AI and the rise of Fast Food Content

 

This article was in part inspired by my friend Josh Ginsberg’s piece on Generative AI. Give Josh a read and a follow if you would like. And the image is from Agata of goodstuffnononsense.com. Go check out their work!

In 1940, the McDonalds Brothers opened their first hamburger restaurant. In 1948, McDonalds introduced the Speedee Service System, a process that did away with plates and forks and reduced the menu to handheld foods such as burgers and fries. For Americans with a need for speed and the development of highways and suburbs, McDonalds was convenient and profitable. In 1953, McDonalds began franchising. By 1972, they were global, spreading their efficiency all over the world.

But there was a dark side to the rise of fast food. As McDonalds, Burger King, Wendys, and hundreds of other chains spread across America, American waistlines also spread, blood pressure increased, and obesity soared. In 2004, Morgan Spurlock released “Super Size Me”, a documentary detailing the impact of McDonalds and fast food. This followed Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal”. Numerous studies linked fast food to poor health. An American success story in efficiency was killing Americans.

In response, fast food chains saw a drop in revenue. McDonalds sales lagged throughout the early 2000s until they introduced dollar menus, sparking low-income customers. But for many, the damage was done. Fast food is still considered an unhealthy, albeit convenient, option.

Today our society faces another type of efficient revolution. Not in food, but in thought. Or the outsourcing thereof. Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) use has soared in the last five years. Outputs from Gen AI have swamped our media in a way that makes the expansion of fast food from 1950 to 2000 look glacially slow. AI slop is everywhere, from emails to letters, wedding invitations to commercials. Students are using AI to write papers, lawyers to write arguments, job applicants to write resumes, musicians are using AI to make music, artists to make art, and authors to write books. It seems everyone is using AI to make everything.

I don’t trust anything created with AI.

AI is driven by Large Language Models. Those LLM drive the outputs of queries. I don’t have the time or the patience to read what is under the hood of every Large Language Model and how it chooses its responses to queries. Nor do I care.

Think about this, if an LLM was only fed text in Yoda-speak, it would only reply like the ancient Jedi master. And that is why we need humungous data centers on every corner, because the LLMs behind popular AI models need to scan through trillions and trillions of gigabytes of data to give users an answer. Because the robot is making the analysis from millions of unknown sources, I don’t trust it.

I compare AI outputs to cake. I could ask a machine to make me a strawberry cake. I can add the strawberries to the LLM, but what else is in the cake? It could be coded to make a strawberry cake out of cement mix and strawberries. That’s a horrible cake.

(Not to mention copyright issues and lawsuits that have resulted from LLMs sucking up very distinct work and providing outputs to users for the financial gain of the AI company, not the original creator.)

According to Gregory Bourne of Tiny Desk Publishing, I am not alone in distrusting Gen AI, especially as a Gen Xer. My generation, the one known for its cynicism and aloofness, is among the most distrusting of AI technology. According to a few reports, Gen X is using AI in the workplace, but reluctant and hesitant to incorporate it in their private lives due to privacy concerns.

As a writer, I believe AI takes the fun out of writing. It removes the joy and wonder of creating. It reduces the need to make mental and creative connections. When I wrote my novels, I often sat with two scenes in my head for days, wondering how I can get them connected. When a middle scene finally arrived in my brain, it was like unlocking a puzzle where suddenly all the pieces have a place. The lightbulb went on and I started writing. I don’t want AI to do the creative lifting and put in puzzle pieces I am struggling with. There is no fun in that to me.

According to Eve Fairbanks’s recent article in The Atlantic, AI writing is like a mass-produced burger, flavorless and boring.

“The tone is bland; individual word choices are baffling; the structure lacks sense; key pieces of the argument are missing; facts are false. Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There’s nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin.”

Burgers created through the Speedee Service System aren’t known for their flavor, they are known for their speed. Unfortunately, speed is a key driver to today’s creators, especially those creating for marketing purposes.

Good art takes time. But when “content creators” need to make “content” to maintain awareness in the algorithm of social media platforms, they query and prompt whatever Speedee Service System they can, lest they fall behind and their posts not reach their desired metrics in views and engagement.

Did you know TikTok recommends posting 5 to 10 times a day to maintain relevancy on their algorithm? Big media organizations are able to do that, especially if they have daily inputs, such as sports highlights. But that is impossible for small creators.

Meeting an algorithm’s demands is not about art. It’s about numbers. Marketing content driven by analytics, driven by ROI and budgets. Financial people don’t care about the quality of art. They only care that the money spent gets the value desired. So be it if a content creator has to go to the fast-food drive-thru 5 times a day to get a mass-produced burger and fries to fill the belly of an ever-hungry algorithm.

When does it end?

While it took 50 years to see the impact of fast food on health, there are already multiple studies on the impact of AI on human thought and learning. Like fast food, the results are not good.

Studies on AI users show less cognitive activity, less creativity, and less thought. Outsourcing decisions is leading to laziness and the atrophy of human decision making. Worse yet, the AI is programmed not to disagree. It is more apt to agree with the user and at the same time, produce content that is homogeneous to other users’ work. In other words, it lacks originality. It lacks flavor. It doesn’t take much brain power to make a hamburger at McDonalds. It doesn’t take much brain power to make art as bland as a Speedee System product.

(No offense to McDonalds workers. My first job was flipping burgers at Mickey D’s.)

Not only is AI ruining our brains, it is also producing content that is hurting the very LLMs the content is derived from. According to a new study by researchers at Texas A&M University, University of Texas at Austin, and Purdue University, Large Language Models can be negatively influenced by attention-grabbing, sensationalist, and shallow information. The results of queries from LLMs fed this “brain rot” content were marked by “worse reasoning, poorer long-context understanding, diminished ethical norms, and emergent socially undesirable personalities”.

The rise of AI programs in our current tech and media spaces is akin to McDonalds incorporating the Speedee System in every restaurant and grocery store in the world while feeding its own workers its own unhealthy fast food. When the great cholesterol calamity occurs, the only survivors will be those who create their own supply chain, breed their own cows, slaughter their own animals, grill their own meat, and make their own burgers. They will be oases of humanity in a desert of Gen-AI slop.

As Fairbanks writes in her Atlantic article,

“Maybe human writing will become like cloth-aged cheese or handloom rugs, an artisanal product created effortfully. Maybe we will come to treasure older writing. Herman Melville, George Orwell, Toni Morrison—all authenticated. Writing like this will be a fossil record for a kind of thought process we buried without realizing it.”

Meanwhile, McDonald’s itself is heavily embracing AI in its Speedee System 2.0, attempting to use automation to get orders out faster. Americans are still partaking in fast food cuisine, reportedly more often than ever before. 

