It’s based, of course, on my experiences with Last Beautiful and Normal Heights, nee Shelldrake.

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1. Week 1575
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3. Week 1576

So: wow, the feedback was all really good. I’m not going to quote anything at extreme length, because I didn’t actually specify that I was going to share any of it. (Need to remember to do that next time! I’ll include a little “it’s okay to make this feedback public” checkbox.)

Note that, except in cases where people identify themselves, I never know who the feedback is coming from. I actually really like that: it forces me to judge it based on quality of articulation and force of argument. (And I do judge it! This is not slavish crowd-fiction. Very often I’ll read a block of commentary and go: Huh. Interesting, but I disagree.)

So here are some bits of feedback that I found particularly useful (with an occasional comment from me in bold):

• “Narrative engine… it really isn’t there. Especially towards the end when it becomes clear this really is all going to be completely diary-esque and nothing is going to happen with Kate, he is just going to philosophize a bit about life. That said, the hunt for her keeps you reading right up to the end, so there is a forward motion, it just isn’t so action based. One possibility is that you give us a little more Kate interaction, sure they made out twice, when, why was it so good, something more there.”
• “I don’t think you need a climate changing ship. Story would work just being a mystery of why the sun went away. […] Some better words about what pre fog Kate means would be a major coup as well.”
• “I wanted either more about Kate or more about the disaster—personally, I’d prefer more about Kate (not necessarily traditional characterization—could be more along the lines of the belly image) and having the ship disaster a little more obscure (see Nabokov and the banning of electricity in ‘Time and Ebb’ and ‘Ada’).”
• “I didn’t need the boat. I mostly liked the Kate story, the feeling that you made an error and missed something, not that you found something else. The drama of it being ‘the last day’ was too much for such a simple, personal story.” (I got a lot of this kind of feedback—“less science, more girl”—and I made some changes based on it… but I couldn’t bring myself to drop the ship entirely.)
• “The concept, while limited at this stage, was unique. One of the things that struck me was how powerful your descriptions of places are (ocean beach in particular). I’ve never even been to SF but you made me feel the tragedy of losing its sunshine. In fact I still feel a bit melancholy.”
• “The description of the protagonist’s photo collage project was a bit muddy. Might want to sharpen the description of what it actually is.” (Describing computer interactions is going to be an ongoing challenge. I think they’re increasingly important, both narratively and emotionally… but also really difficult to write about.)
• “Maybe this is what you are going for, but your narrator sounds like a giant, sorry wuss. But if you want to cast Michael Cera as the protagonist, then go ahead.” (Ha ha. Love this. Ouch. It’s a good hurt.)
• “More of a question. Is the point of this story that we make our own beautiful days? And, did you start with this concept in mind or do you just spontaneously generate existential lit?” (The first line came to me while—wait for it—riding my bike to the beach on a beautiful day. It all unspooled in my head from there for the rest of the afternoon.)
• “The pace really kicks up when the protagonist decides to create the Last Beautiful Day project. If you can establish the internal ennui of the first part of the piece more quickly and get to the project faster, you’ll probably increase readers’ completion rate. That may be the magazine editor in me (‘compress the lede, move the nut graf up!’) but my enjoyment level spiked where the project starts.” (“Readers’ completion rate”—you’re talkin’ my language!)
• “But this idea [of the last beautiful day] […] I think needs to rely on fragments. It’s about absence—or its potential—and it needs to make the reader ache. The ‘band of belly’—perfect. Coupled with that hazy yellow light, and it evokes that sense of desire etc. w/out being lascivious or obvious, and does so with the most tiny of gestures. I guess that’s the direction I personally feel this needs to go in.”

It’s funny to think about how much this story changed not only between the rough draft, which these reviewers read, and the first public version, but even between that version and the version you can read today.

But my emerging process hinges on this notion: a piece of fiction is like a lump of clay, and my preference is to put it out in public before it finishes drying. It does dry eventually: it would feel really strange to go back and make edits to, say, The Writer & the Witch at this point. Even Last Beautiful feels mostly baked. But did I open it up and smooth out a sentence just now? I sure did.

My friend Andrew accused me recently of being “addicted to real-time feedback.” I had to admit that I was; I find this process just totally, irresistibly fun and useful. And rather than wring my hands over whether it’s the best path to producing great work—longer stories, better stories, deeper stories—I’m going to just keep developing it, improving it, until it gets me there. As I said up top, and as I’m sure you’ve sensed: this isn’t slavish crowd-fiction. There is a purpose to all this, and the purpose is to make something great.

Welcome to the new process.

Related posts:

1. Last Beautiful
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Annie, age six, saw it first. She squealed, tiny hands pressed flat against the window that looked out across the back yard, and cried: “An elf! AN ELF!”

I darted over, pushed my nose against the glass above her, and a chill ran through me—the chill of a strange silhouette in your kingdom. Annie was right: there, at the far end of the yard, was the shape of a little bent-over man struggling through the snow-drifts. But it wasn’t actually a man, and it wasn’t a child, either. The shape was truly tiny. Miniature.

