The twins got to go to Apple camp this year — a two-day free computer camp held in the Apple store.  While they were learning how to make movies, the parents got a class on parental restrictions.  Imagine my glee when I learned that I could turn off in-app purchases on my phone, effectively ending those tempting pop-up offers from Candy Crush asking if I wanted to purchase extra moves, lives, or lollipop hammers.  I’ve yet to spend a dollar on the game, but even I don’t have an iron-clad will.  It’s really hard to say “no” during those times when I’m stuck on a level for days (my last one was level 125 — that was a killer).  I could see myself buying a few extra moves if I was a few steps away from clearing the board.

So I stopped it.

One click.

Done.

No more options for chattering teeth to eat through the licorice.

[If you want to do this on your device, go into settings, choose restrictions, set a pass code that is different from your phone’s pass code, and then scroll down to turn off in-app purchases.  In the same place, I also switched over iTunes to require a password for every single purchase instead of allowing unlimited purchases for 15 minutes once I put in my password.  There are also dozens of other limitations you can set in that area.]

My friend sent me an article the very next day about how Candy Crush parts you with your money that riffs off of the original post on Gamasutra. It’s not exactly rocket science.  Offer to sell someone 5 extra moves before the game begins, and they likely won’t take it.  Offer to sell them 5 extra moves for a paltry 99 cents when they can clearly see that they’re 2 moves away from winning, and they’ll reason that 99 cents is still less than a cup of coffee, and the purchase will allow them to move on with the game.

See, easy as taking candy.

In-app purchases also means that you’re so far removed from seeing your money float out of your hand.  The money is deducted from your iTunes account, and even that barely feels like real money (even though it is).  I mean, it’s a code on a gift card and it’s numbers and it’s the immediacy of the purchase.  All I have to do is click a button; I don’t even have to open a wallet.  I’ve already felt that danger with iBooks, purchasing new books instantaneously and starting to read them seconds later from the comfort on my living room.  So I didn’t need an article telling me just how dangerous in-app purchases could be.  I’m not particularly worried about the Wolvog and ChickieNob — I’m worried about myself.

Of course, the part about it being more of a money game than a skill game is also interesting, considering how often I get stuck.  Perhaps I just like this point because it allows me to still see myself as intelligent; I’m just at the mercy of a game that is trying to get me to purchase a booster.

Early game play maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slowly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consumer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills.

See, it’s not me.  It’s them.

There was no a-ha moment reading that article; simply a lot of head nodding, especially when it said that “King.com was generous enough to point out that their target demographic for CCS is middle aged women. 80% of their players are women, only 34% of their players are under the age of 30, and only 9% are under the age of 21.”

In other words… me.

Which made me doubly glad that the Apple store taught me how to turn off in-app purchases.

I am sure that game programmers will only get smarter, figuring out go-arounds for all the safety nets that other software creators put in place.  But for now, no matter how much I want 5 extra moves, I cannot get 5 extra moves.  I know because I tested it, clicking on the button and smiling hugely when it told me that the purchase failed.

And if you were wondering how lucrative in-app purchases can be, Candy Crush brings in $633,00 per day.  I am obviously in the wrong profession.

The CNN news alert makes no mention of the sex of the baby except in a pronoun in the final sentence…

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, has given birth to the first child for her and Prince William.

The baby will be third in line to the British throne after Prince Charles and Prince William. He is the first grandchild of the late Princess Diana.

Does this mean the baby is a boy?

Josh leaned on the living room threshold while I wrote, pointing out what he thought was hopeful news from learning that JK Rowling and Robert Galbraith were one and the same.  “See, even bestselling authors — writers of beloved books like Harry Potter — only end up selling 1,500 copies of their books when they keep their name off the cover.”  Instead of making me feel good — even JK Rowling can’t sell a lot of books when people don’t know that it’s JK Rowling — it made me depressed.  Because I don’t have a household name to slap on the cover.  I just have my name.  And it’s a name I share with a “model” who may or may not also make soft core porn.

It is really really hard to sell books.  It’s never-wracking to put your work out there for critique, but the marketing side is also exhausting and frustrating.  I have to be honest: asking authors to market their work is like asking a painter to cook you a meal.  It’s not that a painter can’t cook, but making a souffle is not in a painter’s repertoire.  Painting a souffle would make more sense.   And so marketing — which requires people to be social and assertive — goes against the traits commonly held by writers such as shyness and a love of solitude.  It’s not that I can’t market a book, but it’s not something I do particularly well.

