A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about my pledge only to read self-published fiction in 2012, an experiment in what is known as "dogfooding," whereby an individual or company opts to use its own product in a vote of confidence. Since I have decided to make an honest attempt to self-publish my fiction (at Amazon, Smashwords, and elsewhere), I thought it was only fair that I should purchase and read the works of my self-pubbed peers, as otherwise I would be something of a hypocrite.
After announcing my intentions to eat nothing but self-publishing dogfood for an entire year, I was asked whether I was planning to review the books I read during my experiment. Fellow self-pubbed authors wished me well and wanted to follow my progress, and even people who regarded this idea as little more than a masochistic exercise in literary self-flagellation were nonetheless rather curious to see how it would turn out. Thus the Dogfood Chronicles were born.
My first review is Speculation, a literary thriller by Edmund Jorgensen. Before I proceed, however, I must confess that this book just so happens to be the self-published novel of a dear friend from college. He and I both decided to take the plunge in offering our books on Amazon around the same time. Lest I be accused of using this review to garner Edmund any undue sales advantage, however, I should point out that Speculation is currently blowing up the paid Kindle rankings in Amazon - right now he's #144 - entirely on the merits of his own storytelling.
Andrew, a struggling professor of philosophy at an unnamed Boston university, is presented with a conundrum when his best friend from college "Sothum" dies and wills him a choice between receiving ten million dollars or the contents of a sealed envelope. Does Andrew take the safe bet so that he never need worry about money again, or does he take the envelope, whose contents are a complete mystery?
While his wife Cheryl sees this as a simple decision - i.e., take the money and don't look back - she begrudgingly indulges Andrew's natural curiosity as he tries to figure out what could possibly be worth passing up a fortune. Is it even more money, or better yet the secret of Sothum's financial success, or is the envelope empty, a final cruel practical joke from beyond the grave? The fact that Sothum is implicated in the disappearance of a mutual friend (a writer named Buddy) only serves to complicate Andrew's choice.
The more that Andrew investigates into Sothum's weird and reclusive life, the deeper he finds himself drawn into a philosophical puzzle which threatens not just the stability of his marriage but his own mental health as well. Will he follow his best friend all the way down the rabbit hole to satisfy his need to know the truth at any cost, or will Andrew leave Sothum's final riddle unsolved and choose life, love, and sanity instead?
Author Edmund Jorgensen sets the bar high with his debut novel, but Speculation delivers on its promise. Jorgensen paces his story masterfully, interweaving bittersweet college reminiscences with a gradually unfolding mystery, all the while raising the emotional stakes with every chapter and new revelation. This progression is executed in such a subtle fashion that when Sothum's at-first almost sophomoric meditations on the meaning of life, chance, and fate suddenly take on a very real and truly terrifying aspect, the reader is blindsided by the transformation.
Despite these elements of suspense, Speculation is at its heart an Intellectual Bromance, in the grand tradition of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Indeed, Andrew, Sothum, and their third friend Buddy are as entertainingly clever and inextricably doomed as Eco's Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon were. The downward spiral of intense friendship also calls to mind the philosophically rich but emotionally damaged relationship between Louis and Lestat in Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire. In a less capable writer's hands, Speculation's choice would never have been a real head-scratcher, but the author's genius is that despite yourself you can't help but find that you have been seduced by Sothum's demented brilliance in perfect lockstep with Andrew's first-person narrator. Jorgensen not only captures the cerebral intoxication and Platonic intensity that so frequently occurs in one's heady years as a young impressionable college student, but he turns them against you so expertly that you can only admire the artfulness of the betrayal.
Is there any downside to this book at all? I'll be damned if I can find one. Not only is Speculation engaging and intellectually satisfying, it is also extraordinarily well-written, edited, and professionally polished. So why isn't this book already on the shelves of your local bookstore? In private conversation, the author confided that literary agents generally had high praise for his manuscript when he made the query rounds, but even the most kindly-disposed said they'd be at a loss to market it. Their loss, to be sure!
