The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

I asked my daughter in September what she wanted to be for Halloween. Without a moment’s thought, she said, “Cthulhu.” Mind you, she’s 4. The reason she said this is because her faux Grandfather got her a couple of cuddly Cthulhu toys, and that’s her idea of what the great ancient beast is. I mentioned this to the people I work with, and they went, uh, what’s that? Now, I don’t expect everyone to know who Cthulhu is, and i do work with musicians. They aren’t exactly all readers, but they are pop culture people, so I was a little surprised. Hell, I first heard of Lovecraft when I was 13 and heard Metallica’s Call of Ktulu and went in and figured out what the hell the title meant. I guess I just like to delve. This is significant to my thinking in this essay, by the way, it isn’t just a bit of personal history.

But this isn’t why Cuddly Cthluhu will kill us all. Last weekend I went to Capricon and took in the panel on Lovecraft. We started off on where we first ran into Lovecraft. Gene Wolf was on the panel, and he went back to dime store adventure stories days. One of the panelists found out about Lovecraft from gaming.

But then we got into how Cthulhu has evolved in pop culture, mostly by talking about cuddly Cthulhu, Miskatonic University window stickers, some of the film and television adaptations, and then some derivative works, things like the Sarlacc pit in Star Wars, and even got to Japanese Tentacle Porn. We told some amusing stories about the non-scifi public’s encounters with these things and had a good laugh. There were a few other things, like fear of the unknown which Lovecraft creates so well in the atmosphere of his stories. Then I tried to steer the conversation back to the literature, asking who is carrying on the literary legacy.

The conversation went back to pop culture.

This goes back to something I’ve been thinking about for a couple weeks, namely “clever” will kill us all (which was originally going to be the title of this post). One of the worst trends I see in current SF/F or horror is the clever story. What do I mean by this?

We are being overrun with cutesy zombies, vampires, elder gods, robots and everything else under the sun. I can think of a couple examples of zombie temporary agencies. I’ll puke at another classic old book and classic monster mashup. Abraham Lincoln was not a vampire hunter, and there’s no Zombies in Pride and Prejudice. My life doesn’t revolve around cute mashups of pop culture and crochet.

I have a daily ritual of sites I go to, mostly for inspiration and ideas, for looking froward and being on the cutting edge of thought and technology. One of them is Neatorama. A couple days ago, the front page was The Great Gatsby NES game (which appeared on several of my reads), then moved on to the Legend of Zelda as a teen movie, then a couple stories down, a space invaders moss (yes the green plant-y stuff) mural, slasher movie plushies, a dating service for Superheroes and villains, and it goes on.

At the same time, we’re at a unique point in sci-fi history. We’ve had a ton of success in popular culture from some serious films. From the Lord of the Rings Trilogy to Inception, we’ve got quite a run going on here, and the question is, where do we take it?

Science fiction used to be about ideas. We’re just now realizing the potential of technologies Arthur C. Clarke thought up fifty years ago, and we’re doing better at them because of how he thought for us. Our phones are way better than any communications devices science fiction came up with prior to the 90s or so, and that’s only one technology example. Sci-fi used to be about ideas and their implications. Fantasy too, had its mirror to the world.

We have the ear of the world, and what are we offering up that is new? If we allow the pop culture references to become our answer, we’re going to lose it quickly. Pop culture references of this sort are a sort of reciprocating inside joke. We are no better than Comic Book Guy, and the more mainstream a person, the less they’re going to join in on the fun. The more we insulate ourselves at con, the worse this phenomena will become, too.

I have a feeling that while the rise of geek should be celebrated, we should take pains to remember at one point, Star Wars was an innovative leap forward in storytelling, science fiction, and movie making, not just a series of pop culture references, and we lose the impact it once carried as we trivialize it. Lovecraft was once ahead of his time and visionary. I’m wondering if our attention to the in-joke will starve the veritable prodigy out of our market. Yes, an Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter may sell a million copies, but is that paying for the next Lovecraft, or is it paying for The Wizard of Oz and Werewolves?

