Those days are not these days. The winners of the Hugo award have just been announced, and not only have I not read a single one of them, but I haven’t read any of the nominees either.

In fact, in the last year, I have only read five of which were published in the last five years: The Year’s Best Science Fiction 26th Annual Collection (from last year), The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, David Sedaris’ When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Holly Black’s Valiant, and Stephanie Meyers’ Breaking Dawn.

I am so far from the cutting edge right now…the cutting edge cut me in half and then moved on…

…this is why I find it so hard to imagine that there could possibly be any demand for new books…yet, somehow, there is…

I mean that generally speaking, I don’t know what to think. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I don’t know how to think.

About two years, I started to become aware that my undergraduate education in economics had combined with the graduate degree in demography that I earned by growing up as the son of a professor in sociology to create a comprehensive set of strategies with which to approach all of the world’s problems.

Economics is the study of how human beings exchange things. Within the conceptual framework of economics, it does not matter what those things are. They might be exchanging money for goods, or services for prestige, or work for wages, or if exchanging something in the present in return for something else in the future. All that matters is that they have some allotment of things (and we all, at least, have our bodies and our time), and they want to expend some of that allotment in order to get other things. Economics does not care why they want the things they want. Nor does it seek to dictate what they should want.

Because that part of the equation is already provided for. People are telling you what they want. They tell you by the way they spend their time. People spend their time pursuing love. They spend it working in order to afford expensive, high-status objects, or entertainments, or stuff that will make their kids happier. They spend it working in order to achieve success in their field and the acclaim that comes with it.

(And here is where we depart a little bit from what the economics I learned in school says and venture more into what the ideal version of economics that I have in my head says. So don’t reproach me with some crap that Paul Krugman said, or something)

Because, for economics, no question is more meaningless than what people should want. What matters is what they do want. And that question can be answered. They’re telling you the answer. They’re telling you all the time.

(Now, even this question can’t be answered very easily. Because the main proxy being used for value is money. But someone could want something very desperately and not be able to afford it. What does it even mean to want something and not be able to pay for it? How can that desire be said to exist vis a vis all the other desires you can actualize? How does it affect your actions? Of course there are also some things you can’t buy with money. And peoples’ valuations fluctuate, and there’s evidence that relative rankings of things are not rational in the way you’d expect…etc…)

But what’s nice about the question “What do people want?” is that it is answerable in a way that the question “What should people want?” never can be. It’s very hard to answer the former question. You need to define a lot of terms. You need a lot of caveats. You’d need to run a lot of very innovative experiments. You’d probably need to bring in some neurobiology, psychology, evolutionary biology, etc. No one’s really done it yet, sure. But it can be done, and the reason it can be done is because of the central assumption that people’s actions reveal their desires.

But the latter question – What should people want? — cannot be answered. If you need a proof that there is no answer to that question…I refer you to…some philosopher (probably Hume). But it’s always seemed intuitively obvious to me.

Still, with economics, I have a way to approach problems. First, you look at what people are doing. That tells you what they want. Then you throw up your hands and say, “This is the way things are because people want a lot of stuff and have interacted in such a way as to produce this situation.” Yes, the economics-in-my-head is a very fatalistic system.

Like, let’s say someone is talking about a book, like…the Twilight series. The Twilight series has sold millions of copies. The fact that people buy it shows that they like it. People who don’t like Twilight often buy different books. Those books don’t sell as well as Twilight, and their authors don’t make as much money. Oh well! People don’t like those other books.

Why do people buy Twilight? Well…I can follow that line of reasoning a little farther down…

For instance, I can posit that there are a large number of readers who feel comforted by the notion that millions of other people are reading the same thing as them. These readers are much more likely to read a book they see someone else reading. It spreads virally and little hits become big blockbusters.

This theory would seem to have a certain amount of proof in something like Oprah’s Book Club, which can manage to move millions of copies of any book, from Jodi Picoult to Leo Tolstoy, through this mass-comfort.

Whereas there is another group of readers that feels comforted by the notion that they are strange and special and unique in reading something no one else is reading. They are repulsed by books they see in others’ hands, and settle on something else. This group is the group that really hates Twilight.

None of this has anything to do with the qualities of the book. That is because I am still very suspicious of the notion that a book can be “good” or “bad”. The notion of “good” is tied up with “should”. If a book is “good,” then people “should” want to read it. It seems to me that as long as one person likes a book, then it is good to somebody.

(If no one in the world likes a book in any way, even then I would not feel confident in calling it bad. There may someday be born a person who will like it.)

