Why I Blog (Part 2)
I
first put up this web site in early 1999, and oh, what a beauty it was.
It had a picture of the Syrup cover, and little blue bubbles,
and funny hand icons next to the links, and you could only get to it
via “maxxbarry.com,” with the two Xs. I wish I’d kept a copy somewhere,
but, alas, all that’s left is
this
carcass courtesy of the
Internet Archive project.
I was very proud of my site, because in 1999 not everyone had one. It often received as many as 8 visitors a day, spiraling up to a heady 13 visits per day in July when Syrup was released. Thirteen! Just imagine, if 13 people visited me in person each day, I’d be exhausted. Clearly this web site thing was a good idea.
I also started getting e-mails from people who liked my book—not many e-mails, but a few—which was very exciting and made me feel famous in a way that the watching my first novel sink without a trace hadn’t. I decided that I would get more serious about the web for my second novel, Jennifer Government. In March 2002 I redesigned the site. In September I added pages for Jennifer Government and my bio, and got to work on an online game called NationStates (which in late 2002 looked like this).
Thanks to NationStates and the US publication of Jennifer Government, my web traffic took off: in January 2003 maxbarry.com received almost 50,000 visitors. But over the next year, it steadily dropped. If a new edition of Jennifer Government came out somewhere I would see a little blip, but clearly people weren’t visiting my site so much. And why should they? I didn’t post to it. It was just the same old site, week after week.
I started to worry that by the time my next book came out, nobody would remember who I was. It could be Syrup all over again: a couple of weeks on the “New Releases” shelves, then gone before anybody realized it was there. Then I would start getting e-mails from my publisher saying things like “not as well as we hoped” and I would have to crawl back to Hewlett-Packard for a real job.
I’d discovered weblogs via Wil Wheaton and thought they were a pretty cool idea. I wasn’t sure how exciting my blog would be, since my day generally goes (1) Wake up (2) Type (3) Sleep, but on the other hand I did have a lot of obnoxious opinions and wasn’t afraid to share them. Surely that was enough.
Apparently the first rule of blogging is… wow, have you ever Googled for “the first rule of blogging”? Seriously, there’s like a hundred different first rules. So I guess the real first rule is: “Everybody’s got an opinion.” Or maybe: “People post all kinds of crap on blogs and nobody checks anything so you can’t trust a damn thing they say.” But the one I had in mind when I started this paragraph was: “You must blog every day.” This sounded like a lot of work, though, so I decided I would just post whenever I thought I had something worth saying. I would create a semi-blog.
In March 2004 I rewrote the site into the sleek, attractive, standards-compliant form you see before you, and started posting to it. At first I floundered around, not really sure what to write about, but then I found my groove and discovered Newlyweds and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and I was away.
I think I get three things out of blogging. First, I get to stay in touch with people who enjoy my writing, and tell them when I have a new novel out that they must immediately purchase because my cocaine habit doesn’t pay for itself, you know. (Since I started blogging, site traffic has steadily risen and is now back to where it was when Jennifer Government was first published. Look, I even made a graph.) This is a two-way thing; via e-mail and comments, I also get to hear back from people, which is just about the best thing ever. Writing is a solitary business, and it’s continually thrilling to hear that a novel I once printed out and mailed in a box to my publisher has become a small part of someone else’s life. Without that, publishing books would feel very odd—like having a child move out of home and never hearing from him again.
Second, it’s good writing practice. The more you write, the better you get at it, and when I’m working on a novel it’s a nice break to write something different. Third, it’s like a diary: I end up with a permanent record of what was important at this time in my life. I can look back on it in ten years time, or show it to my kids. Imagine their sweet little voices: “lol omg dad u r so 1337”.
Happy Birthday to me!
Have I been hanging around computers too much? I’m all excited
because today I’m 25.
Why I Blog (Part 1)
How are you? I know you get fan mails all the time so I’ll keep this short. I am currently doing an undergraduate thesis paper on blogs and I was wondering if I can ask you one question: Why have you decided to use the blog format for your website?
The short answer is because I thought it was good way to keep in touch with people in the long, empty years between novels. The long answer has graphs, and I’ll write that in the blog after this one. Because you need some backstory: the fact is, I wouldn’t have even known what a blog was if it hadn’t been for that little punk Wil Wheaton.
