Oooops...

This is what a depressing start to the year looks like for a writer:

That's a clip from the spreadsheet where I track downloads for episodes of The Second Realm. The numbers (below the second black line) are the total downloads for each individual episode, with this one, the most recent (published on December 31st), at the bottom and boxed in red.

That string of zeros prompted me to publish this whinge, which I now need to fully and publically retract. It's not just that it's a kinda whingy post (and in my defence, it's hardly the most whingy thing I could have written in the circumstances - I was trying to analyse the problem); it's that I made a couple of discoveries on Sunday which go some way to explaining the problem, and both of them are mistakes on my part for which I owe an apology...

Firstly, the link at the top of the right-hand column of this page you're looking at now, the one which is supposed to go to the hub page for the current season of The Second Realm, was broken. I apparently failed to check it or make use of it for three whole weeks, which speaks pretty ill of me. Given that my only marketing activity is this blog, and that link is the main and most visible way for people to discover my actual writing, this can't have done me any favours. So, sorry about that.

A broken link, though, is just a dumb mistake. The more serious error is my failure to notice the 'recommended price' that Smashwords displays for books published on their pay-what-you-like (PWYL) service. I didn't know this existed, and somehow I've managed to publish two PWYL short stories, and visit their Smashwords pages several times each, without noticing.

Worse, this means that the default value was left up. The default value, regardless of publication length, is $4.95. Now, I'm aware that there are writers out there who disagree with me on this, but I think that's a pretty outrageous price for a 10,000-word short story, particularly one that's available for free elsewhere.

The 'recommended price' feature actually exists so that Smashwords can put a price on PWYL books when it ships them out to its partner distributors (Apple, Sony, Kobo etc.), because none of them have the facility to offer PWYL through their stores. You don't get the ability to change the default until after you've published the book (and the setting is hidden away in a sub-page of the main settings page), which is how I missed it during publication. There's no option 'Don't show recommended price on this book's Smashwords page'.

Given that I've blogged more than once about my enthusiasm for PWYL models, I wouldn't hold it against anyone to have viewed that default recommendation as an act of unspeakable hubris on my part (particularly if I didn't know it was a default). The whole point of PWYL is leaving the decision about price up to the reader.

PWYL is about asking the reader the question, "What do you think this is worth to you?"

Putting a recommended price on a PWYL book is basically changing that to "I think this is worth this much, what about you?", a question which is cognate with "Do you think this is worth this much?" At best, that second question is the same as non-PWYL sales have been asking since the dawn of capitalism. The best one can hope for with a recommended price is no advance in consumer psychology over ordinary capitalism.

But trying to put myself in a reader's perspective, I think I'd regard it as rather worse. I'd be very put off to see a recommended price on a PWYL book; I'd feel like the author was telling me 'I trust you to come to your own decision about this, but only if you live up to that trust by agreeing with me'. It's a weird and deeply unpleasant combination of emotional blackmail and hypocrisy.

In fact, given that the PWYL model seems to be on the rise, I'd view it as a shallow act of bandwagon-jumping, trying to keep the 'protection' of the fixed-price model while grabbing the fad of PWYL.

Therefore, I hereby reject any 'recommended price' for any of my PWYL publications. I've set the numbers on Smashwords as low as they'll go (which, unfortunately, is still $0.99), and I'm going to write to Smashwords and ask for the option to hide the recommended price on the SW page (though it's a bit adjustment to ask, so I'm not hopeful). Unless and until that option becomes available, I'd like you all to ignore the recommended price completely. Please?

High Drama (part 1)

(This is not the next installment of the series I've promised on WEIRDos - I'm planning to run that on Thursdays/Fridays, but there won't be one this week because the new Second Realm episode is out this weekend. It's also not the blog I was promising yesterday about my cock-up with Smashwords, which will run on Thursday)

Instead, today, before the moment fades, I want to start on a topic I've been prompted towards by the final volume of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, a fantasy epic I've been a fan of for over a decade. The final volume came out a couple of weeks ago, and I'm finally reading it (it's very good - and don't worry about spoilers; I won't be discussing it in detail, and I haven't finished it yet so I can't spoil any of the really juicy stuff).

