As I think about what I might write on this blog and what I might do with my life, this passage seems particularly helpful right now:

I tell you these things because of my own difficulties. One great inhibition and obstacle to me was the thought: will it make money? But you find that if you are thinking of that all the time, either you don’t make money because the work is so empty, dry, calculated, and without life in it. Or you do make money and you are ashamed of your work. Your published writings give you the pip.

Another great stumbling block and inhibition to me was the idea that writing (since I wanted to make a fortune and dazzle the public) was something in which you showed off, were a virtuoso, set yourself up to be something remarkable.

But at last I understood from William Blake and Van Gogh and other great men, and from myself–from the truth that is in me (and which I have at last learned to declare and stand up for, as I am trying to persuade you to stand up for your inner truth)–at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it. If they did not–fine. They did not need to listen. That was all right too. And I would never fall into those extremes (both lies) of saying: “I have nothing to say and am of no importance and have no gift”; or “The public doesn’t want good stuff.”

When I learned all this then I could write freely and jovially and not feel contracted and guilty about being such a conceited ass; and not feel driven to work by grim resolution, by jaw-grinding ambition to succeed, like some of those success-driven business men who, in their concern with action and egoistic striving, forget all about love and imagination, and become sooner or later emotionally arthritic and spiritually as calcified and uncreative as mummies.

– Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

Yes. I certainly shouldn’t think about making money as a blogger. And I should be wild and free and write from the heart instead of worrying about making a big show of it.

It occurs to me that Brenda would have loved the internet and blogging. That anyone can publish their thoughts for the whole world to see. That you can easily share your words with anyone that cares to read them.

Is This My Dream?

It makes me question my desire. Is this really my dream? Or do I just like to fantasize about being that successful author? I believe in the idea that you should do what you love. You’re probably not going to like everything about what you do, but you should generally want to do something you love, right?

So why not write? Am I just plain lazy? Not willing to put in the time and effort? Or is it possible I don’t really like the actual act of writing that much?

Doing What You Love

Paul Graham wrote a great essay a couple of years ago, How to Do What You Love, that included a couple of points just for us aspiring writers:

That’s what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you’re going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

[...]

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.

“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

–Paul Graham, How to Do What You Love

Wise words, and I think of them often when I’m failing to produce.

Resistance

So many writers struggle with resistance and avoidance. Much writing advice stresses the importance of actually writing (surprise!), and letting the work be its own best reward. (Really? That’s all we get?)

We’re encouraged to break through our resistance. To sit. To write. We’re told that gradually we will start to break through, if only we would write. Our muse will come if we can reliably be found at our keyboards trying to turn out the words. But again, it’s so much easier to do anything else.

Breaking Through Resistance

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to something I am working hard at these days: exercise. Especially running.

Pushing Through Boundaries

Whether outside on the road or inside on the treadmill, the first two to three miles are usually tough. But if I stick with it, I’m feeling pretty good by miles four and five. I start to look forward to that feeling and am willing to do the work to get there. Experience tells me that the reward is worth the effort. Had I not pushed myself to stay with it and keep going farther, I wouldn’t have discovered how much I enjoy running. (How much I love to do it?) I would either be working at it with grim determination, or would have stopped by now.

Physical exercise is different than writing, of course. With exercise, you just have to do it. Which I know can be difficult in its own way to get started on, but once you’re doing it, there’s not much to it. With running, you just move your legs and breathe. That’s over-simplifying things, but I think is essentially true, at least for my exercise goals.

With writing, it’s not as simple as “just moving your fingers on the keyboard.” You have to make them say something; hopefully in an interesting way. (And you have to contend with a thousand critical voices in your head, constantly tearing down the work in progress. And there’s the fear of exposing yourself so nakedly. And, and, and…)

So it occurs to me that I should work at my writing more. Keep at it even when each step is a struggle, keep pushing ahead even though it would be so much easier to give up yet another day. I want to see if there is a “three mile barrier” that I can get past, and enjoy a similar sense of satisfaction and reward as I get from running. I want to crave writing the way I’ve lately been looking forward to a run.

Die When You Die

Another feature of running is that I “run when I run.” When I’m running, oddly enough, that’s what I’m doing. I don’t switch from running to wandering aimlessly around the Web and then come up for air an hour later, feeling empty and defeated. (Of course, on a treadmill it would be possible to do both, but I’d still be doing the thing I mean to be doing.) Not so easy to stay focused on writing, with all the potential distractions near at hand, but it would be beneficial if somehow I could focus on it for a duration longer than five minutes. One of my favorite writing teachers understands how it is:

It is important to have a way worked out to begin your writing; otherwise, washing dishes becomes the most important thing on earth–anything that will divert you from writing. Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write. That is painful. Writing is so simple, basic, and austere. There are no fancy gadgets to make it more attractive. Our monkey minds would much rather discuss our resistances with a friend at a lovely restaurant or go to a therapist to work out our writing blocks. There is a Zen saying: “Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.” Write when you write. Stop battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats.

–Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

Write when you write. It sounds so simple.

Related to this is that I can think about exercise as a discrete unit of work. I know it will take about an hour or so to get a good workout in. I can plan for it, do it, and be done with it for the day.

I make my writing goals out to be so much more ambitious and vague. I think of all the time I could and should be doing it, and the task becomes too big. I don’t know how to write for five hours in a day, so I never start. It just weighs on my mind all day. I don’t sit down for the half hour or hour that would strengthen my writing muscles and increase my endurance. Or, if I do put some time in, it never feels like enough. I never feel like I can be “done” for the day. So again, I just avoid it.

If I can learn to treat my writing time more like exercise time, then maybe I’ll be less of a basket case about the whole process. I think this is what “write when you write” should mean for me. Pick the time, do the work. Write. Then be done writing. Go enjoy some family time without distracting thoughts about ambitions and dreams unrealized.

The Work As Its Own Reward

The hardest part may be finding satisfaction only in the writing, and not depending on the things I hope may result from it: love, recognition, and riches. With exercise there is immediate feedback: a sense of well-being, and longer term effects: better health and weight control. I don’t expect anything more from my running than personal enjoyment and better health.

With writing, so far, I usually feel more mentally ill as I grapple with it more. And longer term, there is an increased sense of hopelessness that it will “pay off.” I’d so love for my writing to pay the bills, but that day seems impossibly far off, if not unreachable. Bitter, petty inner voices try to convince me to stop doing it. I suppose they’re only looking out for my best interests. Just trying to protect my ego. If I don’t try, I won’t fail.

The feedback loop isn’t as positive for writing as it is for running. And it’s harder to measure progress. With running, I know if I’m running farther and faster; if I’m losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight. With writing, there are only doubtful voices, questioning if I’m doing the right thing, and pointing out that I’m most likely just wasting my time. (The voices are clearly focused on external rewards.)

I don’t have answers for these voices. I guess I’ll just have to write more and try to invest time more consistently from day to day. Hold on to the possible connection to running, and try to break through the three mile barrier, in whatever way that boundary may manifest itself in the writing process.

I’ll get back to you with the results. You can help, by reading and providing feedback, and spreading the word if you enjoy what you find here. At least with the magic of the Internet, I can click the Publish button and instantly share these words with you today…

In the first installment of this series, I promised to lend my keen insight to a comparison between the old print publishing business and the new online publishing business. What qualifies me to perform this service? Well, I have limited experience in the traditional publishing industry, having garnered forty-two rejections on five short stories over a two year period, and I have a blog that’s all of two months old.

Who could possibly be more qualified to pontificate on the subject?

(Do rejected stories count towards publishing industry experience? Or is that just editorial experience? In either case, don’t worry, you will receive the benefit of my wisdom.)

Also as promised last time, and potentially of more interest, I’ll share the sad tale of hopes and dreams denied in the form of the rejection history of one of my stories. When I say “of interest,” I’m imagining more of the gruesome can’t-look-away-from-a-car-wreck kind of interest. (Don’t judge me for hosting the car wreck, rubbernecker. You’re the one gawking.)

My experience has been in science fiction and some of my comments will relate to that field, but I think they apply generally also. Aside from the obvious difference of physical printing and distribution of paper vs. transmission of transient bits to an electronic display, I think the main difference between old and new publishing comes down to filtering and payment.

Money, money, money, money

Not surprisingly, payment seems to be a big concern for people. How do creative people get paid when their work can be easily copied for free? So many imaginative people think about this and it’s odd that they can’t envision any other system than what we have now. The people making the money now want to continue making the same amount of money and maybe even more thanks to added control over the product of their work. Many people who are currently making no money want to preserve the system that gives them a chance–no matter how small–of making money. (I also get the sense that a lot of amateurs support the current system and onerous new control schemes because they like to daydream about the chance of hitting the intellectual property jackpot.)

There will be ways of making money. Maybe not millions for a select few authors, but I’ll be able to sleep at night if the most talented writers are able to simply make a good living instead of a fortune. Before moving on to my own inchoate thoughts, here’s something I ran across recently that gets at some of the key points of this move from old to new:

How inappropriate the concept of copyright is to computer communications becomes evident as we examine how the law has to squirm to deal with the simplest problems…. the process of computer communication entails processing of texts that are partly controlled by people and partly automatic. They are happening all over the system. Some of the text is never visible but is only stored electronically: Some is flashed briefly on a terminal display; some is printed out in hard copy….

