Montaigne/squirrel-brain is my instinctive vote. Pithy has its place, but does it actually reside anywhere in your brain, or will you need to become someone you're not in order to consistently truncate your thoughts in that manner? Also, if the point is to sell books, mere bullet points won't do that. Only emotional engagement will.
Now, from a copywriting standpoint, grabbing people by the feels in as few words as possible is the goal, but with it comes the danger of devolving into mere manipulation, rather than actual connection. And I promise you that the younger generations upon whom the continued relevance of your work and the aforementioned book sales will likely depend will smell a rat if you choose manipulation over connection.
That said, "analyzing, and predicting the dark, dank, shiny, terrifying, unpredictable unknown that is our future" is a potent means of cultivating emotional engagement. So, Gibbs ain't entirely wrong. Which suggests that the key is for you to do that in the least exhausting way possible, for both yourself and your readers. And I suspect that requires some editing, but also some squirrels. ;)
Madame Ximon, thank you for this wonderful, kind comment. It's beautifully written and very helpful. You suggest a way forward, which is to temper my squirrel-brain tendencies with a bit of Gibbsian focus on the atual objective. I think you have hit the nail on the proverbial head.
Note to readers: before Madame Ximon relocated to the west coast of the USA, she used to reside near Providence, Rhode Island, where she was the motive force behind a smallish but very cool annual science fiction convention known as Templecon.
I first attended Templecon around 2012, when I got a table in the vendor area from which to pitch my books. A few years later, when the theme was 'cyberpunk,' I was invited back as a featured participant. That was a wonderfully reassuring and quite unexpected honor. I know Mme. Ximon to be a thoughtful and effective patrol and promoter of artists of all kinds.
#TeamMontaigne here. I get annoyed when I get a newsletter and I clear out some mental space and time to read it, and it's over almost before it started.
Leave TikTok to the attention-challenged, and keep digressing. God knows that too much of our world already is built around the (likely correct) idea that most people can't focus on something for more than a moment.
Related to that, I had a WTF moment with my wife this weekend. She had just finished the new Netflix martial arts series ("The Brothers Sun") and it was my turn with the TV. I pulled up the 1982 BBC adaptation of John le Carré's "Smiley's People"[1], and she complained that she was bored with the scene I had on, where Smiley's debriefing Circus folks on the General's murder. I couldn't be more transfixed with the verbal jousting, but she wanted none of it. This is the woman who used to read copious amounts of books, but was effectively ruined for reading once she discovered podcasts.
We need more slow windy spaces and to preserve the ones we still have.
Thanks for this great comment, and don't be too dismayed by your wife's evolution. Such is the nature of marriage, a estate that some old-fashioned people, such as myself, find congenial despite changes like these.
About "Smiley's People": I must watch that. I'v heard people rave about it, and all the clips I've seen have been wonderful -- for the reasons you give.
Before jumping into "Smiley's People", if you didn't catch the earlier BBC adaptation (1979) of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", you should probably watch that first. Basically the same group of folks involved (inc. Alec Guinness as George Smiley), and it's the first story in le Carré's "Karla Trilogy" that BBC was adapting. (Alas, they skipped over "The Honourable Schoolboy" in the middle.)
"it’s her reading of The Tailor of Gloucester, by Beatrix Potter. You must hear her saying ‘no more twist’ in an impossibly high and squeaky mouse voice. It’s absolutely darling."
You are cruel, Johnny.
You write a sentence like that, after giving us a YouTube link to hear "I had a farm, in Africa..." and then don't provide us with a clip?
Where's the link!?! The Tailor of Gloucester is one of my favourites, and I had no idea Meryl Streep narrated a version!
Sorry, I don't mean to be cruel. We had a recording on cassette that we used to listen to in the car when our children were younger (we're all big Beatrix Potter stans in our house). That cassette might be in some box in the back shed or someplace, or maybe it's simply lost, but I haven't seen it in more than a decade and I haven't been able to locate a replacement. But you've motivated me to embark upon another search. I'll let you know if I find a copy.