If I was to describe the quality of a book, I would not use literary analysis. Instead, I would find a random sampling of people, get them to read it, and then survey them as to their opinions of the book. I would assemble a demographic profile of my survey respondents, and ask them all kinds of other questions, and then I would come out and say, “This is the kind of person who likes this book. This is the kind of books he or she likes to read; he/she has this level of education, this income, this kind of occupation.”

(My working definition of a “good” book is a book that people are more likely to like if they’ve already read a lot of books. My working definition of a “bad” book is one that people are more likely to like if they’ve only read very few books.)

Maybe I would assemble a huge group of people with just the same demographic profile and give them all that book to read and scan all their brains (both before and after). And I’d look for variations in neural make-up between the did-likes and didn’t-likes to try to explain, even in this demographically similar group, why some liked it and why some didn’t.

(I know this isn’t how people really do experiments, but c’mon this is a blog entry and not a grant proposal.)

And hopefully, somewhere in this process, I would have a model that I could maybe even use to predict who would like this book and who wouldn’t. Maybe I could use this model to find other books that that person would like. Maybe I could use this model to tweak the book slightly so that more people would like it, or so that these people would like it more.

But at no point, would I ever feel comfortable saying, “This book is great, and people should read it.” Because I don’t even know how to begin to think about that statement. There is nothing in my worldview that can allow me to make sense of it.

…

…

Except I just did that. You might have missed it. It was like twelve hundred words ago.

Because my comprehensive worldview is really good for…something, I’m sure…

…but it’s not good for anything that I actually have to do in my life. I’m not out there running surveys to figure out what people think about books.

All I really have to work with is what I think.

Except…nothing in my training has really taught me how talk about that.

And…it should not be that hard. Because I do things. I act. I am one of those people who I would potentially be surveying. I clearly want things, and like things.

But talking about why I like them, or why something is good, and why something is bad is really difficult for me. It’s something that Delany does really well in this book. For instance, he undertakes a 60-page dissection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. And I read it. And I was impressed. But I still don’t know how he could have the gall to do it.

I suppose my problem is…I am never going to undertake these surveys and brain scans and such…for the rest of my life, my main data point is going to be my own reaction to things. And how can I possibly use that to generalize to other people?

But even my own “reaction” is suspect. The connections I see are largely a function of what I’ve been told. Most of the things I think are just regurgitations of what I’ve read (see…well…everything in this blog post).

How can I, in good faith, attempt to generalize from my own experience?

And this is not an idle concern. It’s of central importance to my attempts to write. What I write will succeed or fail on the basis of whatever kernel of novelty it contains. It will depend on my perceiving that there is something missing from what I’ve read, something that my life contains which the works I’ve encountered do not, and putting that missing thing into my own work…

…which is made a little harder by me not even having the first idea of how to systematize my thoughts about a work…because under the worldview I’ve always operated under, those thoughts didn’t matter.

…

…

So, on another note, I think I can safely call The Jewel-Hinged Jaw a mindblowing work. It’s actually not as inaccessible as I’d feared. Although I can’t shake the persistent notion that Delany is using words somewhat idiosyncratically. He tosses out a term like “inchoate didacta” as if it had some sort of formal meaning (as a phrase)…because as individual words, that means nothing to me. “Inchoate” is like…beginning, or half-formed. “Didacta” is like…a teaching? I don’t think “didacta” is a word in English. Still, you can sort of figure out what he’s talking about, and most of it isn’t like that.

(in his usage “didacta” seems to be the background information in a novel, like the fascistic military-service voting system in Starship Troopers or the nature of the egalitarian, anarcho-collectivist society of the Anarresti in The Dispossessed).

Anyways, you should read it.

I found this blog refreshing and highly fascinating. But I was also somewhat repulsed by it, because, like pretty much every person, I know that there’s not really any sort of objective standard for quality in art. I might enjoy a work or not. I might find it complex or simplistic. I might find it discerning or idiotic. But the things I see in it are not inherent in the work, even down to the most micro-level.

