No… really… where did it go? I haven’t felt particularly busy, and yet I find my Things To-Do list with a growing number of things undone. Including the last couple of posts here on rfdc. My goal is to get them both up by Sunday at the absolute latest:

Book Review: Anathem by Neal Stephenson
In all honestly I let this one slip a bit on purpose, as I needed more time to think about it. What’s the final verdict? Come back and see in a couple days!

The rfdc Short Story Club: “The Nonesuch” by Brian Lumley
No excuse. Just haven’t written it yet.

I’m just about finished with A Long Way Gone. Since I always have trouble trying to figure out what to read next (I have more books in my “To Read Bookcases” than I do in my “Have Read Bookcases”), I figured I’d put up a poll and see what you all want to read about come review time. I don’t promise to read the book that wins (hell, I don’t promise to read a book that’s even on the list!), but I’ll certainly give the vote-winner some serious consideration. Here it is:

As an addendum to my previous post on the transitory nature of Facebook’s default privacy settings, I give you:

INFOGRAPHIC: The History Of Facebook’s Default Privacy Settings

And with that I have nothing more to say on the matter other than the (likely) inevitable announcement that I have deleted my profile altogether.

Before I get started, I’d like to point you to an awesome post by a friend of mine, Anne Panning:

On Facebook and the Fabrication of Lives

Go read that, and then come back… it won’t take long.

All set? OK… let us begin.

For many of the same reasons that Anne talks about, I’ve always been a bit torn when it comes to FB. I love the fact that it simplifies connecting and reconnecting with people, but she’s right… The Robert Flynn that is presented on Facebook isn’t really the Robb Flynn that lives and breathes on the other side of the keyboard. He’s the Robert Flynn I choose to present to the world, one who’s witty (or who tries to be, at any rate), loyal, dashing, charismatic… He’s not usually the insomniac holed up in his basement office, the lonely fellow with an odd blend insecurity and egotism hammering away at stories or blasting mutants back to whatever hell from which they spawned.

In short, my friends on Facebook aren’t necessarily friends. Most of them don’t really know me, the forty-something blading guy focused on putting one foot in front of the other just like everyone else. With only a few exceptions we don’t hang out on weekends, chat on the phone, or email each other pictures of our families. The only way we communicate, actually, is through Facebook. I’ll go so far to say that I end up knowing my students better (and they end up knowing me better) after a single semester than 95% of the people who have been on my friends list for over a year. And, really, there isn’t anything at all wrong with that.

But it brings me to the ongoing privacy concerns surrounding Facebook.

Open up a new browser window and head on over to Facebook.

Once there, in the top right corner, click on Account > Application Settings

The default list that comes up displays applications that you have used in the last month. More importantly, it shows applications that have had access to your personal information in the last month. Mine, at the moment, is relatively small, as recently I have been rather diligent about removing or ignoring applications that request access to my friends list, etc.

Now, in the Show drop-down box, select “Granted Additional Permissions” or “authorized.”

Oh. My. God.

The list is… long. Some of these items I remember adding, some I don’t, and some I will go to my grave swearing I never, EVER granted permissions to (Facebook for iPhone, for example. I have never owned an iPhone, so why would I install this app?). The majority of them have permission to publish to my wall. Two which I have never heard of have permission to change my status update. Three to add photos, two to add videos.

With the recent Facebook Connect API that has been implemented, there is growing concern in some sectors that applications for specific websites are being added without the user’s knowledge. While I have no evidence to back this up, it would certainly explain why ESPN and CNNBC are among the applications listed. I don’t need or want my FB friends knowing when I am reading the latest drafting misadventures of the Buffalo Bills, and it gives me pause to think that the default setting for applications is to latch on to my account and potentially “Post Short Stories without Prompting” (as described by the settings for the ESPN SportsNation application).

