Category Archives: Favorite Posts

Beating the Publishing Odds
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Yes, you CAN beat the odds. You already did.

Yes, you CAN beat the odds. You already did.

What are the odds of getting a book published professionally nowadays? I’ve read everywhere from one in 5000 to one in 12,000 to one in 100,000.

They’re high. Not quite win-the-lottery odds, but high. You think you’re lucky enough to beat them? I do.

Consider this.

You are the product of 100% survivors. Since the dawn of time, every single one of your ancestors survived droughts, plagues, fires, earthquakes, meteors, Ice Ages, floods, wars, genocide, homicide, witch-burnings, Inquisitions, jihads, and in the last thirty years, Roe v. Wade, to bring forth at least one offspring that was fit to reproduce.

100%.

100% of your ancestors were winners playing at a brutal global table with odds considerably higher than it takes to win the lottery jackpot, just to be breathing in the first place.

And they had you. The two cells that got together to make you are full of winning genes. Spectacular, luckier-than-shit, magnificent genes that came together at odds of anywhere between 40,000,000 and 100,000,000 to one (any of those other sperm would not have resulted in you, nor any of those other eggs). The baby that resulted from that conception then survived a risky nine months (or thereabouts) just to be born, and however many years following that moment. To arrive here. Now.

The odds of your being YOU, and being alive to read these words at this moment are so astronomical you might as well be counting atoms in the planet to figure them.

And yet here you are. You beat all the odds to get here. You want to write, you want to sell what you write, and you’re getting a certain amount of crap from people telling you that you can’t do it, that the odds are too high, that it’s too hard.

Gimme a break. You’re HERE, dammit. Breathing, kicking, with a dream and a vision and a hunger, having passed through millennia of dangers and suffering and struggle just to get here. If you want to beat puny publishing odds: You. Will. Find. A. Way.

Believe.

And then ACT.

(Wrote this in 2005. Needed to bring it to the front, because I keep hearing despair, and this is a time for challenge, and endeavor, and effort, and triumph.)

“It’s beautiful”
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Some moments define us—define a place and time, who we are to ourselves and to each other, what we are about. And those moments we hang onto desperately, because they come unexpectedly, they are so fleeting, and if lost, we lose a part of who we are with them.

In the course of planning out my writing for the night, I was considering how many memories would slip away over the course of a very long life, and realized how many of them would be memories that mattered—that were defining. How much we would lose if we lost them.

And a memory of my own came sharply and starkly to mind. My youngest child was three, and he had been playing with one of those plastic toy stethoscopes that are, frankly, useless. I had a real stethoscope, and I thought he might like to hear through one that worked. So I put the softest earpieces on it, and called him over. I fit the earpieces into his ears, and held the stethoscope bell to his heart, and let him listen. He grinned at me as I said, “That’s your heart.”

I then put the bell of the scope over my own heart, and said, “That’s my heart.”

He stood there, transfixed, an expression creeping over his face that brings tears to my eyes even as I write this. I watched him, wondering at the serious look in his eyes, and after what seemed a very long time, he said, simply, “It’s beautiful.”

Three years old. He was hearing the music that had been his first symphony, the sound of his existence before there was light or air, which had been echoed again and again while I nursed him.

I had never heard him say those two words about anything before. Thinking back over our eleven years together so far, I cannot remember ever having heard him say them since.

They were, simply, his words for that moment—for the two of us and who we had been to each other before we saw each other’s faces. Who we were right then.

How we see the world changes in these defining moments, and it never goes back to the way it was before. For me, forever more, the words “It’s beautiful” will conjure the face of my three-year-old son, wide-eyed and motionless, leaning just a bit forward, listening via an old blue stethoscope to the beating of my heart.

The Power of Allegories
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“A side note: I always thought Vincalis was an environmentalist allegory.“

Good. I could have hoped for no better outcome than that you found your own meaning in it.

I’m reminded of the lyrics of a song.

You can’t always get what you want
But sometimes …. you get what you need.

Once upon a time, you see, I wrote Bones of the Past. Like most of the rest of the books I’ve written, it was about the story, but it was also about something, a dark, real-world issue that ate at me and gave me nightmares and still does, frankly (but not so much since I wrote that book). I sank myself in the story, the theme, the characters and issue that obsessed me, and I wrote my third book (second solo), and when I was done, I could see a little too clearly what it was really about, so I buried the allegory deeper. Sent it out. Let it go.

