Category Archives: Personal

Global Warming? You’ll wish…
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I’ve been saying all along that the global warming scare is just that: an attempt to divert massive amounts of money and power into the hands of a bunch of fearmongers who prey on the gullibility of people who don’t want to learn science.

Here’s the latest.

Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about

Note that the article, while pointing to no increase in temperature since 1998, also notes that the folks who brought out the data say that even though temperatures are dropping, they think “man-made carbon dioxide” will be sufficient to keep everyone warm.

If that’s true, China will have the best temperatures around: it has much of the world’s heavy industry and air you can cut with a knife. The US, with relatively clean air, won’t have that spiffy man-made carbon to keep it warm.

Note also, however, that there’s debate over the release from the Met office—that scientists aren’t all falling in line with the thought police’s “carbon is more important than the sun” mantra.

Here’s the thing. The sun has regulated temperature on this planet since there was a sun. And a planet. Temperature increases in the late last century fit with the planet’s relationship to the sun. And those increases were nowhere near as great as pre-industrial increases.

The planet’s temperature cycles. It does this without out us. It did before there were humans, with much more variable swings than we’ve experienced in the last 200,000 years. It will continue to cycle without us, and not just in the next ten years or hundred years. We’re not experiencing carbon warming. Or carbon cooling. Or whatever the power-hungry decide to claim as the next great crisis.

We’re experiencing weather. Weather changes. Invest in coats and greenhouses.

(Thanks to Jim Woosley for the link.)

And for the much, much more I’ve written about this over the years, use the search button on the right side of the navigation bar, and just type in “global warming.”

Ignore Google’s ads at the top. You’ll fine a long list of my stuff.

What would you do with a four-day work week?
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Fun, work, freedom

Fun, work, freedom

I read this article on Inc. recommending switching businesses over to four-day work weeks. Obviously this is not something that would work for restaurants, retail outlets, hospitals, or anywhere in the service industry (if the word “emergency” can be legitimately used in any portion of your business, in other words). For businesses that invent, improve, and manufacture, it could be done. Software designers, computer manufacturers, car manufacturers, ehrm… writers, artists, and so on could work ten-hour days four days a week, with one of those days dedicated solely to research, and it would change us.

But how? I know I couldn’t make it work for myself. I start getting itchy on Saturday and Sunday when I’m taking enforced time off.  For me, that’s what it is. Enforced. If I don’t make myself do it, turn my computer all the way off, and stay the hell out of the office, I will end up working because working is what I like to do. It’s my form of fun.

But self-employed is different than job-employed. I’ve done both, and while I was doing my toughest job, working ER, I worked twelve-hour shifts two days a week. I exchanged every weekend of my life for less pay (compared to the nurses who worked five days a week), no vacation or sick time, and no benefits for five days of absolute freedom. For me, it was worth it. I could not miss a single day, or I would lose half my pay for the week.

But on my five days of freedom each week, I accumulated six out of my seven years worth of rejection slips, wrote several novels, sold the second and all that followed, spent time with my kids, and built the career that let me finally, after ten years of working seven days a week (five of them on my second job), walk away from my nursing job to live the life I’d earned.

So, for those who chose to use it, a four-day work week could be like that. A third day into which you could pour your efforts for yourself. Look at what you do with your days off now, and think about what you would do if you had an extra one. Obviously, if you aren’t using your current days off to build the life you want, an extra day would be of no real value.

But if you are already using your time off, what changes would that extra twenty-four hours allow you to make?  Would you take it if it were offered?

If you have employees, what benefits other than the ones listed in the article could a four-day work week offer? Conversely, what problems would it cause?  Would the trade-off in employee satisfaction and employee retention be worth whatever downside you see?

Writing grants, both Good and Evil
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Grant Money

Grant Money

When I closed down comments on the slavery post, I got a lot of irate emails from folks who did not read closely, and who were under the impressions that I thought ALL taxes were slavery, that ALL grants were evil, and that anyone who accepted any sort of grant was a slaveholder by degree.  I’ll get back to taxes at a later date, but for now I want to talk about Grants.

What I always hope is that people will read what I wrote, but most people don’t. And they reply to what they think I said, rather than to what I said.  What I said was that government-funded grants were funded by slave labor. I was very specific about that.

I think grants funded wholly by individuals or their businesses who want to help writers and artists are a fine and lovely thing. I even think those folks who fund grants should get a legitimate tax write-off for their grant-funding, since they are in effect paying someone else to work—creating some part of a job—and that ought to count for something. I don’t care what sort of works these folks want to support: If you love something (that isn’t criminal), you have every right to spend your money to make more of what you love available.

At one point I considered—to the point of figuring out which works of mine I would funnel profits from in order to fund it—creating a Romanticist grant, a fund to be given annually to one writer of my choice who was working on a piece of Romantic fiction (Romantic fiction being that which presents the world as it could be and should be, and that stresses individual achievement, heroism, and villainy: in other words, the sort of fiction that does not EVER receive grants from anyone else).

I value Romanticist fiction.  It’s what I write, it meets my strict criteria for fiction that is worth my time, and the good stuff is damn hard to find. It would be worth funding.

Then I realized that in order to create this grant, I would have to read a whole lot of applications, and that I did not have the time to do so. And I further realized there was no one else to whom I would be willing to hand over responsibility for choosing grant recipients. I knew what I wanted to reward, and knew at some point I would be unhappy with a work chosen by anyone else.  So the grant idea died.

