Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Redefining Sex Work
"It's been great, honestly," she told me a couple weeks ago at an Oakland Chinatown lunch spot, steam rising from the vermicelli bowl in front of her and fogging her lenses. She genuinely likes her clients, or at least as much as anyone can be expected to like the people they work with, and she appreciates the freedom of being able to set her own hours: "I don't have an alarm clock," she said. "I make breakfast every morning, I get to hang out with my friends whenever I want. This job affords me a lifestyle most people don't get."
Sex is one of those commodities that tends to be popular no matter how bad the economy is, and Parton said the Bay Area's booming tech industry — and its attendant cadre of young, lonely men who want an escort they're compatible with both sexually and intellectually — has been great for business. All told, with a rate in the several hundreds of dollars an hour, she can work between five and ten hours a week and still make far more than the vast majority of other 24-year-olds out there. Parton has met many of her friends through sex work, and it's via her involvement with the Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project — a national advocacy group and decriminalization effort founded by and for sex workers in 2003 that's better known by its acronym, SWOP — that she's found her footing as an activist. "Honestly," she said, "my job is one of the most stable and rewarding things in my life
Parton is exceptionally well-adjusted by any measure — especially for someone working in a trade that's illegal and often maligned — but as it turns out, she's far from alone. In fact, she's but one example of what's beginning to look like an emerging breed of sex workers: educated, empowered, tech-savvy, and activism-oriented, honest about who they are and proud of what they do. They have iPhones and nose piercings and college degrees; they chronicle their experiences on Tumblr and are out to their families. They're primarily what are known in the industry as "indoor" sex workers — meaning they find clients mostly via the web, at online marketplaces like Eros and Redbook, rather than working on the street, and they tend to charge rates in the hundreds of dollars an hour. (...)
"The relationships between customers, managers, sex workers ... are incredibly varied and very nuanced," said Max Besbris, who conducted a sociological study of Oakland's sex trade as part of his honors thesis at UC Berkeley and is now a Ph.D candidate at NYU. "What we've seen is that there's a great deal of agency exercised by a lot of women and men who do sex work. But the laws basically reduce all relationships to exploitative ones."
The latest and highest-profile such proposed law is Prop 35, which appears on California's November ballot. It's a complicated measure, rife with legalese and referential to several different parts of the penal code, but essentially, Prop 35 would expand the definition of, and increase penalties for, human trafficking. On the surface, it sounds like one of those unequivocally positive ballot measures anyone can feel good about voting for — and, in fact, it's been endorsed by both of California's major political parties.
Advocates of Prop 35 — mostly law enforcement and those who work with victims of childhood sex abuse — argue that human trafficking is an epidemic in California and the laws as they currently exist don't adequately address the problem. But the ballot measure is also getting vehement criticism, much of it from within the sex industry itself: A number of victims' rights organizations have come out against it, arguing, for the most part, that a problem as complicated as trafficking deserves a more comprehensive solution, and many sex workers have raised fears about unintended consequences, specifically with regards to the fact that the proposed law would expand the definition of trafficking to anyone who benefits financially from prostitution, regardless of intent. "Prop 35 implicates a lot of adult consensual behavior," said Monet. "In my opinion, it's an erosion of sexual rights" — not a protection of human ones.
In Parton's eyes, it's not just that Prop 35 would further criminalize the kind of work she does. It's that it's predicated on the idea that that kind of work — the kind where all parties are participating by choice and no one feels exploited — is fundamentally impossible, that all sex workers are victims. And in that sense, Prop 35 isn't just an inconvenience — it's an affront to a political and social movement that's taken years to build.
by Ellen Cushing, East Bay Express | Read more:
Photo: Blair Hopkin
Everything Breaks Eventually
In the corner of Building 4, a massive complex at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, the ghostly skeleton of a pickup truck endures a constant torment. The truck has no wheels, no bed, no seats, and no steering column—it’s just a vacant shell and a set of pedals. Inside, a pneumatic piston is positioned to press on the gas pedal over and over again, night and day. It’s a test of the whole accelerator assembly, but engineers are focused on one simple part—the hinge that connects the gas pedal to the frame.
