rowyn

Everything Old Is New Again

2024-11-18T01:12:48Z

I saw this article about how smartphones have turned us all into zombies who won't engage with the real world or the people around them boosted on Fediverse the other day. Independently, a friend linked me to this xkcd:

Which was relevant to the topic, but less relevant than The Pace of Modern Life -- it's long, so I'm not embedding it, but it's a series of quotes about how technology has destroyed the fabric of society, dated from 1871 through 1915. And yet here we are, more than a century later, claiming that society still had fabric left to be destroyed in the last few years. Maybe it grew back.

Perhaps it is unfair, or unkind, to liken every complaint about smartphone etiquette to complaints made 100+ years ago about newfangled magazines or inexpensive postage or whathaveyou. But good Lord, it is tedious to read people waxing on about how Back In My Day, Things Were So Much Better.

Do you know what I did before I had a GPS in my phone? Well, thirty years ago, I would write down a list of directions from someone who knew the way. And then, when I got lost, I would look for a payphone and hope that I had their number in my little book of contacts and also that I had the little book on me, so I could call and we could try to figure out where I was and how to get where I wanted to be. If that failed, I might stop at a gas station and ask a stranger for help. They wouldn't know either. I had some gigantic intricately-folded maps that could never be folded again if you unfolded them. They didn't help much. Twenty years ago, I printed out directions from MapQuest and then, when I got lost, I would stop and call for directions and write those down. Repeat as necessary. This was a little easier because by then I had a cellphone so at least I didn't have to find a payphone and change and my contact list.

Do you know what I do when I get lost while using GPS on my phone? Yeah, I don't know either, I can't remember the last time I got lost. My phone could run out of power but I have a USB cable to plug it into in my car, so it's not likely.

Yes, today, I still have vague mental map of the area where I live. Yes, I still remember the routes I use to get places after going a few times. No, my mental maps were not better in pre-GPS days. I was bad at this then and I'm bad at it now and the big difference is now it doesn't matter because I have an assistive device to do it for me.

Do you know what I did before the internet? I watched network TV and read books. So much network television. So many commercials. About one-third of air time for every network program was commercials. As a kid, I spent several hours every day watching TV. Cartoons, syndicated shows, primetime broadcasts. Was this good TV? Absolutely not. I remember one fantasy TV show with a sword-slinging main character and a sidekick who talked to animals and it had so little to recommend itself that I can no longer find mention of it. Web searches on the theme turn up "best-of" lists. Dear internet, this show was not in the top 100 for anything, including "shows with characters who talk to animals". I watched it anyway. It was there, and I was That Bored. In 1988 I went to college, discovered the internet*, and my TV-watching plummeted.

Of course, I couldn't watch TV while I was out of the house. That's what books were for. Do you know what I did when I was on the bus, or walking down the sidewalk, or at a coffee shop, or during breaks between school classes (or during classes if I could get away with it), or at the gym between sets**, or literally just existing in any public space not designed for socializing? I read a book. I carried at least one at all times. Ideal purse size in the 90s: holds wallet plus two paperback books. Larger and it'd be too heavy. Had to make do with the book I was currently reading, plus a spare.

Do you know what I didn't do? Talk to strangers if I had literally any choice whatsoever. I didn't even talk to acquaintances if I could help it. Why would I do that. They didn't want to talk to me. No one is at the bus stop for the hot happening social action. We're there to catch the bus. If I wanted to socialize, I could go somewhere designed for that purpose and likely to have a people with common interests.

And you know what? You still today can go to places designed for socializing and guess what? People will socialize there! Lut and I used to go to the Warhammer store to play Kill Team, and I promise you, people did not bury their noses in their phones and ignore the world while there. They played games or talked about games, or painted miniatures, and generally interacted with the real world because that was why they had come. If you want to meet strangers or interact with people in the real world, please go to events at your local library or a dance club or a gaming night at a store or a knitting club in a coffee shop or whatever other pastime suits your fancy. The web will be happy to help you find any of these spaces meant for socialzing!

Stop being nostalgic for a time when you thought social norms made it acceptable to demand the attention of strangers in all public spaces. We didn't want to talk to you then, either.

I don't know if the author is right and the social norm has changed over the last few years, making people's reactions angrier at being interrupted in public by strangers. But if it has: Boo-hoo. So sorry your personal preference for a social norm has been replaced by the personal preferences of others. But it is their preference. The social norm did not change out of spite for you, personally. It changed because people wanted to be left alone and not coerced into small talk about the weather by randos every time they left the house. They're not ignoring you now because they have a phone to stare at instead. They're ignoring you because now they can get away with it.

