Happy Halloween

Got broadband? This week's chuckle only comes animated. Skip, jump, or zip over to Bravo Zulu, scroll down past "Cat Bowling" (boooo!) to the amusing "Crappy Halloween Treats". The proprietors says it's an oldie, in which case, it's a goldie. Ah, memories of Halloweens past--popcorn balls, apples, and once even a toothbrush!

Top Books

Which books would you expect to find in most of the libraries around the world? OCLC has updated its list of the top 1000 titles owned by member libraries--the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the "purchase vote" of libraries around the globe. I must admit to being surprised to see the top ten (ranked in order of popularity):

Bible
US Census
Mother Goose
Divine Comedy
Odyssey
Iliad
Huckleberry Finn
Lord of the Rings
Hamlet
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The whole website is fascinating for a bibliophile. Take a look at the Factoids and page with links to other lists. [top books]

Perish Publishing

Yet another new publishing opportunity/danger: Google Base. If you read the TOS (Terms of Service) closely, you'll find the niggling clause:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, modify, adapt, publish and otherwise use, with or without attribution such Content on Google services solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services.

Thanks to Google Blogscoped because I couldn't get the login to activate--unlike many who can't even get the page to load as Google goes very beta with this new activity that looks to eat up Craigslist, eBay, and every other self-selling type of website. [copyrights]

Writers Rights Trampled

The spread of magazine "brands" over many different media will create new challenges for those of us trying to place material with magazines. Publicists must think beyond simple press releases and product samples and photographers might be asked to provide video in addition to still-photos. And do writers want to continue giving away all rights for a one-time fee (usually miserly) while your words are plastered all over the world, raking in money for the publisher?

asks Meg Weaver in the 10/26/05 Your Wooden Horse News Alert.

You are not just an author, a publisher, or a publicist, you are an information provider. You must provide your knowledge in any form your buyer wants: books, reports, audios, videos, seminars, speeches and/or private consulting.

says Dan Poynter in The Self-Publishing Manual

I ripped off the image from the November issue of Wired magazine's print version of an article on The Super Network: Why Yahoo! will be the center of the million-channel universe. So ... is technology trampling creative rights even as it expands opportunities? Remember my warnings about providing content for free or little pay? Already some blog posts I wrote for a fee are turning up on other websites, some of them unrelated to the blog group that hired me. Those posts are directing lucrative Google Ad Sense advertising to put pennies in pockets of others. And the test article I posted with a content provider showed up on two different websites minus the ads. When I pitched a royal fit, one company made amends, the other simply pulled all of the articles it had taken rather than add the links back in. I suspect they had scraped web page displays rather than spend time copying from the source code. [branding]

Women Writing

Lalla Essaydi's gorgeous and disturbing photographic exhibit, Reinventing the Spaces Within: The Images of Converging Territories currently hangs in the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts. Above is the center image, Night of the Henna. The other photos are of women against similar backgrounds of fabric inscribed with henna. In some, lettering adorns the women's faces and hands, all that can be seen of their henna-inscribed cloth-coverd bodies. In one photo, the woman appears to be inscribing the very fabric she is wearing. Here's the beginning of a translation of the Arabic script seen in Essaydi's photographs:

I am writing. I am writing on me, I am writing on her. The story began to be written the moment the present began. I am asking, how can I be simultaneously inside and out?

A meditation on the condition of Islamic women. [women writing]

Book Sales

One of the more prolific female sci-fi writers is Holly Lisle. She graciously offers a free eBook, Mugging the Muse: Writing Fiction for Love and Money. Everyone who cares about writers, books, book stores,and the publishing industry should read her "ABOUT BUYING BOOKS - MINE OR ANY OTHER AUTHOR'S" beginning on page seven. It's too long to reproduce here, but the gist (NOT jist as too many cybercorrespondents write) of it is that computerized ordering systems are wiping out midlist authors. By "ordering to the net" chain stores automatically reduce the size of succeeding orders for books until none are ordered, even though the "sell through" (percentage of books sold) would remain constant if larger quantities of books were ordered. Lisle urges readers to bombard independent stores with requests to keep authors' books in stock, feeling it's useless to battle big chains' monolithic machines. It seems to me that the battles should take place where the action is (or vice versa), and readers could deluge the big box businesses with complaints and demands. [book sales]

Writers Groups

One of the quotations delivered by the new service, DBQuotes, in the left column included this by Ernest Hemingway:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer`s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.

