The Sanity Project

Researching fantasy fiction

This entry was posted in My writing and tagged fiction magic battery on by

While I make my money writing about tech, I have a fiction project going as well. It’s called The Magic Battery. The starting point was some questions about how magic worked in a friend’s story. Magic always has to be limited in some way, or anything becomes possible with a wave of the wand. But if there are limitations, there will be ways of overcoming them. My comment was “Whoever invents the magic battery will make a fortune!” That was my starting point.

The story is set in 16th century Saxony, and I’m striving to make it as realistic as possible except for the existence of magic. Sorcerers are tradesmen with special skills. They make a nice living because they can do things no one else can, but they aren’t super-powerful. As one of the characters puts it, “Magic isn’t magic.” It has serious limits, one of the most important being the sorcerer’s capacity to draw on the “World Behind.” But what if they could draw on this power and save it for later use? What if they could sell their stored spells to people with no magical talent? That would change the world.
(more…)

The researcher’s guide to beating the search engines 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Internet research on by

If you’ve ever tried to research a difficult topic on Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, or any of the other major search engines, you know what a battle it is. You don’t just get irrelevant results, you get the feeling the search engine is working against you. Instead of matching your keywords, it returns matches for vaguely similar spellings. Instead of matching all your search terms, it gives you popular pages that match just one. You may start to think the search engines are conspiring against you, and in a sense you’re right.

Why the search engines fight you

Here’s the secret: Search engines think you’re stupid. They think you can’t construct a proper search and they have to “help” you by guessing your real intent. Statistically, this isn’t so unreasonable. Most people have no idea how to construct a search string. They can’t spell. Search engines have dumbed themselves down to the level of these people. This is great if you can’t remember the spelling of a name and you’re looking for popular articles, but it’s murder when you’re trying to get an answer to a difficult query.
(more…)

California bill threatens freelance writers 2

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged business California law writing on by

California map from EPA.gov Politicians hate the “gig economy.” The simple reason is that it’s harder to collect taxes from freelancers than from employees. The California Assembly has passed a bill that would put many freelancers out of work, including writers. It would force clients to take them on as employees. That’s very unlikely to happen for the typical writer, who would simply lose the work.

As of this writing, the bill still has to be passed by the Senate. The text of California AB-5 is on the state website.

I’m not a lawyer and (fortunately) don’t live in California, but this kind of legislation could spread to other states. If it does, it will force a lot of writing work overseas, hurting people in every state.
(more…)

The content reviewer, as seen by the writer

This entry was posted in Satire Writing Writing as business and tagged clients satire writing on by

Note to companies that purchase content: This is a satire, not a model to follow! 😊

These are from the experience of other writers as they’ve described them on forums, just a bit exaggerated in some cases. I can only speculate on what the reviewer was actually thinking, but the writer can easily imagine a professional sadist at the other end of the transaction.

If you want to cultivate a team of writers who will give you a steady stream of material, please don’t follow these examples. Most reviewers try their best, but hastily-written comments can leave writers bewildered and discourage them from fixing easily-corrected problems.
(more…)

Tips for creating topic descriptions

This entry was posted in Publishing Writing as business and tagged clients on by

Do you create topic descriptions for writers to make proposals or submissions on? There’s an art to creating a useful description. Some common omissions regularly evoke complaints from writers. A description that doesn’t work well will result in submissions you can’t use or none at all. When you have to reject them, that sours writers who might have provided you with good material. Here are some tips, based on my experience:
(more…)

Seanan McGuire on writing

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged books fiction on by

Seanan McGuire has a good article on Tor.com on how she wrote her new novel Middlegame and on writing in general. It’s a reminder of how much of writing is just working steadily. “Every book is sit down, write, keep writing, edit, edit again, try to sell, hopefully succeed, buy some groceries, nap.”

Middlegame sounds interesting to me because of its philosophical tie to Mary Crowell’s song, “Doctrine of Ethos.”

“Files that Last” pirated on Scribd

This entry was posted in Publishing Writing and tagged piracy Scribd on by

Update: My book wasn’t exactly pirated, but involved a rather dubious maneuver on Smashwords’ part. See the additional information at the end of this post.

Just this morning I learned that Scribd hosts a pirated copy of my ebook Files that Last. I’ve submitted a takedown request. We’ll see if they do anything about it.

According to the automated email response, “Content on Scribd is uploaded and maintained by our members and publishers with no editorial approval or other intervention by Scribd’s employees. Scribd takes the rights of intellectual property owners very seriously and complies as a service provider with all applicable provisions of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) of 1998. We expeditiously remove infringing material and terminate repeat infringers when such action is deemed appropriate.”

Translation: Scribd makes no attempt whatsoever to stop pirated works from being uploaded yet claims to take copyright “very seriously.”

I put months of effort into writing Files that Last. I paid for copy editing and cover art. Scribd is siphoning money off my work, getting ad revenue, without having lifted one finger to contribute to the book’s creation.

I’m sure there are lots of other pirate sites where you can find copies of just about anything ever published. But Scribd pretends to be respectable.

As thanks for reading this, here’s a coupon code for Files that Last on Smashwords, letting you buy it for just $4.50 (regular $7.99): VN54Y. Expires May 11.

Update

Within a few hours of reporting the incident, I got a reply from Scribd. It included the following:

was delivered to Scribd as part of a content distribution agreement with Smashwords. As part of this agreement, Smashwords content is automatically added to Scribd’s BookID copyright protection system. The agreement is described on Smashwords’ blog at http://blog.smashwords.com/2013/12/smashwords-signs-distribution-agreement.html. This content was not removed from Scribd.

You can disable delivery of your content to Scribd with the Smashwords Channel Manager.

So it isn’t actually piracy, but I never agreed to let Smashwords put my content on Scribd. Smashwords is a distributor, not a publisher, as they make very clear to their writers. A “copyright protection system” sounds like DRM, and I do everything possible to keep my books from being distributed under DRM. It does nothing to hinder the crooks but keeps legitimate buyers from having “files that last.” I just logged in on Smashwords and “opted out” from Scribd, as well as a couple of other channels that didn’t look familiar. I don’t know how long it will take for the page to disappear from Scribd.

Linux for writers

This entry was posted in Commentary Tools and tagged computers Linux software on by

Users are discovering that Windows 10, among its many annoyances, doesn’t work well if you can’t get reliable Internet download speeds of 10 megabits a second or better without a data cap. Macs are better in some ways (I’m using one right now), but they’re expensive. A lot of writers would just like a reasonably priced laptop that doesn’t make unreasonable demands on their connection.

Some writers consider a Chromebook a reasonable solution. It’s cheap and it doesn’t have ridiculous bandwidth requirements. You can use it in a library or a coffee shop. All your documents are online, so if you have a desktop machine at home, you can easily move documents between it and the Chromebook. But it means handing all your documents over to Google. I like having my files on my own computer, thank you. If Google locks you out of your account (I’ve had that happen temporarily) or terminates it for any reason, everything is gone. If you don’t like other people reading what you write before you submit it, how confident are you that Google doesn’t?
(more…)