On a thread on the Well with Bruce Sterling posting about the state of the world (well worth a read), there is this fantastic quote:

When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.

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The internet rewards quantity and consistency. Having a routine of posting, being dependable to create content online is what builds an audience. Well, one thing that builds an audience.

But the “real world” doesn’t quite work the same way. Or perhaps it just works on a slower scale — daily isn’t the requirement. But the net effect is the same — you can spend 2 years, 5 years writing a book or creating a work of art. And your audience will still be there.

Once again, there is some kind of balance here between these two items, but so far I am not seeing it. The “big names” online are big because they are frequent and consistent — granted, it’s also because they are good, but there is little doubt that peeps like Kottke would be as large if he posted once a week.

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Ok, now this might be getting silly. This is a slight addendum to my other 2 reviews of QoS. ( review 1 and the second)

Nick sent me this review of Quantum of Solace, as I seem to be moving into defense for this movie*. Though if this guy’s biggest issue with the film is that it’s too realistic, I suggest he stick with Die Another Day.

The newest issue of Final Crisis came out**, kicked ass and I have some pull quotes:
Morrison on the style: “We had widescreen comics and decompression and super-compression. This is channel-zapping comics.”
And a review: “Throughout the series, Morrison has been using what I’ve been calling a “pointillist” style, where he shows a quick scene here, a quick scene there, all so you get an overlying sense of universal dread.”

The notion of this skipping around, the full picture never seen — and the notion of seeing reaction more than the action is something I like and expect to see more of.*** The Martin Amis interview I linked to a few days ago reinforces this in my head — I’m unsure what the true literary name for this style will be, but it is reflected in the internet, our consuming of media (where comments are nothing but reaction — online, we are never present for the actual event) and the whole 21st century/post postmodern movement.

Have you noticed anything like this in other pieces of media?

* I don’t love this movie. I think it is remarkable because I see stylistic and directional choices that are hanging out at the periphery at the moment. For now, it’s a perfect example in film of where I think we are going with film.

** Here is one other review of FC, which I really just ought to point out for the zillionth time that I am really enjoying. I’d tell you to run out and read it, except that it is prob too comic booky for you. I mean, unless you already are familiar with the New Gods. That might be a decent barometer. But from the first comment in this post: “I love the book, but the problems that people in my circle have come down to the extremely sudden start/stop of the scenes, the very loose connection from one scene to the next, and the general chaos of it all” Zing!

*** I’d be lying if I said that I don’t see some of it in my own novel as well, but I hate tooting my own horn.

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Ok, it appears I am now writing on a theme; apologies for those of you who weren’t ready for me to spend 1500 words and a bunch of posts talking about vague ideas of publishing online. I left off talking about Web 2.0 and the difference between services and creating. There are some weird overlaps though, items that have popped up to me in the past few weeks.

Like selling your by-products online. (Kinda NSFW, thanks to Vice’s naughty photos.) I mentioned a few days ago about how we don’t get to decide how media consumed and it’s this article that tied it together for me with the Gladwell ideas of timing and genius.

Creating isn’t just about having the genius to create something unique and interesting. That’s tough enough. But it needs to happen in line with popular culture. And there aren’t rules anymore — it’s beg, borrow, steal time. Selling your used underwear online is just as legitimate as another part-time job. Finding ways to make money online in combination with the real world, whether artistic or not, is exactly the point.*

And so I have spent weeks wracking my brain thinking about publishing online, writing for audiences and how one might step out of the notion of ‘blog blog blog’ as a way of building an audience.

Suddenly, I’m less interested in marketing my novel to you and somehow sneaking it through your service filters.

Suddenly, I’m far more interested in finding new ways to convince you to read. Of course I want it to be my stuff. But I’m also thinking about things like the iPhone, Rss feeds, Twitter and goodness knows what else as ways of integrating story-telling into daily life.

Tumbarumba seems interesting, but it looks like it is going the opposite direction of me: I want to find ways to make reading and consuming easier and more rewarding. I’m not convinced that making a game of reading fiction is more fun. It’s conceptually interesting but it doesn’t reduce the effort.

But it goes further — it’s recalling that the internet isn’t limited to the web; that email and texting and networks and bittorrent and a whole host of other pieces are available to make use of. It’s part of the challenge — finding new ways to glue all of this together, along with products like the iPhone/iPod and the Kindle.

At the moment, I don’t have solid solutions. This is as far as I got in thinking before finding out I had medical issues that totally derailed my thinking. I’m sure I’ll have more — and I welcome any dialogue; I imagine I am moving towards a ’see what sticks’ type of thing. And I’ll keep you updated.

* This is a no-brainer, but my personality drifts so hard to black/white, it’s often very difficult for me to get to the shades of gray. This is one of those times.

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Keep with me on all of this.

Think about all the crap you consume on a daily basis. I don’t mean food and packaging or even your clothing. I mean information and media and how you spend your downtime. When you relax, when you say, “Let’s watch a movie.” or “I want to read a book.”

