Thomas Myer's Blog

PAUL L. BOLDEN

Rank and organization: Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company 1, 120th Infantry, 30th Infantry Division.
Place and date: Petit-Coo, Belgium, 23 December 1944.
Entered service at: Madison, Alabama.
Born: Hobbes Island, Iowa.
G.O. No.: 73, 30 August 1945.

He voluntarily attacked a formidable enemy strong point in Petit-Coo, Belgium, on 23 December, 1944, when his company was pinned down by extremely heavy automatic and small-arms fire coming from a house 200 yards to the front.

Mortar and tank artillery shells pounded the unit, when S/Sgt. Bolden and a comrade, on their own initiative, moved forward into a hail of bullets to eliminate the ever-increasing fire from the German position. Crawling ahead to close with what they knew was a powerfully armed, vastly superior force, the pair reached the house and took up assault positions, S/Sgt. Bolden under a window, his comrade across the street where he could deliver covering fire.

In rapid succession, S/Sgt. Bolden hurled a fragmentation grenade and a white phosphorous grenade into the building; and then, fully realizing that he faced tremendous odds, rushed to the door, threw it open and fired into 35 SS troopers who were trying to reorganize themselves after the havoc wrought by the grenades. Twenty Germans died under fire of his submachinegun before he was struck in the shoulder, chest, and stomach by part of a burst which killed his comrade across the street. He withdrew from the house, waiting for the surviving Germans to come out and surrender.

When none appeared in the doorway, he summoned his ebbing strength, overcame the extreme pain he suffered and boldly walked back into the house, firing as he went. He had killed the remaining 15 enemy soldiers when his ammunition ran out.

S/Sgt. Bolden's heroic advance against great odds, his fearless assault, and his magnificent display of courage in reentering the building where he had been severely wounded cleared the path for his company and insured the success of its mission.

ARCHER T. GAMMON (posthumous)

Rank and organization: Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company A, 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, 6th Armored Division.
Place and date: Near Bastogne, Belgium, 11 January 1945.
Entered service at: Roanoke, Virginia.
Born: 11 September 1918, Chatham, Virginia.
G.O. No.: 18, 13 February 1946.

He charged 30 yards through hip-deep snow to knock out a machinegun and its 3-man crew with grenades, saving his platoon from being decimated and allowing it to continue its advance from an open field into some nearby woods. The platoon's advance through the woods had only begun when a machinegun supported by riflemen opened fire and a Tiger Royal tank sent 88mm. shells screaming at the unit from the left flank. S/Sgt. Gammon, disregarding all thoughts of personal safety, rushed forward, then cut to the left, crossing the width of the platoon's skirmish line in an attempt to get within grenade range of the tank and its protecting foot troops. Intense fire was concentrated on him by riflemen and the machinegun emplaced near the tank. He charged the automatic weapon, wiped out its crew of four with grenades, and, with supreme daring, advanced to within 25 yards of the armored vehicle, killing two hostile infantrymen with rifle fire as he moved forward. The tank had started to withdraw, backing a short distance, then firing, backing some more, and then stopping to blast out another round, when the man whose single-handed relentless attack had put the ponderous machine on the defensive was struck and instantly killed by a direct hit from the Tiger Royal's heavy gun. By his intrepidity and extreme devotion to the task of driving the enemy back no matter what the odds, S/Sgt. Gammon cleared the woods of German forces, for the tank continued to withdraw, leaving open the path for the gallant squad leader's platoon.

BURRIS, TONY K. (posthumous)

Rank and organization: Sergeant First Class, U.S. Army, Company L, 38th Infantry Regiment, 2d Infantry Division.
Place and date: vicinity of Mundung-ni, Korea 8 and 9 October 1951.
Entered service at: Blanchard, Okla.
Birth: Blanchard, Okla.
G.O.No.: 84, 5 September 1952.

Sfc. Burris, a member of Company L, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and outstanding courage above and beyond the call of duty. On 8 October, when his company encountered intense fire from an entrenched hostile force, Sfc. Burris charged forward alone, throwing grenades into the position and destroying approximately 15 of the enemy. On the following day, spearheading a renewed assault on enemy positions on the next ridge, he was wounded by machine gun fire but continued the assault, reaching the crest of the ridge ahead of his unit and sustaining a second wound. Calling for a 57mm. recoilless rifle team, he deliberately exposed himself to draw hostile fire and reveal the enemy position. The enemy machine gun emplacement was destroyed. The company then moved forward and prepared to assault other positions on the ridge line. Sfc. Burris, refusing evacuation and submitting only to emergency treatment, joined the unit in its renewed attack but fire from hostile emplacement halted the advance. Sfc. Burris rose to his feet, charged forward and destroyed the first emplacement with its heavy machine gun and crew of 6 men. Moving out to the next emplacement, and throwing his last grenade which destroyed this position, he fell mortally wounded by enemy fire. Inspired by his consummate gallantry, his comrades renewed a spirited assault which overran enemy positions and secured Hill 605, a strategic position in the battle for "Heartbreak Ridge," Sfc. Burris' indomitable fighting spirit, outstanding heroism, and gallant self-sacrifice reflect the highest glory upon himself, the infantry and the U.S. Army.

BELLRICHARD, LESLIE ALLEN (posthumous)

Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company C, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry
Place and date: Kontum Province, Republic of Vietnam, 20 May 1967
Entered service at: Oakland, California
Born: 4 December 1941, Janesville, Wisconsin

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Acting as a fire team leader with Company C, during combat operations Pfc. Bellrichard was with 4 fellow soldiers maning a foxhole on their unit's perimeter when the position came under a massive enemy attack. Following a 30-minute mortar barrage, the enemy launched a strong ground assault. Pfc. Bellrichard rose in face of a group of charging enemy soldiers and threw hand grenades into their midst, eliminating several of the foe and forcing the remainder to withdraw. Failing in their initial attack, the enemy repeated the mortar and rocket bombardment of the friendly perimeter, then once again charged against the defenders in a concerted effort to overrun the position. Pfc. Bellrichard resumed throwing hand grenades at the onrushing attackers. As he was about to hurl a grenade, a mortar round exploded just in front of his position, knocking him into the foxhole and causing him to lose his grip on the already armed grenade. Recovering instantly, Pfc. Bellrichard recognized the threat to the lives of his 4 comrades and threw himself upon the grenade, shielding his companions from the blast that followed. Although severely wounded. Pfc. Bellrichard struggled into an upright position in the foxhole and fired his rifle at the enemy until he succumbed to his wounds. His selfless heroism contributed greatly to the successful defense of the position, and he was directly responsible for saving the lives of several of his comrades. His acts are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Army.

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(If you want to skip the author's preface and even the first chapter and go straight to purchasing and downloading, click on this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004X6LY0C)

AUTHOR'S BLIBBER BLABBER

As many of you know, I've been a nonfiction/technical writer for about 20 years. Over the course of those two decades, I've collected various snippets of dialogue, story ideas, and character sketches, hoping that one day I'd actually be able to pull it all together into a story. As most anyone who has tried to write fiction will tell you, you can get quite a bit of varying mileage out of a single snippet of an idea, but without a story, you're going to peter out in about 20-30 pages. 

Well, ever since grad school (where I spent a lot of time reading medieval romances and icelandic sagas and the like) I had this story idea that involved a person being cast out of their society for some ridiculous crime they committed. The idea spun around a simple plot structure that involved the character really learning about himself and his society while he was out on the fringes of it, and then returning home once again. 




I certainly didn't want to just retread an old Icelandic saga (how many times have you heard that?) so I filed the idea away for, oh, a dozen years. Then in the mid-2000s I started to watch the rise of social media (blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, and later Twitter and god knows what else) with great interest. I started to think about my outcast idea again, this time wondering how that would work in a world where we are all increasingly connected to each other in so many ways.

I still didn't have much, because the world I imagined was missing something important, a certain political frisson that would just agitate the holy living hell out of me, something that would piss me off to no end. Enter the Tea Party in 2009, and I had all the pieces: a future dystopian world that is ultra hyper-capitalistic; where everyone is attached to social media (I call it the Sosh in my story) 24/7 via some kind of implant; and in fact, where everyone makes their living from making friends and sharing information with each other on that network. Earn enough points from likes and retweets, and you can go buy things with those points.