In March 2003 I started finding odd bits in people’s e-mails, like, “By the way, congrats on the Wil Wheaton rave!” I had no idea what this meant or who Wil Wheaton was. But after I got enough of them, I decided to find out—because I’m very curious, if you prod me repeatedly. I did an internet search and discovered that Wil Wheaton had a web site, and in passing he’d said:
I just finished a great book called “Jennifer Government.” I bought it on a Saturday, and finished it by the following Tuesday. I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever read a book. It’s that good.
This was pretty great, but who was this guy? I clicked around a little more and was struck numb with horror: Wil Wheaton was my high school arch-nemesis.
(Well, one of them. I had a few. Don’t think I’ve forgotten you, Berryman!)
See, one night in the late 1980s a bunch of us teenagers went out to the movies and saw Stand By Me. It was a great movie, and I enjoyed it even though it was hard to concentrate with Jen, the girl I was lusting after, sitting so close by. We came out of the theater and started to talk about the actors in it and Jen said something like, “Ohhh, that Wil Wheaton, he’s so dreamy!”
Well, naturally enough, I was immediately struck with the urge to hunt down Mr. Wheaton and beat him into a bloody mess.
I resisted, because that was illegal and I didn’t have the plane fare to go to L.A. Instead I settled for less extreme but, alas, no more successful methods of pursuing Jen for the next few years, until one day she cracked under the unrelenting strain and agreed to marry me. Ten years of wedded bliss later (I speak for myself here), and suddenly Wil Wheaton is on the scene trying to mess things up again. I could feel my temples throb with the old rage, and hear the voices whispering, “Now he’s not such a big-shot actor, his house probably doesn’t even have that good security.”
But no! I was a grown man, now (I told myself). That stuff was ancient history. And this site of Wil’s, called a “blog,” was clearly something of a phenomenon: he would write about whatever the hell he was up to that day, and an astounding number of people would drop by to read it. It was an intriguing idea, and Wil an excellent writer; I quickly became engrossed reading about his trials and tribulations as an actor, writer, stepfather, and human being.
I wrote to Wil to thank him:
Hey, you liked my novel! And then you told hundreds of thousands of people about it. Boy do you rock. Thanks a lot.
Wil wrote right back:
Right on. :)
You rock for writing it. It’s the first novel I’ve read in years that was so compelling I only put it down to sleep and drive. Yeah I read it while I ate. Best 4 days in recent memory.
He also put my e-mail to him on his web site, which was an unexpected introduction to the custom of bloggers to make just about anything public, along with a complete fabrication about how he e-mailed me first. But this was surely just a harmless mistake, and it was quite thrilling to get a reply. “Hey, Jen!” I called. “You’ll never guess who I just got an e-mail from. It’s that guy, Wil Wheaton, who you —”
“Wil Wheaton!” Jen exclaimed, her eyes lighting up. “He’s dreamy!”
Damn you, Wil Wheaton. I’ll get you one of these days.
We’re not in Redmond any more, Toto
About nine months ago I switched from
Microsoft Windows
to
Gentoo Linux.
I wasn’t unhappy with Windows, but Linux is very handy
when you’re
designing a web site,
and I got sick of rebooting all the time to switch from one to the other.
So I decided to suck it up and go all the way.
This turned out to be a lot like moving to another country, both in the sense that I didn’t know where anything was or understand the local language, and because I realized things about the place I’d left. So here’s what I learned.
(Note: There are several different types of Linux, and they each do some things better than the others. Not all my comments apply to all Linux distributions. But I’m still going to just say “Linux.”)
- Linux is a religion.
When you first hear about Linux, it’s from slightly creepy people
whose eyes shine with a born-again fervor while they rattle on about
all kinds of things you don’t understand. I have become one of those
people. There really needs to be some kind of warning sticker on the
CD: “May cause you to blog about the philosophies of operating systems.”
I mention this up front because it helps to explain everything else.
- Windows thinks you’re an idiot;
Linux thinks you’re a genius.
What I love about Windows is that no matter what it asks you to do,
you can choose the default and it works. You can
actually install software by inserting the CD, closing your eyes, and
hitting ENTER over and over again. You have no idea what you’re doing,
but you don’t care.
Linux, on the other hand, wouldn’t dare to assume it knows what you want. There’s hardly a default setting on anything, anywhere. Naturally you will want to do some in-depth reading about horizontal frequency rates before leaping into anything as advanced as displaying a picture on the screen, right? The first time you do anything in Linux, you come away with an education.
Each approach is handy at different times. It’s very handy being treated as an idiot, until you want to do something smart. Then it’s annoying.
- Windows plays soccer; Linux plays rugby.
