(1) STATHOPOULOS WINS MAJOR ART PRIZE. Although the critics gave their prize to Louise Herman’s portrait of Barry Humphries, the people have voted the 2016 Archibald Prize People’s Choice award to a fine artist with fannish roots.
In Nick Stathopoulos’s commanding portrait which won the 2016 Archibald Prize People’s Choice award on Wednesday, its sitter, Deng Adut, sees himself exposed and vulnerable.
A monster, thought the former Sudanese refugee and lawyer when he first saw the finished portrait….
Of the eight artists who approached him, Adut selected Stathopoulos, who grew up not far from where Adut practices as a lawyer, to paint his portrait for this year’s Archibald Prize.
It took three sittings, one of nearly six hours, and four-and-a-half months – the longest time Stathopoulos has taken for an Archibald entry – for the artist to be satisfied he had captured the essence and likeness of his subject.
The portrait, titled Deng, is Stathopoulos’ first public choice winner and his fifth entry to be selected as an Archibald finalist. A “clear winner” among the pool, it comes with a $3,500 cash prize.
The Guardian calls it “vindication”:
The win is something of a vindication for Stathopoulos. In 2014, the artist was “astonished and disappointed” when his portrait of the author Robert Hoge, titled Ugly, did not make the finals of the Archibald or the Doug Moran prizes; it went on to win the people’s choice at Salon des Refuses, which features work that did not make the Archibald’s finalists exhibition.
…The Art Gallery of New South Wales director, Michael Brand, said: “This vote of appreciation by visitors to the Archibald recognises both the meticulous skill of artist Nick Stathopoulos and the wonderful contribution Deng Adut has made – and is making – to Australian life.”
The Archibald exhibition is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 9 October.
(2) THE TRIMBLES: The title of GQ’s article – “This Is How Star Trek Invented Fandom” – is bound to rub some who remember earlier fanhistory the wrong way, but the article itself has accurate information about the start of Star Trek fandom. Especially the part that comes from two impeccable sources:
“We’re pretty sure that the Trek community you see today would not have existed but for us,” Bjo Trimble says. “Not bragging.” Special guests at Star Trek Las Vegas (and a host of other 50th anniversary events), Bjo (pronounced “Bee-joe”) and her husband John are Star Trek’s ur-fans, the determined couple who saved the franchise.
They’re both in their eighties now: John wears red cap with a blue Vulcan salute on the front, Bjo has a streak of brilliant pink hair floating in her cloud of white. She’s the more loquacious of the two, but, she insists, “the whole Save Star Trek campaign was John’s fault.” They had heard the show was being cancelled in 1968, after its second season, during a visit to the studio lot. At John’s suggestion, the two launched a letter-writing campaign—all mimeographs and postal mail. It was the first ever to save a TV show, and the first time any fan community had flexed its collective muscle.
“NBC came on, in primetime, and made a voice-over announcement that Star Trek was not canceled, so please stop writing letters,” Bjo adds with pride.
TOS’s third and final season premiered with “Spock’s Brain,” commonly held to be one of the worst episodes of all time. (“We’re responsible for there being a third season,” John admits, “we’re not responsible for the third season.”) But by the run’s end, with a grand total of 79 episodes—barely making the minimum threshold—Star Trek could enter syndication. It had earned a second life.
(3) KINSELLA OBIT. Canadian author W. P. Kinsella (1935-2016) died September 16. Much of his fiction was devoted to depicting First Nations people of Canada, or baseball – and he is particularly well known as the author of Shoeless Joe, which was made into one of my favorite movies, Field of Dreams.
Kinsella’s first published book, Dance Me Outside (1977), was a collection of short stories narrated by a young Cree, Silas Ermineskin, who describes life on a First Nations reserve in Kinsella’s native Alberta. A later collection of similar stories, The Fencepost Chronicles, earned Kinsella the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Kinsella was criticized for engaging in “cultural appropriation” by writing from the point of view of Native people, while he rejected the criticism on the grounds that a writer has the license to create anything he chooses.
