Richland, WA
It’s a strange town, home of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, my home away from home while facilitating meetings of the Hanford Natural Resource Trustee Council. Their mission – to assess injuries to natural resources associated with the Hanford site, calculated damages associated with those injuries, and on behalf of the public trust, restore those injuries to the extent possible.
There is no other small-town airport I know of where all the large ads on the walls are for mega-laboratories and engineering firms – Fleur, Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Parsons Engineering. Walls full of smiling scientists and hard-hatted engineers. Looking around in the airport, crew-cut engineers and federal bureaucrats mingle with cowboy-booted farmers and field-hands.
Driving into town, buildings are named after CH2M Hill, Battelle, Dept. of Energy. I’m staying in the Red Lion Hanford House, with conference rooms named after geographic features of the sweeping Hanford Site.
A ceaseless wind is blowing when I arrive, piling the tumbleweeds up against the fence near the airport. One wonders where they’ve been … tumbleweeds hereabouts having occasional issues with radioactivity. Even now, even as Fleur works to keep them from growing in the contaminated zones, while they fight back by becoming resistant to even the most effective pesticides.
The wind moans through the roof of the hotel, and dust rises out on the farms and arid plateaus. The locals complain; it’s about time for the wind to stop, they say. Later in the week, it does. One of these years I’m going to remember about Richland and bring decongestants. No matter the time of year, there’s always something in the air. Tumbleweeds float down the Columbia River out in front of the hotel.
I am grateful for this job, genuinely enjoy the people I’m working with, the challenges they bring, and support the mission of this council. I have the luxury this year of focusing on this work, mainly, serving these people. So, welcome to Richland, my home away from home.
A new way of writing
I’ve been writing blogs and participating in online discussion groups for so long, perhaps it’s only natural that I’m thinking about alternative ways of writing books (OK, the Kindle might have something to do with that, but only indirectly). My first two books were traditional books, written by me, sent to a publisher, who added illustrations and formatting, cover illustrations and title, and marketed and sold physical books. And owned the copyright.
Like most beginning authors, my part of the wholesale (not retail) value of each book sold was 10%. Think about that for a minute. Subtracted from that were returns, books that stores bought but didn’t sell, and were allowed to send back to the publisher. All told, a book that my readers might buy for $16, I might receive $1 in royalties. Not enough to live on, certainly, unless you’re a wildly popular author with a large potential audience.
Added to that is the almost more serious issue of not owning the rights to the material I created, not being able to use it online or in classes, not being able to publish it in another language, not being able to, well, give it away for free if I want to, however many years later. And if the publisher doesn’t keep it in print, then no-one has access to it. Even me.
So much has changed in the world that we now have other options. A previously published author can obtain an ISBN number and sell their books as e-books on Amazon.com or from their own website. A person can independently publish e-books or even real books through just-in-time small print run online publishers. Advances in desktop publishing software have certainly improved things for the graphically inclined to illustrate their own works.
The question is, how do you reach your audience? This is the true value-added of most publishers, mine included. There’s something to be said for that thrill of seeing your book pre-orderable on Amazon.com, or a hard copy at Borders, or Waldenbooks, or the local new age bookstore. Famous authors, like Steven King, can and have tried any experiment they want in e-publishing, including giving their material away for free and asking fans to donate what they think it’s worth. Of course, they’re famous; when they try something like that, it’s headline news (or at least blogger news).
Still, the accessibility and the economics are interesting. For one thing, it takes a year or two to get a book published the normal way, even once you’re done writing it (we won’t talk about how long THAT can take). And I could sell a book online for $4, make four times as much, and have my readers pay four times less, than through regular publishing. That ought to make up for at least some publicity issues. The internet is loaded with opportunities to publicize a new book, through online forums of interested user communities.
But what I’m really toying with is the idea of allowing the material to be downloaded like freeware – made freely available, with a request to donate to the author if the reader finds the material to be useful, interesting, enjoyable, or helps build their own business. This preserves the ethic I’ve always had about most of my writing, to make it freely available on my website to those who want to learn. At the same time, I believe people would place value on my work and donate what seems reasonable and affordable to them.
