Wind Sprints

I wrote the first draft of THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I didn't like it. It wasn't bad necessarily. It just wasn't the story I set out to write. The story I had planned was this huge intricate intrigue that spanned the politics of the university, the city, the kingdom! And in the end, a meeting made at the beginning of the book would afford the hero an opportunity to make his case and win the day.

In the first draft, he fills out the paperwork for the meeting and then it's never mentioned again. The story took a MASSIVE left turn and finished in half the word count I originally expected. After what I felt was the success of WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING (in terms of story even though I never landed an agent), finishing THE TRIAD SOCIETY with such a mediocre offering really brought me down.

So, I broke my routine. Normally, when I finish a manuscript first draft, I will take a few weeks off and read a book or three. Then I'll go back and revise. This time, I read a couple books, but then I started work on JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. I usually start a new manuscript while the previous ms is with beta readers. I'll then stop and revise for the third draft. This means I'm only about 12,000 words into a manuscript.

Instead, I wrote 32,000 words before even starting on the second draft. What happened, though, was THE TRIAD SOCIETY went from mediocre to solid. I still like WANTED's story more, but Liz tells me that she likes TTS better. After struggling to find my rhythm and pacing, I wrote another 25,000 words on JH before revising TTS again.

So now we're done with TTS and it's ready to go to agents in its awesome state. The longer break, I think, saved an average manuscript from remaining average. HOWEVER, it's also affected the newer manuscript in a negative fashion. It's hard to bounce between voices, especially when one is a bureaucratic fantasy and the other is an anarchic sci-fi. It's even harder to do it twice!

If writing is sunshine, revising is sunshine bent through a magnifying glass that burns the ant in the driveway. It's a complete immersion in a manuscript where you question every word choice, sentence structure, and plot point. You can't just revise an entire manuscript and then go back to another manuscript that's 2/3 finished. At least, I can't.

So once again, I find myself without momentum on JH. Maybe I really should stop and try something else for awhile. In addition to breaking the rules, it feels shitting to stop working on a manuscript that is 30,000 words from the end. What I really need is a jumpstart. I'm not having trouble writing JH. I know what comes next. But the motivation is gone. I feel like I should still be working on TTS or even (in total violation of the rules), it's sequel THE RED SOCK SOCIETY.

That is when I thought of a new exercise. Wind sprints. Run, stop, run, stop. Get your heartbeat up before basketball practice where you'll have to run up and down the court and Joe is a chubby little kid and sucks at running, so he needs all the warmup he can get.

I have a number of stories on deck: THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE, WHAT'S BEHIND THE CROOKED DOOR?, THE RED SOCK SOCIETY, and THE HOUSE ON SANDWICH NOTCH LANE. Plenty of things to dabble in. And dabbling is exactly what we're going to do. I'm going to write the first chapter on all or some of these but not commit to writing any of them. Basically, I'm doing writing wind sprints. I need to get my writing heart rate up so finishing JH doesn't seem so laborious. And, it lets me create some new things with new voices and just revel in creativity for creativity's sake.

Two posts following this one will have chapter 1 of 7Sac and CROOKED. I may post more later if the need arises or I may hop back into JH and finish that thing off.

I'll Make a Bajillion Dollars!

So, as we all know, the reason there is still resistance to the ebook is because some people worry about losing their pretension. How can one prove that one is better than those around one if they cannot see that the book one is reading is clearly far beyond the reading level of everyone else gathered.

There had been a quickly-abandoned proposal of creating ereaders with screens on both sides, one for reading and one for showing the cover. Given that nearly all ereaders are immediately put into a protective cover, this proved a waste of time and monies.

But there must be a way we can welcome the coming epocalypse while maintaining our pretentious superiority! Well, there is, with the Selbomatic eBook Attenuated Label (SEAL-the bad ass of ebook covers).

Take the standard design for an ebook cover. Thick, padded sides with straps to hold in your ereader. Cut a rectangle into the top cover and shave off a few millimeters so there is a book-like divot in the cover. Slice an opening in the side. Print out a color image of the cover of the most pretentious book you want people to think you’re reading (and if you’re really concerned about looking superior, I suggest you actually read the book too lest someone else ask questions you cannot answer). Put the paper image between two thin pieces of plastic, then slide them into the opening until the image is situated in the divot. This divot being in truth a window to your intellectual superiority.

