I’d travel earlier this morning and write this post.
(Did anyone else wonder, hearing “If I had a hammer” what peculiarly deprived land the singer came from? I mean, even in my childhood when things like scissors could be considered “expensive” hammers were all over the place. Heck, hammers were probably the first weapon of mankind, and even I can make one from a rock, a stick and some rope.)
On the serious side… I was asked recently, either here or elsewhere, what would I do if I could go back and tell my struggling beginner self that I would one day be published.
Twenty years ago, when I was pushing the baby carriage all over downtown Colorado Springs, because it was the only way to make Robert sleep so I could have two hours to write, what would I have done if I’d come from the future to tell me “You’ll be published. Many times. Everything will be all right.” what would have happened?
Well, beyond the fact that I’d have known I’d gotten hold of some really funny veggies at the farmers market? I mean, supposing there was a way to travel back, or to have me see myself, or to send a note – would I do it?
For years and years, even five years ago, the answer would have been “oh, yes.” Knowing for sure I was going to be published one day would change things for the better. Gone would be the long, long silences of doubt, the times I spent chipping at block as though it were a big stone wall, and writing as though I were passing words out through a small hole in it. Because I would know I wasn’t writing in vain, right? I’d know I’d make it.
Let’s leave aside the effect this might have had on my fledgling talent. I know for at least four years I worked backwards, working away from publishable and towards “literary” not because I wanted to, but because I thought it was the best way to break in. (At that it might have been, just not for me.) And I know that for three years my entire writers group worked away from “publishable” because the one published writer who’d joined thought there was ONLY one way to write a book “action adventure” and despised romance even as a plot element. She dispensed her opinions not as opinions but as holy writ and we of course followed, even though she’d published ONE book, ten years before. We didn’t know any better.
A little bit of self-confidence might have helped there. Almost certainly would have helped there. And I might have developed a voice and the confidence to have a voice earlier.
But the truth is, if I had a chance to go back, if I had the ability to speak to my younger self, I couldn’t really tell her “Everything will turn out all right.” To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, you don’t want to lie. Not to the young.
Would I tell her about the books written that never saw the shelves of a bookstore – let alone in sufficient numbers to find an audience? Would I tell her about the years when I had to write six books a year because somehow the houses who were doing me a favor by publishing my trash wanted to do me a favor many times a year? (Because that makes so much economic sense.) Would I tell her about the contracts that I signed while knowing they’d put my own books out of my hands for my lifetime and maybe even my kids’? Would I tell her about the contracts I signed thinking they were perfectly safe which aren’t now, because things have changed so fast? Would I tell her about the houses holding on to books that BY CONTRACT and LAW have reverted, where it would be too expensive to litigate and they know I don’t have the money because they never paid that much? Would I tell her about being considered seminal by younger writers and bumping into fans every other place I go, while at the same time seeing numbers on my statements that mean I should be known to my close family and only on a good day?
Back then, when I was trying to break in, would I even have believed any of that? I’d have told myself that business was past all that. We weren’t in the days when some company paid pennies to the maker of Monopoly then went on to make billions off his invention. We had a conscience now, even businesses – particularly those businesses that dealt with intellectual property. People know it’s wrong to take people’s unique work and pay them a pittance. People wouldn’t buy Manhattan from some tribe for beads and trinkets. Business has by and large become more moral, if nothing else because public opinion could be bad for them.
No, I probably wouldn’t risk being told that stuff. I mean, people can die from laughing too much. Particularly when it’s not a happy laughter. Also, I don’t think I could have explained to my young self that while that might be true of companies that make gadgets and hammers (ah!) It’s not true of what we’ll call the “saintly industries” where people are forming people’s opinion for people’s own good. After all, they’re doing everyone a favor by influencing what sells, and by using you – yes, you – to promote people more worthy of being seen by the public.
Also, they controlled the press for so long, and were so used to being described in glowing terms, that they still don’t get that public opinion can turn on them. And their captive writers are fostering their illusion, and making sure they land real hard. (Sometimes I wonder if that’s on purpose.)
So… what would I say?
I guess I would say “Yes, you’ll get published, but don’t sweat the low times, and be careful. In the future, oh, seventeen, eighteen years in the future, there will be this time when you can put up your own stuff. So, pick and choose what you let the traditional houses get, and don’t sign stupid contracts.
It might be worth it to you, for a while at least, to let the traditionals have a few books. Whether your statements reflect that or not, and even taking in account you only get a few pennies per book sold – even if all is reported perfectly correctly and above board – you’re seeding an audience. This will make your indie efforts start up faster and bigger.