I might say that the phrase “Tanya thrust the thruster into overdrive and blasted out towards the farthest reaches of the universe,” is terrible writing because “thrust” is repeated and “farthest reaches of the universe” is a cliché and the two clauses have different subjects (Tanya in the first clause and her [implicit] ship in the second clause). But if someone was to say to me, “No, you’re wrong about that, the thrusted thruster is a poetic repetition that calls to mind the sexual act, and the “farthest reaches of the universe” is meant to call attention to the banality of her ambitions vis a vis the scope of her opportunities” then what am I going to say? What meaning does our analysis really have? All we’re describing is…nothing, none of what we said has any concrete foundation. There is no evidence that repetition is banal, or that it is poetic. There is no proof that clichés are bad writing. Nor is there any possible way to acquire this evidence. All we’re doing is producing mental chaff. That is why I often steer away from any sort of criticism.

Disagreement is an absolute defense to criticism. For instance, I think that if this xkcd strip is about porn characters acting in an uncharacteristic way then that is a really confusing and bad premise because porn is already about ordinary archetypes acting in uncharacteristic ways (i.e. the pizza delivery man doesn’t just deliver your pizzas like he normally would…he also has sex with you), so if a porn character acts in an uncharacteristic way, wouldn’t that just mean that the pizza delivery man would deliver your pizzas?

But someone could easily reply to me, “Oh, no, it’s a brilliant inversion of what you’d expect. It’s a Dada marvel.” And what do I say then? Any attempt to provide some underpinning to my reaction, no matter how clever or even brilliant, can easily run up against the wall of just a single person saying, “That’s not true for me.”

That’s why I am always uncomfortable about criticizing any book or work. Because…those criticisms are usually just not true on the face of it. What does it mean for someone to say that Twilight is bad? Millions of people enjoy it. You might have tons of reasons for why it is bad. But if even one person enjoys something, then there is proof that what you’re saying is wrong.

Again, this is not any sort of new notion. It’s something everyone has thought about. And in fact that’s why there’s a FAQ response on xkcdsucks addressing this very comment. And I think that response is actually pretty smart.

I think the best way to describe [the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity in criticism] is to explain what a critic means when he says “this is bad.” Ideally he goes on to explain himself, but this is not an example of pure subjectivity. What he is saying is this: “many of the objective elements in this are ineffective or badly put together, or the ideas, feelings, and thoughts they tend to evoke are otherwise negative.” This is partially subjective, certainly–but I will then go on to describe why I think that something is put together. If I dislike the pacing, I will explain how the pacing doesn’t flow very well, and tends to be highly disjointed–this is an objective description of the pacing. It does not rely on me as an observer to make it a valid statement. I will then say that I think the pacing is ineffective because of its disjointed flow. This is a subjective statement! You may think the disjointed pacing lends the story a really brilliant, fragmented flow. But when you have finished with a criticism, you should be able to identify precisely what it is about the story (its objective qualities) that evoked that subjective reaction in the writer.

Of course that doesn’t really capture the complexity of what he was saying, because it’s hard to even say the “the pacing is disjointed” without being pretty subjective. But, as I was thinking about this over the past few days, I realized…”This is totally beyond the point.”

I don’t really care about trying to convince others about the quality of a particular work. I only care about my own reactions to it. And I use these notions of objectivity and subjectivity, which really only matter in terms of a larger audience, as bugbears to scare myself away from the notion that for me, there is good and bad.

When I read a book, I do have some reaction to it. And there are reactions I enjoy, and reactions that I do not. There are books that I enjoy more and books that I enjoy less. I don’t need to worry about this hypothetical person who might disagree with me, because I am not really concerned with trying to get him to agree with me. What I am concerned with is finding out what kinds of things I enjoy, why I enjoy them, and how to utilize those elements in my own writing

(Although I am slightly uncomfortable with the word I use here — “enjoy” — since it seems slightly facile and concerned with immediate emotional reactions rather than the sort of long-lasting imprint the book leaves on me, which is what I am really talking about. I think a more honest and appropriate word would be “love”. Although an even better word would be <3 because what I am really talking about the books I <3 and why I <3 them. Of course, that’s slightly ridiculous, so I will just go with “enjoy”.)

Because when I put aside my baggage about subjectivity, and go into a book and try to think about why I enjoy it, I can often find reasons. Often it’s about the worldview or ideas expressed by the book. Sometimes it’s just about the style of writing. And what’s more, I find value, for myself, in thinking about those reasons. Even though what I’m engaged in is a rather silly game, it does provide some insight into myself.

Of course, other people could object to what I say on a variety of levels ranging from “uhh, what you see in this book isn’t really there” to “I also see what you see in this book, but I don’t think that thing is very good”. And that would be crushing, if I cared about convincing them.