The Wheel of Time captures what I feel to be the essence of 'fantasy' as a genre, and thus forms a very good jumping-off point for an attempt to define the genre. You might be thinking that you know how fantasy is defined - after all, there are sections in the bookshops for it (actually, and I feel this is a point in my favour, most of the bookshops I've been in lump fantasy and sci-fi together) - but I want to pose the question in a slightly new way.

This is a video about design theory for video games, and to those of you not literate in games, it may be a little bit dense, but it provides the basics of a framework for genre definition that I think we need to bring into the SFF world in books (I don't mean, by the way, that I want to use their definition of fantasy - I think it works just fine for games, but isn't what 'fantasy' is truly about in literature).

Put simply, the video lays out a way of analysing genre which cuts things up in terms of core aesthetics rather than superficial ones (the superficial aesthetics in games being the mechanics). The core aesthetics of a piece of art (for some legitimate-but-broad definition of 'art') are the things that we go to that particular piece of art for rather than any other.

The presenter claims that outside of the video game world, where art within a medium is broken up by genre, the genres are defined by core aesthetics. This is certainly true, I think, for cinema (which makes sense, since it's the field which has made most effective use of the concept) - it's easy to see that romance, drama, horror and so on are fulfilling different emotional/psychological needs. Something similar is true for most forms of literary genre - after all, you can tell what a person goes to erotica or horror for pretty clearly, but the same is generally true of literary fiction, thrillers etc. etc.

But there's quite a difference between the way sci-fi and fantasy are handled in films and the way they're handled in books. By way of example, despite all involving fictitious science, Armageddon is a disaster movie, while The Matrix is an action film and The Day The Earth Stood Still essentially a kind of political thriller.

By contrast, consider my favourite science fiction novel, Dan Simmons' Hyperion (actually, my favourite is the second in the series, but never mind that). Hyperion contains, in order, a horror story, an erotic romance (though not a massively explicit one), a bizarre cross between a reflexive meditation on art and a psychological thriller, a family drama, a Hollywood-Chandleresque detective story, and an unmistakably literary character piece tale-within-a-tale.

All of them have elements of fictitious science, with characters undergoing relativistic time dilation effects, or visiting dozens of worlds, or travelling through vast galactic computer networks, or being hunted by sinister automata, but the underlying stories are of vastly different types.

So what makes them all science fiction? Well, in a lesser collection of stories, the answer would be 'space ships and laser guns' - there are certainly many works of sci-fi which are really just thrillers transposed into a spacey context. In the case of Hyperion, though, every one of those stories involves an element of fictional science whose effect on the characters could only be achieved by that means - one character, for example, is made immortal; another sees his lover only a handful of times, between relativistic journeys that mean she ages through a whole life-span while he stays young.

The key to defining sci-fi, then, is this link between scenario and characters - this is what links all of Hyperion's stories with the much more precisely scientific sci-fi of Arthur Clarke's Earthlight or  Greg Egan's Diaspora. We shouldn't fall into the trap of saying that everything set in space is sci-fi; Star Wars, for example, is just the monomyth in space, no different from the myth of Orpheus or, fundamentally, The Lord of the Rings. The space-ness of it doesn't add anything except visuals - superficial stuff.

So much for sci-fi, then. But this post is primarily about fantasy, and this raises a more difficult question. Think for a moment about cinema; is Bruce Almighty a fantasy film? What about Twilight or Evil Dead? Equivalent books could (and, indeed, do, at least in the case of Twilight) find their way into the fantasy section in a bookshop.

It might be tempting to say that fantasy is about worlds that are alternatives to our own, either in terms of being (like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia) worlds with a hidden magic element, or in terms of being secondary-world fantasies (like The Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire). But I've already discussed the absurdity that that leads to.

I hope that so far, I've shown that there's a problem here worth talking about. To put it bluntly, I feel like most of the people in charge of genre branding for books use the following decision process: 'Does it have magic in it? Okay, it's fantasy.' (and yes, magical realism blah blah blah, I'll come back to the topic of magical realism later). Okay, we now have various labels like 'YA fantasy' and 'Dark fantasy', which I suppose are steps in the right direction, but you still see a big lumping-together of stuff on the fantasy shelves.