These stories use the ineptness of the white bureaucrats on reservations as background, and Kinsella defended them, saying, “It’s the oppressed and the oppressor that I write about. The way that oppressed people survive is by making fun of the people who oppress them. That is essentially what my Indian stories are all about.”
Kinsella wrote nearly 40 short stories and three novels involving baseball. Shoeless Joe (1982) was his first novel, and the second, Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), was written as an epic spiritual conflict in the form of a game between a minor league team and the 1908 World’s Champion Chicago Cubs which threatened to go on to the ending of the world.
(4) BESIDES THE FICTION. Abigail Nussbaum says don’t overlook another reason to respond to Strange Horizons’ fund drive:
But beyond my relationship with it as a writer, what makes Strange Horizons special and important to me is the material it’s put before me as a reader. A lot of the testimonials you’re going to see around the internet in the next few weeks are going to talk about Strange Horizons‘s fiction department, which has and continues to give platforms to new writers, many of whom have gone on to great things. That’s worth recognizing and celebrating, but to me Strange Horizons will always be special as one of the finest, most interesting, most fearless sources for criticism and reviews. There is, quite simply, no other online source of genre reviews that covers the breadth of material that Strange Horizons does, with the depth of engagement and the multiplicity of perspectives that it offers. The editorial team that took over from me in 2015, under the leadership of Maureen Kincaid Speller, has excelled at finding new voices, such as Samira Nadkarni, Vajra Chandrasekera, and Keguro Macharia, to offer their vital points of view, while maintaining the presence of reviewers like Nina Allan and Erin Horáková, whose writing is essential to anyone interested in the state of our field.
(5) ASPIRING TO GREATNESS. Kameron Hurley identifies another of her writing problems in “The Madhatter Teaparty: Rescuing Your Characters from Endless Cups of Tea”. I have wondered if she didn’t struggle, would she still have such a rich source of examples to use in teaching about the writing profession? (She probably would!)
Plot kicks my ass. It kicks my ass up one end of a story and down another, because honestly, all my characters want to do is snark at each other over tea. Or whisky. Or coffee. Or bug juice. Whatever. Any excuse for them to sit around flinging zingers at each other and discussing what they are going to do next works for me.
This over reliance on tea-and-conversation scenes is a hallmark of discovery or gardener writers like me. When we get stuck on what happens next, we just sit the characters down for a chat and let them figure it out. Needless to say, this is a time consuming bit of lazy writing, because while it may get us where we’re going eventually, we can spend literally thousands upon thousands of words over the course of a novel having the characters explain the plot to each other, and then we have to go back and remove all those scenes or make them more interesting in their final form (I spent a lot of time in Empire Ascendant in particular going back and making talking scenes more interesting. For real: in the first draft, the first 150 pages of that book was just people talking)….
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- September 21, 1897 — The New York Sun’s Frank Church replied, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
- September 21, 1937 — J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit.
(7) COMICS MAKING. NPR tells about “A Comics Convention For The Unconventional: The Small Press Expo”.
In theory, SPX seems a lot like many of the other comic-cons that have been popping up across the country over the last few years. There’s the vast exhibit floor, there’s a packed schedule of panels and spotlights featuring interviews of, and discussions between, various comics creators. People mill about, lugging bags loaded down with stuff they’ve bought, or find an empty patch of carpeted hallway on which to plop themselves and rest while perusing their purchases.
If you close your eyes, its sounds a lot like any other con: the low, steady murmur of voices punctuated by the occasional exclamation of delight or surprise from someone who’s stumbling across an old friend — or a new passion.
But the moment you open your eyes, you’re reminded that SPX isn’t like most other cons.
It’s smaller, for one thing — the big shows in San Diego and New York attract upwards of 130,000 people, and SPX’s attendance is closer to 3,000. It fills the huge ballroom at a hotel in North Bethesda, Maryland, but unlike other comic-cons, where companies build massive booths that tower over you with video screens, loudly hawking all manner of comics-adjacent stuff like toys, games, statues and t-shirts, everything at SPX is at eye-level.
