Back of the Envelope

Welcome to the eighty-ninth Storyblogging Carnival. We have seven stories this time. Marco Kaufman makes his debut with a trio of fun stories.

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Precocious
by Marco Kaufman of The Big Book of Grievances
A 195 word short story rated PG-13.

A teenage boy is manipulated by a younger girl.

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Superdelegate
by Marco Kaufman of The Big Book of Grievances
A 223 word short story rated PG.

The last superdelegate is wooed by Clinton and Obama for the nomination.

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Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
by Marco Kaufman of The Big Book of Grievances
A 252 word short story rated PG.

A graduate student makes an amusing discovery.

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Changes, Part III (First Part)
by Tom Harrison of Monday Evening
The next 600 words of a 4,000 word short story.

Art was supposed to be at an interview with a company representative. Or, Private Arthur Rodriguez was supposed to be at an operations briefing; supposed to be wearing ACUs instead of jeans and t-shirt. Inside the fenced compound with no gate, it is starting to rain. Part three of seven.

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Rise of the Potato
by Goemagog of this space for sublet
A 674 word short story rated PG.

Birth of the evil potato hivemind.

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The Curious Case of Toulouse Le Grandfig (Part 1)
by Mark Rayner of The Skwib
The first 700 words of a continuing story rated PG-13.

The duty doc at Bellvue (circa 1951) discovers that his patient is more than another graphic designer at a Madison Avenue agency.

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Grail Quest, Part II
by JC of Simply Jews
The next 1,096 words of a 1,984 word continuing story rated PG.

JC's unusual take on the grail myth continues. The Sage of Wales is enjoying this series as he takes a few months off from chasing the minions Cthulhu.

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This concludes the eighty-eighth Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.

So yesterday I quit my job to become a writer.

All right, that might need a little clarification. While Lincoln Laboratory's been good for me, it was time to move on from my current position. At first I was looking for other positions within the Laboratory, but I eventually decided to cast a wider net and look at jobs outside. I was offered one with Cardinal Intellectual Property, doing patent searches under contract from the US Patent Office. At first it struck me as a very interesting job that offered a lot of flexibility, even if it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. When I realized how I could benefit from the flexibility it gave me, I discovered that I was asking the wrong question. The real question was "How serious am I about my writing?"

I've always wanted to be a writer "someday," but lots of people say that. The difference is that while before I was planning on writing a book at some point, I have now written two books, and the question isn't "How do I write a book?", but rather "How do I publish one?" This will take time and effort, and a flexible job is a great benefit to accomplishing it. I am taking some risks to do so, but if ever there was a time in my life to take risks, this is it, and I think it's worthwhile.

You may be wondering what happened to the webcomic update. I'm afraid that I decided to discontinue it. I was no longer doing it once a week, and it was taking too long to go over a month's worth of comics each time I got it ready. I hope you're not too disappointed. Maybe I'll start it back up at some point, but not right now.

I'll be hosting the next Storyblogging Carnival, the eighty-eighth, here at Back of the Envelope. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals. This next carnival will be going up July 7th.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, July 5th. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this comment on my post "Doc Rampage: The most metaheroic blog in the world?":

Hi all. Your estimation of the definition of metahero is so off the mark that I find it even disturbing. Meta- does not mean the same as super-, and a metahero is nothing like a superhero. Also, metaheroism has absolutely nothing to do with blogging, and it certainly is not an attribute of someone who has nothing to say or who just doesn't wish to be left out. A metahero goes beyond heroism in every sense. A metahero not only defines completely out of existence things like heroes, superheroes, gods, angels, wizards, demons, etc. A metahero also offers an alternative that is much better than anything any of those other types of heroes/villains could offer.

I don't know of anyone else who's ever written about a valid, bona fide metahero, but I'm currently in the process of writing just such a tome which will not only negate all forms of heroism but also redefine personhood, progress and reality itself. In case you're wondering, it takes a metametaphysician to create a genuine metahero. If you wish you know more about how I'm using any of these terms, or to understand how a metahero can be infinitely more powerful and wonderful than any kind of god or superhero without that person also being some kind of hero, feel free to email me and be specific in your inquiries or comments. Or if you wish, just wait for the book everyone will be talking about. You won't be able to miss hearing about it.

It is possible that this is supposed to be humorous. It certainly sounds like it, with the declaration that a metahero is better than all other kinds of gods and superheroes and everything. Or it could be, and this is the impression that I get, that this person takes himself way too seriously. And he's also severely humor impaired.

My post is supposed to be funny. Doc and I were both having fun with the question of whether making a word up means you get to decide what it means. But, since it seems to be lost on my commenter, let me see if I can explain my post a little better. I won't quote the whole thing, but here's how it begins:

In this post, I wish to address the question of whether the blog Doc Rampage is, in fact, the most metaheroic in the world. As Doc Rampage is also the pseudonym for the blogger, I will refer to the blog as Doc Rampage and the blogger as Doc.

