A really interesting piece from Garrett Murray on the kinks in the Mac App Store distribution method. What really caught my eye, and applies regardless of your platform, OS choice, or hardware, was the closing sentence:

[A]s always, back up, back up, back up.

Garrett Murray knows it, I know it, and you should know it. I can’t stress how important it is to have proper backups of your important data.

Having hopes is healthy. They can act as a motivator to reach your goals, a psychological stress-release valve, or even just an idle daydream. I hope that I win the EuroMillions lottery, that my MacBook will spontaneously sprout an i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM, that I’ll find the secret of eternal youth, and become the greatest thinker in the history of the human race. Like I said, hopes are good, but it’s also important to realise that not all hopes are realistic.

Take, as an example of this, Jack M. Lyon in the aforelinked:

[I]t would be great if you could do professional-quality typesetting in nothing but [Microsoft] Word. The truth is, you can, if you know how. And in this article, I hope to teach you most of what you’ll need.

In the former sentence, he’s absolutely right: it would be great if you could use Word to produce professional-quality typesetting. Just think of the money you’d save on a typesetter, and the control you’d have — almost end-to-end, barring only the printing itself. And using a piece of software you already have on your machine, requiring practically no learning! It would be wonderful.

Unfortunately, despite Lyon claiming that “[t]he truth is, you can”, it’s completely untrue. You can’t. You can compose a primitive layout in Word, but you can’t typeset in Word. It’s a small distinction, but an important one.

Typesetting is more than just “things like typographical dashes and quotation marks”. Running a few search and replace functions for “curly quotes” and en-dashes will not make your manuscript “look professionally typeset already”; it will merely make it look less shit. (And if you’re using any version of Word released in the last decade, these settings should be on by default.)

To do it right, typesetting requires microscopic levels of control: the ability to adjust the of kerning single words, or even a single character; proper, real hypenation; ligatures beyond just “ff” and “fi”¹; proper control over leading; old-style figures; &c., &c., &c. ad nauseum.

Using the proper software, a lot of this can be automated. But this is because the software was specifically designed to do these things. Word isn’t designed to do any of these things. Sometimes, you can hack them into your manuscript, but that is not the same as baked-in support for them. An ugly hack will always be an ugly hack.²

Ultimately, it comes down to respecting your audience: if you want them to pay for your book, then make something worth paying for — set it using the right tools, to produce the very best product you can. If you can’t do it yourself, get someone who can to do it for you. Don’t give in to the craft-stall mentality and be a lazy, cheap arsehole about it; either do it right, or don’t bother doing it at all.³

From a piece in the New York Times, with the cringe-inducing title “The Digital Generation Rediscover the Magic of Manual Typewriters”:

They’re fetishizing old Underwoods, Smith Coronas and Remingtons, recognizing them as well designed, functional and beautiful machines, swapping them and showing them off to friends. At a series of events called “type-ins,” they’ve been gathering in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest.

To recap points made previously: a typewriter is a tool, for working with, to produce something. It is quite possible for a typewriter to be “well designed, functional and beautiful machine” (I have a yellow Olivetti that fits this description).

A typewriter is not, however,

• a “decorative conversation piece”;
• for “showing … off to friends”;
• something to imbue you with “a sort of post-digital style and gravitas”;
• a way of saying “saying, ‘In your face, Microsoft!’ ”;
• something for “typecasting”¹;
• another way to escape from the distractions of the internet (AKA a means to overcome a total lack of willpower).

Either write with your typewriter, or don’t. By all means, appreciate its beauty, its practicality, and its utility, but for fuck’s sake, don’t worship the damn thing.

And while you’re at it, GTFO my lawn, you damn kids.

(Source: mleddy.blogspot.com)

Erik Mallinson:

I’m really, really bummed that Bob Slate is closing. It’s been around for 78 years and for quite a few of those I made it my stop for whatever I could find there. Nowhere else can you walk into a store and buy one sheet of resume paper. Need a coin roll? 2 ¢ each. Those dry transfer sheets that Field Notes just repopularized? They have around 10,000 individual sheets in 10 different font styles and point sizes, by the sheet. Want just one Speedball 2-C nib? $1.95.

