(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.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
You have my attention. (No snark. I’m genuinely curious.)
Okay: in Office, you can do find-and-replace on tabs and paragraph marks. LibreOffice, nope, unless it’s changed in the latest version. (This is actually something I do a lot.)
In Office, you can set tabs for an entire document at one time (and I am still annoyed at MS for hiding the tab box in Word 2007). LibreOffice: nope.
I won’t swear that you can’t set paragraph styles for an entire document in LibreOffice, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I saw some of the HTML that used to come out of Office. It was word-by-word automagic conversion, and needed a lot of cleaning up, and that was just the body.
Oh, yes, please accept my kudos for the Amish Werewolves too! Literally laughing out loud.
—
And while I’m here, another SOUS (Stories of Unusual Structure), classics edition: Olaf Stapeldon’s Last and First Men and Starmaker. The Generational Novel taken as far as that concept can possible be taken! 🙂
As if Harper Lee wasn’t enough, Umberto Eco as well.
Oh, by the way, someone asked at some point about ‘All the Birds in the Sky’–I read it and reviewed it here:
http://fraggmented.blogspot.com/2016/02/review-all-birds-in-sky.html
Short version: It’s spectacular when it’s about the characters, and suffers a tiny bit at the end when it has to pay attention to the ostensible plot, but not terribly so. Oh, and I really thought CJA would put more non-monogamous/heteronormative relationships in there, but that’s my own fault for creating expectations and not her fault for not meeting them. 🙂
@Xtifr
I will second Zanzibar, and amplify it with 2312, which uses similar narrative tricks.
Farmer’s Lord of the Trees/The Mad Goblin Ace Double was interesting to me, in that whichever order you read them in, there were still narrative surprises held out. I don’t know if that’s structural or just clever.
Sorry to hear of the loss of Eco. He wrote several worthy books.
On the whole “Could Starship Troopers win the Hugo today,” as others smarter than me (or is it I?) have said, Heinlein probably wouldn’t probably write the same novel today. Aside from other issues, like women in the military, it would probably have a lot more, you know, actual fighting for a military SF novel. (I remember from my most recent reading, maybe 10-12 years ago, was a WHOLE lot of talking and maybe 1-2 battle scenes).
Camestros: I would totally read “The Atticus Finch Mysteries.” Anyone remember William Faulkner’s collection of detective stories, “Knight’s Gambit,” featuring (Oh, darn, I have to go Google the name, here it is) county attorney Gavin Stevens? Or “Intruder in the Dust”?
The whole discussion about kids in college and sex these days reminds me that in the 1970s-1980s, I lived in a dorm where one wing was male, one wing was female, with a common area in between, and everything went on that you could imagine. And I still couldn’t get a girlfriend. (Not that I’m bitter, or anything. Happily married today.)
JJ on February 19, 2016 at 1:56 am said: “I mean, look at The Phantom screaming when treatments of comic book characters don’t align with his historic experience. Some people feel threatened by anything which is not familiar and which challenges their ingrained definitions and expectations.”
JJ, your deliberate misrepresentation of my remarks is rude, uncalled for and idiotic. I said that when you change major things from a comic for political reasons that do not forward the story, the resulting movie will be rubbish. What I wrote is still there for anyone to go and check.
That you do not like me and my views is unfortunate, but not really any of my business. However I’m really not prepared to tolerate you lying about me in an open forum.
Probably Starship Troopers wouldn’t win a Hugo today. Probably Gone With the Wind wouldn’t win an Oscar. Probably Marie Curie wouldn’t get a Nobel, probably I Love Lucy wouldn’t rake in the Emmys.
Annual awards are like that. They have a real “what have you done for me lately?” quality.
I do all my APA submissions in LaTeX, and even wrote up my own document class/style and environments.
For interacting with other people, I usually find that the ability to convert LaTeX to either PDF or RTF is usually good enough, depending on what the people on the other end need. PDF for full pages with pre-determined layout, RTF if it’s being imported into somebody else’s layout program (such as for a conbook).
With regards to MSWord vs Open/LibreOffice… let me say this: I have had MSWord documents at work where merely attempting to open them with MSWord, on the same machine and version of Word which created them, would cause Word to crash hard. (This was, admittedly, Word97 with a binary .doc file.) Opening the document in OpenOffice, and then re-saving it, allowed Word to open it without crashing and with no apparent loss of formatting.
