Posted on by Eileen Young

Google Plus

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.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Island Writer Launch

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

The launch went very well. We had a lovely evening of readings from our contributors. One of the interesting things that came out with the readings that wasn’t as apparent when we were putting together the magazines was how dark a lot of the stories were: we’d joked at our editing meetings about a common thread of police involvement and hard liquor, but it was quite prominent hearing them aloud that a lot of our contributors had really gone for the gritty side of life for this issue.
This also marked the first time Island Writer has gone digital, so I hope everyone takes advantage of it to read the fantastic stories and poems within.
Reading list
Judy Burgess – A is for Arthur
Lee-Anne Stack – The Bouquet
Daryl Baswick – Rainbow Park
Cathy Van Elslande – Gee Whiz
Laura – Tokyo Experience
Judith Castle – Doll
Derek Peach – a birthday poem that was not published
Ulrike Narwani – After The Opera on Humboldt St
Sheila Martindale – Under Police Escort
Posted on by Eileen Young

Oh. Right

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.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Protect Your Internet

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.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Hiatus

I just realized I forgot to update today. That’s probably going to be a recurring theme for the next few weeks: we’re just putting this issue of Island Writer to bed, with all the attendant organizing of the launch and making sure we get the number of copies we need. I’m also making my own Halloween costume – Batwoman – and I’m horribly behind on that.

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!
Posted on by Eileen Young

And Now For Something Completely Different

I live in Canada, and do not understand local sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Everywhere/We Are The 99% movement. Canada has a shortage of workers (in the oil sands and mines, so they’re cold and blue-collar and much less fun than protesting in sunny, gorgeous Victoria), and a dearth of corporate ‘fat cats’ controlling our economy.

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).
Posted on by Eileen Young

Gay YA

There’s another kerfuffle going on about gay teens in YA – see this for a good jumping-off place on the issue at hand.

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.
Posted on by Eileen Young

The 99%

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about how revolutionary stories are always a little disappointing to them, because the author builds a world and then starts destroying it immediately, and they like the world-building much better because anarchy is always the same.

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.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Analysis

An author I admire recently went on a rant on his blog about the way literature classes are taught and how in-depth analysis ruins reading, and the best way to write was to write without thought of theme or subtext – just to get the story out.

There’s some merit to his points: over-analysis can make a lot of people tune out, and spending all day on one comma is an utterly ridiculous waste of time. But it’s fun to insert layers of meaning deliberately. Writers can’t help putting in a lot of their world view in their writing, which is part of what makes books like Lullabies For Little Criminals fascinating to read.
If a writer is used to reading analytically and approaches writing similarly, then they can insert the ideas they want into the piece, deciding themes and motifs actively as opposed to letting them rise naturally from the story if they arise at all. Neither technique is superior, but having the training in literary analysis necessary for it to be a deliberate process is not a bad thing.
Posted on by Eileen Young

By The Time You See This, It Will Be Out Of Date

But it’s a fascinating speech, so you should read it anyway. Ben Hammersley spoke to the IAAC a couple weeks ago about, among other things, how we’re becoming increasingly comfortable trading personal information for personal service.

I was going to post about that, but already had my blog for that week finished, and wanted to sleep rather than double-post and not have anything lined up for the next week. Which got me thinking about the length of time it takes to get a book from concept to reader.
Aside from the time it takes to actually write a book, it takes a while to produce. If it’s a first book, there’s finding a publisher and that whole process, but even if you have a publisher and a deal, there is the editing process, the design, the cover, any pre-launch marketing and the arranging of launches and signings, and the printing time itself. So even if a reader picks up a book as soon as it is available, there’s still a lag time of, usually, several months.
This can lead to a bit of a disconnect. I find myself slightly confused when I pick up ostensibly modern mainstream fiction and characters aren’t visibly using cell phones, or all their phones do is call people: and this is as someone who does not own a cell phone. That’s just on the narrowest scale, though. The television show Combat Hospital is explicitly dated 2006, which gives the writers plenty of time to research what exactly is going on before trying to translate it to an audience, but also keeps the audience reminded that this is not supposed to be real-time, so there’s no subconscious expectation of the things we see about the Middle East on the news to be reflected in developments on the show.
The second part of that is most relevant to what I’m trying to get at: in 2001, all the books that came out that fall that were set in New York had major discrepancies. It’s a problem that authors will continue to face as the world insists on changing, and there aren’t any really neat solutions. Dating everything gets tedious, and never lets the reader feel they’re reading anything truly modern, and trying to push through faster publishing turnaround leads almost inevitably to more mistakes in production. Narrow scope works well, but leaves one with, well, narrowed scope. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files gets around rapidly evolving technology by having a main character who destroys technology by his mere presence, which leaves a narrative vaguely disconnected from the present. It works, as the world is full of magic and vampires and things that go bump in the night, but I think it says a lot about either technology and society or my particular technological addiction that the lack of cell phone stands out more than the rampaging werewolves.