And most writers probably have ridiculously unrealistic expectations for their work anyway.

I get why JK Rowling probably published under the name Robert Galbraith.  I suspect that there is a lot of exhaustion that comes from the publicity that goes into something that is immediately poised to be a bestseller.  She may have wanted to see how her work was received when her name wasn’t on the cover; people and critics alike approach a JK Rowling book with a different eye than they do an unknown author.  I don’t even begrudge the woman needing additional accolades, or gathering proof that she could write a great book all over again.  Even the most successful people need their ego stoked from time to time.  Having glorious achievement after glorious achievement doesn’t remove the need to still have achievements in the future.

But still, the whole exercise filled me with a sense of dread.  Even good books don’t sell very well.  Bestsellers tend to be by the same people over and over again, or by the breakout freak occurrences that you can never plan for.

And the other millions of books languish somewhere between flop and fine.

1,500 books sold is nothing to sneeze at.  Really, you would be dumbfounded if you knew some author’s numbers.  As in, they’re much lower than you suspect based on the press and display at Barnes and Noble.

My brother had a great post on his blog about the whole JK Rowling reveal.  I think he’s onto something that perhaps the hope comes from a redefinition of success in the future.  That we stop thinking a certain number is a “bestseller” and use other metrics to determine what was well-received.  And yeah, it sort of does help (a bit) to know that editors took a pass on JK Rowling’s book when her name wasn’t attached to the project.  I’m sure plenty of well-received, bestselling books wouldn’t sell again if everyone’s memory was wiped and their books were submitted again.  It’s literally the luck of the draw in addition to talent.  Really good books get overlooked every single day.

The Time magazine article on the topic even pointed out a famous publishing experiment:

In 1979 a would-be writer named Chuck Ross conducted an infamous experiment in which he retyped the entire of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Steps, which had won the National Book Award in 1969, and submitted it to 14 publishers and 13 literary agents under the name Erik Demos. Every single one rejected it—even Random House, which had published Steps in the first place. Kosinski’s name changed everything.

There is also the side that I haven’t seen tackled yet which is that many of us — myself included — would have never found Cuckoo’s Calling because we don’t enjoy crime novels.  If I don’t end up reading this, it will be because it’s not a genre I spend a lot of time exploring.  And if I do end up reading, it will be because of JK Rowling’s name.  Attaching her name to a novel I would have never touched otherwise simply because I think I don’t enjoy crime fiction may open my world to other crime writers.

Her success, in other words, may mean the success of others.

At least, that is how I am choosing to console myself as I go back to typing my next novel, visions of book sale figures dancing in my head.

So the twins went from never being on the Internet to being everywhere on the Internet with a single photo.  Peter Souza’s image of the kids with President Obama went on my blog and in newspapers and on the White House website and on the White House Facebook feed and now in a tangential story on CNN.

Image: Peter Souza / official White House photo

Someone told me about Richard Deitsch’s tweet last Friday, the one where he asked people to send happiest moments they witnessed and photographed.  Someone (Pete Souza?) sent in the image of the kids meeting the president.  I forgot about that project until Deitsch’s project went viral, and K from Where Love and Chaos Reign told me that the story was now on CNN.

Which is sort of cool and… you know… sort of my worst nightmare.  I’m laughing (because if I don’t, I’ll cry) because I spent so many years respecting their wish to not have their image up anywhere (before that, it was just not doing anything because I didn’t know how they would feel).  I warned them when we went to the White House that there was a good possibility that they would end up in a picture or two, and they accepted that risk for the opportunity.  But, come on, when people said, “what do you think will happen if someone takes their pictures?  It will end up splashed across CNN?”  YES, YES, that was our fear.  And now it has come true.  And nothing has really changed so I’ll admit that.

Actually, that’s not true.  Something did change.  While the ChickieNob still does not enjoy being photographed, she didn’t put up her hand or scowl when someone took her photo at camp last week.  I saw her glance at the lens, and then go back to what she was doing.  We’ve asked friends and family to still respect their wishes and not post images of them online — it’s the lack of control that comes from images that go online vs. being passed from one person to another in a house — but it’s also nice to take that step towards relaxing a bit.  At least I feel more relaxed seeing them more relaxed.

And it’s true — that photo really did capture a happiest moment.  The twins will never forget it.  I will never forget it.  So I totally get including that as a happiest moment, and I’m grateful to the person who sent it in for recognizing how these tiny moments mean so much to the people in the photo.

And yeah, putting yourself out there means that people like Christina Lopez write things like “@petesouza, I like these kids already.”

