Smoking Lizard Media

© 2015 G.N. Jacobs

I’m not just about ruining werewolf mythology with a basic middle school understanding of science. I also try to steer writers away from the many unscrupulous attempts to separate us from our money. For the moment, I will assume that you’re fully aware that the West African prince or rather his banking representative is a Nigerian scam artist pulling a modified Spanish Prisoner. I will also assume that you know better than to take a cashiers check for a Craigslist sale. But, these scams affect everybody, not just writers, so what sorts of things are targeted specifically at writers?

Until very recently, I would get a email from Script Magazine, an e-zine associated with The Writers Store, touting a group called American Writers and Artists, Inc. The email and website promises to set me free by teaching me how to be a highly skilled copywriter of those emails that I pretty much shunt from my spam folder to the trash folder barely reading one in a 1,000. They have recently added education for writing resumes and other types of freelance writing to their suite of educational materials on their site. So far, I have refused to sign up and I will explain why.

First off, strict adherence to the niceties of defamation law suggests I shouldn’t use scam, unscrupulous, or any other words of the same ilk when crafting a sentence that specifically refers to AWAI’s business activities. I will get away with the words in the header paragraph because I will argue they refer specifically to the Nigerian fuck sticks who are an easy punching bag for an introduction and are widely known as unscrupulous scam artists. Or I will argue “highly opinionated hyperbole protected by the First Amendment.” Depends on how loud their lawyers and supporters get.

The reason for me talking out of both corners of my mouth is that officially AWAI is not a scam. Sometime last year, I checked them out with the local chapter (Delray Beach, Florida) of the Better Business Bureau and found that they had the highest rating possible. They have money back guarantees that they appear to honor religiously. But, I do have the right to express doubt based on oversold promises and expensive materials.

The pitch says that they want to help you, the writer, get in on the $2.3-trillion dollar direct response marketing industry. Basically, they will teach you to write emails that directly pitch products and services to the consumer. The writer gets paid upfront for the original email text and a percentage of future sales.

The percentage of future sales is the key part of my dubious feeling. This is what business school wonks refer to as passive income, money or some other asset that makes money for you while you’re off doing other things. A guild actor gets residuals from film and TV performances that repeat. As do screenwriters that pay their dues. Trust fund brats have passive income because the fund manager makes the financial decisions and doles out the money sparingly (or not) to keep their clients stylishly alive.

Writers want more sources of this passive income. We want to fund our writing life with a quick direct response email dashed off to buy us two weeks or a month, while we bash our heads in because we missed a common story beat in Act Two. Create a need, someone will fill it.

In my first pass at doing my three minutes of research, I looked at the prices of the books, downloads and what have you. I looked at them again five seconds ago. The entry-level product is $79. The Ferrari-priced books are $497 (What?). Sometimes they have sales.

In my older pass through AWAI’s pitch, I also discovered that the program included several monthly subscriptions designed to give the writer the most up to date information to stay employed. Sounds good, you can think of the main services as the bartender school seen on TV and the monthly subscription as the add-on job placement service. I’m naturally suspicious of monthly subscriptions. I know what I’m getting when I pay for HBO.

All of this sounds good, buy a book or program, pay into the monthly job placement/skills refresher plan and make the money we feel we deserve. But…

Shouldn’t the writer in need of a steady source of passive income shop around to get the best price on the information he or she needs? A quick check of Amazon’s section on Direct Response Marketing brings up a plethora of titles both in paper and Kindle formats. A few are free or nearly so. Many are $25. The average appeared to be $10 or so.

Compare to AWAI’s $79 basic book or the $497 Ferrari book or program. If the $10 book (or let’s be realistic three or four $10 books bought at the same time) provides the same skills and opportunities as the $497 book who buys the Ferrari?

Choosing the books to read does depend on the trust factor placed in the author of the book. Does the author have a business degree with experience in the specialized field of Direct Response Marketing? Does the author have relevant experience gained outside of business school? Did the author and/or publisher price their product so that more people could afford to buy the information? Essentially, the Law of Averages says at least some of the many $10 books on Amazon will be as effective a teaching tool as AWAI’s $497 product.