And a friend of mine read it. She was a little older than me and had been married to a man a little younger than me, and he had died of cancer. She was devastated. She’d crawled into herself and was having a hell of a time clawing her way back out. She read Bones of the Past, and she told me she got it, and better than that, it had helped her. She found in that story an allegory about cancer, about how it destroys, about how it could be fought, about how those who survived picked up the pieces of their lives and moved on.

It had been the book she needed at the time, because it was about something deep and dark and scary, and how to come to grips with that terror and pain. It had mattered to her.

Thing is, cancer never crossed my mind when I was writing the thing. I got what I needed out of the book by writing it, but if I had pushed to force everyone else to take my message from it, the book would have been worthless to her. By being willing to bury my message behind allegory (and bury it deep), the book still had deep meaning, and layers. It still had a passion to it that reached her, because allegories ring true on a lot of levels, and can be viewed in a hundred shades of meaning, and applied to a thousand different situations.

For you writers, here’s a writing recommendation. Put your heart and soul and self into your story, give it everything you’ve got, and rip out any bit of writing that clearly tells the reader what your story means. Accept that you will be the only person who ever knows the true meaning of your story, and give your readers permission to find their own meanings, knowing when you do this that they will take away from it a hundred things you did not mean, and that fifty of those hundred will be things with which you vehemently disagree. Write your issues out on the page just for yourself, then give up control, and let the story go, and hope that someone out there will get what he needs. The best thing you can do as a writer of fiction is to allow your readers to meet their own needs with your work, rather than attempting to force them to meet yours.

For readers, take what you need from the stories you read, but understand that what you found there may not be what the writer created, but what you created. When you read, you are collaborating with the writer, and what the two of you come up with will be something neither of you may have expected or intended.

THE ALLEGORY GAME
And for those of you who have read some of my books, here’s a little game. To the first three of you who correctly guess my allegory (that is, what I meant when I wrote it) for any of my books listed in the essay linked above, I’ll send you an autographed copy of TALYN (or another book that I have copies of, if you already have an autographed copy of that one).

Those of you to whom I have privately confessed meanings of a particular book may not guess on that book, of course, but you’re welcome to guess on any others. This game will be open until there are three winners. NOTE: Make sure your e-mail address in your blog account here actually works, because while I’ll announce when all three winners have been selected, I won’t publicly name who they were. It’s important to me that readers get what they need from the stories, and that means not telling them what I want.

LATE NOTE: ALL THREE COPIES OF BOOKS HAVE BEEN WON, AND THE CONTEST IS CLOSED.

Quantum Entanglement, God Immanent, and Talking Socks
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Two Pairs Talking SocksSo I got to reading about quantum entanglement and thinking about how it could be used in with worldbuilding to create a magic system. Quantum entanglement is the extraordinarily cool fact that quanta—the very, very smallest, indivisible particles that are force carriers for the matter of the universe—form connected pairs, and these pairs have connections to each other that are not hindered by space or time. A quantum particle in one place that is acted upon will respond … while its connected quantum particles elsewhere will ALSO respond identically, and simultaneously, no matter how far away they are. (Or perhaps even in which universe they exist.)

This little bit of science is perhaps the fantasy writer’s great motherlode of workable magic, and I tripped over it, and dug into it, and fantasy gold started raining on my head. Let me show you why.

(Beyond this point, we drift from science into my speculation.)

Everything contains quanta. Not just light, but you and me and the kitchen table and the stars scattered across space and through time. You, through the connections of your quanta, are connected to the Eiffel tower, and some chick in Monterey, and the planet Venus, and the star Alpha Centuri, and perhaps to the moment and the place of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, and to some eight-eyed scientist in another universe. Right now. And when your quanta get pinged, all these things to which you are connected register the hit. And—here’s the golden part—when all of those things to which you are connected register the hit, YOU get pinged.

It’s all very small. It might seem insignificant. But what if it isn’t? What if those pings are what are registering when you suddenly think of your best friend from high school, and then the best friend, out of the blue and after fifteen years, calls you the same day? What if those pings are registering when three different people in three different parts of the world stumble over the same new scientific theory at the same time, and start pursuing it independent of each other?

