There's this thing called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for shorter, which I do. Or have done. Or something. I think the first time I did it was in 2004, though I may be wrong, it might have been 2003. All records of the period have grown sketchy, and the computers I wrote on then, which might have contained such information, are corrupted and long dead. In any case, from that point I've given it at least a shot every year: try to write a novel of at least 50000 words in one month (November).
There's been a good amount of success. Two years ago I wrote Engines of the Broken World; a couple edits later, it got bought by a publisher, and looks likely to make its way to shelves in time for NaNo 2012 (or maybe 2013, the timing on publishing being not an exact science). 2006 was Daughter of Cleopatra, which I've epublished; 2010 was Never, which is probably my favorite of all the things I've written, and is also readily available. Other years brought Speech of Angels, being edited and polished, and the House of the Serpent, ditto (though it needs much more editing and polishing). There was the year I was at sea, and didn't finish anything (sad year for NaNo, but hell, I was sailing around the world, and I was pretty impressed that I even gave it a shot).
This year I'm getting married in November. That takes up, as you may know and can certainly imagine, a goodly bit of time in the lead up, and then there's a honeymoon after. So it's not going to be the best month for writing a book. But I'm still going to give it a try, and see what comes. I suspect another failed attempt, and I won't much blame myself for it. One must, however, make the attempt. And so should you, dear readers, if the least hint of being a novelist has entered your head.
One month. One book. It's a hard equation to master, but simple in concept.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Friday, October 28, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Best Chart Ever?
I think this might be the best flowchart in the history of flowcharts. Or it might be better than that, and be the best flow chart in both the history and the future of flowcharts. (And the present, of course. Mustn't forget the present.)
Thursday, September 8, 2011
What makes a classic?
In discussing "girls' books" last week, I mentioned that The Diary of Anne Frank is a classic that probably should be read by everyone. But that led me to think about classics, and what they are, and how they get to be that way.
There's a first, easy definition. Classics were once those books that survived the so-called Dark Ages, the works of Greek and Latin writers that managed to come into the light of the Renaissance and the modern era. If one were reading a classic once upon a time, it was Aristotle, or Galen, or Xenophon, or Tacitus. That was it. There were no other options. Chaucer and Dante and the Venerable Bede may have been around a while, but they were not classics. So this, I think, provides us with our first criteria: a classic is a book which has been around a while, possibly even a book from another era or age.
With that in place, we can eliminate all the "instant classics" that blurbs constantly mention. When someone proclaims say, Franzen's Freedom or Stoddard's The Help to be a classic, it should rightly be viewed as nothing but nonsensical hyperbole. I understand, of course, that blurbs are in general nonsense; I understand that even if not just given as a favor or in haste, the use of the word classic is meant to evoke the possibility, more than declare the certainty. Still, the word is thrown around too much for very recent works. What is needed is some age, certainly. To my mind, a classic cannot be thought so until the world has changed enough that people are reading it in a different mindset than when it was written. So at least a generation, I would think. And a full generation, 25 or 30 years. Which means that House of Leaves isn't a classic yet, nor Infinite Jest. Perhaps in time. Perhaps.
Time, then, is the first marker. But it is not the only one. In his day, Winston Churchill was a best selling novelist. He wrote a great number of books roughly a hundred years ago that were very well received and sold truckloads. Or wagonloads, it being the very beginning of automated travel. Yet not a one of them will you find on a book store shelf these days, except if you stumble upon a very old and worn used copy in some dark corner of musty shelving. His fiction though terribly popular has vanished almost without a trace. So age in itself is obviously not enough, when big novels from only a century ago cannot by any stretch be called classics.
What else, then? I think it's important, vital even, to write for the ages. Not that you need to be thinking of the future, and what readers in a century or two will be interested in. But that your stories need to be meaningful not just to whoever is reading them on the second Thursday of May in your current year, but in any year. Stories about real people, doing real things. Of the original classics, the Greeks and Romans, most have faded from memory. They are available, of course, if only in the Loeb Classical Library series, but they don't turn up in class reading lists, and no one has heard of them except specialists. But Euripides and Seutonius and the like are certainly still classics, and Homer is the granddaddy of classic authors. I can only assume it is because they still speak to us, even two or three millennia later, while no one much reads Sextus Empirius or Frontinius.