It truly breaks my heart that Bob Slate is closing.

I felt the exact same grief when Service Point, a stationers that had been there in one form or another for almost a century, closed in August of last year. It was one of the few shops that I’ve truly loved in my life, and I’d known the staff since not long after I moved to Aberdeen. They weren’t friends, but they were people I knew, and saw frequently, and seeing their livelihood being closed underneath them was heartbreaking. Stupid as it sounds, I even felt guilty when I bought Lumographs and watercolours at 50% off — like I was just another one of the vultures who had swooped in to pick over its corpse during the closing-down sales.

Part of it was upset over the loss of convenience (where else can I get Decadry sheets, Swann Morton scalpel blades, and Alwych notebooks singly or by the dozen?), but, mainly, it was sadness over the loss of something old and good. It wasn’t fashionable, it didn’t have everything, but it had character, and stock going back years. Getting stationery from Paperchase just isn’t the same — they may sell Rhodia, but the place is impersonal, and the staff don’t seem invested in it.

The saddest part was seeing something that had survived so long, and been through so much, finally succumbing to “progress” — that nebulous, ill-defined forward motion that ignores worth and focusses instead on “going forward”, seemingly just for the sake of it. The closure of Service Point, and Bob Slate, and all these other little shops, is a loss that no new shopping mall or supermarket can ever really compensate for — each time one of them dies, a little part of what makes a town or city unique dies with it.

Steve Kinney:

During [the last eighteen months], my professional life got a lot more interesting and I want to talk about it. I’m doing some really cool stuff, but I don’t want to alienate the people who started following me because I posted some random crap I found on the Internet, but updates on my quest to drink 500 different beers this year and being a teacher don’t dovetail all that well.

The other wrinkle is that the general suckitude of Tumblr has increased exponentially over the course of the last year. I used to really, really enjoy using Tumblr, but lately, I can’t get anything done without a cute “We’ll be back shortly!” message. If I do take writing seriously again, I’m not sure this is the place I want to do it.

There are two separate issues raised here that, whilst interlinked, aren’t deeply intertwined: the division of personal/professional writing, and Tumblr’s fucking awful reliability.¹ There’s both worthy questions, but they should be tackled individually, as one doesn’t necessarily have bearing on the other.

The question of divide, or lack thereof, between personal and professional sites is an interesting one, and has no simple answer; it really comes down to how you perceive yourself and your job in relation to said self. If you have a career, one that you’re passionate about, instead of just a job, then the two presumably are deeply linked, and there’s really no need to insert an artificial division. As long as you’re not a manic, porn-reblogging troll when you take off your shirt and tie, there’s no harm in just having one single blog. The beer thing is something of a non-issue. Trying 500 different beers in a year doesn’t automatically disqualify one from being a teacher; it just shows that, yes, you’re a human being too, and that, yes, you also like beer. Increasing your beer knowledge ≠ encouraging irresponsible drinking. (And who knows, showing your hobbies and interests as well as your profession might just make you more credible, not less.)

Worrying about alienating some of your followers with “boring” posts about work-related stuff is hugely counter-productive. Anyone who unsubscribes/unfollows after one post that doesn’t interest them isn’t worth having in your audience anyway. Having a large number of followers is nice², but it doesn’t really tell you very much — especially since following someone on Tumblr is such an easy thing to do. Even “Likes” are a pretty poor barometer of success. What really tells you whether you’re engaging your audience is the number of conversations that your posts generate; when someone takes the time to compose a reply, it shows that you’ve engaged their attention. (Conversely, just because you don’t elicit a response doesn’t mean your post was totally worthless; it just means nobody felt passionately enough about it to respond at length.)