*Technically, in 1988 I started using the university VAX to talk and play games with other students of the university using the same VAX. I could've accessed usenet but never looked at it. I didn't start using the internet until I got an account on FurryMUCK in 1990 or 1991.
**Yes, the guy in the article who occupied a gym machine while scrolling on his phone for 15 minutes was being rude. He would've been rude staring at a gym TV or reading a magazine, too. Phones did not invent rude people

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Gender and the Internet

2023-03-15T16:09:53Z

Sometimes, when people talk about trans people in a "wow, there sure are a lot of trans people now" way, I think about how long I have known trans people.

I have been an extremely online person from the moment I got to college and had access to "online", in the late eighties. I created a character on FurryMUCK in 1990 or 91, played for a few weeks or months, and then left. I returned in '92, I think, and remained active there for some years. I also flitted between various other online spaces before/between/during my FurryMUCK years, but Furry is the space I remember best from this period.

MUCKs were text-based MMOs but without the "fight monsters and get loot" part. People built rooms and lands and worlds and characters out of text descriptions, and hung out there together to chat. Like Discord, but with a lot more atmosphere. FurryMUCK was -- is, it's still around -- a MUCK for furries. And furries have always been a queer lot. In the late 80s and 90s, people created characters with every kind of gender: male and female were the most popular, but neopronouns and nonbinary characters were commonplace. The last was often fetishized -- but not always. "Nonbinary" wasn't a term yet. Most of the enby characters labeled themselves as "hermaphrodites"; some of them as "neuter."

One of the many things that's changed about "online" in the last thirty years is the gender ratio online. In the late 80s and early 90s, most people online presented as male in person. It was so overwhelmingly male that even most people who presented as female online presented as male in person.

I don't really know how many of those people who played female or nonbinary characters on Furry were trans. It was undeniably easier to get attention with a female character. I rarely played male characters myself, not because I disliked male characters but because when I played one, I recognized how hard it was to stand out from the crowd. I knew several AMAB people who preferred to play female characters online but who, so far as I know, were cis men.

The first trans woman I met was in the early 90s: 1991, perhaps? She came to one of the periodic furry meet-ups that one of my friends hosted. She was older than most of my friends, although I do not know how much older; I'd guess she was in her thirties or forties, when most of my circle were in our early twenties. She was polyamorous and kinky and dated one of my friends who was perhaps twenty-one. I don't know how that relationship turned out in the long run, but they struck me as happy together. I hope they did well.

One of my closest friends on Furry usually played male characters. But she* played one character who was a water elemental and genderless. She used "it/its" for that character. At one point, she told me that character was the one she most wanted to resemble, but that she had a hard time playing it because it was too much her idealized self. She didn't feel like she could live up to that ideal.

*I'll use her present in-person pronouns for her.

Years later, she came out to me as a trans woman. To my everlasting shame, I argued with her over it. I didn't think there was anything wrong with being trans -- my logic was something like 'you don't seem especially feminine to me and you never played female characters so you can't be a trans woman.' (To be clear, this is complete nonsense and I had no idea what I was talking about.) I didn't argue for long -- it was one conversation that went roughly:

Friend: "I'm a woman"
Me: "what no you can't be"
Friend: "NO REALLY"
few more exchanges
Me: "...okay, I don't understand, but I do support you"

Later, she told me that she would have preferred to not have a gender at all. But getting recognized as nonbinary in the late 90s was basically impossible and transitioning to a woman was something cis people could wrap their heads around, and "woman" was much more acceptable to her than "man." That stuck with me, because it fit so well with everything else I knew about her. She had always been one of those feminists who'd thought the world would be better off without genders.

Another person I knew on Furry in the early 90s played a shapeshifter character. Most often, I saw them* in female shapes, but they had male and neuter shapes as well. Sometimes changing little but the pronouns from one description to the next. (They used it/its for the neuter forms. I recall they had one exaggeratedly mixed-gender shape that existed solely to make fun of other people's fetishized/sexualized descriptions which gave prominent attention to three or more sets of genitalia.)

*likewise using their current pronouns here.

Years later, when I knew them much better, they told me that their preferred pronouns were it/its. Many years after that, they started asking people to use they/them, because they being treated as nonbinary was important to them and because too many people would assume that anyone using it/its would be doing so to be offensive.