It caught my eye because of a debate that raged on the forum at The Writer as to this author's deteriorating writing prowess preceding his suicide. I know that Hemingway sought and seemed to enjoy the company of other writers. He also measured his work against theirs, a potentially self-defeating, self-destructive action. I currently have very mixed feelings about the writers' groups in my home town. Some are such cliques that outsiders simply can't get in, although their money is always welcome at events. Others are sinking so fast, they grasp at newcomers to take on too important jobs. Some are just for journalists, some just for women. The writing community is splintered and ineffective. Each group has its big dream and too few volunteers to accomplish much. I wonder what would happen if we all joined hands? [writers' groups]

Flaming Leaves

We should have suspected the day would be different when we awoke to an overcast, yellow sky. It didn't occur to me that what I was seeing in the east was not cloud cover, but smoke, racing westward on 60 m.p.h. Santa Ana winds from the desert. Hot, dry blasts pushed the largest southern California wildfire ever recorded. Yellow skies in Florida had meant tropical storm season. In the Midwest, a tornado. My mind just didn't process the information.

Television news provided clues that a monumental catastrophe was impending. A usual fall fire that had started 60 miles away in the mountains on October 25 was joined by fires to the north and south of central San Diego. As I worked at my computer, I kept a small TV tuned to a local channel giving continuous news about the fires. Word that homes were burning along a certain road I knew jerked my attention away from email. A report that Scripps Ranch was being evacuated jumpstarted my adrenalin. That was only one freeway exit north of my community, on the other side of Miramar Air Station! Ten minutes later, flames jumped I-52, the freeway between Miramar land and my small community of Tierrasanta. I grabbed photo albums and dumped them in the trunk of my car, alerting my non-believing neighbors that they'd better leave.

Exit from our cul-de-sac community was almost completely cut off. I could drive west toward the ocean or south on I-15 toward fires in Mexico. I was too panicked to remain on the road. After spending several hours breathing smoke in a stadium parking lot, I crept down Mission Valley to the first hotel I found. Two expensive days later we were allowed to return to see if we had homes. Ten of my neighbors were losers.

We didn't lose much compared to the overall results: 15 dead, 2,200 homes destroyed, millions spent containing the fire. For a week we moved like zombies. A year later we were still traumatized. Now, two years later, we agree that event has changed our lives. Some feel anxious whenever we hear sirens; some question remaining here. It's fire season again, and last year's relatively lush rainfall resulted in a bumper crop of tinder for this year's fires. We teeter on the brink of the continent, wondering if we'll be shaken off by earthquakes or driven into the Pacific by flames, or simply priced out of the population because, despite the precarious natural dangers, it still seems that everybody wants to live in this paradise.

Excellent Editing

Is an editor a devil or an angel? Writers who think/feel in hyperbole are probably drawn to one definition or the other. New writers are especially vulnerable to such "black and white" misconceptions. Sometimes a particularly negative experience early in one's career causes one to castigate all editors (tarred with the same brush, in cliche-speak). A recent "Editors are Evil" contest at WriteSideOut.com revealed the worst. An initial pleasant experience with editors could similarly color your view for life. Citizen Culture Editor-in-Chief, Jonathon Scott Feit, explained the duties of an editor last fall in an article that has since been replaced on the website with a revised (and I think watered down) version. I teach students that editors can be your best friends; they want to use your work, and they want readers to read it. That my goal when editing, or even just proofreading, a client's writing. [editorial services]

Famous Quotes

Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch. Ian Fleming

Down in the left column (where I stash all the good stuff) you may have noticed a new feature delivering quotations from various writers. It's from QuoteDB. The interactive service provides famous quotations in a wide variety of areas. You can search by author or category, and the website features a limited selection of well-known speeches. You can also email quotes and vote on their popularity. If you register, you can keep a list of your favorites at hand. The main editor, Brenda Wilson, is a professional speech writer since 1985. She has worked with people from various professions and helped them sound like professional speakers. Famous quotations is her passion, according to her article on Michelle Dunn's writing website. I'm not too sure about their grammar, but the article offers tips about using quotations. [quotations]

