(1) INTERNET HIGHWAY ROBBERY. Chuck Wendig tees off on a Huffington Post UK editor who preens about not paying their 13,000 contributors.
Because it isn’t “authentic.” To pay writers.
You toxic tickledicks.
You venomous content-garglers.
You thieves, you brigands, you media lampreys.
Let us expose this hot nonsense for what it is: a lie meant to exploit writers and to puff up that old persistent myth about the value of exposure or the joy of the starving artist or the mounting power of unpaid citizen journalism.
The lie is this: writing is not work, it is not fundamental, it is a freedom in which you would partake anyway, and here some chucklefuck would say, haw haw haw, you blog at your blog and nobody pays you, you post updates on Twitter and nobody pays you, you speak words into the mighty air and you do it for free, free, free. And Huffington Post floats overhead in their bloated dirigible and they yell down at you, WE BROADCAST TO MILLIONS and DON’T YOU WANT TO REACH MILLIONS WITH YOUR MEAGER VOICE and THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU.
But it is an opportunity for them, not for you.
But it seemed to me after a strong start Wendig’s rant winds down and loses headway:
Writing is work. Most things begin with writing. Though I find writing a pleasure, it is also a thing that requires great mental effort. It is not mere content — that word said almost dismissively, as if it is a synonym for styrofoam peanuts. (And by the way: you actually have to buy styrofoam peanuts. They aren’t free unless you rob them from boxes shipped to you.) Content is not slurry. It’s not protein goo. It’s not mud or air or some readily available resource…
Intrinsic value and market value are different things. While I don’t think Chuck Wendig believes all writing has the same market value, or necessarily any market value, it seems to me he has conflated spiritual and economic value in this paragraph.
Wendig is right that Huffington Post capitalizes on uncompensated labor, of course. If HuffPo is making money, that establishes that the content collectively has some market value. Since none of that value flows through to the contributor, you can argue an injustice.
But are all these contributors trying to launch writing careers? I do agree that if somebody is trying to be a pro writer, which not all HuffPo contributors necessarily are, they should be working on material that has a paying market.
(2) THAT GETTING PAID THING. In a series of tweets, John Scalzi thanked Wendig for doing the heavy lifting today, and tossed in a few more points:
I should note I am only very rarely asked to write for free these days. Set enough people on fire for asking, everyone else catches on.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) February 18, 2016
Publicists: Please don't "invite" me to participate in another author's blog tour. You're not doing me a favor. It's the other way around.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) February 19, 2016
(3) WRITING VS. WIDGETS. Elizabeth Bear tells about detoxing as a writer, metaphorically speaking, in “if you live for something, you’re not alone”.
One of the things I’ve realized that I need to work on in order to develop a healthier relationship with my job involves certain toxic aspects of the professional writing/publishing culture that I’ve done an overly good job of internalizing. And I’m trying to scrape it out of my soul, because in the long term it winds up being the opposite of productive when dealing with a creative career.
Some of that is a competition thing: “Writer X turns in three books a year and I’m a slacker if I don’t, too!” And that’s not great, honestly, and the sheer pressure to produce isn’t great, either, and doesn’t necessarily lead to good work. One has to think up new things to say between books, after all, or one ends up writing the same book over and over again. No use in that.
I think there’s a certain bravado of culture among may writers that is actively toxic in a lot of ways. And it’s tied to the NaNoWriMo kind of mode of “produce a bunch of stuff really fast, lather rinse repeat” pressure, and also the “THIS JOB SUCKS AND WE’RE WARRIORS FOR DOING IT” thing. It’s this weird Puritan machismo in suffering.
I mean, you don’t learn to write well by turning out 50K in a month once a year. It’s the two pages a day or whatever that get you there. Constant practice, as with any art. And mammals don’t respond well to punishment for performance. If we do a thing and the result is horrible, we generally avoid doing that thing again
(4) STARSHIPPING. From the Initiative for Interstellar Studies, Principium, Issue 12, February 2016 [PDF file]. The overview begins —
In this edition our guest introduction is by Gill Norman. Gill is a former director of i4is. She has helped us become the reasonably well organised body that we now are. Her thoughts here are on the necessity of human engagement in Interstellar Studies and space in general, Space: It’s all about people. She tells us how we need to engage resources and talents from all who feel our outward urge. Scientists and engineers are essential but so are entrepreneurs, PR experts and, of course, the best administrators we can find!
(5) FRAUD AT ICE CREAM COUNTER. “Astronaut ice cream is a lie”!
Astronaut ice cream — did it really fly? Vox’s Phil Edwards investigates, with the help of the Smithsonian and an astronaut.
(6) MOVING DAY. “China displaces nearly 10,000 humans for huge telescope in search for aliens” reports Asia One.
China will move nearly 10,000 people to make way for the world’s largest radio telescope which promises to help humanity search for alien life, state media reported on Tuesday.
It’s compensating them less than $2,000 each to relocate.
(7) CONGRATULATIONS: Becky Thomson and Tom Veal, friends for over 45 years, have announced they are engaged to be married. The wedding will be on June 25, in Ft. Collins, Colorado.
(8) SIGNALLING THE BEST. At SF Signal, “Top 15 Sci-Fi Comics of 2015 (Becky Cloonan, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Greg Rucka, More” .
We don’t write many articles about comics here at SF Signal. That’s not to say that we dismiss comics as literature, though. Many of the contributors to this blog are huge fans of the medium, but sites devoted the field abound, and whether superheroes are actually science fiction or a form of fantasy that simply employs sci-fi conventions as convenient MacGuffins is debatable. The one notable exception to our comic freeze out is our annual list of the top science fiction comics of the year… which number exactly one, because last year’s list was our first.