Between things like that and the way Word used to try to re-paginate your document just because the new machine had different printer drivers, I’ve had lots of reasons to distrust Word. I also agree that it is a lot better now, but I still prefer a nice text editor and LaTeX for large-scale formatting.
Books with interesting structures:
MS Found in Saragossa (Jan Potocki). “Completed” in 1815. Stories within stories within stories, with a number of fantastic elements. Beautifully written.
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell). Also an example of nested stories (including two set in far future) but with a unique formal structure and an amazing array of styles. The interactions between events and characters in the different stories are unexpected and ultimately quite touching.
Eco, too? Damn. This has turned into a seriously not-good day. Name of the Rose was one of those books that fascinated me and made me laugh out loud, despite the meanness . . . ouch.
It was Foucault’s Pendulum for teenage me, though I think Name of the Rose is a better book. Hell, I just thought of it this afternoon–I took a nap, and remembered the line as I was staggering around groggily, to the effect that sin was like sleep in the afternoon, and the more you had, the more you wanted.
2016 is front-loading the grief, it seems.
LibreOffice and MS Office each have features the other lacks. And the list is not short. This should come as no surprise when you realize that OO/LO were never intended to be MS Office clones! They trace their ancestry back to the days when there was still actual competition in the office suite market.
P J Evans on February 19, 2016 at 3:53 pm said:
You need wildcard search/replace for that. On the search dialog, select “other options” then “regular expressions”. Then, “\t” will match a tab, and “^.” will match the start of a paragraph. I’ll gloss over the other wonders (and horrors) of regular expressions for now. 🙂
I don’t know whether this really counts as structurally innovative, but I liked Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn which is an epistolary novel written by characters living in an increasingly repressive society which is gradually forbidding use of the letters of the alphabet one by one. I thought the author managed to convey the increasing anguish and rebellion of the characters despite their ever-diminishing vocabulary as the novel advances…
is one of my favorite books.
@RedWombat:
Well we better hope so.
Foucault’s Pendulum was dizzying and exhilarating. I’m not sure if I could read it again, but what a trip. Baudolino is pretty nifty, doing a similar excavation in the rich vein of stuff they were willing to believe about Prester John and such.
I was thinking a minute ago that if Eco isn’t genre, he’s genre’s next door neighbor who we talk to over the back fence regularly.
Mike Glyer wrote:
I am reminded of the paragraph in the book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot in which, after noting that Mr. Limbaugh claims to be a comedian, Al Franken quietly asks the reader to compare Limbaugh’s single Cable ACE Award to his (Franken’s) *shelf* of Emmy Awards for comedy writing and performing on Saturday Night Live.
I quietly suggest that File 770 readers might want to make a similar comparison.
One interesting thing I note about Paulk’s piece: while it stops short of admitting that differing tastes are a normal and acceptable thing, it does at least acknowledge that someone who doesn’t share her tastes might have motivations other than trying to force an evul librul agenda on the world! I think that’s the first time I’ve seen anyone from any of the puppy camps admit anything like that!
It’s a small step, but a positive one, and should be encouraged.
@jack lint
“Failure to communicate! Failure to communicate!”
Though not a romance, the “Amish Werewolf” genre goes back to at least Tristan Egolf’s 2006 novel KORNWOLF.
I will have to disagree with the positve remarks about Wright’s “Awake In The Night Land”. Trying to read it, I fell asleep twice in the first fifteen pages before giving up.
Brunner’s structure for STAND ON ZANZIBAR was inspired by John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy. (After reading Brunner’s take, I tried Dos Passos’ work myself, but didn’t enjoy it much.) A recent interesting-sounding book, Johnny Shaw’s FLOODGATE, is described as being inspired by the idea ““What would happen if John Dos Passos was hired to write the movie novelization for Big Trouble in Little China?”
Aaaaghhh! Too many interesting books!
@Kip W: the impression I get from his essays is that Eco wasn’t especially interested in specifically writing in a genre way, but that he had no fear of including genre stuff in the mix along with a lot of other things. And, more actively, that he had fun doing so.