Around 2016, as I was thinking about my next book, I realized that I had finished three books in three different settings, and none of them had an explicit trans or nonbinary character. I'd had friends since the 90s who were nonbinary, a fact I had long ago accepted. But I'd never put nonbinary characters into my work. Dragons and magical healing and prophecy: sure, those were reasonable elements to expect a reader to accept. But a nonbinary person? A BRIDGE TOO FAR.

...

Me to me: "seriously WHAT. What is up with that. Why are you writing books that don't include this normal component of your own life."

I decided, at that point, that I would never again write a setting that didn't include nonbinary people. Not necessarily as major or even minor characters, but: nonbinary people had to, at a minimum, exist in the world. Even if it was just as a throwaway mention somewhere. In two of my settings -- the Demon books and the Etherium novels -- I use it/its for some nonbinary characters and they/them for others. Because I had two friends who'd wanted to use it/its and never felt like they could in the real world, and I couldn't change that but what the heck, I could at least make a space for them in my fictional ones. In the Demon books, it was particularly important to me to use "it" for some nonbinary humans because the demons in the setting don't have sexual reproduction and the pronoun for all of them was "it". I did not want the book to come across as 'agender = evil'. x_x

The first trans woman I met wasn't someone I knew well or stayed in touch with. But the people who later came out to me as trans have been good friends for most of my life, at this point. Sometimes I think about all the other people I met on FurryMUCK who used nonbinary or genderfluid forms, but who didn't become lifelong friends. How many of them weren't cis, either? How many of them thought they were cis for years and only much later realized they didn't have to be?

Do I really know more trans people now, or do I just know more people who are comfortable being open about being trans?

Furry fandom was open to a variety of forms in a way that other online spaces weren't. I don't know if this is because there's something innately queer about liking anthropomorphic animals as "when your setting is all about nonhuman characters like dragons and bipedal cats and such, characters who aren't male or female seem pretty reasonable." But "AMAB people presenting as female online and male iRL" was commonplace throughout the internet, in every online space I saw. And I knew some women who preferred to play male characters for the exact reason I preferred female: they got less attention as male and they liked that. Having a medium where no one could see what you look like or hear what you sounded like made it easy to be whatever you wanted. To experiment.

And in an environment where it's easy to experiment, of course people will learn things that they didn't when it was almost impossible to do so.

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Machine Learning and Audio Narration

2023-01-28T20:30:12Z

I wrote a hypothetical about the future of machine learning and creative works a few months ago. I am still thinking about this subject. It's hard not to.

I received an invitation this morning to submit one of my books to Apple's new digital narration program.

My choice here, in one sense, is easy. These are the actual categories Apple is accepting:

Primary category must be romance or fiction (literary, historical, and women’s fiction are eligible; mysteries and thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy are not currently supported).

I do have several titles where "the primary category is romance". However, all but one of them is also fantasy. My sole contemporary romance is You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99 but Really You Wanted To Be a Better Person. And this title is full of sections like this:

From afar, Jadarea says to Razgathak and you, “sorry”
From afar, Jadarea says to Razgathak and you, “couldn’t think what else to do”
From afar, you say to Razgathak and Jadarea, “It was a selfless and generous act on your part, Jadarea; by no means should you apologize.”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “Yeah”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “What Cae said. ty”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “That is. Thank you. Seriously, that was amazing. We should all be dead.”
From afar, you say to Razgathak and Jadarea, “Just so. Allow me a few moments to relog; I shall message as soon as I reconnect.”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “wait”
From afar, Razgathak says to Jadarea and you, “Loot Cae’s corpse first, just in case.”
From afar, you say to Razgathak and Jadarea, “Oh yes. That would be wise.”

In text, it's a little awkward if you are not familiar with the conventions of MMOs and/or MU*s, but a reader is likely to catch on and skim the dialogue tags rather than reading them. But in audio form, it would be tedious in the extreme. Beyond that, it has many fictitious names, like Razgathak and Jadarea, that a digital narrator will not recognize or know how to pronounce. (This might be one reason sff is excluded from their initial plans, though that is pure speculation on my part.)

Even if I submitted a title, it's unlikely it would be accepted. If it was accepted, it would be unlikely to garner many sales. I will not submit a title at this time, and I give up very little in making this choice.

I listened to the audio samples for romance titles. Compared to the voice that gives directions on my GPS or that reads text messages aloud in my car, they're fantastic. They do not sound mechanical and they vary their emphasis on parts of a sentence in a generally sensible way. But compared to a human narrator: meh. They are clearly inferior to a skilled human narrator. In some ways, they're inferior even to, say, me reading aloud, and I have zero skill at voice narration.

