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November 20th, 2009
03:38 pm - Random Weirdness
There is a word -- and I wish I could remember what it was -- that describes an advanced technology being used to imitate a more primitive technology. Rolling ticker tapes on web sites are a prime example.
Example #2 is the way I keep my place during revisions. When I get to the end of my writing session, I type "BOOKMARK" into the manuscript. A simple text search gets me right back to my spot in the morning.
So it turns out that I am using a multisyllabic phenomenon whose name I can't remember on a regular basis.
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November 17th, 2009
11:18 am - Why Host Writing Contest?
Most of you know that AnthologyBuilder sponsored a writing contest this year. (The judges are still out on the finalists: results soon.)
Of the marketing tools I've utilized, writing contests rank very near the top. Why?
1. They attract attention
Contests are fun, and nothing is quite as alluring as the prospect of shiny prizes. People will not only enter the contest, but will cheerfully tell their friends about it, link to it, and so forth.
2. They encourage new visitors
Many marketing efforts are aimed at encouraging previous visitors to come back to the web site. Contests reach a new audience because they're interesting to groups who have had no prior exposure to your product.
3. They are not pushy
I hate pushy sales-people, blinking web banners, and pesky spam emails saying "Buy! Buy! Buy!"
Contests are a pleasant marketing tool because they are totally laid-back. Entrants don't have to make a purchase or ever come back to the site. It serves the noble goal of marketing ('making people aware of your product') without falling into the sleazy pitfalls ('pressuring people to buy something they don't really want').
4. They give something back
Writing contests are a great way to support and enourage aspiring writers. (I'm not sure why, but new writers seem far more likely to enter contests than they are to submit to established magazines. Perhaps it's because contests feel less threatening.) It gives something back to the community, and that makes me feel all warm-fuzzy inside.
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Short version: I heart contests. If I ever manage to (a) finish A New Kind of Sunrise and (b) sell it, I am sure as heck going to find a way to tie a writing contest into the marketing strategy.
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October 28th, 2009
11:21 pm - Salvaging
Six-year-old Alex has developed a keen interest in all things electrical; especially in taking them apart. So far we have dissected a flashlight, a hand microscope, a remote control caterpillar, and an electronic alien-in-a-car with a broken wheel. He squealed with glee when we connected the caterpillar motor to a battery and it started spinning.
I find I enjoy both the time spent together and the excuse to get rid of items that I otherwise would have kept. It's hard for me to throw away electronic toys even if they have stopped functioning. This way, I can chalk their destruction up as a learning experience.
Alex is carefully collecting circuit boards, LEDs, battery mounts, and motors from each dismantled object. He wants to use them to build a robot even better and cooler than the Wowee Robot Uncle David sent us for Christmas several years ago. He plans to do this in stages, taking each robot apart to re-salvage the parts into an even better model.
Today I picked up a soldering iron at the hardware store. Tomorrow the real fun will start.
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October 27th, 2009
08:22 pm - Randomness
Hexes and Tooth Decay is now up at Darwin's Evolutions.
Toilet Paper Wedding Dresses. Gosh. Wow. I don't know whether to be entranced or appalled.
Schlock Mercenary books can now be ordered from local game stores. Makes me wish I had one nearby so I could pester the manager to put more copies on the shelves.
By the way, the bargain hunter in me just noticed that the Schlock Store has a clearance section. Just in case you're a cheapskate like me who cares more about the book's content than about whether the spine has a crease.
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October 17th, 2009
01:15 pm - Does reading require more effort than watching a movie?
The generally accepted knowledge -- at least among booklovers -- is that reading is a far more active experience than watching television because you have to imagine what everything looks like.
I find myself wondering whether that's actually true.
Books leave more room for the reader to visualize the situation, I'll concede that. But what about complex tasks like extrapolating characters' motives, predicting what they'll do next, or wondering what that mysterious man in the black overcoat is up to? Books often hand that information to you cut-and-dried, where as movie-watchers, unable to read the charaters' thoughts, must figure it all out.
There's a lot of trash on tv, no question. (There's a lot of trash on bookshelves, too, as it happens.) But let's say we take truly high-quality entertainment from both mediums: the best book you've ever read and the best movie you've ever watched. Is it really true that watching the movie is a passive experience while reading the book is somehow more active, more intellectually stimulating, or otherwise better for you?
