Jen is devouring the Twilight novels. Should I be worried?
I have a cold. NOT SWINE FLU. A cold.
Ever since I started emptying my coffee grounds in the plant outside, small, jittery birds have been digging it up.
Up to my elbows in Perl. I like Perl. Yeah, I'm the one.
Started selling Machine Man from my website via PayPal. So far nothing has gone horribly wrong. That's a win.
Heh, "reader's block." From: http://bit.ly/VVlcQ
Going to hospital to have Fin's cast removed. She's excited. Haven't told her yet this involves buzzsaw.
Girl at my talk: "I want to be you." Which is funny, because I want to be blonde and 16.
Heading to Eltham College to talk to 16-year-olds about writing. This could get messy.
Magic day with my daughter… lunch on the grass outside the State Library while she chased pigeons.
Machine Man update
Seriously:
I’m making this story up as I go. I didn’t say that just to lower your
expectations. It’s a work in progress. I haven’t plotted it out in advance.
I write each page a few days before you see it.
I’d like to believe the reason I keep getting emails like, “Come on, tell me: how much of this have you written already?” is that people think Machine Man is so amazingly brilliant that no mere mortal could dream it up on the run. Unfortunately, I have to face the fact that you just think I’m shifty.
So look, I swear: it’s for real. I’ll show you the blank pages I haven’t written yet.
Anyway. Six weeks in, I’m thrilled. I like the story, I like checking the latest comments about each page, and 2,700 people have signed up for it. The unsubscription rate is 7%, meaning 93% of people who try it out via email stick with it, which I couldn’t be happier about. Well, I guess I could. 100% would be better. But maybe that 7% just changed email addresses. Or someone close to them died and they couldn’t handle any contact from the outside world for a while. You can’t rule that out.
Now some news:
Machine Man is going to be a book. You know, a real one. My Australian publisher, Scribe, decided there was no need to wait to find out whether the rest of the story—i.e. most of it—would be any good, and offered for print rights. That’s some pretty good blind faith right there. I’m touched but slightly afraid.
I did an interview on Machine Man for LiteraryMinded.
I’m enjoying this enough to see it though, so the end of the free feed is nigh. I’m thinking Chapter Ten; i.e. the last free page will be 43. That’s eight and a half weeks in, which seems about right. Actually, page 33 would have been a good place, story-wise, but I hadn’t gotten around to setting up PayPal. Soon, anyway, you’ll have the opportunity to pay $6.95 for the rest of the story. If it helps, you can think of me using that seven bucks to buy shoes for Fin. Look at her! Right now she has to walk around in baskets.
And a few thoughts:
My favorite chapter so far is Chapter Five, which contains my favorite page (20), which contains my favorite line (“Don’t do that thing.”). I realize this is something no self-respecting author should ever admit, but that line made me giggle like a child.
Biggest surprise was the reaction to page 23. I forgot that nobody but me knew that Lola was into prosthetics. I mean, really into them. And people liked this development. Which was great to discover, you sick bastards.
At the risk of disappointing you by revealing its very mundane origins: Page 21 is more or less the original idea I had for this story. I was walking along one day when I saw an unattractive man in a beautiful car; I had a notepad with me and wrote down: The cars are better than the drivers. I thought about this while waiting for the train, at which point I added: I want to be a train, which is essentially page 2. The rest follows naturally, I’m sure you’ll agree.
26 commentsAnytime anything interesting happens, I see everyone's heads down, tweeting about it.
If swine flu was as infectious as the idea of swine flu, we'd all be dead by now.
SHE'S CONTAGIOUS
Uh-oh. Stomach… clenching. Gorge… rising…
Woke to: "Daddy? I've done a vommie." Now five chucks and counting. Poor bunny.
I think I've finally figured out Twitter. The idea is to rank everyone on the planet by popularity. Right?
It's impossible to put on your shoes and urinate at the same time. I'm just saying.
It's a Daddy Day! So far I have played dress-ups, teased kittens, and supervised a poo. What have YOU done?
