Maria Speaks Episode 18: Maria Speaks Merges.
For the past few weeks — since discovering enhanced podcasts, in fact — I’ve been creating two versions of some episodes of Maria Speaks. All standard podcasts go on Maria Speaks. But enhanced podcasts go on Maria Speaks Plus. This podcast explains why I’m doing away with Maria Speaks Plus and what that means to you, the Maria Speaks listener.
I try — and fail — to get a few good bargains. But I’m not giving up.
I talked to my brother the other day. He lives back east, in the NY/NJ metro area, with his wife and dog. They live in suburbia, on a curving, tree-lined street where the houses don’t all look like each other. The first time I visited him, he had maple trees growing in his gutter. He’d just bought the house, which needed some work, and he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the gutters yet. The trees were only a few inches tall. When we lived in New Jersey, we had a 4-foot maple growing on our roof for a while.
Anyway, my brother buys just about all of his electronic equipment on eBay. The other day, he’d just bought himself a new cell phone and was waiting for it to arrive. He already had the hands-free, bluetooth headset that would work with it and was trying it out with his wife’s phone. It seems like every time I talk to him he’s telling me about some new gadget he bought on eBay.
I’m in the market for a few electronic devices myself. So I blew the dust off my eBay account and logged in. What I discovered is that eBay is no longer the garage sale of the Internet. It’s now the flea market of the Internet.
Why the difference? Well, a garage sale is usually full of used stuff — much of it junk — that the owner no longer wants. A flea market has much of the same junk, but it also has brand new, still in the box (abbreviated NIB for “new in box” on eBay) items. Call me spoiled, but when I buy a piece of computer hardware that I need to depend on, I want it brand new.
The first thing I needed was a portable external hard disk that I could use with my PowerBook. Experimentation the other day with iMovie and my video camera ate up the remaining 5 GB of unused space on that computer’s disk. I’m not replacing the hard disk — Mike went through that with a local computer consultant a few months ago and it was a 2-month nightmare. Instead, I’ll get a portable FireWire hard disk I can use to store big, fat media files. Like video. (Although it wouldn’t hurt to pare down my iTunes library on that computer; 12 GB of music is a bit much when I carry around the same songs and video on my iPod.)
So I hunted around on reputable sites — including the Apple Web site — and found a name brand and model I liked. Then I searched on eBay. I had literally dozens of matches, many of them NIB. Wow.
At the same time, I decided I needed some more RAM for my G4, which will soon be upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server. The machine, which is currently doing server duty with the dreaded WebSTAR, has 384 MB of RAM. That was quite generous when the machine was new 4 or 5 years ago, but nowadays, it just doesn’t cut it. Especially with the Webcam and audio streaming software running on it. Near as I can figure (without opening the box), one of its 3 RAM slots should be free. I figure I’d put 512 MB in there to pump up the RAM. And, if I could get the RAM cheap enough, I’d buy 2 512 MB “sticks” (apparently the RAM lingo) and throw away (or eBay) the 128 MB one I pull out. I did a search and found dozens of compatible RAM sticks. Whew.
I started bidding. And after two days, I noticed a pattern that I had noticed once before. You can be the winning bidder right up until about 10 minutes before bidding ends. Then someone comes along and outbids you. If you’re paying attention, you can bid back. That results in a bidding war and, if you’re not careful, you’ll wind up paying more than you really wanted to.
I’m careful. And I know how much these items are worth at their cheapest (or cheapest I can find) retail source. So someone outbids me and I start the process all over again with another item.
I have a theory about this. I believe that some vendors who sell the same thing over and over — dealers, in a way — have buddies who help them out near the end of an auction. Their buddies come along and bid to get the price up. They’ll bid right up to the amount the dealer really wants and step back. The bidder that crosses that line pays more than the dealer’s bottom line. And if there is no other bidder, the dealer pays the listing fee on the price his buddy “paid” and re-lists the item. This is how so many items can be sold without reserve. (A reserve is a minimum price the seller will accept. It costs more to list with a reserve and lots of buyers won’t bid on products that have reserve prices.)
The long and the short of it is that I’ll probably be ordering that RAM from an online retailer today. I can’t seem to get it on eBay any cheaper than I could get it from a retailer, so why risk a private seller on eBay?
