Over the last two days I’ve read through the entire nerdfighter secrets archives. I saw a lot of repeated themes and statements, so I wanted to write an open letter to the majority of those submitting their anonymous confessions…
Dear fighters who are nerds with secrets,
None of us have it all figured out. I’m twenty-seven and I still don’t feel like I have it all figured out. I get self-conscious all the time. I still wonder if I’ll be able to make new friends, if people will like me. I worry about losing old friends once they get to know the real me. What if I’m not as “made of awesome” as they thought? What if I’m not as funny or smart or creative as they imagine me in their heads? This is something everyone struggles with. Me. Hank. John. Charlie.
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Over the last few weeks I’ve been quietly helping YouTube fight Viacom in their ongoing court battle (along side a dozen other prominent YouTubers). I can’t say much about it, but YouTube has made our recent legal brief public, so I will talk about that.
Viacom recently referred to all registered YouTube users who post original content as a “sideshow”, suggesting the original content posted to YouTube was worthless when compared to the unauthorized copyrighted content that is illegally uploaded. So together with the vlogbrothers, lisanova, whatthebuckshow, smosh, and others, we formed “The Sideshow Coalition”.
We recently all wrote brief statements for the court to read on how we’ve used YouTube to not only reach an audience with our original work, but how we’ve made YouTube a home, a business, or a place for friends and family.
[click to read more…]
When I was fifteen, I was convinced I was going to be a rock star. I had just got my first electric guitar and learned how to play Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”. Those five chords were all I needed to conquer the world. I was obsessed with making my mark before I turned twenty-seven, afterall, that’s the age that all the great rock stars died at – Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Robert Johnson… all died at twenty-seven.
This May I will be turning twenty-seven.
The years following my fifteen-year-old-rock-star-fantasy were tough years for me. Family stuff, girlfriend stuff, anxiety stuff. I wasn’t where I wanted to be, and let everyone know it through my angst-ridden poetry and music. But about two years ago, things started turning around. I got a book deal and was published. I was hired by Lisa Nova and left my full-time job to work at home. I started a record label which has been wildly successful and inspirational to so many. Like dominos, one life-long goal after another became reality, in just the past twenty-four months.
I’m not okay with dying at twenty-seven any more. Screw being a rock star!
[click to read more…]
This is a three part series, previous posts in this series:
- Part 1: Thoughts from a Reader (hey, that’s me!)
- Part 2: Thoughts from a Writer (a conversation with NY Times Bestselling author, John Green)
To conclude this series on eBooks, I had a discussion with Kathleen Fitzgerald, the content manager for Scribd.com. Scribd is a website that provides a “platform for readers, authors, publishers and anyone else seeking to express themselves”. Scribd allows you to upload and instantly publish your eBook to share with the world, for free. Not only does Scribd offer self-published (or user-generated) content, but Scribd also offers commercial works by publishers like Simon & Schuster and The New York Times.
[click to read more…]
This is a three part series, other posts in this series:
- Part 1: Thoughts from a Reader (hey, that’s me!)
- Part 3: Thoughts from a Retailer (a conversation with Scribd.com, eBook publisher and distributor)
Yesterday I shared my thoughts, as a reader, about eBooks. My post was sort of a reply to Alex Day’s article (linked in the first post). But we’ve all heard a lot of readers’ opinions about eBooks. Who I really wanted to hear from were the writers and publishers soon to be embracing, or shunning, this new format.
The following came out of a discussion I had with John Green, whose latest novel, the New York Times Bestselling (and Edgar Award-winning) Paper Towns, was published in 2008. John’s first novel, Looking For Alaska, was published in 2005 and won the Printz Award. His second novel, An Abundance of Katherines, was published the following year, in 2006. John is currently working on two new titles; he’s co-writing the novel Will Grayson Will Grayson with David Levithan (co-author of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) while working on a new novel of his own entitled The Sequel.
[click to read more…]
