The best song ever. No, really.

I think the song “Fire” by the Brit band Kasabian might be my favorite song. Ever.

This is a hell of a notion. I played guitar in a blues band for years, and I love many types of music. I have a nearly flawless memory for lyrics and can recall thousands of songs going back 30-odd years (a neat trick at parties, if I ever went to parties.)

But it’s not really that complicated: it’s a pattern recognition type song, which the human brain associates with comfort and familiarity (it’s why hymns and mantras are so effective in a religious context) and … it’s the opening theme this year to Premiership football games on Saturday.

And I’m nutty about footie. So I’m addicted to the song.

And that’s what fickle, subconsciously influenced beasts we mere mortals are. Next year, they’ll start the show with another song by another British band I don’t know – unless one of their cuts is included in the latest edition of FIFA for PC – and I’ll probably spend two months telling myself THAT is my favorite cut.

Hell of a tune, though.

The Tillman Story should be viewed by all

If you ever sat and wondered about the world, you probably had more in common with Pat Tillman than you might have suspected , from the image of the late NFL player and soldier portrayed in the media.

But Tillman’s life kept being stolen from him long after he was accidentally killed by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. And that’s why, if you get a chance to watch The Tillman Story, the documentary about his family’s efforts to find out what really happened, you really owe it to yourself as a human being to do so.

It’s hard. If you’re a good person who tries always not to prejudge, to be objective and fair, it’s a painful film to watch. I don’t cry at much, or have too much of emotional output that I like to share publicly, and I’ll tell you it made me cry, several times.

I’ve worked in the media for 23 years and I’m a bit ashamed that it’s never been about the truth, really. It’s always been a mixture of compromises; part of the news is pure show, part is an earnest attempt to explain the world; part an attempt to change it. But as good as some of us are sometimes at trying to educate, others of us are purely there for the job, the money, the quick sound bite.

In a way, Tillman – a complex, intelligent man with an explorative intellect and a constant hunger to learn – was reduced to one of those sound bites. He had an excited side to him, an athletic side, and he had done well in life. He did, to some degree, identify with the American dream. But he was much, much more than that.

Few people had as much character; but all of us are more than caricatures, and if nothing else, that was the most admirable quality about the guy: he wasn’t the jingoistic cartoon the so-called “leaders” of his community and country turned him into. He respected other people’s qualities and didn’t try to elevate his accomplishments above theirs.

His family, so obviously the source of so much of his intelligence, explains that at length in the documentary, and in doing so offers something rare in journalism: unvarnished truth. They don’t paint their brother, husband and son as anything other than human. It’s still tough not to idolize the guy, to a degree, because in rounding out his character, they make it clear why his U.S Army Ranger squad mates respected and admired him so much : because he wasn’t a star, a jerk, an egotistical jock. He wasn’t a caricature. He was a man who made a bad decision, to fight for something that wasn’t worthwhile, and he knew that before he died. But he lived – and died –for that bargain nonetheless.

That the reality of his death was covered up is not surprising; America was very good about covering up the reality of his life, after all. As an intellectually gifted man, he did not share many of the beliefs and values many of those praising him did, even if he respected their right to do so. That’s obvious in talking to his brother and his father. In fact, Tillman himself probably would have been astonished by the poor taste put into canonizing him.

We should all, always, be a little ashamed when we treat life so simply, so like it has an easy answer – whether in the form of a caricature, a belief system , or an ultimately selfish decision – and in doing so abdicate our responsibility to think and be honest, to respect unvarnished truth. It's pretty hard for a society to truly be civil without it.

Sales pick up on the back of a freebie

July was a good month.

I've only been self-publishing fiction since February, but I was prepared for the fact that, with millions of other writers out there in the marketplace, getting people to read my books would be difficult. 

To that end, and following the advice of other self-pub'd authors, I gave one of them away. It seems to be finally helping, with a small but steady sales trickle starting this month. And the novel, Buried in Benidorm, has been in the top 10 of the "Hard-Boiled Mysteries" category for several weeks now, which can't hurt in terms of exposure. For one its sequel, Vendetta in Valencia, is selling about a book a day now, even without reviews.

Ah, reviews. What a bitch goddess that whole area is, as the Kids In The Hall might've said.

It would be hard to overstate just how tough it is to get book reviews, which are pretty much required before people will plunk down even the small amount of loot my books cost. For every request 10 requests out there, one will bite. For everyone four that are interested one or two actually write a review. When you've got seven books on the market, and an eighth coming soon, patience becomes a necessity. I'm lucky in those that I've received have been almost exclusively thoughtful, from hardcore book fans.