What does metaheroic mean, you ask? Good question. I couldn't find metaheroic or metahero on Dictionary.com, but I remembered that Doc had defined metahero for us once, so I looked it up:

[Long quote from Doc's website goes here.]

Doc posits that since he invented the term, he gets to decide who's foremost, and that's him. Which sounds good in theory, but did he really invent the term? After all, putting "meta-" in front of "hero" is just too easy to do for me to believe that Doc's the first one to think of it, so I did a Google search on metahero. Lo and behold, Doc's not the only person to use the term metahero. In fact, a number of people have used it as their screen names for various forums. Some of those people could have been Doc, but none of them have his e-mail, and one claimed to be a guy named Alex living in Mexico, so I'm thinking not. So what do all those other people who are using the term metahero think it means? Well, a lot of what I saw was fiction, which used the term metahero as a synonym for superhero. Like Doc, they figure that "meta-" means "beyond," but by "beyond" they mean "more advanced." Which is all very nice and all, but I think superhero is a good enough word, so what right do they have going around preemptively removing words from the English language before someone can apply a more original definition to them? I like Doc's definition better.

So the whole point of my (hopefully humorous) post was that the term "metahero" did not exist as a word with an agreed upon definition in the English language. This is still the case. Now if my commenter wants to create a new definition of metahero, he's free to, since the whole "agreed upon definition" thing is still up for grabs. And if he's written a whole book on the subject, then he's certainly being aggressive about it. The problem is that the fact that he's written a book doesn't make the other definitions wrong. A book nobody's heard of does not an agreed upon definition make. And even if his book is wildly popular and his definition becomes the agreed upon one, criticizing people for using alternate definitions before there is an agreed upon definition exudes solipsism.

Eugene Volokh points out the obvious, that there's no first amendment exception to hate speech:

Simply asserting that some speech is unprotected under current First Amendment law because it's "hate speech" doesn't demonstrate much of anything — except that it demonstrates to those readers who are familiar with First Amendment law that the speaker isn't making a sound First Amendment argument.

Of course, I said that a while ago, but then, I'm an Electrical Engineer, not an expert in constitutional law. It's nice to hear the same from someone who actually knows what he's talking about.

There's a good article on the Iraq war at the Wall Street Journal. Fouad Ajami begins with a simple proposition:

Of all that has been written about the play of things in Iraq, nothing that I have seen approximates the truth of what our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, recently said of this war: "In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came."

He spends most of the article addressing the debate about how the war began:

In the narrow sense of command and power, this war in Iraq is Mr. Bush's war. But it is an evasion of responsibility to leave this war at his doorstep. This was a war fought with congressional authorization, with the warrant of popular acceptance, and the sanction of United Nations resolutions which called for Iraq's disarmament. It is the political good fortune (in the world of Democratic Party activists) that Sen. Barack Obama was spared the burden of a vote in the United States Senate to authorize the war. By his telling, he would have us believe that he would have cast a vote against it. But there is no sure way of knowing whether he would have stood up to the wind.

With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the arguments made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is odd and misplaced: The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith.

It is also obtuse and willful to depict in dark colors the effort made to "sell" the war. Wars can't be waged in stealth, and making the moral case for them is an obligation incumbent on the leaders who launch them. If anything, there were stretches of time, and critical turning points, when the administration abdicated the fight for public opinion.

Nor is there anything unprecedented, or particularly dishonest, about the way the rationale for the war shifted when the hunt for weapons of mass destruction had run aground. True, the goal of a democratic Iraq – and the broader agenda of the war as a spearhead of "reform" in Arab and Muslim lands – emerged a year or so after the onset of the war. But the aims of practically every war always shift with the course of combat, and with historical circumstances. Need we recall that the abolition of slavery had not been an "original" war aim, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was, by Lincoln's own admission, a product of circumstances? A war for the Union had become a victory for abolitionism.

America had not been prepared for nation-building in Iraq; we had not known Iraq and Iraqis or understood the depth of Iraq's breakdown. But there was nothing so startling or unusual about the connection George W. Bush made between American security and the "reform" of the Arab condition. As America's pact with the Arab autocrats had hatched a monster, it was logical and prudent to look for a new way.

It's worth reading.

Well, "The Office of Second Chances" is, according to an e-mail I received today, on the short list. My guess as to what this means is that they looked at it, saw that it was in English, had most words spelled correctly, and wasn't written in crayon, so they didn't peremptorily discard it with a contemptuous laugh.

In other news, I've been offered a book deal for The Eyes of the Shadow. It is not, however, a really good book deal. It's a co-publishing arrangement.