(8) CAN THOSE EDITORS. A piece on wired.com by Susanne Althoff called “Algorithims Could Save Book Publlshing – But Ruin Novels” looks at ways publishers are using data to determine which books they buy, including a summary of The Bestseller Code.
The result of their work—detailed in The Bestseller Code, out this month—is an algorithm built to predict, with 80 percent accuracy, which novels will become mega-bestsellers. What does it like? Young, strong heroines who are also misfits (the type found in The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). No sex, just “human closeness.” Frequent use of the verb “need.” Lots of contractions. Not a lot of exclamation marks. Dogs, yes; cats, meh. In all, the “bestseller-ometer” has identified 2,799 features strongly associated with bestsellers.
Later, Althoff discusses a company called Inkitt which invites everyone to submit their novels for everyone to read, and offers to act as agent for the books that are the best-performing. Inkitt sold YA novel Bright Star by Erin Swan to Tor, which will publish it next year.
The ability to know who reads what and how fast is also driving Berlin-based startup Inkitt. Founded by Ali Albazaz, who started coding at age 10, the English-language website invites writers to post their novels for all to see. Inkitt’s algorithms examine reading patterns and engagement levels. For the best performers, Inkitt offers to act as literary agent, pitching the works to traditional publishers and keeping the standard 15 percent commission if a deal results. The site went public in January 2015 and now has 80,000 stories and more than half a million readers around the world.
(9) KAREN GILLAN IN JUMANJI REBOOT. The Hollywood Reporter has “9 Theories as to Why ‘Jumanji’ Has Actress Karen Gillan So Scantily Clad”.
The first image of the upcoming Jumanji cast was released Tuesday, and one notable cast member looked like she got lost on the way to a Lara Croft Halloween party and ended up in the jungle instead.
Karen Gillan plays Ruby Roundhouse alongside Dwayne Johnson as Smolder Bravestone, Kevin Hart as Moose Finbar, and Jack Black as Shelly Oberon. Johnson promises there’s a plot-driven reason for Ruby’s seemingly sexist and totally nonsensical costume in the reboot.
“Her jungle wardrobe will make sense when you know the plot,” Johnson said. “Trust me.”
(Some fans are guessing that Gillan’s character is a trope. The original Jumanji from 1995 featured purposefully stereotypical characters who were part of the game — so perhaps that’s the plot device Johnson is referencing.)
(10) VOTE FOR FEMINIST AND QUEER COMICS AWARD. Autostraddle is holding is third annual comic award contest, for both excellence in the art form, and excellence in representation: “It’s Time to Vote in the 3rd Annual Autostraddle Comic And Sequential Art Awards”.
This month is the three year anniversary of this column, which seeks to highlight and celebrate comics by, for and about queer women. So, that means that it’s once again time for the Autostraddle Comic and Sequential Art Awards, the only comic award that focuses on feminist themes and queer women’s representation in comics. Starting last year, these awards are voted on by you, the fans and readers of these comics and these books, and we’re doing that again this year, but now there are even more categories for you to vote in! This way, even more comics and creators get the recognition they so rightfully deserve.
(11) LANSBURY HELPS CELEBRATE BEAUTY & THE BEAST’S 25th. She can still carry a tune at the age of 90 – click through to watch as “Angela Lansbury sings ‘Beauty and the Beast’ theme in honor of anniversary”.
Twenty five years later, Angela Lansbury is ever just the same enchanting actress for Beauty and the Beast fans.
The actress, 90, reprised her role as Mrs. Potts during a special screening for the 25th anniversary of the animated classic. Lansbury, accompanied by composer Alan Menken, sang the title song, “Beauty and the Beast,” during the celebration in New York on Sunday. At the end, she even spoke her line to her character’s son: “Run along and get in the cupboard, Chip!” much to the delight of the crowd.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Rose Embolism, Martin Morse Wooster, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bruce Baugh.]