But round about 2010 start disengaging from the traditional industry. The Titanic is going down, and the lifeboats are going to be a scramble for survival until eventually you reach other ships that might make it to shore. Just step off onto the grand piano. It will float and let you bide your time till things shake out and you know where to go.
Or to drop that over extended metaphor: at about 2010 start working on the side to launch your own indie career, so you can stop writing six books a year, and start making money.”
How much difference would that have made? Well… I might not have signed some of the dumber contracts. But in at least three of those cases, I also wouldn’t then have written those books, which HAVE got me some fans. The books might be captive in enemy hands, but I wouldn’t wish them unwritten, any more than a mother whose kids fail wishes them unborn.
I might – would in fact – have kept aside some of the books I did write that I more or less gave away. I might – would in fact – have written a few books I really wanted to write that my agents refused to send out or told me there was no market for. I might – would in fact – have reached this point with a stash of ten or so books in the drawer and ready to go up.
And I might have written fewer short stories, which, in the long run, weren’t as useful to my particular career as I thought they should be.
But the shorts were useful as learning tools, and other than the fact that it’s a pain to put up that many short pieces, they’re little more-or-less-continuous cash cows and once I get them all up, they’ll make me the equivalent of a novel sale a year, or a little more.
And a year and ten books? That would be the difference, otherwise? Ah, come on. Would it be worth going back in time for a year advantage? And ten books? – shrug – I could do that in less than two years even while working for Baen too.
So… if I had a time machine? I’d tell myself what I tell beginner writers (because with the indie stuff I am in a way beginning all over again):
Don’t give away your inheritance for a mess of pottage. (Or a pot of message.) Traditional publishing in the end costs more than it’s worth – unless you find the one or two houses who will deal fairly with you. And even then, be aware you’re tying yourself long term to getting a tiny percentage of your book’s sales. (Not saying it’s not worth it for reaching a larger audience. I do it. BUT it’s not by default something you should do.)
Don’t not write something because no traditional house will take it or your agent refuses to send it out (It might be a good idea to work without an agent if you can, btw. I know some houses won’t, and you might not be ready to drop them, but the net gain FOR YOU of an agent is a round zero.) Write it and (eventually) put it out yourself.
Write for the public. Forget all those how to write blockbusters books. Those are written for how to impress the publishers, who in turn are trying to impress the distributors. Go back before the publishing industry discovered how to pleasure itself and bent into a circle. Read the older bestsellers and figure out how to make people who read – not the same as people who publish or distribute – happy. Cultivate THOSE techniques.
Can you make a living from indie? Well, I can’t tell you for sure “yes” yet, but from what I’ve seen there’s a better chance it will than that traditional ever would.
And you are free to create what you want – a freedom you only appreciate when you’ve been deprived of it from so long.
That’s about it. If I had a time machine, it might cut two years off my attempt to go indie and make a living… Helpful, but hardly worth it.
So, I’ll start today trying to make up that little gap. And whistle while I work.
(Though before the portal closed, I WOULD have yelled at my past self “Homeschool those kids. Trust me.” … but that’s a different matter.)
Unrelated: I’m almost over the killer flu, only I feel like I need to sleep rather a lot. But it’s sleep on the way to recovery, not the ‘I’m too exhausted because I stood up sleep.” And maybe it’s not as unrelated as that. Perhaps that applies to my career too. In either case, right now, I’m going back to bed for a few hours. The future will wait that long.
According To Hoyt 
Given a time machine … So-and-so is NOT your friend, be wary … Whassname IS your friend, rely on ’em … read Terry Pratchett sooner … buy Apple stock steadily through the 90s and don’t sell before 2010 … AOL is a dead end … watch your sugar intake, fer gawdsake … and that idea for ? develop it
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*nod* “Buy more Apple. Get the kid her IEP for Asperger’s before first grade. Sift the litterbox more when the basement is being worked on.”
And, sadly, “MAKE YOUR FATHER-IN-LAW GET THE HEART CHECK. IT’S BAD!” :(
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BTW – Glad your health is taking a turn for the upside. Restock the reserves and heal — you still have unwritten books I want to read.
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Glad you’re feeling better.
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Thank you for these posts, Sarah. They help me keep going.
May you have much sleep and no dead appliances, backed up plumbing, or mysterious green stains seeping through the wallpaper . . .
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I was just reading an article about ‘if you want to be an artist, don’t go to art school.’ http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-june-12-dont-go-to-art-school-if+you+want-to-paint-jacob-willer
It is a bit like your advice not to write for what publishers think people want. I’ve seen the same trend in Hollywood with film school. It’s Nolan and Tarantino who don’t have film degrees. Across the creative arts, modern institutions have crushed creativity. The best stuff is starting to come from individuals who practiced and taught themselves using masters of old. I’m sure there is a broader lesson in that.