Old habits die hard, I guess.

The Indie Dilemma

 

When I set out to release Curveball at the Crossroads to the masses way back in 2013, when the book was 95% finished, I originally looked for a publisher. From 2013 to 2015, I emailed several dozen agents and publishers. I received a few rejection letters and a lot of ghosting.

After re-writing the ending and adding additional scenes to the novel in 2020, I perused publishing again. The less said about Gabriel Vaughn and Legacy Book Publishing the better. Not a good experience.

That led me to self-publishing. Following a few years of my own hustle, I learned I am referred to as an “Indie Author” and that this is a badge to be worn proudly. I am proud of my work regardless, but people say I should be proud to be an indie author, so here I am. I own all my own rights, negotiate all my own deals, and make all my own profit. Income is split between me and my distributor, be it Ingram or Amazon.

There are downsides to being an indie author. All of the marketing, hustle, and promotion is on me. Spreading the word is tough. Social media has not been a magic panacea as it is for other authors. I have less than 1,000 followers on tiktok and Instagram and less than 2,000 on twitter. I get it. My book is not in a tik-tok friendly genre. Despite booktok’s overwhelming legendary clout, it’s not for everyone. I’m there, but it’s not a gamechanger.

I’ve done what I can to get positive feedback. I’ve done morning television, newspaper write-ups, and given away dozens of free books to get reviews from people I think might influence my demographic. Those who have replied have liked the book, which is a good thing. Good reviews help me stand out.

Standing out is important when it comes to attracting other book reviewers. They look for what’s trending, what’s hot, and what’s popping. From what I have seen, they rarely take a chance on random indie books. There is a stereotype that indie equals less than. Indie authors have to have an even bigger buzz than traditional releases to be reviewer, which is even more difficult given indie book’s lack of marketing machine.

It’s unfortunately a battle indie authors rarely win and therein lies the problem. If a reviewer dismisses indie authors because the authors haven’t gone through the traditional publishing process, they are doing their readers a disservice. Plain and simple.

The other day, I read a substack column by Summer Brennan, a writer and book reviewer. I don’t know Summer at all. I’ve never read her books and until Substack recommended her article to me, I had never heard of her. Apparently she has 23,000 followers, but it was her content that got my attention, not her follower count. In the giant, massive, enormous slush pile that is online content, I took the time to read her post because it caught my interest. I didn’t gatekeep.

What Summer said bothered me a bit.

“The problem with trying to put self-published books on my reviewing radar is that I have no idea how to find the good ones in an expedient manner. This concern is not new. Doing so would take far too much time. The world of self-published books is, essentially, one enormous slush pile—perhaps the world’s largest and slushiest—and I don’t have interns who can take the time to look for those inevitable, rare gems—nor do I think it economical to do so.”

When it comes to indie novels, all reviewers have to do is check the ratings. If 25 ratings is enough, then my book makes the cut. If 50 or 250 is the minimum, then I don’t make the cut. But never fear, Bookweb.org, Indiebound.org, Indiebookspotlight, and Kirkus have websites dedicated to top indie books. Even Amazon has a Top Indie Books ranking. I found all that with a quick, two-minute DuckDuckGo search. DuckDuckGo is your friend. But if two minutes is far too much time, so be it. Some people are busy.

Imagine writing a list of the top movies of 2025 and not listing any indie movies. Imagine your list only consisted of the top five film studios – Disney, Warner Brothers, Sony, Universal, and Paramount. Imagine writing a list of the top rock bands of 2025 and not including any indie rock bands. Imagine writing a list of the top professional wrestlers in the world and your list was only wrestlers in WWE and AEW. Those reviewers would be laughed out of the building. They would have no credibility because they didn’t do their homework. I know reading a book takes more time than watching a movie, listening to a song, or watching a wrestling match, but I expect credible reviewers to do their homework.

There are a lot of indie musicians, indie movie makers, and indie wrestlers who make a good living. There are also a lot of indie authors who do as well. They are goals. I like being an indie author. If I want to release an unprofessional book, I can. If I want to release a book that can go toe-to-toe with anything on the New York Times Bestseller list, I can do that too. I can release a mixtape. I can release a double album. I can be like Lil Wayne and release a chapter every Monday for a year. As an indie author, I can do whatever I want. Gatekeepers be damned.

And as for the critics that might not like that, to paraphrase the Adam Sandler classic Big Daddy, “Indie authors only caught a bad rap because most critics are cynical assholes.”

Novel number two update number one

 

I haven't mentioned it here yet, but I have mentioned it on my social media. But I should mention it here, because it is a good idea to mention good ideas when there are good ideas to be mentioned.

Novel number 2 is a thing. It's a big mess of a thing that is currently under construction. It is over 64,000 words of a rough draft. It's gonna take some work and some time. I think I am approximately 66% through the plot. Which means it will probably be somewhere around 80,000 words. Which is a lot for a fiction novel. Which means a lot of editing needs to happen. And we need a title and a cover and formatting and printing and publishing.

In time, dear reader. In time. But that's a good thing. We are closer today than we were yesterday. And closer yesterday than we were the day before that.

What is novel number two about? Like novel number one, it is about the Devil. This time however, pro wrestling is involved. And novel number two is darker. Much more evil and bigger in scope. Sprinkle in some occult and some heavy metal and there is something there.

A big mess of something.

Meeting Gabino Iglesias at Tombolo Books

 

One of the most important things about being a writer or an author is being a fan of other's writing. No writer lives in a vacuum. We are surrounded by other writers. Some we look up to, some we help up, some we look to as peers. As writers, we are part of a huge community. 

Gabino Iglesias is an author I look up to. He has put out some amazing books and is a fixture of great writing wisdom and encouragement on Twitter. Every Friday, Gabino encourages his followers to retweet about his book and in turn retweets about theirs. That's huge to someone just starting out or someone with far less followers than Gabino. To date, he has retweeted about my novel Curveball at the Crossroads maybe ten times. Although I will RT about his book whenever I can, I save his RT power for times when I have something happening, like an upcoming book signing or a TV appearance.

To boot, Gabino is also a metalhead with similar taste in loud music.

On Tuesday, September 24th, I had the pleasure of meeting Gabino at his book signing at Tombolo Books in St Pete. He was awesome, answering a lot of great questions and doing a brief reading from his latest book, House of Bone and Rain.

After the event, Gabino signed books for the attendees. As he signed mine, I asked if he wanted a copy of Curveball at the Crossroads. He said yes. When I brought him the book and signed it for him, he complimented the cover and said he recognized it from his retweets. That was an awesome feeling. 