Building 4 is Ford’s Tough Testing Center, where the company evaluates nearly all of its nonengine parts, from seat belts to axle assemblies. The facility is a monument to a dark truth of manufacturing: Even the best-engineered products fail. Some percentage of all mechanical devices will break before they’re expected to. “Companies come to me and say they want to be 100 percent failure-free after three years,” says Fred Schenkelberg, whose firm, FMS Reliability, estimates the lifespan of products. “But that’s impossible. You can’t do it.”Consider a few recent examples. In 2009, Mohawk Industries—one of the largest makers of carpeting in the country—was forced to discontinue an entire line of carpet tiles when the tiles failed unexpectedly, costing the company millions. In 2010, Johnson & Johnson had to recall 93,000 artificial hips after their metal joints started failing—inside patients. In 2011, Southwest Airlines grounded 79 planes after one of its Boeing 737s tore open in midflight. And just this past summer, GE issued a recall of 1.3 million dishwashers due to a defective heating element that could cause fires. Unexpected failure happens to everything, and so every manufacturer lives with some amount of risk: the risk of recalls, the risk of outsize warranty claims, the risk that a misbehaving product could hurt or kill a customer.
This is why the sprawling hangar-size rooms of Ford’s Building 4 are full of machines. Machines that open and close doors, robots that rub padded appendages on seats, treadmills that spin tires until they erupt in a cloud of white smoke. There’s even a giant bay where an entire Ford pickup is held up in the air by pistons that violently shake the vehicle by its suspension. Officially, Building 4 is about reliability, but it’s actually more about inevitability. Ford isn’t trying to ensure the gas-pedal hinge will never break. The company knows it will break; its engineers are trying to understand when—and how and why—this will happen.
Product failure is deceptively difficult to understand. It depends not just on how customers use a product but on the intrinsic properties of each part—what it’s made of and how those materials respond to wildly varying conditions. Estimating a product’s lifespan is an art that even the most sophisticated manufacturers still struggle with. And it’s getting harder. In our Moore’s law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This thinking has seeped into our expectations about lots of product categories: Cars must get better gas mileage. Bicycles must get lighter. Washing machines need to get clothes cleaner with less water. Almost every industry is expected to make major advances every year. To do this they are constantly reaching for new materials and design techniques. All this is great for innovation, but it’s terrible for reliability.
by Joseph Flaherty, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Christopher Griffith
Ivory Worship
Although the world has found substitutes for every one of ivory’s practical uses—billiard balls, piano keys, brush handles—its religious use is frozen in amber, and its role as a political symbol persists. Last year Lebanon’s President Michel Sleiman gave Pope Benedict XVI an ivory-and-gold thurible. In 2007 Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gave an ivory Santo Niño to Pope Benedict XVI. For Christmas in 1987 President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan bought an ivory Madonna originally presented to them as a state gift by Pope John Paul II. All these gifts made international headlines. Even Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi, father of the global ivory ban, once gave Pope John Paul II an elephant tusk. Moi would later make a bigger symbolic gesture, setting fire to 13 tons of Kenyan ivory, perhaps the most iconic act in conservation history.
Father Jay is curator of his archdiocese’s annual Santo Niño exhibition, which celebrates the best of his parishioners’ collections and fills a two-story building outside Manila. The more than 200 displays are drenched in so many fresh flowers and enveloped in such soft “Ave Maria” music that I’m reminded of a funeral as I look at the pale bodies dressed up like tiny kings. Ivory Santo Niños wear gold-plated crowns, jewels, and Swarovski crystal necklaces. Their eyes are hand-painted on glass imported from Germany. Their eyelashes are individual goat hairs. The gold thread in their capes is real, imported from India.
The elaborate displays are often owned by families of surprisingly modest means. Devotees have opened bankbooks in the names of their ivory icons. They name them in their wills. “I don’t call it extravagant,” Father Jay says. “I call it an offering to God.” He surveys the child images, some of which are decorated in lagang, silvery mother of pearl flowers carved from nautilus shells. “When it comes to Santo Niño devotion,” he says, “too much is not enough. As a priest, I’ve been praying, ‘If all of this stuff is plain stupid, then God, put a stop to this.’”
Father Jay points to a Santo Niño holding a dove. “Most of the old ivories are heirlooms,” he says. “The new ones are from Africa. They come in through the back door.” In other words, they’re smuggled. “It’s like straightening up a crooked line: You buy the ivory, which came from a hazy origin, and you turn it into a spiritual item. See?” he says, with a giggle. His voice lowers to a whisper. “Because it’s like buying a stolen item.”