What if those pings are registering when you have the sudden, very bad feeling that you need to get off the road right now, and you do, and a truck comes around the corner the very next second, on your side of the road, where you would have been if you hadn’t listened to your gut?

What if those pings are registering when you ask God, however you may perceive God, for something, and that something happens?

What if you could connect to these pings on purpose, through meditation or prayer or biofeedback or because You Can Build A Mainframe From The Things You Have At Home*? (* Title of an old computer-geek filk that I happen to love. Sorry about that.) Could you learn to control what you heard? What you saw? Could you track what is going on somewhere else in the country? In someone else’s country? Could you and a hundred other quanta listeners track down Osama bin Laden with just your minds because you’re all connected to his quanta? Could you create a cure for some heinous cancer? Could you turn a hurricane around? Could you listen to the birth of the universe, or witness life on another planet, in another star system?

Magic, all of those things. But maybe not.

Maybe all the stuff our brain is doing with the 90% that doesn’t look like it’s doing anything is related to connecting with quanta, with listening to pings. Maybe your gut has a quanta listening station built in, too.

Maybe God is connected quanta—the part of each of us that is also part of everything and everyone, everywhere, everywhen—that knows everything, that feels everything, that is everything, eternally. God immanent. A number of religions have described God in this fashion—maybe the folks who follow those religions are listening to their quanta.

So, if your magic system is based on quanta, if you’re going to utilize the principle that everything is connected to everything else and that all these connections are in constant, immediate communication with each other, how do you make that work?

Abundance Talking SocksWhy? Well, because socks are fun to make, first of all, and if you’re going to do magic, it might as well be fun. Next, the technology for making socks is available to the most primitive and the most sophisticated people equally. Also because socks are useful and warm, and they are a physical, tangible point of contact between the maker and the wearer. Because socks can come in any colors, any patterns, any styles. And you can have people agree on what those colors and patterns and styles mean. Agreement on meaning, that is, language, is critical.

Give Thanks to Spirit SocksThe demo socks I’ve shown here are Quantum Socks—or Talking Socks, to the Anzi people, whose culture I’m thinking about and developing as I make the socks. I’ve decided that the Anzi created a small language to embed prayers and, eventually, communication with other Anzi, in their clothing. They started with colors, each of which has a meaning and a meditation. They moved on to simple patterns; braids and blocks and checks and bands. And then they created glyphs. The glyphs embed the specific desire of the maker into clothing in visible, readable form.

Give Thanks to Spirit GlyphThe green, brown, gray and red Abundance Socks on the right (in the picture above) carry the Give Thanks To Spirit glyph in a continuous band.

The blue, green, white, tan, and rose Winds of Change, Waters of Serenity Socks on the left (in the picture above) carry the Summon Spirit, Invoke Change glyph in a continuous band.Winds of Change, Waters of Serenity glyph Each color has a meaning, the placement of each band has a meaning. (Yes, I have worked out the placements and meanings. I’m deeply geeky that way.)

So where’s the magic?

In the quanta. The act of willing something, of praying for it, of visualizing it, pings the quanta (in my worldbuilding system). The act of putting one’s will into a tangible, visible form allows others who know the language to ping the quanta again, simply by seeing the patterns and reading the language (because the act of observation changes that which is observed, remember).

The Abundance Socks give thanks for something needed. They acknowledge the Anzi belief that as soon as you put your will into the system, the system answers simultaneously, though you may not see the results immediately. So when the Anzi pray, they don’t pray for something. They give thanks for it, because whether they have what they need yet or not, they accept that Spirit has already answered.

From a real-world perspective, I started in on the first Abundance Sock, working out the magic of it as I was making it, and the next day, got word that THE RUBY KEY and a second book sold for nice money—news that I desperately needed. Were the socks, the prayer, and the quanta involved in this? Dunno. It makes an excellent story, though, don’t you think?

Talking Socks. They talk to Spirit, they talk to people, maybe they talk to quanta.

I’ll put up the background material (color meditations, band patterns and theory, and glyphs) and a pattern for the socks in the Reader section of the site as soon as I can. I have to write the sock pattern first (I’ve never written a knitting pattern before, so that in itself may take some time.)