Montaigne all the way for me too, John. The first time I read your posts, I was enthralled by the bric-à-brac (meant in the most flattering way, like a a treasure trove in an unexpected place) quality of your writing. I'm also a sucker fo serendipity, and I continually stumble upon a whole lot of it in Sundman figures it out! Let your freak flag fly.
Portia, Thank you for your very generous comment. In a bit I'm going to reply to Madame Ximon's kind comment as well, sharing a bit of the how she & I came to know each other. I think you'll find that interesting as well, serendipity wise.
Before I throw my 2 cents into the ring, let me say that I love the current topic-hopping style. I find it both interesting and entertaining.
However, if your goal is to sell books, should you instead consider investing your energy into short side stories for your characters. Perhaps your character's reactions to our ever changing world? Or some other more imaginative use of your characters? Writing that connects to your books, and leads to your books...
Well, I set your email aside until the weekend when I have some time, as trying to scan it during my daily email-deletion pass is unsatisfying and misses the point. I enjoy the meandering, though I wouldn't mind having the nuggets wrap themselves up more cleanly, within or between posts. I think fondly of Colette's "My Mother's House and Sido" which has short autobiographical "postcards", not in chronological order, but at the end of which one feels well acquainted with her (fictional?) life.
I take your setting aside my mail for weekend reading as a compliment. Thank you.
As this blog enters its second year I'll try to focus it a bit, taking into account suggestions from attentive readers like yourself. I'm not familiar with that work of Collete, but I will check it out. Thanks for that, too.
I kind of have to agree with Tim. I think you’re brilliant and have many original ideas but they often get completely overlooked and lost in the soup of too much wordy wordplay and side tours distractions that aren’t realty necessary, and which provide no real resolve - what you’ve “figured out” - and it’s exhausting. Sometimes less IS more?
Please see my replies to Mark, above, and see also the great comment by Madame Ximon, who suggests away to apply some of Mark Gibb's insight without totally discarding the style -- if we can call it that -- that I've been trying to refine in these essays so far.
As for your offline comment that the title of my blog/newsletter is misleading because I never do, in fact, manage to figure anything out: Well, I admit that you got me there. However I'm going to keep the current title because "Sundman attempts to figure it out but never actually does" seems much less zippy.
People, people ... don't get me wrong, I love John's longreads but if he's going to get traction (AKA "sales") I think his target audience is more computer/sci-fi/nerdish than you chaps who can spell "Montaigne" which, IMHO, requires a different style. Then again, I could be wrong, that happened once before.
Mark, of course I exaggerated your advice on this topic, but in this comment and in your first comment you raise the all-important question of what I'm trying to achieve. Why am I doing this thing? Am I like Michel de Montaigne, just trying to figure out what I'm thinking and throw my thoughts out into the void, or am I trying to grow the audience for my books by writing things that are likely to interest the sort of people who read my books? Those are two different things as you correctly point out. And I have, in fact, been trying to do both. Perhaps that is not possible.
Now if you look at novelists like John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig -- whose target audiences are reasonably close to mine — you find that they blog about all kinds of things -- whatever's on their minds. But I suppose that they have the luxury of doing so because they already are so well-established.
But the problem of how to grow a readership, I have found, is a pretty tough nut to crack.
I wonder if your audience isn't closer to Neal Stephenson, who also has a tendency to go off on longer digressions than you'll see folks like Scalzi do. (I love Stephenson because I know I'm going to get a decent story, but ALSO a college seminar's worth of background about the time and setting in which he's writing.)
