![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
(I would have gotten to this eventually, but the timing is inspired by Meika.)
Web 2.0 is a wonderful, nebulous concept. It’s a buzzword, a meme, a marketing gimmick, a catchcry, a call to arms, and yet it doesn’t actually describe anything in particular. To programmers, it’s an exciting way to build interactivity into websites, experiment with online communication and collaboration, and make nifty gadgets. To tweens, it’s an awesome way to get stalked and to get busted puking into your mom’s Beemer. To most humans, though, Web 2.0 finally delivers on some of the promise of the Internet that made you buy that first modem, back in nineteen fscking ninety-six.
Web 2.0 hacks, and the talentless masses who choke these channels with meaningless content, can pat themselves on the back now that Time has declared this river of shit the most powerful cultural force in existence. Dear god, now we’re all watching each other poop, and rating it.
One thing Web 2.0 has done is bring us closer to Andy Warhol’s prediction, and the metaphorical period of fame closer to a literal 15 minutes.
One thing Web 2.0 won’t do, however, is put your words in a better order. There’s only so much you can learn from sifting through garbage.
Every year or so some pundit declares the next technology to be a [some industry]-killer. POD, e-books, e-paper, Amazon.com, they were all supposed to have killed traditional publishing and bookselling by now, and we were all supposed to be sitting under healthy trees reading democratically-promoted writers on the one sheet of electronic paper, while flying cars whizzed by. But the dents made by these technologies are nothing compared to the impact of Dan Brown and JK Rowling alone. For every person who took a gamble on a POD author, or squinted through an e-book in the last five years, there are two kids and a high-school dropout who set foot in a bookstore for the first time to buy TDVC or Harry Potter and the Obvious Fantasy Reference.
POD, self publishing, e-books, Internet distribution – none of this is really new (not Web 2.0 new). Writers have always had the option of writing out more copies of their manuscripts to hand-bind and sell in the market. The only difference now is that e-books and POD make it a snap to reproduce the product, which means even the laziest writer (who manages to cobble together a first draft of some “experimental” fiction over decades of minimal effort) can become the sole proprietor of I Wrote This Myself Enterprises.
Because the barriers are lower, more shit flows. More books are published now than ever before, but quality hasn’t improved. There’s just more stuff in the middle, and much more stuff at the bottom.
Apart from experiments in interactive and collaborative fiction, Web 2.0 has meant nothing for how people write. Hell, we haven’t even got an online or software thesaurus that beats reaching behind you for the battered copy of Roget’s you bought in college. The cyber-fantasy of online, instant feedback and criticism is hampered by two obvious inertias:
And thus the dream of Web 2.0-driven fiction founders, on the rocks of obstinacy, continually dashed by waves of utter indifference.
So what does Web 2.0 mean for publishing? Not much. Publishing companies are big enough to absorb the shift to POD, when the quality of POD eventually rivals mass production. People still buy books for the same reasons, and how these books get in front of their eyes is less important than which books they choose – and they ain’t choosing meika loofs samorzewski.
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Hear Hear! Whatever that means.
Although, I must say, as well-written as your entire post is, that last half a sentence could have been left out. All you’re doing is feeding that fool’s ego and giving him the attention he so clearly and desperately wants (and, I’m thinking, didn’t get from his parents/teachers).
Debunking the myth of Web 2.0 is about more than debunking some goofball’s fantasy life.
And that all sounds way bitchier than I had intended.
Oh yeah? Well, well, you just wait until the Segway catches on. Then. THEN we’ll see who’s wrong about the revolution!
BTW, dictionary dot com has almost EVERY word in the English language, AND informative, non-obtrusive ads about Volkswagons. So stick THAT in your pipe and smoke it, “oldie.”
Quote: “All you’re doing is feeding that fool’s ego and giving him the attention he so clearly and desperately wants…”
Meika was nice enough to put a link on his site to the comment stream about him. He’s a publicity hound at heart.