Most of these books don’t have subscription plans. Buy the book, read and apply the techniques that make the most sense, then evaluate the results. Buy another book if you discover the first one didn’t help you. The direct response copywriter trying to stay employed will cold and warm call all kinds of people, companies and organizations regardless of the ongoing tips gained from the monthly plan. And the contact information of the people acting as point of contact is not some highly classified secret like nuclear launch codes. A phone call will do…most of the time.

Another concern I have is that AWAI’s language seems to assume a continuously expanding labor market. They assert that the market is growing. That more and more companies and organizations need direct response emails written. But, I’ve noticed that AWAI has been in business at least ten years.

The $64,000 Question: could there be a time when AWAI (and the other authors on Amazon for that matter) reach a point when they’ve trained all the direct response copywriters needed for the entire year? Once too many workers enter a certain field fees for service decrease, or they go nuts drumming up new business.

Case in point: lawyers. We have had more lawyers than there has been true legal work for decades. Some law school graduates never get hired and become something else. Others chase ambulances drumming up the spurious lawsuits that conservatives love to attack come election time.

Similarly, the nascent direct response writer could run into years where someone else got the gig due to being first, faster or playing golf with people who can say Yes. The upfront fee would decrease as would the negotiated back end percentage. The writer getting 5-percent loses out to the equally skilled writer asking for 3-percent.

Additionally, AWAI doesn’t seem to make allowance for the possibility that over time service providers will want to put skilled direct response writers on salary and eliminate the back end agreement altogether. A client wants to pay for service, but not endlessly over the lifespan of the contracted email text. And the larger clients also want the message of the direct response email to match the message of their video and online advertising. Eventually, advertising and marketing firms will hire the direct response email writers on salary and turn it into the 9-5 grinder that writers say that want to avoid. It certainly would cease to be passive income.

Unlike the physical universe no market continuously expands. Pretty much all the American real estate good for houses and businesses are filled in. So property goes up until people can’t afford the square footage and then the market corrects wiping out the weak and strengthening the large players.

Similarly, there are too many screenwriters chasing approximately 300 or so new movies every year. Stock markets peak, tumble and resume the upward climb. Smart people know when to get in and get out based on being truly educated in the market. A story went around Wall Street for years that Joseph Kennedy Sr. got a shoeshine and the shine boy blathered on about his portfolio leading Mr. Kennedy to sell all of his position a week before Black Friday.

So if this is how other markets work, why does AWAI assert in their communications that the prospects for direct response email writers remain perpetually rosy? Maybe they are, I’m not actually in that market right now.

My last point of suspicion is that finding freelance work tends to be more work than some people think. I have occasionally posted to the jobs offered on freelancer sites only to spend hours sifting through jobs I didn’t want in the first place. I just bought the most recent Hollywood Screenwriting Directory, thick phonebook with thousands of leads that all need an email or letter. Sure to eat up time that should go into writing a script or novel. Why would my job search as a direct response email writer be somehow magically different?

American Writers and Artists, Inc might actually help some writers. They do pick up all kinds of glowing testimonials on their site. But, I remain suspicious.

© 2015 G.N. Jacobs

What follows next negates very easily by the carefully expedient of the writer sticking his or her fingers in ears and humming very loudly until it’s all over. Many literary subjects, like werewolves and shifters, have very little relationship to the nuts and bolts of our reality and require a tantrum worthy of a five-year-old saying “because I said so!”

I really don’t want to go too deeply into the psychology, anthropology and religion surrounding the legends and metaphors of werewolves and the closely related shapeshifter. I think certain PhD candidates put in their class work just to be able to read the papers created in the field. None are as vicariously thrilling as “he’ll rip your lungs out, Jim.”

