Another year... another step closer to the future.

Posted by Victor

Over the past year, I've gone through a major transformation in how I view media.  As I've written elsewhere, I'm at the point where I no longer have the urge to hoard and own media that can sit on my shelves.  This past week, I took a dozen hardbacks to Half-Price Books.  Many of these were books I've been hauling around for years and years.  I felt a pang of regret upon letting them go, but that passed quickly.  I am now preparing to sell almost my entire music CD collection and another batch of books.

One of the reasons I'm feeling less anxious about parting with these books is the rumor of a 9-inch touchscreen iPod.  Already, a regular iPod and iPhone are gaining significant ground on the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader.  If the reading experience on a regular iPod is pleasant enough, a 9-inch touchscreen iPod will be the killer app that drives a stake in a large percentage of the paper book industry.

This 9-inch iPod won't be the ultra-portable device like a phone, but I really believe it can become the all-in-one media device we (well, I'VE) been waiting for.  One device that easily play music and movies, display e-books and pdfs and word documents, surf the web, and play hundreds of games... what's not to love?

But you're saying, "I've already got that!  It's called my laptop computer!"

But this will be different.  This will be the lightweight ultra-cool device that you carry around with you as easy as a notebook.  It won't be as powerful as a laptop, but it will be infinitely more fun.  You'll be able to use it anywhere at any time and have all your media available to you at moment's notice.

One industry that I think will especially benefit from a device like this is the rapidly dying comic book industry.  Already, you can't get most comic books anywhere except comic specialty stores.  And the prices on a single comic is about to jump up to nearly five dollars an issue.  Even considering potential collectability, it's not worth it.  The best comics are usually the independent publishers, or the self-publishers, and the cost for them to produce even small runs of an issue aren't financially viable.  But something like this large-format iPod will completely level the comic book playing field and make them a viable mainstream form of media.  If the only hard cost a comic creator has is for the art supplies, then they can lower the purchase cost for a digital issue to a reasonable rate, maybe even as low as 50 or 25 cents.  The upside is, the creator no longer has a finite number of issues he or she can sell (which is based on how many they can afford to publish).  Now, they can sell as many copies as people want to download.  Combine this with an iTunes-like store, and you have the rebirth of a new medium.

And not just traditional stand-alone comics, but comics with varying degrees of interactivity or motion.  I can easily envision a format where you at first only see the art, then advance the page or panel and it reveals each word or thought balloon in succession rather than having to have all of them crammed into the frame right from the top.

The one thing I think that will ultimately be the tipping point for a device like this 9-inch iPod isn't comic books or videos.  It's schools.  The first time a school or college makes their schoolbooks available digitally, it will be all over.  Imagine only having to carry one slim touchscreen around all day, rather than fifty pounds of books.  Once Apple worms its way back into the educational market (where it once was king, back in the 80's and 90's), the paper book industry as we know it today will be no more.  Raise kids on reading books and comics using a digital device, and they'll never get that connection to having to own a physical book.  Just like all of us no longer care about owning CD's or albums.  I've got my music on my iPod, and I could care less about the physical object.

Okay... I'm done rambling.  I predict that by this time two years from now, the big buzz topic will be how much the act of reading (for pleasure) has taken hold among our youth, because it will be cool and fun and convenient.

And for all of us that fancy ourselves writers, that's something to look forward to.

Socializing Media (Stripping Down part two)

posted by: Victor

No, not THAT kind of socialization!  You hyper-sensitive Republicans... relax!

In part one, I talked about how I'm on the verge of transitioning over to an all-digital entertainment lifestyle.  Today, I posit the question of how it will affect those of us that aspire to create entertainment content (and hopefully make money at it one day).

Right now, we still live in a world that is mostly dominated by physical entertainment goods.  DVD's, books, magazines, CD's.  You can still go and purchase something and hold it in your hands and lend it to someone or eventually sell it in a garage sale for 50 cents.  We're still in a world where to be an author or a musician or a filmmaker, you are assumed to have produced some sort of tangible object that can be bought and sold.  But those days are quickly evaporating. 

Already, we don't think twice about music as a purely digital product.  When was the last time you purchased a CD and actually listened to that CD (as opposed to immediately digitizing it and burying the CD in a box with other CD's)?  The same is becoming more and more true with cable on-demand downloads, Netflix downloads, Hulu.com, Fancast.com (a great sites that collects all the free TV and movies that are available online) and on and on.  The only thing we're waiting on is the one uber-device that makes all of this seamless.

