Mrs. Clinton has been around too long.  Her past drags her down, especially those events reflecting on her trustworthiness.  Her lack of vision diminishes her future electability.  And she learned to waffle from her hubby.  In the last days before the Iowa caucuses, she said she was the better candidate because she is more moderate.  Now, in New Hampshire, she’s saying she’s the progressive.  I put her more toward center than the Bern, but her ties to big money, special interests, and lobbying groups all mean that whatever she’s saying at the moment just represents empty rhetoric on her part.

Trust?  It’s hard to imagine any politician being trustworthy.  “Trustworthy politician” is an oxymoron.  The longer s/he’s around, the more opportunities there are for a politician to lose our trust.  Part of young people’s distrust in Clinton and trust in the Bern can be attributed to two facts, of course: Mrs. Clinton has been around so long that people know she’s untrustworthy; the Bern has been around a long time too, but people don’t know him that well.  When that happens, any sane person focuses on policies (there are a lot of insane ones among voters, of course).  The Bern talks about policies—maybe not enough, but at least he does; Clinton talks in fifteen-second sound bites with zero policy content, keying her remarks to impatient media and TV viewers instead of intelligent people who look beyond all that to policy details.

Clinton’s references to her past service record remind me of job applicants who tout their wonderful past accomplishments (it’s bad when you see they weren’t so great, as in the case of Clinton).  First, they don’t tell me much about what the applicant will do in the future.  When Clinton says, “Look at what I’ve done and what I’ve put up with, so it’s my turn,” it just doesn’t cut it with me.  She isn’t promising a chicken in every pot, of course, so she tries to reduce our expectations.  In fact, she is promising more of the same.  She’s the establishment candidate with the constant litany that she’ll continue Obama’s programs.  That’s living in the past, not the future.  We need more than Obama’s programs!

Saying she wants to continue with what Obama started might eventually win that well-intentioned but ineffective man’s endorsement (he seems hooked on this legacy thing—not bad, but he could have done so much more), but the next Democrat in the White House should be trying to fix the things wrong with what he started, the first priority being to break all ties with one-percenters who are destroying this country (they might be only one percent of our population, but Sturgeon’s Law applies to them as well).  That’s a huge gap in any vision Clinton pretends to have—channeling Obama will not get the country’s problems solved and will piss off a lot of people who know he caved to special interests in too many circumstances.

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[Last week, book endorsements came up in a discussion thread on Goodreads, the best social media site for readers and writers.  That little exchange motivated this blog post.  Comments are always accepted.]

Product endorsements are as common as eyes on a potato.  If you ever did any “live experiments” in grade school general science “labs,” you know those eyes can sprout.  Mark Watney knows that a good dose of fertilizer helps, but the sprouts will come even in sugar water (maybe even tap water if it’s not from Flint, Michigan).  For product endorsements, it’s a mixed bag whether those sprouts mean something positive or negative, although they meant survival for Watney (and a place to put bodily waste).

I tend to ignore books with endorsements written by famous authors.  NYC’s publishing industry is a lot like Hollywood’s movie industry—it’s incestuous.  I don’t know whether it’s old authors (old movie wonks for Hollywood) wanting some kind of young and adoring disciples, or whether it’s some mistaken perception that only they can discern new talent (what about the readers or moviegoers?), but I’m always suspicious about this.  I once reviewed a thriller that was just OK—it was set in Boston, and I wasn’t too happy that the author got some of the “local color” wrong, for example.  The author’s next book was endorsed by someone (Patterson or Preston probably—whoever it was, I remember I wasn’t a fan)—I never read any more of that author’s books!

In Latin America, it’s called “la palanca,” which can be translated as leverage or influence.  There and here it usually goes far beyond simple references for a job application, getting an appointment to see someone for a business deal, or completing an application to attend college.   From the receiver’s point of view, it’s a way of eliminating competition; from the giver’s point of view, it’s often a way of currying favor—scratch my butt and I’ll scratch yours.  In the worst cases, it’s a way to get around equal opportunity laws, what few there are.

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Don’t be a jerk on the way to work.  Even if late, don’t spread hate.

In libris libertas…

Before giving you a first look into my new novel, here’s the blurb:

Hidden away from near-Earth planets in remote spiral arms of the Galaxy are Human worlds that have lost contact with more progressive worlds and reverted to strange and primitive customs and traditions, their leaders using religion, superstition, and imported technologies to rule in tyranny.  Survey ships explored and catalogued these planets as suitable for future colonization centuries earlier, but groups with a special interest in ensuring a homogeneous and often despotic society didn’t bother applying for permission to colonize.