In soccer
(sorry, to me
this
is football), whenever
one player makes the slightest contact with another, he collapses to
ground, writhing in agony and clutching at his ankle. Everyone
gathers around and looks very worried until the referee holds up
a yellow card and then—amazing!—the player springs up again,
completely cured. So too Windows: as soon as anything
goes wrong with any program, the whole thing collapses in a
screaming heap, and requires a reboot. Linux, on the other
hand, shrugs off application failures like a rugby player
ignores broken fingers. Programs crash, but Linux keeps
going.
- Linux marketing sucks.
Microsoft is a corporation with an overriding
financial interest in persuading people to buy Windows. The people
who make Linux, on the other hand, are mostly volunteers who simply
love building good code. So while there are plenty of Microsoft
advertisements and salespeople and lobbyists to tell the government
that you can’t trust Linux, there is practically nobody on the other side.
It’s always a bit creepy when you have
a big corporation up against a non-profit or non-entity; you end
up being told that sugared drinks are better for you than water,
you wouldn’t dare breast-feed your baby when good old manufactured
formula is available, and there’s no such thing as global warming.
Linux people don’t merely lack the funding
to match Microsoft’s marketing; they also don’t really want to.
The Linux
attitude is that they have built a magnificent operating system
and if you can’t see that, well, that’s your problem.
So Microsoft’s aim is to sell operating systems while Linux people
focus on building them.
- Windows lets you, Linux unleashes you.
Occasionally I see the phrase “lets you” in discussions of Windows
software—as in, “This software lets you press C to get a preview.”
The idea that you are not allowed to do anything
to your computer unless it “lets you” is, I realized, very
Microsoftian. Because in Linux, you can do whatever the hell you want to
pretty much any piece of code: improve it, change it, or break it.
Not that you need to, because everything is incredibly customizable
already, but you can. If you complain about any piece of software
in Linux, you stand a good chance of being told, “Well go make
it better, then.” By comparison, Microsoft asks,
“Where do you want to go today?” but then strongly recommends
you select: “Default.”
- Windows gets in your face.
Like an annoying four-year-old, Windows
can’t go two minutes without attention. You boot, start
to do something, and suddenly there windows are flying at your face.
Everything is checking for updates or activating or deactivating
or switching channels and IT HAS TO TELL YOU THIS RIGHT NOW.
Linux puts its messages in the log, and you read
them when and if you feel like it.
- Windows fails silently.
Oh my God. Before, I never even noticed this.
But now every time I have to use Windows I end up bug-eyed and yelling
at the screen, “Just tell me what’s wrong!” When something
goes wrong in Linux, it spews messages into the system log,
which you can read through to see what it was doing. Then you copy a
phrase or two into Google, click Search, and choose from a list of
pages competing to tell you exactly what the problem is and how to fix it.
Windows doesn’t do this. Windows doesn’t even have a system log, as far as I know. When things go wrong, they do so mysteriously and without complaint: you click buttons and nothing happens, or you try to run a program and it just vanishes. There’s no way to discover what the actual problem is. If you Google for the symptoms, you find endless pages complaining about the same thing, but no solutions. Or you do find solutions, but they all come down to the same thing: (1) Reboot (2) Reinstall. They should issue a Microsoft Support Manual that contains nothing except these two words, because that’s the solution to every single Windows problem. Even if you manage to fix it, you never find out what exactly the problem is; you just grope around blindly reinstalling things until suddenly and just as mysteriously things start working again. The other day I e-mailed a company’s tech support and their semi-automated advice was to reinstall their program and Windows XP. If that didn’t work, I was to e-mail again to get help from a human. That’s right, wiping my hard drive was the first step in their diagnoses process. This is like having to get a heart transplant before the doctor will see you about your hiccups.
The end result is that even though Windows is simpler to get to grips with, I never felt really confident with it, because I couldn’t tell what it’s doing. Linux requires more understanding, but when you’ve got that, you’re more assured.
- Linux people rock.
One day my Windows PC choked on an automatic security
update, and thereafter every time it tried to update itself, it
failed. Having an unpatched Windows computer connected to the internet
is like walking through a bad neighborhood tossing your BMW
car keys from hand to hand, so I wanted to do something about this.
There was no error message, of course, aside from the gloriously
unhelpful, “The update failed to install.”
I ended up going through the maze of Microsoft’s
technical support to send in a problem report.
I received an automated e-mail back saying my report had
been received, then nothing. Weeks went by. I tried again. Same thing.
Then one day, it just started working again.