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First Fifth, from a motel in Santa Cruz where I am reading Necrotech. An interesting cyberpunk novel of the classic form…
Second fifth?
Off to finish up Juliana in Old English reading group.
The pure and sinless one is about to be offed, much to everyone’s relief.
Maybe we can go back to riddles.
Not quite fifth yet again
(9) KAREN GILLAN IN JUMANJI REBOOT. – “make sense when you know the plot”. I hope so. We were told the same thing when it came to Metal Gear Solid’s Quiet, but that basically fell into the “The creators wanted a scantily-clad female, so came up with a (terrible, *terrible*) reasoning for it later” reasoning.
(8) “Algorithims” should be “Algorithms”
(5) Endless Cups of Tea seem to have worked just fine for Ann Leckie’s characters.
Speaking of which: Having recently finished Ninefox Gambit, one detail I noticed is the obsession the characters have with gloves, which is also a motif that shows up occasionally in the Ancillary novels. Is this just an empire thing?
Just for the hell of it, tickybox, but I haven’t had a notification from here in days, and checking back over and over and finding my place is too much like work.
(No notifications at all. Not even on older posts, and it claims to accept my subscription, so I don’t know what’s going on.)
I’ll be back when my notifications return.
The Hopeful ::ticky::
[ticky one more time]
Seriously, Mike, has anyone at WordPress said anything about the notifications?
For those who asked about it, I have written a post showing how the Sad and Rabid Puppy groups separately affected the Hugo ballot.
Leaving those of use with tastes that don’t correspond to bestsellerdom with…?
Not mentioning anything regarding fifth because I’m super classy and have a very, very sophisticated sense of humor that would never obsess over a joke long after its hilariousness had been worn away by overuse. To quote myself 25 years ago: I know when to quit.
@microtherion – I noticed the glove things with Ninefox Gambit, and associated it with Ancillary *noun* (Ha! subverting the dominant haters’ vocab!), but now I’m wondering if both of those are referencing something else?
ETA: I’m getting my subscription emails, but that’s all. This is GodStalkGate2016. This is seriously messing with my lifestyle.
Mike Glyer – in the unlikely case that you would trust some arbitrary Filer, if you give me access to your web account (particularly shell access), I can troubleshoot. You should have my email address from a previous exchange. If you want, you could go through the company I work for. I could send you the contact info.
EETA: We normally charge X amount per hour, but I could give a 100% discount for File770
(8) On Inkitt, there is of course a lengthy discussion in the Absolute Write Bewares, Recommendations & Backgrounds forum. There, Inkitt is widely considered YADS – “yet another display site” where you are encouraged to blow your first publishing rights in the mistaken idea that trawling such sites is a primary or even frequent way for publishers to acquire new books – and it is pointed out, re: Bright Star‘s acquisition, that Tor accepts unsolicited submissions, so it’s not like Inkitt was a necessary link in the chain there.
Apparently, certain of Inkitt’s personnel engage in pretty spammy Twitter practices too.
Via that thread, a link to Jim C. Hines blogging about them a couple months ago. Excerpt:
“Spock’s Brain” was the first Star Trek episode I ever saw, September 1968, because of scheduling conflicts (piano lessons) during the earlier seasons. I’d already read the first book of James Blish episode adaptations; I had also seen some of Lost in Space, and no question “Spock’s Brain” was a great deal more impressive. (I was 11.) The visual effects were good, and so was the music.
Not until daily reruns of the whole series began, a few years later, did I have any reference point by which to judge the third-season scripts as weak. I still have a lot of affection for the episodes that I first saw on Friday nights at 10, as bizarre as some of them are.
DAY THREE OF THE FILE770 GODSTALK TICKY CRISIS
I’m still getting notifications from both Scalzi and Camestros’ WordPress blogs, so I suspect that Mike’s server host changed some settings.
(5) I have the sudden overwhelming impulse to go to my WiP, and tear out two major conversations. And I promised myself I wouldn’t touch it until I got an editor to look at it.