What concerns me more, however, is that all these applications, all 86 of them listed under the “Authorized” tab, have access to my information: my Friends list, my networks, my birthday, my location, everything I choose to display in my profile. It’s one thing to give that info out to my “Friends,” but it’s quite another to have it usurped by strangers just because they run a website or put together a silly little application that lets me know which Star Wars Character I Am (fyi… Boba Fett).

I’ve been on the fence for the past month or so on whether or not I want to maintain a presence on FB. With the “Share the Wealth” stance on privacy settings the Developers seem to be taking, I am leaning more and more towards minimalizing that presence. The Facebook Developers have it backwards. It should be my choice to share my information. After all, it is mine. It is not theirs to “share” with their marketing partners, affiliated websites, or anyone else. It is my information, and they have no right to display or give access to that information without specifically asking my permission each and every time they want to send it out into the world. If they don’t, then they are, quite simply, infringing on my right to privacy and stealing my personal information.

To be fair, applications added through the FB interface do ask for permission. But the default “Sharing” settings that FB continually reverts to is, in my mind, borderline criminal. I shouldn’t have to go into my Privacy Settings each and every month to make sure something new hasn’t been added that sends my info sailing across the interwebs, and yet I do. And probably 3 out of 5 times I find something that has been changed or added and requires me to re-adjust those settings back to “Friends Only.”

Facebook has become more of an annoyance than a tool for mass-communication, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll tolerate the developer’s lack of sensitivity for user privacy. After all, there are reasons, however selfish and obtuse, I present the Fabricated Flynn to the Facebook Universe. For now, though, I’ll dive back into my privacy settings and start removing the 86 applications that have access to my account information.

I have some new neighbors. Newlyweds, in fact. They can be a bit noisy, but it’s mostly during the daylight hours while they move in, so that’s OK. I blame it more on the thin walls of the townhouse than anything else. The building isn’t exactly old, but the walls are thin:

Over the last week, they have been moving in rather slowly. The wife usually stays and sorts everything out at home while the husband, I assume, is off being the breadwinner. She’s a pretty little thing, as you can see in the above picture. Wait… what? You can’t see her there? Here I’ll move a little closer for you:

Yes, my new neighbors are ducks. Over the past few days, the male has arrived and kept constant vigil while the female sits atop the nest, a surprising 20 or so inches from my front door:

After talking to folks more knowledgeable about ducks than myself, it’s evidently not terribly uncommon, as the mulch and wood chips retain heat for when the two of them disappear. Usually, when they do head off on a date, or wherever it is they go, they move the chips and mulch and bury the eggs beneath. Another male duck arrived the other day, however, and there was a big ol’ row. I opened up the front door to see what the heck was going on with my new neighbors to discover the newlyweds chasing the intruder around the little open space that leads out to the driveway. Then they all disappeared, leaving the nest uncovered:

Nine. Nine? My new neighbors may be quiet right now, but I have a sinking feeling that the silence may not last much longer.

rfdc reader Martin, currently reading the Dune series, sent me a note asking about Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and why the heck I don’t have a search function for old posts.

I used to have a search function, but for some reason, after I switched to the current implementation of the Thesis engine, it stopped functioning correctly. I disabled with with a note to look into getting it working again, and just never got around to it. I’ve made a (new) note and will try to get it up and running soon(ish).

As for The Dark Tower series, it remains one of my favorite series ever. Martin’s comment, however, was shared by a lot of people when the final book of the series wrapped the story up:

what Roland finds is a case of “what happens when a writer doesn’t know how to end a series”

It’s been a while since I read the series, and I have been meaning to do a re-read and series review like I did with the Dune and Harry Potter books, but there’s been too much on my plate (like the series review of Mistborn, thanks Nick and Brian for finally shoving my face in the first of the trilogy!) to take on another 7 (8? I forget exactly how many books are in The Dark Tower series) book read.

