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The Importance of Scale

April 23, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

Much of writing and storytelling involves putting the reader in the right head space so they can understand and even feel what you’re trying to communicate. It’s much more art than science, but it’s also necessary: if you don’t frame issues and provide critical context you can’t maximize the impact of what you have to say.

In many cases this is easily done, but not always. Whether looking for a needle in a haystack or an airliner in the ocean, human beings are notoriously terrible at gauging scale, and that’s true even when asked to give an estimate of something familiar like the size of a bedroom or kitchen. Tell the average person the footpath they’re following rises two thousand feet in three miles and they’ll probably think nothing of it, but an hour later they’ll be taking an extended break if not turning back.

This inability to comprehend scale cuts both ways, however, particularly when vast distances are involved. What we don’t understand can also open the door to plausible-sounding ideas that are in fact beyond fantasy, including space travel. Yes, you can visit the moon if you have the right equipment, but sending humans to Mars and back isn’t simply a longer voyage, it’s an entirely different animal. As for making the leap to interstellar flight the reality isn’t daunting it’s disqualifying, yet most people don’t know that because they don’t understand how vast such distances truly are.

This is how vast.

When you get tired of scrolling there are buttons at the top of the screen that will speed your journey, but they will also necessarily blunt your understanding. Stick with it until you get to Mars if you can. It’s worth it.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: context, Space

The CreateSpace Calculator Fail

November 8, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

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 ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: context, CreateSpace, size