A simple way to write for the ages is to the be the first at something. This brings us Homer, and Euripides, and Herodotus. But it brings us also Lady Murasaki, and Cervantes, and Aphra Behn. But that's not always the case. Dr. Polidori, who was Byron's lover, wrote probably the first vampire novel. But who remembers it nowadays? No the vampire novel we all recall is Dracula, and that's the classic in the field. Again, it is because Stoker spoke to us in a way that still feels relevant, and Polidori did not, nor any of the handful that came between the two. But one could argue there are other classic vampire novels. Anne Rice is a contender, certainly. Twilight, one assumes, will not make the cut, but only time will make that clear.
So time is needed, and originality is a strong factor. Yet original works of great age have vanished time and again, preserved in the memory of scholars but otherwise ignored. Which brings me to the third and most obscure factor: dumb luck. It all starts with the real classics, and the dumb luck that brought them to us. We assume these were the best books of their time, because it is all we have. Yet there were thousands more, hundreds of thousands, perhaps. Fire and water and age and ignorance and willful hatred destroyed them all. Some were scraped clean to copy out Bibles onto; some were burned for warmth; some were just forgotten in dusty corners until they could no longer be read. Certainly one or two of those would be among the greatest works of the Classical Period, probably more than just one or two. Yet we'll never know what we're missing. Ill chance has taken them away from us.
But there's more than that. There's the fickle taste of the public. Chance will bring one book to the forefront, and another will vanish rapidly. While being a best seller is no measure of quality, few books that failed to sell have made it to be a classic. This is why some authors have only one classic book, or at least, less than their output. But all of Austen, and all of Dickens, even with his massive output, tend to be counted as classics. So there's no way to be sure.
I know that sounds like a copout. What makes a classic, he asks, and then answers himself with, I have no real idea. But it's true. I can point to some factors: time, quality, relevance. But I cannot say that there is a formula. I can tell a classic when I see one, but I cannot tell why it is so. Even adding up the skill of the writing, the reception that managed to let the work move forward at all, the luck and chance that kept it going, I cannot.
What is a classic? It is a book we have read, we are reading, we will read. It is something that tells us who we are, and why we are, and how we are. But it's something more than that which can't be named. It is a wonder and a mystery. I wish I knew, not so that I could write one (though that would be very nice, of course) but so that I could know what I should read. What they will be reading, in fifty years, in a hundred, when I'm dead and gone to dirt. What will the future remember of us, what books will tell them who we all were? I wish I knew that.
People speak of the death of books. It will not happen. They will change, books. But they will live on so long as we wonder at the past, at ourselves, at where we are headed. Classics can tell us that, and little else can.
There's a first, easy definition. Classics were once those books that survived the so-called Dark Ages, the works of Greek and Latin writers that managed to come into the light of the Renaissance and the modern era. If one were reading a classic once upon a time, it was Aristotle, or Galen, or Xenophon, or Tacitus. That was it. There were no other options. Chaucer and Dante and the Venerable Bede may have been around a while, but they were not classics. So this, I think, provides us with our first criteria: a classic is a book which has been around a while, possibly even a book from another era or age.
With that in place, we can eliminate all the "instant classics" that blurbs constantly mention. When someone proclaims say, Franzen's Freedom or Stoddard's The Help to be a classic, it should rightly be viewed as nothing but nonsensical hyperbole. I understand, of course, that blurbs are in general nonsense; I understand that even if not just given as a favor or in haste, the use of the word classic is meant to evoke the possibility, more than declare the certainty. Still, the word is thrown around too much for very recent works. What is needed is some age, certainly. To my mind, a classic cannot be thought so until the world has changed enough that people are reading it in a different mindset than when it was written. So at least a generation, I would think. And a full generation, 25 or 30 years. Which means that House of Leaves isn't a classic yet, nor Infinite Jest. Perhaps in time. Perhaps.
Time, then, is the first marker. But it is not the only one. In his day, Winston Churchill was a best selling novelist. He wrote a great number of books roughly a hundred years ago that were very well received and sold truckloads. Or wagonloads, it being the very beginning of automated travel. Yet not a one of them will you find on a book store shelf these days, except if you stumble upon a very old and worn used copy in some dark corner of musty shelving. His fiction though terribly popular has vanished almost without a trace. So age in itself is obviously not enough, when big novels from only a century ago cannot by any stretch be called classics.