There’s also the fact that posting on a wide variety of topics that interest you can be beneficial to your readership; I’ve lost count of the number of new ideas and interests I’ve been exposed to in posts by other people that were outside their normal range of topics.³ Heterogenous posting makes your site better, not worse, and if it loses you some of the LOL COOL STORY BRO crowd,⁴ then, oh well. They really aren’t an audience worth engaging with if your writing is at all serious.

Tumblr as a platform has some excellent features baked into it (stability not one of them, alas), and it’s just so much less hassle than running your own Wordpress. (The seemingly constant “New Update!” treadmill becomes incredibly tedious after a while.) Richard Gaywood nails its single biggest selling point:

To my mind, Tumblr’s most compelling feature, however, is its social feedback loop — the dashboard, the “like”, the replies, the easy reblog, and the notification system that ties those together.

That ties in with what I said above, about engaging your audience. Tumblr makes it so easy to do it: you can reply to people within its own ecosystem so effortlessly, and it all ties together so nicely, that it’s a feature that I’d sorely miss if/when I were to move off Tumblr.⁵

But one really good feature will never be enough to hold you hostage to a sinking platform, nor should it. Your goal should always be to use the best tool for the job at hand, and that will depend on your personal requirements. For some, Wordpress is the perfect candidate; for others, something like Hakyll or Stacey is the better choice.⁶ Personally, I found Wordpress — even ignoring the never-ending chore of keeping it updated — just got in the way of my writing; it lacked the immediacy that initially attracted me to Tumblr. (I had a somewhat similar reason for abandoning Posterous after this site’s brief tenure there, though I did love its post-by-email implementation.)

Ultimately, it comes down to choosing the right balance between what works best for you and what works reliably for you. If Tumblr makes writing easier, and you can live with its current stability issues (or better yet, they get resolved), then continue using it. If Wordpress or Stacey would work better for you, and offer the required level of stability, move over to one of them.

This blog is normally more fixated on white people problems — like UI design, typography on crappy pulp TV shows, and the manifold stupidities of Everett Bogue — than cataclysmic human tragedies, and many of them go by daily without remark. Its author is also strongly against shallow “clicktivism” (“Massive Human Tragedy‼ Click the “Like” Button to “Help” the People Affected‼ — Also, Please Look at, and Click on, the Ads We’re Showing You”).

The unfolding devastation in Japan is enough to shake me out of this bourgeois complacency. Whether it’s motivated out of my deep admiration for the Japanese people, a sense of white guilt, or even just ennui isn’t important — what matters is at least trying to do something to help. Since I can’t be there in person to help clear the rubble or search for survivors, I fall back on the classic Western response: firing money at the problem. It’s not much, but it’s something.

And in that spirit, I ask anyone reading this who hasn’t already donated to please do so. It doesn’t need to be much, and it isn’t hard to do, but the money is better spent on a Red Cross donation than a Starbucks coffee. (And for those without an iTunes account/with an ethical-moral-philosophical problem with Apple, there are plenty of other ways to donate.)

At this point, I should probably warmly thank you, but that wouldn’t be in character. Instead, I’ll close by saying this: don’t tell me if you donate or not; either do it, or don’t.

I thought I’d never say it, but it looks like my favourite cybergogic transhuman yogi has, somehow, fallen in with someone that actually seems to know what they’re talking about. In his most recent post, Bogue interviews Thom [sic] Chambers, who publishes a magazine¹ called In Treehouses, and they discuss the future of publishing. For whatever reason — perhaps Chambers acts as a moderating influence on Bogue? — the conversation remains pretty sensible, and covers some decent stuff.

The really interesting part comes about halfway through:

The lack of gatekeepers online means that we’re living in the age of the amateur. It’s great that you don’t need anyone’s permission to create or to publish anymore, but the unspoken consequence of this is that there’s a lot of low quality stuff out there.

That’s not necessarily the creator’s fault, either — now you need to be your own writer, editor, designer, publisher, marketer, promoter, customer services department, PR department, and all the rest. It’s rare for anyone to be capable at all those things.