Of course, this is not specific to Microsoft. Pretty much every company treats a support customer like something they just stepped in: their aim is to get rid of you with as little touching as possible. I can’t remember the last time I e-mailed a company for support and it didn’t go like this:- Receive automated response suggesting I look in FAQs
- Receive response from alleged human being that consists of copy-and-pasted text from FAQ
- I write back thanking them for the information and expressing regret that none of it is remotely relevant to the problem I described
- Human being actually reads my e-mail starts being helpful.
The other day I had some trouble getting a piece of hardware working on my Linux machine, and found a web site by a guy who had written Linux drivers for it. Not because it was his job; he just felt like it. The hardware was Australian-specific and Google wasn’t helping much, so I e-mailed him a question, not really expecting a reply—because it’s a bit like e-mailing Bill Gates to ask what that DOS command is that displays all the directories. (Or would be if Gates actually wrote DOS. Bada boom! Sorry. I’m sorry. See point #1.) He wrote right back with the answer.
Retrospective #4: Comments, e-mails, Ellis, and Arjun
This is the bit when I look back at—ah, forget it, I can’t hand-hold
you new people forever.
No sooner had I posted the blog about getting the Syrup screenwriting gig when I received an e-mail back. “Ah!” I thought. “Already the congratulations are rolling in!” This is what it said:
you only write about your scripts, and that too few and far between. youre ignoring your loyal website readers such as me. you stopped writing funny stuff long ago. im upset. :(
you need to get back to the old days when you wrote a post every other day, and incredibly funny ones too.
regards
arjun
This evoked several competing thoughts. First was, “Kiss my butt, Arjun!” Second was, “Maybe he’s got a point. I haven’t done so many comedy blogs lately. And he is quite flattering about my older stuff.” The third was, “Kiss my butt, Arjun! What do you want, a refund?”
I know artists have to put up with people saying, “I like your old albums/books/films better than your new ones,” but geez, I didn’t think I’d get that about my web site. I searched through my e-mail and discovered that Arjun had written to me a couple of times before. If I were petty enough, I might observe that his earlier e-mails were much more entertaining than this one. And I am, so I have.
I finally changed my e-mail page to announce that I can no longer reply to all letters. I cringed as I did it, because I knew some people would take this as proof that I am an out-of-touch egomaniac with no time for his fans, and I’d prefer to keep that a secret. I also worried I would get fewer e-mails, since people might not bother writing if there wasn’t much chance of a reply. Instead, my e-mail inflow practically doubled. It’s like everyone was looking at that pathetic line, “I will try to reply in 19 weeks,” and thought, “Poor bastard, I’ll leave him be.”
Or maybe it was because of my interview with Ellis. This blog clearly encouraged a lot of people to e-mail me crazy comments in the hope that I would interview them for the site, too. Either that or a lot of genuinely crazy people suddenly all wrote to me at once. Hmm. That’s a more disturbing idea. But anyway, Ellis has his own web site now, which promises to reveal more of the enigma wrapped inside a riddle that is Ellis. Compulsory reading.
In December I added the ability for site members to post comments in response to my blogs, which, to my surprise, turned out great. If I post a funny blog, people post a bunch of funny follow-ups; if I post a serious blog, people post lots of thought-provoking comments. I have to admit, the reason it took me so long to add this was because I was sure it would get spammed into the ground by idiots. And I guess this will happen sooner or later, since this is the internet. But so far, so good!
I received many long, thoughtful e-mails in reply to my “On Capitalism and Corporatism” blog. I took the time to read them and mull them over and think how lucky it was I didn’t have to write equally thoughtful replies. Amongst them was a one-sentence letter that, possibly inadvertently, made the most persuasive argument for the ascendancy of capitalism of all. After digesting my opinions on political economics, globalization, and corporatism, Joseph had this to say:
you play world of warcraft? Cool lets play sometime
That’s 2004, then
Christmas is a deeply sacred holiday in Australia, because its arrival
signals that it’s time to put aside daily trivialities and focus on what
Aussies really care about: sun, sport, and lying around not doing much.
I am partaking in this by making a pilgrimage to
Perth,
and since Western Australia doesn’t have electricity, this will be my last blog
of the year.
Thanks to everyone who’s visited my site in 2004—this blogging thing has been very cool. I wasn’t sure what the hell I was doing in the beginning, or whether posting regular updates to my site would quickly get boring. I don’t know about you, but I’m still having fun, so I’ll be back in 2005.
P.S. Okay, okay, Western Australia has electricity.
| MaxBarry.com ›
Max ›
That’s 2004, then