::tickbox:: and see if I get a subscribe notice.
And it worked again! Didi I just get stuck in some warp? Haven’t received any new posts or comments since yesterday. Getting all my other email.
(7) COMICS MAKING. Yay, SPX! I’ve gone on and off over the years. I was out of town last weekend and somehow didn’t even realize it was happening then. Well, I need to save money anyway. 😛
(8) CAN THOSE EDITORS. “cats, meh” – whaaaaaat?! 😉
::bookmarking latest comment I read, to come back later:: (which, uh, I usually do anyway until a thread at least partially slows down)
Gak – reposting here ‘cuz I thought I’d left this comment on the latest Pixel Scroll, but I left it on yesterdays. And who knows if anyone will see it, with comment-e-mail-limbo. 😉 So:
Anyone read or heard much about The Lazarus Gate by Mark Latham (published by Titan)? The book covers are tasty and this part of the description intrigued me: “a secret war between parallel universes, between reality and the supernatural”
Sigh…still not getting new comments in email. Any ideas what to do??????
@junego Run in circles? Scream and shout?
Kameron Hurley’s tea complaint: I have one manuscript I call “my ten-pot story”, because I made and drank about ten pots of coffee over the course of writing it. And yes, the characters drink a hella lot of coffee. Brief quote: “Of course coffee had been made. Coffee was blood, coffee was gasoline, coffee was the dark-roast matter from which galaxies were formed.”
Jumanji‘s being remade? Why? It was a perfectly good, if not great, movie the first time. And with DVDs, streaming video, etc., the original’s still easily available to watch, tbmk.
@Iphinome. I’m doing the running/screaming (but quietly, hub is asleep) between trying to catch up with yesterday and today’s Scroll comments. But it’s still broke!
Wasn’t there an outbreak of something similar near a year ago and people had to unfollow and refollow the site? Hmmmm, let’s give that a shot.
So here’s my re-up ::ticky::
(9), at least as presented, looks like a weasely hedge. “Sure we’ve highly sexualized the only female character, but don’t worry! We have a plot justification for it!”
That’s nice.
I bet that plot justification totally explains why she doesn’t borrow the jacket from the guy on her left.
Oh hey, next time could you sexualize one of the guys?
You might feel weird about it, but don’t worry. I’ll write you a plot justification. I don’t see how any possible objection could remain.
Meanwhile in Sweden:
Stockholmers hunt killer badger after hipster cat attack
Hampus Eckerman: Stockholmers hunt killer badger after hipster cat attack
This seems eminently sensible, according to my SJW credentials. 🐱
Also, I think that we are in dire need of a Swedish Worldcon sometime in the next decade. Sweden sounds like it would be even more fun that Finland.
Today’s read — Borderline, by Mishell Baker
Fantasy; a woman with borderline personality disorder is recruited into an organization that oversees the Los Angeles fey community.
I’ll say, first, that there’s a lot to like about this book. It’s told from a perspective that’s rare in literature (possibly unique, although I couldn’t swear to it), and it manages the difficult task of presenting a main character with serious issues, warts and all. That’s not easy, and the author deserves a lot of credit for it.
That being said, exposition nearly killed this book for me. There is a lot of exposition. If the nature of magic is not being explained to the narrator, then the narrator is explaining the nature of borderline personality disorder to the reader. Over and over. I also think one of the central premises ultimately made little sense, but that’s almost a minor issue compared to the amount of information that was told rather than shown.
So … thumbs up? Thumbs down? I’m going to say neither. It’s right on the borderl — er, edge.
(5) Hurley’s tea party: I think one challenge for writers is to spot when a conversation should be summarized or briefly referred to instead of retold verbatim. This might be a situation where a too-literal understanding of the “show, don’t tell”-rule will land an author in deep waters: No, showing the relationship between the protagonist and their best friend does not require you to repeat everything they say to each other. It’s more efficient to simply tell readers “they chatted for hours”.
ETA: I’m on Team Badger.