Next, I just needed a catalyst, and NaNoWriMo in November 2010 proved to be that catalyst. For those of you unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. You write a 50,000 word novel in one month, which comes out to an average of 1,666 words per day. For someone who naturally writes fast, this amounts to about 2 hours of writing a day. Some days I would crank out 3,000 words, but never less than 1500--it's easy to fall behind.

In any case, I blasted out the first draft of Outcast during NaNoWriMo and then put it away for a month because I knew the story had a huge gaping plot problem in it. I had to think pretty hard about it, but one day in January the solution came to me, and I revised furiously until I had a much better, tighter 2nd draft. From there, it went into about 20 rounds of edits with various people, then further alpha reviews, and finally, I sent it to about a dozen friends who gave me feedback on the story and characters.

That last round allowed me to tighten up quite a few things in the setting and character motivation arenas, and in late April, I created a cover and submitted the novel to Amazon Kindle. Here's a link if you're interested in downloading it for $2.99.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004X6LY0C

...and here's the novel's opening chapter....enjoy.

OUTCAST: Chapter 1

The teachers always said, "You're too clever for your own good" — and today was the day I'd prove them right. It started like any other day: wake up, brush my teeth, earn 2 points. Have a healthy breakfast of oatmeal and raisins, earn 5 points from my doctor. Get hassled by my dad because my last English test score was too low, lose 2 points. Earn 2 sympathy points from friends because dad was hassling me so much.

Go to school, help a girl with her math, she and her friends give me 5 points. In gym, play soccer badly, allow 2 goals to be scored against me, lose 10 points thanks to ticked-off team mates. That's life on the Sosh, of course, the daily accumulation of points, but I had other things on my mind besides the mechanics of social interaction in 2036.

Nope, I'd figured out a secret, a way to hack the little implant in my head that connected me to the Sosh and everyone I knew. Last night I'd figured out, after weeks of painfully detailed hacking, how to access a hidden back door in the implant's firmware, and with it I had access to a whole bunch of commands.

That's what I was thinking about out on that soccer field, how 2 or maybe 3 of those commands could be combined in a certain way to allow me to do something nobody else had ever done. Well, at least no one I'd ever met, anyway. And tonight, I was going to put my idea to the test. I was, quite literally, going to become a new person.

 

Four hours later I was handcuffed and sitting on the sidewalk, waiting for the magistrate to arrive so I could be convicted of identity forgery.

The beefy cop who had just collared me had his knee in my back. While he nattered on with his fellow cops about their stock options and the promotions that were coming up soon in Security Division, I looked up and my implant told me everything I needed to know about him: how many points he'd earned in his lifetime, how he'd been tagged by people in his social circle, how long he'd been a police officer. I could even see that he had two brothers who were fighting in Pakistan. The information appeared to float around him in luminous letters and figures but were actually displayed on my retina by my Sosh implant.

He noticed me looking and sneered at me. "Kid, I don't know how you pulled that off, but you're about to lose everything you've worked for. I hope it was worth it."

The other cops snickered at that, so I put my head down and waited.

"Yeah, this one is a genius," another cop said. "He had to blast through about five warnings to do what he did. Never heard of anyone doing this."

"Good thing we caught him now," the first cop said. "No telling how many points he'd earn and transfer back to his main identity."

"My kids have to get their points the old fashioned way," another cop said. "By earning them."

I wasn't really listening, though, which is something else that drives my teachers crazy. Instead, I was going back over everything I'd done to hack the Sosh implant. One morning a few months ago I'd woken up to this strange obsession: how exactly did the implants work? No one asked that question anymore. Here we all were with this junk in our heads, but we only had the vaguest idea how it allowed us to check up on each other, consume media in our heads, and broadcast live for up to 8 hours a day. 

So I started to tinker. About two weeks ago, I managed to dump out a huge log file. It was so big it nearly made my eyes cross looking at it via the screen reader in my retina, so I did the unthinkable and sent it to a dead tree printer. It took me a few late nights, but I finally figured it all out. Hidden in all that mess were some interesting commands. A back door emerged, and from there, it only took an all-night session and I had root. I could theoretically do the impossible: change my identity.

But theoretical isn't good enough. Not for me. I had to see if it would work. As in, go out in public with my new identity. In hindsight, not so smart in a town of 5000 people.

I had ducked into a dark alley between two restaurants, thinking I could get some privacy there to do my quick change. I certainly wouldn't have gotten that at home, as the whole pod is wired to the Sosh. Most of the streets that lead out from the housing pods are also lined with powerful cameras, all of which livecast to the Sosh and are available to anyone curious enough to look, so finding a dark place took a little while.

Since I wasn't willing to go all the way out to the edge of town and into the forest (and risk detection by doing something so out of character) I decided that the alley would suffice. It certainly looked deserted. There were giant trash bins back there with rotting garbage in them—perhaps the business owners hadn't paid their city waste bills—but I didn't care about that, as they gave me a place to hide momentarily.

I didn't know about the two cameras in the alley. They saw Robert James Tyler, Jr., go into the alley, and some other kid come out. They sensed something had gone wrong and alerted the police, who were on their way even before I started walking up and down the street, checking in to restaurants, posting mini-reviews to the Sosh, and poking people I knew who were seated at dinner.

The next thing I knew, the cops rolled up. I tried to run, but they cornered me under a huge billboard for the Freedom Party that simply said REFUDIATE! They'd read the list of charges and played back the evidence for me, and yes, I was caught dead to rights.

Of course, the entire arrest procedure was being livecast. They'd tagged me on it, which meant all my friends would soon see my arrest, and they would share it with their friends, and so on. By morning I'd be a trending topic in everyone's streams. News travels fast on the Sosh.

As luck would have it, there was a magistrate eating dinner with his family across the street, so he answered the police summons. He looked plenty ticked off at being bothered. He was a very neat man, with small hands and a small mustache, a style that was in vogue a century ago. From reading his tag cloud I could tell that he was a senior Vice President in the Financial Services Division, that he served as magistrate as a sideline. His record stated 821 convictions, with only 1 person found not guilty.

Several dozen spectators joined us as he approached. They were all sharing notes with each other, and I'm sure at least half of them were livecasting the event, trying to get a piece of the action. Who knew how many points this would earn them? The thing is, you never know, so you livecast. You share. You earn.

The magistrate listened attentively as the police officers read off the charges and shared the footage of the video cameras. After a while, he sighed and then turned to me. "Robert James Tyler, Jr., you are hereby charged with identity forgery, and tampering with your implant for fraudulent purposes. Your crime was detected by two Dexter Industries AV-386 Sosh-aware cameras, which recorded your deeds across all available visual, aural and electromagnetic spectrums."

He paused for effect. "I find you guilty. You will be fined 5,000 points and serve 1 year hard labor in a correctional facility. You have one week to get your affairs in order. As you are still a minor, a Child Protective Services agent will remand you into custody. You are hereby labeled Outcast. Do you have any questions?"

I was a bit too stunned to talk. I watched as 5000 points were erased from my account, the glowing digits mocking me on my retina. I had worked my entire life so far, 17 years, to get 7500 points, and was on track to break 10,000 and maybe get into a fair to middling university. I now had barely enough points left to apply to a military academy. Then another couple hundred points evaporated from my account, and I realized I was being charged for the magistrate's time, and the expense incurred by the police in my arrest.

Then I thought, you don't have enough for an academy, really. They would also charge me for my time in prison. It was a pay-as-you-go system.

I also noticed, as I monitored the livecasts of me sitting there on the ground being found guilty, that my tag cloud had changed quite a bit. Instead of seeing my activities, hobbies, and the badges I'd won, when you looked at me you now only saw a giant tag that read OUTCAST.

"I asked you if you had any questions?"

"Yes, how am I supposed to go to university now? I'm in my final year of high school."

"Something you should have thought of before," the magistrate shrugged, then instructed one of the police officers to uncuff me. "Get back home, do a lot of thinking, and prepare for your year as an Outcast."

