The Most Peaceful Christmas Songs of All Time

In my previous post, I explained my theme this year for Christmas, which is peace.  Here is a list of the Christmas songs which sing of peace, be they Christian of origin, or written by those silly fluffy hippies we're all supposed to hate.

Starting with the hippiest hippy of them all, John Lennon, in Happy Xmas.

Bing Crosby & David Bowie sing Little Drummer Boy with additional lyrics:

Peace on Earth, Good Will To Men

I've had a lot of mixed feelings about Christmas over the years.  As a kid, I felt alternately excited and guilty.  Excited: obvious.  Guilty because my parents went overboard when buying me gifts, and I never seemed to have enough money to buy them anything they really wanted, and I was bad at buying gifts anyway.

When I was a teen, the excitement gave way to guilt and fear.  Fear that I wouldn't be excited enough or grateful enough or happy enough that I'd forget to buy gifts, which I usually did.  I secretly hid a lot of depression and social anxiety as a teen, and Christmas really brought that out.  At holiday family gatherings I was often at the brunt of most of the teasing.  There were peaceful and loving moments during this time as well, but I tend to forget those since pain is much louder than joy.

In my early twenties, as a single mom, I had a couple of really great Christmases.  I was on my own, in my own place, making my own choices.  I found a lot of spirituality and peace during this time.  I was still Mormon, and my boy really small.  Everything was very magical at this time in my life, and somehow I tapped into the "True Meaning of Christmas".  I remember listening to a lot of music, like Mannheim Steamroller and a Mormon production called The Forgotten Carols (both of which I would still recommend to this day).  A Fresh Aire Christmas had a lot of choir music that is really beautiful, like Veni Veni, Emmanuel.

When I lost religion, I became very cynical around Christmas.  Its blatant commercialism became clear to me, which rang chimes with my feelings of guilt and fear as a child.  I had mixed feelings about the idea that only a baby god child could bring peace to the earth... a peace which never seemed to come, in spite of the promises of angels on high.

I Am the Crazy Uncle

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. - Richard Bach

I feel like I have become the Crazy Uncle of my family.

The timing is about right. My Crazy Uncle passed away about seven years ago, around the time I moved to Seattle, and about that time it was starting to be clear to most of my family that I wasn't Mormon anymore, and wasn't ever going to be again. My strange family has always tended toward estrangement. We were always too busy with our own activities, or caught taking sides in a who-hurt-whose-feelings war. But after that, whatever distance was already there just grew and grew.

My Crazy Uncle was weird because he took myth too far, with his conspiracy theories and demons and conspiracy theories about demons. He would call my mom every few months to talk her into buying gold or silver, or to invest in garnet mines or whatever scheme he'd gotten into his head. Because the economy was about to collapse, any minute, he'd say. Edgar Casey was right, he'd say. Mt. Rainier is going to blow up so you guys need to move to where it's safer, in Ohio. He'd had a vision, he'd say, and plead with my mom to take this action or that.

And now and then, she'd even be convinced by him, just a little. I remember the time we bought silver at $4.25 an ounce, and waited for it to shoot up in price like he said it would. We waited for the world to end so it would be worth something. But there it stayed at $4.25 an ounce for years.

I grew up in a system of thought that was waiting for the world to end anyway,

Why Crazy Wins

These days there's a lot of crazy.  In all debates in the courts of public ideas, be they political, spiritual, moral, or cultural, the ideas most in the fringe seem to dominate.

In preparation for NaNoWriMo, I've been reading a lot about plot and story.  20 Master Plots and How To Build Them is an excellent resource, (as is Story by Robert McKee).  Every plot must focus on drama, on the tension of an unresolved problem, an unreasonable antagonist, a goal worth dying for, overwhelming passions, major strengths, massive weaknesses.  Unmovable objects vs irresistible forces.

Writers are encouraged to bring the tension to a tipping point; to make it seem like there is no way out, to stack the odds to the point where your protagonist is sure to lose (even if she wins in the end).

No matter the plot, there must be drama, or your reader will yawn and put the book down.

Frustrating conflict is great for stories.  But it's not so great for real life.  In real life, be it personal or political, drama leads to sadness, tears, hardships, and destruction.  On the grander scale, it can lead to lost jobs, hunger, crime, injustice, and even death and war.  In real life, it reaches a point where it is no longer entertainment, though it may seem so to viewers who watch it from afar.

All plots can be placed in two categories: Physical or mental, force or fraud, tragedy or comedy, outward action or inward movement.  Whatever you call it, all plots emphasize one of these, while the other takes a backseat or doesn't exist at all.  The action story will focus on physical resolution to tension.  The murder mystery or romantic comedy will solve it via the mind or character development.

