Russian light show

Rockets stopped being entertaining long before we actually managed to land on the Moon, but it seems that the Russians are working on ways of making them fun again.  Just think:  mysterious blue spirals in the sky!  Who needs the things to actually do anything?

I remember reading the people in northern Russia always saw a lot of UFOs, because the secret cosmodrome at Plesetsk fired off all sorts of rockets without ever informing anyone of the base's existence.  NASA has been much less entertaining of late.

However, the most interesting phrase in the story I linked to is "Celebrity astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaar".  This guy could get a reality show just based on that attributed title and his name alone.

The evolution of metaphor

From Peter Frost, of Evo and Proud  something I've read about elsewhere: that we really do tend to think of someone as having a "warmer" personality if we are holding something warm, and that washing really does make us feel less guilty--Pilate was on to something.

This stimulates three thoughts.  One: we always overestimate the influence of our thoughts in our decisions, and underestimate things we don't even perceive.  Two: metaphor is woven into the very way we perceive the universe. It's not just a rhetorical technique.  Three: knowing about this and taking it into account can help you control your environment to allow for more rational decisionmaking (that is, if that is your goal.  It is mine.)

Frost thinks this means we are reusing neural pathways evolved for other purposes, which explains the seeming high heritability of complex and recently evolved behaviors.  I think we've only just started moving toward an understanding of where our sense of the world really comes from.

The romance of employment

While romantic literature is concerned with getting a proposal of marriage, much modern science fiction is concerned with getting a job offer. And while the mate is supposed to be worthy, as well as worth much, the company doing the hiring is supposed to be interesting, important, and innovative. The real difference is that SF deals with exciting jobs, but romantic fiction usually drops the happy couple at the church and goes on its way.

I thought of this recently, after Neil Stephenson's Anathem, where all the characters eventually get recruited into a complex mission, and Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids, where all the various characters (all clones of the same person) get recruited to save the world--retrogressively sleeping with the man hiring them in the bargain (you didn't think we could get rid of that other "romance" in the process, did you? It just has to happen in the workplace.) William Gibson has a lot of hiring and employment in his books, and I'd say it was a fairly common trope.

Most of the writers of these books, on the other hand, are unwilling-to-be-employed freelancers, which allows them to romanticise the workplace without worrying about the realities of quarterly numbers, Yankee swaps at the holiday party, and notices about keeping the microwave clean.

Jane Austen never got married, either.

The social construction of climate change

Us rational nerd-type folks were irritated during the Science Wars (remember them? I suspect we have an armistice, but not a permanent peace) with various postmodern views of the scientific enterprise, including social construction and feminist epistemology, and were delighted by daring forays into the enemy's territory, like Sokal's Hoax. After all, when we write hard SF, we try to base it on reasonable modifications to the current scientific understanding of the universe. We do assume there is such a thing, and that it has something to do with the actual universe.

The recent furor over the stolen emails at the Climate Studies Unit at the University of East Anglia shows that the "current scientific understanding" of anthropogenic global warming is not socially constructed, but may be a bit slipperier than might seem at first.

Modernity's great generators of knowledge and wealth--trade, science, democracy--all involve managing the natural human urges to cooperate with those closest to us (thus building long-lasting personal bonds) in order to allow for large-scale anonymous information-maximizing transactions (thus making us richer and smarter).

Refusing nepotism, cronyism, and groupthink isn't easy. It violates all our natural hunting-band ingroup/outgroup default mental habits. So there is nothing weird or incomprehensible about what happened at the CSU, but there is nothing admirable either. Keeping objectivity is a constant struggle, because we so hate its results. Any coherent mental practice eventually leads to a result you are emotionally uncomfortable with: it's a sign (thought not a guarantee) that you are maintaining consistency. The CSU community seems to have gotten to like each other a bit too much.

For much of the louder part of the world, of course, the truth or falsehood of AGW is not the issue. Coalition is the issue. AGW has no more objective meaning to such people than the presence or absence of Filioque in the Creed, or Socialism in One Country, or wearing white after Labor Day (and, yes, I know people have died, at least for the first two, so I am aware such issues can lead to bloody results).

But we can't worry about the voices of those people when we are seeking some kind of knowlege. Ignoring them can sometimes be the hardest part of true science. What happened at CSU might be "inevitable". But so are plane crashes and house fires. We do our best to make sure they happen as infrequently as possible, with as little loss of life as possible.

