textfiles/fun/CAA/gecaa-24

From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan  7 17:25:23 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: chapter-24

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

#24 in the second online CAA series

by

Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)

Palo Alto, CA; 11,687 miles.

(c) February 23, 1987





     Sitting at a desk in a cluttered room on a sunny California day is not

unlike being chronically married and walking past a nude beach. Through this

wide suburban window the sky is blue, the trees are green, and the shadows are

crisp.  It's breezy and warm.  People are strolling by in SHORTS, fer

chrissake, and some even torture me by whizzing past on sleek 18-speeds --

their buns shaped by lycra tights, calves standing proud in that fine sheen of

early-season sweat.  Sigh.



     I suppose I always have the option; I could just pedal away.  No court

restraining order has confined me to this Palo Alto house at the hormone-happy

onset of virtual springtime.  But I'm trapped:  the list of things to do is so

overwhelming that I spend most of my time poring over it, abstracting it into

categories and priorities.  Suddenly the journey is PROJECT instead of

lifestyle -- I'm spread over three desks trying to start a mini-magazine,

script a video, kick off a new column, finish (well, um, start) some overdue

articles, and dramatically enhance the bike communication and control system.

That's the plan anyway.



     But Time, as always, slips through my grasp, teasing me with its touch,

taunting me and torturing me as it dances just out of reach. (Yes... you're not

the only one.)  No matter how much I plan, it tricks me:  darkness before the

afternoon, sleepytime before night, interruptions from self, friends, or cosmos

whenever a moment's concentration threatens to yield progress.



     Procrastination followed by despair, that's the freelance life. The LIST,

that great overblown impressario of personal time management, is at once refuge

and tyrant, comforter and accuser.  I add to it with satisfaction, peruse it

with nervousness, and cross things out with malicious glee.  (Sometimes, er, I

even add items for that purpose alone:  Saturday I sent a card to daughter

Emily, then wrote "card to Emily" on the TO-DO list, switched pens, marked it

off, and took a well-deserved break with a smug air of self-congratulation.

This is highly pathological behavior, even for a high technomad.)



     It has been an interesting week, all the overhead of getting

pseudo-settled aside.  Ray Rolls was here yesterday from Chico, bearing an

armload of Vacaville nut breads and urging me past the muddle of startup on the

magazine project.  This publication, in short, is a print version of these

weekly tales for all those poor unfortunates out there who don't have online

access.  Tentatively called "The Journal of High Treknowledgy," it will be a

monthly compilation of CAA highlights, feature articles, guest editorials, and,

for all I know, recipes and cartoons.  You can now turn your offline friends on

to my ramblings by buying them gift subscriptions. (Details at the end of this

article.)



     The danger, of course, is that I'll let the bike grow dusty, becoming so

immersed in the business of writing stories that my stories will be all about

the business of writing stories -- a sad fate that has befallen many an

otherwise excellent author.  Wonder how long THAT would last...



     But hey.  This trip isn't all adrenalin, torn ligaments, logging trucks,

whimsical host analysis, rubber-band wars, and loony street people.  It's work,

too, hard work -- and I might as well share the reality behind the fantasy.

(After all, you might otherwise think I PLAY for a living.)



     So.  This and the journal are only part of it.  I'm starting another

"profit center" that fits in perfectly:  The Computing Across America Traveling

Circuits.  That's right -- a road show.  After a few years of observing the

near-obsessive fascination that my techno-bike spawns across the land, it

finally sunk in.  Of course -- charge admission!  All I have to do is show up

in a strange town, roll the bike onto stage, tell a few funny stories about

life Out There, and answer questions.  Sounds easy... though the difficulties

include timing, advance arrangement of venue, advertising, and so on.  Enter

another partner:  Pat Barrentine.  Her job is to pave the way for our little

electronic circus, town after town.  She's hard at it already, setting up some

local events to see if this will play in Peoria.



     And there's more (isn't bicycle touring fun?).  I'm trying to make a

regular column out of the myriad lessons of doing business on the road

("Breaking the Chains"), and am still hustling random freelance articles.  And

yes, I'm still grappling with a world-class publishing nightmare on the book --

oh, didn't I tell you?  No?  Well, if you're not already cynical about the

publishing industry, prepare to become so...



     The Computing Across America book, written about my first 10K miles, was

begun back in 1984.  It was a major event:  the contract with Simon & Schuster

had carried a $30,000 advance, far and away my biggest ever.  But I got caught

up in a whirlwind of editorial musical chairs reminiscent of Westlake's "A

Likely Story":  Editor One, after 3 exuberant months of long phone

conversations and dreams, jumped ship to join an investment banking firm.  I

missed her.  Editor Two didn't seem to know much about anything, but it didn't

matter -- he disappeared soon into another division of the company.  Editor

Three, a man with solid industry experience, hung in there long enough to

receive my manuscript.



     "I love it!" he said.  Releasing the third quarter of the advance, he

requested a general tightening of flabby passages and added, "It's going to be

terrific!"  Considering this tantamount to acceptance, I went gleefully to

work... while he left S&S to join a new publishing company.



     Editor Four received the manuscript and sat on it for two months. One day

in the summer of 1985, I called him.  "Uh, Steve Roberts? Let's see... hmm...

that's the bicycle book, right?  Ah, gee, Steve, I'm probably not the best

editor for this.  I'm not really into travel books."  A panicked phone survey

revealed that there had been a complete turnover since the original contract,

and that nobody at Simon & Schuster knew (or cared) who I was.  They soon

invoked the ubiquitous "unsuitability clause," a particularly nasty trick of

publisher-designed legalese that allows them, in effect, to unilaterally kill a

project anytime up to the moment of formal acceptance.  For no reason at all.



     Oh, where was my agent through all this?  Quiet and in the background,

that's where.  He didn't want to make any enemies over there, since there were

several "important" projects of his under consideration.  He even chewed me out

for making waves.



     I fired the agent and licked my wounds -- staring with increasing dismay

at the finished 620-page manuscript on my desk, the product of some 2,200

hours' work.  A letter from S&S twisted the knife... asking for a return of the
ration, Ined to Learned Information -- a small publisher in New Jersey with which I

had done some business over the years (articles and speeches).  Ahhh, now we're

talking:  a company on a human scale.  Within a month I had a verbal agreement,

a new and delightful editor, and a much healthier outlook on life.



     That was well over a year ago.  The new typesetting machine took a few

months to arrive and a few more months to get working, other projects take up

most of their time, and there's still no written contract.  The editing was

fine and the book will actually happen (in June, they tell me, only 8 months

after their original predictions), but in the meantime I'm out here doing a

high-profile media tour for no reason other than that it's just... what I do.



     The lesson in all this?  No publishing venture is straightforward and

predictable.



     This could go on all day, but you probably didn't come in here for a

lesson in nomadic business survival.  I can hardly invent adventure, however,

when this week's REAL story has more to do with the architecture of the whole

loony enterprise.  So where are we now? In a house in Palo Alto, owned by a

wizard in ultrasonic transducer design and signal analysis who also shares

space with a pretty blonde artist and a black lab named Maggie.  We're actually

"tenants," bartering some carefully targeted marketing copy for space, good

music, and an occasional splash in the hot tub.



     Oh yes, I did have one adventure this week -- an intriguing glimpse into

another layer of Dataspace.



     I entered through Portal, a new host system based in Cupertino. The first

delight was the cursor control:  I cranked up the VT100 emulator in my HP

Portable PLUS and the whole experience of being online changed completely.

Screens were cleanly formatted, with minor changes in menus and directories

happening in a blink.  I poked about happily, forgetting I was on a dial-up

service.  Nothing like speed...



     The system supports electronic mail and conferencing, with no services

like CAA or Reversi or Easy Saabre.  But the architecture is elegant in the

extreme, including a sort of personalized electronic clipping service that lets

a user tailor the system to specific interests.



     The real magic, though, comes from the gateways.  Portal is one of

thousands of systems on internet and usenet -- global networks designed to link

diverse "domains" into a dynamically mapped, standardized meta-network.  In

other words, you can send mail all over the place:  into corporate or academic

email systems, defense establishments, private systems across the sea, and so

on.  Naturally, this extends to conferencing, and the dialogues in progress on

the network are interesting enough for me to add this complex environment to my

growing Dataspace neighborhood.



     What we need to do now <conspiratorial wink> is get Portal and GEnie

linked through a gateway.  CompuServe made headlines with their recent MCI

hookup... here's a chance to one-up the competition and bring the world another

step closer to the truly useful objective of universally linked networks.  The

present condition -- isolated communities on competing monolithic systems --

should eventually give way to complete network freedom, wherein any modem owner

could communicate with any other.  The various major hosts would continue to

thrive, of course, offering competing services with different features and

flavors... but MAIL could go anywhere.



     Push for it, friends -- lest we end up with just as much electronic

nationalism as that of the geophysical variety.  (It's already starting, you

know.  Don't people on The Source seem a little... ALIEN somehow?  What kind of

mail address is ST3701?)



     By the way, my address over (up? down?) there on usenet is:

Steven_Roberts @ cup.portal.com



     Well, it's been a strange column this week, but then, it's been a strange

week.  Good thing I have Maggie to keep me sane (not the lab, the other one).

And now... to the soldering iron!



NOTE:  As promised above, here's the data on our hardcopy publication. For six

issues (we won't promise any more until we see how these go), send $13 (plus

$10 if you also want a book) to:

         Computing Across America

         The Journal of High Treknowledgy

         762 Churchill Drive

         Chico, CA 95926

     Thanks!

          -- Steve