More Show Me How

It’s great that the world supports eclectic books like More Show Me How: Everything We Couldn’t Fit in the First Book Instructions for Life from the Everyday to the Exotic. Described by its publisher (HarperCollins): “A new collection of fun, practical, and outrageous projects from the genius minds of the original Show Me How…Volume two of the Show Me How series contains brand-new instructions that show readers how to amaze, trick, create, style, and love, among other endeavors. Ideas range from the practical (hang a ceiling fixture; hem a pair of pants) to the outrageous (boobytrap a bathroom; forge an antiquity) to the romantic (ace a school crush; send a saucy cell phone pic.) So go ahead and learn some killer pool moves. Or stage your own impromptu gallery show. Style you hair in a fauxhawk. More Show Me How is the indispensable real-life resource that helps readers live life to the fullest and be the star of the party.” To find out more about this book, I recently email interviewed two of the creative forces behind the book, Derek Fagerstrom and Lauren Smith, who also operate “The Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco‘s Mission District, selling (and falling in love with) everything from a make-it-yourself ukulele to a DIY bird-watching kit.” My thanks to Smith and Fagerstrom for their time.

Tim O’Shea: How was it decided what topics to include in the book? Were there any that were deemed too absurd or obscure for inclusion?

Derek Fagerstrom: We wanted to make sure that the book appealed to a wide range of people, with all sorts of interests and skill levels, which meant that there were very few restrictions as to what we could include. A lot of the topics came initially from the personal passions and expertise of the Show Me Team (it’s always more fun to start with what you know and love). From there we just made sure to have a good balance of topics that we found interesting, fun, and useful (with the occasional absurdity thrown in for good measure, of course!). The only real reason that we ever decided NOT to include something was if it turned out to be dangerous or overtly criminal.

O’Shea: Do one of you always come up with the idea for an installment, or do some suggestions come from the Show Me Team?

Lauren Smith: Derek and I brought our own particular interests, but it was very much a team effort to come up with the huge amount of information in the books. And after we had settled on all the topics, there was a whole other team of amazing artists and designers that translated our instructions into beautifully rendered, easy-to-understand illustrations.

O’Shea: Now you have me curious, with #54 “Disappear from a cruise ship”, did you develop that one based on someone who had done that and succeeded? Any news reports I ever hear, the person just disappears/presumed drowned, not later found to be hiding on an island.

Lauren: To a certain degree we wanted the book to be encyclopedic and timeless, something you can keep going back to over and over again to learn new things. But we also wanted it to be relevant to what’s going on in the world today, so we looked to pop culture and current events for topics as well. And at the time we were working on the book, lots of financiers and other corporate criminals seemed to be “disappearing”, so we thought we’d offer some friendly advice. The tips are partly based on schemes actual people have tried, partly on fictional depictions of people who disappear, and partly on our own vivid imaginations and dreams of deserted islands.

O’Shea: Have you ever heard back from a reader, thanking you for getting them out of a bad situation, due to one of the show me how installments?

Derek: We’ve never had someone report back to us that they escaped an anaconda attack or an avalanche because of the book, but lots of readers have told us how helpful its been in other areas of their lives, particularly food, crafts, home decor and gardening.

O’Shea: Do fans come into The Curiousity Shoppe with suggestions for future Show Me How installments?

Derek: Not really. Mostly they comment on how insanely comprehensive the two books are.

O’Shea: Why did you come up with the idea to include a graphic index of tools in the back of the book?

Lauren: It all started when people would walk by the pages we were working on and say, “What’s that yellow blob, anyway?” And it was so obvious to us that it was a loofah! (Or a wheel of cheese. Or something.) So, we figured we should help readers understand what special tools they might need–and whether that’s a crowbar or a very rigid snake.

O’Shea: The #285 Ask Without Words chart, how long did that take to compile (given how much ground it had to cover). In retrospect, are there any you wish you had thought to include?

Lauren: Almost more than anything else, this was a massive collaborative effort. The editor whose crazy idea it was took a stab at it, then all of the rest of us on the team chimed in with the things we’d experienced while traveling–and then the poor illustrator had to draw it all! It took weeks to get it really right. And it seemed like such a simple idea when we first thought it up (that seemed to happen a lot).