One last example: Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy version of Ocean's Eleven - it's a heist caper (which, in cinema, is a surprisingly clear-cut and distinctive genre, albeit a quite rare one), with all the particular kinds of character interplay and authorial sleight of hand that implies. And yet it sits on the shelf right next to his The Way of Kings, which is unabashedly a straightforward epic. Okay, author branding makes it good to keep all his books in one place, and most bookshops don't have a section for capers (though they'd normally end up in 'crime' alongside a bunch of books better described as 'thrillers'), but the two books are very different in feel and style.

So there's a problem here. I'm going to split at this point (ooo, cliff-hanger ending), and next week, I'll pick up the theme and offer my definition of fantasy as a genre (and then I'll get back to that WEIRD stuff).

Making the world WEIRDer

(Education; Industrialisation; Riches; Democracy; Conclusion)

This is a topic that's been doing the rounds for a couple of years now, starting with this paper by Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. The WEIRD paper (as I'll be calling it henceforth) is originally about the predominant use of American undergraduates as a sample in psychological studies. It turns out that a vast majority of psychological studies are carried out on the people that psychology academics have to hand - to whit, their students.

The WEIRD paper claims that the assumption made by all this research, that undergraduates form a representative sample - that is, that things which are generally true of undergraduates can be expected to be generally true of everyone else - is misguided, and that in fact undergraduates are a very poor sample, due to being from a quite peculiar background - a background of being Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (hence, WEIRD, which may be set to become this generation's YUPpy or WASP).

Now, there are some legitimate questions over the psychological science involved in this paper; not so much the claim that undergrads make up too much of our psychological sample, but whether or not the WEIRD diagnosis is correct and whether it is as much (or as little) of a problem as the WEIRD team think. Those complaints are for psychologists and anthropologists, though, and I'm neither (this article is a good starting point - I particularly enjoy its suggestion that we replace WEIRDs with MYOPICS: Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary).

I'm more interested in a broader issue which has appeared in some commentary on the WEIRD paper, an issue which falls more squarely within my remit as a philosopher. Roughly put, some people have made an argument a bit like this:

- The WEIRD paper can be taken as alleging that the most powerful nations in the world (at least, pre-2008) share an unusual mindset, the WEIRD mindset.
- These nations have imposed their values, the values which come from the WEIRD mindset, on other nations.
- The cultures and values of other nations have been suppressed or otherwise damaged as a result.

The first of these claims by itself could be quite controversial even in the wake of the original WEIRD paper, but I have seen references to other research which has pointed in this direction (though the only thing I can lay hands on at short notice is a reference to this book by Ethan Watters), and I'm happy to accept the claim.

What we're talking about, of course, is cultural imperialism, and there is much more to the debate about cultural imperialism than the WEIRD paper. Certainly, the Western tradition of cultural imperialism (and it does seem to be a primarily Western tradition) has a great many evils to its name, both directly and indirectly - it goes back at least as far as the slave trade, encompasses the partitioning and statification of the third world, and remains an issue today in our handling of post-war Afghanistan and Iraq, to say nothing of the growing question of how we should deal with China's essentially non-democratic power system (and, indeed, whether we should take the nation's hierarchy into account at all in our dealings with them).

There is definitely, therefore, a worry here, one that Watters and anyone else like him is entirely right to examine. But there's also a possibility of overstating the danger and going too far in the opposite direction. If we try too strenuously to avoid cultural imperialism, we will end up with unrestricted cultural relativism - the doctrine that outsiders to a culture can pass no judgement at all on the values of that culture.

Stated as such, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with cultural relativism. It's certainly more palatable than some of the more condescending and clumsy acts of imperialism in the 21st century. But the philosopher Jürgen Habermas pointed out that relativism is incompatible with the doctrine of human rights. Basically, a 'human right' is, by definition, a universal value (at least, to all humans and human-like sentients). So if you want to say there are human rights, you must accept the principle of censuring cultures whose values conflict with what you identify as 'human rights'.

This is where we find perhaps the most serious danger of cultural imperialism - who, after all, should decide what is and isn't a human right? The deeply anglocentric UN? If the WEIRD research is right, these decisions have been made, from the first, by people not necessarily qualified to speak on such matters.

I posed this question to a philosophy seminar group I was teaching last term, and most of them expressed a preference for relativism over human rights, at least in terms of us being the ones to pick rights to prescribe for all of mankind.