Part of the issue with marketing of course  is that I only sell on Kindle which, while doubtless the future of the biz, still only accounts for about a third of the marketplace. Other writers have told me that, even with good Kindle sales, they don't sell that many paperback copies, probably due to shelf space. But people still want paper, and they've mentioned it enough for me to get the point. To that end, I'll be putting  out paperback versions of all of my work over the next few months and, from now, on at release. I figure there's not much point in limiting the market. 

Perhaps the biggest issue for all writers is that we're more inclined to introspection that to being extroverted, which is required in the social networking age, it seems. I find myself far more inclined to spend my spare time reading, writing and relaxing than promoting, an issue that I'll doubtless have to address as this adventure continues.

A dream that gets less likely daily

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found great peace and satisfaction in gaining an understanding of how humans behave because, despite our own often deluded perspective of our species, we’re all the same biologically, and our biology (particularly our neural biology) drives our behavior. All of it.

So while we like to think there are great elements of surprise and uncertainty to the things we do, in fact we behave like every pack animal and we follow patterns, largely dictated by the interplay beteween social evolution and survival instinct.

 You’ve heard the saying “it’s all been done”? Progress relies on it, because all social evolution is a move forward from a contextual baseline.

What does this have to do with writing fiction for a living? Well, probably a lot of things. But my interest is a little more selfish and simple: I rather like the romanticized British notion (I’m Canadian but was raised there as well) of retiring to a career writing fiction an hour from the Costa Tropical in Spain.(You can find my books on Kindle, here).

And right now, Spain  is stuck in another cycle of damnably stupid human behavior.

In an earlier age, guys like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway were so struck with their passion for Spain’s history and people that they fought to keep it free from the Nationalist dictator Francisco Franco. 

They didn’t succeed, and Spain spent 40 years under his thumb, and under the yoke of a Catholic technocracy, plagued by repression, an absence of basic rights and death squads, even as lowered labor rates and tariff-free trade made the Catholic right-win elite wealthy and successful.

But that era was just the latest in a history of human development that is simply among the richest on Earth, rivaling in importance the development of early China and Africa.

Among the earliest travel routes for our species, moving out of the Rift Valley in Africa and into what is now Europe, some of our earliest DNA is linked to early mankind found in Spain.

It was the religious and trade crossroads between the middle east and Europe, a constant target for either Muslim or Christian invaders from the turn of the millennia on. First, the Romans conquered the indigenous Iberians. Then the Visigoths drove out the Romans; then after a few hundred years of growing fat and lazy in the Andalusian heat, the Visigoths were driven off by the Muslims (or Moors, as they were known in Europe) of the Umayyad caliphate.

  

Various Islamic dynasties held on until about 1500, when the current lineage of power brokers began with the conquest and unification of the nation by a coalition of Catholic local regents. From this group the Spanish monarchy and national unification was achieved and ruled with a variety of styles until the modern era, when republic fought of dictatorship, then was beaten down by it; when dictatorship gave way to democracy, socialists were elected, and the dictator’s son and cohorts promptly declared a civil war.

Franco won. As Chevy Chase was wont to note, he is still dead.

But Spain is about to cycle back to the right wing. There are a lot of smaller contributing reasons as to why this has happened, but the outcome will be that, once again, the national political scene has swung from one extreme to another.  And the result won’t be pretty.

Human logistics and the process of rationalization would suggest that political systems that reduce the power of individual politicians and force dialectical debate in the development of policy will be more steady in their growth and problem management. But Spain doesn’t have that. Instead, it has a typical republic, a constitutional monarchy with two sides acting as opponents, a historical sop designed to limit the impact of ideology in governance.

In fact, it does the opposite, boiling entire systems down to one extreme versus the other, with tiny concessions towards the middle, because such systems – whether Republicanism in the U.S. and Spain or Parliamentarianism in Britain and Canada – are as much about the natural human survival dynamic for some to seek leadership and power as they are about actual voter representation.

 If we wanted government to be effective, we would instead develop systems that reduce political power in lawmaking (perhaps via public fiats like Switzerland) and demand proportional representation – if not necessarily in the voting system then certainly in the establishment of all-party committees to develop national policy.

This is a “best of both worlds” solution. It allows the ideologically driven power seeker to represent the public and work for their beliefs, and to be unconstrained by a differing communal dynamic as they attempt to develop new ideas and solutions; but once elected, it limits the damage we can suffer from their intransigence with respect to existing belief. They can contribute as both individualistic right wingers and communalistic left wingers.