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Yes. A lot of what I’m doing is unlearning. It’s particularly important for writing, because distribution was SO controlled in the US — as David Freer put sit, they forgot who their REAL customers were and were putting out books to impress the (other liberal arts graduates from same small group of colleges) distributors, because that paid off in getting on the shelves, which sells better than not getting there, of course.
I have one tinny-tiny advantage, never having been able to put on the “socially relevant” or “speaking truth to” nonexistent “power” (in the proper way, of course) that they tried to enforce. I’m afraid myself kept breaking through.
And thank you for commenting and reminding me of your blog which I remember liking very much. (As someone who adapted to the US as exchange student, then back to Portugal, then to the US again, I find your experiences fascinating.)
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Sleep is nature’s way of healing ;-)
Thanks for the advice… I suppose that it is good for other than beginner writer’s too.
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Time machine? I would have gone back to 1994 and told myself not to sweat it that I didn’t get the assignment back to Hill AFB, Utah after a year in Korea. I would have told myself not to freak out so much about Texas – that it would all work out very well in the end. Would I have become a serious writer then (instead of a private scribbler trying to break into the trad publishing world)? I probably wopuld have never started blogging – if I had gone to Utah and transitioned into the job at KUED the way that I had planned, I’d have never had the job with the time and internet access. I would have been a writer, I think – but I don’t think I would have had quite so much material to work with,or the encouragement that I did from blog-fans.
A lot of things wouldn’t have happened to me if I had gone back to Utah.
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Yaaah on the improving health front. Keep on resting to kill it. I had one friend that tried to push to fast and it turned into full pnuemonia requiring a lot of time at Dr offices and medication to cure.
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I’m very afraid of pneumonia — first because I’m genetically prone to it — my poor kids too, meaning as sturdy as they look, the seventeen year old has had pneumonia twice — second because of our air right now.
I’m awake, probably briefly, for tea and a boiled egg, after which I’ll either return to bed or, if I feel better, do light research reading. I have no intention of prolonging this.
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I expect I’ve advised this before, but: increase the vitamin & mineral supplements.
A bad cold/flu depletes your stores of minerals (Zinc most notably) with less than pleasant effects (for example, without zinc all foods lose their flavor. Blah.)
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Part of the issue is that the eczemal lesions which are bad now, reacting to the bad air, seep zinc in particular. So I’ll need to pump it up.
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Second on the “glad you’re starting to feel a little better” front.
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Yeah. was actually starving for breakfast, and am feeling much better after shower. Mind you, I think I still need naps.
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(When someone reminds me of “If I Had A Hammer” my mind immediately goes to the Beatles’ tune “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” That’s probably a bad thing.)
If I had a time machine, I’d send back a sports almanac or whatever it was in “Back To The Future 2” that Biff gives himself. And now that you mention it, I’d short some Borders stock, too.
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“Buy Amazon” — but I was assuming I’d only have the time to do the career thing, and possibly the kids.
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I think your mind has good taste and a fine sense of self-preservation. ‘If I Had A Hammer’ is dreary, sententious, and vastly overrated. Whereas it’s always good clean fun to rhyme ‘quizzical’ with ‘pataphysical’. And one has such lovely daydreams about that silver hammer coming down on certain people of one’s own acquaintance!
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I’d tell my fat high school self that the nerds will win, and to keep writing. I’d tell my pilot self to keep trusting your instincts but also to keep her mouth shut a little more, and to keep writing. I’d tell my grad student self to hang on to her hat and to keep venting in fiction, ‘cuz it’s gonna get more Chinese-sense interesting than she can imagine. And to hold onto that Apple stock, but short Enron hard and to NOT let my financial adviser buy it again “because the home office says it’s rebounding.”
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That “the nerds will win stuff” sounded exaggerated and like trying to keep a flickering candle alive in a hurricane when I was 15. Now that I’m approaching 40, I understand it as an incorruptable truth.
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Ebooks sold more than Hardcover books this year.
I hope the smoke is not bothering you to much.
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For Adult Fiction in the US. And that is from traditional publishers self reporting so the real numbers are higher since it doesn’t count self and micropress publishing which is going ebook much faster.
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I can confirm – I got a link to my Amazon author page last month from Instapundit, and sales of print books barely hiccupped, but the sales of ebooks that month and to date have quadrupled.
