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Playboy Documentary

There’s a new documentary piece on Hugh Hefner coming out, about his role as a social activist. Seem weird? Yeah, to me, too. This article takes a look at some of the driving motivation behind the documentary. I have yet to see the documentary (it opened yesterday), but I am really looking forward to it.

The things he, Kinsey, Steinem, and Meads have done – their contributions to the Sexual Revolution, have changed society in a lot of ways. The internet has contributed. In discussing the documentary with my mom the other day, we discussed the fact that she first encountered BDSM culture in her 30s, while she was living in San Francisco. I encountered it in a fairly mainstream fantasy novel when I was 15 and so, curious, Googled it, and found a well-laid-out Wikipedia page.

And that was normal for me, for my generation. Yes, there is a lot of hypersexualization, but there’s also a lot of information available to work with that – information on STDs and where and how to get tested, information on how to be safe in myriad ways. In my social circle, at least, it’s something to discuss -openly – near the beginning of a relationship, just to determine compatibility. Kinsey and later, when we were old enough to sneakily read The Onion, Dan Savage taught us that nothing was weird, simply potentially incompatible. And that was okay.

Hefner, of course, isn’t solely responsible for the social movement towards openness. But he’s a contributing factor, and one in iconic silk pajamas, so I very much look forward to the documentary.

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Island Writer

On Tuesday we had the first meeting of the new editorial board of Island Writer. We gathered at Simeon’s house and had his own white wine and chips and salsa and chocolate in his sunny living room, with Christine and I plugged into our little machines. It’s exciting, to have the working period of the next issue looming. Not too many submissions so far, but they’re trickling in. And, if the last one is any indication, I can expect about 70 in the two days before the deadline.

But talking about our vision for the magazine and the ways we want to organize it was great – I jumped in very late in the game on the last issue, and so wasn’t part of that. It wasn’t necessary, of course, but I really like having a better idea of what we’re doing. And I like that I’m going to be more involved in the process.

The rest of the board; Chelsea Rushton, Simeon Goa, Sheila Martindale, Christine George, and Kim Nayyer, all seem wonderful. Kim wasn’t able to attend, but Chelsea took minutes. I’m looking forward to working with everyone on this issue.

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CanWrite 2010, part one

So, it’s been a week since the end of CanWrite, but I haven’t been able to put anything together because of the sheer volume of information I gathered there. It was a fascinating experience, and highly educational.

Jean Kay, the coordinator, was very nice, and extended a generous invitation to the awards banquet on Saturday. She was intensely busy all weekend, and I rarely saw her for more than a few consecutive minutes.

I spent the weekend mostly at the registration desk with Sheila Martindale and Brock Clayards, both Victoria residents. Sheila Martindale is the venerable English author of eight (soon to be nine) volumes of poetry, and is a member of the local branch of the Canadian Authors Association, and is the Poetry editor for Island Writer magazine.

Brock is a retired RCMP officer and now has a small vineyard and many dogs. He’s had a fascinating career in various branches of the RCMP.

Thursday all three of us manned the desk, as there were registrations all afternoon. Friday and Saturday we all switched off as we attended sessions with the various speakers.

Friday we were joined by Julie, a publisher and the creator of InspireABook, who helped manage the blue pencil sessions – the ten minute periods where conference attendees could make an appointment to talk to four authors who had volunteered. Behind the desks were kc dyer, Lois Peterson, Anthony Dalton, and Bernice Lever.

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CanWrite starts tomorrow!

I’m volunteering all weekend at the CanWrite! 2010 conference. I’ll be at registration, and then doing signup for the blue pencil sessions. I’ll probably be everywhere, but I can be tracked down there, if anyone is so inclined. I’m excited at the prospect of my first writing conference, and this one is focusing on something dear to my heart – applying technology to your writing.

It’s interesting how technology is changing the industry. People are experimenting with storytelling via Twitter the mind-bogglingly broad spectrum of webcomics. Two of my recent discoveries have been Metaphysical Neuroma by Attila and FreakAngels, written by the iconic Warren Ellis.

Comics are their own separate world from writing and publishing books, but they have strange and sometimes beautiful overlap, such as that personified in Neil Gaiman, who has written everything from the screenplay and then novel of the BBC’s Neverwhere to the children’s book Coraline to the fantastic graphic novel Sandman to the novel American Gods. He’s amazingly dynamic, and has had a definite impact on both my writing and the variety of vectors my interests follow.

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Open Source – not just for computer people

Open source is more than a way to get great software like web browsers Firefox and Chrome, word processor Open Office, art program GIMP and antivirus program ClamWin. It’s a movement towards freedom of intellectual property – towards intellectual communism.

Open source software isn’t new, though – the GNU Project, the precursor to Linux (a family of open source operating systems), was started in 1983. But in the past few years, open source has moved from a computer thing to a culture thing. Creative Commons took the idea of open source and applied it to intellectual property other than code.

Now some of the same principles – not being forced to pay for interesting things – are being brought back to the physical world through things like Decentralize Dance Paries. Which looks completely awesome.

