Write Now steven r. boyett's blog

We Have Ignition

It’s taken me longer to settle in and adjust than I figured (unusually optimistic of me, wasn’t it), which is one reason my posts have become a bit sporadical lately (no, I haven’t blogfaded), and I’m just now starting to get involved in local events and suchlike. On Sunday I went into San Francisco with my friend Scott, who is visiting from L.A.. It was the first first clear and sunny day since Maureen & I moved up here a month ago. It felt like spring and the whole city went outside. Golden Gate Park was bustling and fun, and god knows I ate too much. When I worked for Pixar some years back I gained 12 pounds in three months, largely because I couldn’t resist the many great restaurants of San Francisco.

Today I’m headed to the city again to attend Ignite, O’Reilly Media’s

high-energy evening of 5-minute talks by people who have an idea—and the guts to get onstage and share it with their hometown crowd. Run by local volunteers who are connected through the global Ignite network, Ignite is a force for raising the collective IQ and building connections in each city.  And, via streaming and archived videos of local talks, local Ignites share all that knowledge and passion with the world.

It’s part of Global Ignite Week, and I think it will be fun. It’s a great way to meet people in an area largely new to me, and to see what sorts of interesting things are going on hereabout. Los Angeles has a similar monthly event called Mindshare that I highly recommend.

LJWC & My Favorite Class

I delayed writing about my experience at the November 2009 La Jolla Writers Conference until audio of one of my classes/lectures was available (see below). The annual conference is held at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa, just north of San Diego in a weirdly Pacific Island-ish location you’d never guess was there.

Conference teachers and speakers donate their time and expertise. To be honest, when I discovered this I was a bit put off — everybody wants something for nothing, and everybody thinks you should be delighted to freely lend the time and talent that pay your rent in exchange for some nebulous and unsubstantiated notion of “exposure” (see 3/4 of the services ads on craigslist, for example).  My usual response to this sort of thing is to say, Tell you what, you come to my house and mow my lawn for free, and I’ll tell everyone how good you are. Feel free to bring busines cards. But I had a novel coming out and was in PR mode, and it had been a while since I had taught and I wanted to jump back in.

I’m delighted to report that I had a terrific time at the LJWC. It was well-organized and offered a curriculum beyond the usual “how do I break in?” fare. Teachers were working professionals who seemed to know their stuff, and were quite dedicated to the tasks at hand. Conference staff were wonderfully accommodating, even redirecting a scheduled class to another room when a class I was teaching (audio below) went over time but wanted to keep going. I have grown skeptical of events and publications purporting to help beginners but whose stock in trade is really a kind of carrot-dangling before a hungry constituency.  Such was clearly not the case at LJWC; it was apparent that revenue taken in for the conference went straight into the conference itself, and into organizing the next conference.

But I was most impressed by the students themselves.  These weren’t people who thought it would be cool to be a writer, or who treated it as a hobby.  These people were dedicated to career and craft.  They knew their stuff, and they were demanding and challenging. As a teacher and lecturer I was in heaven; it meant I didn’t have to keep everything basic , that I could run with ideas and build high from a solid foundation.

So I can heartily recommend the La Jolla Writers Conference to all. What they do is a Good Thing, and they are amazingly devoted to it and professional in their delivery (though they better have coffee available to teachers in the morning next year or I will initiate a friggin coup). LJWC will remain the only conference to which I will donate my time as a teacher. Homey gotta eat, ya know.

Besides teaching classes on craft and technique, I was the New Media maven at the conference. For years now I have been steeped in podcasting, and the digital media revolution in which we are now well immersed has reshaped my thinking about everything from intellectual property to business models to the form of the book itself, and I have been on something of a crusade to make writers aware of what’s coming — what is, in fact, now here. My delight in discovering, only a few years ago, that there was an entire movement and literature already devoted to these subjects (collectively called, for purposes of conversation, “copyleft”), and that it was remarkably congruent with my own thinking and presentations, was pretty dang intense. Forward-thinking individuals such as Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, and others, have been tirelessly working not just to describe the emerging landscape, but to shape it.

What astonishes me about the class lecture below, ostensibly on “New Media Alternatives to Traditional Publishing,” was the degree to which the publishing landscape has shifted toward what I describe since I taught this session only last November. Throughout the talk I keep insisting on the fundamental level of change that writers, readers, and publishers are going to see within the next two years at most. Reviewing the audio before putting it online, it was a little freaky to realize that a great deal of what I insisted is coming showed up on the horizon in only three months.