At least one of my readers is blind. She reads my books via screenreader. I think about her when I think about digital narration, more than anyone else. The machine-learning image and text generators make it easy for humans who want to turn their ideas into images or text without putting in the time to draw/write it themselves. They are a benefit to the human creator who wants such a tool. The benefit to human audiences -- people who want to view art or read stories -- is much less clear. As an audience member, I find ML text to have negative value -- searches are more likely now to turn up machines spouting confident and unidentified lies. ML images are less annoying, but I still am rarely glad to have seen them, or feel that they have enriched my experience.

Digital narration, by contrast, has a clear case for improving accessibility to audiences who literally cannot read stories in written form.

Beyond that, if a book is written by a human and narrated by a computer, it is absolutely clear that the human author also owns the copyright to the resulting audio. There is no legal question that the human who wrote the words has done enough creative work to be entitled to copyright protection. By contrast, the legal question of "can you own the copyright on an image generated by a computer based on your prompt?" is not yet settled, but the Library of Congress is at present refusing to grant copyrights to such work. (For the curious, Legal Eagle did a video on AI and the law, with an emphasis on image generators and related lawsuits.)

It's possible that digital narration is subject to some of the same legal issues that afflict machine-learning image and text generation. I don't know how Apple trained their digital narrators or if human narrators would have grounds to claim infringement. It seems less likely; Apple is not using their digital narrators to cobble together the content of books based on a training set. At most, they are copying the style of human narrators, and 'style' (as Legal Eagle notes) is not something you can copyright.

That doesn't mean there aren't ethical questions here. I am a Luddite about ML image and text generation. I hate it. I hate the idea of it. Writing stories and illustrating are my hobbies. Computers can have my day job and may the world take much joy from the result, but I don't want a computer coming for my hobbies.

But I am very aware that, as a person who neither does voice narration nor listens to audiobooks, I have no such personal bias when it comes to digital narration. Audio narration is also an art form, if not as popular a hobby as writing or drawing. Is there a meaningful difference between asking a computer to read my book aloud so I don't have to, and asking a computer to paint a picture for me so I don't have to?

So my reasons for self-selecting out of the Apple offer are:

I have only one title that suits their criteria
That one title is a terrible candidate for other reasons
I am not familiar enough with the tech behind digital narration to know the legal and ethical issues, if any
I feel some solidarity with voice actors who hate the idea of machine narration

If Apple had said "we're looking for all romance, including fantasy", would my other two reasons be enough? I don't know. If I didn't have the last two reasons, I'd throw A Rational Arrangement or Level 99 at them anyway; no cost to trying.

None of my books have audio editions. I have zero objections to audiobooks, but paying for professional narration of any of my titles would cost more than I have earned from any one title. The odds of making back such an investment are minuscule. And I am not interested in acquiring the skills and equipment to edit my own audio.

That last gets to what bothers me most about all of this. Half the work of audio narration is editing. I know multiple people who would be happy to record their own audio narration -- if only they didn't have to edit out all the pops and wheezes and mouth noises and weird pauses and whatnot. If I didn't already know how tedious and/or expensive it was to edit audio, I might be willing to invest the time in learning to narrate and record my own audio. Why are developers insistent on replacing the part that humans excel at and in some cases enjoy -- reading aloud -- instead of automating the part humans generally hate -- getting rid of extraneous noises? You don't hear people complaining that ProWritingAid will put proofreaders out of work because (a) it won't but also (b) hardly anyone likes doing proofreading anyway. Luddites are rare in modern times because most modern people are used to the idea that if their job gets automated, they'll find new work in another area, and very few of them loved the old work. Much of my professional career has centered on "I hate doing this, let me see if I can make the computer do it for me." I never worried that I would run out of things I hated doing to automate.

Tl;dr: dear innovators, please direct your efforts at having machines perform chores and not leisure activities k thx.

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AI Art

2022-09-23T21:11:39Z

The purpose of 2D AI Art and co-writing engines like Sudowrite is to reduce the amount of human effort needed to create. A logical extension of this into the future:

Let’s say you want to watch a movie.

You go to NetJourn-E and start entering the kind of movie you want to see, based on tags/prompts. The tags can be anything: found family, royalty, queer, fantasy, hurt/comfort, mystery, actor names, character names, actors playing characters: whatever you think sounds fun. You can get as specific as you want -- “leading man is Chris Evans acting in the style of Humphry Bogart as directed by Francis Ford Coppola.” Or you can be general: “leading man is handsome.”