To my surprise, though, last year’s list of the Top 14 Sci-Fi Comics of 2014 turned out to be one of our top ten most popular articles of 2015. So, back by popular demand, here’s a rundown of the best on-going science fiction comics to hit stands in 2015. It’s not exhaustive, because there were a LOT of great sci-fi series this year, but it’s what we consider these to be the cream of the crop. Feel free to debate or contribute your own suggestions in the comments below….
(9) KENYON/CLARE ARTICLE. Laura Miller at Slate writes with a fannish slant about “The Shadowhunters vs. the Dark-Hunters”.
A lawsuit between two best-selling authors involves fantasy, romance, charges of plagiarism, and fan fiction gone mainstream….
I have friends with deep roots in fandom—albeit without much connection to this particular sector of it—who believe that this is the true source of the undying animosity toward Clare: She left fandom “badly,” or, worse yet, she seemed to be repudiating her own origins in that community by changing the spelling of her name. Fan-fiction writers are routinely and viciously ridiculed and shamed for their hobby, which makes their communities especially insular and self-policing. “Back in the day,” Cleolinda Jones, a onetime regular at Fandom Wank, wrote to me, “we used to say, ‘The first rule of fanfic is, do not take money for your fanfic.’ Because the overriding fear was intellectual property holders would sue everybody and shut fandom down.” Rights-holders that once issued cease-and-desists against fan sites for using promotional photos now encourage fan art and other tributes, Jones says, but in the early 2000s, “I just really cannot overstate the sense of living on borrowed time by the grace of the IP holders.” This would explain why word-for-word plagiarism, as opposed to the transformative appropriation of another creator’s characters and setting, would seem a catastrophically reckless sin against the entire community.
Of course, Clare was reviled—and adored—in Harry Potter fandom even before the plagiarism charges against her came to light. And fan fiction itself has come a long way, spawning numerous real-world stars, fan writers such as E.L. James who move on to publish best-sellers. Clare was among the very first to do this. But the prospect of going pro and striking it rich seems to many fan-fiction writers like a serpent in the garden, corrupting what once felt like an idyllic, egalitarian gift-economy of like-minded dabblers. Once, fandom was a destination in itself; now it’s just another stepping stone for ambitious writers with their eyes on a richer prize. Like so much of the idealism of the early Internet, this, too, has become an offshoot of the marketplace. “I think what you don’t understand,” one friend told me when I expressed bafflement that Clare’s fellow fan-fiction writers didn’t view the popularity of her books as a feather in their collective cap, “is that a lot of them just feel used.” When I admitted that didn’t make sense to me, she added, “It’s hard to explain, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
(10) CON OR BUST. MidAmeriCon II has also pitched in:
MidAmeriCon II, August 17-21, 2016, Kansas City, MO, USA. MidAmeriCon is the 2016 WorldCon; its Guests of Honor are Kinuko Y. Craft, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Tamora Pierce, and Michael Swanwick, and its Toastmaster is Pat Cadigan.
MidAmeriCon has donated four memberships to Con or Bust, either in full or as upgrades to supporting memberships (if the recipient already has one).
(10) TAKING ART IN NEW DIRECTIONS. “Best Fan Artist?” asks Steven H Silver. GPS Doodles’ Stephen Lund creates figures by riding his bike in meatspace on routes tracked by Strava. Some are Star Wars-themed.
Wasn’t it Yoda, Grand Master of the Jedi Order, who said “Doodle. Or doodle not. There is no try”?
Well, doodle I must. And on May the 4th, there’s little choice but to doodle the Jedi Order’s most disciplined master of the Force. Good ol’ Yoda.
“Take a ride on the dark side”
Subject: ride along I’d like to request one. Can you come up with a suitable topic? Vader and his young apprentice perhaps?
It sounded like fun – not just the Star Wars theme but the idea of having someone along for the ride.
Kudos to Geoff, who stuck with me for the entire 4.5+ hours with no inkling whatsoever about what we were doodling. He was completely in the dark (“on the Dark Side,” I suppose you could say) until he got home afterward and downloaded the ride to Strava.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- February 18, 1930 – Clyde Tombaugh discovered planet Pluto, before it became a dwarf.
- February 18, 1977 – First unmanned test flight of space shuttle Enterprise mounted on another aircraft.
(12) ARE YOU SHOCKED? Kate Paulk’s award overview series continues with “Hugo Categories Highlight – The Short Fiction Categories”.
The problems of the Hugo voting/nominating population being relatively small and to a large extent long-term fans who could be termed the science fiction “establishment” (in the sense that many of these people have been to the same conventions for twenty and more years and helped each other run quite a few of them) have probably had years where they actually could read everything eligible with the result that they’ve seen practically everything.
This leads to a kind of weird inversion of killer mailbox syndrome (what happens to your marvelous tale about a killer mailbox when the slush reader has just read the third killer mailbox piece in the slush dive and the other three were horrible. The horrible gets imputed to your story because of the human mind’s extreme pattern-making and association ability) where something that isn’t all that great seems the freshest, most wonderful piece of the year because it’s sufficiently unlike the rest of the entries it stands out. This gets good-but-not-extraordinary works nominated and winning awards because they aren’t like everything else.
There’s no need for a conspiracy to explain some of the “winning the future” selections in recent years – this effect will do just as nicely, particularly since many of said voting group have very similar opinions about what constitutes a desirable message and from what I’ve seen are honestly shocked that their views of what is right and proper are not shared by the rest of fandom (two rules that we fans have to remember: sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice; and highly intelligent people are capable of extremely advanced stupidity).