But my point here is that grants given voluntarily by people who value what they are funding are a wonderful and magnificent thing. They are Good, big G, on the scale of Good and Evil.

Grants funded by me (or you) with money taken at gunpoint by the government are Evil, big E. The government gives my money to agencies run by individuals who fund works I do not value (fiction from the school of Realism, deconstructionist crap, and other work I consider an utter waste of my time and money), which I would not voluntarily pay for. I don’t object to those works being created. I object to them being created out of MY effort, which has all been funded by ME.

And speaking now specifically to the folks who so kindly told me if I objected to having my rights voted out from under me and I didn’t like having my money forcibly extracted from me for uses I do not approve of, I could always leave…

Yes. I can. Taking a couple of jobs other than my own with me—jobs I have created and that I pay out of my own pocket because I am someone who knows how to create jobs. I’m sure the folks I pay will thank you for telling me to go away.  If I do, you need to realize that I’ll be late to the party.

You folks have been inviting folks like me to leave—folks who do not wish to have our rights voted out from under us—for about half a century now. Amazingly, you do not realize how many have already done so, taking with them the jobs you bitch about not having, and putting those jobs in India, China, the Philippines, Mexico, Pakistan, and anywhere else in the world where folks who create jobs are appreciated rather than punished. (For now, anyway.)

If you insist on punishing the people who make your lives and your work possible, and if you do not actually know how to create jobs yourself, or are not willing to expend the effort, risk, money, and frequent failure that someone who creates jobs incurs, you might want to rethink this strategy of yours. Voting away the rights of the people who create jobs doesn’t seem to be working out too well for you.

Do you support slavery? Most people do.
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The SlaveMy position is that slavery is alive and well in the US and everywhere else in the world, that most people are in favor of it and actively working for its furtherance, and that most of them would deny fervently that they are doing anything of the sort.

I will support my position, and if you disagree with me you are invited to debate, but to debate, you MUST follow the blog rules.

First, let me define terms.

individual: A human being. All human beings are individuals.

individual rights: Every individual on this planet is born with the following inherent rights (and only these rights), which exist independent of any grant or external source, by virtue of the fact that the individual is alive:

  • The right to life—that is, the right to sustain his or her own existence.
  • The right to liberty—that is, the right to choose to take such actions as permit the individual to sustain his or her own existence, so long as these actions do not infringe on the rights of other individuals.
  • The right to the pursuit of happiness—that is, the right to pursue any work or activity that the individual finds rewarding or pleasurable, so long as his rights do not infringe on the rights of other individuals.
  • The right to self-defense—that is, the right of the individual to respond with force to preserve his own existence when faced with the threat of force used against him or her. No individual has the right to initiate force against another.

No matter where you live, no matter what sort of government you live under, these are your rights as a human being, by virtue of your existence as a human being, and these rights may not be taken away from you ethically or legitimately for any other cause than that you have initiated force against another human being (Example: You attack someone to steal his money.), or have caused such force to be initiated. (Example: You hire a hit man to kill someone, so you bear equal guilt for murder with the person who physically killed him.)

ethical human being: An ethical human being acknowledges individual human rights as the origin and underpinning of all rights, deals only voluntarily and consensually with all other human beings, and uses force against another individual only in self defense. No human being who deals with individuals in any other way is an ethical human being. Ethical human beings are rare, and have to work hard to remain ethical, but do exist.

ethical government: Any government that exists under constitution as the servant of the individual, with its laws created to protect individual rights and with individual rights reserved equally for all individuals, and that exists only to protect the individual from the use of force against him, either within or without, and which is paid voluntarily by the individual to provide the services free human beings require:

  • A military force to protect individuals and their rights from force originating outside the nation’s borders,
  • A police force to protect the individual and his rights from force originating within the nation’s borders.
  • An impartial judicial system held to the same standard of law it enforces, charged with ensuring that laws protect the rights of the individual, which will enforce contracts and decide objectively and without bias in support of individual rights when disputes exist, and which is held accountable for every decision made by the individuals who serve within it.
  • A representative executive system made up of individuals chosen by the vote of all those individuals represented, where the representatives must live under the laws they create, and who are charged with and entrusted with the making of laws to preserve the rights of the individual—and NO other sort—and who are held accountable for and will be judged for the laws they create.

An ethical government is the only entity which has the right to initiate force, and may initiate force against individuals or nations who have used force against its citizens or who intend to. Because it is the only entity that may legitimately initiate the use of force, ethical government must be closely controlled by ethical human beings: those who hold the preservation and protection of individual rights as their sole standard, and who do not seek to turn human beings into slaves. At present, I am unaware of the existence of any ethical governments in the world.

slavery: 1) Outright ownership of one human being by another human being or by a government, OR 2) outright ownership of the products of the labor of one human being by another human being or by a government, OR 3) the involuntary removal of the products of labor of one human being by force for the enrichment of another human being or a government.

Involuntary and by force in the definition above are actually redundant because they mean exactly the same thing, but because most people accept one of the two above as acceptable, but not the other, I’ve included both.

There is no such thing as the right to enslave.

Now I’ll give examples, by sections of my definition of slavery.