What else, then? I think it's important, vital even, to write for the ages. Not that you need to be thinking of the future, and what readers in a century or two will be interested in. But that your stories need to be meaningful not just to whoever is reading them on the second Thursday of May in your current year, but in any year. Stories about real people, doing real things. Of the original classics, the Greeks and Romans, most have faded from memory. They are available, of course, if only in the Loeb Classical Library series, but they don't turn up in class reading lists, and no one has heard of them except specialists. But Euripides and Seutonius and the like are certainly still classics, and Homer is the granddaddy of classic authors. I can only assume it is because they still speak to us, even two or three millennia later, while no one much reads Sextus Empirius or Frontinius.
A simple way to write for the ages is to the be the first at something. This brings us Homer, and Euripides, and Herodotus. But it brings us also Lady Murasaki, and Cervantes, and Aphra Behn. But that's not always the case. Dr. Polidori, who was Byron's lover, wrote probably the first vampire novel. But who remembers it nowadays? No the vampire novel we all recall is Dracula, and that's the classic in the field. Again, it is because Stoker spoke to us in a way that still feels relevant, and Polidori did not, nor any of the handful that came between the two. But one could argue there are other classic vampire novels. Anne Rice is a contender, certainly. Twilight, one assumes, will not make the cut, but only time will make that clear.
So time is needed, and originality is a strong factor. Yet original works of great age have vanished time and again, preserved in the memory of scholars but otherwise ignored. Which brings me to the third and most obscure factor: dumb luck. It all starts with the real classics, and the dumb luck that brought them to us. We assume these were the best books of their time, because it is all we have. Yet there were thousands more, hundreds of thousands, perhaps. Fire and water and age and ignorance and willful hatred destroyed them all. Some were scraped clean to copy out Bibles onto; some were burned for warmth; some were just forgotten in dusty corners until they could no longer be read. Certainly one or two of those would be among the greatest works of the Classical Period, probably more than just one or two. Yet we'll never know what we're missing. Ill chance has taken them away from us.
But there's more than that. There's the fickle taste of the public. Chance will bring one book to the forefront, and another will vanish rapidly. While being a best seller is no measure of quality, few books that failed to sell have made it to be a classic. This is why some authors have only one classic book, or at least, less than their output. But all of Austen, and all of Dickens, even with his massive output, tend to be counted as classics. So there's no way to be sure.
I know that sounds like a copout. What makes a classic, he asks, and then answers himself with, I have no real idea. But it's true. I can point to some factors: time, quality, relevance. But I cannot say that there is a formula. I can tell a classic when I see one, but I cannot tell why it is so. Even adding up the skill of the writing, the reception that managed to let the work move forward at all, the luck and chance that kept it going, I cannot.
What is a classic? It is a book we have read, we are reading, we will read. It is something that tells us who we are, and why we are, and how we are. But it's something more than that which can't be named. It is a wonder and a mystery. I wish I knew, not so that I could write one (though that would be very nice, of course) but so that I could know what I should read. What they will be reading, in fifty years, in a hundred, when I'm dead and gone to dirt. What will the future remember of us, what books will tell them who we all were? I wish I knew that.
People speak of the death of books. It will not happen. They will change, books. But they will live on so long as we wonder at the past, at ourselves, at where we are headed. Classics can tell us that, and little else can.
Monday, September 5, 2011
The Boys' Books of One Boy, Me
I wrote a bit about "girls' books" last week. What I wrote is about all I'm competent to write on the topic. I don't have a daughter, I didn't grow up with sisters, and I did not myself read the sorts of books I talked about. Part of the reason I didn't was because I was a very advanced reader, but still a child. By which I mean, I couldn't exactly appreciate Balzac or Waugh or Wharton or any of them because I was too young for nuance. But I wanted to read adult books anyway, and was inclined towards fantasy (and to a more limited extent scifi and horror), so that was what I read.
I don't want to imply that either a) fantasy and scifi are boys' topics (though I will discuss this below) or that there are no nuanced books in the field. I know there are nuanced books. It's just with fantasy, you can read the book at the surface level and not be missing anything if you don't get the nuance. That's a little less the case with a small percentage of fantasy, and a little less the case with more recent fantasy than it was when I was a wee lad, but in essence, one can read about wizards and cursed forests and dragons and suchlike without worrying about subtext. There is little in the way of literary analysis in the field. So when I was eight or ten or twelve, I devoured fantasy and related matters and felt like I was reading books that were at my level, and didn't feel I was missing much.