Xtifr on February 19, 2016 at 5:02 pm said:
They certainly bury that information. I think I’ll deal with Office for that.
@P J Evans: “Okay: in Office, you can do find-and-replace on tabs and paragraph marks. LibreOffice, nope, unless it’s changed in the latest version. (This is actually something I do a lot.)”
You can do a lot of non-obvious searching in LOW; using Ctrl-H instead of Ctrl-F opens up a lot more possibilities, like the mentioned regex search option that allows start-of-paragraph and other matching.
If you want to set an entire document to use the same paragraph style, I can do that in LOW in a couple of clicks. Highlight everything, double-click the desired style, done. There’s also a feature to search for one style and replace with another.
What frustrates me about output HTML in both is the way they treat edits to formatted text. For instance, given the italicized “brickhose” that needs a U inserted, the resulting post-edit HTML will be italicized as [brickho][u][se] instead of the correct [brickhouse]. What this means in practice is that, should you need to make such changes, you need to then highlight the formatted section, clear the formatting, and reapply it… which, sadly, has become almost second nature to me now.
I loved Foucault’s Pendulum too. It’s only February and 2016 has far too much mourning!
On (15) I had a very similar reaction to Uprooted, and when protagonist and douchecanoe took it to a new level I stopped reading in disgust. Later it bothered me, because I’ve read other things by Naomi Novik that I loved, plus I’ve read far more horrific romances. I guess you can’t really write it off as “chemistry” when you find a fictional character sexy/gross but it feels similar. Applied theoretical chemistry, maybe.
Paying/valuing writers.
Years ago I was one of the highest paid writers serving the paintball industry. I got paid bonuses, was sought after and was a brand that the magazines used to enhance their value.
A new publication came to me, asking me to write for them, offering a very low rate (but ‘no editorial interference’ with content). I was arrogant and declined the offer “until you can match my current rates”.
A couple of years later there was a range war in the industry and my primary outlets were either improperly aligned or trying to stay out of the fray.
I turned to the aforementioned and accepted their much, much, much lower pay rate because it had become as widely distributed as the other publications and was willing to publish articles and columns regardless of the industry politics. I would and did accept no compensation for some of that work. I eventually became sports editor and then east coast editor, and frequently ghosted editorials – after having prevailed in the range war.
And now, there are no print paintball magazines anymore and I don’t think any of the few remaining online ones pay anything for content.
Which is by way of saying that this is an issue fraught with millions of individual exceptions and motivations, needs and goals.
I think the better way to look at it is: is the content creator being exploited? (I certainly wasn’t.).
@jr Lawrence
Use Of Weapons really stands out for using a odd structure brilliantly; I did wonder whether Leckie was referencing it in at least parts of Ancillary Justice.
Books with interesting structure: The Life and The Opinions of The Tomcat Murr by ETA Hoffman.
The Tomcat Murr has written his autobiography, but when it is published, the pages have been mixed up by those of the depressed composer Johannes Kreisler. The stories have nothing to do with each other apart from interrupting each other at strange times and leaving gaps in the telling. It makes for a wonderfully weire experience.
Oh, love for kater Murr!
Public service announcement: the POC Destroy SF Kickstarter has about four hours remaining.
Since I’ve backed both previous Lightspeed “X Destroy SF” campaigns, I already have all the Lightspeed back issues and a few each from Nightmare and Fantasy. I’m pretty sure that my $55 pledge to subscribe to both active magazines (Lightspeed and Nightmare) will plug the rest of the holes in my collection. (Thanks to an early stretch goal, Nightmare subscriptions come with all of its back issues, ditto for Lightspeed, and they’ll substitute the Fantasy back catalog if you already have the back issues for the magazine you’re subscribing to.)
So, if you’ve been on the fence with this one, now is the time to pledge.
Most people have already mentioned my favorite unconventionally structured sci-fi books–or at least authors who regularly use them (i.e. Priest and Lem)–so I’ll just throw out Proust’s In Search of Lost Time because it always amazes me it has a structure at all, let alone the ouboros-like structure it does have and Wu Jingzi’s The Scholars which tells many inter-related stories, but in such a way often the resolution of one story is only mentioned in passing in another (it’s a technique it shares with Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian).
