Me too! This has Kickstarter written all over it!

It might be a good time to change all your social media passwords, Wil. Just sayin.

...yeah, but is it organic awesome?

500 words to get to cat poop. Well, I've read far many more words to arrive at a much shittier conclusion, so you're already one up on many, many other authors I could name.

I feel about the same, on Xbox though, so I hated dealing with the snotnosed punks on Halo. Actually, the worst part of playing games like that is dealing with the snotnosed punks. I suppose the second worst is remembering the full range of uses for the 11 individual controls on the Xbox controller. I'm a lot happier playing relatively simple-to-control games that are cute (Cthulhu Saves the World), cute and somewhat challenging (the Lego series), or simple to control but requiring intelligence (I recently discovered Limbo). It's considerably more pleasant for me to actually enjoy the experience than it is to deal with the opprobrium of online pubescent mouth-breathers, all of whom are truly shoddy ambassadors for the products they claim to like. Halo isn't for wankers - so why do so many wankers play it?

A quick search of the site here doesn't seem to answer the question, so - is Seamus's name a reference to the Pink Floyd song from "Meddle"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_%28song%29

The thing about paywalls is this. Someone has to produce the content, and somehow they have to get paid. Blogs such as this one are a valuable public service, something enjoyed by many, but done out of the goodness of your heart. For income, you're doing other things. Professional journalists, scholars, science writers, and so on are actually doing the jobs they get paid for when they write, and if that material is posted for free, how can they pay their bills? Paywalls suck, when you're looking for free information; but as a commerce model, I can't think of another viable alternative.

Sure, I'd buy a copy. I liked Sunken Treasure, after all.

The Apple IIe was not a Mac, and the article clearly referred to Macs, not "Apples". Words mean things, you know.

"[E]very PC and Mac used to come with a slot for a floppy disk drive, first the 5 1/4-inch version and later the sturdier 3.5-inch version." Minor quibble here. No Mac ever sold with a built-in 5.25 floppy drive. They were 3.5 from the beginning. The coolest Walkman I ever had was the size of a tape case. It extended about 1/2" so you could insert a cassette. Cost me about $100 in the mid 80s.

Hey, congratulations! A decade! Not bad by any measure. "[B]eing married to your best friend rules." Maybe, but I could never talk him into it.

The hardest part of losing my cat Mira was dealing with Sputnik's grief. He couldn't find her anywhere, and looked and looked and called and called for her. Probably the most painful moment was when I was reviewing a video I'd made of them. This was maybe a year after Mira died. In the video my voice was audible, calling her name and talking to her like I used to do. Sputnik heard the recorded voice and his ears perked up, and he looked all around for her, waiting for her to come walking into the room. That memory -- of his sweet, forlorn hope -- still makes me cry. It will get less painful, less acute and immediate, but it will never completely stop hurting. That's how you know it's love.

Dude. Your dog is totally huffing.

Hey, man, got your back. Um. Wait a minute.

a sob caught in his throat, and he faced the brutal truth. Hard truth.

The poor choice of product association is only part of it; you've gotta admit that the trend of naming things "Obama" is in itself a fairly obnoxious thing to do. (Full disclosure: I voted for him.) What's going to happen if he turns out to totally suck?

Sure, it's a goofy song, but it's also fun as hell. The video's even more bizarre, adding a surreal layer of nonsense to something already nonsensical, causing everything nearby to collapse into -- not a perfectly sensible black hole, but instead a chartreuse hole lined with pink llama fur. Or something. But it's still a fun song.

I creep past the crash, hope that nobody was hurt... You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Artery-blocking collisions bring out the worst in me, the very worst.

And apropos of video game nostalgia, Slate just put up an article on the Atari 2600 console... http://www.slate.com/id/2213124/pagenum/all/

A quick word on editors and working with them. Expect criticism; and expect it to be constructive. Some people take on the task of editing with the attitude that whatever they say must be worthwhile. They can strike down passages or redact items with a high degree of baffling opacity, and don't necessarily offer very good reasons for why they've done it. Such individuals are incredibly annoying to work with. If you think you've got such an editor, see if you can find someone else willing to be more flexible. By contrast a good editor will spot more than technical mistakes; she or he will point out areas where your writing might have lost its punch, or even its way, and suggest means to improve it. Rather than replacing swaths of your own work with his or her own, a good editor will highlight the troubled places and offer some advice on smoothing or improving. Also, a good editor should be very well read. A literalist who's taken in little more than Hemingway would simply have his head explode on reading Faulkner; and a purist who's steeped in Niven would balk at Delany. A good editor will have a decent grasp of your narrative and understand what you're driving at, and will be able to see where things don't entirely fit -- and, more importantly, will be able to say why. (I realize the foregoing is given in the context of fiction editing, but that's because that's what I've done most myself.) That said, it's possible, as a creator, to feel nettled when you seem to be confronted with complaints; try to walk the delicate line between feeling protective and interactively working with your editor as a partner in the final polish of your prize. Oh. One more thing. You'll find yourself absolutely in love with a lyrical bit of prose in something you've written, and see it's been flagged for redaction. Believe me, it happens to everyone. Redact it, because as beautiful as it is, it probably doesn't belong; but save it somewhere so you can use it again in another context, where it might find a better fit.

