So as I’ve mentioned in the past, Demand Media is giving out a lot of bonuses this month. And if I finish 125, I get an extra chunk of change—this is actually a regular bonus, but I usually don’t find it practical to try for it.
But when I thought about it today, I realized that if I put in the extra 35 or so articles by the end of next week, and then do that much less articles next month, I could make the quota without neglecting my other writing.
On the other hand, trying to bat out an extra 35 in time to get them all approved will be exhausting and stressful. And given that I’m not desperate for the extra money (I’d love to get it, but I can pay my share of the bills without it), maybe it’s not worth the candle.
Whatever I do, I figure it’ll be a learning experience about my limits.
Okay, enough about my awful first-world problems, on to links!
•My new And column is out, on the NSA spying revelations.
•Echidne links to several stories, including one about Virgin Airlines proposing to help passengers hit on each other. Another link is to an article about the age gap between Hollywood leading men and their woman, actually looking movie by movie at the gap for Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, George Clooney and others.
•The growing popularity of hummus means a boom in chickpea farming.
•Paleofuture looks at the decline in mass transit in LA, and argues that it wasn’t the result of a scheme by car companies to destroy mass transit. Rather it was the transit companies delivering sub-par service, so the automobile looked the ideal solution. The comments include some disagreement.
•Texas Rep. Michael Burgess sees fetal hands moving and brilliantly deduces that male fetuses can masturbate at 15 weeks. And therefore, they can feel pain. But right-winger Ann Althouse (while insisting on her support for abortion rights) complains that this is hideously disrespectful: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” So there! Meanwhile, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose assures us “abortion is never necessary to save a woman’s life.” So never worry about the facts.
Category Archives: Writing
This will be a learning experience
More writing links
Delilah Dawson weighs in about the current SFWA sexism issues. Jim Hines responds to Malzberg and Resnick’s complaints about anonymous attacks with a list of criticisms with authors’ names attached. Seanan McGuire also speaks up about Resnick/Malzberg’s insistence she’s a “lady author” and lady authors shouldn’t be offended at being called lady authors.
At this point, I will break from links to tackle a particular point Resnick/Malzberg brought up (and I’m sure they’re not alone), that romance covers have lots of scantily clad men on them. A fair point, but it’s a different genre, where the hotness of the characters is often an important part of the story (even when you have an SF story with a romance, it’s not the same). And in the world we live in, near-naked pictures of men simply don’t have the same effect as near-naked pictures of women. The cultural overtones are very different (I’m pretty sure women don’t see half as many online ads with implausibly endowed men as I do of implausibly endowed women).
•An article at American Journalism Review on whether to use email in interviews.
•Various news sites attempt to curb trolling in comments.
•Therin Knite on picking a genre when marketing your story.
•Are contracts selling your soul legally enforceable?
•Speaking of sexist images, here’s some mucho sexist Marvel shirts.
•I’ve blogged before about Google’s digitization plans for out of print (but not necessarily out of copyright) books. Now it seems the French are putting copyrighted works into a database and allowing publishers to negotiate for digital rights. It’s supposedly a service to make unavailable books available, but authors have found books of their that are still in print in the ReLire database. More here.
•The Justice Department says Apple was the ringleader in an e-book price-fixing scheme.
•The drawbacks to using family names or names of pets, etc. as password recovery tools. A recent article in the SFWA bulletin made a similar point and suggested making up names instead.
Filed under Writing
Conflict at the Science Fiction Writers Association
This has not been a good year for the SFWA, sexual equality wise.
First, for the 200th issue, they used a cover of a swordswoman in a very small halter-top and a chain-mail bikini bottom (I didn’t hear about this until recently, as I joined right after), rather than, say, armor or any sort.
Inside the issue, in discussing great editors they had known, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg referred to one female editor from the 1950s (a very respected one, I gather) as “a knockout.” Which I gather (again, I haven’t seen this issue), was not a standard they applied to any of the men they talked about.