O’Shea: Were either of you fans of the TV show MacGyver growing up?

Derek: Of course! I’m still a fan.

O’Shea: Are you excited about the possibility of expanding the popularity of the Show Me Brand with the new iPhone app?

Lauren: Yes! Show Me How is perfect for mobile apps. There have been so many times when I’ve been out doing something and wished I’d had Show Me How handy for quick reference, and this will be much easier than lugging the book around!

Heartland

I love the mixture of absurdity and accuracy in writer Mark Teppo‘s bio (from his site): “Mark Teppo suffers from a mild case of bibliomania, which serves him well in his on-going pursuit of a writing career. He also owns a pink bunny suit. Fascinated with the mystical and the extra-ordinary, he channels this enthusiasm into fictional explorations of magic realism, urban fantasy, and surreal experimentation. Maybe, one day, he’ll write a space opera. With rabbits.” We delve into a range of products in this email interview. My thanks to Teppo for his thoughts/time and to friend of the blog Allison Baker for introducing me in contact with Teppo. One of his collaborations, The Mongoliad, actually had its official launch earlier today, be sure to visit the site.

Tim O’Shea: As an urban fantasy author, I’m curious did you grow up in a city? What is it that attracted you to writing in the urban fantasy vein?

Mark Teppo: I grew up in a speck of a town out in the Mohave Desert, and spent a better part of my formative years in a towns under 100,000 people. It wasn’t until I moved to the Seattle area going on twenty years ago that I really arrived in a city, proper. I grew up on a diet of thrillers and mainstream mystery fiction, which always seemed to take place in big cities. In the classic “write what you know sense,” this is what I knew: all the action took place in the cities. As for the fantasy part, well, I didn’t think I knew enough about international politics and guns to write a convincing thriller.

O’Shea: In a recent essay about your writing, you said of Lightbreaker, the first book in the Codex of Souls series: “I was going to write an urban fantasy book without vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, angels, or demons.” When and why did you realize you wanted to approach the book without vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, angels, or demons?

Teppo: In the original version of LIGHTBREAKER, written more than fifteen years ago, the protagonist was both a werewolf AND a vampire. Basically, I couldn’t decide which, and when I came back to the book around the turn of the millennium, I realized that (a) the market was already filled with both, and (b) I couldn’t really wrap my head around the vampire mythology in the 21st century. The old, Bram Stoker-era, vampire rules make little or no sense in the modern era, and being chained to them seemed like a real chore. Plus what I was really interested in was magic and religion, and it didn’t take much to see the easy solution to all my problems.

O’Shea: You recently released the second book in the Codex of Souls series, Heartland. In returning to the Codex of Souls series, were there certain characters or dynamics of the series that you were most looking forward to working with again?

Teppo: HEARTLAND is a continuation of the story started in LIGHTBREAKER, and was a book that I wrote five versions of before I figured out how to edit a manuscript. In many ways, I’ve been carrying around both of the books for a long time, and I’m very happy to have them behind me now. There was a lot of emotional baggage with the character that was really tough to not let flavor the work, and I’m fairly pleased that I managed to strip out most of it in HEARTLAND.

That said, I’m really looking forward to ANGEL TONGUE and KARMA KISS (books 3 and 4) as they’ve never been plotted or written. They are completely new territory for me, and I like the idea that I have no better idea what’s going to happen than the protagonist. I have some idea, but the journey of getting from the beginning to the end is always a marvel. I like to punish the characters a lot to see how they’ll react, and it’s always a fascinating evolution. I know where ANGEL TONGUE and KARMA KISS go (and where the series itself is going), but the details are going to be fun to uncover.

I like that I’ve closed the loop on the protagonist’s relationship with a person from his past; I’ve got someone new in mind for him, someone that I hope will stick around for a few books, and I’m building her background to be quite different from his. It’s the oldest trick in the book–throw together two incompatible elements and see what happens–and I’m embracing it shamelessly.

