Don MacDonald » blog

Hiatus

Don — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:57:23 +0000

I’ve posted the first two chapters of Machiavelli, but have stopped there. I’m reevaluating my plans for the book. It’s become more and more clear to me that Machiavelli doesn’t really work as a web comic. I wrote and drew it as a novel. It was never really meant to be read in installments and I feel it’s ill-served to be read in that way. Machiavelli’s publication history (or rather history of non-publication) is a complicated tale that I can’t really get into here.

I feel I owe it to those of you interested in the book not to simply stop posting pages without some explanation. When I have more details on how I’ll be publishing, I’ll post here. If you’d like to be notified when the book is ready, send me an e-mail at don@donmacdonald.com and I’ll give you a heads up when I have a pub date.

Thanks,
Don

The Miserable Process of Getting from 25 to 35

Don — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:39:00 +0000

In 1937, researchers at Harvard began a remarkable psychological study of Harvard sophomores that has continued up to the present day. Unlike most other clinical studies which focus on illnesses, the goal of the Grant Study was to examine health and well-being. The Atlantic has published a fascinating article—What Makes Us Happy?—about the Study and Doctor George Vaillant, who has been its director for the past 42 years. The depth of it is just staggering.

One quote in particular jumped out at me. In the video interview accompanying the article, Dr. Vaillant says:

Its alright that young people can do the things that they can do. I mean the youth that the old envy is accompanied by the miserable process of getting from 25 to 35 where you’ve got all this health and all this youth and you’re scared stiff that when it’s all said and done you’re not going to amount to a hill of beans. And if you just wait virtually all of them by the time they were 45 or 50 amounted to something. And knowing that is such a relief. You just don’t know it at 30.

I must admit I hadn’t really thought of it this way before. Being in the (upper end) of that age group myself, I really hadn’t considered that the anxieties of the past decade are, in fact, typical for people our age. “And knowing that is such a relief. You just don’t know it at 30.” Yes it is, and no I didn’t. But I feel a bit better about it now.

Thoughts on the Launch of Machiavelli

Don — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:41:02 +0000

A book launch is a scary thing. Even though I am serializing Machiavelli and publishing on the Web, it is still structurally a book: it has a narrative arc, chapters, pages, and other elements associated with books. And yet I’m adding hypertext commentary beneath the pages, footnotes and links that wouldn’t be included in a paper edition—or would only as endnotes that don’t interact with the artwork in the same way that this post does with the artwork that you see just above it. As I move from the prologue—which is intended to set a mood—into Chapter One, in which Machiavelli takes his place at center stage, I’ll be using footnotes in the form of blog posts to shed light on historical details which may be relevant but not central to the story I’m trying to tell. I may also link to sites which I feel will be interesting to my readers, or have some relevance to Renaissance studies. I will avoid linking to or posting about topics that have no connection to Machiavelli or the project. I hope not to do too many “meta” posts like this one. The web site is the book. And it will continue into the second book (not Machiavelli, but…I’m getting ahead of myself.)

But I digress. A book launch is a scary thing. What has struck me the most in the past week is how much support I’ve gotten from unexpected places and it’s caused me to reevaluate, seriously, the way I look at people. People who you think are critical to your success may not be, and it’s the people who stand by you when no-one is watching who count.
So thanks to you guys who have Twittered about Machiavelli, submitted it to BoingBoing, joined my Facebook “fan” page (we few, we happy few), or set up LiveJournal feeds. You’ve placed a trust in me and I will do my best to earn that.