(I will note also that I've gone back and read many of the same books again as a grown person, and most of them have no more subtext than what I noticed at age 11. A delightful genre, but not the deepest.)
Now, on to my point a) above, that fantasy and scifi are or are not girls' topics. I will now place myself into immediate hot water by saying that they were, when I was young, the property of boys. There were girls who squatted on the territory, of course, but they were the exceptions, the invaders of a particularly nerdy, in-joke ridden, awkward land that was almost exclusively masculine for certain very young values of masculinity. As time has gone by, as the world has changed, as nerds have grown up and raised their daughters into nerdy ways, as fantasy has expanded and broadened, this has in large degree changed. There are as many, or almost as many, girl geeks as there are boy dorks. (My nomenclature will be vague here by choice. I realize that to use nerd, dork and geek interchangeably is a sin to some, but I will stand by my usage as one who is a bit of all three, thank you very much, and can thus bandy them about as much as I wish for essay purposes.) But this was certainly not the case when I was young, or if it was, the girls kept it very well hidden and used their disdain and complete incomprehension to make it clear that what we geeky boys were up to was nothing worthy of notice or mention.
So then, a bit back to the point, that as a youth I read a good deal of this boyish province of fantasy, now colonized and comfortably settled by girls. And I read a lot of fantasy with killing and fighting and spells and general stupidity in it, most of which has faded into merciful oblivion both in bookstores and in my mind. But now I will document a few of the titles that have endured, and why I think they weren't girls' books, and why I think they should or at least could be.
1)The Lord of the Rings. It always comes back to this. Fantasy grew from many springs, but it was in Tolkien's classic that they all came together, and the mighty waters raged over all the geeks yet unborn, and we grew up on the shores of the land and world that he built. I read this books at least two or three times a year, every year from the time I was about 8; I read them until their covers fell off, until they were stained and battered, until we had to get new copies (more than once). I practiced writing my name in runes, in elven languages. I knew the lines of the Kings, and the degrees of consanguinity of the hobbits, and all such notions. The LotR was my Bible, as much as I had one. My mother had read the books. She was a reader of all things, devouring print like most people drink water. Even now she normally has three books going at once, one for commuting with, and one for upstairs, and one for the bedside. So I know that women (and one must assume girls, though I didn't know of any) read the books. But they seemed an exclusively male domain. There were only a handful of named women, none of them major characters. The scope was vast and geopolitical. And the strongest relationships portrayed are of course manly, mostly the bonds of warriors one for another. Yet there are other traits that would suggest to me that it wasn't just a book for boys who wanted orcs and dragons and such. There is careful thought of culture and custom; there is at least one actual well thought out and deep relationship between Frodo and Sam; there is the universal appeal of a hopeless quest of good against evil. So why didn't I know any girls who read the books until quite a bit later? I can't say. But I didn't.
2) The Belgariad. When I was 13, I consumed this series in moments, or so it seemed. Five books about a boy chosen by fate to defeat an evil god. A cast of dozens of major characters; maps of various kingdoms; gods intervening and monsters attacking and magic spells and everything else a boy could want. David Eddings, who wrote the books, would later write them again and call them the Mallorean. And the Elenium. And the Tamuli. The fact that he had a good series in him and was willing to milk it multiple times is kind of horrible and kind of awe inspiring. In any case, I think it is a good series, for a young person. It has a very strong female character in Polgara. It has many other female characters of all types (I credit Eddings' wife, I think, for that, because it turned out years later that she had helped him with all his books, and she at last recieved credit for doing so on many of his later publications.) It has family dynamics, it has romance, it has slow moments to counter the endless battles and schemes and depictions of evil. All of this, I stupidly think, would make it seem like a good book for a child of 12 or so no matter their gender. But again, I only knew boys who read it (my mother didn't even touch these), and we all loved it.
3) Chronicles of Amber. I probably should do drugs if I want to fully understand these, especially the second series, which is not, in fact, what I'm talking about here. The first five books are strange, innovative, and filled with guys competing with guys to see who can be king of a magical realm. The women are femme fatales or disregarded; even the terribly scary Fiona is seen as a wicked child more than anything else. These books were written by a guy for guys, and as a boy I loved them greatly. I cannot say that these were boys' books, though. They were so obscure for a child that I don't know of anyone who read them in those years, except me and my brother. Adults, they read these books, not children of either gender.
