Pulp Friction

Subtitled “The Writer’s Guide to Making More Money,” Kelly James-Enger’s book about freelancing is a good introduction to becoming your own boss and freelancing full time.

If you are already a freelance writer, you might get a few nuggets of wisdom from this book, but for the most part this book is aimed at the novice who hasn’t started freelancing, or maybe has submitted a few articles to magazines but hasn’t made the jump to fulltime writing yet. The book walks you through some of the realities of writing full time, including the solitude and unpredictable nature of the business (read: unreliable pay).

$ix Figure Freelancing doesn’t delve into any one topic too deeply, but gives you enough information to start and research the intricacies on your own. For example, the book gives some general advice about the differences between writing as a hobby and writing as your job with regards to taxes. The author then suggests consulting an accountant or a different book specifically on the legalities and tax implications of being self employed, a pattern you will see repeated throughout the book.

One section of the book that I thought could use some bolstering was chapter 6, concerning query letters. There are a few examples given, for different types of work, including novels. I would have liked more samples, personally, but the shallowness of this chapter is similar to the rest of the structure of the book; it gets your feet wet and gives a recommendation for places to look for further information.

Be aware, though, that I’m not saying that the book is worthless. It is a good high level introduction to freelancing from an experienced freelance writer–a writer who has published many articles in mainstream magazines and published books about topics other than writing, not just a writer whose primary claim to fame is books about writing. However, if you need this book, you will also need more books (she recommends several), or some other source of information about your potential markets and being self employed.

Half the book is common sense, the other half is enough to get you started. The language is friendly and informal, and the print is large. If you’re considering a jump to freelancing but you don’t know anything about the business, I would recommend it. Plus, it’s only $10.47 through Amazon, with free shipping. I don’t even have a referral link, so I’m not going to make any money off of you getting it.

I’m going to start reading Robert W. Bly’s Secrets of a Freelance Writer next.

We said our goodbyes to my brother in Reston and started up toward Pennsylvania and New York. We decided to stay on the Canadian side of the border, for some reason I can’t remember now; possibly for cheaper hotel rates. Although I didn’t get any pictures of the town of Niagara Falls, Canada, believe me when I say it’s kind of an ugly little tourist town, but with some redeeming features.

The streets can be very steep, so wear some decent walking shoes. There are lots of eating establishments and entertainment venues for the traveler looking to lighten their wallets of some of their heavy dollars. Definitely worth a look around if you’re in town. We ate at a restaurant owned by Kelsey Grammer, and the food wasn’t bad, if a bit expensive (nearly $20 a person for sandwiches and a drink). We didn’t flinch at the cost, however; it’s a tourist town, that sort of thing is to be expected.

We had a mixed view from our hotel room, as you can see from the pictures in the gallery. We could see lots of lights and towers, but right below us was the dingy, dirty parking lot for the hotel. It was very well lit.

The Falls themselves are a great treat if you’ve never seen anything like them before. Watching the thousands (I’m just making this up, it could be millions or hundreds) of gallons of water pouring over the falls every second made me feel like this was an artery of the Earth, pumping blood for a giant of such magnitude that dwarfed my insignificant viewpoint. The flat ocean just doesn’t convey the same amount of power and weight that tons of water falling does. I suppose that feeling is a small part of what people on the ocean in rough weather, or people facing a tsunami, might feel.

We got the tickets to go behind the Falls, and that was a 4 on the excite-o-meter. It was a cool perspective, but it was very limited (and slippery). The real excitement was riding the Maid of the Mist. No, pervert, it’s a boat. Actually, there are several boats named Maid of the Mist with a Roman numeral following to tell them apart. If you take one of these boats, you’ll realize where they get the “Mist” part of their names.

First, you don a cheap plastic poncho. Then you take the several minute ride to the Falls, all the while hearing the roar of the water getting louder and louder. At your closest point to the Falls, the noise is deafening, and the spray is constant (and cold, depending on the weather.) Definitely an interesting and unique experience, and I highly recommend it.