@Rev. Bob, McJulie, Christian Brunschen re: 50 Shades of Gliders –
I learned to fly fixed-wing aircraft at Boulder Municipal Airport, which has a secondary runway for use by glider operations. (“Always wait for the glider to turn before you turn crosswind!”) I imagine landing one of those must have much in common with landing a powered plane during emergency procedures – engine’s shut down, set up best glide speed, etc., only with still having to land on a particular runway rather than just choosing a convenient field.
I’m not sure how much it could have in common with piloting or landing a rotary craft, but I’ve never been in a helicopter, let alone piloted one, so I don’t know what their engine-off procedures are like.
@Rev. Bob, re: Perk (those not interested have been warned) –
You are clearly much more dedicated at this than I am. I get about 1K per day running the Perk.tv website, sometimes on two browsers simultaneously if I can be bothered. I don’t run any of the Perk apps for fear of them banning me for Bluestacks use. (Emulators are NOT fraud, you stupid bureaucrats! It’s how someone without a smart phone uses apps! Sigh… at least Perk do have *some* browser-based points-earning operations, unlike Viggle.) But it seems I didn’t get banned for converting my 88K Viggle Points to their equivalent in the Perk system, nor my reward suspended, so I guess it’s safe to continue using Viggle. Dunno, though; the way its tv-show check-in works sounds like a hassle, and is also said to still be buggy on Android (which is what Bluestacks is based on).
Anyway, ordered the $5 B&N card as an experiment. Received it today and used it successfully on the aforementioned used copy of The Interior Life. The bookstore fulfilling the order is local to me, ish, but enough out of my day-to-day way that the shipping is absolutely worth not having to drive there. I’ll have to visit them next time I’m down that way, though.
I also attempted “shopping with Perk” to get that new VGA cable I’ve been needing. (My preferred work environment involves expanding my screen space over an old flatscreen monitor. It got very tiresome when the cable I was using deteriorated to the point of cutting out the red channel and/or losing connection to the external monitor entirely.) Supposedly some amount of points will show up in my account within 15 days.
The new VGA cable (“MONSTER Digital Life”) is quite nice. I didn’t understand how a cable, of all things, could get so many 5 star reviews on Best Buy’s website. Now I get it.
I’ve only had one lesson in helicopter flying, but my feeling is that it would give you absolutely no advantage with regards to landing a plane. I think they are two very different creatures.
On structure, has anyone mentioned Nabokov’s Pale Fire? It feels like several different books all happening at once: the poem telling one story, the author of the notes and index trying to tell another, and the reader having to find a third that brings them together. (When I was putting the finishing touches on my (academic) book, I was inspired by Pale Fire to try to get secretly wacky with my notes and indices).
Books with unusual structure….it’s not SF but Catch-22 is the book that first comes to my mind. I always felt that once Heller finished the book he randomly shuffled the chapters.
@BGrandrath: Roger Zelazny’s did (mostly) randomly shuffle chapters for Roadmarks. I don’t remember much about it, and I read it a long, long time ago – probably it confused me at the time. Read more about it at Wikipedia, that bastion of incorrect knowledge.
Another books with a somewhat interesting structure is Joe Haldeman’s The Coming. It has a lot of short POV sections, but each connects to the next (or previous) via someone observing, or entering or leaving, or hooking up with the people from the previous/next section. So POV moves around, but in a connected way, every event being connected through how the narration, characters, and action moves around. But then IIRC, halfway through, he dropped this, and I was left wondering WTF? Either that or – I should admit this is possible – maybe I lost my focus and missed the connections. Anyway, I enjoyed the novel aside from this; the structure was an an extra bit of “oh, fun!” to the book.
BTW woah, 200 or so comments today?! Yipes!
@Rev. Bob: Thanks for the feedback! “half a dozen compilations” – oh dear, what’m I getting myself into by buying Ballantine & Morris’s first “Ministry” book. 😉 Also: “for the sadistically curious” – LOL, ISWYDT.
@Richard Gadsden (pages ago, sorry): Good grief, is this how Margaret Atwood has justified in her own head her periodic claim that she doesn’t write SF – she thinks she’s being original, thus it can’t be SF? I wonder.