Had maybe-idea for serial to write after Machine Man. Good day.
Mmm, Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade beckons. What could possibly go wrong?
Taping over. Adrenaline crashing. So… tired…
Makeup on for taping of show. Resemble wax statue of self. Kind of turned on.
Boarding plane for Sydney. I just met legendary Aussie YA author John Marsden, I think I love him.
"Book Club" TV show featuring me scheduled to air July 14 on ABC. Flying to Sydney for taping this Friday. Wheee!
Jen's hives apparently caused by plant known as "pregnant onion." Pregnant with DANGER.
Terrifying Love
Forgive me, but I need to get this off my chest. I am a
Richmond Tigers fan.
That’s a football team. And by football, I mean Australian Rules. I don’t
want to get into a whole debate about which football code is best,
but it’s this one. Let’s just stipulate that and move on.
I began following the Tigers when I was about eight. Looking back, I think it was the exact moment they transitioned from a league powerhouse to the most spectacularly unsuccessful football team of the last quarter-century. I love the Tigers, but so far the journey has comprised three or four moments of ecstasy in an ocean of misery and despair.
Currently we are at the bottom of the ladder, with zero wins. We are probably about to sack our coach. I have been a strong supporter of our coach over the last five years, because he is smart. Our previous coach was not smart, and that didn’t work out so well. So this was a refreshing change.
But now I’m thinking smart is overrated. It’s useful. But it doesn’t seem to be as important to winning games as other qualities; in particular, being Terrifying and Lovable.
Because
I woke at 5AM this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, I decided to rate
AFL coaches on those three dimensions. I scored a coach highly on
Terrifying if he is combative in interviews, physically intimidating, and
generally looks seconds away from pushing somebody’s head
through a wall. He scored Lovable points if he is the sort of bloke I
would want to share a beer with or invite home for dinner. And I awarded
Wily points if he is clever and tactical, both on match day and in the media.
(Incidentally, my first thought was to rate coaches based on how many Google hits their names returned when coupled with relevant words. But I couldn’t find ones that worked. The word “tough,” for example, occurs frequently in articles about Richmond, but in contexts like “tough season,” “tough luck,” and “Convincing anyone to coach this club will be tough.”)
It turned out that Terrifying was about twice as important as Lovable in terms of modeling a coach’s success, and Lovable in turn was about twice as important as Wily. This explained a lot for me. Richmond’s current coach, Terry Wallace, is very Wily, but not very Terrifying, and a little too self-interested to be Lovable. Our previous coach, Danny Frawley, was very Lovable, but neither Terrifying nor Wily. And I suspect Lovable can only take you so far: if you keep losing games, you probably become rapidly less Lovable. Those coaches who have a significant impact in their first year or two, then are powerless to stop their team sinking down the ladder: I think they’re Lovable coaches losing their shine. And one more thing: this accounts for the vogue toward younger coaches. “Lethal” Leigh Matthews, an extremely successful coach over many years who was nonetheless replaced last year, was one of the most physically intimidating men the game ever produced, but at 57, he wasn’t getting any more Terrifying.
Based on this, I hope Richmond’s next coach will be Nathan Buckley. I have no idea whether he’s any chop as a tactician, but he seems like a really decent, stand-up guy who might, if you annoy him, tear off your arms. Perfect.
Jen woke up with hives. HIVES! She looks like Angelina Jolie just got punched in the face. Don't tell her I said that.
Ooh, I'm going to be on TV. Just got a call from (Aussie) ABC TV's "First Tuesday Book Club."
Finished writing Chapter Five of Machine Man. Happy with this one. Made myself laugh with page 20. Is that too lame?
OK, how are you people finding me? I haven't told anyone I'm using Twitter yet, but have 36 followers. Do I need to call the cops?
I didn't ask Fin to pose for the pic below, btw. I asked if I could take a photo, and she crammed herself into that pose.
Memory Bones
I
don’t want to freak you out, but MY DAUGHTER’S STRUCTURAL
INTEGRITY HAS BEEN BREACHED. Her bones have bent. One has cracked.