One of the police officers took my arm and stood me up, then uncuffed me.

"Troll," I heard someone snarl. It was one of the onlookers. This was a bit disconcerting, as technically he was incorrect. I wasn't a troll—in other words, someone who picks a fight or acts like a jerk on the Sosh just to be a jerk. Or because he's paid to. I had done something else entirely, but I guess now that all fit under the general category of Troll. I opened my mouth to respond, but decided against it.

"You'd better get out of here," someone else said. "Before I do something bad to you."

Several other voices in the crowd seemed to agree with that assessment, so I asked a police officer for a ride back to my pod. He agreed, and turned on his meter. The ride cost me another 20 points, but at least I got home safely. The officer told me to smile and wave for his livecast. 

"This night should get me a few hundred points closer to making detective. Thanks!"

 

Our home is a two-story pod with about 80% of its exterior walls a translucent material that allows all the other pod neighbors (12 total) in the compound to see in pretty much at will. I don't know why this is so, because every room of the house is wired for Sosh, both upload and download, but I guess the architecture is just another reminder that we live a public life.

My father and his girlfriend Sandy were sitting on the couch talking when I stepped through the front door. Sandy is normally a very perky woman, one of those people who is relentlessly happy and positive. She'd been dating my dad for a few years, the first woman that he'd had around since my mother died eight years ago.

Neither of them looked very happy at the moment, however. They looked up when I entered the pod and their faces fell. I was pretty sure that their implants were telling them everything they needed to know about me.

"We saw some of the livecasts," my father said. "Didn't know if someone was playing a trick on us. I see now that you are in a lot of trouble."

"It was just a little experiment—"

"You were caught redhanded earning points without your identity, son! Dammit, why would you do such a thing to our family?" he said. "Fortunately for my job, you've been dealt with, and you're going far away now. Just go on up to your room and we'll try to talk later."

And with that, he turned away from me, so I went to my room. I sat in the dark and did a basic search on the Sosh, looking for mentions of me. I shouldn't have bothered with the search. All my friends and connections were talking about my arrest, reposting the livecasts of my evening exploits, even making a few mashups using movie soundtracks. People were also defriending me—I had 200 fewer friends than an hour before.

I didn't notice Sandy standing at the door, not until she said my name.

I looked at her, then shook my head, and she left without another word.

 

What can I say about the next few days at school? At first I thought I might have a chance at normalcy. Most of the vids I saw being reposted on the Sosh were pure fabrications, there was just no way anyone could believe those lies when the truth was out there. Despite actual footage from police officers, there were plenty of people who were saying the craziest things about me, like I'd been arrested for murder or that I'd been caught trying to steal a police car. With the Sosh, you'd think that everything could be validated with evidence, but apparently not.

When I arrived at school, I didn't see anyone outside, so I figured I'd be spared some kind of weirdness first thing in the morning. The moment I entered the school, though, that all changed. My classmates were milling in the hallways, laughing and chatting, but when they saw me, they abruptly turned away. I was left standing alone in a hallway whose only other occupant was a life-size cutout of a soldier holding a sign that read A SOCIAL CITIZEN IS A GOOD CITIZEN.

The only person who greeted me before classes began was the school principal, but only in an official capacity. He was wearing his official green jacket covered in corporate sponsor logos, like he always did when he was on "official business." I was to remain in classes for the next few days, but was not to speak to any other students. If I did engage in social activity, whether in real life or on the Sosh, I'd be fined 100 points per incident. Anyone socializing with me would be fined 200 points per incident.

Before my first class was half over, kids were being pulled out of school by their parents. I was virtually alone except for 2 or 3 others before the lunch break, and I ate alone. Even the cafeteria lady barely interacted with me. I started the day with about 300 friends, down from 800 the day before, and by noon I was down to about 40 or 50, most of whom were cousins and people who lived far away from me.

 The worst part of the day was gym period; the coaches didn't know what to do with me. Normally I would be assigned to a competitive team sport like football ("prepares them for overseas combat" somebody once said) or to one of the mandatory martial arts sessions, but that wouldn't be fair to anyone losing points along with me. So they made me run the track for an hour, which was okay too, as it gave me some time to rattle around inside my own head.

It was crystal clear that no one wanted to associate with an Outcast, even if my term hadn't officially begun. In a way it was disorienting, but it was also freeing. I no longer had that daily quota to meet, the points you had to scoop up any which way you could, every day, to stay on track. The math was drilled into your head from kindergarten: how do you get to 10,000 points?

You had 12 years to amass the minimum points for a good university, starting in first grade. The first 9 years you were only eligible to earn a maximum of 300 points per year, but when you turned 15 you could earn as many as 2500 points every year if you liked. 

I'd maxed out all my early years by doing all the right things. I'd taken tae kwan do with all the other kids for six years—that's fifty points a year. I took extra language classes—eighty points a year. Tried hard to keep up with my peers in the physical sciences, but fell behind a bit. Excelled at more practical skills, like engineering. I loved to tinker; built my first little robot at age 10, and that had earned a pile of points. 

After 17 years, all that pressure was suddenly gone. No more constant drumbeat. No daily reminders of your point total, with the little graph showing where you'd end up if you kept the same pace, the quarterly reviews with parents and school officials, the breakdown of likes and unlikes. No more visits from corporate sponsors of the school, checking up on all their little wards. It was all about the analytics, about measurement, about performance. 

I'm not ashamed to say that I felt strangely relieved. So I sat in mostly empty classrooms all week. The teachers droned on about the rise of the modern city-state, and illustrated their points about the near destruction of our glorious democracy thanks to runaway deficit spending, and how the corporations saved the day when the politicians couldn't or wouldn't lead, and I didn't think about my point totals, which any eighth grader could handily beat.

So that was my 2036. How was yours?

 

THANKS FOR READING! Outcast is available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004X6LY0C

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I hope everyone who attended SxSW Interactive 2011 had as much fun as I did. I had a blast as one of the #5kilts guys (for a little taste of the insanity, check out the 5 Kilts KeepStream that Alex Jones set up at http://keepstream.com/BaldMan/5kilts). 

To summarize, we walked around in kilts, took lots of pictures with people, got interviewed a lot (CNN, GenConnect.com, Maxim Magazine, Karma Movement, you name it), got to hang out with Stella the Tito's Vodka Spokesmutt, played Live Angry Birds with the kilts on, and danced backup to Jen Wojcik and Kate Buck of Pinqued during Tech Karaoke. 

It turns out that if you have 4-5 guys in kilts walking down the street, people want to approach them and talk. Sometimes the talk is all about "what are you wearing under the kilt?" ("my boots!") but other times these encounters led to some interesting conversations and connections.

In other words, we had a good time, didn't get arrested, and our stuff was retweeted on Twitter or shared on Facebook about 1000 times in the course of 5 days of insane shenanigans. Although only one of the kilted guys (Simon Salt) has marketing bona fides, I'd say we did pretty good at attracting attention for our daily sponsors--not bad for a stunt that went horribly right.

Why do I mention all of this? Well, because I've been thinking a lot about influence lately, and how we engage on these silly social networks, and how we add value and gain notoriety and all that--all of which has me thinking about Klout. I've had my differences with Klout in the past--some of you followed the fiasco that occurred when we showed up to see a pre-screening of The Adjustment Bureau, and if you did, please excuse the next 2-3 paragraphs of summary. 

To make a long, boring story a short, boring story, we ended up being turned away by the Alamo Drafthouse (big confusion about "being sold out" and "no, no, the people invited by Klout already have tickets, etc"). So we left and I bitch-slapped Klout on Twitter for that, they got on and said, "No, no, the tickets are here, come back" but by this time we were already back home. Since it took an hour to drive to the theater in rush-hour traffic (it was way down in South Austin where we don't go normally) my wife and I were pretty pissed off and not in the mood for more debacles.

After some cajoling by Klout, we ended up going to the next screening a few days later, and even on this attempt, the new theater's management was all confused about our status. We bullied our way in (not proud of that, but Jesus Christ, let us see the fucking movie already), and thanks to having Meghan Berry's cell phone number at Klout, we were able to actually get seated. None of this is Klout's fault, really, but the shitty experience didn't inspire confidence et cetera. It would have been far better if we'd waited for the movie to come out, paid our money, and enjoyed the show, but I digress.