In response, NetJourn-E gives you options. First, some existing content that matches some of your tags. This includes analytics: percentage match on your tags, number of viewers for the content, average rating for the content. You can adjust sliders to determine your results: maybe you only want to look at results that got a 90% or better rating, or have 10,000 or more views, or have 100 or fewer views, or have a 65% or better match, or various combinations of the above.

Another option: create a new movie based on all of your tags. If you pick this, NetJourn-E generates a handful of trailers for films that include all your tags. You browse through the trailers, maybe watching them through, or maybe just a few seconds if they don’t catch your eye.

You can pick a trailer that you like and tell NetJourn-E to generate the film. Or you can generate another batch of trailers from the same prompts. Or perhaps try some new prompts, or pick your favorite trailer from the batch and iterate on that with new prompts.

Maybe you want to get into the weeds. Maybe you generate the film but then you want a new ending, or you don’t like how some of the scenes flow. You can fine-tune them with new instructions. You can write your own dialogue and have the computer-generated actors speak those lines. Tell the actors how to speak those lines, maybe perform them yourself as a demonstration and have the computer mimic that performance using the avatars of your choice. Change the lighting. Change the appearance of actors. Substitute one actor for another. Change the angle on shots.

When you’re done, you can save your creation. You can also make it public on NetJourn-E, or share it with your friends who use the service. Perhaps NetJourn-E sells a Creator license, which allows you to share your creations on other platforms.

You probably can’t make much money by doing this. You do it for fun and for love. Pretty much everyone involved in entertainment in this future does it because they love it. There are a few rockstar influencer/creators who have huge followings and make real money by creating/curating. Maybe they lavish a hundred hours on each film, polishing and perfecting it to match their vision based on what the AI churned out from a prompt. Maybe they’re just curators, known for their discerning eye in picking out good films from the morass of AI-generated content.

But there’s no need to personally involve hundreds of humans in making a single film, no reason to spend hundreds of millions on two hours of entertainment. The AI can generate a polished, professional-looking film on its own. Everything humans add to it is to match their personal taste, not to make it “objectively better.”

There are still films made entirely by human crews working with human-written scripts and human directors and human actors. There’s no money in this, no film industry, no deep pockets backing them. It’s entirely a hobby, viewed almost exclusively by the tiny audience that prefers it. Most people pick films that match their tastes exactly. They don’t care if an AI made it or a person did. And the AI can make a million films in the time it takes a team of humans to generate just one. It’s not that AI is objectively better -- it’s that there’s so much more of it to choose from.

And this is great, right? It’s the democratization of creation. When you have an idea for a film, you can just make it. You don’t need to find actors or scriptwriters or get funding or anything else. You don’t need to learn how to tell a story, how to act, how to direct. Just go to NetJourn-E, type in your idea, and poof: it’s real! And if it’s not exactly what you want, well, you can try again. You can poke it and prod and reshape it.

Probably you wouldn’t spend too long getting it right, though. It’s just a hobby. Just entertainment. It’ll never match exactly what you had in your head. But that’s always been true: filmmakers have always run into constraints of time, money, the conflicting visions of everyone involved.

And isn’t this so much better than laboring for years to make your vision come to life? Who wants to spend thousands of hours refining their craft, only to be a small part of a single film? Wouldn’t it be so much better if we removed all those unnecessary barriers to entry? If anyone, with no experience, background, training, or time investment, could turn their idea into a beautiful, polished film?

This is great, right?

And it’s still human-created, really. Humans are still supplying the ideas, and that’s what counts. Humans have always been assisted by technology. It’s like actors learning how to act by watching films, artists using photo references for their paintings, Michelangelo studying the anatomy of corpses to use in his sculptures. It’s a natural extension of the continuum.

AI is not just for films, of course. The same sort of technology makes every creative act easier: painting, sculpting, architecture, video games, virtual reality, role-playing: it’s everywhere. It’s even in education, for people who are still interested in learning skills, for whatever reason. It makes everything so easy, so effortless. It’s exactly what humans have always wanted.

Right?

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Free Speech and Compelled Speech

2021-04-08T21:00:39Z

I have a pretty straightforward take on the first amendment: I agree with it, and I agree with the general thrust of courts to interpret its protections broadly. The government should not stop people from saying things, and this includes things that are reprehensible and hateful. Many ideas are dangerous and harmful, and as a general matter the government should not prevent them from being expressed.

This is less because of my great faith in the marketplace of ideas and its ability to make the best ideas rise to prominence and the worst ones fade to obscurity, than because I have zero faith in the government’s competence at same. If you tell the government that they get to decide what “hate speech” is, they’re not gonna lock up white supremacists for threatening poor minorities. They’re gonna lock up twitter liberals for saying “eat the rich”. This will not work out the way you planned.