No Title

Notice anything strange about the image to the right? It's the cover of the paperback edition on Tom Wolfe's latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. No, there's nothing wrong with the graphic. This is exactly how it appears on the Amazon website. The publisher printed the cover without the title. Some people think that the author's name alone is enough to induce people to buy the book. Would you reach for it if you saw it in a book store, on a shelf, in a rack? [authors]

Allonyms Anonymous

This week's A Word a Day theme is words about words and included allonym, explained as

allonym (AL-uh-nim) noun

The name of a person, usually historical, taken by an author as a pen name (as opposed to using a fictional pseudonym).

And later, Anu Garg wrote:

Writing a great novel might be a breeze but choosing what to call your pseudonym, that's not easy! You could simply call it your pen name or byname. If you wish to appear sophisticated, you might say it is your nom de plume or nom de guerre. If you reversed your own name to coin a nickname, it would be an ananym. But why not take a walk in the library, browse the spines, and select an allonym?

My question is why? Why have a pen name at all? Does anyone other than serial romance or mystery writers use them? It is sad that so many women writers still use initials to disguise gender, but why would you not want to be known by your works? [pen names]

Fiction Death

Scroll down Warren Adler's home page to find Fiction is Dying. Yet Again? where he says:

There is a strange disconnect going on in the world of fiction writing and publishing. Less and less fiction is being published by adult trade publishers and magazines and more and more wannabe fiction writers are flooding creative writing courses in colleges, universities and boutique schools offering such courses ... the gateway to novel publishing is now in control of the bean counters, whose limited vision and obeisance to the powerful commercial Gods will, for a time, cripple but not kill, works of invention and imagination, meaning fiction.

He extends the left brain/right brain character of the book publishing industry which pits creativity against the logic of business. I hear the same anguished arguments from the wannabees Adler mentions in online writing forums and informal writers' groups. Within fiction, the schism develops into "literary" vs. "commercial". Is it a range of quality? Some think so. This conflict isn't new, and it isn't limited to the field of creative writing. I can remember the deep disappointment I felt when I learned how much commercial pandering it takes to try to make a living by painting pictures, or even to support painting watercolors as a hobby. I'm not certain many artists are self-supporting. [fiction creativity]

Senior Sock-Hop

I went to my first sock-hop for seniors. I'm not kidding. The dance was held in a gymnasium, during the day, and I sat in the drag line of single women. At first, every time a man approached us, my inner teen jumped up, waved her arms, and shouted, "Pick me! Pick me!" Was it counterproductive not to make eye contact? I'd never seen so many men who needed to put in their teeth and take off their bad rugs. Eventually I danced with the handsomest one. His full head of wavy reddish blond hair was obviously authentic. Dressed in a stylish grey suit, he also smelled divine. I couldn't understand a word that he babbled through a thick accent, speech impediment, and possibly senility. Still, the experience did not duplicate high school dances entirely. Many couples flew around the floor. Everyone smiled and chatted, men and women mingling, meeting, socializing, and exercising. It was all it was supposed to be without the adolescent angst. [creative nonfiction]

Story Blogs

The other day debut author Greg Fishbone wrote:

Story blogs. These are stories told in serial format on blogs. I've stumbed over two today, which means there have got to be at least 20,000 of them in hiding, assuming they follow the visible cockroach rule.

Tom Evslin calls his a "blook"--apparently short for "weB LOg boOK". Hackoff.com is quite an incredible production, including a wiki, a reader forum, a contest with prizes, and a faux website for the fictional company in the story. That's in addition to the comments, trackbacks, RSS, email subscription, and linkroll features you'd expect from from a blog. And the Cafe Press store. And the Javascript "blookmarks". All that and the project is still only in beta! The release blook will probably make radish rosettes, too.

Then there's Ray Rhamey, who calls his story blog a "story blog". It's not as fancy but does feature a vampire kitty-cat and is narrated in the first person. It's called "Death Sucks: On Being A Vampire Kitty-Cat".