I haven’t given up on the FireWire hard disk yet. And I’ve started looking into another iSight camera for a portable Webcam. And you know, I can really use a FireWire hub…
Why they’re burning less cars.
I heard on NPR this morning that only 600+ cars were burned in France last night. That’s down considerably from the 1200+ the night before and even higher numbers before that.
I know why they’re burning less cars. They’re running out of cars to burn.
I talk more about beginning novelists.
The other day I wrote an opinion piece about NaNoWriMo ’05, which I turned into a podcast for Maria Speaks. Here are some related thoughts and experiences.
One of the things that has always bothered me was way organizations prey upon people who want to be writers — particularly novelists. They have writers’ workshops and writers’ magazines and and writers’ Web sites with forums and writers’ mail-away courses. They sell products to writers to motivate and inspire them and make them better writers. I’ve seen these products and although I admit to have bought my share of writing books, I’ve also seen enough to know that only a small percentage of what’s sold will really help a writer. And the thing that bothers me most is the fact that the vast majority of writing publications focus on topics of interest to beginning writers — people just starting out. I’m talking about people who haven’t had anything published yet. It’s as if they never expect their readers to get beyond that point.
The people they prey upon — the beginning writers — have a story (or or two or three or dozens) inside their hearts that they’re trying to get out. They’re convinced their work is better than bestselling author, fill-in-the-blank. They believe that the editors who have rejected their work are stupid, selfish, and evil. But rather than spend their time writing, getting those stories out and fine-tuning them for submission and possible publication, they waste a lot of time whining about editors and publishers and the industry in general in online writers’ forums. Or providing all-knowing (or sarcastic) answers to serious questions posted by other want-to-be novelists.
This is where something as silly as NaNoWriMo can help. If these people would stop wasting time and get down to it, they might actually get some work done. A novel in 30 days sounds impossible, but if they’ve been thinking about it as much as they’ve been wasting time in online forums, they should have all the hard part done: the planning, plotting, and character development. Getting the words down should be easy. Just stop procrastinating.
And if there’s one thing that’s always helped me produce, it’s deadlines. Ask Cliff, Nancy, and Megg, three of my editors. (More on that in another blog entry.)
Here’s a real life story about someone I knew years ago. There’s a slight chance she might read this and, if she does, I hope she’s not offended by me telling her story from my outsider’s point of view.
Mary (not her real name) always wanted to be a novelist. I think she was partial to fantasy and science fiction, but she may have had other things in mind. I don’t know because I only had an opportunity to read one thing she’d written. She spent most of her non-working hours online, frequenting bulletin board systems’ (BBSs’) message boards (precursors to the Internet’s forums). She had a BBS and so did I. In fact, that’s how we met.
Her BBS posts were consistently negative toward publishers and editors. She spent a lot of her writing time writing short stories and entering them into contests. She never won. (More about writing contests and other gimmicks in another entry.)
Sometime around then, she sent me one of her short stories to read. I don’t remember what it was about. I don’t recall it being bad, though. But it did have one big flaw. At the end of the story, which takes place in Washington, DC, the main character looks out the window and sees the Pentagon. It was an important part of the story’s irony — seeing that building. I remember that clearly. But it was also a serious flaw because the Pentagon is not in Washington, DC. It’s in Arlington, VA. And it simply cannot be seen from the location her character was standing. When I pointed this out to her, she got extremely offended, as if I’d gone out of my way to find something wrong to pick on her story. I hadn’t gone out of my way. The glaring error was there, right in my face. I would have done her a disservice if I hadn’t pointed it out.
Anyway, she didn’t send me any more stories.
Then one day she decided that the biggest thing holding her back from being a published author was her job. I’m talking about her “day job” — the one where she spent time to earn money to pay rent and buy food. That job. So she quit and retreated into her apartment to write her novel.
A year later, Mary was completely out of money and borrowing from family members to survive. She hadn’t finished her novel and she hadn’t had anything published. I think someone pulled the money plug and she was forced to go back to work.
That’s about the same time I left my day job and started teaching computers and writing how-to books. She claimed I “sold out.” I think she meant that I was writing non-fiction instead of fiction because I was in it for the money. Maybe I did, but my current lifestyle sure beats the 9 to 5, suit-wearing grind I’d be stuck in if I’d kept that corporate job. And who the hell wants to be a starving writer, anyway?