A werewolf has been likened to the representation of the human dark side that violently explodes leaving neighbors to say, “He was so normal.” Some shamanic traditions exploit the metaphor to adopt perceived qualities of the animal used in the ritual. And there must be hundreds of thousands of academic words written highlighting the ancient beginnings of the metaphor that ask salient questions like could the first Classical Greek werewolf have been one of Circe’s goofed experiments in transformation magic before meeting Odysseus?

I just care about milking all kinds of metaphors for their entertainment value. Any high-falutin’ metaphorical constructs in my work will just have to sneak in through the back door. Sometimes the different aspects of my writing get in the way of each other. For instance, I can’t wear my Science Fiction Writer hat too tightly on any story with a werewolf.

Writing science fiction requires having paid attention in my K-12 science classes between the exploding methanol burners and other hijinks involving burning magnesium. I did, plus I get to look things up on Wikipedia. A human to wolf, dog, or any other animal transformation results in a huge red flag based on a scientific principle known as Conservation of Mass.

The best way to explain Conservation of Mass without resorting to equations is to state simply that in a closed system the mass of material at the beginning of a process must equal the mass of the material at the end of the process. For purposes of clarity and precision Energy can be thought of as Mass in most circumstances. When ice melts the resulting water has the same mass.

How does this bit of inconvenient science lawyering affect the werewolf or shapeshifter story? In some iterations of the story, none at all. The classic wolfman presented to us by Lon Chaney posited a six-foot hairy wolf suit that represented a midpoint between wolf and man. Probably, the filmmakers didn’t want a real wolf on their set and thought the machinery looked fake.

This wolfman doesn’t have to worry about gaining or losing mass between human and animal forms. However, if we apply concepts like Natural Selection, the six-foot wolfman loses the ability to hide among other regular wolves. The scared villager regulator committee with pitchforks and torches shouldn’t have too much trouble killing the six-foot wolfman.

Many storytellers prefer werewolves and shifters that exactly mimic the animals into which they change. A perfect wolf or whatever gets to maul unsuspecting Londoners in Mayfair and then visit with the Queen. But, wolves don’t tip the scales the same way humans do.

Case in point, I currently weigh 191 pounds hung on a 5’11” body, but a quick hit on Wikipedia’s wolf page says full-grown male wolves average between 95-99 pounds. If I were to get bitten and change into a werewolf, we must ask the ugly question – where does the 92 pounds I would lose go?

Werewolf Me has the same reason to get the mass back returning to human form that I had to lose the mass changing into a wolf: protective camouflage. If I didn’t look how I did before wolfing out, the people in my life would notice I’m suddenly vastly lighter to the tune of being asked if I had recently contracted cancer. This doesn’t count as being able to hide among humans, expect an even shorter lifespan than usual. If I were to emulate Sam Merlotte from True Blood and turn into a hawk in order to escape, the problem becomes proportionally greater.

The opposite problem of a smaller human gaining mass in order to become a wolf is equally perplexing from the pseudo-science presented in this post. How does Vern Troyer (Mini-Me) who likely never weighed 99 pounds in his life gain the mass to fit in with the wolf pack? Similarly, the problem of a were-animal larger than the human undergoing the change comes into hilarious focus when we posit, say, a human to Gray Whale transformation. Again using me as an example, how many fish do I have to eat to make the gap between my 191 pounds and the 36 short tons of the whale?

Could this massive disparity be one reason why it seems no one has ever created a story, myth or theological construct of a were-whale…in 150,000 years of human storytelling? Now that I’ve had the idea…were-whale goes into my creature folder in my note taking app. Get to it eventually.

If were-beasts are to be governed by a semblance of science (not recommended, see my lead sentence), how does the writer explain a werewolf or other were-beast without bending the science in ways that don’t grow back? I’m pretty sure that the apparent Conservation of Mass violations are my only objections to werewolves being real. The wonders of stem cells and lizards that regrow tails suggest that everything else about growing hair and sharp teeth are at least plausible. We would need a road map; I have suggestions.

A) Invent some kind of extra dimensional space in which to store the extra mass.