Suffice it to say this for now… I remember that I wasn’t all that irked by the ending of the final book. I understood what people were getting at, but it didn’t really bother me as much as it seemed to bother other folks. That said, the ending was also entirely forgettable, which I think is actually a bigger problem. I remember the criticism of the ending better than the ending itself. In fact, I had to do a bit of research to jog my aging brain as to what actually happened in those final pages.

And while that is a tremendous problem, it’s a problem that I think King has suffered from throughout his career, especially in his early years. Even Duma Key, one of his best and most recent books, has an ending that seems completely contradictory in tone and intent than the rest of the book.

Anyone familiar with King, I think, would not have been surprised how The Dark Tower series wound up. I know I wasn’t. Disappointed, perhaps, especially after the equivalent length of about 5 Lord of the Rings trilogies, but not surprised.

It’s a bit overdue, but I’d like to introduce my two new nephews!

As you can see, already they are wondering why I have more hair on my chin than I do on my head. All I can say is… hey… I have more hair than the two of you, combined! (well… almost)

They arrived the morning of March 9th and, along with mommy, are doing great. With their arrival comes the sparking of an idea for a rather long post, but for now, since I am already posting a day later than my usual schedule, I’ll end this here and begin thinking of all the new and useful ways I can spoil them rotten.

Congratulations, Shelly and Tom!

I’m too analytical. And obsessive. I know this. Especially when things go wrong, I need to know WHY. I’ve even come to tell my students that why is my single favorite word. It’s like I’m three years old again. Why can’t I carry the cat around by his tail? Why can’t I play with the dead bird? Why does Daddy hide in the basement whenever Mommy crosses her eyes? It’s a powerful word, why, and I want my students to always ask it when they are writing. It is, I think, the single most important question a writer, any writer, can ask about their work.

Given my obsessive tendencies, however, it isn’t often that I stress out about the why behind a problem. It’s a puzzle that I enjoy trying to solve. Granted it tends to slow me down and throw me off schedule as I attempt to figure it out, but it is, after all, what it is. Recently, though, why gave me absolute fits with my writing.

When National Novel Writing Month ended last November, I knew I had a sprawling mess to try and fix. Hell, I knew it as I was writing it. I’m what some refer to as a “pantster” – as in I write by the seat of my pants. I’ll have a character or two, a line of dialogue, a scene, and a general idea of where I want to go. It usually means heavy, heavy rewrites, and normally if something starts to go off track, I’ll back up and try something new. But I couldn’t do that with NaNoWriMo because of the writing schedule I needed to keep, so I didn’t edit anything as I wrote it, even if I realized halfway through a scene that it would never work. I kept a notebook and jotted down page numbers and basic thoughts in it as I typed, or stuck quick revision ideas at the end of a scene or chapter. My plan was to let the manuscript sit for a few weeks while I finished up the semester and then get back to it over break. First I’d read through the whole thing, including all the notes, and then I’d use the notes I took to get me back into the story. It was a good plan, a solid plan.

But it didn’t work. I never even finished reading through the manuscript. The individual story lines were fine. They needed some work, certainly, but there wasn’t anything there to panic about. What got that inner why all fired up was the structure of the thing. Or, rather, the utter lack of structure. I couldn’t even see it. And in my frustration in trying to find the source of the problem, in trying to answer the why, something happened that has never happened before.

Everything shut down. I’d call it strange, but there were days that it was downright frightening. I started finding excuses not to write, knowing exactly that was what I was doing while I was doing it. I dove back into video games. I read even more than I usually do. I brought out and reread stories and screenplays and poems from ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. Material I only had hardcopy of I entered into the computer and saved in a folder titled “Beginnings.” I cleaned more than I cleaned in the previous twelve months. I cooked more than I cooked in the previous twelve months. I wrote less than I… well that doesn’t make much sense, but you know what I mean.

And it wasn’t just the novel I was avoiding. I tried playing around with these little things I call Snapshots, mainly, I think, because I was reading so much Lydia Davis back in January. I hoped they’d lead me to something more than just a quick vignette, but they never did. Nothing really held my interest. The only thing I was able to focus on, it seemed, was remaining utterly unfocused.

