About that writing thing

Ostensibly, this blog was started as part of my 500 word a day discipline challenge. Unfortunately, this blog has continued long after the 500 word a day challenge fell to the wayside. But the words are starting to flow through my veins again.

So, this is not an open committment or anything, rather it’s me thinking out loud. What sort of tricks can I play on myself to keep up the effort?

It’s a funny thing–a little bit of accountability can go a long way, but a little too much can demotivate me. I guess the challenge will be figuring out how to walk that line. You spouses of writers take note… We all wish we didn’t have to lean on you, but we do. We love you though, and we hope it pays off as much as you do.

Albums that are Albums

I was sitting recently, listening to Derek Webb’s album She Must and Shall Go Free. It’s an album. It has great individual songs on it, but it is a cohesive unit, 11 or 12 (I can’t remember) songs that form a flow of thought. It’s a wonderful thing. Caedmon’s Call’s 40 Acres feels like this (as does Share the Well), Andrew Peterson’s Love and Thunder feels this way, and the best example (in my favorites) is Rich Mullins’s A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band.

I love listening to albums that are albums. MP3 players, Itunes, winamp, and all those other convenient things with those shuffle buttons have kind of ruined albums for us. We hear whatever song randomly comes next (or, in the case of Itunes new Genius function, whatever song they think sounds good to follow up the song you’re listening to). We don’t usually sit down to listen through an album; we let music be the background we do things to, and we don’t exactly catch any continuity.

So, sometime this week, turn off the shuffle feature and listen to an album. You might find that the artist put some thought into the direction that the songs take you. That’s the sort of stuff that makes an album worth paying for.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Matt was right. Matt, if you’re reading this, you’re right. If you’re not reading it, I’ll tell you next time we talk on the phone.

About a week ago, my little brother called me from the bookstore. We’ve been doing a better job at random calls lately, and it’s fun. I miss him, he’s a great friend. Anyway, he was looking for something to read. He came upon Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I said, “Oh, I want to read that!” He bought it and called me a couple days later.

If I recall correctly, his review was essentially: “The only good parts were the parts Jane Austen wrote. They added zombies, killing, and overt sexual innuendo. It all felt tacked on and needless.”

I found it in our library (Support your librarians! They put up with more crap than you can imagine!) and got it out to read it and see what I thought.

Matt was right. I don’t often say that because I don’t want him to get high on his horse, but, boy, was he right. It’s just not very good. You’ve heard of addition by subtraction? This feels like subtraction by addition. The story is worse. The clever parts were Jane Austen’s anyway.

Sorry we let them do that to your work Jane. We’ll get them one day. Probably in the zombie apocalypse.

Monday Motivator

I have a son. He is 17 months old. I did not know this until recently, but it turns out that this is a really fun time in the life of a little boy. Everything he gets to do is a learning experience — even spilling one hundred cheerios on the floor (and saying “Cheroos” while doing it). He’s developing concepts, and not always developing them right. It’s a lot of fun, for example, to watch him get to the end of the board book, where they have two boards glued together for the back cover. He insists that its broken. How does he express this? By putting his hands to his head to indicate, from a song his mom taught him, “Broke his head.”  Yep… that’s our concept of broken.

Anyway, getting to observe this little boy (currently on the floor, pointing at the  spot on his finger that he managed to cut on something, and saying “ow!”) is an absolutely wonderful experience. Life changing. Perspective granting. He makes Mondays well worth the effort.

Hokey Hockey Drama

It’s been quite the off season in hockey. Especially if you live in Phoenix, Arizona. See, there’s a hockey team in Phoenix (the coyotes). Go figure… a hockey team in a desert. It hasn’t be going so hot for the coyotes lately. Low attendance, a terrible team… pretty much the only thing they’ve got going for them is their coach, Wayne Gretzky. The Wayne Gretzky. But, Gretz hasn’t been doing so hot either.

So, after the season ended, the owner in Phoenix declared bankruptcy. Real quick like, this guy called Jim Balsillie makes a bid for the team that is a whole huge chunk of change more than anyone would pay in their right mind.