Certainly for someone going normal human to wolf, the storage space solution allows me to store 92 pounds and get them back when I wake up wondering what the Hell happened. But, I have yet to explain the Mini-Me or were-whale problem. The first time I change into a whale I would have to gain 36 short tons that would then go into the storage attic for retrieval later.

From where or, as would be more dramatically interesting, from whom would the were-whale acquire the extra mass in blubber? Would someone missing their blubber come looking for it? Certainly, a decent story hook to have to fight for the extra blubber, but ludicrous science.

One last thought about the storage attic, the minute writers start talking about extra-dimensional space there is a possible conflict with the other big usage of extra-dimensional space: hyperspace. It being the era of genre blender literature, werewolves on starships can be a tempting prospect. Until those starships bump into the whale blubber stored in out of the way corners of hyperspace. KA-BLAM!

B) The mass as a wolf remains exactly as it began during the human form.

I actually like the thought that mass doesn’t change during the transformation, at least for the normal circumstances of a guy that weighs slightly heavier than the average wolf. In the hypothetical case of me, that means that I pack 92 extra pounds into a standard wolf body.

This matters because wolf packs are commonly depicted as having the same kind of organizing structure as, say, a certain publishing house where Jack Nicholson was employed while he slowly became a wolf (Wolf, 1995). Like wolves, the executives peed on each other and very nearly punched it out. While small humans can generally fight even using a few more brain cells than the big bully, it’s unclear without spending decades out photographing wolves in the wild if the small wolf ever wins the rumble.

So, a 191-pound wolf wins the fight against the 99-pound wolf that doesn’t know what hit it. The heavier wolf would have nearly double the density of the smaller wolf because the greater mass is shoehorned into the same space. The heavier wolf would also be proportionally stronger because much of that extra mass would likely be distributed in muscle.

Unfortunately, I still can’t answer the Mini-Wolf problem. A Little Person turning into a werewolf under this particular idea would remain small proportionally to the rest of the pack. This is a victim that doesn’t even know he’s dead, yet. So, not a great idea in all cases.

C) The transformation gains and loses mass accordingly, but the character must replenish with food.

This choice of literary rule could explain the werewolf’s insatiable hunger. He or she would constantly eat to regain the human weight, not just as a wolf but as a human, too. Mini-Wolf would also eat tons of food to manage being a regular-sized wolf. Sounds good…not!

While it is true that certain characters, like Lois Lane, spent too many decades in print being completely oblivious that a single pair of horn rimmed glasses separated Clark from Kal-El, most people in a werewolf’s orbit would notice that – “Hey, Joe! You’ve been eating nonstop since you got that scratch on your arm!” Eventually, someone makes the correlation to finding all those ripped up villagers and cue the regulator committee.

All of my ideas flow from the basic premise that if we apply science in the form of Conservation of Mass, we must also apply science in the form of Natural Selection. If a werewolf, were-tiger, or were-whale can’t hide long enough to reproduce, then it’s likely that Evolution will simply treat these literary metaphors as genetic dead ends.

D) Since most writers assume that lycanthropy is a magical curse, then it follows that magic could alter the perspective of the observer.

Ahh, now we’re getting somewhere! In wolf form the werewolf steps on a scale and tips at 99-pounds. In human form the werewolf stands on the same scale and tips at 191-pounds. At least, from the perspective of the possible victims that just can’t believe that their loved one will rip your lungs out, Jim. A bubble of illusion surrounds the werewolf changing how the other people in the room see him or her, especially bathroom scales.

If you, Dear Reader, really need to science lawyer your next werewolf/shapeshifter story with item D, I won’t stop you. However, your story will essentially function in an indistinguishable fashion than the one written using the proposal contained in my lead sentence – ignore any scientific basis for werewolves and write your story!

You may wonder why it is now 1,760 words later and the whole point of my post can be summed up with such circularity. One, I need to write stuff regularly and this is what I picked. Two, you can think of this post like a math test at school where getting a right answer without showing your work still fails the question. So anyway, here endeth the lesson.

The writer acknowledges Warren Zevon and his awesome songwriting for Werewolves of London, even though I probably haven’t abused Fair Use…yet.

