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In several of his more recent posts, my eponymous character on NeilRorke.com has been talking about events in the news. The first post or two felt a little odd — almost like an out-of-body experience — but in retrospect the resistance I felt fell away quickly.

One big advantage I have with Neil is that he’s a contemporary character. He lives in the now, alongside events as they happen. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about how a period character might integrate with the web, but obviously there are some issues. Not only can’t an 18th-century vampire hunter link to contemporary sites without some sort of narrative explanation (time travel?), but linking at all from a walled-off period site might be enough to shatter suspension of disbelief.

I don’t know where the line is with Neil or any contemporary character. Maybe there’s some subject matter that would blow readers out of the fictional world Neil lives in. Maybe he can’t comment on stories that are too real or visceral or traumatic. I can imagine him having something to say about 9/11 on that day, but the very idea of having a fictional character speak to something like that seems either trivializing or exploitative. Then again, if Neil was a well-known character — more like an old friend — that might not be the case.

So far, all I can tell you is that this is interesting stuff. At least to me. 🙂

My Aeron Chair

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I live in my office chair. Live in it. It’s where I do my work. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, or even good for me. But it’s a fact.

Having a comfortable seat to work from is a big deal. In the early days I used an orphaned kitchen chair. It was great for tipping and teetering, but hell on my back. When I moved to L.A. and started screenwriting I bought myself a cranberry ergonomic office chair that looked like it meant business. In less than a year it broke me down until I had to sleep on the floor in order to be able to function the next day.

By the late 1990’s I’d gotten to the point that I hated the idea of working. Not because I didn’t have things to say or ideas percolating, but because work was physically painful. Like a jackhammer operator with white knuckle, the repetitive stress of sitting had worn my body down to the point that I couldn’t sit.

So I did some research. I looked at chairs as devices, looked at ergonomics as science and art (and marketing fraud), and looked at my personal needs, which included being able to slump, slouch, and otherwise fidget while lingering over a sentence or word. After a while, no matter where I started my search on a given day, I kept coming back to a chair that had been brought to market in 1995. The Aeron.  [ Read more ]

The CreateSpace Calculator Fail

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After looking at the available print-on-demand (POD) options I decided to go with CreateSpace. This decision was not unqualified, however, and there were certainly things about CreateSpace that gave me pause.

Chief among them: the CreateSpace Royalty Calculator. While it is possible to get a rough sense of the royalty splits for a hypothetical title, the calculator’s utility for the work I want to produce seems dubious, it not utterly useless.

And CreateSpace essentially admits this. The title above the calculator reads as follows:

Royalty Calculator*
Use the royalty calculator to figure out how much you’ll make every time your book is manufactured.

Clear enough, right? You plug in data and the calculator tells you how much you’ll make with every sale. Except…when you follow that nagging asterisk, here’s the text you find immediately below the calculator:

* Figures generated by this tool are for estimation purposes only. Your actual royalty will be calculated when you set up your book.

Okay. So the calculator won’t so much help you “figure out” what you’ll make, but rather give you an “estimation” that is both unreliable and non-binding. I guess I have to give CreateSpace points for being honest about the calculator’s lack of utility — after proclaiming its utility — but the clarifying and contradictory information doesn’t inspire confidence. And it gets worse.  [ Read more ]

Washing Chicken

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Decades ago it was commonly understood that ulcers came from stress. Where parasites or other nasties were suspect in ailments of the lower gut, it was obvious that nothing could live in the toxic soup of human stomach acid. In the early 1980’s, however, it was discovered that a specific bacterium was alive and well in the stomachs of many people suffering from ulcers:

Although stress and spicy foods were once thought to be the main causes of peptic ulcers, doctors now know that the cause of most ulcers is the corkscrew-shaped bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori).

More recently, the conventional wisdom that human beings need to drink eight glasses of water each day in order to be healthy was also challenged. Having heard this advice most of my life, and having generally ignored it except during an epic mid-July crossing of the Mojave Desert in a non-air-conditioned vehicle, and having known of no human being who did follow that advice, I often wondered about its basis in fact.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Physician Heinz Valtin,…

…a kidney specialist and author of two widely used textbooks on the kidney and water balance, sought to find the origin of this dictum and to examine the scientific evidence, if any, that might support it.

In 2002 he released his finding that there was no evidence to support said dictum. In 2008 a follow-up study reached a similar conclusion:

“There is no clear evidence of benefit from drinking increased amounts of water.”

So where did this belief come from? Valtin believes it may have have….

…originated from a misunderstanding. In 1945 the Food and Nutrition Board, now part of the National Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Medicine, suggested that a person consume one milliliter of water (about one fifth of a teaspoon) for each calorie of food. The math is pretty simple: A daily diet of around 1,900 calories would dictate the consumption of 1,900 milliliters of water, an amount remarkably close to 64 ounces. But many dieticians and other people failed to notice a critical point: namely, that much of the daily need for water could be met by the water content found in food.

Oops.

And what about the vaunted appendix? Hasn’t it been proven beyond any doubt that the appendix does absolutely nothing? That it is, in fact, an evolutionary remnant of some long-lost bodily function?

Well, no. Recent research indicates the appendix may actually be doing the job it was designed for: repopulating the gut with critical bacteria after a riotous bout of Montezuma’s Revenge:

William Parker, Randy Bollinger, and colleagues at Duke University proposed that the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria when illness flushes those bacteria from the rest of the intestines.[6][10] This proposal is based on a new understanding of how the immune system supports the growth of beneficial intestinal bacteria, in combination with many well-known features of the appendix, including its architecture and its association with copious amounts of immune tissue.