However, when I re-phrased the question as "Is there a universal human right to life?" that preference more or less disappeared. Put more strongly, we could ask "Is respect for a cultural value ever so important that one should allow that value to lead to the death of a human being?" If you answer no (and, though this is a debate for another time, I believe one should), then you accept Habermas' point.

You may have realised by now (no kidding) that I'm no relativist. In fact, I am quite stringently against relativism, for a whole wealth of reasons. However, relating this specifically to the WEIRD research, what I want to present, over the course of the next few weeks, is an argument that the values identified by the WEIRD team - education, industrialisation, richness and democracy ('western' isn't a value in and of itself) - are actually, properly construed, very good things to be promoting in all circumstances.

I'm not saying that these values as currently practiced in Western society should be exported - I think we actually do a pretty shoddy job of some of them, especially democracy - but the essence of each value remains important, and, I will argue, universal. I do not intend to be a cultural imperialist speaking purely to cultures other than my own - I would rather regard myself as a cultural absolutist speaking to all cultures (and indeed, my claim to be just this will figure in several of my arguments).

The question of whether I am fit to make pronouncements of this kind is a legitimate one, but one I will deal with separately. I also intend to offer some arguments as to why being WEIRD may have had a part to play in creating the dominance of western culture to date.

All of that will have to wait for other posts, though, because this one has gone on long enough.

What the other half are saying...

So, on the 30th of December, the Observer newspaper published this article, making ten predictions about publishing in 2013. I agree with some of them (ebooks continuing to cost less than an espresso), and I can't honestly say I outright disagree with any (except the tongue-in-cheek hope that Amazon will be boycotted over their tax practices - there's a knotty moral problem in this area, but I'll reserve it for another time). What niggled at me was the overall establishment sense of the piece, from the closest thing the British press has to a paper that should know better.

For example, prediction #3 reads: "As the self-published market booms, more writers will be scouted on Wattpad and more publishers will launch self-publishing services, like Simon & Schuster's controversial Archway." This is probably all true, but the description of Archway as 'controversial' is at best generous. Archway is Author Solutions, and that Writer Beware article summarises the problem better than I can.

In fact, as Writer Beware points out, contracting with Author Solutions to run a 'self-publishing service' is already in vogue among the big six, which is the single biggest piece of evidence yet to emerge that they really don't care about anything resembling ethics or responsible business practices. Now, the Observer is supposed to be Britain's most intellectually rigorous, sensibly left-wing paper - why is their mention of this trend so uncritical? It's not just British manners. Were I writing an article like this for the Observer (and yes, I'm aware there's a risk of being sued for libel, because our libel laws are ridiculous over here), this note would read 'More traditional publishers will contract with Author Solutions to tempt naive authors with overpriced 'self-publishing' package deals of dubious value.' - and if there wasn't the threat of lawsuits, I'd word this rather more strongly.

Prediction #5 puts a rather positive spin on things, too; "Traditional publishing will become more experimental." Now, without wanting to start sniping, I can't help but hear Joe Konrath's voice completing this sentence with '...in a desperate attempt to catch up to the innovations of the independent sector.' The examples the Observer gives focus on "stretch[ing] the definition of 'book'", but while there will be a degree of that on both sides of the fence, the internet has been doing this in a huge variety of ways for fifteen years or more, just as it's stretched the definitions of 'film', 'newspaper', 'comic' and countless other terms.

The innovations that are coming out of the digital publishing revolution aren't artistic revolutions - those were happening anyway, and will continue to do so. The digital publishing revolution is an industrial revolution, and its innovations are in pricing models, distribution, product life-cycles and so on. Perhaps most importantly, the digital revolution might be producing changes in reading habits, with more people now reading on their commutes, and possibly even more people reading overall, mainly thanks to Amazon and Apple - organisations that certainly can't be included in the label 'Traditional Publishing'.

#4 sounds hopelessly out of touch when it says, "Self-published authors will start to form co-operatives, such as Awesome Indies." It's the 'start' that's problematic; after all, I can remember finding my way to the Indie Book Collective website right at the start of my interest in self-publishing, almost two years ago. Where's the mention of Carolyn Arnold's Celebrating Authors, which has been knocking around for at least a year, or Kristen Lamb's #MyWANA, which has been a feature of the self-publishing landscape as long as I've been aware of there being a self-publishing landscape? For that matter, what about Booktrope, which an author-led group far more substantial than just 'a collective'?

