Disney is reportedly stiffing writers
According to accounts on the science fiction site File 770, Disney is failing to pay royalties it owes Alan Dean Foster for tie-in novels.
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Writing
Alert to writers who use Audible
An article on File 770 reports that Audible has been encouraging readers to return audiobooks for refunds. They can return them as much as a year later, after reading the entire book. Surely it should take less time and reading than that to decided that you hate a book and wish you hadn’t spent the money on it.
The return counts as a revoked sale. The author gets no royalties, even though the reader got a year’s worth of use out of the book.
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Virtually absurd
When you don’t see people face to face and all your interactions are by phone or over the Internet, life can take on an unreal quality. It feels as if we’re living virtual lives, not real ones. Maybe that’s why writers put the adjective “virtual” on virtually everything. Instead of real learning, we have “virtual learning.” There was talk of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates having a “virtual debate,” apparently in lieu of actually debating. Yet perversely, people we barely know on Facebook are “friends,” not “virtual friends.”
We need to hang on to the reality of life. The term “virtual” means being not quite something or being simulated. If something is “virtually impossible,” it still has a glimmer of possibility.
Many things are now simulated on the Internet because we can’t do them in real life; there are virtual meetings, virtual classrooms, virtual attendance, etc. That’s legitimate. But the outcomes ought to be real. Virtual classrooms should result in real learning, or what’s the point? Distance doesn’t make things less real. People have debated by correspondence for thousands of years; why does distance suddenly make debates “virtual”?
The word “virtual” is an antonym of “literal.” Maybe the long history of abusing “literal” has made the abuse of its opposite inevitable. If you can say someone “literally exploded” when there was no explosion, then why not say you “virtually learned” when you actually learned?
“Virtual,” like “algorithm,” is a trendy word to stick everywhere because it makes the writer sound computer-smart. But it’s virtual smartness, just the appearance of it. Let’s hold on to what’s real in life and not dismiss everything we do at a distance as “virtual.”
How to impress people with the word “algorithm” 1
If you want to come across as a writer who really understands computers, the best way is to learn about them. Read technical books and blogs. Learn how HTML and HTTP work. Find out what the common security fallacies are.
But that’s a lot of work. A quicker way is to use the word “algorithm” a lot.
An algorithm is a precise but abstract description of a computational process. “Precise” means laying out each step mathematically, so that any implementation should produce the same results. “Abstract” means it’s independent of a particular programming language or operating system. You can implement an algorithm in C, PHP, Java, or any other language. Some algorithms work more easily in some languages than in others, but there’s no inherent requirement to use specific technology.
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A new Magic Battery story 1
“To Gain the Whole World,” a new story in the world of The Magic Battery, is now up and available to read free of charge.
Nikolas Fest was the character who gave me the most trouble in the story. I had to throw out a whole chapter about him after getting beta reader feedback. Most of the characters are well-grounded. They know what they’re after and what they live by. Nikolas is constantly striking out in different directions and has trouble putting his life together. It’s harder for me to understand that type of character, but they’re often the interesting ones. In this story, Nikolas meets with the Meistersinger Hans Sachs, and he faces a dilemma about how to treat his own past. Meanwhile, pushbutton magic is starting to become a part of everyday life.
It has some spoilers for The Magic Battery. If you haven’t read the novel and hate spoilers, I recommend buying and reading the novel first. :) If you can deal with a few spoilers, it could help you decide whether the hovel will interest you.
If you spot the allusion to an early TV show, let me know in the comments.
California governor signs bill exempting freelance writers from AB-5
Governor Gavin Newsom of California has signed a bill exempting freelance writers and some other businesses from the draconian restrictions which state bill AB-5 had placed on contract work. Previously, AB-5 had limited writers to 35 articles a year to the same customer. That made it impossible, for instance, to contract for a weekly column.
California may be an insane place, but sanity prevails now and then.
Is Constant Content stiffing its foreign writers?
The news for Constant Content’s foreign writers doesn’t look good. This Reddit discussion, as of the time I’m writing this post, suggests that no one is getting paid. (The company is based in Canada, but it doesn’t treat US writers as foreign, and at least some of them are getting paid.)
Constant Content is months behind in paying these writers. Its website still doesn’t acknowledge the existence of a payment problem. Its FAQ contains blatantly false information, still claiming “Payments are made through Paypal.” It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the company’s only guiding principle is what it can get away with.
Update #2 on Constant Content
The situation with Constant Content remains the same. Payments to writers are long past due, and I’ve seen no indication anyone has been paid recently. Some people have received an email instructing them to set up payments through Stripe. Others say they haven’t received it. They can’t find this information on the website. I used my old account to log in and couldn’t find any information indicating a change of ownership or payment method.
The writers’ FAQ says, “Payment is made the first week of the beginning of each month.” It doesn’t say the first full week, so I take that to mean writers should have been paid last week. Comments on Reddit and elsewhere indicate that’s been their past practice. I let the following Monday go by to be generous, but I’m still seeing no reports of people getting paid.
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Update on Constant Content
There’s a tiny but important change to constant-content.com: The page footer now says it’s “A Division of Moresby Media Inc.” As I mentioned in my earlier post, the footer previously identified RevenueWire as the parent company. The FTC fined RevenueWire for helping shady “tech support” companies to scam people.
Writers are saying that Constant Content has sent out an email telling them they will soon be getting payment through Stripe. Others say they didn’t get the email. It’s plausible that the mail had trouble with spam filters; bulk email promising payment tends to be viewed as spam. Alternatively, CC may be sending the mail out in batches.
Setting up to receive payments by Stripe is straightforward; payments can go to a bank account or a debit card. However, it’s not available in all countries, and that could be an issue for some writers.
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The return of lily-white writing? 1
Back in the “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” all the leading characters were light-skinned by implication. Well, all the human characters. The aliens were often green or blue. It wasn’t that the authors set out to portray white-only casts or mentioned every character’s appearance; it was just the default, and most writers (themselves light-skinned) rarely thought about it.
The situation slowly changed. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, published in 1959, presented a thoroughly international and multi-ethnic military. We’ve reached the point where characters of all physical types and ethnic origins appear in SF. It’s happened in nearly all kinds of fiction; I’m focusing on SF because it’s what I’m familiar with.
But now there’s a nasty push back. Some people want fiction re-segregated. At first I thought it was just a fringe movement with no significance, but it’s gaining in influence. I keep seeing would-be writers apologetically posting to Reddit, asking whether it’s OK for their stories to have characters whose skin color doesn’t match their own. The responses are overwhelmingly “yes,” so it’s still on the fringe, but it’s a toxic idea that needs firm rejection.
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