© 2015 G.N. Jacobs

Mom asked me a couple weeks ago – “Why do you like science fiction?” – over dinner.

There are many ways to take that question. Unintentional dig from someone who decided long ago the genre held no attraction for her, but wants to understand. Semi-intentional dig from someone trying to shape my writing away from the things I like. Some flavor of All of the Above. It’s Mom, bet on the All of the Above answer.

I sort of knew when I gave my answer that I’d hear from the scared part of her that wants me to write important things. To the tune of 60-percent. She didn’t disappoint; I got the email three days later saying “You are so creative and have been all your life. There has to be some way to focus that into other things.”

Of course, I will use another post to really go off on her for the hurtful parts of this conversation. This one is all about what is so freakin’ awesome about Science Fiction, Fantasy and all other forms of speculative fiction that I’m going to mostly ignore the attempt to improperly change me as a writer in someone else’s image.

My answer included elements of my stock answers on the subject of science fiction. SF isn’t really a genre, but a setting in which other stories from other genres can play out. The best case in point is Nora Roberts’ In Death Series. Take the hardboiled police procedural novel out of Evan Hunter’s (writing as Ed McBain) cold dead hands and set the book in the middle 2050s. I suppose when I get out of my own way long enough to actually read about LT. Eve Dallas, I will learn why Barnes & Noble curiously stacks the series in Mystery and not Science Fiction.

So as I said this my next point to Mom went towards the classic raison d’etre of the science fiction story: the disguised Social Commentary. Using the examples of my favorite three Star Trek episodes, I carefully explained that science fiction allows the writer to get in his or her shots at things that either need to change or must undergo the extensive discussion that explains why they must stay the same.

I brought up Let This Be Your Last Battlefield where the Enterprise picks up two gents that each have black on half of his face and white on the other half. These characters instantly revert to character archetypes that we saw in Les Miserables, the multi-decade pursuit of a downtrodden underdog by a police officer dedicated to Law & Order at all costs. Beale and Loki run around the ship trying to win hearts and minds among the crew.

The crew seem to take this contest of ideas as something amusing, because the conceit of the whole show was to assert that by 2266 (the in-show calendar year of the first season) racism would be largely bottled up on the trashcan of history. The crew politely hear both men out and don’t take sides, because people from a society that has already worked through racism and who are constrained as much as possible by the Prime Directive don’t need to take sides.

A little bit of drama results when Commissioner Beale forgets that he is a guest on the Enterprise there at Captain Kirk’s sufferance. Beale insists on a direct trip home for Loki’s trial and probable execution. Kirk explains about a mission to deliver important medicine to a nearby colony and that a Federation court convened by a more responsible authority (at minimum the Commodore or Admiral in charge of a starbase) must decide what is essentially Loki’s extradition hearing. Kirk punctuates his demands by threatening to self-destruct the ship with all souls aboard.

Beale relents long enough for the Enterprise to deliver the medicine, but then uses his greater personal power to yank out the self-destruct circuits and hijack the Enterprise to his homeworld. He explains the hatred to the crew members that one breed of the alien race is black of the left side of the face and the other breed is black on the right side of the face, a heavy-handed metaphor for racist social division based on skin color. The Enterprise arrives to find everybody dead on the planet below such that no one was able to bury the bodies. Beale and Loki beam down to the surface to finish the extermination of their people because their hate is all that remains.

I explained to Mom that in 1967 the mostly white television audience of this episode espoused views like that of Commissioner Beale. The good ones might have said I’m fully aware of the flaws of our society, but I don’t see why I have to put up with the liberal rabble-rousing on TV that wants to rub my face in those flaws like it’s somehow my fault for being successful. The bad ones freaked out when Kirk kissed LT. Uhura in a later episode Plato’s Stepchildren. According to one of Nichelle Nichols’ oft-repeated anecdotes from The First Interracial Kiss on American TV (interracial kisses had aired earlier in Britain) a man from the South wrote this letter – “I don’t hold with mixing the races, but Uhura lookin’ so fine like that…Kirk’s just gonna kiss her.”