Form 1—Outright ownership: If you walk down to the corner slave market and buy Bob so that you claim a right to force Bob do whatever you tell him to do, you are a slave owner and Bob is your slave. Same thing if you stick a gun to his head and take him into captivity so you can claim the right to force him to do what you tell him to do.  If you hire an agent of the government to capture Bob and give or sell him to you so that you may force him to work for you, you are a slaveholder, and Bob is your slave. If your local, state, or federal government sends an agent into Bob’s house to claim ownership of him so that it may force him to work, the government is a slave owner, and Bob is its slave—BUT if you are the beneficiary of the spoils of Bob’s forced labor, YOU are also a slaveholder, and Bob is YOUR slave as well as the government’s.

Form 2—Serfdom: If you don’t actually own Bob, but claim the right to force Bob to give you everything he makes (either in terms of money or physical goods), you are a slave-owner and Bob is your slave. If you hire an agent of the government to take everything Bob works for to give to you (either in terms of money or physical goods), you are a slave owner and Bob is your slave. Likewise, if your government lays claim to the products of Bob’s work, even if it does not claim to own him, the government is a slaveholder, and Bob is its slave. AGAIN, however, if you receive any of the spoils of Bob’s stolen labor, YOU are a slaveholder along with your government, and Bob is YOUR slave as well as the government’s.

The euphemistic term for a human being who is not owned by an individual or government, but who does not own what he produces, is serf, but in truth, serfs are slaves.

Form 3—Enslavement by degree: If you don’t own Bob, and don’t lay claim to 100% of his production, but do claim the right to stick a gun to Bob’s head to force Bob to give you some percentage of his production for as long as he produces, (whether in terms of money or physical goods), then you are a slave-owner and Bob is your slave to the degree of the percentage of his production that goes to you. If you hire an agent of the government to force Bob to give you a regular percentage of the results of his productive efforts for as long as he works, you are a slave owner, and Bob is your slave by degree.  If the government claims the right to force from Bob a percentage of his productive effort for as long as he produces, then Bob is a slave of the government to the degree that what he has created is taken from him—AND if you receive any portion of the products of his forced labor, you are a slave owner by degree, and Bob is your slave by that same degree.

You as an individual are free to the degree and percent that your individual rights are protected and observed by your government and other individuals, and that the products of your effort to sustain your own existence belong to you.

Some of you are looking at instance #3, and thinking, “Wait a minute, that’s, um… familiar. She doesn’t really mean that.“

Yes, it is familiar, and yes, I do mean that.

Enslavement by degree is the version of slavery most people actively and enthusiastically support for exactly as long as they can pretend that it’s not really slavery.

I had my one brush with attempting to be a slave-owner back in the early nineties, when I applied for a grant from a government-funded arts council. I was writing a book outside my normal genre, and doing it on spec, and I thought it would be nice to have a little extra money to live on while I took the chance on a book I couldn’t be sure would sell. I hoped it would sell, of course, but I couldn’t be sure, and we were hurting financially.  (I think the book I tried to get the grant for was a very early version of what became MIDNIGHT RAIN.)

I applied for the grant, waited a long time, and eventually heard back from the council. My grant application was turned down…but the reason it was turned down was both fascinating, and—when you take the time to actually think about it—horrifying.

My work did not receive a grant because it was deemed to be commercial fiction.

Okay.  What is commercial fiction?

Commercial fiction is any fiction that one human being voluntarily purchases from another human being.

The act of volition, of having one person say, “I think this is good enough that someone will be willing to pay me for it,” and of having another human being say “I like that enough that I’m willing to pay for it,” makes a work commercial.

If just one person is willing to pay you voluntarily for your work (not donate to you: pay you—in that you set the price, and your reader purchases the right to read your work), then you are a writer of commercial fiction. If you cannot make a living from one reader, you are STILL a commercial fiction writer. The right to the pursuit of happiness does not guarantee that you will be able to make a living wage from whatever you love and pursue. It simply grants you the right to pursue it, and if you don’t make a living wage at it and you wish to be an ethical human being, you’ll have to support yourself with a second job, the way all ethical writers start out, and the way many ethical writers continue for as long as they create.

HOWEVER, I was, back then, still screwed up enough that I was willing to look at money without questioning too hard where it came from. Before that rejection, I would have happily taken the grant, and I would not have looked at the price other people paid for it to exist.

That incident—and trying to figure out the standards by which the individual handing out the grants was using to select work—forced me to look at where the money DID come from, and by what standards it was being handed out. If commercial work—work people would happily pay for—was not considered appropriate for government-funded grants, then what work was considered appropriate?

And the answer was: Only work that the individual handing out the grants decided no one would pay for voluntarily, and that individuals should be forced to pay for, whether they liked the work or not.

Take a moment and think about that, and think about the horror that underlies it. Government money is being taken at the point of a gun (and if you would debate this point, first try not paying your income taxes, then call me from prison to let me know how that’s working out for you), and it is being taken to give to people who have not earned it.

In the case of government-funded writing grants, the money taken at the point of a gun from individuals who work to support their own existences is being given to those who are creating works some individual has decided no one would pay for voluntarily. Because that’s what non-commercial work is.

Non-commercial work is work people are not willing to pay for voluntarily, and government grants are the means by which governments force people who would not willingly buy a work to pay for it anyway.

I’ve rephrased that same statement three times, and I apologize for the repetition, but this matters.

So what sort of ethical government grants exist?  None.

If you are a writer and you accept a grant funded by government taxation, you become a slave owner. You are a person who has willingly participated in the forcible removal of the products of another individual’s production, which should by right belong solely to him to support his own existence. And, because you used an agent of the government to apply force against another human being for your benefit, you have walked away from being an ethical human being.