Ideally, you could manufacture this entire thing, but if your intellect can’t wait to be on display, you can accomplish it with a razor blade and a file. I am now accepting start-up capital.

The Tlot Thickens

As I mentioned on Friday, my productivity fell to shit when I joked about being the anonymous subject of an agent's impending rejection. I checked my email over and over and over again until the day came to a close, and it was time to go home.

Of course, there was no rush to go home since my wife was in New Brunswick. I decided instead to walk across Boston Common and take in a movie at the AMC1, 2. When the movie was over, I bust out my Palm Pre (smart phone of champions) and check my email to see if my wife had the results of her competition3. She had not, but the agent had.

OH NO! The rejection, it came! Calm down Mr. Pessimist. Maybe they're asking for a full. Ha! Yeah right! This is the agency that holds my personal record for fastest rejection to a query ever4. Of course it's a rejection.

Walking out of the theater, I open my email...

A REQUEST FOR A FULL!!!!!!

Now, I could in all haste send them the finished manuscript. I'm a professional. I wasn't so foolish as to start all this without finishing my work. BUT, this is a big flipping deal. When once this blog held a list of agents I wanted to work with, these people ranked number one. You don't just send a manuscript all willy nilly because they want to see it. You go back over that shit and make it shine like a diamond, like your combat boots with the drill sergeant waiting to look at them. You'll be able to see your reflection in this manuscript when I'm done with it.

So I go back over it. Again. All weekend, this is what I did. I sat in front of my computer, and I pored over this thing to find every typo and unnecessary past progressive verb. Moreover, the super fabulous awesome Elizabeth Poole, beta reader extrodinaire, went back over it in a single day to offer me new comments. (My favorite of her comments was "The tlot thickens!" Of course, this was followed by my own typo, "What he wouldn't give for a clean shit." Awe yeah. I'm a professional.)

A half hour ago, I sent in the revised revised revised manuscript along with a stylesheet (not asked for, but I think they're helpful). I now begin the nerve wracking two-month wait to hear whether they want to rep me. Liz tells me the thing is good, but is it good enough?

We'll find out. In the interim, I will return to JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. That thing is only 40k away from an ending. It would be fun to say "I finished another book while I was waiting for your response. Would you like to take a look at it? (I'm a show off like that.)

Wish me luck.


1 $11.50 for a movie? Are you crazy? I'll stick the the weekend morning shows for $4. Get off my lawn!

2 I saw "Unstoppable" with Rosario Dawson. Helllooooo nurse!

3 Her quartet moved up two spots to 6th place out of 30 something quartets. Phenomenal for their second year together.

4 3 minutes5 in case you're wondering, and you know you were.

5 Yes, you read that right. Minutes. Not days or months. Minutes.

How to Kill Productivity

How to Kill Productivity in Five Easy Steps


Review your Twitter as you do often during the day.

Reply to an agent who you follow when she asks for feedback on whether saying "it was a close call but no thank you" was cruel or encouraging.

Suggest that it would be crushing at first, but over time would become exciting and encouraging.

Follow said response with a joke of "unless it's me, in which case you should say 'Yes, more please.'"

Check your email obsessively to see whether or not it really was you.

The Six Books of Harry Potter

Nathan Bransford invited readers to post comments about Harry Potter on their own blogs and link back in his, for which this post is created. Depending on how long you've been following me, you might have listened to the episode of the PodgeCast or even read the older post on my LiveJournal that covered the matter. Rather than digging through all that, I will repost here why I think the seventh book should be erased from the collective memory.

Why to read HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

Molly Weasley vs. Bellatrix Lestrange


Why NOT to read HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

Like many of the previous novels in the series, HPDH lacked a firm editorial hand1. The 300-page trek through the woods was interminable. At least 100 pages could have been cut from that scene without detracting from the story.

The climax of HPHBP enumerates a number of rules for the final book. Harry is chasing after Snape and not having any success at all. Snape tells him that he'll never succeed without learning how to cast without speaking. More over, if Harry ever hopes to face Voldemort, he must first defeat Snape. Neither of these issues are addressed in book 7.

Never, not once ever, does Harry cast a spell without speaking in the seventh book. When it comes to the final conflict, it has no bearing whatsoever to the outcome.

Harry never faces Snape. Nagini kills Snape while Harry watches, so really, the whole ending of book 6 is negated.

WORSE, that negation also reduces Dumbledore's sacrifice. Why did he let Snape kill him? To protect the Elder Wand. Snape defeats Dumbledore and thus is the owner of the Elder Wand. Harry is supposed to defeat Snape so he can get the Elder Wand. The Elder Wand is one of three items that GIVE THE BOOK ITS NAME! That plotline is entirely disregarded.

Lupin and Tonks die so that Harry can be father to an orphan, bringing to a ridiculous conclusion to the character arcs of two of the most reasonable characters in the series up to that point. They throw their lives away to avoid responsibility2 and their deaths are a complete throw-away. It's not even a scene of the book.

Harry sends Ginny, the most badass combat wizard of the group, away at the end of the sixth book. And she stays away. What character is this? Certainly not the one that had grown into a strong-minded woman in the two previous books3.

And the clincher, JKR's comments following the publication of the book. No, not that Dumbledore was gay. Who gives a shit about that? No, she made two comments that just make me wonder how she managed to write such an amazing series in the first place as she seems completely out of touch with her own characters.

Blog post 1: JKR answers the questions of what happened to the characters after the end of the series. Harry and Ron become aurors and revolutionize the field. AYFKM?!?!? Neither of them are smart enough to be aurors much less to revolutionize the field. They lucked into potions class and would never have been able to last in any long-term capacity in that profession.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, she had created an arc she never resolved. Voldemort had tried to be the Dark Arts professor and failed. Following, the school never had another professor for more than a year. Being his opposite and given his proven track record at surviving the dark arts (and experience leading DA), Harry should have taken on the roll to break the curse. Ron could have taken his self-confidence and gone on to play professional Quidditch, which is the only activity he ever truly loves in the entire series.

Blog post 2: JKR says she crafted the ending specifically for Harry to represent Jesus in an effort to draw readers to Christ through her fiction. Hey, if that's what she wants to do, that's her choice. But to accomplish it, she derailed her own series and turned it in a direction where she could recreate Good Friday in a wizard combat zone. Never sacrifice your story for your message. A skillful author could use the former to deliver the latter.

Adendum 1: I also contend that Neville is more popular because of the movies than he is because of the book. JKR uses Dobby as the character that arrives with the timely answer (e.g., gillyweed). In the movies, they use Neville who is a lot cheaper than a CGI house elf. Not only did it work, it was BETTER than the books. It fit the character better and fleshed it out. The Neville of the books never got any real attention (other than being a practical joke) until HPOP, whereas the movies began his evolution one story earlier in HPGF. While he gets a great scene in the final book, I wonder how much attention he would have got if he hadn't grown so popular.

Adendum 2: What would have been cool? In HPPS/HPSS (depending on your nationality), Ron is the knight and has to sacrifice himself for Harry to continue on to the end. If that had been paralleled in the final book, it would have been a stroke of genius.


1 After the series became popular, there became a standard format to any Harry Potter novel. Part 1: Main plot. Part 2: Awesome subplot. Part 3: Lame subplot.

Parts 2 and 3 always got equal attention and swelled the book well beyond an appropriate page count. Parts 3 from every novel could have been chopped with no loss to character or primary plot flow. It would have just chucked lameness that we all had to wade through like we were sewer workers or something.

2 I have yet to meet a (sane) mother who would sacrifice the life of her kid to be with her husband while he runs off to get himself killed.

3 In all their previous fights, Harry and Ron have required a third person to force them back together. When Ron returns with the sword, it should have been Ginny hauling him there with whatever cattle prod Ron needs that book. They abandoned their strongest weapon and the story abandons her too4.

4 I will admit to some bias, as she's my favorite character, but really. If you're going to war, you don't send the guy with the machine gun home because it's dangerous. Certainly the guy with the machine gun doesn't stay home once he's there.

Echoes of Halloween

This is our first year in our new townhouse and as such, we did not know how many kids would stop by (10-12 was the final count). We WAY overbought on candy. Suggestions of taking the left overs into work have been shot down by the missus. The plan is to keep the bag until we have guests over in January. Now, the only question that remains is whether the bag will actually last until January (peanut M&Ms are no more, as of last night).

