Dude, I was part of the precariat before it was cool.
I have been putting little income streams together for decades now while most of my peers got regular jobs. I’m well suited to it, I like the variety, and most importantly, I chose it.
Not so the Millennials.
Continue reading »My first novel launched twenty years ago today. To mark the occasion I’m publishing the first of a series I’m calling the Fallow Essays, reflective pieces on art and cultural production from the vantage point of having spent two decades walking this path. Each will be accompanied by a recorded conversation with an artist peer.
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I have a guy in my head.
I call him Niles. Picture a hulking acne-riddled teenage loser with a punk rock haircut, a white denim duster jacket and big boots, walking down the street muttering to himself angrily.
For decades, when I heard Niles behind me, I’d walk faster. Or cross the street to avoid him. I resent Niles, and he despises me. Or at least it seems like it. I’ve never talked to him.
I’ve never written every day. When I write novels, I write 1250 words 4 times a week — each session generally taking 3-4 hours — which gets me to 100,000 words in six months. When I’m writing I write on a schedule, but often I go months without writing fiction.
Just to try out a new approach I decided to write a complete story in an hour every day. For a month I posted a daily story to Twitter, Medium, and Wattpad. Now I’ve also published them as a free ebook in .epub, .mobi and .pdf formats with a cover featuring Jonathan Wyke’s excellent illustration above. Below I share some of my qualitative and quantitative results. Continue reading »
Each day for the past two weeks I’ve been writing a story in one hour, taking a screenshot of it, and attaching it as an image to a tweet — they’re generally a screen long and definitely a violation of Twitter’s 140 character limit. It’s fun to scope a story to super short pieces, explore whimsical sci-fi ideas, try different tones and styles, and spend a moment or two with some characters.
The other day me and Sean were over at Mathew Borrett’s place and he showed us how he’d ported some of his mind-blowing HyperNurnia series created for 2D display into virtual reality. A few minutes after I took off the Oculus goggles I knew what my one hour story was going to be that day. Above is the landscape that inspired the following story, click to enlarge and if you have a VR headset and the wherewithal here’s the stereo file. After the story, deets on how to get my graphic novel, Therefore Repent!, for free.
David watched his son rock back and forth in his chair and knew it was just a matter of time before he fell over and hurt himself.
“Harry,” he said.
His son stopped, stared at him defiantly. “What?”
“You know what.” Continue reading »
I’m not crazy about Blu-ray, so I started to think of alternative ways to deliver the 1080p version of the movie and came across these usb bracelets. When I started to think about what else you could put on it, I realized there was a connection to one of the ideas in the movie: that in 2025 the Cloud was repossessed. I like the idea that people can also use it to store their own locally owned data, as insurance against that day. Or even if nothing happens, for a time when you make the choice to get off the Cloud (or the grid) and find out that something you clicked I Agree to years ago limits that choice.
You can buy it here. (Sorry, only DVDs left now.) More thoughts below. Continue reading »
A big part of the reason I like community organizing, beyond the social and cultural aspects, is that it allows me to design systems. Beyond their cleverness and elegance, systems are great at automating routine things and I find this useful in a number of ways in my life. Continue reading »
