Archives for May 2010

Writing Grief

May 29, 2010 By Mark 6 Comments

For the past year or two I have been living with two impending deaths. One was natural, merciful and literal. The other was unnatural, tortured and figurative. Both have both come to pass.

I have been alive long enough to know that there is no way to anticipate or speed the grieving process. There is no way to shed grief but to endure it and to respect the truth of it. I am also aware that the trend these days is to encourage people to move on with their lives, or to otherwise ignore or distract themselves from grief — advice that is often proffered by friends and family who do not want to embrace the totality of loss, or the inevitability of mortality, in their own lives.

As I have watched myself move through this process in two instances, I have noticed that as a writer I do not have the tools to accurately describe what I am thinking and feeling. Were I authoring these events I would struggle greatly to communicate the totality of what I feel as a character. [ Read more ]

Getting Back Up

May 25, 2010 By Mark 9 Comments

One of the things you learn when you find yourself lying flat on your back with metaphorical blood running out of your mouth is that the ceiling always looks different from that perspective. You see the cracks in the plaster, the peeling paint, and the old stains that were never properly sealed. It’s a lesson in point of view, as well as a reminder that you can adopt different points of view voluntarily, instead of waiting for life to knock you on your ass.

As anyone who has spent time on the web knows, internet time is a literal warping of the time-space continuum. My previous post here was a little less than two weeks ago, but it feels like ten years. In the interim I’ve watched the sun move across the walls each day, and felt the warmth as it slid across the floor and washed over me. I’ve had time to think and to rest, and with the tail of my shirt I’ve been able to stanch the flow of blood.

[ Read more ]

Taking A Punch

May 13, 2010 By Mark 6 Comments

I’ve taken a few punches over the past year. Some of them were economic, some were emotional, but they’ve all taken a toll.

For the time being I’m going to have to step away from this site. I hope to be back soon.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Brian O’Leary/Magellan Media

May 13, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

Every moment in time is an intersection. People come and go, events transpire, all in a murky context. Sit though enough moments and you may be able to deduce that the steady stream of ore-laden trucks passing by reveals a distant mine, a factory, or both. Stick around a while longer, and when the stream turns to a trickle you may conclude that the mine is empty, or that demand has dried up.

Paying attention is not rocket science, but it still requires concentrated thought. In a world full of shiny objects and huckster begging for mindshare, paying attention is both difficult and critical. One way to short circuit the requirement is to find people who are good at paying attention and pay attention to them. Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media Partners is one such person.

Here’s a recent example:

If devices truly are important to a business model, the people leading content companies need to embrace the technologies, not just sign off on them.

A shallow understanding presents the real threat: that we’ll keep taking our eyes off the ball to pursue the latest and greatest development.

Pointing at (even championing) shiny objects is not enough. You need to understand how devices intersect with context, demand and consumer need. I don’t have a clue about any of that, but Brian does — which is why I pay attention to him.

Stop by the site and read a few posts and you’ll see what I mean. He’s throwing down some serious clarity about publishing in an environment teeming with shiny objects and deceptive pitch-people who really are trying to make a buck off their ability to distract you.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Chuck Wendig/TerribleMinds

May 13, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

Lots of people say what they think. Chuck Wendig says it the way he thinks it:

I ride you people pretty hard. I’m like an old man on the lawn, shaking his walker at you interlopers. “Get the hell offa my property! Quit screwin’ around!” Next thing you know, I’m thumbing two homemade rock-salt shells into the breach of a double barrel. Ch-chak. “Old Man Wendig’s gonna make Swiss cheese out of our backsides again! He’s lettin’ the taco terrier out of her hermetically-sealed cage, too! It’s like Jurassic Park, and we’re the goats in the T-Rex paddock!”

I deft you to find anything similar outside of a state-run institution.

But that’s Chuck. He’s got attitude to burn, and the writing skill to weld that attitude to a web page. If you want a little entertainment with your subject matter, you’ll get a feature-film’s worth at TerribleMinds.

(I can’t tell you if Chuck’s site is safe for work or not, because for all I know you run the Hell’s Angels Deli. Still, it’s a question you might want to consider.)

But here’s the thing. Chuck isn’t just entertaining. He also knows what he’s talking about craft-wise. He knows about writing, he knows how he writes, and he knows the difference. And that puts him in a pretty small camp.

So pick yourself out a pretty one of these, and one of these, and maybe $500,000 worth of this, and head on over to Chuck’s site. He’ll welcome you with open arms, as long as you’re cool with the pulled pin.

— Mark Barrett

The Facebook Backlash

May 12, 2010 By Mark 3 Comments

A little over two weeks ago I decided I’d had enough of Facebook playing me for a punk. I deleted my small Facebook account and Ditchwalk page, and as noted earlier I felt (and still feel) no loss in doing so.