How Very Strange
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libra: libra is at the threshold of new thought, new identity, new new new. Lauds to you for taking the risks and venturing into the unknown to find a sweet, profitable,transformed you. No plastic surgery, this isn’t TV. — from Astrology for Writers, Editors, and Filmmakers

It’s funny. I’ve finished my last contract. Haven’t sold anything new, nor am I trying to at the moment. I have money due me from two publishers now, and assume that some of it will be coming in shortly, and that will be enough to live on for a while.

We live on what I make from writing. Only. So I should be in a complete panic at the absence of contracts and the absence of striving, not because I have to fear for this month or next month (assuming my publishers do pay me), but because without contracts now, I’ll have problems four months or six months or a year down the road.

But I’m not panicking.

I’m trying to figure out what I want to do next. Where I want to go. At the moment, I have no clue where that is.

For this moment, I feel weightless, timeless, suspended in a radiant bubble that protects me from stress, panic, fear, worry, and uncertainty. I sit in my office, and the light flows through the window and illuminates the dustmotes that the heating vent blows upward, and the words flow into my little personal writing project, and I am oddly and blissfully content.

I’m writing the e-book. I’m putting together my e-book store. Planning on offering my own writing e-books, and when it’s finished, a wonderful piece of writing software, plus e-books from other writers (names withheld for the moment, when they start mentioning the projects on their own weblogs, I’ll link up here). I’m putting together an affiliate program that will pay between 15% and 20% on gross products sales (and 13% on second-tier sales), and monthly on any amount earned over $10 (because I know I’m not the only one who’s had a crappy year financially, and I figure I’m not the only one who could use extra income.) I’m considering doing a very inexpensive e-book version of Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, and considering writing the follow-up series, whether I find a publisher for it or not. I loved Cadence Drake, and I want to know what happens to her, dammit.

I have some books that I want to write for professional publication, of course. I have what I’d planned intially as a four-book light-hearted fantasy series on ghost-hunters (Ghosts and Gremlins, Inc.) that I’m considering reconfiguring into a single, much heftier, book. I have the Seven Accursed books that are pinging at me to be written. And all those paranormal suspense proposals that I did for Claire that I’d still like to write, albeit for the fantasy market.

Maybe it’s the post-book decompression. Maybe it’s that this time off (and even though I’m writing, somehow it feels exactly like time off) is something that I’ve desperately needed, and my mind is refusing to look at the future. Maybe it’s that I’m hoping the e-books will do well enough that I’ll have a buffer when the pro publishers don’t pay.

But whatever it is, I’m back to reinventing myself again. Breathing in this little space of moments that I have before the bubble bursts and I’m back in the thick of struggling to survive. Maybe hoping that this time, finally, the bubble won’t burst.

And I’m enjoying the light. The dustmotes. The silence.

The weightlessness. Especially that.

So … Monterey
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The kid called last night. He’s got a room with one of the friends he made in basic, overlooking mountains, with the evening temperature hovering around 60˚. It was dusk, a fog was rolling in, and he was elated that he only had to share a room with one person, and that showers were private.

He’s already been warned that the dropout rate for his school is brutal, that washbacks are common, that this course he has chosen is incredibly difficult and will continue to be incredibly difficult the entire time he’s doing it.

In spite of the warnings, he’s happy. He’s discovered that he can do a hell of a lot more than he thought he could. He can run, do sit-ups, do push-ups. He can get through a gas chamber, coming out the other side still standing and functioning, and leave the TI impressed that it’s possible for one human being to produce that much mucus on short notice. He can pass an obstacle course, be screamed at and still function, hit a target with a weapon, work with teammates, strive for the greater good. He’s looking at a future he won through his own hard work, and the fact that he still has hard work ahead of him is something he can view as a challenge, not as an obstacle.

He’s not the same kid he was three years ago. He’s grown in good ways. And though I’d love to take all the credit, I can’t. I can take credit for telling him from an early age that I believed in him, and for making sure he knew that there would be no gravy train — that I was damned sure he could make his dreams into realities, but that he was going to have to do it on his own.

That was hard. But it was what my parents did for me.

As a parent, we want good things for our kids. As a parent, I’ve come to believe the worst thing we can do is try to give them the things they need to earn for themselves.

We don’t owe our kids a free ride, free college education, everything they ever wanted — and we do them vast disservice if we give them those things. If we make their way smooth, we allow them to be weak. Not good for them, not good for us, not good for anyone.

