the pan) Fiction

Flash fiction is not one of my favorite forms of writing. In fact, you could say that I kind of hate it. I dislike it so much that I've had to restart this post four times for being much too harsh. It's not really the fault of the flash fiction, either; it's those people that write flash fiction. No, not you that have written a short story or three that happen to fall into the "flash fiction" range, but those people that just love "flash fiction" because it's so unique and forces you to do so much with so little and all of that other pretentious hogwash.

And it is. Pretentious. And hogwash.

It's especially pretentious since most (almost all) of what those people write when they're doing all of their flash fiction crap is crap. C. R. A. P.

Here's something I read recently that kind of illustrates the point. It was someone talking about the "grand tradition" of flash fiction and how it goes back decades and decades. Um... no... the term "flash fiction" didn't appear until the early 90's, so it, as a thing, certainly wasn't a thing before that. Which is not to say that short stories under 1000 words didn't exist before then, because they did, and they, at various points, had various other names. But, sometimes, when things are given a "name," they become a "thing," and "flash fiction" has only been a "thing" for two decades (which is, technically, decades, but it's hardly "decades"), and it's only been a "real thing" for, maybe, the last decade or so.

But that's kind of the thing, they are JUST short stories. In fact, on the scale of literary items, so to speak, "flash fiction" doesn't even exist. You have:
short stories -- less than 7500 words
novelettes -- 7500 - 17,500 words
novellas -- 17,500 - 40,000 words
novels -- 40,000+ words
Yeah, I did research on this stuff for my creative class, and that's really the generally accepted breakdown. Something close to that, anyway. No one even mentions flash fiction in terms of publication. Generally speaking, if a magazine (or whoever) wants something that would fall into the "flash fiction" category, they ask for SHORT STORIES at around the 1000 word length.

Yeah, I know a lot of you are probably thinking I'm getting all worked up over nothing, and I can see that, but let me give you a similar example. I thought about speech as a major when I was in college, so I took the requisite intro to speech class. WOW! Now there was a class that was trying too hard. You think psychology tries hard to be recognized as a science, try taking a speech class. One of the things we learned early on is that there are specific "scientific" names for the distances people stand away from you when you talk to them. (and I am completely making these names up, because I don't remember (nor do I care to remember) what the actual names are) So, if someone is standing within 2" of you, he is in your "C" zone. If he is 2-4" away, he is in your "R" zone. If he's 4-8" away, he's in your "A" zone, and, if he's 8-12" away, he's in your "P" zone. Yes, because all of that, also, is CRAP. While it's true that how close to you someone stands is important, because it affects different people in different ways, there are also cultural and personal distinctions about  this stuff, so it's NOT THE SAME for everyone, so giving these arbitrary distances names was just a way to sound all sciency about it, and it didn't mean anything.

And that's how I feel about "flash fiction."

Oh, and I decided not major in speech, because, after that class, I figured it was just going to be a waste of time. Speech, as a major, is like trying to dress a pig in a dress and pass it off as your prom date.

>sigh<

So... flash fiction just tries too hard. It does. It's trying hard to be something more than just a short story, and, the truth is, it is just a short story. Except, mostly, they're very poorly written short stories.
And here's why:

1. Frequently, because the author is trying to stuff, say, a 5000 word story into an artificial 1000 word format, he has to rely on lots of exposition (or Telling) to impart enough of the story to make it make sense, so what we end up with is 500-700 words of the author telling us the background and only a few hundred words of the actual action of the story (the Showing). It's very unsatisfying, and I'm always left feeling like the author should have just written another few thousand words so that we could actually experience more of the story as story rather than as "historical" prologue.

Mostly, people should just write the story that needs to be told without worrying about how long or short it is. Shorter, contrary to popular belief, is not better, as I'm continually telling the kids in my creative writing class, who always want to get away with shorter, and I have to tell them to go back and expand expand expand. Show me the action; don't just tell me what happened. Flash fiction writers need to take this lesson to heart. If half of your flash fiction is Telling, you're writing in the wrong format. Period.

2. I suppose because the format is so short, authors of flash fiction often feel like they need to work in some kind of twist ending. Something unexpected to give us a shock at the end. These things sort of give flash fiction a joke-like quality, like they need some kind of punch line. The twists often feel forced and unnatural, too, which makes them bad jokes. I've not read a single piece of flash fiction with a twist at the end that was worth reading. Especially when the twist is accomplished through some gruesome act for no other reason than to be shocking.

I truly hope this fad of flash fiction passes relatively quickly, because it's reducing story telling to the same level that free verse reduced poetry, which is garbage. None of that is to say there aren't good examples out there, but it's not something just anyone can do with any skill. Learn how to tell a story and use as many words as you need to tell that story. If it happens to fall under 1000 words, great, but, if not, don't force it. It's pretty much the same as cutting off your toes to get your foot into a smaller shoe.