Which is not to say that sharing one’s criticism can’t be valuable as well. I just don’t think that the purpose of doing it is to “convince” other people that they are wrong. Clearly there is some universality in our subjective reactions. In fact, there is a huge amount of universality. Two people, watching TV in distant apartments, can laugh at the same joke on the same sit-com. That’s incredible, when you think about it. They heard the same words, analyzed the intention, pondered the intended reversal or disjunction or whatever makes humor humorous, and found it enjoyable.

So if I say that I see something in a work, there is a very good chance that someone else has seen it too. But there is no reason why a given person has to see it as well. In fact, it’s rather more incredible that anyone agrees on anything ever. That’s why I think that criticism really only works when it’s conducted in good faith, and I don’t mean good faith on the part of the critic. The critic is documenting his own reactions, as are we all. I mean good faith on the part of the reader.

Because it’s really easy, for me, at least, to say “I don’t see it.” And there is no way to disprove me. Sometimes I am doing it unconsciously. I am willing myself not to see what someone else is talking about. Sometimes I am just unwilling to put in the work to try to understand. And sometimes I’m just pissed off by someone shitting all over something awesome (like Mars Attacks) and I’d rather take refuge in my one unassailable defense. But usually, if I try, I do understand a little bit of what a person is talking about, and I can see a little bit of what they see, even though I am not required to.

I’m not really sure why this only happens when I drive, but not when I fly, or take the bus. I think it might have something to do with not being allowed to distract myself from my own thoughts; from being forced to be alone with them for hours on end. But, usually, when that happens I start thinking very fast, and begin going over and over in thought-spirals.

When I drive, that does not happen. My thought proceeds very slowly, in fits and nibbles. Sometimes an hour passes without a single thought that I can remember. But then, slowly, something starts to form, and I am left alone with it, and can build upon it, and even though it begins to degrade the moment I leave the car, something remains behind that I can carry with me forever (or at least for awhile).

During this trip, I somehow found myself thinking about Sturgeon’s Law. For those of you who aren’t in the SF world, Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer (a fairly good one). His law is: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” From Wikipedia:

The first written reference to this appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture, where Sturgeon wrote: “I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud”.[1] Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms do.

            This is often used as a sort of truism in SF. I don’t know why I was thinking about it. Maybe it was because of Larry’s series of posts at the OF Blog of the Fallen on reading and being a good reader. In one of them, he said something like, “I wish people wouldn’t just quote Sturgeon’s Law. That frees them from having to think about why they don’t like the books they don’t like.”

            And I was thinking and thinking, and it came to me: “Where are all these crap books? I haven’t read them. Ninety percent of the books I read are pretty good.”

            I’ve always just assumed that, even though most of the books I read are good, that I am nonetheless occupying a tiny plateau of goodness surrounded by crap: that there are vast, titanic mountains of crap out to get me. But…where is the crap? I can always sort of sense it in the distance, but, somehow, it never gets to me…

            I exercise only minimal discernment in choosing the books I read. I hear about it online, and then I check it out from the library. I glance through it at a bookstore, and if I like the first few pages, then I buy it. It’s not like I’m erecting some sort of super crap-proof forcefield around my bookshelves. So why do the books I read, on average, tend to be so good?

            And I was thinking, and thinking, and…ninety percent of everything I use tends to be pretty good. When I flip through the radio, I can usually find a song I like. When I’m surfing channels, I can usually find something that I enjoy watching. When I go to the theater and see a movie, I usually like it. When I buy an electronic device, I’m generally satisfied by how it works.

            And then, another hundred miles later, I extended it to the rest of my life. When I visit a restaurant, the service is usually pretty good. When I order take-out, I generally enjoy the food. When I get to know someone, I usually find that they’re fairly interesting.

            And it’s not like I am some sort of connoisseur of the finer things. I eat at Burger King. I shop at Best Buy. I watch HBO at 4 AM, and watch USA’s silly low-rent TV shows. My water comes out of the same tap as anyone else’s, and my Coca-Cola comes from the same bottling plant. If ninety percent of everything was crap, wouldn’t it, like…find me?

            I think the key here is the term, “with minimal amounts of discernment.” If I was just buying books by the boatload from the remaindering factory, then, yeah, maybe ninety percent of them would not be to my taste. If I just bashed my remote against a rock and watched whatever channel came up, then I would probably dislike it. But it doesn’t take much time or effort to not do that. It only takes one trip to a bad restaurant to be like, “Huh, not going to come here again.”

            I actually cannot say whether ninety percent of everything is crap. I am not sufficiently willing to sample things at random in order to figure that out. What I am willing to say is that the statement “ninety percent of everything is crap” has, even if it is true, almost no practical implications.