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Celia, something I and the other traditionally published authors have noticed is that we get TONS of requests to bring our epublished books out in paper, but when we do we sell one or two copies in paper, per thousand in ebook. Which hardly seems worth it.
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It was an eye-opener, actually – that the market was more for eBooks, even with the print versions available. I still think it is a good thing to have both print and eBooks out there, but it’s obvious to me know which is the better-selling of the two.
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And I need to ask Glenn for a link — but I’ll do so after I have some novels out indie.
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Is E-Book publishing an area that deserves address at cons? Con attendees are likely a good sample of core audience — those people interested enough to bear the cost in time & money of attendance. Over time a few “shows of hands” over the questions of “do you own an E-Book?” and “do you prefer digital or dead tree?” should reveal trends.
Sure, people often assert one thing (I prefer dead tree) and act differently (I prefer the prices of E-Books enough to overcome a preference for dead tree.)
Are cons having more panels on E-publishing and going Indie? Ought they?
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Hi, RES, it might be a very good topic. My feeling (and it’s based on nothing more than than that and looking at my sales figures) is that there’s still a fair number of people who do prefer print books, for one reason or another, but the popularity of e-readers is huge. It’s rather like cellphones – remember, they were very expensive at first, and only a few people had them, but then they got cheaper, and more usable, with more and more handy applications … it’s the same with e-readers. And one reason that they are getting popular with older people (who are usually resistant to new gagetry) is that you can change the font size, and easily carry around a whole lot of books with you.
More and more people will be carrying around the darned things … and they’d like to read materiel on them, and not have the individual book cost as much as a print book does.
We kicked the notion of pricing around at the IAG discussion group (Independent Author’s Guild – sort of a self-help for indy authors that started up three or four years ago), and came to the conclusion that about $3-5 was optimal, unless it was a novelette. .99 cents is just undervaluing yourself, and depressing the whole market.
A trad publisher charging as much for an eBook as for a print version is just greedy.
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Celia, how do I join IAG?
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Yahoo discussion group, mostly. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IAG-members/
Website is here – http://www.independentauthorsguild.com/
Many of the early joiners are not so active any more, having gotten what they needed to get out of it, but there are some very knowlegable stalwarts still active.
Just ask to join the Yahoo group, maybe check out some of the past discussion threads. Although a lot has changed in four or five years since the group started, and some of the knowlege is outdated – there’s a lot of good advice there. Some of the old hands have been at indy-pubbing for decades.
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Trad publishers greedy??? I have always been told (by them) that they lose huge amounts of money and are just in the business out of a love of the printed word. I figured the eBook price reflected true costs and that they take a loss in the conversion to dead tree. /snark
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Went to the dentist the other day to get my teeth cleaned, and brought along my Kindle because I hate waiting around in the chair with no magazine or whatever. The dental hygienist wasn’t surprised a bit; she just asked if it were a Kindle or a Nook. She said that all the women come in with e-readers now.
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Less convenient than asking a con audience but probably much more informative: a survey of receptionists covering # (%) of eBooks and sex and age of reader.
I expect the results would skew female and younger: purses make eBooks easier, early adapters are generally younger. I expect also that Amazon & B&N know the answers and keep it closely held. I wonder whether sales analyses would be available, as they should point the direction the eBook market is trending. It might be useful to know whether a significant number of eBooks purchased are Literary, Romance, Western, UF, SF/F, ? or other. I also wonder how many long-haul truckers opt for eBooks and how that might be determined. The demographics of who is buying eBooks probably matters less the demographics of what they buy, since eBooks are the ultimate in anonymous reading. There may be a lot of guys reading stuff that would have Fabio on the cover and a lot of gals reading Raymond Chandler and Mike Hammer.
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From what I have read eBook adoption rates are highest in Romance, SF/F/UF, Mystery, and Thrillers. Literary not very much at all (I bet that is one genre were not being able to show off the book cover of what you are reading is a major downside :) )
Children’s books are also lagging a lot probably from a combination of “do i want to give an expensive ereader to my kid who will just break it?” and how hard it is to make eink readers handle picture books.
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I wonder how YA sells in eBook? Disposable income is likely an issue for kids. Both their own and their parents — when the kids are really young parental incomes are usually stretched already.
An eReader for college texts would probably pay for itself in a semester or two. Probably why that will be the last market to accept the format. ;-)
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Young YA is a concern. teens… not a big deal. My kids both have down-model kindles they got in their teens. (Called mom-wants-a-newer-one) :-P Marshall’s reading habits are, as always, baffling. He seems to have a lot of the old physics and such textbooks that are given away for free…
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And how do you clean poo off eink reader. Sorry, but sooner or later, a toddler is going to get poo on it. (And himself. And the walls.) At least boys — which is where I have experience.