“I wrote a book!”
One hundred million voices echo back: “Me too! Me too! It’s on the Internet! Read mine! Read mine! Read mine! Read mine! Read….”
Thank god for editors is all I can say.
Mike, it’s not helped by a pair of writers who keep arguing that Everything Should Be Free, and that everyone turning the Internet into one big “Take My Crap” party based on their example only leaves the responsibility of ascertaining value on the heads of the readers. Oh, sure, they make a big deal about how they’re offering their books for free online, when they’re not singing “I wuv you, you wuv me, let’s whack off to tech-no-lo-gee,” but they refuse to acknowledge what their followers refuse to acknowledge: it only has value if anyone’s willing to pay for it, and putting their screeds online just adds another turd into the Web 2.0 toilet bowl.
Paul, I’m picturing you in a Barney TBPD outfit, singing that song.
It scares me.
Mike, just go out to Armadillocon in Austin, Texas one of these days, and you’ll hear a lot of that singing. If the heat doesn’t kill you (the idiots running the convention insist upon running it in the middle of August, the week before the students return to the University of Texas, because they can save a few bucks on the hotel), the constant braying of “It’s on the Viridian List! Have I mentioned the Viridian List?” will.
Viki, at some point 101 Reasons will probably be revised and republished, and I’ll remove all the dead links/memes.
Right now Meika serves a useful(!) function, in personifying the issues this blog talks about. If, after getting negative feedback about his book, he’d simply posted “Oops! Sorry, I’ll revise for another decade and ask again,” no-one would care. But his refusal to take the criticism he professes to want has turned him into a two-blog meme, potent enough to last a week. That in itself is impressive, and very Web 2.0.
You can learn something from anyone, even if all you learn is “You’re a worthless piece of crap.”
Guess what I learned from Meika?
After a VERY expensive education at an excellent art school, I was bemused in the mid-90’s when at least 20 Gen Xers I knew began styling themselves as “graphic designers”, because A) they had a computer and B) easily pirated software.
It was enough to eventually send me back to brushes and canvas and paint.
No question- technology has turned flooding the world, or at least the publishing biz, with shit.
Not just a buzz word, it only has the software producers scared into buzzing!
Web 2.0 applications will replace installable software (less chances of infected programs too) and put some corporations out of business. The public (us) is benifiting though, schools benefit from free online applications, libraries, etc. Now with so many free operating systems (or free access at library) and free online software, it won’t cost much to operate a personal computer.
Search for more Web 2.0 stuff on http://www.web20searchengine.com.
Here is some background
reading
for
you all.
I don’t think your post above on the subject addresses anything that these writers cover with any insight. You just like things the way they were.
But, look, I agree, Web 2.0 won’t change publishing, but the conversation about it will.
I never said my crap was good, I never said it was good because of the puke beneath the crap. I said I thought the layout was good, and I was proved immediately wrong and I addressed that, so ‘it’ did work, at least from my perspective in self-publishing.
Saying my crap was crap was actually off-topic, and I never said it was good. Not that I said it was crud either. Mind you staying on-topic meant I got accused of denial (about people’s honest reactions to the crappiness of my work) and then I got a bit sucked into answering the stuff, and that was really wrong. Off-topic stuff is better dealt with in a backchannel email. A few did that, only one negative, and it was more merely insulting than abusive, but then I guess that type of behaviour requires an audience too.
But of course once one presses people’s thymnos buttons, even inadvertently, then all is lost. I’ve learnt a lot about Web 2.0 in this little nook of notoriety.
But then I too remember what Theodore Sturgeon said when asked why 90% of SF was crud, he replied that 90% of everything is crud.
Of course its no excuse to keep writing.
Unless, of course one is cursed to write.
But, it will be said, the curse does not a writer make.
BTW
the linkbait has helped you too 101RTSW
Happy New Year!