(13) THE REBUTTAL. Vox Day at Vox Popoli makes additional arguments supporting his contention that he is a better editor than David Hartwell.
The SF-SJWs at File 770 are appalled at the fact that Tor Books and Castalia House author John C. Wright is willing to go on the record and state that, in his opinion, I am a better editor than the late, Hugo Award-winning editor David Hartwell:…
You see, I have perspective that they do not. Unlike them, I have seen Mr. Wright’s unedited prose. I know exactly what it looks like. And as it happens, it looks very much like the prose that appears in Mr. Wright’s novels that are published by Tor Books. John is an excellent writer; he is one of the greatest SF/F writers alive. But he writes very, very quickly and he is prone to what one might describe as an exuberant approach to writing. Last year, Castalia House offered him a contract for a 60k-word book. I am now reading the manuscript, which clocks in at nearly 200k words. Even those authors who don’t like Mr. Wright or his style might well contemplate suicide if they truly understood how speedily and effortlessly the man writes… and writes well. When I say he is a great writer, I do not do so lightly, nor do I do so because I am fortunate enough to publish some of his works. I say it out of pure envy and awe.
…. UPDATE: It appears my surmise about the extent to which Mr. Wright’s books were edited at Tor Books was correct, as per L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright
Just in case anyone wondered: John has tremendous respect for Mr. Hartwell, whom he admired, appreciated working with, and liked as a person. But Mr. Hartwell almost never made any changes to John’s manuscripts.
(14) ADMIRATION. John C. Wright’s contributions to the foregoing discussion included this compliment to another author:
I would have trouble editing George RR Martin’s books. Most of the comments here mock him, but he is an exquisitely skilled writer, a consummate writer. His writing is a little dark for me, but reread the opening prologue of GAME OF THRONES: the text establishes a fullfledged three dimensional character, a man who is realistic yet sympathetic, and who is snuffed out as a redshirt a few paragraphs later to show you how the monster works — and it comes as a surprise because usually the redshirts are not given a backstory. What in other hands would have been a boring B-movie horror scene in Martin’s is a masterful, and even moving, establishing scene. Now, to be frank, I have not read his last two volumes, and I may never, because he has killed off too many likable characters and is taking too long to get anywhere: but once the series is done, and I know it reaches a satisfying conclusion, I may revisit that decision. So Mr. Martin may be suffering from the victory disease, where some of his discipline lapses due to his popularity. Or he may be, as I am, an exuberant writer who likes his digressions.
(15) TROPE TRAP. At The Book Smugglers, Carlie St. George “examines the Sexy Douchecanoe trope” in “Trope Anatomy 101: Reader, I Didn’t Marry Him – I Kicked His Jerk Ass to the Curb”.
The Sexy Douchecanoe isn’t an official trope, as such; at least, it’s not one that I often find people analyzing, subverting, and/or railing against. It is one, however, that I run into constantly because, while they’re often unfairly associated with strapping, half-dressed men on paperback covers, Sexy Douchecanoes actually pop up in every medium and every genre. The first time I remember coming across one, I was maybe 20 and reading Naked in Death by JD Robb. At the time, I’d been interested in giving romance a go, but as I hadn’t read much of the genre, I wasn’t entirely sure where to start. I figured the best plan was to pick a romance that was also a murder mystery set in the future.
And maybe that plan would have been successful, if I hadn’t hated the love interest with the power of a thousand suns.
(16) MONSTER HIGH NOTE. Lady Gaga and Mattel are teaming to create a Monster High doll.
You know you’ve made it big when you’re commissioned by a major toy manufacturer to design a doll. That’s exactly what’s happened to Lady Gaga. The singer/actress is adding “toy designer” to her resume now with a forthcoming Monster High doll. Is there anything she can’t do? She’s designing the doll with her sister, costume designer Natali Germanotta. Which is totally fitting, given Gaga’s Mother Monster moniker.
https://twitter.com/LGMonsterFacts/status/698251609860485120
(17) THIRD MILLENNIUM. Part three of “Who Are Millennial Fans: An Interview with Louisa Stein” by Henry Jenkins at Confessions of an Aca-Fan.
[Louisa Stein] I mentioned above the TV series Supernatural’s ambivalent depictions of female fans over the years. Supernatural is a series that has a dynamic and rich transformative fandom, and the majority of those participating in the fandom are women. Supernatural fans, while expressing love for the series and its characters and potential, have long been critics of its gender and racial politics, and have spoken out at times about how they have felt misrepresented and even attacked by the series and its metatexts, for example, in response to a preview that declared the teenage girl the “ultimate monster.”
(18) STUBBY ON SPUDS. At Tor.com Stubby the Rocket says, “Matt Damon Has Replaced Sean Astin as the Face of Pop Cultural Potato Enthusiasm”. Yes, I guess he has…. (It’s a reference to this antique video from the dawn of YouTube.)
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, Brian Z., Dave Doering, Will R., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day redheadedfemme.]
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I was gonna make a comment on something, but I don’t see the point because nothing I say for the rest of the day is going to be as good as Isabel Cooper’s amish werewolf post. Every word of that is a delight.
August: It’s not at all about what the writer chooses to do; there are all kinds of reasons and venues for writers and other creators to do stuff for free without somebody else making money off their backs. It’s about what we consider to be acceptable business practices for those whose sole business is presenting that work alongside advertisements.