Afterlife porn

From Cat Valente, a brilliant post on mainstream attempted use of fantasy techniques without really understanding them (via the estimable Theodora Goss), and the creation of a useful term:  afterlife porn.

Because that's it. What passes for fantastic fiction in the mainstream is almost entirely this: "You Will Not Die, And Neither Will Those You Love". There are other elements, certainly, but that is the underlying point of its writing and its reading.

So, of course, there is no underlying logic or structure to it. The more fictional plausibility the author creates, the less spiritual plausibility it has, because it becomes about the writer's creative work, and not the reader's denial of death. Those damn writers and their fictions. Just messes up a good book.

The still-living spirits of the dead are not part of daily life (for most people, anyway), so techniques of fantastic fiction seem a natural tool to use. But in the cases at hand these techniques are the accidents of fantasy, and not their substance (using the terminology of Aristotelian physics for literary criticism is perverse, I'm aware, and I suppose there are better literary terms for what I'm talking about, but I don't know what they are--Dora will know).

In her own post referring to Ms. Valente's rant, Dora (I use her first name because, believe or not, I actually know her.  Not her fault, it just happened) goes off on The Time Traveler's Wife.  Now, I actually liked TTTW better than she did (and felt weird liking it--not my usual thing), but it, again, is about denial of death. Dora sees it as a Scenes From a Marriage kind of thing merely, but I think it too is a kind of afterlife porn, with that being a significant emotional element.

Now Ms. Valente and Dora have me thinking, always a dangerous thing. Fear of death makes you accept all sorts of implausibilities. There are people who believe in ghosts, reincarnation, and the afterlife, all at the same time. I suspect those people are not usually readers of my books, or Ms. Valente's or Dora's either.

"In Our Time"

I ride my bike to work and listen to lectures and podcasts while I do it. Not optimally safe, I suppose, but I can hear traffic, and I've been doing it for years.

Aside from The Teaching Company classes I've mentioned before, I like the various episodes of In Our Time, from BBC4.  Melvyn Bragg interviews three different people a week, usually university professors, on a topic of intellectual interest, whether Boethius, the Ediacaran biota, or Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. Bragg is pretty good at keeping the various dons on topic.

The most recent episode is available on the site as a podcast, and you can listen to the previous ones. I particularly liked the one on the Baroque, and the aforementioned revenge tragedy one.  Bragg did a four part series on Darwin, in honor of the anniversary, that was fun and comprehensive.

Writers and word counts

Some writers post their daily word count on their blogs. To me that seems both weirdly intimate and completely uninformative, but maybe that's because I do not manage to generate anywhere near as many words as these people tend to. Word counters don't seem to post things like "15", "121", "0", "0", "erased everything I wrote last week and then threw up"--they post robust and intimidating numbers instead.

It's not that I don't track my word production. I do. I even (to be weirdly intimate in my own way) graph moving averages, etc. as a way of making sure I'm keeping my pace up.

But that number, while not completely meaningless, is quite misleading. I generally write a lot, and then spend a lot of time rewriting, cutting, rewriting, cutting. I don't usually throw up, but that would not be out of place. So for me that word production number is more "wheat seed sown" rather than "baked loaves of bread delivered". In the current credit environment, no one is lending me money against that.

Using the Peloponnesian War

It was a nasty little regional war, with combat from Sicily to the Hellespont, lasting (with poorly adhered-to truces) for 27 years, involving all the great Greek states (wealthy farming Thebes and oligarchic commercial Corinth as well as the better-known war-geek Sparta and art-for-our-sake imperial/democratic Athens), and many smaller ones, often involuntarily, with brutal massacres, sieges, ethnic cleansings, dramatic turnarounds, and plagues. Being written about by Thucydides sealed its interest for well over two thousand years.

The Peloponnesian War was popular during the Cold War, since it asked various questions of interest, like:

• Can a democracy successfully fight a long war that requires a lot of sacrifice from its population? (Answer: yes, extremely well, but you don't want to be a general in its army or navy. If you fail they execute or exile you, and if you succeed they fete you, then become suspicious of you and execute or exile you)
• If the main path to victory is blocked by a determined opponent, should you try striking in an unexpected place? (Answer: often it's unexpected because it's dumb. Try to avoid high-risk enterprises that, even if successful, have minimal payoffs.  We should all fear a Syracusan Expedition, but instead find the concept of a surprise end-run around a stalemate irresistable.)
• Can terrorizing civilian populations and destroying resources win a war without crushing the opponent's main force? (Answer: no, but it has a weird sort of satisfaction that can become dangerously addictive.)
• Who is more effective at war, determined tyrannies or fractious democracies? (Answer: the judgments of battlefields can be fickle, and chance can play a large role. But no matter who wins, democracies have staying power:  Athens lost, and then regained its prosperity and dominance--before losing all to Philip of Macedon and his nasty little boy, Alexander, in the next century.)

Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other taught me a lot about the ground level truth of that war. Highly recommended to anyone trying to depict realistic state-level combat with Classical-era edged weapons. It's a painful, bloody grind. You have to watch your back as well as your front, and you may do everything right and still die of plague.

Five reasons writers don't improve with age

I had dinner with my old friend Bob Klonowski last week, and he asked me an exasperated question:  why do writers seem to get worse as they get older? If writing is a skill (and it certainly is), why shouldn't increased experience with technique, as well as extended encounters with other human beings, cause writers to improve? He had had several bad experiences with writers he had once enjoyed, and was interested in an explanation.

I didn't have an answer, or even any good counterexamples, but in a related article, Terry Teachout, recently wrote about artists who stop producing, indicating that this is often a good thing, because later work, when produced, tends not to match the quality of earlier, thus bolstering Bob's point.

"I'm a big fan of his early work" is a standard joke.  But is it true?  And if it is, why is it true?

I had a couple of explanations for Bob, and a couple I thought of later.

1. Lack of editing.  Many writers are more the creations of their editors than they would like to acknowledge.  Chop the worst-quality 10 percent (or 20 percent, or 30) of any work, and it likely would be improved.  In a writer's early days, the editorial requirements often cause that to happen. When a writer starts selling, and has a reputation, editing falls by the wayside. Even formerly perceptive friends and colleagues are deluded by the simple fact of success into thinking that editing is no longer as important.
2. Related to lack of editing is the simple fact that a writer has to be better to make a reputation than to keep one. Once a reputation is achieved, reviewers look less carefully, and readers who have developed a taste for what the writer has to offer are willing to put up with a diluted or cut product in order to get it. Marketers have an existing hook to sell the books with, which makes sales relatively easier to achieve.  Having market dominance means that quality is less important as part of the total sales package.  And, since quality is painfully hard to achieve, and successful writers have speaking gigs, tours, and other distractions to contend with, they are disinclined to torture themselves.
3. With increasing age, there are basic failures of cognition. Sad, and agist, but unfortunately true. The number of words you can see ahead goes down. The skein of detailed relationships is harder to perceive. The reader of the final book doesn't see it, but the act of writing is as fraught as surfing and as reflexive as Whac-A-Mole. It gets harder to manage, and thus scarier, leading to writer's block. One hopes that increasing experience can compensate, but sometimes it doesn't.
4. Some writers just don't have that much to say. They have a few experiences, some key perceptions, a limited repertory company of characters, and a couple of verbal tricks. Book One is fabulous and original, Book Two revisits the successes of the first, Book Three is a chastening attempt to try something new that doesn't come off, and successive volumes after that are rewrites of Books One and Two.
5. And, finally (related to the above), maybe the original books weren't really that good in the first place. You were the right age and having the right experiences to be charged up when you read them, but if you read them now, you would like them no better than that obese volume squatting loathsomely on your nightstand that some enthusiastic review persuaded you to buy against your better judgment.

Not all these explanations apply to every writer, of course.  Maybe the trick is to start late in life, like Penelope Fitzgerald, after some other career, thus avoiding unfortunate comparisons with youth.

Anyone know a decent writer who became better with age?

Having a day job means seriously setting priorities

One thing a day job does take is time. I mean, they make me be at work all day. And, as if that weren't enough, I have to be working on the stuff they pay me for. My other job is of no interest to them.

That means I spend most of my weekends working on my writing career. That's fine, but that career has a lot of other parts to it other than creating prose. For example, my book is coming out in a little over a month, and, aside from trying to entice you with my witty blog postings, I haven't done that much to promote it.

I feel that creating the work comes first. And it's easy to fall completely behind. If story and novel inventories are empty, it takes an incredibly long time to fill them again. Once the pipelines have something in them, keeping them flowing is somewhat less fraught.

