Deadline for ballots is the 17th. If you’re unsure who to vote for, I have some suggestions.
Find your ballot, and get it in the mail today. Or follow the instructions on how to drop it off in person.
Deadline for ballots is the 17th. If you’re unsure who to vote for, I have some suggestions.
Find your ballot, and get it in the mail today. Or follow the instructions on how to drop it off in person.
It’s not that hard to make bread. You simply need the right combination of flour, yeast and water, plus an oven to cook it in. With a little work, you can end up with a delicious loaf most of the time. Plus, you can customize the recipe to exactly your taste.
So why doesn’t everyone make their own bread?
Because it’s a kind of pain in the ass. A lot of things can go wrong, leaving you with a blob of sticky dough. It takes time. It requires bowls and pans that have to be washed, plus an oven that heats up your kitchen. And truth be told, most people aren’t exactly Nancy Silverton.
All in all, it’s much easier to buy a loaf at the store.
To make a blog, you need something to write about, plus software and hardware to put it on the web. 1
When I first launched johnaugust.com in 2003, I assembled everything on my own computer, then uploaded it to a shared host. In baker parlance, I mixed the dough in my own bowls, then carried it down the street to the community oven to bake it. I was outsourcing the expensive hardware.
By 2004, I outsourced most of the software as well, running Movable Type on the shared server. Later that year, I switched to WordPress, which has continued to run the site ever since.
I like WordPress a lot. It’s remarkably easy to install and theme. It’s powerful and flexible. It has an extremely active development community, so if there’s a feature you’d like, someone’s probably already built it.2
But make no mistake: you’re still baking your own bread. Things can go wrong. Really, really wrong. And when they do, it’s a lot of work to fix it. A bad loaf of bread is disappointing. A bad error in your database can be catastrophic.
Over the weekend, there was a lot of uproar about a worm attack on WordPress installations that wrecked some notable blogs. Amid the sometimes-smug observations by the unaffected, I found one point that needs to be elevated to basic principle:
Most people shouldn’t be running their own blogging software.
Services like Tumblr, Posterous and Blogger are excellent and free. WordPress.com, the hosted version of WordPress, gives you 90% of the benefits with none of the hassle.
In 2003, I had to run my own software. There was no choice. But if I were starting a blog from scratch today, I would do it on one of these services.3
For all the hassles, there are some benefits to doing things yourself. Just like the artisanal baker can tinker with a recipe, the self-hosted blogger can tweak things just to his liking. He also has more control over his content — some services make it difficult to migrate.
In a month or two, I’ll be launching a revamped version of this site, which will continue to use WordPress. That means I’ll have to keep up with security updates, backups and a lot of general troubleshooting. There will be more worm attacks and self-inflicted wounds. I’ve decided it’s worth it. For most folks, it’s probably not.
If you’re considering starting a blog, ask yourself whether you really want to bake your own bread. Odds are, you probably just want a sandwich. Buy a loaf and get to it.
From today’s USA Today:
Darla Horn, 26, acknowledges she didn’t give much thought to the cost of college when she enrolled at State University of New York in Purchase. […] Because she didn’t qualify for financial aid, she took out student loans, graduating in 2005 with a double major in journalism and anthropology and more than $80,000 in debt.
That’s way too much debt for an anthro-journalist. But is it too much for an engineer? Is it too much for an actuary?
When I was buying a house, the rule of thumb was that you could afford a home three to four times your annual income. It feels like there should be an equivalent rule of thumb for how much you can spend on your education versus average salary of your studied profession. Or, hell, a web calculator.
In a few minutes of Googling, the closest I could find was this:
Don’t take out more student loans than what you expect to make in the first year. This rule of thumb puts a reasonable upper limit on how much in student loans you should take out, which is a good thing, but doesn’t paint the whole picture.
There are some jobs (like screenwriting) in which starting salary is almost impossible to predict, and others (like law) in which salary goes up quickly based on experience. But rules of thumb are helpful because they simplify things, and this one seems a good start.
By this measure, an actuary could take out about $50,000 in loans, while an electrical engineer could feel okay taking on $55,000 in debt. Darla, meanwhile, should have capped her loans at $33,000. (All salary estimates from PayScale.)