@Isabel Cooper: “Amish werewolves” – with or without romance, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter and buy your Amish werewolf books. 😉 Even if it’s supposedly been done. And your comments about this stuff made me LOL. And as someone else mentioned, your name links to something that redirects to http://www.wordpress.org. But mostly: Amish(ish) werewolves, please!
@Re. Umberto Eco’s Passing: I’m sorry to hear that. I remember fondly playing a fantasy RPG in college based on Name of the Rose. 😉
@Kyra: you might be interested to know that Dorothy Heydt is planning to make The Interior Life available as a free e-book, with fonts a bit easier to distinguish than the print version. (I’m curious to know how you got on with the ones there, in fact.)
P.S. @Isabel Cooper: Is this you? No Proper Lady, described at fictiondb.com thusly: “It’s Terminator meets My Fair Lady in this fascinating debut of black magic and brilliant ball gowns, martial arts, and mysticism.” LOL, that’s a great tagline.
Unrelated: FYI folks, Kobo has some more Super Sale genre books including The Sharing Knife #1 by Lois McMaster Bujold (my other half enjoyed this series a lot, so I recommend-it-by-proxy) and Rides a Dread Legion (Demonwar Saga #1) by Raymond E. Feist. A lot of the stuff in the sale isn’t SFF, but there’s some. You get some bonus points if you spend a lot (yawn, IIRC their “points” require a truckload to be useful). Anyway, there ya go.
Beale:
Ah, but he’s failing to take into account the small detail that Wright’s opinion is worthless.
Oh, in the interesting-structure department, one has to mention Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories. The guy figured out so many fascinating things to do with his presentation.
Just read about Umberto Eco dying – I don’t think any writer has dealt with the topic of reason & unreason quite so well.
I have heard from many a person who fly that fixed wing aircraft and helicopters are so completely different that knowing one doesn’t give you much of an advantage at the other, save for the fact that you’re familiar with the whole being off the ground thing. Indeed, some of the reflexes on one will crash you on the other. Pretty sure that fixed wing pilots have to learn how to use their beasties as gliders just in case, but helicopters are really not at all aerodynamic when the power goes out.
@The Phantom: “I said that when you change major things from a comic for political reasons that do not forward the story, the resulting movie will be rubbish.”
Let’s just examine that at face value for a moment, hm?
You have repeatedly put forth the casting of a black actor in the role of Johnny Storm as an example of this – a major change for political reasons that do not forward the story. Let’s accept every word of that as 100% completely true, for the sake of argument. Let us also accept, because I don’t recall hearing anyone argue to the contrary, that that FF movie was crap. Most of us who’ve said that blame other changes, but that’s irrelevant to my purpose here.
Now, let’s say a renowned author – perhaps one Kurt Busiek, to drag a fellow Filer into the example – writes a script for a new FF movie. This script is, by all accounts, Not Crap. Kurt knows the mythos and writes a compelling script that does it justice. The studio looks at it and gives it a green light. Production will start in a couple of months.
Oh, one more thing: the cast of the previous movie is still under contract, so the major roles are still cast. It’s a legal thing. In terms of continuity, it’ll be just like the previous movie never existed. Kurt tosses in a line to explain why Sue and Johnny are siblings with different skin colors – maybe keeping the adoption explanation – but otherwise his script is untouched. It is filmed as is.
Assuming the cast does a competent job of playing the roles, and assuming the rest of the moviemaking process goes well (CGI, budget, editing, etc.) – will that resulting movie be rubbish?
If so, what – precisely – is so important about Johnny Storm’s whiteness that that sole change is enough to ruin the movie?
Ray on February 19, 2016 at 9:58 am said: […] Or Perec – A Void is a nov… book missing a particular common thing, a thing no authors until that work could do without.
Um … Gadsby (1939).