So most questions of “should the government stop X from saying Y” aren’t interesting to me because my answer is just “no” unless it meets a very high bar. Like “we should meet at [specific address] at [specific time] in order to murder [specific person]” probably rises to the level of true threat and the government can arrest you for that. But “[politician] deserves the guillotine” is tasteless and wrong, but not criminal unless, eg, you are standing in front of a working guillotine with [politician] next to you while you encourage a crowd to seize them and put them into it. But in normal contexts, it’s hyperbole. I find it offensive and obnoxious, but I wouldn’t want it criminalized.

The issue of private companies censoring speech is thornier for me.

I do not love private companies censoring speech either, especially ginormous private companies like Amazon Web Services. I do not love that we live in a world where a handful of technocrats control access to the vast majority of the American audience. One of the reasons I like the fediverse is that it’s a decentralized form of social media and therefore much harder for a single entity to decide what can and can’t be said there.

“Compelled speech” is the legal term for forcing a private person or entity to say something whether they want to say it or not. The first amendment is considered to protect individuals against compelled speech as well. Just as there are exceptions to free speech like “it is illegal to make a true threat”, there are narrow exceptions where compelled speech is legal. But the broad legal principle is “the government can’t make A say X,” and this is, again, an area where I agree with the principle.

That means that whether or not I like the decisions Amazon Web Services makes about who to host, I also don’t feel that the government should compel AWS to provide hosting services to any given entity. But getting back to “a handful of technocrats control access to most people”: it’s still kind of a terrible result. The answer to “do I distrust Big Government or Big Business” is “yes”. But Big Business doesn’t have its own army or police force so it’s slightly less entrenched. I have a little more hope that market forces will help competition arise and/or induce existing businesses to wield their influence with restraint in order to avoid that.

I kind of feel like I should have a better answer than this, on the one hand, and on the other hand it’s just as unsatisfying as my response on hate speech so at least it’s consistent?

Maybe it's not so much thornier as "the older I get, the less I feel like principles actually work out in practice" and I don't know what to use if I don't use a principle. Like maybe the principle isn't as great as I'd hoped, but throwing it out feels like a guaranteed way to get an even worse result.

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"Goals Don't Work" and the Utility of Experimenting on Yourself

2021-01-03T18:36:01Z

So scientific research shows that, on average, setting public goals isn’t constructive. In general, people who proclaim “I will do [X]” are less likely to do [X] than those that don’t announce their goals. It might be that saying “I will do [X]” gives the brain the same reward that actually doing [X] does. Having announced it, it feels like it’s already been done and therefore doesn’t require additional effort.

I started writing fiction at 14. By age 32, I had drafted one (very rough) novella, written one novelette and two short stories, plus four other short stories as class assignments. I’d started 10+ other novels. My total word count for fiction, over the course of around 18 years, was about 200,000.

Around age 32, I started posting my writing plans and goals on my blog. I continued to do so sporadically and in a few different fashions for several years, before settling into my current method of yearly lists of goals.

Now, about 18 years later, I have published eleven novels, one collection, one standalone novelette, one novelette as part of a shared-world anthology, written four additional novels that are not yet published, and written another 20+ flash fics/short stories/novelettes. My total word count for fiction was around 2,500,000.

It is, of course, unfair to compare my teenage self to my thirty-something self (although I wrote more fiction in some years as a teen than I did in some years in my 30s). There are many factors that intersect. My current productivity builds heavily on lessons I learned when I was younger and struggled much more to figure out what I was doing. It wasn’t a matter of “Setting goals is magic and as soon as I did that, I could write 12x as fast.”

But it’s also clear that announcing my goals helps me to achieve them. I feel an obligation to myself to do what I said I would. I take pride and pleasure in accomplishing a stated objective. Writing down a list of goals gives me something to reference when I’m bored and don’t know what I want to do: “I could doomscroll more? Or wait, let me look at my list of things I want to accomplish and see if any of that looks good.” I am writing this post right now because I put “write more posts” down on my goal list for 2021.

I am not writing this to prove that “those studies saying goals don't work are WRONG!” My own experience proves almost nothing about the average person.

But likewise: the aggregate experience of all people proves relatively little about me. Or about any given individual. Yes, there are a range of things that apply to literally everyone -- we all need oxygen, water, and food to survive -- but there’s a huge range of things where individuals vary dramatically. Take two humans of the same age, gender, height, weight, and activity level: will their bodies burn the same number of calories in a day? Probably not. If they each eat identical diets at identical times, will they experience identical levels of hunger? Probably not.