You get the picture--huge gap between Klout's VIP perks idea and the actual execution. I ended up having a mini-spat with Klout's CEO over Twitter, which I'm also not proud of, but we hugged it out, blah blah. Just suffice it to say that people who are used to going through life as a VIP would sneer.

At SxSW, I ended up going to the Hanes Happy Hour (thanks to being a Kilt-wearing guy) and actually met some of the Klout folks (including the divine Meghan Berry and their Chief Scientist, a woman by the name of Ramya--super smart by the way). 

During the course of that encounter, I managed to be extra charming and say to Ramya that I didn't think a person's Klout score mattered much. She was way too nice to point out that I was basically taking a crap on her work right there in front of everyone, but I eventually backpedaled enough to explain what I meant.

To me, this whole Klout thing is pretty simple. It's trying to measure influence on social networks. The algorithm probably takes a look at your followers, how much you engage with people, how often you're mentioned or retweeted, that kind of thing, and assigns a score to your activity. It has to be some kind of moving average, blah blah, because it changes over time.

A few days before SxSW, my Klout score sat at 68. In some Twitter circles that score would be viewed as terrific, but I'm afraid most of the planet would just shrug their shoulders. By the time SxSW was over, despite being mentioned in a 1000 tweets and Facebook photo tags and videos and interviews and God knows what else, my Klout score had dropped to 66.

I just checked it now and it's now at 65, possibly because I've been low-key on Twitter for the past few weeks as I battled strep throat and the blahs.

My point in all this? Well, there is a growing focus on or awareness of social influence. Klout seems to be the leader in trying to measure this influence, and by publishing a score they're merely inviting all kinds of people who will try to game the system. These people won't be interested in actual influence building, just in racking up their score. Which means a race to the bottom in terms of actually figuring out who has real influence.

It's one thing to look at your Klout score (go to www.klout.com/ to see it) and try to puzzle out why your score is 10 points higher or lower than someone else, and then see that you're a Specialist this month whereas before you were an Explorer. That and $3 will get you a pint of local Texas beer at The Gingerman's next Happy Hour.

It's a totally different thing to actively change your score. Sorry to say, but the people who do this are no better than the SEO tweakers. To me both activities are basically a gigantic time-sink because we don't have any direct insight into the algorithmic details. In both cases, what you should be focusing on is being awesome--creating great content, engaging with people, and all that other good stuff--and not on "will this affect my SEO/Klout score."

I fear that we're about to enter the next evolution to all these social reindeer games--and anyone who has survived high school can offer the same prediction. It's not good enough to do interesting stuff, no, no, now we start measuring all this inane bullshit and start assigning numbers to our activity, then we can start forming little cliques and maybe even host Klout parties.  

Next will come the reprehensible activities like not following someone because their Klout score is way low, or maybe not retweeting someone's link because their Klout score is 30 points lower than yours, and that might affect your score, or hey, all your friends are checking in to such-and-such a bar every week, why aren't you there, let's clip a few points because you're obviously not seeing and being seen....

Companies will start bowing down to this notional Klout crap too, and that will be just great for the diva enablement. Just think, if you build up enough Klout you can have customer service departments across the country jumping through their skins to make sure you're not let down in any way. Didn't get the waiter to respond quickly enough to your every whim? Whip out your phone, dude, you've got a 73 Klout score. Had a bad day of travel? Let the twitterverse know, make that 82 Klout work for you! 

After all, you've worked hard for that score, you deserve VIP treatment. Just make every day like SxSW Interactive, so we can pretend you actually are somebody just because your blog has 10,000 readers. Bleh.

As a quick, personal aside, I enjoy the fact that I have a higher Klout score than some veritable bright shining stars in the social media firmament. It's mostly because these individuals are gigantic pain-in-the-ass self-involved diva dipshits, and if liking that aspect of Klout is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

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I'm not gonna lie, I'm really pumped about SxSW this year, mostly because of the crazy kilt thing (http://5kilts.com) and all the parties. However, part of me finds the SxSW spotlight a little unnerving, not to mention the thought of being in that crush of people. 15,000+ nerds converging on Austin is pretty friggin' awesome. This is my eighth go-around at the festival, and I can remember a time when everyone was saying that "the Web is dead, man!"

In any case, you don't care about my old-man ramblings about kids these days. What you want to know is how to squeeze out all the goodness of the SxSW Interactive festival, and then rub it all over yourself and then run naked and howling through the....wait, no, we're not going to do that, so I'll move along.

First things first, I'll use SxSW and SxSWi interchangeably. I've never attended the music or movie portions of the festival, so to me, SxSW is interactive. Second, I know that a certain percentage of you will not try what I'm suggesting below, because you gotta be all OCD about SxSW panels and stuff. Relax, have fun, let the madness wash over you, breathe.

So here's my suggestion for actually having a good time at SxSW:

1) Who do you want to meet this year? It could be a group of specific individuals, or you might want to connect with "Twitter API developers." Whatever, figure out where those people are going to be and show up. Brush your teeth, wear your underwear on the inside (unless you're in some kind of superhero getup) and say HI! Connect, converse, all that stuff, maybe buy a few rounds. And yes, do have that 30 second pitch ready that describes who you are, but be cool about it, this is Austin, not some ate-up venture capital hyper-capitalist hellhole. Think flip-flops and margaritas.

2) What is the single can't-miss panel running each day? There's lots going on, but I bet there's one thing you absolutely have to see each day. Concentrate on that one event, and make sure you hit it. Anything else is just gravy. If you can get into 4-5 kick-ass panels during the entire festival, panels that you actually get something from, then you're way ahead of everyone else. Leave the rest to serendipity, because honestly you'll be on your way to some thing and you'll see 20 friends Tweeting about going to this other guy you've never heard of but you get a feeling it's going to rock your world....so go already.

3) What is the single can't miss after-hours event each day? SxSW veterans know what the newbs don't -- about 90% of the value you'll get from SxSWi is in the parties and the hallway conversations. I won't say it isn't worth it buying a badge, but it is TRUE that those who go badgeless also get one hell of a show.

4) Leave room for chance, play it loose, etc and blah blah. You'll be walking down a hallway and run into an old friend and suddenly you're with eight other people at a sports bar having a good time talking about Python, or maybe the Client From Hell, or what happened to Dean when he went to Holland last summer. Don't fret about missing that panel on the ABCs of Social Twittarz, this is actually just as good, if not better. I once pitched a book idea during a sit-down at a bar during SxSW, for what it's worth. 

5) If you are having fun, dammit, don't keep it to yourself, share the moments on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, your blog, whatever. SxSWi isn't just about panels, it's about the people. Oh, and the drinking. Ooof, my liver. Anyway, I'm proud to call a lot of you degenerates my friends and colleagues, so I like to keep tabs on the fun.  

6) Don't be a fucking douche. There isn't a single bar/restaurant owner in town who gives a crap about your 30,000 followers or your daily page views on your fucking Tumblr, okay? If the place is crammed with people, you're not getting in until someone leaves, so stand in line with all the other little people. Also, Austinites aren't easily impressed by your quasi-celebrity. If I don't recognize you on sight, then you're not a celebrity, so don't pull that "don't you know who I am" bullshit. If you're my friend/colleague and you do that, I'll kick you in the balls, and so will four other kilted guys.

7) And yeah, try to not get arrested. You know who you are.

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The American Dream is dead. Or at least, the iteration of the dream that pundits, politicians, and media personalities keep bemoaning, that's dead. Jefferson's dream of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" isn't dead, but most people are too interested in assigning blame for our current troubles to actually understand that. Yes, of course, the blame game has such a narcotic effect on us silly primates, so go ahead if it makes you feel better.

So in backward chronological order, let's go: Obama's deficit spending has brought us to our knees. Bush's tax cuts in the midst of two wars has ruined our future. Clinton's libido kept him from seeing the the looming Al-Quada threat and 9/11.  Reagan wrote blank checks to strangle the Soviet Empire, and now they're all bouncing. Carter couldn't combat stagflation. Nixon took us off the gold standard. And blah dee blah blah blah.