It’s like saying, “The surface of the earth is mostly water.”

            I mean, yeah, that’s true…but that’s no reason to worry about whether or not you’ll be able to find some land to stand on.

            Even if ninety percent of everything is crap, the effort required to avoid it is so extremely minimal and almost totally unconscious that the world might as well be mostly composed of good stuff. And what if the world is composed mostly of good stuff? Wow, that would be really scary. It’s a good thing that my drive ended before I could contemplate that one.

            I believe that all human beings are unique. And I believe that there is an infinite difference between you and me. But at the same time, that difference is incommunicable. It doesn’t seem like it should be that way. It feels like we should just be able to open our mouths and explain what we think and feel and somehow push out everything in our minds that feels so fresh and strange and unlike anything anyone else has ever told us. But we can’t. We don’t have the words.

            And when we open our mouths, we speak in the words we’ve been given. When we describe ourselves – describe anything – we use descriptions that we’ve been given. And these are so hopelessly inadequate.

            Like the title says, sometimes I get tired of stories. I think that maybe what stories are for is giving us new words: more accurate, powerful, and nuanced descriptions. Better identities. More identities. And that, by giving us the ability to think about ourselves and others in new ways, they also open up new ways of acting, new emotions. Or rather, the old emotions, but reinterpreted. Like how…and this is where I spent twenty minutes trying to think up an example.

            Because stories are not very good at doing that job. They are not very good at giving us that new vocabulary.

            And furthermore, the stories we pay for, the ones in books, and on TV, and in the movies, are much less effective than the ones we get for free. The stories in books, even the very best books, seem so frigid and distant to me compared to the stories my parents tell me, or compared to the stories my friends tell me over the instant-messenger every night.

            They are not expertly crafted, and if they were told to someone who was not emotionally invested in the teller then I doubt they would be worth much at all. But because I do know these people, those stories feel relevant, and real, and it feels like there is some essence of actual communication, as if somehow, upon telling them, we’re performing the miracle of thinking the same thoughts.

And there’s nothing universal in the stories that friends tell, but that is their power. They are not universal. They are specific. They are about my world, and, in some way, about me.

            That is not a power that a story you pay money for can ever tap into. Paying money voids that power.

But the magic has begun, my story, “Death’s Flag Is Never At Half-Mast” has gone live in Redstone Science Fiction’s August issue. And it’s the cover story, which is not at all unsweet. In case you missed my previous post, this is the story I wrote as a result of this blog post, entitled Lord Nelson Could Beat Up Your Dad.

And, really, more than anything, it’s my tribute to (and parody of) military science fiction, a genre that I love reading, and would never write.

For instance, it took me 2,156 days of living to reach 500 days on which I’ve written, meaning I wrote on slightly more than 20% of the days that made up roughly the last six years. But for this year, so far, I’m at 61%, and last year I was at 37%. Which is just another way of saying that half of those 500 writing days were in the last 19 months.

But any online followers from the writing world are probably not my facebook friends, and they might follow either blog or twitter. Anyway, I posted this to twitter a few days ago, but my story “The Association of the Dead” is online at Clarkesworld Magazine.

            Being not-in-America makes me really miss America. I sometimes surrender to the temptation to kiss the ground upon returning home. There’s really no other place in the world in the world where I want to live.

            But I also find that feeling so paradoxical. Because I know that life in America is not better than it is in other developed countries. In many respects, it is significantly worse and its people are significantly unhappier. Which makes the 4^th of July kind of a weird holiday. Down here, we have a country celebrating a war that killed 26,000 people in order to liberate it from….Great Britain? North of the 49^th parallel, there is a country that expended no lives and is also a free and stable democracy.

            If anything, we’d be better off right now if we were part of Canada. From the modern standpoint, it seems like the main results of the Revolutionary War are a lack of healthcare and millions of innocent people, from across the world, directly and indirectly murdered in our name.

            Given that, what does it even mean to say that I love America? I certainly don’t think it is more moral or provides a better life for its people than most (or any) other developed nations.

            The only rationalization I could think of is that I love America in the way that most people love their families. You know that your family is not really better than the millions of other families around you. But you love them anyway. You see their good points and downplay the significance of their bad points.

            And sure, I can name a hundred and one things that I love about America. In fact, I delight in most of the things that are generally held to be negatives. I could go on and on about it. But those are not really real things. I like those things because I grew up with them, because they’re familiar to me. America is the scenery for every major event in my life, and so of course American things will have an emotional resonance for me that other things will lack.