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Character Creation

The Victoria Writers’ Society had its last meeting before the summer on Wednesday. Tricia Dower spoke about character creation and read from her book, Silent Girl. Despite being sick and having to leave the room a couple times, she gave a really great talk.

Character creation, and the role of the character in the story (should they drive the plot? should the plot dictate everything about them? is setting a character, and should it be?) is a topic that comes up on every writing forum I’m a member of. Every writer is different, and takes different approaches, even amongst different of their own works.

Tricia Dower had an interesting approach to interviewing one’s characters, getting to know them as individuals beyond the page so that they inhabit the page as whole beings.

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Pacific Northwest

I spent this last weekend trekking fabulously through the Victoria Steampunk Expo then down to Port Angeles and thence to Seattle and back to Vancouver and then home. In three days. I think. It was a great deal of fun. Working inside most of the day, I don’t tend to appreciate what a gorgeous corner of the continent I live on.

Met Christine Hart at the Steampunk Expo, though didn’t realize we were both in the Victoria Writer’s Society until Monday when I came back and she’d found me on DeviantArt. It’s a wonderfully small community out here.

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Reading Lists

So, I am in a discussion with someone of Wuthering Heights; I’ve been to the home of the Bronte sisters, and have read about them, and analysis of their work – I’ve even read her sister’s great work, Jane Eyre. But I’ve never read Wuthering Heights.

I’m realizing I am not all that well-read in general; I’ve read The Great Gatsby, and The Jungle, and The Yellow Wallpaper, and a few other classics, and I’ve seen the BBC versions of every Jane Austen novel as well as attempting to read Emma. But somehow I slipped by all that required reading, A Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies and all those other books people of letters have read.

So I’m going to attempt to rectify the situation, with aid from Time, The Best 100 lists, and these blogs. Even with overlap, that is probably well over 100 books. I’m going to compile the total list and add another page to list all of them, so I can check them off as I read them. The goal will be to read all of them.

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Island Writer Magazine

The launch for the Summer 2010 edition of Island Writer was this last Wednesday. It was my first launch; I was on vacation during the last one, and it was also my first launch as a member of the editorial staff. I was and am the editorial assistant for the magazine, and it’s a tremendous learning experience for me, seeing exactly what goes into a publication. I was also lucky enough with this issue to have two illustrations included. At the launch I got the meet the author of one of the stories I illustrated, Judith Mackay, and that was wonderful, to actually meet the person whose work I worked with. I hadn’t even spoken to her before that, except in form letters sent in my capacity as editorial assistant.
This issue was also the last issue for the editor in chief I worked with, Stacey Curtis. She’s spent the last several issues as the editor, and is moving on to other projects. She was wonderful to work with; creative, open to input on the technical side (we used Google Docs for some stages, which was a great and easy way to get everyone the files), and patient of my inevitable mistakes.
I met several of the new editorial staff at the launch, as well, and am looking forward to working with them on the next issue, coming out in December.

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Epublishing and Publishing Companies

Went to a very interesting talk by the estimable Ruth Linka of Touchwood Editions and Brindle and Glass about the effects of ebooks on the publishing industry. This was a couple of weeks ago, but it took me some time to both process the information in her very informational talk and examine my own feelings about it.

It’s a complicated subject, the role of ebooks in the world of publishing. I read a lot of ebooks, and a lot of books released free online under Creative Commons licensing. Ruth mentioned something about the new “Cult of Free” that I wish I’d written down, about how my generation very much believes in free things, and how that’s not exactly harmonious with the publishing industry. More on that later.

Ruth also said very definitively that ebooks are not a trend. They are here to stay. The difficulty lies in that there are easily two dozen separate and unique file formats that someone at a publishing house has to convert them to.

There is a movement, of course, towards some sense of uniformity. And PDF, of course, never goes out of style, though it’s less than ideal for several platforms. And a different ISBN is needed for each individual e-release. All of which takes man-hours, which contribute to the price of a book. This leaves aside the fact that the cost of editing remains the same, and one of the biggest components of book price. There is a general feeling that ebooks should be cheaper than paper because there are no associated printing, storage, or delivery costs, but those are much smaller factors for small printers. For large distributions, like that of bestsellers (Harry Potter, Twilight, or anything else people dress up and wait for hours in the rain for the release of), editing and other man-hour costs become a much smaller part of the cost, which allows them to keep the cost of ebooks low. Given the low cost set as the standard for ebooks, it is harder for small publishers to keep up with low prices.

On the other hand, ebooks are ideal for self-publishers. The cost of a print run can be hugely intimidating for an individual, but ebooks have, wonderfully, no printing costs. With no initial capital outlay (other than an editor, of course, and a graphic designer), epublishing allows many more authors to get their work out there. There is still, of course, the attendant hard work and devoted marketing required of any self-publication, but it makes it more accessible. But part of that accessibility is that the market for ebooks is flooded, and not everyone is willing to pay for an ebook by an unknown author, especially a novel, when there are novels available for free under Creative Commons and public domain. Novels by noted authors, too, including Cory Doctorow.

Part of that is my own devotion to the Cult of Free (backed up, you’ll note, by there being no price tag on any of the stories I have up). But it will be interesting to see how the Cult of Free and other market forces affect the future of the ebook and the publishing industry.