So I've decided to focus on more short stories and the next book, rather than publicity for the one coming up. That may prove to be a long-term error--there is no guarantee that the next book will be picked up unless Brain Thief does well.

Watch with me, and see how my decisions pan out.

Heuristic hijacking

Humanoid robots were once universal in science fiction. They looked somewhat like metal people, and had narrow human personalities with programmed obsessive-compulsive disorder that kept them focused on their assigned tasks.

They were also charming. Now, as I've mentioned before, we tend to react emotionally to beings (fictional or real) that have constrained emotional and intellectual toolsets (autistic, mentally handicapped, animal, programmed). Robots certainly meet that requirement, and were usually written with a certain pertness or "speaking truth to power" attitude. The bombastic or prideful would meet their comeuppance from the clarity of a robot. Robots weren't deliberately contrary, had no emotional needs of their own, weren't petulant, snarky, or angst-ridden, and were in general easier to deal with than messy human minds.

In real life, people are still working on that charm.  In his article Robots That Care, New Yorker medical writer Jerome Groopman describes some attempts at therapeutic robots. The article is vague and bland, partially because robots still can't do that much, and using them to interact with people who have had strokes, Alzheimer's patients, and children is mostly unsuccessful.  The article does have some interesting things to say about how a robot can be programmed to interact differently with an extrovert than with an introvert, but has little hard information on it.

Because, of course, the article is about robots who might someday successfully pretend to care, not robots that care. The designers seek to hijack our hacked-up heuristics for interpreting other minds. Since we're capable of attributing personalities to computers, cars, and cats, we clearly are predisposed to see other minds even when they aren't there. Sherry Turkle, at the end of the article, thinks this is a bad idea. She wonders why people are so eager to cut humans out of the therapeutic relationship. The benefits would have to be extraordinary, she says for it to be worthwhile.

So beware heuristic hijacking (a concept that's been around, but Google indicates that I just now thought up the term--remember that you read it here first). Our makeshift analytics will inevitably be trickable by devices with the right programming and enough processing power. It hasn't happened yet, but it will.

Life is good: we have dentists

This morning I went in to my dentist for a routine cleaning.  Every time I go in to have my gums probed and my teeth examined, I reflect on this relatively unsung hero of our happy existence.

Improperly treated, teeth can cause incredible pain, both chronic and acute.  They rot, cause damage to the jaw, and fall out.  The remaining teeth then shift, and get loose in their turn.  Once you have few teeth, food is harder to eat, your diet suffers, and your overall health declines.  Soon, you are old.
Enlightened dental hygiene combined with regular dentist visits prevent this.

This is incredibly boring, isn’t it?  "Enlightened dental hygiene".  Something you would expect from your most blowhard relative over turkey.  How quickly the miraculous becomes mundane.  Good dental care adds healthy and pain-free years to your life.

Interestingly, I can think of no fairy tale where someone wishes for a new set of teeth (I am no folklore scholar:  does anyone know of one?).  Of course, no one asks for lifelong resistance to infectious disease, escape from death in childbirth, or a smokeless chimney either.  Were these things literally unimaginable?  Most likely it’s just that a fairy tale requires some element of believability to be adequately comforting.  One can imagine a bigger house, more food, or a nicer spouse.  Decent teeth were far beyond the realm of possibility.  It wasn't even something that would occur to anyone.

But so far from being unbelievable, these things are now routine.  So, this Thanksgiving, in addition to giving thanks for all you have, give thanks for dentists.  And vaccines, public health, and smokeless domestic heat as well, while you’re at it.

The benefits of silence

I just got back from visiting my mother, who had bypass surgery a few weeks ago.  She's doing fine.

There is no internet connectivity at her retirement community, and it proved difficult to get anywhere I could get some.

On the other hand, I'm not as comprehensively mentally connected as most other people.  I often read people complaining about shortened attention spans, distraction, etc., and I certainly feel that when I have connectivity.

When I don't, however, I'm perfectly happy.  Her apartment is looks out over the roofs of the other buildings into a Midwestern oak forest.  It is utterly silent.  So, while my mother napped, I read, alternating Middlemarch and Victor David Hanson's analysis of the Peloponnesian War, A War Like No Other.  No, I didn't discern any deep connection between the two works.

Now I'm back, and catching up.

