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July 16, 2019 / Leave a Comment /
Episode 453 | How a Non-Technical Founder Built and Sold a Multi-million Dollar SaaS Startup with Jeff Epstein
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob interviews Jeff Epstein, Founder of Ambassador, about building and selling his multi-million dollar startup as a non-technical founder. They dive deep into the details of the acquisition and the toll it took on him.
TinySeed
Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, I talk with Jeff Epstein of Ambassador about how he, as a non-technical founder, built and sold a multi-million dollar SaaS startup. This is Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 453.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, a podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you've built your first one or you're just thinking about it. I'm Rob, and today with Jeff Epstein, we're here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we've made.
Welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. On this show, we talk about building startups in an organic, sustainable fashion that allows you to focus on your personal freedom, purpose, and relationships. We have different show formats and this week, I sit down with an accomplished, impressive founder named Jeff Epstein. I've known Jeff for around eight years and watched in awe as he built Ambassador—it's at getambassador.com—into a $5–$10 million ARR SaaS company, and all the trials, the tribulations, the struggles of what he went through to get there. He exited about seven or eight months ago.
What I like about Jeff is that at heart, he's a bootstrapper. He bootstrapped Ambassador—which was, at the time called Zferral—for a year and he had to pay a developer essentially out of his own pocket. Then he raised a very, very small round between $25,000 and $50,000 just to basically keep the product moving forward. He's a scrappy founder. He was doing sales calls constantly in the early days, really, a founder who was ambitious.
One of the interesting things we dig into today is how he has a kind of what a bootstrapper mindset had to raise funding to keep the company growing and we talked through his decision to do that. We also talked about the toll that the company took on him over the course of this time. He said he didn't sleep very well, he did feel stress, he put on a lot of weight that this company took a toll on him, and we walk through any regrets he has. It's really a fascinating story.
The latter half of the interview focuses on the acquisition because I find that level setting people's mindsets of what a real acquisition looks like. The fact that Instagram was supposedly sold in a weekend for a billion dollars is like, (a) we don't even know if that's really true or if that's just kind of a myth and the story around it, and (b) even if it is true, that's like a once-in-five-year thing or once a year, once a decade, whatever, very, very, very rare.
The other thousands and thousands and thousands of companies and startups that are acquired happen much more like what you'll hear Jeff talk about today. Again, the latter half of the interview focuses on that. Then it's fun to talk through with Jeff to hear what he's been doing for the seven months since he was able to leave the company. I always enjoy sitting down talking with Jeff, really enjoyed the conversation and digging into his victories, his struggles, his failures, and everything that came along with it.
Oh, and one side note before we dig in, it was an absolute comedy of errors trying to get this recorded so I'm actually impressed that we're even able to ship it. I was in a Starbucks—which I normally don't work from coffee shops—I especially don't record interviews from coffee shops but due to extenuating circumstances, that's where I was. Fire alarm started going off an hour before the interview then stopped, then went back on, then went off, then went back on.
Eventually, I went out to get my car and take off and fire trucks had blocked the driveway so I literally could not leave so I sat in my car, I hooked up my hotspot to my phone and this entire interview was recorded using that USB headset plugged into just a laptop sitting on the passenger seat so it was a funny moment. I couldn't cancel the interview because the episode wouldn't have gone live on time. But the show must go on, we ship every Tuesday morning. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jeff Epstein.
Thanks so much for joining me on the show this week, Jeff.
Jeff: Yeah, great to be here, Rob. Thanks. I appreciate it.
Rob: We go way back. We were in a mastermind with Ruben Gomez for a couple years, if I recall back, when I was doing HitTail, 2011–2012 timeframe.
Jeff: Yeah. It seems like a long time ago but it was a lot of fun and I know, at least for myself, it was a really valuable time to chat with folks. Also, there wasn't a huge community and we're all in interesting areas where there weren't startup communities and it was really important back then and, obviously, so today. It's cool that we remained friends for so long.
Rob: I agree. I see you at MicroConf every so often. You made it this year. It is cool that we ran across each other. I remember you and I originally met. I came and spoke, I believe it was in Grand Rapids and you live in Detroit, Ruben was in Florida, and I was in Fresno, California so we were all in these places where there wasn't a huge startup community around us and we found each other through these channels.
Today, I want to walk people through your story because, as I was saying right before I hit record, your story of growing Ambassador as a non-technical founder is so compelling, it almost writes itself. We just cover the points and it's like, "Oh, man, that was amazing." "Oh, man, that was brutal. How did you get over that?" These are the best kinds of stories where there's a lot of adversity and struggle and it was probably pretty painful at the time, the different things that happened with co-founders and whatever, fundraising, and working 24/7 for a few years, but I do think the folks are in for a pretty good ride today so thanks again for sharing your story.
Jeff: My pleasure and I'm excited to tell it. It is interesting and there's certainly a bunch of highs and lows, so hopefully I can help some people avoid some of the stresses and struggles that I had but definitely interesting for sure.
Rob: To summarize, so we don't have to spend 10 minutes going through details, you started Ambassador in 2010, you exited, sold the company in 2018 to a company called West Corporation. Ambassador was originally called Zferral and you did raise a few rounds of funding, I believe. You started working on Zferral/Ambassador in 2010 and you raised a small angel round between $25,000 and $50,000 in 2011. You've been self-funding it since then.
You mentioned to me that your wife was making money and you were pumping the money out the back door into the app. What was the impetus to raise the angel round? Because I think of you more as a bootstrapper. You just have that capital-efficient, you're not the Silicon Valley go-big-or-go-home billion dollar valuation, you're ambitious, but you don't fit the mold of, "I'm going to topple Salesforce and become the next Dropbox, Facebook, and Airbnb." What was the impetus for taking outside money in 2011?
Jeff: Good question. For me, it was really in a sense kind of bad, but it was almost desperation mode. I didn't act like that—I don't think—at the time, but for me, I had done pretty well, I guess, for being an adult without having an actual job, I was investing in real estate, I was doing some odd things, I had just come out of law school, and I had sold a small business that helped me pay off my loans. I didn't have that much money saved up or capital, and again, it was coming off of the 2008 financial situation, so there weren't a lot of jobs.
I basically self-funded Zferral and it was maybe $4000 or $5000 a month to pay for developers to build the product. A couple of things led to me raising money. One was there wasn't this playbook that exists today in terms of how to bootstrap even. Bootstrapping at the time, was just grinding it out and getting money wherever you could. I kind of exhausted all avenues. The problem for me—I mentioned this earlier to you—was I couldn't stay up late and get the app done. I wasn't able to just do the work because I couldn't write code. I had to basically pay for it.
At the end of the day, I had an opportunity to raise $25,000 and I took it because I got married in 2010. So, right before this money came in 2011, I had to think about my wife in terms of, "Hey, it's not just my money I'm risking now. It's our partnership." She was kind enough, she believed in me, and allowed me to do it but it was at a certain point, literally, the money was coming in and it was going right out. She wasn't making, even maybe me, even more than what I was paying out. Our household was a net deficit, which is pretty tough to do when you're just getting married and just bought a house.
She's used to always joke, "I thought I was marrying an attorney and this isn't what I signed up for." She was a good sport. She's joking about it, but I don't know if she knew that was what she was getting into. It was a big relief at the time and $25,000 was probably six months of expenses. I was fine not getting paid, but money going out was tough when I wasn't making anything.
Rob: And at that point, you had maybe a couple of grand in MRR, you think?
Jeff: Right. The other thing is, at that point, we probably just started getting customers. I don't think the customers could fund the development and sustain the business. As that started happening, again, I probably didn't take a salary until maybe after Techstars are around Techstars which was 2012, but again, just not losing money. I remember that was a big turning point in my family. It was like, "Alright, we're not losing money anymore." We're just not making any money, but we're not losing money. That was pretty big.
Rob: Getting back to break-even. It's tough, man, in an early, I won't say new relationship because you guys have known each other, but a new marriage and then trying to scramble and start a startup like that. Do you have any regrets around that, either raising the money initially or not learning to code at some point? Anything you would do differently? Or do you feel like no, you came to play, you showed up, and you made it happen?
Jeff: I don't have any regrets about it. I do think it would have been smart for me to learn how to code. That would have saved a ton of stress and heartache. As you know, I'm willing to do the work so being able to do the work would have been hugely valuable for me instead of having to rely on somebody else. Even just being a control freak, which you think a lot of founders are, it would have been better if I could do it myself.
That being said, I think the value and what I was so lucky was that my wife was supportive and understanding about it, so as hard as it should have been, it wasn't nearly as hard as it probably sounds. But overall, no regrets.
Rob: That makes sense, you look back today and you've had this successful exit. Everything worked out, but at the time, when you're grinding it out for a year and you're at $1000 or $2000 MRR, you just started taking customers, and you've spent tens of thousands of dollars, I'll assume it's hard. That's not an easy place to be in, I can imagine.
Jeff: Absolutely. It was super tough. It was a perfect storm of being naive and young enough where it would be a lot harder for me to do that where I am in my life today in terms of age and expectations. Fortunately for me, I was willing to do it. It is hard and looking back, you're like, "Wow, I can't believe I did that." But you also don't know any better. That's part of the beauty of it.
Rob: I know you're under NDA for the acquisition terms, but I'll ask it in a more vague way that I feel like people have asked me on the record about the Drip acquisition as well. You sold the company last year. Did you make enough money that you don't have to work again if you don't want to?
