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Thank you so much for reading The Lurge Robot Factory Adventure. It was a ton of fun to write, and posting it in this chapter-a-week format seemed to work out well.

This is the first time I’ve written a detective story, and I’ll level with you: it was nerve-wracking for me posting it piecemeal. Every week, especially towards the end, I was thinking, “Oh no, what if people hate this next bit?” On the plus side, there was a plot hole that I thought of in early August, which I was able to address before the last chapter went up. In mysteries, especially, one  mistake by the author can ruin the whole thing.

To my great relief, people seem to have enjoyed how the story ended up. I posted the whole thing on one page, with a hyperlinked table of contents, here. There was an issue with the chapter menu I’d created with the blog posts–it didn’t sort the chapters properly, because apparently the algorithm puts “Chapter 10” between “Chapter 1” and “Chapter 2”. It looked silly, so I figured I’d better come up with a more convenient way to read it. I will also look into publishing it on KDP and/or Smashwords at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Once again, thank you all for reading and sharing the story on social media. You are, as always, the best!

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A week or two ago, I saw a social media post from somebody (sadly I can’t find it now, otherwise I’d give credit) saying when they were a child, they thought the title was “Prince of Whales”, and they thought this made sense, because they had heard of the “Dolphin” of France, and assumed all royalty must command some form of sea life.

Then I thought about the post-apocalyptic video game Fallout 3, throughout which you hear the voice of a man named John Henry Eden, the acting President of the United States, giving patriotic speeches over the radio. At the end, it turns out Eden is just an advanced AI in a military bunker at Raven Rock.

Then I wondered how hard it would be for intelligence agencies (both in America and elsewhere) to build an AI that would comb social media searching for popular jokes and memes, and then re-post variants of them on a widely-seen account, carefully timed so as to distract people’s attention from real issues. 

“President John Henry Eden” from “Fallout 3”

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I don’t want the April Fools’ post to be the first thing anyone coming to this blog sees, since it’s no longer April Fools’ Day. However, I don’t want to delete it, and I don’t have any publishable posts at the ready.

So I’m going to try an experiment and open up the floor for comments. That’s right, just post about whatever topics you want in the comments below. I’m curious to see what will happen.

For guidelines, my gold standards for discussion are The McLaughlin Group and “open lines” on Art Bell’s Coast-to-Coast AM.  Thus, the more you can say “Issue [X]” or reference The Mothman, the more likely you are to win the non-existent prize.

But above all, please try not to be like Topix.

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I keep writing reviews that include a line to the effect that “it’s like Lovecraft, but it also explores aspects of human psychology that Lovecraft always ignored.” This has happened with The Ballad of Black Tom, Annihilation (the book and the movie), Prey, and The Friendship of Mortals. I’ve been writing this so much that I can’t call this an exception to the rule anymore. It has become a style of its own.

It feels wrong to call it “Lovecraftian” horror. Lovecraft deliberately minimized the role of human emotions and thoughts in all his stories. Lovecraft’s philosophy was that human beings were unimportant “incidents” in the grand cosmic scheme, and he wrote accordingly. That was part of the horror. (Hence “cosmic horror” as a synonym for “Lovecraftian”.)

The works I listed above certainly retain elements of cosmic horror, but flesh out their human characters, making them interesting and relatable. Whereas Lovecraft approached the horror of humanity’s place in the cosmos with a detached, dispassionate tone, subsequent writers have framed it by humanizing their characters first, then pitting them against the unimaginable outside forces.

This style is also different from the kind of horror that humanizes things too much to be called “cosmic”. Stephen King, for example, writes in a style more like that of noir detective thrillers that feels too immediate and gritty to be “cosmic”—even in stories that have what you might call Lovecraftian elements. (e.g. 11/22/63) The works I’ve described above are much closer to a 50/50 balance than King’s style of an “earthly” horror story with a few cosmic elements.

My point isn’t that any one of these styles is better or worse than the others; but just to point out that they are distinct, and that I don’t know of any term that fits stories like those I’ve listed here. Calling them “semi-Lovecraftian” or “semi-cosmic” feels too weak. “Weird fiction” or “New Weird fiction” is too broad. The best I can come up with is “humanized cosmicism”, but that sounds awkward.

Thoughts?

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Need extra words? Here are some random ones!

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I’ve been working on a new novel for the last two months. My goal at the outset was 100,000 words, and I’ve been keeping a running update of my progress. Here’s my latest:

I re-read it, and I think the story has a pretty decent pace overall. It may be a little too brisk (it turns out these things seem much faster when you’re reading them than when you’re writing them), but I think I have the central plot arc in place. And there’s just no way to pad it out to 100,000 words, which is bad, because it’s a sci-fi novel, and those are generally “supposed” to be at least 80,000 words.