My brain was primed from watching Planet Earth in school this year, and I recognized the shape: It was a monkey. (In the next moment, a flash of wonder: I’d actually used something I learned in school.)

“Holy shit,” said Uncle Mike, leaning over my shoulder. From the outside, he and Annie and I must have made a Truman-family totem pole. “That’s a macaque.”

The little monkey kept its pace, stumbling step-by-step. It really did look like a little old man with long, lanky arms. It even had the suggestion of a bushy gray beard. Then the wind rose and gusted for a stretch of seconds, pulling a scrim of white across the window, and when it fell, the monkey was gone, disappeared over the boundary into the next yard.

There were many questions. Where had this macaque come from? What was it doing in Minneapolis? Had it been brought here and given as a gift? Who would give a monkey as a Christmas present? How did it escape?

Was it dangerous? (Mom.) Could we keep it? (Annie.) How did Uncle Mike know anything about monkeys, anyway? (Me.)

Trumans were suiting up: Dad pulling on his thick black boots. Cousin Mike Jr. pausing his video game and instructing Annie in loud, monospaced syllables: “Don’t. touch. this. Okay? Don’t. touch. it.” Uncle Mike rummaging in the closet for ski goggles.

And me, begging to come along. Dad agreed, I think because he hadn’t seen the macaque himself and wasn’t quite convinced it was real. Also because he knew I would be annoying to Mom and Aunt Ronnie if he left me behind.

Uncle Mike cracked the back door and it was like opening an airlock; the warmth was sucked out of the room, out into the silvery swirl. I felt like Master Chief in my layers of snow-gear—thick and sturdy and a little stiff. We all tromped out onto the porch, and Mom sealed the ship behind us and waved farewell through the glass.

I followed behind Dad, hopping to place my steps in the craters he made with his black boots. We were going back across the yard, straight to where we’d seen the macaque last. I narrowed my eyes and made a tough expression under my scarf. There might be macaques everywhere.

The Great Christmas Monkey Hunt had begun.

That’s a graph of readers’ paths through The Truth About the East Wind. The x-axis is elapsed reading time, in minutes. The y-axis is progress through the story; the higher you get on the graph, the closer you are to the end of the page.

So if you’re someone who scrolled through the story… you’re in there! One of those ghostly blue tendrils is you. The page is rigged up with a very simple (and totally anonymous) scroll-tracker that dispatches data points to SimpleDB at regular intervals. It’s a book that phones home.

If you’ve ever talked to me about the Kindle, you know this is something I’m totally obsessed with; call it instrumented reading. This post at Snarkmarket sketches it out in a sci-fi way (and, P.S., has one of my favorite titles of any Snarkmarket post ever). So, after talking about it for a looong time, I decided to actually collect the data. And you know what?

I have no idea what to do with it.

The aggregate behavior isn’t very surprising. “Yup. People scroll down the page.” If anything, the surprise is simply that a lot of people spent 10 or more minutes with this story—which is pretty awesome.

It’s the individual graphs that are interesting:

I feel like that graph tells a little story. What happened around minutes 10 and 12? Did this reader go back to savor an image—or to double-check a confusing name?

Seriously, these graphs are almost like little narratives themselves:

And this one? No idea:

So sure, these are kinda fun to look at, but they don’t really deliver anything actionable. And I don’t think the aggregate graph up above does, either. I mean, is there anything I can change about the story, or about its presentation, based on what I see there? Not really. Not yet.

But this is just a first step. Like the story itself, it’s a prototype—a proof-of-concept. I’ve got my hands on a cool tool here… and I think I’m probably measuring the wrong thing.

So what should I measure instead?

Nerd notes: The data gets piped to SimpleDB via a little wrapper built with Sinatra, a Ruby framework that is the best thing I’ve yet discovered for making super-simple tools like this. It’s just fantastic. The graphs were plotted with gchartrb and the Google Chart API. Does everybody already know about this? It’s like magic. What a wacky, wonderful service from Google.

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1. Asymmetrical information
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3. CC shout-​​out

It’s a story about curiosity, obsession, and one of the greatest cover-ups of all time. Also, Greek gods. And it includes pictures and sound.

Hit me at robinsloan at robinsloan dot com if you’re game and I’ll send you a link!

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…but kinda nice, no?

(That’s an illustration from d’Aulaire’s hiding in there.)

• It makes me appreciate the mega-logistics of a big media release (e.g. one of the Harry Potter books) a lot more. Moving that much stuff in sync is no joke. But it matters that, if you really really want a copy, you can get one at the same time as everybody else.
• The super-fast (really near-magical) shipping experience that you get from Amazon, Zappos, Newegg and others set the bar high for everybody. And I really think indie operations—even solo creators like me—need to try to meet that standard.

Both points relate to a larger idea. Especially for a media product on or near its release date, the getting of the product is part of the product. Honestly, I think it’s just as important as things like the cover and, you know, the first sentence. It’s all part of the same experience.