She has broken her arm.
It happened at an indoor play center, one of those technicolor places with dizzying heights and terrifying drops, trampolines that launch children through the air like patriot missiles and treacherous plastic balls that sneak out of pits to slip beneath tiny sneakers. Naturally, Fin navigated these with contemptuous ease, then tripped over her own feet on a stretch of flat carpet. Exactly how you break an arm falling two and a half feet onto shag pile, I don’t know. But she wailed like… well, like she’d just broken her arm. When this didn’t abate, and I noticed her arm dangling at her side like a wet noodle, I began to suspect something was wrong. I sprang into action, demanding a refund from the play center. Well, it was five bucks. And we’d only just arrived. I don’t see why I should have to pay five bucks for eight minutes of fun, followed by a broken bone. They gave it to me, too, plus a voucher for a free coffee my next visit, in 4-6 weeks.
As soon as that was taken care of, I carried my screaming three-year-old daughter straight out of there. I didn’t have a car, so I bore her in my arms to the nearest hospital. I don’t want to claim I was a hero, but if anyone wants to make a movie of my life, that would be a really moving scene. I think there could be an operatic sound track at that point. That’s just a thought.
Fin stopped crying the second we stepped into the Emergency Room, which was a shame, because they decided she wasn’t urgent and told us to go to another hospital. I was tempted to pinch her, in the interests of securing prompt medical attention. But that might have been a difficult moment to explain in the movie. So off we went to the Royal Children’s Hospital, where they X-rayed her, pulled her bones straight, and encased her arm in plaster.
Let me tell you about this process. I’ll tell you the same way Dr. Elliot explained it to me, right before he began to inflict excruciating pain on my daughter: “We’ll give her some gas. It’s not for pain relief. What it does is block the formation of short-term memory, so when it’s over, she won’t remember what it was like.”
Now, I don’t want to criticize Dr. Elliot. He is a smarter, better-educated guy than me, and no doubt across the many excellent medical reasons why this is the optimum course of action for children. But if they suggested this idea to an adult patient, that person would PUNCH THE DOCTOR RIGHT IN THE MOUTH. Is this not the most horrible concept you have ever heard? “We won’t block your pain. We’ll just make you forget it afterward. It’s basically the same thing.” NO IT’S NOT. Option A: no pain. Option B: TONS OF PAIN. That’s the difference.
Fin sucked on that gas like she was drinking it. Dr. Elliot pulled her bones straight. “Daddy,” she cried out. “Daddy, I want you.” I squeezed her free hand and told her it was all right, and a few seconds later she had forgotten all about it. When they were finished, she smiled and said, “I like this hospital.”
I hope that creeps you out as much as it did me.
Dear media: It's not a computer worm. It's a Windows worm.
Uploading NationStates April Fools gag in 3… 2… 1… http://nintendo.nationstates.net
Lessons from the Machine
A writer friend emailed me about Machine Man:
I’ve managed to get to the FAQ, but am I REALLY supposed to believe what you have posted there?
I think he means that writing is a good way to send yourself insane before you ask everyone in the world to watch you work and post comments. True, it’s not a method I’d generally recommend. It’s essential to stay excited about a work-in-progress, and there may be no better way to deflate yourself about a promising story than to show it to people before it’s ready.
But I am a big boy. And I did set expectations before I started: this isn’t a plotted, edited, polished book. This is me caught in the act of making sausages. I think everyone understands that.
Ha ha ha! No, of course they don’t. And nor should you: all that really matters is whether the story is worth reading.
One week in, this is what I’ve found:
You people don’t miss a thing. Upon posting Page 4, I was immediately slammed by multiple readers for being repetitive, unimaginative, and suggesting that straight hair can dangle. This is slightly terrifying, because no doubt Page 4 is a lot better than some others I’ll serve up. But it’s also instructive. I think Machine Man is good training for me in the same way as a boot camp commander who makes you crawl through mud while screaming insults about your mother. They’re both… uh… character-building.