Because I really really like those kids too and have for almost nine years (who am I kidding: I liked them when they were only an idea).  So it’s pretty cool when you hear complete strangers saying they like your kids too.  It feels like a giant like-fest.  Which is only a good thing.

The world needs more like.

I thought I was going to hate the new version of Gmail and dreaded seeing my inbox switch over, but I have to say, I am in love with the new system.  My social media notifications go into one column, and I can read/delete/archive them in huge batches.  Anything promotional goes into another column, and I can now quickly drag product pitches over there and never have to see them again.  I’ll just comb through that column once a day to make sure no legitimate emails got stuck in there.  It’s like having a turbo spam filter.

And then the rest of my emails are all coming into my normal inbox.

I get a lot of email every day, and a chunk of my evening is spent separating out the emails I need to read from the ones I just need to glance at and archive.  And don’t even get me started on my annoyance over the amount of junk mail I receive.  Now I can scroll down a column, hit “all” and poof — they’re gone.  Archived.  Trashed.  Whatever I want.

Well done, Google.

*******

Last week, we drove down to Carmen’s for water ice.  As we drove over, I realized that I had no cash on me.  I hate using a credit card for a small amount of money, so I decided that I would buy a Crave card (one of their gift cards) and use it immediately, keeping the remainder for another day.  Problem solved.

Except when we stepped up to the door, there was a sign saying their credit card machine wasn’t working.  We went inside anyway to see if it had miraculously been fixed and they just hadn’t taken the sign down.  Alas, it was like Ladyhawke — they could only take cash, and we had no cash, no ATM card, no blank check.  We only had the credit card, and they had a broken credit card machine.

We were going to have to leave without water ice.

I told the twins we could come back on the weekend, and the ChickieNob promptly began to cry.  It had taken us a while to get there, she had debated flavours in the car, and now she was going to have to wait days for her water ice.  Carmen’s is also nowhere near our house — a long drive — and she knows from past experience that the best laid plans sometimes don’t happen when we need to figure out how to get there again.

As we crossed the lot, we heard a woman call out to us.  “Come back,” she said.  “Let’s figure this out.”

So we went back in the store, and the owner came out from the back room.  Apparently, after we walked out, the employee went to tell him how sad the ChickieNob had been, and being the parent of a similarly-aged kid, he decided that they must have water ice that day.  They simply couldn’t be expected to wait.  He brought out a portable credit card machine that they use for their carts, and rang up our water ice.  It tasted even better than it would have if we hadn’t thought we wouldn’t be having water ice that day.

That’s the sort of nice step a family-owned business can do for its customers.

Later that weekend, we came back because I had indeed promised the kids water ice on the weekend.  So they ended up getting two water ices in one week.

Thank you, Carmen’s, for not sending away two very sad eight-year-olds sans water ice.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “This is my Therapy” (Mama Said Knock You Out)
• “Birth Plans” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Advice, and Double Dark Chocolate Beet Muffins” (A Half Baked Life)
• “Straddling Worlds” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “Six Years into this Lonely Walk… Saudade” (The Empty Cookie)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about setting up your future when your future isn’t following the course you thought it would take.  In other words, answering the internal question, “what’s next for me?”  She writes, “When a big life goal – whether you’ve held it for your entire life, or simply the years in which you were trying to conceive – is taken away as an option, we often feel that we need to replace it with something equally big. How do we save the world, make a difference, feel as if we’ve achieved something, and leave our mark on the planet if we’re not going to be a parent?”  She answers with her own advice for this question.

Starlit Dreams has a happy post about gratitude.  Maybe it’s having read her for so long, to know how dark some of the dark days were, that it made me smile hugely to read her post and think about this happy space keeping her from sleep.  May everyone get to feel that type of contentment in their lives.

On the opposite end was Baby, Borneo or Bust’s post about moving, also starting from a place of being unable to sleep.  You can practically feel the excitement of the night before your life changes popping off the screen.  Wishing her safe travels.

Lastly, Baby Makin’ has a post about when her job and her infertility collide.  This line really moved me: “Will I ever be able to tell my child to ‘make something pretty!’ when I drop them off and see their excited faces when they bound up the stairs at pick up time with their project from the day?”  And then this one: “I give her a small smile to try and make her feel better. She doesn’t know, however, that I’m crying inside, wondering if I’ll ever have a little girl like her.”  That last one got me crying.

The roundup to the Roundup: Love the new Gmail.  Thank you, Carmen’s.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 12th and July 19th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.