Then in 201, C.J. Henderson discussed branding andmarketing and cited Barbie as a textbook example of a brand that despite 50-plus years and lots of variation, never loses sight of the core brand. He then went on to add that part of her brand was “that she maintained her quiet dignity as a woman should.” An assessment of womanhood that had nothing to do with the point of the article (he also mentioned that when Barbie got her college degree, she never acted as if Ken didn’t want her to be successful. I think Mr.Henderson’s making another point there about women in the real world). E. Catherine Tobler expresses her less than enthused response, including that the organization she belongs to gave all this the stamp of approval.
And then, in 202, Malzberg and Resnick unfortunately decided to defend themselves against what they saw as a wave of criticism being flung at SFWA and themselves (scans and excerpts here). It would have been more persuasive if they hadn’t trotted out every argument in the book: They were being complimentary, would anyone object if they’d said that about a man, why is it wrong to mention women are attractive, they are so totally not sexist, OMG CENSORSHIP!
Which is, I suppose, why I wanted to mention the current storm here: That is the standard response, not only on sexism but racism, gay issues, religious issues, etc. That the speaker obviously didn’t mean to say anything wrong, so therefore they didn’t say anything wrong. They have no sexism/racism in their heart, so they couldn’t have said anything sexist/racist. And anyone who shouts them down is calling for censorship!
And I suppose it’s possible that someone in this fight is indeed calling for censorship (however you define that)—I’ve only read a fraction of what’s been discussed. But equally certainly a lot of the people are not. They’re simply saying “This shit is sexist, don’t run articles/pictures like this.” Which is a reasonable request, especially when the stuff is sexist, more so when you’re paying dues to the group responsible.
Malzberg and Resnick also have an absolute right to argue back, but these are not good arguments. Equating criticism with censorship is never a good argument, let alone invoking well, if we can’t say this, what if the government starts saying who you can have sex with? If the censors get away with this, the next step is Nazism or Stalinism!
That’s not a slippery slope, it’s a gigantic leap across an abyss.
John Scalzi, current SFWA president, has a reasoned response online here.
I had intended to post a whole bunch more today, but instead of being swept away by countless demands on my time, I was swept away by laziness, and the opportunity to do next to nothing. And it felt good!
Wiped
Part of which is probably Tropical Storm Andrea pressuring my sinuses. Partly also a busy week.
It was satisfyingly productive, though a little catty-corner. There are extra bonuses for the Demand Media stuff this month, so I’m front-loading them big-time. Plus the meeting I went to Wednesday sucked up some time, as did writing it up. I also attended three hours of a “building your brand” seminar online, for free. A lot of it isn’t really applicable to me (I don’t have a product or a service that needs funding, or a website anyone’s going to have the urge to buy), but some of it may be. I’ll review it later this month.
I managed to meet my goals for the week (30 Demand Media), though by late afternoon today, I think my performance was really dragging. But now it’s the weekend, and we have nothing in particular to do, so it should be extremely relaxing. Fingers crossed.
Writing links
A good look at how to get characters to act out of character: because they’re pushed to the limit, drunk, or hiding they’re real selves for instance.
•If you’re planning to write porn movies, this is probably not good news. Some banks don’t want your money.
•A writer discusses the detailed research she went through to write a drama set in Bolshevik Russia. I don’t usually go into as much detail for my own work (the historical detail isn’t the main selling point—and I find heavy “time dropping” annoying) but it’s still an interesting read. And if that’s not enough, here’s a support group for historical figures unfairly maligned in fiction. It’s hysterical.
•Amazon has a plan for writing fan-fic, getting paid for it and giving the rights holder some money too. Consumerist talks about it too.
•Dean Wesley Smith blogs about ghosting a novel in 10 days, charting his day-by-day progress. Interesting to see him do it starting from scratch though the blow-by-blow of the account isn’t exactly riveting (it’s like I imagine Tweeting about writing to be). In a related post, his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch uses him as an example of getting work done in small bursts of time. And I agree with her wholeheartedly about the importance of getting up and moving every hour or 30 minutes or whatever.