So, I’m going to try to get better at this. Obviously Amazon has an advantage, because they ship thousands of things every day—every hour. But there are ways to harness those economies of scale for indie purposes, too. Next time.

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I am outlining.

My first conscious memory of outlining comes circa second or third grade. Assignment: research paper. Subject: THE SHIPS OF THE WORLD.

It was night, dark outside; I had my materials spread before me on the dining-room table, books big and small from the Wattles Elementary School library; and I was paralyzed. I’d pored through the books, looked at the pictures and picked my favorites, but I had no idea what to do with that knowledge, or what to do next, or how to do anything.

My mother approached. “Well,” she said, “why don’t you make an outline?” And then she explained what an outline was.

Later, I would scan images of Viking longboats into our Mac Plus, paste them into my short Word (1.0?) document, and then print it all out on a screeching ImageWriter. No one in my class had seen anything like it.

(You can skip straight to it if these process notes don’t interest you.)

The fun part is that I asked people for some quick feedback on Twitter and wow—they delivered! Using this form, I got sixteen really thoughtful responses in a matter of minutes. (I’d show them to you, but I never indicated to my on-demand reviewers that their responses would be made public, so I’m going to honor the assumption of privacy. Seriously, though: so thoughtful.)

None of the feedback said “meh” or “blech” so I decided to spend just a bit more time on it and address some of the problems that people identified. I am not assuming that anyone will actually want to compare these, but just for the sake of sharing the process: here’s v1 in Google Docs, the result of about 40 minutes of rushed typing; and here’s v2, with about another 40 minutes of work put into it.

Anyway, I’m not suggesting this is great literature, but I had fun with the process, and I actually think there’s something interesting about being able to “metabolize” stuff that’s very in-the-moment and make a story (or story-stub) out of it. And that really means being able to ask for feedback, and get it, in near-real-time.

I wish I could keep writing this story—I’m curious to know what happens next—but I’ve got to finish this book and I’ve already spent an irresponsibly large amount of time on this today.

Anyway! Enough meta-discussion. On to the story-stub.

Before you read, look at this: a quick post on the Facebook memorial feature.

And, an important warning: This is an Annabel Scheme scene, so if you’re trying to avoid all exposure before reading the book, you should definitely skip this for now.

Otherwise, read on!

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In this book, I’m trying to craft a central character with some of that same iconic strangeness that makes Sherlock Holmes so appealing. There’s a lot that goes into that, but for now, focus on the name. Sherlock Holmes. It leaves an indelible mark on the brain.

So, I have a name in mind for this character, and I was looking for a meaningful way to test it out—without giving it away.

That’s where AdWords comes in.

Here’s what I did:

Created a campaign attached to a bundle of search terms: mystery, detective story, sherlock holmes, noir, and more like those.

Came up with a whole set of names, basically wide variations on a theme. One was my original pick, but I liked all of them. Then, I created an ad for each one, all with the same body text but each with a different name swapped in for the headline.

Allocated a small budget ($40, to be exact) and kicked off the campaign. And wow there are a lot of people searching for stuff on Google. Over the span of 24 hours, my ads made about 100,000 impressions.

So the question—and I do think it’s a serious question, insofar as it’s a simulation of a decision that will confront many potential buyers of this book—the question is, which name worked?

The results, pixelated for secrecy’s sake:

Here’s the way I read this: The four names at the top all did about the same. I wouldn’t choose a name with an 0.23% click-through rate over a name with an 0.20% just because of that measly 0.03 margin.

But the 0.07% at the bottom? I think there’s real signal there. As it happens, the name at 0.07% was one I really liked—but it didn’t make the cut. Alas.

My original idea—the name I came into the exercise with—is the one at 0.21%. So basically, I see this as validation: The name works. People don’t see it and go “ew” or “meh.”

But okay, I’ll be honest. This was mostly just an excuse to try a new tool. Any nerd will tell you that tools can provide their own intrinsic rewards. There’s an aspect of exploration to it, too: you’re pressing out into new tool-territory, learning about what you can and can’t do.

This little AdWords test is a first step. Mechanical Turk might be next. I mean, imagine—this is the sci-fi extrapolation—imagine highlighting a block of text, choosing a menu item called Test the way you’d choose Spellcheck today, and when you do, a little timer appears next to it. Five minutes later, ding—the timer goes off and you have the results right there, floating over the text. Aggregated feedback from an anonymous swarm of readers: “I stumbled here,” “this variation works better,” “this line rings false.”

That might sound naive—it’s definitely oversimplified—but I think there might be something useful lurking in this particular tool-territory.

Okay so, finally, here’s the irony: I’m making a big deal out of keeping this name secret. Functionally, it is secret—none of you know what it is yet! And yet… 100,000 people out there have laid eyes on it. Thousands of Google searchers have seen her name. What kind of secret is that?

Ah, liquidity. Ah, scale.

Sometimes, the vast sea of clicks can be a comfort.

(Cross-posted to Kickstarter.)

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