We stand at an interesting precipice. Abilities to produce film, animation, and product which were once the realm of big companies with lots of money, as well as the distribution of that product is now in the hands of the average person. This unprecedented power comes with great responsibility, er, well, you know. That one was kind of hard to avoid. We also control delivery methods, largely thanks to iTunes, the App Store, Scribd, Lulu, Bandcamp, and any number of other sites. Pioneering artists like Radiohead and some of the authors who are now branching to self-pub are leading the way with a reputation for credibility, but the question of anybody coming up gaining credibility in this manner is still up in the air. Arguments about who is the gatekeeper for quality should be addressed elsewhere.

I don’t want to say that there is any less creativity or skill in any of these endeavors. There certainly is skill and talent. I think we should recognize what is a more serious attempt at creating something new, and what is an extended joke, and be conscious of how we handle it in either case. When you sit at a con, and the discussion lingers on the relative merits of running zombies versus walking zombies, remember, most people in the world probably don’t care. A line must be drawn, and I think my criteria is fairly simple. Doe we go for the obvious joke like Shakespeare went after puns? If so, well, I’m really not that interested anymore. I study writing, I read widely, I read classics, I’m into literature. That’s where I go. Your mileage may vary, but I don’t have a lot of time for stuff that ultimately won’t satisfy me past the moment.

There are warning signs. Steampunk is one, much as I like the aesthetic. Zombies are another. There are just no original comedic uses of zombies anymore. And yet, Cherie Priest mixes the two brilliantly in Boneshaker, but it is how they are used, as significant points of a well-built world, not as a pastiche, not as a way to lead to punchlines, in the world they exist in, they are a circumstance, not an absurdity.

Many of us try fanfiction, and this is where a number of current authors developed. There is a certain departure velocity and trajectory from fanfic and parody to higher art, and some consideration should be put in to how we review, what we expect of that feedback, what kind of coverage we give it, and how serious we take it as an audience.

I have my moments of this, but I don’t try to pass them off as literature. I also reject more cute and clever ideas than anything else. I’m a little concerned that my tendency to reject these cute ideas will bury me because the public taste is very for it right now. Then I see those ideas someone else has written. Sometimes I think I would have done better. Other times they are way more developed because I abandoned them early in development.

So there’s some thoughts that probably pissed off a generation of fanboys and girls. Let me know what you think.

Like most people in my situation, being a creator of content and trying to promote it, I am signed up and signed away on social media. It really is the way of the future. But there are so many options, what really is working, and what isn’t? I’ll certainly ask for your input for more ideas, but I’ll look at the main culprits here and give you an idea of what I see.

First, my own sites. As I’ve discussed, I’ve decided to post all my work on my site to give more exposure more quickly to the work than I can get by the magazine submissions process. Every time I post a new article or story, I can see the effects immediately. My days double or triple in traffic. To break it down, I get more unique visitors, and usually there are two to three page views per visitor, which means that people are looking at more than one page apiece. I also get more feed reads.

I can also tell where people are coming from. Each time I post a story, I see the tags that bring people in, and so I know that those search terms are helping my traffic in general. That makes it tempting to do reviews of podiobooks and books in general just to get the traffic from the tags, but I’ve already got enough on my plate. I do wonder however, how many people who are out looking for new UFO data are disappointed to find my “First Responder” short story on that search term, or is the UFO community enough of a sci-fi buff to read a short story, and in turn, how many of these people decide to follow my site, or sign up for the rss feed. What is disappointing is how few people leave comments. Comments are bread and butter, and can significantly influence what I focus on writing next.

I can also see on occasion an email read as an incoming referrer, so I know that a few people are sending my links out.

Twitter has been a revelation to many of us. The quick response and feedback of twitter, plus the amount of personality that is shown in a short message really succeeds as the quickest way to develop a network of dedicated fans, followers, and friends. I’m a fairly shy person, and so I question whether I should make random comments to people, but most times I do, I get a quick and kind response. It’s really helped to break shy little me out of my shell. Whenever I post a link, I get hits. Sometimes straight from twitter, but almost in an equal amount from twiturls.com and other similar sites. These simply list links that are posted on twitter.