One thing I wholeheartedly agree on is #9: "Libraries and publishers will fail to see eye to eye on ebook lending." But this is not a problem that's coming from the library side. This is conservative, reactionary publishers making life difficult for libraries and readers alike out of paranoia about lost profits. Given how (rightly) furious the British left wing got in defence of our libraries after the Cameron government came to power in 2010, why is there no censure at all here of the corporate publishers?

It would be both trite and unfair to suggest that this was a deliberate ideological move to close ranks with other big publishing institutions (the Guardian-Observer group of papers is the only segment of the British press to be financially protected from corporate and political influence). The problem in this case - and the only thing that makes this article worth talking about, because most of the other broadsheets will have made similar predictions, but without the independence that the Observer has - is rather that we, the footsoldiers of the digital revolution, are failing to get the message out.

If a paper as scrupulous as the Observer can be this blind to where the frontiers currently lie, and to the realities of policies like 'not seeing eye to eye' with libraries and hiring Author bloody Solutions to run your self-publishing platform, we have a long way to go before gaining the parity that we need and deserve with the traditional machine.

I'm not normally this belligerent, but the Observer article was a real eye-opener. There's a big gulf between how we see what we're doing and how the world outside sees it, and we're not going to overcome the prejudice against self-published books until we change that.

How do you feel about Normalcy?

For work the other day, I was in a class where the lecturer asked the students to answer the question 'What is normal?' For responses, she had them write whatever they thought of on sheets of paper (each with an image that had resulted from a Google search for 'normal'), and then she took a selection of these and put them on-screen for the whole class to see.

There were lots of obvious answers, both of a biological and a social kind. People talked about number of limbs and eyes, health and wealth, fashion and cliques. But there was something completely missing from the discussion and I was genuinely surprised that it didn't come up.

No-one, in a room that must have contained over a hundred students, most of them 18 or 19, expressed the opinion that 'normal' is an insult, or a bad thing to be.

Now, I've taken for granted for many years that 'normal' is something to react against. For me, it probably started as a way of coping with how unpopular I was in my teens (which may or may not have been my fault - even by the standards of teenagers I was a particularly unpleasant, self-absorbed and socially stupid teenager), combined with the fact that one of my closest friends discovered 'alternative culture' very early, and so I was freely exposed to a broad range of anti-normal forces.

However, as I came to the end of my time at school, the people I knew all seemed to have caught up. Very few of us managed to actually *be* non-conformists (since most non-conformism is really just conforming to some slightly less common type), but we all thought we were, and even rabid X-Factor watchers and people who held season tickets to local football grounds would claim that they viewed 'normal' as an insult whenever the topic came up.

I definitely think this is the right attitude to have to social norms (moral and legal issues notwithstanding). It just isn't true that there's such a thing as a 'normal' human being, and every time I've seen someone 'try to be normal', it's hurt them. I certainly did myself no favours in my few clumsy attempts to 'fit in'.

And pretty much everyone I know, I think, would agree (and no, it's not ironic that the one thing we can all conform on is the rejection of conformity - it's a perfectly natural logical inevitability. Stop trying to be clever ;D). Equally, I move in pretty much exclusively academic and nerdy circles, social environments which are structurally opposed to the social norm in pretty much every dimension.

So, where did this (fairly large) roomful of students who shared no such thought come from? Some of it may have been the way the question was set up, in that they were asked 'what is normal?' rather than 'what do you think about normalcy?', but the bits of discussion that I was in earshot of certainly ranged over both. The more aggressive non-conformists in the class may also have felt a little bit nervous about speaking up, too. But does that explain the total absence of a critical sentiment towards 'being normal'?

The difference is particularly interesting because the university I work for, Liverpool Hope University, specialises in taking in students from poorer backgrounds (unlike the university I study and sometimes teach at, which, like most of the top flight of British universities, is still predominantly the preserve of the middle economic classes). So there is a quite noticable class divide between the people who were in this class and the people who were and are my fellow students (and for what it's worth, the students at Hope tend to work rather harder and with rather more devotion, though that's both a potentially patronising remark and a blog for another time).