I moved to Arizona and we pretty much lost touch. I heard she had a short story published in a small literary magazine. She was paid in copies. (See my blog entry about Freebies.) But she had her first clip.
The point of this story: this is one person I know who falls into the same category as many of the beginning writers attracted to things like NaNoWriMo, writers’ magazines, and writers’ Web sites with their forums. I’ve just reported her progress in about five years of her life. Five years is a long time. Too long to waste if you’re serious about becoming a writer.
Every day you don’t write, though, is a day you waste if becoming a novelist is your goal. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that participating in those writers’ forums is good practice for writing your novel. I’ll agree that it’s good practice for typing your novel. But it isn’t going to get you any closer to finishing your work in progress.
So why are you reading this? Get back to work!
And why I don’t care.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I occasionally — or often, depending on how I’m feeling — express my opinions about things. And sometimes those opinions seem rather harsh in that they go against the grain of what other people think. Or think they think.
That’s the key, of course. It all comes down to thinking. And I believe that’s where I differ from my critics. I think. They let other people think for them.
[Uh-oh. Another harsh one coming. Better put on your mental armor and get your hackles up.]
For example, a few years back I wrote a blog entry putting forth my opinions of the snowbirds that flock to Wickenburg every winter. I commented on the increased traffic, crowded parking lots, and blocked supermarket aisles. I made some observations about the attitude of most of these people toward their winter home and its year-round residents. The observations were not positive. I also commented about how the town’s dependence on a seasonal economy supported by fixed-income, part-year residents was a big mistake. The blog entry gained me fame throughout Wickenburg. The people who spread the blog entry were trying to make me look evil. But most of the people who read it — the year-round residents in the same boat I was in, looking with the same kind of eyes and heart — agreed with me. I was stopped quite often for a few weeks by people who told me how much the blog entry had made them laugh or how it was nice to read something that wasn’t the same old party line.
I’ve written other blog entries with my opinions in them. I think my opponents have realized that calling attention to my blogs was helping my cause more than theirs because I haven’t gotten much local publicity lately. Too bad. It’s always fun to stir up the pot here in Wickenburg. Too much old school, old boy thinking.
I did a piece a while back about the yellow ribbons that people were sticking on their cars. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one bothered by the yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons. I’ve since read dozens of blog entries with the same basic opinion.
And then there was the one about public sacrifices for the War in Iraq. I didn’t get any feedback about that one. Could it be that everyone who read it actually agreed with me?
Last week I wrote a podcast about NaNoWriMo where I stated a few very strong opinions. It might be safe to say that I “blasted” the folks who run the NaNoWriMo Web site. But I made my statements — as I make most of the statements I make here — after some deep thinking about the topic. In that case, I’d been exposed to NaNoWriMo for a few days and had visited the Web site in question. I was able to look at it with the eyes of an outsider, someone who has succeeded as a writer and knows something about the business, even though I’ve spent my time on the non-fiction side of the business. (More on NaNoWriMo in another new entry.)
Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts from NPR, Slate, and the Progressive (egads!). They’re full of strong opinions, even stronger than the ones I write here. I agree with some of them and disagree with others. But in all cases, I’ll admit that the authors of the pieces have put a lot of thought into what they composed. They’re logical arguments based on facts. And I think that’s why I listen to them. They not only expand my knowledge of a topic, but they provide insight into the way other people have thought about it. People with brains. People who aren’t afraid to think for themselves. And sadly, for the rest of us.
I think that’s a huge problem today. I believe that only a small percentage of the U.S. population actually spends time learning about and thinking about the things going on around them. I don’t think they spend time making their own opinions. Why bother when someone else can make opinions for them? A political party, a church group, a club? Find a herd, join it, and follow it anywhere it goes. Put a flag or yellow ribbon on your car because everyone else is doing it. Just don’t miss the next episode of Desperate Housewives, Lost, or the latest incarnation of C.S.I. I don’t belong to a herd and I’m not interested in joining one. I’d rather think and act for myself. And if it gets me in “trouble” with people who don’t agree, so what? The more of them who speak out about the things I’ve said or written, the more I know my message has reached them.
And maybe, just maybe, it’ll get them thinking, too.