Though I have spoken extensively about these topics in recent years — at Barcamps, podcasting conventions, science fiction conventions, writing workshops, and the like — I have actually written very little about them. I’m not really sure why that is. Maybe because people who ask me to come talk somewhere are listening even if they disagree, whereas lengthy blog posts (such as this one!) are just another squawking bird on the digital beach. I dunno.

In any case, below is the 98-minute session. It covers a lot of ground, and it becomes one of the best sessions I’ve ever conducted.  Many thanks to Jared Kuritz of LJWC for making this available.

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Download “New Media Alternatives to Traditional Publishing”

Back in the Saddle

Well, the move went smoothly, and friends in L.A. and here in the East SF Bay worked like mules to get us loaded and unloaded. I feel lousy that I don’t have pix to post. My friend Ken Mitchroney posted a ton on Facebook, and as I am not a Facebook member I don’t have links and such. But to everyone who helped, my deepest gratitude.

Maureen drove up with the birds a day ahead of me. My friend Adrian and I slept in the empty L.A. house and took the truck up early next morning. The drive up the 5 is usually one long snore through the San Joaquin Valley, an unvarying straightaway bordered by bland brown hills. But the entire west coast had been deluged throughout the previous week, and the hills were emerald green all the way up.

View from my new office

Maureen and I lived in a fairly small place in L.A., with literally half our stuff in the garage waiting for when we lived in a bigger & better joint. The old house must have been some kind of clown car, because we not only filled the biggest U-Haul truck available, I had to rent a trailer at the last minute to accommodate what wouldn’t fit in. The new house had seemed unfillably huge before we moved in, and yet we’ve filled it up to a surprising extent. I can’t believe we’ve had this much in storage. And now I get to open boxes and actually use things I haven’t even seen in two years. O Bliss.

My first order of business whenever I move is to set up my office. I’m sure there’s some pissing-in-corners territorial monkey emotional security aspect to this, but it’s also a matter of practicality: If I wanna stay in the house, I better get to working in it asap. So the new writing desk is set up and the audio desk is set up on the other side of the room, and I’m going through the lengthy process of dialing in the room acoustics (my first mix here was a friggin joke; thank god no one will ever hear it) and then sorting piles of files and gear and crap.

Collaborating again at last

I’ve already turned in new Groovelectric and Podrunner mixes, and am cranking away at the stories that are due in (ulp) two weeks.

Our third night here I was awakened by a weird noise. I realized it was an owl in the back yard. The next night it was the same owl (he’s here every night) and coyotes in the hills behind us. And it brought home what a big change this move really is for us. A week before that what woke me up was, I am not kidding, six helicopters hovering over our house, aiming tv cameras and police spotlights about a block over, and a voice on a chopper PA saying Put down your weapons and come out with your hands up. You have one minute. So it ain’t like I’m gonna complain about being awakened by hooty owls.

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to Making Stuff in a place that is conducive to it, and I can’t wait to see what kind of effect it has on my work.

Tonight's sunset from the back deck

I Leave L.A.

Sunset Boulevard?  We leave it! Santa Monica Boulevard?  We leave it! (apologies to Randy Newman)

So I’m here in my new office in the East San Francisco Bay on a rainy gray morning surrounded by stuff that needs to be put away. I am using my wife’s Veriszon wireless card because, a week after we moved in, ATT still lacks the technical ability to turn on my new DSL line despite the fact that I was able to tap into the outgoing resident’s line for two days when we arrived here. Since it is clear that ATT could not pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel, I am terminating all my service with them and going with, god help me, Comcast.

The move went amazingly smoothly, with crews of friends and neighbors on both ends who worked like pack mules and got us packed up and unloaded in record time. I can’t thank everybody enough.

We’re still setting up here (we will be for months), and I haven’t gotten back into the swing of writing and DJing. But I will on Monday, because I’m fond of little luxuries such as eating and electricity.

I’ll be back to proper posting soon as well. Meantime, here’s a parting image from Moving Day that says why I left Los Angeles better than anything I could write (compliments of Adrian Smith).

Bookcasting: iThink iCan, iThink iCan

Dear Mr. Jobs:

Congratulations on your recent launch of the new iPad device! I know that many pundits were more whelmed than overwhelmed (having fallen for the hype they themselves created; I recall no hyperbole out of Cupertino), but I think it is important to point out the acidic combination of bad memory and lack of foresight that allows such mavens to be hypercritical without applying the company’s past accomplishments to the likely developmental future of your wonderfully promising device. The potential is all there.

But my main point in writing you this open letter, Mr. Jobs, is to urge you to allow the e-book portal on the laudable iBooks section of the iPad to have a section devoted to free e-books, with content provided by users who format their own works using the easily available ePub platform iBooks already utilizes.

I strongly believe this would do for digital books and magazines what podcasting did for digital audio:  bring millions of eyes to the device, allow niche publications that otherwise would be unaffordable in the traditional bound-print model, democratize the end-user experience regarding popularity of such works, and give yet another voice to creative people previously unable to garner what has long been considered the imprimatur of traditional publication.

As someone who created one of the world’s most popular music podcasts, Podrunner, I can attest firsthand to the power of such access, and to the broadening, enriching, and enlightening experience of finding and directly interacting with a hitherto unidentified, and indeed unavailable audience. It is empowering at all points of the transaction, from creator to consumer. For what is the purpose of such technology but access?

I believe such a free e-book portal — call it bookcasting — would not harm the present book industry one whit.  It would instead provide an outlet and a potential audience for writers denied such by the expense and often the subjective whim of commercial publishing. The need to turn a profit would not be part of the bookcasting equation. It would allow writers the opportunity to supplant or even derive the totality of their income from reader donations.

Bookcasting would provide readers with access to perfectly fine authors denied publication because, while they may be talented artists, they are not necessarily commercial ones, and publishing them is not justified under the current and much more expensive publishing model. Readers would also have access to authors for whom there has simply not been room in a crowded marketplace with limited shelf space.

Bookcasting would even allow established traditional-publishing authors to have a venue for works outside the purview of their genre, books long out of print, or books considered too obscure or experimental for mainstream publication. It would also give traditional publishers an adjunct to offer works, interviews, and other material as a gateway to their commercial publications.

I believe that bookcasting would also usher in a renaissance of literary periodicals. Many prestigious bedroom periodicals of high repute that have been uable to remain viable due to production and distribution costs would suddenly be able to thrive, with overhead drastically reduced if not altogether eliminated.

I will be one of your first bookcast providers and one of your first bookcast readers. And I think there are millions of us out there.

Thank you for your attention, and I wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

Steven R. Boyett

Na’vi Don’t Surf

So this human male not only supports the oppression and subjugation of the alien creatures right in his own backyard, he even contributes to it. But through a miraculous process he ends up smack dab in the middle of the aliens themselves. Because he is brave and his heart is good, the Earth Mother Spiritual Leader and the Patriarchal Tribal Chief assign him a female to teach him the ways of the people — history, language, customs, warrior rites, the whole shebang. Other aliens don’t like or trust him, but his female mentor sees that he has the potential to be great among them. As he learns their ways he begins to realize that these people have an ancient and legitimate culture that is connected to the world in ways his own culture is no longer (if it ever was). Our hero undergoes a rite of passage in which he essentially becomes one of his adopted tribe.

Unfortunately our little human has himself initiated the process by which humans are going to invade the alien territory and destroy the aliens. Our hero switches sides, but he does not yet have the respect of the aliens because, to them, he himself is an alien.  Then the aliens learn that the hero himself is a major factor in their immediate misfortune and imminent slaughter. To gain their respect and get their attention, he must perform a heroic feat that is undeniably something only the best of the aliens themselves can accomplish. He promptly does this, gives a rousing speech that demonstrates beyond a doubt not only his allegience but the fact that he is now one of them.

Then he basically becomes Leader of the Rebellion, and even goes so far as to unite formerly hostile animals in their environment against the common enemy, riding the backs of huge vicious creatures in an all-out spectacular attack against the technologically superior invading humans.

Because of his leadership and the combined strength of formerly competing factions on the food chain, the aliens win the day and send the technophile humans packing. Our Hero is now as much an alien as he ever was a human being.

I’m talking of course about The Ant Bully, released by Warner Bros. in 2006, to immediately disappear without a ripple in the ocean of CG kid films released at the same time.

A Farewell to My Desk

I fear this post places me firmly in the Land of Mawkish Sentimentality, a porous-bordered, perfumey territory rife with poodle fur, diamondcollared kittycats, waifs with giant brown eyes, and the pervasive music of Counting Crows. The very embodiment of the Tarot Fool, I proceed regardless.

When I leave Los Angeles this weekend I am going to leave my desk behind for whoever wants it. This is causing me a certain and entirely unexpected measure of anguish.

In 1984 I was living in Gainesville, Florida, and my first novel had just come out. I had a rather amazing job word-processing for the History & English Depts. at the University of Florida. I had broken up with the first woman I ever lived with and was living alone in a rented house.  I made about five bucks an hour, was getting lots of media attention, was getting rather epic amounts of female attentiion, was selling more copies of my first novel than many of the people whose manuscripts I typed and proofed would sell in their entire career, and was absolutely miserable. I wasn’t challenged and wasn’t getting anything written, and my completely stoopid ambition was to try to give a reading at the university and achieve some kind of legitimacy in their eyes. To be King Shit of Turd Moutain.

I’d met writer David Gerrold at a convention and we’d struck up a correspondence. He lived in Los Angeles, and I was trying to decide whether I should move to L.A. to be in the heart of the movie industry, or New York, to be in the heart of the publishing industry.  I wrote David and I wrote the poet Nancy Lambert in New York and asked them questions about living where they lived — cost of living, job opportunities, pay, blah blah. David, no slouch when it came to reading people, called me up and said, look, I think you’re drowning there. I’m coming out to Florida to visit Epcot in three weeks. I’ll bring you back to LA if you want.

I said sure and gave notice at my job the next day. Three weeks and three days later I was in Los Angeles, and I never looked back. I was 23 years old.

I had very little money but wasn’t especially worried; I typed 110 WPM and my grammar skills were ridiculous; I had a job after giving myself a week off. I slept on a mattress on the floor of a room I rented from David. I had all my books in a bookcase I’d made with my friend Kerry that went together like some kind of Jenga puzzle, something only people who did not live in earthquake country could have concocted.

Tight as money was, I used my first paycheck to get myself a desk.  It was a sturdy L-shaped desk that cost around $350, which was a decent amount to pay for a desk in 1984. But I knew I was going to practically live at this desk, and make a living at this desk, and I wanted something more than some Ikea cardboard monstrosity that would crumble to dust in months.

I loved my desk. Since moving to Los Angeles I have moved — let me count here — six times, and the desk has come with me. Last move I had to sacrifice the right-hand return on the desk because my new little office didn’t have room for it. I wasn’t happy about it but didn’t have much choice. I was ergonomic about the damned desk before I’d ever even heard the term. It was all about workflow.  I used to teach a seminar at UCLA Extension called “The Writing Life,” all about practical aspects of managing a writing career, not a whit about writing itself. I devoted an entire segment, called “Arm’s Reach,” to what should be on your desk, in the drawers, in the drawer file, etc.

KayPro 10

I loved my desk.  I still love it.  It’s beat to shit, scarred, chipped, stained, and still something that might survive a nuclear blast. I wrote — let me count here — eight? Yeah, eight novels on this desk. I wrote longhand, I wrote using WordStar on a KayPro 10, I wrote using WordPerfect 5.1 on IBM PS/2 clones, and on PCs I built myself and casemodded (one to look like a Holstein cow with matching mouse & keyboard; I still use the cow copyholder & tape dispenser I painted). I’m writing this at that desk using a backlit keyboard attached to my Acer Aspire 9800 “laptop” with a 20″ screen.

I did a lot of graphic design work for my own stuff on this desk, in the heady days when I had time for such luxuries, and the desktop is covered with ruler-straight lines from X-Acto knife cuts. I learned to DJ on it, too, using Traktor 1.5, I think it was, and a SoundBlaster 5.1 audio card that was The Shit right before pro-level audio cards entered the mainstream consumer market. I had no studio monitors and learned on headhpones, which is kind of unusual.

The desk is so harshed that it will just look horrible in my office in the new place.  It’s long been time to get a nice new desk, and one will be delivered to my new house the day after I move in. This is all necessary and good. I realize that the desk about which I’ve been waxing sentimental for several hundred words now is just a beatup assemblage of wood and veneer and glue and screws.  I know that. But I can’t help feeling like I’m taking a great old dog to the vet to be put down.

I Like Chinese

Among the few things I know I’ll miss when I leave Los Angeles is Grauman’s Chinese Theater. (The Mann Corporation took it over some years back, but only cads with no sense of history call it Mann’s Chinese Theater.) It’s a venerable old warhorse of oldtime palatial theaters, among the last such in Los Angeles. The Orpheum is even bigger and more plush, but in disrepair and not used much. There’s an L.A. Theater Conservancy, Last Remaining Seats, dedicated to trying to preserve these grand dames — a losing battle, I’m afraid, as they are steadily being converted into swap meets and retail space, but a noble battle nonetheless.

Because I’m moving after being here for over half my life, I have been making a point to visit my favorite spots these last few weeks. I saw The Lovely Bones and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus at the Hollywood Arclight (though I haven’t actually seen Avatar at the glorious Cinerama Dome (the anchor of the Arclight complex) because quite frankly it’s on the bottom of my list of movies to see. Yesterday I went to see The Book of Eli at the Chinese.

The Chinese was the first theater I went to when I moved to Los Angeles in 1984. I saw Children of the Corn there. Most of the cast showed up, and so I also got my first taste of spoiled little child actors. But having come from Gainesville, Florida, seeing a movie in a theater the size of a county where the people in the movie were also in the theater was — well, not cool, and not surreal. The word that comes to mind is enframing.

Even more enframing, I saw Speed at the Chinese. The scene where the Red Line car breaks through the street and screeches to a halt outside the theater was especially fun because the theater it slides in front of is the theater I was sitting in. You couldn’t help turning your head back toward the lobby, as if trying to hear the ruckus. (Though even more enframing was Gremlins 2, which I saw at the Vista. There’s a scene where the camera pulls back to show the movie you’re watching on a screen, continues back to include the theater audience, and trucks back as someone gets up and storms out to the lobby to complain to the manager [Paul Bartel] about the film. They shot the scene at the Vista — now that was surreal.)

One of the most fun movie nights I’ve ever had was when a big group of us got together at the Chinese to see Titanic on opening night. The anticipation was huge and the crowd was electric. (Possibly the best movie night I ever had was attending the premiere of 2010 at the Westwood Village with David Gerrold and sitting with Arthur Clarke, Peter Hyams, and Harlan Ellison. Good lord. Shame the movie sucked.)

Even a bad movie is better at the Chinese, and it speaks to a day when moviegoing was an event, a sort of absorbing group ritual, instead of the distraction from cell phone conversations it serves as nowadays. I will definitely miss seeing movies at the Chinese.

FWIW

Getting my own ballot for the 2009 Hugo Award Nominations made me realize that it would probably be all wise and PR-like of me to mention that

Elegy Beach, by Steven R. Boyett (Nov. 2009, Ace/Penguin)

is eligible for nomination in the Novel category this year.

Not that you have to vote for it, you undertand. I mean, if you don’t, we’re still friends. I mean, in a superficial, don’t-call-me-to-bail-you-out-of-jail kind of way. But if you’re eligible to vote for the 2009 Hugos, there’s a chance you intended to vote for Elegy Beach but got that weird mind-goes-blank thing that happens when we walk into bookstores and grocery stores, and when we open the fridge. So I’m really just reminding you, you see.

And remember, vote early and often!

MLK

Some years ago while auditioning samples for compositions, I was listening to pieces of Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech and was astonished to realize that that the speech is — from start to finish and without variation — 125 beats per minute for over 15 minutes.

I have always thought that the “Dream” speech is about the most passionate, important, lyric, and beautifully constructed stretch of oratory imaginable. The realization that it’s also right on tempo caused me to start listening to it as a musical construction. It has a nearly symphonic structure, with distinct movements. And of course there’s that astonishing finish.

I wanted to compose something that would underscore the speech’s musicality — a simple piece that wouldn’t call attention to itself or stand independently of the speech, but act as a bed to illustrate the structure and lyric beauty of King’s amazing words.

I did absolutely no editing to the speech beyond toning down some of the applause and EQing it a bit for clarity. It runs in “MLK” exactly as it was recorded, from start to finish, and the music is composed around it. All stops, breaks, returns, emphases are exactly as Rev. King delivered them.

After many listenings my appreciation for Rev. King’s words (and passion, and hope) has only deepened, and the demonstration of their musicality fills me with a childlike wonder. I hope that you are as moved and astonished by the beauty and depth of this speech as I continue to be.

Download:  Steve Boyett – “MLK”

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