Posted on
by

Accounting for Writers and Artists
Orycon 34
(Note: Neither I nor the panelists are CPAs, lawyers, etc. Don’t consider this tax advice, etc.)

Edward Muller, John R. Gray III, John Hedtke, Richard A. Lovett
·      How does accounting impact your business?
o   JG: I hire an accountant once a year. He gives me a layout of what’s new and what I need to keep track.
§  I keep every possible receipt. I write on the back what they are for. I fill out every form with what fits into the categories, and the accountant figures out what can be used.
o   JH: Was a sole proprietor for years, doing it all myself. I tried a CPA a few times, but found I was still doing most of the work myself. It was going through all the spreadsheets and receipts. I have a big box, and I stick everything into that box. Periodically I sort it into folders.
o   RL: Does it himself. My system is receipts. I keep them, I stick down at my kitchen table. I have an old fashioned ledger paper. I do not put money into the bank or receipts into an envelope until I’ve put them into the ledger. I take the ledger sheet, and using a calculator, put it into schedule C. The one that causes me the greatest grief is mileage. I have a mileage counter in my car to keep track, the trick is to remember to do it.
o   EM: I write short science fiction, and sold it. I have a day job. My wife is a doctor. We use a CPA. Thermal print will fade, so write it down on paper.  I claim mine as hobby income. Then you have hobby expenses. A whole slew of rules on that.
o   JG: I don’t claim a whole office, because the rules are too strict. It’s too much of a nightmare.
o   RL: I claimed a home office, but it was somewhat easier to claim, because it was my sole source of income and sole place I worked.
o   JH: For a number of years I took a deduction for home office. I took a deduction for 25% of my home. A lot of money. But you don’t want to claim
·      For online expenses?
o   Put the email receipts into a folder.
o   Print the receipts.
·      Save all bank statements for at least three years in case you are audited.
·      If you have a business, you can take losses and apply it against other income.
o   You can do it 3 out of 5 years.
·      Travel for novelists for research…
o   Is the primary purpose business?
§  You can deduct as long as side trips are less than one third.
§  It’s got to be plausible.
o   It’s different for foreign travel.
o   Must document the travel purpose, the research you are going to do. More documentation is better.
·      Never volunteer anything in an audit. Find out why they are audited.
·      How do you know when you should start paying quarterly taxes?
o   They’ll tell you.
o   You are required to make estimated tax payments when you expect to pay more than $1,000.
o   If you do have to pay, then if you pay a quarter of previous year’s taxes each quarter, you are safe even if your income goes up.
·      Royalties are schedule C income, subject to social security taxes. But the IRS might try to tax you twice on this.
·       

Posted on
by

Theme in Writing
Panel at Orycon 34 (2012) #orycon

Richard A. Lovett, Annie Bellet, Aimee C. Amodio, Wandy N. Wagner

·      Definitions of theme
o   Avoidance in plot drift
o   Underlying philosophy
·      What are the themes in Firefly
o   Brainstorm
§  Independence
§  Family
§  Space opera
§  Aftermath of war
§  Responsibility
o   Joss Whedon says…
§  Strong women
·      What is the difference between theme and plot?
o   AA: Theme is the philosophical subtext. Plot is what actually happens.
§  Firefly: What is right and wrong (Is it OK to steal medicine?)
o   AB: From an English Major perspective: Theme is about the philosophical underpinning.
§  In GRRM’s Song of Ice and Fire, the theme is about power, and what power does to people. What happens if you lose control of it?
o   RL: Setting is a place where you can work out their themes, e.g. Fantasy is a place to work out themes of power. Setting and theme can tie together, but they are separate.
·      Can you put a theme into something without intending to?
o   AB: Yes, I don’t think about theme as I write. I discover it afterwards. And it’s possible to go back and strengthen those themes.
·      How do you find your theme?
o   WW: When I’m about halfway through my first draft, I find myself asking ‘What’s really important?’ With one book, it was about relationship with nature. As I recognized theme, I used it going forward and went back and played it up.
o   AA: Usually not until I’ve put some distance between myself and the writing. While I am writing, I am too into the story part.
o   RL: I usually don’t know until I’m two thirds or more of the way through.
·      You’ve found a theme (e.g. responsibility), how do you use that information to improve your story?
o   AA: It’s got to end with it, and it’s got to telegraph it in the beginning.
o   WW: there’s a pattern with jokes: tell, tell, spin. It’s similar with theme: you must not overdo it. It should be just enough.
o   AB: If you’re too focused on theme, then you may not focus enough on the story. Also, none of my first readers read for theme, which makes it challenging to find issues with theme.
o   RL: Overdoing it is worse than underdoing it.
·      How many questions are too many themes?
o   AB: It depends on your work.
§  If you’re writing a 5,000 word short story, it should be very few.
§  Also, no more themes than you have points of view.
§  If you a 150,000 word novel, you can go big.
o   AA: Everything doesn’t have to be the main theme. Thinking back to Firefly, it doesn’t always have to be survival. It can also be family.
o   RL: If I could write a novel, I’d write it in first-person. I’d probably have more than one theme. But clutter is really dangerous. Beginning writers either clutter, or they beat it over the head, or they ignore it.
·      What is the difference between theme and moral?
o   Fables have a moral, but is that the same as a theme?
o   RL: It’s like philosophical discussion vs. philosophical conclusions.
o   GMMR explores what power does, but by the consequences he assigned to characters, he’s also making conclusions.
·      WW: A theme is what is inside a story and is shedding a light on an aspect of the human condition. 