You always hope people in real life are as cool as they are online. Gabino Iglesias is the real deal. I'm looking forward to reading House of Bone and Rain and hope to cross paths with him again. Maybe next time, I'll be the one with the new book.

Dealing with the Devil of Legacy Book Publishing

 

 

Getting published is every writer’s dream. I wanted my book in every bookstore, on top lists, and selling thousands, if not millions of copies. But that dream almost crashed before it began.
In 2012, I started writing Curveball at the Crossroads. The first rough draft was finished in late 2013. I put the manuscript aside for a few years as I went back to school. From 2013 to 2019, I would occasionally submit the first 20 pages to publishers. I had a few dozen rejection letters and even more unanswered email queries. I grew frustrated, thinking the book would never be published.

I was laid off when the world stopped in 2020. With nothing to do besides looking for a new job and hoping the economy would start again, I decided to work on creative projects. The top project on my list was getting Curveball at the Crossroads published. I wanted to get my book in the hands of other bored readers. With no sports on TV, I thought people might flock to a sports fiction novel.
With no success pitching to larger publishers, I googled “Florida book publishers”. I figured if I was a local writer with experience in local publications, if I worked with a local publisher all the money would stay local. In theory, it was a good idea.

I found a list of Florida publishers and emailed several of them the first chapter of Curveball at the Crossroads. Only one emailed me back: Legacy Book Publishing from Winter Park, Florida.

Within a month, I signed a contract with Legacy Book Publishing to publish Curveball at the Crossroads. That was a huge mistake. I should have done my homework.

Gabriel Vaughn is the owner of Legacy Book Publishing. According to Florida business directory Sunbiz.org, Legacy Book Publishing doesn’t exist. Here are Gabriel Vaughn’s companies according to Sunbiz. Of them, only Legacy Press of Florida is active.

 

Representing a fictional company in a contract is illegal. Even if Gabriel Vaughn changed the name of the company on the contract, I still should not have done business with him. Not only does he have a claim against him by an author on RipoffReport.com, not only is there a scathing review of his lack of services to another author on his Google Business page, he has been sued in the Orange County Court by several authors.

As of 2022, my name is on the top of the list of authors who sued Gabriel Vaughn and his publishing companies.

Gabriel Vaughn provided me a published book in November 2020. Unfortunately, the original printing of Curveball at the Crossroads was littered with typos, including three on the back cover. The cover was poorly designed and not to the level of other books. Lastly, when I opened my shipment of books, several copies had blank pages and misaligned pages in the middle of the book. I was completely embarrassed.

Even worse, as of 2022, Gabriel Vaughn has never paid me for any sales. Nor has he ever told me how many books, if any, I sold through his company.

So I reached out to a lawyer and we sued him. My lawsuit demands four things: monies owned, a list of sales, that he de-list Curveball at the Crossroads off his website, and that he never sell my book again.

Most of the lawsuits against Gabriel Vaughn are for Breach of Contract. Gabriel Vaughn and Legacy Book Publishing is what is known as a “Vanity Publisher”. Gabriel Vaughn charges aspiring authors money to print their books. The authors get published by an actual publisher and avoid the stigma of self-publishing and Gabriel Vaughn gets paid without having the responsibility of selling any books.

Getting paid up front also reduces his incentive to print good products. 

Prior to dealing with Gabriel Vaughn, I was under the assumption that self-published meant “bad” or “cheap”. I also thought it meant only distributing through Amazon, which I did not want to do. Not until after I tried selling Gabriel Vaughn’s printing of Curveball at the Crossroads did I learn about self-publishing distribution.

I wanted my book on the shelves at small book stores. That was a goal. Unfortunately, Gabriel Vaughn and Legacy Book Publishing did not distribute through Ingram Spark, the preferred distributor of most small bookstores. The few stores I spoke to would not order books from individual publishers, especially ones they never heard of. They wanted the book to be available through Ingram Spark.

I was stuck with a poorly designed product that no one would order and a publisher who already got paid. I should have had “Sucker” printed on my forehead.

Fortunately, I still had the rights to my novel. I was able to reprint Curveball at the Crossroads in 2021. Reprinting took me almost an entire year. I learned how to commission a cover artist. I learned how to work with freelancers on Fivver.com, to include an editor and a book layout designer. I learned how to submit a self-published novel to Ingram Spark so small book stores can order it. All of the effort was well-worth it. I am proud of the second edition. It is a better product with better editing, a much better cover, and is more widely available.

I doubt I will ever get my money from Gabriel Vaughn. He is a hustler and scam artist who preys on the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers. When I last spoke with my attorney in December 2022, he told me the lawsuit could not be served because the Orange County Court could not find Gabriel Vaughn.

Ironically, Curveball at the Crossroads is about the consequences of signing a contract with the Devil out of desperation. I feel I did the same when I signed with Gabriel Vaughn and Legacy Book Publishing. For future authors, no matter where he surfaces, do not ever do business with Gabriel Vaughn and Legacy Book Publishing.

The much-improved second edition of Curveball at the Crossroads can be found at Bookshop.org, on Amazon.com, or ordered through your local bookstore.

911 Studios Reviews Curveball at the Crossroads

 

Good friend Adam from 911Studios reviewed and promoted my debut novel Curveball at the Crossroads.

Check out his video here:

Curveball at the Crossroads available now

Buy Curveball at the Crossroads here.

I am super excited to announce that my first novel is now available for purchase. Entitled Curveball at the Crossroads, it is the story of a baseball player who makes a deal with the Devil after a career-ending injury. As he rises in success, he realizes eventually all deals come with a price. His deal with the Devil could cost him everything he cares about.

I worked on this book for over eight years. In 2012 and 2013, I wrote Weekly Book Updates on this site. It is interesting to go back and read my thoughts on the book from back then.

From March 2013,

I am happy to say the initial rough draft is done. And when I say it is rough, it is really rough. As a matter of fact, it is so rough I am still deliberating on one of three different titles.

(That's ok, the way I see it, Return of the Jedi was Revenge of the Jedi until a year before release. And while filming, the movie's code name was Blue Harvest. So that's three names too.)

I can however tell you what the book is about. I don't want to spoil it, but it's about baseball, the blues, the devil, the crossroads, and a deal gone wrong. It has humor, sports action, and enough mojo to hopefully keep every reader interested. At least that's the goal.

My plan now is to sit on this draft for a little while, at least until I get back to the states, then begin the editing process. There is of course a lot of work that needs to get done before I turn this draft of 120 pages and over 62,000 words of plot into a cohesive story. But such is the creative process.

