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The Cod Liver Oil Theory of Reading is Broken. We Need to Teach People to Read For Fun.

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Several parents gather around a third grade text, and after reading it, find the questions asked about the text to be ridiculous:

By asking young students to spend time taking tests like this we are doing them a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.
Consider for a moment what it would be like to try to answer this question of a major work of children’s literature. So: what is the story ‘Piglet Meets a Heffalump’ mostly about? Is it about hunting and trapping techniques? Facing one’s fear of scary monsters? Joining with others in a great enterprise? Trying to impress your friends by claiming knowledge you don’t possess? Or does it mostly reveal how friendship and love can transcend all our foibles?”

(Via Dear Governor: Lobby to Save a Love of Reading – SchoolBook.)

I call it the ‘cod liver oil theory’ of reading. So many people keep harping that reading is ‘good for you’ that this is often the main avenue to which kids are exposed to literature. Constantly being give texts to analyze and find ‘answers’ within. Guided to pre-determined outcomes.

Fuck. That. Shit.

No better way to kill a love reading than to beat it into some kid that literature isn’t fun, or reading a way to transport yourself elsewhere. No better way to teach kids that reading is only one thing; a boring task for infovores.

Here, eat your story vegetables you little shits. Eat them up and stop crying. It’s good for you. There can never be story steak, story potatoes, or story candy, or story dessert. Story food is only fuel, never pleasure. Don’t go listen to some chef, here’s your story cube. Find the nutrients. Find them now!

A whole class of college freshman recently read my novel Arctic Rising. While signing after a Q&A session a football player came up to have the book signed and said, embarrassed, that it was the first book he’d ever actually just enjoyed reading.

Sure, it had been assigned, but it’s a refrain I’ve heard over and over again. It does indicate a certain failure of the cod liver theory of literature he’d been living in until he turned 19.
For 14 or so years, literature for this person was only ‘you have to’ and ‘you need to find out the…’ and ‘it’s good for you.’

Shit, if that had been the way reading was taught to me, I wouldn’t have put up with that either.

And I still ran into cod liver oil bullshit. Teachers saying that it wasn’t good for me to read ahead of my level. Getting held back because I could read a whole book, but couldn’t recite my alphabet in order.

The joy of reading is being suppressed, and that leads to fewer active readers.

Eight Things I Told My Intern… (About Being a Writer)

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I have a new intern, joining the team with another intern I already have been working with from the local college. They do cool things for me that help with some outreach, PR, admin tasks that I struggle to keep up with.

New intern came with a notebook and lots of questions for her first meeting, and for some reason I was quite willing to talk on and on. And I wrote on twitter that I’d wished I’d recorded the little monologues. I then began to tweet what I remembered. Here’s a pseudo reconstruction of all the tweets I made:

I told my intern, it’s so hard to predict who’ll sell enough books to make a living, or make a splash. Or which books will react…

So you need to focus on doing what Neil Gaiman said, the art. The book. The story. Not whether you’re owed a living or success…

The success may come. It may not. But if you did work you love are proud of and don’t come at [the job of being a writer] with entitlement, you’ll always be proud of it…

I’ve seen a lot of writers get twisted up and bitter about that entitlement. They’ve worked so hard (and they have) and didn’t sell X… [I let expectations and bitterness sabotage me on my second novel, a hard but valuable lesson among many I learned on that book]
But in art, sometimes the hard work on a specific project doesn’t translate to success…
And that is hard [it really is] to take. But if you focus on the love of the work, then you have that. It can’t be taken away…

And if you work really hard for a very long time, you increase the chances of breaking out. Almost all overnight success is after long work… [if you look hard enough, you almost always find years of prep. I can only think of a small number of true overnight successes I’ve met. Many of them often faded away because they didn’t understand what they’d just done, or got frustrated by the next level of hard work ahead of them]

I told my intern refuse debt. Live as simply as you can b/c if you want to be an artist there are no regular paychecks…

…if single, consider exploring another country where exchange rate helps you, or do the tiny apartment thing. Minimalism. [is your ally]

I told my intern there’s nothing wrong with not making a full living off art. Amazing art comes from long time part timers…

If you part time your art, don’t resent it’s inability to make your living. Remember it’s importance, maybe even over job. But don’t resent…

I told my intern everyone around you is not an artist. They will pressure you, out of good will and love, to make bad decisions for an artist [it’s not their fault, they mean well, but they’re not doing what you’re doing]

I told my intern if you want art to be your job, it needs to be your job now. You need to spend time on it like it’s your second job.

I told my intern once you write the work, and loved it, and created it, then you become mercenary. Put on small biz cap.

…once you’ve lovingly crafted widget, you try to sell it. But don’t assume your first widget will work, entrepreneur. Maybe next…

I told my intern go out and start trying to make art, and make money off it right now. There’s no certificate, no formal hiring process.

I told my intern you will hear no a lot. It doesn’t mean anything other than ‘not right now with this.’ I still hear no all the time.

How To Make Amtrak Profitable

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Actually, you can use the subsidy scope charts from 2008 to make a profitable Amtrak:
Take a look at all the lines, and which ones are profitable. Keep those.

Acela makes $220,200,000 a year.
Northeast Regional makes $146,500,000 a year
Northeast Corridor ‘special trains’ make $3,600,000 a year.

According to the chart I linked you need to deduct $1,300,000 for labor on the NEC corridor.
You’re left with the North East Corridor routes making $369,000,000 in profit a year.
The Government Accountability Office and Subsidy Scope claim that Amtrak’s depreciation, ancillary businesses and overhead costs are $24.29 a customer.

That gives you $265,000,000 (roughly) in overhead. That means the North East Corridor lines mentioned above make $104 million dollars in profit a year. So carve those out as an empire that’s profitable. They serve about 11 million passengers a year. Even the most anti-rail frothing angry face can’t argue that’s all good.

Then you can play with the remaining state and short run lines up to $104 million in loss. You would have to give up on all long run lines. If you look at the charts, they’re all losing a tremendous amount of money (every passenger is a $100 or more loss on those long hauls). And all train vs plane studies show that trains succeed in the under 500 mile range. Planes make more sense going coast to coast, unless you get super super fast rail. We’re not there. So we need to focus on city to city, and not on hooking up the whole network just yet (even in Europe, it’s moving that way, big cities get fast rail, and then the network slowly spreads. Take a look at the map).