We owe our kids our guidance, our love, and our faith that if we refuse to hand them the entitlement package we’re told we should give them, they will be able to develop the backbone to carry themselves through life well, and will be able to take the values we’ve offered them and make something good of them. At the age of twenty, and going into the third year of pursuing his goals actively, the kid is just barely getting started. But I think he’s starting well.

Blue Horses: Loving the Real
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Picasso and Franz Marc might seem to be odd folks to remember from public school kindergarten. But my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Quimby, had us doing crayon copies of their work, and discussing what we liked about it. She didn’t name the artists, or the paintings, but I still vividly recall my encounter with Big Blue Horses , the 1911 Franz Marc painting shown here.

I was a six-year-old horse nut. Had read every C. W. Anderson horse book at the library a dozen times; lay on my stomach in my bedroom copying his pictures over and over again trying to draw the way he drew; pinned a scarf to my butt and galloped around the house on all fours, setting up boots and shoes and toys as obstacle courses over which I could jump ….

Serious horse nut.

So in kindergarten, I copied that painting with my Big Fat Crayons, and I absolutely fell in love with it. It spoke to me. I can look at it now and see exactly what I saw then, as if I were still six years old. It breathes. It vibrates. It is full of life and movement and magic.

I was apparently doing a bit of vibrating, too, because Mrs. Quimby called on me to answer why I liked it so much.

“Because it looks so real,” I said, and just about got my ass laughed out of kindergarten. My know-it-all midget colleagues and associates pointed out in no uncertain terms that the horses were blue (you idiot), and weirdly fat, and lacking in that C.W. Anderson detail that kindergarten artists with erratic motor skills worshiped.

And I was six. I did not have the words to give my classmates a view into the soul I saw in that painting. In many ways, I still don’t. But I remembered the encounter, and the painting, and the magic — and this morning, talking with Matt before I got up to get to work, after we had just finished listening to Ray Bradbury on the radio talking to (the indescribable?) George Noory, I finally found out how that encounter had shaped me.

We were talking about why much of Bradbury’s work is still as fresh today as when he wrote it. About how it transcends genre and time, about how it is something that, like Twain, will still be readable in a hundred years. I said something about Bradbury’s work always being so real to me.

And, bam!, there it was. The connection. Bradbury’s work, like Marc’s, takes a step back from the minutiae of daily life, from the picky details of science and sociology. He blurs things just enough that we see past the story to what lies beyond. Just as Marc’s painting moves past the horse to give us the soul of the horse, Bradbury’s work moves past people to give us humanity. He writes real the way Marc painted real, doing work that leaves echoes in our minds and imprints on our souls long after we walk away.

I came back to the keyboard today a little more alive. Inspired. Excited. I remembered that when I was twenty-five, the reason that I wanted most to be a writer was because I could still be working at 85 — and there is Bradbury, who this morning said he’s working on two novels and a play, that he doesn’t know what people do with their time, but that he writes. That the secret of life is to always do something new.

Listening to him, I remembered C: The Secret Project, lying in wait on my hard drive. About why I want to write it so much. I thought about where writers get their ideas. I thought about snakes and sunrises. And, getting a little choked up, I remembered that, most of all, I have always wanted to write real.

Oh, God, Oh, God, The Sky Is Falling
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Since the early 1980s, the civilized world has been crushed beneath sheets of onrushing glacial ice. We’ve watched in horror as the world’s great cities have fallen beneath those relentless, grinding masses, as the lights have gone out in heartbreaking, poignant flickers, overrun by darkness that will not retreat for thousands of years, if ever.

Here we sit, in our caves, the few survivors of a once-populous world, and … What? The world isn’t covered in sheets of ice, cities aren’t ground to rubble beneath the onrushing glaciers, we aren’t all dead? Sonuvabitch. If only that had happened, we could have been spared Wham! and glam-rock.

But the world did end on January 1, 2000. Here we are, our civilization crushed by our foolish dependence on computers, living in caves and starting fires by banging rocks together and …. and … Dammit. We missed that one, too?

For those of you who missed the Ice Age that glaciated the populated world in the early 1980s, or the devastation of Y2K, be sure to catch the exciting hysteria and fun panic of your very own chance to die horribly in ten years.