I'm definitely excited.

What became Curveball at the Crossroads was initially written in 2012-2013. I edited and re-wrote a lot of it in 2013. Then I put it aside for a few years while I went back to school. In 2017, I worked on it a little bit, sent it to publishers, and received several rejection letters.

In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, when everything was closed, no sports were on, and boredom ruled, I dusted off the latest draft and began final tinkering. When I finally wrote an ending I liked, I started looking for independent Florida publishers. After a month of submissions, I found Legacy Book Publishing from Winter Park, Florida. 

After finally receiving an email of interest from a publisher, I drove to Legacy Book Publishing on June 23rd, 2020. I signed a contract and we got to work on making my draft a real novel.

On November 4th, Curveball at the Crossroads was listed on the Legacy Book Publishing website. It will be on Amazon in December 2020. But why support a trillion dollar company when you dollars can support local writers and local publishers?

As always, thank you for reading and thank you for your support.

Quick blog posts

Quick posts are subtle like ninja strikes. Thoughts rapping with words rapid like bmx bikes. Jumping over cities and towns, minds surfing the web and never slowing down. Good blogs keeping you moving through the intertubes, like a time traveling telephone booth with two cool dudes.

Meeting Cristela Alonzo in Tampa

Last month I had the awesome opportunity to see comedian, writer, actress, and activist Cristela Alonzo live in Tampa. She was hilarious. Afterwards, I bought her new book and gave her a copy of mine. We both signed our respective books for the other. Very cool moment.

Deadspin is Dead Long Live Bloggers

For all intents and purposes, Deadspin.com died earlier this month. After corporate orders restricting content to only sports, the site's writers and editors walked out in protest.

Since 2005, Deadspin.com was a bastion for against the grain views. When the mainstream media, especially sports media, was grasping with how to handle their growing online audience, Deadspin was at the forefront of the sports blog "revolution". Bloggers were influencing how the online audience thought, and their views were vastly different from the TV-viewing audience.

Many sports blogs wrote from a fan-based perspective not seen in the "ivory tower" of established journalism. To the internet-savvy fan, newspapers were a relic of a slower past. This infuriated more traditional media representatives such as Bob Costas and Buzz Bissinger.

Check out this video of Bob Costas's interview with Deadspin founder Will Leitch in 2008. Costas begins by calling the blogosphere the "wild west of the internet" where "anyone can post anything".



(The best part is Costas decrying the "potshots and mean spirited abuse" abundant online. As more people got online and as the internet became more of our daily lives and media went from easy to "social", the mean spiritedness only got worse. If only we had to worry about a few sarcastic comment sections. But that's a social commentary for another day. Maybe another blog post.)

Simply put, the breaking of the publishing barriers and the ease of blogging allowed readers to read, learn, or laugh about sports in ways that circumvented traditional media. Blogs and stat sites were the underground. Blogging was a cool kids club similar to hackers or other online groups that the mainstream didn't understand.

During the time of Deadspin's rise, I wrote frequently on this site and my work and my words were quoted on Deadspin a few times.

In September 2008, for example, then-editor Rick Chandler and I had a small back-and-forth when Chandler insulted the Tampa Bay Rays. First, Chandler posted a letter I wrote to the editor on his post entitled "Mock The Mohawk At Your Own Peril":

On Tuesday, I received this email: Rick I always thought Deadspin was the place for the underdog. I don't know your sports affiliations, but you definitely came off as siding with the Red Sox in your post on last night's Rays vs. Red Sox game, particularly your shot at the Rays attendance (the majority were of course pro-Red Sox). I'll be at tonight's game and I'll definitely be able to determine if the majority of fans are pro-Rays, as they normally are, or pro-Boston. If you are there too, please let me know. I'll say hi. You know, I never thought Deadspin would be pro-Evil Empire; I thought that was ESPN's job. Things definitely have changed since Will Leitch left. Jordi Scrubbings

That night, I wrote a post documenting different types of Rays fans, which Chandler then quoted the next day on Deadspin.

Secondly, there was a sellout crowd of 36,048. And as my pal Jordi Scrubbings points out, most, evidently, were Rays fans. Scrubbings has taken me to task for claiming that Rays fans are uninspired and rarely present, so he took the time to document his claims to the contrary. Included in his thesis is this example of the Rays Mohawk:

You had to roll with the punches. If you had a sense of humor, the blogosphere was fun.

I also wrote a post for Deadspin in 2009. I was picked to preview Florida State basketball in the NCAA Tournament. I had to send them a sample of my writing and in return, they provided me with a bit of exposure.

Besides being quoted and writing for Deadspin, writing about Deadspin was also a thing. Yes, it was naval gazing, but many sports bloggers knew they were part of something new. Again, it was similar to the early hackers who knew the internet was going to be big and they were on the cusp of a movement. Sports bloggers knew there were going to be changes to how people ingested their sports. We knew something was happening at the crossroads of technology and media.

(Unfortunately, like the early hackers, early bloggers couldn't control what happened to online sports media, they could only write about it. But that too is a possible post for another day.)

My favorite naval gazing post was written when original editor Will Leitch left Deadspin in 2008. This post entitled "Hey, Wait, I'm Blogging Sports Complaints" used Leitch's love for Nirvana as a basis for discussing the blogging "revolution".

Ironically, at the end of the article, I attempted to predict the future of Deadspin.

"Will the mantra Leitch promoted be marginalized by the very consumerist machine that sparked its conception?"

Although editors who followed Leitch continued his philosophy of speaking truth to power, the inside powers that be - venture capitalists who eventually purchased Deadspin as part of an online journalism conglomerate - killed the site.

Admittedly, I haven't been a regular reader of Deadspin for several years. I have no idea how much of their posts were sports versus partly sports versus completely non-sports. But that is not the point. The point is that a website that was once the pinnacle of the underground was eventually forced to lose its voice.

While I am disappointed Deadspin is dead, I do not share in the thought that all is lost. Writers will still write. Writers who were previously employed by Deadspin will surface again. They will continue to put words on screens and click publish buttons. Before the days of Deadspin and other corporate forums, many writers were underground. If need be, the former voices of Deadspin will publish underground again - be it on sites such as wordpress or blogspot, or on their own websites.

And when the former voices of Deadspin do write again, they have the power of social media (particularly twitter) to market their works. That built-in audience is an advantage that the early blogosphere did not have.

Unfortunately, independent blogging rarely pays. This is why so many writers flocked to corporate owned platforms over the past 10 years. Perhaps many of the former Deadspin writers will find paid gigs - if so, more power to them. I fear some will not.