Back to real life.  In the past, power was often won by force.  There was no such thing as the Bill of Rights to protect people, so whoever could suppress the people at the point of the sword, or who ever could kill the king, won the day.  Force is still very much a powerful tool, but in stable democratic nations, it is likely to backfire.  And so today those who seek power must resort to mental strategies.

Don't Throw the Booth Babe Out With The PAX Water - My Take on the Dickwolves Controversy

Trigger Warning: Dickwolves Ahead

A lot of people I know and follow on Twitter have talked about boycotting PAX over the dickwolves controversy.  Recaps abound all over the internet, but here's a timeline and a summary from my point of view:

PAX is a very large gaming con run by the guys who write the webcomic Penny Arcade.  Last year, they wrote a strip (see "dickwolves" link above) making fun of quests in MMORPGs.  Typically these quests go like this:  Save five slaves.  Leave the other fifteen to rot.  Move on to next quest while more slaves spawn in behind you.  The joke is that games don't make sense, and in fact encourage our fictional-selves to be jerks.

The controversy is over the use of rape in the joke.  The (male) slave declares that he is going to be raped to sleep every night by dickwolves, but not even this persuades the heartless hero, who has other quests to complete.

Most of the controversy arose months after I read this strip (and LOLed).  Gabe and Tycho issued a funny apology where, in spite of the humor, they make it clear they do not condone rape.  Later they pulled their dickwolves merchandise, but not the comic.  Again, that first link is the quickest way for you to get up to speed here.

Gabe and Tycho have actually received death threats over this, so yeah, it's a pretty big deal.

Nevertheless, I happily attended PAX Prime 2011.  The subject came up in Twitter several times over the year, and each time, I tried to describe in 140 characters or less why a boycott is the worst possible reaction (second to making death threats).  But Twitter is a poor place to make effective arguments about sensitive and complex topics such as these, hence a post.

I've been attending cons since 1995, and of them all, PAX is the most female-friendly.  I want to support that.  More, I want to continue to influence con culture by being a strong woman with strong opinions.  That's how culture improves.  Each of us makes our little waves in the best way we can, trying to persuade.  We don't take our toys and go home.  That doesn't persuade anyone.  As con culture improves, we need to continue to participate fully.  Now is not the time to abandon the community just because we're all now more aware of what has always gone on.

Fact: Geek culture is hostile towards women.  It always has been.  It won't always will be.  This past year there have been a lot of other controversies, which in my opinion, are far more worthy of outrage.  Like actual harassment at Apachecon against a speaker and board member.  After that a lot of women came out of the woodwork to tell their own stories, and I realized I have a few of my own that I could look at in a new light.  Instead of feeling shame, which was my original reaction, I realized I could feel empowered and set boundaries and push back.

Defcon Badge Contest: In General

Of my four years of going to Defcon, I had the most fun this year at Defcon19.

Granted, my first year was pretty fun.  There were lots of antics going on, and I went to a lot of talks.  And Defcon17, we got an invite to the Facebook party at Studio54 where DualCore and YTCracker were playing.  And last year, Defcon18, was kind of a blur.

But none of those years had a badge hacking contest I could actually participate in.

When I heard the badge this year was going to be non-electronic, I scowled.  I waxed cynical.  I joked to people that they were going to print the badges on hot-pink cardstock.  It was hard to imagine any badge being as cool as this, this, or this.

As with every year, there were not enough badges.  Here's a quick summary of just how lucky I was to even get one.  I got in line at 2:50 on Thursday.  I stood in line for an hour and a half, the line stopped 14 people away from the front, waited 30 minutes, got told lots of conflicting information about badge availability and wait-times, waited longer, got to the front of the line, got told more metal badges on there way, but if I registered right then I'd get a badge of shame paper badge non-redeemable for a metal badge later, heard there were badges left at Caesar's Palace (where Blackhat was letting out), left the line, tried to call Roland so he could get me a badge there but my phone battery died, heard that all metal badges were gone for good, Roland arrived from Caesar's, got back in line for two hours, and 25 people away from the front of the line it stopped again, then heard the good news ripple up from the front: A small Fedex package had arrived with a small number of metal badges.

Color me ecstatic and incredibly lucky.  Here's a picture of my beautiful badge:

And not only is it stamped on antiqued oxidized titanium, printed on the last supply of .040"sheet-titanium left in the United States, but it is also part of a complex series of puzzles, a conspiracy if you will, that permeated the entire con.

