Eileen Young

It’s time to come clean: I am a Homestuck.

What, that terminology means nothing to you because you are not already a member of the fandom?

When my boss said he’d arrange for me to spend some time with a Kobo Vox at our staff Christmas party, I thought he was going to borrow his girlfriend’s.

He didn’t.

He gave me one.

It’s pink.

I made noises of enthusiasm that I’m reasonably certain my coworkers had not previously produced by a human.

The Kobo Vox is a backlit ereader with wifi accessibility. This means that, whenever I am in range of a wifi network (school, home, Starbucks, the library), I can download as many books as I like directly to my ereader. It also means that I can check my email, browse the web, and watch Youtube videos, if I like. One of the highlights so far is that it lets me read Google Docs easily, so I can read my friend’s novel-in-progress on the bus to work.

Having not had a cell phone in three years, I was a little concerned that a touch-screen, and especially a touch-screen keyboard, would frustrate me beyond all rationality. But the keyboard has proven well-spaced, so I mis-type only about as often as I do on a physical keyboard.

The automatic bookmarking is a nice feature, as well. I find I’m curling up more frequently and more easily with my ereader than with a book or my laptop, and it’s fantastic.

So I finally succumbed to Blogger’s promptings and integrated this site with my Google Plus profile. It doesn’t appear to have changed anything on the front end, which is great. I guess this means I can delete the Google Plus link from the list of links for other places to find me, with this integrated.

There’s something to be said for a unified web presence, and people being able to track you across multiple media. It introduces people who may know you from one area – a comic or group blog, for example – to other things you’re good at, like prose writing or editing or whatever else you do.

I know I treat this very much as a hub site: every social networking site I’m on links here, even if I don’t link to all of them in my sidebar (because, really, if you’re coming here to find out about my editing rates, you don’t particularly need to find my OKCupid dating profile, do you?), and that works well for me. I get frustrated when I find authors who have an author site, and a Tumblr, and a Twitter, and no mention is made on any of them that the others even exist, or if mention is made it’s buried somewhere in the archive never to be seen again. So all of the projects I work on that are ready for public consumption are linked here for everyone’s convenience.

The biggest downside to the integration with the rest of Google’s services is a fairly new thing to the rest, too: the interface is now very white, and I don’t like the aesthetics of the navigation.

Biggest positive might be that I no longer have to update as many places with a new profile picture whenever I get a haircut.

Next week I’ll be talking about the Kobo Vox, as I get to play with one at my office Christmas party tomorrow.

Island Writer is now available for free download here: http://victoriawriters.ca/?page_id=16

So, I exist. Sort of. Mostly. I passed my class, and now just have licensing to face down before I can work as a paramedic in BC.

This means I get to rejoin the adventure of looking into what’s new with publishing (while not working at the place that pays me or on Island Writer or Theory Train). Anne McCaffrey’s death on November 22 was sad: I loved her book The Ship Who Sang. The Kindle Fire is deliciously pretty, and I am in lust for either it or the Next 7, since both perform as lightweight tablets as well as e-readers.

Amazon is looking like a better and better route for independent authors, as you are competing with the entirety of the market there. Smashwords has become what looks like much more of a niche where only the self-published live. Which is great for readers looking for indie writers, but there aren’t enough of those yet. Feedbooks, where I published my novella and downloaded Wuthering Heights, is now showing me mostly porn (word deliberately chosen over erotica) under the ‘New and Popular’ tab. That’s disappointing, as they encouraged Creative Commons licensing, where Smashwords won’t accept it at all, or wouldn’t last I checked.

Regular updates will, I hope, resume this Wednesday with a write-up of the launch of the latest issue of Island Writer.

I am taking time from bitching about and practicing spinal rolls for my EMR class to post about how much SOPA sucks. http://americancensorship.org/ has more information. BoingBoing has more information. The Silicon Alley Insider had a very well put together article for those of you for whom BoingBoing gets a bit technical.

Go forth. Read. Protest.

I’m going to email my former Congressperson and Senator and then study spinal rolls some more.

Also, as of November 7, I’ll be starting an Emergency Medical Responder class, which will be three weeks of what I’m informed will be lots and lots of studying. I’m already reading my textbooks to not get too far behind on that.

Oh, and I’ll also still be working weekends.

And attempting the National Novel Writing Month challenge, because I’m apparently insane.

So I’m not going to be posting every Wednesday for the next while: hopefully I’ll still be posting some, but I can’t guarantee I’ll even be at my computer until December 3 at the earliest, that being the day after the launch of Island Writer.

Hope to see you all at the launch!

If anyone can explain it to me in a manner that takes me from point A (American economic upset) to point B (global pro- . . . democracy, I think?) without undue rhetoric, I’d be much obliged.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading lots of comics. DC’s relaunched universe, with The New 52, primarily, though also some of Fables. Fables is interesting, as it’s award-winning, and has a somewhat-related TV series out this fall, Once Upon A Time. I find I like how much of the storytelling can be done through the purely visual part, and the many threads that can go on at the same time. There’s not a heck of a lot of introspection, but it also happily lacks the sort of long descriptive paragraphs that drove me away from Tolkien, substituting gorgeous art.

Writing for comics is very different from writing prose. Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman both manage both fantastically, though Neil Gaiman can apparently write for any medium he turns his hand to: the novelization of the mini-series he did for BBC, Neverwhere, evokes the same mood and imagery scene by scene. The audience walks away from both with the same feelings, which ought to be the aim of every translation between media (adaptations are tautologically different).

It seems like something I hear perennially, but that may just be as someone who graduated from an extremely liberal high school in the past few years and went on to spend time with book-minded liberals and then on the West Coast.

There are gay teens in YA literature. In fact, there’s a whole genre of coming-out literature.

Which is why we need more gay teens in mainstream YA. Coming-out fiction is generally awful and formulaic – like Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories that proliferated like rabbits in the 1860s. You only need to read one to have the whole genre down. You only need to read two to be a little bored of it. You only need to read three to sincerely believe that gay teens need to be better represented in other genres so that gay teens don’t need to read this awful shit to find people whose orientation they can relate to, because at least minor romantic subplot interests most teens.

Coming-out literature is of limited use: most people only need to come out fewer than a handful of times. Fiction in which gay teens are out, and are doing interesting stuff to which being gay is fairly tangential and being awesome is primary? That’s always going to be a interesting.

And that’s what I thought of when I saw Occupy Seattle featured on the Seattle news. It’s a brethren-organization to Occupy Wall Street, which is kind of sort of affiliated with We Are The 99 Percent, a photo-journal of stories submitted by discontented people around the US.

There are protests being staged and organized in several cities across the US, some, like the one in New York, culminating in arrests. But the protests don’t have clear demands. They are calling for the economy to be better, for the American Dream to deliver as promised or at least not to lie to them.

It’s the kind of unrest that demonstrates how a world, a culture work. It’s an illustration of unrest without tearing down the world and making everyone start from scratch.

At least at this point. It’s getting too cold here in the Northern Hemisphere for properly enraged civil disobedience. We’ll see where we are in the spring.