Behind the boiler

Occasionally a magazine or web site will run photographs of writers' spaces.  Now, I presume they are tidied, fluffed, and art-directed before the photograph is taken--I've never seen one with a crumb-covered plate or even a decent layer of random paper.  But even taking that into account, they tend to look kind of artistic, with interesting curios, favorite chairs, antique desks, that kind of thing.

I work behind the boiler in my basement.  Now, this is not as grim as it might be--the basement is fairly dry, the walls are painted white, we removed the asbestos.  But...once I brought home a Taunton Press book on basements.  If you've ever looked at a Taunton Press book for ideas on how to redo your kitchen, or your attic, or your orangerie, you know that they don't really give you any information useful to a normal person.  In this case, none of the basements were actually underground.  They all seemed to be part of houses built into hills, so at least one wall actually had windows that looked out on something.  It was pretty annoying, actually.

I don't have windows that look down on anything.  I work by artificial life, day and night.  I've covered the walls with geologic maps of Canyonlands and the Grand Canyon (lots of nice colors).  I have books all around me.  My desk is a butcher block door on two filing cabinets that I've had ever since my first apartment, a long time ago.  I have to put on headphones when someone is watching the TV, which is in the other part of the basement.  There are worse things.

Still, I'd like a nicer space.  I'd like the kind of space a magazine might print.  Someday, maybe.

Brands and satisficing

The slogan of the Sycamore Hill Writer's Conference is "Adequate Science Fiction", based on the principle that "good enough" is, well, good enough.

The writers who attend Syc Hill (of which I have been one) don't believe this at all, of course.  They are aiming at something far beyond "adequate", the use of a litotes (a rhetorical word for "understatement") being a signature turn of the fancy pants literary SF writer.

But humans are not maximizing creatures.  We are "satisficing" creatures:  if seeking out the best takes too long or expends too many resources, then it isn't "the best", not from a resource-conserving standard.  Good enough, found quickly, beats really good, found with difficulty and effort.

Brands (and genres too--I'll get to that at some point) are search-conserving heuristics (to use some fancy pants rhetoric of my own).  They seem to compress a lot of information into a narrowband signal, because they evoke information you already have cached.  We perceive little and process less, and the best way to get to us is to tell us something we already know, disguised as something new.  Effortless revelation follows.  They enable us to find the adequate, quickly.

So a brand (like, say, a writer you may be thinking of reading) should be consistent, so that it can quickly inform you of something you already know.  Writers who think their brand can just be "quality literature" quickly learn that that's too vague--and, frankly, too difficult to deliver on consistently.  We all think we keep our quality high at all costs, but aside from someone like Ted Chiang, we are mostly fooling ourselves.  Better "military science fiction" or "the guy with the weird aliens".  Those are attributes whose quality can vary quite a bit before you get into trouble.  They can convey something you already know.

What is my own brand?  I'm still working on that one.

Westerns and space operas

Every genre writer's dream (or at least this genre writer's dream) is to write a work that attracts readers from outside the genre, without compromising its essential genre nature.  In fact, to bring them in, to show them what the point of the genre really is, and get them to appreciate it.

I've not read enough Westerns to know whether McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is a representative Western, but it sure is a great novel.  It's pretty elemental:  men and women in rough, hard-to-survive country, hard because of the unsparing environment, and hard because of other human beings.  Some characters you have invested real feeling in get killed offhandedly, the way real people did, and do, die.  Victories are local and temporary, and savored all the more for that.  Defeats are large, and often final.  The characters are compelling, and often funny as hell.  They understand what many of us have forgotten:  our most important duty in this life is to entertain each other.

McMurtry does it without elaborate literary references, mythic structures ("mythic" in contemporary fiction means "unbelievable characters with tortured syntax"--run if you see the word used in a review), or "fine writing".

Now, McMurtry is not purely a writer of Westerns, though he is a Western writer, so it's not like he's clawing his way out of the corral.  But he's decided to play to what makes the genre appealing (particularly a stoic nobility brought out by the harshness of circumstance), commenting on it at the same time (Call, the most stoically noble of the characters, is disliked and suspected by all women, who tend to perceive too clearly what it is he had to give up to be who he is), while letting us share in the genre's inherent energy (you can see why the men respect Call, obey him, and instinctively want his approval, while understanding why someone who does not depend on his skill and authority might be less taken in--even Darth Vader eventually identifies himself to his son, and Call...well, you'll just have to read it and see what Call does with his own unacknowledged son).