The community of sites developed around twitter is great and unique. The money woes of twitter have led to a significant number of other startups and tools, tinyurl.com, twiturls.com, etc. Some of which are useful, and some of which are frankly stupid. I stumbled across one person who Gives you a ranking on twitter based on how many characters of your 140 you use on average. I can’t think of a possible use of this statistic. Sometimes, a single word is more effective and indicative of a person than 140 characters.

There are some issues with twitter. How many people can I follow at any one time and still build some sort of relationship? I started a new project, gearsecure.net, and started following musicians as I found them, and really searched them out, and found I couldn’t follow as quickly as I’d like, and I lost track of conversations friends were having, and just didn’t like following more than like 250 people. I made a new twitter account for gearsecure.net, and I can follow both much better. What I’d really like is to have different timelines for groups of people. I could assign a person to a group, and follow the conversations of the writers, the musicians, the celebs, the social media types, the kinksters, and the right-wing freaks that I keep an eye on to stay a step ahead of the news (I really enjoy it when they decide to follow me, too). I know tweetdeck does this, but for some reason, it doesn’t pick up all of the people I follow, and it is a computer resources hog. For some reason, my recording software uses less system resources than this program.

Twitter also hasn’t gotten over some of its growing pains. There’s a lot of people who are just beginning to figure out how to spam on twitter. I got five spams tonight. There was the worm that went around last week. The sorting of people would seem like an obvious thing, but sometimes the obvious is not so much when you’re busy in a start-up. Another couple points of irk with twitter is that my bio can only be 140 characters, I can only input one website for public display. Maybe a field of 140 characters for a description and one of 500 for more info would be good. All in all though, it is mostly the best promotion tool, and I’ll tell you why: I have to be there. There is no silent salesman on this one. The more you put in, the more you get out. You get nothing out of it if you’re just collecting friends, and that’s what the spammers haven’t figured out yet.

Speaking of collecting friends, let’s talk about myspace. Myspace was the darling of the social media scene. Friendster (does that even exist anymore?) may have been the first, but Myspace improved the model. I used myspace to connect with friends I already had mostly, and avoided the popularity contest. I was one of the first music manufacturing companies on myspace with Jones MFG. Then I dropped off the face of the earth for a while, and now that I’m back, I can see that nothing has changed but the b.s. factor. When I came back, I found that I had a lot of hits on my blog, and I figured I might be able to capitalize on that. As I started to add content, my page views, subscribers, and friends didn’t change. Now, I could increase the amount of messaging, comments, and other “contacts” I make, but I just get this feeling of the high school popularity contest for me. If I decide to keep up with myspace, it might be a very passive thing. I’ll let you find me. The real reason for this is that I enjoy interaction, and I get that from twitter much better than anything else. Myspace has stopped working for me.

That brings me to facebook. Compared to myspace, facebook is slick. It gives me a lot of updates in a quick amount of time, and is really somewhere between myspace and twitter in terms of what it does. It is passive, in that the information comes to you and sits, but active in that it comes to you in a timeline like twitter. It just isn’t as dense. I really like this interface, but the downside is that I feel like I need a manual to learn it. I wanted to join a network for my school, and it required a school email. Not my regular email, my school one. I haven’t been to that school in ten years, and so I can’t join the network.

I don’t have an email from there. I can’t look at someone’s profile by casual browsing. I’m kind of a shy person, and don’t add people that aren’t pro or at least trying to be, but it is hard to identify who that might be from browsing, even if I’m browsing a group. I wanted to set up a page for gearsecure, but I can’t set up a page for a company. I set up a fan page, or should I have set up a group? Or both? Or is that too much work? I set up a fan page for myself, only to find that I already had seven fans for a photographer named Bryan Peterson. I use the Lee to distinguish myself from other Bryan Petersons, but now I can’t change the name on the fan page. It’s little things like this that just piss me off about facebook.

I think that the way social networking is redefining the word “friend” needs to be addressed. There was the guy who made news because he invited all of his facebook friends to a party, and only one showed up. We need to remember that unless we really have regular meaningful interaction, the person is a contact at best.