I am getting a lot of love for this project, which is flat-out wonderful. It’s thrilling to watch a page go up and read comments about it. Scary. But thrilling. There is usually a gap of several years between me giggling to myself in my study over a line, and anyone outside my immediate friends and family reading it. That immediacy of reaction is kind of addictive. Thanks.
Long-time meta-blogger Adam wrote:
I wonder what would happen if every day I tried to predict what will happen on the next page. I feel like it would really screw with Max as a writer.
Ha ha ha! It sure would! Although that is a fascinating thing for me: I have always wished I could stick probes in your brain to see how you react as you read my stories. Are you buying this particular subplot? Do you care? Did you notice that foreshadowing before; was that too obvious, or too subtle? Usually I have to bug Jen about these things. Here I feel closer to getting an answer to the eternal question: How does this book look when it’s inside your head?
Quite a few people seem frustrated at the one-page-per-day drip-feed. I’m not sure whether this is good frustration (“I love this story so much, I can’t wait for pages!”) or bad frustration (“In the 24 hours between each page, I totally forget everything that happened!”). I guess a little of each. I’m enjoying this format very much, but will wait and see how well it works for readers over the long-term.
GMail is really popular. Which is not particularly relevant, but wow: almost half of all subscribed email addresses are at gmail.com. Hotmail is a very distant second. There are about 1,500 people signed up to Machine Man at the moment, with… huh. I just double-checked my numbers, and it’s exactly 1,500 people. That’s a little weird. Anyway, 1,500 people, with three-quarters getting it via email and the rest via RSS. There might be others reading pages on the site without subscribing.
Since it’s been a happy beginning, I’ve decided to start a new Machine Man feed every Wednesday. So if you only stumbled across this concept today, you can still get Machine Man delivered starting from Page 1! Feel free to tell your friends about that.
Machine Man launch
Machine Man launches tomorrow! Which is also my birthday. Yeah, thanks for
noticing. No, no, don’t try to make excuses. It only demeans us both.
Speaking of which: Machine Man! I hope you’re signed up for this spectacular venture into real-time serial fiction. I say “spectacular” because “I wound up writing a 200-page story for eight interested readers” would qualify too, albeit not in the sense I’m hoping for. But either way.
Because the original concept wasn’t self-destructive enough, I decided each Machine Man page will accept your comments. That way, my eight interested readers can not only bankrupt me financially, but also destroy my creative confidence. There’s a very real chance here you may see me totally disintegrate as a human being. And I’ll throw that in for nothing.
P.S. I have to confess: I’ve cheated a little already. I got ahead of myself and built up a little stack of pages, which are now ready to go. It has been fun. There is something very satisfying about a solid, ninety-word scene. I think I like this medium. It’s like a novel with ADHD.
P.P.S. I got a spam email from “Mal Awesome.” That’s the best name I’ve ever heard. Next time I need a character name, I’m trawling my Junk folder.
This is the something
I’ve never
loved the idea of reading a novel online, because novels aren’t meant to
be read that way: they are designed to envelop you. Anything I see on
the web, by contrast, I give my attention for a maximum of eight seconds before
checking Reddit for videos of laughing dogs. Don’t say that’s just me.
It’s how the internet trains us.
So rather than trying to shoe-horn a novel into a web-friendly format, I thought I’d write you a real-time serial. That means a continuing story that turns up one tiny page at a time in your inbox. It is titled “Machine Man.”
I say “real-time” because I will write it as you read it. I’m warning you about this up-front because it’s going to be a little chaotic, and Hemingway was right. Also there is the possibility that it will go so badly I nuke this part of the web site and pretend it never happened. But it’s the web, right? So I will release early and release often.
Right now you can sign up for free. If it goes well, I’ll turn it into a subscriber thing where you can buy the whole thing for $6.95.
Pages start Wednesday March 18, 2009. You can find out more here.
I hope you like it.
P.S. I’m not sure if anyone’s done anything quite like this before. If they have, and it was a disaster, please don’t tell me.
P.P.S. Special thanks/blame to Ian for haranguing me into doing this.