Home for my words
It would be very easy for me to say that publishing is an industry, and that the reason I don't make enough money to even think about telling people I am an author when they ask the ubiquitously depressing get-to-know-you question is because I haven't invested in marketing or my platform, but I won't say that even though I just did.
The comparison of large tech companies and corporations to colonizing powers is not a new one. In this essay I examine the comparisons that have already been made and what can be contributed to the discussion.
I wish that I could make something better to express the stress I feel inside because my heart is a cannonball and my soul is an ocean. I sink deeper, down through the abyss and my eyes burst from the pressure and the sun is drowned and I am blind.
I wish I could make something better.
When I first started writing my novel it was in LibreOffice Writer, but I quickly realized that while it worked well for essays and even my thesis, it was not ideal for writing fiction. At least, not for me. I wanted something stable and flexible enough to handle tens of thousands of words of dark, realistic fantasy. In addition, I wanted to make sure that when those tens of thousands of words were ready for publishing, I could convert the manuscript fairly easily from a single master file.
This guide is what I wish I had when I started, and I'm putting it together in case anyone else is curious or wants to use free and open source software to write and publish their novel.
Sorry for the radio silence. My wife and I took a vacation to Disney (my first time!), so I haven't had a whole lot of time to do research and write. I have had a lot of time to think, however, and I've decided to research colonialism and see if there are any comparisons between colonization of the “New World” and the colonization of the internet. I've spent some time narrowing it down and have a thesis to work with.
Disclaimer: I mean no disrespect to other bloggers and writers on any of the platforms that this is read. I do however, mean to disrespect the current ad-driven, marketing-centric model that dominates the blogging and internet writing landscape, which seems to reward quantity over quality.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau tells a story about an Indigenous man who weaves a basket and tries to sell it to a well-known lawyer in town. The lawyer refuses, saying he does not want any, astonishing the Indigenous man. Thoreau writes: “Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off – that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed – he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that this was so...“