Avatar photoSteven Savage

Wondering How Long We’ll Care

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

We’ve got the SAG-AFTRA strike.  Big Studios and groups like Netflix seem to be very interested in replacing real people with AI – and we know they won’t stop no matter the deals made.  Ron Pearlman and Fran Drescher are apparently leading the Butlerian Jihad early.

As studios, writers, and actors battle I find myself caring about the people – but caring far less about the media produced.  There’s so many reasons not to care about Big Media.

You’d think I’d be thrilled to see Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and Star Trek everywhere!  But it’s so many things are omnipresent it sucks the oxygen out of the room.  Even when something is new, it can be overhyped.  If it’s not everywhere, it’s marketed everywhere and I get tired of it all.  Also damn, how much anime is there now?

The threat of AI replacing actors and writers removes that personal connection to actors and writers and creators.  There was already a gap anyway as groups of writers created shows and episodes, abstracting the connections with the creators.  The headlong rush into AI only threatens to make me care less – I can’t go to a convention and shake hands with a computer program or be inspired to write just as good as a program.

We have plenty of content made already anyway.  I could do with a good review of Fellini, maybe rewatch Gravity Falls again, and I recently threatened to watch all of One Piece for inexplicable reasons.  Plus of course I have tons of books.

Finally, there’s all sorts of small creators new and old I should take a look at.  Maybe I don’t need the big names anymore.  Hell, the small creators are easier to connect with.

Meanwhile all of the above complaints are pretty damned petty considering the planet is in a climate crisis and several countries are falling apart politically and economically.  I’m not going to care about your perfect AI show when the sky turns orange because of a forest fire.

I have a gut feel I’m not alone in the possibility of just kind of losing interest in the big mediascape.  We may have different triggers for giving up, but there’s a lot of possible triggers.  Plus, again, potential world crises create all sorts of possibilities.

Maybe that’s why the “Barbenheimer” meme was so joyful, with people discussing these two very different films as a kind of single phenomena.  It was spontaneous, it was silly, it was self-mocking.  Something just arose out of the big mediascape (and two apparently good films), a very human moment it seems we’re all too lacking.

Maybe it’s a reminder we can care about our media.  But it the chaotic times we face in a strange era of media, I wonder if we’ll remember it as a fond exception.

Steven Savage

Remembering Good Enough

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My latest book Think Agile, Write Better is in its final read-through, and I’ll be formatting it for e-book next week.  This book has been through many edits to get it right, but my biggest challenge lately was to realize that “it’s good enough.”

I’d gotten into an “editing binge” when one pre-reader found some flaws with first third of the book.  I went through the suggestions carefully, rewrote them again, kept going, and kept looking for what else to fix.  I knew there had to be more to do.

That’s when the same friend read it and said basically “ok, seems solid” which surprised me because I’d expected yet more to fix.  I’d gotten into a habit of editing and looking for flaws, not realizing if the book was “good enough.”

It’s easy to get into the zone where you edit, edit, and edit some more.  Looking for flaws leads you to find more flaws, and sometimes even imagine them or second guess yourself.  You can get to the mental place where your book will never be “good enough” because you can’t recognize it and aren’t even looking for it.

There I was, with what was basically a finished book and I didn’t even know it.

I think there’s a skill to recognizing a book is done, a skill with two facets.

The first facet of the skill is to recognize that a book is good enough on a technical and content level.  This mix of organization, intuition, empathy, and technical knowledge is one that a good author just develops over time.  I don’t think it’s one you can train in, more one you get to by just doing it.

The second facet of the skill is psychological –to be in the mental space to recognize that a work is complete.  Based on the experience of myself and fellow authors, this “skill facet” of being in the right mental space to say “done” is less common than the ability to see the work is done.  Many of us have met authors with it what is clearly a finished work that authors clearly can’t stop editing.

I can relate.  I still rethink past writing, but there is a time just to realize it’s good enough and move on.  If one doesn’t move on, one will never publish what they’re working on, let alone publish anything else.

I’m glad I caught that moment of being in the mental space of not seeing “good enough,” as it not only kept me moving but it was also a good reminder to move on.

I might not know what’s next, but at least I know there will be a next.  All because I could say “good enough.”

Steven Savage

40 Versions Of Me

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

(Thanks to Serdar for the idea.)

  1. There’s a me who became a comedian.
  2. There’s a me who became a minister and then lost his faith.
  3. There’s a me who became a minister and then lost his heart.
  4. There’s a me who became a tutor.
  5. There’s a me who churns out hack SF at a rapid pace.
  6. There’s a me who collects obscure sci-fi and fantasy movies.
  7. There’s a me who designed psychotronic devices.
  8. There’s a me who designs artificial limbs.
  9. There’s a me who did documentation for video games.
  10. There’s a me who didn’t live to see eighteen.
  11. There’s a me who does neurological research and hates it.
  12. There’s a me who joined a cult.
  13. There’s a me who founded a cult.
  14. There’s a me who got a Computer Science Degree and vanished into a government job.
  15. There’s a me who got deep into indie bands and ran their newsletters.
  16. There’s a me who has a nursing degree.
  17. There’s a me who has only worked in a University setting but isn’t an educator.
  18. There’s a me who helped a company dominate their industry, and I never realized what I did.
  19. There’s a me who is a crotchety old programmer.
  20. There’s a me who is a damn good Executive Admin.
  21. There’s a me who is a humor columnist since my college days.
  22. There’s a me who is a life coach.
  23. There’s a me who is a professional writer – of anything.
  24. There’s a me who is a social worker.
  25. There’s a me who is a therapist
  26. There’s a me who launched an anime fan magazine.
  27. There’s a me who manages video game programmers.
  28. There’s a me who programmed video games.
  29. There’s a me who still works in banking and likes it, for some reason
  30. There’s a me who supports expensive laboratory devices.
  31. There’s a me who was never married.
  32. There’s a me who works in the RPG industry.
  33. There’s a me who writes weird, surrealist fiction.
  34. There’s a me who wrote – and maybe still writes – indie comics.
  35. There’s a me who’s a dual citizen in Canada.
  36. There’s a me who’s a professor of some kind.
  37. There’s a me who just realized what he’s done with his life.
  38. There’s a me who likes himself more.
  39. There’s a me who likes myself less.
  40. There’s a me who never writes things like this list.

What are 40 versions of you I should know?

Steven Savage