And when that device or technology arrives (in the next few years, at most), what's next for the content creators?

While the works you create will be instantly available to ANYONE in the world, how do you put your work in front of them?  And by the same token, EVERYONE's books and movies and music will be similarly available to everyone in the world.  How does one stand out in this new world of media democratization?  As many of us here on Humble Fiction Cafe have learned, it's HARD to make yourself heard when everyone else is squawking at roughly the same volume.  It's a lot of work.  And it's by no means foolproof.  It takes a lot to convince someone to part with their hard-earned money for whatever article of entertainment you have created.

One solution is pricing I think.  I think twice about purchasing something for three dollars.  Five dollars.  Twenty dollars.  The fifteen to twenty-five dollar range is reserved only for the best of the best.  Those authors or artists who I will buy sight unseen.  But how much am I willing to risk on someone I've never heard of or that doesn't have any sort of track record?  Ten dollars?  Nope.  Five dollars?  Still too risky.  A dollar?  Maaaaybe.  Fifty cents?  Now we're talking.  A quarter?  Sure!  At that price, even if it's the stinker of all time, I haven't made an investment that I'll regret.  I'm sure most people would fall into this category.

So with that in mind, how many of you would be willing to sell a digital copy of your book or song at ten cents?  A nickel? Who wouldn't be willing to buy a book for a nickel or a dime? What if selling it at that price point gets a million people to try it?   That's $50,000 or $100,000.  How many of us would be satisfied with $10,000?  That's selling your book for just a PENNY. Granted, you have to find a way to get your book in front of a million people, but with the internet, this sort of thing isn't impossible.

The record companies and movie studios are still hung up on the big price points for their products.  99 cents per song is a nice price point, but it's still only going to be songs that I WANT.  I'm still reluctant to just try out new music at that price.   But for a nickel per song?  I'd happily by a new band's album.  I'd buy a bunch of new artists albums. 

The key to all of this is the socializing of all this content.  We're already a good chunk of the way there, with the explosion of social websites like Facebook and Myspace.  There are tons of other niche social websites, like Goodreads, and Flickr and YouTube.  These are all great at what they do, but the sticking point is that for the most part, these sites still don't talk to each other.  It's not yet a seamless experience.  I have to leave Facebook (where I have dozens of friends) to go to Goodreads, where I have a much smaller circle of friends, who are unlikely to be on the site at the same time I am.  While I can post a review of a book on Goodreads, or attempt to start a discussion about it, it will usually go unseen for the most part by the vast majority of my online-capable friends.  Unless I post a link to my Goodreads review, no one on Facebook or Myspace even knows I did so. 

So the key is all of these sites talking to each other constantly.  When a friend posts something in Facebook, for instance, it shows up in my 'friendfeed' almost immediately.  Nearly every item is clickable or able to have a comment posted on it.  This feature makes a simple posting able to become a discussion thread.  And now, not just me and that one friend, but me and everyone else I know will be able to see that discussion and also contribute to it.  It's always fascinating when a friend from one of my social groups interacts with a friend from another group, such as when an old school friend from grade school in Canada responds to a comment that a recent filmmaking friend made. 

In the same vein, social networking will become the new shopping mall.  We are all influenced by the items our friends buy or recommend.  Things like postings and comments in Facebook will soon become (I believe) the greatest form of word-of-mouth advertising ever created. 

Already on Goodreads, it's possible to immediately click on any reviewed or recommended book and purchase it from Amazon.com.  But like I said earlier, at the current price points, I balk.  But if when reading that review, (and even if it only kind of sounded like something I might be interested in),  if it only cost a nickel or a dime or a quarter, I don't think I'd hesitate to click BUY.  I may never actually read it, but it didn't hurt my wallet to purchase it.  If it only cost me a quarter or so to immediately get in on whatever all my friends were suddenly talking about or downloading, I'd be crazy not to. 

We're still a few years away from the final seismic media shift, but it's coming.  The whole pricing and distribution structure for media will collapse on itself and then be reborn.  Instead of studios and publishers telling us what to watch or listen to or read, we'll be telling each other.  And the media we recommend to each other will be entirely different than what those corporations would be shilling.