I can and probably will throw in some additional world-building detail and “local flavor”, tie up a few minor loose ends in the plot, and add some more description of scenes and characters. (Description, as long-time readers know, has always been my weak point.) But even all that will probably bring it to around 60,000 words, at the maximum.

Personally, I have never been a fan of arbitrary word counts for a genre. A story should be told in the number of words that make it most powerful for the reader–no more, no less. Too many words, and they get bored. Too few, and they won’t get drawn into it.

But of course, the publishers don’t see it that way. They have certain rules for word count by genre. In my opinion, this “quantity over quality” approach encourages overly-long books, but then again, when you have to review thousands of manuscripts, it helps to have some rules that let you automatically eliminate some of them. (This article summarizes it well.)

The key question here is; what do readers like? Assuming the two books are equal in price, does the typical reader prefer to have a longer one to a shorter one? Do they want to maximize the number of words they get for their money? Or do other considerations take precedence?

For myself, I generally make decisions based on other factors. I read the synopsis to see if it sounds like an interesting premise, then I flip through the book a little and see if I like the author’s style. Cover art also makes a difference to me, even though we all know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

What about you? What factors most heavily influence your book-buying decisions? How much do you care about the length of a book?

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i can do better

I’m working on a new novel. It’s an idea I’ve had for a while, but I just recently started writing it down. (I’ve hinted about it a few times already on Twitter.)

I’m about 19,000 words in, and I recently wrote a scene that bothered me a little because it reminded me of a passage in my novella The Start of the Majestic World.

There’s a scene in Majestic World where Agent Maynard has a verbal confrontation with the main villain, Colonel Preston, a handsome army colonel who tries to intimidate her into following his orders even though she’s not under his command.

Here’s a bit of it:

The Colonel stood up, and walked around the desk so that he was very close to Maynard—so close, and in such a posture, that Maynard felt he was trying to brush aside the barriers of rank and agency, and underscore primarily the difference in sex between them. 

I don’t want to give away too much about the new book, but the scene in it has some very similar elements. The female protagonist is in a meeting with a handsome male colonel, and he is trying to get her to do something that may violate protocol. (It’s deliberately ambiguous in the scene, but she feels uneasy about it.) And there’s some uncomfortable sexual tension–it’s less overt than in the above, but there’s some suggestion he might be trying to seduce her.

Now, there are also some big differences, involving both the setting and the characters. But as I was sketching out the scene in my mind, I was thinking, Gosh that’s awfully similar to the Maynard/Preston scene.

So, right now you’re thinking: “Well, dummy; you’re the writer–don’t write it that way, then!”

True, that’s one option. But there are a couple reasons I hate to remove or alter the scene. First, it’s a very natural way for things to play out in the story–it works well in context, both in terms of plot pacing and characterization. I hate to lose scenes like that.

And second, it’s a much better execution of the concept than in Majestic World. The dialogue is more natural, the characters are more nuanced and less caricatured. This is encouraging to me–it’s good to know I’ve improved as a writer since writing the Maynard/Preston scene over three years ago.

The great film director John Huston once said about movie remakes: “There is a wilful, lemming-like persistence in remaking past successes time after time… Why don’t we remake some of our bad pictures… and make them good?” That’s sort of how I feel about this–sure, I tried this basic concept once, but now that I’ve improved as a writer, why not prove that I can do it better?

At the same time, I could see somebody who read Majestic World reading the new book and saying “Yawn! Another Colonel behaving inappropriately towards the protagonist. Give us something new, Berthold!”

But I can guarantee it won’t be the same thing over again. Trust me.

What do you think? Should an author revisit a concept similar to one they’ve written before, if they feel like they can write it better this time, or is it best to try to break new ground?

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It all started when I read this post from Carrie Rubin.  In it, she describes how people make money by entering book giveaways on sites like Goodreads, etc. and then immediately selling the free books they have won, without reviewing or even reading them.

I have an economics degree, so I began thinking about the incentives that cause this, and what adjustments you could make to the market to fix it. It made for a nice thought experiment. And, well, maybe it got a little out of hand.  But I’m posting it anyway; just for fun.

First of all, we need to discuss the concept of expected value. Wikipedia has a nice summary, using the game of roulette as an example, which I quote below:

Suppose random variable X represents the (monetary) outcome of a $1 bet on a single number (“straight up” bet). If the bet wins (which happens with probability 1/38 in American roulette), the payoff is $35; otherwise the player loses the bet. The expected profit from such a bet will be

E [gain from $1 bet] = -$1 x 37/38 + $35 x 1/38 = -$0.0526

i.e. the bet of $1 stands to lose $0.0526, so its expected value is -$0.0526.