FWIW, it may be worth looking at Charles Stross's blog and seeing what works when it comes to cultivating and growing an audience for books. Stross is the only other author whom I keep up with in this way, and he manages to find a decent balance on writing about what picques his interest that day and tying it back to the books he's writing. I've learned a ton from his Scottish socialist perspective on Brexit and a ton of other stuff, which he's actively digesting for inclusion in his work. Might be some things worth adapting from his success in this area (maintaining and cultivating a readership online):
P.S. (For Mark) I'm a software developer who discovered John two decades ago via Kuro5hin, maintaining a number of nerdy projects with a sci-fi bent. An anecdote isn't data, but I suspect that I'm not all that unique here, either. ;-)
Thank you again. Neal Stephenson is the writer to whom I'm most compared (at least in the context of Acts of the Apostles and Biodigital). I like his books through Cryptonomicon (which I like very much) but I haven't been able to make my way through any of his other books (with one exception, see below). I guess I like digressions when they're done in the service of the story (as in, for example, Tristram Shandy, where {the fact that there is no story} is the story). But Stephenson's digressions are just -- I don't know. They irritate me the way that my digressions in Sundman figures it out irritate my friend Ande. But I think there's a big difference between a meandering essay and a book that presents itself as some kind of thriller, like Neal Stephenson's do.
I don't know Charlie Stross, though I have met him once, and I used to follow him on Twitter until I left that hellsite. I am, however, well acquainted with that other Scottish SF luminary Ken MacLeod. Ken, however, doesn't do much in the way of blogging or any social media stuff.
Although I don't know Neal Stephenson, his co-author on The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. and a few of the Mongoliad books, Nicole Stephenson, is a good friend of mine. Curiously enough we met not in any literary context but at a dog park -- on Martha's Vineyard, the island which has been my home for 30 years, and where Nicki was born and raised.
If, by some otherworldly skill you have managed to avoid seeing this 44 second clip of Nicki talking about my little novella Cheap Complex Devices, I present it here:
John, John, John. Technopotheosis wasn't better, it was just different and, IMHO, more suited to your goal of selling more Famous Author™ books. Now, I (and I am sure this applies to all of your subscribers) have bigly enjoyed your eloquent, discursive, and surprisingly long and complicated forays into the hinterland of your biography (one of your essays even motivated my to look into the Wolof language (Kan'd am xalaat ñoom?)) but, dude, the goal is to sell books.
As for writing about tomato growing ... really? As far as I know, your expertise in horticulture consists of tending your back patio and dousing burning vegetation with large quantities of water. So, would I or Biggs or Temkin ever suggest such an endeavor? Not unless you were to spin it into a discussion of gene editing, the machinations of Big Pharma, the hidden agenda of tech billionaires, and the out-of-control Military Industrial complex.
Plus, here we are, at a pivotal time in history with politics, technology, the economy, culture, medicine ... hell, the whole fuckin' enchilada ... about to explode, implode, disintegrate, reintegrate, and burst into flames and you're writing about subsistence farming in Africa and wild sex with your travel agent (okay, I'll grant that the latter was amusing, particularly the last part of the story where you gathered up your clothes and, naked, snuck out the back door. But I digress ... ).
So, here as in our conversations, I recommend you get back to analyzing, and predicting the dark, dank, shiny, terrifying, unpredictable unknown that is our future.
Yours in Christ look at the time, I've got to run ...
Please see my reply to your second comment. You raise a very important point, which is that if my objective in writing Sundman figures it out! is to grow my audience (and ultimately sell more books), then I should write in a way most likely to achieve that goal. As always I value your good counsel.
Thank you, Mark. As discussed, I am putting this all in the cogitator. Sometime in the next two weeks Sundman figures it out! will reach its first birthday. An appropriate time to step back and do a little reflection about where to take it from here would be in order, I think.
Mark and the entire gang of pithiness are wrong. Montaigne is basically the prototype for my newsletter, so please. More of this.
Also...Sundman on Gardening is such a beautiful specimen of trolling. 😈
I enjoy the current style. It humanizes in a time where a bot may have written those tomato guidelines :-)
Thank you. Any bot worth its logical salt can write a much better 'how to grow tomatoes' newsletter a thousand times better than I ever could.