Six weeks of winter recess came and went, and not a single new page was written. Every night I’d go to bed cursing myself for not just buckling down and starting something new, anything new, and every morning I’d wake up and find new ways to avoid working on anything new. Worst of all, when my favorite word would start tingling in the back of my brain, I squashed it. I didn’t want to even think of the why that was behind my disinterest. And when school started back up at the end of January, it became even easier to avoid the writing.

But here I am, two months later, and slowly, ever so slowly the focus is coming back. I still haven’t let myself ask why, but I’m ok with that for now. Maybe my brain just needed to recharge. Maybe some of the ideas needed time to germinate a bit, and somehow, somewhere, I knew that without really knowing it. Either way, I don’t care anymore. It is what it is, it seems to be over, and it’s nice just to be writing again. I’m back to working on the novel, focusing on the structure first, working out mid-points and climaxes and the intersections of story lines. I’ve set aside my normal “pantster” ways and have become more of a plotter (and all my grad school professors cheer).

Eventually I’ll let myself ask why I’ve made this change to my writing style, but for now I’ll just go with it since it seems to be leading me in new directions. In the end, the only why I really care about is the one that revolves around my shutting down for almost four months. I didn’t like that feeling. Not. At. All.

Full disclosure: I don’t own an e-reader. I’ve played with a few different models, primarily evaluating them for use in the classroom, but have never been able to convince myself it was something I actually needed. So, that said, know that while I am not altogether ignorant of these devices, my first hand experience is a bit limited.

That’s not, however, because I dislike the platform. Rather, the platform in it’s current (or past) implementations, just hasn’t given me what I needed and/or wanted. Specifically, the combination of DRM or proprietary limitations and minimal, dedicated functionality resulted in frustration at simply wanting to be able to do more than the device or content allowed. The good news is that there are well over 15 different e-readers and tablets either already on the market or lurking on the horizon, a few of which have more than piqued my interest.

Dedicated e-Readers, I think, are going to have tough go of it in the immediate future, especially with the number of tablets poised to invade the marketplace. The push by Sony for a standard format (EPub) is, I think, a huge step in the right direction, one that Sony learned long ago when their proprietary Betamax video format lost the consumer wars to VHS. With Kindle being the dominant device on the market, it will be difficult for EPub, I think, to gain traction, but as more and more devices come to market that will eventually and inevitably change.

Because, in the end, content is king. It’s what rules the world of e-readers. Amazon is the single largest retailer of print media, both digital and traditional, in the world. They have worked tirelessly at positioning themselves as the go-to source for books and, essentially, e-readers. It is impossible for publishers to ignore the impact they have had on their business, and it would be foolish for them to try. In their exclusivity, however, Amazon has, perhaps, unwittingly alienated themselves from the publishers whose content they sell.

And that’s where the future of e-readers resides… in the hands of the publishers. A new gadget can have all the greatest bells and whistles, but it all adds up to nothing without the publishers pushing content. Not just the traditional book publishers, either. I think that subscription-based publishers, who have, over the past decade, seen their numbers slowly dwindle, stand to gain the most, and I am surprised at how many of them don’t offer full electronic versions of their publications. I currently subscribe to about 10 magazines, and if just 4 of them published electronic versions I would go out and get an e-reader tomorrow. And if my local paper had an e-version I’d pay for that, too. I’d even pay a buck or so for a preview chapter of a novel I was considering, although I’d buy the hardcover if I enjoyed it, because… well just because that’s the format I like reading novels in. But short story collections and journals? I’ll take them all digital, thank you very much.

But not just yet. With the invasion of the tablet, the entire landscape of the dedicated e-reader is about to change, as evidenced by the Entourage eDGe (their spelling, not mine), a dual-screen folding device with a WXGA screen (running the Android OS) on one side and an e-ink screen on the other. The potential for this particular device within the education marketplace is tremendous, especially considering the outrageous pricetag retailers put on physical, print editions of college textbooks. It’s what, theoretically, at least, I have been waiting for… a functionally robust e-reader. But the question remains… where will the content come from?