This. Yes. The “we’re doing writers a favor by not paying them” is the problem, even more so than the “not paying,” to my mind. I’m definitely in favor of writers being paid, but if any writer chooses to write for free, for any reason, then that’s the writer’s choice and I respect it. For any business entity to tell said writer, “this is what you should be doing, because this is a more authentic form of writing; we’re proud of ourselves for not paying for your work”–that’s flat-out wrong. It’s the old “serious writers don’t care about money” argument, which I also think is silly. Writers who don’t care about money will eventually end up either starving or writing very little because they have to do other things in order to avoid starving–at best. (Well. They might also have started out independently wealthy before becoming writers, but I don’t think that wealth should be a requirement for being a Real Writer.) In any case, I want my favorite writers to write MORE, not less . . . and paying those writers for their work would seem to encourage them to do just that.
Come to think of it, The Hunter’s Haunt is relevant to (15) too– one of the stories is sort of a metafictional comment on that very same trope.
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” – Samuel Johnson.
“The trouble, Mr. Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art, and I am only interested in money.” – George Bernard Shaw.
If the NYT and Atlantic said “we are going to stop paying you and retroactively dip into your bank accounts to recover all of the money we paid you in the past”, then they would be doing something highly illegal and be sued out of existence. But if the NYT and Atlantic had never been paying writers and made it clear that they would not pay writers, then writers who sign on under those conditions don’t have a legal leg to stand on to then start demanding pay. They could attempt to get all potential writers to boycott unpaid posts and form a universal union, but I don’t think that herding of cats has even the remotest chance of succeeding.
The Mockingbird Killer in London
The Mockingbird Man of Alcatraz
The Mysterious Case of the Congealed Watchman
When we had claims last year from pups that Starship Troopers wouldn’t win a Hugo these days I did feel like saying* that of course it wouldn’t because anybody reading it as a new book now would think “This is just ripping off Starship Troopers“. However, at the time I thought that was a tad disingenuous because I thought they were trying to make some other point or it was a counterfactual in which nothing like Starship Troopers had ever been written before etc. Looking at Kate Paulk’s theory, I have to wonder – i.e. imagine there is some bug or glitch in the Hugo rules that means that magically Starship Troopers is somehow re-eligible in 2016 and the universe is otherwise exactly the same. Should it win Best Novel or at least be a credible contender? Is it coherent to thing that it could have been Best Novel in the past but now? If not Starship Troopers then how about Dune.
My feeling is no, judged as new novels but with the whole field of SF/F existing (including them as old novels) they aren’t contenders because BEEN-THERE-DONE-THAT. Novelty isn’t the be-all and end-all and novels that revive aspects of a genre or which appeal to a past age have their place but novelty does still count and even books that push a revival of a past style do so as a way of offering novelty.
*[maybe I did say it but I don’t recall doing so]
@Darren Garisson – Interesting. I wonder how that would play out in different jurisdictions. US labour law is… not always analogous to how it works in the rest of the industrialized world. (“At Will” employment laws, as a for instance, are largely considered absurd to the point of insanity here.)
@ JJ: “I’m looking at Lamplighter’s statement that Hartwell hardly made any changes to JCW’s books, and JCW’s statement that it was three assistant editors — not Hartwell — who would have been making changes to his books, and trying to figure out if the former is a deliberate obfuscation or just an invented assertion made up to defend someone without actually knowing the truth.”
I have no opinion on (or interest in) who edits/edited JCW or what they did/didn’t do with his MSs.
But as a more general overview, at various publishing houses, it’s not uncommon for writers to get shuffled around a lot (and this may be even more likely at a large and chaotic program like Tor). For example, at my first house (Silhouette Books), I was assigned to 7 different editors over the course of five years and about a dozen books. At other houses, I’ve been through 2-3 editors as people come and go, or as editors get promoted, become, overwhelmed with admin duties, and their writers get reassigned to junior staff. There are also structures at some houses where there’s a senior editor who is nominally The Editor of a number of writers, but those writers actually work directly with assistant editors who are under the supervisions of the senior, and the senior has little direct contact with those writers and even less contact with their work. Additionally, there are editors for whom that is not an official or formal arrangement, but who slough off a lot of work on their interns and junior assistants–and there are situations (I was in such a situation once) where you’d much RATHER deal with the assitant, because they’re bright and efficient, whereas the editor is a burned out wreck upon whose desk all manuscripts, contracts, and other paperwork goes to die.
So a writer like JCW, who has been at a large and often shifting program like Tor for years, might have been through several editors by now, and it may have been some combination of being under Hartwell’s direct editorial hand for some amount of time followed by some amount of time being assigned to various assistant editors who worked with Hartwell.
Also, a lot of what an editor does has absolutely nothing to do with editing. They usher a book through the publishing process, which is a long and fraught process in traditional publishing involving many, many administrative and business components. A “best editor” or “good editor” need to be good at many things, plenty of which don’t involve editing a manuscript.
Additionally, when it comes to editing, much of what goes in on an editorial relationship never appears on the page. Writers get paid to write professionally because, GO FIGURE, most of us have significantly better command of narrative, prose, dialogue, and language than a freshman English student whose writing needs lots of red-penning. I haven’t had a book line-edited in years. When you’re actually a competent professional novelist, much of what a good editor does with you involves discussion, not changing “he was cold” to “he felt chilly” in your MS. They talk conceptually and thematically with you about the work, the characters, the story, etc. Maybe when you pitch the idea, maybe after they read the MS. Betsy Wollheim’s input at DAW, for example, made a significant difference in a series-arc element of my Esther Diamond urban fantasy series, and this wasn’t red-penned itno the MS, this was a series of discussions we had about the series in between my writing books 1 & 2. -That- is much of what an editor does. The notion that there’s a “before” and “after” version of a MS in which you can see an editor’s influence is much less prevalent than readers suppose.