That a book of this quality would never see the light of day is the reason I decided to take a chance on self-publishing myself, and I'm heartened that my friend Edmund has also decided to make the leap. Even if you have been lukewarm on self-pubbed authors thus far, I strongly recommend that you give Speculation a chance. If this first review in the Dogfood Chronicles is any indication of just how much undiscovered literary talent there is out there in the so-called "digital slush pile," I'm in for a very rewarding year of reading...
Friday, March 30, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
How to debrief yourself
So last week I went to the ILLiad International Conference in Virginia Beach to sequester myself by the sea along with a few hundred of my closest resource sharing colleagues to share ideas, compare best practices, and try our hardest to resist the siren call of the ocean. Despite ever-shrinking budgets, short staffs, and the (albeit painfully incremental) progress in virtual conference attendance I'm still a huge fan of the real deal, as I firmly believe that the physical experiences of travel, serendipitous conversations, and late-night bull and/or brainstorming sessions over a couple of drinks by the fire pit is an experience that the digital world can not yet fully replicate.
No offense intended to Second Life, but actually going somewhere else other than your office for several days also means that you may fully immerse yourself in an alternate reality so that your conference experience may be transformative as well as edifying. There's a certain magic at work at a good conference that makes you almost intoxicated with all of the new possibilities that are revealed by simply getting a glimpse of what other people in your field are doing, thinking, and aspiring towards. But how do you keep that magic alive, once you return to your daily grind? This is a challenge that I've struggled with over the years, but I think I've finally made a breakthrough in bottling up your conference magic and making it a renewable resource of inspiration.
When you do finally get back to work, before you do anything else of substance and definitely before you attempt to dig yourself out of your email, your inbox, or whatever it is that has piled up in your absence (trust me- a few more hours of accumulation won't harm anyone) go back over your conference notes in their entirety. I like to use Twitter as my preferred form of note-taking at conferences, as not only am I following the conference hashtag anyway, but by going back and cutting-and-pasting everything posted to that hashtag I can capture not just my own conference notes but everyone else's as well. This can be especially useful if you are at a conference with multiple tracks, many of which you may wanted to take but couldn't due to scheduling constraints.
So what I do is take the whole Tweetstream for the conference period, copy it into Word as text only, then paste that again into Notepad - actually I use Notepad++ because I like its additional editing functionality - so I can go through each individual Tweet line by line. Then I edit this text for content, deleting all of the interpersonal Tweets (and most of the jokes) until I've boiled it down to useful information for both myself and my colleagues at work.
While I'm going through this editing process, I will inevitably stumble across ideas I'd like to follow up on, interesting books I should read that were mentioned by other presenters, and colleagues whom I will remember to email to ask about X, Y, and Z. Assuming that most of these tasks are simple enough to do in a minute or two, I will do them as I edit, so that I don't table the thought and forget about it, as there's nothing worse than being inspired by a good idea at a conference and then completely failing to explore it once you get home.
While I'm making this pass through the Tweetstream, I can't help but recapture a lot of the enthusiasm and excitement of the conference itself - this is a huge shot in the arm for me, especially when I've just gotten back and am vulnerable to the post-conference blues - not to mention hashtag withdrawal! As I send out emails, Facebook notifications, and Tweets to follow up with other attendees I'm hoping that I'm sharing a little of the magic as well, and then when I organize my Tweet notes into a conference update for my colleagues here at work (I'm also planning to share my ILLiad 2012 notes online) I will keep the inspiration flowing in a positive feedback loop.
As luck would have it, I actually had a job interview here at Harvard today as well. While going to a library conference is generally a good way to get into the right frame of mind for an interview, I found that reviewing my conference notes this morning really energized me about the issues I ended up talking about. I'm curious to see if anyone else out there has any additional practical strategies for keeping the "conference buzz" going after the fun is over - if so, please feel free to share!