Posted on
by

I was searching my computer for a file this morning, and found a bunch of images I’d created in the course of writing and publishing Avogadro Corp. You can click on any of the images to see the original, high resolution photos.

It starts with this timeline for Avogadro Corp. I think it’s pretty cool, although the canonical date for the events in Avogadro Corp is now 2015.

I also found one of the pieces of the original cover design. We ended up abandoning this style, but you can see the subtitle “The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears” comes from this visual:

Here’s the Avogadro corporate structure. This is somewhat inaccurate as compared to what’s in the final book. It also doesn’t quite address one of the lingering continuity errors: Gary Mitchell is the combination of two earlier characters. In the novel he is the head of both Ops and Communication Products.

This is probably my favorite image of the bunch. It’s the location of Avogadro Corp headquarters, located in Portland, Oregon. In real life, this is the site of Conway Trucking.

Posted on
by

Advertisements on apps and websites drive me crazy when they detract from using a website or application.

Earlier today, for example, I was trying to use evite to send a message to invitees to a party I held last summer. The user interface is so chock full of ads that it’s actually hard to make it from screen to screen and keep track of what I’m trying to do.

Popup ads on news sites are similarly frustrating: I want to read the content, not see a completely unrelated, intrusive ad.

I’m not opposed to paying for an ad-free experience.

I love Pandora, for example, and I’m delighted to pay for an annual subscription. I get a better product, no ads, and the feeling of supporting a company I love.

At the same time, it’s not practical to pay individually for each and every site I might visit, especially ones I use only occasionally (evite, wired.com) or once. As Chris Anderson talks about in Free, the transaction cost of paying even a small amount (the cognitive load of deciding to pay plus the mechanics of paying) vastly overwhelms the financial impact of the actual price of the product.

I think the solution is bundle or prix fixe pricing for websites.

What I imagine is something like this: As a user, I pay $X per month, or maybe $8*X per year. With this payment, I get access to a very large pool of content and websites: magazine articles, newspaper articles, and services like evite. It’s not coming from just one site or one company but from many different sites from many different companies.

When I go to sites to read, I’m identified via some common login system (like the way Facebook or Twitter authentication works). I read/use whatever I want, as much as I want. While I’m doing this, the websites are keeping track of my amount of usage, based on pageviews.

At the end of the month, the amount of my subscription is divided evenly among my pageviews. If I read one article, my $X goes to that. If I’ve read 50 articles and used 20 services, each gets 1/70th of the whole. This is done for every subscriber.

The end result is that there’s no transaction cost associated with each piece of premium content (because I’ve paid in advance), and yet there’s still a flow of dollars based on actual use. It’s a win for the customer who can now choose to conveniently get an ad-free experience without worrying about individual subscriptions, and it’s a win for web businesses, because they can now monetize their content without ads.

As a build upon the core idea, I can imagine different tiers as well:

  • At $10/month, I see no ads on content sites like the New York Times and occasional use services such as evite.
  • At $20/month, I see no ads on frequently used sites like Facebook or Pandora.
  • At $30/month, I can unlock premium, subscription only services.

