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2 Literary University of Iowa MOOC’s 4U

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Like many institutions of higher learning, the University of Iowa (my alma mater) has begun offering Massive Open Online Courses. Given that Iowa is home to both the Iowa Writers Workshop and the International Writing Program it’s not surprising that the initial offerings play to those strengths.

The first course, which began in mid-February but is still open for registration, features an in-depth look at Whitman’s A Song of Myself. If you’re interested in poetry, the roots of modern poetry, American history, the roots of American individualism, or Whitman himself, you can’t go wrong here.

The second course, which begins in June, is called here, or run this search. The original site/pages seem to have been relocated at least once, making them hard to find.

— Mark Barrett

On Being a Successful Writer

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If you have an interest in writing, and at some point you feel you’ve become a writer, is being a writer success in itself? If not, why not?

How should writers measure success? How should non-writers measure the success of writers? Should writers pay attention to what non-writers think about success? Should writers pay attention to how other writers define success?

Can the success of a writer be measured objectively? In judging your own success are there specific metrics that matter to you? The number of fans you have? The amount of money you make? The number of awards you receive? The nature of the awards you receive?

Are all award-winning writers successful? Can a writer be successful without winning awards?

If you make money as a writer are you successful? Is your measure of success tied to how much money you make? Can you be successful as a writer if you don’t make money writing?

If you never win an award and you never make any money but you have devoted fans are you successful? If you don’t think you’re successful does that make your fans wrong?

Are subjective measures of success more or less valid than objective measures? Is that true for all writers?

Is your definition of a successful writer fixed or does it change over time? Is your sense of your own success fixed or does it change over time?

Do you measure success relative to your writing or how your writing is received? Both? If you write something you don’t respect and it makes a lot of money or wins a lot of awards or pleases the public, have you been successful? What if you write something that garners no interest but you believe to be your best work? Is that success? Failure?

Is it possible to objectively prove some writers are good and some writers are bad? Do you believe good writers eventually succeed and bad writers inevitably fail?

Is there such thing as a failed writer? Is that something writers decide about themselves or something non-writers say about writers? Is a failed writer someone who failed at the craft of writing? Someone who failed to make money writing? Someone who failed to turn writing into a career?

Does writing itself sustain you, or do you need feedback from others? Are you driven by the process of writing or the outcome? Both? If you could choose only one, which would you choose?

When it comes to defining success as a writer you get to choose what success means to you. Choose carefully.

— Mark Barrett

On Being A Writer

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If you have an interest in writing, what will it take for you to think of yourself as a writer? If you already think of yourself as a writer, what convinced you? If you write but don’t think of yourself as a writer, why not?

What does it mean to be a writer? Is being a writer like being a plumber? A doctor? A cleric? A singer?

What does it mean to be anything? Does it mean that label is your whole life, or what you’re doing at the moment, or what you’re doing at the moment for money?

Who gets to decide if you’re a writer? You? Somebody else? If somebody else, who? Your friends? Your family? An authority who knows nothing about you except what you’ve written?

What if there’s a difference of opinion? What if some people think you’re a writer and others don’t? Does it matter who thinks what? If your friends think you are and your family thinks you aren’t, are you a writer? What if your family thinks you are but your friends think you aren’t? What if an authority thinks you are or aren’t?

What if nobody thinks you’re a writer but you? Can you still be a writer? Can you be a writer by yourself? Can you be a writer if no one ever reads what you’ve written? What if you write in the woods and nobody reads your work until you die? Were you a writer while you were writing? Or are you a writer only after your work is discovered?

Can you be a writer if you make a living doing something other than writing? If you’re being paid to write are you a writer? Always? Is writing a profession? A career? If you work as a writer and you stop working as a writer does that mean you’re no longer a writer?

Do you think of some writers as real writers? Are writers who make money real writers? Are writers who don’t care about money real writers? Are writers who make money better or worse than writers who make no money?

There are a lot of questions in life. There are forty-one in this post alone. Some questions can only be answered with experience. If you think of experience as making mistakes you will always be in pain. If you think of experience as learning you will never know your limits.

When does your interest in writing turn you into a writer? You get to choose.

— Mark Barrett

On Writing

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What is writing? What does it mean to write?

In thinking about those questions do you need more information before you can answer? If so, why do you feel that way?

How is all writing the same, or can all writing ever be the same? Is some writing inherently better than other writing? If so, how do you know which is which? Is that something you decide or something others decide for you?

Is writing a means or an end? Both? Always?

Does the written word inherently have value? Does the act of writing inherently have value?

I ask these questions to separate writing from the context in which writing takes place. Yes, context matters, always, but context is not writing. Writing is writing.

I believe all writing is communication. Writing can also be art and commerce, but I think the implications of writing as communication are worth considering.

You don’t have to agree with me, of course, but if you’re interested in writing for any reason — and I mean any reason at all — I don’t want you to confuse writing with fame, fortune or being an author, because those are separate things. They may spring from writing, but they are not writing.