No offense intended to Second Life, but actually going somewhere else other than your office for several days also means that you may fully immerse yourself in an alternate reality so that your conference experience may be transformative as well as edifying. There's a certain magic at work at a good conference that makes you almost intoxicated with all of the new possibilities that are revealed by simply getting a glimpse of what other people in your field are doing, thinking, and aspiring towards. But how do you keep that magic alive, once you return to your daily grind? This is a challenge that I've struggled with over the years, but I think I've finally made a breakthrough in bottling up your conference magic and making it a renewable resource of inspiration.
When you do finally get back to work, before you do anything else of substance and definitely before you attempt to dig yourself out of your email, your inbox, or whatever it is that has piled up in your absence (trust me- a few more hours of accumulation won't harm anyone) go back over your conference notes in their entirety. I like to use Twitter as my preferred form of note-taking at conferences, as not only am I following the conference hashtag anyway, but by going back and cutting-and-pasting everything posted to that hashtag I can capture not just my own conference notes but everyone else's as well. This can be especially useful if you are at a conference with multiple tracks, many of which you may wanted to take but couldn't due to scheduling constraints.
So what I do is take the whole Tweetstream for the conference period, copy it into Word as text only, then paste that again into Notepad - actually I use Notepad++ because I like its additional editing functionality - so I can go through each individual Tweet line by line. Then I edit this text for content, deleting all of the interpersonal Tweets (and most of the jokes) until I've boiled it down to useful information for both myself and my colleagues at work.
While I'm going through this editing process, I will inevitably stumble across ideas I'd like to follow up on, interesting books I should read that were mentioned by other presenters, and colleagues whom I will remember to email to ask about X, Y, and Z. Assuming that most of these tasks are simple enough to do in a minute or two, I will do them as I edit, so that I don't table the thought and forget about it, as there's nothing worse than being inspired by a good idea at a conference and then completely failing to explore it once you get home.
While I'm making this pass through the Tweetstream, I can't help but recapture a lot of the enthusiasm and excitement of the conference itself - this is a huge shot in the arm for me, especially when I've just gotten back and am vulnerable to the post-conference blues - not to mention hashtag withdrawal! As I send out emails, Facebook notifications, and Tweets to follow up with other attendees I'm hoping that I'm sharing a little of the magic as well, and then when I organize my Tweet notes into a conference update for my colleagues here at work (I'm also planning to share my ILLiad 2012 notes online) I will keep the inspiration flowing in a positive feedback loop.
As luck would have it, I actually had a job interview here at Harvard today as well. While going to a library conference is generally a good way to get into the right frame of mind for an interview, I found that reviewing my conference notes this morning really energized me about the issues I ended up talking about. I'm curious to see if anyone else out there has any additional practical strategies for keeping the "conference buzz" going after the fun is over - if so, please feel free to share!
Monday, March 19, 2012
Whoa, I'm halfway there
This week I weighed in at 237 pounds, which means I've lost a total of 37 pounds so far on my 2012 Make It Happen Diet. It also means that I am officially halfway to my goal of getting down to 200 pounds!
I had a moment of panic last week when for the first time not only did I manage not to lose any weight, but I'd actually succeeded in gaining back a half pound. Granted, thanks to my tooth troubles I had a very unusual week, and despite the fact that you'd imagine an inability to chew would translate into even more weight loss I seem to have found a way to get all of the calories I needed and then some. Looking back on what I ate I'm pretty sure the sudden influx of carbs was to blame - Weight Watchers points or no points, I'm now convinced that pasta is more or less the Devil - but I'm sure it didn't exactly help that I was entirely sedentary for the better part of that week as well.
Whatever the reasons, I was genuinely worried that I'd reached some sort of plateau in my diet, so I was rather anxious about weighing in on Sunday. While I know I should be overjoyed that I've even lost as many pounds as I have at this point, I really want to reach my goal (and maybe then some), so needless to say I was quite happy to see that I am squarely back on track.