So the point of science fiction is that by wrapping the metaphor in the garb of fantasies easily dismissed for its unreality the author gets to say more than if he or she tries to drop that First Interracial Kiss on, say, an episode of the nearly contemporaneous first season of classic Hawaii 5-0. Being able to speak up and say things that matter should appeal to people like Mom who holds her humanity slightly cheap because she had too many good reasons not to march with Dr. King, who was later assassinated creating mountains of regret. Science fiction when given into the hands of people who have something to say is never unimportant.

I didn’t get to say this next part to Mom because it came up in a conversation a few days later with another family member about Jules Verne and the ability to extrapolate the future. I said that Jules Verne writing in From the Earth to the Moon ninety years ahead of Apollo 11 predicted many things about the details of the program. That Americans would fund the effort because who else was wastefully rich enough to try and had already built up a national personality from our westward expansion that we can do anything we decide upon? That three men would go. That these three men would shoot from a place in Central Florida that seems to be equidistant from the current sites of Disneyworld and the Kennedy Space Center from the description. That the vessel would look like a conical bullet. Science fiction writers when they guess correctly prepare us for the future. Similarly, how much of our present day worry about cybercrime stems from works like Neuromancer that depicted hacking to be so very easy?

But, the real reason for enjoying and defending Science Fiction is the sheer joy I get pitching my stories to a certain type of writer: the one whose eyes light up in the presence of wild mind expanding ideas. I go to a bar after the one writers group I still attend. The what are you working on question comes up.

I wax eloquently and craptologically on the current works in progress. One is about a ruler of a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud who sees with the vision to be the local version of Caesar or Alexander who is forced on a great quest borrowing the rogue personality of his twin brother. I explain that I borrow the larger than life of a Caesar as written by Shakespeare, mix it with the mythic Twins Switching Places motif of everybody including the Bard and filter the awesome through the lens of Star Wars.

I got a conditional seal of approval from the woman in the conversation as long as borrowing from Shakespeare meant only taking plot elements and not the confusing, to her, iambic pentameter. I may respond in a later post that iambic pentameter in context is massively awesome. But, it was a fun moment compared to pitching my already written crime story about the George Forman grill with another woman in the room. Gleeful usage of cannibalism even in service of black satire about TV advertising, consumer culture and so on floated like a lead balloon. Still learning to read my audience.

But the point is, I just like being the guy with the interesting forward thinking ideas.

© 2015 G.N. Jacobs

Inevitably, discussions between writers turn to variations of how I do things. The answer varies with each writer who over time has developed his or her unique style, work habits, work schedule and favorite tools. The tools part of the discussion can be especially fascinating.

Close your eyes when listening to us talk about our tools. You’ll hear a lot of passion about things that essentially more or less work the same way. Write in English with intent towards creating a typed manuscript; write with the dreaded Qwerty keyboard. Inevitable, like night following day.

This came about due to the makers of the first PCs making a conscious decision to keep Qwerty so that the office assistants likely to see the most immediate gains in productivity wouldn’t freak out. It meant that preparatory to attending the expensive combined middle and high school my parents thought I needed, I had to take Typing Class. In addition to learning to nine-finger type, I also learned the value of not putting certain thoughts down on paper to avoid certain parental and familial entanglements. More on this later.

My last official speed trial said 40 WPM. But, does a speed trial really matter with the spell and grammar checks that have become routine with modern word processors? The traditional speed trial deducts for mistakes, but technology that does the 80-percent heavy lifting for proofreading renders the worry about mistakes lessening our speed to nil. Because I am specifically not the business type in a suit yelling at the long-suffering ladies in my office (a psychic predicted this of me for my mother, more on this later), I don’t need to think of my output in terms of WPM, but Words per Writing Day.

When I am really good despite my need to watch more television than is strictly good for me, I pull off 4,000-5,000 Words per Day. A more normal day says I will pull off 1,500-3,000 Words per Day. This is either a chapter a day or two chapters a day. I shoot for more of the former because I do feel the Reaper following me egging me on wanting more speed, more speed before I die. I also have a life coach, whom I have to pay, calling me every morning to make sure that I did my homework the night before.

