Way back in the wayback, I started this blog by talking about Cory Doctorow. He really is a smart person, and in this guest blog for indie author legend Brian Sanderson he brings his ethics and intellect to bear on how Amazon is ripping everyone off.
The problem with Audible is not that it makes a wide catalog of audiobooks available through a convenient app. The problem is that Audible uses technology, accounting fraud, and market power to steal vast fortunes from creative workers and the audiences who love their books.
Disclosure: I’m an author who uses Amazon as a sales platform, but in this insular space I feel safe in expressing my deep concern that we have let a single corporation insert itself into so much of our daily lives. I’ll let Doctorow himself speak to that.
I don’t have any audiobooks for sale. Authorship and publishing take so much attention that I haven’t had any to spare for yet another aspect of it, so I can’t add much commentary. But Doctorow has nothing to gain by refusing to list his audiobooks on Amazon. In fact:
my agent tells me that it cost me a fully paid-off mortgage and a fully funded college savings account for my daughter.
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If more big-name authors were prepared to starve Audible of their content, would Amazon cave to pressure and make the deal fair for everyone? Or is it going to take another few election cycles before President Warren (don’t laugh) demands the break-up of this predatory company?
Until then, I’ll keep listing my books on every platform I can. There is another way. We can and must find it. For everyone’s sake.
St Nicholas Catholic (lies, lies, I’m not even baptised)
St Matthews Anglican (more lies, mom? ok…)
Riverside PS
Oakridge HS
some defunct Niagara District school for the arts for a single semester that felt like an episode of Degrassi Junior High, complete with cliques, fake IDs, sororities, achingly cool transfer students, and dating a boy who was testing if he was gay (spoiler: he was)
Oakridge HS again
flunked out
Beal HS
dropped out again
That one summer school English credit I needed to finally graduate
The funny thing is…I went to my high school graduation (Oakridge #2.) I don’t know if the system is it’s the same now, but grad was held before exams. So it was totally possible to go to the ceremony, get your fake diploma on stage, then go to the prom (if that was your thing,) and then fail.
The funny thing is…of all my classes, I hated English the most. Taking six weeks to read a book? Uggggghhhhh. “Academic” level classes were even more plodding. As a child I was such a reader I devised a way to read while getting dressed for school that involved holding the book open with my toes. In high school, my highest mark in English was a 72.
In a perfect world* this should have been when someone asked if I had ADHD. But this was (oh god I’m old) 30 years ago, when it was still called ADD, and all it meant was a boy who couldn’t sit still.
I was merely inattentive, a dreamer, not applying myself. Unable to focus on the tasks at hand because the tasks were cripplingly dull. So I just didn’t do them, or did them lazily at the last minute, then shrugged when the teacher asked why.
Oh, the shrug. The blankness. The weaponized indifference of a clever teen with a revolutionary’s heart. The number of times I met my mother’s concern, her anger even, with a shrug.
Dissociation’s a hell of a drug.
Like this post: I started with the list of schools but I don’t remember what I wanted to say. Maybe nothing, other than remind myself that my path has never been smooth. There are no straight lines in my landscape, only curves and slopes and tunnels, backways and side-ways and unexpected turns. I’d like to end on an optimistic note, but maybe the hope is simply in knowing this, knowing that I can’t get there from here without going this way and that and a few other places. In this game, the side-quests are mandatory.
*Assuming your perfect world includes compulsory education. Mine includes dragons. What, you said perfect, didn’t you?
Hi, welcome to adult-diagnosed ADHD for women, where today you’ll learn that:
While scientific evidence is still emerging about how changing hormones can impact ADHD Janine feels the link was undeniable. Oestrogen helps to modulate the release of dopamine in the brain. When Janine’s level of oestrogen began to drop as she entered perimenopause, the ADHD symptoms she had been able to manage became much harder to deal with.
I was today years old when I learned that. You might not have been masking intentionally. Your ovaries were doing it for you. As their function declines, so does your dopamine supply. An incidental cruelty. Aging isn’t a punishment, it simply is, but that doesn’t make it easier.
Might explain why I recently got back into Drum & Bass. I’m rather a connoisseur of dopamine stimulation (within the boundaries of my enduring motion sickness and terror of deep water) and there’s something about playing a belting dj mix as I rocket around my empty kitchen at 5 am that helps the rest of my day run smoothly. I’ve already invoked some chaos, gleefully triggered some joy. It’s a smooth run from there.
A holodeck and a human actor: a best-case scenario for AI filmmaking. Human actors reacting in human ways to whatever scenario the filmmaker invents, which is not much different from what goes on now.