Now all I have to do is manage not to stuff myself silly during this week's ILLiad International Conference down in Virginia Beach - no easy task, mind you, as the host Atlas Systems is a firm believer in Southern hospitality! Wish me luck...
I had a moment of panic last week when for the first time not only did I manage not to lose any weight, but I'd actually succeeded in gaining back a half pound. Granted, thanks to my tooth troubles I had a very unusual week, and despite the fact that you'd imagine an inability to chew would translate into even more weight loss I seem to have found a way to get all of the calories I needed and then some. Looking back on what I ate I'm pretty sure the sudden influx of carbs was to blame - Weight Watchers points or no points, I'm now convinced that pasta is more or less the Devil - but I'm sure it didn't exactly help that I was entirely sedentary for the better part of that week as well.
Whatever the reasons, I was genuinely worried that I'd reached some sort of plateau in my diet, so I was rather anxious about weighing in on Sunday. While I know I should be overjoyed that I've even lost as many pounds as I have at this point, I really want to reach my goal (and maybe then some), so needless to say I was quite happy to see that I am squarely back on track.
Now all I have to do is manage not to stuff myself silly during this week's ILLiad International Conference down in Virginia Beach - no easy task, mind you, as the host Atlas Systems is a firm believer in Southern hospitality! Wish me luck...
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Eating the self-pub dogfood
My name is Tom Bruno, and until this year I was a self-publishing hypocrite.
You see, although I had decided to take my fantasy novel Confessions of a Gourmand - which I had shopped around to prospective agents only to get a couple of encouraging words but nothing more - and offer it online as a Kindle edition through Amazon, up to that point I had only read one self-published book (which a friend had written a couple of years ago, way ahead of the self-pub revolution) and nothing else, always opting for traditionally-published fiction instead whenever it came time to decide on something new to read.
That I didn't see this for the hypocrisy that it was is testament to how deeply ingrained the bias against self-publication is among would-be authors such as myself. Even now many aspiring writers would still rather keep editing, workshopping, and re-writing their manuscripts and querying the ever-shrinking pool of literary agents or publishing houses in hopes of landing a contract rather than attach the stigma of self-publication to their books. To these defenders of the traditional publishing model, self-publication is nothing more than a vast digital slush pile that floods the market with writing that didn't deserve to be published in the first place and drowns out "legitimate" authors from getting more attention than they would have gotten otherwise.
Or so the argument goes. This post is not about debating whether or not this is in fact true, although my own personal belief is that quality will always find its way to the top, and that (in the words of a fellow self-published author) "I'd much rather have 10000 people write crap and enjoy doing what they're doing than 9999 people never let their work see the light of day". No, this is about practicing what I preach. If I truly feel that self-publishing has become as legitimate a path for writers as the traditional publication route, then shouldn't I be supporting self-published authors with my dollars and my reading time?
There's a term for this: Dogfooding. Eating your own dogfood is a concept that goes back to the 1980's, supposedly from the old ads for Alpo dog food featuring Lorne Greene, who made a point of saying in the commercial that he fed his own dogs Alpo. It was a Microsoft executive who coined the actual phrase, however, expanding the concept beyond actual dogfood into a general vote of confidence in one's product by promoting its use by your own employees. Dogfooding is therefore not just an exercise in public relations, but an active proof of concept.
I've decided to adopt this idea and apply it to self-publishing - to that end, I've resolved that I will only read self-published fiction in 2012. So far I have read three self-pubbed works this year: two novels and a novella. One was a literary thriller, another a fantasy offering, and the the third was a post-apocalyptic science fiction tale. All three were excellent, and each could just as easily have been published via traditional means, had the authors chosen to pursue that route.
While I'm sure that during my yearlong experiment in dogfooding I will no doubt find myself forced to wolf down an unappetizing clunker or two, I must say that I am encouraged by the quality of these initial readings. Perhaps there's more good stuff to be found out there than self-publishing's many detractors would have us believe...