Following the ITUIP (Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets) Protocol, ships were restricted to observe and maintain a hands-off policy for these rogue planets, even when there was great temptation to intervene.  Eden, where a theocracy rules with an iron fist, is such a planet.  A group of rebels struggles to end the oppressive regime to forge a new future.

Set in the same universe as the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” and the Dr. Carlos stories, this sci-fi saga once again explores the never-ending battle between good and evil so prominent in my other books.

I had fun writing this hard sci-fi tale with a fantasy flavor.  I hope you have as much fun reading it, soon to be available on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s associated retailers for only $2.99 (much more filling than a McDonald’s order, better for you too, and less expensive).  I have yet to decide whether there will be a print version (Create Space).  And, as usual, you can read for free in exchange for an honest review (I’ll probably put it on Net Galley for a short time for those would-be reviewers who are too shy to query me directly).

Now, for the excerpt:

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Benoit Mandelbrot (11/20/1924—10/14/2010) popularized the description and construction of 2D and 3D sets of fractional (non-integer) dimension.  He called them fractals.  I won’t use the word “invent” because such sets were studied as far back as the 1800s.  Of course, to say fractional (or “fractal” or non-integer) dimension, one has to redefine dimension a wee bit—Haussdorf, a 19^th century mathematician did that.  (The famous Cantor set, always a subset of the real numbers between zero and one, can be constructed to have any Haussdorf dimension between zero and one—no wonder Cantor went crazy.)  Just about everything Mandelbrot described and constructed still must exist in a space of integer (1, 2, 3, …) dimensions.  The construction of a fractal is often based on self-similarity, tacking on more and more similar but smaller pieces, ad infinitum (or taking them out).

Fractals represent ultimate geekiness because they have found many applications in computer graphics, including artsy stuff like landscapes and seascapes.  There was also a time, though, when just about every other paper in solid state physics used fractals, fractional dimensions, and self-similarity to describe complex systems—they’re ubiquitous in nature.  Today that fad has passed, but fractals still remain (sounds like a line in Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence,” doesn’t it?  It appeared 12 years before Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature).

Mandelbrot spoke once at Clark University in Worcester, MA.  There was a cocktail hour before, befitting a famous VIP visiting from IBM, followed by a lecture—Mandelbrot seemed to enjoy himself at both.  He didn’t discuss the history of fractals much—to paraphrase Newton, Mandelbrot had stood on the shoulders of mathematical giants—but Benoit certainly sold his product well.  I’ll have to admit that his book is a work of art and probably helped popularize the subject even more—maybe a large number of applied mathematicians nowadays owe their geekiness to that book and its applications to computer graphics.

Today fractals are just another useful tool in the applied mathematician’s bag of tricks.  I even remember an image compression scheme based on fractals (JPEG is a more popular one).  Applied to sonic data (like MPEG), it could probably find useful applications today in compressing Senate filibusters—it was a lossy compression scheme, but the public wouldn’t care about that when dealing with filibusters.  No problem with candidates on the stump, of course, because they never spout more than fifteen-second soundbites.

And so it goes….

[Many readers of this blog are familiar with my unconventional and acerbic opinions about the writing business—see the posts archived in the “Writing” category of this blog.  I recently saw something about SkillShare, so I thought maybe it was time to distill some of those ideas into a short course on fiction writing for would-be authors.  You’re in luck.  A perusal of that site’s offerings about writing didn’t impress me at all.  So, here’s my short and unconventional course—and it’s free!

Actually, like any Irish whiskey, this little course is thrice distilled—a development over the years of my own ideas about writing, the afore-mentioned blog posts, and now this mini-course.  You might not like some of the things I say because I don’t sugarcoat my opinions.  That’s too bad.  They’re my honest opinions at this stage in my writing career.  BTW, while readers might enjoy my points of view, this is mostly for indie writers, but traditionally published authors who aren’t Patterson’s workers on his book-writing assembly line, or other Big Five old stallions, i.e. midlist authors, can benefit too. Without further comment, here’s lesson five.

Added note for this lesson: yeah, I know it’s long, but it’s time someone said something honest about PR and marketing, so I can summarize all that’s below by saying that nothing works!  Of course, I’ve done a few things in 10+ years in the business, so read on about things to try.]

An Iconoclast Examines Fiction Writing

Lesson Five: How to Market Your Book

Whether you’re an indie or midlist author, this is an absolute must.  There’s a lot of DIY that can be done, so watch how you spend your money—there are “gurus” just itching to take it (and they’ll sell you their books too—truth of the matter is, those are the only books most gurus write, so their “knowledge” is always suspect, and Sturgeon’s Law always applies).  Here’s a to-do list where every item is optional—at least, how much you do with each item is.  There are no guarantees here—don’t believe anyone who says they have a sure-fire method.  None exist.