People should buy new ivory icons, he says, to avoid swindlers who use tea or even Coca-Cola to stain ivory to look antique. “I just tell them to buy the new ones, so the history of an image would start in you.” (...)
Today’s ivory trafficking follows ancient trade routes—accelerated by air travel, cell phones, and the Internet. Current photos I’d seen of ivory Coptic crosses on sale beside ivory Islamic prayer beads in Cairo’s market now made more sense. Suddenly, recent ivory seizures on Zanzibar, an Islamic island off the coast of Tanzania—for centuries a global hub for trafficking slaves and ivory—seemed especially ominous, a sign that large-scale ivory crime might never go away. At least one shipment had been headed for Malaysia, where several multi-ton seizures were made last year.
The Philippines’ ivory market is small compared with, say, China’s, but it is centuries old and staggeringly obvious. Collectors and dealers share photographs of their ivories on Flickr and Facebook. CITES, as administrator of the 1989 global ivory ban, is the world’s official organization standing between the slaughter of the 1980s—in which Africa is said to have lost half its elephants, more than 600,000 in just those ten years—and the extermination of the elephant. If CITES has overlooked the Philippines’ ivory trade, what else has it missed?
by Bryan Christie, National Geographic | Read more:
Photographs by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
Photographs by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
The Vanishing Groves
On Earth, the past is even quicker to vanish. To study geology is to be astonished at how hastily time reorders our planet’s surface, filling its craters, smoothing its mountains and covering its continents in seawater. Life is often the fastest to disintegrate in this constant churn of water and rock. The speed of biological decomposition ensures that only the most geologically fortunate of organisms freeze into stone and become fossils. The rest dissolve into sediment, leaving the thinnest of molecular traces behind.
Part of what separates humans from nature is our striving to preserve the past, but we too have proved adept at its erasure. It was humans, after all, who set fire to the ancient Library of Alexandria, whose hundreds of thousands of scrolls contained a sizable fraction of classical learning. The loss of knowledge at Alexandria was said to be so profound that it set Western civilisation back 1,000 years. Indeed, some have described the library’s burning as an event horizon, a boundary in time across which information cannot flow.
The burning of books and libraries has perhaps fallen out of fashion, but if you look closely, you will find its spirit survives in another distinctly human activity, one as old as civilisation itself: the destruction of forests. Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past. Over this past century of unprecendented deforestation, a tiny cadre of scientists has roamed the world’s remaining woodlands, searching for trees with long memories, trees that promise science a new window into antiquity. To find a tree’s memories, you have to look past its leaves and even its bark; you have to go deep into its trunk, where the chronicles of its long life lie, secreted away like a library’s lost scrolls. This spring, I journeyed to the high, dry mountains of California to visit an ancient forest, a place as dense with history as Alexandria. A place where the heat of a dangerous fire is starting to rise. (...)
The world’s oldest trees, bristlecone pines belong to a group of ‘foxtail’ pines that live in small alpine pockets of the western United States. Foxtail pines are hardly newcomers to this Earth. Their oldest fossil ancestor dates back more than 40 million years, to the Eocene, the epoch when modern mammals first emerged. Though today the trees are found at between 2,700 and 3,500 metres, their range fluctuates considerably with climate. Because the trees like things dry and frigid, they extend their reach downward in cool, glacial times and recede to high ground in warm periods. In California, foxtail pine fossils have been found as low as 1,500 metres, no doubt the denizens of a previous ice age.
The oldest of the living bristlecones were just saplings when the pyramids were raised. The most ancient, called Methuselah, is estimated to be more than 4,800 years old
In March this year, I paid a visit to these extraordinary beings on an arid strip of dolomite atop California’s White Mountains. Located just north of Death Valley, the White Mountains are some of the driest on the planet. Visiting the trees in March meant trudging several miles through snow at just over 2,700 metres, as road access to the bristlecones is closed through May. It also meant that the forest was empty, as deserted of human beings as it has been for all but a brief flicker of its history.