Chambers is absolutely spot-on here, and in his other comments regarding curation and the boutique approach. He elucidates in a very clear, concise fashion the problem of writing for an online audience: how do you ensure you don’t get lost in the background noise?²

The answer, says Chambers, is to curate to the highest possible standard, and to apply a boutique mentality to your work. And he’s absolutely right.

Striking out on your own, as a writer publishing online, is the most delicate of balancing acts: you have to write about things you deeply care about, to the highest possible standard, and never just settle for “good enough” whilst simultaneously avoiding falling victim to perfectionism.³ No matter how you look at it, to do it right is fucking hard work.

He also talks about the “craft-stall” mentality that (negatively) affects a lot of online writing: the kind of mindset that makes it okay to produce stuff that’s “not particularly pretty or grammatically correct or anything, but I’m only one person so that’s okay. As long as I’m ‘myself’ then people will forgive me”. The import of this is, of course, totally lost on Bogue, who’s a practitioner of exactly this kind of “fuck it; it has ‘personality’ ” writing,⁴ but the point stands: your writing has to stand or fall on its merits as a piece of writing, and not as something that “has character”. If you fall into the trap of relying on charisma to cover your failings with words, you’ve truly screwed the pooch.

Chambers, to his credit, seems to relish the challenge, and embraces the hard work required to succeed and stand out from the crowd. His magazine, which I haven’t done more than skim so far, is well put together and looks like a real magazine — definitely more a product of the boutique approach than the craft-stall mentality.

And Chambers is right when he notes that if “you’re sharing all this average stuff, why should we listen to you when you say you’ve found something remarkable?” It’s true when you’re just linking to something on Facebook or Twitter, but it’s doubly true when you’re writing yourself. If you’re mass-producing tasteless, low-grade beef burgers all the time, nobody’s going to be hungry when you do occasionally make an delicious filet mignon — you’ve already ruined their tastebuds.

To succeed as a writer — and to build a worthwhile, profitable audience, if that’s your goal — you need to become your own gatekeeper; your own agent, editor, copywriter, and harshest critic. You need to ruthlessly push yourself to produce something you’d be proud to show to all the people who think you’re a failure and a waste of skin, not just your mother and your friends who’ll lie to save your feelings.

You need to do this because your writing deserves it, and because if you spend the time creating something for publication, your audience deserves it too. And if you don’t think you can do all this yourself, don’t be afraid to ask someone for help.

Jessica Firger, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

After quitting her PR job seven months ago to write full time, MacLean knew she’d have to portion out the Internet or else she’d never get anything done. So she downloaded Self Control, a free computer program that blocks access to email and sites such as Twitter and Facebook for a predetermined amount of time. Even rebooting the computer won’t restore full Internet access.

That these writers seek out wifi-free locations to write in isn’t the story that should be covered here; the story is that they’re too weak-willed to turn off their phones and power down their laptop’s wifi. It’s pathetic, really, to attempt to glamorise this as some kind of “Search for the Promised Land” when it’s nothing of the sort. It’s about shallow, weak-willed people, unwilling to accept responsibility or control over their impulses, trying to spin it out into some kind of artistic quest or burden — a huge obstacle they must fight to overcome to create their art. It’s the artistic equivalent of those idiots who eat a Big Mac meal every day for a decade then sue McDonalds for “making” them fat.

I know only too well the temptation to hit Google Reader for “a quick look” when I’m meant to be focussing, or checking Twitter, or a hundred countless other little distractions, but I also know that this is my own fault. More importantly, I know that I am not a powerless victim in this situation, and that I need to control my procrastination, not rely on some application called “Self Control” to do it for me. (I’m certain the app was named purely so that people could make dire “Now I have Self Control‼” jokes.)

Instead of constantly searching for “the ultimate wifi free writing space” — something you will never find, because the real problem isn’t with the space: the real problem is you — how about you just turn off your phone, your wifi, and just fucking write.

And if the internet really is such a huge problem, just write the way I do most of my first drafts: