Lone Gunman

The First Law of Fan­fic­tion states that every change which strength­ens the pro­tag­o­nists requires a cor­re­spond­ing wors­en­ing of their chal­lenges. […] sto­ries are about con­flict; a hero too strong for their con­flict is no longer in tense, heart-pounding difficulty. […]

The Ratio­nal­ist Fan­fic­tion Prin­ci­ple states that ratio­nal­ity is not magic; being ratio­nal does not require mag­i­cal poten­tial or royal blood­lines or even amaz­ing gad­gets, and the prin­ci­ples of ratio­nal­ity work for under­stand­able reasons.

That’s Eliezer Yud­kowsky in an intro­duc­tion to his acclaimed Harry Pot­ter fan fic­tion, Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ratio­nal­ity.

The piece of “ser­ial fic­tion” looks at cog­ni­tive sci­ence and ratio­nal­ity in a Harry Potter-type world where Harry, hav­ing been raised by a sci­en­tist step­fa­ther, is a ratio­nal­ist, enter­ing the wiz­ard­ing world “armed with Enlight­en­ment ideals and the exper­i­men­tal spirit.”

Cur­rently 63 chap­ters long–including chap­ters such as A Day of Very Low Prob­a­bil­ity, The Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment, The Unknown and the Unknow­able and Title Redacted, Part I–the Meth­ods is a fan­tas­tic read.

There’s a “book-style” PDF avail­able, ePUB and MOBI ver­sions for those on e-readers, and a great TV Tropes entry.

Although lis­ten to Eliezer when he says “This fic is widely con­sid­ered to have really hit its stride start­ing at around Chap­ter 5. If you still don’t like it after Chap­ter 10, give up”.

via Hacker News

For book rec­om­men­da­tions, most of us rely on the sug­ges­tions of trusted friends and on word of mouth. This, at least, allows us to hold some­one account­able for those inevitable poor rec­om­men­da­tions. But what of ‘pro­fes­sional’ book rec­om­menders (writ­ers in pub­li­ca­tions, not algo­rith­mic ‘recommenders’)?

Laura Miller–author of the book rec­om­men­da­tion Slate col­umn, –looks at what she calls the fine art of rec­om­mend­ing books.

“You can’t rec­om­mend books to strangers with­out ask­ing per­sonal ques­tions,” [edi­tor of the Paris Review, Lorin Stein] told me. As he pointed out, what we want to read is often pegged to tran­si­tory moods. The same book may not thrill the same per­son at every point in his or her life. “I don’t think peo­ple read ‘for’ plea­sure, exactly,” he went on. “Of course there is plea­sure in read­ing. But mainly we do it out of need. Because we’re lonely, or con­fused, or need to laugh, or want some kind of pro­tec­tion or quiet — or dis­tur­bance, or truth, or what­ever.” The rec­om­mender must take this into account.

Miller also looks at the book rec­om­mend­ing processes of The Morn­ing News’ Bib­lio­r­a­cle (John Warner) and “the doyen of all pro­fes­sional book rec­om­menders”, Nancy Pearl.

Pearl sug­gests that there are four “door­ways” that intrigue read­ers in the books they read: story, char­ac­ters, set­ting and lan­guage. One or more of these door­ways appeal to each type of reader and the task of the rec­om­mender is in match­ing the reader’s door­way pref­er­ence with a book that deliv­ers exactly that.

Derek Sivers’ book rec­om­men­da­tions con­tinue to be some of the most well matched to my own tastes.

Infre­quently updated, Derek Sivers’ book list pro­vides a tiny sum­mary of his recent reads, fol­lowed by exten­sive notes he has taken from each: some­what sim­i­lar to my cur­rent process, now that Amazon’s Kin­dle has com­pletely trans­formed my read­ing and note-taking habits.

In addi­tion to the exten­sive book list itself, Sivers lists eleven of his top rec­om­men­da­tions (some that I would change, oth­ers that I’ve heard con­tra­dict­ing views on, but a great start­ing point nonetheless):

• Under­stand­ing the world we live in
  • Stum­bling on Happiness
  • The Wis­dom of Crowds
  • The Para­dox of Choice
• Mar­ket­ing
  • Small is the New Big
  • Made to Stick
• Get­ting your life under control
  • The 4-Hour Work Week
• Own your own business?
  • E-Myth Revis­ited
  • The Ulti­mate Sales Machine
  • The Art of Profitability
• Deal­ing with people
  • What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
  • You, Inc.

I’ve only recently taken a look at font retailer FontShop’s col­lec­tion of edu­ca­tional typog­ra­phy ebooks despite hav­ing the site book­marked for months. It’s a won­der­ful (yet small) col­lec­tion, cur­rently con­sist­ing of these five books:

• Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Typography
• The Typographer’s Glos­sary: Com­mon Type Terminology
• Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips: Seven Rules for Bet­ter Typography
• Type Anatomy: A Primer of Typo­graphic Terms
• The Right Font for the Job: Type Selec­tion, Beyond the Look of the Letter

The online Typographer’s Glos­sary will no doubt come in handy for many, too. In fact, just click on every­thing they have under the head­ing ‘Type Resources’–it’s all great.

via @jasonfry

“Don’t write a book” is the first piece of advice Michael Lopp offers us in a post chron­i­cling his writ­ing process.

Lopp–an engi­neer­ing man­ager at Apple, author of Being Geek and Man­ag­ing Humans, and more com­monly known as Rands–details his tools and meth­ods for writ­ing a book and, as always, his advice is applic­a­ble to more than just the topic at hand:

You must become com­fort­able with incom­plete­ness. At one point dur­ing the lat­est book, I had seven chap­ters in var­i­ous state of done­ness. When I began Man­ag­ing Humans, I’d get pan­icky if I didn’t com­plete one chap­ter before start­ing the next. This is your brain, once again, try­ing to orga­nize where it shouldn’t.

The rea­son I have sim­ple, read­ily avail­able tools is that I can never tell when I’m going to be able to write. I’m on a dead­line and my edi­tor is breath­ing down my neck, which means I do have a weekly writ­ing sched­ule that carves off morn­ings three days a week. As I set­tle into one of these morn­ings, it’s just as likely that I’ll write as it is that I’ll count the num­ber of folks in the room who’ve cho­sen to drink from ceramic mugs ver­sus paper cups.

A sin­gu­lar focus on fin­ish­ing a chap­ter is just another bar­rier to writ­ing. By brows­ing all my chap­ters in var­i­ous states of done­ness, I’m more likely to pick one that is going to tickle my writ­ing fancy: Oh hey, I have some­thing to say about this today. Those ceramic mugs have to wait.

Kathy Sierra’s com­ment is one not to miss.