In Four Roads Cross, there’s a number of chapters in a row where everyone is drinking coffee endlessly, and judging its quality — good coffee, bad coffee, awful coffee, middling coffee but with cinnamon in it and heated to the right temperature so now it’s good, etc., etc., etc. I seriously wanted them to shut up about the damn coffee. (For what it’s worth, I am not a coffee drinker and mostly think of it, if I think of it at all, as an ice cream flavor.) Fortunately the story eventually moved on.
@Kyra
I was a bit up and down on Borderline. I actually appreciated the exposition about BPD because I wouldn’t have really got it otherwise, but it fell into the now-traditional UF trap of having someone explain everything to the main character about 5 minutes after it would have been helpful. I quite liked the worldbuilding, and there’s a joke about Spielberg that still makes me chuckle, but I’m not convinced it’s going to sustain a series.
On the other other hand, I definitely like Baker’s writing and am interested to see what else she does.
@Hampus…now see…if only that cat and badger had sat down to some tea, at a location were no author would have been tempted to include it in their Inkitt submission…something, something…different universe!
@Inkitt stuff. Yeah, what Jim Hines said. Read the EULA, then do not submit.
I’d go, though I suspect it would be about a decade before one could be set up. Wasn’t Helsinki the first ‘scandanavian’ bid of recent times anyhow?
Mark —
I agree that a certain amount of exposition about BPD was necessary, but it Just. Kept. Coming. And yeah, the “would have been nice to know five minutes ago” issues were annoying.
It’s a book which has both significant plusses and significant minuses.
@microtherion: I have not yet read the Ancillary books, but generally gloves in SF make me think of B5’s Psycorp.
They already remade it once, when they called it Zathura.
As for how “nonsensical” Karen Gillan’s outfit is for travel in the jungle, we should look to the clothing choices of the people who actually live in the jungle, such as the Yanomami (the most famous to me, at least) plus various others. (Free bonus: the full movie of The Emerald Forest.)
Yes, to be more practical in the hot and humid conditions of the rainforest, Amy Pond should be dressed more like That One Scene in Not Another Happy Ending
(5) I am reminded of the acting exercise—for the life of me I can’t remember what it’s called and my Google-fu is failing me—in which one character is engrossed in a normal activity (say, washing dishes) while having a Dramatically Significant dialogue with the other character.
(8) Even if the Inkitt people are on to something, once the market is flooded with books that score at the top of their metric for best-seller-worthiness, those books will divide the market among themselves, and then none of them will be best-sellers.
brb, writing a novel in which the hero is a hedge-fund manager who fights crime using the billions he earned through a deep understanding of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis… I need some exposition here, so I’ll just introduce a scene of him drinking coffee and shouting at his Bloomberg terminal…
One of the very few scenes that irritated me in City of Stairs (a book I adore) is when the main character suddenly starts cooking a meal for no particular reason while delivering a massive chunk of exposition. It was so clearly put in there simply and solely because the massive chunk of exposition would be too boring without something else happening, and the character’s supposed love of and expertise in cooking which purports to motivate it is never brought up or mentioned ever again.
Forlorn clicky.
Reprint Harlequins? Asked the Textbook Man
Cosplay Harleyquin, Said the Tik-Tok Man
Repaint Harlequins, Said Picasso’s Muse
Still no updates. It took my subscription. It’s my 770 Crisis—though I see I am not alone, now.
On of my biggest pet peeves in fantasy/sci-fi is the lack of diversity in drinks or one drink thinly disguised as another drink. Drinking endless cups of tea is fine, but not when they’re calling it khah and the term buys the same damn thing everywhere in the Ten Kingdoms or whatever. Or barbarian walks into a tavern in a big city and orders an ale. Brewing is relatively advanced in the normal high fantasy world and local breweries were fiercely competitive in real period of the period. It’s like writing a police officer in a thriller walks into a bar he’s never been in and orders a beer or a whiskey and the bartender just puts something down like a default in front of him.