I am loving this structure sub-thread! Thank you all for your contributions.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami goes back and forth between the real world, with Inklings (not the writers, but vaguely menacing evil creatures) living underground in Tokyo, and a fantasy world. They converge. Much more concrete than the stuff Murakami is known for.
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. Three Novellas that complement or confound each other or both. It has been a while, but I think the Priest’s Tale from Hyperion was inspired by it.
A lot of R.A. Lafferty’s works could be recommended, but the one that jumps to mind is “Selenium Ghosts of the 1870s.” A different kind of film is invented and TV and film get an early start. Several movies are described and there is a story arc that carries through it all.
Not nearly so mind-blowing, but one of the short stories from 1940, Wollheim’s “The Planet that Time Forgot,” has a split structure. The first half is told from the aliens’ point of view. It is about an impending war between two countries on a giant planet outside the orbit of Pluto. Things get resolved in a way that is inexplicable to the aliens and the reader. The second half explains, from the human point of view, what had happened. It ends with what may be the inspiration for Star Trek’s Prime Directive.
I concur with Ray about Perec and Calvino. But be wary of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. When you finish it, you will be very sad, for no matter how many wonderful things are ahead for you, you will never be able to get comfy in your favorite cushy armchair, you know, the one you inherited from your grandmother that still smells of hard candy, Thanksgiving, and love, and read this book for the first time again.
Johan P / Camestros:
No, Starship Troopers (which I just mistyped as Starship Tropers, which is something else again) wouldn’t win awards now; given the social / cultural changes of the 1960s plus the experience of Vietnam, it probably wouldn’t have in the mid-1970s either – but The Forever War could, and did, with a fresh take on the basic idea. Forty years on, with any number of developments in SF and in the real world, neither of them would win, but if someone came up with a new approach to the grunt’s-eye view of war and politics, someone like (say) Ann Leckie, then it’s just possible that we’d have another winner.
HuffPo Voices is a blogging platform – closer to WordPress, Blogspot or even Facebook than it is to any sort of media (even the bottom-feedy Buzzfeed end).
HuffPo also has professional employed writers who write paid content.
The bit that annoys me about their business model is that they are terrible about distinguishing between the two, and they have editors who can promote a Voices article into the main news sections.
It’s not just that HuffPo isn’t paying its writers: it’s that we have a presumably salaried editor asserting that “authentic” writers don’t get paid. Which means that he is explicitly dismissing the viewpoints of anyone who doesn’t choose, or can’t afford, to give their work away.
Extending his stated argument, nothing at HuffPo is authentic, because the editor doesn’t care enough about finding and selecting authentic writing to do his job for free. Also because HuffPo insist that their advertisers pay for advertising, rather than Ariana Huffington looking at all the ad submissions for authenticity (whatever that means in this context) and then running the ones she likes without charge.
I don’t think it’s been mentioned yet, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed has a split structure as well, although a fairly simple one of following the protagonist through two different arcs of his life in alternating chapters.
Chuck Wendig to write the comic book adaptation of The Force Awakens .
@Hampus: Tigerman is excellent, if not quite in the class of The Gone-Away World; I devoured it over a weekend. It’s only barely SF, however.
Even though I don’t think Harkaway quite sticks the landing on the Big Reveal in The Gone-Away World, I don’t care; that book is just glorious. It also has the most improbable sentence ever penned that made me choke up: “V nz Vxr Gurezvgr”, fnlf Vxr Gurezvgr, “naq jr ner gur Fbpvrgl bs gur Ibvpryrff Qentba.”
@Darren Garrison: Does Mike Glyer care that WordPress is a for-profit company
Citation needed.
If his footer’s to be believed, Mike runs the open source distribution of WordPress, which is not, so far as I can tell, incorporated in any way. The only incorporated entity I know of that’s associated with WordPress is Automattic, a company run by the founders of the WordPress project, which manages, among other projects, WordPress.com, whose product is not the WordPress software, but hosting for WordPress.
If Mike is using the open source version, WordPress is not making any money off of him, and he’s not using a product created or supported by a for-profit company. And if he were using the Automattic hosting, they have an advertising profit-sharing option. It makes a fugly-looking page, but they would in fact pay him for his labor proportional to his pageviews.
So isn’t this yet another fact in support of “regular fans have no idea who to vote for in the ‘Best Editor Long Form’ category”?? I could see that becoming a sort of ‘inside baseball’ award, voted on ONLY by writers who can see what’s behind the curtain. But the rest of us? (*shrugs*) We have no way to tell.
My mistake. I was thinking that WordPress was the name of a blog-hosting service, not blogging software.
I always loved the structure of Ken MacLeod’s The Stone Canal. Of course it didn’t hurt that I had spent a good many years in the locations featured in the present-day thread.
So isn’t this yet another fact in support of “regular fans have no idea who to vote for in the ‘Best Editor Long Form’ category”?? I could see that becoming a sort of ‘inside baseball’ award, voted on ONLY by writers who can see what’s behind the curtain.
Perhaps we should sell the award to the SFWA.
Tristram Shandy, of course! The sort-of film, A Cock and Bull Story, is also very good
On structure, I love the The Moonstone‘s pose of presenting all the different sources of “evidence” in the crime as if they were witnesses in a court case. Very innovative at the time, and hugely influential later. Also, *sigh* Gabriel *sigh.* (He’s the butler who uses Robinson Crusoe as a kind of sortes Vergilianae.)
Another story with a different sort of interesting structure: “The Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius”, by Stanislaw Lem, included in The Cyberiad. It contains stories within stories within stories.
@Isabel: (FSoG)
Blanket disclaimer/clarification: I’m talking about the movie, as I have not read the book and have no desire to do so.