Goodreads is a new social networking site, and it connects people via books. This is somewhat interesting being an author, and I can upload material there, but I’m not very interested, or more to the point, encouraged to find “friends” there, and I can’t tell if people are reading my uploads. There’s no hit counter. Most of the authors I have friended started with their own books, and that’s all well and good, but then when it came to adding things that they have read, well, they haven’t been all that quick at adding those, and what has been loaded is either disappointing or they just aren’t reading widely. This was kind of a disappointment. I looked a little too closely at people I was looking up to. Ah, maybe they’ll get around to listing all of the great works of literature they’ve been reading in their free time eventually. We won’t think bad of you if you read outside your genre.

I am in dire need of a good comic artist for a project, so I have signed up for Deviantart. The problem with Deviant art is that it is too much like myspace for artists. It’s complete amateur hour. It is very hard to find a good artist, and most people up there aren’t very smart at marketing themselves. Anybody with a pen can put “art” up there, and the communication is very much on the myspace level. Thanks for the add. Thanks for the favorite. Okay. Buh-Bye. Nobody really reads the fiction, and nobody reads my site. Maybe if I favorite your art, I might be interested in a collaboration as I’ve put into my descriptions. I’ll eventually put more time into finding people up there, and communicating, but right now, the dividends are slight. One of the nice things about Deviant art is that talent can’t be faked. You can tell in an instant if somebody is holding a pencil for the first time, or if they have some skills. Talent, unlike myspace popularity, can’t be faked.

I found Scribd and made it part of my plan to market myself. I have a Scale manual for electric bass that is on Lulu.com. I haven’t pushed it much, and so I haven’t sold a single copy, and I can’t tell how many people are even looking at it, which is an issue. I put it on scribd, and in less than a month, with no effort have over 1,200 looks. It made it to the editor’s picks list twice. It’s now on the hotlist. So I added a short story, The Oral history of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. In a week it had 400 hits. It also made the editor’s picks and the hot list. Out of over a million documents, they put eight on their front page, and for one Saturday, two of them were mine. So I’ve been putting just about everything up there. It isn’t as social of a community, and I don’t see too much going there in terms of networking, but in terms of passive exposure Scribd is good. Literary stuff doesn’t get as much attention as other things, especially original literary things, but they are getting read. I’ve had a handful of comments on some short stories. I’ve gotten comments on my scale book. I admit that many of the hits on my first story up there are probably people looking for a copy of Hamlet, but who’s to say that somebody looking for Hamlet doesn’t stick around and read a short story involving Hamlet?

A new one I’ve found is Authonomy.com. This is a site Harper Collins uses to scout new talent, and uses writers and editors to give feedback and rank you. I don’t know if there’s a way to punk the system, and push yourself up popularity contest style, and there’s no guarantee that will lead to a deal. This could become a great site for workshopping, if it doesn’t attract too many amateurs in high school (the deviantart problem). It’s still in public beta, and I’m glad to be there. One of the nice things is that you can’t make a document public unless there is over 10,000 words of it. That should keep the kiddies at bay.

Blogcatalog is something of a myspace for bloggers. I get hits here and there, but of the 60 some odd friends I have, only one has really proven to be a real “friend”. That would be Shaun Duke, and you should check out his blog and twitter. This one has some potential, but I’m kind of over it in the same way as myspace. I think the benefits are somewhat limited, but it is the best community I have found so far for bloggers, and I don’t know what I’d change to improve it.

The last one I want to cover is We op-ed. This is strictly for political bloggers, and as such, is a vocal community. It is small, a very niche market, but I value it as much as any of the others. The feedback is real and challenging, the community is supportive even when the viewpoints are different, and so far I haven’t caused a flame war (even though I’m trying with one guy). I hope this one keeps going, and other pick up on this niche community thing.

There’s a couple forums I post on occasionally, boingboing, jref, tor.com, and a few others, but those don’t usually lead to hits or network, and I have very little time after everything else to spend there.

So that’s it, a what’s working, and what’s not. Bottom line is involvement will build your community, and I think twitter and facebook are going to be the most beneficial in the least amount of effort, but participation is the most important aspect of any of them. The strategy is to put that effort where it will get the most response. My focus is on twitter and facebook right now.