How I celebrated my 6th year freelanceiversary

May 10th 2012 at 12:49 am

Last year I celebrated my fifth year of freelancing (every May 9th I celebrate my freelanceiversary, the day I walked off away from doing 9-5 and to steering my own life). I’ve loved being a freelancer, and it has been a joyful thing.

For the epic fifth year, I wanted to celebrate with a tattoo, but couldn’t budget for it. But for a couple of years, I’d been planning a tattoo. It would be a memento mori, to remind myself of how close I came to death more than once in 2008-2009, and it would celebrate my continued life as a freelancer, and it would also contain a quote that I’d become enamored with that would guide future decisions.

I’ve had a near-pathological fear of needles most of my life, until 2008 when I ended up in and out of hospitals due to the heart defect. So in a way, getting a tattoo in and of itself had a sort of meaning as well.

I couldn’t quite afford the tattoo last year. But this year, the novel retreat I attend every year, that has been so crucial to my growing as a writer, happened to fall on my freelanceiversary. In fact, in 2006, I choose May 9th as my last day of work because I was also leaving for a Blue Heaven workshop.

It all came together. I would get a six year celebration tattoo that I’d been planning for three years. I figured if, after three years, I still thought about, and wanted, the tattoo, that it was something I could safely imagine myself still being psyched about for many years. This was not a quick decision.

So on May 9th, with Cassie Alexander, Jenn Reese, and Ian Tregellis and got the tattoo. I wanted a skull, with a pen and pencil, and the latin for ‘create or die’ underneath.

First things. I went in with a ‘cute’ skull, stylized, almost day of the dead-ish. But after some back and forth with the artist and talking to him, we decided to go with a bit more attitude. And I’m glad I did, most of my friends agree, artist’s skull was cooler.

Secondly, the latin.

Well, I spent three weeks relearning latin. And consulting with friends. And a classicist. There were variations decided upon, and although a grammar purist could argue slightly, I went with a translation I like. If you meet me in person you can see it and talk to me about it.

Here’s a rough idea of the end result though:

What was it like?

I was worried the pain would make me chicken out. The artist said it would be an hour. The first ten or so minutes, after that first bite, I kept my game face on. No flinching, focusing on the pain, trying to figure out how long I could handle it.

After that I stopped worrying, starting listening to my friends chat, and joining in. The bits that did get me to bite my lip a bit were close to edge of my arm.

Instead of an hour, that’s what it took for just the outline! Plus another thirty minutes! We paused, and then he went back in for another hour and a half of shading, which again hurt towards the edges of the arm but weren’t too bad. But another hour in the chair was starting to wear on me (I don’t sit still well), and my arm kept falling asleep. That ended up being more painful than the tattooing up to that point.

For the last half hour, he came in with some white for emphasis on the words, and that was when I started to seriously want to get the fuck out of the chair I was in. He was retracing stuff that had been lined, then shaded, and now was back.

It was about three and a half hours, which I wasn’t anticipating. But he really got into his work and was taking his time, and I really love the details on the pencil and pen in particular. I left what I hope was a good tip, and went to dinner, because I was about ready to faint from hunger.

There was a bit of ‘holy shit, did I just do this?’ when in the bathroom washing it off. And then I thought, ‘heck yeah, write more! Create or die!’ when I saw it. And that’s why it’s there. To remind me I survived 08-09, and came out the other side with a lesson I don’t ever want to forget.

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A still from the film adaptation of my short story All Her Children Fought

May 8th 2012 at 4:56 pm

I mentioned that this last weekend my short story All Her Children Fought was being filmed in Ireland:

All Her Children Fought will go into production in Rathdrum, Wicklow over the May Bank Holiday weekend. Directed by Patrick Ryan, the 15 minute drama explores the corruption and resilience of natural instincts in a future state of war. ‘The story has great resonance’ said Snugboro Films producer Liam Grant, ‘it deals with the forgotten details – how children grow up and how mothers cope rather than the spectacle of war on TV.’