4) Earthsea. One could make a strong case that these books shouldn't even count as "boys' books" with quotes or not. Only they start off so insularly boyish that one almost must. Though written by a great writer who happens to be a woman, they have no major female characters in the first book. It is to a boys' school that the main character goes, to perform boy dares and foolishly, boyishly curse himself. That there is a major female character in the second book is some redemption, and the later books in the series are much more "balanced" if one can use such a weighted term. But as a boy, the second book, with its girl and its strange labyrinths and grim dark service to unknown gods, did not appeal to me as much as the first, or the third with its land of the dead and its dragons. The second book was a bit of an aberration, then, to my young perspective, and in retrospect was a sign that it wasn't, as the first and third were, a "boys' book".
That's a few. I could go on at length about more. All of Michael Moorcock, perhaps. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I could mention a few scifi titles, too. Larry Niven's opus; Heinlein, though I came to him late, really. But I think this suffices. These are books that I know many women have read, and will read, and will enjoy, but in those days, I did not know them. I did not know, until I got to high school, a single girl my age who read such things, or even seemed to want to. Though if they had wanted to, I don't suppose, as a boy, I would have done anything to make it possible. Geekdom was very tribal (still is?) and my tribe was all boys. But these were some of my books, some of the books that the geeky boys I knew read, and that I couldn't picture any girl ever reading.
What were you boy books? What were your girl books? Why were they for boys, or for girls? Why shouldn't they have been?
I don't want to imply that either a) fantasy and scifi are boys' topics (though I will discuss this below) or that there are no nuanced books in the field. I know there are nuanced books. It's just with fantasy, you can read the book at the surface level and not be missing anything if you don't get the nuance. That's a little less the case with a small percentage of fantasy, and a little less the case with more recent fantasy than it was when I was a wee lad, but in essence, one can read about wizards and cursed forests and dragons and suchlike without worrying about subtext. There is little in the way of literary analysis in the field. So when I was eight or ten or twelve, I devoured fantasy and related matters and felt like I was reading books that were at my level, and didn't feel I was missing much.
(I will note also that I've gone back and read many of the same books again as a grown person, and most of them have no more subtext than what I noticed at age 11. A delightful genre, but not the deepest.)
Now, on to my point a) above, that fantasy and scifi are or are not girls' topics. I will now place myself into immediate hot water by saying that they were, when I was young, the property of boys. There were girls who squatted on the territory, of course, but they were the exceptions, the invaders of a particularly nerdy, in-joke ridden, awkward land that was almost exclusively masculine for certain very young values of masculinity. As time has gone by, as the world has changed, as nerds have grown up and raised their daughters into nerdy ways, as fantasy has expanded and broadened, this has in large degree changed. There are as many, or almost as many, girl geeks as there are boy dorks. (My nomenclature will be vague here by choice. I realize that to use nerd, dork and geek interchangeably is a sin to some, but I will stand by my usage as one who is a bit of all three, thank you very much, and can thus bandy them about as much as I wish for essay purposes.) But this was certainly not the case when I was young, or if it was, the girls kept it very well hidden and used their disdain and complete incomprehension to make it clear that what we geeky boys were up to was nothing worthy of notice or mention.
So then, a bit back to the point, that as a youth I read a good deal of this boyish province of fantasy, now colonized and comfortably settled by girls. And I read a lot of fantasy with killing and fighting and spells and general stupidity in it, most of which has faded into merciful oblivion both in bookstores and in my mind. But now I will document a few of the titles that have endured, and why I think they weren't girls' books, and why I think they should or at least could be.
1)The Lord of the Rings. It always comes back to this. Fantasy grew from many springs, but it was in Tolkien's classic that they all came together, and the mighty waters raged over all the geeks yet unborn, and we grew up on the shores of the land and world that he built. I read this books at least two or three times a year, every year from the time I was about 8; I read them until their covers fell off, until they were stained and battered, until we had to get new copies (more than once). I practiced writing my name in runes, in elven languages. I knew the lines of the Kings, and the degrees of consanguinity of the hobbits, and all such notions. The LotR was my Bible, as much as I had one. My mother had read the books. She was a reader of all things, devouring print like most people drink water. Even now she normally has three books going at once, one for commuting with, and one for upstairs, and one for the bedside. So I know that women (and one must assume girls, though I didn't know of any) read the books. But they seemed an exclusively male domain. There were only a handful of named women, none of them major characters. The scope was vast and geopolitical. And the strongest relationships portrayed are of course manly, mostly the bonds of warriors one for another. Yet there are other traits that would suggest to me that it wasn't just a book for boys who wanted orcs and dragons and such. There is careful thought of culture and custom; there is at least one actual well thought out and deep relationship between Frodo and Sam; there is the universal appeal of a hopeless quest of good against evil. So why didn't I know any girls who read the books until quite a bit later? I can't say. But I didn't.