And I believe that's when all of us will finally have a chance to be on equal ground with the 'big boys.'

Stripping Down (part one)

Submitted by Victor

No.. it's not that kind of post.  Get your head out of the gutter!

What I'm talking about it stripping down and streamlining one's life.  Reducing the clutter.

This has been on my mind increasingly over the past few months and lately it's directly intersected with the realm of entertainment, including reading and writing.  Specifically, I wonder if we NEED to have all of these books, DVD's, comics, CD's etc in our physical possession. 

We are pretty close to realizing all-digital experience.  For me, it started with my music collection.  I digitized it years ago and haven't seen one of my actual CD's since (I've got upward of 500 CD's).  I used to love putting the CD's on shelves in my media room and just LOOKING at them.  I loved seeing the vast collection.  But... I haven't seen those CD's in years.  And I have to say, I don't miss them even remotely.  I have all my music on my computer and my Ipod, every single song is available to me at a moment's notice.

A good friend of mine is in the process of setting up a home media server at his house, with one central computer that holds all the music and photos, and allows for the digitization of DVD's, and the recording of TV shows.  And then through his home network, any computer or XBOX can access any of that media content in any room, and even remotely through the internet.  If you have enough hard drive space, ALL of your movies, CD's and photos can be captured digitally, allowing you to dispense with having your physical DVD's or CD's take up any space. 

Likewise, I've discovered digital versions of my entire comic book collection.  As much as I have always loved looking at the physical comics, and flipping through my longboxes, I have to say that the experience of reading the comics on my laptop computer (on a screen that's actually significantly bigger than a comic book) is a superior experience.  I've been looking askance at my comic book collection lately, which is taking up a lot of space in my "library", and wondering if it's time to pack them up and put them in storage, or more extreme yet, SELL them all.

So now we come to where this intersects with this blog's primary focus, books.  I love my books.  More than CD's or DVD's or comics, I love seeing my book collection on my shelves.  I love seeing entire series with matching covers all lined up.  But I've got a lot of books (not as many as SOME members of Humble Fiction Cafe, you know who you are), and unless I find room for more bookcases, I'm going to have to start going two deep on some shelves.  And that, of course, is bringing me to the question:

Is it time to get rid of my book collection?

Again, make no mistake.  I love my books.  But the allure of streamlining and no longer having to own and store and haul hundreds of books is becoming almost too tempting to ignore.

The recent advent of book-readers like the Amazon Kindle is making the need for having a physical book in your hands almost obsolete.  That technology isn't entirely there yet, but it's close.  And for that matter, reading a book on my laptop isn't the headache it once would have been.  I've already got dozens of great free books that publishers have made available and they are releasing more and more free e-books every day.

One of the rationales for owning and collecting so many books is to be able to have them at one's fingertips should one suddenly need to read them or flip through them.  Or perhaps because of the fear that if we don't keep this copy, that we might never see another copy of it again.  These were all reasonable concerns back in the day, but now, thanks to EBay and Amazon and all the myriad online booksellers, I challenge you to go to any book in your collection and not be able to find a copy available online.  If you REALLY need a book, it can be in your hands overnight.

And if the internet still scares you, there's always the library.  With its system of inter-library book loaning, there's hardly any book that's not available to you with only a minimal wait. For FREE!

So DO we need to own books (or any media for that matter)?  If, like me, you're about at overload with clutter and STUFF, the thought of totally streamlining and going all-digital with one's media collection is so so so tempting.  As I've found with my CD collection, I ultimately don't miss SEEING them.

So where does this lead for those of us that desire to CREATE content?  I'll discuss that in part two later this week.

Make 8 Great!

8 as in 2008.

For me, 2007 seems in many ways to have just been a build-up to, or preview of, what 2008 will offer. I spent the last few days of 07 seriously ramping up for this year, getting into an ambitious, yet practical, mindset. No weight-loss or exercise goals. No "stop doing this" goals, or "start doing that" goals. I gave myself just one directive entering 2008:

Make this the Non-Stop Year. Make 8 Great!

No more wasting time. No more randomly surfing the net for hours at a time. No more turning on the TV just to "see what's on" (and then turning it off hours later.) No more avoiding the most agonizing projects. No more avoiding the projects I'm actually excited about. Just DOING something. Anything, so long as it's something that moves me forward either personally, spiritually, creatively, healthily, or whatever.