Jeff: Yeah. For the most part, we definitely can live a comfortable life based on how things went. We could survive and be pretty well-off. The reality is we both want to continue working. My goal is really just to focus on things that I'm passionate about and just have the cab of more fun. That's a big change going forward and has been already.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. I've done the same thing. The passion is like TinySeed's what I'm excited about and it's nice to have the luxury of basically not getting a paycheck for a year or two, or three or five. Einar and I got our first paycheck from TinySeed last month and it was like, "Yay," but I couldn't have done that 10 years ago. You can't just not take a check for a long time, so it is nice to have the luxury.
I know how much of a hustler you are and when you find that next thing, while I hope you don't go as all-in as you did on Ambassador—because you're right, and I walked through a year or two of it with you when I saw the toll it was taken on you—I do think that you'll find that spark again and you'll go mostly in on something that you'll be working on.
Jeff: Yeah, it's funny you say that. It's something that I've even talked to my wife about is that I'm concerned that I won't be able to do 80% or whatever the number is. That's a healthy amount of all in this because I always tell people, "I'm not all-or-nothing kind of guy." I'm not good at, "Oh, yeah, I'll just work for X hours a week." Even if it's 20, or 40, or whatever it's supposed to be, or 60, if I say it's that, I'm not realistically going to stop unless I feel like I did everything I could. It gets harder and you just get worn down. For me, it definitely had that happened.
I'm getting close to 40 years old so it's like, "All right, I need to start reevaluating my life and looking at it a little bit differently than feeling like you're a college kid," which is what I felt like for the last 10 years, probably.
Rob: It seems like one of your goals with the next one should be to control your work, to work 35-hour weeks, or 40, or some reasonable amount.
Just to wrap up the intro story so that we can dig into some of the points, you mentioned you went through Techstars in Austin, that was mid 2011, that was back when Techstars wrote really small checks, so it was like $18,000. It was just a stipend. Then I think the next year, they started giving $100,000 notes which probably sucked for you to not get that. I'm imagining you could have used that money at the time.
Jeff: Definitely, and we were in New York so it was even more expensive to live. But yeah, it was during the class, they announced the $100,000 note and it was super big bummer for us because we were one of the few B2B companies, and at the time, 2011, that also meant we were completely unattractive to investors especially in New York. We had a really hard time raising money while all of our cohort, basically all the B2C apps, all the mobile apps, they easily raised money. I don't think any of them are around now, but they had a much, much, much easier time raising money than we did. It was really tough.
Rob: Then you raised a couple of hundred grand in a note in 2012 and then you did raise a Series A in 2015. So total over the course of several years—that's almost five years—you brought to about $2.75 million. I know you mentioned earlier, you needed that early money to fund development because you couldn't write the code itself. In 2015, when you raised $2.4 million, what was the thought there? Was it that you'd hit product-market fit, you're growing super fast, and you need money for bodies? Talk me through the logic.
Jeff: Yeah. It's funny thinking about this. Someone asked me the other day and thinking about my thought process, I didn't run a process, which is a little bit different than most people. It was an opportunistic fundraise. I had—and you probably know this personally—at the time, fundraising wasn't on my radar.
We were mildly cash flow positive. I would say five figures cash flow positive and then maybe the team was 10 or 11 people. There were certainly people there. It was a ragtag group of folks. I would say most people weren't experienced startup or tech people, it was like you're hiring people that would be willing to work with you even though you could offer them almost nothing in terms of benefits or comps. That's always tough.
One of the reasons why we raised money and one of the goals that I had before I even started Ambassador was I really wanted to help build the community in Michigan, I wanted to create an environment where these companies survived and thrived, and where people wanted to go to work every day. That was what I wanted to build. I realized that incrementally adding one person at a time and being really, really lean, I mean, I was super lean. I was paying myself $40,000 a year. Our office was all IKEA furniture. It was just really hard to create that environment with such a lack of resources.
When Arthur Ventures came along and pitched me on a partnership where they said, "We're not going to make you step out of your comfort zone and try to grow at all costs. We do respect the way that you've built the company and that," I think the director said, "you wouldn't die. You should have died, but you didn't because you were willing to just fight." I just saw this alignment there and I said, "You know what? This could be really good." We had great people and we got lucky that the people that we hired early all ended up being amazing and grew into amazing pieces and teammates. Even more awesome to begin with, but being able to spend ahead of where we were, it was a big accelerant for us that we needed. It allowed us, again, to give people benefits, to up comp, and do some of the things that I wanted to do. There was no money to be had before that, so really that was why I raised money.
Rob: It sounds like you found money on terms that made a lot of sense for you to raise and didn't come, perhaps, with a lot of the strings attached that maybe a lot of the Silicon Valley money would come with. Whether it still does today, it's still evolving, it's becoming more founder-friendly. But is that accurate? You found someone willing to give you a couple of a million bucks in a way that made sense for how you wanted to grow the company and didn't negatively impact your optionality down the line.
Jeff: Yeah. I have a ton of respect for Arthur Ventures and Pat. They were awesome and it was a really great fit. Did we want to build a $100 million company? The answer is yes. The expectation was we were going to try our hardest to do that, but what I always said to him is I don't want to leverage the business to be successful. I don't want to get to $100 million or die. I think that's something that many VC's, if they hear that answer, they'd be like, "This isn't the person for me," which is fair and in some cases, they want you to take that swing and if you miss, they're okay with it and they can go to bed at night. I didn't want to sleep at night and saying, "Everyone could have had a really great career and a really great experience," but I selfishly went for it and we all went home and that was it.
I think there was an agreement there. I know for a fact we weren't the best outcome for Arthur's. I definitely do feel bad about that and I know that I tried my best to be both smart enough and calculated to maximize the outcome without killing the business. We got pretty low, to be honest, in cash multiple times, way lower than we agreed to get because we were trying everything we could to continue to grow as fast as possible to get to the next stage. But yeah, it was definitely founder-investor fit for sure and we have nothing but great things to say about Arthur and Pat who's awesome. When they offered, we negotiated a little bit and that was what we did.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. Something that I want to dig into is the fact that you said you got pretty low on cash multiple times. You and I both mentioned that you were all-in and you were basically working 24/7 for several years. This all sounds like not fun. That sounds very stressful. Was it that in the moment? When you were doing it, were you thinking to yourself, "Oh, my gosh this is brutal"? I would have been stressed, let me put it that way. There are people who just absorb that and they just don't feel the stress about this stuff. Talk me through. It's an eight-year period, so it's hard to nail anything, but I'm just curious. Were there moments when you were like, "I don't think I can keep doing this. I'm going to explode"?
Jeff: To be honest, not really. I like stress for the most part. I used to always tell people—maybe this is a bad advice—I would say if you care about something, there'll be a level of stress. To me, that shows that you care. There was, looking back, more stress than I would have liked, but I'm also the kind of person who loves to dive in and obsess over something. When it doesn't go exactly as you want, then it becomes what I would consider to be stress. Whether that, at one point in my life, was playing poker, or another time in my life, it was wondering to play sports or whatever, those things were, at a certain point, super stressful to me but in a way that it didn't bother me that much.
To me, it manifested in things like gaining a lot of weight, not just being exhausted, not working out or not being able to sleep, things that I reasonably should have been able to do but I just couldn't focus or prioritize for those things because I was so concerned about doing everything I could for the business.
There were very few times where I'm like, "Oh, my God I need a vacation." I always thought like, "Man, I'm really stressed," but day-to-day, I really enjoyed it, especially post-Series A when we had a little bit of money in the bank and I was surrounded by more people that felt like peers. Some of the early employees became good friends, so it's not that but people that had experience.
For a long time I felt like I was doing everything myself. Of course, my CTO and co-founder, Chase, was an amazing help, but when we added a couple of more folks and we had a leadership team, so to speak, that took a lot of burden off of me. The problems became different problems. It never got less stressful, but it became a little bit more fun for me and allowed me to keep going despite some of those other challenges.
Rob: I know you applied to Techstars one year and you didn't have a co-founder. You had an agency or was it an offshore developer and you got rejected. One of the things they said was, "We don't really want a non-technical single-founder type of thing." So, you came back the next year and you applied with a technical co-founder but he was almost like employee number one, is that right?
Jeff: Yeah. The next year I had applied to Techstars. I had done some networking in between the two applications. I had a reasonable feeling that I might be able to get in the next time in New York. I had known some people that were in the prior class and they're like, "You need to have a technical person show up with you," so I hired somebody who, again, technically we'd called him a co-founder and certainly he deserves that title, but he was basically hired a couple months before TechStars New York, to just basically help rewrite that code base from the original Zferral one, which was what I applied with into Ambassador, which we ended up leaving with, so to speak. So, we had rewritten the code base.
Rob: That was your first to rewrite of the code base. Didn't you rewrite it again in 2012–2013?
Jeff: Yeah. We rewrote it again. Soon after when Chase joined—he's still part of the team and actually onto bigger and better things at West now—one of his first projects was really to undertake start migrating the code base to something a bit more scalable and in a more modern technology. We were previously PHP and then we moved it over to Python and Angular, which became React eventually. It was a big undertaking. We probably started that 2013 and it may have taken a year or so, but we did it in a compartmentalized way. We didn't really slow down the site too much, but there's a lot of extra work probably to do it that way.
Rob: And the reason that you wound up leaving the mastermind is you, Ruben, and I were like, I had HitTail and maybe was just starting Drip, no employees, Ruben had two contractors or three—I don't know—two employees, and you were hiring your 20th employee. You were putting out culture and vision documents, trying to get everybody on the same page. We're like, "Look, we like each other, we're all ambitious," but you're just at a different place. That's what wound up happening.