I got a strong sense of “sheltered religious upbringing” from Ana early on, but when we see her mother in the movie (and, later, hear her having sex), she does not seem anything like the sort of parent who would bring a kid up that way. It is at least jarring; whether it’s mischaracterization or anachronistic is up for interpretation. Possibly some of both.
As for the computer… I’m pretty sure Ana told Christian that hers was busted, which is crucially different from not owning one at all. He didn’t buy her a first computer; he replaced a broken/malfunctioning one. Now, it could be that she was originally fibbing to him to cover for not owning one; I don’t recall. My major takeaway from the exchange was that it was hella creepy for him to just send someone to her place to install a new computer (of his choosing) and set it up (to his specifications) without even asking her.
I got major “dangerous stalker” vibes from Grey’s attempts at romance in general, and while I can kind of squint and see some of them as being the way he’s accustomed to treating his sex partners, that really falls apart under examination. After all, one of the earliest bits of characterization is that he isn’t seen with women in public (leading to the “are you gay?” interview question) – so no, there’s no justification for him being accustomed to dictating every aspect of a woman’s life both in and out of the bedroom. Replacing a computer, stealing her car and replacing it with one he likes more, flying to Georgia to spy on her when she visits her mother – hell, treating her virginity as an inconvenience to be immediately removed without her explicit consent, despite his paperwork fetish? All of these are danger signs with big neon lights.
[1] Well, you get what you pay for.
[12] Paulk replicates a pattern I’ve seen a few times in puppydom — say something reasonable, if arguable (ie, novelty winning out over quality in Hugo noms) and follow that up with a word salad of puppy talking points, presented as IF they have something to do with the previous point, but actually all complete non-sequiturs.
[13] Why, yes, it does strike people as absurd for someone to make the claim that an editor whose main distinction is extra-curricular shenanigans is superior in his craft to an editor who is LEGENDARY in the field. But…
I know he tries to give it context by praising JCW in the following sentences, but it still looks like a passive-aggressive dig to me. Probably considering the source.
[15] I enjoyed reading the article as an analysis of the trope, although I, too, think she misrepresents the ending of Jane Eyre. But I ended up being disappointed, because the introduction makes it sound like she’s going to talk about why she doesn’t like genre romance, yet the article is entirely about why she doesn’t like gothic romance, specifically, even when it shows up in other genres.
On a related note, I live-tweeted the 50 Shades of Grey movie & storified it, if anyone is interested:
https://storify.com/mcjulie/fifty-shades-of-grey-mcjulie-watches-stuff-so-you-
@John Seavey: Aw, thanks!
@Rev. Bob: Yeah, in the novel (IIRC, and admittedly I haven’t read it in depth) she hasn’t owned a computer at all before Christian buys one for her. I suspect that the movie changed a few things because someone on board spotted the ridiculousness therein.
The religious upbringing I could go either way on, but…it’s not a religious *college*, and she’s a junior, so…again, based on my own college experience, it’d take more than a religious/sheltered background. Even if she hadn’t done anything before, she’d have more of an idea of what it was: hell, even the Orthodox Jewish no-touching-boys-until-marriage girl in my group of friends grasped the fundamentals of BDSM.
It really does come off as the sexual/cultural version of Pac Man Fever, that trope where for a long time all “video games” in TV/movies were represented with 80s-arcade bleeps and graphics, even when the show itself was supposed to be set in 2005. I don’t know if there’s a specific trope for “writing as if cultural values and technological access haven’t changed in twenty years,” but perhaps there should be.
And I totally agree with you on the creepiness of the entire romance subplot. I mean, it’s Twilight fanfic, so I wouldn’t have expected anything different (which, if we want to get into “controlling douchecanoe heroes”…yeah), but still, so gross. So abusive.
That pushed me over into:
“And I’m livin’ in the scroll of the common pixels
Joe Clifford Faust and THE COMPANY MAN
Daddy’s gonna buy you CYTEEN to cling to
Mommy’s gonna GOD STALK just as much as she can
And she can”
And Iain Banks credited MacLeod with the structure of The Use of Weapons …
Just a mention: over on @RedWombat’s LiveJournal & Twitter, and Seanan McGuire’s Twitter, literal mockingbirds are literally being killed in a wildlife adventure encounter. It’s been my fun social media read for this week. Starts Feb.16th.
Big thanks to Kyra for all the books-with-unconventional-structure recommendations. I’ve been wanting to read The Interior Life ever since Jo Walton blogged about it at Tor.com (and, based on descriptions of it, I can see where her admiration for that book may have been expressed in My Real Children). By the time I got caught up on this thread, I’d ordered a used copy with my very first Perk reward gift card (attn @Rev. Bob). (And then, of course, I saw the comment noting that it would soon be a free ebook, but what the heck.)
I would like to give August a standing ovation for writing so eloquently and powerfully in favor of valuing the labor of writing. If HuffPo had a clear distinction between “writing for our blog is unpaid; writing articles for us is paid” based on which a writer could decide which side of their business to do business with and, very importantly, hadn’t emitted a self-serving sermon about how REAL writers, AUTHENTIC writers will ALWAYS write for free, I’d have a lot less ire for them. But with a statement like that, they’re not just asserting their right to their preferred business model–they’re trying to argue that NO self-respecting writer, certainly no writer who wants to be considered AUTHENTIC and GENUINE, should be paid. That’s shots fired in a war against writers, any writers, making a living at all.
@Isabel Cooper:
I cannot think of better hands for that whole thing to be in.