The thing is, you can’t fake human, and maybe it’s not worth trying. Everything else in filmmaking—sets, props, locations, eldritch horrors—can be represented artistically and therefore generated with digital imaging. It’s the people you can’t fake.
Consider: we pay people to do nothing but be good at emoting. Certain people emote i.e. act more skillfully than others, and we make them millionaires and give them gold statues and big parties and all our attention. One individual, idiosyncratic human with their asymmetrical face and personality quirks and gut biome, singular among all other humans currently alive, can win the hearts of millions. You’re telling me a calculator (which is what a computer is, writ large) is going to be able to fake that any time soon?
AI research has over the years taken up billions of dollars, and we’re still nowhere near faking people. Maybe it can’t be done. A computer as intricately modeled as the human brain might need to be either the size of a mountain or be an actual biological brain, grown in situ.
We are clever soup. But we are like nothing else. We’re cheap to make, easy to teach, endlessly inventive. Why bother trying to mechanically replicate what’s already so abundant?
You’re not going to believe this, but I learned a lot about writing from reading this article about, er, recording and mixing pop songs. But what does an interview with one of Beyoncé’s sound engineers have to do with writing a book about kissing?
I write genre fiction, the pop music of the literary world. And before you sneer at that, consider that romance novels make up 40% of the entire global book market. Your literary stream of consciousness debut novel is a free-rider on our sales (you’re welcome.)
Pop music has to get its point across in three minutes. Less, ideally, because if the first fifteen, twenty seconds don’t slap, no one is going to want to hear the rest. And by slap I don’t mean bombast. I mean that the opening has to suggest a big payoff is coming. A fat beat, a mad drop, some crazy vocal run that make your hair raise. The money shot, if you will. The Big Fight at the end of the action film or the last kiss at the end of the romance (where we always promise a happy ending.)
But again, what does that have to do with writing books? It’s all about Stuart White’s commitment to the first take as being the truest. Understand that this first take he’s talking about isn’t a demo. When Queen Bey walks into that sound booth, it’s already planned what’s going to happen when she starts to sing. Hours of thought and setup, years of training and experience, all come into play in creating a perfect moment, where singer and song unite at an instinctive level, the way they ideally do onstage. Everything after this first take is fine-tuning.
Similarly, by the time I write my ‘first draft’ of a book, I’m ready to deliver a great performance. Even though I call it a ‘zero’ draft (gives me permission to let it be bad) I go into writing a book with a full synopsis, and all the scenes I’ve collected since thinking of it all nicely laid out in order. With chapter headings. Ready to write. What’s missing at that stage is the feelings. And those can be planned for but not plotted. That’s what I deliver when writing a chapter from my notes, the emotions of the scene, which register in my body* while I’m writing. I don’t want to stop and figure out which character is sitting on which side of the bed in the middle of getting them into the bed. If all those bothersome details are plotted, everything else just flows.
Your results may vary, but this is my system and it’s what my high-diffusion scatter ADHD seems to like: wild ideas, usefully structured, with a flowchart of operations and a minimum of attractive nuisances i.e. side-quests my characters don’t need to go on.
What my dang brain hates is editing. The rewrite, the do-over, the second take. A rerun of the same creative form that strives, and often fails, to improve on the first instinctive attempt. And for my busy little enterprise, a massive time and/or money sinkhole.
I despise writing words that I’ll have to delete, and that’s what happens when I write without a plan. Being very (problematically) imaginative, I can take a story in any of a dozen directions if left unsupervised. My plan is therefore my supervisor, and they’re a hard-nosed bitch who I hate to disappoint. Speaking of, they’re looking meaningfully at me over the imaginary cubicle wall. Time to clock in.
*This is why I hardly ever watch tv or movies and am very selective in my reading. By the end of the day I’ve had So Many Feels that I don’t want to have any more, and certainly not most of the feelings that ‘broadcast entertainment’ wants you to feel: jealousy, confusion, revulsion, futile anger at the establishment (I have that to spare, you want some?) When my day is done, I want real people. Or sleep.
Have I written any poems this year? I keep posting old poems to Insta because I’m lazy and I need content. I don’t write poetry with any diligence. Only when the words need to be poems and not my standard prose.
But I went to an indie book fair yesterday. Everyone in my town is a poet or knows a poet. Pretty, pretty books everywhere. This is what I bought:
Hugely enticing, right? Relax, I’m just conducting another experiment on you.