But if I could make one media suggestion before I conclude this ode, it is that the internet needs better aggregation sites. We need sites that list the best writing from independent writers and bloggers and lets readers discover new voices. In the early blogging days, sites such as Deadspin, The Big Lead, and others always had a "link dump" of the best articles they found that week. For a small, independent blogger having an article listed on a major site meant hundreds, if not thousands of new views to your work.

Unfortunately, aggregation posts don't get many ad clicks and page views. Few people share aggregation posts - they more likely share the articles the aggregation posts link to. Aggregation posts have to either be vanity pages or they have to be on sites such as Reddit.

In conclusion, this has become quite the long ode. But this is my site and no venture capitalist is going to tell me to wrap it up.

Long live Deadspin - a site that helped me not only gain exposure and confidence in my writing but also taught me about blogging to power - something I have done often on my Tampa Bay Baseball Market website. There, I don't have access, favor, or discretion and sure enough, several of Tampa's mainstream sports writers don't like my voice or opinions. Oh well.

Hard to believe I have been writing online for over 13 years. The writing world is a lot different these days. But even though time passes, and we know lives and businesses come and go, it is still sad to see the home of a revolution strangled by the hands of corporate greed.

RIP Deadspin.

Affirmed.

Writing Advice From Leonard Pitts

When I was in college, and just starting to understand how to write, I emailed columnist Leonard Pitts in response to an article he wrote about the mother of Emmitt Till, a young black man whose death was a key point in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. I thought Pitts's article was so well done I had to ask him how I could write like that and how maybe one day I could have my own general interest column. Although I think his assistant sent a canned response, Mr. Pitts's advice was some of the best I ever received - actually, it may have been the only advice I ever received on the art of writing. Anyway, here is what he wrote:

As for advice...practice your craft.  Then practice it some more.  After you're done with that, take a little more time and practice. This is the only sure route to learning your craft.  There is, in other words, no trick, secret, or magic formula that will make you good.  Unfortunately for them, most writers are very good at finding excuses not to write.  This is because writing is not enjoyable.  As some sage once put it: "Writing is not fun.  Having written is." So what is required of the would-be writer is that he or she first develop the discipline to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair and start putting words down on the screen.  You will be awful at first, then a little better.  In time, perhaps, you will become good.  And sometime after that, assuming you possess the basic gifts for it, you will become great. Time not spent writing should be spent reading.  Read constantly and promiscuously.  Read writers whose work you admire and try to figure out how they do what they do and what it is in their work that makes it achieve whatever effect it does.  Read writers whose work you dislike and try to figure out what they're doing wrong so that you can avoid making the same mistakes. Also: It's important to invest in the tools of your craft.  In making an investment, you prove - to others and, more importantly, to yourself - that you are serious about this thing.  To that end, you need a workspace - doesn't have to be fancy, but it ought to be yours and accessible to you on a regular basis.  You need a word processor or computer; a good dictionary, an almanac, a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style, and a thesaurus. You need a copy of Writer's Market, which is a directory of magazine publishers.  It lists the kind of material they're looking for, the contact persons and the prices they pay.  Also, get yourself a subscription to Writer's Digest; it's a monthly magazine that deals with the craft of writing, but also the business of it.  The magazine provides a great crash course for young writers. Finally, assuming you have any cash left over, you might want to pick up a copy of Stephen King's On Writing.  It's a memoir of the craft that I found inspirational and instructive.

I still haven't picked up that Stephen King book yet. I might want to do that.

Work or write: The Creative Conundrum

A few weeks ago, there was a huge tiff in the online creative writing community. According to reports, well-known author Diana Gabaldon advised aspiring writers not to major in English. In response to a tweet asking her advice on the career path of an author, the author of the Outlander series wrote:

English major = “Want fries with that?” . Pick something that will give you enough money to write what you want. https://t.co/MQ52HSzZCl

— Diana Gabaldon (@Writer_DG)

Gabalbon's comment spurred all sorts of hubbub among writers. From reports, it also offended some food service workers. So as someone who worked at McDonalds, then years later received degree in English/Creative Writing from an award winning and highly acclaimed university program, here are my two cents:

Even without the first sentence, Gabaldon is 100% correct. Majoring in English or Creative Writing is a useless endeavor if one aspires to be a writer. Writers write. They write on napkins, on scrap paper, and on the back of receipts. They write when inspiration hits them. They don't need to go to school for that.

Writers without degrees can still be self-published, freelance, submit to publishers, and network like hell. Go to book fairs. Meet writers, publishers, and literary agents. Organize writers' groups. Use local/social media to your advantage. Work the field to get your name out there. It is difficult to do, but it is no different than any local rock band, spoken word poet, or underground hip-hop artist.

While most creative people said their feelings were hurt by Gabaldon's comments, but they would survive, even if it meant not reading her work anymore, one reply really stuck in my craw. It was personally insulting and to use the modern parlance, I was almost "offended".

Tim Chevalier, aka "@fatneckbeardguy" wrote a long diatribe on twitter about how his lifelong dream of being a writer was crushed by the heavy weight of becoming a computer programmer, a career choice he never wanted.

It is over 1,000 words of the biggest load of whining and bullshit I have ever read.

I have a computer science degree and thus all the money I want and no emotional energy left after work for writing. If I'd majored in English (like 13-year-old me wanted) I wouldn't have gone down the path of lots of money and spiritual/artistic vacuity.

This is not his career's fault. It is his, and his alone. He let the weight of his job crush his creativity. Don't blame the game, blame the player. He lost the will to create.

I've worked and created on the side for over 10 years. While in Afghanistan, I worked 15 hours a day over 8,000 miles from home in a warzone. I missed my family and friends and I was doing the most stressful work of my life. But I still found the time to write over 200 pages of my first novel in that year. Why? Because I needed to. Writing was my escape. I didn't watch movies or go to the gym. I wrote. I wrote to escape. I wrote to create my own world.  For an hour or two every night, I would be in the world of my characters.

So the bullshit that a job as a computer programmer leaves someone with no emotional energy to write is an excuse. That's all it is, a flimsy cop-out. You write when you feel the need to. If you don't have a passion for it, then it's not your job's fault. It's yours.

Chevalier then goes on a tangent about getting trapped in the working world.

Anyway, once you get into industry, you realize the real day-to-day work isn't much fun, or that there are fun things about it but not the ones you anticipated, and a whole lot of soul-sucking baggage that's the price of both the fun and the money, but by then the money has you trapped.