Science fiction is a much bigger playground than Westerns, so it's natural that many more writers can play there and nowhere else, and have successful, productive careers.  But sometimes it's worth trying to take your ball and play somewhere else, using the skills you learned there.

That was my ambition with Brain Thief, certainly.

Genre as a community of practice

Genre writers of ambition sometimes start to wonder why the rest of the world does not take them as seriously as it should.  "Isn't my work as valid as some damn sensitive coming-of-age story?" they wonder. "Isn't a charge of Comanches or a crash landing on an ice planet or a body discovered face down in the koi pond as significant an event as an adulterous encounter during a grant-funded year abroad?"

I'd say they are, but not because all of those things exist in some kind of common literary space.  I think there really are genre boundaries, because genres are communities of practice, sets of agreed-upon techniques and tropes, and market segments aimed at audiences with certain already existing characteristics.  They exist, not in the same sense the chair I'm sitting in exists, but certainly as definitely as, say "left-liberal urbanites with a need to feel compassion" or "Red Sox fans" or "model railroad enthusiasts" exist.

There is lately a bit of buzz about this in my own field, shown, in one instance, by a book edited by my friends John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly, The Secret History of Science Fiction, ably reviewed by Paul Witcover here.  Is science fiction part of a continuum of literature, or is it somehow separate?

Is "Thai food" part of the continuum of food, or is it somehow separate?  Is "big band swing music" part of the continuum of music or....etc.  You get the idea.  And I think you already know my answer.  These are communities of practice, sets of agreed-on techniques and tropes, and productions that appeal to a certain market segment.  Many of us like responding to our fellow writers, like being able to test ourselves against great writers of the past, like having some standard techniques available to us so that we can focus on experimenting in other ways, and like knowing something about who our audience is and what it cares about.  These are not pathetic weaknesses.  In genre there is strength. 

I was going to start this entry writing about Lonesome Dove, which I just finished--Western being another genre.  Some other time!

The Augustan History and The Onion

The problem with history as a source for fiction is that a lot of history is already fiction.  Or, rather, we have no idea how much of it is fiction.

Consider what we know about the Roman Emperors of the Third Century, that melancholy time of civil wars and usurpations.  Written sources are extremely rare and fragmented.  A lot of what we think we know comes from the Historia Augusta, a motley collection of tales that mixes what seem to be real documents with a lot of stuff someone might well have made up.  No one is even sure when it was written--it bills itself as a collection of six historians made during the early Fourth Century, but no one seems to believe this anymore.  The putative author of this weird work (which I've never read--but all authors on the period have to cite it) might make a good character in a historical novel.  What was he after?  Is the Augustan History something like The Onion?  Incidentally, The Onion would be a superb source on the spirit of our era, if you could pass its distortions and heightenings through some kind of reverse filter.

So would The Simpsons, for that matter.  These channels are sensitive to the zeitgeist in a way more deliberate journalism isn't.

Is the author of the Augustan History still mocking us after all these centuries.  Is one of those Emperors completely made up?  If so, which one?

Brand identity is what marketing people give you when they can't give you sales

So that's why I've always spent a lot of time "branding".  I've talked positioning, I've tweaked logos, I've reconfigured web sites, I've devised suites of collateral as multifarious as the seas.  It's a lot of work, but at least when you're done you don't have anyone asking you why sales are down.

For some reason, no one thinks rebranding has anything to do with sales.

Really, of course, it should.  But it's so indirect, it's impossible to tie together.  Unlike, say, the response rate on that last mailing or the stats on the sales pages on the web site.  Nowhere to hide there.  Marketing people will chew their own arms off to get out of that particular trap.

A few months ago my company was forced to change its name and all of its branding.  The orders came from above, and were not to be argued with.  We got an absurd logo and an eye-hurting color palette.  Our press releases had so much boastful boilerplate there was no room for content.  I had to describe the offerings of our parent organization before I could kiss my wife when I got home.

Then everyone responsible disappeared.

Now what?  The new administration indicates we can escape from our current identity.  For various reasons, going back to our original identity is not in the cards.  So I'm riding the rebranding train once again.  Wish me luck.

As an author, I have it pretty easy.  I have my name, such as it is.  I have my positioning--"amusing, snarky writer of SF with pretensions of literary quality"--and my message--"buy my book!"--all pretty straightforward.

It's my day job that does the brain damage.