Any human being can regain his ethics. To do so, you agree that never again will you be party to the use of force against any other human for your benefit, that you will only deal with other human beings voluntarily and by mutual consent, theirs and yours. And that you will resist in any legal manner you have available to you the use of such force against yourself.

Remember, the right to enslave does not exist.  Not for anyone, not for any reason.

 

 

Comments have been closed for the simple reason that the vast majority of commenters EITHER had not fully read the post and chose to think I said that ALL taxes are slavery, which is nothing like what said, or what I think,OR were A) supporting slavery while B) NOT demonstrating WHY they believe people must be slaves for civilization to work.

For those who offered insightful response, thank you, and I appreciate your input.

For those who think that “slavery is okay if it’s just a little slavery,” I’ll note that your argument is the same as “poison is okay if it’s just a little poison,” as well. Both arguments remain false.

Finally, for the folks who were attempting to argue that human beings have no rights, please unsubscribe from my list. You have the right to think whatever you like, but I have no desire to help you make a better life for yourself.

Why I love history: Ancient Roman Dick Jokes
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Venus on Alert in Ancient Pompeii

Venus on Alert in Ancient Pompeii

I have been doggedly trying to find out more about the Roman Republic (pre-Caesars, pre-decline, pre-depravity). It’s almost impossible. The Romans were a successful self-governing people with a working republic for five hundred years and change, but damn near every resource I can locate begins at the point where their corrupt senators handed over control to individual despots and everything went to hell. I want to know how they succeeded for five hundred years. I think Americans, as a self-governing people, might all want to know that.But no. Apparently everyone else only wants to know how they failed.

Anyway, I was watching a history of the excavation of Pompeii. My husband was half-watching, but at the same time discussing with our son the sensationalist structure of the show we were watching and its emphasis on destruction and depravity, with the documentary collectivist mindset of “this was all the Roman people lumped into one vast generalization,” rather than “this was a one-day snapshot of the lives of some rich Romans on vacation.”

Watching the show, listening to my husband and son, an object I couldn’t quite believe passed before my eyes.

I said, “Dude, stop. Whoa, stop, stop, stop, you gotta see this. Back it up.” My husband did the Manly Remote Thing, and backed up the documentary. He didn’t have to ask me where to stop. The object on display for just that instant was a bronze phallus. Sort of. It was a bronze phallus with legs and feet, wings, a tail that ended in another phallus…and the phallus had its own phallus, neatly situated between its legs. And bells. Don’t forget the bells.

And this…er…creature…was looking around a corner.

I was laughing my ass off. My husband and son burst out laughing too.

The narrator had been droning on about the Roman equation of the phallus with luck, and here was this amazing, beautifully finished, exquisitely detailed, frikkin’ hilarious piece of artwork that some dude one day before 79 AD had created, and the massive bore of a historian and the flat-voiced narrator didn’t stop for so much as a giggle. They were intent on turning this goofy, delightful bit of creativity into a tedious proof of a deadly dull point, and frankly, I didn’t give a shit about the speculative Roman collective mentality regarding the significance of the phallus.

I wanted to know who the guy was who made that thing, because he was a funny, funny guy. It was the fact that he made the thing look around a corner that got me.

Bugger has been dead for pretty close to two thousand years now. And what he created made me laugh.

To me, this is history. Not who were those people, but who was that guy?

(Found a picture on a historical site here: http://www.apollonius.net/pompeii2.html Scroll down three images to the first image under Three Examples of Tintinnabula, or Bronze Windchimes.)

ADDED LATER:

The questions really driving me batty:

  • Was this the guy’s job, or was it his hobby?

    If job, what was the job title for this particular specialty, so that if someone asked you where you got your interesting front porch ornament, you could say, “You can by them from Phallius, the … what?”

    If hobby, well—okay. Sure. I’m betting some guy in Kansas has a similar one.

  • How many guys had this job, and if so, were they in competition?

    I’m saying there were at least two, because there are some significant differences in style in some of the…chimes.Matt suspects this was two guys and an elaborate practical joke on each other, with one sneaking his latest creation onto the other guy’s front porch in the dead of night and hanging it there, and the other guy making one with one more phallus than his friend made, and hanging that thing in front of HIS house. And the two of them, caught by neighbors in the midst of these shenanigans, saying, “Oh, these are good luck charms.” And the neighbor saying, “Really?! I could use some luck. Could I buy one? Only with more dicks?”

    That’s the sort of thing that could spawn an industry.

  • Was this the equivalent of the tourist T-shirt?

    Go to Pompeii, get a dick? Nobody found any of these things (that I know of) prior to the excavation of Pompeii, so was this actually a tourist collectible, emphasizing the thing the town of 20,000 was best known for? “Pompeii, Home of the Dick?”

A pic from my office: My path-to-freedom workboard
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What I have to do to retire from teaching

My office workboard, now with what is probably going to be a two-year checklist in place.

If you’ve taken any of my courses (or read some of my more detail-oriented posts, you’ll recognize me as big on goal-setting, getting a plan in place, and making sure it’s where you can see it.

So the day before yesterday, I erased all the short-term stuff off my office workboard, and put up my BIG goal, which is to retire from teaching inside of two years so I can write JUST my fiction again.

And I put up the steps on how I’ll accomplish this, in order, and with checkboxes.