This love/hate with my chosen life affects my choices for technology. On the one hand, I want the latest most mobile thing that means doing my work in the fastest way that other people (the presently mythical editor helping me get my equally mythical bestselling novels into New York shape) can easily manipulate. So I go for things like Word including the Mobile versions with the best Bluetooth keyboard that fits my hand size. I have used a variety of apps that output Word documents (See Reviews). Then Microsoft finally decided to wipe out many of their competitors with their own Mobile app. Unless the product completely sucks, go with the winner of the monopoly war.

Alternately, I go very primitive, pen and paper or manual typewriter. Usually, this is a sign that I’m still working out my story. I did take it to heart that a writer should work out the concept in the cheapest possible way ($2.99 for the 6” x 9” spiral and $2.50 for the ball point cartridge, or free waste paper run through the Olympia) before committing the words to the big technology. I sometimes need to create about six chapters in this manner before adding future chapters to my To Do List and doing them whenever the noise in my head allows. It breaks down like this: pen and paper for situations where portability is key (most days) and typewriter for when I feel the need to go unplugged in a situation where the noise won’t affect my fellow writers at the coffeehouse.

It took me a long time to realize how to do pen and paper in the most economical way possible. First, I found that disposable pens lack precisely because they are disposable. I liked Sanford Rollerballs and Pilot G-2s for a time, especially the smaller points. But, these pen lines are still the ones where you pay $12 for six and then because you have more than one you still treat them like disposables. Suddenly, going to the office supply superstore to buy the pen box becomes that strange impulse buy. I have a breadbox sized container of all the expensive disposable pens that I cleared out of my desk that I really, really would just like to give away. Any takers?

Saving money with pens meant that I had to learn to treat my pens the way mythological kings and heroes treat their swords: own one expensive pen and metaphorically give it a name. King Arthur had Excalibur. Charlemagne had Joyeuse. Aragorn had Anduril. I have Storyteller, a name that I just made up to complete the metaphor of this paragraph.

Storyteller is silver with black rubber grips and a shape much like a high-velocity rifle bullet (let’s avoid the obvious analysis here). My sister gave me the original as a birthday gift. Two weeks later, while still in the throes of buying expensive disposables, I misplaced the as yet unnamed Storyteller. Behind the sofa cushions I think. I promptly went to Staples to get the replacement because when your non-writing sister gives you a sword, I’m too cowardly to admit I lost it.

Proving the aphorism that you find things for which you stop looking, a week later I found Storyteller. But, at least I have the nearly-identical spare, Wordsmith. It doesn’t have the patina my grimy fingers gave Storyteller and the ballpoint cartridge doesn’t seat exactly the same way. For a good while, these pens rested in my drawer while I did other things and then figuratively speaking I pulled the sword from the stone. But, Storyteller needed a stablemate, Red Doom, my editing pen, a later design from the same company using interchangeable ballpoint cartridges.

So, not counting the disposables, I’m out about $80 to the Cross Pen Company, including replacement ink. When you buy the one and always know where it is, over time you get to amortize the cost into endless utility at the cheapest cost. It took months to break my habit of going into the office supply store and buying disposables, but habits can break from time to time.

My decision about pens affected my decision about clothes in that I buy shorts and long pants with the right kind of pockets so I can clip my pens to a pocket at my left hip. So, I carry four pens everywhere, Storyteller, Red Doom and two of the disposables that are for the person who asks to borrow a pen, one in blue, one in black.

And so this is but a small part of me communicating my fussy persnickety relationship to my words…

© 2015 G.N. Jacobs

I have just officially nominated October 2015 as Black October. No, I haven’t lost millions of dollars due to market positions predicated on red ink. And no one has died…yet. But, this month certainly shapes up as the month where mobile writing has taken a dive to the canvas. Currently none of the mobile writing apps that survived the writing app derby I conducted in print last year work properly.