There are many people in the world — tens if not hundreds of millions — for whom writing is intensely personal and private. These people use writing as a means of reflection and meditation. Most of their writing will never be shown to another human being yet still provides communication with the self.

If you have an interest in writing, protect it. It doesn’t matter what age you are, what your educational background is or isn’t, or anything else. Don’t let anyone trivialize or denigrate your interest in writing.

There are people who believe words are sacred and only certain people should be allowed to use them. Words are not sacred. You are sacred. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is to be ignored.

There is a lot in life that cannot be communicated through language, let alone writing. At times there really are no words. Encountering the limits of writing is as interesting as discovering what writing can do.

You are not obligated to tell anyone that you are interested in writing. You get to keep your interest private unless you want to talk about it. You don’t have to justify it or defend it, and no one who cares about you will ask you to.

What is writing? You get to choose.

— Mark Barrett

Five (More) CSS Tips for Beginners

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Even if you’re an absolute beginner, making changes to an existing CSS style sheet is not complicated. Yes, there are things you need to learn, and computer code is often unforgiving, but as I hope I explained in the previous post the basics are easy to grasp. Fuel your own initiative with a reference site like W3Schools, where you can pick up tips and information as needed, or even try out techniques before implementing them, and the only thing standing between you and success will be the bitter realization that an innocent misstep may lead to hours of hysteria because you don’t know how to protect yourself from your own ignorance. So let’s solve that problem.

Whatever goals you have for learning or even just tinkering with CSS, the first thing you need to do is see those goals in context. Yes, finding the exact right shade of green for your hyperlinks is important, but so is ensuring the stability and functionality of your site. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about making changes or even making mistakes when you’re working with computer code as long as you know how to protect yourself from inevitable errors. That protection begins with making sure you can always get back to the most recent stable build, even after you’ve made (and forgotten about) multiple changes.

1. CTRL-Z IS YOUR FRIEND. CTRL-Y IS YOUR OTHER FRIEND.
If you’ve been using a computer for any length of time you probably know that pressing and holding the Control (Ctrl) key, then simultaneously pressing the Z key will undo the most recent action in many applications. Most word-processing and image-editing software uses this convention, and the same holds true for many of the applications used to edit CSS style sheets.

If you make a change to the CSS in your style sheet, then upload the change and get results you’re not expecting, you can usually press Ctrl-Z to undo your mistake. Since mistakes are quite often unintentional you may not even be sure what you did to cause the problem, so Ctrl-Z can be a real lifesaver. Even better, many applications allow for multiple undos, so you can go back through five, twenty or even fifty edits. (Check the documentation to determine the exact number.) Since some mistakes become apparent only after multiple changes, Ctrl-Z may be the only way to step back through the sequence that triggered the problem.

What many people don’t know is that holding the Control key down and pressing the Y key will often redo an action, meaning between Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y it’s possible to go backwards and forwards through your most recent changes. For example, maybe you made a change but forgot what the original value was and suddenly realize it’s important. With Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y you can cycle back and read the value, write it down on a piece of paper or copy it to a separate document for reference, then cycle back to where you were. (What you must not do is cycle backwards with Ctrl-Z and make a change unless you’re sure you won’t need to press Ctrl-Y again. Any change you make when you go backwards with Ctrl-Z necessarily starts a new Ctrl-Y sequence in the application’s memory at that point.)  [ Read more ]

The Most Important CSS Tip for Beginners Ever

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This isn’t the first time I’ve tinkered with a website or tweaked a WordPress theme, but as usual it feels like it. While I do remember a few things from previous style-sheet adventures, as with all things tech the horizon is constantly receding, and what once seemed like bedrock knowledge has become obscured by an ever-evolving feature set.

In the face of such inevitable changes the only options are to stay constantly up-to-date or effectively start from scratch each time. Because nobody in their right mind would stay up-to-date on CSS if it wasn’t paying the bills, it’s probably safe to assume that any CSS hacking you intend to do is driven more by your desire to have things just so than it is by a love of code. You want things to look the way you want them to look, but because money is an object you either have to suffer the indignity of off-the-rack blogging or make those changes yourself.

I feel your pain. In order to prevent you from feeling some of the pangs and jolts I’ve experienced, however, I thought I would pass along one tip I’ve never forgotten, which has saved me more time and trouble than the sum of all the CSS knowledge I’ve gleaned from websites, books and kind strangers who took pity on me. For all I know this is a common practice even among CSS professionals, but if that’s the case it’s considered so obvious that nobody mentions it when offering tips to absolute beginners. I stumbled upon it myself by accident and only belatedly recognized it as a means of preventing the kind of frustration and disorientation that can, in more advanced cases, lead to a seventy-two hour psych hold. Sure, you laugh — or at least I hope you do — but don’t laugh too hard because CSS can perplex almost anyone.  [ Read more ]

Construction Notice

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Spring is right around the corner and that means it’s time to swap out legacy plugins and update the third-party theme I use to modern standards. This will necessarily involve a fair amount of breakage, so if you notice something’s missing or not working (or you hear plaintive wailing in the distance) that’s why.

