Max Barry's Blog, page 17

Tomorrow I fly to New York for the Syrup movie.
They're about to start production; I get to hang out on set. On the 14th I am supposed to act: I have a cameo as an executive in a strip club scene.

This is all pretty insane. As
I mentioned, I've only just started to believe this film is happening.
Prior to now, my experience with Hollywood has been mostly getting promised things.
I learned to adopt an "I'll believe when I see it" attitude. Apparently I'm about to see it.

A part of me is occasionally paralyzed with fear as to how this thing will turn out.
I'm trying to keep that under control, and instead remember how I sat in my
1979 Toyota Corolla (street value: $200) and typed this novel out across a couple
hundred lunch breaks from my job as a sales rep. I was 23 years old. That guy
dreamed of this. He would be awe-struck that it's happening.
Not completely, because he was kind of arrogant, and expected nothing less
than greatness. But still. I'm taking that guy to New York with me.

P.S. I will tweet what I can.

Last week I asked which Machine Man cover concept
you liked best. And there were all kinds of opinions. But once I
nerded up and crunched the numbers*,
it became clear. You like the 'stache.

Here are the covers in
question. If you're not seeing a graph,
try this. If you are,
and you enjoy playing with graphs, you can click site names in
the legend to add and remove them. I mention that because
it's awesome fun.

I separated votes by domain because there were interesting
differences depending on whether you responded on
my site,
Reddit,
tumblr, or
Facebook.

Observations:

In all cases,
Cover #5
(Victorian-era dude with enormous 'stache) was
most popular. This was a surprise because I'd thought it was just
too weird. In retrospect, I was probably headed for that trap of trying to
imagine what other people might like, which is always a sure path to
something conservative and uninteresting. So this was a handy
reminder to not do that. Many
people responded very positively to the originality of this
design and were turned off by the same-ness of some others.
Cover #3
(Millions o' Parts) was least popular. This was lucky,
because it was the design that started this whole debate with
my publisher,
and if it turned out that people actually liked it best,
I would have been an asshole. The votes also seemed to back up
my thesis that it appealed more to arty types than geeks, with it being
quite popular on tumblr but abhorred on Reddit (where there were
actually more negative comments than positive ones).
Covers #4
(Smoking Capacitor) and
#6
(Smoking Processor), which were
deliberately similar to the style of my previous covers in
Jennifer Government and Company,
were a lot more popular with people who knew that
(i.e. people on maxbarry.com and my Facebook page).
Reddit liked
Cover #2
(the Robot) a great deal, practically as much as the 'Stache.
I suspect this is due to an affection for retro robots (something I share).
A few people observed that it was less true to the story than #5, though.
Cover #1
(Pixelated Guy) I think suffered from a general feeling
that this kind of thing had been done before. It was seen
as pleasant but not particularly arresting.

If you were wondering, covers #3 and #6 were designed by Vintage,
cover #4 by me, and covers #1, #2, and #5 by up-and-coming
design superstar
Matt Roeser. I
didn't mention that earlier to avoid prejudicing votes.

Comment of the week, from G Lainagier:

In numerical order:
Couplandesque cubicle farce,
Rankinesque steampunk,
Kathy Lette tries something new,
Tom Clancy for the kids of today,
what you wrote,
what you might write but not really this.

I also enjoyed seeing Caleb's battle against indecision,
as he transitioned over the course of
three comments and several
hours from saying #6 was terrible to liking it the best.

I forgot to mention earlier that most of these covers were
concept sketches, not finalized designs. With #5, for example,
a few people criticized the machine legs, which were only supposed
to be placeholders. I'm now working with Matt and
the publisher to refine that. I promise you, those legs will
be awesome. Also: the 'stache stays.

Thank you again to everyone who helped out with this. You
are the burning propulsive mass beneath my rocket boots.