But during that time, I remember, that rewrite was not super fun. You just had a team of developers trying to rewrite it and then you had folks trying to add more features. You were basically building the parachute after you jumped out of the plane. I don't know what there is to say about that, but do you remember that as being super painful? Because that was my memory of it. Or do you remember it as, "No, we handled it and we got it done"? I guess the fact that you rewrote it twice was the real brutal thing.
I remember when we talked about it, I was like, "Gosh, do not rewrite this code base." Coming from a developer, my own perspective whenever I come into a new code base, I'm always like, "Oh, this is a whole piece of crap. I'm going to rewrite this whole thing," and then I eventually resist the urge and I push the business forward instead. But you made a very, very hard decision to do that.
Jeff: Yeah, it's funny you say that. I remember even when Chase joined, when he was thinking about joining, and he had done some diligence, we agreed like, "Hey, let's not rewrite it." I think even you said something like, "The first thing he's going to want to do is rewrite it." So, one of the things we talked about was, "Okay, let's try to keep it as is and we'll go with PHP." I remember we hired a PHP dev and we hired someone else who was competent in PHP but also knew Django and Python as well. After a couple of months he's like, "Dude, we got to rewrite this. I'm sorry. There's too many issues with it." Like you said, it was building the parachute on the way down or he used to say it was like changing the tires on the highway while you're going 70 miles an hour.
At that time we had $20,000 a month maybe in customers, so we made $250,000 ARR maybe. Your customers don't care if you're rewriting it until it's done. At the time, we might have had even T-Mobile or we were getting a customer like T-Mobile, so it was super stressful. Knowing that you're building something that's going to get ripped out eventually was way more stressful for them than it was for me.
As you know, anything technical always takes a lot longer than you hope and that probably happened, but what went well and what I learned from Chase—I knew even then—was he was super money when he recommended we do something. It always seemed like it was the right move. It was one of those things where he was like, "We have to do it," and I said, "Okay, let's do it." It wasn't what I wanted to do because obviously, it doesn't feel like you're moving forward.
We were rewriting it this year, too. We rewrote a lot of the front end, we rewrote some of the back end in terms of scalability, going from a few hundred thousand or a few thousand people on your site to millions of people on your site, the growth in terms of requests was insane. They were 10X-ing the site every year just to maintain it. It was pretty insane.
Rob: Yeah. I've been a part of one of those. Insane is the right way to describe it. So, you grew it. I remember in the early days you had a lot of focus on sales. You were doing a lot of one-on-one demos and that's how you've landed, or one of the ways you've landed to customers like T-Mobile and these big enterprise deals. I was super impressed with that.
At a certain point, you and I lost touch for a year or two. I was doing Drip and you were really digging into growing Ambassador. When you sold the company in 2018, how big were you, guys? I don't think you've been public with revenues so I won't ask that, but employee count or some other indication?
Jeff: I'll tell you a couple things. We were between $5 million and $10 million in revenue and about 40 some-odd employees, give or take.
Rob: What was the acquisition process like? Were you getting approached by people who wanted to buy you? Did you have to go out looking for interest? How long did it take? Talk me through. There are folks listening to this who don't get to hear a lot of inside stories about these because a lot of them are so opaque. "It's a TechCrunch post of X company sold for Y million dollars." "Wow, isn't that great?" and you feel like it happened in three days. The Drip acquisition from first email to close was 13 months, and 6 of that was me working 20 hours a week on it. It was incredibly stressful for me, so I loved if you can walk me through bits of it so people can hear what it's like on the inside of something like this.
Jeff: Sure. It was definitely intense and it was probably close to, like you said, a year of planning total at least. For me, because we were funded, because we had a board, the first part of the process really came about through board discussions of, again, when you have a board, you always have to look at multiple years out. One of the things that we were doing was trying to figure out how can we get to where we want to be and what are the strategic options, and that includes either fundraising or essentially selling or buying somebody.
Once you raise money, you're on the clock. So, the worst thing you can do is grow slowly or decelerate. Not say that it was happening, but I think it was a concern. We were kind of in-between a Series B, it was possible we could raise to B and that was one option. Then all the factors you have to think about if you raise a B between dilution, and lots of times people want new leadership teams. That was one path potentially and another path was, of course, selling. Another path was going to stay in the course, but having to figure out a way to accelerate growth instead of decelerating, which happens to most companies that usually don't grow faster the year after.
We came up with the idea that we'd kick the tires and see if it made sense to explore strategic partnership which really usually means a sale, but it could have been different kinds of investments, too. We're pretty open and we'd also looked at other types of alternative financing. So, we were looking at all options.
As I mentioned, money was getting lower than we had planned. Again, we were with 40, 50 people, we weren't burning a lot, and some years, we were cash flow positive, but the swings with 40 people, payroll was several hundred thousand dollars a month. So, the swings are pretty big. You need to have enough cash-on-hand and again, relying on checks from companies and things like that.
That was going to begin the process. We didn't end up hiring a banker, which basically was much more work from my perspective, for me personally, to get ready for working with a banker than working for fundraising. It was like putting a whole fundraising deck together but then including everything, even things that you would normally maybe not tell or you wouldn't want to advertise, but you need to be really open about and just get everything together so that you can share everything, and that they know everything so that things go well and they give you an accurate idea of the value of the business.
When working with a banker, one of the things is the process. First, of course, they speak directly with the companies, companies are interested. Then they reach out to the team and they have what's called a management meeting. We probably had a couple of dozen management meetings which are basically calls with the entire management team, giving them an overview of the business. It's extremely stressful. For us, we had to do them and keep them private.
I like the idea that we were talking to potential acquirers, couldn't be that obvious to the company. It was really stressful and we did probably a dozen or more of those. Some companies were some of the biggest companies that everyone's heard of, some of them were known, private equity companies, and range across the gamut. We did that for several months and then eventually you get IOIs and LOIs. Eventually, once the LOI is signed, there's a lot of work to do, you actually meet with all the folks, and try to really talk about get down to brass tacks in terms of integration and real items.
It was incredibly stressful. For me, I played a point person on most of the stuff. Obviously, the banker did a lot, I did a lot, it's a lot more stressful than I anticipated, and it's a lot harder, like a few times investors be like, "Why don't just wait like two years and just sell?" I was like, "Man, it's not as easy as it sounds," but people always say that.
Rob: But you're eight years in it at this point and it's like, "This is eight years and it's been really hard." I imagine you might have been feeling some burnout. There's a certain point where I feel like you start to hear that there's an opportunity to not have to continue doing what you're doing. I don't get the feeling that you hated what you were doing. I think you were still into it, but at a certain point, you start to think about the next phase as well as, "When is this going to pay off? All this hard work, my whole life's work, and my net worth is tied up in this company."
Jeff: Yeah. That was one of the things where I felt bad because truly, my investors, some of them would have been excited if we would have kept going. The business was in a good spot. It wasn't the best deal ever. We did well and generally, everyone was pretty happy, but it also wasn't a no-brainer. You always hope for a no-brainer and everyone's on the same page. The reality is, investors are smart. If something's going well or something's going good enough, they want to keep going. They're only making so many bets or investments per year and if it's working and there's a pretty clear path to the next milestone, they don't want to sell, which makes sense.
We got mixed feedback. Lots of people were happy. No one was mad, but people were like, "Hey, have you considered continuing on and going?" Like you said, Rob, I got to the point where it was so close, you could taste it, you see the outcome, and a lot of us have worked hard for it. They knew a year before that we were going to try to do this. It was one of those conversations that I had with them was like, "Guys, I know we've been working hard, but I need you to work twice as hard this year. Hopefully, they're going to pay off and here's all the incentives and reasons why we should do that." I think everyone was pretty burnt. I think we were fried. As what we used to say, "We were totally fried. It was tough." From that perspective, it was really hard to just walk away.
Knowing that, it obviously makes it a little bit more stressful because at any point in my time in Ambassador, I always felt like I had a lot of optionality where I didn't need a specific outcome. This was one of those situations where I was like, "Alright, if we don't sell here, we're going to have to start looking to replace people because I don't know if they're going to be able to handle it." That's my analysis of it and, of course, we never got to that point. I'm really good friends with everybody, so if I would have also said, "We need you," they would have stayed, but I just felt I would have been doing everyone a disservice by pushing. We pushed really hard for a long time.
Rob: I know the deal closed last October of 2018. When did you tell your employees and how did they react?
Jeff: We told them that day that we signed the deal. We had done all the diligence up into that point and had not told them. The reason for it was, based on everything that I heard, you really don't want to tell people. I know that with big companies, with really big transactions or public companies, as soon as the LOI is signed, they tell the companies.
For us, we had the LOI signed a lot earlier. It wasn't 100% that it was going to get done. That was just like in bigger companies, there's a lot of shareholder pressure and things, like when you make the announcement, the expectation is that you're going to close the deal. We had a lot of deal points that were not ironed out yet. Actually, multiple times during that period, I thought we might not close.
We told the team early October. I would say 95% of the people were super pumped. A lot of them were way more pumped when they heard what they would get out of it. I like to say that I prided myself on really trying to build a great culture, especially over the last couple years. Really, that was my main focus.
I think a few people were sad that, that might be happening and the uncertainty with an acquisition is scary for a lot of people. We were super transparent and we immediately had like a town hall Q&A. Everyone felt good after, but there were some things that we couldn't control.
