There was a gigantic spike in web traffic a while back, all of it a result of my piece on optimizing the DC Metro. The bump literally pushed 2014 to the Busiest Year Ever slot over two days in May!

(I guess I can take the rest of the year off…)

Now that the surge has died down, I thought it might be a good time to do a revised Top Ten Posts list. As I was putting the numbers together, I also realized something intriguing: the list clearly adheres to a power law. For fun, I included a graph showing this Pareto-like distribution of the Top Ten. Continue reading →

Good writing is not about a narrative. It’s about multiple narratives in relationship with each other, not only the narratives in the story itself but also the narratives in the readership that the story is responding to, confronting, confirming, or tweaking.

For example, To Kill a Mockingbird contains narratives about small town politics, Southern culture, family dynamics, racial bias, gender bias, the justice system, and prejudice against the mentally challenged. Today, it’s often reduced to the few of those narratives that most confirm and comfort the political narratives we bring to the story as readers, but the other narratives are there nonetheless.

I was reminded of this complexity recently when I noticed that my novelette, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die, had gotten another very positive (5 star!) review, which I hadn’t seen until now. At first, I was encouraged, taking away the most comforting narrative that it told. But then I realized that the fact that I hadn’t noticed it even though it was over a year old meant I’m not one of those writers who obsessively check their Amazon stats.

And that’s not as comforting a narrative.

The absence of that desperate need to be accepted and loved may not bode well for my chances for success as a writer in today’s literary culture. Self-promotion is the lifeblood of 21st century writers, and it’s a practice that makes me uncomfortable and the excess of which I find off-putting in others. I try, but I am deeply aware that I am “not that kind of writer” and likely never will be.

Scanning around my favorite lit blogs this morning, something occurred to me.

The reason I usually skip the comments on the blogs I regularly read is not the usual internet comment peeve about anonymous nastiness, unfounded political assertions, and the like. It’s the scrambling self-promotion.

Typically, the aspiring author barely bothers to segue from the topic of the blog entry to dropping the name of his/her latest writing project. On the websites of many published writers, lit agents, and other publishing types, far too many comments read something like this:

“That’s a really important thing you just pointed out. I’m so glad that in my own book, Dark Mystic Desire, I avoided this by having the main character blah blah blah… “

What also occurred to me is that I am not entirely sure if the reason I rarely comment on these sites is (a) I don’t want to be associated by proximity with this sort of last-call-flirtation desperation, or (b) why bother when anything I have to say about the actual topic of the post will be drowned in a deluge of amateur plugs?

Or, it may be a reflection of the human instinct to avoid malady, because the commenters I’m reacting to rarely seem genuinely happy about being involved in literature. The optimism seems manic and forced. And, often, a little creepy.

A little self-promotion is necessary, but at a certain point it becomes off-putting.

Here I am in the midst of another snow storm, days after the official start of spring, wondering if the Groundhog had a heart attack.

I’m not going to just revisit the Game of Thrones meme—although, it’s intriguing how Ned Stark still dominates our thoughts about the series. (SPOILER ALERT: He gets his head chopped off at the end of the first season.) I also want to do a little reflection.

I have been working on a personal transformation blog entry for weeks, and I can’t seem to finish it. Partly, because the transformation is ongoing. Partly, because I’m finding it hard to translate between my internal reality-modeling software and the meat-flap languages used here in the outside world. Every rewrite leaves me thinking, “No, that’s not really what is going on.”

I might end up deciding that it’s inexpressible. Except through action.

I have also been struggling with a fiction series I’ve been reading, which has taken a disappointing turn into stifling gender politics. In short, it’s selling its female villain short by treating her like a baby, in the interest of making her more sympathetic. In book one, the male villain ended strong, defiant, and shot in the face without trial. In book two, the male villain ended strong, defiant, and locked indefinitely in solitary confinement. In book three, the female villain ended weepy, confused, and an emotional funnel for other characters’ sympathy and forgiveness.

That might seem like a pro-female dynamic, but it really makes women seem like perpetually unaccountable minors. And that’s not how adults should be treated.

Anyhow, I guess that’s all that’s going on really, beyond a few side projects that should remain unexplained for now. Hope everyone stays warm. I’m sure spring is right around the corner.