You have two basic problems: letting the world know who you are (also called name recognition) and letting the world know what you write (recognition of your books).  Some things below work for one or the other; others work for both.  Much of this involves internet presence—it’s a connected world now.  That means you can reach out to many people all over the world.  It also means most other writers are doing the same thing, so the signal-to-noise level is bad (you’re the signal, they’re the noise, as far as you’re concerned).

Again, King ignores all this in On Writing (he has a website, though, so someone must maintain it for him—maybe multiple someones?).  Today most authors can’t do that.  It’s an important part of being a writer in today’s publishing environment.  To survive, you have to know enough about it to recognize your limitations and seek help if necessary.  And all authors can do a lot with DIY, but it takes time.  It can (but doesn’t guarantee) reaching your final goal: a successful book (whatever that means—develop your own definition, but be realistic).

Somehow you must put your books above that average sea level of other authors’ books so people notice you and your books.  No one says it’s easy, including me (in fact, as noted above, I’d say it’s well nigh impossible).  It’s often the last task you want to spend time on as a writer too, but grin and bear it.  You’ve had all your fun writing and publishing the book.  Now’s the time to get down to the nitty-gritty and sell it.  “Sell it” is loosely speaking, of course, and your first job is to write a great story.  Beware, though—there are many good stories and good authors and possibly great ones out there no one knows about.  Or, being modest, not so good or great but prolific, as in my case.  We’re all trying to find readers in a very competitive environment.

Review wars.  Here’s the skinny: Amazon treats books like every other product, even though they had their start selling books.  Therefore, they treat book reviews like product reviews.  They ask the reviewer to assign a star-ranking so their computers can calculate an average ranking—that’s all they really care about anymore.  A book can have over 1000 reviews—the more there are, the more Sturgeon’s Law applies to the overall set—but Amazon loves this.  1000+ reviews means they sold 1000+ books (with those numbers you can bet that each reviewer didn’t get a freebie in exchange for an honest review).  Your best bet are reviews where the reviewer takes more than two lines or so to say what s/he liked or disliked about the book and why.  Most of those 1000+ reviews fail miserably to meet this simple criterion.

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Conservatives read the Wall Street Journal, progressives the NY Times—that’s an old cliché that doesn’t have much basis in fact.  Progressives also read the Journal—one had to be stupid not to do so in the events leading up to and during the 2008-2009 financial implosion, even if it was just to see how much money your IRA or 401(k) was losing (or the money wonks were stealing, depending on your interpretation).  Today’s markets bring similar woes, thanks to China’s imploding economy and its decreased demand for oil killing the oil prices and tumbling markets everywhere, not to mention Greece, Spain, and other spending economies dragging the markets down.

This article is about journalistic integrity or the lack thereof, but I only will have bad things to say about the NY Times because we know where the Journal stands—it’s conservative, of course, reflecting its name.  The Times, on the other hand, is far from being the progressive bastion conservatives love to attack.  Consider it a sophisticated and arrogant example of yellow journalism, sort of like bile in color and use, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but never impartial.  Let me consider some examples.

First, a general comment: the Times’ reporters and editors decide what news is fit to print (probably mostly editors, of course—the worker bees generally don’t have much say in any big corporation).  This isn’t new journalistic practice, of course.  What’s egregious here is that the Times pretends to cover all sides of an issue but slants the news following an agenda that’s neither conservative nor progressive—their number one goal is the same as the Daily News and other rags, that is, to sell more papers (the Daily News covers are often classics).  The Times criticizes those other NYC rags, for example, if it even bothers to acknowledge them, but their brand of journalism is still yellow.  Sgt. Friday’s dictum, “Just the facts, ma’am,” is unheard of in many Times’ articles.  I can stomach that when the article is op-ed, opinions don’t have to be based in facts and op-eds are often slanted because they’re opinions.  I’m talking about what the Times calls news.

They censor or embellish the facts too often, often hiding sources under the cloak of freedom of the press, that old constitutional favorite the Founding Fathers never imagined would lead to so many lies and deceit.  Those “unnamed sources” or “sources close to X” are frustrating for concerned citizens who want to check facts.  (Maybe the Times doesn’t worry because there are so few left?)  If you believe for a moment that a reporter or editor is always truthful, you don’t understand journalistic legerdemain (this is one reason why I say a journalism degree is better than an MFA as prep for a fiction writer).  What reporters write and editors approve are always designed first and foremost to sell newspapers, no matter the official orientation of the paper or whether it’s op-ed or news.  My motto is always trust but verify, or maybe distrust and verify, but how can you verify when the facts can’t be checked?