Defcon Badge Contest: In Specific

The grand post probably none of you have been waiting for.  My previous post is an overview of the badge contest.  This post gets into the very detailed list of clues and theories and musings.  It will only be interesting to participants of the contest, and even then, we only actually solved a couple of things.  So if you're looking for answers, it's likely that here you will only find more questions. :)

That being said, I stole got a few solutions from other people who were weak and capable of being social engineered willing to share their findings.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy Was A Bear: Killing 'Was' Brings Prose To Life

Every time our writer's group gets a new writer, I give a certain speech: Was is a dead-word.  Kill it.  It is the low-hanging-fruit of better writing, an alarm that jumps off the page and demands, "Make me more interesting!"

Was is clearly a verb, but doesn't move.  It offers no description or action.  It notifies us that a thing exists, but tells nothing about how it exists or what it is doing.  The nouns and adverbs that follow it will surely describe more, but that is no excuse.  Replacing a was is an easy opportunity to make prose more colorful and active - and possibly a chance to trim extra words. 

Was (and his sister were) is also a warning that something may be amiss.  Many was's indicate that the passive voice was used.  (See what I did there?)  It can also indicate that the writer was using an extra verb that can simply be cut.  (See what I did there again?)

So what do we do with those was's?  Some of them are extremely easy to cut if you know the tricks.  Some are troublesome -- you know it needs to go, but how?  And some are impossible to remove.  Moreover, not all was's are bad.  Fuzzy Wuzzy really was a bear, and I can't think of any better way to say it.  And there are other factors to consider -- like voice, rhythm, and pacing -- and it we don't want to sacrifice those, do we?  Sometimes not.

So let's start with the easy was fixes, and move up to the more complex.

Replace with a more active verb.

The soldier was on the hill.

Snore.  There he was.  On a hill.  Boring.  I want to know more about that soldier; I want to see him.  Here, the was indicates the author is telling, not showing.

The simplest fix: Find another verb.   

The soldier stood on the hill.

It's still kind of boring, but maybe the soldier is boring, and he'll be doing something exciting in a moment.  Maybe we don't want to distract the reader with what that soldier is doing, because all we need say is that he's there, and the real action is coming up from a different direction.  But maybe the soldier is doing something else while he's standing there, and it is I, the author, who is being boring.  Here are a few better examples:

The soldier waited on the hill.
The soldier paused on the hill.
The soldier hid on the hill.
The soldier gripped the side of the hill.
The soldier watched from the hill.
The soldier shivered on the hill.

All of these examples give more depth, more information about the emotional state or intentions of the character.

The last one is my favorite.  He's still just standing on the hill, but with just one word-change, he is now feeling something and we know

Exporting Outlook Express Files to .eml

I know this isn't a tech help blog, but I searched the web for how to do this, and couldn't find it.  Turns out it's really easy, so it needs to be recorded.

Problem:

I have an old laptop gathering dust that I want to decommission.  I want to save five years of old emails stored in Outlook Express 6.  I now exclusively use Gmail, so I want them in a format I can refer to, even decades from now when no one's ever heard of Outlook.  The most standard format I've ever run across is .eml, which is not only recognized by a number of email clients, but worst-case it is text-based, so neatly viewable in Notepad.

However, Outlook Express doesn't let you do a mass-export of everything into .eml.  When I tried clicking and dragging 4000 messages into a Windows Explorer folder (which works for small groups of messages), it would pop up the message, "Error copying file or folder.  Cannot create or replace email: There is already a folder with the same name as the file name you updated.  Specify a different name."

The Role of Agents in the Post-Publishing World

This subject has come up a couple of times this week in various blogs.  Scott Nicholson calls agents Unnecessary Evils in Self-Publishing Agents: Unnecessary Evils, and Debbi Mack says she can do everything any e-stributor might do in The 15 Percent Solution.

In some ways, I agree with both.  Services provided by traditional agents are now something of a rip-off, especially if you're a well-rounded person with an eye for design and the ability to make contacts and do business.  Agents have an upper-hand, and this gives the profession a reputation of haughtiness.  They're not any kind of solution because they're part of the problem that we're fleeing, right?  So who needs 'em?

But I do see a role for something.  Let's face it -- not all writers are comfortable with certain aspects of the business-side of writing.  Moreover, even those of us who are comfortable with it, may eventually find some of those detailed tasks distracting... in other words, it may end up being more profitable to shell out 15% so we can focus on doing what we do better -- writing.