I love checkboxes.

They’re physical proof of progress. Sitting there blank, they’re a reminder of a step to be taken. Checked, they’re a square on the game board you’ve now covered.

I don’t know how you organize goals, but on the MACRO level, this is how I do mine. On the micro level, I have a notebook I carry with me all the time, in which I keep lists of the small steps that help me accomplish the big steps. I’m pretty close to finishing the first of the four Self-Pub lessons. I’ll check that off on the little list, then make a check on the board when all four are finished.

How do you get from where you are to where YOU want to be?

Oh. By the way, CD II and CD III on the right are shorthand for Cadence Drake 2: Warpaint, and Cadence Drake 3: The List of Three (working title). So my list does include the completion of two novels along with all the rest of the work on the board.

Answers to the Eleven Big ‘I’m Quitting Teaching’ Questions
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Think of this as the "I'm Quitting Teaching" FAQ

Think of this as the "I'm Quitting Teaching" FAQ

I was overwhelmed by the number of responses to my 51st birthday post and the announcement I made about quitting teaching. In those responses, I ran across ten questions that needed a response everyone could read, and I realized there was one question no one had asked, but that desperately needed an answer.

So I’ve answered these BIG questions below.

THE ANSWER TO THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION NO ONE ASKED:

What can I do as a student or graduate of one of your big courses (HTTS, HTRYN, HTWAS) do to make sure I don’t get left behind during the upcoming transitions?

Log into your account for EACH course in which you’re a student, go into your Profile on your student page, and do the following:

  • Make sure your e-mail address is correct and that it’s an address you check regularly,
  • Make sure it is exactly the same e-mail address in each course you’re taking (so you don’t get locked out of the forum)
  • Scroll all the way to the bottom of your profile, and make SURE you have checked the box beside Receive Critical Updates.

If you are not getting critical updates, you stand a HUGE chance of missing the announcements that will move you from the existing course platform to the new one, and if you miss the move, you’ll lose your downloads and access to the forum.  I’ll give plenty of warning, but there are a huge number of students who are NOT subscribed to critical updates, who don’t visit the forum regularly, and who, having graduated, don’t visit their student pages often.

So if you’re a grad or an existing student, do this now, before you forget.

(These links are for existing students only.  They are not registration pages for new students.)

If you don’t remember your login information, please create a support ticket at http://novelwritingschool.com/support and ask me to help you.

QUESTION ONE:

I’m a graduate or a current student in one or more of the following courses:

  • How to Think Sideways
  • How To Revise Your Novel
  • How to Write a Series (stand-alone version)

Will my lessons and extras continue to be available when you lock the course to new students, or do I need to download everything now?

All your materials will remain available, AND you’ll continue to be a full, permanent member of the Boot Camp Writers’ Community on all your course boards.

QUESTION TWO:

I’ve purchased one or more courses from Shop.HollyLisle.com.  Will those continue to be available for re-download after you close the shop permanently?

No.  If you have all your copies intact, burn them to a backup disk now.  If your hard drive has eaten courses you’ve purchased and you need to get backups before I close the shop, log into your account at http://Shop.HollyLisle.com (the login is in the top left corner) and re-download whatever you’re missing.  Burn your copies to a backup disk.

When I close the shop, ALL my smaller courses will be available on Kindle, Nook and iTunes, or as print books on Amazon.com and elsewhere.  However, if you lose your existing copies, you will have to re-buy them, because my old database will not have any connection with the big platforms, and I won’t be able to issue free copies.

If you have lost your account login information, create a support ticket at: http://novelwritingschool.com/support and ask me to help you get back into your HollyShop account.

QUESTION THREE:

J.A. Konrath is just now opening his writing shop.  Why are you closing yours?

Because everything that involves the exchange of money on my site ALSO involves doing customer service.  I do my own because I want it done the way I want it done, I’m a perfectionist and a big pain in the ass in making sure my people (customers AND employees) are treated right, and it was my horrified experience that when I hired someone to cover some of my customer service for me, people knew they weren’t dealing with me, and regularly treated my helper like shit.

When people treat ME like shit, I politely help them get their problem solved, then request that they don’t buy anything else from me.  My helper couldn’t do that.  I refuse to subject anyone else to the sort of abuse my helper took on my behalf, however.

I ALSO refuse to use a third-party customer service option, though, because my own experiences as a customer with those options have been awful.  So I handle all problems myself.  And even though I rarely receive abusive treatment from a customer, when I do, it screws up my day.

And doing customer service, even when working with the kind and understanding folks I usually deal with, is exhausting, time-consuming, and it draws focus from my ability to create.

So I’m moving EVERYTHING that involves the exchange of money to sites that will not only collect the money for the courses I create and then send it to me, but that will do customer service on what they sell.

It’s worth it to me to have my students get my courses from platforms that are dedicated to making everything work right on every sale, every time—and I’m willing to pay the 30-ish% fee to sell on those sites to have that happen.

If J.A. Konrath is doing his own customer service, I wish him luck—it’s going to bite his writing time.  If he’s hired a friend or fan to do it for him, I wish his helper luck—many customers will not treat his helper with the kindness or respect they’d use in dealing with him personally.  If he’s farming customer service out to some third-party customer service solution, I wish his customers luck.  I have found NO happy solution to customer service, but third-party is the worst solution.