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Ziploc bags are Every E-Reader’s Friend.
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actually if you fly — from watching people on planes, guys tend towards ipads and iphones. Girls tend to kindle and nook. They ALL read ebooks. I think the percentage of people with paper — books or magazines — was about 3 out of a 100 in the last flight I took.
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I no longer fly — sinuses don’t handle the pressure changes at all well, and my seat no longer fits their seats so easily as when I was 150 lbs and 5’11” — and my loathing for the TSA interrogation is a further anti-incentive.
Fliers are probably a specialized market, but if they’re sufficient to keep the airlines afloat I am sure they can support a few authors. I wonder what would be required to distribute free samples at airports? The cost would be deductible as marketing expense … I see issues with getting the books onto their Nooks, though … maybe pass out business cards/bookmarks with the address of Baen’s Free Library or Naked Reader Press, with a promotion code for one free download?
I wonder whether airport newsstands offer eBook download?
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From what I know of truckers (my best friend’s dad and her brother are truckers… in Australia… which may skew things), they prefer audiobooks. Though my friend’s brother seems more inclined to run up insane cell phone bills chatting with a fellow trucker so they keep each other awake.
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Yep. Back in the nineties, for a very short time, I made decent money from a company who put my shorts on tape.
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I was floored when Jean asked for a Kindle for Mother’s Day this year. We’ve since loaded it up a bit, but by no means to capacity. One of the reasons she wanted it was that she could load both written works and audiobooks on the same device.
One thing I’d LOVE to see come out electronically is the collection of “Great Works of the Western World” that was pushed several decades ago. I haven’t been able to get a list of them, much less to know if I’ve read more than one or two of them. I’d like an ebook version to check quotes and things I THINK I remember, but can’t really say for sure.
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Don’t know if it covers the same kinds of books, but you might try Bloom’s Western Canon. I’ve got a link to a transcription of it somewhere. I’ll post it when I can find it, or you can consult Professor Google.
Tangentially, I’d love to see a ‘canon’ of strictly genre fiction, especially speculative fiction (SF&F).
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They are. They ought.
And people lie. Look, I’m buying same number e and paper, but most of the paper I buy used, because my price point for a “fix” is $5. The times are what they are.
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People specially lie to themselves. But the nature of the lies can be informative.
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Yes, Monsieur Poirot. (runs.)
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When I first met The Spouse he used moustache wax and carefully curled the sides of his ‘stache.
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I KNEW it! :)
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The SF cons I attend are, and I can attest that it’s a lovely warm feeling having someone come up to you after a panel to tell you they just bought your ebook and they’re looking forward to reading it.
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Very glad you’re feeling well. Yes, get some sleep.
If I had a time machine, I’d go back twenty years and tell myself to quit waiting to be inspired and just start writing regularly, the inspiration will follow.
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I want a Time Machine to send my mind back to me as a Kindergartner so I can take up residence as a voice in my own head for about 20 years. Way too many mistakes to pick any one time to go back to.
On the other hand, perhaps I could pick one time, and it would unravel all the others? Maybe, if could figure out a way to convince me at 13 that none of the crap I was getting in school really mattered, but that would probably have been a futile gesture.
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Oops, I mean “better” not well. Wishful thinking there.
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And forgot to refresh before posting, so this is attached to Wayne’s post and not mine just above. I’m clearly caffeine deprived today.
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Is this where we point and giggle?
Just so you know, I only do that when it is something I would do myself. :-)
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:-)
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And yes, Wayne, just as well you didn’t know at 13 that the school crap didn’t matter. You still had to play the game. Sorry about that.
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Knowing phys ed didn’t matter, though, would have eased a lot of the issues I had in middle school. See, I had issues not unusual to severely premature children, but ti wasn’t till ninth grade I got a teacher who recognized and worked with them. All the others saw was this great big strapping wench who — to their mind — wasn’t TRYING. (My coordination was so bad I had permanently skinned knees till fourteen. Mostly from tripping while walking normally) So they heaped scorn and abuse on me, because that would make me “try”. My classmates piled on, of course. I was trying to the limits of my ability. I remember contemplating suicide before phys ed at 12. I wish I could have known it didn’t MATTER. (My parents caught on to the issue and got me a medical dispensation even though they didn’t KNOW it was medical. They thought it was psychological. But they KNEW I was TRYING.) Then in ninth grade, a phys ed teacher watched me with a friend who had the same issues. We were trying to learn badminton on our own. He came up and said “You were both very premature, right?” We were. He said “Come take my class. I won’t push you. I used to work in rehabilitation for kids who were born extremely premature. How come no one put you in those classes?” The answer, we were born at home so we weren’t in system as extremely premature. Anyway, that man, whose name I can’t remember, bless him, was the MOST patient and nicest phys ed teacher I EVER had. And he took us not only to fully functional in the ways other humans are — walking without falling. Normal coordination — but both of us ended up in the badminton team and getting great pleasure out of the sport into our twenties.
