Wednesday, January 19, 2005
 
Google is trying out a new tag that prevents comment spammers from benefiting from those links in the calculation of Google rankings, which I understand is one of the motivators for people like the ones who've been vandalizing the ORU blog and wiki. I'm not sure whether it'll be effective - it's still too easy to automate and spam everything that's accessible, thereby making sure you get lots of pages out there, even if you don't get the Google rankings. Other measures - like requiring some kind of validation step like typing in a number presented in the form of an image or clicking an 'I am a human' checkbox - will probably still be required.


Sunday, January 09, 2005
Cory Doctorow Featured by Locus
 
Reproducing, below, a message sent out on Cory Doctorow's mailing list about his appearance in Locus. I like the man's style. Particularly like the bit about "A lot of things that look like fringe activity, in hindsight will look like mainstream or the precursor to mainstream activity." This is an all together happier and more me-compatible message about the future of reading than the "Walmart Mafia" or "Poor Man's Movie" one.

Locus Magazine has posted an excerpt from the interview they've run
with me as their cover story for January:

        "My dad is a mathematician and teacher and my mom is a teacher,
        and I grew up in a political household: my folks are Trotskyists.
        My dad used to change 'Conan' stories into socialist parables. He
        would change Conan into this gender- and racially-balanced
        threesome called Harry, Larry, and Mary, and on long car trips he
        would retell these half-remembered 'Conan' stories but they would
        all turn into the proletariat casting off their shackles, killing
        the king, and forming soviets! These days, I like to think that I
        haven't moved to the right but at right angles to left-wing
        politics. But listening to his stories probably had something to
        do with my becoming a speculative fiction writer.
       
        "The world changes completely every five or six years, but most
        people don't notice. A lot of things that look like fringe
        activity, in hindsight will look like mainstream or the precursor
        to mainstream activity. While we weren't looking, e-books have
        become the dominant form of text on the planet. What we haven't
        done is create a class of writers who identify what they're doing
        when they produce the text as book writing. How do we create a
        class of well-paid, professional Web writers? Even if we can't,
        there may be a way to create hobby income and continue this
        really amazing Cambrian Explosion of new documents, information,
        articles, and stories that are published on the Web.
       
        "People today spend as much time as they can possibly drag
        themselves away from the real world to sit in front of the screen
        reading text, and I would argue that the text they are reading,
        the thing they are treating like a book, is a book. Our
        definition of the term has gone through radical shifts over the
        years. Dickens's were originally newspaper serials, thousand-word
        chunks.


Sunday, January 02, 2005
 
Found an interview with Lucius Shepard on the Bookslut site . Always had a residual tickle of curiosity about him, because he had the intelligence to like Alison's books. The featured quote, on the Bookslut page, also struck a resonance since I've been doing a lot of thinking about the money versus purpose and commercial versus meaningful thing myself, of late. Shepard's versions went:

"I just was confused and I wasn?t liking what I was writing. Now I think I have some expectations that were engendered during my gap. I know what I want to write. I know what I like."

The difference is that I have always known what I wanted to write, but having finally hit a wall in terms of how far I'll go to make it commercial, I have more confidence about being productive about it and drawing satisifaction from it again in the "old"--pre-publication--way. Mind you, I am sure that the experience of making myself intelligible to a wider audience has been a good one on the craft end of things, and it always helps to learn what is or isn't "getting through" to people. But without some core values and confidence about what they mean to you, it can do more harm than good to one's closet-reared muse to be duking it out with the pressures of the commercial world.


Anyway, now I have discovered places on the web where writers like Lucius--who are not market-whipped--shamelessly express their opinions, I will be less inclined to feel rebellious and depressed by my next dose of the "worlds of no" lectures one gets at the writers events at sci fi cons, of late.


By "worlds of no" I mean the sort of spiel by a published writer that exalts the horrors of the slush pile, stomps on anything subtle or intelligent on the grounds that it is bound to lose the average reader, and just basically sends out the message that getting published is hopeless--except for intrepid and talented folks like themselves and anyone else willing to sell out whatever ideas they started with and submit to being 100% market whipped. The bottom line in that message amounts to moral and artistic bankrupcy for all that I can make of it. There's fighting for accessibility and quality in your work, and there's selling out for fantasies of fame and riches.


I am not claiming to equate my own attitude to writing with that of Lucius. He says he is "... a connoisseur of desolation" (http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_12_003799.php) for starters, and I'm into those thin rays of hope and the small glories of the well-balanced human spirit. But I do feel much more admiration for someone like Lucius Shepard who writes, first and foremost, because he has things he needs to say, than I do for people who start and end their conversations about writing with a pork-belly trader's eye on what's hot at the checkout counter.


The market-whipped writers already get the goodies in cash rewards. Why can't they leave those of us who still have an ideal or two left, to pursue our foolishness in dignity, instead of trying to relegate us to the slush pile with a firm hand?


Could it be, maybe, that they're worried it might be coming back into fashion to have something to say, and to write with integrity? Maybe even about--horrors!--complex issues.



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