This was a personal decision. It was not a business decision. Then again one of my failings as a businessman is that I don’t have one set of morals for my customers and clients*, and another set for the people I have emotional relationships with. For that reason, if I think you’re a liar or a cheat, I’m not doing business with you even if that (potentially) hurts me more than it hurts you.

What’s been interesting to me in the aftermath of that decision is that Facebook has clearly lost control of its image. In previous instances where Facebook reneged on promises or otherwise sold out its own users, everyone (included the abused users) was eager to help Facebook recover its cachet. Now, however, I don’t see anyone coming to Facebook’s defense. In fact, there seems to be a growing trend toward stating the obvious:

Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially “out,” as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are – simply put – not trustworthy.

That’s a fairly calm paragraph from a rant by Jason Calcanis, which may be part of a growing pop-culture reassessment of Facebook as a company and as a phenomenon. When you’re at the top, there’s often nowhere to go but down — and plenty of people who would like to see you head that way. [ Read more ]

The Missing iPad Review

May 11, 2010 By Mark 12 Comments

I get the utility of hype. If you can work people into a frenzy about a given brand in a crowded marketplace, you sell more of that product. Fair enough.

But after you’ve got that spanking new Ferrari parked in the garage you’ve still got to take your three kids to school, including their sports equipment. After you’ve had that delicious pedicure or manicure, you still need to plant your garden or rake your leaves. And of course there’s all that gizmo-driven exercise equipment in your basement, which you used exactly twice.

Point being: it’s one thing to buy yourself something cool and another thing to use it in your day-to-day existence. Products that require a lot of care and maintenance generally get neither, meaning we tend to avoid those products or destroy them in short order.

Now that all of those how-the-iPad-will-change-the-fabric-of-the-universe-twice posts have faded into the coffers of Steve Jobs, I find myself confronted with a deafening silence on more banal points like utility and usability. If you’ve had an iPad for a while, and you’re using it regularly — or, alternatively, not using it regularly — I think you could corner the market on iPad news by answering any or all of the following:

What’s it like to lug an iPad around?
It weighs 1.5 pounds. You can talk all you want about how that’s super-light for a laptop, but it’s still 1.5 pounds. The average person is not built to carry a weight like that, let alone manipulate it in one or both hands. (If you think I’m kidding, grab yourself a much-easier-to-carry 1.5 pound barbell and lug it around for a day.)

[ Read more ]

Happy Happy

May 10, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

In the previous post I talked about celebrity and credibility, and referenced Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. While I was working on that post I happened to go to the local library, and there on the new-books shelf I happened to find a book by Barbara Ehrenreich called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. (To whatever degree you find this coincidence suspicious, I can only agree. Pulling her book off the shelf was one of those weird movie moments that seemed completely contrived even as I lived it.)

I finished reading the book this weekend, and I want to take a moment to say that this is a book I think everyone should read. And by everyone I mean not only Americans, but people outside the United States who are interested in understanding what makes America tick (and tic). It’s not often that a work successfully weaves various disparate cultural threads together, let alone places them in historical context, but Bright-Sided does that in spades. [ Read more ]

Celebrity, Character and Credibility

May 6, 2010 By Mark 6 Comments

There are a number of hardened memes each independent author must confront at some point in the publishing process. One of these is the platform meme, which says you have to be willing to create your own audience. As regular readers know, I equate an author’s platform with their celebrity.

Celebrity
A related publishing meme dictates that you can’t successfully leverage your platform and celebrity unless you actively engage your audience. No matter how clever your marketing is, it’s not enough to say, “Here I am!” — you also need to say, “How are you?” and “What do you think?”

There are two reasons why this engagement is deemed important. First, you must differentiate yourself from the torrent of information available to (and being broadcast at) consumers, because consumers have become experts at tuning out. Second, engagement builds the strongest possible relationship you can have with the consumer, short of asking them to move in with you. While your engagement will mean nothing to the majority of consumers, to those who are interested it may mean the difference between passing interest and brand-grade commitment.

It’s not all good news, of course. To the extent that the internet facilitates such engagement it also drives the need. While it’s literally true that the internet requires a person to opt in, as a social matter it’s assumed that everyone will do so — and this is particularly true for people who aspire to build any kind of brand awareness. Because celebrity is simply brand awareness for a person, and because celebrity brands now have the potential for direct human interaction, there is both an additional level of opportunity and obligation in engaging celebrity-interested consumers. [ Read more ]

The Information-Age Myth

May 5, 2010 By Mark 6 Comments

I went into a large, nationally-known chain store last night to buy a few things. When I what I wanted I went to the check-out lines. Because the store had too few employees handling too many customers I elected to take my five items to the twelve-items-or-less line, on the assumption that fewer items would mean a faster checkout.

Confirming the wisdom of my choice, the customer two places ahead of me breezed through checkout. Because the three women ahead of me were only buying two items as a group, I felt confident that I would be on my way in short order. (In the fable business, this is known as counting your chickens before they hatch.) [ Read more ]