Montaigne/squirrel-brain is my instinctive vote. Pithy has its place, but does it actually reside anywhere in your brain, or will you need to become someone you're not in order to consistently truncate your thoughts in that manner? Also, if the point is to sell books, mere bullet points won't do that. Only emotional engagement will.
Now, from a copywriting standpoint, grabbing people by the feels in as few words as possible is the goal, but with it comes the danger of devolving into mere manipulation, rather than actual connection. And I promise you that the younger generations upon whom the continued relevance of your work and the aforementioned book sales will likely depend will smell a rat if you choose manipulation over connection.
That said, "analyzing, and predicting the dark, dank, shiny, terrifying, unpredictable unknown that is our future" is a potent means of cultivating emotional engagement. So, Gibbs ain't entirely wrong. Which suggests that the key is for you to do that in the least exhausting way possible, for both yourself and your readers. And I suspect that requires some editing, but also some squirrels. ;)
Madame Ximon, thank you for this wonderful, kind comment. It's beautifully written and very helpful. You suggest a way forward, which is to temper my squirrel-brain tendencies with a bit of Gibbsian focus on the atual objective. I think you have hit the nail on the proverbial head.
Note to readers: before Madame Ximon relocated to the west coast of the USA, she used to reside near Providence, Rhode Island, where she was the motive force behind a smallish but very cool annual science fiction convention known as Templecon.
I first attended Templecon around 2012, when I got a table in the vendor area from which to pitch my books. A few years later, when the theme was 'cyberpunk,' I was invited back as a featured participant. That was a wonderfully reassuring and quite unexpected honor. I know Mme. Ximon to be a thoughtful and effective patrol and promoter of artists of all kinds.
I agree with you 100%.
#TeamMontaigne here. I get annoyed when I get a newsletter and I clear out some mental space and time to read it, and it's over almost before it started.
Leave TikTok to the attention-challenged, and keep digressing. God knows that too much of our world already is built around the (likely correct) idea that most people can't focus on something for more than a moment.
Related to that, I had a WTF moment with my wife this weekend. She had just finished the new Netflix martial arts series ("The Brothers Sun") and it was my turn with the TV. I pulled up the 1982 BBC adaptation of John le Carré's "Smiley's People"[1], and she complained that she was bored with the scene I had on, where Smiley's debriefing Circus folks on the General's murder. I couldn't be more transfixed with the verbal jousting, but she wanted none of it. This is the woman who used to read copious amounts of books, but was effectively ruined for reading once she discovered podcasts.
We need more slow windy spaces and to preserve the ones we still have.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vYAyq5l2Bs
Thanks for this great comment, and don't be too dismayed by your wife's evolution. Such is the nature of marriage, a estate that some old-fashioned people, such as myself, find congenial despite changes like these.
About "Smiley's People": I must watch that. I'v heard people rave about it, and all the clips I've seen have been wonderful -- for the reasons you give.
Before jumping into "Smiley's People", if you didn't catch the earlier BBC adaptation (1979) of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", you should probably watch that first. Basically the same group of folks involved (inc. Alec Guinness as George Smiley), and it's the first story in le Carré's "Karla Trilogy" that BBC was adapting. (Alas, they skipped over "The Honourable Schoolboy" in the middle.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq61jstTApk&list=PLyNzc9cbF4EWeXnVOQhXG6_wGdlssG22y
"it’s her reading of The Tailor of Gloucester, by Beatrix Potter. You must hear her saying ‘no more twist’ in an impossibly high and squeaky mouse voice. It’s absolutely darling."
You are cruel, Johnny.
You write a sentence like that, after giving us a YouTube link to hear "I had a farm, in Africa..." and then don't provide us with a clip?
Where's the link!?! The Tailor of Gloucester is one of my favourites, and I had no idea Meryl Streep narrated a version!
Sorry, I don't mean to be cruel. We had a recording on cassette that we used to listen to in the car when our children were younger (we're all big Beatrix Potter stans in our house). That cassette might be in some box in the back shed or someplace, or maybe it's simply lost, but I haven't seen it in more than a decade and I haven't been able to locate a replacement. But you've motivated me to embark upon another search. I'll let you know if I find a copy.
