I Choose Not to Use the Oxford Comma, and That's Not a Hill I Will Die On

Some people say they will die on the Oxford comma hill. Such a strong feeling: It's punctuation people. Their argument is that it's the only sensible answer, and then they typically give a contrived example like:

"I'd like to thank my parents, Tom Hanks and Betty White."

Such interesting parents. These zealots suggest that the extra comma is the way to solve any potential confusion of such sentences. Honestly, I think there are better ways to make the sentence less confusing, if it is indeed confusing.

It is equally easy to contrive a sentence where the Oxford comma makes the sentence more confusing:

"I'd like to thank my principal, Tom Hanks, and Betty White."

I bet Tom Hanks would make a good principal. The point is, neither of these example contrivances are enough to make such a strong argument. Confusing sentences should simply be rewritten--no need for death pacts over punctuation.

I choose not to use the Oxford comma for two other reasons. First, it seems more logical to me. Consider this sentence:

"I'd like to thank Tom Hanks and Betty White."

We'd never use a comma there, so logically, why would we add the extra comma when there are more items in the list? What's so special about jumping from two items to three that makes adding the comma important. It feels inconsistent to me.

My other reason is a preference for avoiding ink on a page. I do the same thing with charts and graphs. Anywhere I can use less ink and get the same information across, I do. It's not that I care about conserving ink, but I think it makes the page look less cluttered--cleaner.

Will I die on that hill? No. If I'm working with a publishing house that prefers the oxford comma, then fine, I will use the Oxford comma. Consistency overrules my preference. You can do the same thing: Pick the way you prefer to punctuate and be consistent about it, but perhaps be less certain that you have the only right way.

Getting Used to Alien Pronouns

It has taken me a while, but I think i'm starting to get the feel for the pronouns in my alien world. The writing feels much more natural. Here's a sample:

Jamie stopped at jes grandparent’s home. It stood on an oak platform. It had a single roofed room where jes grandparent kept a few items that couldn’t survive being outside in the weather. Grans loved to read. Gi had a small shelf of gis favorite books. Gi also kept a number of items to remind gir of family, including a drawing that Jamie had made as a child. Gi kept it in a frame hung on a wall.

Gi had a second room with full sized oak walls and two large windows. There were no window panes, but there were curtains that gi shut when gi was reading so as not to entice her neighbors to stray from The Ideal. Jamie noticed that the curtains were shut. Gis reading room had a door that opened onto gis porch and down into a lush, grassy yard.

Gi would have loved adding a white picket fence, but that metaphor evoked too much of a sense of ownership. People respected each other’s personal space not because of a sense of the rights of ownership, but because it felt neighborly to do so.

It was custom in the community not to enter someone’s area without a welcome--custom, not a rule. Gi had placed a post, like the corner of her idyllic picket fence, on the edge of her area. It was painted white and carefully carved, as if all the craftsmanship of a whole house was imparted on that one post. Many of the houses in this ring of the compound had such knocking posts for people to announce themselves. Jamie knocked on Gis. Jes grandparent opened gis door and stepped out onto gis porch. Jamie beamed at seeing gis welcoming smile.

Note the two pronoun formats: Je for Jamie and Gi for Grans. This alien world doesn't have a male and female dichotomy, indeed, it has no concept of gender among people. Its pronouns are built around wealth, which is visible to everyone based on how many nanobots you are made up of. The 'e form for people with the full complement of their possible nanobots, and the 'i form for people with less. The first initial comes from the name of the person, and is completely omitted for people with less than half of their full nanonbots potential--the poorest of the poor.

The 'i form is used without any overt disrespect. It's just a pronoun, and feels as natural as "he" or "she" does to us. But, just like in our world, the pronouns come from a power imbalance, which in this world is based on wealth rather than gender.

You'll see the pronoun variations--je for 2nd person, jer for 3rd person, jes for possessive--are similar to our usage, but I've had to make some choices so that they don't evoke specific gender as a rule, but are close enough to be understood by the reader.

I've had two kinds of major difficulties writing this. The first is that pronouns are so natural as to be invisible in writing. I have added a task to go back and check for our pronouns slipping in, which they do to me all the time. The second difficulty has been trying to set aside my own natural tendencies to think of people as male or female. As much as I try to push the idea out of my head, each character has a natural gender in my mind. I can see it in how my pronoun errors fall in. For example, if I see "he" falling into my text, that's a clear indicator that I'm thinking of the character as male, possibly bringing my own unconscious biases into how I write them. It's a fabulously challenging exercise.