I'm not sure it is.
Does anyone know of studies that compare brain activity while reading a book to brain activity while watching a film?
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October 15th, 2009
10:35 am - Servant of a Dark God
 
The first book in John Brown's trilogy was released this week. John is very cool, and is also one of the judges for the AB Writing Contest. Yes, he's going to be reading finalist stories during the first month of his book's release, bless him.
Random Coolness: On the Amazon page for this book, four of the 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought X' links are also written by someone I know.
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October 14th, 2009
10:04 pm - Things Writing Can Do That Movies Can't
When I watched Moulin Rouge I experienced a moment of utter despair. (It happened to occur during the rotating aerial view of the golden elephant room, but really, it could have happened anywhere in the movie.) The combination of imagery, music and story was so powerful, so omnipresent, so... so... cinimatic that it made me long to write a story that could do all the same things. And I knew I couldn't. If you want music, imagery, and raw power, cinema has literature outclassed. Cinema has a direct link to our primary senses -- sight and hearing. Writing doesn't.
I moped around for several days resenting the technology that made my writing feel so hopelessly lackluster. I decided that, if I couldn't match movies in visual and audial stimulation, I would just have to find literature's strengths and learn to capitalize on them.
Here are five areas where literature is more effective than cinema.
Secondary Senses
Cinema may dominate in the realm of sight and sound, but it falters at subtle sensations like the nip of winter air or the rough texture of tree bark. A camera zoom on a woman with her hair blowing in the wind lets us know the weather is windy, but it doesn't make us feel the rush of air against our skin.
Cinema is even more handicapped when it comes to depicting smells, and must often resort to heavy-handed methods. (We've all seen coffee commercials where a well-dressed woman inhales deeply over a steamy cup of coffee, right?)
Point of View
This is perhaps the most frequently touted advantage of literature: the idea that you can get inside a character's skin and experience the world as he or she does.
While it's true that you can't read the minds of characters on the silver screen, cinema circumvents this problem through dialogue. The dialogue patch falls short, however, when we leave the realm of third-person limited and move into omniscient POV. A character may reveal his fears, his prejudices, his virtues and his passions through his speech, but he cannot reasonably talk about things he doesn't know.
Selective Description
Each person, upon walking into a room, is likely to view it differently. A pickpocket might notice the wallet lying on the table. A gardener might see that the floral arrangement is wilting. A child might focus on the stuffed teddy bear.
In cinema, although it is possible to zoom in on particular elements of a room, it is not possible to place emphasis on part of the scene the same way literature does. In writing, the reader has only the few details the author provides. The selection of these details, therefore, gives the author far more power to manipulate the audience's experience than the director has when he designs a set.
Telescoping Time
A written narrative may spend pages discussing a few seconds of action or skim over decades within a sentence. Cinematic approaches to time manipulation -- slow motion effects and the musical montage -- are neither as subtle nor as natural as the literary equivalents.
Unexpected Analogies
Movies frequently tap into analogies that viewers are likely to expect: using a plant as the symbol of a relationship, for example. But movies cannot introduce a startling, unexpected analogy with ease. Literature is free to liken love to oysters, gunmen to hamsters, and loneliness to socks hanging from the laundry line on a sunny day, and it doesn't have to worry that the audience might not pick up the hint.
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October 12th, 2009
10:39 pm - Let's Talk About Style
I got an email today and, while answering it thought "Gosh dang, this would make a great blog post". So hey, here it is.
The question asked was: "Is style an issue with you?"
[By 'style' we're talking about what some people would call 'technique' and other people would call 'stupid, dogmatic laws of writing'. Things like where your paragraph breaks are, how you handle speech attribution, single vs multiple POV, whether you use narrative or exposition, the use of cliché phrases, and so forth.]
Answer:
I think style is an issue with everyone. The only question is where you draw the cutoff point. In the extreme example, one could argue that spelling and grammatical errors are just a style issue; that the story is what matters and one shouldn't get caught up in minutia. But of course, as a reader, I find spelling and grammatical errors so distracting that I can't pay attention to the story no matter how stunning the plot is.