Hey, Wil, what are you using for a page layout program? The heavy hitters -- InDesign and Quark -- cost like hell, and each has its foibles. Quark took forever to upgrade to OSX, long enough that InDesign basically took the market over. While InDesign is stabler by and large, and integrates quite well with Photoshop and Illustrator (naturally), it still can't do automatic imposing of pages, to the best of my knowledge. This is a rather significant and baffling omission. However, its handling of OpenType fonts is outstanding, and its export to PDF, once you understand the technical aspects, is superb. On the platform specific side MS has Publisher. I've never used it, so can't really comment on it. So too for Pages from Apple. Grossly, these apps have fewer finessing options available, but they also cost considerably less than the big guns. For creation of raw content I prefer DevonNote. This is a surprisingly inexpensive OSX app that I like for one specific reason: I can group my chapters as individual files within folders in the app, letting me shift them around as necessary, and I can use something like aliases as well. (It's also got native formatting, exports to RTF, PDF and HTML, and can import a genuinely surprising array of file formats.) This is good for me because in an involved narrative it lets me write a complete set of chapters as an arc for a character or set of them, then interweave the chapters for comparison to see how the assembled work will look. That way I can have several storylines in development at once for the finished piece, but also treat them as linear narratives for purposes of continuity. If I didn't have access to InDesign, I'd probably work with Pages for final layout, but for composition DevonNote really does the trick. (As a bonus it integrates with all of OSX's text handling and spelling extensions natively.) Pages basically replaced AppleWorks, I think; that was what I'd been using before. That was okay, but had just enough quirks and frustrations that I dropped it as soon as I could get my hands on InDesign. And ended up with an entirely new set of quirks and frustrations, of course. Anyway, I was just curious about the creation, prepress and publishing software you're using, since I know you've got stacks of loads of heaps of free time and whatnot to talk about such things. The self-publishing info you've presented here is good, but it's only part of the story...

Oh groovy. I'll be DVRing that one. Your production diary in ST is the entire reason I'll be watching the show, for the first time ever.

Until I read the explanation of the picture, I thought you were going to say she'd needed a barf bucket attached to her collar for a while until the baconpeño poppers passed.

What sold me on ST was the personal angle. I'd been reading your blog for a bit, following your tweets, and when you put it on Lulu I was already primed. There was a personal connection there, something that couldn't have been manufactured by Crispin Porter + Bogusky. That's significant, I think. I bought ST not because of any advance reviews, or the possibility of reading the Next Great American Whatever, but because I wanted to see what was in it, because I like your blog, your writing and your onscreen work. There's something here, something far deeper than any PR work could make, the idea of an intimate personal connection on some level. This is interesting, and it's making me think about how I'll be doing things at work tomorrow. Not so much about how to manufacture or create a "personal" connection -- rather, how to authentically let it germinate and grow.

I can echo what Wil wrote. My micropress requires aggressive self-promotion on the part of the authors. More candidly, I'm not sure "real" publishers are the model to follow any more in any case. Osborne/McGraw-Hill published a tech book I wrote back in the early double-oughts, and while it was well-received in its limited demographic, even then I was expected to take up a lot of the weight in re marketing it. Well dammit, Jim, I'm a writer, not a PR man. (And thus, irony, as later events proved.) If you've got a story that roxxors boxxors, it might be a mistake to try to pimp it the oldschool way via agents, or sending things over the transom to land in a slush pile. It might be more worthwhile to consider setting yourself up with a blog account, or installing a blog script to your site (if you have the site, and the desire/skill to install the engine yourself), and just post excerpts or entire short pieces there. One of my personal delights here, specifically now, is seeing how well Sunken Treasure is doing, how well it's being received, and especially reading about Wil's sale spike when the PDF went live. In truth this didn't surprise me; it's just a documented example of what I've suspected to be the case for the last several years. To wit: Giving your content away for free or nearly so doesn't reduce hardcopy sales. It can increase it enormously. Parallel discoveries were made in music (pirated concert tapes, cf. early-80's Metallica), then discarded (Metallica and DRM, or, "Metallica: A history of Heavy Metal Irony"). The other thing Wil mentioned is editing. You can't trade a good editor for his or her weight in gold. Both Stephen King and JK Rowling have two things in common: (1) Their books are hugely successful; and (2) they work best when working with a strong editor who knows how to say "redact" in a meaningful way. (Actually, you can say the same of Lucas: Witness SW eps I - III vs. IV - VI.) It's worth giving Lulu a shot, if you've got the DTP software to create a more or less finished document, and the skill/desire to create a prepress-ready piece. If your work is shorter than book length, consider putting it online and generating a fanbase, and whatever, whatever you do, keep writing.