Actually, of the two I'm more interested in Ray's because he claims to be making up the story as he goes along, bootstrapping the plot in front of a live audience. [story blogs]

Writing Aloud

Over in The Writing Show a calvalcade of horror stories will appear, starting tomorrow, called "The 14 Days of Halloween" from the Australian Horror Writers Association. "Big deal," you might think, "horror stories". But wait! There's more.

Each day, an author will read from his or her own horror-filled work. Some of the stories will feature sound effects.

These are podio (MP3) broadcasts for which, according to this site page, you don't need an I-pod, but to listen on your computer, you will need a piece of software like the Windows Media player, iTunes, Winamp, Real player, and so on. If you don't already have the software, there are links to obtain it. Many of the useful-sounding writing advisories at The Writing Show are in audio format, and you can subscribe to notifications of them through RSS feeds or aggregators. [podio]

Best Writers

From the This Is Not Art 05 Moblog: Pictures from the 2005 This Is Not Art festival in Newcastle, Australia, posted by festival goers we have writers are the best. No credit given for photographer or on Flickr "tina pics" gallery. Permission to reprint requested, but no response received.
[hand writing]

Book Relief

Book Relief is an unprecedented, publishing industry-wide effort that will distribute at least 5 million books:

to those displaced by Katrina,
to schools and libraries supporting the evacuees, and
to replenish the schools and libraries ultimately rebuilt in the Gulf Coast.

Over 370,000 children are displaced, 600 schools destroyed. Help get books back into the lives of those affected by Katrina.

Yahoo Content

Meg Weaver, writing in her 10/12/05 Wooden Horse News Alert asked:

Is this guy serious?

Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo, talked to the attendees at a recent Internet trade show, calling Yahoo a "media company" because "in the 20th century, media was about content and distribution." But now, "to be a media company, technology is at the core."

Media is not about content?

[media content]

World66 Photos

From this month's World66 newsletter:

World66 has become a great resource for travel photos. At this moment we have over 10.000 photos (in fact the counter is at: 10.672) of locations as far as Onstwedde or Timbuktu.

And good photos too! That is because our list of images is, just like our articles, subject to our moderation process. Not so good images are replaced when better ones are uploaded. This way the World66 travel images database is constantly improving, making the best resource for open content travel images on the net.

When we have enough images for a destination, a photo gallery is automatically generated. You can find the photo gallery in the section menu at the left hand side. Examples of nice photo galleries are Rome, Amsterdam, Mexico or Cuba.

[ photo resource]

Therapy Fiction

An editor at a small publishing company describes what happened when she asked for novel submissions in Guardian Unlimited Books By genre The ultimate needle in a haystack

When publisher and writer Susan Hill asked aspiring writers to send in their work, she didn't anticipate the deluge of abysmal manuscripts

Just two of the more than 3,700 submissions were from agents. She read only seven, and next May Long Barn Books will publish The Extra Large Medium or Unfinished Business by Helen Slavin. Hill said:

When the real thing comes along it is unmistakable and this is by a born writer with a crisp style and wholly individual voice. It is very funny, moving, original, off-beat and it tells not one but a basketful of stories about characters who walk straight off the page to grab your attention.

[fiction]

Indian Bloggers

For Indian authors, blogs are not just another expression of creativity--they are an intrinsic tool in creating awareness of their work -- DNA

Occasionally I dip (or slip) into websites beyond the comfort zone of Western Civ. The Indian Daily News & Analysis carries an entertainment column called After hrs. with UNA. This one, A midsummer night's blog, rounds up opinions from Indian authors who also blog about their work. Fascinating, sometimes conflicting, views about "going public" and what it can do for their careers. [authors' blogs]

Blooker Prize

It had to happen. After all my raving about books from blogs, someone's established a prize for them. Lulu.com calls such a production a "blook". Another new term I saw recently is "flog", as in Family Blog. The blook prize is technically The 2006 Lulu Blooker Prize for Blooks and will be awarded for fiction, nonfiction, and comics. Thank [fill in the blank] they didn't call them "graphic novels"!