Note that the expected value of a bet in a roulette game is negative.  This is why casinos make money and gamblers typically don’t.  The game is designed to be rigged against the player.

In the book giveaway scenario however, the “player” is not required to pay anything to enter.  The only cost to them is the opportunity cost of the time it takes to enter a giveaway, which is minimal once you have created an account.

Of course, to have a realistic shot at winning anything, you have to enter a lot of giveaways.  So the expected value is the sum of the value of each book times the probability of winning it.

Since there is no monetary cost to entering giveaways, the “player” only stands to gain by doing it.

The author, on the other hand, has little incentive to give the book away.  They only will benefit if the recipient likes the book and makes it known to others.  A bad review, or no review at all, goes down as a loss for the author. If the recipient then sells the book to someone else, it’s an even worse loss, because now multiple people are getting the benefit of the book without payment to the author.

How can we fix this?

One way would be to charge a fee to enter the contest, as in the case of the roulette example.  This would probably work too well–nobody would risk losing even $1 unless the potential reward were an extremely valuable book.  Hence, no one would enter the contests.

Another way would be to impose some limit on the number of giveaways a user is allowed to enter in a given timeframe.  After all, for it to be worth their while, the contestants must be entering a fairly high number of giveaways. Placing a cap on that could deter the book-scalpers.

But remember the original intent of the giveaways.  In an ideal world, the way it works is that the reader gets a free book, reads it, and reviews it.  Both the reader and the author benefit–in economics jargon, this means the outcome is “efficient”.

As part of my research for this post, I decided to find out if Goodreads takes reviews into account as part of the algorithm they use to pick winners.  According to this site, they do–citing the giveaway terms and conditions:

“If more people are interested in a book than there are copies available [which is nearly always the case], we will pick the winners at our discretion. The factors that go into our algorithm are: randomness, site activity, genre of books on your shelves, current phase of the moon, and more.”

I notice they say “site activity”, which is pretty vague, but I’ll assume it means that somehow or other they factor a user’s review track record into their chance of winning.

Tweaking that algorithm might go a long way towards fixing the problem.  But I don’t know what their algorithm is, so for the sake of this exercise, we’ll assume that it’s perfect.

Instead of changing the algorithm, another idea would be to change the terms of giveaways.  If a winner doesn’t post a review in some period of time (e.g. 30 days) they are required to pay a small fee–less than the price of a new copy of the book, but still enough to decrease the profitability of re-selling it.

I think this would increase the effectiveness of giveaways.  It incentivizes (to use that horrible word that only an economist could write) giving reviews, but while still benefiting the recipient, since even if they don’t review it, they are still getting the book at a cheaper rate.

That said, there are some potential problems with this plan:

  1. What is the mechanism for charging people?  Goodreads does not require credit card information to make an account. (It’s much more straightforward on Amazon; there, all users have some sort of account that can be billed.)
  2. It could lead to lots of garbage reviews.  People are likely to post short, unhelpful reviews to get their free copy.

We can still do better than this.

Remember, only physical books can be re-sold.  They can’t do much with a free eBook.  So, how about this: when someone wins the contest, they automatically get a free electronic version of the book, but to get the physical copy, they have to review it.

Amazon has a free reader app that runs on almost anything, so chances are, if you have a device that can be used to enter a GoodReads giveaway, it can also read an eBook.  And Amazon owns GoodReads, so it would be easy enough to set this system up between the two sites.

There’s still potentially a problem with an incentive to give garbage reviews, but it’s lessened considerably by the fact that the reader gets rewarded for posting a review, rather than punished for not posting a review.

What do you say, readers? Could this work?  Is it totally insane?  Do I think too much about weird stuff? Is this why everyone hates economists? Let me know what you think!

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I was cleaning today and found an old list of possible titles I jotted down for what became The Start of the Majestic World. Here they are:

  • Thuban AM
  • Siege Mentality
  • Civilization Under Threat
  • Classicism and Decadence
  • Equally Jests
  • Concerning the Cancellation of Thuban AM
  • Upon What Meat?

Re-reading this, it’s clear to me that I made the right decision. Note that the last title on the list is from the same scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that includes the phrase “the start of the majestic world”, which gives you some insight into how titles get selected.

What do you think?  Do you agree with my pick?