This could also be a solution for the dilemma of newspapers: they could more effectively unlock revenue from customers in an age whether readers tend to read articles from everywhere.

Comments?

Posted on
by

Cory Doctorow, author and internet activist, held an “Ask me anything” on Reddit last week. I took the opportunity to ask him two questions, which he answered. I’m reproducing them below, but you can read the entirety of the ama on reddit.

I asked:

I understand and agree with your arguments against Trusted Computing.
I also know that with the government taking an increasing role in underwriting viruses, and the looming specter of evolutionary viruses, it seems like maintain a secure computing environment may become more and more difficult.
Is there any chance Trusted Computer could have a role to play in protecting us against a future onslaught of semi-sentient computer viruses, and if so, is it worth it?

He answered:

Yeah — I cover that in my Defcon talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ogmy8XRXvo

I also asked:

Hi Cory, I love your work. How do you decide what level of technical detail to get into when you’re writing fiction? Do you get pushback from editors on the way you handle more complicated issues (e.g. what’s the right level of detail to include when discussing copyright law in Pirate Cinema), and if so, how do you handle that?

He answered:

Naw. I’ve got an AWESOME editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who makes my books better. He got me to rewrite the dual-key crypto stuff in LB a couple times, but only to make it clearer, not less nerdy.

Posted on
by
From Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, comes new evidence that the universe we live in is indeed a computer simulation: 

It’s this kind of thinking that forces physicists to consider the possibility that our entire cosmos could be running on a vastly powerful computer. If so, is there any way we could ever know?

Today, we get an answer of sorts from Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a few pals.  They say there is a way to see evidence that we are being simulated, at least in certain scenarios.

First, some background. The problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time.

The question that Beane and co ask is whether the lattice spacing imposes any kind of limitation on the physical processes we see in the universe. They examine, in particular, high energy processes, which probe smaller regions of space as they get more energetic

What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That’s because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself.

So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles.

It turns out there is exactly this kind of cut off in the energy of cosmic ray particles, a limit known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin or GZK cut off.

Let’s just hope they keep running the simulation through to completion. Also, this suggests all kind of interesting Inception-style questions: e.g. At just what level of simulation are we running? Or Matrix-style: Can we hack the simulation and modify our own limits?

Posted on
by

I’m incredibly excited that the audiobook version of Avogadro Corp is available on Audible.com!

It’s narrated by Rob Granniss of Brick Shop Audio. I’m delighted with how the book came out.

When Avogadro Corp was first published last December, it had a few typos. I released updated versions of the Kindle format, as those mistakes were uncovered and corrected.

But when I got the first audition tape for Avogadro from Rob, it was the first time I’d heard the book read out loud by something else. I quickly realized that I needed to do a lot more than just correct typos: I needed to go through the whole novel with a scouring pad, and clean out my overuse of certain words or sentence structures.

The result was a lengthy reworking of the narrative, with more than two hundred and fifty changes.

The audiobook includes the most up to date text, and the Kindle version has been re-released as well. The paperback in still in progress — print formatting is time consuming and hard — but that will be re-released in a few weeks as well.

I hope you’ll buy a copy of the audiobook for yourself or a friend, and check out the updated Kindle version as well.

Posted on
by

The notion of a ‘contained thriller’, that is a story which takes place entirely within a constrained environment, holds tremendous appeal for me because it allows the exploration of ideas, characters and settings without the distractions of the world at large. I find that the tension is further heightened because the environment is limited: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window would be an entirely different movie if our protagonist could simply have gotten up out of his wheelchair and walked over to the neighbor’s apartment.

Such is the case with the novella Brody: Hope Unconquered. Erik Wecks has done a superb job of using a contained environment (a two-person spacecraft on an unstoppable/unchangeable five year journey) to create, hold, and build the tension core to the story. In a time when year-long crewed missions to Mars are under consideration, I think this is a timely exploration of just what it means to live within such an environment.

The other example of a contained environment scifi story is Hugh Howey’s Wool, which I loved and reviewed a few months ago. I found a similar enjoyment in both Wool and Brody in terms of growing to understand the universe at large as well as the limitations of their environments.

Brody has two intertwined threads: the story of the trip through space, and a backstory thread that explores how Roger and Helena came to be on the ship, and the stakes involved for them. This backstory serves to heighten the tension of the forward storyline. The integration of the two is perhaps the one weak point of the book, as I sometimes found myself confused in the backstory thread, but this didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

I enjoyed Brody: Hope Unconquered and hope you’ll check it out.