Here are some very preliminary stills from the 15 minute film they let me see, and share with you all as they’re in the editing room:

and

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Writing writing writing

May 7th 2012 at 12:20 pm

Am bunkered down for the next week to finish writing The Apocalypse Ocean with many other fellow writers around me at Blue Heaven 2012. I’ll probably be quiet the next week, though I’ll natter on via twitter, no doubt.

See you next week.

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Can you franchise a western city into the developing world? Honduras is about to find out.

May 4th 2012 at 2:44 pm

I find this endlessly fascinating, because every time I read and think about it, I come out the other side with a different opinion. To whit, a charter city in Honduras will be adopting the governance model of Canada:

Honduras recently defined a new legal entity: la Región Especial de Desarrollo. A RED is an independent reform zone intended to offer jobs and safety to families who lack a good alternative; officials in the RED will be able to partner with foreign governments in critical areas such as policing, jurisprudence and transparency. By participating, Canada can lead an innovative approach to development assistance, an approach that tackles the primary roadblock to prosperity in the developing world: weak governance.

So:

The RED offers a new way to think about development assistance, one that, like trade, relies on mutually beneficial exchange rather than charity. It’s an effort to build on the success of existing special zones based around the export-processing maquila industry. These zones have expanded employment in areas such as garments and textiles, with substantial investment from Canadian firms such as Gildan, but they haven’t brought the improved legal protections needed to attract higher-skilled jobs. By setting up the rule of law, the RED can open up new opportunities for Canadian firms to expand manufacturing operations and invest in urban infrastructure.

By participating in RED governance, Canada can make the new city a more attractive place for would-be residents and investors. It can help immediately by appointing a representative to a commission that has the power to ensure that RED leadership remains transparent and accountable. It also can assist by training police officers.

So on one hand, what comes to mind? Colonialism, right? Here would be a western nation literally running a piece of a developing world nation. That brings up a lot of troubling past. Missteps. What happens when the Canadians running this new Honduran city decide to unleash some of the unlawful police brutality exhibited during the G20 riots in Toronto? The legal fallout of which is still continuing. What will that look like?

But you read the article, and you see that this nation is thinking, we don’t have strong rule of law, and tradition, and maybe this is a way to jumpstart it. And when other cities see the prosperity of a smoothly running, high infrastructure city with great civics, they’ll adopt (consider the ripple effects Hong Kong/Singapore have) and spread.

Do it right, you have a central American Hong Kong. Do it wrong… ?

It’s Honduras making the call, and asking for this, though. They’re wanting to bootstrap more, and as far as civic effectiveness, Canada isn’t a bad model. It ranks highly on quality of life, governance, transparency, etc.

There’ll be some racists who hear this and cheer, the optics of a country asking for help bolster the case of ultra-nationalists. You can almost hear the pro-empire cackling of Niall Ferguson.

All of which creates a knee jerk ‘ach, no, self-determination.’

But the Hondurans know all that, and are willing to ask for this experiment anyway.

Which is what impresses me. If you’re not making something work, looking for a better solution is smart. Not invented here complex ruins many structures (businesses, governance) because their ego and price and nationalism and whatever dictate that someone else *can’t* do it better because *they’re someone else.*

The fact that Hondurans went out, looked for what they thought was the best model for running something, and are kinda hiring those people to help get it off the ground reminds me of reading about how when Singapore decided to figure out its healthcare system they sent experts to travel around the world, take a look at all the systems, and come back to implement what they figured worked best.

You have to admire that approach.

But it’s still wild. Franchising a city, basically. I’ll be following this for sure.

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American lifespan by county

May 3rd 2012 at 9:06 pm

Average life space in the US. A useful indicator of health/wealth and success of a country/governing area. But importantly, it’s done by county.