Speech attribution, Show-Don't-Tell, and similar "laws of writing" are a much more gray area, but the principal in action is the same: the style should facilitate the communication of the story to the reader, not obstruct it. This means that in order to get my story across to certain readers, I must to work within stylistic constraints.
Here's the key part: the constraints change depending on who your reader is. Connoisseurs of literary fiction respond to a different range of styles than, say, space opera fans or young adult readers. Authors -- new authors, in particular -- tend to be hypersensitized to style issues and are jarred by things that Average Joe Reader wouldn't notice.
As for my personal tastes... it's hard to say without specific examples, but multiple characters speaking in the same paragraph would be likely to bother me (it's harder to sort out who's saying what when), while show-don't-tell would only be an issue if I happened to be bored and was looking for something to blame it on.
Come to think of it, I've noticed that people tend to get nit-picky only when they're bored. If the story sucks them in, they have very little to say, but if there's not enough tension they remember that they're supposed to be critiquing and start citing rules. Hence, I sometimes pay less attention to exactly what the critiquer says than to where he or she said it.
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October 8th, 2009
10:04 pm - Writer-Brain in Overdrive Again
Scientists Find Path to the Fountain of Youth.
What fascinates me most about this article are the following paragraphs:
The genetically altered female mice lived 20 percent longer... than their normal counterparts.
At age 600 days, the equivalent of middle age in humans, the altered female mice were leaner, had stronger bones, were protected from type 2 diabetes, performed better at motor tasks and demonstrated better senses and cognition, according to the study....
Male mice showed little difference in lifespan although they also demonstrated some of the health benefits, including less resistance to insulin and healthier T-cells. Researchers said reasons for the differences between the two sexes were unclear.
Oh wow. What if there really were a Fountain-of-Youth Pill, but it only works on women? Would production be outlawed because the drug is inherently sexist? Would women rule the earth because they have more time to amass money and education? Would men rule the earth because new affirmative action legislation gives them an advantage in the marketplace?
I'm not even going to start in on the metabolic possibilities. Pigouts without consequences? Talk about culture shift.
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September 26th, 2009
11:04 pm - Ooh, this is cool.
I stumbled across this by accident, but as it happens, I've met the woman behind it.
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September 17th, 2009
08:17 pm - 5 Ways Kids Help Stay-At-Home Writers
1) They got you into the business. If they hadn't come along, you'd probably be doing something more stressful, more lucrative, and less enjoyable.
2) They require frequent attention. This interrupts bursts of creativity, but it also interrupts glaze-eyed stints and obsessive clicking to see if a new email has showed up in the in-box.
3) They are ergonomically beneficial: They ensure that you stand up and move around at least once every thirty minutes.
4) They provide a neverending source of inspiration.
5) They keep you happy.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif) amused
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September 16th, 2009
10:21 am - ...and then there are quiet days
Like yesterday.
Alex used most of a roll of tape for his machine and Aubrey used most of a bar of soap in the bathtub, but they were both happily occupied for nearly an hour.
Alex and Aubrey also partner-danced to one of our music CDs, complete with underarm turns, promenades, and lifts. The cuteness level was way off the meter. I asked Alex where he learned to put one hand behind his partner's back and hold her free hand with the other, and he said, "You showed me, Mommy."
I did, but that was at least six months ago. That kid's got a memory like an elephant.
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September 10th, 2009
11:18 am - Interview and Interesting Reading
Luc Reid, who is a stellar author and all-around intriguing guy, has interviewed me at The Willpower Engine: Entrepreneurial Motivation and Creating a Business from Scratch: An Interview with Nancy Fulda
I've been a bit silent on the blogging front lately. That's because I'm doing some work-for-hire programming and it's eating all my time. If you're looking for neat stuff to read, though, you should check out the SFWA Blog. They run interviews, news alerts, and fascinating articles about linguistics, morphology, and building an author web site.
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August 28th, 2009
03:05 pm - Disturbing Email Heads-Up
Samantha Henderson posted a very valuable warning a few days ago. I think it's worth passing along.
If any of you have received an email from a Dr. L. Prakash praising one of your stories, you should read this post.