Time machine — tell myself it didn’t matter the teasing — and maybe give that man a great big hug. He went above and beyond the call of duty and to the extent I’m a physically-functioning adult it’s partly because of him. Mind you, if I’d had him from elementary (not a possibility) I might now not be so afraid of driving (because I’m afraid of not reacting fast enough in a pinch. This is MOSTLY in my mind, but… I learned early not to trust my body.) But one can’t have everything.
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Hey, my daughter was nearly 11 weeks premature. However, it’s impossible to tell now, thanks to the tank she’s become. :-D
There’s lots of stuff taught in school that don’t matter to most, so I really wish we could better tailor it to a student’s strengths and not shove something down their throats they’ll never use again. For example, various math courses were the only ones I ever got an F in. not saying that I shouldn’t be versed in the mathematical sciences, but there’s no reason I should have been forced into calculus – I haven’t used it since I left school.
(*cue all the math folks who will now scream that it’s my attitude as to why American kids are falling behind and we use calculus on a daily basis; not saying it doesn’t havfe uses and shouldn’t be taught, but most folks have neither the aptitude nor the need to know what the cosine of the line is tangent to the circle*)
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I’m of two minds on that. I can see what you’re saying. On the other hand, I reacted VERY badly to what I can see looking back was normal, everyday teasing by others, which brought on a flood of being made fun of for being such a wuss. And I wasn’t really being treated that badly; I was just so overly sensitive that I felt like I was.
Basically, if I could have just been convinced to PLAY the game, instead of being steamrollered by it, that’s all I would have needed.
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I think I would have benefited from advice to relax and spend an extra few moments thinking before acting … looking back I think I clearly displayed impulse control issues that would result in medicating today. Being smarter than the average kid does not always mean thinking things through, eh?
Ah, I take it back: I would have received no benefit because I would have never heeded such advice.
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My life became a lot easier when I learned how to say, “I’ll look into that and get back to you” when someone wanted a quick answer.
Of course, I’m an ex-programmer, and programmers and engineer types don’t like being pinned down on anything. Part of that Murphy’s Law devotee mentality, I think.
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Rule #1 of a canny manager – never let anyone stampede you into an instant decision on something, when it is not actually critical to the mission. Especially when they have stopped you in the hallway, or something. Sometimes they have ulterior motives
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For me, it was mostly deadlines. I’d stall on that big time, until I really knew, because I knew my wild-a’d-guess, even if I clearly stated it as such and that I shouldn’t be held to it, would wind up as stone in someone’s project timeline and I’d get hassled for failing to meet it.
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I work in IT Tech Support. Murphy was an optimist! :)
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Exactly!!! Thomas – he didn’t take into account human error. lol
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OR human perversity. Yes, humans DO that. Like Thomas P. said, Murphy was an optimist. Things are MUCH worse out in the real world… 8^)
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In that case, absolutely yes, it didn’t matter.
When I finally wised up and got a real job at 30 (I slacked through my 20s) in a huge corporation, which was actually a good place to be, I found myself working with all kinds of people, including people who would have had nothing to do with me had we met in high school (and vice versa). I even became good friends with many of them. I’ve concluded that we all survive high school, even the ones we’re sure are acing it. I’ve even thought I might have been one of the happier ones. There’s something I wish I could tell my teen-aged self. (If only we’d had Buffy back then, the third season was kind of eye-opening.)
Would the teen years be easier if we had a higher adult-to-teen ratio in them?
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I’d say yes, a higher adult:teenager would help, but I’m biased. It was adults who provided physical protection in junior high, and a few concerned adults who steered me towards people who could provide crowd-based protection later. And it would depend on the adults, if they were mature enough to keep things aimed the right direction.
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Not warehousing teens together would REALLY help.
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Apprenticeshiping was the old-fashioned way of training teens – definitely a better adult-teen ratio. And the teens had work to do ;-)
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One regular objection I would hear about home education was, ‘What about socialization?’ I would answer, ‘What about it? How many of us age segregate once we get out in the work place. And how better to learn to be part of an adult world than to be exposed to the adult world?’
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Ah, but in the public schools they have TEACHERS and Administrators to model adult* behaviour!!!