Posted on
by

I’m a long term Cory Doctorow fan, having loved Makers, Little Brother, For the Win, and Eastern Standard Tribes.

Set in the near-term future, Pirate Cinema is a science fiction thriller about oppressive copyright laws.

In Pirate Cinema, like Little Brother, we have another young adult protagonist and his super-smart female love interest and their tribe, who become outraged at government and corporate interests and take action to improve the world.

As in other Doctorow novels, we get great, really rich settings. This one takes place in London’s street/squatter scene. It’s hard to imagine that Doctorow could write this stuff without having lived it himself. I’d love to spend six weeks with Doctorow and see what his life is really like.

In Pirate Cinema, the technology, morals, and activism take place front and center, as they do in most Doctorow novels. This is about intellectual property rights, their effect on creativity, trusted computing, DRM, and the rights of corporations versus people. In his earlier books, Cory’s prose sometimes read like an academic paper when he’s talking about the serious stuff. This is still here, but I think he’s done a much better job of blending it in. And I really don’t mind the lectures: they’re fun and educational, even for someone relatively conversant in the space.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I laughed out loud and had to immediately text a few friends when I get to the scene on panhandling A/B testing. If you know what A/B testing is, I promise this scene will crack you up.

In short, if you liked Little Brother, Makers, or For the Win, you’ll love Pirate Cinema too. If you haven’t tried any of Doctorow’s fiction, I highly recommend it. He writes about important issues in a fun and entertaining way. You can read for the fun or the lessons or both.

Note to parents: my kids are still in their single-digit ages, but when they hit their teens I hope to feed them a steady diet of Doctorow novels, including Pirate Cinema. The language, street living, and drugs might be slightly edgy, but the lessons about corporate interests and activism are right on.

Buy it on Amazon.

Posted on
by

One of the benefits of my writing critique group is that when I critique someone else’s work, I feel compelled to be absolutely sure about the advice I’m giving. So I’ll often do way more research into a topic when I’m giving someone else feedback.

I did a little research into past tenses for my writing critique group, and thought I’d share it here.

There are nine different past tenses for English, but I researched three of interest to our critique group.
Simple past: I walked to school. (I did something in the past.)
Past Perfect: I had walked to school. (In a story where I am writing in the past tense, I am describing something even earlier: the past of the past.)
Habitual Past 1: When I was younger, I would walk to school. (Something I did habitually in the past, but it needs some kind of time qualifier to know we’re talking about a past time.)
Habitual Past 2: I used to walk to school. (Also, something I did habitually in the past.)

These are always indications of habitual past, and they are the only two ways to describe habitual past activities:
  • would [verb] (requires a time indicator)
  • used to [verb]
My writing teacher would often suggest doing a writing exercise to help makes concepts concrete.
For example, you could write a scene describing eating breakfast. If only needs to be a paragraph or two. Write it once in the simple past, one in past perfect, and once in habitual past. 

I’ll do the exercise with a different example: Going to school.

Scene 1, simple past. I’m writing about the past, but describing it as it happens:

I kissed my mom goodbye, shrugged on my backpack, and walked outside. It was cool and crisp. I zipped up my jacket and walked to school. It took me about fifteen minutes to get there, and before I knew it, I was standing outside the school building. With trepidation, I entered.

Scene 2: past perfect. I’m writing about the past of the past. In this case, I’m writing from the perspective of lunchtime that day. Note that the first sentence is simple past to set the context, then I move into past perfect.

I took my lunch out of my backpack, and unpacked the sandwich my mother had made for me. That morning, I had kissed my mom goodbye, shrugged on my backpack and walked outside. It had been cool and crisp. I had zipped up my jacket and walked to school. It had taken me about fifteen minutes to get there, and before I knew it, I had been standing outside the school building. With trepidation, I had entered.

Scene 3: habitual past. I’m writing about what usually happened.

On the first of each elementary school year, I would kiss my mom goodbye, shrug on my backpack and walk outside. It would be cool and crisp. I would zip up my jacket and walk to school. It would take me about fifteen minutes to get there, and before I knew it, I would be standing outside the school building. With trepidation, I would enter.


I avoided contractions (because both I had and I would contract to I’d) which makes it a little awkward, but hopefully still clear.

These are the articles I read: