Sunday, September 17, 2017
Friday, September 1, 2017
The Story of "Progress Debunked"
The release date is only two weeks away, and I think its fitting to tell the story here of how my book came to be and why it has been such an important part of my life. Much of this story can already be found scattered among my posts on this blog. But I'd like to bring it together.
The story begins with myself as a very unsatisfied philosophy grad student. Why exactly I was unsatisfied was a mystery even to myself. Though I loved reading the great philosophers, from Plato to Nietzsche, modern academic philosophy seemed to have become generally pointless. It was merely an ever-growing collection of terminology-heavy articles each trying to prove certain other articles wrong. It was a giant game of "You must be wrong about X and Y because of Z," and "Ah but Z must wrong because of Q and R," and nobody knew where it was going and nobody seemed to care. Something was wrong, but what exactly?
At the time I thought that the problem was a kind of religion that had been erected, one worshiping Reason, or maybe Rationality, or Logic, Math, Science, something like that. Or all of the above. Of course my notion that Reason was a Religion was nothing new, and is called "Postmodernism." Stereotypically, postmodernists hate rationality. That wasn't exactly where I was coming from. I was ready to admit that logic and reason are good things, tools for finding truth. But still: why worship a tool?
And here was one of the great mysteries I wrestled with. How had we come to build this giant institution -- the University -- whose one department devoted to finding the meaning of life -- Philosophy -- does little more than worship a tool, reason?
I spent many long walks in the park, asking myself things like: If science has become a religion, why? How do religions start? Why is it not like any other religion?
The obvious answer, of course, and the whole reason I had studied physics as an undergrad, and was now studying the philosophy of science, was that Science had produced Progress.
The more I thought about this, the more it made sense. Our worship of science was essentially the same as our worship of "progress." The entire soul-deadening boringness of academic philosophy (and much of academia as whole ... and much of modern life!) was due to this obsession with incrementally making the entire world a better place. Hence big, bureaucratic science was the meaning of life. Hence big, bureaucratic politics and the United Nations, and their goals of world peace and solving world hunger -- these were the only things that were supposed to matter -- and in the grand scheme of things adventure, romance, poetry, faith, courage, and all the things that used to make life wondrous were now deemed: worthless.
This is to state in extremely mundane terms a powerful set of emotions that already made me spend several hours a day writing poetry and aphorisms and stories trying to make them clear to others. It seemed to me, even at these early stages, that ultimately it was fiction and poetry that was capable of expressing the vim, vitality, and vigor of life as it should be, close to nature and lived for life-and-death stakes. (Why then, was I never a soldier? I guess because I've always seen myself as a mental or spiritual soldier. To understand the sort of emotion that often drives me, you might watch Ken Burns's Civil War documentary, start to finish, so well evoked that when the veteran Civil War reenactors around the year 1900 say they love the enemy soldiers they fought at Gettysburg, and are eternal friends with them, and wish to die and go to Valhalla with them and live it all again and again, it makes perfect sense. At the same time, I must say that war is not the meaning of life, especially modern war, which tends to be either police action, or to occur at such a large scale that the individual soldier is little more than a robot in a vast, honorless machine. Feudalism is closer to what I mean, more as an ideal to balance all the opposite excesses of modern ideals than as any sort of utopian goal.)
It was in this day-to-day mood back in 2006, reading articles on human genetics for a philosophy seminar called "Genes and Behavior," that it finally hit me. I came up with a good logical argument that progress is ultimately self-defeating, that things will always come back to a balance. I'm not going to try to explain the theory here. I summarize it elsewhere on this blog, and to explain it in detail is the purpose of my 200-page book. For the purposes of our story, all you need to understand is that I had stumbled on a logically-tight argument that progress is impossible. Armed with this, a lot of things started to come together. The following semester, as luck would have it, I took a seminar on the development of Darwin's theory of evolution. It turned out that Malthus's theory of population was a huge influence on Darwin. Reading Malthus's original Essay for the first time, the logical structure of a more general argument against progress now formed in my mind. I felt ready, even back in 2006, to write up an article debunking progress.
If progress was an illusion, then there was no reason to worship science. And there was no reason to think that philosophy should be modeled on science. Academic philosophy might seem to be slowly converging to the truth, but even this sort of progress would be meaningless unless it actually made people's lives better in the long run. And this was impossible.
And now the real philosophical work began. Not on my book -- I wouldn't try my hand at a draft for another 2 years. But on the only real question for a philosopher -- the meaning of life. If life is not about saving the world from poverty, what then was it about?
At the time I did believe in God, but I had no idea how to form a relationship with Him. I knew that there was something meaningful beyond Reason to live for, that life was an adventure of some sort, but wasn't quite sure how to visualize it, let alone pursue it. The story of this post-progress journey is told largely on this blog. And I will not try to summarize it here. Suffice it to say it changed everything. I developed a relationship with God, I started a family, and I finally left academia to take up independent scholarship and writing.
But before all this, in 2008, I took a leave of absence from grad school to write my argument up as a book. I had already written down the meat of it in a paper for a seminar, but the professor had given me an A- because it was not very relevant to the course material. I had also brought up my argument to professors and friends at the bar or at parties, but they uniformly dismissed it, whether as "eugenics" or as "the old idea that people will get stupider and lazier under socialism" or as "a recap of the Bell Curve."
My argument, I maintain, is none of these things. I have spent years reading the literature on human heredity and population growth, and, aside from Malthus, I've never encountered anything like it. All the eugenicists, anti-socialists, and Social Darwinists want progress more than anyone--they just think we need to sacrifice much more to achieve it. But I'm not saying progress is harder than we thought. I'm saying it's impossible.
And so I spent two years living on rice and eggs in a tiny apartment, floor scattered with books, reading and writing up draft-after-draft explaining why natural selection is an ineliminable part of human life. None of these drafts seemed to come out just how I wanted them. Looking back, I think I was too obsessed with making the argument as theoretical and mathematical as possible. It became so abstract that it kept becoming unclear, even to myself, how it was relevant to anything. The anxiety that had been caused by being dismissed as a eugenicist was getting the better of me. I wrote hundreds of pages of notes and drafts simply trying to debunk eugenics, to prove that even eugenics could not produce progress.
And as I delved deeper into these dark schemes, even darker schemes for progress came to me that would have to be debunked. ... So maybe we can't afford to genetically engineer all new babies in the world. But maybe some world dictator might decide to nuke the majority of the world's population and re-engineer it from scratch, creating a new Adam and Eve genetically programmed never to mutate in any way that would destabilize their own DNA ... or maybe an endless solar-powered virtual reality simulation where a fixed population could experience all the pleasures they wanted and even experience adventures and death, only to be reborn ...
Thus forcing the theory to become still more abstract. I had to apply my theory not only to biological evolution but extend it to cultural evolution as well.
In the end, none of this would be in vain. The theory was refined and deepened by these dark meditations, and now the book as it will be published is brief, yet quite general and theoretical, only focusing on those few schemes for progress (birth control, eugenics, transhumanism, AI) that people already take seriously. But the structure is all there, I believe, to attack nearly any ridiculous, dark, or even pink and fluffy scheme for progress that might be thrown at it. Of course, only posterity will really be able to judge this.
Anyway, when I returned to my philosophy department in 2010 with my manuscript, the professors did not seem very interested, and what was worse, I was not very confident in my most final draft. I felt it had been rushed, even after two years, and I was afraid of coming across as "cranky." I was afraid, furthermore, that they really wouldn't consider it to be "philosophy," since it doesn't talk about any of the narrowly technical topics that modern academic philosophy is usually about.
I gave them parts of it to read, and they were indifferent. And I realized that I didn't care if they cared anyway, as the whole modern philosophical institution was, provably in my view, pointless anyway. The only sensible thing to do was leave, and so I did, beginning my career in IT back in 2011 at a menial call-center help-desk job.
At the time I believed that you needed a PhD to publish a nonfiction book, so I decided to establish a career in fiction first. So up until 2016 I had been working on fiction writing, and have a small body of work to show for it, mostly science fiction, and I hope to publish much of it in the next couple of years.
But in early 2016 someone asked me why I didn't finally publish my philosophy book. They pointed out that nonfiction writers are scarce, and nonfiction readers plentiful and voracious. Everyone wants to write a novel -- that market is saturated. Why not start with my nonfiction?
I realized that my plan was all backwards. In the modern publishing world, largely dominated by independent authors, a PhD is no longer necessary to establish yourself in nonfiction.
And so I wrote up my final draft, and after all those years of meditating on progress and practicing my writing, it came out easily, flows well (I think), and now it is ready. It will be available on Amazon starting September 15.
The story begins with myself as a very unsatisfied philosophy grad student. Why exactly I was unsatisfied was a mystery even to myself. Though I loved reading the great philosophers, from Plato to Nietzsche, modern academic philosophy seemed to have become generally pointless. It was merely an ever-growing collection of terminology-heavy articles each trying to prove certain other articles wrong. It was a giant game of "You must be wrong about X and Y because of Z," and "Ah but Z must wrong because of Q and R," and nobody knew where it was going and nobody seemed to care. Something was wrong, but what exactly?
At the time I thought that the problem was a kind of religion that had been erected, one worshiping Reason, or maybe Rationality, or Logic, Math, Science, something like that. Or all of the above. Of course my notion that Reason was a Religion was nothing new, and is called "Postmodernism." Stereotypically, postmodernists hate rationality. That wasn't exactly where I was coming from. I was ready to admit that logic and reason are good things, tools for finding truth. But still: why worship a tool?
And here was one of the great mysteries I wrestled with. How had we come to build this giant institution -- the University -- whose one department devoted to finding the meaning of life -- Philosophy -- does little more than worship a tool, reason?
I spent many long walks in the park, asking myself things like: If science has become a religion, why? How do religions start? Why is it not like any other religion?
The obvious answer, of course, and the whole reason I had studied physics as an undergrad, and was now studying the philosophy of science, was that Science had produced Progress.
The more I thought about this, the more it made sense. Our worship of science was essentially the same as our worship of "progress." The entire soul-deadening boringness of academic philosophy (and much of academia as whole ... and much of modern life!) was due to this obsession with incrementally making the entire world a better place. Hence big, bureaucratic science was the meaning of life. Hence big, bureaucratic politics and the United Nations, and their goals of world peace and solving world hunger -- these were the only things that were supposed to matter -- and in the grand scheme of things adventure, romance, poetry, faith, courage, and all the things that used to make life wondrous were now deemed: worthless.
This is to state in extremely mundane terms a powerful set of emotions that already made me spend several hours a day writing poetry and aphorisms and stories trying to make them clear to others. It seemed to me, even at these early stages, that ultimately it was fiction and poetry that was capable of expressing the vim, vitality, and vigor of life as it should be, close to nature and lived for life-and-death stakes. (Why then, was I never a soldier? I guess because I've always seen myself as a mental or spiritual soldier. To understand the sort of emotion that often drives me, you might watch Ken Burns's Civil War documentary, start to finish, so well evoked that when the veteran Civil War reenactors around the year 1900 say they love the enemy soldiers they fought at Gettysburg, and are eternal friends with them, and wish to die and go to Valhalla with them and live it all again and again, it makes perfect sense. At the same time, I must say that war is not the meaning of life, especially modern war, which tends to be either police action, or to occur at such a large scale that the individual soldier is little more than a robot in a vast, honorless machine. Feudalism is closer to what I mean, more as an ideal to balance all the opposite excesses of modern ideals than as any sort of utopian goal.)
It was in this day-to-day mood back in 2006, reading articles on human genetics for a philosophy seminar called "Genes and Behavior," that it finally hit me. I came up with a good logical argument that progress is ultimately self-defeating, that things will always come back to a balance. I'm not going to try to explain the theory here. I summarize it elsewhere on this blog, and to explain it in detail is the purpose of my 200-page book. For the purposes of our story, all you need to understand is that I had stumbled on a logically-tight argument that progress is impossible. Armed with this, a lot of things started to come together. The following semester, as luck would have it, I took a seminar on the development of Darwin's theory of evolution. It turned out that Malthus's theory of population was a huge influence on Darwin. Reading Malthus's original Essay for the first time, the logical structure of a more general argument against progress now formed in my mind. I felt ready, even back in 2006, to write up an article debunking progress.
If progress was an illusion, then there was no reason to worship science. And there was no reason to think that philosophy should be modeled on science. Academic philosophy might seem to be slowly converging to the truth, but even this sort of progress would be meaningless unless it actually made people's lives better in the long run. And this was impossible.
And now the real philosophical work began. Not on my book -- I wouldn't try my hand at a draft for another 2 years. But on the only real question for a philosopher -- the meaning of life. If life is not about saving the world from poverty, what then was it about?
At the time I did believe in God, but I had no idea how to form a relationship with Him. I knew that there was something meaningful beyond Reason to live for, that life was an adventure of some sort, but wasn't quite sure how to visualize it, let alone pursue it. The story of this post-progress journey is told largely on this blog. And I will not try to summarize it here. Suffice it to say it changed everything. I developed a relationship with God, I started a family, and I finally left academia to take up independent scholarship and writing.
But before all this, in 2008, I took a leave of absence from grad school to write my argument up as a book. I had already written down the meat of it in a paper for a seminar, but the professor had given me an A- because it was not very relevant to the course material. I had also brought up my argument to professors and friends at the bar or at parties, but they uniformly dismissed it, whether as "eugenics" or as "the old idea that people will get stupider and lazier under socialism" or as "a recap of the Bell Curve."
My argument, I maintain, is none of these things. I have spent years reading the literature on human heredity and population growth, and, aside from Malthus, I've never encountered anything like it. All the eugenicists, anti-socialists, and Social Darwinists want progress more than anyone--they just think we need to sacrifice much more to achieve it. But I'm not saying progress is harder than we thought. I'm saying it's impossible.
And so I spent two years living on rice and eggs in a tiny apartment, floor scattered with books, reading and writing up draft-after-draft explaining why natural selection is an ineliminable part of human life. None of these drafts seemed to come out just how I wanted them. Looking back, I think I was too obsessed with making the argument as theoretical and mathematical as possible. It became so abstract that it kept becoming unclear, even to myself, how it was relevant to anything. The anxiety that had been caused by being dismissed as a eugenicist was getting the better of me. I wrote hundreds of pages of notes and drafts simply trying to debunk eugenics, to prove that even eugenics could not produce progress.
And as I delved deeper into these dark schemes, even darker schemes for progress came to me that would have to be debunked. ... So maybe we can't afford to genetically engineer all new babies in the world. But maybe some world dictator might decide to nuke the majority of the world's population and re-engineer it from scratch, creating a new Adam and Eve genetically programmed never to mutate in any way that would destabilize their own DNA ... or maybe an endless solar-powered virtual reality simulation where a fixed population could experience all the pleasures they wanted and even experience adventures and death, only to be reborn ...
Thus forcing the theory to become still more abstract. I had to apply my theory not only to biological evolution but extend it to cultural evolution as well.
In the end, none of this would be in vain. The theory was refined and deepened by these dark meditations, and now the book as it will be published is brief, yet quite general and theoretical, only focusing on those few schemes for progress (birth control, eugenics, transhumanism, AI) that people already take seriously. But the structure is all there, I believe, to attack nearly any ridiculous, dark, or even pink and fluffy scheme for progress that might be thrown at it. Of course, only posterity will really be able to judge this.
Anyway, when I returned to my philosophy department in 2010 with my manuscript, the professors did not seem very interested, and what was worse, I was not very confident in my most final draft. I felt it had been rushed, even after two years, and I was afraid of coming across as "cranky." I was afraid, furthermore, that they really wouldn't consider it to be "philosophy," since it doesn't talk about any of the narrowly technical topics that modern academic philosophy is usually about.
I gave them parts of it to read, and they were indifferent. And I realized that I didn't care if they cared anyway, as the whole modern philosophical institution was, provably in my view, pointless anyway. The only sensible thing to do was leave, and so I did, beginning my career in IT back in 2011 at a menial call-center help-desk job.
At the time I believed that you needed a PhD to publish a nonfiction book, so I decided to establish a career in fiction first. So up until 2016 I had been working on fiction writing, and have a small body of work to show for it, mostly science fiction, and I hope to publish much of it in the next couple of years.
But in early 2016 someone asked me why I didn't finally publish my philosophy book. They pointed out that nonfiction writers are scarce, and nonfiction readers plentiful and voracious. Everyone wants to write a novel -- that market is saturated. Why not start with my nonfiction?
I realized that my plan was all backwards. In the modern publishing world, largely dominated by independent authors, a PhD is no longer necessary to establish yourself in nonfiction.
And so I wrote up my final draft, and after all those years of meditating on progress and practicing my writing, it came out easily, flows well (I think), and now it is ready. It will be available on Amazon starting September 15.
Saturday, August 19, 2017
Saturday, July 29, 2017
“Progress Debunked” is Six Weeks from Publication, and Other Updates
If you don’t know the story behind Progress Debunked, you can read this post. I’ve spent the last few
weeks finalizing the interior of the book for both print and ebook versions. I
am nearly done. In about two weeks I’ll be sending out review copies. If you’d
like a free copy so you can be one of the first to review on Amazon, let me
know. (You can use the contact form on the lower right if you don’t have my
email address.)
Publishing has been taking up most of my spare time, but I
have made some conceptual progress on a few of my other projects, primarily on The First King of Montana and my fantasy
computer game, tentatively retitled Sagas
of Orthadel.
Last week I took my family on a road trip through Montana.
We all had a great time. It was the kids’ first real road trip out of state,
and my wife’s first time that far north. And it gave me, as a novelist, the
chance to get a feel for the place, the people, the landscape, and its ecology.
The experience has given me some fantastic notes and images to work with. For
example, I knew Montana was big, but just looking at maps and photos and
satellite images doesn’t really give you a good feeling for how big. And we traversed it in our van. Riding across
it on horseback would be an entirely different story. It also gave me a better
feeling for the towns, cities, and ranches. Even the largest cities there feel
pretty isolated. Their post-apocalyptic versions would be even more so. Let
alone the ranches way out in those central-Montana valleys, where a single
saloon will draw in regulars from 50 miles around. We saw cattle grazing in
wetlands by little creeks you could jump across, surrounded by hills and
mountains of parched desert and fragile, desertified pine forest as far as you
could see.
And there’s a lot of local pride in Montana. People up there
love where they are, and in parts they’ve done an incredible job of preserving
the primal forests. Much of the state is natural or man-made (overgrazed)
desert, but there’s also true wilderness there. Up north they connect with the
endless untamed Canadian wilds. Wolves and grizzlies, and tall, thick forests to
the horizon, black within. To meditate on them is to fill your spirit with a beautiful
and holy kind of terror.
I realized for the first time on that roadtrip that to write
a novel about Montana, let alone the first king
of Montana, is to promise something awfully huge. I’m not sure how else to put
it. It’s a big task. The place has a big spirit. I will have to put everything
I have into my novel if I am going to even come close to doing it justice.