Writing, Publishing & Social Media

Writers write.

Wouldn't that be nice. Once I'm in the flow, writing is a delight. Getting motivated, getting started, not getting distracted--those are difficult for me. Who knows why? Some people call it writers block. I've come to think of it as a lack of mental energy, not a lack of ideas.

On top of that, writers spend time getting published. We like to get eyes in front of what we write. That can take away all the time from writing, and is another kind of slog.

The third think many writers spend time on is marketing--helping people find their books. Mostly that means social media, like this blog. Marketing is a third kind of slog, often difficult for the type of people--introverts--who like to write.

So, writers write, and submit, and market ... usually not in that order. The hurdles to writing and submitting your work are high. The hurdle to putting yourself and your work out there with marketing is also high. So, what do we do instead? We read other writers' social media and think about how to apply what they are doing to ours. That doesn't get words in a story, stories submitted, or advance our audience.

Today, I forced myself to write. (And, write this post.) It was a delight.

Setting up a Mailing List

I think I've picked the mailing list tool I'm going to use--MailerLite.

I started setting up my first "campaign" for letting people join my email list. "Campaign" is what these tools call the popup that gives the sign-up form. Of course, it's not going to be as simple as: "Here's a link to join my mailing list."

There is so much to think about.

The first is finding a hook for getting people to sign up. These tools are built for marketers. Best practice is to hook people with a deal of some sort: "Free ebook," "Sample story or chapter," "Discount code on your first order," or as simple as "Be the first to know."

I started fretting about what my hook should be, but I realized that I was letting that worry distract me from getting started. I decided to keep it simple in this first round and just give people who want to follow my writing journey a place to sign up.

So, I went to creating my first campaign.

Distraction: Ooh, look at all the different templates.

Distraction: Design time. All the colors and fonts and positions. Oh, and I need a photo for this page.

Distractions from Distraction: Which photo should I use. Oh, look the photo tool has all kinds of color filters.

I finally got down to getting words on the form. Each block of text--the right title, description of the list, a promise to not share data, even the title of the submit button--require some careful thought.

Distraction: As I write the description of the what people are signing up for, I realize that some people just care about when I publish a book, others might want a short story now and again. The tool lets me log those preferences with a check box. What should I call those check boxes? Does the group of checkboxes need its own title, or just each checkbox?

Distraction from Distraction: Given that I can get people to select groups they want to be part of, perhaps I should add a checkbox for people willing to be early readers.

I set up all that and then I noticed that there is a whole other popup to set up--what they call the success page. That makes sense from a user interface perspective. You have to show them something when they click the button. So I designed that popup too, with all the same complications and choices from the first one.

I finished the designs and clicked next and got a whole page of options about when and how to display this popup. I realized I wasn't nearly done.

Distraction: Should it pop up on top of the window, slide in from the side, hover near the bottom? And, after how long? The default is wait five seconds, then shove the annoying pop up in my audience's face. How should I set that up to be the most effective and least annoying.

Distraction: Speaking of annoying, how can I set this up so that I don't annoy the people that are already on my list every time they come to read my blog? Should I set up a side page, or a permalink blog post about joining my list? Can blogger support adding the javascript code on just a single page?

Distraction: This is getting complicated, I better do some beta testing of this. I should test that I can send mail to the list before a bunch of people are on it, and that I can actually unsubscribe people who ask.

--- insert record scratching sound here ---

As I was writing all this, I was thinking, something felt too complicated. What I really wanted was a link to send someone to where they can sign up--No pop-ups, no "campaigning," no cleverness. Then I remembered that all these tools have something called a landing page. I hurried back to the tool I'd picked to see if they had a landing page concept.

That's it, that's what I wanted! Simple-ish. It still required some design, including a photo, but now I can share that page from anywhere that I can put a link. Simple is better. Time to get on with it.

If you want to sign up for my list go here, to my new landing page!

Meta Hates Blogger

I've been trying to share these blog posts with my writing groups on Facebook. Those posts got blocked as spam. Someone suggested the problem was because I copy and pasted the same post to two groups. That made sense.

I tried then to summarize the problem to one of my groups. I added a separate comment that said:

The link to my blog is https://kenflowersauthor.blogspot.com

I got an immediate popup:

I'll just leave this here and walk away shaking my head.

Traditional or Self-publishing

Enough of the technical aspects of a web page for a moment. Let's talk about publishing, or, how to get my stories in front of eyes.