If a scientific study shows that something works or doesn’t work “on average”, that can be a useful starting point to guide your own decisions. But unless the details of the study show that there's almost no variance in results -- that it fails or succeeds for 99%+ of people -- it’s not a good end point. It’s more useful to pay attention to what works or doesn’t work for you, personally, than to assume that your own results will match the average. One way or another, most people won’t match the average.

And that is even more true for anecdote-based advice on “how to succeed in business” or “how to write a novel” based on the author’s own experiences. YMMV.

Which, of course, includes this post. You should definitely ignore this, if it doesn’t work for you.

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"Ask" and "Hint" Cultures

2017-08-12T16:31:20Z

I had a long online conversation with some friends about "Ask" and "Guess" cultures (link is to a random article on the subject for those who aren't familiar with the concept). I'm going to use "Hint" here, because one person pointed out that (a) "Guess" is a misnomer because most people who grow up with people who do this are not guessing, they know and (b) "Guess" makes it sound objectively worse, and this is not an objective subject.* I don't know if "Hint" is a lot better, but I'll run with it for now.

* In the clash of another cultural concept: I prefer to refer to people by name when I'm talking about things they said. But I'm not doing that here because I don't know if the individuals involved want to be quoted by name or not. I also don't have convenient Twitter or LJ handles to refer to, which makes credit more complicated.

There are some things I've thought about this concept since I first heard of it. Like most dichotomies, it oversimplifies. Most people may lean one way or the other, but they are not going to be pure "Ask" or pure "Hint" about all things. Also, people vary in what they are Ask vs Hint about. You might be Ask-culture when it comes to visiting friends: "Would you like me to come over so we can play games?" but Hint-culture about birthday gifts: "I love Scharffenberger chocolate!" Or you might be the reverse: "It's always so much fun when we play games at your place!" and "Here's my Amazon wishlist!" You might feel it's unreasonable to ask directly for someone to email but normal to ask them to call, or the exact opposite, or that both are appropriate, or that neither are. People's inner rules about "this is too much to ask so I can only hint about wanting it" vary a lot.

My family is probably more "Ask" than "Hint": we are good with words and somewhat oblivious in general. But there are lots of things that I won't ask for. For example, when I realized that I needed a car, one of my friends pointed out that shipping a privately-bought used car halfway across the country was cheaper than the premium for buying a used car from a dealership. My parents have two cars and they basically don't use the second one: my mother almost never leaves the house without my father. It occurred to me that I could ask to buy their second car, which is a nice car in excellent condition because it's rarely driven. But I didn't, in part because asking for their car -- even asking to BUY their car at full market value -- felt like an unreasonable request. I told them I was planning to get a car and if they had offered to sell theirs, I'd've taken it. But they didn't, and I didn't ask, and that's fine.

One of the reasons that I am aware of how much I am not "Ask" culture is that I know someone who is. This is the person who inspired Wisteria, my character who is congenitally unable to take hints. And once I start thinking about all the areas where I expect hints or try to interpret them, I realize how much I rely upon them. For example, I was working with someone on a project where I hadn't heard from them recently, so I checked to make sure I'd responded to their last request and I had. But I hadn't gotten a reply, so I wanted to make sure now that they'd seen my email. We were still well-within the agreed-upon time frame so it wasn't a problem yes, but if spam filter or something had claimed my email, it would become one. I reached out on a different channel and said: "Oh hey, just wanted to make sure you got my email from [X Date]. No worries if you're busy and haven't gotten to the next step in the project yet, just making sure my email got through. :)" I included the second sentence specifically because I would react to the first sentence as "I expected to hear from you by now and I am deeply disappointed that you haven't finished the next step yet, what is your problem?" So even though the first sentence is at most a Hint, I still want to make sure that it has the right Hint-culture connotation of "I really do just want to make sure you got the email and are not waiting on me. I am not resentful or rebuking either your work or communication rate."

"Ask" and "Hint" cultures both encourage different failure modes. The failure mode of "Hint" is "passive-aggressive". Properly-done, Hint culture is designed to save face by giving both parties a graceful way out of a request. If you are eating chocolate, and I say "I love chocolate", and you say "Isn't it great?" and finish your chocolate without offering me any, then I can think "well, I didn't ask so you probably didn't realize I wanted some" and you can think "she didn't ask me for my chocolate so it's okay that I didn't share." If I simmer with resentment that you didn't offer to share your food when I Hint that I want to try it, or if you simmer with resentment that I Hinted that I want you to share, then we are Doing Hint Wrong.