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I am fascinated by football helmets and uniforms.  I study them like some people I know study the dresses movie stars wear at award ceremonies.  Like any enthusiast, I have my opinions on the aesthetics of uniforms and helmets.

In my opinion, these are probably the two best helmets in all of football:

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Image Credit to the NFL. Reproduced under Fair Use for the Purpose of Criticism.

I’m not crazy about the black pants for the Bengals–I almost always prefer white jerseys with white pants–but otherwise I think these are pretty good. (Interestingly, the Ram helmet with yellow horn was the first football helmet design ever.)

Apart from white-on-white, I usually don’t like the same color jerseys and pants–teams like the Chiefs, Texans and Cardinals will wear all red, and they look like they are in their pajamas. I did like these old Buffalo Bills uniforms, though I would prefer it with a white helmet.

The absolute worst uniform in all of football is the Tennessee Titans’ current one.  It is a total disaster, although this mess the Jaguars wore (against the Titans even!) is pretty bad, but it was only an alternate.

I am also a big believer that you can’t change your uniform once you have success with it.  The Rams won the Super Bowl with their yellow horn helmets, then changed them to an awful gold color, and haven’t won since.  They did lose one to the Patriots, who are now stuck with a pretty bad uniform that they have enjoyed tremendous success in.

At the college level, everybody gets new uniforms all the time now, thanks to the influence of the Oregon football team.  Oregon wears a new combination every week, and I have yet to see them find one that is good, although these chrome helmets look kind of interesting.

In general, I find most college uniforms to be stupid. I do like these all-grey uniforms that West Virginia and a few other schools have done. Strangely, my team, the Ohio State Buckeyes, has not worn one of these even though grey is one of their traditional team colors.  Speaking of the Buckeyes, their regular uniforms are some of the best in the sport.  These alternates, which I call their “Christmas tree ornament helmets”, are weird but interesting.

Probably the best helmet/uniform combinations in college football are USC, Ohio State and Michigan State.  I also loved these camouflage uniforms that Army has worn a few times.

What helmets and/or uniforms do you like?

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A friend of mine told me about the great themes of literature. The idea is that most great books, movies, etc. all have at least one of the following  themes.  She and another friend had come up with two of them–they suspected there was a third, and I’ve included the suggestion I cooked up. Here are the categories:

  1. “Love Conquers All”–Pretty much all happy endings fall into this category. The Harry Potter series practically had this embossed on every page. In Star Wars it’s a little less obvious, but it’s still there.  It can be different kinds of love–romantic, familial, platonic.  I’d say To Kill a Mockingbird is a “love conquers all”, in the sense of a sort of universal, fraternal love between all people (Yeah, that makes the book sound way more gooey than it really is.) Jane Eyre also falls into this category as an example of romantic love conquering all. And for the record, every Gilbert and Sullivan operetta except Yeomen of the Guard and The Grand Duke is in this category also. I’m not sure how bittersweet love stories like Casablanca fit in here–the love story doesn’t wind up exactly where the leads get what they want, but it’s not really a tragedy, either.
  2. “Ya Can’t Fight City Hall”–This is the category for tragedies.  In Greek tragedy, “The Gods” or “Fate” are “City Hall”, and the stories end badly when people try to fight against their will.  Chinatown, one of my favorite movies, is almost the epitome of the “ya can’t fight city hall” genre (e.g. the line ‘He owns the police!” at the end.) Dystopian novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four usually end up being in this category as well.  I think your really good horror stories–like Lovecraft’s best–fall into this as well, with unexplainable, powerful supernatural forces standing filling the role of “city hall.” But the concept can be extended psychologically–in Macbeth, city hall could be either the supernatural forces of the witches or Macbeth’s own failings as a person.  I guess this is because tragic stories have a feeling of inevitability about them, and that’s what makes them feel tragic.  Most of Thomas Hardy’s novels fall into this category.
  3. “The Cake is a Lie”. Most thrillers and twist endings fall into this category by default.  (I took the name from the famous line in the video game Portal.) This is the category for stories where things aren’t as they seem.  The Repairer of Reputations, as well as most unreliable narrator stories–e.g. The Turn of the Screw–are in this.  But also any story where a major element is that characters are deceiving others, or themselves.  This is where I think The Grand Duke fits as well, because everyone is pretending to be something else.  Most “meta” narratives fall into this category, because they are about illusion and deception.  I’d argue that the game Spec Ops: The Line has one foot in this camp, and one in the “ya can’t fight city hall” camp. Works with ambiguity and room for multiple interpretations fit in this category as well.

What do you think, readers? Any suggestions for things that fit these categories? Anything that doesn’t fit any of these categories?  Are the categories themselves nonsensical?