For at least the past 20 years or so magazine publishers have tried to get away with paying authors by-the-word at a dime per word and without any future rights reverting back to the author.
Not only is ten-cents-a-word an outrageously bad sum of non-money -- it denigrates the idea of "the whole of the writing" by breaking down the craft into its tiniest bits and not even its architectural pieces.
As an author, you must focus your life on writing good stuff.
Many authors are more obsessed with achieving fame instead of creating greatness in their words.
When fame is the locus of your life -- instead of good writing -- your perspective is skewed to serving the middling taste of mainstream success.
When you instead concentrate on construction and on craft -- you are concerned about the story and the showing of the drama in the lives you hope to perpetuate -- and that means you feed the world instead of starving it with selfishness.
If your writing is good, fame will follow.
Fame without good writing plows hollow lives in fallow land.
Is it better, as an author, to make a solid $50,000 on a book and have a tremendous success in the marketplace?
Or is it better to get a $2 million advance on a book and have it die on the vine of public prosperity and to have it slashed by the critics?
Is success for an author measured in popularity or by the pocketbook?
Now is the time of the year when we must inventory our incendiaries and countenance our joy.
Enjoy your friends.
Welcome your enemies.
Live to fight another joyous day.
My latest book -- Picture Yourself Learning Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard -- is now available for purchase from major online resellers and your local bookstore.
This book was a real pleasure to write.
As a relative newcomer to the world of Apples and Mac OS, I was able to discover and reveal the fun in Leopard and I sure hope my joy effectively translates from keyboard to words on the printed page.
Thomson/Cengage Learning is my outstanding publication house and one thing I really love about the book is the semiotics in the teaching: You get full-color, super-high quality images of the Mac Operating System in action on every page!
The word can slay -- but the image burns the eye forever!
Do you believe when you use a search engine online your privacy should be protected when it comes to knowing what you wanted to know?
Do you own your search results or does the search engine "own" your thoughts typed as characters on a screen?
There's an interesting move afoot to federally regulate and control search engine privacy:
Should search engines be subject to the types of regulation now applied to personal data collectors, cable networks, or phone books? In this article, we make the case for some regulation of the ability of search engines to manipulate and structure their results. We demonstrate that the First Amendment, properly understood, does not prohibit such regulation. Nor will such interventions inevitably lead to the disclosure of important trade secrets.
Now the question becomes: "Who do you trust more to protect your private search queries?"
Google? Microsoft? Ask? Yahoo!?
Or the federal government?
All books must be of the world.
Books are required by their very nature to reflect the values and conscience of the author as well as the world currently framing the context of the word.
Too often technical books and computer books are not of the world; they are instead stale and bone-dry and have no sense of humor or spirit or effective memes or identifiable passion and magnitude.
Current events and poems and the news and response cries and personality and dreams and wishes and colloquialisms are required to be embedded in the sinew of any book written by all authors.
Why should a computer book be less compelling than an Epic Poem or a Fantasy Novel?
Technical books must sing and twirl and express joy -- or the journey created for the reader is dull and rote -- and that goes against the craft of the writer who must forever aspire to higher leanings and who must always lift the reader from pinnacle to pinnacle while avoiding the pitfalls of temptation and merely writing to fill pages instead of brimming imagination.
I was on the phone the other day with a designer I hired to work on a project.
When you talk on the phone -- words become even more vital in trying to pin down an abstract image.
We were working to find the right "feel" for yellow on the page -- that's a hard thing to do because light yellow doesn't "read" on a page and dark yellow quickly becomes orange.
ME: We need a different yellow.
DESIGNER: Like a morning pee yellow?
ME: That's too dark.
DESIGNER: Like a kidney infection pee yellow?
ME: Too cloudy.
DESIGNER: So a lighter tainting of blood in the urine?
ME: Let's try that.
Our similar, shared, experiences give meaning and context to abstract ideas.
Language lives in common crevices.
Describing the crevice reveals how a person relates to the world.
In a recent article -- Rise of Radical Religiosity in Representative Democracies -- I argued that the purpose of the religious right and conservative politicians is to punish the humble majority by provocatively creating false fears:
Protecting Children and Fighting Evil -- those are two topics where we are forced to surrender our civil liberties in the grand stretch of being good citizens -- and governmental powers know this and exploit those two ideals for their own darker demands. If you stand up and say, "Waitaminute!" you are branded a pornographer and an infidel.
Children should not be imaged on the internet or allowed to surf without direct parental control until the age of majority. What's the rush? Make friends in person first. Practice your social skills with your family. Create a place in reality for yourself first before going virtual. Then, once you've learned to read people in person you can work on the harder task of "reading" them on the web.
The web has become a series of insane cul-de-sacs where those with vested interests create their own truths outside of an unbended reality and they claw and scratch each other trying to prove they are right and the rest of the world is mad. This is the path of the familiar the hate mongers with political ties.
Kids are too set on growing up too fast and the parents let them grow up and shoot away because it is the easier, selfish, path where they no longer wish to be bothered with a life that is not their own even though they, The Parents -- in one of the original and native acts of "power labeling" -- named their kids but failed to provide expectation.
Good people need to stand up against bad intentions and truly evil ideas that are conceived and bred in the fallow minority.
If we fail to fight unfair persecution in every instance, our morality is made shallow and our meekness in the face of The Wrong Thing begins to tragically define us, our neighbors, and our nation.
Some amateur authors are bemoaning the fac Amazon takes a 65% cut of your Kindle-published book sales.
What those inexperienced authors fail to realize is a normal hardcopy publisher will take a 94-90% cut of the price of your book as payment to recover the cost of creating and printing your book and as the means of making a profit off your words.
Many authors are taught to write in the now and to write in the moment -- and while that idea is good and fine -- it does not always allow for introspection from the distance of time.
If we write from memory, instead of from the moment, we immediately enrich our lives, and the experience for the reader, because wisdom and yearning are embedded in the word.
Memes and their memories create shared intelligence.
Memory imbues intellect and emotion belies meaning.
Memory leads us onto paths we share, but have yet to discover, while emotion -- made of fuzziness and heartache -- confuses and misleads us by bending light.
If you give someone a blue pencil and the title of an editor -- I promise you that blue pencil will be used to edit and change your work merely because of the title in mind and the pencil in hand.
Editing someone else's work is a tender task that must put you, as the editor, in the mind of the author. It is not the editor's job to change the work just because the work can be changed.
As the publisher of Go Inside Magazine and Urban Semiotic and Boles Books -- each day I deal with the delicate task of preserving the author's voice and perspective while making the whole work work better.
The editor's primary directive is to make the work better and sometimes that means dropping the blue pencil -- and its uncanny, innate, instinct to propel you forward with editorial power -- and let the work breathe its own life into the world without your direct interference.
The best editors are those that edit with an invisible hand and a steady eye and they are always deferential to the work and a tie forever goes to the author.
Many years ago I was considering getting an advanced degree in screenwriting at UCLA.
I was invited to sit in on a class and I was glad I did because it was during that visit I realized UCLA was not the right place for me.
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