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11:07 am - Stories I will not write
Aside from the fact that I'm ineligible to enter AB's Match-That-Artwork contest, I also have no spare time. Nevertheless, my muse won't shut up, so here are the stories I won't be writing.
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Janna doesn't exist. She is the unborn grandaughter of a lonely woman who has willed her into being. This has created a metaphysical disruption that Janna cannot correct on her own. And everyone she asks for help begins to slowly go insane. |
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In 2143, archeologists in China uncover the skeleton of a dragon. |
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The largest particle accelerator of all time was built on the moon in 2081. Its first trial run unfolds one of the hidden dimensions predicted by string theory. This causes massive earthquakes, creates wormholes that can be used for transportation, and knocks the moon out of orbit. |
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All Tepp ever wanted was to be a Dreamspinner. What could be more noble than weaving threads of the future into mortals' dreams to help guide their days?
But the Elders have terminated his apprenticeship and the only option left open to him involves a dark, de-winged stranger, intricately crafted lies, and nightmares. |
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Meet Chloe.
There are twelve of her, each gene-crafted to be a genious in her field and conditioned into absolute obedience. Or so her creators think. |
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Jonas is spaceborn, his bones too brittle to survive a trip to earth. He will never meet his cousins. He will never have a playmate who stays longer than a few months on the space station. His parents claim he has a bright future in space, but Jonas is determined to carve out a place for himself back home, on the blue planet. |
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August 19th, 2009
11:55 pm - The Supermarket Theory of Genetic Manipulation
Have you ever been given something -- a pair of shoes, a used book, a new set of tools -- and had the odd experience of discovering that, although you would never have bought it had you been browsing the racks at the Supermarket, it is exactly what you wanted, and is in fact far better than what you would have chosen to buy instead?
This happens to me all the time. I am apparently a poor shopping strategist. The clothing I think I want turns out to be only mediocre, while the shirt I never would have lifted from the rack ends up as part of my favorite outfit.
I even came by my husband this way. You know how teenage girls make lists of everything they want in a guy? Well, I never did that, because I thought it was stupid. But if I had done it, the list would not have been anything like Fabian. He walked into my life being all the things I didn't know I wanted.
Sometimes, we just don't know what's good for us. We really don't.
Sooo... I've been thinking about designer babies and the copious Gattica-like futures that are cropping up in science fiction stories. You know the scenario: all children are carefully selected to precise genetic requirements. 'Natural' babies are an abomination, with no life and no future. Or there are only a very few Neo-Aryans, but they are rapidly taking over the world.
Nope. I don't buy it. Because we just don't know what's good for us.
I predict the opposite. People will pay for designer babies, no question, but the resulting Perfect People will not, in fact, grow into the next generation of Movers and Shakers. They will not all become leading perfomers and politicians. They will not be the ones making scientific breakthroughs. They will not be disproportionately represented in the ranks of the world's millionaires.
Why not? Because parents picking out their ideal child are going to do a dang lousy job of predicting which genes will make their kid successful. Playing genetic roulette is going to be a lot like playing the stock market. No matter how much you study, you're never going to consistently perform much better than random.
Add to this the unavoidable psychological issues for designer children (ranging from "Mom gave me the body of a prima ballerina, but I don't want to live out her dream" to "My parents could have made me a mathematical genius! Why did they leave me in the mediocre intelligence range, instead?") and the necessary blunders of early experimentation ("What? Who could have guessed that the gene for perfect pitch combined with the gene for high energy levels creates a predisposition for anxiety attacks?") and the world's first generation of aggressively designed babies has a woefully poor prognosis.
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August 16th, 2009
06:44 pm - Aubrey's Definition of Friendship
According to my three-year-old's social algorithm:
1) If we wear our hair the same way, we're friends.
2) If our shirts match, we're friends.
3) If we like the same game, we're friends.
4) If I'm riding a red bike and you're pushing a red baby buggy, we're friends.
5) If you say something I didn't want to hear, we're not friends.
6) If I'm snuggling Daddy and I don't want you to snuggle Daddy, we're not friends.
7) If you make me mad, we're not friends anymore, not ever again.
8) If more than twenty seconds have passed since I unfriended you and one of (1)-(4) applies, we're friends.