Since I’ve moved to the US, as an outsider with many international friends, I sometimes have to act as ‘Speaker for Americans’ in explaining things. Most of my friends in Western non-US countries are flabbergasted by healthcare and how its run in the US (and now that I’m a freelancer and have also gone through the experience of a major issue with multiple hospital visits, and then had a visit it Canada to compare it to, then took out several books about how healthcare is done throughout the world to educate myself, I’m a bit croggled as well), as well as other things. And what I have to explain to them is…

…the US is a really fucking big place. I mean, it’s as big as all of Europe. So it’s not so much comparing, say France and the US and how things are done, but like saying you have French hospitals and some-Eastern-European-country that just got of communism/dictatorship/whathave you and just joined the EU and has its own set up hanging in there.

There is tremendous disparity and difference from a rural West Virginian/Kentucky county and Manhattan.

And that’s because they’re really, really far apart.

That creates culture differences, expectational differences, and infrastructure differences. To whit:

In 661 counties, life expectancy stopped dead or went backwards for women since 1999. By comparison, life expectancy for men stopped or reversed in 166 counties. This troubling trend is occurring in 84% of Oklahoma counties, 58% of Tennessee counties, and 33% of Georgia counties.

The gap between women living the longest lives and those living the shortest lives is growing, too. In Collier, Florida, women live 85.8 years on average. In McDowell, West Virginia, they live to be 74.1. That’s an 11.7-year gap. In 1989, the gap was 8.7 years. For men, the gap is larger – 15.5 years – but it has grown by less than a year since 1989. Men live the longest in Marin, California, at 81.6 years. They live the shortest lives on average in Quitman and Tunica, Mississippi, at 66.1.

The range of life expectancies is so broad that in some counties, such as Stearns, Minnesota, lifespans rival some of the places where people live the longest – Japan, Hong Kong, and France – while in other counties, life expectancies are lower than places that spend far less on health care – Egypt, Indonesia, and Colombia. Even within states, there are large disparities. Women in Fairfax, Virginia, have among the best life expectancies in the world at 84.1 years, while in Sussex, Virginia, they have among the worst at 75.9 years.

If you live in the right place in the US, you’re living the developed world.

If you live in the wrong place, it’s similar in some cases to the developing world.

That shocked me when I moved here. I pictured the USA as being fairly uniform. And very wealthy. And it is, very wealthy. In many ways.

But in many ways, when I’m at a gas station in Allen County, Ohio and my attendant has most of their teeth pulled I have to remember I’m not living in ‘THE US-Fucking-A,’ but Allen County, which according to the research done above has an average lifespan of 71.9 years, putting it almost 10 years on average BELOW the US average, and which means I roughly am living in a part of the US with the equivalence of, according to Wikipedia, a place like El Salvador or Armenia (although, unlike those other countries, since Allen County is in the US, I can drive to a better place for opportunities if I can afford a car and transportation).

To understand where the US is the US that outsiders think it is, you need to look to metro areas.

According to the US Mayors report for 2011:

In 2010, U.S. metro economies accounted for 89.8% of the nation’s gross domestic product and wage income and 85.7% of all jobs—slightly down from 2008, but still the overwhelming majority of domestic product and wage and salary disbursements.

The New York metropolitan area ranked first, with 2010 gross metropolitan product (GMP) of $1.28 trillion, followed by Los Angeles ($738 billion), Chicago ($531 billion), Washington ($426 billion), and Houston ($379 billion).

The US economy is $15 trillion, of which NYC, LA, Chicago, DC and Houston are responsible for $3.35 trillion of.

Now, this isn’t an indictment of the county I live in or the US… if things were getting better or holding still.

But sadly, as I pointed out above, counties like Allen County are losing. People are, on average, living fewer years. Meaning something is broken. American progress in those counties that are like the developing world, are slumping, while others are moving forward.

That gap will be, if it continues, a major fissure in a future America.

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Spring Gardening

May 2nd 2012 at 3:34 pm

Last year I declared I was trying to learn how to garden. Because our house has a lot of neat features that lend well that the previous owner left behind. We’ve, out of self defense, simplified as much as we could, and now I’m trying to learn how to love it.

Because paying for the full landscape job is a bit tough. And because I figured that I could use a hobby that gets me outside. I’m not allowed to run or lift or anything, so gardening actually burns calories (more than I realized) and has a secondary result.

I hate weeding. I don’t understand US plants. I lived on a boat.

So it’s been very uphill, but last summer I took out books, started reading. And have been learning a few things.

June of last year we cleared out this bed and planted a ring of Creeping Phloxes on the border, with Veronica Speedwells on the inside.

Planting:

This spring the phloxes flowered nicely:

The speedwell’s behind them, taller, have fluffed out and will flower in the middle summer, so the bed always has some color.

I need to put down mulch, but I’m happy with it, and it’s been fairly low maintenance.

I’m working on figuring out how to control the weeds between the flagstones out front, and tested out 4 different plants last summer and over the winter to see what came back this spring. Nothing was hardy enough.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to keep from the massive amount of weeding the large in front of the house beds need. I got curious about Creeping Thyme. I chose Pink Chintz because it was sun hardy and in the spring bloomed awesomely.

Last June we planted:

A surprising amount of it died, but the plants arrived pale and limp from the place I ordered them from. I ordered a second batch in September. But some of the first batch survived and spread:

I really like the way it colorfully spills over the rocks.

Once the September batch (you can see the little green patches just behind the flowering thyme near the rock) fills in by the end of this summer, I’ll calculate where and how much more to plant to fill in the left side of the house, but the aim is to replace all the mulching and weeding with a full bed of Creeping Thyme under the windows out front. Smells great, looks great in spring. I figure by the end of this summer I’ll have filled out half the left hand bed.

The next project is the flagstones, which I will tame this summer with some sort of ground cover plant, and it will be joyous and save me much weeding.

I’m not nearly as orderly and neat as my neighbors, who are constantly out picking up sticks, but I’m enjoying the slow creation of a ‘hands off’ landscaping outside.

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The Apocalypse Ocean: new rewards level met, last day of pre-orders

May 1st 2012 at 7:44 pm

The Apocalypse Ocean is the crowd funded, 4th novel in the Xenowealth series (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose and…). People pre-ordered and backed the book, and I’ve been writing the novel, with an expectation of putting it in backers’ hands by June 30th (as promised).

Part of the crowd funding process were the rewards levels. I stated that if we met $12,500 by April 31st we would have Pablo Defendini create a custom map of the Xenowealth, which we’ll be doing some cool things with.

Well, I’m happy to announce that yesterday, April 30th, Kevin Pratt of Black Tusk Books, a bookseller/collector out of Vancouver, came in as a major pledge backer to make sure the custom Xenowealth map art would be unlocked.

Since April 30th was the last day of the month, and I said I’d take pre-orders until April 31st, for a lark I’ll be taking pre-orders via the online store until midnight tonight, then shutting it down.

The Apocalypse Ocean currently stands at 50,000 words long, for those of you interested in the progress. The estimated word count is roughly 66,000 words. I’m expecting to finish the book in the middle of this month, and then will be doing edits and copyedits, as well as testing out physical copies. So June is still the date the novel will be finished and shipping to backers in both physical and eBook form. My bet is that early June everyone will get the eBook (because you’ll all want to read it ASAP), and then the print ones will follow more on the June 30th date.

So thank you all backers, and thanks to Kevin for getting us up to the point where we can have that great custom map made.

June is just around the corner!

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270 MPH Maglev train

May 1st 2012 at 3:46 pm

via Boing Boing, today. Riding on a 270 MPH train in Shanghai.

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B&N teams up with MSFT

April 30th 2012 at 9:57 am

Everyone in book land is looking at the new announcement by B&N and Microsoft teaming up to spin off B&N’s Nook ecosystem:

Barnes & Noble is breaking itself apart, by spinning off its fast-growing digital unit from its slow-growth bookstore business. And it’s doing so with help from Microsoft.

Redmond will put $300 million into the new business at a $1.7 billion valuation, and will get 17.6 percent of the new company. That will leave Barnes & Noble with a stake in the new unit worth about $1.4 billion.