Meika, my lad, you’re making a classic mistake. I do not need more “background reading”. My opinion is informed, and I still disagree with you. You’ve had ample opportunity to explain your case, and most of the time you’ve left readers scratching their heads wondering what the fsck you’re talking about.
Self-publishing is not new. Nothing these links discuss is radical or revolutionary, they’re just fluctuations in the supply chain. The “scarcity” in the economic model of publishing is not the opportunity to publish, it’s quality work.
Writers do not need to wrest control of the slushpile away from the New York publishing behemoth. The option to self-publish has always been there.
What writers need to do is strive to produce better work. Or stop writing.
(Yes, it does mean that 90.9 of my 101 Reasons will also be crud. But you won’t know which ones until we’re done.)
I said, “But then I too remember what Theodore Sturgeon said when asked why 90% of SF was crud, he replied that 90% of everything is crud.:
I said, “But then I too…”
I said “too”.
Hope I haven’t belaboured the point ‘too’ much but I won’t let you get away with that one. It suggests you are a lazy reader (something my .before country is all about, the main conflict in the book is about the one with the reader. Can’t think why you haven’t worked that out.)
What we really need is a blog called 101reasontostopscanningand
toreadwhatisbeforeoureyesbecause
itwillmakeus
allbetterwriters.blog.com
Here’s one reason why yours is crud. You use a technology which will change what people will be able to do (have more conversations unmediated by publishing houses, this will lead to better writing [this lead includes reading and posting at your site]).
It’s the conversation silly!
We will be better writers and self-publishers because (when we converse on blogs and other web 2.0 places) (so long as we get out of our comfort zones and learn something and not just sit back and war blog forth on our pet hates or ‘too’ cute pets) we discuss stuff. Talking makes things happen.
You don’t believe that’s possible, and that’s fine. In fact you want talking to stop something. Well good luck. Far be it from me to say you shouldn’t blog that view point. I do suggest you read stuff though.
I think the scarcity currently lies in the scarcity of readers to not be anything other than passive recipients of publishing houses edification programs (what does that mean? read those four links at the head of my last comment above).
A scarcity of people who do not want to engage in conversation but simply be passive buckets, or wannabe producers of pap to pour into said buckets. Great writers or what not. Great artists who are ‘published’.
I am not so damn precious about it.
But then why should ‘i’ change.
Centuries ago ‘anyone’ could self-publish by scraping away at vellum and write/paint illuminated manuscripts. How many did? How many could?
For these manuscripts to reach their height of glory it took a group of people in close conversation to support small scriptorums (and even then they only focussed on certain religious texts, bit like a large glorified Flinstones photocopier whose moving parts were little monks and nuns rather than rollers, scanners and lasers).
It took the printing press to make novels but the first printed book were still said religious texts, the printing press was a fast way to ‘copy’ a lot faster than monks. But eventually the copying became ‘printing’ and then ‘printing’ in the long term became ‘publishing’ and it changed the means of production. It is now the beginning of the end of that era.
It had turned ‘letters’ that people passed around, (more word of hand than word of mouth) and printed and bound, ‘published’ them as ‘novels’ fictions and such for a market that wanted more than the religious pap so worthy of scriptorums’ time past.
But it didn’t happened all at once because it took a conversation, a comparitively active readership, to produce a market that the tech could then support. Before that even the writers were not active, they just mindlessly, devotedly, and barely capapble of agency, copied the word of god.
So go on, you’ve moved from the pulpit into the streets with your pamphlets decrying the rise of the printing press and go on about how no one knows how to properly copy anything anymore.
But you’ve joined the conversation even as you damn it. You even use it as a reason to stop writing, or do you mean copying?
That’s the main reason most of what you write is crud. But I can sympathize about the crud, that’s for sure.
(Maybe the verb for what we do now has not been invented yet? And unnamed it cannot be defended?)
But it will get better in conversation. I have. You will, even if you reject what I am saying for i am not that important, but the conversation is.