You see, although I had decided to take my fantasy novel Confessions of a Gourmand - which I had shopped around to prospective agents only to get a couple of encouraging words but nothing more - and offer it online as a Kindle edition through Amazon, up to that point I had only read one self-published book (which a friend had written a couple of years ago, way ahead of the self-pub revolution) and nothing else, always opting for traditionally-published fiction instead whenever it came time to decide on something new to read.
That I didn't see this for the hypocrisy that it was is testament to how deeply ingrained the bias against self-publication is among would-be authors such as myself. Even now many aspiring writers would still rather keep editing, workshopping, and re-writing their manuscripts and querying the ever-shrinking pool of literary agents or publishing houses in hopes of landing a contract rather than attach the stigma of self-publication to their books. To these defenders of the traditional publishing model, self-publication is nothing more than a vast digital slush pile that floods the market with writing that didn't deserve to be published in the first place and drowns out "legitimate" authors from getting more attention than they would have gotten otherwise.
Or so the argument goes. This post is not about debating whether or not this is in fact true, although my own personal belief is that quality will always find its way to the top, and that (in the words of a fellow self-published author) "I'd much rather have 10000 people write crap and enjoy doing what they're doing than 9999 people never let their work see the light of day". No, this is about practicing what I preach. If I truly feel that self-publishing has become as legitimate a path for writers as the traditional publication route, then shouldn't I be supporting self-published authors with my dollars and my reading time?
There's a term for this: Dogfooding. Eating your own dogfood is a concept that goes back to the 1980's, supposedly from the old ads for Alpo dog food featuring Lorne Greene, who made a point of saying in the commercial that he fed his own dogs Alpo. It was a Microsoft executive who coined the actual phrase, however, expanding the concept beyond actual dogfood into a general vote of confidence in one's product by promoting its use by your own employees. Dogfooding is therefore not just an exercise in public relations, but an active proof of concept.
I've decided to adopt this idea and apply it to self-publishing - to that end, I've resolved that I will only read self-published fiction in 2012. So far I have read three self-pubbed works this year: two novels and a novella. One was a literary thriller, another a fantasy offering, and the the third was a post-apocalyptic science fiction tale. All three were excellent, and each could just as easily have been published via traditional means, had the authors chosen to pursue that route.
While I'm sure that during my yearlong experiment in dogfooding I will no doubt find myself forced to wolf down an unappetizing clunker or two, I must say that I am encouraged by the quality of these initial readings. Perhaps there's more good stuff to be found out there than self-publishing's many detractors would have us believe...
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Dens sanus in corpore sano
A funny thing happened on my way to Making It Happen in 2012... I forgot that while focusing on externalities such as my weight was all well and good and entirely overdue, being thinner wasn't going to amount to a hill of beans if I didn't address other health problems that were perhaps less immediately visible but no less important to my overall well-being.
Take, for example, Tooth #19- or as I like to call it, the Root Canal of the Living Dead.
To say that I had had an unpleasant root canal experience would be an understatement. It was over ten years ago and I had woken up one morning to find myself in excruciating pain. When I could finally get to my dentist, he informed me that a lifetime of grinding my teeth had resulted in a cracked molar which had become infected and would require an emergency root canal in order to save the tooth.
A few hours later I am whisked away to the local endodontist, who begins work only to discover (SPOILERS: Do not continue reading if you wince at the sound of a dentist's drill!) that my aggrieved tooth is so "hot" that they can't actually get it numb without drilling until they hit the root and injecting it directly with anesthetic. This wasn't just as unpleasant as it sounds, but far, far worse, and was without a doubt the most pain I'd ever experienced in my life to date.