Over the next century or so, we’ll see such systems developed, as the social cycle in such nations continues and the rebound against authoritarian, individualistic right-wing policy develops in to a community ethic again. The left has already moderated more towards the middle thanks to the failure of Marxism.

But I don’t want to wait 20 years or more to move to Spain just  because their current government is as full of ideologically-driven, narrow-minded individuals who think the obvious answer to social malaise is rampant capitalism.

Here’s the problem with the political right and the political left: by pushing for one side to unilaterally control any system, they ignore the obvious socio-biological ramifications of their beliefs. Our beliefs influence our decisions subconsciously all the time, which is why we can look at others’ religions and see them as absurd due to a lack of proof, but not criticize our own in the same manner.

Neuroscience also indicates, for example, that the more self-sufficient we become and the less we require the aid of others, the less empathy we have for them as a consequence, because empathy is part-and-parcel of our survival instinct: relating emotionally to others helps us learn from their mistakes and avoid the same problems in our lives. If we don’t need it to survive (due to acquired or inherited power or an acceptance or predatory ruthlessness) we don’t develop it or, over time, we shed it.

So while it’s admirable to pursue individualism – and by definition necessary to establishing new ideas – it’s also dangerous to push individualism too far. Greed ISN’T good. It turns us into predatory creatures because we lose empathy for our fellow man and instead start preying on them. It’s just a natural, pack animal instinct to go after the weak in the herd.

And we revert to that animal instinct when we’re taken away from civilizing factors. “Civilization”, by definition, requires group mores, and group mores, by definition, require communal agreement, not pure individualism.

What this shows us is that people who gravitate exclusively to the political right are likely not only to stay there, but to redefine their own view of others’ behavior to fit that paradigm. They may be more personally successful and powerful, but with each gain in success and power, their requirement for pack support seems less important to them.

That egocentric selfishness is a natural human trait, which is why so many right-wingers say things like “greed is good.” But LOTS of things are natural human traits and we’ve socialized ourselves away from them. There’s a fair swath of anthropological evidence, for example, that humans routinely ate each other at one point—probably before we’d evolved into mass pack interaction and developed consciences to maintain those units.

On the left, the concept of community as the absolute priority is equally dangerous, and equally likely to drive subconsciously biased behavior. For a community to remain together, it develops social and civil codes. But in early-stage community development, those codes are often adhered to because the majority wants them … not because they’re the smartest way of doing things. The group develops an ethos to act as its survival instinct as if it were a singular entity; the more rigid this ethos is with respect to its members, the more “orthodox” we see the group as being.

But that rigidity eventually causes every communal system to break down and fail – or evolve, as is usually the case, through moderation. This occurs because individuals in the group exercise a sense of self and challenge the group’s rules and preconceptions – even though they often have to fight the biologically driven anxiety known as “cognitive dissonance” that goes with holding conflicting beliefs at the same time.

Back to Spain, where a right-wing political group is using public money to bail out private banks (and one big public bank, too). It will start shedding the public sector next, followed by lowering labor controls on things such as wages, union membership and hours worked.

In truth, some degree of all of these things is probably needed to get the country into economic recovery, because for years a bloated social democracy has been corrupted by regional nepotism, bureaucratic empire building and vast public over-employment. The black market economy in Spain is so big, entire administrative regions have had to begin purges of illegally owned homes, because the paperwork was all done under the table, with discounts for the buyers. It’s still easier to get something done by taking the local official for golf once than it is by being honest.

This cronyism started under the technocrats and became part of the national economic makeup. The more money you had – whether a socialist overpaid appointee or a wealthy landowning rightwinger – the more influence you had.

But because of their ideological beliefs, the right-wingers trying to fix the economic situation have already gone too far, bailing out the banks instead of the mortgage holders, and allowing construction and development to continue at an unhealthily high pace despite the worst glut of unsellable real estate on the face of the planet. You’d have about an easy time getting market value for a villa in Murcia these days as you would of selling a nice two-bedroom apartment in southern Zimbabwe.

Spain, and other trembling, worried nations need a change alright, but it’s not to the latest edition of one political extreme or another; it’s to a system that forces the two sides to work together to get anything done.   Trying to simply graft right-wing austerity and privatization onto a populace that spent four decades under Franco is a recipe not only for failure economically, but socially, as well.