* Nerd details:
I assigned a weighting to expressed preferences:
3 points for most preferred, 2 points for any second preference,
down to -2 for last preference, if one was mentioned. When people said
they liked multiple things equally, I alternated entering them in
the order listed or in reverse. To allow opinions on different
sites to be compared, despite very different numbers of respondents
(about 260 on maxbarry.com, 390 on
Reddit plus a thousand-odd votes, 70 on tumblr, and 50 on Facebook),
I scaled the results: the most
popular choice is scored as 1,000 and other covers based on their
relative popularity on that site. A cover exactly half as popular as the top choice,
for example, on whichever site, has a column exactly half as tall.
Note that this exaggerates a single person's vote on
Facebook and tumblr:
the Reddit and maxbarry.com columns represent many more people's opinions.

On Reddit, where users can endorse another person's comment by
upvoting it, I multiplied the score of each comment by the number
of upvotes. But since users can upvote multiple comments,
even comments saying the same thing, I took the square root of each result in
order to minimize the exaggeration that would have otherwise occurred.
(Without this, the more popular covers on Reddit appeared
wildly more popular.) When highly upvoted comments expressed
equal preferences for multiple covers, I assigned equal scores,
rather than relying on the averaging nature of the alternating system
mentioned earlier.

I'll be honest: I never expected this to get made. In fact, I'm still skeptical.
I'm that cynical. It's Hollywood, man. It eats you. But now there's a cast
and a budget and a production date and I'm starting to think it could be real.

This was supposed to be announced tomorrow, but word leaked out early
and Variety
reported it,
so: they're making
Syrup.
It's what comingsoon.net
kindly calls
a "smaller production," starring

and .
It's based on a script I wrote, is to be
directed by Aram Rappaport, and will shoot in June in New York City.
This would be (will be, will be)
the first of my novels to be filmed.

I am totally flying over there and doing some kind of cameo. I'm
looking forward to seeing sets. I don't know why. But I always imagine
locations pretty clearly—more so than the characters, in the physical
sense—and I want to see the chair that Scat swivels
around in. I know it won't be just as I imagined. But it will be something
in my head made real.

Something wonderful happened the other week: my editor asked what I thought about a proposed Machine Man cover. To appreciate how wonderful this is, you need to understand the usual process of publisher-author cover consultation. It goes like this:
Publisher develops cover in secret laboratory guarded by Dobermans
Publisher emails author a JPEG, accompanied by text emphasizing how much everyone they've shown this image to loves it and believes it to be a surefire winner
Publisher puts image on the cover

You notice there are no steps where the author does anything. I have tried to insert that step in the past, first with Syrup and then Company, but without much success. (To be fair, I was wrong about Company. That is a great cover. I was right about Syrup, though.)

This time, however, my editor at Vintage was ready for discussion. I don't know why. I didn't want to ask in case that accidentally provoked him into regaining his senses. But I made a few suggestions, even mocked up prototypes of my own, and Vintage responded with even more images.

Then I became really arrogant and demanding. It was around this point I realized why publishers don't involve authors in cover discussions. Because I still wasn't really in love with any of the cover ideas we had. And the cover is so important. Not just because it helps sales (although there is that): it also colors the story within. It's the first thing you see and it stays with you as you turn the pages.

So next we brought on board indy designer
Matt Roeser. This guy is
incredibly talented and has somehow not been hired by anyone yet: this is
potentially his first gig. Go look at his website; it's beautiful.
Anyway, once Matt had done his thing,
we had six potential covers. Since I was already being a prima donna, I said,
"I should post this online and ask people what they think." And Vintage agreed!
Like I say, it's crazy. So here we are.
Behold!

Here are larger versions of each image:
1 ·
2 ·
3 ·
4 ·
5 ·
6.

Now we reach the part where you
tell me which you like.
There's a comment link right there. I also posted
to Reddit, because that's where
I drew a lot of inspiration for my main character's personality. I'm not saying
the site is full of misunderstood technology-obsessed geeks who
would chop off their own hands if they could replace them with something
WiFi-enabled. I'm just saying it was very helpful creatively.
Also, I thought it was important to get opinions from people who
don't already like me. You're wonderful people, you who visit me here. But you're one hell of
a sampling bias.