Years ago, I started out using Documents to Go Premium before switching over to Microsoft’s Office apps. It was always a good mobile app for working on Word documents in the absence of Microsoft finally acknowledging the mobile segment of the business and putting out their own app. So, when Microsoft’s latest update (10/12/2015) essentially killed the ability to work going mobile, I thought I’d just tell my phone and iPad to reinstall Documents to Go again. But, I read the reviews on the iTunes store.

Documents to Go updated about a week ago creating a mess as if they brought a hand grenade to the pool party. The reviews essentially state that this once useful writing app corrupts saved data that the users that stayed with them despite Microsoft’s entry with non-third party Office are quite pissed off or vexed if you prefer nicer words. People don’t like losing data.

Microsoft’s problem concerns crashing. In both Word and Excel, the app crashes the user out to his or her home screen. In the 24 hours since I made this ill-advised update to keep up in the ongoing arms race between app design and operating system design both apps have crashed nearly every time I try to save the document. I work from the local file and then duplicate it into Dropbox where I keep the file that I then save using the Replace File method. Right now, the app will crash.

The review I left for Word this morning mentioned that the crashed documents do get saved. But, it’s a massive bitch. Preexisting documents with a lot of text in them seem to be unaffected, but new test documents created to determined the extent of the problem will save the file name, but with an otherwise blank page. As I write from prepared templates with a few words on the page in order to standardize margins, font and indents saving a blank page pisses me off.

So then I go into Apple’s Pages, I work on their phones and iPads. I think that I should be able to get some work done and the recent versions are free with Apple technology. Turns out, the mobile version of Pages is in even worse shape than either Word or Documents to Go. I couldn’t change the font to the 12-point Roman I use because I can. I can’t get the changes I ask for to show up on the screen causing me to lose trust that my document is in proper format. I deleted Pages back into my iTunes account as a bad idea.

So with QuickOffice dead about a year, what do we do to get work in mobile without losing data or too much time fixing that which wasn’t broken before yesterday? Microsoft is glitchy. Documents to Go and Pages seem worse for different reasons. Well, some of the reviews for Microsoft say to delete the app(s) after saving the files in the local folder so you don’t lose work that hasn’t moved over to Dropbox. Time consuming.

There are several solutions that mostly all simply say to not use the mobile apps until the various companies take their thumbs out and fix this perfect storm of bugs that afflict THREE SEPARATE WRITING APPS ALL AT THE SAME TIME! This message comes to you courtesy that I have the desktop version of Office and I can still type. A writer, I suppose, could look even further afield in the iTunes Store for an app with reviews that aren’t as scathing as the one I left for Microsoft insisting that they fix the glitches “at my earliest convenience, not yours!” But, the three writing apps savaged in this post are the leaders in terms of market share so the other apps might not be as well thought as the leaders were before last week.

I have one other solution for writers who also do scripts. Final Draft Mobile has the ability to write prose, a little publicized feature of the desktop version as well. The writer creates a new screenplay and simply clicks on General and then types. This element creates single-spaced text in Final Draft Courier that can later be cut and pasted into a Word document on your computer. There hasn’t been working Tab key in Final Draft Mobile since ever, so the writer has a bit of text jiggery ahead getting the indentation to work correctly. But, at least there is no crashing or lost data.

Imagine that; three major players in the iOS mobile writing app business are either down with glitches or, as I suspect with Pages, was simply never truly updated because the Apple in-house writing app was losing ground to Office that seemed to work perfectly until Monday. I’m sure others will start bandying conspiracies about this perfectly black week and a half where nothing works the way it should. Conservatives will blame al-Qaeda. Liberals will blame the Koch brothers. Who cares if the loud complaints get heard and these apps get fixed?

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Immediately after making these whiny complaints, saving the important local files and deleting the Microsoft apps to load them all over again appears to have worked. The author wants to know where to direct the hard elbow for wasting about two hours of his life. He doesn’t care enough about Documents to Go or Pages to investigate those fixes, if any…