QUESTION FOUR:

(The four-week version of) How to Write a Series is the bonus gift for How To Revise Your Novel.  Will Revise Your Novel students be able to get the upgrades to the full, stand-alone version of How to Write A Series?  Or is there a discount for HTRYN students to move to the full version?

The four-week version is a solid course in its own right, and a good freebie for How To Revise Your Novel.  But ONLY students of the full stand-alone version will receive the updates and the extended version.

There’s a discount for both HTRYN and HTTS students and grads.  I’m not sure if I have it posted in the HTRYN course yet (I thought I did), but if I don’t, I’ll make sure to make the discount for upgrading to the stand-alone version available in the next couple of weeks.

QUESTION FIVE:

I’ve been saving money for one of your big courses, but I haven’t saved up enough yet.

If I can’t join the course before you close the doors, is that course just gone forever?

NO! ALL of my courses will continue to be available somewhere and in some form.

(When I said I’m not abandoning my students, I include FUTURE students in that statement.)

A LOT of folks missed this.

How To Think Sideways, How To Revise Your Novel, and How To Write A Series are going to be available for Kindle, Nook, iPad (if I can work out some problematic linking issues) and where possible, as print versions.

Let me go into a bit more detail on this:

  • If you don’t have a Kindle, you can get the free Kindle app for your computer and get your lessons that way.
  • If you don’t have a computer, you can get the Kindle app for your iPhone or Android phone, and get the lessons THAT way.
  • If you just hate Amazon, you can get the NOOK app, and get your lessons THAT way.
  • And at least for How to Think Sideways and How to Revise Your Novel, you’ll be able to buy lessons in print, though because of paper and printing, these will be more expensive than the e-versions.  (And because the courses run about 250,000 words, and 150,000 words respectively, not including handouts, you’re committing to some serious shelf space.)
  • How to Write A Series, because of its format, may only be available as individual lesson DVDs.

Each lesson will be available separately, (meaning that students can buy them as you can afford them and take them at your own pace) and will include both:

  • A link for free worksheet and handout downloads, and…
  • A sign-up link for the Boot Camp Writers’ Community for either a small monthly fee, or a one-time permanent membership.

QUESTION SIX:

Will you be finishing any of the other courses you’ve discussed or surveyed for or said you’d like to create?

No. I’ve had hundreds of course ideas.  They’re scattered across my hard drive like a giant guilty conscience, and I’ll be deleting the ideas as I trip over them.

I want my fiction.  I want clarity, and breathing room, and to pursue the stories that are scattered in bits and pieces across my hard drive like a garden full of flowers waiting to bloom.

I’ll refine my existing courses and transfer them to the big platforms.  I’ll finish Create A World Clinic because only about seven zillion people have asked me to, and it really is SUCH a cool series of techniques.

And that’s it.

Me.  Novels.  Short story collections.  A couple of truly weird fiction ideas agents and editors kept shooting down that I’ll now do.  That’s my future.

QUESTION SEVEN:

Has Cadence [Drake] ever done anything like this [complete priority shift]?

I laughed when I read this…but then realization slammed me across the nose.

In what is currently Chapter Four of the first draft of Cadence Drake 2: Warpaint, written a few days BEFORE I made this decision, Cady does exactly this.

Exactly.

And now I’m giving my Muse, my subconscious mind, a fishy eye and muttering, “Okay, so when did you know I was going to make this change, you sneaky bastid?”

QUESTION EIGHT:

When is How to Write a Series available?  And is it really that much different from How to Think Sideways?

Okay.  Let me just do the existing course rundown here.

All three courses, How to Think Sideways, How to Revise Your Novel, and How to Write a Series, are stand-alone courses.

Each covers its own subject matter, its own techniques, and its own objectives.

How to Think Sideways is my course on how to have the ideas, use them, and create the stories from them that will allow you to write novels (or screenplays, or short stories, or whatever form of fiction floats your boat) for the rest of your life.

How to Revise Your Novel is my course on how to get the book you want from whatever wreck your first draft turned into in ONE revision, and make it the book you dreamed it would be, so you can move on to writing your next book.

And How to Write A Series is how to create the characters and the stories that will allow you to write exactly the series you envision, in exactly the number of books you desire, and have each book be stronger and more compelling than the one before it—and how to end it how you want it and still thrill your readers.

There’s some unavoidable crossover in a couple of very basic writing techniques, but the main course subject matter does not overlap.

My rule on courses has always been that no one will ever by a course from me, buy another course, and find that he or she has just paid for the same damn information, written in different words.  I’ve bought those recycled crap courses from other people, they pissed me off, and I swore I would never treat people that way.

That goes for my little courses as well as my big ones.  If you want the details on how to create a character, for example, the ONLY place you’ll find those details is in Create A Character Clinic.

And finally, ALL my courses except for the upcoming Create A World Clinic are already available.

QUESTION NINE:

Will all the writing stuff on your website still be available?

Of course!  Do you know how many years I’ve been adding to that stuff?  There are articles in the writing section that were actually print articles I did for the little writers’ group newsletter I used to send out back when I was still in Schrodinger’s Petshop, before anyone but scientists had even heard of the internet.  1989-1990…somewhere around there.

I’ll still add the occasional writing article to the site as I feel like it.  I know me, and sooner or later I’ll have something new to say about writing, and I won’t be able to keep it to myself.