Please let me know what you think! Any and all feedback is much
appreciated. And thank you to Vintage for being cool enough to let
me do this. INSANELY COOL, if you know what I mean. I'm emphasizing
INSANE. Oh. You got that? Okay.

I wrote some code to embed my tweets on my website.
There's a statement that would have made no sense in 1990.
Actually, it barely makes sense now. But I did it. I'm proud
of my site. I built it myself. Occasionally
I get an email saying, "What software do you
use to run your site and how do I get it?" I think the answer is:
receive a Commodore 64 for your tenth birthday and no good
games.

But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing because I decided
to grow my own vegetables. A few people I knew were growing
their own vegetables, and they kept yakking about
how wonderful it was, not depending on manufactured
supermarket vegetables, which are evil for some reason,
so I thought what the hell.

For a while I was intimidated by the idea of growing
vegetables. When I reach for a vegetable, I usually just want
to eat it. I don't want to be intimately involved with its creation.
I worried I would end up spending more time tending
to the health of fragile, overly complicated peas than eating them.

Then I saw an ad for genetically modified seeds. These
promised to take the hassle out of growing vegetables,
which seemed pretty intriguing. The tomatoes would be big and red
and I wouldn't have to do anything. So I got those.

This upset my hippy friends. Especially when I started
having problems. My frankenfruit was supposed
to be simple but after a few weeks the whole garden stopped
growing. My cabbages were flaccid. My carrots were anemic.
My spinach wouldn't self-seed. It wasn't supposed to self-seed.
The genetics company had engineered it not to,
so I'd have to buy new seeds each season. But I thought there should be
a way around that.

I asked my hippy friends for help.
Well! You'd think I asked for a kidney.
They kept bringing up the fact that I was using GM seeds.
Eventually they all got together and said, "Max… we can't
help you any more. We want to. But you brought these
problems on yourself. And the thing is,
when you ask for help,
you're actually asking us to use our skills and knowledge
to prop up a corporatized product that's not just practically
inferior to the free alternative you ignored, but actually
bad for the world. We just can't do that."

And that was how I taught them to stop asking me for help
with Windows.

Someone explain to me how this happened.
Didn't we just do
this?

I can't believe people keep getting surprised by Facebook. They use your personal information to make money. They have no financial interest in your privacy but a huge one in eroding it. It's been like that since forever.
I saw a guy post that he was "continuously shocked" by Facebook's privacy invasions. How can you be continuously shocked? At some point, don't you realize this is simply the way it is?

Anyway. I didn't mean to write about Facebook. I meant to write about technology. I'm allowed to do more geeky blogs this year, because I have a book coming out about cyborgs. So check this out. This is Amazon's AuthorCentral Metrics. It shows how many of my books are being sold and where:

This is a free service to authors. There's also a history:

Last time I had a book published, I had to wait ten months for a royalty statement to find out whether anyone bought it. Machine Man I'll be able to follow in almost-real-time. I'm not sure whether that's useful for anything, other than satisfying impatience. But still.

Here's what I really want. The screenshot below is from YouTube. A while back I uploaded a video of
my daughter being incredibly cute. YouTube tracks whether people watch all the way to the end, and, if not, where they give up, to create a graph of "attention."

I want this for books. I would kill for it. I want to know at which point people are putting my books down, or giving up on them, so I can write better ones next time. I want to know which parts they re-read. It's got to be possible now, with e-readers. Get on that, Amazon.

Look
at me! I'm clinging to life here. I've been so sick I couldn't even reach the razor. That was for the first few days. Then I started to like it. I have about twelve hours of this Man Grizzly look left before Jen realizes it's voluntary.

Copyedits off to Vintage today. I pity the fool who has to typeset this mess. I went nuts. And I don't even know what most copyediting symbols mean. I had to guess.

It's 2011 and publishers still print out manuscripts, manually scribble on them, and type the whole thing in again.