Just To Let Y'all Know . . .

The spam from China has been coming thick and fast enough that I have to switch on comment moderation. Sorry about that. The notifications go to an email address that I check pretty regularly, though, so comments from actual human beings who are reading and responding to the entry and not planting links at random will show up soon enough.

The new book is coming along by degrees, and I've taken everything I've learned from NaNoWriMo about forgiving imperfections and applying it to this draft. It's a mess at this point, but it's a start, and as I've said elsewhere, there's no way to sharpen a blade before it's been forged.

And It's Been Sent . . .

Took me all morning to muster up the nerve, but there you are. Soft Places has been submitted to an agency and I will keep myself occupied with my next book while waiting for a reply.

Oh, yeah, by the way, I started writing another book. I'll probably resume the habit of excuse notes here until I've at least gotten the first draft hashed out.

That is all.

Almost There . . .

I think I'm finished with the final pass of revisions on the manuscript and I'm getting it ready for submission to an agent.

Yikes.

The Dunning-Kruger Threshold, or, Congratulations, You Suck

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

--Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

In December of 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a paper entitled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. In it, they described what has since become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

If you’ve ever seen a craptastic poet who thinks he’s some kind of genius, you’ve seen the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you’ve ever seen a brilliant artist fret over the tiny flaws in her work, you’ve also seen the Dunning-Kruger effect. The gist of the paper, as the title indicates, is that the worse you are at something, the worse you are at determining just how bad you are at it. The flip side of this is that the more skilled you become, the better you get at assessing your ability.

In the course of the original research, Kruger and Dunning also found that as people improved their skills, their ability to self-assess improved as well. What the research doesn’t mention, but many people can tell you, is how discouraging this process can be. The Dunning-Kruger Threshold is my term for the point at which you become competent enough to see just how incompetent you’ve been. You can also call it the Oh My God I Suck Moment.

Anybody who has flinched when confronted with their earlier work will know what I mean, whether it’s the cheesy spy stories you wrote after seeing that James Bond movie when you were a kid or the angsty poetry you wrote as a teenager or that first try at a novel you wrote in college. I also suspect that a certain baseline of metacognitive ability can be absorbed through the osmosis of appreciation. For example, I’ve listened to enough music to know what a guitar is supposed to sound like and that what comes out when I pick the thing up is definitely not it.

So what do you do when you’re good enough at something to realize just how bad you are? (And I mean genuinely gut-level aware, not just deliberately self-effacing in the hopes of a pat on the head and reassurance that you’re not that bad, really.) As painful as it can be, it’s an encouraging sign. It means you can see more clearly what needs to be fixed and work on advancing your abilities in order to fix it.

And if you think that everything you create is unmitigated brilliance? Be very, very worried, because that means you still have quite a long way to go.

A Random Observation About The Writing Process

. . . which probably isn't news to anybody who has written anything, but struck me as a bit amusing.

Sometimes the work bears a remarkable resemblance to doing nothing at all. Anybody who observed me over the past half hour or so would have seen me staring out the window, occasionally pulling at my hair and drinking my orange juice. Those were my physical actions. Internally, I was mulling over the possibility that an abandoned short story idea of mine may well be the seed of another novel. It's something like watching a Polaroid picture develop from hazy shapes into a detailed photograph.

I've come up with a few becauses for the whys that I've raised. I have the place figured out but I still need to determine the time, since setting it in the present day would create a very different story than setting it in the time period that the idea originally sprang from.

Maybe another NaNo, maybe something else. We'll see.

Why I've Given Up On Amazon.com

I just canceled my Amazon Prime membership.

First off, I'm not sure if the money on shipping that I was saving was that much more than what I paid for the yearly membership. It came in handy when getting birthday and Christmas presents shipped to my nieces (which is pretty much what I've been using Amazon for) but I'm still too broke to do much book shopping for myself, and I have this thing for browsing in physical bookstores anyway.

The main reason, though, is that Amazon has been acting like the 900-pound gorilla of book sales and doesn't seem to realize that it's not the only gorilla in the jungle anymore.

The standoff between Amazon and Macmillan has been documented in more detail elsewhere. John Scalzi has provided the snarkiest coverage (and is where I was first made aware of the issue) and Tobias Buckell perhaps the most detailed. Short answer for those who don't feel like clicking on links--Amazon has stopped selling Macmillan titles because Macmillan doesn't want to sell ebooks at the loss-leading price of $9.99 anymore. At last word, they had supposedly backed down from this, but the Buy Now links on Macmillan titles are still mysteriously absent.

It's possible I might feel more sympathy for Amazon versus the Big Bad Publisher if Amazon hadn't screwed up so royally previously, when they abruptly reclassified all gay-related titles as "adult" and thus excluded them from sales rankings. They did at least correct that mistake, but waved it off as a mere 'glitch' and I mentally filed Amazon under "corporations not to be trusted an inch further than they can be thrown." Now with this debacle, I think it's time to find other nice places to get my book fix. There's no rational reason to wait for Strike Three.

IndieBound is a marvelous site devoted to helping people find Real, Live, Independent Bookstores in their neighborhoods.

The Book Depository is based in the UK, but ships all over the world for free. I think I'll be hitting them up should I need a book shipped to me in future.

Meanwhile, on my other blog . . .

I sometimes wonder if I separate things out a bit much in terms of blogging, but for those of you who only follow me here, I have another blog called Wonderbink.com where I talk about free writing and the various ways I make use of it.

This marks the start of something potentially amazing. I'm not sure where it might lead. But I do know that there's no going back from it.