*for certain values of “adult”; may not apply in all cases. Check Woody Allen at the door. DO NOT GOOGLE “teachers having sex with students”!!
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Ah, yes, I wasn’t thinking more teachers to increase the adult part of the ratio (though there are some good teachers out there), I was thinking more, you know, real people. :-P
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Excellent post. Thank you. I needed to hear it, too.
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If I had a time machine and could go back, I’d tell myself to listen more to my father. My dad taught me some awesome stuff that I can barely remember parts of today. I’d like to teach Timmy some of that, because neither of my daughters are interested, and he may be. I keep dredging up bits and pieces, but it’s not ALL there, and I want to remember it all to pass on. The survival stuff would be especially useful if civilization were to actually collapse at some point.
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If I had a time machine…well, I wouldn’t change anything in MY life. It’s far from perfect, but it’s not so bad that it’s worth risking the existence of the universe.
I would, however, write a full history of the world from 200,000 BC to the present. :)
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T. L. Sherred in 1947 had a novel (E for Effort) about some guys who had a time machine that allowed them to VIEW past events. They proceeded to film a history of the world (employing lip readers and voice over actors) exposing the dirty deals done behind closed doors — e.g., what really went down at Yalta, what FDR actually knew about Japanese plans for Pearl Harbor.
I don’t recall the characters surviving the experience.
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If that’s the same one I read, I think they wound up being released, but they knew that they were being watched everywhere they went, by their own machine.
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I read it 40 years ago, so I had to Wiki it. According to the Wiki summary
I wonder, once time travel gets perfected, if a market for antiques will develop, and we’ll discover what happened to all those medieval and classical statues, tapestries, books, and jewel-encrusted things that “vanished” during and after sieges, epidemics, and natural disasters. “Pssst, Gentle Sir, can I interest you in a set of like-new certified antique Flemish tapestries?”
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Ayuh, and the contents of the library at Alexandria will be as ubiquitous as splinters from the true cross were in Medieval Europe. (OTOH, splinters of the true cross may actually be available.)
And maybe it will turn out the Genghis Khan was coached by time travelers eager to plunder the cities he sacked.
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Actually, splinters of the True Cross were never that available. People were fussy about provenance, because basically the only authentic source was the Byzantine Emperor (other than That Guy Who Bit Off a Piece of the True Cross, One Good Thursday in Jerusalem, which Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). And then the True Cross was lost to the Muslims, so there weren’t any more authentic pieces.
So anybody in Europe who has a True Cross piece is either someone the Byzantines once wanted diplomatic ties with (like kings and lords along trade routes), someone who got married or associated with someone whom the Byzantines once wanted diplomatic ties with (and thus got a piece of a piece), or somebody who had a very safe place to keep important Christian/world diplomacy items (like Liebana in Spain, which is way back in the waybacks).
And in point of fact, some crazy French historian guy actually went around Europe and the Near East, cataloguing and measuring all the known pieces of the True Cross. They do all seem to be from the same piece of wood, most of them have clear provenance to the Byzantine emperors, and the total quantity of wood is far less than even one crossbeam would take. (I don’t know if anybody’s actually done wood DNA tests, carbon dating, and the like.)
So you can argue about whether St. Helena did in fact find the True Cross or not (although her idea of testing old crosses for which one had miracles happen is just crazy enough to work), or you can worry about the True Cross they got back from the Persians; but all the European pieces seem to be consistent pieces of the same something.
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Um.
If the story of That Guy Who Bit Off a Piece of the True Cross, One Good Thursday in Jerusalem, which Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things is out there I WANT TO READ IT.
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Are you telling me that my history books (Fictional and NF) misled me??? I am soooooo shocked.
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That was part of the plot in Connie Willis’
“To Say Nothing of the Dog” – some irreplaceable items from Coventry Cathedral wisked out of the way moments before the cathedral was blitzed by the Luftwaffe.
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Great minds and all that. :)
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What we really need are books. And then you don’t even need the artifacts themselves, just pictures of the pages. That makes it so you’re only interfering with your own time, not other people’s.
Of course, as the last week’s discovery of the original Greek version, far more complete than Rufinus’ Latin translation, of Origen’s Homilies on the Psalms proved, it’s not so much the books that are lost forever as the books nobody realizes we have. That thing has been sitting in Europe since long before Byzantium fell, and it’s been meekly sitting in the Bavarian State Library for 400 years. But it was catalogued as just having some Greek homilies by some unknown Greek guy, and nobody knew what treasure they were ignoring. And if the chick in charge of cataloguing hadn’t been the kind of chick who had read Rufinus’ translation and could say to herself, “Hey, this sounds familiar,” it would have been sitting there hidden in plain sight for the next four hundred years.