I’d really like to make enough off my books to move to Spain in the next few years with my wife and our pets. We’d like to find our nice little house in the country – with a pool – where I could work on my fiction and my wife could rescue strays. On the weekends, we could enjoy being in Spain – because the people are the most social, gregarious and outgoing in Europe; because the strip mall is nearly non-existent there; because meals often last three hours as people talk and laugh the night away; because the beaches are some of the best in the world; because the country is covered in the archeological remnants of ancient Phoenicia, Rome, the Islamic era and the era of knights and lords.

Oh, that and 300-plus days of sun a year.

Let’s face it, if you’ve got a historical, sociological bone in your body, it’s an easy place to love.

But not right now; not with a 20% tax rate, 25% unemployment and a government about to unleash the usual ideologically driven stupidity, to the enrichment of a few and the pain of many others.

And that’s a damn shame.

A swing and a miss from The Newsroom

Perhaps the great irony to Aaron Sorkin's new TV show The Newsroom is that it's about the dissolution of responsible journalism in the modern age ... and yet manages to be slavishly ideological in its approach to addressing every major social issue.

When Sorkin announced the show, a lot of old hands wanted to kiss the guy, assuming we were getting something akin to an ongoing TV version of Network, the medium parodying itself with the malicious precision of a snuff film. After all, we've seen TV news go from merely bad most of the time to complete crap, in one generation.

Instead, it's just a fluffy fantasy for Rachel Maddow's fan club, one liberal diatribe (mostly correct, but one-sided nonetheless) after another.

Its one saving grace is that Sorkin remembers to frame these ongoing ideological lines (Freudian: I typed “indieological” initially) within a discussion of the role and responsibility of news. It's total fucking fiction, of course, because daily news has always been about 1) The image 2) The Rating 3) The ad rate 4) The viewer 5) The value of the content. I've worked in daily news for more than two decades; believe me, while some TV people are quite brilliant, the pretty-but-dumb quotient is about as high as you'd expect. The film Broadcast News, while not contemporary in its setting or content, is certainly accurate in its portrayal of TV news characters.

Of course, TV can be a great medium, and TV news can be a great example. But it has to be done with context, objectivity, sensitivity and honesty. All of that fits somewhere into point number 5, above, and thus is rare. Not unheard of, largely thanks to public news outlets, but rare.

Sorkin's show could be great, too. It could be as objective and rational as that great first speech Jeff Daniels' character Will McAvoy gives in episode one. Instead, so far, it's lazy, a blend of Sorkin's increasingly over-stylized and tired “short burst” dialogue and preachy, tired proselytizing.

If people want to know what's wrong with TV news, it's simple: selling fear and division is cheaper and more profitable than selling context and information designed to inform and empower, particularly to a numbed middle class that, when it turns on the TV, just wants to fucking relax and which, in truth, derives some security from the knowledge life is that much shittier for someone else.

That's the real human story these days: the division, the disconnection, the lack of civil discourse. But if you want a show about the news that accurately portrays how media should go about addressing those issues, you'll have to find a copy of Lou Grant on DVD. It went off the air in 1982, killed for largely political reasons despite good ratings.

There's a lesson in that, too.

Farewell to a show about the small details

Those who know me well know I've worked as a reporter and editor since I was a teenager. After nearly three decades of it, I've watched the social power dynamic shift, and the mainstream media has been turned into a vacuous puppet for its owners.

So it was particularly disheartening when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "Dispatches" crossed the airwaves for the last time -- save one rebroadcast of the final show, this Sunday night.

Dispatches was a rarity these days, a show that cared about context and the human angle. Reporters for the CBC and freelancers filed weekly 23-minute documentaries from around the Globe, giving people the kind of insight into other lives and cultures that pop culture TV long ago forgot.

One of the contributors noted during the final show that he fears the long-form radio documentary is dying, and I hope that's not the case. Certainly, the plethora of import ant-while-entertaining documentaries that have made it into theaters in the last few years would suggest the form, if not necessarily the medium, is even more highly value than ever.

It should be. Dispatches ignored the daily news cycle pap, delving into how people were affected by governments, by economic and religious beliefs, by family traditions. And it did it in countries many North Americans can't pronounce, let alone find on a map, all guided by the measured tones of host Rick MacInnes-Rae.

We need more of that, not less. We need more understanding of how other people live, so that we have cogent moral arguments for respecting and supporting one another's traditions in an open world. Perhaps if we saw a little more frequently how people are treated to produce, for example, the bulk of our consumer goods, we might feel less inclined to support people who exploit foreign political oppression. Or to send money to help a kid in an impoverished country. Or any other number of small-but-important humanistic expressions that we value community.