The writing newsletter now has 52 articles in it.  One full year of once-a-week tips.  It will remain a free resource on the site, and again, if I get froggy, I may add to it.  Even if I don’t add new tips, if you stay on it, I’ll make sure to send you links to any new articles I write.

QUESTION TEN:

You’re not still using Word, are you?!?!

Oh, God, no!  Not for years.  I use Scrivener and Pages, and I have Open Office on my computers but have to confess OO is really only there so when I’m talking to the Windows crowd, I can offer something that I know works.

I just checked, and discovered that I don’t actually have any Microsoft stuff on my computers anymore.  Lot of Adobe, lot of indie stuff.

Not sure when the last of Microsoft went away, but I think it’s kind of telling that I didn’t notice is was gone until today.

WHAT DID I MISS?

These were the ten big questions I found, plus the one nobody asked.  But over the next few days, I’ll check in here as I can and answer as much of what I missed as I can.

And thank you, thank you, thank you.

I had tears in my eyes reading your responses to my 51st birthday post.  I have always maintained that it has been my privilege to hang out with the best people on the internet, and that was proven again with your replies to my post.

But now, ONWARD!

We’re going to have some fun, and we’re going to create wonderful things.  Today, tomorrow, for the rest of our lives.

 

Fifty-One: At The Start Of My Second Half-Century, I’m Rethinking Everything
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Follow Your Passion

Follow Your Passion

Inertia’s a bitch.

It can mean doing nothing until something kicks you out of your complacency and starts you rolling.

But inertia can also summon up Newton’s First Law, part of which is: “An object in motion remains in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

You get rolling in a particular direction, and it make sense, so you keep on rolling in that direction, doing the same things, dealing with variants of the same problems, until your direction, your actions, and your life all start to feel inevitable.

Inertia tells you: This is what you’re doing, therefore this is what you ought to be doing. It’s working, therefore why question it?

Until now, since I started teaching writing online back in 2006, I have NEVER taken a vacation that did not include checking both e-mail and customer service at least a few times. So I never had a full stop to derail my inertia. Even if I rolled slower, I still kept moving in the same direction.

My inertia included back-to-back-to-back 70-hour seven-day-a-week work weeks, creating new writing courses, supporting older writing courses, writing newsletters about writing, building a (very cool) writing community, and a LOT more.

Recently, with the self-publishing explosion, I added getting rights back on all my out of print work, and adding in MORE work while I get those ready to reprint.

There was answering a lot of writing e-mail.

There was lots and lots and lots of customer service.

People love my writing courses and get some simply amazing results from them. So putting what I know about writing into in-depth, comprehensive courses felt like the way things ought to be. What I ought to be doing.

However…

If you want to shake off your inertia, to actually see your life as it is, and to be able to question what you want it to be, there’s nothing like jamming a right-angle turn into your forward motion to shake you loose from everything you accepted as having a permanent place in your life. And the past two weeks have been, for me, that right-angle jump-the-tracks come-to-a-screeching-halt turn.

There was the vacation, first of all. I turned the computer off, and left it off, for two straight weeks. I did not look at e-mail, I did not touch customer service, I did not pay affiliates, I did not work on courses.

I. Was. Gone.

There was my time with the Air Force kid. My older son had a grim time in Afghanistan, which is not to say his tours of the Middle East’s other “vacation spots” have been picnics. But Afghanistan was a real nightmare, and even now that he’s home, there are parts of this last deployment he isn’t going to shake off. Not in a few weeks, a few months, a few years. Not ever. A line of ghosts follow me from my ten years in nursing. He has his line of ghosts, too, and though they’ll become less insistent over time, they won’t go away.

As much as we could, we worked around the ghosts. I loved being able to sit and talk with him again, to discuss the screenplays he wrote while he was in the desert, to talk about going indie from the film-maker’s perspective. I loved just being able to see him, and to know that he was okay, he was safe, he was home.

And I loved having nothing but time to spend with Matt and my younger son, too.

There was Steve Jobs’ death, and I’d be lying through my teeth if I suggested that was anything but a massive wake-up call. He created what he loved, not asking what people wanted but envisioning what he wanted, pushing past “that’s not possible” to make what he wanted possible, and then bringing his visions to those of us who have appreciated the hell out of them.

Figure: Having Windows eat my work, crash regularly, update constantly, welcome viruses like long-lost friends, and require constant fucking tinkering with the system, in the form of .ini files and other tweaks, just to get programs I needed to function so I could get writing, printing, and internet work done, was a part of my life, my expectation, my inertia. I backed up constantly when I remembered, and when I got into the flow of my fiction, I lost whole chapters because that’s just the way Windows is.

Until my husband bought me an early OS X Snowball Mac. I got it for Christmas in 2002. In the almost ten years since then, I have ONCE lost words. About three hundred of them, if I remember correctly. MY screw-up. The Mac asked me if I would like to save the file when Word crashed, and I, being VERY new to the system at the time, said “no.”

I haven’t lost a single word since. And since then, I’ve upgraded through iMacs and iBooks and Pros, and currently have an older Pro, the 11″ minimal-configuration Air, and the currently largest possible iMac desktop. Every Mac I ever owned still works. I just needed bigger and faster for the courses, the movies I was creating. And because, let’s face facts: I’m a total tech ho and while I don’t spend money on shoes or clothes or much of anything else, I’m white on rice when it comes to upgrading to a new computer.

So I owe Steve Jobs’ driven passion to create the best possible products—and to hell with the naysayers—for making my life measurably better.