2) The Belgariad. When I was 13, I consumed this series in moments, or so it seemed. Five books about a boy chosen by fate to defeat an evil god. A cast of dozens of major characters; maps of various kingdoms; gods intervening and monsters attacking and magic spells and everything else a boy could want. David Eddings, who wrote the books, would later write them again and call them the Mallorean. And the Elenium. And the Tamuli. The fact that he had a good series in him and was willing to milk it multiple times is kind of horrible and kind of awe inspiring. In any case, I think it is a good series, for a young person. It has a very strong female character in Polgara. It has many other female characters of all types (I credit Eddings' wife, I think, for that, because it turned out years later that she had helped him with all his books, and she at last recieved credit for doing so on many of his later publications.) It has family dynamics, it has romance, it has slow moments to counter the endless battles and schemes and depictions of evil. All of this, I stupidly think, would make it seem like a good book for a child of 12 or so no matter their gender. But again, I only knew boys who read it (my mother didn't even touch these), and we all loved it.
3) Chronicles of Amber. I probably should do drugs if I want to fully understand these, especially the second series, which is not, in fact, what I'm talking about here. The first five books are strange, innovative, and filled with guys competing with guys to see who can be king of a magical realm. The women are femme fatales or disregarded; even the terribly scary Fiona is seen as a wicked child more than anything else. These books were written by a guy for guys, and as a boy I loved them greatly. I cannot say that these were boys' books, though. They were so obscure for a child that I don't know of anyone who read them in those years, except me and my brother. Adults, they read these books, not children of either gender.
4) Earthsea. One could make a strong case that these books shouldn't even count as "boys' books" with quotes or not. Only they start off so insularly boyish that one almost must. Though written by a great writer who happens to be a woman, they have no major female characters in the first book. It is to a boys' school that the main character goes, to perform boy dares and foolishly, boyishly curse himself. That there is a major female character in the second book is some redemption, and the later books in the series are much more "balanced" if one can use such a weighted term. But as a boy, the second book, with its girl and its strange labyrinths and grim dark service to unknown gods, did not appeal to me as much as the first, or the third with its land of the dead and its dragons. The second book was a bit of an aberration, then, to my young perspective, and in retrospect was a sign that it wasn't, as the first and third were, a "boys' book".
That's a few. I could go on at length about more. All of Michael Moorcock, perhaps. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I could mention a few scifi titles, too. Larry Niven's opus; Heinlein, though I came to him late, really. But I think this suffices. These are books that I know many women have read, and will read, and will enjoy, but in those days, I did not know them. I did not know, until I got to high school, a single girl my age who read such things, or even seemed to want to. Though if they had wanted to, I don't suppose, as a boy, I would have done anything to make it possible. Geekdom was very tribal (still is?) and my tribe was all boys. But these were some of my books, some of the books that the geeky boys I knew read, and that I couldn't picture any girl ever reading.
What were you boy books? What were your girl books? Why were they for boys, or for girls? Why shouldn't they have been?
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Homer
We have a machine where I work, an Espresso Book Machine. It's job is to make books; it looks a bit Rube Goldberg, a bit Steampunk, a bit ridiculous. It makes sounds like a Willie Wonka machine. And in the end, after a few minutes, it gives you a book, much like any other paperback.
I work on the machine. Not maintenance, which I definitely do not do. Machines are complicated, and I do not well perform the job of fixing them. No, I print things. Which is really just a lot of pushing of buttons, of making sure the right things are loaded as far as paper and ink and suchlike, and of keeping an eye out for problems. We print up odds and ends, books that have long gone out of print, books that have been tossed out to Lightning Source (which is like a centralized Print on Demand clearing house), and increasingly, we print out self published books.