I don’t think it would be a credible contender. It’s a book that has Things To Say about politics and also there’s shooting. Consider two other high-profile books in 2015 that had Things To Say about politics and systems of power and also there’s shooting: Baru Cormorant and Ancillary Mercy. Consider something with a much more narrow scope, like Persona. Consider the Scorpion Rules. Consider Nagata’s trilogy. There’s no way I’d rank SST above any of those, and that’s just considering books that are doing somewhat similar things, not stuff like Dark Orbit or Planetfall or Towers Fall which do totally different things but which I’d also rank above SST. More importantly, if SST were dropped into the market today and you magically erased everyone’s knowledge of it, I think few other people would rank it highly on their 2015 list either. I could be wrong, of course, but…well, consider how these books handle their “messages”. Heinlein sticks you in a classroom where you’re literally lectured on remedial Not Actually Fascism But Closer Than Is Comfortable. And sure, he makes efforts to make it entertaining by making the lecturer an amusingly obnoxious douchecanoe, but jokes about Carthage only take you so far. As opposed to the high-profile 2015 titles, which make an effort to work their themes and points and etc into the plot and characterization in a way that’s more complex and more interesting than collectivism being instantiated as an army of marauding insects.
But, this goes back to the point that’s been repeatedly made: if Heinlein were somehow alive and writing for the market in 2015, Starship Troopers would be a completely different novel, because he’d be writing for a different time and a different audience.
And my favourite among SF with interesting structures: Slaughterhouse V.
@Nicole: “I also attempted “shopping with Perk” to get that new VGA cable I’ve been needing.”
(Other Filers: More Perk neepery follows. Skip along if it ain’t your thing.)
Let me know how that goes. I’ve been trying that with the Kobo ebook store, but I haven’t had any luck. Maybe it’s a Kobo thing…
As for being more dedicated… really, I just have a good setup that makes it easy to get points. While I’m reading or using my laptop (like now!), I have my Android tablet over to one side and my iPad mini where I can see the screen. I click the tablet’s mouse* once in a while, and I tap the red circles on the iPad when they show up. If I see that one of the screens has gone black with a spinning cursor, I take about thirty seconds to force-quit the app and get it restarted. Once in a while, that means taking a minute to see what’s on TV, so I can plug a show name into the iPad app. For me, all of that is a low-demand multitasking thing that requires significant attention maybe once or twice an hour.
Yesterday, that got me almost 3100 points. That’s a record for me; “normal” is more like 2000-2500. It’s just that if I’m not doing anything else with the devices and I’m in wifi range, I might as well have the apps going. If I go to a con, I’ll have the iPad with me anyway… so I might spend an hour a day scarfing points, but I’ll be doing something else at the same time. (Reading, most likely.) I probably won’t make 1000 points over an entire con weekend, but I’ll get a few hundred.
Basically, for the next three months or so, my goal is to get about 12,500 points per week. I can use those to unlock 250,000 Viggle points from my backlog (currently 3.5m) and get a $25 gift card. That’s $100/month of what I consider free money that I’ll probably blow on adding a wing to Mount TBR. 🙂 Once I get the backlog cleared… y’know, 10,000 a week is a nice $10 gift card. If I can score that in four or five days, I can go off the grid all weekend and not feel like I’m missing out. That’s a free paperback every week, and that ain’t bad.
* Yes, my tablet has a mouse. It’s part of the keyboard dock.
If we’re back on the Fantastic Four movie, I did want to add to the previous conversation that I, being adopted myself, thought that characterizing the central characters as a multi-racial adopted family was one of the strongest things about that movie. It made the theme of “We are a family and we will fight for each other and to stay together” that much more poignant and powerful.
(It really is amazing how much “adopted isn’t *really* family” crap is still floating around out there. Also the idea that finding out you’re adopted must be TRAUMATIC can please go take a long walk off the nearest available short pier at its earliest convenience.)
I am not conversant with FF lore, myself, so I had no stake in the movie’s relationship to the comics. My husband does, but he was in the mood for lightweight romp with explosions and fire, so he cued it up. It was enjoyable enough for what it was. But, given that, the casting and characterization of the central family really stood out for me as a blow for the good guys.
tl;dr: The thing that our most noxious persistent troll was complaining about? I think it was one of the few points in that movie’s favor.
Rev. Bob – sounds like a nice set-up you’ve got there. Having a couple of app-bearing devices does sound like an advantage!
Once they’ve got Viggle!Android fixed for check-ins, and maybe once they improve the check-in experience, I might get a little more ambitious. For now, clicking the +1 ads on Viggle’s “Bonus Shows” section makes the points accumulate surprisingly quickly; they’re much shorter than the videos running on Perk.tv. (Which I’m still running in the background, because why not.)