Okay: so what does all of this have to do with storytelling in the digital age? Well, I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to talk about chicken washing. No, not that kind of chicken washing. The kind you do when you’re about to cook chicken.  [ Read more ]

Linking the Fiction Blog

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From a craft point of view, dealing with inbound and outbound links on a fiction blog is less problematic than allowing readers to post comments. While concerns about the fourth wall should be paramount in any storyteller’s mind, links are an indirect threat. Between the functionality of modern blog software and the limits of authorial control in an open medium such as the internet, there isn’t a lot of innovating that needs to be done.  [ Read more ]

Update: Blog Fiction and NeilRorke.com

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I’ve got a few posts up about blog fiction and on Neil’s site, and I wanted to follow up with a bit more explanation about what I’m doing. If you’re interested in character blogs or what fiction on the internet might become, check out NeilRorke.com. If you’re interested in how I’m approaching that site from a craft perspective, take a look here..

Neil Rorke is the main character in a novel I wrote, which I hope to publish in e-book and POD versions fairly soon. As such, presenting him in a character blog fits what I think is the evolving definition of transmedia: exploring different facets of a single storyworld through various (if not also appropriate) mediums. But it’s also the case that Neil himself fits the description of someone who would blog, and I think that’s critical. The overarching goal is for both works to explain more about Neil, and to work together to fill out his character.

The intent with Electric Fiction is to explore and document the move away from simply presenting traditional fiction for consumption on the web. A movie may be fiction, but it’s hand-crafted fiction that uses techniques specific to film. Most of the online fiction I’ve seen could also be a book, or a story in a magazine. Yes, they’re all text, but to omit the connectivity and pacing and structure of blogs or comments in internet fiction seems to me a mistake — in part because reading long works on a computer screen is difficult. (I’m not denying the utility of using the internet as a pipeline to deliver fiction to dedicated e-readers. I’m doing the same thing, and plan to do more.)

As I continue to grow Neil’s site I’ll comment on the craft problems I encounter. I’m conscious of the fact that talking about Neil’s site blows the fourth wall to smithereens, but I don’t see any way around that. My hope is that Neil’s site will be enjoyed by readers, while comments about Electric Fiction here will be of interest to writers.

— Mark Barrett

The Comment Question

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Because the internet delivers sound and imagine it can be used not only to distribute content, but to present it: video clips, streaming movies, novel-length text, music — virtually every kind of content imaginable can be experienced on a computer of any size. Turning the internet to the end of storytelling is something else entirely, even as the end product will also be communicated through sound and image.

Imagine a single story told through these mediums: stage, screen, novel. While the characters and plot would be the same in all instances, the techniques used to dramatize the story — to convey the narrative to an audience in a way that supports suspension of disbelief in each medium — would necessarily be different. It’s also possible, if not likely, that for any particular story one medium might be better than the others, because the strengths of that medium aid the cause of dramatization. Novels are excellent at putting you in the mind of a character, and lend themselves wonderfully to narrated tales. Movies excel at the visceral and the visual, at replicating reality, and now, through CGI, bringing fantasies to life. Theater excels at intimacy and at communicating the reality and complexity of human emotion.

The strength of the internet is communication and conversation. To approach the internet as a storytelling medium without acknowledging and embracing that aspect of the medium would be like using motion picture technology to film theater productions — which, oddly enough, is exactly what was done in the early days of film. The techniques that defined film as a medium came later, and only as a result of experimentation with the technology and form.

While many people have presented fiction on the web, and some people have tried writing dedicated character blogs, my survey over the past year suggests that many of these efforts replicate craft techniques from other mediums, rather than emphasizing techniques unique to the internet itself. In my own character blog at NeilRorke.com, I’m particularly interested in embracing and leveraging the strengths of the internet to the greatest possible extent.  [ Read more ]

Blog Fiction and the Fourth Wall

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If you’re not familiar with the fourth wall as a concept integral to storytelling, here’s the gist of it:

The fourth wall is the imaginary “wall” at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.

The central idea of the fourth wall is that the characters inside the fictional world remain unaware of the audience, even as the audience sits only feet away. If the audience breaks into thunderous applause, or begins to throw rotting fruit, the actors continue to attempt to exist in their own fictional space, apart from the physical reality of the theater.  [ Read more ]

Storytelling and the NFL

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I like sports. What I like most is that sports go against the deterministic grain of storytelling. Where the effect of a story is prepared by authors in advance, the outcome of a sporting event is determined as it unfolds. As a storyteller I can often intuit how a drama will play out because I can see the thin wires of preparation leading to a particular resolution or turn of events. In sports there is no script. Just a cast of characters driven by goals and constrained by a set of rules.

This doesn’t mean, however, that there is no narrative in sports. Quite the contrary. The experience of watching a sporting event can be as emotionally involving, if not physically taxing, as any scripted story. Audience investment in the outcome of a particular game, or in the performance of a particular player, or a decisive moment, can lead to heights of excitement and depths of despair.

As with drama, the ability of an audience to become emotionally engaged in a sporting event hinges on the audience’s mental state. Prepare a safe and supportive context and you get wild enthusiasm. Force them to confront realities they don’t want to confront and enthusiasm will wane.  [ Read more ]

Site Notice: Server Issues

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It’s almost beyond belief to me that I’m continuing to have trouble with my site host, Network Solutions. I apologize to anyone who’s tried to visit this site or the small site I put up at the beginning of the week. The amount of data I’m trying to move is trivial, but for some reason the addition of one site to NetSol’s server capacity seems to have crippled its ability to send pages to your screen — if it allows those pages to be served at all.

I am once again in tech support hell, and have once again managed to escalate the issue to NetSol’s tech support by demonstrating that the problem is not on my end. I have tried several of the fixes they asked me to try, and if they didn’t make things worse they did nothing to resolve the problems at hand. My hope is that the issue will be resolved shortly.

— Mark Barrett