See my gallery for photos and possibly more insight.

I didn’t realize the theme didn’t have register/login links. Fixed that. The stampede begins!

I’m playing around with new themes.

The blocks at the top are buttons that you can press to change the background. Unfortunately, the first time you load the page, it’s quite slow. Sorry about that, but I really like being able to have a variety of backgrounds for people to choose from.

I’ve been brainwashed over the years by listening to a few distinguished published writers talk about how they don’t outline. They say they get a general idea for a story and they let it go where it will.

I had an idea for a story. I eventually called it Dark Glass, and I have about 17,000 words written, but it stalled when I got to a certain point because I hadn’t established enough of a structure. I didn’t realize that was the problem, I just kept picking it back up and putting it back down.

So, I’m doing an outline. I’m using Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces to help me flesh out parts of it. I’d recommend to anyone interested in mythology, history, historical literature, or writing of any kind to pick up this book. Mostly I’m using his terms for things I’ve already established, but it works as a nice crutch for someone who hasn’t finished one novel yet. Maybe once I finish one novel and become more confident in my own style and vision I’ll be able to fly solo. For now, though, Campbell is my copilot™.

We said our goodbyes to my wife’s friends and headed up to the D.C. area. We had to look all over the internet before we left to try to find decent hotel prices; Reston is a terribly expensive place to try to get a hotel room. Unless you book ahead, you’re looking at $150 a night. We ended up staying at a hotel several minutes from my brother’s apartment, and it was still too expensive.

We met up with my brother at a restaurant slash microbrewery that I usually end up visiting when I’m in town. Good steak, great service, and a wide variety of beers to choose from, and the beer menu is usually different every time I go since my visits are months if not years apart. I get the beer sampler, which is 6 beers in small glasses, and then a followup of whichever beer I enjoyed the most of the group.

Our next order of business (not directly next; steak and beer = a good night’s sleep at the hotel) was to see a bit of D.C. while we were in town. I’d never been to the Smithsonian museums before, so my wife and I took the subway into D.C. from our hotel about 20 minutes away. We had to purchase a parking card for the parking structure and subway passes. A pain in the rear, but compared with driving in downtown D.C., it’s a blessing.

We had a few priorities on our list, and unfortunately we weren’t able to see everything because we didn’t want to spend three months on the road. We had to make painful decisions about which musems and attractions to see. We ended up going to the Museum of Natural History, which could be three days of viewing in itself.

There were thousands of fossilized remains. There were reconstructions of animals and charts and movies on the differences in the different periods of archaeological history. There was a whole wing devoted to mineralogical information, including many gem and metal displays, some of them interactive. Of special interest to me was the meteorite exhibit, featuring carefully bisected meteorites.

I’d taken a lot of pictures by this time, so my camera battery was very low. I put the camera away, and concentrated on experiencing. We saw the Hope Diamond, and so many other things that my head was swimming with images. I would love to go back some time and revisit some of the exhibits I breezed through.

Our next stop was the Air and Space Museum. Interesting stuff here, like early jet engines and physics exhibits, but my camera was dead, like I said, so I can’t show it to you. The interactive physics exhibits were neat to play with. Motion of objects in a vacuum, air pressure, principles of flight, etc.

We met my brother in the A&S Museum and saw a movie in the IMAX theater. The movie was cool, but I don’t remember what it was about. A lot of stars and stuff.

After the A&S museum, we went to the International Spy Museum. It was really cool! I would definitely recommend this if you’re in the area. The decor and tour is really designed to get you into the mood for learning about the history and technology of espionage. At the beginning, you’re asked to memorize facts about a new identity, and near the end of your visit, you are asked about them. This is a test of your memory and ability to memorize quickly and assume a role. It’s a neat way to start.