It is hard to resist cliché when conveying the antiquity of the bristlecone pine. The oldest of the living bristlecones were just saplings when the pyramids were raised. The most ancient, called Methuselah, is estimated to be more than 4,800 years old; with luck, it will soon enter its sixth millennium as a living, reproducing organism. Because we conceive of time in terms of experience, a life spanning millennia can seem alien or even eternal to the human mind. It is hard to grasp what it would be like to see hundreds of generations flow out from under you in the stream of time, hard to imagine how rich and varied the mind might become if seasoned by five thousand years of experience and culture.
by Ross Andersen, Aeon | Read more:
Photo: Nick Paloukos
Cracking the Quantum Safe
Given its importance, many of us in the physics community expected the event to earn this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. Instead, the award went to achievements in a field far less well known and vastly less expensive: quantum information.
It may not catch as many headlines as the hunt for elusive particles, but the field of quantum information may soon answer questions even more fundamental — and upsetting — than the ones that drove the search for the Higgs. It could well usher in a radical new era of technology, one that makes today’s fastest computers look like hand-cranked adding machines.
The basis for both the work behind the Higgs search and quantum information theory is quantum physics, the most accurate and powerful theory in all of science. With it we created remarkable technologies like the transistor and the laser, which, in time, were transformed into devices — computers and iPhones — that reshaped human culture.
But the very usefulness of quantum physics masked a disturbing dissonance at its core. There are mysteries — summed up neatly in Werner Heisenberg’s famous adage “atoms are not things” — lurking at the heart of quantum physics suggesting that our everyday assumptions about reality are no more than illusions.
Take the “principle of superposition,” which holds that things at the subatomic level can be literally two places at once. Worse, it means they can be two things at once. This superposition animates the famous parable of Schrödinger’s cat, whereby a wee kitty is left both living and dead at the same time because its fate depends on a superposed quantum particle.
For decades such mysteries were debated but never pushed toward resolution, in part because no resolution seemed possible and, in part, because useful work could go on without resolving them (an attitude sometimes called “shut up and calculate”). Scientists could attract money and press with ever larger supercolliders while ignoring such pesky questions.
But as this year’s Nobel recognizes, that’s starting to change. Increasingly clever experiments are exploiting advances in cheap, high-precision lasers and atomic-scale transistors. Quantum information studies often require nothing more than some equipment on a table and a few graduate students. In this way, quantum information’s progress has come not by bludgeoning nature into submission but by subtly tricking it to step into the light.
by Adam Frank, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Jesse Tise
Monday, October 22, 2012
The Billionaires Next Door
Pittsburgh was one of the smelters of America’s Gilded Age. As the industrial revolution took hold there, Andrew Carnegie was struck by the contrast between “the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer.” Human beings had never before lived in such strikingly different material circumstances, he believed, and the result was “rigid castes” living in “mutual ignorance” and “mutual distrust” of one another.
The twenty-seven-story Mumbai mansion of the Ambani family, rumored to have cost a billion dollars, is just seven miles away from Dharavi, one of the world’s most famous slums, and the gap between these two ways of life is even wider than anything Carnegie could find in the Golden Triangle. So, for that matter, is the difference between Bill Gates’s futuristically wired 66,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Lake Washington, which is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 and whose library bears an inscription from The Great Gatsby, and the homes of the poor of Washington State, where unemployment in 2012 was slightly above the national average.
Even so, the correct etiquette in today’s plutocracy, particularly among its most admired tribe, the technorati of the U.S. West Coast, is to downplay the personal impact of vast wealth. In April 2010, when MIT students asked him how it felt to be the richest person in the world, Bill Gates suggestedit wasn’t a very big deal. “Well, the marginal return for extra dollars does drop off,” Gates said. “I haven’t found any burgers at any price that are better than McDonald’s.” He admitted there were some great perks, like flying on a private jet, but said that after a “few million or something, it’s all about how you’re going to give it back.”
If you traveled to Mountain View to visit Eric Schmidt when he was CEO of Google, you would have found him in a narrow office barely big enough to hold three people. The equations on the whiteboard may well have been scribbled by one of the engineers who works next door and is welcome to use the chief’s office whenever he’s not in. And while it is okay to have a private jet in the Valley, employing a chauffeur is frowned upon. “Whereas in other cultures, you can drive your Rolls-Royce around and just sort of look rich and have a really good time, in technology it’s not socially okay to have a driver who drives you to work every day,” Schmidt told me. “I don’t know why, but you’ll notice nobody does it.”