Sagas of Orthadel,
the Tolkienesque fantasy computer game I’m working on, is also shaping up to be a big task, if doable. It will be a
real-time strategy with some role-playing elements, based on my board game Bloodline of the Eldar. Each player
guides a handful of characters possessing both hereditary powers and learned
skills. Players can either cooperate against outside foes or vie for political
dominance. Characters can marry, have children, teach each other skills, die,
create artifacts, and exploit or heal the natural (simulated) ecosystems around
them. Most of the basic rules have been playtested in board-game form, but it
will likely take several years to finish the computer version.
The basic reason for this is fundamentally the same as with
my novel: the subject matter is huge. In this case, though, it’s not a real
place. Rather, I’m trying to capture an ideal,
an ideal that goes beyond what any philosophical essay or novel, or even series of
novels, could really capture.
Modern novels have lost the ability to investigate consequences.
Of course, novels have never been interactive. But before the modern era this
was not important. Life was interactive enough. Novels were used to express
lived experience, and thus carried experiential knowledge. But you can’t trust
novels to do this anymore—novel-writing has become a craft that is more dependent on style than on content to satisfy a
reader. It’s all illusion, it’s all surface now.
Today, books don’t teach
you anything. They have no message.
Modern authors are even proud to have no message.
And the most “literary” novels today are the worst. Magical realism? Post modernism? You can’t trust them not to frivolously negate
their own reason for being, if that makes any sense to anyone without a
graduate degree in the humanities.
The modern novel (and movie, too) has given us—has indoctrinated
us with—a false version of reality. It is false because it can be false. It is
anchored to nothing but popular opinion. And popular opinion has run away with
itself.
What I am saying is probably still far from clear. So let’s
take a specific example. Female heroes in modern storytelling. What’s the first
image that pops into your mind? Is it:
(a) a warrior
or
(b) a mother
Yeah, okay, you say, it was (a), but so what? Can’t women be
warriors too?
Sure they can. But is it healthy for a culture to focus on teaching
women to be warriors when in reality they
will more often be mothers? How many popular movies or novels can you think of
where the hero was a mother and her
heroism consisted of doing really well as a mother?
And if you think I’m just making a point about “gender issues”
here, let’s talk about men. How often are male heroes heroic as warriors rather
than fathers? Even here we see an unhealthy tendency toward pure fantasy in our
modern entertainment. Fathers are much more common that warriors. In fact they
should be just as common as mothers.
Which, again, isn’t to say that there are no differences
between men and women and their respective duties in a culture. The very idea
that there are or should be no differences between men and women is another
example of the veil modern storytelling has pulled over our eyes. Our fictions
have come to sacrifice reality for the sake of popular political messages. But
to champion a popular political message is to champion no message at all, but
merely to flatter the prejudices of one’s own age. It’s to say, “Yeah, those [republicans/democrats]
are crazy and you really need to vote
[conservative/liberal] because they’ll fix things.” But this sort of binary
message is utterly worthless. It’s pure propaganda. A vote is just a millionth
of a decision. What about how people live
their lives? The only respectable task for a novel, the only worthy task, is to teach people how to live better.
The same goes for a computer game. The example about fathers
and mothers and warriors above is in fact right on point when it comes to the
game I’m writing. Characters can be father, mothers, warriors, rulers, teachers,
craftsmen, and farmers. Balancing these roles is a major part of the game. And
the right balance isn’t some arbitrary percentage decided by how liberal or
conservative I, the author, am. It’s determined by the ecology of the rules of
the game. You can see what happens if you make all your females into warriors
and none of your males care about teaching
the next generation. Sound complicated? It’s not. At least not as a game. It
will take a lot of work to code, as any game does, but the gameplay itself won’t
be much more complicated than in most popular computer games. I am designing it
not simply to be beautiful and fun but also—if all goes well—to mirror
something important about reality. It will go against the modern tendency: it
will be designed to teach future generations.