More bullshit. Sure, paying bills sucks and if you have a passion for a big house and a fancy car, you might have to work some 12-hour days. That's life. But that doesn't mean you can't still create. Money doesn't trap you. A job doesn't even trap you. Throughout every job I've had - from military deployments to 9-to-5 daily grinds - I wrote. I made youtube videos. I performed comedy. I ran around town with an afro wig. I found time.

Then there is this beautiful nugget of self-defeatism - an admission Chevalier gave up.

We -- as in, we adults who've had our dreams beaten out of us -- terrorize kids with a lot of fear-mongering about starving artists and starving musicians. The truth is that artists and musicians have always found ways to survive in a world hostile to art, so long as they're lucky enough to get taught that the shame of not being affluent must be avoided at all costs.

You can be affluent and creative at the same time. It is entirely possible. You can be Bruce Wayne during the day and Batman at night. You can work and do open-mics. You can freelance for newspapers. You can stop at Starbucks on the way home and write a page of poetry in a notebook.

So while part of me knows it's not too late, part of me is too busy grieving over all the time I lost to be able to make a new plan.

By the end of his post, with its whiny story about being unable to read Bruce Springsteen's autobiography, I didn't know whether Chevalier was playing his readers, was this sad, or was trying to make up for lost writing time by piling on the melodrama.

What you do want is time to spend doing the work that makes you feel whole.

Again, I wrote fiction and comedy in a warzone because I mentally needed to.

But in case I am a bad example for Chevalier - perhaps my burning desire to create is superhuman and beyond his capacity - here is another example of someone who toiled all day and then used his spare time to create:

In the early 20th century, there was a young patent officer in Germany who was married with a child. He worked 8 hours a day examining inventions for patentability. Then he went home and he wrote. He claimed his life was divided into 8 hours of working, 8 hours of writing, and 8 hours of sleeping.

According to one source:

Even the hours he had to keep at the patent office worked against him. By the time he got off for the day, the one science library in Bern was usually closed. How would he have a chance if he couldn't even stay up to date with the latest findings? When he did have a few free moments during the day, he would scribble on sheets he kept in one drawer of his desk—which he jokingly called his department of theoretical physics.

That writer was Albert Einstein, perhaps the smartest man of our time. Einstein eventually wrote his findings, submitted them, and was published in the esteemed scientific journals of the day. The rest is history.

Here is advice for Chevalier and all others who have crumbled under the weight of their own creative regret: Instead of complaining, challenge yourself. Sign up for Nanowrimo. Write 1,000 words a night. Write 100 words a night. Write a haiku. Close twitter, close facebook, and write.

From the rest of Chevalier's tweets, I'm thinking he might reply with "here is a straight, capitalist-supporting, white man telling people how to think and live". If so, that's another cop-out and an attempt to lean on a victim complex.

But as an English major whose desire to never again work at McDonalds led me to national security jobs and graduate schools, and someone who still wrote a novel, composed thousands of blog posts, freelanced for newspapers, and performed stand-up comedy, I have skin in this debate.

To sum, majoring in English/Creative Writing isn't the smartest thing to do if you want to write. It's not even the smartest thing to do if you want to make money creating. Applying for jobs with an English degree requires explanation how you can take those skills and apply them. Recruiters and hiring managers are not usually smart enough to derive useful skills from unconventional backgrounds. Hence, they usually pass on resumes that require exposition. Majoring in something tangible - media, marketing, or public relations all have writing elements - will catch the attention of hiring managers and recruiters.

To college students everywhere, make your future job hunt and life easier, keep English/Creative Writing as a minor and write and promote your writing in your spare time, but major in something more tangible.

To Tim Chevalier, I hope you find the time to one day reach your dreams. Cheers.

Tired of instability

I'm tired.

I'm tired of instability. Tired of not knowing what the future holds. Tired of trying to figure out what's next.

In 2013, upon returning from Afghanistan, I decided to start a second master's degree in Business Administration. I was tired of working for the Department of Defense, tired of hopping from contract to contract, and tired of working in a world where your employment hinges on a budget, not on how effective you are. The Department of Defense doesn't have profitable years or not-profitable years. They don't "sell" anything. If you are on a contract, working harder rarely means job security. If the government ends the contract with your employer, you are out of luck, no matter how well you did.

I was tired of contracts ending.

So after an 8-year break, I went back to school. It was difficult. I had never taken Accounting or Finance and I was trying to understand them at the graduate level. Management and Marketing came easier to me, but anything with math or numbers was a struggle. After 12 years in the Intelligence Community, I was not used to thinking mathematically.

But I pushed through. For over a year, I spent money I made in Afghanistan on my new degree. It was an investment in myself. It might have been tough, but there was hope at the end of the tunnel. I was off in a new career.

I wasn't sure where the MBA was going to land me. I didn't know anything about the corporate world. All of it was new. I didn't know about balance sheets or financial statements, marketing plans or margins. I didn't understand the speed of business nor it's dog-eat-dog environment. I had no idea where I was going, I just knew I was learning new and interesting things.

All along I hoped I could take my past experiences - experiences in analysis, research, and geopolitical understanding - and apply them to business. After I finished my first year of school work, I started looking for employment. I was open to any idea than combined what I knew with what I was learning.

I was open to finance and intelligence, marketing and intelligence, process analysis, cyber and intelligence, business strategy, corporate intelligence, and any analytics job. As I progressed and learned about these and other fields, however, I realized some career paths might be mountains too high. Some wanted experience I didn't have, while others required courses that would have caused me to slow my degree plan drastically as I would need to focus on one difficult course at a time.

In all, from February 2014 to July 2015, I applied to over 150 jobs. Some local, some national, some lower-level, some management. I had maybe 5 interviews. No second interviews and no job offers.

I was tired of applying and getting nowhere.

But I had time and I had money. So I wasn't panicking.

With that many applications and little to show for it, I realized I needed a change in job-seeking strategy. I was going to network. I was going to meet as many people as possible and be seen and tell people who I am and what I can do. At the same time, I was going to finish the last year of my MBA.

The strategy paid off in May 2015 when I met a military professor who saw my background and was interested. He offered me a great position, great hours, great pay, and a great opportunity to learn academia from the teaching side. I was interested and jumped on it. I was also able to work on the six classes I had remaining.

Before he could hire me, however, I had to wait for a budget opening. As I mentioned before, just because you provide value, if the government budget says no, you are out of luck. I don't think any other organization works like that.

Meanwhile, after my lease expired in my cheap apartment in August 2015, I was homeless for a few weeks. Luckily, I had friends who offered me a place to stay. But it was one of the most frustrating weeks of my life as I waited for government money to be free so I could sign a new lease in the cheapest apartment complex in Tampa. I felt like I was getting nowhere.

