81–90 of 134 posts
The article title is actually “No, you probably don’t have a book in you”. But the intended meaning of the article is more like “no, you probably don’t have a bestselling book in you.” Disclaimer - I’ve written a kids sci-fi novel in the past year. Something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile now, and finally got around to actually putting down the words on the page to make it happen. Now it’s one thing to say “I wro…
One of the most fantastic things technology has given us, really only in the last 20 years or so, is (unlimited) space to store all of these "minor" works and the ability for the 9 people to whom these works will have meaning to find and obtain them.
>I put it like this: I have been running since I was about a year old. Almost 40 years! But I cannot for the life of me run a marathon. I am not physically capable of it, even though I can run a few miles in a row. Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. And yes, you can write a book. Whether it gets published or not is another story. I don't understand why someone whose job it is to find the next best…
Agreed. I could run a marathon if I put in the effort. The reason I "can't" is truthfully that I can't be arsed . If you want to run a marathon what you're saying is that you're happy for training for that marathon to take over your life for, probably, about a year, and I'm not motivated to do that. With that being said Eddie Izzard, with little training, ran 43 marathons in 51 days. He didn't break any records or wi…
My training consisted of maybe a dozen 2 mile runs, and a couple of 6 mile runs, in the space of about a month.
I didn't do any exercise other than that. I wouldn't say I'm naturally athletic either. Sure, I was pretty slow at 2:30, but I managed to run the whole thing without resting or walking.
I reckon that I could smash out a marathon with less than 6 months of training, running 3 days a week. It certainly wouldn't take over my life, and it wouldn't take a year of training.
A similar endurance event I did once was riding a century (100 miles). Sure, riding a bike is a bit easier than running, but my total training for that was about 6 months, riding 25 miles 4 times a week, plus a single 60 mile ride. I managed to complete the ride in about 5:30.
Humans are well adapted to long distance endurance activities. A person of average fitness can walk 12 hours a day for a week with a 15-20 kg pack.
I find it fascinating that there are sweet spots for the length of an economically successful book (50,000 words), movie (90-120 minutes), or song (3 minutes).
For whatever reason, even collections of short films packaged together as a feature-length movie are rarely successful. Likewise with short written works packaged as a full-length book. I guess songs were the exception in that multiple songs sold together as an album did work (at least until recent years).
It's interesting to think about how attention span, delivery mechanism, costs of goods, and who knows what other factors, created these target lengths.
> for many reasons too boring to get into here, and no, it’s not just cheaper to do ebooks, either Guessing he's not counting kindle publishing here, but regardless I'd love to know all the little details of why publishing e-books are so difficult
Charlie Stross detailed this in a blog post (which I can’t easily find). Basically, printing a book is easy in comparison to editing, typesetting, and marketing.
>I put it like this: I have been running since I was about a year old. Almost 40 years! But I cannot for the life of me run a marathon. I am not physically capable of it, even though I can run a few miles in a row. Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. And yes, you can write a book. Whether it gets published or not is another story. I don't understand why someone whose job it is to find the next best…
Tell that to my knees. I'm mostly fine walking around. I can even do short flights of stairs. In fact, up until a few years ago they only bothered me when I sat in a really unergonomic chair for a while. Then someone convinced me to try this "couch to 5k" thing, and said that literally anyone could do it, and that I liked like I weighed maybe half as much as people that'd actually followed the timetable and gone from…
Almost came here with this exact same comment. Absolutely not amount of motivation or feel good thinking about my own capabilities and willingness to 'do the damn thing' can surmount the sheer agony and pain I feel after a 2 mile run (because that's the most I can bear to stand) after years of jumping out of airplanes for a living (US Military) over 12 years.
Ever have your knee shattered to pieces and fracture a femur after having a chute partially open and hitting the ground at 6ft/sec? Lemme tell you something: it's horrifying.
You know the phrase "blinding pain"? It's a kind of pain that's so severe your vision literally blurs.
You can see things, you can make out shapes, but your brain is so focused on that pain that vision rides shotgun for a bit. It's a level of pain that can (and has) induced vomiting and loss of consciousness when I so much as step the wrong way off a curb.
Don't tell me "you can do it, just put your mind to it" when my mind doesn't even have the bandwidth to register vision.
There is NO amount of "you can do it" motivational, go-getter mentality that will convince me to push through that kind of pain. Absolutely, positively and without any hesitation on the topic at hand: N-O-N-E. Heck, I stood up once to go get a cup of coffee, turned, stepped in an awkward way and turned my knee and immediately fell over in tears.
So when someone says they can't run a marathon, maybe leave it at that-they know what they're capable of better than you do.
>I put it like this: I have been running since I was about a year old. Almost 40 years! But I cannot for the life of me run a marathon. I am not physically capable of it, even though I can run a few miles in a row. Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. And yes, you can write a book. Whether it gets published or not is another story. I don't understand why someone whose job it is to find the next best…
>Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. Eeesh. Any able-bodied person can walk a marathon, given sufficient motivation. You might be able to run parts of it, but you can't run a marathon through sheer force of will if you haven't done the training. A book is technically just a bunch of bound pages, so anyone can write one in the loosest sense of the word. I can just type the word "beige" 80,000 times…
The original metaphor is a bit off. Anyone who puts in the effort could write fifty thousand words on the same theme or plot. Likewise anyone could complete a marathon with enough training and effort. A better comparison would be writing a novel that people would pay to read, and completing a marathon so quickly that people would pay you to do it.
While everyone can do the amateur version of these tasks not everyone can do the professional certain.
A negative article. I spent 2 years writing a sci-fi about a guy who builds a blackhole powered computer to simulate another universe. It got less than 150 downloads in 18months. I did it because I was doing nothing else with my life. Ultimately it failed to be succesful. But I gained a lot. It really helped me get a lot of crap off my mind. I learned a lot. I also read 400 books and graphic novels over 4 years. It w…