Why? Oh, this guy has history with the NHL. He wants to move an existing NHL team to Hamilton, Ontario. That’d be a good business move, but part of the history is that the NHL wants nothing to do with Balsillie.

Would you believe that this thing is still ongoing? Yep… sure is. There’s a judge trying to figure out of Balsillie can buy the team in spite of the NHL’s hatred for him.

Drama, drama, drama. To make matters worse, Coach Gretz didn’t show up to start training camp.

Oy vey. Can’t wait for either the Pens or the Leafs to meet up with the folks from Phoenix. Those guys will be so discouraged by all the mess, they might not even tie their skates.

A Christian Response to Ayn Rand

I recently finished Atlas Shrugged. I didn’t even mean to bring it home, I went to the library looking for an atlas, and the book looked the right size. I kid, I kid.

But it is a long book. Seriously.

It’s a book with a purpose though… Ayn Rand is putting together a defense or maybe an explanation.of her philosophy in fictional form.

Let me get the easy part out of the way. I think she’s wrong. Not all wrong, but wrong in some pretty important ways.

But, where she’s right, she has some important things to say to the world we live in today. Where’s she right?

Well… first, there are things that are true absolutely. It was funny to read her “Bad guys” who insisted that there were no absolutes. They come off as totally ridiculous (Because they are)… and yet, I know that there are people in our world who hold the same views and are taken quite seriously.

Second, for a man to know anything, he must use reason. He must think for himself. The apathy that leads people to simply adopt the views of others as their own is as problematic in the real world as it is in her book.

Third, she’s right that a man’s actions ought to be governed by what makes him happy.

For essentially the last 200 pages of Atlas Shrugged, I thought…. hmm, so close, but so far away. As the characters in the book remind each other, if something doesn’t seem to add up, you have to check your premises. I wanted to shout, “Check your premises” when a main character railed against spirituality because God was inherently unknowable and therefore irrational and dangerous.

While I concur that God is unknowable (and dangerous), there’s a fatal flaw in their assumption. They presume that because God is unknowable (that is, we cannot know Him perfectly because He is eternal and we are finite), we cannot know what He’d have of us.

This, then, is the Christian response: We agree that man needs a rational, absolute basis to his morality. We also agree that man should be governed by that which makes him happiest.

However, God has revealed Himself to man. In revealing Himself to man, God also gave man the information needed to understand what God would have of him. And, the Christian affirms that man ought to be governed by happiness… but not a short-term, earth-oriented happiness. The first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism reads “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”

If Ayn Rand or her characters were standing here today, I’d tell them how right they were and how wrong they were. I’d hope that they’d see the light. And even if they didn’t immediately, I’d probably be encouraged by them, because their worldview, at the very least, hinges on rationality. That means that at least we’re starting from the same place and we might get there eventually.

Guilty Pleasure Tunes

Ah, my dear wife will cringe at this topic. She knows where I’m going with this. It seems like everyone has some band, album, or genre of music that they like but don’t necessarily want to admit to liking. I don’t think it’s pretension, I think it’s just sincere embarrassment.

Take yours truly, for instance. I don’t have longish hair that sweeps down over my eyes. My jeans aren’t inordinately patched. I don’t dye my hair. I don’t wear eyeliner. But, I do, on occasion, sing along ridiculously to whatever pop-punk I can get my hands on. It might be Blink182, it might be ReliantK, it might be Brand New… but whatever it is, it’ll make my wife roll her eyes (rightfully so) and it’ll make me play air drums.

Whew. I just admitted it. So, now I’ll put the question to you… who or what is your guilty pleasure listening?

I’ve gotta go find Rebecca’s eyeliner.

Will readers ever pay for online news?

Some days the internet puts things together for you. Not often, because, it’s mostly an inanimate object or something. But, sometimes, you read a story and then read another one, and think… hey, weren’t those connected?