Of course, this also shows how what works for one person doesn’t work for everyone. Rausch and Smith structure their cooking plans to minimize the distraction from their writing; I love to cook, so I make sure and find time for it. Of course, I give up time for other stuff in return, but I think it’s a fair trade. And even when time is crunched, I’m unlikely to do much takeout; the gain in time for me isn’t worth the cost (for them, it’s obviously the other way around).
Filed under Writing
Writing what you know
It’s an old cliche that you should write what you know. And there’s also the old counter-cliche, that this is too damn limiting for a writer.
Although I do side more with the counter-cliche, knowing stuff can really help writing. It’s not so much a matter of confining yourself to your life experience as importing it to whatever you’re working on. Particularly details.
Case in point, the owl in the picture above (from a Mensa event last month). During the presentation by the Greenville Zoo, someone played a tape of owl calls and the bird responded. What was striking was that it didn’t flap its wings or start, it simply turned its head. Slowly. More like a machine than a startled living thing.
I didn’t know owls moved like that. If I ever have to use an owl in a story of mine, I’ll try to work that detail in, just because it’s neat.
Likewise, I was watching our garden last week and saw a honey bee come to rest on a clover blossom. Only it didn’t rest because the flower swayed from side to side under the weight of the bee. When the bee flew off with its pollen, the clover vibrated for a couple of seconds from the release before it came to rest.
I could do a story with someone sitting in the field, watching the bees, without mentioning that little detail. But it would be a better story if I threw it in.
The great animedirector Hayao Miyazaki made the same point in an interview: when one of his films required a snake fall out of the tree on someone, he had to go out, find a snake and let it fall. The animators were city kids and they’d never had the experience of seeing it happen.
In the same vein, back in biology class I had the privilege of watching a small constrictor (I’m inclined to say hog snake, but I can’t swear to it after so many years) attack a mouse. It’s the first time I’ve literally seen something move faster than the eye can see—a quick blur, then there’s just a snake coiled around the rodent.
In a novel I worked on back in the 1990s (regrettably never finished, despite consuming several years of work), I had a fight by moonlight. I went out to the neighborhood park under the full moon just to so I could gauge what you can see in that kind of light.
Little details probably won’t break or make a story, but they can’t but enhance it.
Filed under Writing
Snake hands
In Engine Summer, John Crowley’s narrator observes that snake hands—the parts or stories that branch off from the main body—are the most interesting part. Of course snakes don’t have hands, but stories don’t really branch if they’re told right—it’s all part of the same narrative.
This weekend has been a whole bunch of snake hands, which is why I didn’t post yesterday and didn’t get the couple of posts done I was planning for today (or pretty much everything else).
Saturday, after posting, TYG and I went out shopping, then to a continuation of the Hitchcock festival where we caught North by Northwest last week (this week Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window with a film-group dinner at a tapas bar in between).
Sunday would have been slower, but we’d been invited to brunch by recently engaged friends. So we got up early and rushed out to get some bicycling done. Unfortunately, we overdid it (I had a feeling we might be pushing it) which left me somewhat wiped the rest of the day.
Anyway after brunch we went car shopping. It was frustrating: Several hours but only one car driven (either the lot was closed or they didn’t have the car we wanted). By the time I got home, I was exhausted.
Today, we got up, took a walk,then I made the pear/butternut squash soup that I was too tired to make yesterday. Then out car shopping again. This again turned out much longer than anticipated—but that’s because we bought the car,so at least that’s taken care of.
So while my planned activities for today (lots of little stuff I wanted to catch up) got diverted by snake hands, it’s a good thing (our old car was close to dropping dead mid-trip). And we won’t have to do more car shopping.
On the down side, I have a feeling that getting the remaining details wrapped up (dropping off the old car we’re trading in, signing paperwork, taking it for a practice drive on quiet streets before I brave the freeway) will suck up a lot of work time tomorrow. Unfortunately, it needs to be done (I’ll have more on that topic tomorrow too). As I’ve said before, some weeks there are just too many giants with axes.
(Cover by Billy Graham, rights all belong to current holder).
Filed under Personal, Time management and goals