Using a spreadsheet, these lines could survive on that $100 million profit that the NorthEast Corridor generates:

Chicago-St.Louis (makes or almost makes profit)
Washington-Newport News (makes or almost makes profit)
Non NEC Special Trains (makes or almost makes profit)
Carolinian (makes or almost makes profit)
Illini/saluki
Adirondack
Heartland Flyer
Ethan Allen Express
Piedmont
Pere Marquette
The Downeaster
Hiawatha
Vermonter
Blue Water
Hoosier State
Illinois Zephyr
Kansas City-St.Louis
Keystone Service
Pennsylvanian
Cascades
Albany-Niagara Falls-Toronto
That does lose you:
San Joaquins
New Haven – Springfield
Capitol corridor
Pacific Surfliner
Wolverine
Empire Service

People there would be pissed (I think the Pacific Surfliner and Wolverine would be good investments with sped up times and are worth a turn around bet). But Amtrak could begin to operate independently, seeking loans and speeding places up, acting like a business.
Those last ones could even be kept with a focus on lowering some costs, and boosting ridership on profitable areas. At the very least, the red would be seriously reduced.

As for the long distance lines, there are some that might be recoverable, but looking at that chart, they look pretty damning. There’s no reason for Amtrak to be covering the entire middle of the country. It’s expensive, it is half the reason it struggles to exist and gets used as a punching bag by anti-rail zealots. Long distance lines eat up most of the money it has to ask for. And until recently, Amtrak had to run those lines because it was legally obligated to (neat trick, obligate them to run those lines, then critique them for needing money to do it, then call rail a failure).

Amtrak is no longer legally required to run those lines, but is ‘strongly encouraged’ by congress, who act as their board.

Conservatives keep talking about wanting to hand over the Acela to a small company. But it might not be a bad idea for Amtrak to be allowed to be it’s own company so that it could kill all those long distance lines, a select number of services, and start without meddling.

On the other hand, a number of politicians strongly support having those long distance lines go through their underserved rural areas. And when Amtrak tries to drop services, often states will step in to try and keep service, because the state will deem it useful. So Amtrak is sort of muddling through here. I mean, if you keep being given money, even if you are being reviled by the people who do it, it allows service to continue to millions of people a year. Amtrak is not a profit-oriented corporation but a service, that’s its mission statement since 1970. It’s only doing what its told to do. So I sympathize.

But I also wonder what it could do if it dropped those long haul routes and focused on the good ones.

How Ray Bradbury Inspired Me To Persevere Through Hundreds of Rejections To Success

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Ray Bradbury has passed. I saw Twitter and FaceBook fill with people sharing their favorite Bradbury stories. He was a touchstone writer, both for my field and in the larger world. So many were touched by his stories.

The first Bradbury stories I encountered were from The Martian Chronicles. It was an awkward first encounter, because I’m fairly young. I was born in 1979. I also grew up without much access to libraries and books, so my reading habits were formed by encounters with impromptu guerrilla libraries with little hand-written signs that said ‘take one – leave one’ which developed my genre habits.

By the time someone gave me The Martian Chronicles, in the early 90s in high school, it was the age of cyperpunk and high space opera for me. The Martian Chronicles, with its 40 year old stories, puzzled me. The fact that it was advertised as a book, but was really a collection of thematically related stories also puzzled me. I really didn’t know what to make of it and bounced off it. We knew Martian canals weren’t real, we’d put a lander on the surface, after all.

But…

…stories like Usher II, The Martian, and There Will Come Soft Rains and The Million-Year Picnic lodged in the back of my brain and just never left. And like little seeds blossomed until I came to a sort of personal understanding and appreciation of the book.

Later I would read that the stories were riffing off the old Edgar Rice Burroughs and older planetary adventures. It was part of an internal genre discussion. And yet the stories could be so hauntingly amazing about interrogating the human state, they were part of a great discussion about what it means to be human. The Million-Year Picnic still sends little shivers of sadness down my spine. They became part of my personal canon.

But aside from loving his work, Bradbury helped me become a writer.

I don’t know where I read it, but in college I came across an article where Ray Bradbury mentioned that when he’d started out his stories kept getting rejected. He couldn’t sell anything in the beginning. But he promised himself that he would persevere until he had 500 rejections. Then, he said, he’d quit. His 500th submission was a story that just barely got accepted. His, probably apocryphal, anecdote really energized me. Rejection was a form of forward progress, I realized.

I then solemnly swore I, too, would achieve 500 rejections. It would take 500 before I would reconsider trying to be an author. And even then, I argued, back when Bradbury broke in after 500 rejections, there were many more markets for short stories. It was easier to break in with a larger market. So I might have to go above and beyond. After all, I wasn’t Ray frikkin Bradbury. I had a lot of work ahead of me.

Starting somewhere toward the last half of my sophomore year in college I decided to start aiming for 100 rejections a year to try and hit that 500.

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to break in a bit earlier than Bradbury. I got my first check for a story my junior year ($8.50 for a story, submission number 158), and my first professional paying big sale my senior year was on submission number 195 to Science Fiction Age (story: The Fish Merchant). I think I’m clearing in on my 700th actual rejection. I have some that are in email that need logged for some novel projects. I’m guessing one day I’ll report in that I have achieved that 1,000 that I suspected I would get to.

I owe a great deal of my own dogged persistence to Bradbury’s being willing to talk about those 500 early rejections. Too often literary giants are presented in their current position as if they became what they were via fait accompli. Without this crucial understanding as to how freaking hard Bradbury worked, I would never have had the courage to keep pushing on despite early rejections.

And that piece of advice, that realization about how hard he worked, led me to fall even further in love with his writing as time passed.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. I am disappointed I never got to meet you.

How I Used Kickstarter to Reboot a Book Series

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Hello.

Some of you who will read this won’t know me from Adam. But the short version is that I’m a science fiction writer. I write and freelance full time since 2006, the ratio of each to my total income changing based on the uncertainties of both lines of income (some years the fiction income mostly pays the bills, some others freelance). I’ve seen 50+ short stories appear in various venues since 2000. I’ve been translated into 16 different languages.

I’m probably most known for writing a HALO novel that hit the NYT Bestseller list, though I’ve written many other science fiction novels. My entire bibliography is here. I’m 33 years old, and I’ve dreamt of being an SF writer since 14. I sold my first story at 19 and have been working hard at this since.

This is a long post. I don’t know why, it came out this way. I tried to make it short. But I had so much to share, and every time I sliced into something short I cut out all of the nuance, and joy, and information I was trying to share. So I made it long again. And I like it.

Bear with me.

Seriously, this is like 5,000 words long. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.