This inspired me to make a LIST! (Because it's what I do. I hope none of the candies will be offended by said list.) What are your favorite candies?

1. Twix (after refrigeration, this achieves candy bar nirvana) AND Reese's Pieces (not at the same time, but they're both wicked awesome)

2. Watchamacallit (some people still haven't heard about this one. How is that possible?)

3. Peanut M&Ms1 (I eat all the red ones first)

4. Mars (briefly renamed Snickers with Almond, the Mars bar has recently made a comeback)

5. Krackle (akin to Nestle Crunch which is also awesome, there's something about the Krackle's chocolate that tastes better than Nestle's offering)

Runners Up: White chocolate kit-kat (holy hell, the amount of saturated fat will kill you!)

Thousand Grand (not even sure why, I think I liked the struggle I had as a kid to actually bite off a piece of this bar, so filled with caramel that I felt like an alligator)

1 I got in trouble a lot in 8th grade. Me and detention became good friends (sometimes even when we shouldn't have). In an effort to get me to behave, my Spanish teacher bet me and my best friend, Jeremy, 1 pound of peanut M&Ms each that we couldn't behave for two months.

Two months and one day later, we both sat in detention eating our peanut M&Ms.

Stuart Greenman has the right of it

Livia Blackburne tipped me off to Stuart Greenman's entry into the Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. In one sentence (and pay attention, it really is one sentence), Stuart Greenman shows everything that drives me nuts about fantasy:

A quest is not to be undertaken lightly--or at all!--pondered Hlothgar of the Western Boglands, son of Glothar, nephew of Garthol, known far and wide as Skull Dunker, as he wielded his chesty stallion through the ever-darkening Thlargwood, beyond which, if he survived its horrors and if the royal spittle reader spoke true, his destiny awaited--all this though his years numbered but fourteen.


Let that soak in a little.

"You have a right..."

So the whole Amazon pedophile thing has stirred up an argument I absolutely hate. It begins when someone says "You have a right..." and trails off into some moronic thing you don't actually have a right to. So for all you American readers/writers (as a number of modernized countries don't offer a right to free speech), know the law. Your rights have limitations. And even if you are within those limitations, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence. You are free to be a dick, but that does not mean people have to like you or even listen. It certainly doesn't mean a vendor has to sell your dickitude.

Your speech cannot harm others or put others in harm's way. Your speech is your ability to say and write what you want. It does not require others to listen, print, or read what you say/write.

The first amendment of the constitution of the United States of America affords me the right to say that George W. Bush is the worst president in our nation's history without fear of the government arresting me for that voiced opinion. It does not mean people who love George Bush need to listen to me or that a newspaper, magazine, or publisher must afford me the opportunity to publish my onion of George Bush.

Know your freedoms. Know your freedoms' limits.

Don't Make the Pimp Hand Angry

A proposal: Stop being passionate about your writing.

Writing is not dating. You are not trying to find a spouse or get to third base with your manuscript. You may find yourself enthusiastic about a project, passionate or even obsessed, but those feelings will fade over time, much like when you were dating in high school. You don't just break up and move to the next girlstory. You finish the manuscript.

I know I just posted about this. Perhaps it's NaNo, but I'm seeing more and more people commenting about how they're not passionate about the story they're writing. WHO CARES? You think you can only write when you're passionate? That's no different than writing when you're inspired. Do you think you can go into work and tell your boss that you want to keep getting paid but you're not going to do any work because you're not passionate? No. You go into work and you do what you do because that's your job.

Writing is your job too. Stop trying to date your writing. Your writing is on the job. It's your bitch, and you'll cut a bitch if she don't do what she should.

The Obnoxiousness of Fantasy Characters

Fantasy characters are dicks. In fiction, in D&D adventures, anywhere "adventurer" is available as a life choice, people are dicks. You see it all the time. Main character meets Douchebag McAsshole and DMcA immediately starts talking down to him. I'm a wizard. I'm a barbarian. I don't bow before anyone. I don't show any semblance of etiquette that lets me function in a social environment. Blah blah blah.

With so many dangers in the world (waking gods, monsters, demagogues) and everyone seemingly armed to the teeth, how do these people not get left for dead on the side of the road?