It might, then, be that my attitude to normalcy is an artefact of my background and the limited social horizons it has imposed on me. Maybe I've hung out with weirdos so long that they've become normal to me, or I've forgotten that other views exist (this is very possible). The alternative, and it's an alternative I find very appealing, in a self-exasperated sort of way, is that most people do share this attitude, but most people don't feel the same need to shout about it that those of us who are self-consciously anti-normal do.

This would mean in effect that the normal attitude to normalcy is 'Who cares what's normal?'

Here's hoping. Given what I've said about the kind of people I know, it's probably self-defeating for me to ask what your attitude to normalcy is, given that you're almost certainly either nerdy or academic in some way (let's be honest, if you've found your way to the philosophical blog of an obscure early-career fantasy author, you're probably some kind of nerd <3), but I am interested in your opinions. Do you ever long to be normal? Do you deliberately avoid things you think are normal? What does 'normal' even mean to you?

Well, that was disappointing...

Immortal Remains, after just over 5 weeks, has 19 downloads on Smashwords, of which only 7 are the complete story, of which only two were paid for (though those two sales did generate fractionally more money for me than 'Heaven Can Wait' did in four months back when it was in print).

The latest Second Realm episode has done even worse - zero Smashwords traffic after a week.

This is a fairly sharp kick to the optimism that 2012 gave me. It's tempting to fall into despair and worry that the 2300-odd downloads of Second Realm episodes so far have all been either by bots or people who aren't willing to continue to support my work when it's not absolutely free.

This time last year, that's probably where my thinking would have ended, and I'd have gone away to cry in a corner somewhere. However, I think there is actually another possibility; that people really aren't used to the Pay What You Like model. After all, the only real difference between The Second Realm 4.1 and 3.4 (which has, at time of writing, been downloaded 63 times) is that a reader has to click a few more links to get access. 4-1 is still available for free, it's just that you have to 'buy' it for nothing first.

The problem I'm running up against is that my following on Smashwords is quite opaque to me. My total download numbers go up by 30-50 most weeks, but I have no idea how many of those are real people, and of those who are real people I have no idea how many are fans coming back for the next episode as against people stumbling across a free short story and taking a copy just because it's there. About the only thing I do know is that almost none of those downloads represent people who are interested or passionate enough to leave reviews (hint hint ;) - and my thanks to the one fan who has left a review on Immortal Remains <3).

One possibility that has occurred to me in particular respect of the new Second Realm episode is that my regular readership - whatever its size - all value my work enough that they do want to give me some money for it (or at least feel that they shouldn't keep reading without giving some indication of support), but don't feel able to spare the money at the moment. It's a slightly comic, implausible idea, though (and, guys, if you are in that situation, take the story for free, because there'll be other opportunities to support me and you support me best by reading my work and telling others about it). Here are three data points I have noticed which might be of some minor interest:

First, downloads of earlier Second Realm episodes continue to rise more or less on the same trend as before. In fact, last week (being a launch week for a new episode) was the best overall since mid-November, in the wake of the last episode release. It actually looks like what happened was that the new episode aroused the same amount of interest in prior episodes of the series as all the other episodes have done when new, the number for the week only ending up low compared to other release weeks because there weren't the dozen-or-so downloads of the new episode to make up the difference.

Second, two people have added episode 4-1 to their Smashwords libraries without buying it. Now, I don't actually know what being added to a library means, except possibly that people are marking the story as one to come back to, but it must surely indicate someone taking an interest. Most of the Second Realm episodes are in 8-10 libraries (though 3-4, the finale of season 1, is still only in 3), but it is early days for 4-1.

Lastly, the overall position is less positive. Average numbers have been in a slow decline since the summer, and I don't think the pattern of downloads indicates the presence of a large dedicated readership; there's no obvious pattern at all to which episodes have more downloads than others. Episode 1-4 has 60-odd more downloads than its predecessor, and more recent episodes seem to come in pairs; 2-2 and 2-3 are separated by only 10 downloads, but each is 50+ downloads separate from its other neightbour - and the same is true of the next two pairs, as well.

So it's very difficult to get a handle on what's going on. If you think you know (and particularly if you're a regular Second Realm reader on Smashwords but haven't got the new episode yet), I'd love to hear from you with ideas. I can't rule out the possibility that this is just a post-holiday slump, with everybody working their way through the books they got for Christmas before getting back to more regular habits, but that flat zero is quite unsettling. Talk to me, folks!

What's Your Zig-a-Zig Ahh?