I'm tired of getting nowhere.

Finally, the government freed the funds to hire me. And for six months, everything was great. I was getting a paycheck. I was going to school at night. I had a place to live. I was even putting some money away in my retirement account. I also started my own LLC and wrote for a market analysis blog where my research was mentioned by elected officials.

Life was good.

Then, in February 2016, the contract ended.

I'm tired of contracts ending again.

While working, I was able to put away enough money to fund my final four classes. I even registered for the final project needed to graduate. The countdown began for graduation in December 2016.

If I could only make ends meet until then. Then I would be free to move and leave Tampa if needed. Not that I would want to leave since every job report says Tampa is one of the most growing cities in Florida. It is a great place to live and I have met many amazing people here. But if my skill set can't help any employer here, it might be time to look elsewhere.

What is my skill set? That was something I had to determine. What was I pitching to employers that I could do? What did I bring to the table and why should they hire me?

I came to the conclusion my skill sets depends on the industry. If applying for a military/defense job, I bring years of experience, analysis, research, and organizational understanding. I also bring all the government clearances I had in the past.

If applying for security/investigations/compliance jobs, I bring research, geopolitical understanding, and analysis.

If applying for marketing strategy or market research positions, I bring years of analysis, research, storytelling, and creativity to the table. I am flexible, agile, a good communicator, globally-minded, and a solid team player. All the things business articles say businesses want.

I'm tired of what I read not reflecting reality.

Now I am finishing my second-to-last class before graduating. The pursuit of an MBA has been an amazing journey that has taught me so much about the business world. But right now, I'm not sure it has been worth it. I don't yet see a payoff at the end of the road. The doors they said it would open remain shrouded in a fog of career ambiguity. They are not only not open, I'm not sure where they are. It's tough to knock when you can't find the door. Then you hope you are knocking on the right door and that someone opens.

I'm tired of doors not opening. I'm tired of not knowing where the doors are.

During the last few months, I've felt like a rat trying to find cheese in a maze. Or like Alice trying to make her way though Wonderland. Or Dorothy journeying through Oz. I have been networking and networking, bouncing around like a hot potato trying to meet the right person who can provide me a key to a position. I've met many people with great ideas and great advice, but they always seem to lead to another locked door.

I'm tired of locked doors.

Especially in the government sector. At least until a new budget is released in October.

The problem is, I can't wait until October. Similar to 2015, I have a lease expiring and no income to find a new place. I could again lean on the kindness of friends to provide me shelter so I can continue my education. Again, the search for a place to live supersedes the job hunt. I think that's Maslow's Hierarchy in proof.

I'm tired of not knowing where I am going to live. I'm tired of surviving on the kindness of friends for a roof over my head. I'm tired of being the only person I know with 15 years experience and 1.5 master's degrees without a job or a place to live.

I'm tired of being unemployed.

This isn't a problem of keeping up with peers, some of whom have great jobs and great homes and great families. This is a problem of making a decision to go back to school that seemed good, but has yet to payoff. This is a problem of working hard and finding nothing in return. This is a problem of not being able to progress without always trying to figure out the basics.

This is a problem of instability.

I'm tired of instability.

The Story of the Sad Giraffe

This is a giraffe.

He is sad.

He liked this blog.

Then the writer of this blog got really really really busy and didn't have time to write anything on the site for nearly a month.

The giraffe got sad.

He died.

The writer of the blog felt really bad and decided to pen an ode to the giraffe who was the blog's biggest fan.

I'm sorry, giraffe.

If I knew you liked to read my blog, I would have written sooner.

I have many unfinished posts in the drafts. Many good ideas that need to be finished.

But I am also taking five classes this semester in business school and am halfway to finishing my MBA.

I need to make the time to write more. I also need to step away from the computer and do non-computer things, like run or lift weights or make jokes or attend a sporting event.

Or find a job. That would be important too.

I feel bad that there might be more giraffes out there who are fiending for more of my illustrious prose.

For the giraffes, this post is for you.

Major sad face.

Weekly Book Update #10

Wow. I haven't done a book update in a while. Not much has changed, to be honest. The novel is still in draft form. I have however sent pitch letters to six agents on April 13. So I guess that is news. I received one rejection letter so far. I will probably wait another week or so before sending a pitch letter to six more agents. I figured doing six every three weeks should increase my odds of hearing from someone.

Then I have to send a sample - most likely the first 30-50 pages. Then the agent has to like that enough to represent me to a publisher. Then the publisher has to read it and mold it into a final publishable version. So we have a ways to go.

But I guess I have taken one small step.

This week's link of inspiration comes from the Co.Create blog by Fast Company. They interviewed best-selling author James Patterson and asked what advice he would give beginning writers and storytellers.

His advice:

• Write Stories the Way People Tell Them


• Make It An Experience


• Short Chapters Keep People Reading


• It Doesn't Have to Be Realistic


• Outline Like Your Book Depends On It


• Be Open To Changes During the Writing


• Write With Confidence, Even If You Don't Feel Confident Yet


• Know Who You Are Writing For And What They Want

I like to think I did that with my novel. At least I hope so.

Writing about local rappers

On the online version of the Tampa Bay Times, I profiled a new young rapper named Nick Dessasore. 

Check it out.

Weekly Book Update #9

I have been working on my first book over the past year. My goal is to have this book published. Not self-published, but actually published by a publisher. I've self-published before and I might do so again, but I want to test the waters in the publishing industry. I want to put the name of a publisher on my resume.

With that in mind, I've decided to make every Friday "Book Update Day". Every Friday I give an update as to where I am in the writing/editing/publishing process - at least as far as I can say.

Book Status:

Based on the suggestions of my mother - who read the first 10 pages - I re-wrote the first 10 pages. Again. Although I passed the book to a few people, the opening two chapters were a little herky-jerky for me. But I thought it might have been just me. But my mother confirmed my initial thoughts were correct. So I went back to the drawing board on Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.

Now what was Chapters 1 & 2 is now Chapters 1, 2, and 3 and everything following is higher in sequence. I am happier with the flow.

Yesterday, as I wandered around Tampa pondering how to fix my first few chapters, I stopped by the University of South Florida writing center. I scheduled an appointment, so we'll see if they help and how much. I also found out about Tampa Writers Alliance constructive criticism meetings. I might just stop by those as well. Maybe they will help and perhaps I can help another local writer in turn.

Interesting links of the week:

Here are a few links that have inspired me this week:

First, here is a really great post on baseball blogging by a former Mets writer who walked away. He claims writing about the team became too much of a job and he missed being a fan. I can totally relate, although I wasn't near the regular writer he was. Anyway, its a really good read, so please check it out.