There are two fundamental publishing models right now. The traditional publishing model goes from agent to publisher to a traditional bookseller like Big A or Big B. Then there's the self-publishing model, where the author is their own publisher, making all the decisions and paying all the costs.

I've always longed to succeed in the traditional publishing model. In my mind, the self-publishing model just a better spin on the much-maligned vanity press model. The name alone is shame inducing. To me, getting a traditional publishing deal is something to be proud of. It says that multiple levels of gatekeepers agree that I've written something good. Vanity press suggest that the author couldn't pass the gauntlet, gave up and printed a few books to give out to their friends--they printed a book so they could say that had published a book. Yuck.

I've started down the traditional publishing path, and I'm currently looking for an agent for two of my stories. MirrorEarth has 13 rejections so far and A Christmas Home has 5 rejections. I'm no different from anyone in that I hate rejections. Each new rejection reinforces that little voice that says it's not worth trying.

The prevailing wisdom is to expect 100 rejections on the path to success. Some say that's nonsense, but the point is clear--don't give up to early, and my 18 rejections is clearly too early to give up. Nonetheless, the urge to give up and self-publish is strong.

Now, I haven't been fair to self-publishing by likening it to a vanity press. The market is changing. With the advent of e-readers, the self-publishing market has taken off. Exact numbers are hard to come by in a notoriously opaque industry. Traditional publishing still dominates printed and audio books, but it's clear that sales of self-published ebooks are on par with those of traditionally published titles.

The pros of self-publishing include having total control, often higher revenue, not having to pass through a gatekeeper and faster time to market. That comes with real costs, literally. The author has to pay for things the traditional publisher usually paid for: editing, cover designs and printing costs. Most importantly, the author is 100% responsible for marketing their book, although more and more of that burden falls on the author in the traditional path as well. These cons are in addition to having a difficult time knowing if your writing is any good.

The pros of traditional publishing start with being able to brag, "I got a book deal!" Beyond that they include letting the publisher handle the business of publishing, and getting to see your book on the shelves of Big B. The downside of course includes those rejections, a very long lead time if you do get a deal and a lack of creative control, even rights ownership.

I'm still pushing for that traditional deal. I admit, I'd love that ego boost. More important though is not feeling like I let a poor book into the world because I was impatient. For me, it's not the ego boost though, nor the money--although I'd take both. For me it's about finding the most effective way to get good words in front of more readers eyes. I like hearing someone say, "I read your book. I liked it." Whatever path get's me the most of that, I'll be taking.

Author Web Tools Learning -- So Far

What a mess of things to learn, and none of it easy. It seems like I can set up a subscribe tool pretty easily. There are lots of tools, all of which can grow with me (that is, grow with the size of my followers). Most tools have a free tier for this, up to about 1000 subscribers, but after that they get pricier--starting at $10/month and growing fast with people.

In really rough numbers, that's about 5¢ a subscriber each year. That would mean that if I released a book each year, and expected to make $1 off each sale, I'd need to have 1 in 20 people on my subscriber list buy the book to break even. Getting that many subscribers may be optimistic, but I surely should plan for success. More research here.

It seems I could create a good mailing list and connect it to this blog, and otherwise not have a web site. I think that might be the most cost effective approach, or perhaps just the most prudent to get a move on rather than get bogged down by the perfect answer.

Some of the email list tool companies include some simple web page tools, but most of those don't look like they will grown as my platform does. All of them have either a free tier for that or a trial period. I suspect I'll pick the best two or three to play around with before making a choice.

One surprisingly nice thing about the mailing list tool providers, is that most include some form of electronic purchase interface. That could change the whole cost justification if I could sell and deliver even a few books directly through that platform.

Finally, there's the question of website domain name. This is an extra $4-$20 per year. Not too bad, really. But these sites, and other web hosting sites bundle the domain and web services, and the pricing for those bundles can be confusing, particularly trying to figure out the features that come with each level. Again, there are free tiers, but with limited features. If you need anything but the most basic features, it starts in the $10-$20 per month--not a typo, per month.

Ideally, I'd have a top level domain for a number of my hobbies. It would be nice to get a site that can grow not just with my writing, but support all the hobbies I would like a website for, including my iPhone app for the license plate game: PlateHunt. A nice feature for that game would be to log game data to a central server so that people can share finds with friends and submit new license plate types. That requires some programming on my website, which the hosting service would need to support. Some do; some don't.

If you're eyes are glazing over at this point, well, you get the point.