The failure mode of "Ask" is "abrasive". This is the person who is "just being honest". The person who responds to "should I wear my blue dress or the red dress?" with "Those are both ugly". "Ask" culture is not a license to say anything because it's just words, and it's not a license to keep making the same request after being refused because "it doesn't hurt to ask." There is a point in Further Arrangements where Wisteria asks Justin to explain his reasoning, and Justin's reply amounts to "...because I'm an idiot." Wisteria doesn't accept this response: "My inability to follow your reasoning is my failure, not yours." This is an important facet of Wisteria for me: she can't properly participate in or understand Hint culture, and it frustrates her a lot -- but she doesn't believe Hint culture is innately inferior. It works for other people. It just doesn't work for her.

I have a lot of sympathy for people across the spectrum. I tend to assume the best about people, so if someone makes a request that I find too blunt, I think "they probably don't realize how it sounded and are not being pushy." If someone misses my hints, I assume they didn't notice them, because I know how often I miss hints. If I notice something that look like a hint to me, but I don't want to accede to the implicit request because I think it's unreasonable, I assume the hint was unintentional. Yo, guys, I am so bad at humaning. I'm gonna assume this is just as hard for the rest of you.

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In Defence of Nice

2017-01-26T16:14:58Z

"You're so nice
You're not good you're not bad you're just nice
I'm not good I'm not bad I'm just right
I'm the witch
You're the world."
-- the Witch, from the musical "Into the Woods"

This stanza comes while the giant's wife is on a rampage through the town in "Into the Woods". She is hunting for Jack, who killed her husband. The witch wants to give Jack to her so she'll leave the rest of them alone. The townspeople refuse.

It's a powerful stanza, made more powerful by being delivered by the very talented Bernadette Peters. I first heard it in 1991; it is the first time I clearly remember hearing niceness disparaged.

"Nice" is not "doing the right thing". "Nice" is being pleasant and agreeable toward the people who are around you. Sacrificing your neighbor to the giantess is not nice, even if he did respond to her husband's threat to kill him by robbing her house and killing her husband.

On the other hand, is it the right thing to do, either?

Since then, decrying "niceness" has felt like a thinkpiece staple. Nice is getting along with people even when they're wrong. Nice is caving to peer pressure. Nice lacks self-confidence. Nice is for children. "Nice guys" aren't nice at all, they're entitled and manipulative. Nice is weak. "Nice", as a label, is an insult.

Nice is feminine-coded.

"Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice".

I aspire to kindness. "Kind" is not the same as "nice". Kindness is warmth, friendship, and compassion. Nice is pleasant and agreeable. Nice is Kindness's maligned younger cousin, accused of superficiality and fakery. Kindness can be cruel, but niceness never can.

I have long regarded this as an important distinction. When I talk about my aspirations, I am careful to say "kind" and not "nice". But as I get older, the distinction feels increasingly like splitting hairs.

The truth is, I don't think it is a kindness to tell a young artist "it's too hard to make a living in art, you're not that good and probably never will be, just focus on getting a regular job instead." It is not kindness to give unsolicited criticism to an author of their work, no matter how weak it is or how much I dislike it. Perhaps the former would be happier if they had a steady job and no dreams. Perhaps the latter would write better books with my advice.

Perhaps it's not my call to make.

I write fantasy novels and I can spin a million hypotheticals where the "right thing" is cruel or harsh or alienating. But in my actual life, interacting with actual people, I am hard pressed to think of a time where a situation was improved because someone decided to be mean. It's happened, I'm sure. I just don't remember it.

I do remember that one woman I worked with as a teaching assistant, who told me that all my co-workers hated me and wanted me to stop talking to them because I was clueless and rude, but they wouldn't tell me so because it wasn't "nice".

I am sure she thought she was doing the right thing.

I have many regrets in my life, but "I was too nice" has never been one of them. This is no doubt in part because niceness has never come easily to me. I don't mean to deride anyone who feels that they need to be less nice because people take advantage of them. I'm not going to say you're wrong if you think you have to take a stand against evil even if that means being unkind to some people doing the wrong thing. You do what you have to do.

I just think I'm done with making fun of niceness. Being pleasant and agreeable is hard work, too, and it makes the lives of the people around one a little bit better. I'm not going to sneer at that as "merely nice". The pleasant, agreeable, nice people of the world are not the ones making it a worse place to live. Quite the opposite, really.

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