Some of them are interesting: a family cookbook thick and rich with memories. Some are curious: a translation of Gandaharan fragments to be taken with the author, in 800 page versions, to India. Some are slightly embarrassing: a collection of not terribly good poems with a horrid cover and very bad formatting. But each and every author is excited to see their book, to handle it, still warm from the presses. A few of the books we agree to carry in the store, but most of them are just for the authors. They may give them away, or sell them on their own time, or in one case sell them in a different store that is near their house but which does not, and never will, have an EBM.
We named ours Homer. I like to pretend it's because of the ancient blind poet, and that we fancy ourselves on some sort of odyssey. This isn't true. It's from a book about a donut machine, which was vaguely similar to our own contraption. But can we still stick with the lie about the poet? I like him better.
The machine has some problems. It's high strung and shows it by being picky about when it will and will not work perfectly. It's prone to running out of things all at the same time, so that you change out the paper, and five pages later must change out the toner, and five pages after that change out a color on the cover printer. It produces a smell compounded of toner and glue, which is potent and gives some people (myself included) headaches. All the same, I find it a wonder. That there could be such a device that would make a book, and millions of books no less, for a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time, is outlandish and as near to a miracle as I'm inclined to believe in. As much as I expect and assume that the future of the written word will be in digital form, it is terribly exciting still to hold a book hot from the presses and to put it in the hand of she what wrote it.
Today I'm working on Homer. I'm making books. I'm fulfilling dreams. It is a wonderful feeling, different in scale but the same in kind as was compiling the forthcoming 20001 anthologie. There, too, I made a few dreams come true, more immediately. Yet I can't deny the wonder of holding the book in hand, any book, which is fresh and a little tacky from the heat and still smells of ink. It is wonderful.
I work on the machine. Not maintenance, which I definitely do not do. Machines are complicated, and I do not well perform the job of fixing them. No, I print things. Which is really just a lot of pushing of buttons, of making sure the right things are loaded as far as paper and ink and suchlike, and of keeping an eye out for problems. We print up odds and ends, books that have long gone out of print, books that have been tossed out to Lightning Source (which is like a centralized Print on Demand clearing house), and increasingly, we print out self published books.
Some of them are interesting: a family cookbook thick and rich with memories. Some are curious: a translation of Gandaharan fragments to be taken with the author, in 800 page versions, to India. Some are slightly embarrassing: a collection of not terribly good poems with a horrid cover and very bad formatting. But each and every author is excited to see their book, to handle it, still warm from the presses. A few of the books we agree to carry in the store, but most of them are just for the authors. They may give them away, or sell them on their own time, or in one case sell them in a different store that is near their house but which does not, and never will, have an EBM.
We named ours Homer. I like to pretend it's because of the ancient blind poet, and that we fancy ourselves on some sort of odyssey. This isn't true. It's from a book about a donut machine, which was vaguely similar to our own contraption. But can we still stick with the lie about the poet? I like him better.
The machine has some problems. It's high strung and shows it by being picky about when it will and will not work perfectly. It's prone to running out of things all at the same time, so that you change out the paper, and five pages later must change out the toner, and five pages after that change out a color on the cover printer. It produces a smell compounded of toner and glue, which is potent and gives some people (myself included) headaches. All the same, I find it a wonder. That there could be such a device that would make a book, and millions of books no less, for a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time, is outlandish and as near to a miracle as I'm inclined to believe in. As much as I expect and assume that the future of the written word will be in digital form, it is terribly exciting still to hold a book hot from the presses and to put it in the hand of she what wrote it.
Today I'm working on Homer. I'm making books. I'm fulfilling dreams. It is a wonderful feeling, different in scale but the same in kind as was compiling the forthcoming 20001 anthologie. There, too, I made a few dreams come true, more immediately. Yet I can't deny the wonder of holding the book in hand, any book, which is fresh and a little tacky from the heat and still smells of ink. It is wonderful.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Book News Roundup
There's stuff going on in the book world.
--Sony's got a new ereader for release. The only thing I see here that's notable is that when Pottermore goes live, they'll be getting a Harry Potter branded limited edition ereader, which is kind of cool and fanboyish.
--Barnes and Noble has 4 times the sales of Nook content over last year.
--Amazon has launched daily deals for the Kindle, with massive discounts on select titles. This isn't exactly new; they've often taken ebooks and made them free, but discounts instead of giveaways is something different. Further, these are daily deals, while the free books might be free for days or even weeks at a time. I like the urgency.