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Late for a date with fate?  Leave people alive.  Don’t text and drive!

In libris libertas….

[Sorry, this is a wee bit verbose, but it’s been awhile.  I was busy getting the manuscript for Rogue Planet (see below) ready to send to beta-readers.  Cherry pick those items that grab your attention first.  You can always come back to this newsletter later—they’re all in the archive.]

Item. Wise words?  I’ve started a new series of posts titled “Monday Words of Wisdom”—words of advice, a bit of humor, forced rhymes, whatever you want to call them.  Why bother?  The number one reason is that people’s Mondays are often bleak—returning to that day job on Monday is often a drag—so a little bit of humor might do as much for you as caramel topping on your latté.  Second, finding words that rhyme and using them logically exercises my mind—maybe not as much as a crossword puzzle, but it’s a wee bit more creative.  Third, I don’t sell many of my books, so maybe I can get a side job with Hallmark.  It would beat working as a Walmart greeter.

Item. The course on fiction writing.  It’s almost done.  Phew!  Readers who took the opportunity to learn about the book writing business hopefully enjoyed my personal spin on it.  Call it the indie viewpoint.  I don’t like traditional publishers—their treatment of authors is terrible—but I hope I also provided some thoughts for frustrated authors working in that paradigm who are thinking of going indie.  Next week will be the last lesson.  I imagine it will make some PR and marketing people angry with me (see below for an example)—I don’t have much love for most of them either.

I suppose many readers and writers might say I have some nerve pretending to write a complement to King’s On Writing.  Say what you will, I’ve written many books.  King started earlier and won the lottery, so I ignore a comparison of number of books published.  And he completely ignores indie books, probably disparages them, in fact, ignoring his personal startup pains described in his book.  If only for that reason, his book needs an update to consider the problems of indie writers.

Item. Books with graphics content.  Paper books, especially pop science and textbooks, often have fancy graphics.  They’re probably a major factor contributing to the cost of a book, especially an academic textbook, inflating the cost beyond the traditional publisher’s greedy desire to exploit starving students.  Of course, there are also those coffee table books that are mostly pictures.  People think they’re conversation starters.  (One conversation might be about how expensive they are.  Or, why anyone would ever buy them.)

But I’ve often argued that the ebook offers a great opportunity for inventive authors to go multimedia (probably indies, because there’s nothing inventive about traditional publishing).  One can envision a great and interesting combination of graphics, sound, even videos and odors.  Whether we’d still call that an ebook is beside the point.  (And thinking about a version of Fifty Shades of Gray like that might gross some people out, including me.)

About the graphics, though.  I recently reviewed a book that had a lot of them.  Many people have Paper White Kindles.  Color graphics often don’t translate well to many shades of gray (even if there are fifty).  Authors and publishers should think about that.  Especially for textbooks (if you’re depending on a reader to distinguish two curves in a graph, one black and the other blue, the results might be disappointing on the Kindle).

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In his op-ed article on creativity in the NY Times, Prof. Adam Grant, management and psych professor at the Wharton School of UPenn, says step one to creativity is to procrastinate.  “Creativity takes time.  So I’m trying not to make progress toward my goal.”  I think that’s BS, and I’m hoping I’m not alone.  The first part depends on your definition of creativity, of course.  Presumably, this prof, who’s trying to sell his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, is using a business definition.  I don’t see much creativity in the business world.  I see it in the author/composer of Hamilton; I’ve seen it in the works of Alejandro Obregon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and I’ve seen it in scientists and engineers, from researchers to smart phone and car designers.  Grant confuses creativity with business acumen.  Trump has the latter, but he isn’t creative (come to think of it, Trump and his progeny went to Wharton).

So, let’s get past that first statement in the quote and move on to the second.  Procrastination is the opposite of creativity!  If one procrastinates, s/he’s doing absolutely nothing.  Now Alan Watts might say doing nothing is accomplishing something—that’s part of Buddhist teaching (make your mind blank to achieve enlightenment)—but it sure as hell isn’t being creative.  I’d generally call it wasting time!  At a conference once some Austrian physicists told me that they were in the process of thinking about getting some dinner.  Maybe that’s typically Austrian—I seem to remember Vienna as pretty laid back (but probably not during WWII)—but dinner just isn’t that complicated, and time spent in the process of thinking about it would be better spent doing physics in this case, where a physicist can and should be creative.  Leave the dinner creativity to chefs—culinary art is creative, but only when you do it, not in the process of thinking about it.

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