Seven days into the new year, I'm shocked at just how absolutely energized I still am. I've yet to allow myself to have an idle moment, and rather than the mind-numbing exhaustion I was expecting, I find it's just the opposite. Everything seems like a bright opportunity, even the things I normally dread on a daily basis.

I could bore you with more details (which I had, before highlighting it all and hitting the delete key), but already this year, I've accomplished more on all levels than I did the entire first two months of last year.

From an Humble Fiction Cafe perspective, the next big event on our horizon is the actual (self)publication of our "Split" anthology. It's taken a lot longer than any of us expected, but I think it's going to turn out a lot better than any of us expected, as well. My contribution was one of the stories, Spirit, as well as the cover and layout of the book. It's been exhausting, but incredibly rewarding. Kelli had the (in my opinion) far more arduous task of making our little book LOOK professional. Without her input and editing, this book would have looked a lot more amateurish. I've seen a good deal of sloppy, rushed, and dull self-published work, and I'm proud to say that on a technical level, "Split" is going to be pretty slick. All the members of Humble Fiction Cafe will be able to present this book to friends and family (and strangers) with confidence and pride.

While the professional merits of self-published work is debatable, the effect that having this tangible product in our writing group's hands cannot be underestimated. It makes this hobby REAL. Even though the book hasn't been produced (yet), I believe the effort that has gone into it has pushed all the members of Humble Fiction Cafe into a new level of belief that they aren't just playing around at writing, or spinning their wheels. Everyone has upped their game, and the results are already starting to show. 2007 has already seen several members win awards for their work, and others are finding success with their novels being accepted for inclusion in a series of books to be released starting in 2008. And success gets contagious.

There has been some debate about whether or not we should do a Big Project for 08, and while I was at first firmly in favor of a new end-of-year book collecting our efforts, I'm now thinking we don't need it anymore. "Split" showed us what we are capable of. It showed us the bare minimum of what we should expect of ourselves. Now's the time to take the training wheels off and WRITE that novel or screenplay or memoir we've been holding inside for our whole lives.

"Split" was a good warm-up. But that's all it is. I can't wait for the day in the (not-so-distant) future where we all look back on "Split" and groan at how comparatively bad our writing is compared to what we will be doing then.

So get off your butt! Get started on whatever it is you passionately want to do. The time is now!

Make 8 Great!

No matter whether I win or lose, I'm always the Victor

I have a tendency to get long-winded, so I’ll attempt to make this short (I failed). My name is Victor and I’m a writer. (Hi, Victor!) In reality what this means is that I’ve mastered the art of doing everything BUT writing, and have developed an amazing assortment of activities to do when I theoretically want to be writing. But I’m getting better. My output of actual writing is increasing, and the quality of it is (I hope) getting better.

Joining this writing group last September has been one the best decisions I’ve made. I’ve made more than a dozen new friends and I’m involved in a variety of fantastic new creative endeavors that I never would have imagined otherwise. I hope everyone else in our writing group enjoys it as much as I do, and if you’re not a member of a writing group, I highly encourage you to join one (unless you don’t like to write, that is…)

I’ve always been a creative person from my earliest memories. After devouring almost all of the Hardy Boys books as an eight or nine year-old, I started writing stories to amuse myself. My first ‘series’ was called “The Trail Boys”, and it was about me and my friends and the adventures we had riding the trails in the woods near our neighborhood. Sadly, that series never clicked with the general public and I abandoned it. Anyway, throughout my life since then, I’ve always had some sort of writing project going. I’ve entered a few writing contests in my school days, and won a couple. Winning something is always good for perpetuating a passion.

My creative energies ultimately followed the path of video production, and since 1987 I’ve been involved in this industry in some capacity. I’ve been a general operations person at a TV station, I’ve been the lead producer for a TV station’s 6pm and 10pm newscast (worst job I ever had), and over the past decade or so, I’ve been owner or co-owner of an independent video production company, first in Louisiana, and for the past three years here in Houston. A big part of this career has involved writing, and I’d venture to say that I’ve written maybe 300 commercials and a few dozen long-form videos. But as anyone that HAS to write stuff knows, this kind of writing sucks all the joy out of writing. So my ‘fun’ writing had to come from another source.

