Mimsy Were the Borogoves

This is not a book about a bunch of cool events tied together to form a history—though it certainly has its cool anecdotes. Priming the Pump is about the gestalt of its time, a time when programmers were designers, and writers and artists moved into programming as equals. When people selling software out of their trunk weren’t selling knock-offs, they were selling their own original programming. And a time when the powers-that-be didn’t recognize what was happening.

The New York Times, like most other general news vehicles of the day, did not see anything newsworthy about the entry of a completely off-the-shelf affordable microcomputer.

It’s difficult to hold it against the Times, however. When Don French, one of the two Tandy employees behind the TRS-80, suggested they produce an initial run of 50,000, “I was almost laughed out of the room”. Management suggested 1,000 units, which they eventually increased to 3,500 but only because that was the only way to get a good deal on parts. They justified the increase by saying that each of Radio Shack’s 3,500 stores could have one, and even if they didn’t sell, perhaps the stores could find a use for them.

Radio Shack upper management didn’t seem to have any idea how revolutionary their computer at their price was. Stan Veit, who had a New York computer store at that time–when computers were mostly still things that you built, or programmed by switch, or both, was shown the TRS-80 before its introduction, and echoed French’s recommendation:

Charles Tandy asked Veit how much he thought the computer should sell for. Veit says “I really had no basis for comparison except possibly for the SOL¹ and it sold for $1400 with a video monitor. Well, this machine is a lot simpler, so I figure about $1000. But this is Radio Shack, so it must be cheaper. I’ll say $900.” When Veit was told the price would be $600, he reports telling Charles Tandy “you better build a hell of a lot of them.”

Even after the computer was displayed to the public, at a Boston computer show, customers recognized the potential of the new computer before Radio Shack did.

Every once in a while I start getting caught up. Then I find an amazing book and stay up until four o’clock in the morning reading, and everything’s out of whack again. That happened when I ran across Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality yesterday.

It’s a bit of a Mary Sue situation, where Harry Potter is what a stereotypical university professor would want their children to be: most of the rationality of an adult with some of the knowledge removed. He’s Batman, Sherlock Holmes, and Richard Feynman rolled into one. He ends up saying things like:

“I’m not sure how to heal Slytherin House,” Harry said slowly. “But I know it’s something you and I will end up having to do. It took centuries for science to dawn over the Muggle world, it only happened slowly, but the stronger science got, the further that sort of hatred retreated.” Harry’s voice was quiet, now. “I don’t know exactly why it worked that way, but that’s how it happened historically. As though there’s something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness, not right away, but it seems to follow wherever science goes. The Enlightenment, that was what it was called in the Muggle world. It has something to do with seeking the truth, I think… with being able to change your mind from what you grew up believing… with thinking logically, realizing that there’s no reason to hate someone because their skin is a different color, just like there’s no reason to hate Hermione Granger… or maybe there’s something to it that even I don’t understand. But the Enlightenment is something that you and I belong to now, both of us. Fixing Slytherin House is just one of the things we have to do.”

Remember, eleven-year old boy.

It’s also extraordinarily well-written and hard to put down. It takes the kids and the situation very seriously. The trick appears to be, “what if nothing else in the story changed, except that Aunt Petunia married a college professor instead of Vernon Dursley?” From this it follows that Harry would be a rational, science fiction-loving, eleven-year-old who reads Gödel, Escher, Bach and who follows the scientific method as a religion. He’s a humanist, and that’s his happy thought.

From this we get a story about a kid who believes he can rule the world and wants to control his “dark side”.

I haven’t read the books, but enjoyed all of the movies; it appears that The Methods of Rationality covers the same events as the first book, but with the new, improved Harry Potter running through it. Neville Longbottom has a part much earlier, and Ron Weasley ends up not coming in for real until halfway through, but when he does he’s the same person. Everyone’s the same except Potter, who, as the hero, changes everyone else. Ultimately, he wants a unified theory of Hogwarts Houses.

New York’s “young literary cubs” moving forward?

I first saw this story tweeted via Iowahawk, and then via Instapundit. A bunch of recent college graduates with high-end literary degrees—resulting in $200,000 of debt in at least one case—have started their own literary magazine after being unable to get a job in the establishment literary market. The New York Times spins it as due to the current economic downturn. I’d guess that it has more to do with time marching on—the entire publishing industry has been trying very hard not to capitalize on the possibilities of mobile computers and networks.

People seem to be focussing on making fun of the recent graduates. But I don’t get the problem here. This is what should happen when an industry’s dying: new upstarts start their own companies and build a better product.

Think about what would have happened if the publishing industry got a bailout like the car industry: Rebecca Chapman would have gotten that unpaid job as an intern working on yesterday’s model. Instead, she’s building something of her own with a like-minded group of people who have a vision for the future of publishing.

They’re not making money—but they wouldn’t be making money in the old industry either.

“There’s something incredibly liberating,” said Rachel Rosenfelt, “when you realize that climbing that ladder is a ladder to nowhere.”

That said, they could be doing the same thing without having spent $200,000 and several years—times however many people are involved in their venture—that they can’t get back. That’s up to four million dollars (twenty people, according to the article) and four to eight years per person. Even with inflation, a couple of million dollars would have been a great investment in their current venture, and four years is a long time on the Internet¹. Just not being heavily in debt helps a lot when starting a new business.

An author at the conference picking at the scraps of the print industry.

A quick wrap-up of interesting remarks and recommendations from this year’s conference:

Mark A. Clements told us that the best lies are the same as the best fiction. To lie well, you need to think about things that you don’t want to think about.

Everything starts with a “What If?” In Pet Sematary, the question was “What if my child were to die young?” and the question that made it stand out was “What if I could bring him back?”