The receivers may be individuals and clearly identified, or they may be passers-by with access but whose access is never recorded; the passer-by may only look, as a reader browsing through a book, or he may make an automatic copy; sometimes the program will record that, sometimes it will not. To try to apply the concept of copyright to all these stages and actors would require a most elaborate set of regulations. It has none of the simplicity of checking what copies rolled off a printing press….

One would like to compensate an author if a computer terminal is used as a printing press to run off numerous copies of a valuable text. One would not like to impose any control as someone works at a terminal in the role of a reader and checks back and forth through various files. The boundary, however, is impossible to draw. In the new technology of interactive computing, the reader, the writer, the bookseller, and the printer have become one. In the old technology of printing, one could have a right to free press for the reader and the writer but try to enforce copyright on the printer and the bookseller. That distinction will no longer work, anymore than it would ever have worked in the past on conversation. Those whose livelihood is at stake in copyright do not like that kind of comment.

They contend that creative work must be compensated. Indeed it must…. But the system must be practical to work…. in an era of infinitely varied, automated text manipulation there is no reasonable way to count copies and charge royalties on them…. It may be very unfair to authors. It may have a profoundly negative effect on some aspects of culture, and in any case, whether positive or negative, it may change things considerably.

If it becomes more difficult for authors and artists to be paid by a royalty scheme, more of them will seek salaried bases from which to work. Some may try to get paid by personal appearances or other auxiliaries to fame. Or the highly illustrated, well-bound book may acquire a special significance if the mere words of the text are hard to protect. Or one may try to sell subscriptions to a continuing service….

These are the kinds of considerations one must think about in speculating about the consequences for culture of a world where the royalty-carrying unit copy is no longer easy to protect in many of the domains where it has been dominant…. it is clear that with photocopiers and computers, copyright is an anachronism. Like many other unenforceable laws that we keep on the statute books from the past, this one may be with us for some time to come, but with less and less effect.

–Ithiel de Sola Pool, from Technologies Without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 254–59.

As quoted by Julio Cole at http://www.monografias.com/trabajos28/controversy-absence-copyright/controversy-absence-copyright.shtml.

The effect may seem negative, especially to those who lose their lofty positions and status, but overall I think it will be an overwhelmingly positive thing when we have culture that is free.

Further random musings below…

Old Publishing

Filtering: There is a lot of crap out there. Traditionally we’ve had pre-publication filtering. Some wretch of an editor has the thankless job of combing through the slush pile, looking for something worthwhile to print. Or at least something that will help him or her sell magazines or books. With all the expense of the publication process, editors have incentive to find good writing. We benefit from their work in the form of the many good books that make it through the editorial/publishing process.

Payment: As mentioned, everyone cares about the money. Traditionally, the writer’s product didn’t get in front of the reader until it was paid for. The writer got paid (not very much, usually) because some editor decided to take a chance on their work and cut them a check. The author continues to receive royalties if the book continues to sell. When books and magazines came to us in paper form, there wasn’t really a reason to object to the copyright monopoly. Why should some other publisher get to print the books and make the money? As long as it had to be distributed as a physical object that had marginal costs associated with it, it made sense for one publisher to enjoy the monopoly to safeguard their investment.

Benefits: (To both the writer and to us readers.) I think one benefit of this process to the writer is that it makes them a better writer. You have to improve if you’re going to get out of the slush pile. You also benefit by improving your work before many people see it. We all form opinions, usually quickly and harshly, and if we see some so-so work from a writer we may be disinclined to give them another try later. Traditionally, and hopefully, by the time a writer breaks through and becomes published, they have benefited from years of work at their craft. They also benefit from all the editing, of course. The benefit to readers is that the process discourages many bad writers and filters out a lot of the junk, leaving us with only the best work (theoretically).

Drawbacks: The old way doesn’t always leave us with the best work. We know that crap still gets through, and we know that good stuff is sometimes missed or stifled, maybe because it didn’t fit in to a niche. We may just get more of what has a good chance of selling, which isn’t always the best.

New Publishing

Everything changes. And stays the same. We can’t hold on to the past just because some people think it was better. The only question to me is how long the established copyright interests will be able to hold us back with DRM and other nonsense.