Right after closing that, I think West didn't do very well and that got everybody unsettled again. Luckily, things went as smooth as they could have been. Behind the scenes, it was a lot of scratching, clawing, and tough conversations. I'm really proud for the leadership team and for what we did to hopefully make things work out as well as they did, but I think I'm very happy with how things turned out.
Rob: I know you're someone who takes a lot of personal ownership over things, obviously, over your company but over the culture and over the well-being of your employees and such. The deal closes, you're obviously relieved, probably pretty happy that went through. It's a life-changing moment for you, but I know, as you just mentioned, over the next several weeks or whatever, a month or two, West maybe fumbled the ball a little bit and you weren't in charge anymore. These weren't things that you could fix. How did that impact you? Was it really hard to see it? Was it something that you knew would iron itself out so it didn't stress you out that much?
Jeff: It was really hard actually. There were multiple times after the fact where I was like, "I wish we wouldn't have done this, wouldn't have sold." A couple deal points weren't fully fleshed out because West Corporate wasn't able to disclose the particulars because they were still fluid. We agreed, "Okay, we won't agree to this in terms of we won't specifically memorialize it in the agreement," and that ended up being a big mistake for me. I don't want to say anything harmful, but what we got in that particular agreement was a lot worse than what we expected and it was again, to me, directly affecting the people and culture, and it really was a gut punch.
I did a couple of things that cemented my place with West probably and wrote some really aggressive emails and took some pretty aggressive stands that I hope paid off and set the tone for my team. Luckily, only a few people ever saw or heard it, but I felt good that I took a stand. I felt it was the right thing to do. Luckily, I know the folks who were going to stay there after me, I needed them to see that we need to stand up for the folks. Everyone was in agreement that we did.
Rob: Yeah, that comes back to that ownership piece, that's what I was pointing at. That's your personality. I figured you would do something like that. You mentioned that during that post-acquisition, you were struggling with it and that there were days where you regretted selling.
I guess I was lucky or whatever, I never woke up a single day after the Drip acquisition and thought, "I wish that we hadn't done that." It just worked out. There were some hard days, but it never made me think, "Oh, I would go back on this." That tells me a lot. That tells me that it was hard, that it was really hard knowing you and knowing your psyche and ability to take stress and deal with it.
You were with West for about a month or two after the acquisition, really the first of the year, you were able to move on. It's been seven-ish months, seven and a half months. Have you had any regrets since that point about selling?
Jeff: No, definitely not. A couple of things have changed those, I should add, the team, I would say, has worked really well with West. West just recently has put Ambassador in a position to be successful and that took a lot longer than we hoped it would, but even just as recent as last week, I still talked to a bunch of folks there, everyone's doing well, I actually played in the softball team yesterday so it's a lot of fun and everyone's really excited, which is really great and that's what we wanted to do.
West has really done a great job of correcting course and working with Chase, specifically, but other folks at Ambassador to try to continue to allow it to flourish and be successful. From what I've heard, things are going really well and people are happy.
Rob: That's great to hear, man. It's easy to have no regrets when it did work out in the end for your team. It worked out financially for you and several folks on your team, and then obviously life is substantially better for you at this point. I'm happy to hear that things are a lot better.
I think that leads us to our final question. Do you know what's next for yourself yet or is that just something that you'll wait and see? Because there's no rush. That's what I would tell you. Jeff, don't rush into the next thing. There is no need to rush into the next thing.
Jeff: Yeah, I know. It's funny. I've even told my wife, "Let's be super intentional about what we do going forward," because we're fortunate enough to have that flexibility. I've tried to be really intentional. I've spent a good amount of time just advising, not formally, but I wrote a couple blog posts and just said, "Hey, if you're in the area or you want to chat, I'm happy to talk."
Rob: You're a TinySeed mentor, thanks for that.
Jeff: Yeah, hopefully I can even do more but I'm excited to be on the Slack group, answer some questions, and be available for when it's my turn to […] folks. I'm staying busy a little bit, looking to maybe do some lightweight consulting where I'm still keeping a lot of flexibility. I'll be honest, I've talked to a couple of business brokers, just looked at what's available, and tried to see what piques my interest.
I've floated out a couple of offers for companies that were maybe not the best offer for the founder. No one's accepted anything yet, but I'm kicking the tires on a few things. But as we talked about earlier, my biggest concern is can I do it in a way that's not all in and that allows me to be flexible? If I were to do something, I would really focus on that work-life integration or balance or whatever you want to call it where it's much more flexible than the traditional company. I think that's the future.
Rob: Thanks again, man, for coming on the show. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Jeff: Absolutely. It was great catching up again, Rob, and always good to chat.
Rob: If folks want to keep up with you online, where's the best place to do that?
Jeff: Best place is probably Twitter, it's @jeff_epstein. I'm on Medium also, but Twitter, I'm pretty active. If you tweet at me or DM me or something, I'm sure to see it and I can follow-up and chat from there.
Rob: Sounds great. Thanks again, man.
Jeff: Of course. Yeah, my pleasure.
Rob: Thanks so much for listening. As you can tell, I've been changing up the format over the past four or five episodes. Mike is on a temporary hiatus and an update on him, he took some time completely off. He was on vacation and he's interested in coming on the show in the next few weeks to talk about his thoughts and his progress. So, we'll hear from Mike soon.
In the meantime, if you have a question for me or one of my guest hosts, call our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email them to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Thank you for listening.
If you haven't left a five-star review, would really appreciate it. If you liked the change-up in the format and the fresh voices, fresh perspective, even just the fresh show format, I'd really appreciate if you could lend a five-star review, even tweet out particular episodes that you've been impacted by. It really does help to show me that what I'm doing here matters.
I'm spending a lot more time on the show. I'm dedicating time to trying to raise the bar. If it doesn't make a difference and I don't hear anyone talking about it—I've heard two or three people compliment me on, that was super appreciated—if it doesn't move the needle, then obviously, I have to invest my time in places where it really moves them forward. So, I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, sentiments on Twitter. You can email us directly, obviously, questions@startupsfortherestofus.com or five-star review always helps as well. I appreciate it and I'll talk to you next time.


Distinguishing Characteristics: White female. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Stephens wears contact lenses. Her ears are double-pierced and she has a scar on her nose. She is called by her middle name, Cherice. Cherice's maiden name is Gwinn. Some agencies may hyphenate her last names, as in "Gwinn-Stephens." Clothing/Jewelry Description: A gold band with a one-carat diamond.
Cherice was last seen in Beckley, West Virginia on October 1, 1993. She dropped her husband, Norman Stephens, off at his place of employment in the 200 block of George Street in the Industrial Park area of Beckley during the day. She was driving a white Dodge Daytona at the time; a photo of the car is posed below this case summary. Cherice has never been heard from again.
Cherice's West Virginia driver's license expired in 1996, three years after she vanished. Her husband refused to take a lie detector test in her case, and filed for divorce a month after she disappeared. A private investigator hired by Cherice's father believes Norman didn't work at all on the day of Cherice's disappearance; the investigator also believes the car she was driving was sold after her disappearance. Norman has not been named as a suspect in his wife's case, however, and maintains that she simply left him.
Foul play is suspected in Cherice's disappearance; it's uncharacteristic of her to leave without warning. Her case opened 2018 by Psychic Brian Ladd. In 2014, she was declared legally dead.


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Entertainment Photos TV & Film
The Top Movies of 2012!
The future of Hollywood belongs to men and women in spandex: the superheroes have taken over. This spring, The Avengers—the Marvel Comics mash-up of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, the Hulk and more—soared past the billion-dollar mark in one weekend, joined in that stratosphere soon after by the final installment of director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. Columbia Pictures' The Amazing Spider-Man was the lowest grossing of all Spidey's films, but the recent reboot still rolls on. (Jamie Foxx is cast as Electro, the villain of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, due May 2014.)
Even films that rocked 2012 without official comic-book roots weren't far removed from that world. The Hunger Games—based on a series of young-adult fantasy novels—succeeded with an apocalyptic, hyper-adventurous storyline. Looper novelly played around with the time-travel genre. Prometheus, director Ridley Scott's accomplished return to sci-fi, revealed the origins of the whole Alien franchise while setting up its own. Skyfall's James Bond is arguably Hollywood's original superhero, and his 50th anniversary film was worthy of the birthday. Even Django of Django Unchained was the heroic gunslinger Warner Bros. was shooting for (no pun intended) two years ago with its DC Comics adaptation, Jonah Hex.
So before The Man of Steel arrives next spring, with Superman ushering in Hollywood's next wave of costumed adventurers, I tip my hat to the best of 2012. Judge my entirely unscientific, most likely biased opinion yourselves by tuning into iTunes to rent our picks! (Or hit up your local DVD rental spot, if you can find one…)
Miles Marshall Lewis is the Arts and Culture Editor for EBONY.com.
In this article:cloud atlas, Django Unchained, lincoln, looper, moonrise kingdom, prometheus, skyfall, the avengers, the dark knight rises, the master
Watch the Latest Trailer for 'Avengers: Infinity War'
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Anthony Mackie on The Avengers, Captain America
LeVar Burton Calls Bullsh*t on Quentin Tarantino

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Adjusting the size of the coverage window? In my sonarqube (3.6.2)  instance, if I click on my project's (Java, built with Maven, evaluated with JaCoCo) coverage number, I am taken to a page which contains 3 windows containing module, package, and class, respectively.
These windows are short (about 5 lines vertically) and they are stacked horizontally, requiring that I scroll left and right to see them.
I've been unable to find any obvious way to increase the window sizes or to adjust their placement on the page.
Any pointers would be very much appreciated.

A: There is no way to tune this behaviour. Are you using a low screen resolution ? If this is not the case could attach a screenshot ?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
South America/
Argentina/
Argentina Weather
Argentina's enormous size dictates an incredible variety of climates, which makes it difficult to summarize. So, we offer a general description, and then refer you to the individual conditions and forecasts shown below.
In the northeast, tropical and steamy is the daily forecast on its border with Brazil; the northern Chaco plain areas are usually hot and dry in the summer, and moderately cold and dry in the winter; the capital city of Buenos Aires and the central coastal regions are warm and humid (often hot) in summer; then cool in winter.
The central Pampas is generally moderate throughout the year, with dry winters, hot summers and desert-like conditions in the far west.
The massive Patagonia region's weather ranges from subtropical (mild) conditions in the north, to sub arctic status in the far south. The higher elevations of the Andes are very cold, with frequent snow in the southern peaks.
Note that seasons in Argentina are just the opposite of those in the northern hemisphere. As an example, the summer months are (December - February) and daily highs in Buenos Aires reach the mid 80s.
Countries Of South America
Argentina |
Bolivia |
Brazil |
Colombia |
Easter Island (CL) |
Ecuador |
Falkland Islands (UK) |
French Guiana (FR) |
Galapagos Islands (EC) |
Guyana |
Paraguay |
Peru |
Suriname |
Uruguay |
Venezuela |
This page was last updated on September 29, 2015.
Argentina's Information
2,736,690 km2
2,780,400km2 (#8)
43,886,748 (#32)
16.04/km2
Government Type
$879.00 Billion
Peso (ARS)
Buenos Aires (13,076,300)
Cordoba (1,428,214)
Rosario (1,173,533)
Mendoza (876,884)
San Miguel de Tucuman (781,023)
La Plata (694,167)
Mar del Plata (553,935)
Quilmes (518,788)
Salta (512,686)
Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz (489,505)
View all cities in Argentina
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About Argentina
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Related To Argentina
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20 Biggest City Parks In The World
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Midland now boasts a new venue that will add to the versatility the city is proving capable of. The Horseshoe opened the entertainment and meeting venue Horseshoe Pavilion this weekend with the Silver Spur Gun and Blade Show but celebrates the grand opening Saturday with comedian Jeff Foxworthy headlining.
The Pavilion is part of the vision of a growing Midland — but it's also a response.
Dirt was also an issue.
For animal or rodeo type shows, the arena could simply keep its dirt floor. Dooley described the horse and cattle shows as an economic stimulus for the county. However, when that switched over to a flat show that needed an actual floor, hauling out the dirt was both a logistical and financial concern.
Then events started to outgrow the 34,628-square-foot facility.
The Pavilion broke ground 16 months ago thanks to Midland County, which owns the Horseshoe complex.
The Pavilion comes in at 52,000 square feet that can easily house trade shows and major regional conventions. Its versatility is also noted by movable walls which can host concerts with up to 5,619 patrons or be broken down into smaller venues. The Pavilion also includes an outdoor amphitheater with seating up to 4,500.
The venue will feature high-tech audio visual equipment that can enhance both convention and concert events. Wifi capacity is expected to handle up to 2,000 devices. An onsite full kitchen will increase catering capabilities as well. Arena seating also will be available.
Both the indoor and outdoor spaces share amenities such as parking and restrooms.
"I'm pleased and proud of it," Dooley said.
Dooley credits the commissioners and Judge Mike Bradford with the building's progress and completion, especially with a financial ease.
Bradford said the Pavilion had advantage on its side even before the weekend's gun show.
Ironically, with looming worries of potential economic downturn, both Dooley and Bradford have confidence the Pavilion can sidestep any concerns.
With enough reserves and no property tax or debt, the building is probably one of the few exceptions to the rule. Added ease was found in an already-filled schedule. Many trade shows and non-animal exhibitions will be moving from the arena to the Pavilion.
But where does the Pavilion fit in with other large capacity venues?
The last thing Dooley or Bradford want anyone to see the Pavilion as is competition. Instead, they see it as a complement.
"The plan is to have concerts there but we're never going to take the place of the Wagner Noel. We already have a base for events, but we're also fairly versatile. We expect to have all kinds of entertainment to reflect the community but we're not here to duplicate anything," Dooley said.
Bradford sees the Pavilion as another option for Midland's growing population as well as expanding the city's attractions to include outside events.


text:
Complicity and the Reader
by Jo Walton on March 7, 2017
In the genres of science fiction and fantasy, when a book is written in an unusual mode, it's usually either a gimmick or window-dressing. Window-dressing is when for instance a Victorian feeling book has a faux Victorian style as part of that feel. An example of this would be Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where Heinlein doesn't have to tell us that the English spoken on the moon is heavily influenced by Australian and Russian, he gives us a first person narrative devoid of articles and peppered with Russian borrowings and Australian slang. It's great, but really it's just scenery, everything else would be the same if he'd chosen to write the book in third with just the dialogue like that. It's quite unusual to read something where the mode is absolutely integral to what the book is doing. In Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence, the decaying grammar and vocabulary of the first person narrator, Lola, mirrors the disintegration of society around her, and we the reader slowly move from a near future with a near normal text to a complete understanding of sentences that would have been incomprehensible on page one, in a world that has also changed that much.
In Palmer's Terra Ignota, after a page of (amazingly clever) permissions that locate us solidly in a future world with both censorship and trigger warnings (though we may not yet be aware we should take those trigger warnings very seriously) we meet not a normal Twenty-First century "1" or even "Chapter 1" but an Eighteenth Century style "Chapter the First: A Prayer to the Reader." Then we are addressed directly:
You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you come to me for an explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.
That's one sentence, explaining why we're going to be reading a book written in the Twenty-Fifth century in the style of the Eighteenth, and the first word in the narrator's voice is "you". Straight out of the gate we're being offered optimism, ambition, opinion and sentiment, long before we know who's offering it to us.
This isn't just scenery. From the first we are being set up. There are a whole bunch of things going on, and as we accept into something we're expecting to be there for flavour, we find ourselves drafted into the Project of the books. We, the real readers, are being subsumed into the Reader, who is a character. "You will criticize me, reader…" We're not only being invoked, we're being second guessed. At this point, I was very far from the imagined Reader. I didn't want to criticize at all, I wanted to clap.
In this piece, I'm going to capitalise the Reader who is a character and a creation within the text, to distinguish them from the external and objective readers, who are us, who are, technically at least, outside the text. But what Palmer is really doing here is breaking the fourth wall in a very interesting and unusual way by deliberately blurring that line. The Reader is a character. Our first person narrator Mycroft doesn't just address the Reader, Mycroft persuades, cajoles, and argues with the Reader — and the Reader argues back, interupts, makes demands, engages in dialogue, more and more as the books go on. Mycroft, who is so deferential that it becomes a new way of dominating, addresses the Reader as "you", but the Reader addresses him in return with Eighteenth Century familiarity as "thou". (The next line, positively overflowing with worldbuilding, is "You must forgive me my thees and thous and hes and shes".) Mycroft pleads with the Reader, explains and clarifies things to them, thanks them for continuing to read, and along the way the line between the imaginary Reader and the real reader gets fuzzy.
We're immediately asked to take it on faith that this is the only way we can understand the story. We don't need to know anything about the Eighteenth Century or the Enlightenment ahead of time to read Terra Ignota, Mycroft is always at our elbow, helpful and ready to tell us everything we need as we go along. But we the real readers are also learning, right away, that the story isn't being told to us, Twenty-First century readers who are in the story's distant past, but to the imaginary future Reader, who is either somebody of Mycroft's immediate future, or somebody of his further future looking back at his period as one of historical significance. Mycroft is quite deliberately shaping his document for that purpose, in a way that recalls Graves's Claudius writing for the far future, for us, and not for his contemporaries. Mycroft is consciously addressing the Reader of near and far future, while Palmer is of course completely aware that it will be read by us here and now, and using the space of this disjunct to shape our real interactions with the text. In many ways it gives her the best of both worlds — because Mycroft can turn aside to explain things directly to us, but always within the bounds of what he believes the Reader already knows.
When people read fiction, the text causes us to open questions in our minds, which we then hold there unanswered until we either work out the answers or they are given to us. One of the skills of reading science fiction is to hold open questions of the universe in the same way that a reader of mimetic fiction holds questions of character and event. We all have reading skills of determining what is important, what we want answered, what we care about. Within SF, we know that sometimes we will be given answers directly and other times we will put them together from separate pieces of information.
Some of the information here is being conveyed by the very way the story is being told, and some of the questions that raises don't get answered for a long time, but the answers when they come and the process of answering them is so satisfying that it's a solid part of my enjoyment of the books. The mode here is utterly integral.
When fiction is written in first person, there's an expectation within the text that the story is being told at a particular time and place and to a particular audience. Traditional texts often explain the circumstances in which a story is told, sometimes with a frame story. You know the kind of thing, people in a club telling stories, or papers discovered in a desk. Within genre I've played with this myself, and recently Rothfuss has been having a lot of fun with it. Brust in the Vlad books reveals in one book the circumstances in which a different book was told. Zelazny throws in a line, several books into the Amber series, which has been unexamined first person all along, "as I stand here in the Courts of Chaos telling you…" which grounds the narrative in a time that is future to everything we have been told, giving us anticipation and context. I don't think I've ever been as excited by the promise of any single line. The later Amber books disappointed me, but nothing can beat the sheer narrative thrill to teenage me of being promised narrative context that involved the narrator being Sheherazade in jeopardy, in what had already been revealed to be the reality beyond ultimate reality.