The Misadventures of a Baseball Blogger - Narratively

On the flip side of the same coin, here is a post by Pittsburgh writer Dejan Kovacevic on how to survive writing sports for a living. He says to never be a fan and never let your affiliations blind your story. Writers write about anything. I loved these quotes:

The job is about journalism, not about being pals with your favorite teams or athletes. The passion has to be for journalism, for reporting and writing and editing and taking pics and page-designing or whatever your specialty.

Later on in the article:

If you want to blog into adulthood about what you know or think about sports, better make sure you’ve got a separate way to actually make money.

My final favorite quote:

Learn to write. It’s a learned craft, not an inherent one. No one is born a good or great writer. It’s up to you to read and to practice as much as possible.

Writers write.

Want to be sports writer? Forget sports. - Morning Java

Weekly Book Update #8

I have been working on my first book over the past year. My goal is to have this book published. Not self-published, but actually published by a publisher. I've self-published before and I might do so again, but I want to test the waters in the publishing industry. I want to put the name of a publisher on my resume.

With that in mind, I've decided to make every Friday "Book Update Day". Every Friday I give an update as to where I am in the writing/editing/publishing process - at least as far as I can say.

Book Status:

I finished re-writing the second chapter. I've sent the rough draft to a few friends. Although I was busy with school during the week, hopefully they took some time to read it and hopefully I get feedback soon. Then the goal is to look for sports fiction publishers, then of course, prepare a proposal.

Interesting links of the week:

Here are a few links that have inspired me this week:

First, a paragraph from AdviceToWriters.com

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them. - MICHAEL MICHALKO

Second, I've mentioned Jessie Rosen of 20-Nothings before. I really dig her blog. In one of her latest posts, she discusses how her and her fiancee are hoping to buy a church in the small upstate NY town of Hudson and turn the empty church into a theater for the arts. Such an awesome idea. Of course, we shall see how well they can do it being from LA.

My Fiancee and I Are Buying an Abandoned Church - Part 1 (20-Nothings)

Weekly Book Update #7

I have been working on my first book over the past year. My goal is to have this book published. Not self-published, but actually published by a publisher. I've self-published before and I might do so again, but I want to test the waters in the publishing industry. I want to put the name of a publisher on my resume.

With that in mind, I've decided to make every Friday "Book Update Day". Every Friday I will give an update as to where I am in the writing/editing/publishing process - at least as far as I can say.

(And I missed another Book Update last week. This is almost turning into a bi-weekly update. But once I give in to bi-weekly, then it is a slippery slope to yearly.)

Book Status:

I finished re-writing the second chapter. Yesterday I added some much needed text to the story to get it off and rolling into the main plot. I am really excited now, because I think I am in the ballpark to being done. And I think it reads well now. Everything flows nicely, at least I think so.

The goal now is to maybe give the story another once over and meanwhile look for sports fiction publishers, then of course, prepare a proposal. I am also open to sending a polished draft a select group of friends, colleagues, or other writer folk.

Interesting links of the week:

Here are a few links that have inspired me this week:

This week is Timothy Leary Week. According to Wired.com, the New York Public Library acquired a mass amount of the famed psychologist/drug advocate's personal library. This week, the NY Public Library made the collection public opening the archives to researchers, historians, and other curious individuals.

I've mentioned before how big of a fan I am of writer Aldous Huxley. Huxley was influenced a lot by Leary's studies, especially in regards to thoughts of reaching higher consciousness through psychedelic drugs. Huxley then influenced Jim Morrison, who named his band "The Doors" after Huxley's Doors of Perception book. I got into The Doors years ago and worked my way backwards to Leary.

Here are two recent articles on Leary from Wired.com:

Timothy Leary’s Transformation From Scientist to Psychedelic Celebrity - Wired.com

This article explores Leary's migration from Harvard professor to drug advocate. While some discouraged his work, others praised it. The article takes a fair look at whether both the criticism or the adulation was warranted while adding a good amount of history to the context.

Turn On, Boot Up, and Jack In With Timothy Leary’s Long-Lost Videogames - Wired.com

In this article, Wired.com looks at Leary's later years and his experimentation with computer games. According to the article, Leary saw potential in the networking aspect of computer programs years before the Internet emerged as a force. Leary helped create computer games and models that helped expand the mind, using the computer systems as he did drugs years earlier.

Last but definitely not least, here is a link to the Timothy Leary Online Archives. It has been a big week for them. Tons of great stuff on this site from pictures to letters to links to other material.

Weekly Book Update #6

I have been working on my first book over the past year. My goal is to have this book published. Not self-published, but actually published by a publisher. I've self-published before and I might do so again, but I want to test the waters in the publishing industry. I want to put the name of a publisher on my resume.

With that in mind, I've decided to make every Friday "Book Update Day". Every Friday I will give an update as to where I am in the writing/editing/publishing process - at least as far as I can say.

(And I missed my first Book Update week last week. Oops. I was getting good at this.)

Book Status:

I finished re-writing the first chapter. Yesterday I merged the several paragraphs of background on the characters into the second chapter. I still need to smooth it out and bring it back into the story.

That's one of the things about writing a long story. It sometimes feel like I am knitting a giant sweater. All the tangents have to be part of the story. No strings can be left hanging. Especially if they are in the middle of the chapter. Sections can't be disjointed.

The goal now is to finish this second chapter, then maybe give the story another once over, then send the polished draft to a select group of friends. Once I get back some feedback, then it is on to contact publishers.

Interesting links of the week:

Here are a few links that have inspired me this week:

Washington's Comedians are Taking a Do-It-Yourself Approach - WashingtonPost.com

This article explored the Washington DC stand-up comedy scene. It talked about comics finding hole-in-the-wall bars and putting on their own shows, some of which have gained significant followings. Among the factors I've thought about if I were to ever move to DC is the comedy scene. There have been some great big-name comics from there, and great to see the lower ranks holding their own as well.

Where Parody Ends and Politics Begins - GlobalVoices.com

An interesting look at comics and parody parties that become serious for change and run for political office across the world. There is truth in humor and sometimes that truth gains enough of a following to be popular.

Worst I Ever Bombed: Patton Oswalt - Late Night With Jimmy Fallon

This Youtube clip from Late Night With Jimmy Fallon has comedian Patton Oswalt describing his worst-ever comedic performance. While funny, his bombing isn't really a bombing, more like a lack-of-trying. It could be worse, he could have bombed in Afghanistan.

I just noticed all of today's links started with the letter "W". So today's post is brought to you by the number 6 and the letter W.