We use the term “co-publishing” to describe a hybrid between conventional royalty publishing and self-publishing (or subsidy publishing), utilizing the best of both worlds. ... We print the book for our own inventory, market it, distribute it, and pay the author a royalty on every copy we sell...

Our company has an outstanding team of editors, graphic designers and production personnel to produce books with the highest quality. Also, our company’s system of marketing would help to position the book to be widely distributed both in the Christian marketplace and general book trade. That system includes trade catalogs and fliers, sales presentations to independent retailers, chain stores, and distributors, representation at the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), press releases, Internet listings and advertising in Christian Retailing, our premier trade magazine.

So where's the catch, you ask? What does the author provide to make this a 'co' process?

[I]t is made possible by the author’s willingness to purchase--at a deep discount--at least [a very large number] copies of the book from the first press run. For authors who have a means of selling copies of their own books, co-publishing works very well.

To be honest, it sounds like I'd probably lose money on this, unless my book is a runaway success and/or I'm willing to put in a lot of effort doing my own publicity, selling off the copies I've purchased via book signings, talking to bookstores, selling over the Internet, and all sorts of unusual distribution schemes. Probably both. I'm not even sure where I would put that many books.

I'm at least going to figure out what the actual sum would be, and do some research on the process. I'd certainly appreciate input. Does anyone know anything about co-publishing? Any experience with it?

Welcome to the eighty-eighth Storyblogging Carnival. We have seven stories this time, from both newcomers, and some old-timers (including me).

One thing I'm getting tired of are submissions which aren't stories. Some of the carnival submission places allow you to submit to a lot of carnivals at once, and you can tell that some people just check off everyone there, including the Storyblogging Carnival. If it's close, I usually give it the benefit of the doubt, but posts explaining marketing or self-improvement strategies definitely do not count.

But enough ranting. Please enjoy the entries that do qualify as stories.

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Ode to a Grudge-holding Judge
by Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane's Humor Blog
An under-100 word brief story rated G.

Just what it says, in limerick form.

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A Moment in Fiction
by Talulazoeapple of TalulaZoeApple
A 265 word short story rated PG.

An ongoing fictional narrative.

[Since the description Talula provided isn't that detailed, I'll just add that it's about a startling encounter. -DSC]

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Changes, Part II (First Part)
by Tom Harrison of Monday Evening
The next 550 words of a 3,000 word short story.

Was it the botched attack Private Rodriguez remembers, or the industrial accident his doctor tells him about? Either way, things grow more difficult and disturbing.

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Grail Quest, Part I
by JC of Simply Jews
The first 888 words of a continuing story rated PG.

Sooner or later, everybody goes on a quest for the grail, whether it's real or not.

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I Heart Jane Austen Fanfiction
by Juliana of Funnier That Way
A 1152 word short story rated PG.

It might seem familiar to you.

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Stay Gold
by Michele Catalano of A Big Victory
A 2,579 word short story rated G.

Rivalries and gang wars in 70's suburbia

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Crossing Over, Part III (The Whole Story)
by Donald S. Crankshaw of Back of the Envelope
A 2,721 word excerpt of a 17,472 word short story rated PG-13.

A College Roomies from Hell!!! fanfiction, in which I reveal the difference between Dahlia and Dave.

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This concludes the eighty-eighth Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.

Back of the Envelope was down this weekend. I doubt that many people noticed, but it was rather infuriating to me. The reason for it can be found over at the Powerblogs development blog website:

Yesterday, our service provider sent out this message:

This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

Aside from other Powerblogs sites, such as Dean's World and The Volokh Conspiracy, some other prominent sites suffered from this service interruption, such as Blank Label Comics, which supports Schlock Mercenary and Shortpacked. The main effect of this on my blogging is that it's set me behind on getting the Storyblogging Carnival put together. Hopefully, I'll be able to get that done tonight.

In other news, I submitted "The Office of Second Chances" to Coach's Midnight Diner on Saturday. I'm glad to have it done, although I'm not completely confident of what I submitted. I didn't think "Aha, this is the perfect version of this story," so much as "It's due today, I better send in what I have." Not that the version that I sent in was a bad version. I'm just not sure that it was the best version. I wrote four separate versions of Second Chances. Not revisions, mind you, which is merely where I take a story and edit it, changing the details but keeping the same basic plot. Versions are different enough that they don't tell the same story, and this one has had four. The first two were boring, and I don't miss them. The third, I thought, was pretty good, but a friend of mine thought it read too much like a Young Adult story (I didn't entirely agree), so I changed it. I wasn't certain that this fourth version was better than the third version, but it is the version I sent in. What I really needed was time away from this story, so I could come back to it with fresh eyes and then judge it for myself. Unfortunately, the compressed timeline for writing this story, and the decision to discard the second verison and write a third with just a week to go, didn't give me any time to do that. If the story gets rejected, I'll come back to it after some time away and see if I can produce the perfect version of the story.