Welcome to the Xenowealth

My first science fiction novel debuted in 2006. Crystal Rain was flavored with a science fiction stew of Caribbean refugees fled to a lost world, steampunk, a dangerous dreadlocked cyborg in a trench coat, and an ancient evil pressing down on our heroes. The first of my Xenowealth novels, it was followed by Ragamuffin in 2007 (a Nebula nominee), and Sly Mongoose in 2008. I was in my mid to late twenties. I wanted to write more. I wanted to grab the dream I had since I was 14 (and indeed in 2008, after much hustling, most of my money was coming from fiction and I was pretty much living the life I’d been striving toward).

The books didn’t do too well in chain bookstores, each time getting a smaller order. As we know from real estate: location location location. So each book sold less in bookstores. It was quite dramatic with the step between Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin (where a small buy-in from Wal-Mart even buoyed first time reader numbers, but was not repeated for following books). And yet…

…readers of the series compensated for the loss of chain bookstore placement by switching to ordering online off Amazon. Independent stores were still really nice to me (special shout out to Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, which always was responsible for moving the highest number of copies). Library orders still remained okay. Sales didn’t increase, but they weren’t dying. In fact, Sly Mongoose slightly grew in hardcover (it just came out in paperback this year after a 3 year delay, so those numbers are still trickling in). Tor had agreed to buy two more books in the series, giving me my planned 5 book series.

But I am nothing if not a realist. In later 2008, when I met my editor after seeing that Sly Mongoose was barely carried in any bookstores we had an honest discussion about the chances the 4th Xenowealth book would have. It would probably get even less bookstore placement, being harder for readers to stumble on. Based on the core, awesome, dedicated readers I already have, we guessed that it would do okay. Just like Sly Mongoose it would get enough readers to offset the loss in bookstore readers, and indies would help. But overall, I wouldn’t be growing sales much. Just ticking up slightly.

Some have wondered if my publisher killed the series. No. It was a mutual decision hashed out over a business lunch, the topic raised by me. My editor and I thought, hey, let’s change direction. I started working on a novel called Arctic Rising.

In which life sucks for a while and I don’t write much (skip if you don’t want to read depressing shit):

Life being life, I also promptly was hospitalized for a nasty genetic heart defect a couple months or so later, suffered a pulmonary embolism as a side effect of exploratory surgery, and was left with my health, confidence, and stamina shattered. Despite good health insurance, I had been dumb enough to have this happen at the end of the year, and was in hospital both at the end of the year and at the start of the next. Doubling my deductible. My wife was just about to give birth to twins.

Yeah.

Also, I had a few hours of stamina every day, and doctors wouldn’t tell me whether my heard defect meant I could drop dead at any moment or if I had a good chance at living on. So for a year I didn’t work on novel-length work, as I had no decent personal expectation that I would live long enough to finish the damn thing. Also, my savings was wiped out, credit extended, as I could only work a few hours a day (and was thus earning less as I worked less, a horrible cycle). I focused on the highest per-word work I could do. Friends (and boy in situations do you find out who they are) helped me find some freelance gigs that helped. I wrote some short fiction where I could.

By September 2009 I’d lived almost a year, and begun to suspect that I might stumble through a bit longer. I began to work a bit on Arctic Rising again as I could. And collapsing in the Canadian health system, where doctors will happily tell you what they think about your chance of living because they’re not worried about lawsuits, really helped me. A heart specialist in Montreal said he’d bet that I died of something else before my heart defect, and said that I had a very survivable version of it (thus, with one sentence and five minutes and some paper towels while I broke down, changing everything for me).

I felt I could risk writing novels again.

Getting slowly back in the ring

For the next two years I worked on Arctic Rising as best I could in between freelance work. I sold my little red sports car to give me breathing room and time to write. I stole hours where I could. I lived lean. I got it done. And by September of 2011 I knew it was scheduled to come out from Tor in February 2012. From August 2008 to February 2012 there would be a giant hole in my novel writing career, but I was finally moving forward.

During this time, people kept asking me a single question: When was I going to write another Xenowealth book? I’d been thinking about this for a while.

From 2008 to 2011 things had been swinging around a lot (hell, since 2000). I’ve always been one to keep my basket diversified. I’d released ebooks of short stories as creative commons to see how they spread, or were read. I’d sold them through Fictionwise. I’d worked with medium sized presses, smaller ones, and one of the largest. I’d written a media tie in novel that hit some bestseller lists.

Lots of people kept suggesting that if I just released another Xenowealth book digitally, I’d suddenly be on my way to riches and gold. But I spent enough time reading through Kindle forums to see people selling single digits worth of books to know there are no guarantees. I’d released a short story collection to test what the lifecycle of an eBook looked like. How covers affected it. My feeling was, there might be some money in doing this. But it was a risky gamble. And I had a family to take care of. It was easy for other people to suggest I spend a year’s worth of productivity on a gamble.

But Kickstarter.

Kickstarter makes things interesting

I’d been watching authors and other artistic types use Kickstarter to good affect. And the powerful part of it was the ability to test your potential market. Kickstarter took pledges (or pre-orders) from everyone, and didn’t withdraw the money unless you raised a certain amount. That caught my interest right away, because I knew then that this was a way to try something different. In my view, this was more potentially disruptive than just eBooks. Because sometimes it’s getting seed money to kick that generator, to get it to fire, is sometimes the hardest trick.

I was freelancing to keep from drowning, and snatching writing time while underwater and holding my breath. I’d been doing that since the day I got out of the hospital.

But I started working with my friend Pablo Defendini to create some custom art for what would become the next book. I began working on a video for the project, and I signed up for Kickstarter. I mulled the idea over with friends I trusted. I thought, at the very least, it was a moment that would let me see if there was enough fan support to write another book in the series. We could let it go, if not. And move on.

So in October 2011, I took a deep breath and went for it.

What I did

I created a Kickstarter page. I created a video with the custom graphics Pablo had made, with me giving a brief synopsis of the novel to be, and a lot of explanation as to how Kickstarter worked (it was a little over a year ago, it was a newer concept).

I researched every similar project I could, and read the Kickstarter (and Kickstarter lesson articles) blog summaries of statistics.

I decided that I would a) keep to as few levels of support (rewards for backers) as I could, as many indicated too much choice creates choice fatigue or confusion and b) focus on the $25 and $50 price levels that Kickstarter indicated are the two most popular.

I set the eBook as the $25 reward, and the printed limited edition hardcover as the $50.

I promised to start the novel January 1st, and finish it sometime in the middle of the year (I kept using July as a target month).

I created a spreadsheet, where I then ‘gamed’ various scenarios based on averages that Kickstarter showed for successful projects (most people support at 25, then 50, and so on).

I took a look at a print on demand publisher, Lulu, and eyeballed out what a per-book cost was going to be. For the hardcover, Lulu estimated ~$20. I added in $5 shipping and handling on my end, I wasn’t sure how much they would charge, so I guessed $30 a book to be a very safe place to be. I gamed out how different levels of support would affect the overall profit of the project, and came up with a final price.

Back in 2006, five years earlier, I sold my first novel for roughly the bog standard minimum wage of genre novel writing. The mythical $5,000 advance. I earned way more than that in royalties once it earned out, and translation sales, audio rights, and the SF Bookclub addition. My advances are higher now, but this was my first attempt. It felt right to compare.

So I figured, I needed to at least beat $5,000 in profit. Printing fees looked like they could be anywhere from $2,000 and on up. I set aside money for design (Pablo does amazing work, man, and deserved to be paid as he does this stuff professionally, as he was doing a cover design, an interior PDF for the print copy, and so on). There was shipping. There was copy editing that would need done. There was the 10% in fees that would be taken out (5% to Kickstarter, 5% to Amazon payments). I looked at it and figured, $10,000. Minimum needed to make it work.

So that was the set up. The Apocalypse Ocean. $10,000 needed to fund it to match the same sort of base scenario as my first novel.

What was I hoping?

I was hoping to squeak over the 10K. The five figures seemed like a barrier, a dangerous one. Some of my friend suggested lowering it, but I know I needed that to do this right.

I was hoping, at the time, to build my portfolio. I had short stories, two collections, all making a little bit of money each month. Not a lot, but a regular flow. The idea was that I’d work on this book in between the freelancing, pushing myself to finish it in between the cracks. I’d taken over two years to write Arctic Rising, I knew the sequel was going to take a long time as well. But this would maybe make me some extra, much needed money. Novels sell better than short stories or collections.

And, I wanted to get closer to giving fans all five books. Really.

When it gets down to it, if I were only in it for nothing but the money, I’d be a stock broker. Not a novelist. There’s love here.

That was where I was. Hoping that it would, down the line, help things out.

And I wanted a win. I’ll be honest.

Hell, I needed a solid win. Yes I’d turned in Arctic Rising, but I had no idea how it was going to do. And my novel writing career had this huge, growing gap in it. I wanted a successful Kickstarter.

After treading water I wanted to just hit a project out of the park, feel enthusiasm, and go for broke without risking hurting anyone.

What makes a successful Kickstarter?

I think there are three things that make for a Kickstarter success:

1) An intriguing product

2) Created by an entity that has proven it can deliver it

3) Created by an entity that has a following (or publicity reach)

Any two of those create an atmosphere where I think success is more likely. Hit all three, you’re likely to see something interesting.

Look over successful Kickstarters, you’ll find a lot of doubles and triples, and very few of the above successful as singles. I’ve seen even famous people stick up a Kickstarter, people who should have a huge following, and fizzle because they had not fulfilled #1 and #2. I’ve seen plenty of #1s, by people who had no following or proof they could deliver it. Fizzle.

I’ve seen lots of projects that hit #1 and #3, and watched them struggle to deliver it. That’s made a lot of news in the last six months. But they still got funded. And I bet still will.

What I had was a little bit of a following. My blog gets two thousand user sessions a day or higher. At the time a few thousand people followed me on twitter. And I knew that there were some fans of the Xenowealth out there, because they asked me about writing another book a lot. So I had to trust the books.

I knew I could prove #2. I’d written a number of novels.

So I had #2 for sure, and some hazy amount of #3 after 11 years of publishing stories and novels and people reading Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose. Those were my two, for sure, strong legs.

I made a case for #1 in the video about the project, and hoped that people would find it intriguing.

And it worked!

A couple of thousand dollars of orders for a new Xenowealth book came in during the first few days. That was when most of the action happens, so it was exciting. But at only 25% of the amount, I was worried. Many successful projects funded in the first couple days. I might, I realized, end up rejected by my own readers in public in front of everyone.

That was the fear, wasn’t it? That had everyone asking me if I really wanted to do this. It’s so public.

But rejection and failure are just business. It means you tried. And you’ll never get a win if you don’t at least swing for one.

I love my blog readers, fans, and twitter followers, so I did my best not to constantly spam them about the Kickstarter after the first few days. I tried to settle into a once a week thing.

I knew from the Kickstarter blog that 90% of all projects that hit the 50% mark get funded. So it took from September 18 to October 1st before that happened. For 13 days, it just kept inching forward as we went through the middle muddle. But on October 1st I celebrated with a beer, knowing that 90% was not a bad coin toss. We spent the next 15 days inching forward from 50% to 75%, increasing the odds.

And then it seemed that people couldn’t stand the tension, because on the 15th a host of pledges came in to kick the project up over the 10K mark. In the end, $11,652 came in, meaning that the little extra covered the Kickstarter and Amazon fees.

There it was. In a month and a half, I’d be starting a new novel in an old, treasured universe I’d started on years ago.

I now owed my readers a book!

How it changed everything…

Here’s the thing. I’d been working three freelance gigs. And right as this Kickstarter happened, one of them folded. I spent December running the figures on my spreadsheet, forecasting cash flow. Thanks to gig #3, I’d set some cash aside. Not a lot, but enough to cover printing costs and then a little extra. Combined with the Kickstarter money, I looked at my cash burn rate, and realized I could do something truly, insanely, crazy:

I could quit gig #2, stick with only gig #1, and I had enough money to make it for nine months. Maybe ten.

I had a taste, in 2008, of only working one freelance gig and then spending all other time writing. It was the thing I’d worked toward since I was fourteen. I’d always juggled in various amounts, but never down to a single freelance gig on the side while writing furiously.

After talking it over with Emily (my wife), I did it. I jumped.

I came up for breath thanks to the Kickstarter and was writing. Not just moments underwater. Full on. We lived tight, and it wasn’t easy, but I was able to really put some fuel in the furnace.

I wrote The Apocalypse Ocean, I wrote short stories, I wrote novellas, I wrote another novel called The Trove, I wrote a nice chunk of another novel, Hurricane Fever, I completely revised another project. I dreamed words, people. It was good.

Those freelance gigs, I love them. But the writer in me got to stretch some serious wings and soar. And I’d been furled up and caught up in that treading for so long, it was a great feeling. In this last 11 months, I’ve learned a lot about how to do this better, how to harness the energy, and what I can do when unleashed.

I recently accepted an offer from gig #2. I have just two gigs now. I know now I was burned out from juggling 3 freelance gigs and writing. Going to just one gig and writing gave me recovery time. I have the tools to handle two and writing. Ultimately, food goes back on the table. I’m not unhappy in the slightest. I’m ahead. I made it. And I couldn’t have done it without that injection, that nugget that Kickstarter provided when I was really down low.