That’s about $600 million more than the value the market placed on all of Barnes & Nobles until this morning. Not surprisingly, Barnes & Nobles investors love this idea, and are bidding up the stock a staggering 80 percent this morning.

The best point of view is to look at it this way. Until the Kindle Fire, the B&N Nook Color was the best selling Android tablet that industry people didn’t think of as an Android tablet. Every time I would see an article trying to poise yet another crap-ass tablet as being the next iPad killer, I would point out that the B&N Nook had already outsold it.

Of course, the Fire has done a very good job moving units.

But that still makes the Amazon Fire and the B&N Nook Color and the B&N Nook Tablet the best selling tablets.

But someone recently made the argument, and I can’t find the link, that the choice of buying a tablet is really a decision to buy into an ‘ecosystem’ of media content. You buy a Fire, you’re not just buying a Fire, but a window into Amazon MP3, Amazon eBooks, Amazon cart, Amazon video, and Amazon Prime Videos (their answer to Netflix), as well as software installs. But an iPad, you’re buying into iTunes (movies, music, eBooks) as well as software (interestingly, on an iPad you also can carry over your B&N and Amazon books, but not as much other media.)

So Microsoft now has a way for you to buy into an ecosystem (B&N). And if B&N’s smart, they have abilities to reach out to either Google Play or MSFT media options.

NewCo (the name of the new joint company) needs to think ecosystem as fast as it can. Grabbing Microsoft’s contacts and getting them to put a stake in is actually a smart move.

No wonder stock doubled in pre-trading.

If you’d told me that B&N and MSFT had teamed up back in 2002 I would have thought ‘how Orwellian,’ and yet in this picture, they’re both the underdogs.

But this will give Microsoft things to offer as it tries to come out with a tablet soon.

And while I’m not the world’s biggest Microsoft fan, I do love competition. As I’ve pointed out before, tech journalists are always trying to recast every brand competition in the frame of MSFT vs AAPL from the early 90s, and that has done us all a tremendous disservice. Consider Xbox–Nintendo–Playstation. I prefer a healthy competitive environment. Look at the world of smartphones right now (iPhone/Android/Blackberry/Windows/Symbian), there’s been a lot of innovation in the last four years, and I’ve enjoyed the benefits of seeing good ideas on different phones migrate, which has benefitted me.

This will be interesting.

That being said, who the hell thought naming the company NewCo was a good idea? (Update: it really is a placeholder name until they can come up with a better one, they’ve stated as much, it just got missed in following coverage)

That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

But again, to summarize, it’s probably not about the Microsoft OS showing up on future Nooks as much as it’s about giving MSFT tablets access to *content* to give customers a reason to buy one, I think, as well as goose Microsoft’s existing smartphone sales by giving them access to an ecosystem of content.

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The Boy who plays with nukes

April 27th 2012 at 4:18 pm

Remember that story about the radioactive boy scout, who tried to learn how to make nuclear power in his parent’s garage and ended up creating a mini-superfund site. Here’s a kid who read that article and thought ‘hey, I could do that,’:

A rational society would know what to do with a kid like Taylor Wilson, especially now that America’s technical leadership is slipping and scientific talent increasingly has to be imported. But by the time Taylor was 12, both he and his brother, Joey, who is three years younger and gifted in mathematics, had moved far beyond their school’s (and parents’) ability to meaningfully teach them. Both boys were spending most of their school days on autopilot, their minds wandering away from course work they’d long outgrown.

David Hahn had been bored too—and, like Taylor, smart enough to be dangerous. But here is where the two stories begin to diverge. When Hahn’s parents forbade his atomic endeavors, the angry teenager pressed on in secret. But Kenneth and Tiffany resisted their impulse to steer Taylor toward more benign pursuits. That can’t be easy when a child with a demonstrated talent and fondness for blowing things up proposes to dabble in nukes.

I read this at the doctor’s office today and was blown away. Smart kid.

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