Like Glass is now officially available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle format, as well as via MobiBooks format on MobiPocket.com. Click here for more information, sample chapters, and links to where you can get a copy of it.

(I know there was recently a post saying it was released; however, it’s now available in paperback on Amazon, whereas the last time it was only available in digital format, or in paperback through a “personal” store.)

As of this morning, Like Glass is officially available in eBook format and paperback.  However, due to the Terms of Service here at WordPress.com, I won’t be directly linking to where you can get it here.  I probably could get away with it just fine — probably no issues at all — but I don’t really want to step on anyone’s toes.  Hence the second part of this post.

I’m “officially” moving this blog to a new host, and you can update your bookmarks (or whatever) to point at http://mcory.net.  There you can find information on how to get your copy of Like Glass — and that’s the majority of the content that’s there right now.  Over the next few weeks, however, I plan on moving a fair amount of the content from this blog over there, and I’ll be changing the domain name (chocolatefordogs.com) to point there.

Fun stuff.

For what it’s worth, it isn’t just because of the terms of service, nor is it anything to do with WordPress — the blog that’s set up at the new site is a wordpress.org blog.  I’ve been playing with the idea of moving it for a while now, have a bit more control over everything than you get here, and my confusion with what WP allows as far as commercial linking gave me the right excuse I needed.

So, if you find two copies of my posts, check the url — if it’s this one or mcory.net, it’s fine.

Quick post today as I’m running late as it is, but there’s some stuff I wanted to talk about.

First, I ordered another proof yesterday. I’m expecting this to be the last — there’s probably still spelling and grammar problems scattered about, but whatever; I’ve seen enough typos in professionally edited material that I’m not too concerned about it. I’m really just wanting to double check the formatting, as I changed the indentation and it might’ve screwed things up. Otherwise I would’ve just approved it sight-unseen, and we’d be having a release party right now.

Second, I’ve come to a conclusion: I’m not going to be working at the company I’m at for much longer. It’s just not worth it — I used to love programming, and now I hate it. I know why at least: it’s the environment I’m in. It’s too stagnant, no one ever wants to try anything new. I came to this realization this morning as I was looking at MonoRail, an MVC architecture for ASP.NET web apps. Going through the tutorial, I got really excited — it’s easy, it’s clean, it’d make our site probably 10 times easier to work with.

And no one there would give a rat’s ass. They might think it was nifty, but they wouldn’t want anything to do with it.

And that’s fine; I can’t change them, and I’m not going to. And it’s not even about MonoRail in particular — that’s just the example I have at hand. I might be able to convince my boss to check it out, but the other web developer would dismiss it, and since he has seniority there, it’d be his opinion they’d pay most attention to. He’s just old fashioned in some respects, and lazy in others, and he fits in quite well there — the whole mindset is to touch absolutely nothing unless you have to, regardless of how terrible it is to deal with.

Fine, just not for me.

Patti and I are talking about moving anyways, and that’s something we’re going to be discussing over the weekend. I mean moving like back home or somewhere else altogether, not just up to Olympia or Lacey. Get out of this damned state and get closer to people we can relate to.

Smoke time; gotta run.

Had an interesting session with the therapist last night; he brought up something that Patti and I didn’t have time to discuss in more depth with him, though we wanted to (well, we wanted to on the ride home, at least).  There’s two vital (and quite obvious) points to it.

The first is a saying you’ve probably heard: tell a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth.  Or, phrased slightly differently, tell yourself something often enough and you’ll start to believe it.  Really simple, but really powerful too — you’ll know that if you’ve ever tried it.  And I mean it mostly for emotional/psychological concepts — I hate my job, I can’t quit smoking, I need to drink, I can’t do this or I don’t like that.  “Can’t” and “don’t” are often the terms used in those kinds of phrases; it seems to be really easy to say those instead of “can” and “do”.

The other point is even more obvious, and quite related: humans are quite adaptable.  Both physically and psychologically.  In spite of our general tendency towards negativity, we’re also very good at making lemonade when we’re handed lemons (or they’re thrown violently at us).  We can, when we desire to, make the best of any situation, or at least make it tolerable.

The first leads to the second here; I separate them mainly for emphasis, though adaptability is truly the overall concept — you can adapt to a situation by telling yourself over and over again that you like it.   I do not question that in the slightest; I’m the one who has the ability to make myself happy, not my job, nor my house nor the city or state that I live in.  That’s in my hands, and I can either accept and adapt to my environment and let myself be happy regardless of what’s going on around me, or I can sit and pout and say “I don’t like this.”

My main question — the question Patti and I were wanting to ask as we drove home last night — is where do you draw the line?  Where do you say “You know what, this just ain’t worth it any more”?  I can adapt to not having a cigarette with dinner — that’s not a big deal, because (contrary to how I often portray it) smoking isn’t vital to my existence or even my happiness (it often helps the latter, but it isn’t necessary).

But what about the larger stuff?  When is it better to just get out of the situation?  A job, for example — when is it better to just say “You know what, I don’t want this anymore,” instead of fighting it out each day?  Where do you draw the line between something that’s acceptable to adapt to — like no cigarette at dinner — and something that’s worth fighting for?

There’s a couple of concepts behind this that I’m driving at.  The first is that life’s short.  Even at best, I probably only have about another 50-60 years left in this world.  Why should I spend it on stuff that I’m not happy with?  Why shouldn’t I live my life as I want to, instead of trying to convince myself that I’m happy with a particular job or in a particular location?

The other concept — and I probably haven’t led up to it as well as I should have, and it’ll seem like it’s out of left field — is that my happiness (or lack thereof) is entirely mine; it isn’t something anyone else can dictate.  No, I’m not necessarily thrilled with my job, even if it’s something that countless others would love to have.  But someone can’t make me be happy with it by saying “Well, at least you’re not doing <blah>, so get over it.”  Yes, there’s lots of people that are in much worse situations than I am; does that make me feel better?  Hell no; makes me feel worse — now I’m not only unhappy with my situation, but I also feel like a jackass for being unhappy.

Well, I need to run right now; quick update on Like Glass: the latest copy has been uploaded and I’m probably going to order a new proof today.  If all goes well, it might even be ready to go next week.  Keep your fingers crossed.

One of the great things about coming home is that you get reminded of all the things you despised before you left, and you get a chance to look at them with the new perspective that intervening years has brought.  Weather is a good example — I used to get so damned tired of the sun and the heat while I was in El Paso before, and I loved rainy days with a passion; after spending four years living in the Pacific Northwest, I’m highly inclined to review that opinion.

Another grievance I used to hold against El Paso was admittedly an almost racist one.  As a border town, El Paso has an extremely high Hispanic population — I don’t believe it would be much of an exaggeration to say that Caucasians are in the minority here.  Growing up here, I held the population against the city for reasons I’ll elaborate on, though I’ve since seen the error of that train of thought.

I’ve tried very hard throughout my life to avoid holding bigoted opinions, to avoid prejudicial beliefs; growing up in the Sun City it was quite difficult.  Most of my elders had long since grown tired of things I was growing up to consider par for the course.  Because of the high Hispanic population, mere probablity would ensure that, if something went wrong, odds were it wasn’t a white guy or a black guy behind it — if 75% of the population around you is Mexican, then there’s a 75% chance that the kid who busted your window was too before you take anything else into consideration.

Stupid train of thought, I know now, but when you’re cut off in traffic twenty times a day by someone with a Front-Chihuahua license plate, or the people blocking every aisle in Wal-Mart don’t speak English, it’s hard to keep yourself from stereotyping.  When you can’t find a job because you don’t speak Spanish, or the job you do find pays crap because there’s thirty others who will take it for minimum wage, it’s hard not to hold a little resentment.  Well, hard for me at least; I’m flawed in that way.

Living up in Washington though, I’ve come to think differently.  There’s bad drivers everywhere you go; crappy driving knows no color.  People are rude and inconsiderate no matter what race they are.  It has nothing to do with being able to speak English or not, or whether you’re a legal citizen or not.  Just a fact of life.

I’ve also learned more about business since I’ve been up there, and I’ve changed my perspective on the job market in El Paso — I don’t like it any more than I did, but I understand it better at least.  As a software developer, I can command a fairly decent wage — probably $30K entry level; with my experience, probably about $40K-$50K if I can convince people I know what I’m doing without the little piece of paper that says I know what I’m doing.  If I had that paper, it’d most likely be around $60K-$70K.  Here in El Paso, for every development position, there’s probably 10 qualified people who live either across the border or in low-rent areas (and there’s lots of those, as the number of low-wage jobs far exceeds the higher paying positions).  Those people don’t need a lot to survive on, and since there is such high competition, they’ll undercut the salary.  My $30K position just became $20K.  So I move to Washington, where there’s higher paying jobs.

Magnify that by several hundred — no software development positions worth the gas it takes to get there, so all the developers move to other areas of the country.  No qualified software developers in the region means no decent software company will open shop down here, so there’s no reason for developers to stay here.  That’s just one industry — expand that across whatever industries you’d like, and you can see the viscious cycle El Paso’s found itself in.

For every decent paying job, there’s a high number of candidates who will do it for less than you because the cost of living is low.  The cost of living is so low because there’s no high paying jobs.  There’s no high paying jobs because all the qualified candidates move elsewhere to find high paying jobs, instead of staying in El Paso and fighting for better wages. Q.E.D.

One of the other gripes I used to hold was the language issue — people come to this country, they should learn the language, right?  I stumbled across this on xkcd a while ago:

Puts things in a different perspective.  Granted, if you move to an area — or you just spend a large amount of time in an area — you should familiarize yourself with the language as much as possible.  That’s just a decent survival skill.  But at the same time, even when I lived here I only went to Mexico maybe once every two or three years — why should I learn Spanish then?  If I moved there, that’d be different, but it would still take me probably a year to get halfway fluent in the language.  If you look at it that way — not counting that English is a rather difficult language to learn — then someone may have just moved across the border and is trying to learn the language, they just haven’t gotten the hang of it yet and you’re pissed at them because they didn’t instantly understand it as they crossed the river.  Yes, they should try to learn it as soon as possible, but it isn’t going to happen overnight.

From a business perspective it makes perfect sense to want to hire bilingual employees.  With such a high percentage of the city’s population being Hispanic — not counting legally (or illegally) commuting workers, tourist, and shoppers — you’d eliminate a large portion of your potential customer base by employing people who only spoke English.

I think the business perspective is what needs to be changed in El Paso.  A lot of people talk about fixing immigration — even so far as just straight up closing the border — but I don’t think that’s the key.  The city needs companies who are willing to spend money here to revitalize it, to make it a city where people will want to move to and where people can make a career for themselves.  The language-barrier for employment probably will never go away, but I think it could be diminished with the right companies moving to town — and, again, it’s still a kind of fact-of-life: the region is predominantly Spanish speaking, so in order to survive here you probably need to learn Spanish, regardless of what flag is raised in front of the company doors.  Last I checked, the U.S. didn’t have an official language.

Well, the flight made it — had a two hour delay in Dallas, but what can you do?  (Other than gripe at my sister-in-law for not setting us up with the straight-through Southwest flight, non-stop from SeaTac to El Paso, but…)

It really does feel like coming home too.  Hell, feel like I haven’t even really left.  We went to the bar last night, most of the old crowd was there, shot pool and did almost as good as I always had (made some, missed some, had fun overall though).  Hopefully I’ll be able to get in touch with a few old friends and see how they’re doing.  I know one guy I went to school with has three kids now.  I think for Christmas I’ll get him and his wife a television set so they have something else to do…

I don’t know how well I’ll be keeping up with this thing while I’m out here — I’m using my mother-in-law’s computer, and I’m sure they wouldn’t have any problems with my use of it, but it’s still someone else’s computer, so… 

Anyways, if I don’t get back here between now and then, I wish you and yours a great holiday season.  I’m off to go smoke and contribute to the El Paso smog.

Got my new proof in for Like Glass and it looks great.  Almost like I knew what I was doing. Still the same number of typos and other areas it needs a bit of editing, but it’ll be fine.  I’ll try and post a cover shot before too long — it’s not spectacular, but it’s not too shabby and I’m a little proud of it.  Might be a while on the pic though, as I’m not sure what the next couple of weeks are going to be like with the trip and everything.

I’m still planning on releasing in mid-January (I set a date here a couple of days ago; can’t remember what it is right now.)  I should be able to do a fair amount of editing on the trip, and even if I can’t, I’ll be putting in nights and mornings on it when I get back I’m sure.