Now that first person is a conventional narrative mode, many writers use it without bothering to answer these kinds of questions — leaving the reader forever puzzling over where and when and to whom the narrator would tell this story, and most especially why.
Palmer tells us on the permissions page that Mycroft is recording the Terra Ignota books "at the request of certain parties" and Mycroft explains to us early and earnestly that it is for very specific reasons — to try to have a record out there of what happened, with plausible deniability (his insanity), and to prevent war. He is to some extent an unreliable narrator — he tells us he's "easy to call mad", and we know his text is being edited by the mysterious footnote adding "9A", who translates for us the dialogue Mycroft wants to leave in Latin. We also have occasional chapters in Martin Guildbreaker's voice, and in Seven Surrenders a chapter with extra censorship warnings. Besides all this, we know Mycroft would go to great lengths, and maybe lie to prevent war, but while we really can doubt his sanity, it's hard to doubt his desperate passionate sincerity. He wants us to know what happened — the Reader is Posterity, and Mycroft cares about Posterity so very much.
One of the difficult things in describing Terra Ignota to people is explaining that is is warm. Most books this complex and clever, this intellectually challenging and this dedicated to making you think, are cold, distanced, and ironic. Ironic distancing is one of the signifiers our culture currently uses for seriousness in fiction. Things are either cool and serious or warm and squishy, a book is either supposed to make you think or make you cry, not both. Terra Ignota is very definitely both. This is also, culturally, weirdly gendered, where the masculine comes over as ironic, cool, universal and to be taken seriously, while the feminine is viewed as passionate, warm, parochial and easily dismissed. This isn't always the case with the work of specific writers, because a lot of female writers are desperately embracing the ironic in order to be taken seriously, and some male writers are in fact interested in giving readers emotionally valid experiences. The intellectual weight of the Terra Ignota books is never in doubt — on those grounds, they can be compared to the best the field has ever produced. But they are warm. With cool writers like China Mieville, Jeff Vandermeer, Adam Roberts, if ever I do get engaged in the story, something always happens to make me feel the writer is pulling away, saying "Ha ha, made you care." You can see this in practically every case of unreliable narration or metafiction, from Nabokov's Pale Fire to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. But here, though Mycroft is patently unreliable to the point of insanity, it's not like that. He's also vulnerable. And he's not just vulnerable within the fiction, he's vulnerable on the fuzzy line I've been talking about, vulnerable to the Reader, to Posterity, and therefore to us as the Reader's alter ego. Instead of pushing us away, we are in drawn closer and closer.
I believe that Mycroft gets this from Diderot, and specifically from Diderot's warm playful but metafictive Jacques The Fatalist And His Master. More on Diderot later.
From now on, this piece is going right into huge spoiler territory, the kind of spoilers that genuinely spoil things, and I strongly recommend not reading on any further unless you have read all of both books. I believe that there are some joys of revelation that it is worth coming to slowly, and I really don't want to spoil the pleasure of discovery that coming to these things in the right order will give somebody, even somebody who thinks they feel they don't care about spoilers. Really. Go and read both books. The rest of this piece will still be here, and if you're not going to read the books anyway, the rest of this piece won't be very interesting. I'm not kidding. Go read the books and come back. They're great. I love them. Go on. You'll thank me!
Right at the beginning of Too Like the Lightning, Mycroft tells us that the answers we seek — before we've even started to formulate very many questions — lie in the Eighteenth Century, and that we are more fluent in the language of the past than we think we are. This raises huge questions, and the answers to them — Madame and her Eighteenth Century brothel which really controls the world, the underground gendered sexuality there (and therefore the aboveground demigendered norms), Casimir Perry and his Count of Monte Cristo plot that's quietly going on in the background of what Mycroft is foregrounding for us as important — are hugely important, and we couldn't understand anything without them. But we have to take it on trust and keep the question open, because we don't get any hint of these answers for a long time.
Another set of questions embodied in the form of the narrative concerns Mycroft himself.
Mycroft informs us in that same first chapter that a lot of people hate him, and that the text will give us cause enough to hate him ourselves. But we don't hate him — at least, I don't. I love him and want to shelter and protect him and make sure he's eating. Palmer constantly makes us worry about whether and how much he is eating, largely by having him given food and then not telling us whether he eats it. I don't think this urge to feed Mycroft is unique to me. I know some readers don't like him, but I find him very sympathetic.
Part of this is because we first see him taking care of a magical kid, which is inherently sympathetic. Then we see him working very hard while being subservient to everyone, including us. Then there's the way he cares passionately about some things. It's interesting to examine the things he really cares about. An attempt at a list: His world, Bridger, civilization, that creepy JEDD Mason, Apollo Mojave, the significance of Bridger and JEDD Mason to metaphysics, and metaphysics in general. (The metaphysics here is amazing, I'd never previously come across the concept of multiple universes each with an omnipotent monotheistic God, never mind the idea of a dialogue between those Gods. Fascinating.) He loves Greece, and the Iliad, and the Enlightenment, and languages, and while he clearly enjoys telling us the story, with all the asides and things we need to know, he's not as passionate about any of these things the way he's passionate about the things on my first list.
Mycroft is our friend, our guide, and, especially, he builds up a special relationship with the Reader He listens to the Reader's objections and engages with them, at least attempting to comply with them. Sometimes those are our objections and sometimes they aren't. For instance when the Reader demands that Mycroft stop calling Thisbe a witch, I was impatient with them — I didn't mind him calling her a witch, I just wanted to get on with the story. At that point, the Reader is an actual character in the text quite separate from me, with their own obsessions and demands. But when the Reader is standing for me, which is most of the time, then the line between the real reader and the Reader on the page gets increasingly fuzzy.
There is one moment in Seven Surrenders where Mycroft says he owes the world seventeen lifetimes of work and therefore he shouldn't rest. Reading this, I thought "Eighteen, your own life too." In the next line, the Reader made the exact same objection. At that moment, there was no distinction between me, the real reader, and the imagined character Reader, the Reader voiced my objection, and Mycroft answered it. My engagement with the text and that moment and my integration with the Reader was a hundred percent. There wasn't a fourth wall. The way the story is written had led to me being actually inside the text. And in book 3, The Will to Battle, the line gets fuzzier again, and what Palmer's doing with this becomes even more integral and fascinating.
From the first moment, Mycroft confides in us, or rather in the Reader. The way he does this encourages us to like and trust him, and again, this is like Graves's Claudius, and also reminiscent of two great villains: Shakespeare's Richard III, and Francis Urquart in the original UK House of Cards. The stage direction "aside to the audience" makes the audience complicit. Only we see into their true motivations, only we know what they want, and what they're doing. Mycroft's asides confidences to the Reader have the same kind of effect of drawing us closer, letting us into the secrets. I never realised that Urquart was lovable until I saw the US version of House of Cards, where the Underwood character is a jerk, which made the whole thing pointless. Urquart is just as despicable in what he does (the same things!), but because he stops and addresses us, because he tells us the truth while lying to everyone else, because of his little smile aside, we are seduced into being much more on his side than we should be. Part of us secretly wants him to get away with it, because of the way that charm and sincerity is directed at us. It's just the same with Mycroft.
In Chapter the First, Mycroft begs the Reader to trust him for a little while, and we do, and by the time we find out what his crimes are — and they're so much worse than we could have imagined — we feel betrayed. We also feel complicit — we've been trusting you, Mycroft! How could you have been a rapist and a torturer all this time? Mycroft's attitude to his crimes, the weird pride he has and contempt for his victims, is very difficult to accept, especially before you know why he did it. And this is withheld for a long time — it's well on into Seven Surrenders before you find out that he had a really good reason for killing the Mardis.
It shows you what a great world this is where an atrocity where somebody tortured seventeen people to death is the worst thing that had happened for centuries. But that doesn't help us in our personal complicity with Mycroft, who has been telling us things he doesn't tell anyone, who has been drawing us closer and closer, who has been our companion and our friend and our constant guide through this strange world. The chapter after the revelation of his crimes starts by thanking us for keeping on reading, and I think for some real readers that's a real question. This is quite an achievement in itself.
Generally, genre SF and fantasy has a very high body count, and a very high level of atrocities committed by protagonists. Nobody bats an eyelid at Brust's Taltos being an assassin, for instance. That's just fun. And torture — generally done for the best of reasons — isn't unusual. We'll happily read things with wars that destroy entire planets, or close up battles with enemy deaths in the tens of thousands. Seventeen deaths can't really compare. The difference here is the level of realism and the fact that is is not okay. It isn't fun, it isn't cool, it isn't happening at a level of reality where we can in any way enjoy it. Beyond that, Mycroft's reaction to what he has done is incredibly disturbing — he's proud of his craftsmanship, he's proud of his relationship with Papadelias, and when he talks about specifics it's stomach-churning. It's very uncomfortable to read him caring about not being called a mass murderer — he's not, he tells us indignantly, he murdered them all individually!