I’m glad I went for the win. Because I was able to go on an author book tour for Arctic Rising when it came out. To speak at Tools of Change in New York (which was amazing). To write, write, write.

There’s a spark in me, now, that was getting flickery just due to plain exhaustion.

Yes, this year has been stressful. Great goodness has it been. Watching that money leak out slowly over the eleven months while trying to make other deals happen; that’s been crazy tough. I’d been hoping something would strike before I had to go get a freelance gig #2, and I could continue the run. Arctic Rising is doing well, but it takes a while for that money to reach me. There are other things percolating in the distance. Having the time to write nearly full time gave me the time to pitch some ideas, work angles a little harder.

So I wouldn’t trade it the last eleven months. Not for anything.

Why not do another Kickstarter? I was asked this recently, but I explained it thusly:

I am still working on studying The Apocalypse Ocean and how it did. I did Kickstart it, and when all was said and done, with extra sales outside of the Kickstarter, and a pledge from a bookstore for a number of copies, I think I ended up making a $7,000 profit. But that is not a living. So now The Apocalypse Ocean is up for sale through Kindle, B&N, and Kobo, and iTunes. I need to get a sense for how it does for a few months to get a sense of the entire book’s lifecycle. Will the backlist sales be solid? Or very meagre? My guess is that if it does as well as the novella I have up, then this will have been smart.

But also, I didn’t want to ask people to pony up for a Kickstarter until everything I’ve set out to do with current Kickstarters is delivered. That means everyone has their limited editions of The Apocalypse Ocean and are reading them. And I did another Kickstarter, a short story collection called Mitigated Futures. Backers didn’t have their copies yet. I couldn’t ask again. No, I wanted both the data on sales after the projects and for people to have been satisfied and taken care of.

It’s a point of honor.

Hey, how did you print the book?

Well, that’s a pretty cool story, actually. One of the backers who got The Apocalypse Ocean twittered that they were “high quality, I mean, like Subterranean Press quality.” When I first ran the figures I knew it was going to be expensive per book. As I got near time to print them, Pablo and I got copies from Lulu to check out the process. But I was also emailing around asking, and looking, for alternatives. This was part of the learning process!

Lulu wasn’t too bad. It was actually better than I expected. I’d feared what print on demand would be. It’s come very far in just a couple of years.

But Bill at Subterranean was able to recommend me an offset printer he worked with, and the quote, it turned out, was not too bad. It was more expensive, for sure, than the Lulu run. But… for an extra $800 I could finagle a very, very high quality printing.

I couldn’t do this with the short story collection Mitigated Futures that I had Kickstartered later in this year. Too few copies. But I could with the novel.

And in the end, as I mentioned, if this was only about the money, I wouldn’t be here. The chance to print a 200 copy limited edition run of the fourth Xenowealth book in high quality paper stock?

I didn’t even think twice, really. It was an investment in my future, as someone who could deliver on execution. And because it would become properly collectible.

Mistakes, as they say, were made

And now, to the brutal self honesty part I promised would come.

I have made mistakes.

Boy have I ever.

I launched the project at noon. Because I was writing and fixing things that morning. So I set it to go live. Rookie. That meant I missed four hours of first day, the biggest day, of word-of-mouth and fundraising. The momentum was slow from day one. People love piling onto a winning project. Mine did not come out the gate strong for The Apocalypse Ocean. Next time, I set it to go live at 7am.

I set the eBook price too high. $25. It worked, because fans backed the project and jumped aboard. I think I could risk focusing harder on a $10 eBook. Then maybe a $25 trade paper, and then move up.

While I got backers their eBooks as fast as I could, roughly by the deadline, I vastly underestimated how long the project management of creating a print book would take. Physical copies had to be mailed around. Proofed. Schedules had to be lined up. It was all… fiddly. I thought August/September I would have books delivered. Instead, it ended up being early December.

To be fair, part of that was because I switched from going with Lulu to going with a real printer.

I don’t even regret that. Next time around, I know where I’d be bringing a novel if we have preorders. But I spent a lot of time making first timer mistakes.

Some have asked if this makes me way more interested in going it alone. But the truth is, I really, really like having a team around me that can take stuff out of my brain-worrying area so I can focus. I’ve talked to people who are interested in helping authors run a Kickstarter, it’s something I will ponder in the future.

With the collection of short stories I did, Mitigated Futures, my distractibility ended up costing me a whole print run. I didn’t spot an error. I had to reorder the hardcovers with the fix. I was the one who approved the final, it was on me. Again, a big mistake.

Another mistake was that I really botched the $100 backer level with The Apocalypse Ocean. If you ordered the $50, you got a limited edition hardcover. For $100, you got it signed, and your name in the back of the back as a backer. For $250 you got that plus reading the book as I wrote it!

When I was designing the Kickstarter, I overvalued the live read along, which I thought would snag a few more people. Halfway through, I asked the $250 level people for permission to tweak things, and bring the $100 crew into the live read along. I didn’t get enough replies quickly enough to feel confident about shifting everything. It was my first time, I was nervous about breaking trust.

Next time around, I would put the live read along at $100, to see if it would pull some people out of the $50.

Toward the end of the The Apocalypse Ocean’s print run, I felt I’d communicated what was happening not too well, some readers felt compelled to keep asking what was going on. Some people don’t want over-explained or bugged, but I needed to be clearer about timelines. And if I wasn’t, to be okay with bugging people.

Another thing I won’t do: I won’t take orders after the Kickstarter closes. Keeping track of those was… really hard. Those people didn’t get notified at the same time, it added extra stress.

What were the negative sides of using Kickstarter?

There weren’t many negative sides. But there were a few things that stood out.

One was that owing your readers a new project, directly, meant they had a stake and ownership in you in a way that is not normally experienced. So… there was pressure to deliver. However, I’d been living under various sorts of pressure, it only really upset me when I got a weird dizzy spell period that affected my ability to focus on a monitor and use a computer. Falling behind freaked me out.

Two, some people started hitting me up about their Kickstarter. Sure, there were many people doing Kickstarters that I loved, and backed, or raised the word about and loved hearing from. But there were also people I’d never met, never talked to, didn’t know, insinuating that since they spread the word for me (and in these cases I’m not even sure they did) I should do the same for them. I felt it should be about stuff we genuinely loved, not logrolling. But it sometimes got a little passive/aggressive.

Three, a lot of people assumed I was now a fighter against the evil New York corporate publishing system and would be taking it to the man. I’m sorry to report that I’m still a corporate sellout. There were some weird reactions.

Would you do it again?

I get asked a lot, would I do it again?