In this format, I could post chapters as they’re written, and people could subscribe to get the very latest. Entire books would be one thing, but a lot of other materials could be provided that way – extended essays, course materials from online classes, newly developed spreads, etc. This material could then be used by the reader in any way they saw fit – potentially contributing to their own online business, website, or classes, which would ideally make it even more valuable to them. A freeware-type copyright would be used, which expressly allows for all these uses, with appropriate attribution and website links.
What do you think of this experiment, potential readers (and downloaders)?
The cat and the Kindle
Recently, I posted about giving up books, and how the Kindle 2.0 was going to help me stay on the straight and narrow. So now I have it in my hot little hands, and have been showing it off incessantly to all my friends and colleagues :) It certainly does have many of the benefits I was expecting; I immediately subscribed to the Seattle Times and am now enjoying my daily newspaper being beamed to me while I sleep each night without any paper to recycle! I have really missed my newspaper, and the only disappointment I have on that score is that for some reason, they don’t include the comics, or Dear Abby! Hmph.
I also downloaded a trashy book that I’ve been wanting to read but just really couldn’t justify buying :D I am finding it very light in the hand and very much like a printed page to read. It’s extremely convenient to take to those places like doctor’s offices, coffee shops, bus stops, etc., where you might find yourself with bits of time to read, and is a lot more compact. So now I’ve got my hardcover book I read at home, and my trashy novel for reading out and about :)
The real test came today when I was out for coffee with some friends and we went shop-hopping afterwards, including several used bookstores. Being determined NOT to buy books, this was the real challenge of whether Kindle will change my habits. I’m happy to say that I came out of the store with a list of books to download and one small blank paper journal (100% recycled), which I’ve been needing – I use those for half-formed ideas for books and classes, note-taking during mediation interviews, and birding records while traveling. Now if only they could put bird guides on Kindle, my backpack would be much lighter – but that will require color someday.
One unexpected advantage – usually when I read at home my books are large enough that the cat and the book can’t coexist on my lap. The cat sits nearby and looks at me, with “that” cat look. Last night I was reading my trashy novel and there was plenty of room, so I called Sophie over, she jumped in my lap, and I read my book with my left hand and petted my cat with the right, and she stretched out luxuriously in her rightful place. There’s at least one being besides me that’s happy for my Kindle!
Unnecessary organisms
Today I’d like to take a moment to rant about viruses. Yeah, I know – everybody hates them. But this is how I handle things that are just driving me crazy – I blog about them! So I’d like to borrow a line from War (huh! What is it good for? absolutely nothing!) and ask the same question about viruses.
Right at the moment I happen to be suffering from a really unpleasant malady called pleurisy – an inflammation of the outer lining of the lungs, which causes all kinds of muscle pain, breathing problems, and just plain misery – caused by, you guessed it, a virus. One I didn’t even know existed. Then there’s AIDS, flu, herpes, chickenpox, encephalitis, mononucleosis, polio, meningitis, rabies, SARS, yellow fever, west Nile fever, hepatitis, measles, mumps, hemorrhagic fever (!), and I could go on and on. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget cervical cancer.
So what’s my point here? Just this – what are viruses for? Everything else, even those annoying mosquitoes and various other pesky critters, have their place in the food chain or some point for their existence. If you eradicated them, things would change in various ways, not all for the better. According to Wikipedia, some viruses reproduce without any apparent harm to their host organisms, but it says nothing about WHAT they’re doing or whether there is EVER any beneficial effect from any virus to any organism.
Technically speaking, they’re not even alive. Basically, they’re just little bits and pieces of once normal biological systems that have somehow run amok and turned into evil little self-replicating nano-robots that cause no end of misery. It’s hard to imagine how there could be so MANY of them with such terrible consequences to the human body (and animals, and even plants).
So I say, death and destruction to all viruses!! Without guilt, I think. Now can we take all that money we spend on war and get busy on this, please?
RSS - Posts