This egalitarian style can clash with the Valley’s reality of extreme income polarization. “Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out,” Schmidt explained. “We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done.” When he was CEO of Bain Capital and building his current net worth of about $200 million, Mitt Romney drove a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with red vinyl seats and a beaten-up fender. Carlos Slim’s trademark look is slightly scruffy casual wear, and he loves to tell journalists he doesn’t own any homes outside his native Mexico.
But even when he dresses down, a billionaire inhabits a world apart. A little more than a decade ago, I asked Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia (and, as it happens, also someone who favored casual clothes and lived in a modest house), what he thought of the rest of us. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” (Khodorkovsky’s subsequent experiences — his company was appropriated by the state in 2004 and he is currently in prison for fraud and embezzlement — have tempered this Darwinian outlook: in jail cell correspondence he admitted that he had “treated business exclusively as a game” and “did not care much about social responsibility.”)
The twenty-seven-story Mumbai mansion of the Ambani family, rumored to have cost a billion dollars, is just seven miles away from Dharavi, one of the world’s most famous slums, and the gap between these two ways of life is even wider than anything Carnegie could find in the Golden Triangle. So, for that matter, is the difference between Bill Gates’s futuristically wired 66,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Lake Washington, which is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 and whose library bears an inscription from The Great Gatsby, and the homes of the poor of Washington State, where unemployment in 2012 was slightly above the national average.Even so, the correct etiquette in today’s plutocracy, particularly among its most admired tribe, the technorati of the U.S. West Coast, is to downplay the personal impact of vast wealth. In April 2010, when MIT students asked him how it felt to be the richest person in the world, Bill Gates suggestedit wasn’t a very big deal. “Well, the marginal return for extra dollars does drop off,” Gates said. “I haven’t found any burgers at any price that are better than McDonald’s.” He admitted there were some great perks, like flying on a private jet, but said that after a “few million or something, it’s all about how you’re going to give it back.”
If you traveled to Mountain View to visit Eric Schmidt when he was CEO of Google, you would have found him in a narrow office barely big enough to hold three people. The equations on the whiteboard may well have been scribbled by one of the engineers who works next door and is welcome to use the chief’s office whenever he’s not in. And while it is okay to have a private jet in the Valley, employing a chauffeur is frowned upon. “Whereas in other cultures, you can drive your Rolls-Royce around and just sort of look rich and have a really good time, in technology it’s not socially okay to have a driver who drives you to work every day,” Schmidt told me. “I don’t know why, but you’ll notice nobody does it.”
This egalitarian style can clash with the Valley’s reality of extreme income polarization. “Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out,” Schmidt explained. “We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done.” When he was CEO of Bain Capital and building his current net worth of about $200 million, Mitt Romney drove a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with red vinyl seats and a beaten-up fender. Carlos Slim’s trademark look is slightly scruffy casual wear, and he loves to tell journalists he doesn’t own any homes outside his native Mexico.
But even when he dresses down, a billionaire inhabits a world apart. A little more than a decade ago, I asked Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia (and, as it happens, also someone who favored casual clothes and lived in a modest house), what he thought of the rest of us. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” (Khodorkovsky’s subsequent experiences — his company was appropriated by the state in 2004 and he is currently in prison for fraud and embezzlement — have tempered this Darwinian outlook: in jail cell correspondence he admitted that he had “treated business exclusively as a game” and “did not care much about social responsibility.”)
by Chrystia Freeland, Reuters | Read more:
Sleight of the ‘Invisible Hand’
Capitalism is a word that Smith never used — the author of “The Wealth of Nations” had been dead for almost 50 years before it entered the language, via Karl Marx — but his most famous expression, “the invisible hand,” is often taken as its proxy. Romney juxtaposes it with what he calls the “supposed informed hand of government.” As he said in a speech on economics at the University of Chicago in March, “When the heavy hand of government replaces the invisible hand of the market, economic freedom is the inevitable victim.”
Heady words, but hardly unusual. Few phrases in Western philosophy have embedded themselves as deeply in the vernacular as Smith’s invisible hand, and no single image has ever so captivated (and occasionally inflamed) the popular mind. This has been the case for a while now — the intellectual historian Emma Rothschild called the 20th century “the epoch of the invisible hand”— but the financial crisis and the federal government’s response have recently made it a cause for celebration and debate.
This development would most likely have surprised Adam Smith. The invisible hand makes only three appearances in his work, all fleeting. Blink, and you will miss them.