Well, the ticky box has never worked for me from day one. I put it down to the Safari browser – it doesn’t play well with various websites (floating elements in the centre of the page when they should be in a sidebar, pop-up boxes with close buttons hidden off the bottom of the page, etc). I just keep multiple tabs open and refresh every now and again.
Also, as the movie is released on Friday:
The Scroll With All The Gifts.
That’s so standard in US TV shows that I confess I’d assumed it was generally the case, outside hipster craft brew drinking holes. You know, the only kind I’d want to be caught dead in. We’re so used to the idea of default industrial American beer being just awful that it made sense. Now that I think about it I can also see “[If Coors aren’t prepared to pay for /the regulators don’t allow] product placement then they’re not going to get any” though if so I’m vaguely surprised that more shows don’t invent a fictional beer ala Duff.
@Kyra
AGREE. I don’t normally mind reading about delicious fantasy curries but that scene was so bizarrely left field in what was otherwise a super well put together book.
On Borderline, I enjoyed and appreciated the distinction between “here is what I know about my thought processes and how they are a product of mental illness” and “but this is still how I’m thinking and so whatever I’m acting on it anyway” – i.e. making Millie a reliable narrator without giving her a superhuman ability to rise above her own illness. I can’t argue that the result is very exposition-y though.
Fantasy brew naming competition go! Beers and teas/infusions all valid.
JUMAJI remake: how can you replace Robin Williams?
Personally I like the technique of exposition through fake encyclopedia entries or similar at the start of each chapter.
8) Sounds like you are not obligated to use Inkitt as agent for your book once you post there, its just an option. So its basically the same as Wattpad?
NickPheas:
Works very well for beer in Sweden. You say “a big strong” and get the default beer.
(3) I always liked Kinsella’s baseball stories. I really got interested in baseball by reading Shoeless Joe on a whim.
Scrolless Joe Comes to Iowa
File770 Pixel Confederacy
Scroll Me Outside*
The Last Pixel Before Armageddon
If Wishes Were Pixels
* Have to be careful. In the story, “Dance me outside” is an invitation to fight akin to “Wanna step outside?”
Regarding using machine learning to identify promising novels, certain types of classifier (e.g. CART and Maximum Entropy) can be trained to do a good job of identifying low-quality materials. For example, at Microsoft, my team built a MaxEnt classifier that identified low-quality web pages with great accuracy (about 70-80% of all web pages are too poor to want to show to customers). No single feature was a guarantee of low quality, but it figured out how to weight the different combinations. If I remember right, the strongest features were 1) does the word “fuck” appear anywhere on the page (or maybe it was what percentage of the words were derived from “fuck.”) and 2) are there any instances of multiple exclamation points?
For slush-pile processing, I’d bet things like frequency of words like “that” and “felt” and “-ing” would probably offer clues. Some of the features described in the article would require someone to read the whole novel and fill in a form afterwards, which might be acceptable as a second filter.
But what it won’t do is find the very best works. Nor will it find “black swans”–books that manage to be bad for novel reasons.
You’d need to have access to a publisher’s slush pile to build a thing like this, since it would have to be trained on actual bad books. Trivia question: why is it impossible to use good books alone to train a classifier to separate good from bad?
I was under the impression that a lot of bars do have a standard brew on tap for the person who doesn’t want to think past “orange-yellow drink with a head in my glass NAOW.”
I do agree that there could be a great deal more subtlety about the social usage of drinks that are kinda-coffee or the like in SFF; my favourite story on the subject though is Diana Wynne Jones’ “Dan and Nad adn Quaffy”.
______
I thought “Dance me outside” started as an invitation from a woman to her dance partner – Ie, really neither fighting nor dancing – and was only used in the fighting sense later when the guys were trying to implement their plans. I could however be confusing the story and the movie. Since I started reading books written by people who actually live in a Rez about rez life, I’ve been avoiding going back to Kinsella for fear of the Suck Fairy.
Say, is ANYBODY getting notifications when they tick the box?