            But…even that is kind of unsatisfying as an explanation of my love for America. You love your family because they’re people, because they love you, and because you need to love them in order to interact with them and grow up with them and put up with their various impositions. Love lubricates the entire setup.

            But…America doesn’t love me. America is not capable of emotions. America is a place. Or a collection of people. Or a system for organizing people. Or a shared set of customs. If the purpose of a nation is to create an environment conducive to the material well-being and happiness of its people, then America is not that great of a success. The solution is to move somewhere else, or, if that’s too much of a hassle, to deal with it. What purpose do all these extraneous emotions serve?

            If anything, it makes the things America does feel worse, and seem more egregious. Especially when it’s things that directly affect me. The way that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Travel Security Agency act at airports is not actually that bad. I don’t mind it when other countries hassle me. But receiving even minor hassling by your own country upon coming home…that just really sucks.

            I’m pretty sure that love is not the right word. Maybe I’m just using it as a synonym for, “I’m comfortable here” or “I’m happier here than I would be somewhere else”. That feels righter, since it puts the emphasis on me and on some chemical stuff going on inside my head, instead of on America, an object which is not, on its own merits, capable of supporting these emotions.

            But I don’t know if that’s really quite true either. I feel much more positively about America than many people I know, including people who would be much, much unhappier in some other country.

            And that’s where I’ve gotten on this topic. I think my problems here are mostly linguistic and semantic. I haven’t really defined what I mean by “America” or what the emotion I feel is. And I’m not really sure what the question is either. Is the question, “Why do I feel this way?” or is it “How should I feel?” I don’t know.

            Now that I have a reader or two, feel free to chime in with your own mild America-related angst.

But that time is now. The internet is filling up with words that I wrote. And every one of those words contains the germ of an image. And that image is growing in peoples’ minds whether I want it to or not. And the time has come to decide what that image will be.

I’m not going to go off all crazy and say that all great authors have authorial persona. But it really does help. I don’t think Hemingway would be very famous if he hadn’t spent so much time being Hemingwayish and hitting up bullfights and fishing for big fish and shooting guns at big animals and volunteering to fight in wars that were none of his business. I’m sure you can think of a ton more examples.

Reading is a pretty intimate experience. When you read, it’s like someone is whispering into your ear. And, like it or not, words have a bigger impact when the person saying them is somehow enticing to the imagination. It’s like how you pay way more attention whenever an attractive person is speaking.

While authors are not movie stars, being attractive is a not-at-all unhelpful part of authorial persona. It works for Neil Gaiman. And you can’t read about Truman Capote, even sixty years later, without hearing about his author photograph on the back cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Unfortunately, that avenue is not really going to do it for me.

Oh, but you might say “just be yourself.” That is not good advice. First of all, there is no such thing as just being yourself. All communication is performance. The problem with the internet is that it’s hard to accurately gauge who the audience is, and what they want. That means that all communication tends to sort of drift towards one of two poles.

The first is anger. Writing to the internet is a lot like shouting in an empty room. You know that probably no one’s listening, but there’s a feeling that if you yell hard enough, someone will hear. And when you’re by yourself its really easy to get all worked up about things. The end result is that you end up being a huge dick, and expending all kinds of words on things that either A) don’t actually bother you that much; or B) do bother you, but which you know shouldn’t bother you.

I think that I tend to avoid the “anger” pole, mostly out of an exaggerated awareness of how one or two really offensive comments could reverberate around the internet and be enshrined forever in my permanent record.

But I definitely fall into the other pole, “cuteness”. For some reason , well over half the things people write out on the internet come out sounding like they’re being lisped by little girls (or boys) who’re missing their two front teeth. Especially amongst SF writers. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism. Although cuteness is grating, it’s fairly unoffensive, and is especially good for covering up self-promotion, an unpopular opinion, or just the fact that you consider yourself smart enough that when you say something you think people ought to not only listen, but pay to hear what you have to say.

And that’s pretty much what I do. I really dislike it. I read the comments I make in blogs, or the posts I make on message boards, and I am horrified. It’s hard for me to see the person who writes those things as an actual person. Seriously, I don’t even know why he bothers. He’s engaged in negative communication, the actual leaching of meaning from the world and from the words themselves. I find his motivations utterly opaque, unexplainable even by the simplistic economic theories that I learned in college (the ones that explain everything).

I need an authorial persona, if only to make the horror stop.