The most cited usage is in “The Wealth of Nations,” the foundational text of modern economics, first published in 1776. The invisible hand appears once, several hundred pages into the work during a discussion of trade policy. Mercantilism, then the prevailing school of economic thought, held that the way to secure a nation’s wealth was by implementing rigid protectionist polices. Smith agreed that such polices could strengthen certain sectors of an economy, but he contended that this came at the expense of “the general industry.” If restrictions were lifted, every merchant would pursue the most profitable trade available to him, making the most efficient use of his own time and money. Granted, he would act with an eye only toward his personal “security” and “gain,” but in so doing, he would “render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can.” He would be “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention,” namely, to benefit society and the broader welfare of its citizens.
“[T]he system works behind the backs of the participants” is how the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow described this phenomenon. Smith wouldn’t have objected, though what clearly intrigued him was less the enlightened mechanism than the moral paradox. The invisible hand not only works behind the backs of participants, it succeeds despite them.
Consider Smith’s use of the phrase in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” the first of his two great works. He describes the landlord who, admiring his fields, consumes in his imagination “the whole harvest that grows upon them.” Fortunately for the poor, the size of a wealthy man’s stomach, if not necessarily his storehouse, is roughly equal to theirs. The rich “only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable.” The rest they “divide with the poor” such that they “are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions.”
Again, the system yields an outcome that is salutary and humane, but one that stands at odds with the selfish interests of participants. The wealthy, says Smith, spend their days establishing an “economy of greatness,” one founded on “luxury and caprice” and fueled by “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires.” Any broader benefit that accrues from their striving is not the consequence of foresight or benevolence, but “in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity.” They don’t do good, they are led to it.
by John Paul Rollert, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Leif Parsons
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Inside the Mind of a Workaholic
I hate writing this story because I want to be a person you admire, but I also hate not writing it. Because I want to be a person I admire. I want to be a person known for honesty.
Which means I need to tell you that I wish I cared more that I’m not talking to the Farmer.
I hate that I have stories I don’t want to tell. Because I have found that almost always, the secrets we keep matter a lot to us, but they don’t matter to other people.
For example, I emailed to Melissa one day. “I have a secret: I drank wine at breakfast today and I haven’t stopped.”
I thought Melissa would email back that I’m an idiot and I’ll be in rehab.
But she emailed back, “I forgot to get a refill for Lexapro and today is the first time in a year that I’ve initiated sex.”
Secrets are fun. That’s what I try to tell myself. It’s fun to not have to have a secret anymore, really.
It’s very hard to tell which of our secrets are huge and which are small. Like, I did not think it was a big deal when I said I was having a miscarriage, but that was a huge deal to a huge number of people. And I thought it was a huge deal when I said I was trying anti-anxiety meds, but no one really cared. What is a huge secret to you and what is a huge secret to everyone else is so different.
Which makes me feel unsure about secrets.
But I read a piece in the Wall St. Journal about a safari guide in Zimbabwe. He is one of the most famous safari guides in the world, and he says he tells people to “never run away from an animal. Always go slowly. Unless I tell you to run. Then run.”
And there was one time when he was guiding a man and woman through some elephants, and a mother elephant started chasing them. So they had to run. They ran for about half a mile, and they still hadn’t gotten away. And the woman said, “I can’t go anymore. I can’t run anymore. I just can’t.”
And the guide said, “Okay. I’ll have to shoot the elephant.”
Then she said, “No. I’ll keep running.” And she did.
I think we are like that. That if the alternative is terrible, we can keep running. But first we have to really believe the alternative is terrible.
by Penelope Trunk | Read more:
How to Write the First Draft of a Novel in 30 days
[ed. All six stages can be found here.]
The outline you'll complete using the 30-day method will become a snapshot of your novel. After finishing a full outline, you should feel you've got the makings of an entire book (your story should feel complete, solid, exciting and satisfying) and you should be desperate to start writing the book itself.
This first draft outline is the equivalent to the first draft of a manuscript. Because you've revised it so thoroughly, it will read with all the completeness and excitement of a finished novel. Using this outline to write the first draft of your book (which, in almost all cases, will be the final draft, needing only minor editing and polishing) should be so easy you might even feel a little guilty about it. All the hard work will already have been done creating the outline.