I have a nuanced reply. I think, for short story collections of mine, Kickstarter has been an obviously solid experiment. With Mitigated Futures, I had already written the stories. A couple of a new ones were commissioned. We did the books with Lulu, which is not as cool as traditional offset print run, but still solid. The big bonus was interior art for the collection and everyone got their eBooks really quickly. Right at the end of the month the Kickstarter happened.

For novels, I still think it is powerful and potentially transformative. It gave me the money I needed to get this off the ground. It came along at just the right moment to help give me a sorely needed boost. But so far I’m not making as much as I do for novels like Arctic Rising.

But I’m doing two things here. I’m playing a long game, hoping that the royalties on a book that I wrote and own directly will help me out. And… I wrote the fourth book of the Xenowealth series!

It got done, and it’s out there. And it’ll find new readers. And things will will build. And, maybe sometime very soon, or maybe a little further out, I’ll come back again to do the final book.

But for now, I’m writing Hurricane Fever. The sequel to Arctic Rising. And, yeah, it’s a lot of fun. That’s my focus. That has to be done.

But I have no doubt the final book, Desolation’s Gap, will be written. If I finish Hurricane Fever very soon, and I see that The Apocalypse Ocean has a solid stream of sales… then it will be sooner. Maybe even over this summer. That would be cool. That would be my dream. Maybe it will happen. Maybe it won’t. I don’t know.

But if it’s really a trickle then I’ll wait until the sales build and give it time. Like a good wine. And the book will come along then, after some aging, while I pursue some other stuff. But the lessons, and the tools that Kickstarter gave me, they’re all still here. There are more possibilities in the air.

As a writer, it’s a good time. I can work with a large publisher, I can work with a medium sized publisher, I can work with smaller publishers. I can put projects directly up as an eBook. I can use Kickstarter.

This is a modern, diversified author, using the tools at their disposal. It’s all good. There is no one True Way, there are, instead, lots of opportunities.

Thank you!

To all of you who backed the book, and made it real. We did it! Pepper lives!

So many of you spread the word, cheerleaded me, and just offered to help. Doing this reminded me that I had a readership that enjoyed what I wrote and was passionate about my stuff. That really made a difference. More than many will ever realize. I live to tell these stories, and seeing them valued in real time like that was surprisingly empowering. So… thank you.

Buy the book! Spread the word!

Seriously, if you’ve read this far, I have poured my little heart out. I got ready to launch on Friday, but yanked everything down. It wasn’t the time. But today, Monday, I’d like to re-launch The Apocalypse Ocean (and will be telling everyone it’s here). And I’d ever so appreciate your help in spreading this little story you read. Or anything about the book.

Here’s the book. Buy it, rate it, spread it around:

The ebook is available [directly from me] on [Amazon Kindle] or [B&N Nook] or [Kobo Books] or [iBooks] How I used Kickstarter to reboot a book series, and my career (and maybe my life?)

A Writer and His Aspirations

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

One of the problems with talking about writing advice is that different pieces of writing advice hit people at different parts of their journey. It’s often why I think writing advice from someone *just* slightly ahead of where you are in a career can often be the most easy to puzzle apart and get.

I’d been relating my writers and pellets story mostly to writers who’d broken through, sold novels or short stories, but then found that insecurities still dogged them, as they failed to achieve some of the success that they’d felt was right in front of them as a result of lack of attention, rewards, sales, or money.

While many people understood what I was trying to explain, that one had to learn love the act of writing and build a focus on things they could control, a lot of people assumed that what I was writing was a screed against having aspirations.

In short, many read this as advice that one should not aspire to greatness. No more dreaming, no more reaching for the stars.

Which really misses the point of it.

By setting out to pen a novel, of course I have aspirations. I have aspirations of selling it. Of the rewards that I might accrue.

When you build a rocketship, you often, of course, do it because you dream of reaching the stars (so to speak).

But the art of becoming an excellent rocketeer involves loving building rockets, over and over again. Of the machinery and calculations involved. Aiming for the stars is wonderful, but liquid oxygen has to be procured, and rivets welded, and someone has to sit down with a slide rule and run the calculations.

And the rockets will fail. On launchpad. In the air. They’ll go off course and need to be blown up before worse happens.

In aiming for the stars, you’ll need to become a great rocket builder. In order to build great rockets, you have to get into the process of building great rockets.

You might get into space hating the process of building great rockets. Chances are, you’ll be a miserable rocketeer. A bitter person who might achieve something amazing (the stars) while hating the process. That’s okay.

Or you could get into the nitty gritty of building rockets, and be a happy person who achieves something amazing. And… in the off chance that you never get to orbit, you’ll still have had fun building great rockets.

And yes, there are some people who are building great rockets who will achieve that aspiration of getting to the stars, that aspirational dream, who weren’t even really trying to achieve it. They just loved rockets. They’re *also* happy people.

This is what I was saying: aim for the stars, by all means. But it makes me sad to see people not enjoying rocketry, both achieving and not achieving orbit. Or so focused on getting to orbit they’ve forgotten to love the process of getting there. They always strike me as unhappy, because even after getting to orbit they’re still stuck making rockets. But those people I see who love rockets, and have aspirations and not, seem to love what’s going on around them and are not as miserable. So my advice is that maybe, if you think you’d like to be happy, it might be worth looking into how you interact with your rocket.

I’m just saying.

Writers and Pellets: How Randomness, Success, and Art Can Drive You Crazy

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

A good friend asked me to write about my pigeons and pellets story I’ve been telling friends for the past year.

It goes something like this…

When I talk to writers I often reinforce the importance of milestones versus goals.

Milestones are things you’d like to have happen to you. Selling a story. Selling a novel. Getting nominated for an award. Winning an award.

Goals are things you can actually achieve. Finishing writing a story. Writing a certain number of words. Writing a certain kind of story.

Too many people, when they create lists of goals they’d like to achieve in their year, choose to list milestones over which they have little control. Saying you’d like to sell a novel as a ‘goal’ is possibly not in your control. The market may not be right. You may not have written a good novel. But you can certainly somewhat control writing a novel and submitting it.
This failure to pay attention to what we can control as authors and what we can’t leads to a form of Cargo Cult neuroses in writers out of a desire to recreate milestone successes that were never in their primary power to recreate.

You see it in new writers who look at rejection letters, trying to figure out what they ‘mean.’ It’s jokingly called ‘rejectomancy’ by more experienced writers. You see it in writers who keep trying to write the same kind of story because the first one in that vein succeeded.
The neurotic behavior persists at all levels of writing. It isn’t necessarily the writer’s fault.
The reason for this is writing, as well as many of the arts, are fundamentally (but accidentally) designed to create horrible psychological atmospheres that are very conducive to creating neuroses if you aren’t paying attention. Because the reward systems for artistic success aren’t predictable. Which really fucks with the animal brain.