The exhibits were very well done and we had fun, even though a lot of the “museum” is glitz and polish. Even the gift shop at the end was entertaining, with a lot of toy spy gadgets and other unusual items you might not expect.

If and when we go back to D.C., I still want to see the American History Museum, the Library of Congress, the place where they make money (treasury? mint?), the Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson monuments slash memorials respectively, and tours of the Capitol Building or White House, but I think those have to be scheduled in advance.

After leaving the coast behind (with not a small amount of regret), our next stop took us to Newport News, Virginia, where my wife has some good friends.

One couple she knows let us stay on a hide-a-bed in their spare room while we were in town. The wife plays EverQuest (or used to; she might play World of Warcraft exclusively now) and the husband is very much involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism. These guys aren’t playing around; they put on realistic suits of armor and beat each other black and blue and sometimes worse with their blunt weapons. Their SCA chapter has a royalty and a whole hierarchy surrounding them, although from what I understand there is a democratic process behind their selection. There are many SCA chapters around the world, usually geographically based.

I went to an SCA meeting once, as a guest. It was a class in Illumination, which is the process of taking a text and transcribing it, and then elaborating on it with drawings using colored inks, to make the page a work of art as well as literature. The most famous examples of this art are old Bibles, especially the amazing Book of Kells. Anyway, I don’t even recall how I met the guy who took me, but he invited me to go, and I, being curious in many things including the sorts of things the SCA was known for, accepted his invitation.

The class itself was fairly uninteresting, because I don’t recall much of it. What I do recall is gripping the doorhandles of the guy’s car (I don’t remember his name) as he swerved dangerously back and forth on the road while driving. He was either intoxicated, incompetent, or insane. Likely he was at least two of those. He ran over curbs, scared pedestrians, and likely I was paler than usual during his obscene dance with death. I survived, we made it to the class, and then, I had to endure the torturous trip back to my home, where I amazingly arrived unscathed. I never spoke to him again. Perhaps it was PTSD that erased my memory of the class.

Anyway, anecdote aside, we stayed for a few days and visited with her friends, then we continued on our way to Reston, Virginia, which is about 20 minutes outside of D.C. Some pictures are up in the gallery, but I will write it up tomorrow.

Online forums are the breeding grounds of the modern gangs. Let me explain from the beginning.

In the olden days, when most people didn’t use the Internet, if someone wanted to socialize with others and get personal affirmation from a group of like-minded individuals, they joined a club, either formally or informally. Sometimes informal clubs grew up to be formal clubs, like a chess club at your local high school, motorcycle enthusiasts, or Bloods. Forming into groups gave them strength in numbers. These powers could be used for good or evil. Another word for an informal grouping of individuals, having a nefarious tint, is a gang.

A gang is a group of individuals who share a common identity. In current usage, gang most commonly refers to small, sometimes informal and loosely organized “street gangs”, usually controlling a “turf” through readiness to use violence against other gangs, and typically engaged in other criminal activities.

Today, in addition to the numerous clubs spread across meatspace, many groups with similar interests have formed in “cyberspace.” In order for these groups to form a social bond, there has to be a common medium through which they can communicate. In the earliest days of the Internet, groups coalesced using Internet Relay Chat, one of the earliest examples of group-oriented software, or groupware. IRC allowed for specific channels, like CB radio, but also allowed for direct person to person communication, a hierarchy of powers used to moderate and administer, and file transfers. To this day, most groupware replicates the majority of these same abilities. The most common examples of this today would be forum software, such as phpBB and vBulletin. These programs, hosted on a computer that allows access from the Internet, allow their users to write “posts” as a metaphor for the paper notes affixed to corkboard bulletin boards used in common places like schools, grocery stores, etc. Other people can reply, and these posts or threads turn into conversations. Some of these conversations can last months or years, and can generate huge amounts of online “buzz.”