Only in fantasy can "Hello" be answered with a recitation of all the reasons why DMcA is better than you and how you're not even worth the time he took reciting his better qualities, and then the two of you can go on a quest together. Together you go over to the tavern where DMcA insults the tavern keeper's food and beer and finds out he's the brother of the merchant DMcA threatened to kill if he didn't receive a 50% discount on some bauble he wanted to buy earlier that day. He gets the best food, drink, and women in the house and everyone steers clear of him because anyone that large of a douchebag must be powerful and could kill them all and DMcA can kill an entire tavern full of people without repercussions in fantasy because anyone that goes into law enforcement is a complete tool unless he's a hero in which case he's gone on a quest and unavailable to teach DMcA a fucking lesson.

Never once does the tavern keeper throw DMcA out, send a scullion for the cops, and join with the rest of the patrons to show DMcA what happens when one person is a dick to an entire town. Main character is then either tarred and feathered for having shared a drink with DMcA or gets to watch while DMcA is thrown down a well and collectively pissed on by a dozen men who have been drinking all night.


Because of this, I am incredibly sensitive about characters, specifically how they react to one another. I could speculate why so many characters are written this way, and I would touch on those points you would expect me to touch on (social deficiencies of the writer, attitude norming of the genre over the course of decades of DMcAs). This morning working on JH, I took Jehovah in a direction I never planned on taking him. At first I thought it was a mistake. It wasn't a "DOUCHE RAGE!" moment, but a tangential angle. I'm cautious to have characters get angry for much the same reason. The exaggerated Hulk reaction is a second-place finisher to the character as a dick thing.

"I ASKED FOR STRAWBERRY JAM BUT THIS IS JELLY. I WILL KILL YOU AND ALL YOUR RELATIVES!!!!!!"

If people lost their temper that often in real life, we'd all live in an episode of Buffy.

Losing time is usually representative of some kind of mental ailment, a la "Primal Fear" (Ed Norton, Richard Gere). But it can happen in great moments of stress, car accidents and the like. Today, Rae stated Jehovah's greatest fear (being abandoned again) and said she would do everything she could to make sure it happened.

Where do you go after that? In a setting where you kill a person for a pair of shoes, how does one remain calm? The obvious answer is one doesn't. But I didn't want a Hulk smash scene either. Jehovah needs Rae and any conclusion to such a situation would be dissatisfying to say the least. And in fact, given the POV of the story, I don't believe Jehovah would remember anything that happened.

So he doesn't. Rae launches her attack on Louisiana Avenue and he comes back to his senses on Maryland Avenue, alone and totally confused how he got there.

This is a risky move. At this point in the novel Jehovah has killed nine people and there will be more to come. This could be the last trick to make him appear a sociopath instead of an empathetic main character. My gut instinct was to backpeddle. Just don't have Rae say what she said and his reaction becomes unnecessary. But given their own relationship and the truths Rae revealed to him, this was the appropriate result. And the more I think about it, the more I think Jehovah's reaction is appropriate as well. The trick is that it's balanced with his experiences up above on the platform, something that won't be coming for awhile. I gotta keep the reader reading to get to that point and he balances himself out.

So in the end, this is a good but tough decision. And even if the reader decides that Jehovah is too much of a killer, at least he's not a Douchebag McAsshole. I really hate that character.

Testing Your Mettle

One WIP at a time. There's a reason I have that rule, a very important reason. When you're writing your novel and things get hard, your imagination is your worst enemy. When people talk about ideas of how to get inspired, they're ignoring a greater problem: only writing when you're inspired. You need to be able to write even if you're not inspired. There are going to be entire chapters that don't thrill you. You just have to slog through. If you only write when you're inspired, you'll finish a tiny fraction of your proposed manuscripts.

Things were kind of tight on Thursday and Friday for my WIP. So what happened over the weekend? I had ideas for THE RED SOCK SOCIETY, THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE, and WHAT'S BEHIND THE CROOKED DOOR? I was incredibly creative on every project except the one that needs my attention.

Why? Because inspiration is easy. If I write to inspiration, I'll die with a thousand half-finished novels. No, I need to pocket those other mss for when their time comes and buckle down on the one that has 50,000 words and needs another 50k so it can be complete. I want to finish this thing so I can start work on one of those others and finish that one and so on.