Two years and a bit into this blog (which surpasses every other attempt I’ve ever made at journaling both privately and publicly) I have given it a Facebook page. A little test, to see if I can trick the machine into giving me some joy.
Attention in: attention out.
Don’t follow me unless you really want to. I don’t expect to post anything other than, er, these posts. The experiment part? To see what kind of noise I can make by posting *inside* Facebook. The machine doesn’t want you to leave. It doesn’t want you to mention (i.e. link to) the outside world. The more you post its own output, the more it rewards you.
A dangerous game, but only if you can’t step back.
I’m betting my life on next to nothing. Writing as a career is often terrifying. It’s all on me. I must, if I’m serious, use every weapon at my disposal to defend myself, to stake my claim. To get noticed.
This book is tied for first with THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY for most important book in my personal history. Douglas Adams taught me about absurdism, and the lyrical power of words. A Doug Adams run-on sentence is a thing of near incalculable beauty, and I’m pretty sure Ford Prefect qualifies as my first book boyfriend (the talking mouse in the Narnia series doesn’t count, as I more wanted to be him.)
Richard Adams taught me politics. Just like Tolkien, he liked to say that Watership Down isn’t about totalitarianism. Like Tolkien, he is both right and wrong. People who haven’t been to war don’t know how deeply it changes you. Whether or not Adams set out to write an allegory, I believe his experiences serving in World War II, fighting literal totalitarianism, became part of the myth of himself.
So yeah, it’s a book about rabbits trying to find somewhere nice to dig some holes, but it’s also a classical pilgrimage from base delusion through the vale of sin into moral righteousness. And it’s also about the horrors of authoritarian rule. In every case that our plucky, fluffy heroes encounter an anti-democratic system of rabbit governance (Adams gave them cops and kings) the outcome is disastrous. Denial, subversion, death.
Meanwhile our heroes are like a carrot-seeking antifa. They don’t have a chief, until other rabbits start referring to one of them as such. They don’t impose their will on each other. They innovate, make friends with other species, liberate tame rabbits from captivity, and defend themselves gallantly against a vile oppressor. What in the world was I meant to learn from this book other than the principles of utopian anarchism?
Like hell it’s about rabbits. It’s about surviving this maddening, misunderstanding, murderous life we’ve granted ourselves. These times are both like and unlike any time in human history. The challenges are enormous. But the will of every heart to go on beating means we will face them and rise above.
I’m not one of those meek, retiring kinds of ADHD. I’m of the “you wanna start some shit?” variety, with high scores for Defiance Disorder and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, meaning I’m always on the hunt for a bridge to burn. I’ve quit jobs to make sure I had the weekend off.
I also think magic is in a way very real. Not that handwavium, turn you into a frog/newt/beddable-monster movie type of magic, but the kind where you deliberately reprogram your own brain to perceive reality in a different way. Practitioners might believe they’re reprograming everyone’s reality as well, but as the only reality you have access to is the one that your brain creates inside itself, I find this a bridge too far for even me to burn (see above.) Let’s just say that the world contains more information than any brain can compute, and if you point yourself at different parts of it, your experience is often that of having created something from nothing. The opportunities were always there, you just maybe weren’t looking directly at them.
So when I see the rise in popularity of “manifesting” to reach one’s goals, I suppress my inner cynic who says it’s a bunch of neo-hippy woo. As a pantheistic pragmatist with a taste for Spinoza, why should I care how people do their magic, as long as they’re getting results? The crystals, the candles, the Burning Man vibes, the binaural beats: my only objection is aesthetic, as in I don’t like cottagecore and my high flicker rate ADHD has *issues* with delta drone.
I’d be a sorry sort of Discordian if I gave anyone lip over how they conducted their spiritual business. Heck, I routinely beg my deity NOT to intervene: “lemme have this one, ‘kay? You can do what you want with me after.”
This never works, by the way. What we want and what The Universe wants often has nothing to do with each other. I find myself infested with its merciless directives, seething with manifestation, which in my case takes the form of my favourite characters from my books taking up permanent residence in my head. I can’t complain, because (ahem) I get results. Their energy, their imaginary love for me sustains me as if they were real people standing beside me, even when I’m at my worst. They both are and are not real. What matters is that it works.
So I will gleefully cling to my belief that no sane person holding a quartz while they meditate seriously thinks the rock is doing anything other than being something to pay attention to. That’s all magick is. Paying attention like never before. Paying so much attention to some stupid shiny rock in your hand, glowing in the flicker of beeswax candles, that you don’t notice everything you’ve ever wanted sneaking up behind you, waiting for you to properly open your eyes.
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