The winner in each category will be awarded US $1,000, although one of the three winners will be deemed the "grand" or overall winner and will receive $2,000. The prize money totals $4,000 (just over £2,000). All three winners will also receive a blurb/quote from the chair of the judges for use in future promotion of their blook, and a little piece of literary immortality as a winner of the inaugural Lulu Blooker Prize.

[books from blogs prizes]

Newspaper Future

Over at MarketingStudies.net, Rok Hrastnik asked Internet Taking the Upper Hand 'Against' Newspapers: What Can Publishers Do?". The Slovenian entrepreneur suggested that papers online:

include rich media content
embrace citizenship reporting
produce supplemental content
allow customization
attend to technological changes

Other enterprises, like Google and Yahoo, are doing a much better job of presenting news using these criteria. Blogs integrated into niche websites also come to mind, along with aggregators and direct RSS feeds. Digital delivery of news and other content is a living, growing, mutating medium. No one knows what will develop, but the crystal ball view I have for ink-on-paper media looks pretty cloudy right now. [print media]

Empty Phrases

In a recession, businesses reduce advertising and print publications shrink. I saw the sign "Paper's Light Write Tight" at the Dayton Daily News during such a period, reminding reporters that story space was short. There was no room for empty phrases, like these lines that are in vogue and still meaningless:

because children are our future
if we've learned anything
on a daily basis

Keep your writing tight, as if paper's always light, no space for trite. [writing]

Writing Basics

In Writing Basics, a Writer's Digest book, the author, Thomas R. Raley, offers steps to become a more productive writer, including these:

Keep a journal. Nothing extravagant or detailed. Simply record each thing you do to advance your writing. You'll need to perform editing and market research, prepare submissions, read books in your field and complete research for your story or article. So take it one step further and record each of these in the journal. It's not for publication; it's simply a tool to help keep you disciplined. Avoid unrealistic expectations. Writing isn't an event; it's a process. Just as you should set realistic goals for your writing, you should also set expectations. If you decide you must write 10 pages a day, you could be setting yourself up for failure. Even working part time may prevent you from achieving this type of goal. If you can average one page a day, at the end of one year, you'll have a 365-page manuscript--a complete novel in 12 months. Doesn't sound quite as painful now, does it?

Thoughts to ponder while considering if you're going to participate in NaNoWriMo. [writing]

Milestone Anniversaries

This summer brought me milestone anniversaries: graduation and marriage. They took place 40 years ago, another time and place, almost in another life it sometimes seems. Humans have a fascination, almost an obsession, with remembering events that took place ten, and sometimes five, years ago. Look at which reunions are celebrated. When do we receive silver, gold, diamonds? These anniversaries not only bring back to mind the day and happenings, they also trigger whole life retrospectives and prospectives. Sometimes the emotions engendered are powerful enough to set off crises or major changes. It's as if we reach a crossroad or divergence in life's path and choices loom. In writing, such an event can present a character with a turning point, provoke conflict, even lead to a resolution. Don't forget the birthdays. [writing]

Sob Stories

It's no secret that I begin my day with Katie, Matt, Anne, and Al of NBC's The Today Show. I've watched that program since its inception. I met J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee who tormented the program's first host, Dave Garroway. My mother and I had the show on during breakfast, and in the afternoons I suffered through her viewing of Queen for a Day, the original TV sob story. Currently the Today gang is making a big deal of "giving" Habitat for Humanity homes to hurricane victims. Everyone looks uncomfortable. I saw them raising the first structure in Mississippi that they'd pre-fabbed in New York, and thought, "What about the other 8,000 homeless as a result of the storms?" Is NBC exploiting these devastated persons? See the Poynter Institute's thought-provoking analysis by Roy Peter Clark. [writing]

Providing Content3

For background see Providing Content1 and Providing Content2. After four notices and an invoice from PayPal, the offending website in this mini-saga has included an acceptable version of the links in my article. I am charitably assuming there was a translation problem because the business is Russian. The interesting side story is that when the content provider, Gary McLaren of ArticleStop, checked my complaint, he said he found 40 other articles the offender had used minus links. Mr. McLaren wears a white hat, boos to the nameless Russian company, and an end to this tale. Oh, will I post any more such articles? Maybe, if there are no more problems, but I suspect this is wishful thinking.