And the wake-up call from his death, combined with the other elements above, allowed me to question my own passion.

Which takes me to Week Two of my vacation, in which, relaxed, happy, and caught up on my sleep, I wrote three and a half chapters of the new Cadence Drake novel, Warpaint.

And became reacquainted with my real passion. Which isn’t teaching. I’m good at teaching, I like it, and I love students’ success stories.

But I love to write fiction.

And when I compared four hours a day five days a week while everyone else was asleep, stretched out on the couch with the Air propped on my lap, embracing my passion by telling a story I want to tell while knowing it’s going to get published the way I want it to be published…

…Versus seventy-hour seven-days-a-week workweeks stretching as far into the future as I could see, struggling to translate how I do what I do into techniques and procedures and processes other people can use to embrace THEIR passion…

…Well…

…You probably have some idea where I’m heading with this.

But I guarantee you don’t have the whole thing, so stick with me a few more minutes.

Yes. I’m going to quit teaching.

No. I’m not abandoning my students.  ALL students who are members of the big courses, including students who join the day I lock each course’s doors to new members, will have permanent access to all your purchased course materials, including, if applicable, the Walkthrough, new self-pub modules, or any other course upgrades, depending on the course in question.

No, I’m not abandoning any of my current courses.

And no, I’m not abandoning the three big promises I’ve made.

Promises first.

I’m finishing the How To Think Sideways Walkthrough. Furthermore, the online version will be the FULL version of the course, minus a few handouts I cannot include, and the Walkthrough. It will include the lessons for Self-Publishing, but it will also include the Commercial Publishing track. So it will be 29 lessons, not 25.

I’m expanding the How To Write A Series Course with what I learn while writing the Cadence Drake series.

And I’m finishing Create A World Clinic.

I’m looking at, best guess, about two more years of working insane hours while I meet these three promises, and at the same time write several Cadence Drake novels, move ALL my courses to Kindle/ Nook/ iTunes/ CreateSpace.

The rest of what I have to do:

Before I can dedicate myself to my passion, writing fiction, I also have to make sure existing big-course students can use the online version of the courses permanently.

And Margaret and I have to put together a way for the students who take my classes via the big publishing platforms (again, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and CreateSpace) have a way to join the Boot Camps writing community.

The Boot Camp Community, with its Self-Pub Resource Providers, its lesson-by-lesson discussions on How To Think Sideways, How To Revise Your Novel, and as soon as we can get the database updated, How To Write A Series, its camaraderie and friendships, will remain and continue to grow.

The Boot Camp Community currently offers free lifetime membership to students of HTTS, HTRYN, and HTWAS for their respective courses (and of course, students of all three courses have lifetime access to the entire community).

For students who take the e-book or print versions of the course, Boot Camp membership will be optional, and will require a small monthly fee or a one-time lifetime membership payment for whichever course the student is taking.

And I’ll become a Boot Camp member writer, rather than an overworked occasional visitor.

But as I get things transferred, everything else is going off my sites. I’ll be closing my little writing shop, and closing the online versions of HTTS, HTRYN, and HTWAS, as well as the Free Plot Outline course.

I’m working on transferring How To Think Sideways first, and the Walkthrough will not be included in the e-book and print versions. I may at some later date figure out a way to do the Walkthrough lessons as DVDs, but right now, my plan is to simply keep them available for Legacy HTTS students.

If you want the How To Think Sideways course with free lifetime community membership and the Walkthrough included, you’ll need to join before I post all the lessons on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (because of technical issues, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to offer the course on iTunes).

I have that pencilled in on my calendar for February, 2012. On the day the course goes live on the big platforms, the doors for the online version close permanently to new members.

How To Revise Your Novel will then follow suit as quickly as I can make it happen.

How To Write A Series will be open to new students considerably longer, because I still have to write the books that I’ll use to expand the course.

And following that, I’ll write the rest of Create A World Clinic, which will ONLY be available through the big platforms. I’ll never sell it from my own shop, which I hope to close before or around the same time I close How To Write A Series.

It comes down to time.

I’m fifty-one.

I don’t know how much I have left, but whatever time I have left, I want to invest in my passion, my true love, the thing that has made me willing to pop out of bed at six in the morning for the past twenty-seven years, just to be a part of it.

I’m going back to writing fiction exclusively.

All the existing courses will still be there for you, in one fashion or another. The community will get even better.

But no matter how long I live, I cannot live long enough to tell all the stories I still want to tell. I would, however, like to write as many of them as I can.

And I aim to give it my best shot.

The Air Force Kid is back from Afghanistan
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After a very bad one-year deployment in Afghanistan, my kid is is back in the States, and on his way home to see us.

I am closing EVERYTHING until he has to go back to work, and I will not be available during this time to read e-mail, check student support/customer service, or deal with any other issues. During the next two weeks, I will not be doing the Walkthrough, writing the novel, or anything else.

I’m checking to see if Margaret can cover for me during this time, but if she can’t, I’ll take care of whatever goes wrong when I get back.

If you have a problem with a class, course, or product, go to http://novelwritingschool.com/support and create a support ticket. If Margaret can cover for me, you’ll get a reply as quickly as she’s able. If she can’t, it’s going to be October 10th (or 11th, depending on how much I find waiting for me in there) before you hear ANYTHING. Please be patient. I’ll be back when I’m able, but this is my kid, and I’m not apologizing for needing this time.