Fascinatingly enough, the end of the world is always ten years from now. Or at least on a Number Ending In Zero. In the early seventies, we were ten years from the ice age. Y2K — many zeroes. Now we’re ten years from a melt-down. If you’re getting a bit suspicious of the magic sky-is-falling God Hates Decimals doom mark (and yeah, you should be), take the time to read Michael Crichton’s The State of Fear. I’d already figured out global warming was hype before I read the book. (I was about thirteen when I read that in ten years everything and everyone I loved was going to be living in perpetual snow. And I was one of those jackasses who thought the carefully documented disaster scenario of Y2K was plausible.) Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. Burn me three times … I don’t think so, pals. I started doing my own research.

But if the end of the world is new territory for you — and with it, the people who make a whole lot of money and gain a whole lot of power when you buy into their scenarios — you’ll appreciate a novel that is massively and comprehensively researched, footnoted, appendixed, and intelligent. And a writer who doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but who is very, very good at pointing out the lies told by those who do claim to.

MacRanting: I Am Not WE, Mac
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I’d like to take a moment to pitch a small fit. I am not WE. My opinions are my own, my affiliations are non-existent, and I do not fit — nor choose to fit — into any corporate marketer’s fucking target demographic.

The demographic that has me most deeply pissed off at the moment is the Mac Community, as created, promoted and described by MacAddict and MacWorld magazines.

I got a computer. I did not joined a goddamned cult.

But from the contents of a couple of years’ worth of MacAddicts and MacWorlds, and the painfully hyped and never-ending Mac advertising, you would think I was ready to shave my head and start chanting “Steve Jobs is God” along with whichever group of cheesewhiz pissant Mac users it is that has collectively disconnected its cortex matter from its input devices and started sucking on the corporate tit for its opinions. (I have to assume this group exists somewhere. The few other Mac users I know are sane people, but SOMEBODY has to be the model for the crap that goes into these two mags.)

Please don’t misunderstand me. I like my Mac. It’s slow, it was overpriced, and it has certain design features that are there because they’re stylish, not practical, and frankly, fuck style. You know? But the Mac is rock-solid, it’s secure, I have to look at maybe three pieces of spam a day because I use Mail, which comes bundled with the OS for free and has the best spam filter on the planet, bar none. (Please note, however, that my recommendation for buying a Mac only applies to a Mac running OS X. Any Mac OS prior to OS X I consider unusable crap. Tried previous versions, loathed them.)

And the only words I’ve lost since I started using my little iMac were, one time, from a user error. Word crashed on me. (Word is a Windows port. I in no way blame Apple for its bugginess — Apple software works.) When I reloaded it, the Mac politely brought up a temp file of the document I had been working on when Word crashed, and the Mac asked me if I wanted to save this document. The machine had saved all the words I would have lost if it hadn’t been such a polite, elegant little beastie. And I clicked the wrong button. Dumped the doc. User error. One time. About 600 words in the last however-many years.

I don’t get viruses, I don’t get trojans, I don’t get pop-ups, I have never had to reformat my Mac’s hard drive, though I do take good care of it with DiskWarrior. And I keep religious backups anyway, because You Never Know.

But my acquisition of a Mac was a business decision. B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S. It met certain criteria that I required in a BUSINESS machine that was responsible for keeping the mission critical side of my business going. Mainly, that it is rock-solid, that it is less susceptible to all the crap floating around the Internet than a comparable Windows machine, and that it doesn’t routinely eat my work like my last computer, which was a POS Compaq.

Buying a Mac was not a Lifestyle decision. I don’t have a Lifestyle, thank you very fucking much. I have a life. My computer is a part of my life inasmuch as, and no further than, it acts as my interface between me and my written words. I do not let it dictate my diet, my politics, my opinions, my religion, or my sex life. No matter what the editors and the writers of the aforementioned Mac magazines — one of which suggested in a recent article that “if a vegan diet is good enough for Steve, maybe we should consider it” — might think.

Eat me. It’s hardware, pal. Hardware. It’s not an icon, it’s not a revolution, and if I want someone to admire, it won’t be a shitwad multi-millionaire who abandoned his girlfriend and kid to fend for themselves, and who is, even when described by friends, a temper-tantrum-throwing prima donna.

Would I recommend a Mac? Yes. No. Maybe. What do you do with your computer?

I’ve given the pros above. If you have something mission-critical that you do with a computer (mission critical is defined here as, if your computer glitches or gets overrun by viruses and eats your last six months of work, you’ll starve), and if the Mac will run software that will let you do that job, go out RIGHT NOW and by a Mac.