I’m now going to talk to you about pigeons and pellets.

I was reading about an experiment where researchers dropped pigeons (or some other bird) pellets from a tube. At first, they could tap on the tube, and they’d get a pellet. Then things were changed. It was done randomly, so what happened was that the pigeons basically went batshit crazy trying to figure out just what the fuck it was they were doing that was causing the pellets to drop.

It’s fairly well known that if you want to mess an animals’s training up, you just need to create an environment in which it doesn’t know whether you’re going to smack the crap out of it or pet it.

So come back to our writer-pigeon self.

Writers work for a variety of types of pellets, and a lot of it depends on their own psychological make up. Many of us are narcissists. It’s not just about the money, we quite honestly think we have something to say or share with the world. Having the world react to that is one kind of pellet. Some of us need to put food on the table. That’s another kind of pellet. Some of us seek validation. That’s another kind of pellet. There are lots of pellets.
But unlike a standard 9-5 job, even in terms of income for a writer, you never have any real idea what sort of pellets are coming you way.

Income? It depends on how well someone else thinks your book may sell, how powerful your agent is, how awesome the book is, and what the publisher’s line up and budget may currently be in some sort of synergy. That’s the advance. After that, it depends on how readers react and word spreads. Foreign rights? All of the above plus idiosyncrasies about how languages and stories translate.

Attention? Will readers love you for the reasons you want to be loved? Ever see a sad author who sells well but hates the series he’s slugging through? You can’t control how critics react. The darling of the moment is no less surprised when their book explodes out. No one’s planning on being a major critical hit, even if they’d dreamed and hoped.
And even when income and attention hit, they do in non-predictable ways according to the chaos theory and general brownian motion that’s a coalescence of readers, thought-leaders, and delivery mechanisms. There are so many variables in all of that that some books pop right away, some take years. Some pop after the writer’s dead.

But those pellets, those rewards, come in. And they come in intermittently and out of the writer’s control.

But these pellets *are* recognizably the result of the author’s work. They wouldn’t come if the author hadn’t been pushing away at the lever (writing). It’s just, you don’t know which lever push made it happen.

And the danger is, whatever the author happens to think they were doing that caused the success is what was being rewarded. Or, they have no idea how the pellets are coming their way, and it creates panic, confusion, despair, frustration, and more fun things.

Even sadder, those reactions to random pellets often get in the way of doing the one thing that is needed for the writer to get more pellets:
write more.

Early on in my career I hit upon a method of focusing and rewarding only the activities that I could control. I knew I wanted to sell a story, but that it was a random pellet. So I focused on writing and submitting stories. No one could stop me from that. I celebrated every 100 rejections (with champagne and nice food and a little mini-celebration) I got as proof that I was laying down the right actions toward hopefully getting a story sold.

I still engage in this action. In fact, one consequence of my near-miss with death in late 2008 was to focus even closer on the basics and reward. What is important is the writing. Getting better at the writing. Writing as much as I can comfortably write. (edited to add: and reward myself for that. Reward myself for doing those things which I can control).

Anything I can control, I pay close attention to. Contracts. Personal relationships. The words. Stories I want to tell.

There are lots of things I pay attention to and track (sales, publicity, attention), just as a pigeon is happy to get those random pellets. But I do my best to keep the focus where it needs to be.

That is not to say I don’t enjoy milestones. I fucking love milestones. But I celebrate them as just that. But, particularly over the last two years, learned to not anticipate them.

All I can truly anticipate and control are tonight’s pages, chapters, sentences, rewrites.
I’m going to spend the rest of my life as a story teller. I have to love the moment. The moment of creating story. Refining story. Or I’m going to be miserably trying to get those pellets by flailing around randomly. And that doesn’t sound like a fun way to spend the next decades of my life.

To Achieve More: Daydream More

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I’m deep into working on Arctic Rising at full pace once more, after spending a few weeks with Arctic Rising on a back burner, getting fewer words in per day, as I focused mainly on a novella for a secret project (hopefully you’ll get to hear more about that soon).

I’d left the book at a bit of a junction, I wasn’t entirely sure how to get over the next four or so chapters to the next big piece of action I had plotted out. After writing what bits I could at my secondary office (the local coffeeshop) yesterday, I came home to an empty house. Emily had taken the kids out to visit her dad. After I finished up my freelance work for the day, I set about tackling the tricky chapters I was facing.

I did this by shutting the computer off, plugging my headphones into my iPhone, and laying down on the floor for half an hour.

My goal was not to sit and actively think about the next four chapters, but to just lay there and not think about the chapters and let my mind wander and free associate.

Eventually the back brain began to return to the issue of what the next few chapters could be like. Ideas bubbled up, and I just daydreamed and kept daydreaming until I began to come up with some ideas that just plain psyched me up.

After that I began to mull the ideas, critique them, consider them from various angles, which created a second round of good ideas, until I felt that ‘aha’ moment come where I knew I’d found a really nifty way to move my character along to the next mile marker in the book. It involved tossing out some bits that I’d thought would happen, and changed some dynamics, but it was cool.

I’ve been reading a lot of neurophysiology books of late, about the nature of creativity and productivity. I’ve started to actively try to create more and more moments in my life to allow creativity. One is to only work on a project when I’m excited to do so: structured play. To prevent boredom, I rotate several projects in and out, and let my hindbrain cook a project while its out of rotation. I’ve been setting aside time to read every night, regarding it as important creativity seeding time. No matter what, I will read. I’ve been breaking out my legos three times a week and building random structures, just for fun. There’s been no ‘point’ to it, it’s to occupy my brain and let it have fun. I’ve taken walks whenever hung up on plot points.
As a result, even though I have less energy and physical strength than I did when I first left to freelance due to my recovery from health issues, I’ve been strangely energized and enjoying the day to day work of being a writer. The moment is fun. It’s a lot more play than work.

And I’ve been productive without burning myself out. In the last ten months I’ve written a novel, three novelettes, two short stories, half of Arctic Rising, and a whole book about writing (Just A Draft, my agent is currently looking it over while we decide what we should do with it, which is why online posting of it is currently paused). It’s not as productive as other people can be, but it’s been a very good pace for me, particularly since I’ve fit this around a bunch of freelance work over the last year.

Yet, on many days, from the outside, I look like a lazy dilettante, ending work early because its frustrating, and working on something else merely because it is more fun. Going for walks because I’m bored. Playing with children’s toys.
But as I’m learning from books, the idea that you should throw yourself against the wall over and over again is, as far as what scientists are learning about creativity, will net results, just not good ones. And for me, with a strong blue collar work ethic, its been hard over the last year to grapple with this concept.