Re-reading, this is even more disturbing, because right at the beginning when he talks about the death of the plastic army man Pointer and how it differs from normal death, when he says "Have you ever seen death, reader?" and goes on to clinically analyse how hard it is to recognise the instant of death "in slow cases, like blood loss." It doesn't seem as if he's saying this in a creepy way, but he is, he's speaking out of his personal experience of having killed seventeen people in horrible ways, and he's speaking as if we, the reader, are likely to share this experience. In fact, I think I'm fairly unusual in that I have seen human death, though only in hospital settings. I can confirm that you can't always tell the moment of the last breath. I was therefore nodding along with Mycroft there… which doesn't help!
So we real readers have done what Mycroft asked and trusted him for a few chapters, and found out that he is a monster at the same time Carlyle finds out, and freaked out along with Carlyle.
It's not for a long time that we discover that we were in fact correct to feel he can't be the monster everyone thinks him. When we find out that he killed the Mardis to prevent war, that he killed them like that to shock the world and therefore prevent war, and when we've already seen the way the OS system is killing individuals to keep the world stable — we're then in a whole new context of Utilitarian ethics. The question becomes whether we would do the same thing. And the further question, whether we'd destroy this world to save a better one, or a better world to save this one. I think we ask ourselves these questions in a different way because of the pace at which we have experienced having our questions answered.
This brings me back to Diderot. Heloise quotes Diderot in Madame's, and Carlyle recognises the quote, and then what we are told about Diderot is:
"Denis Diderot was a great philosopher, the leader of the Encyclopaedia project!"
I wish now, reader, that I had myself introduced you to _le Philosophe_ in some lighter hour. Grant me, if you will, a moment for his noble side, before you associate him forever with this house. Once upon a time there was a bright young atheist called Denis Diderot. In his Eighteenth Century, atheism was just blossoming, and keen libertine minds hungered for a firebrand to stir and lead them. He could have made himself the Pope of Atheists, but he refused, for Diderot, while denying any afterlife, dreamed of worldly immortality, not for himself but for the dead, the dreams and achievements of ages past, and for his world. His Philosopher's Stone would be a book. The second half contained technical plates illustrating all the technologies humanity had achieved, weaving silk stockings, annealing metal, baking bricks, so with a single copy even the lowest peasant could reconstruct all of civilization. The first half was the same for thought. Thus, if a new dark age should fall upon the Earth, but a single copy of this book survived, every achievement of the human race — from bronze to Liberty — could be restored. Diderot named this talisman of immortality _Encyclopedie_ and fearing that his personal beliefs might bring the wrath of the authorities upon the project, he voluntarily suppressed his own work, publishing nothing of the revolutionary atheism which like-minded doubters of his age so hungered for. The public who named Voltaire _Le Patriarch_ dubbed Diderot _le Philosophe_, _the_ Philosopher, guardian and caretaker of all thinkers and all thought. The grand title of "Arch-Heretic," which he deserved, he left to others, to Machiavelli, Hobbes, misunderstood Spinoza, or de Sade. Can you imagine a nobler act, reader? Sacrificing his voice to humanity's Great Conversation to safeguard the Conversation itself?
Now this is not exactly what you'll find if you look up Diderot in Wikipedia, or even if you read serious books about Diderot. It's not our Diderot, it's the Twenty-Fifth Century's imagination of Diderot, Mycroft's Diderot. But the Reader is directly addressed there, "can you imagine a nobler act?" It's an act familiar to us from science fiction — from Miller's Canticle For Leibovitz through Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, Asimov's Foundation and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the idea of deliberately safeguarding civilization through a dark age. It's not something anyone did before the fall of Rome, it's an Enlightenment imagination of deliberately preparing for a new Renaissance. But it's an idea that's familiar to us as SF readers, and which we thrill to, and it makes us feel very positive about Diderot because he did it in the real world. In reading this, we are being recruited or seduced into this project of saving civilization — can you imagine a nobler act, reader?
Beyond that, we're being informed there's a Great Conversation, and in hearing that Diderot suppressed his participation, implicitly invited to participate ourselves. Do you want to save the world, reader? Do you want to participate in the Great Conversation of humanity, living and dead, across all of time? Of course we do.
The questions Terra Ignota raises are huge and reach outside the book in all kinds of directions. We'd think about them anyway. But because we're drawn so close to the text and so directly addressed, we come to them with a different level of intensity, complexity, participation and complicity. Mycroft's trying to draft the Reader into his war. Does he succeed? That's another very interesting question.
Neville Morley 03.07.17 at 4:48 pm
You trust Mycroft an awful lot more than I do… I don't find him always there ready to tell me what I need to know, and not just because I lack lots of information that the Reader, whether 25th-Century or still more distant, can be assumed to possess; on the contrary, he seems to be to be secretive and evasive, withholding things until he has no choice but to divulge them. The truth, but never the whole truth, and he's very happy for us to draw wrong conclusions. Sincerity? Maybe, but also a performance of sincerity; likewise contrition. It would not amaze me if the 'real' reason for his actions, revealed in SS, turns out to be another partial truth. He manipulates the Reader, and us; he is a master of rhetoric. Within the first fifty pages of TLtL I was thinking of the figure of the cunning slave in ancient comedy – and of course that's something he hints at, in discussing his own status in relation to classical precedents…
S 03.07.17 at 5:21 pm
Is the last part of the last block quote really meant to be its own (non-quoted) paragraph? [ED – ALREADY FIXED BUT THANKS]
JimV 03.07.17 at 7:02 pm
"When people read fiction, the text causes us to open questions in our minds, which we then hold there unanswered until we either work out the answers or they are given to us."
Well said. I think that's true and that science-fiction is particularly suited to raising such questions, of a larger kind than whodunit.
I had to stop reading this post at the spoiler alert because I just got the second book today and haven't had a chance to devour it yet, but look forward to finishing the post in a few days.
Jo Walton 03.07.17 at 10:28 pm
JimV — thank you for listening! It will be worth it.
Neville — that's a very interesting reading!
Chris Carpenter 03.07.17 at 11:08 pm
As a long-time lover of Diderot, you can imagine how much these two books sang to me. The passage you quoted about Diderot, was perhaps the most moving tribute to any philosopher I have ever read. I nearly cried when I read it.
But what surprised me about these books was how interesting they made metaphysics. As an atheist, I had always been very dismissive of that entire branch of philosophy. But although Dr. Palmer's books did not change my mind about my atheism (I don't think that was her goal anyways) they did open me up to how interesting that conversation can be.
Luis 03.08.17 at 5:38 pm
I like Mycroft, but I am with Neville: I'm still not sure I trust Mycroft after SS. And indeed by mid-SS Mycroft is practically begging us not to trust him; he's told us his reasoning but then immediately told us his reasoning was (literally) fatally flawed. What else is his judgment skewed or simply wrong/incomplete about? That list would be another interesting one to write out; it isn't short, despite his seemingly near-omniscience.
That said, I trust his *rationality*. So it was interesting to be reminded (here and in SS) that his "madness" supposedly makes him an unreliable witness. Perhaps this is the attorney in me, but he seems no more unreliable in that sense than the average witness. And I do have to wonder if Palmer is setting that up deliberately, reminding us of his madness when at times he seems the only sane person in the room.
Anyway, thanks for writing this – it deepened my appreciation for the craft involved here!
Andrew Watson 03.09.17 at 2:53 pm
Complicity is a fascinating entry point to discussion of these books. There is complicity between at least four agents: Palmer, Canner, the Reader, and the reader (following Jo's useful distinction between Reader and reader).
As I anticipated SS, I was thinking about an aspect of complicity between Palmer (or, more generally, author) and reader. How should they comply to make the sequel work for the reader, who may have read the earlier book some time ago? This is a particularly sharp question when the books are as "big" as these.
I prepared for SS in a few ways. First, I trusted Palmer, based on TLtL and on some of her other writing.
Second, I hoped that SS would include a list of characters. The front matter does indeed include "Persons Appearing in this History".
Third, I looked back over (but did not re-read) TLtL to construct a timeline, which I posted. I noted that Canner "sees no need to tell his reader about anything that happened in the centuries between the Enlightenment and 2073″…
Maria 03.09.17 at 4:59 pm
I agree absolutely about Mycroft's creepy complicity (or the creepiness of my, as Reader's, assumed complicity with him), especially around the Major and death. A couple of times, Mycroft speaks in a quietly admiring way of the Major's experience of death and war, and how it deepens his understanding of life and almost gives a deeper timbre to his voice.
First time round, I read Mycroft's observation as being just in that way some men have of admiring or even wanting to associate themselves with what they perceive as the alpha-maleness of soldiers. Also, I fancied the Major and wanted to agree with Mycroft, even though in real life I know lots of soldiers, many are not alpha males, and politically I find the whole soldier-worship thing quite creepy.
Second time reading the book, knowing what I then knew about Mycroft, was slightly unnerving. The Major was still pretty cool because he's seen stuff the people in the future haven't, but is still very honourable etc. But realising I'd been indulging in the same kind of reflexive hero-worship as a mass-murderer. Ugh! Damn you, Mycroft, for exposing all sorts of complicities I'd personally rather not look at too closely.
Yarrow 03.09.17 at 7:06 pm
I'm a reader who seriously considered stopping Too Like the Lightning after Chapter Twenty. Of course, I imagine the Reader would have had to decide whether or not to start, since they knew what Mycroft had done.