What often gets lost in these discussions is that relatively few students end up paying full freight. For four-year, private American universities, the average tuition discount rate for fall 2007 was 39.1%. The price on the sticker isn’t necessarily the price you pay.
But if you’re looking to study a low-paying field, do Future You a favor by being honest about the cost.
Add this book to your late-summer reading: How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely. It’s fast, funny, and will likely become the next movie I write and direct.
Here’s the official press release, with additional commentary:
LOS ANGELES, CA (August 3, 2009) – Filmmaker John August has optioned How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely through his company Quote-Unquote Films. August optioned the hilarious novel with an eye to adapt and direct. The novel, published by Grove/Atlantic, has garnered excelled reviews across the board and was Amazon’s July 2009 title of the month.
The great reviews include one by Janet Maslin in the NY Times, who quotes so many funny lines from the book that you might worry she’s spoiling it. She isn’t. She can’t.
Hely’s book has an unbelievably high joke-to-page ratio, the literary equivalent of a 30 Rock episode. (Which seems fitting, since Hely is now a writer on that show.)
The book tells the story of Pete Tarslaw, an ambitiously underachieving college grad who writes a shamelessly maudlin and derivative Great American Novel for the sole purpose of upstaging his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. When the book becomes a bestseller, he finds himself sucked into a strange coterie of mega-authors and their attendants.
I wrote that summary, but it omits something that makes reading the book so worthwhile: excerpts from all the other mega-authors’ books, such as Teeth of the Winged Lion by Nick Boyle. It’s hard to write well, but writing badly well is a special talent.
The book also features special publishing-related miscellany, such as this fake New York Times Bestsellers list, which even includes “Great Fish.”
On the title, August said “It’s the funniest thing I’ve read in a really long time. Like Go, it’s about thinking you have the system all figured out, realizing you don’t, then faking it. Characters who do the wrong things for misguided reasons are the heart of comedy.”
Let’s break down my quote.
First, I restate that the book is funny, in case that gets dropped out of any stories based on the press release.
Second, I refer back to an earlier comedy I wrote, because a lot of folks might think of my credits as being more funny-peculiar than funny-ha-ha.
Finally, I try to restate the premise in a way that seems more universal: it’s not a funny book about books; it’s a funny book about a guy on a journey.
Why he bought it himself: “It’s the kind of book I could hear studios saying is too smart. I knew I’d spend many meetings convincing them that it wasn’t nearly as smart as they thought it was. So I’d rather just give them a script so they can see what it is.”
There’s stuff in the book that’s funny only because it’s in a book, such as those great excerpts. The danger is that a studio exec reading it says, “Well, that part’s not cinematic.” And it’s true, some parts won’t translate as a movie.
But the premise, the characters and the plot of the book all translate really well. It’s better for me to show what I can do in a script than focus on what I can’t bring over from the book.
Ken Richman, Esq, negotiated on behalf of August with Anna DeRoy of WME handling the novel.
It’s the first book rights I’ve bought since Big Fish in 1999 — and technically that was Sony buying it for me.
In case you think that this was all Hollywood-insider dealmaking, let me talk you through the process.
In May, I was in New York, working on a yet-to-be-announced project. The hotel I was staying at had USA Today, which I don’t normally read. But I happened to spot this article describing Hely’s soon-to-be-published book, and thought it sounded funny.
So I tracked down Pete Tarslaw’s blog on Google, figured it was probably Hely, and emailed asking for an advance copy:
hey steve hely, can I get an advance copy of your book?
By description, it sounds very, very great.
— John August, the screenwriter
ps. I will also pester you on Facebook.
He sent me the book. I read it the next day. A week later, I met with him at Susina, the coffeeshop featured in The Nines. Lawyers started talking, and eventually we got a deal in place. (So yes, there was Hollywood dealmaking. But it came very late in the process.)
As far as making a movie, that process is just starting now. I’ll be writing a draft, and then figuring out the how/when/where/who.
In the meantime, read his book. It is available pretty much everywhere, but it’s cheap on Amazon ($10.98), and only $8.80 on Kindle.