Filtering: No pre-publication filtering. Any idiot with a web browser and a connection to the Internet can publish their self-serving and incoherent trash. (I just did, didn’t I?) I much prefer this model, even though now we’ve just created the biggest slush pile ever and it will continue to grow, forever. There will be ways to find the good stuff. (You found this web site, didn’t you? :-)

Wouldn’t you rather have a system where everyone gets to have their say? (Except those abominable spammers. They need to be publicly and painfully punished. I watched the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean this weekend and the idea of hanging their skeletons as a warning to others seems like a good start.) It’s not to say that everyone should be heard. That’s what the filters are for.

Payment: Well now, this is the big question, isn’t it? How are we going to make money in this new world where information can be copied perfectly at no cost? That’s one of the big questions to be answered and one of the things I’m trying to do on this site. For now I’ll sidestep it because this post is growing way too long as it is. There’ll be ways for people to make money if their work is good. I don’t think it will be necessary to have harsh control mechanisms. There will be (sooner or later) fundamental shifts in how things work. I’m not concerned about the ways this will turn everything around and who the winners and losers will be. We’ll all be better off in a free society.

I guess I can mention one model. If you’re a new writer (or musician or other kind of artist), you’re a nobody. You just want someone reading your stuff, even if for free. For the SF magazines, you might make one to three cents per word, if you’re lucky. A salable length for a newbie is generally about four thousand words, so you might make about $100 on that big sale. With the number of markets and other writers out there, it’s going to be pretty hard to sell enough short stories to live on. The idea is to move on to novels, but with the standard $5,000 advance (standard when I was reading more about the subject), that’s going to be a tough gig also. I’m just trying to point out that there’s hardly any money for most people in the traditional model, so that we don’t have to demand huge profits from the new system either.

No matter what, you need to get exposure first. People have to know about you. And then, if you’re good (the old way or the new way), you might make some money. But how will this happen with free culture, if I insist that everything should be copyable for nothing? One possibility is that once you’ve built up some readership–and again you have to be good–maybe people will be willing to pay in advance for your work. A third-party intermediary collects pledges up to the amount you require, and it is paid when you deliver. If you don’t deliver, the money goes back to the “investors.” As I mentioned earlier, this may not make as many people millionaires, but they may make a comfortable living. Do you think Stephen King only does what he does because he makes so much money? I think he would have done the same for a decent living.

Here’s (kind of) an example of this sort of thing, an anti-DRM children’s tale called The Pig and the Box. Crosbie Fitch also works on and discusses ways of paying for free culture at his Digital Productions web site.

Benefits: I’ve already mentioned that I think it’s good if anyone can publish anything and be read by potentially everyone in the whole world. We just need good filters to find what is worth reading. I think it’s a hugely good thing if information and art can be copied perfectly at no cost. This is a feature and not a bug. (I’m not going to try arguing that point here, though.)

Drawbacks: For the writer, I think the new system can be dangerous. I mentioned that you are putting your work out there for the harsh judgment of the collective. People may form opinions that are hard to overcome later. Not many people will read your early work, but later it will still be around to haunt you.

My Science Fiction Short Story

At last, we get to the fun part. Or desperately sad part. Maybe burying it here at the end of yet another too-long post is the way to go if I want to have a chance of hiding my shame.

For my own attempts at writing, I wasn’t put off that much by the slush pile and the difficulties of getting out of it. There is good advice out there about how to give yourself a decent chance, if you can write. There is encouragement that you can improve your writing.

Between late 2001 and early 2003, I wrote five stories that I started sending around to print and online science fiction magazines. One of them collected some nice comments and feedback as it tallied up a dozen rejections.

One piece of advice I’ve run across is to let the story speak for itself, which is counter to this odd kind of promotion where I first tell you how thoroughly this thing was rejected and what all the problems are, but it’s all in fun. This was the second story I wrote. I don’t have any illusions that it’s some great work of art that was rejected by clueless editors and that now I’ll show them all by publishing it to great acclaim on the Internet. The story was rejected for valid reasons, and I think I learned from the feedback I received. It received some encouraging personal responses, but it just didn’t work that well. I agree with the assessments, for the most part.

I didn’t try reworking the story because I was operating on the advice that you should keep working on the next one. Let’s call it free/open source fiction. Please feel free to improve the story! I wouldn’t mind a bit if you polished it up and sold it to a magazine. (Of course, under the terms of the license, you’d have to include an attribution to me with a link to this web site, and the resulting work would have to use the same license. You may have trouble finding an editor willing to agree to those terms.)

And now, finally, here is the story of my manuscript. (Listed next to each market is the number of days that it took to receive a rejection back.)

And that was probably as good a place to end as any. So there you have it, a journey of 684 days for my manuscript, from January 25, 2002 to January 27, 2004.