Henry 03.09.17 at 7:37 pm
In favor of Neville's reading – Sniper's statement that he believes that there's a 'real' Canner that occasionally is visible behind the servility. In favor of Jo's reading – that she's read the third book, unlike the rest of us …
The one bit that I do disagree with is Jo's statement about 'cool' writers. Not that I have any problem with the _de gustibus_ – if those writers don't appeal to you, they don't, and there are plenty of writers whom I have problems enjoying too, even if I can intellectually understand why others like them. But I don't get the sense that they're out to trick you into caring that Jo does. E.g. I believe that Wolfe (and here I think John Clute etc are completely wrong) is entirely sincere – the sense of religious wonder that Severian feels is what drives Wolfe too. And Mieville too wants the reader to care – especially in _Iron Council_, but also elsewhere too. Again, not that one has to like them, but I don't get the sense that Jo does (I see why she calls them 'cool', but I find them also to be vast and sympathetic).
Neville Morley 03.09.17 at 11:40 pm
In favour… well, not sure which way this goes, but Sniper is *definitely* not a reliable witness, but *how* not reliable? Okay, risk that I'm falling into my never-gonna-get-written SF novel, but I would half expect cacophony of contradictory voices not occasional alternative voice.
Z 03.10.17 at 8:28 am
Am I the only one who did not particularly feel this complicity? Mycroft Canner is just too talented, too powerful, too well-connected, apparently supremely intelligent, perhaps supernaturally so etc… for me to really connect with him. In fact, I felt the same about just all the characters of TlTl (like the rest of the Muggle world, I haven't read Seven Surrenders): they are all too fabulous and/or extreme for me to really care about them on an emotional level. Not that I don't enjoyed the book, but I just occasionally missed ordinary people.
Donald 03.10.17 at 2:45 pm
I read most of the first book and put it aside, because I didn't care what happened to anyone. I was a little curious about what the point of it was, and will probably read a Wikipedia article on the series when it's finished. The Big Ideas might be interesting, but for me the story and the characters weren't.
I wonder if I would have loved it if the story had some hobbits. This was more like the Silmarillion.
JimV 03.10.17 at 11:07 pm
Someone, I think it was Hemingway, said that it is impossible to write an autobiography without lying. That was the sense or illusion I had of MC – that he was trying to be truthful most of the time but couldn't always do it.
("Mycroft" of course reminds us of Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" and Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".)
I have many times started a novel and like a previous commenter put it down because I didn't identify with any of the characters and/or thought they were made out of cardboard (e.g., the Agatha Cristie mystery starring "Tommy and Tuppence"). That was not the case this time. However, Bridger bothered me. It was like you took, say, "War and Peace" and put a DC comics character in it (e.g., Superboy). I was hoping against hope that he would turn out to be less comic-y in the second book, but that wasn't the author's choice or design.
As a result, I didn't feel like re-reading the books immediately after finishing them, as has occurred a few times in my reading history, but I will re-read them eventually. Aside from the plot quibble, the writing is fantastic.
David Goldfarb 03.11.17 at 6:43 am
I just finished Seven Surrenders, and re-read Too Like the Lightning beforehand. (And boy was I glad I did that latter.)
I thought that the ethical dilemma posed by O.S. was artificially made a little sharper than it should have been: why did O.S. never use any lesser means than murder? In Asimov's The End of Eternity they were able to prevent wars by, say, misplacing somebody's car keys. O.S.'s set-sets were able to work out that killing someone would have various indirect effects. (Induce one person to commit suicide; at two removes this makes a reporter retire.) So why can't they work out similar indirect effects from, perhaps, misrouting someone's car rather than crashing it? There are tons of ways to manipulate the world that are less drastic than murder. Yet we have no evidence that O.S. even tried to use any of them.
On another topic, I was a little disappointed that we never get an explanation of the mysterious 9A. In my re-read, it did occur to me that "Ada Palmer" starts with an A and has 9 letters.
Which in turn leads me to the observation that I always find discussions of fate, Providence, free will, or even good luck to be problematic in the context of fictional narrative, because of course characters in a fictional narrative are known to lack free will, and to have a creator. Yes, in Terra Ignota there exists Providence. But that Providence bears no relation to any Providence that may exist in the real world, and the discussion forcibly reminds me that I'm reading fiction.
David Goldfarb makes an excellent point about the brute-force nature of O.S.'s manipulations. I think Cosma Shaliz's great "In Soviet Union, Optimization Solves You" might provide a partial answer. CS shows that computer analysis and regulation of all market variables for a large country is impractical forever unless Moore's Law proceeds unabated for centuries, which physics forbids (or something like that). Prediction of all future events is a much larger task. One which in fact is still impossible with the magic of "set-sets", since nobody predicted Casimir Perry's machinations. So one might say that the O.S. are grasping at whatever possible solutions appear to be in their coarse simulation.
I agree however that at least some of those solutions should involve, say, early retirement of key individuals rather than death – but perhaps those did occur but were not as noticeable and not discovered.
Christopher Carpenter 03.11.17 at 9:21 pm
David Goldfarb: The assertion you made, "But that Providence bears no relation to any Providence that may exist in the real world" is a metaphysical opinion, not a statement a fact. I happen to believe that there is no providence of any kind in the real world, but I can only assert it as a logical high likelihood not a fact. Nietzsche once (perhaps sarcastically) suggested that Mycroft's version of Providence is likely when he said something along the lines of "it is easier to prove the existence of a malevolent god than a benevolent one." I think that part of what Dr. Palmer may be trying to do is suggest we consider different kinds of providences.
Abigail Nussbaum 04.13.17 at 3:25 pm
Rather late to this comment thread, but I've spent the day reading the essays in this project, hoping for some insight that might help me explain what I missed in Too Like the Lightning, which I bounced off of with alarming strength. So first of all, thank you to all the contributors for their hard work, and second: no joy, I'm afraid. TLTL's allure remains as opaque to me as it was when I finished it (and the odds of my picking up SS are, I'm afraid, rather slim), and the appeal it had for so many of the writers in this project escapes me completely.
Case in point: it is genuinely baffling to me to suggest that we are meant to find Mycroft appealing, sympathetic, or even pitiable. I thought that it was one of Palmer's undeniable (if, to me, unsatisfying) accomplishments to have created a narrator so profoundly unpleasant, so unbearably vain and self-absorbed, and so obviously limited in his worldview that the entire experience of reading the novel became an exercise in trying to look past his crippling tunnel-vision. Spending time with Mycroft felt to me like being stuck with one of those blowhards you meet on the internet (or, if you're particularly unlucky, in real life), who are so convinced that they've unlocked the secrets of the universe that they can allow no new data, and certainly no possibility of their own limitations, to enter into consideration. The Great Man fetishism, the relentless name-dropping, the creepy fetishizing of the bodies of women and POCs, these are all traits that Mycroft shares with such people, and they make him, not only an uncomfortable guide through the book's world, but profoundly boring. These sorts of people rarely have anything new to tell you, and though Mycroft has a slight leg up in that he's our point of view character to the book's interesting world, that doesn't make the experience of spending time with him more appealing.
Such was my frustration with Mycroft that I can't really say that I was surprised when we learned the details of his crime. I mean, obviously I was surprised, because the sheer overheated, over-the-top gruesomeness of his crimes can't help but surprise you. ("Overheated", in fact, strikes me as a much better word with which to describe TLTL than "warm"; though I agree that the book certainly isn't cold.) But at the same time, I couldn't help being aware of the inevitability of the revelation spelled out in this essay, that there would turn out to be a reason for Mycroft's actions that served the greater good (because this is, quite frankly, that sort of book). Far from feeling complicit, it's moments like this that made me feel just how hard TLTL was trying to manipulate me and my reactions, and how juvenile those efforts ended up seeming.
(Also: is it, in fact, surprising that Mycroft turns out to be a rapist? A torturer and a murderer, yes, but a rapist? Is this not the same character who, in the book's first chapter, describes rape as a crime that impinges on its victims' "virtue"? Does he not depict Dominic's near-sexual-assault of Lesley as an act of seduction? Is he not weirdly obsessed with genitalia and reductive gender roles, specifically associating masculinity with power and domination? To bring us back to the blowhard type that Mycroft so strongly reminds me of, they are exactly the sort of people about whom, you are inevitably unsurprised to learn, women have been warning each other for years, and have learned to steer clear of, or only go near in groups.)
(Also also: I am aware that TLTL does not specify Mycroft's gender, and that he may end up being revealed as biologically female/self-identifying as female. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is the case, because once again this is that sort of book. That honestly doesn't change my reading of the character. If Palmer chose to write a female character who is the most extreme version of the convention sexual harrasser, and then spring the revelation of their gender on the reader, it doesn't make my experience of reading that character, or the associations they arouse, any more palatable.)
Dylan Thurston 03.25.19 at 10:43 pm
Very late to the party here! I was just re-reading TLtL in order to better understand The Will to Battle, which further deepened the conversation, and answered some of the doubts. (I'll omit spoilers here.)
With regards to the discussion of Providence, I was quite struck by JEDD Mason's line, "Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God". This serves many roles beyond its effect on Chagatai in the work. For instance, a little earlier in the work there was a long discussion with the Reader on whether or not Bridger was the protagonist of the work. In the novel (at least in Mycroft's belief), Bridger is a human instrument of God, and so indeed makes a suitable protagonist. It also addresses Providence as authorial intent, with the author taking the role of God.
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Long ago certain wonderful virtues were superstitiously attached to what was called "need-fire." This was generated by friction. By rubbing two sticks together this wonder-working flame was supposed to come from God. The Holy Spirit is the "need-fire" of this present time. He will come into the heart as a living flame, in answer to the continued pleading of the soul. Then great and marvellous things will be done.