Now that we know what it is, people are jumping on it; and anybody who feels like it can work on it because there’s a digitized copy available to all comers online.
But yeah, I wouldn’t say no to a full copy of Papias or Tyconius, or a lot of other books we only know by fragments and rumors.
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A complete set of Livy or Plutarch would be nice, sigh. Not to mention all the authors we never heard of because nothing of theirs survived — what if Plutarch & Livy were the Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Suzanne of Ancient Rome and all of the Roman-Heinlein is lost to the flames?
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The great science-fiction writers we’ve never heard of because they could not READ OR WRITE. Poul Anderson wrote a heartbreaking story called “Mute Milton” on that theme.
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My guess is that it will not work well, but we now why the crown jewels lost by King John have never been found…
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First – inform my teenage self that the school guidance officer is flat wrong when he say computers are a “fad”.
Then go watching all those interesting eras of history.
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I’ve thought about this, but I don’t know if I’d go back and offer myself advice. The biggest reason is that all my mistakes have made me who I am(including the bad things I’ve experienced). Star Trek TNG had a great episode about something similar – Tapestry – and it made me wonder. The only way to make it worwhile would be to hang on to the context and knowledge you currently have afterwards. However, wouldn’t you lose that in the new tangent?
Maybe I should just learn to better listen to others who’ve been there before me. :-D
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I was going to say something similar. (I wonder if this line of thought was inspired by watching Star Trek long ago and forgetting I had?)
There are certainly points in my life I wish I’d known better than to do or not do or people to trust or not trust… But I’m a sum of all of my experiences. The good and the bad and the ugly and the stuff I thought was good at the time (which turned out not so good) and the stuff I thought was bad at the time (which directly contributed to something positive).
If I told myself, “You don’t have to publish yet – in fact, don’t publish yet – but start taking it seriously and start working on that writing now.” maybe I’d be spending my time at writing conventions, soaking up the bad advice and you-must insanity that develops in a cultural petri dish like that and gotten even further off-track with writing than I did otherwise. And maybe I wouldn’t have developed into someone who would be offered an opportunity in a time machine to advise this self not to go back in time and give advice. xD;
How do I know that taking a different path would have been better?
Hell. Even if I didn’t use it selfishly and I tried to be unselfish and warn people about 9/11 or the Japanese tsunami or the Haiti earthquake or something – how do I know that what would have resulted would have been for the better? Maybe I’d have been thrown in the loony bin, or placed on a watch list or labeled as some sort of hippie kook. Or if I weren’t personally affected by the fallout, what if the disasters I mention pioneered the way for something that ultimately does or will make the world a better place? What if it inspired someone to do something? What if it caused the death of someone who would have made the world a worse place in the sort of world-wide psychological scar sense?
Instead, I’d rather use the time machine to somehow cheat time and give me plenty of time to fart around and be lazy while also plenty of time to write and learn like there’s no tomorrow. xD
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What the heck … mebbe you (or somebody) did … and took United Airlines Flight 93? Somebody had to prevent a bigger disaster and demonstrate that we knew how to fight back.
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Well… I didn’t even want to go on about that. I think it was Dan Simmons who wrote about this. Sure, you could know about 9/11 in advance, but who would you tell? Forget the loony bin. HOW do you even get to the federal bureaucracy. There are indications, in fact, that one or more of the federal agencies knew about most of it — they just didn’t put it together.
I think what RES suggested, above, is about the best you could do. Try to be on one of the flights, and change how THAT went by fighting back.
But I didn’t even want to go into public stuff, just “What would you do in your personal life”? Because public and society stuff is a whole different ball of wax and filled with imponderables.
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Glad to hear you’re feeling better. May your long-term future be on as bright a future as your short-term health will be.
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..as bright an upswing as your short term health, I mean. Clearly, it’s past time for me to go to bed and find my coherence in the morning.
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LOL. Yes, the first post sounded ever so slight threatening. And I’m slightly better this morning.
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Oh, yes, I remember now – I was going to say earlier that when I started reading this post, it struck me as particularly funny because last week Calvin & Hobbes had a story arc where Calvin had an essay to write, and he went forward in time to pick up the completed essay and bring it back to his current time, so he wouldn’t have to actually work on it.
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“Demand 400 milligrams fluvoxamine, 300 milligrams of trazodone. Now.”
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If I fixed all the stuff which has gone wrong in my life, I’d be unrecognizable as myself.
But then, that would be the plan all along.
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