This site sucks. Why?
Thanks for asking!
My 'real job' is more or less a commercial art gig. My freelance graphics work was suffering for want of a place to host big-ass proofs for customers. Besides, not having a web site is getting to be like not having a business card. Worse, in some respects.
Plus, I had customers spending, say $150 for me to do a simple brochure and business card, then turn around and pay some clown $500 to design a web site and pay monthly fees to host it. I wanted to get the extra revenue of doing the web site, especially since in a lot of cases it's a simple repurposing process.
So I got a couple of books out of the library and learned a bit of coding. All the software I own is really geared towards commercial print, with web elements as an afterthought. The good part of that is that using a $30 copy of EditPlus instead of Dreamweaver or GoLive, besides saving hundreds of dollars, is I actually have a vague notion of what I'm doing. The bad part is that some of the things that would make this site really rock are just beyond my depth.
And the $500 web site I mentioned, I'd learned enough in a week to do a site along those lines. This site is sophisticated by comparison.
Wealth Effects
I've been writing for as long as I can remember. My Dad has my first story, 'The Three Turtles' on reel-to-reel tape. With due respect to Amy Hempel's 'Housewife,' which some claim to be the shortest story ever published, mine was shorter:
Once upontime, there were threeee turtles.
No, those aren't typos. It's what Tom Spanbauer and Chuck Palahniuk refer to as 'burnt tongue.' And with the German-esque combination of 'upon' and 'time' it qualifies as a six-word story. Supposedly Hemingway wrote a six-word story that he considered his best work.
Aside from my love of storytelling, myth, and language, I've always been attracted to the trappings of the writer. I always loved to sit at my Dad's typewriter and click away. The smell of the ribbon, the action of the keys on his Olympia portable.
When I was maybe twelve my Dad organized a neighborhood association to try and block some garden apartments from going in where there were woods near our house. He borrowed an electric typewriter from a neighbor who kept a home office. Even sexier than the Olympia. He borrowed it for the sake of having a clean original to take to Buzz Print. The Olympia's keys were just caked, the letters filling in so bad the lower case 'i' looked just like the lower case 'l' and the number '1.'
God I loved that electric. It had its own perfume, a correcting ribbon and made nice, crisp letters on the page. Dad had to cut me off because he was afraid the owner would be pissed that a whole ribbon had been used up when all he'd used it for was a one page flyer.
Aside from my aborted career as a jazz guitarist, writing has always been my job of choice. I only learned my 'day job' trade because it came with the territory of working for a tiny, unprofitable chain of tabloid newspapers.
Which is were 'Wealth Effects' comes in.
I've 'started' to write a lot of novels. Probably over a hundred of them by now, usually getting disenchanted with my own ideas and seeing all the flaws in it after a chapter or three. 'Wealth Effects' (this is it's third working title so far), has been one that's endured with me.
The idea goes back at least eight years, and I started really working on it about three years ago. I didn't have Word at the time, so I used my old WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS. The idea was to finish it for good or ill and then worry about rewrites later.
I thought so little of it that I didn't even keep a backup, and I was at around 60,000 words when I couldn't find my file one day. Because I was working on it in DOS, my recovery options were narrower, and I wasn't able to get the damned thing back.
So I ran out and bought Word, and started keeping backups, a lot of backups. Six or seven months later, I had 186,000 words, an unsatisfactory ending and some major continuity issues. But it was a rough draft.
Writers I admire and respect were saying in interviews that it takes them twenty or thirty rewrites before they show an agent their work. In some cases, they can't even tell you a number because they are constantly revisiting earlier chapters and so on.
And even after workshops, rewrites, etc., their agent inevitably has suggestions. Once they get accepted for publication, there's an editor giving them feedback, then the line-editing for what Will Christopher Baer calls 'birth defects.' I like Craig Clevenger's 'txpo' term even better.
So onward with a second draft. By now I was participating in the Workshops at The Cult.
I looked for local writer's workshops first. One looked promising but meets on Thursday mornings, when I'm expected to be on the clock. Another didn't even look promising, with its organizer telling me in our first conversation that she didn't' review explicitly sexual or violent material. I don't believe in gratuitous sex, violence or vulgarity, but sometimes it's integral to a story. What would this prude do if Elmore Leonard or Brett Easton Ellis showed up at her writer's circle?
I had the usual trepidations about an online workshop. Plagiarism and morons were my main fears. And at a site dedicated to a specific author (and with a second workshop specifically geared to his lessons), I worried that critiques and submissions would suffer from a clone mentality.
The first fear, plagiarism, is easily put to rest. At least for me. The whole reason I was seeking out workshops in the first place is that I know 'Wealth Effects' is a long ways from market-ready. If I wrote something so clever someone tried to steal it, that would validate me as a writer in a huge way. Sure, I'd be pissed, but in a very proud way. And if I've got that sort of skill, surely I'd come up with something else as clever.
Morons turned out to be a bigger problem, but not as bad as you'd think. We did have people come in and write bullshit 50-word reviews (the minimum at the time) so they could get their own submissions up. The Cult works on a 5:1 ratio, you do five critiques before you can submit something of your own for criticism. Trick is, if the person who receives the review thinks it's not helpful, it doesn't count towards your five.
The best moron the Cult ever found, in my view, was a guy who went and wrote five word-salad reviews. Then, when his own story was cleared, he went in and reviewed it himself, not making much sense but giving himself really high marks across the board.
While the very capable administrators at the Cult made sure to shut that door so you can't review your own stuff, I'm glad that guy showed up to illustrate the opposite of what workshopping is about.
But I was posting pretty lengthy novel excerpts for the most part, and lazy people tended to skip them. Chris Lites, Jonathan Kabol, Paul (a.k.a. PMcK), and others gave me great feedback that helped with my third rewrite.
As an added bonus, I learned a ton of stuff by critiquing other people's submissions. I ended up setting my own 20:1 ratio because I was constantly reading people's stuff and saying, 'don't do...' and at the same time realizing I did the same annoying things.
The last reservation, about it being a 'what would Chucky P do?' environment turned out to be without merit. You post a submission there that seems to parrot Palahniuk's style, you'll get called on it every time. The serious workshoppers there are all about finding their own voice.
Digression Enforcement Agency
I'm your man, Mannix.
This is a hell of a long way of explaining that I know Lobster Land needs major renovations. I need to learn more code, figure out how to use all the awesome features that DreamHost provides. I read it, but I can't even remember what a CGI script is, much less how to use one.
Max Barry made a smart move in making his site a blog. He's got some static web site material, but he also keeps an online diary people can subscribe to and reply to. Midwest Rock Lobster aspires to be a dynamic, interactive site, but right now there's other priorities.
Besides keeping a roof over my head, having a family, maybe making my yard only the second worst eyesore in town, I need to be working on my fourth draft of 'Wealth Effects.' My goal is to have the thing under representation by the end of '05, and I've got a lot of work to do before I'd even send query letters to agents.
A proper agent, not some hack who charges reading fees. Lots of work for your humble Lobster to do.
When it becomes the official site of 'Wealth Effects' I'll try and figure out if I need to learn more code. Other than that, any updates will mostly be small beer.
You might also find me at my blog, though don't bet on it.