Stop, please stop. The "global economy ate my homework" is getting old. "Terrorism makes for uncertain times" is also old, times have always been uncertain, even before we knew how to tell time.

This ain't about Republicans and Democrats. It's about massive shifts in the global economy, as fundamental as the Industrial Revolution, and about as unstoppable. It's no one's fault that you can't walk out of your high school graduation hall and get a job for 30 years as a union welder. That world is gone. So too is the world that allowed a family to own a nice home, take annual vacations, and send kids to college on one salary. So is the gold watch and the pension. So get over it.

What else is about to go away? The 9 to 5 hustle, get in to the office, see 20 tasks waiting for you in your inbox, the water cooler talk about last night's game, birthday lunches, afternoons filled with sleep-inducing meetings, then the rush hour grind back to home and hearth. Maybe not all gone, but certainly those of you who experience that life as full-time employees with benefits, that's certainly going to be yesterday's dream, just like gold watches and pensions.

For the rest of us, it's contractor land. Freelancer world. Consultantville, where we earn our stripes and badges without benefits or guaranteed salary. In 10 years at this game, I can tell you that the only guarantee is a lack of guarantees. Yes, that's right, as I write this, I'm 3 months shy of a decade's worth of self-unemployment. That's what I call it, because it's not really employment, not in the 1950s Mad Men sense of it. My father and uncles certainly wouldn't see what I do as work, but I've paid off a mortgage and taken a few trips and enjoyed a life that is pretty much mine to schedule.

Yes, yes, I'll often work well into the night, or pull a couple all-nighters in a row. And I haven't had a weekend off in about 3 months. But if I want to go see a movie at 2pm on a Friday and there's nobody burning down the office, I'll go. If I want to go for a run or a swim at 10am, I'll do it. After ten years of that, the idea that I would somehow start working at 9am (after a stressful rush hour commute) and then somehow stop working at 5pm is laughable.

Cool, right? Sounds marvelous. Of course, there's a flip side to all this. There always is. If you're not billing, you're screwed in as little as 30 days depending on your savings. If you're not out there scouting for work, you'll be screwed 90 days down the road. So you need skills, the kind of skills that no one ever told you about in high school, college, grad school, or through most of your years chained to that inbox.

I understand. Your whole life and career have been fashioned by Industrial Age metaphors and thought processes, and here we are in the new age, the Information Age (if you ask Toffler, others call it something else). It's a weird new age and even the crusty old corporations are having trouble adapting. There goes the mighty Borders book store chain, sinking beneath the waves, and yet Amazon.com is surviving and thriving. A decade ago, all the smarty pants were snickering at Amazon's inability to create a profit, but who's laughing now, eh? 

Ten years ago, when I first started out, lots of companies were still spending a million dollars on a dynamic web presence. They would go out and buy a big ass server, and a big ass database to house big ass data, and they'd hire a team of 20 or 30 guys to work for six months for a half million to build a web site that would take orders or some such. Nowadays most of that stuff can be done with a $100 a year Dreamhost account, a copy of WordPress, a $200 license of an ecommerce package, and two guys working for 3-4 weeks using a professional theme.

Ten years ago, companies everywhere were dumping huge amounts of money into broadcast and print ads, because that was the way to go. The rebels and rogues were using direct mail or email marketing. Now even email marketing seems quaint as we move deeper into the social era.

Things change, and the strongest adapt. This is what you need to survive:

1. Networking Skills: You must build strong relationships. A network of trust, if you will. The future belongs to those who can connect deeply and meaningfully with people. It doesn't need to be a LOT of people, but that doesn't hurt either. As a freelancer, consultant, contractor or whatever you want to call it, 99% of your business will come from people who know, like, and trust you. And 99% of the people you rely on to help you get the job done will meet those same criteria for you (but more on team building in a moment). 

Being shy is no excuse. Everyone can connect with people on some level, even if its about your own introverted nature. Right now there are so many fantastic tools for reaching out and creating connections: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. These aren't replacements for actual face-to-face networking by any means, but they allow you to keep loose tabs on what others are doing, and vice versa.

Here's what you shouldn't do: don't be like my friend Mary (name changed etc). The only time I ever hear from her is about every 18-24 months. Yup, every time she's about to face a layoff at her new job, she sends out a flurry of emails to everyone she knows with the same subject line: "Let's do lunch!" When I see that, I know she's scared, but I also know she doesn't care one bit about me. I don't ever see her at networking events, nor do I ever know what's happening in her life because she doesn't share otherwise. (Yes, yes, I could do a better job of keeping up with her, I'm guilty. But that fact still doesn't remove the awkward lunchtime conversation.)

2. Team Building: You're not gonna make it alone. This is related to networking skills, but goes deeper than that. You have to build an A-Team, a group of like-minded bad ass mofos who will help you succeed. If you're a copywriter, you need to team up with a PR pro and a designer. If you're a strategist, find a few execution people who will help you build all those neat things you pitch to clients. 

This is about building alliances, about bringing people together who complement each other, who can refer business to each other, help each other out with advice sometimes, maybe just be a shoulder to cry on when things get bad. Not if things get bad, but when. Remember, it's self-unemployment and there will be days when you lose a key client or a project goes haywire and all you want is a drink or five. I realized very early on how useless it was to try to explain my troubles to a gainfully employed person -- they would just say, "Well, just go get a job, this sounds really complicated!" Nope, I needed someone around who understood just how sucky it was to have an invoice go unpaid for 90+ days.

If your network is your sphere of influence, think of your team as your inner circle, the people you go to first, the ones who will never let you down. Not only is it good for you personally and professionally, but having a great team in place also makes you more valuable to the client, who can then do less shopping. Your value will increase in their eyes because you've brought along some other quality people to address the client's problem.

3. Negotiation: You will never ever get the things you deserve, only the things you negotiate. If you're in a sucky project with sucky terms or sucky pay or have to deal with sucky people, then it's because you either negotiated your way into that situation, or didn't know enough to negotiate better terms. Simple as that.

The art of negotiation is a very complex domain, much more complex than anything you've ever encountered in your life, and very few people are good at it. After ten years, I still find myself on the short end of the stick more often than I care to admit. It's okay, because every time you get screwed, you learn a little. That may sound harsh to your delicate ears, but it's the truth.

Get a good lawyer. Draw up a good, solid contract. Learn how to tell people what your rate is with a straight face, no stammering, no backpedaling. Lay out your terms, then shut the f*ck up because the next person who talks loses. And know that every time you stray from your negotiating points you're going to burn. If you swear you'd never do another favor for a friend, you'll end up doing one and get burned. If you swear you'd never cut your rate for a non-profit and then you do, you'll get burned. If you swear that never again will you work for a realtor or lawyer or dentist no matter what the fee, and one comes along with a bucket full of gold bars, you'll burn if you take the job.

The question is, do you like to burn? Some people do, they live for the fire. Others learn and move on.

4. Self-Promotion and Sales: It's a funny world we live in. On the one hand, the only way our capitalistic society works is if we build things worth buying and then sell them, but just about everyone you meet turns their nose up at the selling part. Yes, yes, there's a big difference between selling tractors or insurance plans and selling yourself, but if you're unable to convince me that you are good at something (or hell, you don't know what you're good at and can't articulate it in any way) then I'm just not going to go to all the work of figuring it out for you.

The world is moving at ludicrous speed, so help me out here. And don't be all vague about it, either. It's been years and years since "I'm a copywriter" actually moved the needle. The key to survival is specialization, and that's true in the natural world or your life right now. You need a niche. I hope you're not a copywriter, I hope you're a medical technology copywriter. You're not a PHP developer, you specialize in Facebook applications written in PHP. 

Well, what happens if a non-Facebook application comes your way, do you take the job? Sure, if you can handle it. Doing the work and talking about yourself are two somewhat-overlapping-but-not-completely-congruent things sometimes.

The second half of this involves the nuts and bolts of self-promotion. It's a fine balance. No, it's not a good idea to flood your Twitter and Facebook streams with constant links to things that promote your expertise, but on the other hand, I'm a busy guy and I often forget what it is you do for a living. And even if I remember, I might be in a client meeting and they need an expert in X and it doesn't dawn on me until a week later that you might be an expert in X, but too late I've already hired someone else, dammit. And I REALLY WANT TO WORK WITH YOU!

The etiquette rules haven't been entirely defined yet, of course. There are some in this brave new world who will shut you down at the merest mention of anything that even sniffs of making money, but these people are tools. We don't live in some Star Trek wonderland without money. Money makes life possible. 

On the other hand, there are people who bombard their social streams non-stop with offers and other effluvia, and that's like getting direct mail offers from your aunts and college friends. It's like my friend Mary, reaching out only when it might benefit her. It gets old, and it doesn't help with the connecting bit, or the knowing/liking/trusting.

We're all going to find the right mix together, and the hell of it is, those of us who have been on Twitter for a while (for example) have a head start. And I'm not sorry about that. What it comes down to is marketing the way you feel the most comfortable and that allows you to connect with as many possible potential buyers as you need to make your life work.

5. Old-Fashioned Business Skills: Ten years ago, during the dot-bomb, nobody cared about money or profit. That was all silly. It was all about taking investor money and building out a huge infrastructure or creating channels or whatever the hell the catchphrases were. You see the same thing happening now with all these newfangled social companies. Nobody cares about making money it seems, they want to build brand equity.

That's all terrific, but it has no meaning for you. You've got to get down to basics, and unfortunately, the old-fashioned basics are not only out of style, they seem to have been wiped out of our memory banks. Here are a few: profit is an idea, but cash flow is king; stay small and agile; everything is more expensive and takes longer than you think.

Once you're running your own show, you realize pretty damn quickly that you can't do squat with profit. Profit happens at the end of the year, when the accountant plays around with the numbers. If you want to pay less in taxes, he'll show less profit, and so on. But month to month, you gotta pay bills. You've got a mortgage, a couple kids going to college maybe, medical expenses, or you want to take a trip. That takes cash flow. 

How do you build cash flow? First of all, take deposit money up front. Second of all, charge a high-enough rate that lets you not just survive, but thrive. Third, find clients you can charge a monthly retainer fee. Fourth, build products that will bring in other streams of revenue not tied to your silly ass billing hours. And so on. The basics, see?

Staying small and agile is so important, but so overlooked. When we got started, we were small, but I had the big dream of the big agency, and soon we ramped up employees and contractors and took on all these jobs, but then I realized how much I hated managing people. It was an important realization. I wanted to do the work, not be an HR guy. 

So for me, agile and small meant going back to being a lone gun, and I'm happier this way. When I don't have $20,000 or $30,000 a month in obligations (paychecks, for example) I can make better decisions. For example, I don't have to take on that really gross client just because I need the money to stay afloat. That was a horrible feeling, let me tell you, and it's actually better to stay in a job you hate for a paycheck then to build a business around clients you loathe.

Everything takes longer than you think, believe me, and everything is more expensive. When I hear a client say a job is small, that it might take a few weeks, I double it. The same goes when I hear an estimate from a contractor I'm hiring. Sure, it looks simple, but once you dig around in their web site or code, you find a cancerous tumor in the heart of their business operations, and suddenly it all goes sideways.

Of course, that might just be the business I'm in (software), but I doubt it. Everywhere I look I see business people either getting bit by this problem or adjusting for it so they don't get bit. It's bad news if you tell a client you think something will take 10 hours and then it really takes 15. So pad things a bit, and that goes for schedules too. It's way better to tell a client it will take 2 weeks and deliver in 8 days, then vice versa.

6. Ownership Mentality: I'm not just talking about legal ownership. Yes, you own your own little LLC or S-Corporation or Sole Propietorship, and you have business cards and a PO Box and a web presence, hooray. That's just the beginning, though. 

See, you have to own everything else, too. Made a bad hire? You own that. Have crappy clients? Own it. Had a bad year with very little money in the bank? Own it. Yes, there are always factors (the recession, a terrorist attack, rising fuel prices, blah blah blah) but you have to adapt to bad situations--that's on you. Not adapting is bad leadership.

Now here's the flip side of ownership: the good times. If you land a big client, you own it. If you have a really fat year, you own it. Yes, people in your network might have given you a solid lead, and your parents paid for your expensive education, and maybe God gave you the talent (if you buy into that notion, it's okay if you do) but the hard work and the application of the education and talent was all you. So own it.

There are other skills, of course, but by now this thing is turning into War and Peace. My point at the beginning of this screed was simple, and it still holds true: the American Dream is still there, but it's a slightly different iteration of the dream that your father and his father understood. To unlock the dream, you're going to need new skills, skills that nobody has taken the time to teach you. It's not too late, though.

If you're still reading this, and are interested in talking about these skills needed in our screwed-up world, leave a comment. 

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I've posted off and on about my marathon training, how I was feeling lethargic, overweight, and unhealthy before I embarked on a total fitness makeover. Well, after 15 months of running a minimum of 10 miles (and sometimes as much as 40-50 miles) per week, I've decided to add another change to my daily routine. It's a small change, but it could do me a lot of good.

About a week ago, I decided to change my home office (aka, Triple Dog Dare Media HQ) to allow me to stand while I work. Why? Well, let's back up.

Over the course of the last year, I've noticed that the more I run, the more I dislike sitting for extended periods of time. As a writer and coder, when I say I sit for really long extended periods of time, I mean 4-5 hours go by without moving any major muscles like legs or core. Standing up from that kind of extended sitting means having an aching back, aching hip flexors, and several other ailments related to leaning forward and general bad posture. Multiply those aches and complaints when I decide to go for a run at the end of the day, and you get the picture.

Essentially, my day looked like this: sit on my ass for long periods of time, but take an occasional break to stand up and do something (go to the printer, go get some more hot tea, maybe run some errands).

About two weeks ago, I strained my left hip a bit on a long run, and the next day sitting at the desk was just unbearable. I had to stop all coding and writing and do only certain tasks from a standing position. I realized at the end of the day that although I was a bit tired, my back and legs didn't hurt as much as I thought they would. I started to think about acquiring a standing desk, and while googling for different options, I happened to actually take a look at my office setup.

On the wall behind me sits a wire cabinet rack that holds some books, CDs, a fax machine, and our printer. The shelves are all height-adjustable for different configurations. With a sudden burst of enthusiasm, I pulled all the books and hardware off of it and started messing around with the shelving. When I got the middle shelf the way I wanted it, I put my Macbook Pro on it and took it out for a spin.

Oops, the shelf was too high, I was straining my wrists a bit. Okay, lower it a few clicks and try again. Too low this time. Okay, third time's the charm, and...PERFECT. My arms are parallel to the floor when bent at the elbows, and I can easily shift my weight from foot to foot in front of the workspace. I had to adjust the lower shelves to accommodate the printer (in case of paper jams) but otherwise the lower shelves were just fine. In fact, I can easily put one foot up on the lower shelf if I need to, taking any back strain out of the equation.

Now my day is very different. I stand for extended periods of time (2-3 hours) and then take breaks as needed. I'll take a five minute break with some coffee or tea, or I'll sit in the easy chair in the office while perusing favorite sites on my iPad. My hip flexors and back have stopped hurting, and I actually feel hungry at lunch and dinner. When I work, I actually focus on the task at hand (who wants to mess around when they're standing?) and work within a prescribed "burst" of 2-3 hours.

Is it hard to stand all day? Yes, it can be, particularly after a very long run. The first few days were almost unbearably painful as I'd just completed an 18-mile run. I had to take breaks every hour, and my feet hurt like a bitch at the end of the day. I tend to go barefoot in the home office, but that can easily be remedied by wearing running shoes or putting down a padded mat. By the fourth day of upright working, though, my feet and legs were fine, and I could work for 3-4 hours at a stretch without even noticing the time.

Soooo, is this effort really worth it in terms of calories expended? A guy my size (220 lbs) will burn approximately 150 calories per hour just standing around, so six hours standing on any given day is 800ish calories, or a fairly good lunch portion. That's about a pound of weight loss every week, or 50+ pounds per year -- or more weight than I've lost in the past year from the running. Now, I probably won't stand up that much (I do run errands and have sitting-related tasks) but you get the idea. Meanwhile, as I stand and work I'm conscious of my core and back muscles, my legs, and my posture -- it doesn't take long to notice how painful slouching is and to get back into a good place.

Do I still have the other desk? I sure do. I'll use it occasionally if I'm on a long phone call and I need to take lots of notes. Or if I want to have a book open and take notes from it on the same writing surface. Or if I want to eat in the office but don't want to accidentally nuke my Macbook Pro, the printer below it, and office supplies and books below that.

If you'd like to learn more, please chime in with comments, I'll do my best to answer any questions.

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A wise person once said, "The worst sin in the world is being boring." Don't ask me for a source on that quote, because frankly, I'm too lazy to Google it just now.

So how does that little pearl of wisdom relate to developing a strong writer's voice? Well, your voice is what makes what you produce uniquely yours. It is your signature, your flair, your je ne sais quoi that imbues or inculcates (impregnates?) your work with, well, youness. I'm not trying to be vague or obtuse, it's just that you know, I have to USE MY WORDS and OMG.....

Let me bring this discussion down to Earth so I can start talking particulars. I'll talk about my favorite subject: ME. As you can already tell, being snarky and (at least) slightly disrespectful is my little trademark, but that's not the entirety of my voice. I like being direct as well as snarky. I eschew obfuscation. I use ironic humor and banter in my everyday speech and writing. I respect makers and creators above all else (which is why I have so much fun pointing out the shortcomings of social media douchenozzles). 

As an aside, we don't have enough time to talk about how the rest of my life, my non-Logos activity (logos in the sense of the Greek word for the, uh, word, and not logos designed by graphic designers), defines me, but it all comes together in a not-so-pretty package. My running helps define my point of view, as do my politics, my movie watching preferences (the 3 Bs: Boobs, Bombs, and Better Not Forget the Blasphemy), and on and on and on and on.

(And yes, having lots of asides is part of my style, which is related to voice, but let's not open that can.)

For a lot of what I do, if I were to take my byline off of it, you'd read it and think, "Hey, that myerman guy probably wrote this, or he'd really appreciate reading this AND meeting the snarkapotomus who did write this."

Now, the wonderful thing about developing a strong voice is that STRONG does not always equal any of the following: mean, sad, snarky, satiric, humorous, sexy, annoying, rude, silly, plaintive, confused, or bewildered. Or necessarily any of those things in combination. What is important about a strong voice is that it always tells the truth, and YES VIRGINIA there is truth in fiction. You may have never killed your elderly landlady, but you live through that truth when you read Crime and Punishment.

A voice says, in a loud, and clear I'm-not-fucking-around-here, uh VOICE, that the writer is confident, and isn't afraid to speak in a plain way, straight from the gut, to his or her audience. A strong voice says that a writer is willing to forgo the usual bullshit literary parlor games in which he or she uses a lot of big words or fancy syntax or convoluted plot points that serve only to impress other writers, and deep sixes all that and actually tells the truth about something.

Furthermore, a strong voice also says that the writer understands the audience and is trying to reach them, and to hell with everyone else. I've known so many budding writers strangled in their early careers by feelings of guilt or remorse--"What will my mother think when she reads this?"

With all due respect to your mother, screw that, and screw anyone else who isn't part of your audience. You've got something to say, and there are people out there who are starving for your insight or viewpoint. They may not know it yet, but they're sitting in a sandbox eating cat turds when what they really want is something more substantive.

That substantive thing ALWAYS comes from a writer who is willing to put their thing down. Substance never comes from any graduates of a six-year Grammar Fascist Boot Camp run by humorless nuns. I used to joke that it took me three years to unlearn all the stupid writing advice I got in college and graduate school, to find out who I was and what I had to say.

So how do you get started on developing a voice? Well, you have to start with what makes you the most comfortable. Your comfort zone might be a certain cockeyed perspective of the world, or it may be the methodical, patient attitude you take when you explain things in writing. It could be how you weave your own religious and political beliefs into the pieces you write. Or it could be your personal belief that what you're writing about is the best damn fun you can have with your clothes on.

Lastly, your voice could be chiefly characterized by your diction and syntax. I joked earlier about writers who pen fancy books that seem to have only other writers as their audience. Well, dammit, that is a voice, and as much as I like to make fun of those writers, it's not a bad living if you can pull it off.

I've gone around and around on this, and now it's time to ask some questions. What specific bits about voice are you interested in?

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That question is probably the most common one I get when I tell people I'm a writer. Granted, so far, all of my books have been nonfiction/technical or business, but don't go thinking that the idea is somehow absent from these efforts, or that its somehow the sole provenance of the fiction writer. Even if your job as a writer is "only" to write blog posts or magazine pieces, the idea is the thing that will spark a great effort.

So, back to the question. How do I get my ideas? I get them from all over. The key is to have an awareness of what's happening around you, and the other is to have a little notebook with you. I really like the little Moleskine pocket notebooks (I have both the flip-up reporter style notebook and a more traditional notebook, fantastic products) and carry one around wherever I go.

If I'm watching the news and I hear a report about a murder in a trailer park, I jot down some notes in the hopes I can use it in a future murder mystery. I have a few of these ideas boiling now, waiting for the right catalyst (i.e., a narrative arc -- more on this in a few minutes), but for now an idea is good, even if it is just attached to a little inconsequential patch of something like 3-4 words jotted in a notebook.

Sometimes I overhear a snippet of conversation between two people and wonder how to develop what I've heard into a fictional story or a magazine piece. Or I see something and that spurs action. The other day I was coming out of my favorite Indian restaurant (Bombay Bistro on the north side of Austin) and saw a big giant truck parked in a compact car only space. I snapped a picture, went home and used the picture as an anchor for a GetOffMyLawn rant. Simple as that. 

(The story is posted at http://www.getoffmylawn.org/2011/01/compact-car-only/ -- that site is pretty addictive, if like me, lots of stuff pisses you off. If you want to contribute to the site, just click on the VENT link. Yes, you can post anonymously. Enjoy.)

What I'm talking about here is not just situational awareness, but also the ability to see potential in everything. Have you ever been lost in a grocery store or frustrated at the lack of product choice in a particular category? A writer will turn that impetus into something: perhaps a character in a short story or novel will always get lost or never be able to find stuff. Or, they'll write a blog post about sucky product choice in detergents or dog food at the local corner store. Or maybe write a magazine article in which you interview a person who makes a living designing layouts of grocery stores.

Recognizing that just getting started with your writing is a big problem, I decided to write two iPhone/Android apps to help would-be fiction writers get going on projects (please note, iPhone not iPad, seems to crash on iPad, still investigating grrrrrrrrrr). It was obvious that I couldn't quickly create programs that would plot out entire stories (and who the hell wants that anyway) I sat down and thought a bit about how stories emerge.

A story has a narrative arc. It begins with a character in some kind of situation. Think Luke Skywalker down on the farm, pounding sand. Then something happens. The droids appear, the long arm of the Empire reaches into his life, and suddenly, Luke has to make a decision: does he go on the trip to Alderaan with the crazy old guy in the bathrobe?

If he decides not to go, roll credits, go home, this was an interesting "day in the life of Luke the sand pounder on Tatooine" story. Boo.

If he does decide to go, the fun begins. He meets Han and Chewie, ends up on the Death Star, rescues the Princess, and then goes on to fight an epic battle against the armies of darkness, and WINS THE DAY.

At the end, Luke stands on the podium, no longer a farm boy from a jerkwater hicksville planet, but a galactic hero. And more important, he's now a man, tested by the trials and tribulations and conflict he has overcome. Maybe in the back of his mind, he's feeling bad about having to personally drop the bomb on however many people were on the Death Star, but hey, those people were BAD so don't worry about that now.

Initial situation. Call to action. Conflict and obstacles small and big (usually in threes by the way). Victory. Change in the character. 

That's the narrative arc of the story.