Re: The Potato Apocalypse – I have fond memories of the rant in person, but the twitter/storify one is wonderful. It also has the advantage of being available to all via a link, so I don’t have to just ramble out my best approximation to friends and then helplessly finish with, “And you really should have been there, because I am so not doing it justice.”
OK, getting to work now. Probably. Sort of. *runs away*
Darren Garrison on February 19, 2016 at 8:15 am said:
Couple of things:
First, LibreOffice, please! OpenOffice is effectively dead!* LibreOffice is OpenOffice. And you do people a disservice by continuing to discuss and (potentially) promote OpenOffice, which (because it’s free/open-source) continues to be distributed as if it were a living, breathing project.
Second, I like to remind folks who make such silly claims about the “evuls” of open source that it wasn’t free/open-source software that killed the market for word processors or spreadsheets, and put countless programmers out of work when those markets died! 🙂
But that highlights a fundamental difference between writing software (with the notable exception of games) and writing fiction or news stories. If I find a story or article that I consider to be perfectly written, or even just vastly better than the competition, it doesn’t kill my desire to keep reading new stories or articles. In fact, it makes me want more stories or articles of that quality. No story or article is ever going to become so popular that the market for new stories and articles disappears. And I’m not going to stop reading a story simply because it’s not sufficiently compatible with the story my friend is reading. Or the one my boss is reading.
So, yeah, even though I actually contribute to open source software myself, as well as using it, I’m not going to suggest that writers should give their work away for free. The primary reasons why I do what I do simply don’t apply in their case.
* Despite a tiny handful of folk trying desperately to prop up the corpse and pretend it’s still viable. LO gets more code contributions in a day than OO gets in months.
@Fugue: “I know editors who will go on multi-hour rants about how every writer should use MS Word, not Open Office.”
Contrariwise, after examining the output from several word processing programs when converted to HTML, I absolutely despise the way Word adds bloat. There’s also the licensing factor; the economically-priced Word license that is accessible to most starting writers explicitly forbids using it in a for-profit capacity. (iPad users: So does the default Office license available for the apps!) So, either you violate the license terms, use something else, or pay Microsoft hundreds of extra dollars for a license that allows for-profit use. I generally go with LibreOffice Portable, which is pretty much “OpenOffice, but actually still being maintained and improved.” In fact, it seems a new version (5.1.0) came out last week…
(one download/upgrade later…)
Anyway, I’m lucky enough to have completely legit access to a corporate version of Word; the company offers MS Office 2013 licenses for $10 every so often, and I snatched one up. Generally speaking, I still prefer LibreOffice Writer. I know its quirks (hard-wrapped lines, really?) and can work around them fairly easily; Word has more pervasive issues. From a mechanical standpoint, I greatly prefer LOW.
@P J Evans: “I have both LibreOffice and MSOffice. They are not equivalent. I can open larger files in LibreOffice – but there are some kinds of editing it does not do, and MSOffice will.”
You have my attention. (No snark. I’m genuinely curious.)
@Darren Garrison: “To Kill a Mockingbird 2: Kill a Mockingbird Harder.”
Are you sure? I thought it was The Mockingbird’s Shallow Grave.
Regarding Fifty Shades, I keep returning to Katrina Passick Lumsden’s Review which really captures the essence of the reading experience, I think.
Seanan’s owl encounter on Twitter was epic. To Kill a Mockingbird, indeed.
RIP Harper Lee. Your book made me a better person.
Shared universe is the way to go these days:
The Atticus Finch Mysteries
The Further Adventures of Boo Radley
Scout Finch – Ace Journalist!
@McJulie:
Gliding is indeed a lot of fun! (I’m a glider pilot, sadly lapsed at the moment.)
Here’s a video of a glider landing, from within the cockpit:
@McJulie: (FSoG livetweets)
Yeah, that’s pretty close to my reactions. I thought Ana’s “classic car” line was a joke, though; she has an old clunker because she’s a college student with a limited budget. (And they obviously landed by gliding to a stop on the runway. I don’t find it implausible that someone capable of flying a helicopter could land a glider.)
@Isabel: “I suspect that the movie changed a few things because someone on board spotted the ridiculousness therein.”
No doubt. Some of Ana’s movie lines sounded like obvious “the audience won’t buy it if she doesn’t say what everybody’s thinking” inserts.
Erm. My experience… differs. The college I attended (late 1980s) wasn’t a religious institution, but it was still Puritanical enough that there was a locking gate at the entrance to the women’s dorms. All male visitors had to be out by midnight. (Side note: I’ve just pulled up the current campus map. Things have changed a lot; most of the housing is now co-ed. When I attended, all the dorms were single-sex. The dorm complex I lived in – where my room was originally designed as an elevator shaft – has apparently become an admin building. I wonder if the convenience store across the street is still there.)
Then again, this is the South, and that was more than 25 years ago. I’m somewhat surprised to see how much the old campus has changed, but very glad to see that it has. (Confession: Seeing a photo of a one-time makeout spot on the school’s website was unexpectedly delightful. Finding out that an admin building was left unlocked is good for such things!) I would expect a modern Pacific Northwest college to be much less repressed. So, while I didn’t find her lack of knowledge as jarring as you did, that’s most likely due to me being an old fart. 😉
I happen to really like Dictionary of the Khazars, which is definitely ergodic. It is dictionary entries divided among three different perspectives, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim; you can deduce a sort of narrative, that happened principally in three different time periods, but you piece it, with its uncertainties, and a whole lot of background, together from scattered alphabetical pieces. The introductory section says any way of reading the book would be right. “[The reader] can, with a clear conscience, … read the way he eats: he can use his right eye as a fork, his left as a knife, and toss the bones over his shoulder.”