Need to run as it’s going to be an early morning (3 AM!).  Just wanted to drop a quick line and rest the minds of all my adoring fans waiting with bated breath for word of when the novel will be ready.  Be sure to contact me soon so I can include you in the acknowledgments section of my press release when it wins the Pulitzer.

Okay, that’s enough playtime for now.  G’night Gracie.

In total contradiction of the epiphany I wrote of yesterday, I think I won’t call myself a writer. I actually received some comments on that post — a modestly rare occurrence — that incited quite a bit of thought last night. I have two reasons behind it, one admittedly a little petulant in it’s start, though I’ve since come to honestly agree with it, the other a bit more rational.

The first reason was most definitely inspired by the comments yesterday of Mr. Cliff Burns, particularly this:

“The terms ‘writer’ and ‘author’ confer status because we associate them with great artists and storytellers from down through the ages.”

There was much more to his comments, and I beseech you to read through them — he does make decent points. Regardless, this particular sentence stood out in my mind. It’s very true, what he says, and I can completely understand that trying to associate one’s self with the likes of all the great writers of the past is quite wrong.

That much I could live with though, as I wouldn’t feel as if I were putting myself on the same level as Poe or Melville or Steinbeck or anyone. There are also, however, quite a large number of writers in this world who do have the arrogance I spoke of yesterday, that “you can’t call yourself a writer because <blah>.” By calling myself a writer, true, I’m associating myself with some of the greatest names in history; however, I’m also associating myself with the likes of those people who have too much pride to let anyone else into the little clique.

And, by the definition I’d given yesterday, I’d also be associating myself with people like Hitler (who actually has published more than many who call themselves writers, myself included), and I’m sure quite a few others who no one would ever want to be clumped in with under the same title.

(Yes, you may cry Godwin’s Law)

That’s my petty, immature “inner child” talking. I don’t like him much, but sometimes I can’t control him. Well, I could, but sometimes it’s just more fun to let him take the reigns.  The second reason I hope you’ll find less childish.

What is the point of calling one’s self a writer?   There is no practical reason, regardless of whether one is worthy of the title or not.  It’s purely psychological, giving yourself an identity of any kind.  I say this not in terms of profession, as calling yourself a writer has marketing potential behind it (”marketing” might be a bit of a strong word for what I mean, but I hope you get the point).

If I call myself a writer, all it does is make me feel better about myself.  It gives me a little psychological foundation to stand on so I can get through the day, since that’s something that I want — I want to make my living by writing, I want to study the craft, I want to get that thrill from bringing a story to the close I’d had in mind on a daily basis.

What I call myself has no bearing on any of that.  Calling myself a writer does not give me a pen to write with (or a keyboard, as is most often my case).  Calling myself a writer does not in itself give me that thrill I desire.  If I wrote for the next twenty years, calling myself a writer would still give no benefit to my life..  None of that is related to what I call myself in the slightest.

In fact, what I call myself — whether it’s “writer” or something less controversial — has absolutely no bearing on the world anyways.  I am me, not some label I decide to give myself, or that someone else decides to give me.

I am not a writer.  I am a person who writes, and who loves writing.  Likewise, I am not a software developer; I am a person who writes computer programs and websites, and enjoys it sometimes.  I am not a musician, I’m a person who plays piano and writes music sometimes.

Right now, I’m a person who needs to get out and have his cigarette so he can get ready for work.

I’ve taken the links to the book down now, and changed some of the links around — if you got here via a link I’d posted to the book in a different web site, well, sorry about that.   Feel free to check out the short stories though; they’re still freely available.

If you are interested in finding out when Like Glass is available, feel free to contact me and I’ll drop you a line when it’s ready.  I’m shooting for about mid January, but we’ll see how things go with the proof (still not in yet) and the holidays.

Just realized — one more day to download a free copy of Like Glass before I take it down.  Should be getting my second proof copy in today, so hopefully I can make what ever changes it needs (I know there’s a lot of typos, just from reviewing the previous proof) and get it ready to publish by the middle of January.

That’s the plan at least — we’ll set a tentative publish date for January 15th.  Set your calendar (though I reserve the right to change the date based on how this proof comes out.)

Gotta run.