By which I mean, 'So tell me what you want, what you really, really want...'

(Dear, sweet Jesus, please let that joke still work.)

Anyway, here's a puzzle for you. I've said repeatedly that the only reason to be a writer is passion. After all, the money, the hours, and the uncertainty make it a pretty crappy career option. In effect, I'm saying that the only reason to choose writing as your career is if you'd write anyway, whether out of love or, as I prefer to think of it, an unreasoning, unthinking, unrelenting compulsion.

So the reason for wanting a career in writing cannot simply be the desire to write, since for the most part only writers who would write regardless of any obligation or resulting income will become career writers. In fact, almost universally, you'll need to do a whole lot of writing for free before you get anywhere professionally. So if we're not barking up this tree because we want to write, why are we doing so?

Freedom. Specifically, freedom to write. More specifically, these three kinds of freedom:

Economic Freedom

By which I mean the ability to afford time in which to write. It seems unlikely that we will, within our lifetimes, be freed of certain basic needs - food, water, shelter, the warm and welcoming company of other human beings - and so we all have to do something to ensure we accrue the means of satisfying those needs. That takes time - for most people, a larger slice of every week than anything else except sleeping - and it's time in which you can't be writing, unless you make enough from your writing to cover your basic needs.

This is the obvious kind of freedom to write; the more you make from your writing, the less you have to make elsewhere. The more you make from your writing past the point at which you can satisfy your basic needs (for me, this is somewhere around £6,000 per year, just by way of a basic figure, though I live in a cheap city for UK standards), the freer you are to do other stuff, stuff that will enrich your life and by extension your writing - research and so on.

But there are two other kinds of freedom which I think are really, seriously important and that maybe we tend to think less about when planning our careers.

Cultural Freedom

I'm not talking here about legal freedom. It's a travesty that there are writers anywhere in the world who deserve the legal freedom to write but do not have it, but other people have covered that subject better than I could many times over. I'm talking about something altogether less drastic, but in some ways more insidious.

Most of the writers I know can cite at least one example of a time when they've been pursuing the dream of writing and someone, whether a friend or family member, authority figure or complete stranger, has had a go at them for being childish, or not having a real job, or not doing their duty to society.

It can be an out-and-out attack, or just a stream of 'harmless' jokes - even a single offhand comment at the wrong moment - but it can be absolutely devastating. I've been lucky, personally; I move in unusually enlightened and creative circles. But I know some writers who've been almost completely broken by this sort of stuff. If you're a non-writer and you're doing this to someone, stop it. No arguments. No buts. You're not helping, and you're certainly not going to win anyone over.

Equally, I bet no-one talks like this to Tom Clancy or Stephen King these days. Or Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman (to whom we'll return in a moment). It's not just a matter of the money involved; it's the professionalism and consistency of the people earning it. It's the fact that they treated writing like a career until the rest of the world had to sit back and say, 'You know what, you win.'

That is what I mean by cultural freedom. But perhaps even more importantly, there's...

Psychological Freedom

I love this talk by Neil Gaiman for a lot of reasons. One of my favourite bits is the bit at 7:08 where he talks about 'impostor syndrome'. I've had a similar paranoid delusion once or twice about the proverbial man with the clipboard. I still catch myself feeling guilty doing things which are parts of my writerly career. For example, on Wednesday evening, I was up against some pretty bad writers' block, and did one of the things that tends to work for me: I switched to a different activity which also serves my career goals (in this case, I switched to research - reading a biography of Alan Turing).

And purely because I was switching from part of the job I wasn't enjoying to part of the job that I then did enjoy, I felt guilty about it. Why?

Well, there's a difference between writing and most other jobs; it's a very nebulous, fluid activity. That's one of the things I find really appealing about it; if I get stuck or bored with one aspect of it, I can switch and do something else, almost whenever I want. Most conventional jobs allow no such freedom.

But I shouldn't feel guilty about this - it's one of the privileges I earn in exchange for giving up the better rates of pay, better job security and so on that come with conventional jobs. I feel guilty because I haven't given myself enough psychological freedom to write, or to be a writer.

If you're aiming to be a professional writer, I think all three of these freedoms should be on your list of goals. As for how to achieve those goals? Well, how about this; if I work it out first, I'll let you know, if you promise to do the same for me ;)