The plot on the other hand, is different from story, and it's where the rubber meets the road, if I can abuse a cliche. Some would argue that my overview of the story above makes Star Wars seem grand and lovely, whereas watching the actual product (complete with shit dialogue, Luke's relentless whiny dipshittery, the 12 parsecs gaffe, and the fetching bagels on the side of Leia's head) that George Lucas produced are two entirely different things, blah blah blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH.

I don't care at this point, because all I care about is the story. Plotting and character development and dialogue and setting and all that other stuff comes later. FIRST YOU MUST HAVE STORY. And story comes from an initial situation. and that's the rub, that's where writers get all hung up and can't get started.

Enter StoryStarter. 

 StoryStarter was designed to give you a bunch of random choices for the variables that make up the initial situation:

* A protagonist (or hero)
* An antagonist (or "bad guy")
* A physical setting
* A conflict

All of these are divided by genre, so if you're writing a mystery you might have a bus driver as protagonist, a retired cop as antagonist, a city park as setting, and a bad loan as conflict. What can you do with that? Something probably. But what makes this tool more useful is that you can mark a checkbox next to something that you do like (maybe your protagonist and setting) and then spin the dials again to get the other variables to change.

    

There's a fun category called Just Have Fun, which features some crazy choices (like ninja pirates and voodoo lesbians, I think) which gives you a bit of space to let things run, particularly if they are seeking Nazi treasure in the downtown YMCA locker room. Even better, if you decide to keep a protagonist from say mainstream fiction, you could switch over to Sci-Fi and get a setting from there, and then switch to Just Have Fun and blow the doors off.

StoryStarter is available on Android: http://www.appbrain.com/app/storystarter/com.tripledogs.storystarter
And iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/storystarter/id410592966?mt=8

But sometimes you need a little bit more then an initial situation, or maybe you're not the type of writer who likes to play around with dials and such. You need something to pop up and smack you in the face, as clear and convincing as an ice pick to the medulla oblongata. An opening line, maybe, or something to catch the imagination, something that doesn't involve a bunch of checkboxes. It just depends on what floats your goat, creativity-wise.

So I wrote StoryPrompts.

StoryPrompts is a collection of 300 or so opening lines, bits of dialogue, and situations to get you started. See the accompanying screenshots to get a good idea. Again, this particular program is more about random things that you can keep choosing from to get something--anything, really--started. 

You might get the prompt about the boy who pulls a ring of power from a box of cereal and think, maybe, "Hey I have this idea about a girl who finds a mysterious object in the park while she's out playing, and I have this other story about a girl who leaves 11th grade a big fat loser and comes back her senior year a curvy beauty, and maybe JUST MAYBE the two could work together -- the ring of power is responsible...."

Aaaaaaaaaand off you go. The story pretty much writes itself, or at least a huge portion of it does, and all you needed was a situation, not a detailed plot outline.

  

StoryPrompts is available on Android: http://www.appbrain.com/app/storystarter/com.tripledogs.storyprompts
And iPhone:  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/storyprompts/id412441107?mt=8

That's about it. See you guys at BlogathonATX Part Deux.

PS. These are pay apps, 99 cents on iPhone and Android. 

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I'll be running the Austin Marathon on February 20. Since I live in Austin, I figured it would be to my advantage to start running portions of the course as I advance into the latter parts of my marathon training. Granted, I've done one marathon already (San Antonio back in November) but I am by no means an elite marathoner or even someone who takes his training anywhere close to "serious."

For those of you who are training for the Austin Marathon, let me just say that this is by no means a "beginner's marathon." Typical training schedules call for 16 weeks of training--not gonna happen with Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's preceding the event. I struggled to get in 10 miles per week from late November until January 1st.

Second obstacle: cedar. I was out the entire first week of January because of cedar pollen. Flat on my back, actually, and my first run the following week I could barely get 1 to 1.5 miles in per stretch before I was coughing up a lung on the side of the road. Very frustrating. But here I am, $125 bucks down and I'm gonna gear up on marathon day, even if it's snowing and sleeting.

Third obstacle: hills. Lots and lots of hills. The San Antonio marathon was nice and flat, but Austin sports 10 miles of hills in the first 16 mile stretch, with at least 3-4 of those miles at a steep grade. So if you're training for this course, go back and double that hill training, you're going to need every second of training you can get prior to the gun going off on February 20.

In any case, last Saturday I had a 15-mile run on the schedule, so I decided to run as much of the course I could. I started on Town Lake (convenient parking, but nowhere close to the course start, really) and proceeded down the path to the Congress street bridge. From there, I went down South Congress, or I should say, UP south congress (it's a gradual uphill for 2.5 miles) dodging hipsters and SoCo shoppers as I went.

Instead of turning at Ben White/71/290 (as I would on race day) I turned on Lightsey (about a mile north) and then turned north on S. First, which thankfully for my aching legs, is a steady downhill all the way back to Town Lake. From Town Lake, I ran up Atlanta toward Endfield (15th).

From Atlanta (which is where Run-Tex is near Town Lake) all the way until I finished running at Shoal Creek is one big steady climb, with Exposition in Tarry Town featuring at least 8-10 rolling hills, each seemingly steeper and more painful then the last. I am not ashamed to tell you that I had to stop and walk most of those hills and that my legs felt like they were being pounded on by a maniac with a meat tenderizer. Actually, to be more accurate, I was about 3 seconds away from crying like a little girl on the side of the road.

When I look at that same stretch of endless road on the map, it's only a mile and a half, but it seemed like 20 miles of torture. There were more hills on Exposition than in the entire 26.2 stretch in San Antonio. Being that they come near the middle portion of the marathon is pretty frickin' brutal.
At the top of Exposition I paused long enough to tweet "Whoever laid out the Austin marathon course was not hugged enough as a child." And it's true.

The Exposition stretch of the marathon ends at 35th street, where you turn right and go up a further steep incline (the Mopac exit) and then make a left turn on Jackson, which gradually climbs to Bull Creek, Hancock, and finally Shoal Creek. This is where I turned off, as I was ending my run at a friend's house, who volunteered to drive me back down to my car parked at Town Lake.

My time for the run was 3 hours 29 minutes, a painfully slow pace considering that I ran the first 15 miles of the San Antonio marathon in 2 hours 35 minutes, so nearly an hour off my pace.

Next weekend, the schedule says 18 miles, and I'll hit this section again, hopefully with better success. My plan is to test run the first 12 miles of the course at least 3 times come race day, so those hills on Exposition should become old (if not good) friends by February 20.

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Is your startup launching a new product at SxSW Interactive 2011? Introducing a new offering? Want to create some buzz around your brand? Then I've got a deal for you...

Five of us--Pat Ramsey (@pat_ramsey), Alex Jones (@baldman), Jeremy Arntz (@jeremya), Simon Salt (@incslinger), and myself (@myerman)--will be wearing kilts at SxSW Interactive. We're basically doing it to have a bit of fun, and because we know we'll get attention for doing it--and we love getting attention, that's just the way it goes. 

So we thought to ourselves, "Selves, we're doing this anyway, and being the kind of guys who would pull a stunt like this, why not see if there's a company out there who would be willing to sponsor the fun!?!" So here we are, at your service.

All of us are geeks--we're programmers, gadget heads, tinkerers, or what have you--so we can easily communicate the value prop of your whiz-bang with ease and fluency (let's see a booth babe do THAT!). Each of us also has a fairly large social network on both Twitter and Facebook, giving us quite a good reach for whatever we're doing a Five Geeks in Kilts.

So, if you'd like to have five geeky spokespersons for your new product launch, your SXSW event, a new book, or anything else that needs attention, then come talk to me. We plan on having a lot of fun during Interactive, hanging out with great people and providing your brand/product/company with the positive, fun exposure it needs among a very influential group of people.

We can make sure that any photos taken of us, blogger interviews, or what have you, are tagged in specific ways on Twitter or Facebook to give your product, company, or brand maximum exposure during Interactive.  We can also work within any reasonable constraints you have vis-a-vis events that offer us free booze. Heh.

If you're interested, drop me a line on twitter (@myerman) or ring me at 512.750.3835.

UNBIFURCATED IS THE WAY TO GO!

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