The medium is the message because in the age of web 2.0, and more importantly, peer-to-peer filesharing, the advert is the product. Good writing might still be scarce but distributing makes its production (of the conversation) easier and not just restricted in-house to publishing houses complaining about the slushpile… because its been outsourced to everyone… (even, as I said above, if we use the new tech at first to just pamphleteer our religious views at first, you know, war blog on our pet hates and our cute pets).
(You should also remember conditioning technologies are overhyped at first by boosters but in the middle term permeate unnoticed until they have completely change the means of production in the long term. You’re deep in the middle and have not noticed.)
Oh, that “the advert is the product” is a snowclone by the way.
Its equally true to say “the product is an advert” but we’ll leave explanations of P2P for another day.
Meika, dude, this is ridiculous. You might just want to check the pulse on that “old nag” you keep flogging.
But then I too remember …
Why then would you post a quote and link to it, when you knew I knew the quote and had discussed it?
No, don’t answer. It’s the same reason you think I would’ve read your entire book.
You’re not making your point any clearer. I really don’t know if you have one.
If you think that Web 2.0 is somehow going to manufacture an audience for you, bon chance. But if the feedback you’ve already gotten from others is any indication, you’re preaching to the wrong choir, and you’re wasting time here that you could be wasting on rewrites.
If you think that Web 2.0 is somehow going to manufacture an audience for you, bon chance. But if the feedback you’ve already gotten from others is any indication, you’re preaching to the wrong choir, and you’re wasting time here that you could be wasting on rewrites.
No, I do not think it will manufacture an audience. Not what I am saying at all. I am saying it takes a group of people to put a good book together. Whether this is a publishing house, a dedicated writers group or the web it is this conversation that is important. Look at the quotes I use in .before Country for the tells. There the reason why I decided to publish it. Artsy-crafty pre-Raphaelite william morris-y reasons.
You’re comparing apples (of conversations about, say, writing,) with oranges (of the published book industry) and saying the apples don’t even taste like any citrus you know.
I agree with various entries (I do see you have replied to these thoughts) at Working Towards the Betterment of Publishing. Spot on. And has good enough punctuation not to scare the bejeesus out of people. I like the idea of wikifying slushpiles. Similar to my reclaim the slushpile comments quoted out of context at the rejector.
I am publishing my juevenilia intermixed with recent writing for some very good artistic reasons that I want to share, ie for reasons that have nothing to do with the “conversations” described by this site on the Myth of Publishing and for which your reasons to stop writing are very good advice. I don’t think I am that good (even if child rajer in .before Country was previously published in a poetry e-zine ten years ago).
Now I don’t buy that Myth and so your well thought out advice does not necessarily apply. They would then be crud if misapplied. Trouble with incoming tech is that the new rules don’t yet exist so its hard to learn them ahead of breaking them. Some rules are transferable only where the end product is the same, if it is not (i.e. where perhaps its more about the conversation than the polishing of a fetishistic but edifying end-product) then the rules will have to be found through experimentation. Or at least through mix-and-match and metaphoric use of other usages…
.punctuating sentences this this could be compare to the Unix protocol for hidden files in directories .or perhaps the URL shorthand when starting a (sub)domain more.crud.dotcom .maybe this is a protocol for an unspoken thought, while this is spoken aloud
I am not necessarily trying to do what you enjoy and obviously love, and the old nag was a mighty fast filly in her day.
BTW
None of these comments will be wasted time because I will use them to write an Artist/Writer’s Statement for my site and/or backblurb for the book.
Happy New Year.
Gah! I can’t read all his posts…it’s, it’s, SCRAMBLING MY BRAIN!!!! AAAAAAAAAARGH!
I think web 2.0 is dead.
I don’t intend on publishing online
‘check’
I disagree with the whole concept of writers trying to improve the publishing industry. As in the film industry, writers are in fact, disposable commodities. Most of the publishers are publishing crap because that’s what they have to work with. Why even pay them? A bad worker blames his tools.