This very thing happened to me the other day. I was reading about TechDirt’s CwF+RtB=$$$ (connect with fans + reason to buy = cash). It’s essentially their attempt to show the music industry (or the movie industry, or the book industry, or the news industry) how to develop a sustainable business model in an era where access to your content pretty much has to be free (and if it’s not, consumers will find a way to make it so).

Pretty neat idea. It makes sense too.

• Fans get content without a forced package.
• Pay for premium content / special access / special gifts
• Fans pay because they like you or the site — not because they have to
• Fans are more likely to return (and potentially spend more dollars)
• Business model doesn’t predicate itself upon your ability to turn every transaction into a billable event.

That’s good for you and good for everybody.(Sidenote: like TechDirt, I’d be willing to take down my website and not contribute to a blog for a year in exchange for $100,000,000.00. My email address is in the sidebar. Contact me there. Check must be given time to clear. Sultan Whomever from Arganistan, I still haven’t received the first check you promised me in exchange for access to my bank account so you could clear those funds, so don’t even offer this time. Whatever.)

So, I finish reading about TechDirt’s plan, and I get an e-mail from a google alert I’ve set up. It e-mails me items about electronic publishing. CBS had published an article on its website entitled, “Will Readers Ever Pay for Online News.“

The article talked about various platforms for charging for online access to news. It talked about how they just needed to come up with something that would work like the old model (advertising + subscription) because the new model (online advertising) isn’t working.

The whole time I read, I thought back to TechDirt, and they way they’re giving their readers ownership and options instead of alienation and coercion.

The people who are getting ready to make a push for pay-for-access online news remind me of something a bank president once said to me… “As long as one bank in this market has their staff still wearing ties, we’ll all still wear ties.” As long as one news outlet is giving away content, the others will struggle to charge for the same content.

Why? There are just so many different (and free) sources of news out there that these news providers have provided us with no real reason to want to buy their content.

They’re going to have to start thinking differently. They’re going to have to give us, the consumers (you know, the ones with the wallets they want to stick their hands in) a reason to let them have our money.

They’re going to have to think like TechDirt… because, until they connect with their fans, and give us a reason to buy, there will be no $$$ for them.

What do you read for?

I’ve confessed in the past a tendency to read things because people say they’re great. Sometimes this results in grave disappointment (Hello there Toni Morrison, I’m looking at you), sometimes in indifference (Yeah, the three times I’ve read the first 100 pages of the Grapes of Wrath come to mind), and sometimes in abject delight.

Which, in reality, doesn’t prove anything at all except that enjoying a book is tied more to personality than to the book itself.

I’m reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I started it because, well, it’s a classic. I realized 20 pages in that “it’s a classic” is a dumb reason to read a book. I gave her 30 more pages to make me care about the story. She did that, by proving the environment to be interesting, the characters to be interesting — not in a human sense, but in an archetypal sense.

So, I’ll let you know how it goes, but I’m glad to say that I’m reading it for the story, not for the “classic.” Here’s hoping the story delivers.

Monday Motivator

I’m rejuvenated… it’s a Monday morning and I’m psyched. Why am I psyched? Well, I guess I’m experiencing how much doing a job you love instead of a job you like can improve the quality of your days. I had worked in banking. I hope to write a novel about it one day. Banking wasn’t the worst career that you could pick. In fact, I worked in the best individual bank branch in West Virginia. I loved the people I worked with.

But, while I do possess a somewhat analytical mind, number crunching is not primarily my idea of a fun time. Dealing with customers who feel like they’ve been robbed, even less so. One day I’d like to do a blog post about that. We’ll see. But I did my best at that job, and I feel like I did well.

Anyway, now, I work for BelieversPress (www.believerspress.com), and I have to tell you, it’s a joy. It’s challenging, it’s rewarding, it’s all the things you hope a job will be. And it’s all motivated by a sincere desire to serve the customer best… not the best that we can, but best.

That’s motivating. Doing my job and enjoying it at the same time… that’s something I can wake up on Monday for!

I won’t even mention that preseason hockey starts tonight. Shoot, I just mentioned it, didn’t I?