It is the substance of a writer that he can write. Period. Not write when the mood strikes him or when it's easy. You understand your craft and you can take it to the appropriate conclusion. New ideas are like will-o-wisps. It's easy to get lured off by the exciting and easy, but when you've sated your writing enthusiasm on this new wellspring, you find yourself standing in the middle of a swamp, sinking in the mire of incomplete work.

Focus. Prove your mettle. Finish what you started. There will be time for the next work when you're done with this one.

Minimum Word Counts

When I lived in St. Louis and began to finally put genuine effort to a career in writing, I began the Third World, an epic setting required of every major fantasy author. To that point, I did not read critically. I read what I enjoyed and read for enjoyment. I did not stop to ponder word choice or sentence structure, pacing or plot. I just read. And because of that, I just wrote.

I wrote chapters for the story of that chapter and gave no thought to reader fatigue1 or for that matter writer fatigue. Both CAUSE AND CONVICTION (originally titled THE END OF BLISS) and A CIRCLE OF CRIMSON STONE have chapters that are 10,000 words long. So when you look at the Queue and you see a word count of 40,000 words, that means that book only has 4 chapters written.

Shortly after this, I joined my first writers' group. The response was the same as everyone else's response would eventually be: shock. One chapter is 10,000 words?! Are you crazy? That's so long? Is it? I didn't think it was. Perhaps it was just a difference of genre. They wrote thriller, sci-fi, women's paranormal and...well, not sure about the last lady. But none of them wrote epic fantasy. So clearly mine was more appropriate for my genre.

Was it? I was sure I had read plenty of epic fantasies with similar word counts. But there would only be one way I could know for sure. I went home and pulled books off my shelf. Martin, Williams, Rothfuss, and others. All epic fantasies, the bellwethers of word count. 250k minimum per manuscript. Then I did a cast off2 on a sampling of chapters in each novel. I got the evidence I needed.

The average word count was 2000 to 2500 words per chapter. In the monsters of the genre, the chapters were still only 1/4 the size of the chapters I was writing. Instead of having 25 chapters, they had 100 or more. So, in my next work, I decided I'd try writing shorter chapters.

My next work was BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE which ended up with chapters as short as 500 words, though most averaged about 2000. This proved to be a good move on my part because--as you can imagine--writing 10,000 word chapters can be exhausting. So now, as a rule for first-draft writing, all my chapters will be 2000 words long (minimum). This has been a great yardstick to use. 1100 words and I'm not fleshing out the scene enough. 4000 words and I've included too much back story. 1800-3300 words seems to be a great sweet spot.

This is also why I'm able to write in order and so quickly. I write 1000 words on my way into work. I write 1000 words on my way home, completing one chapter. 5 chapters--10,000 words--a week, and in 2-3 months, my novel's first draft is complete.


1 It's a weird psychological effect, but readers don't seem to handle long chapters well. They get mentally tired and want a break. Even if they don't take a break from reading, a chapter break seems to reset the internal clock, give them a sense of advancement, of knowing the story is moving toward its end. I could take the same ten-thousand word chapter and split it into two five-thousand word chapters, and the response from readers would be more favorable toward the latter. It's weird, but I've found this to be the case regardless of region or reader level.

2 The whole 250 words/page thing? Yeah, that's crap. That's the metric you use in a meeting when you're asked for the total page count and you haven't done a cast off yet. If you want a quick but accurate measure of how many words there are per page, you take a book of like design (you may not realize it, but books have different interior designs allowing for greater or fewer words per page), and do the following. Find five to ten pages that have a fair balance of dialogue and description (not all description and not all dialogue). Count how many words appear in the first five or six lines and divide by the number of lines. This gives you a word-per-line average. Then count the number of lines on each page and divide by the number of pages: lines-per-page. Divide the total word count by wpl average. Multiply this result by the lpp average and that is your projected page count.

There are ways to get even more precise page counts, but this one can be done in 5 to 15 minutes and is accurate enough for our purposes. For adult fantasy, the word count per page is closer to 300 to 350 per page rather than 250. Over the course of 100k-250k, that extra 100wpp can make a big difference.