But understand that for the price you’ll pay for any Mac, you could get about double the processing power, speed, and hard drive space in a Win Box.

Here are some other cons.

It’s hard to find Mac software if you don’t live in a densely populated area. Consign yourself to ordering it online.

The software is generally more expensive than what you would pay for Windows software. (It’s usually better, too, but part of that is that the Mac is a much better-integrated machine than a Windows machine. The Mac does have sweet spots.)

If your primary use of a computer is to play games, forget the Mac forever. Games on the Mac are slow, late, kludgy, lumpy, uglier than comparable Windows games, prone to crashes, way overpriced, and they don’t run worth shit unless you paid as much for your computer as I did for my car. (Used, eight years old when I bought it, in good shape, a Mazda.)

If you’re just kicking around with your computer, you don’t want a Mac either. Part of the fun of having a computer is buying cool new software for it, and as previously noted, there isn’t a lot of software for the Mac and what there is is hard to find.

And if you want a rock-solid machine for cheap, you don’t have to have a Mac. If you hear the words “I wrote a script” and you think computer, not Hollywood, build your own Linux box and you can have all the goodies I’ve described with a Mac, and you won’t be able to play any good games either. But you won’t pay as much for the privilege.

Biggest reason NOT to own a Mac? The Mac Community as described and promoted by MacAddict and MacWorld. When these mags stick to tech articles and reviews, they’re as good as any other computer magazine. You need to subscribe to at least one, just because the reviews and tech articles are valuable. Sometimes essential. But along with the good stuff, you’ll have to put up with prissy digs at Windows machines and Windows users, self-congratulatory little asides on how Mac users are smarter, vast generalizations about how Mac users love Steve (I’m voting for fricasseed), essays about how being number two is better than being number one because it makes you special, flat-out pushes for Mac users to support Steve’s Causes like Steve’s Hollywood Friends do (about which we could have a ANOTHER WHOLE FUCKING REALLY NASTY RANT RIGHT NOW, but we won’t), and a whole lot of other snotty, elitist MacBullshit that is almost, but not quite, enough to get me to toss the machine.

But I won’t.

Because, like I said, I DO have a mission-critical app. Writing. The Mac is my business machine and if there were a Mac magazine that had an honest-to-God business slant instead of a we’re-too-fucking-precious-for-words slant, I’d dump the other two and subscribe to that. In the meantime, I’ll keep my Mac, and eventually I’ll buy another one.

And just to allow myself to feel better about being a Mac user — thus lumping myself in with the Mac mags’ fictitious Mac Community of Users (which lives in complete disconnect with me and the other Mac users I actually know) — I’ll eat meat (which I would have done anyway) and once every couple of years I’ll find my way up to Alaska and club a baby seal.

Pushing Through
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I received a letter from a young writer with whom I’ve been corresponding for a while now. In it she asked me a question that I thought worth passing on, since it is a question EVERY writer will face sooner or later.

Her question:

As for my first novel it should be well and truly finished by now but it isn’t. (Don’t ask – I have a serious case of writers block…of course the lack of any serious deadline also helps!) Actually I haven’t written a single word since a few days before christmas. I know from your ‘Silent Bounce’ messages that you have had to write on difficult days, even persevering through migraines and against heavy deadlines. A skill I will have to work on. I am sure that with experience and time and a better understanding of my craft it will get easier. Any advice on how to push through in the meantime?

And my response

As to pushing through, there isn’t any secret. You’ve hit the point where you’ve realized that this is actual work. This is THE make or break moment for any writer, when you have to decide whether you want to write, or whether you want to have written. If you want to write for a living, you’ll get back to the computer and do it. If you only want to have written, you won’t. You’ll keep thinking of yourself as someone who wants to be a writer, but the goal will drift farther and farther from you as other things get in the way.

If you discover that it isn’t what you want with your life, let yourself be okay with that. I thought I wanted to be a professional artist until I got a job as one, and discovered that I liked the title, but not the work that went with it. Find the work you like, whatever it might be.

Let me know how it goes.

Writing is a wonderful job for anyone who loves to write. Who enjoys the physical act of writing, which consists of sitting down and putting words on paper hour after hour after hour.

For anyone else, it’s a misery.