Monday, June 5, 2017
Why Evil Exists: The Insights of Boethius
I've just posted my essay on the Problem of Evil on Twenty-Five Centuries.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Updates: Indie Publishing, Games, and a Screenplay
This month my plan was to post an essay on the Problem of Evil. But that essay is growing longer and more involved than I expected, and it looks like it won't be done until next month. So stay tuned.
Instead, here's a brief update on what I've been working on.
I've been spending most of my free time preparing Progress Debunked for publication: proof reading, formatting the Table of Contents and section headings, choosing fonts, and the like. It's starting to look more and more like a book. This is my first time publishing, so I'm still not sure quite how long it will take. I need to get permissions to publish quotes, find a graphic designer, get an ISBN, and several other odd things. It could be a month, or it could be autumn of this year. I'm committed to having digital, paperback, and hardback versions all available by the end of 2017.
The more I read about independent publishing, the more convinced I am that it is the way to go. It's faster, it gives you more control over the process, it earns you better royalties, and it is now more common for new authors to make a living by self-publishing than by "traditional" publishing. What's interesting, if you look at the history of publishing, is that self-publishing was actually the most common sort of publishing before about 50 years ago. It is the real tradition in publishing. It's only been in the recent era of mega-corporations and mass marketing that people have been convinced (mostly through advertisement) that you've got to publish through one of the handful of companies in New York that dominate the business. But a revolution is sweeping through; that era is ending.
I'm not so sure anymore that it will be impossible to make a living by writing. Tens of thousands of indie writers you've never heard of are supporting their families on book sales. So we'll see. My first goal in writing is still to express relevant, important ideas as clearly as I can. Money is a secondary concern--and only pertinent because it might make it possible to write full time.
I've also made progress on a number of side projects. I'm re-writing the end of Part I of The First King of Montana. What's coming out this time around is more human, more emotional, has more grit, and feels more real.
Over the past several months I've merged several of my boardgames into an semi-cooperative, Tolkienesque, epic fantasy game: Bloodline of the Eldar. Each player is a different fantasy race, and you play over several generations. Characters can create magical artifacts and realms, marry, pass on magical abilities to their children, and teach one another ancient skills and crafts. The victory conditions are different for each player -- some players may have selfish motives -- and the game typically climaxes with a epic war between good and evil. It's fun, but it generally takes 5-6 hours. I've started coding a computer version of the game, which should speed it up.
My kids keep asking to play my fairy tale game, where you can choose to play a hero, princess, or monster. (Usually I play a dragon or giant, and they play the good guys.) As a hero or princess, you go around the map rescuing people. As a monster, you steal their treasure. Eventually, if the good guys make enough friends and find enough useful items, they can work together to defeat the monster, either by making it into a good monster or chasing it away. The game is set up so that it is almost impossible for the good guys to lose, though you can get into some sticky situations--for example, as last time when BOTH kids' characters were transformed into frogs. You might also get locked in a tower, wounded, or put to sleep by magic. For all the possibilities, the game goes quickly. It only takes about 15 minutes, but usually the kids will want to play again and again. Definitely worth it to try and publish, I think.
A couple months back I read Walter Scott's Ivanhoe for the first time and loved it. It's a story about feuding between Saxon and Norman knights in the era of Prince John and Richard the Lionhearted. My wife and I watched the 1952 movie version and after listening to me rant about how the film had dropped all the most compelling aspects of the novel and everything I would put in a screenplay if I wrote it, she said, "Well why aren't you writing it?" So I wrote my own screenplay. It turns out that two of the main plotlines are romantic (one tragic and one happy), and as a fan of Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, my wife has helped me enhance these. To do this I've had to deepen one of my antagonists -- Bois-Guilbert, a Norman and Templar knight -- and make him more sympathetic. The screenplay that has emerged (to flatter myself) is more tragic, more Shakespearean even, than what Scott originally wrote. We'll see. I've got to sit on this one for a while.