Even with the marriage of the tablet and the e-reader, which is what I think must happen for either platform to succeed beyond anything other than techno-niche status, publishers simply must embrace the fact that e-versions of their publications, be they subscription based or single purchase, are essential to their long-term profitability. Traditional print media will not go away any time soon, but the impact the digital marketplace is poised to make on the publishing industry is, quite simply, staggering. Everything is going to, has to, change, from distribution methods to payment and financial models publishers have with their online retailers. It’s already begun, and that little Amazon dust-up earlier this year certainly won’t be the last. And while Amazon may well be the toughest kid on the e-reader block at the moment, with so many new arrivals to the neighborhood, especially Apple, whose online bookstore will go head to head with Amazon from day one, things are about to get a little dicey.

Unfortunately, until everything shakes itself out, and by everything I mean the content and the technology and the distribution and the DRM, I don’t see myself purchasing an e-reader anytime soon, regardless of how convenient one may be on my long summer road-trips. As long as there are dueling formats, disputed distribution models and hesitant publishers, I just don’t see the sense in investing in a technology that may well change in twelve, six, or even three months time. Make no mistake, digitized print media is the future. But that future isn’t here yet, regardless of what Apple and Amazon are shouting from the rooftops.

It seems like every few months something controversial happens over at Amazon Corporate HQ that makes the news. It’s become regular enough to appear, to me at least, rather PETA-esque. I won’t go into the whole thing, as it’s been covered at length and from all sides at outlets ranging from little corners of the netosphere like this one all the way to the New York Times. To summarize:

While in their contract negotiations with book publisher Macmillan, Amazon wanted, the way I understand it, bigger price reductions on their e-books than Macmillan was willing to give. Both sides walked away from the table, and, as a result of the stalemate, Amazon decided to pull all Macmillan titles, including hardcover and paperback editions, from their virtual shelves, leaving them only available through their third party resellers. This includes all the books from Macmillan owned imprints, such as Tor/Forge Books and St. Martin’s Press (together perhaps the most prominent imprints on my own personal bookshelves).

Since I’m certainly not an expert on the situation, allow me to point you to a few of the more prominent sources of the controversy in case you want to look into it for yourself:

LA Times Article

NY Times Article

Huffington Post Article

Guardian Article

Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s response

John Scalzi, a Tor published author, has published extensively about all this on his blog as have several others.

If you look closely at that list, there’s a rather glaring omission… Nothing from Amazon. The only thing from the bookseller to come out about all this (that I have seen, anyway) is a post on their Kindle message boards from “The Amazon Kindle Team”

Basically, the proposal that Macmillan put forth was similar to the pricing structure used by the movie studios for film releases…

1. First run in a theatre: most expensive
2. Pay-per-view: cheaper, released after the first run in the theatre
3. Rental (Blockbuster, Netflix, etc): cheaper still, released after the PPV
4. TV: Free! Released well after the Rental and edited to fit your screen and for content

This type of staggered release schedule is referred to, if I make the connections correctly, as a Windowed Release model, which is what Macmillan was pushing for:

1. Hardcover: most expensive, released first
2. e-book: somewhat cheaper (I’ve seen $12-$16 floated around different articles), released after the Hardcover
3. Paperback: cheapest, released after the e-book? (release is my assumption, based on the pricing model)

Amazon, the way I read it, wants to set the price of their e-book titles at $9.99 and wants the release date to be the same as the hardcover release date. Macmillan feared a loss of revenue and said no, and that’s when the negotiations broke down and Amazon put a freeze on sales of all Macmillan and Macmillan subsidiary publisher titles, including the hardcover and softcover book versions.