Now, the interesting part of this phenomenon isn’t that people are using the Internet to form social groups; it’s only natural for human beings to reach out to others and attempt to interact, even electronically, with people who share a common interest. No, the interesting part is that anonymous gangs are forming behind the pseudonyms on these forums, and they are causing damage collectively.

For example, a guy named Hal Turner who ran some web site, had a call-in show where he received numerous prank calls, all based out of some forum where the users disagreed with something he said. He attempted to track down and get a little revenge on the pranksters, but it quickly escalated into an all-out war. His wife and son were threatened with physical harm, and eventually resulted in the removal of Mr. Turner’s web site because of the amount of disruption caused by the irate forum users. This is one example of how a group of online users can, formally or informally, wreak havok through simultaneous action. The power of the Internet in this example is that you can easily gather strength in numbers because you are not limited by the physical requirements of having a meeting on real ground in a real building, or even in a park, garage, or basement. There are no permits required beyond the ability to have your messages seen by others online.

A similar example of this phenomenon is the flash mob. Simply defined, a flash mob is “a large group of people who gather in a usually predetermined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse.” These people are informed of the impending event via e-mail or cell phone. This Wired article describes a flash mob formed in Manhattan for the purpose of impersonating a group looking for a large rug on which to engage in sexual congress with one another.

These mobs often have humorous or artistic motivations, but have also been used as a mask for criminal activities. The flash mob would descend upon a retail store, overwhelming employees with their numbers. The thieves can then move freely through the store taking what they want, their only concerns being the security cameras.

The interesting thing about the flash mob and the forum gang are their anonymity. You may receive an e-mail or private message in the forum or read a post that inspires you to go out in real life or reach out through your computer — and you don’t even know the person, you don’t know if they’re taking the same risks you are, or even if they are who they represent themselves as being. These online gangs and flash mobs often participate in actions on the spur of the moment, without thought to consequences or reasons. Many flash mobs are harmless, and forum gangs don’t often focus their actions on inflicting harm, but it happens, and the anonymizing aspect of the Internet and call phone networks somehow loosens people’s inhibitions to the point where they would do things they wouldn’t normally do.

I would suppose that groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations where members act disguised have taken advantage of this same phenomenon for many years, and technology just enables these gangs to be larger and more agile.

My last post didn’t have much in the way of discussion, so here’s a follow-up.

Since it had been in the 70′s and 80′s before we left, and we were just going to the coast, we didn’t even have light jackets. It was early summer, and to save room in the car (as mentioned previously) we shipped as much as possible, including our light and medium jackets.

We stayed in a generic chain hotel across the street from the beach (the only available King size beds). The weather was cloudy and cool with spats of rain on and off the whole time we were there. Mother Nature was brooding, setting an ominous tone to the start of our trip. We visited the Bodie Island lighthouse and the very famous Hatteras lighthouse.

The Bodie Island lighthouse was not open to the public. It was kind of interesting because it had a few wooden walkways above the swamp-ish area around the lighthouse, with a few wildlife placards like you see at these kinds of touristy places. I was asked to take pictures for another family on vacation. I get that now more that I’m married; I guess I look safe.

The Hatteras lighthouse was open to the public, but our timing was bad, so we didn’t get to go up in it. Click the link for more details on that. The Hatteras lighthouse was in fact rebuilt some time in the past because of problems with its foundation I believe. See the album for more information and photos of the old location, a monument to it, and photos from the Hatteras lighthouse museum. The musem was very interesting, featuring the kinds of things you’d seen in a maritime museum; relics from ships, photos of sailors, etc.

The moment from the trip that sticks most in my mind, though, was when I was on the beach at the hotel. I took my sandals off and took in the ocean for what might be the last time for a very long time; possibly the last time. A fierce melancholy and regret for opportunities lost rose up and threatened to overwhelm me. But then I thought, I’m closing a chapter in my life, but starting a new one in the West. I’ll go to the Pacific and dip my toes in before too long. And in the meantime, I’ll have the mountains of Colorado to keep me company.