Phase I will involve changing over to a generic WordPress theme to make sure all basic functions perform as expected.

Phase II will involve installing a new third-party theme and tweaking that theme to taste.

If past experience is any guide the entire process will take, approximately, foreeeeeeeeeever. Then, years from now, I’ll go through it all again.

Because technology.

— Mark Barrett

Two Roads Diverge

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I will be offline for a while, metaphorically following a road less-traveled. I expect that road to converge with the online world again, perhaps in 2014, but only time will tell.

The one thing I’m sure of today, after giving the issue a lot of thought, is that I can’t split focus between that journey and posting here even on an intermittent basis. As I said once long ago, my river only flows in one direction. And that’s ever more true as I grow older.

Update: Comments are back on. Whether they work as intended has yet to be determined.

— Mark Barrett

Opting Out of Sales on Amazon.com

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When I originally decided to use CreateSpace as the print-on-demand (POD) publisher for my short story collection, The Year of the Elm, one of the main attractions was its tight distribution integration with Amazon.com. (CreateSpace is a subsidiary of Amazon, and an amalgam of two companies that were acquired by Amazon in 2005.) I have always been opposed to proprietary e-book formats, so making my work available for Amazon’s e-readers was less of a draw. However, because I already offered the collection in multiple e-book formats on Smashwords, adding a Kindle version was essentially adding a market, not a product. Offering a print-on-demand paperback and selling it through Amazon, however, was a whole new proposition.

The conventional wisdom about distributing a book through Amazon is that every independent author should make their work available on that site. In fact I’d wager that every person reading this post believes that to be one hundred percent true. And as someone who felt a definite thrill when I first saw my work for sale on Amazon I understand the appeal. Instead of waiting for a publishing-industry gatekeeper to green-light participation in the market on an equal footing, Amazon makes it possible for you to green-light yourself. Who’s gong to turn that down? (I mean, other than Groucho Marx, and, apparently, me.)

Over the past two years or so, much to my surprise, I have slowly come to the realization that my work doesn’t and probably never will belong on Amazon.com. Incongruously, this evolution was accelerated and crystallized over the past couple of months while trying and ultimately failing to compel the Bing search engine to find my work on CreateSpace’s out-of-the-way e-store pages. Yes, the fact that royalties are higher on CreateSpace than on Amazon is a plus, but that’s about the only obvious business-related advantage in choosing CreateSpace over Amazon. Yet I’m still convinced I’ve made the right decision.

Before exploring my rationale in detail, however, a couple of stipulations. First, there is no question that Amazon.com long ago became the default bookstore for the country if not the world. Tell most consumers to order a book and they will, without thinking, click over to Amazon because the association is that complete. Second, it is also clear that Amazon does an excellent job of facilitating purchases and fulfilling orders. Since many people already have an Amazon.com account, and because Amazon does everything possible to make purchases effortless, there is literally no easier way for most people to buy a book.

Given those two truths, it should be obvious that any self-published author who chooses not to make their work available on Amazon.com is an idiot. And for a long time that’s how I felt as well. Until, that is, I started thinking about what I’m trying to do by self-publishing my own work, and about the relationship I want to have with my readers. That’s when it dawned on me that what Amazon.com wants and what I want are not the same thing, which in turn led to the realization that how Amazon gets what it wants is not something I want to be part of.  [ Read more ]

Self-Publishing is For Closers

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Until recently it was easy for the traditional publishing industry to puff its condescending chest out and hide behind pretense and bluster, but the staunch gatekeeping the industry practiced was always a shell game. Works and authors deemed unprofitable were labeled not good enough, while works and authors that could be packaged, edited or ghostwritten for profit were granted admission into the literary sphere.

As I’ve noted numerous times, the claim that the publishing industry provides cultural stewardship has always been a lie. The very fact that screams are now emanating from corporate publishing offices tells you that self-publishing is not inflicting cultural carnage, but merely decreasing revenue and decentralizing power in the industry. Many of the people who make their living in those offices continue to toe the party line despite the obvious shifting landscape, but at best that has been a delaying tactic and at worse complete delusion.

There will never be any shortage of celebrity-driven bilge in the literary world, but as many celebrities have discovered to their horror, having a bankable name doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want in any business. If you’re a movie star the studios will jump at the chance to produce your next genre blockbuster, but if you’re trying to fund a small-budget art film you’re going to have as much trouble raising studio money as an unknown actor with dream. The only difference is that the studio can slam the door in the unknown’s face, while they have to go out of their way to shower you with sincere and deeply felt sweet nothings. Likewise, if you’re a literary fixture or a rising star the publishing world will be happy to take another volume of whatever you’re famous for, but if you want to wander into the short-fiction weeds or publish an experimental work you’ll probably find few takers. Unless of course you’re willing to give them more of the good stuff in the bargain, in which case they’ll begrudgingly kick your pet project out the door and support it with marketing that meets the bare minimum of their impossible-to-enforce legal commitment.  [ Read more ]