Here’s my take on it…

It isn’t the price of the e-book that is foremost in Amazon’s mind, regardless of what “The Amazon Team” says. The $9.99 pricing model they want is geared to bolster the position of the Kindle as the #1 reader amid the onslaught of new readers making their way to market (the most important, perhaps, being the Apple iPad). Amazon’s talk of Macmillan holding a “monopoly over their own titles” is akin to saying that Nabisco has a monopoly over all it’s cookies and crackers. Or, perhaps more telling, it’s like saying Amazon has a monopoly over all the titles it distributes through the Kindle store. Using the word “monopoly” to describe intellectual property that Macmillan has contractually purchased from hundreds of individual authors is nothing but spin-doctoring a tantrum thrown by the Amazon execs when they didn’t get their way during the negotiations. The word “monopoly” has negative connotations associated with it, and it’s use is designed to set a very specific tone in the Amazon response. Compare it to the Sargent’s statement (a full page ad he took out in, I think, Publisher’s Weekly, as opposed to a random post on a company message board by an anonymous employee) and decide for yourself which company is the one attempting to “monopolize” the e-book market.

What’s worse, though, is the point that John Scalzi makes in this post.  While these two corporate behemoths butt heads, it’s the Macmillan authors that are paying the price. Scalzi says it far better than I could hope to, especially since he is an author who’s books have virtually disappeared from Amazon’s shelves, so go to his site and read it there.

What am I going to do about it?

Well, personally, this is kind of the last straw for me with Amazon. I was rather put off when they stripped the sales ranking from many gay and lesbian themed books. I was even more concerned when Amazon remotely accessed the Kindles of their customers and actually DELETED the George Orwell books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four which their customers had legally purchased through the Kindle store without any kind of notification from Amazon (they did refund the purchase price, however). I have been toying with the idea of getting a Kindle for a while now, but, quite simply, I really don’t want to support Amazon any longer. I’ll use their site to browse, and to keep booklists and wishlists and giftlists for friends and family, but I’ll do my shopping at places like Powells, B&N, or any other place I can get a decent deal. Because it was never about the price at Amazon… it was about the convenience.

Additionally, I won’t be linking any more titles to Amazon. I’m far to lazy to actually go through and remove all the links I’ve already put up (and I doubt more than 10 books have been bought through those links since I started doing it), but I’ll make a point from here on out to not send them any more potential business.

As for e-book readers, that post is coming up soon. Suffice it to say for now… if I do ever purchase an e-reader, it sure as hell won’t be a Kindle.

Well, it took me about a week to break Thesis, although I have no idea what I have done to it.

I’ve never had issues with my rss feeds in the past. Granted, I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 25 subscribers, but still, everything always worked just fine. When Google took over Feedburner, I waited as long as I could, but finally migrated over to the “new” service a couple of months ago. For a few weeks, I didn’t notice anything, likely because I wasn’t posting much.

But then I got Thesis and started fiddling with things. When I started working on the footer, trying to get more usability out of it with some pretty hefty changes. Alas, none of the changes worked the way I wanted them to, so I went to bed after setting everything back the way it was. Or at least I thought I set everything back to the way it was.

I woke up the next morning with the following message waiting for me in my inbox from the good folks at Feedburner:

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

• line 1, column 0: XML parsing error: <unknown>:3:0: no element found [help]

In addition, interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendation.

• Feeds should not be served with the “text/html” media type [help]

Source: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/RobbFlynn

Looking into it a bit further, I discovered that I had also lost all my subscribers except for 1 (which I think is me, oddly enough. Guess I’ll find out when I publish this post!), and that the 2 “help” links were really anything but help. I know what Feedburner does, but I don’t know how it does it, so their explanations as to what is actually wrong with the feed doesn’t go very far in telling me how to fix it.

So right now, I have a subscribe link that doesn’t subscribe, and I’ll have to wait until the weekend to try and figure out a. how to fix it, or, b. some sort of workaround. Drag. If anyone has suggestions or random thoughts on the matter, I’d love to hear them.