Montaigne all the way for me too, John. The first time I read your posts, I was enthralled by the bric-à-brac (meant in the most flattering way, like a a treasure trove in an unexpected place) quality of your writing. I'm also a sucker fo serendipity, and I continually stumble upon a whole lot of it in Sundman figures it out! Let your freak flag fly.
Portia, Thank you for your very generous comment. In a bit I'm going to reply to Madame Ximon's kind comment as well, sharing a bit of the how she & I came to know each other. I think you'll find that interesting as well, serendipity wise.
I look forward to reading it, John!
Give Gibbs et al. a hard NO. Might as well be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
Yes, but Mark does make a few very good points. I will try to achieve some synthesis.
Before I throw my 2 cents into the ring, let me say that I love the current topic-hopping style. I find it both interesting and entertaining.
However, if your goal is to sell books, should you instead consider investing your energy into short side stories for your characters. Perhaps your character's reactions to our ever changing world? Or some other more imaginative use of your characters? Writing that connects to your books, and leads to your books...
Thank you, Conor.
I've been thinking about his and indeed I plan to be doing some of this, starting soon.
Thanks, as always, for the feedback, and for helping me to spread the word.
Well, I set your email aside until the weekend when I have some time, as trying to scan it during my daily email-deletion pass is unsatisfying and misses the point. I enjoy the meandering, though I wouldn't mind having the nuggets wrap themselves up more cleanly, within or between posts. I think fondly of Colette's "My Mother's House and Sido" which has short autobiographical "postcards", not in chronological order, but at the end of which one feels well acquainted with her (fictional?) life.
I take your setting aside my mail for weekend reading as a compliment. Thank you.
As this blog enters its second year I'll try to focus it a bit, taking into account suggestions from attentive readers like yourself. I'm not familiar with that work of Collete, but I will check it out. Thanks for that, too.
I kind of have to agree with Tim. I think you’re brilliant and have many original ideas but they often get completely overlooked and lost in the soup of too much wordy wordplay and side tours distractions that aren’t realty necessary, and which provide no real resolve - what you’ve “figured out” - and it’s exhausting. Sometimes less IS more?
Ande, thank you.
(I think you meant Mark, not Tim(?)).
Please see my replies to Mark, above, and see also the great comment by Madame Ximon, who suggests away to apply some of Mark Gibb's insight without totally discarding the style -- if we can call it that -- that I've been trying to refine in these essays so far.
As for your offline comment that the title of my blog/newsletter is misleading because I never do, in fact, manage to figure anything out: Well, I admit that you got me there. However I'm going to keep the current title because "Sundman attempts to figure it out but never actually does" seems much less zippy.
People, people ... don't get me wrong, I love John's longreads but if he's going to get traction (AKA "sales") I think his target audience is more computer/sci-fi/nerdish than you chaps who can spell "Montaigne" which, IMHO, requires a different style. Then again, I could be wrong, that happened once before.
Mark, of course I exaggerated your advice on this topic, but in this comment and in your first comment you raise the all-important question of what I'm trying to achieve. Why am I doing this thing? Am I like Michel de Montaigne, just trying to figure out what I'm thinking and throw my thoughts out into the void, or am I trying to grow the audience for my books by writing things that are likely to interest the sort of people who read my books? Those are two different things as you correctly point out. And I have, in fact, been trying to do both. Perhaps that is not possible.
Now if you look at novelists like John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig -- whose target audiences are reasonably close to mine — you find that they blog about all kinds of things -- whatever's on their minds. But I suppose that they have the luxury of doing so because they already are so well-established.
But the problem of how to grow a readership, I have found, is a pretty tough nut to crack.
I wonder if your audience isn't closer to Neal Stephenson, who also has a tendency to go off on longer digressions than you'll see folks like Scalzi do. (I love Stephenson because I know I'm going to get a decent story, but ALSO a college seminar's worth of background about the time and setting in which he's writing.)
