Three years, eight months, and one hundred and twenty thousand words later, the messy first draft of my novel is done! Now to start reading it over. It’s messy, so this is like the alpha or something, like v 0.843. I’ll read it and spend a couple of weeks revising it before even considering it an official v 1.0 first draft (which itself is only the first of many future drafts…). I’m a little apprehensive, to be honest. This past year, I blazed through the draft. I was ticked off at myself for taking so long (never mind that I had a lot of structural decisions to make). Maybe 10 months ago, I was at something like 50,000 words, and now I’m at 120,000. So I really blazed through. I said to myself, “Don’t worry about making it perfect, just make it. It will be perfect later.” I kicked myself in the ass and have managed to end up with this thing, whatever it is, but I know I can do better—the gap between good taste and the thing I’ve made. Keep doing the work, that’s how you close the gap.

To Whom it May Inspire, 

I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, “in the zone” seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time. 

The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-corner-full-of-crumpled-up-paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems. 

In a word: PERSIST.

PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision. Remember what Peter Jackson said, “Pain is temporary. Film is forever.” And he of all people should know. 

So next time you hit writer’s block, or your computer crashes and you lose an entire night’s work because you didn’t hit save (always hit save), just remember: you’re never far from that next burst of divine creativity. Work through that 97% of murky abyssmal mediocrity to get to that 3% which everyone will remember you for!

I guarantee you, the art will be well worth the work! 

Your friend and mine, 

[PIXAR animator] Austin Madison

“ADVENTURE IS OUT THERE!”

(via Lifehacker)

Grescoe is an avowed seafood lover, and it shows in his gourmand descriptions of seafood dishes from around the world. But once he started hearing about the effects of the global fisheries, he started doing some investigating. What he discovered was that the fish we have available in our supermarkets and restaurants (seafood, sushi or otherwise) are part of a destructive and toxic supply global chain. Each species of seafood has its own problems.

Take, for example, shrimp. 90% of the shrimp available in North America is produced in South and Southeast Asia in farms. These farms draw resources away from the subsistence fishing that provides a livelihood to local people, for the benefit of multinational corporations. Now, that’s a problem of globalization, and that’s bad enough, though it’s practically unavoidable for the large majority of the consumer products we buy. So Grescoe digs a bit deeper. The reason local subsistence fishing is destroyed is because the shrimp farms are basically holes in the ground that are full of unregulated veterinary antibiotics and growth hormones, industrial waste, human and animal fecal bacteria, and colorants and chemicals that mask the discoloration and rot of dead and diseased shrimp. When you eat shrimp in North America, you are basically eating carcinogens. It’s like eating cigarettes that have been soaked in the feces of HIV-infected, dysenteric baboons. And it’s that toxicity that spreads around the farms and infects the entire ecosystem.

The problem is more widespread than shrimp. Farmed salmon has largely supplanted wild salmon, but farmed salmon, like shrimp, is full of toxins. These animals are packed into underwater pens that are part of the larger marine ecosystem, but salmon were never meant to be packed so tightly. As a result, they are susceptible to deadly plague epidemics. To combat this, farmers drown the fish in antibiotics, which we end up eating. The fish are covered in boils and pus, and those that escape the pens swim out into the wild, and spread these diseases to the last remaining stocks of wild fish. Even more absurd is the fact that these carnivorous fish are fed up to four times their body weight in protein consisting of other dead or processed fish bits. Think about that. For the salmon to grow one pound of flesh in these conditions, we have to feed it four pounds of other fish and filler–sometimes even large quantities of low-in-the-food-chain species like krill, which are vital to the health of the oceans. And you wonder why we can’t solve global hunger or global warming.

Those are two of the examples that really sickened me, but there are many, many others. Farmed, herbivore tilapia are treated with hormones that induce a sex change–because males reach marketable size faster than females. Huge, billion-dollar fishing ships drag metal-toothed nets across the ocean floor, leveling coral reefs to catch overfished species. Those reefs won’t grow back for hundreds of years. How about pouring cyanide over reefs to stun the organisms living there, then dynamiting entire reefs, then scooping up the remains to serve to you and I? Not to mention the global pirate trade of nearly extinct apex predators like some species of tuna–which by the way are so loaded with mercury that they aren’t worth eating anyway. It’s not just the endangered species of tuna that are loaded with mercury, and the problem is not restricted to tuna, either. Species after species of carnivorous fish, who eat other fish who in turn eat things like plankton, suck up the mercury from all the lower levels of the food chain, all the heavy metals we’ve dumped into the oceans and that are carcinogenic and lethal for human consumption–yet we continue to eat these fish because of the industry’s omertà on the origins of the fish or their habitat. We don’t know and, when we do, we don’t care.