Throughout this guide we'll work on the assumption that the first draft of your book isn't a fully completed draft in the traditional sense, but is instead a comprehensive outline – your first, whole glimpse of the book and a snapshot of what it will be once finished. The outline you create over the next 30 days will become the foundation upon which your entire novel will come to rest. This method is a way to lay out the full course of the story as it flows from beginning to end.
Your commitment to the 30-day method
Despite its flexibility, the 30-day method requires a great deal of commitment from you as a writer. The first thing you need to become a productive writer is self-discipline. This method will give you that in spades – if you're willing to dedicate yourself to it. Not everyone will be able to complete a first draft outline in exactly 30 days on their first try, but that doesn't mean you'll never be able to do it. This method, like all methods, requires a sufficient amount of practice. The more you use it, the more time and effort you'll eventually shave off your outlining schedule. In the future, you may even notice it takes you considerably less time to write the first full draft of your book.
Does it mean you've failed if it takes you 90 days instead of 30? Of course not. If you need more (or less) time to perform certain steps in the process, you can adjust your schedule easily. But this method will probably make you work harder than you've ever worked before.
Some will enjoy the challenge; others will use the method while setting their own deadlines for each step. And others still won't be willing to allow their muse to be harnessed in this way. Find what works for you over the long term, not simply for the moment. Even if you find the next 30 days difficult, persevere – it will get easier with experience.
Understanding the 30-day method schedule
Keep in mind that each of the six stages identified in this method has its own day-to-day schedule. These individual schedules are discussed at length at the start of each corresponding chapter. Don't worry if you need to allow yourself an extra day or two for some tasks. As you become more familiar with the method, you'll find it easier to stay on schedule.
The first steps to creating a comprehensive outline are very rough — each building on the previous one. The preliminary outline you create in stage one won't contain everything. You'll just be getting your basics down at this point. With each step, you'll be developing more details about every aspect of the book, and your outline will grow to reflect that.
The outline you'll complete using the 30-day method will become a snapshot of your novel. After finishing a full outline, you should feel you've got the makings of an entire book (your story should feel complete, solid, exciting and satisfying) and you should be desperate to start writing the book itself.This first draft outline is the equivalent to the first draft of a manuscript. Because you've revised it so thoroughly, it will read with all the completeness and excitement of a finished novel. Using this outline to write the first draft of your book (which, in almost all cases, will be the final draft, needing only minor editing and polishing) should be so easy you might even feel a little guilty about it. All the hard work will already have been done creating the outline.
Throughout this guide we'll work on the assumption that the first draft of your book isn't a fully completed draft in the traditional sense, but is instead a comprehensive outline – your first, whole glimpse of the book and a snapshot of what it will be once finished. The outline you create over the next 30 days will become the foundation upon which your entire novel will come to rest. This method is a way to lay out the full course of the story as it flows from beginning to end.
Your commitment to the 30-day method
Despite its flexibility, the 30-day method requires a great deal of commitment from you as a writer. The first thing you need to become a productive writer is self-discipline. This method will give you that in spades – if you're willing to dedicate yourself to it. Not everyone will be able to complete a first draft outline in exactly 30 days on their first try, but that doesn't mean you'll never be able to do it. This method, like all methods, requires a sufficient amount of practice. The more you use it, the more time and effort you'll eventually shave off your outlining schedule. In the future, you may even notice it takes you considerably less time to write the first full draft of your book.
Does it mean you've failed if it takes you 90 days instead of 30? Of course not. If you need more (or less) time to perform certain steps in the process, you can adjust your schedule easily. But this method will probably make you work harder than you've ever worked before.
Some will enjoy the challenge; others will use the method while setting their own deadlines for each step. And others still won't be willing to allow their muse to be harnessed in this way. Find what works for you over the long term, not simply for the moment. Even if you find the next 30 days difficult, persevere – it will get easier with experience.
Understanding the 30-day method schedule
Keep in mind that each of the six stages identified in this method has its own day-to-day schedule. These individual schedules are discussed at length at the start of each corresponding chapter. Don't worry if you need to allow yourself an extra day or two for some tasks. As you become more familiar with the method, you'll find it easier to stay on schedule.
The first steps to creating a comprehensive outline are very rough — each building on the previous one. The preliminary outline you create in stage one won't contain everything. You'll just be getting your basics down at this point. With each step, you'll be developing more details about every aspect of the book, and your outline will grow to reflect that.
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