Some questions are less obvious outside of horror or fantasy, although I’d say that it’s not that you can’t ask a question like that outside of horror/fantasy, but that you have to be willing to look at the question from different angles. On Sunday, Mike Farris used Million Dollar Baby as an example for his adaptation class, and that’s kind of a non-magical answer to “what if I could bring my child back?”

In something like Pet Sematary, the lies get bigger as the story goes on. Small lies are put in place early to service bigger lies later. Kinda like Shattered Glass. The size of the lie must be commensurate to the size of the question.

A lot of writers told us to write everything in the first draft: don’t limit in the first draft, spew it all out, reminiscent of Stephen King’s advice in On Writing. Steven Boyett said “Give yourself permission to suck.”

Mark Clements: “You have a responsibility to face your fears on behalf of your characters and your readers.”

When it’s time to cut, Clements asks “Does it carry its own weight? Is it worth the detail?” And this is a question that’s easier to find an answer to after the first draft is done. Sometimes you don’t know if it carries its weight until you see what else it’s holding up.

There was a lot of resonance at this conference, more than I remember happening in previous years. Clements used the kite-flying scene from Pet Sematary to illustrate his example; in Steven R. Boyett’s Craft of Fiction class, the very next class I went to, he used the same scene.

Then Boyett read from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and in the next class Dean Nelson mentioned it as well. Both also used Stephen King’s Misery as examples, although in that case they used different scenes.

Nothing keens my writing axe more than knowing I’m about to read it out loud to a bunch of other writers. That one of them is Mark Clements definitely helps. And it is especially true when I’m doing something odd like tDoPB. Which I’m keeping a bit of a secret right now because I’m still not sure I’m going to be able to pull it off.

That’s why I did the temporary podcast of FlameWar. Not too many people listened to it, but those who did mattered. It made me paranoidally aware of every error. I even got some feedback, although that wasn’t the purpose.

Reading with an impending reading in mind makes a huge difference.

Even when the reading is at 2 am. Mark Clements runs a late-night read-and-critique that’s possibly the best read-and-critique I’ve taken part in. The other sessions are all limited by time; this one is not: we go until we have nothing left to say and then Mark wraps it up and we move to the next reading.

A couple of quotes from today’s sessions:

Warren Lewis:

My resume says I lecture frequently. Unfortunately I usually do it at home alone in the bathtub.

An attentive poet does with words what snipers do with bullets… but there’s less paperwork involved.

Raymond Feist:

I love books. I stopped tearing the pages out of books when I was two. I stopped eating them when I was three.

Score one for Apple’s non-removable batteries. I have an awesome Olympus Pen in my bag… and the battery is sitting in the charger back in my apartment. Which means I’m using the lesser camera in my iPad. So I’m not sure you can see the rain in this photograph that’s keeping the lawn free of lounging authors.

The La Jolla Writers Conference is a nice, little, conference with some great faculty. I’m hiding from the rain in room 705 waiting on Mark Clements, king of the late-night read and critiques, but there’s also Mike Sirota whose nuts-and-bolts tutorials are invaluable, and Steven Boyett, whose rambling discussions of literary techniques never fail to inspire. And many more.

I try not to go to too many writers conferences because they take time away from writing. Even though I live in San Diego about a five minute drive from the conference hotel, I only come here every two or three years. On off years I take the time off from work anyway and hole myself up in my apartment writing for the same amount of time I’d be at the conference.

Since this is the only writers conference I’ve been to, I can’t compare it to others, but it’s small, dense, and very useful. If you aren’t here this year I recommend it for next. If you are here this year, write!

At the last minute before the awards banquet I broke down and bought two books from the AD&D reading list. I got them from Marty Massoglia who also raved about LosCon, a Thanksgiving weekend con up in Los Angeles, right by LAX. If you’re interested, note that the price goes up after October 31.

I also bought Jack Vance’s Rhialto The Marvellous, which probably would have been on the reading list if it had been published before AD&D. I picked it up from Paul Kennedy. Both dealers had some nice old paperbacks.

I had a great time, and Greg Ketter of Dreamhaven almost has me convinced to go to the Brighton con in 2013.

The World Fantasy Convention is a world apart from the San Diego Comic-Con. They still have a banquet for the awards ceremony, and I talked to some great fans there. I wish her awards talk was on YouTube, but you’ll have to settle for her opening ceremonies introduction.

The panels were small and the readings accessible. I heard a current draft of Willis’s next book, a great non-reading by Steven Boyett, and an amazing reading by Peter Beagle.

There are authors who write great books and writers who make great speakers; at this WFC, they had both Connie Willis and Neil Gaiman—sometimes at the same time—which made this inspiring. One of the things I talked about at the banquet is the high ratio of writers and writer fans. I’ve vowed to both read more and write more in the coming year. Which is a pretty good outcome given that I bought a bunch of books and have just started a new one of my own!

Steven Boyett flourishes.

“Why yes, officer, I do play Dungeons & Dragons. Why do you ask?”

“Sailing is a lot of boredom interrupted by panic.”—Heather Tomlinson

Dennis L. McKiernan recommended an out of print book called The Lore of Sail, probably driving the price up even further. Devin Poore recommended Sea of Words, about Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring novels.

“God bless the person that invented Goretex.”—Shelly Rae Clift

Like many technological innovations, the great advantage of steam over sail is that steamships require smaller crews, so they are cheaper to operate even if in some cases they might be slower or otherwise inferior.

“Before there were guns, you can’t have a gunwale.”—Dennis McKiernan

Dennis also said that the term “knots” comes from throwing a weighted and knotted line into the water and watching how many knots become visible, to know how fast the ship was going.

From the sea monster panel:

“By the way, the term ‘octopi’ is a misnomer. Use it if you wish, but you’re an idiot.”—David Drake

“You’re an idiot.”