Play more to be more creative. To be more productive.

Sounds crazy. But I can’t deny the results.

How To Make a Living as a Writer: Live Somewhere Cheap

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Pat Rothfuss gives great advice over here for writers:

In closing, if you could give one piece of advice to new writers, what would it be?

Live somewhere cheap.

I beg your pardon?

Odds are, it’s going to take you a long time to finish your novel. Then it’s going to take you a long time to break into the publishing world. That means you’re effectively going to be working at a job that will pay you nothing, and you’re going to be doing it for years. So you should live somewhere cheap.

I keep giving this nugget out too, but it gets met with strong resistance. Hey, I know living in an exciting place, is, well, exciting. But it means you probably value that dream more than another.

I would love to live in NYC or somewhere more exciting. I eventually hope one day to make enough to consider getting out of the more rural Ohio (and at least get to a city in Ohio like Columbus, if not somewhere else), but for the mean time, there is a tremendous advantage to a cheap cost of living: it allows me my dream of being writer.

Someone on NPR not too long ago was talking about a Hemingway essay about why he was living in Paris at the time. To us today Paris sounds exciting and urbane. Hemingway claimed to be living there because it was really, really cheap and he could make each published article go further.

I remember talking to someone, before the real estate boom, that hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity in a house on one of the coasts, as yet unpublished, who told me they envied me the dream of writing full time. They said it was their greatest dream. I told them I envied the fact that they could sell their house and live where I lived for 10 years on the cash at hand, and write for 10 years without any worries.

“I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t leave CITY X.”

“Ah,” said I. “You love that dream then, far more than the dream of writing.”

I understand love of place. I grew up in a place people come to when they leave behind the midwests and so forth.

But the best advice is to live somewhere cheap. When people ask why I’m not back in the Caribbean, it’s mainly because I can’t afford it and that would hinder my writing right now.

And if you want adventure, citylife, and cheap, there are some awesome cities in Eastern Europe and South America that will make your novelist money stretch further.

I Never Had Dreads

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I was at a con a while back where someone swore they’d met me ‘back in the days when you had dreadlocks’ and nothing I could do would dissuade this person from believing I’ve never had them.

It’s true though, nonetheless.

I’ve had long hair, but not locks.

Because I’m not rasta.

Let me take you back to the first rastafarian I met. I remember the man clearly to this day. I met him under the old rickety jetty by the hotel bar my parents ran in Lance Aux Pines bay on the southern tip of Grenada. The old weathered gray planks ran overhead, but they were fastened to an old concrete slab.

If you swam under the jetty, you swam in a private little place in the clear water, over the white sand, by the thick slab of stone like a shelf.

I met him under there, a place I considered my own hangout. I usually splashed around that little space, but this time, he squatted in the water where I usually played.

He was using that slab of concrete, with barnacles and algae all covering it, to hold several slabs of cactus that he’d cut. He washed his hair, and slathered and squeezed the aloe out of the cactus into his somewhat long, knotting hair.

Never said boo to me, after doing his thing, he walked out from under the jetty and across the beach, past tourists lying in the sand watching him curiously, and off into the bush.

I saw him a few times after that, using the beach to clean up, before he went back into the bush.

You see some poor people, see people hard up, but he had an air of deliberateness. Someone said he’d taken ‘the vow.’ He was spending forty days in the wilderness, not talking to anyone, living wild.

The wildness scared me at first. Here was something different.

I never realized how tied I was as a little child to social mores, but meeting a wildman, turning his back on things and society for the wilderness: it was somewhat scary.

Why was he doing this?

What did it mean that others didn’t?

What did he believe, that drew him to do such a thing?

Some people, black like the nice lady who made hops bread and shared it with me from time to time and some of the maids, said locks were dirty and something poor people ‘got.’ White people sniffed about them in similar fashion. As a child, I’d grown to assume they happened to people who couldn’t cut their hair.

So why would this man purposefully create them?

It was something I shelved for a while. The man under the jetty, he didn’t look ready to talk to anyone. Others told me ‘that’s just rasta.’

Then an older man with long, natty dreadlocks started squatting in a stone cottage halfway down the beach: one of those old ruins, probably from colonial times.

He would talk to me. He’d ‘breaks them bread’ with me whenever I’d come by. Things were lean in my life. We lived on the old wooden boat out at anchor and I roamed the beach. Often I’d skip lunch, eat seagrapes or mangoes from trees around the area, skinning up them like a monkey.

But this rasta always welcomed me, a little blonde boy with pale skin and a lot of questions, into the cottage with its thatched palm trees fixing the roof, somewhat, against some of the rain. He often had fish stew with thick, chewy dumplings, which he’d ladle out into a wooden bowl and share with me.

And this rastaman would talk. About the bible, about rastas, about my questions. About ital food, and how it was good for your body.

Locks were grown to signify rasta, he said. Because he’d taken the Nazerene vow: no shaving or combing the hair or beard. The other rasta had gone into the wilderness, like Jesus.

There were other young men, out of jobs, throughout the area. They would shout things like ‘yankee go home’ at me. Words that hurt because the island was all I’d ever known, and was home. Half my family was Grenadian.

But most people didn’t say such things.

And even though others didn’t like rasta, and were relieved when the man in the stone cottage was busted by the police and taken away for squatting, I always felt comfortable around true natty dreadlocks because of him, his charity, gentle patience, humor, and friendship. Long locks, irregular, lifelong. Not styled, or carefully managed. They were a sign of devotion and faith and lifestyle.

They taught me my own bubble of perception wasn’t the only path. Other perspectives existed. That there was more than one interpretation of religion. Ways of eating. These things added to my growing framework of questioning, pluralism, and questing that books later then nurtured far further.

I wonder about that man sometimes, and if he remembered sharing what little he had with a little white boy on the beach. If he’s still alive.

But those two rastamen had a bit impact on me. And they’re also why I don’t have locks, anymore than I wear yellow robes, or a priest’s white collar. The locks were a definitive statement, and thinking of the man who’d spent time in the wilderness, and man in the cottage and his almost monk-like manner, every time I considered locks, I thought it wouldn’t be true.

I know they’re more of a fashion statement these days, and for many, a tie or a claim to ethnicity. Later on, I would meet more and more people who took on the dreads, but not the careful thought and commitment, the philosophy, the monk-like approach.

But for me growing locks would ring hollow to the memory of what they really meant. So I may joke about it, or consider it.

But I don’t see myself doing it.

Because I’m not rasta, but I respect rasta.