At one point, Grescoe mentions that all the fish farms and all the oceans together produce about 140 million tons of seafood annually. China alone will consumed 37 million tons by 2020. It’s not just China, though. Imagine if we’re eating 60 millions tons of fish each year. That leaves only 80 million tons of fish left to reproduce. Year over year, we keep eating more, and year over year, there are fewer fish left to reproduce and replenish the stocks. That’s why fish stocks across the globe have plummeted, down to between 1% and 10% of their levels prior to the Industrial Revolution. We are eating our way through the oceans, and it’s predicted that the world’s fisheries will collapse by 2048. That’s only 37 years from now.

There are species that he encourages us to eat, though, like sardines, jellyfish and oysters. Sardines are full of healthy oils and proteins, and are fished in largely sustainable and non-destructive ways. Jellyfish are becoming so prevalent that if we don’t eat them, they will take over the oceans and kill everything else. Oysters are able to filter out toxins and bacteria that are otherwise turning large bodies of water into ecological dead zones; we should encourage a robust oyster industry by creating demand for them. There are others, of course.

As for me, I’m done with sushi and other seafood. Seafood is often compared to the meat of land animals favorably, as if it’s a lean, healthy choice. Some mythical fish that exists outside of the environmental effects that the book documents might actually be a healthy alternative. The problem is that there is no such fish.

I have to wonder if our above-the-water sources of meat are any better. In fact, I know they aren’t. But that’s something I’ll investigate in turn. For now, I think it’s safer to start by swearing off fish. “Fish are friends, not food!”

Go pick up a copy of Bottomfeeder, please. The writing is lyrical and eloquent, the research is deep and persuasive, and the imagery and ideas will disturb you for a long time to come. They should.

Now I know what I want to do: make interactive children’s books on the iPad. I’ve wanted our company to move in this direction. Maybe they haven’t been pitched the right idea yet. Maybe that’s what I need to do. Granted, the interactivity looks somewhat superficial, but I won’t know for sure until you buy me an iPad.

Outside a relative handful of financial publications, there is no such thing as the news business. There is only the advertising business. The remarkable thing about the newspapers’ piece of that business isn’t that they could reliably generate profits without accomplishing much in the way of innovation—that could just as easily describe the local car dealership. The remarkable thing is that over the last couple of generations, those profits supported the fractional bit of those enterprises that covered the news. This subsidy relied on cultural logic peculiar to newspapers; publishers were constrained not just by their investors but by their editors (who expected the paper to be ethical in the short term) and by their families (who expected the paper to be viable over the long term). In return, a publisher could extract some of the value of the paper in prestige and sinecure instead of cash. This system was never ideal—out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made—and long before Craig Newmark and Arianna Huffington began their reign of terror, Gannett and Scripps were pioneering debt-laden balance sheets, highly paid executives, and short-term profit-chasing. But even in their worst days, newspapers supported the minority of journalists reporting actual news, for the minority of citizens who cared. In return, the people who followed sports or celebrities, or clipped recipes and coupons, got to live in a town where the City Council was marginally less likely to be corrupt. Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked. Online, though, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens—no monopoly over local advertising, no daily allotment of space to fill, no one-size-fits-all delivery system. Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.

Writing 140 characters is difficult if one is trying to say something with poignancy. It’s hard to tell the truth in a tiny box, because the truth is so big and round and gray. Most things I write are crude and awkward, overly unrelenting, not capable of holding the necessary nuance for a confession or an insight. One can’t go too deep in a stunted format. But still, it kind of feels like writing because my fingers are flying, there is that sound of the keyboard, that row of letters getting longer, that momentum of the cursor pushing right. But, it’s not the same as lengthier writing, because it doesn’t necessarily take us anywhere.

Lengthier writing is hard, because it requires one to commit to it. One must be alone. One can not write in a group. One must step away, shut off the world. What do I think? How do I feel? What is this itch? How can I scratch it? Why am I so sad? Why did this make me happy? What’s it like being a father? Why did that project work? What did I learn?

You have to make a choice in life. You can avoid the things that make you uncomfortable, follow the pack and lead a very comfortable, normal existence. Or you can refuse to be limited by the things that challenge you and keep facing them until you crush them. I think giving option B a try is worthwhile.

–Dan Shipper, If you’re not failing you’re not trying (via Lifehacker)

Style is a writer’s way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.

–Zadie Smith, “Fail Better“