About fifteen years ago, I started writing my magnum opus Star Wars fan fiction epic. Well, not WRITING, but “working on”. I have about 300 pages of notes and histories and all the sorts of stuff you’d find for any sci-fi/fantasy epic. I never looked on it as a waste of time (which most fan fiction ultimately is, if the goal is to ever write something that might see the light of day outside of fan fiction circles) because I absolutely enjoyed every last minute of writing it and plotting and everything else. I learned a lot and to this day still think my story is a solid piece of work. I doubt I’ll ever get around to finishing it, but I still have the massive binder to remind me of what I’m capable of when I put my mind to something. But the main reason I kept on working on this story was that I didn’t have any other stories to tell. This all changed in 2005

My Star Wars epic (“Shattered Force”) met its untimely end as a result of a CGI movie called “Robots” that came out in 2005. You might have seen it. This movie was so cookie cutter, so by-the-books in terms of plotting, scripting and presentation, so uninspired, that it ANGERED me. Hard to explain exactly what it was, but a switch was flipped in me, and from that moment, I’ve had a completely different outlook on the sorts of things I was going to be spending my valuable creative energy on. Combined with modern technologies, such as (relatively) inexpensive production gear and new distribution methods, like youtube and NetFlix, I decided in that moment that I was going to pursue a filmmaking career. I began devouring any info on producing independent films, and writing screenplays. While I’ve written and produced hundreds of commercials over the years, it’s not quite the same as venturing into films. It’s two years later, and I’m STILL devouring information and trying to learn how best to approach producing a film. But the good news is that I’ve made significant progress.

I’ve directed and edited a few short films over the past couple of years and have the beginnings of at least a dozen screenplays, with the germs of ideas for a dozen more. The ideas keep flooding in and it’s the most exciting feeling. There are a couple of these projects that are actually looking like they might bear fruit and I’m really trying to kick that into high gear. One is a project with one of the Humble Fiction Café members, Gary. It’s a film project that will incorporate a strong Christian message into it, which makes it an even more attractive project for me.

But it was in the midst of this creative renaissance that the Humble Fiction Café started up at our Barnes and Noble in the summer of 2006. It was a tentative group at first, all of us very nice and supportive but afraid to give brutally honest feedback on each others’ writing. But we kept on meeting and getting more and more comfortable with each other and one meeting, I’m not sure when or by who now, exactly, the idea for our anthology book project, “Split”, was proposed. It’s gained more and more steam with each passing day until now it’s something that I think the majority of us are working on in some capacity just about every day (at least judging by the dozens of emails that circulate each day). It’s fascinating to see how we manage to creatively tie our stories together more and more. It’s becoming a very rich ‘world’ we’re creating for this anthology.

My entry into this anthology (well, the first of what I hope is three or four) is called, simply, “Spirit” and is a part of a ‘tri-chotomy’ consisting of Body, Soul, and Spirit. Dorlana had already started working on her “Body” story and had offered someone that opportunity to do the “Spirit” part of her and Darah’s (“Soul”) trio. An idea instantly came to mind and it just started flooding out. The basic idea for my story came from my wondering how the Holy Spirit (of Christianity fame) might view the soul He’s co-existing with. It quickly turned into an exploration of my own view of God and trying to reconcile all the different aspects of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and the seeming contradictions.

For my own sake, writing this story has really helped me to solidify my own faith and to straighten out some inconsistencies in my own understanding. All of this is embedded within the story that, on the surface, is simply the sad final journey of what could be any Christian that has gotten caught up in something that has led them astray. The culprit in this story is drugs, but it could be anything; alcohol, pornography, a marital affair, criminal activity. "We all sin and fall short of the glory of God." How we do that is different from person to person. In the end, the most important distinction I wanted to make was between how WE view ourselves and the world around us (and in our mind what constitutes success or failure), and how God views those same things. I opted to tell a dark, bleak, horror story that from an earthly standpoint ends horribly, but from God’s standpoint, has a far different outcome. I enjoyed writing it, and I hope people get something out of reading it. One trivia note: They are buried deeply within the story, but there are numerous references to “Dante’s Inferno”, some more obvious than others. I used the story as a VERY rough template for the structure of “Spirit”.

I can’t express how excited I am about this project and about belonging to this fantastic group of writers who are all in the early stages of their writing careers. I can’t wait to see where this leads and to chart our growth as writers.

Victor