@Nicole: “my very first Perk reward gift card (attn @Rev. Bob).”
Yeah, I’ve been wrangling with Perk and the new Viggle app lately. The iOS version won’t convert points, but the Android one will. When I went through the Great Realignment in the wee hours of Thursday morning, I had just over 18K Perk points in my account, plus over 3.6m Viggle points. I earned 2K Perk points between then and that afternoon, converted 100K Viggle points (60K base plus two 20K “you earned 1K” bonus chunks), and ordered a $25 card that arrived today. I’m at 3182 Perk right now, and I figure I’ll wait ’till I hit 12,500 to try converting another 250K Viggle points for my next $25 card. I don’t think I’ll get there over the weekend. 🙂
I’m seriously displeased with Perk’s focus on making phone-format apps. Tablets exist. Universal apps exist. There’s no reason to force an app to display its ads “double-sideways” – by which I mean that the tablet is sitting on its long edge, the app is only capable of portrait mode, a landscape-format ad comes up, and the ad is displayed as a narrow band in the middle of the screen instead of, y’know, rotating to show correctly on the full screen.
@Rev. Bob: It’s pretty fascinating how campuses have changed, yeah. I went to college in 2001-2005: I guess theoretically there was maybe a women-only dorm somewhere on campus, but I don’t recall ever hearing much about it, and it would’ve been the only one. I think they instituted (optional) co-ed rooms the year after I graduated, and I remember that the bathrooms were de facto coed much of the time. I also don’t think anyone ever cared where anyone else was at midnight: two of my not-enrolled-in-that-college male friends stayed over in either my room or someone else’s a lot, and a lot of the time we didn’t get in until after 3 AM.
(The ideal situation was having a roommate who was dating someone with *their* own room, or a chain that led to that, because then you’d effectively have a single. Actually the super-ideal situation was to have your roommate never show up and ResLife not notice, which happened to me my sophomore year. I don’t think I was ever a good enough person to merit that, and can only imagine that I’ll pay a horrible karmic price at some future point.)
I wouldn’t say “old fart”, but I think it’s definitely a different perspective, and I think that one of the many flaws of the books is a failure to account for that. James was born in the 60s, according to Wiki, so would have been going to college at about the same time you did–which means 50 Shades is pretty much an example of Kids Today Are Not Like the Kids You Were. (Which is one of the reasons I consider myself woefully unqualified to write modern YA these days.* To portray modern teenagers, I would have to spend a lot of time talking to modern teenagers, and there isn’t enough alcohol in the damn world.) Research your subcultures, people! Even if that subculture is “college students thirty years after your time.”
See also: McJulie’s *excellent* point about drinking (and also that whole livetweet is amazing). I know one or two people who didn’t drink in college, but they all had either medical interactions or Convictions of one sort or another, the sort that would have come up in narration.
* I sort of maybe got away with it five or six years ago, and I remember a number of reviews freaking right out about the language in the book. And I was like “…I don’t know about you guys, but when *I* was fifteen, my friends and I spent our evenings coming up with obscene versions of the school song, so.”
For interesting structure, All the Birds, Singing
Vasha said:
This sounds like a book I desperately need to read. Thanks for mentioning it!
Stories with unusual structure: classics edition.
There’s John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (the title of which was alluded to in yesterday’s Pixel Scroll). It’s still one of my favorite examples of multiple, braided threads of narrative, just because it’s done so well!
Also, Samuel R. Delany’s novella “Empire Star” deserves some sort of mention here. It’s a time-traveler story with multiple travelers on different, bizarrely intersecting tracks. It starts by following one character, but then it stops, says, “oh, here’s a last couple of missing pieces you need, and you should have the whole story.” And then you go “huh?” And then you go “oh, yeah, right!” I don’t think it could have been pulled off at a longer length (too many pieces to try to put together), but as a novella it was brilliant! Still one of my favorites of his.
(“Empire Star”, for those who missed it the first time around, was recently reprinted as an attachment to Delany’s award-winning Babel-17.)
Word is barely adequate and I use it on the work laptop. On the personal laptop I use LibreOffice for the occasional Word document, but mostly I use Scrivener.
@Isabel Cooper: Were you aware that the link in your name points to isabelcooper.wordpress.org, which redirects immediately to wordpress.org? I had to go on goodreads to find out what you’d written. 😉
@Rev. Bob
I hear ya. I’d love it if there were some way to use TeX as a basic story-writing/editing platform: it makes a lot of my professional work so much easier as it trims out a lot of the concerns about “making it look nice on the page.” You can futz with the formatting, but why would you?
@Andrew M – RE: Best Editor Long Form
Do a straight swap for the Andre Norton. Would help solve the Hugo-lacks-YA-Award and gets rid of the editor category. Heck, give them Short Form too. Two for one deal, and that’s cutting our own throat!
(1) I love a good Chuck rant. His insults are Shakespearean, only more cussing.
(7) You crazy, impetuous kids. Best wishes.
(12) and Camestros: Indeed, finding “never seen that before!” is not only not a bug, but not even a feature. It’s the whole damn POINT of an award of merit.
(15) In fairness, Roarke’s not like that now. He got better and the relationship is very equal now. But I totally agree about “Uprooted”, which is why I have been pushing “Bryony and Roses” as the alternative, done right.
BUT: the article as a whole is superficial and shows the author did approximately no research before writing it. The comments are worth reading for once.
@Isabel Cooper: Yes, yes, exactly what you said about 50SOG, and a standing ovation for Amish werewolves. If there aren’t any novels already (which, paralleling Rule 34, there must be?). I will read your Amish-ish werewolf romance.