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August 14th, 2009
04:01 pm - On Being Classy
Alethea Kontis once made a fabulous post about the importance of being classy. I'm going to paraphrase like heck here because I can't find the source material and we all know how unreliable human memory is, but the lesson I took home was this: Don't be the person everyone's mildly annoyed at. Be classy. Be courteous. Offer to buy lunch for the professional whose time you're taking up at a convention. Smile. Don't gossip, and don't pinch pennies.
Obviously this principle can be taken too far, particularly if pocketbooks are involved. But I do believe that you get farther in life if you treat other people with dignity and respect.
Take a real life example. This week I discovered a problem with the image files for our next round of promotional badges. Joe Hibler at Pure Buttons could have just told me 'Sorry, it's too late to make changes'. Instead, he swapped in corrected images even though the buttons had already gone into production.
Now that's classy.
Do you think I have warm fuzzy feelings about Joe right now? Do you think I'm going to sing his praises the next time someone asks me about our vendor? You better believe it.
Now don't get the impression that I think self-interest is the only (or even the most important) reason to treat other people well. I don't. But self-interest is the part where we often get hung up. In all aspects of life, but especially in business relationships, we fall prey to thinking that it's an either/or situation. We tell ourselves that we don't have time to be nice, that we can't afford to be generous, but it's just not true. Most of the time, we don't have to choose between doing the Right Thing and looking after our own interests. They are the same.
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August 13th, 2009
10:54 pm - Writing as a Business
Literary Agent Kristin Nelson is running a series of articles about running your writing as a business. Moon Rat followed up with a harsh-but-honest post on reasons to make your delivery date. Seems to be a theme this month.
Writing is a business. Regardless of whether we're in it for the Art or the Money, our avocation requires that we sell books: first to editors and publishers and then to the general public. We cannot afford to shy away from phrases like market research, publicity, added value and customer service. We're used to thinking of these terms in the context of SuperStores and bright red CLEARANCE signs, but they are just as relevant to writers.
This week I've been reading Selling The Wheel by Jeff Cox. It's an educational allegory (with poor characterization and a predictable plot) about the inventor of the Wheel.
This book makes me think of the plight of writers everywhere. I mean, here's this guy with a revolutionary creation -- pure genius; something that will change the history of humanity forever -- and he can't find anyone willing to buy it.
All of a sudden I'm looking at the publishing industry in a whole new light. The fact that something is wonderful or breaking-edge or 'what everyone will be buying in the future' does not necessarily mean that anyone is willing to buy it right now. Stunning thought.
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August 8th, 2009
07:39 pm - Reprints vs. Unpublished Material
Several people have asked me why AnthologyBuilder takes reprints, but not unpublished material. Wouldn't it be better to have new stuff? Stuff you can't get anywhere else?
No, I don't believe it would be better. Our business model is based on the idea of having a printable library; a place you can get that story you've been meaning to read but missed when the magazine it first appeared in was in the display stands.
We're also built on the idea that you can come to us and build the anthology you've always wished would show up in stores: Transvestite Dragons; Swashbuckling Bunny Rabbits; Stories You'd Feel Comfortable Showing To Your Grandmother; you name it. To do that, we need a LARGE selection of stories, and that means we can't pay very much for them. (We are, alas, not yet rich.)
What all this comes down to is that it's better for both our authors and our customers if we print previously published stories.
It's better for customers because they get fast, easy access to stories on their 'to read' list, plus a wide selection of new fiction to build Holy Cornucopia, Batman: This is the Anthology I've Always Wanted!
For our authors, it's better to require previously published submissions because our pay rate is far lower than what any author should accept for First Publication Rights. We recommend that authors first sell their story to another market, and THEN submit it to AnthologyBuilder in order to reach a wider audience.
Now, if you're an author just breaking into print, this might sound disheartening. It's like an in-club: once you're published, there are all these cool places where you can reprint your work. But how do you break in in the first place?
The good news is that there are hundreds of markets looking for original fiction. You can find many of them at ralan.com and at duotrope. There are also free, online critique groups that will help you hone your writing skills. Check out the discussion forums for your favorite magazine (many magazines host critique groups or threads on writing advice), or visit critters.org
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