Instead, here's a brief update on what I've been working on.
I've been spending most of my free time preparing Progress Debunked for publication: proof reading, formatting the Table of Contents and section headings, choosing fonts, and the like. It's starting to look more and more like a book. This is my first time publishing, so I'm still not sure quite how long it will take. I need to get permissions to publish quotes, find a graphic designer, get an ISBN, and several other odd things. It could be a month, or it could be autumn of this year. I'm committed to having digital, paperback, and hardback versions all available by the end of 2017.
The more I read about independent publishing, the more convinced I am that it is the way to go. It's faster, it gives you more control over the process, it earns you better royalties, and it is now more common for new authors to make a living by self-publishing than by "traditional" publishing. What's interesting, if you look at the history of publishing, is that self-publishing was actually the most common sort of publishing before about 50 years ago. It is the real tradition in publishing. It's only been in the recent era of mega-corporations and mass marketing that people have been convinced (mostly through advertisement) that you've got to publish through one of the handful of companies in New York that dominate the business. But a revolution is sweeping through; that era is ending.
I'm not so sure anymore that it will be impossible to make a living by writing. Tens of thousands of indie writers you've never heard of are supporting their families on book sales. So we'll see. My first goal in writing is still to express relevant, important ideas as clearly as I can. Money is a secondary concern--and only pertinent because it might make it possible to write full time.
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I've also made progress on a number of side projects. I'm re-writing the end of Part I of The First King of Montana. What's coming out this time around is more human, more emotional, has more grit, and feels more real.
Over the past several months I've merged several of my boardgames into an semi-cooperative, Tolkienesque, epic fantasy game: Bloodline of the Eldar. Each player is a different fantasy race, and you play over several generations. Characters can create magical artifacts and realms, marry, pass on magical abilities to their children, and teach one another ancient skills and crafts. The victory conditions are different for each player -- some players may have selfish motives -- and the game typically climaxes with a epic war between good and evil. It's fun, but it generally takes 5-6 hours. I've started coding a computer version of the game, which should speed it up.
My kids keep asking to play my fairy tale game, where you can choose to play a hero, princess, or monster. (Usually I play a dragon or giant, and they play the good guys.) As a hero or princess, you go around the map rescuing people. As a monster, you steal their treasure. Eventually, if the good guys make enough friends and find enough useful items, they can work together to defeat the monster, either by making it into a good monster or chasing it away. The game is set up so that it is almost impossible for the good guys to lose, though you can get into some sticky situations--for example, as last time when BOTH kids' characters were transformed into frogs. You might also get locked in a tower, wounded, or put to sleep by magic. For all the possibilities, the game goes quickly. It only takes about 15 minutes, but usually the kids will want to play again and again. Definitely worth it to try and publish, I think.
A couple months back I read Walter Scott's Ivanhoe for the first time and loved it. It's a story about feuding between Saxon and Norman knights in the era of Prince John and Richard the Lionhearted. My wife and I watched the 1952 movie version and after listening to me rant about how the film had dropped all the most compelling aspects of the novel and everything I would put in a screenplay if I wrote it, she said, "Well why aren't you writing it?" So I wrote my own screenplay. It turns out that two of the main plotlines are romantic (one tragic and one happy), and as a fan of Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, my wife has helped me enhance these. To do this I've had to deepen one of my antagonists -- Bois-Guilbert, a Norman and Templar knight -- and make him more sympathetic. The screenplay that has emerged (to flatter myself) is more tragic, more Shakespearean even, than what Scott originally wrote. We'll see. I've got to sit on this one for a while.
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Against Heideggerian Philosophy
On my new blog, Twenty-Five Centuries, I discuss how Heidegger has led modern philosophy into a sophistical morass of timid "everydayness":
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