O’Shea: When one has a distinct vision of a universe or concept, as you do with the Codex of Souls series, is it more flattering or frustrating when readers interpret your intention with a plot or a character in manner you never intended when writing it?

Teppo: I had a friend IM’ing me every day as he read LIGHTBREAKER, and it was fascinating to watch the evolution of his understanding of the protagonist, and he offered a number of insights into the character that hadn’t concretely occurred to me. I think I learned as much about the character as my friend did, which proved to be useful when I was doing the final touches on HEARTLAND.

I think everyone will interpret a creative act differently; I think that’s part of the magic of sharing these sorts of things. You don’t all have the same understanding of the impetus and meaning of a piece of work, and part of my job as a writer is to make something that resonates for a lot of people. But I can only get better at making these resonances by paying attention to other people’s reactions. It can be frustrating, yes, when people seem to mis-interpret the work, but part of what I have to ask myself is this because I wasn’t clear enough? What can I do to make the next work more clear?

I’ve always cited Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series as seminal works that I enjoy coming back to time and again because there are always aspects of their work that I FINALLY understand in the latest reading. It’s not crucial that the reader completely syncs with my intention; I’d rather it give them something to think about (above the visceral entertainment of the experience, of course), and perhaps it will drive them to try something new or come back to the work again later and discover something else in it.

O’Shea: For aspiring writers, I think the arduous creative process in your work is something they should take note of–and appreciate the patience it took for you to get the first two books of the Codex of Souls series written. As you note in this blog post: “Drafts of the first two Codex of Souls books go back more than a decade”. How taxing was it for you to keep at the books, working and revising them over the course of several years?

Teppo: We shopped LIGHTBREAKER for about three years back in the day, and the main frustration at that time was that the urban fantasy market as we know it today didn’t exist. I was an untested writer writing something that no one could pigeonhole, and every rejection we got cited a different genre as where it would be placed. I took five years or so off in the interim (to sulk, mainly, and to indulge in some writing about experimental and electronic music). When I came back to writing fiction, I had a better idea of what I really wanted to do, as well as an awareness of the hard work it would entail. I found a new agent (rather, he found me) who was understanding about my desire to rework the book, and after that it was a matter of finding the right publisher.

I didn’t have any doubt that we’d sell it the second time around. It still took a few years, but we were being patient about who we shopped it to during that time. Like any book, by the time you actually see it in print, you’ve touched every word several times and it’s always nice to be DONE. It took another year before I stopped being able to cite chapter and page when someone mentioned a line from the book, and now I can actually pick it up and be pleasantly surprised by parts of it.

Every time I came back to the manuscript, it was clear what needed to be done, and so it was a part of doing the work. Taxing, yes, in that it gets very detail-oriented, but that’s the ugly grind of being a writer. I actually like it. I used to abhor editing and the detail work, but now I enjoy the fine-tuning that comes at the end.

It’s the first two weeks of a new book that I really dislike.

O’Shea: Can you recall when your interest in magick and the occult took root?

Teppo: I studied religion and mythology in college, when I wasn’t playing D & D. Somewhere in there, I stumbled upon Aleister Crowley as well as The Fields of the Nephilim, an English band whose earlier work was based around the legends of the Nephilim and Sumerian rituals. These days, I think The Fields of the Nephilim are the best example of chaos magick rituals set to music, but then I’m pretty biased in my love for them.

Eh, let’s be honest, I was a goth kid who was more into ritual and magic than wearing black and wanting to be undead.

O’Shea: Did your parents instill your serial bibliophilia in you, or is that something you nurtured all on your own?

Teppo: There were always books around when I was growing up. Every room had a bookcase or two in it, and every trip we took as a family included stops at bookstores. It was the way of the world, I thought. When my wife and I were shopping for our first house, there were certain houses that I would have this near pathological reaction to–I just didn’t like them–and it took me a while to realize that it was because they didn’t have any books in them. One place had their single bookcase shoved in a back closet. Creeped me out.

O’Shea: How did you end up as chief creative officer at Subutai Corporation? Is this your first collaboration with Neal Stephenson and the other officers in the venture?

Teppo: It’s my first collaboration with everyone. We’ve all know each other–either directly, or by one degree or so of separation–for a couple of years now, and the project grew organically out of some random conversations about a project (like they do). I was the detail-oriented writer guy who didn’t have a book due in the next six months, and after a few months of doing the work, everyone agreed that the position was a good fit for me. Kind of boring, really: I showed up, did the work, and will keep on doing it until someone turns out the lights and tells us all to go home.

O’Shea: Subutai Corporation’s first major project is The Mongoliad, an experimental fiction project designed for smart phones. How experimental will it be, do you all plan to push the boundaries of the platform with typography or in what way do you hope to experiment?

Teppo: It’s not terribly experimental in what it is: a serial adventure novel. What’s groundbreaking about it is the primary manner in which we’re delivering it to our readers–via smart phones and other mobile devices. The technology–and, more importantly, this generation’s adoption of that technology–has reached a point where we all have devices that are capable of reading things like serial fiction. I don’t think people like to read any less than they have in the past, but they are living much more mobile lives and the opportunity to sit down and read a book–or to read something on a computer screen–is rapidly becoming a luxury. It’s just not the sort of activity that we have TIME for anymore, at least, not in its previous iterations. We still have lots of down time when we’re waiting for a bus or for an appointment or a meeting–there’s no end of waiting–and what we’re doing now in that time is staring at our mobile devices.

Secretly, we’re all hoping some good, rousing serial fiction will magically show up on our screens. In the meantime, we’ll play another hand of Solitaire or update our Facebook status or try to send a tweet.

What these devices do is keep us connected with all our friends in this real-time virtual environment, and when you’re this hyper-connnected with your friends, you have a relationship with everyone that is based on very little filtering and is very immediate. If you’re all reading the same serial fiction and it provides mechanisms for sharing and discussions built-in, then the ability to have that next-day watercooler discussion–you know, how we used to stand around and dissect last night’s episode of Lost–becomes real-time. We’re all chatting and commenting about the fiction immediately after it is released.

Wouldn’t it be great if this discussion actually had an impact on the course of the story?

O’Shea: Is there a finite end point for The Mongoliad or do the creators have no idea where it will end at this point and want the story to evolve based on user response?

Teppo: We’re going to break it into seasons. It’s an arbitrary term, but the concept of a TV season is the closest match to what we’re envisioning. We do have some overarching plans for the entire world, but for the short term, we’re going to play things close to our chests and evolve the story as the audience seems to like it. The splash page for The Mongoliad mentions “Foreworld,” and that’s our umbrella name for our version of history because we’ve already scoped entry points that aren’t in the 13th century. We’ll run it as long as people care to show up and read, and we’re cognizant of the perception that the writers of Lost had to deal with (that there was no end planned), and so we’re going to try to iterate through cycles well enough that people feel a sense of closure at regular intervals.

It may be dangerous to have me in charge, as I fully believe that (a) you should leave the stage before you’re thrown out, and (b) writers have no dearth of good ideas, and so I don’t see any problem will wrapping up a story line or killing a character that people like–as long as it is done well. Everyone overstays their welcome eventually; it is just a matter of sensing when it is time to go before everyone else does.

Tim O’Shea: How did you first come up with the NameShake product?

Brian McCarthy: Well, my wife and I discovered we were pregnant last July. After carting around baby naming books for awhile and suffering the ignominy of numerous paper cuts, I decided there had to be a better way. That’s when I called Lance to ask for his advice and during the conversation we decided to work on this together.

The initial project was much broader but we chose[1] to test the waters by limiting ourselves just to the naming application for the short term. I have to say, we both feel it’s been really worthwhile and hope to do more applications in the future.

O’Shea: What are your respective roles in this project?

McCarthy: It’s funny, because we never decided on specific roles in the beginning but just divvied things up as they happened. Our first challenge was to create a “paper-application” which is to say, we had to decide everything that the program would do and then design all of the graphics for the user interface. We met over coffee and sketched it out for weeks until we were satisfied.

Lance is a great artist so it was logical for him to take those rough ideas and create the page layouts which eventually were implemented into our power point presentation. In the meantime, I found us a programming team, licensed a database from a renowned author and negotiated for each.

O’Shea: What have been the biggest hurdles to date in the product development?

McCarthy: Our own ignorance! Lance and I are pretty smart guys but we knew nothing about programming. We both come from the creative side of TV and film and so the learning curve on NameShake was huge. We decided early on that trying to learn to program in Cocoa Touch would be detrimental so we sought out an experienced programming team, which we found in Pakistan of all places. So coordinating all of the elements – programmers in Pakistan, our database author in Seattle, and text editors in the Philippines became a big chore. It really opened our eyes to what a couple of guys with ambition can do by leveraging global commerce and outsourcing the areas we were ignorant in, or didn’t have time for, to others.

O’Shea: Has it been solely developed for iPhones or is it compatible with other platforms?

McCarthy: Right now it’s only been released for the iPhone. We’re considering porting it to Symbian and Android in the future.

O’Shea: Have you seen a stronger response to date from parents or from writers looking for a tool to help with one aspect of their writing?

McCarthy: It’s hard to say because we don’t see much data on our buyers, but I’d say that right now it’s mostly parents who are buying. We were featured on a couple of websites, MomLogic.com and Babychums.com, who gave us positive reviews so that’s helped to drive sales.

We also hope it takes off with screenwriters and novelists, as personally I’ve found it to be very convenient and a real time saver when working on my own projects.

O’Shea: How important has the Internet been in your marketing–it appears you have a great many followers on Twitter?

McCarthy: Well, the internet is critical to our success and we’re still at the beginning of our marketing plan. As for Twitter, I’ve grown a little skeptical of it as a useful service. We have over 2000 followers but it seems to me that most of them are trying to market to one another. In other words, I think Twitter is a forum where 99% of the people are talking and 1% is actually listening.

And because our first true love is film, we couldn’t resist shooting some humorous webmercials to help market NameShake. So far we have three in the can and Lance is still in the process of putting them together, but we plan on releasing those on all of the usual suspect video sites to help drum up even more attention.

O’Shea: How aggressively are you trying to grow the product?

McCarthy: Do you mean grow our market share or grow our product line? Well, in either case the answer is “aggressively.” We established sales targets before we even designed the program and we want to hit those although we have more competition now than before. Also, we’re looking down the road to see what we can do next as we already have several ideas for a 2.0 release

O’Shea: What’s on the horizon, professionally/creatively for both of you in the remainder of 2009?

McCarthy: Funny you should ask that. We both want to create some more iPhone products but we’re also both hungry to get back to our passion, film. We’ve never collaborated on a film before but now we’ve got a couple of ideas we’re toying with. Our partnership has worked so well and we have such mutual respect that it seems like a natural evolution.

We also plan on focusing quite a bit on iPhone application development consulting as we know for every programmer who’s capable of doing it himself, there are ten others with no programming experience like us who might have a great idea but don’t have a clue where to start. We’d like to be able to guide those people through all of the necessary steps and save them time and money by not making the same mistakes we did. In essence, we’ve learned a great deal on this journey and would like to help others experience the satisfaction of seeing their “million dollar” iPhone idea come to fruition.

If people are interested in our program or in contacting us as consultants they should visit our site, www.nameshake.info

O’Shea: In terms of the consulting services you are offering, what are some of the rookie mistakes that you’ve seen some developers make that hinder an otherwise great product?

McCarthy: I would say that there are two cardinal sins. The first is designing a product that doesn’t answer a need or desire. There are 25,000 applications on the app store and many of them are junk that no one wants. The second sin is having a poor user interface. Nothing will turn off users faster than a program that is confusing or ugly to use. We have an instructional video on our website but if you look at NameShake you’ll see we designed a product that is intuitive to use. Making it easy to use and nice to look at was a major priority of ours.

To make a great product you need to spend plenty of time in pre-production. Think about the product, explore the market, break down the numbers and then design, design, design. If you do enough planning, production and sales will be much easier. It’s much harder to fix it after the fact.