Blog Books

Three top names in the writing/publishing world are using blogs to create buzz about their books. You'd think well-established writers like Neil Gaiman, Chris Anderson, and John Batelle wouldn't need to be self-marketing. That's what publishers are for, right? Apparently not. Science fiction author Gaiman is cited in Blogger Buzz as using his blog to help boost his latest book to the top of the NY Times bestseller list, and "he mentioned how his blog helps him overcome increasingly-small marketing budgets for his books, and connect directly with his readers and fans." Meanwhile, Mark Williams at the MIT Technology Review wrote about Batelle using his blog as part of the process to write The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture and Anderson's The Long Tail: A Public Diary on the Way to a Book. Williams warns:

Despite their familiarity, the ideas in The Search are important and real. Battelle is a clear and forceful writer. The blog-powered process that he (and Anderson) are using may be an effective way to refine ideas and ensure their survival. But to judge by Battelle's book, successfully blogging a book has this unintended consequence: by the time the book is published, your most receptive audience may find your ideas a little stale.

[buzz]

Gray Areas

Ann Beattie has been named the winner of the annual $30,000 Rea Award for the Short Story. Ms. Beattie, who has published eight collections of short stories, including "The Burning House" and the recent "Follies: New Stories" (Scribner), writes narratives that "explore the way men and women struggle with new emotional territory, the gray areas of love and vulnerability," the judges said. ... Ms. Beattie, who is also the author of seven novels, is the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia

says the N.Y. Times, which you may or may not be able to view. I read this news just after I finished The Burning House. "Explore" is an apt term to apply to these short stories. In them something happens (sometimes not much) and then I think, "so what?" I found a more satisfying exploration of the gray areas of love and vulnerability in Lee Martin's new novel, The Bright Forever. The high concept for this book would be "The Lovely Bones in Winesburg, Ohio." Mr. Martin teaches creative writing at Ohio State University. He, too, has won several awards. [writing prizes]

Providing Content2

You will recollect my previous post about having submitted an article to an Internet content provider and finding the article on another website without the valuable links embedded as they were supposed to be. That was last Wednesday when I notified both the offending website and the content provider. I haven't received a response to my email messages, but when I checked the web page today, links had been added. Unfortunately, they were not the original ones. This might be understandable, considering my article advertises Hancock Websites and a book describing how to have an effective website, both of which might be considered competition for the Russian website company using my article. At least I can report positive progress.

Real Writers

Often we participate in discussions on "what (or who) is a writer?" I have a few definitions, depending on the situation. For example, for my class on "Be a Successful Writer" I use the term to mean "paid for writing". That's the goal of "success" for that course. In general, one of my first blog posts required only that a writer be someone who is writing regularly, working at being published/paid, although that goal may not yet be achieved. Others have more stringent requirements, as I found in the Poets & Writers, Inc. application to be listed in their Directory of Writers. Apparently it's only for Poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and spoken word artists, which leaves out most of my career productions, unless you count my tax returns as "creative nonfiction". They use a point system of publications to evaluate one's suitability, excluding:

Journalism or scholarly texts (biography, history, how to, travel guides, book reviews)
Publications from vanity presses such as Publish America, International Library of Poetry, Poetry.com, Noble House Publishers or from other presses or publications that ask authors to pay all or some of the publishing costs
Self-published work, or work from presses that do not offer authors standard book contracts, including, but not limited to, online entities like iUniverse.com and AuthorHouse.com

I find it amusing that P&W refers to these people as "writers" at all. More often the words "literary" and "author" are associated with such productions, except for the "spoken word artists". I find this entire matter most disconcerting. [writers]

OWL Handouts

The Online Writing Lab at Perdue University is a useful learning tool for those just getting started in their writing careers and for ESL students. See OWL Handouts Listed by Topic, which is just one type of index page for a wealth of material about how to use English words to express yourself. This lab is naturally oriented towards academic and business writing, but starting at the top of the page, you can follow links to explanations for the most basic English language parts. I also like the fact that they offer exercises with answer keys, although I suggest avoiding the Interactive Exercise unit until it is replaced with something less confusing. [writers' resources]