FWIW, it may be worth looking at Charles Stross's blog and seeing what works when it comes to cultivating and growing an audience for books. Stross is the only other author whom I keep up with in this way, and he manages to find a decent balance on writing about what picques his interest that day and tying it back to the books he's writing. I've learned a ton from his Scottish socialist perspective on Brexit and a ton of other stuff, which he's actively digesting for inclusion in his work. Might be some things worth adapting from his success in this area (maintaining and cultivating a readership online):
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/
P.S. (For Mark) I'm a software developer who discovered John two decades ago via Kuro5hin, maintaining a number of nerdy projects with a sci-fi bent. An anecdote isn't data, but I suspect that I'm not all that unique here, either. ;-)
Chris,
Thank you again. Neal Stephenson is the writer to whom I'm most compared (at least in the context of Acts of the Apostles and Biodigital). I like his books through Cryptonomicon (which I like very much) but I haven't been able to make my way through any of his other books (with one exception, see below). I guess I like digressions when they're done in the service of the story (as in, for example, Tristram Shandy, where {the fact that there is no story} is the story). But Stephenson's digressions are just -- I don't know. They irritate me the way that my digressions in Sundman figures it out irritate my friend Ande. But I think there's a big difference between a meandering essay and a book that presents itself as some kind of thriller, like Neal Stephenson's do.
I don't know Charlie Stross, though I have met him once, and I used to follow him on Twitter until I left that hellsite. I am, however, well acquainted with that other Scottish SF luminary Ken MacLeod. Ken, however, doesn't do much in the way of blogging or any social media stuff.
Although I don't know Neal Stephenson, his co-author on The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. and a few of the Mongoliad books, Nicole Stephenson, is a good friend of mine. Curiously enough we met not in any literary context but at a dog park -- on Martha's Vineyard, the island which has been my home for 30 years, and where Nicki was born and raised.
If, by some otherworldly skill you have managed to avoid seeing this 44 second clip of Nicki talking about my little novella Cheap Complex Devices, I present it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_SA_AVICzU
John, John, John. Technopotheosis wasn't better, it was just different and, IMHO, more suited to your goal of selling more Famous Author™ books. Now, I (and I am sure this applies to all of your subscribers) have bigly enjoyed your eloquent, discursive, and surprisingly long and complicated forays into the hinterland of your biography (one of your essays even motivated my to look into the Wolof language (Kan'd am xalaat ñoom?)) but, dude, the goal is to sell books.
As for writing about tomato growing ... really? As far as I know, your expertise in horticulture consists of tending your back patio and dousing burning vegetation with large quantities of water. So, would I or Biggs or Temkin ever suggest such an endeavor? Not unless you were to spin it into a discussion of gene editing, the machinations of Big Pharma, the hidden agenda of tech billionaires, and the out-of-control Military Industrial complex.
Plus, here we are, at a pivotal time in history with politics, technology, the economy, culture, medicine ... hell, the whole fuckin' enchilada ... about to explode, implode, disintegrate, reintegrate, and burst into flames and you're writing about subsistence farming in Africa and wild sex with your travel agent (okay, I'll grant that the latter was amusing, particularly the last part of the story where you gathered up your clothes and, naked, snuck out the back door. But I digress ... ).
So, here as in our conversations, I recommend you get back to analyzing, and predicting the dark, dank, shiny, terrifying, unpredictable unknown that is our future.
Yours in Christ look at the time, I've got to run ...
Mark.
Please see my reply to your second comment. You raise a very important point, which is that if my objective in writing Sundman figures it out! is to grow my audience (and ultimately sell more books), then I should write in a way most likely to achieve that goal. As always I value your good counsel.
Thank you, Mark. As discussed, I am putting this all in the cogitator. Sometime in the next two weeks Sundman figures it out! will reach its first birthday. An appropriate time to step back and do a little reflection about where to take it from here would be in order, I think.