Ultimately, over the years, that's what Dispatches was about. It bit the biscuit because the CBC's funding is being slashed by a Conservative government playing to its base supporter's belief in unfettered free enterprise, even though CBC is not even among the top-20 best funded public broadcasting agencies in the world. Anyone who has listened to its news and entertainment programming knows it certainly ranks among the top public broadcasters, making the accomplishment at least somewhat impressive.

Dispatches was no different. But in the Twitter and Facebook era, when people are spoon fed five-minute news cycles designed to push their social networking buttons regardless of value or context, it was valued, and I'm sad it's gone.

If you'd like to catch the last show, it will be up on the site's website, along with past episodes.

The 5 Mystic Rules to Safe eBook Buying

It should be easy. The book has 83 five-star reviews, after all, and a great cover. The blurb isn't exactly William Styron, but it sounds enthusiastic and exciting.

So you download it, sample unread. After all, that many people can't be wrong ... right? You fire up the ol'  e-Reader and head right for chapter one, anxious to get lost in a great story. 

Hmmm. First paragraph is a bit awkward. That's OK. Not a great sign, but...

Well. How about that? Guy missed a "their" that should have been a "there." Ah, it was only 2.99. No big... well now wait a second. That paragraph jumps between the first and third person, and the sentence just goes on an on. 

Eww. 

That creeping feeling begins to settle in. You already know the answer before you've even posed the question: have I just blown three bucks on total garbage?

Well, yes. Of course you have. You didn't follow the Five Mystic Rules for Safe Book Buying.

Mystic rule one: Read the free preview (or a free book by the author.)

If you download a book without reading the free preview first, you're basically buying sight unseen. The most execrable piece of crap in the Kindle Store can be made to look good with a decent commercial-grade cover and a synopsis that took the writer longer than chapter one.

The minimum diligence should be reading the preview. If you don't have time while browsing, use the mail sampler on the right hand side of each Amazon  page.

Better yet: click on the author's name, and if he or she has a free book or sampler, download that first -- I give away my first novel Buried in Benidorm on Kindle as an example of my writing style. Then you'll have an idea if the person can string two sentences together.

Mystic Rule Number Two: Reviews are easily manufactured... but well-written ones are tougher to come by. 

 Without giving anyone unscrupulous too much help, there are ways to "game" the Kindle site and leave false reviews for one's own product. 

As such, the star system is nearly useless. A book can have 55 five-star reviews and only five one-star reviews. But if the one-stars are the only real ones ... 

So what good ARE the reviews? 

Look for the ones that are written by critics -- good or bad. The key is to go through them and look for long, contextual and reasonably well-written opinions. If a ton of THOSE people like it? You might be on to something. Good critics find the good AND bad in a book, and rarely leave five-star reviews that aren't long explanations.

Reviews that simply drip enthusiasm but offer no insight into the book's structure, plot development or pacing may make it sound exciting, but they tell you nothing.

Mystic Rule Number Three: Ignore the book's sales ranking and publisher.

Thanks to the flaws in the review system and the large volume of buyers who rely upon it nonetheless, there are any number of system cheats who make it into the best-seller ranks regularly. 

Problematically, some of these guys have set up ePub companies that then use the same system to publicize good authors, giving their own works even more legitimacy. It's clever in an amoral, shameful kind of way. So you can't look at a publisher's volume of books or a book's sales ranking and assume that makes them any more reliable than anyone else online. 

Mystic Rule Number Four: Read off-site reviews as well.

Places like Goodreads, Shelfari and Library Thing offer numerous opinions as do many independent bloggers. 

Just keep in mind that, as with Amazon, it is easy enough to set up fake accounts on Goodreads, and numerous authors there also use these to create fake support.

Often, however, they don't have the time to keep these "sock puppets" current, and on Goodreads, individual profiles show how recently active the person has been. The easiest way to spot a sock puppet is if the vast majority of their reviews are for one author, and they aren't very active within the community -- as in, perhaps once a week or less, or not in several months.

5) And lastly, Mystic Rule Number Five: Share your opinions. 

The more HONEST readers out there get involved -- whether by reviewing on Amazon or sharing recommendations with friends or their favorite bloggers, the harder it will be for eBook scammers to make a buck.

Right, back to writing!

P.s. Why Mystic? Dunno .... I just always was partial to Van Morrison, I guess. Plus, it sounded neat.