There were a few more comments that were less than 100% glowing, but I have just the tiniest smidgen of pride left, and I want you to have some motivation to read the story, so I withheld them. And despite my attempt at humorous commentary above, I didn’t hold a grudge about the long wait times. That’s just part of the business. Of course it’s going to take them time to wade through all the muck they receive every day.

Next up in the series, the exciting publication of this veteran reject! With new, original art by Gary Mitchell!

Attribution

A big thank you to the University of Southern Florida’s Center for Instructional Technology (FCIT) for giving me permission to use their excellent clipart on movingtofreedom.org. Check out the collection at Clipart ETC (http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/). I emailed to ask permission to use the clipart here and suggested that a Creative Commons license would be suitable for the mission of a University, and was pleased to hear back that they think it makes sense, but they are constrained from doing it for various reasons right now. But they are quite generous about granting permission.

I have some free culture I’d like to share with you. Written culture. A previously unpublished science fiction short story, by me. “No, thanks,” you say. “That’s the problem with the web. Any idiot can publish his adjective-laden tripe. If it was any good, someone would have paid you for it and published it in a magazine.” Ouch. The truth hurts.

But not really. I have a thick skin when it comes to literary rejection. (Or like to think I do, at least.) A few years ago, I was eager to follow the path of submitting stories to magazines and collecting rejections until I broke through. But I only finished and circulated five stories over a two year period. I didn’t mind the rejections; they were just part of the job. I think a bigger problem was that I didn’t enjoy writing fiction enough to keep toiling away at it.

One of the stories received some encouraging responses, and that’s the one I’ll publish right here on movingtofreedom.org. It will be a world premiere event. It’ll even be on-topic for this blog, with software licensing and patents driving the story. (To the extent that it is driven.)

Along the way to the big premiere, let’s look at traditional publishing, where it was generally necessary to get past an editor gatekeeper, and this new-fangled Internet where anyone can publish with no filtering whatsoever. I think I’m a good person to demonstrate the unseemliness of the new way. I failed at the traditional route and now am just dumping my work on the truck… I mean, adding it to the already overflowing series of tubes that make up the Internet. Is it going to be enough to make the tubes finally burst, or will it simply cause some minor blockage, delaying Senator Stevens’s email by a few days?

As a final bit of advance promotion and publicity, I was thinking I’d share the rejections of the story in advance of the publication. How can you pass up drama (or self-inflicted humiliation) like that? Stay tuned!

But what if you don’t know what you’re talking about? What if you’re afraid of looking back on your published opinions with regret? What if even though you’re in your mid-thirties, your beliefs and opinions are still somewhat amorphous and subject to change based on the latest screed you read at www.pusillanimouspundits.com?

And what if you’re an admirer of Ben Franklin and you just read in his autobiography:

I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag’d in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix’d in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire.

– Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext94/bfaut11.txt

Hmm… I have perhaps just the slightest tendency to be dogmatic. And worse yet, I rarely back it up with sound, well-thought out arguments. If I’m lucky I use as a reference someone who provides credible analysis. But I’d like to gain information and improvement from you, my wise readers. Please don’t leave me in possession of my errors. Speak up and help me provide you with a better forum. And discuss amongst yourselves, also: I love blogs that have a good community of people discussing and debating anything and everything. If we can build something like that here, I’ll consider this web site a big success.

So how will I write? I dunno. I mainly want to provide enjoyment and education for my readers, and I hope I can learn and grow and do a decent job of that. I hope you’ll find something you like. I actually do have beliefs and opinions and with this project maybe I can stop being so intellectually lazy and try to define and sharpen them. In the past I’ve hesitated and procrastinated in my writing because I was afraid it wouldn’t be perfect, which of course obviously it won’t be. But I want to write, so here I go, imperfect scribblings and all. I’ll write as best I can. Tomorrow I may know better and I may cringe at the things I said yesterday, but then I’ll try to remember my Emerson:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.–”Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.”–Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16643/16643-8.txt

Let me be clear that I’m not necessarily implying that I think: (1) I’m great or a great soul, (2) I belong in the company of Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, or that (3) I have a pure and wise spirit.

Getting back to good old Ben and his writings, I recommend A Benjamin Franklin Reader, edited and annotated by Walter Isaacson, with the qualification that I haven’t read the whole book yet. I started it and enjoyed the annotations but found that I wanted to read a biography first, so I picked up The First American, by H.W. Brands. It’s a long one at 784 pages but well told by Mr. Brands and I was fascinated by the story. Franklin is such an amazing person. An interesting person living in interesting times. (You can download his autobiography for free from the wonderful Project Gutenberg, but I’m one of those people that still likes printed and bound books. The Isaacson book is very nice, with many other Franklin writings besides the autobiography.)