--DC relaunched their universe today. Reviews are in. I suppose I like that they're making everything very basic and introductory level, but even I, who know very little about comics, and less about DC, feel like it sounds maybe a bit slow out of the gate.
--Sony's got a new ereader for release. The only thing I see here that's notable is that when Pottermore goes live, they'll be getting a Harry Potter branded limited edition ereader, which is kind of cool and fanboyish.
--Barnes and Noble has 4 times the sales of Nook content over last year.
--Amazon has launched daily deals for the Kindle, with massive discounts on select titles. This isn't exactly new; they've often taken ebooks and made them free, but discounts instead of giveaways is something different. Further, these are daily deals, while the free books might be free for days or even weeks at a time. I like the urgency.
--DC relaunched their universe today. Reviews are in. I suppose I like that they're making everything very basic and introductory level, but even I, who know very little about comics, and less about DC, feel like it sounds maybe a bit slow out of the gate.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
This is a good list
I'm always looking for a great list of books, and this is a superb one. I can't really argue with any of the choices, or why they're on the list, and that's not very common. I'm not often pleased with the totality of a list, but this one does it pretty damn well.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Is this actually cost effective, I wonder?
There's a new service just arriving in the United States, based on one that exists already in Japan (we're so far behind!). 1DollarScan will convert your print material into PDFs and email the documents back to you as a file. And it only costs a dollar, as they claim (per chunk of material, mind you: War and Peace would not be a dollar scan.) But I'm trying to figure out the point for most things. Your personal documents that you don't need print copies of but are too lazy to scan, yes, I understand the value. But your library? And that was why the service exists, because a Japanese businessman laboriously made digital versions of his large library and then thought that people would pay him for the service. Which, apparently, they will.
But look: you have to pay shipping. You don't get your materials back, unless you pay return shipping. And so I don't see how this works out to be at all useful or effective. But if it works in Japan, it's got to work here, right? I mean, sushi, Nintendo, nation wide public transit? Wait, strike that last one. That would actually be great. Instead we get book to PDF mail order. Sigh.
But look: you have to pay shipping. You don't get your materials back, unless you pay return shipping. And so I don't see how this works out to be at all useful or effective. But if it works in Japan, it's got to work here, right? I mean, sushi, Nintendo, nation wide public transit? Wait, strike that last one. That would actually be great. Instead we get book to PDF mail order. Sigh.
Friday, August 12, 2011
For me, it's Jane Austen
We had the list of books one should have read but probably avoided because they were assigned. Now from Slate we have a series of authors, many of them quite good, talking about the books they absolutely can't read, thought were vastly overrated, or outright hate. It's good stuff. For me, as noted, it's Jane Austen: I've tried, but I can't get into her light prose of manners and obligations and so many pounds a year. I just can't. I get why a lot of people like her (all right, I don't, but I know that a lot of people like her), but I cannot wrap my head around the idea of tearing through her collected works with anything but a grimace.
Monday, August 8, 2011
I differ, on a technicality
Hybridbooks, which are print books with bonus digital content. So you can use the code to get a better map, or background information, or what have you. Which I think is a great idea, actually. But it's not a hybrid book. It's not print and digital. It's print, with extra features you can get to online, and that's not exactly new; publishers have provided additional content online for years (book group guides, interviews with the author, often even additional material of just the sort that these Hybridbooks are supposedly newly introducing.)
So I like it in concept, but I think the way it's talked up is silly. It's nothing new, not really. Is this perhaps more or better? Could be. And that's good. But it's not groundbreaking.
So I like it in concept, but I think the way it's talked up is silly. It's nothing new, not really. Is this perhaps more or better? Could be. And that's good. But it's not groundbreaking.
Friday, August 5, 2011
I suspect few people read these in High School
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
What would your list be?
10 books you should have read in high school, really should have read, I mean, not just read because they made you, or avoided because they were trying to make you. Here's one list with a local input from Misha Stone, once one of my coworkers back in the day. But what books that we all should have read do you think we really should read? I actually go along pretty well with this list; I'd take away Pride and Prejudice and Siddharta, and add in Go Tell It On The Mountain and Red Badge of Courage, maybe, and then I'd have ten. There could be twenty or thirty, or fifty, though. What books should we all have read?
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