We may not call them agents -- though I think there's nothing wrong with using this term.  (As Debbi points out, an agent is “one who is authorized to act for or in place of another; a representative.”)  In this sense, agent is the perfect word.  He may not be trying to sell your book to an editor any longer, and instead may himself be editing your book, hiring a proof-reader, lining up a cover artist, and writing marketing blurbs for Amazon and Smashwords, but these are still representational activities.  To help eliminate confusion, let's call this new breed "indie agents".

Whatever it's called, there is a niche -- something writers will be willing to pay for, and people willing to do the work -- so it will be filled by someone. 

As a self-publishing indie author, I've made a list of activities I might personally find valuable enough to pay 10-20% of my earnings for.  This list is not all-inclusive.  There are many activities I haven't thought of, that other authors need help with, and those would be added to such a list of services.

• Career guidance - Keep a general eye on the markets and offer advice on things like trends in genres, which books to push and which to let go for a while, movements in pricing, trends in marketing, etc.
• Help with marketing, or at least marketing advice - For example, she could submit things to review blogs, or even just tell me which review blogs are worth the time. An agent may even have connections that could accelerate marketing efforts or lend me credibility.
• Editing and proofing. That's right. I've read that many agents are doing editing now instead of editors anyway. If they don't do it themselves, they could farm it out.
• Lining up cover artists, designers, formatters, copywriters for the blurbs, etc.  Negotiating the contracts.
• Handling the business and legal side. Someone to fill the role of "Talk to my agent".  Looking over any miscellaneous contracts to make sure they're legit.
• Eventually some of us indies are going to reach the level of Neil Gaiman, and have speaking engagements all over the world. You're going to need an agent for that. Likewise for film deals, etc.
• Support - Some agents fill the role of emotional support and encouragement. Given the drastic ups and downs of this job, this is helpful for some of us. Where are you going to find an on-demand therapist or life coach (besides in a spouse)? But some agents fill this role for authors.

In a way, you're getting two services for cheaper than the price of one: Editor and Agent.  Instead of costing you 80%+15%, it costs you 30% (Amazon's cut)+15%+misc direct fees for outside services.  Let's do a little thought experiment with some rough math, and see where it leads.

It's common knowledge that the more novels you have available, the more you sell.  (That's the topic of another blog post.)  If you spend all your time marketing your one book, and never write books two, three, and four, you're not spending your time efficiently.  The same would go for the other distracting activities I've listed above.

Let's say I currently have three books for sale on Amazon for $2.99 each.  I sell 100 copies a month, and spend 40% of my time on the "business" side: marketing, studying the markets, lining up services, formatting my own work, and so on.  Let's say I also spend more time editing my own work than I should, when after a while I just can't see past my own mistakes.  And I have a bad eye for art, so I pick a poor cover designer, and can't explain to them what I want.  I'm making about $200/month, and am making slow progress on my next novel.

Now let's say I get an indie agent and agree to pay 15% for them to do the distracting things.  For now, I pay them $30/month, but the more money I make the higher that number will go.  But that's a good thing, right?  Because if the indie agent is helping me make more, then it's a fair deal, right?

Now I still have to spend some time doing the business side.  I need to approve cover art, integrate the suggested edits and proofs, make decisions about any movie deals (ha!), and so on.  But now I have an adviser, who is keeping up on the industry, who is doing the most boring aspects, and giving good advice about what I should do.  Now I only spend 10% of my hours on the tedium, and have twelve extra hours per week to write.  Not only that, but the quality of that time is improved -- I don't know about you, but for me, the little distractions get my mind off my story and depleate my energy beyond just the house consumed.

That means my next novel comes out sooner.  Not only that, but my agent, who can focus on this kind of thing, is doing a great job writing blurbs, which is helping my existing three novels to sell faster.  And she got me a couple of interviews on blogs, and a few extra reviews, and now momentum is starting to pick up.  Not only that, but she knows a really great editor who fits my style of writing, who has suggested lots of great changes on my new novel, which makes me a better writer.

Now it's a year later, novel four is released, and I'm selling 500 copies a month.  That's $1000 -- $800 more than I made before.  The agent gets $150, but so what?  Even then, it's $650 more than I made, plus I'm that much father ahead for when book five comes out.

I'm not completely sure I'd make this wager.  But it is compelling.  And I happen to have a good eye for art and can make business deals when I need to.  I know how to do the marketing, and know where to look for trends in the industry, etc.  I can do it, I just don't want to.

But I do know for sure there are a lot of great writers who want nothing to do with the business side.  Ever.  They're not good at it, and they never will be.  They couldn't tell a good cover from a stain on the floor, and can't read the first line of a Terms of Service contract without bursting into tears. 

For that reason alone, I am confident that this role is going to exist, and plenty of writers will be willing to pay for it.