Until last Friday, that is. While I'd been warned by several dentists that my root canal was in danger of failing and that I would either need to make a return visit to the endodontist or have the tooth itself extracted, the combined fear of additional agony and the prospect of several additional bank-breaking copays meant that kept putting off the inevitable until... well, the inevitable happened.
Last week I found myself in an ever-increasing amount of discomfort until late Thursday night when the discomfort ramped up suddenly into blinding pain. Silly me, I actually thought for a moment that I'd be able to tough it out with ibuprofen, ice packs, and some Orajel, but sure enough I was back in the dentist's chair by Saturday, and walked out of the office with a prescription for antibiotics and painkillers, an emergency consult with my endodontist, and my tail tucked decidedly between my legs.
You see, folks, I dun goofed. Making It Happen is an all or nothing prospect. Either I commit myself to radical, transformative change on every front or I might as well not change anything at all. This includes tackling all of the problems that I've always allowed to fester (such as my wayward tooth) because I felt like I never had the time, the resources, or the psychic bandwidth to address. But there is always time for change, if you make time for it. My health does matter, and ensuring good health can only be money well spent in the long run.
As far as committing the psychic bandwidth, this is perhaps still the hardest part. I've struggled for so long on so many fronts that sometimes I let myself believe that it is my lot in life simply to struggle, when all the while success is right there within my grasp if only I can muster to courage to seize it with both hands and never let it go. Okay, Tooth #19, I get it now. It's time to be bold. Time to Make It Happen across the board - no exceptions, no excuses!
The lesson has been learned, thank you very much- now be a good little molar and stop bothering me for another 10-12 years...
Take, for example, Tooth #19- or as I like to call it, the Root Canal of the Living Dead.
To say that I had had an unpleasant root canal experience would be an understatement. It was over ten years ago and I had woken up one morning to find myself in excruciating pain. When I could finally get to my dentist, he informed me that a lifetime of grinding my teeth had resulted in a cracked molar which had become infected and would require an emergency root canal in order to save the tooth.
A few hours later I am whisked away to the local endodontist, who begins work only to discover (SPOILERS: Do not continue reading if you wince at the sound of a dentist's drill!) that my aggrieved tooth is so "hot" that they can't actually get it numb without drilling until they hit the root and injecting it directly with anesthetic. This wasn't just as unpleasant as it sounds, but far, far worse, and was without a doubt the most pain I'd ever experienced in my life to date.
Until last Friday, that is. While I'd been warned by several dentists that my root canal was in danger of failing and that I would either need to make a return visit to the endodontist or have the tooth itself extracted, the combined fear of additional agony and the prospect of several additional bank-breaking copays meant that kept putting off the inevitable until... well, the inevitable happened.
Last week I found myself in an ever-increasing amount of discomfort until late Thursday night when the discomfort ramped up suddenly into blinding pain. Silly me, I actually thought for a moment that I'd be able to tough it out with ibuprofen, ice packs, and some Orajel, but sure enough I was back in the dentist's chair by Saturday, and walked out of the office with a prescription for antibiotics and painkillers, an emergency consult with my endodontist, and my tail tucked decidedly between my legs.
You see, folks, I dun goofed. Making It Happen is an all or nothing prospect. Either I commit myself to radical, transformative change on every front or I might as well not change anything at all. This includes tackling all of the problems that I've always allowed to fester (such as my wayward tooth) because I felt like I never had the time, the resources, or the psychic bandwidth to address. But there is always time for change, if you make time for it. My health does matter, and ensuring good health can only be money well spent in the long run.
As far as committing the psychic bandwidth, this is perhaps still the hardest part. I've struggled for so long on so many fronts that sometimes I let myself believe that it is my lot in life simply to struggle, when all the while success is right there within my grasp if only I can muster to courage to seize it with both hands and never let it go. Okay, Tooth #19, I get it now. It's time to be bold. Time to Make It Happen across the board - no exceptions, no excuses!
The lesson has been learned, thank you very much- now be a good little molar and stop bothering me for another 10-12 years...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)