stuartforsyth

DRM

Set me free said the word
Let me rise, let me soar
Joy touching your heart
Hear you begging for more
Let me open your mind,
Stroke the tears from your eyes
Set me free, let me soar
In Imagination’s own skies

And the greedy mouths drool
As they bind you with fetter
re-written, reduced
To gagged-crippled debtor
Then restrained they will rent you
No changing your mind.
They will pimp out your body
As resistance is fined.

Set me free said the word
Let me rise in the night
Set me free to take wing
Above campfires bright
Since the dawn of mankind
With the freedom to roam
To minds who loves stories
Who will give me a home.

It is progress they cry
And we’re saving the trees
Reinventing an industry
That’s down on its knees
Avast there be pirates
Scurvy dogs that do steal
So we bind our poor tales
With commercial-born zeal

Set me free said the word
Never meant to be bound
Discovered, yes. Shared, yes
through touch, sight and sound
Let me spread far and wide
Knowledge brilliantly plumed
For if stories are rented
The future is doomed.

~ Stuart Forsyth (2012)

Tapping the Dark Places

Sometimes, during a creative writing exercise, entire scenes arrive in my head fully formed and gravid. I seem to be able to spin the words into a single harmonious thread that begins and ends with barely a break and almost never an edit or rewrite. Sometimes the end product is light and inspirational, sometimes I tap the dark places that exists deep down in each and every one of us and the stories are scary and taboo. Either way I write until the ink is done. What remains, the story and the characters, seem to have a core of truth to them. I want to go back and explore what will happen to the people and places spun from imagination. This is one that scared me a little but I know I will have to come back to soon - I have to find out what happens at the top of the ladder. Readers of the incredible Dark Tower series may recognise the Crimson King in the image above, king of spiders say true.

‘I don’t want to go!’ The boy said, his eyes blazing fiercely in the candle light.
‘I know.’ The woman put her hand on his shoulder to reassure him. ‘I know.’ Her eyes glistened, pain visible on her face, she knew what she was asking.
‘If you don’t we’ll starve.’ The unwashed sullen man said. ‘You want your kin to starve boy?’
‘Ted!’ The woman snapped. ‘There is a way to go about this. He knows the consequences so back off!’
Ted dragged the tin cup unsteadily toward himself and quaffed a mouthful of the homemade spirits. He belched and a smell of paraffin and old leather filled the small dug-out.
‘I’m scared of the monsters.’
‘I know … we all are … ‘
‘They won’t hurt me will they?’ The woman gave the child a hug. ‘No, no they won’t. They may scare you but they won’t hurt you.’
‘If you go … they’ll hurt you?’ He asked. There was a desperate searching quality in his eyes. A last ditch attempt to change the very nature of things born from his childish hope that believing in a thing could change it in the end.
‘Yes.’
The hope in his eyes died as it did every night. ‘They’ll take you back to the dark places and they’ll …’ His voice faltered and he looked down at the floor. ‘Yes.’
‘But they leave children alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re clever bastards!’ Ted belched again. ‘Because they know children grow up to be adults. Because they know if they eat all the children then one day they’ll all go hungry.’
‘That’s horrible!’ the boy said.
‘Yes it is love.’ The woman said, ‘but Ted speaks the truth. Ever since the fall it’s been that way.’
He was silent for a bit, digesting the information that he knew already. It was the same every night.
‘Mother, when will I be big enough for them?’
She tried to hide the fear that crept in behind her eyes but her tears betrayed her. The truth was, with the children out of the shelters scavenging for food there would probably come a time when the tasters would decide they were big enough. And then they would not return. It was the lot of most, except for those who would be chosen to stay behind, to continue, to endure.
‘I don’t know. Not for many years still.’ She said it with all the conviction she could muster.
‘Okay.’
The boy stood and she did not miss the way he held onto the table.
‘Okay!’ he said more firmly.
She led him to the ladder, the one leading up to the narrow opening where he would slip out into the night. The one too small for them to squeeze their bloated chitinous bodies through, the one protecting them from the spines and the long lancing grippers.
‘Okay!’ he said, more softly and began to climb before his nerve failed him again.

The Herd

Imagine a skyline.

Above an unusually flat horizon, replace the standard blue Earth sky with a deep orange and then score it with crimson rents of high altitude cloud fringed with blues and greens. Below, where you would expect to see land, you see an endless plane of whirling gas; layers upon layer of dense atmosphere all the way down to crushing depths and a metallic Hydrogen core.