At least for me, there is a narrow band of items I know, love, trust. And there is a larger band of services that I use to filter the stuff I love. And all of it comes down to convenience.

Said another way: I like a limited number of creators. This has become more and more obvious to me as I have delved deeper into rating systems. I’ve been rating on Netflix a lot recently and I’ve been much more active in my iTunes, trying to rate songs and albums*. And in doing all of this, I rate most things as a 3 on a scale of 5. 1 and 5 are rare, 2 and 4 are less so. It’s just a big bell curve. A very steep bell curve, really.

And to wade through this morass, I use stuff like iTunes, Netflix and Google to keep track of those few items I like, against the ocean of stuff I am lukewarm about.

And living here, in Silicon Valley, people are always looking and thinking about services. About Wordpress and Twitter and and Flickr and Google and heavens knows what all. It’s the nature of the game now — you build services so you can get people to come contribute content.

This is Web 2.0.

And from time to time, I can convince myself I have an idea for a service, one I never end up building or documenting. That’s a bummer, sure. But ultimately, it’s not what I want to spend time on. That part is my day job anyway — and if you talk about any of the services above, odds are that you can’t name people who worked on any of them.**

The notion of publishing to a service is touched on a little less politely by Jason Scott in his post “Fuck the Cloud.” For the most part, I agree completely with him — but the caveat is that, currently, we need both our own data stores and services. And finding ways to tie them together is the challenge. (This is a slightly different use of the whole application vs data discussion that has existed forever.)

But it really isn’t what gets me hot at the end of the day. At the end of the day, I want to find new ways, interesting ways of telling stories. But it isn’t quite that easy.

* Did you know iTunes has an album rating field? It’s cool, but like many of iTunes neatest features, it’s missing 1 or 2 details and thus is just shy of uber-cool.

** Ok, maybe you can name 1 person or 2. Or if you live here and travel in web dev circles, we can get up on 2 or 3 hands. But really, every single one of those services required the effort of numerous people doing a lot of stuff. Pointing to a single vision for these things is close to impossible.

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Up until my mind was derailed with thoughts about my health, I had been spending a lot of time the past few weeks considering art, creative works and the internet. I hadn’t cemented it all together, which is a shame, because I believe I’ve lost some of the plot now.

I’ve done an admittedly terrible (read: nonexistent) job on marketing my novel. Just getting to it to point where it is now — a real book, complete and listed on Amazon took a lot of energy. I haven’t had the energy to press on with it yet.

But it has prompted much thinking about building audiences, expertise and creating things. Gladwell claims 10,000 hours to become an expert in a field. I’m unsure I have that in much — Rachael pointed out I probably don’t in drawing. Writing is about the only other thing I might be able to claim here and even that might be dubious.

A few years ago, I read an interview with Brian K Vaughn where he claimed that an author needs to pen about 1 million words to actually get good. That’s 100 words an hour, if we forgo all the editing, planning, rewriting and such. I average 500-1000 in a good hour, but this number doesn’t include any of the above things; that number is just pushing words onto a page. I’d argue it’s roughly the same.

All of this means nothing, of course. I’m still proud of my first novel and I certainly haven’t hit 1 million words, even if you count this site and any scribblings from the last 20 years. But, for me, it’s served as a reminder that nothing with without effort (see: hating Tim Ferris).

Of course nothing is without effort to accomplish it. But it isn’t just that simple lesson: for me, these past few months, it has been about trying to reason out a happy handshake between what I am paid to work on (the internet, coding) with what I love (drawing and writing). Or, a different way: how the hell can you make money in the time of now. More soon.

Sidenote: Vice Magazine has an interview with Martin Amis, where he talks about history and popular culture: “My father put it well to me once. He said: “At a certain age you think it’s not like that anymore—it’s like this. But you are not quite sure what this is.” I think it would be insane to harbor the idea that you can remain plugged-in forever.”

Firstly, Amis’ new novel is set in 1970. I would like to state that when an author begins to dwell in nostalgia and the recent past, their influence is done. Amis is done, sadly. Secondly, Amis says he might be a product of the 20th century and unable to truly belong to the 21st. Based on other essays where he discusses disdain for the internet (and this interview where he mentions how the internet has killed poetry), it’s easy to agree. And right or wrong (and I think he is right, ultimately), we — any of us — don’t get to pick how information is consumed.

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A 1965 book, illustrated by Edward Gorey, titled The Recently Deflowered Girl. This is literally the best thing I have seen/read in weeks. What page is your favorite?

Update: a quick scan of abebooks.com shows that this can be had for the cheap price of about 75 bucks. for the cheapest version; you can spend all the way up to about 450 on it.

Update 2: Here is a pdf of the images (5.5 meg though), along with a zip file of them (5.1 meg). You know, just in case you want to save them for re-reading later.

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