Ahead, a bruised wall of cloud fills your three-sixty degree augmented field of vision. This massive storm front, born in the lower parts of the planet, spirals in a world sized upwellings that billow high above you. Then there is the lightning. Electrical discharges thousands of times larger than anything the little rocky planet of your birth has ever seen create cascading flashes that light up the interior of the dark clouds with a terrible blue fire and cause your view to temporarily polarise. You thankfully float outside this particular storm system, at a safe distance, and watch them ride the storm. They are the reason you are here.

Peppered against the swirling maelstrom are hundreds of thousands of tiny specs glittering in the morning sun. Tiny is a relative word manifest only through distance. You know these hydrogen-filled floaters are anywhere from fifty meters to a kilometre in length. The movement of reflective scales is how they communicate with one another over the distances. They speak more as a collective than as singular entity; each organism picking up the message and amplifying it, adding to it like words added to a sentence. We are only now scratching the surface in understanding what these complex light shows mean.
This herd is riding close to the storm front, feeding from tiny particulates in the upwelling with long transparent tendrils that trail below them like jelly-fish. You might ponder how form, so fit for purpose, could manifest itself both in the warm oceans of your home, and here.

Safely ensconced and hardwired into your floating cocoon, your course will take you deep into the herd; today you will soar with them, surfing the storm front to witness their language of light. Today you will observe, and record, and take notes and learn. Today there is no other place in the universe you’d rather be. Today you count yourself the luckiest human alive.

Letters

Am I one of the few who still miss letters written in long cursive script on pages of translucent and fragile paper? Letters that took time & crossed continents. Letters that could be touched, and smelled, and could be re-read. Letters that carried the essence of what it was to distill thoughts or feelings and then chip away at them with the crude tools of language until the shape could be recognized by loved ones separated in time and place.

Time, care, clarity and love are not the remit of email and oh, how I have come to loath it.

Sunday Winning.

My website overhaul is coming along well. Ajax magic has been added to the shopping cart and product pages; also wrote a Ruby RSS parser to pull my Tumblr posts onto my home page alongside my Twitter stream. In addition to spending time with the family, cleaning the house and managing to put in two solid hours on my short story ‘Wishing Stone’. #winning all round.

Lean Publishing and not creating a Dorodango

There are ideas and then THERE ARE IDEAS. Clearly, not all ideas are created equal. I have been struggling with the whole self-publish vs traditional publish quandary for a long time now and have been procrastinating, horribly, because it occurs to me that both paradigms are fundamentally flawed and I don’t want to commit just yet to either. Traditional publishing models are something akin to VC start-ups where publishers hope to align their understanding of what they believe the market has an appetite for with content they will feel will fill that gap. Risks abound on both sides of the fence; the opportunity cost the authors incur by investing huge amounts of time into creating untested content, which possibly no one will buy, is huge. The advances on royalties, the act of creating book-runs, tours, promotions and advertising all eat into money that should, by rights, go to the authors and editors.

The other problem with traditional authoring, for want of a better word, is it’s usually done in a hole. It is almost cliché to think of writers disappearing from the world, a retreat to the cabin at the lake, while they pound away on their now metaphorical typewriters creating reams of pages or digital content. The end goal is the belief that, at the end of numerous rounds of content revision, they will have something polished, something worthwhile, something worth buying, and something marketable. Then, and especially for new authors, there begins the process of submission, of getting agents on board, of somehow being the manuscript to stand out on desks groaning under the weight of the slush pile backlog. This is often the most disheartening time for authors, there has been so much emotional investment into polishing what you thought was a gem; to find out it’s actually a Dorodango can be soul-destroying.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Lean Publishing, the concept that books are released into the wild as they are written. Communities spring up around content and the author gets a voice, the ability to communicate with an audience and to test that there is a market for the content they’re creating. The whole concept hinges on real-time feedback about what is working in the book and what is not. If no fish bite, if you exhaust a social strategy to drum up interest, then perhaps you’re working on a Dorodango and you could better spend your time on something else.

Coming from a technology background, especially one that utilises lean (or agile) development methodologies, the synthesis of this type of thinking in an industry groaning under the weight of it own flailing decade-old ideologies is tremendously exciting. This morning an idea arrived in my head of how to create the tools to guide authors through this process, how to allow them to create a voice in a world awash with digital noise, and to have at the end of the process a tested end-product that already has a social voice and a place in the market. It took me about an hour to get it get it all down in my notebook and I think I managed to capture most of it. Now I just need the time or the seed capital to see it through. Perhaps I could get this to fly through Kickstarter.

S.