LookingLand

overall i didn't get as much done as i'd hoped, but it was nonetheless a good weekend. ate blackberries for breakfast, concocted salads with exotic tomatoes.

( blowing off a wee bit of steam about the kentucky derby )

spent sunday at Fort Snelling. had a grand old time. mebbe i post more pictures later.


overall was out a lot this weekend, which always takes more energy than it gives. as a confirmed closet anchorite, public appearances are a huge drain.

in writing: beginnings and endings.

last week i wrote twenty one pages from the beginning just to get back into the voice. this week i wrote twenty five pages from the ending. i have to write endings early in the process. they give me a target to shoot for. i rarely rewrite them, though how i get from beginning to ending is prone to all manner of digressions, etc.

i think i like my ending. the last couple of beats are giving me fits, but overall, i like the way this thing winds down. because this story is essentially the beginning of a long, long battle, it's hard to find the right note that will finish this both "resolved" and yet on the edge of the next adventure. we'll see if i can pull it off. i'm pretty confident that it doesn't suck, so we're facing the right direction at least.

all that and it's update day for Reconstruction. we're getting into the weirder of the transition areas. it's going to be a little bumpy for a while. i don't really like what i did with this scene (basically condensed it into three pages, which is pretty dang condensed). but i am hoping with the new style, i won't be so prone to trim the edges. we'll see in the next couple of weeks.

in reading: will prolly make a separate post later about the reading i've been doing. interesting stuff. a lot of american terrorism in the 1860s. it's actually been kinda depressing, but very educational. let's just say my vision of this world just got a whole lot darker.

finally, much much much cleaning still ahead in preparation for the fire inspection. i've only managed to clear out the kitchen and pantry area and i am already exhausted. i'll do it little by little this week and then throw myself into it this coming weekend. bleh.

happy monday all!

: D

How Opal Mehta Got Caught, Got Cut, and Got Sent Packing ~ i s'pose by now most of you have read this news (surprised no one on my flist has made any commentary, so i guess i will). i'm glad the publisher took harsh action, pulled the book, and cancelled the deal. while a small part of me sympathizes with the writer (who very clearly was manipulated), she's old enough to know better and deserves the scorn she's receiving. i've been reading reviews of the book from readers who by and large say: despite the hoopla, it's just a lame, amateur book to begin with ~ hardly the work of a teen prodigy.

it's embarrassing especially for the publishers, i think. and exposes much of what's wrong with the industry. if the writer had been a white chick from idaho, the book would have never gotten picked up to begin with. the fact that the text went to a "packager" who was paid to make it sellable/marketable is skeery beyond all comprehension.

a rant about the genre-ization of fiction ~ i've got nothing against "genre" fiction, but it's starting to run the show. i don't personally read genre fiction and i don't write it. i also think a market run by it is narrow and the writers who try to fit the requirements are shoving 6'4", 175 lb imaginations into a size 2 petit package. how many times to i hear writers asking with concern about what genre they fit in or how to make sure they fit into any genre at all? how many agents narrow their field of clients to genre-specific conventional fare?

if all you care about is selling and you don't care how you do it, that's just fine. i make no judgment on that ~ it's a legitimate way to go about the business. but for the rest of you, fight the good fight! write the story you want to tell ~ not the story the market dictates. stop kidding yourself that you have a better chance by conforming to a genre set of standards. stop letting other people tell you want to write.

who knows, if the author of Opal Mehta had written her own book instead of letting other people dictate the parameters for her, maybe she wouldn't have plagiarized. maybe she wouldn't have got a $500,000 contract either, but at the end of the day isn't your integrity more important than being a drone of popular culture? if you're an artist, it's because you have a vision to share that is unique. it can't rise above if it's forever wallowing in the common pool with all the other books just like it.

okay, rant over (mostly).

here's what i think: the small digital press (and self-serve like lulu.com) is going to continue to have a profound impact on the future of the publishing industry. some years ago i poo-pooed the whole vanity press, but it's clear we're entering a new era of self-publishing that doesn't need to be costly, low-quality, or narrow in its distribution. with publishing giants taking fewer risks on newcomers without multi-book deals and horse-blindered agency recommendations, i wonder if it isn't a good time to strike out independently the way that film production is going.

digital cameras and computer film editing software have revolutionized the film industry. so why shouldn't digital press do the same for the publishing? take the power out of the big industries, retain creative and copyright control, and run the marketing campaign of your choice. the big houses are more and more relying on authors to do their own marketing anyway (signings, write the sell copy, etc.)

eh ~ food for thought on a wednesday morn.

: o p

so this morning i'm working on my adr stuff and i come up on a research question and i go surfing along and find this interesting site (i needed a casualty count for the Titanic ~ what won't those japanese shoehorn into a half-hour animé? hahahaha) ~

i've always had an interest in the Titanic disaster. i once wrote a short play based on an eye witness account from a woman who was force-rescued as a child by a crewman who perished ~ she was too scared to get in the boat and he ripped her stuffed pig, out of her arms and threw it in the boat and told her she had to go after it). so many amazing and wonderful stories about the ship and its passengers ~ great grist, indeed.

but anyway, i've long doubted the gross sort of classist assumption that the people in steerage all sank to their deaths on account of hoggy first classers taking all the boats and locking the access gates and other such drivelly nonsense perpetuated by the like of the ridiculous Titanic film, among other popular misconceptions.

the website above gives a decent counter argument using percentages to show who really went down with the ship and what those numbers actually mean.

[T]hird class women were 41% more likely to survive than first class men. And third class men were twice as likely to survive as second class men. [emphasis mine].

Yes, class is a far weaker variable in determining survival rate than sex or age. Indeed, most of the variance in first class vs. third class survival rates can be attributed to sex alone. The reason for this is simple: 44% of the first class passengers were women, while only 23% of the third class passengers were women. Because the survival rate for women was far greater than the survival rate for men, we would thus expect a much higher survival rate for first class passengers as a whole than for third class passengers as a whole.

Although this analysis is incandescently obvious, it never seems to show up in mass media treatments of the Titanic disaster. Why is that?

why indeed? because it's not pc to show poor steerage people acting like poor steerage people. rather than a class issue, the survival rate was a gender and age issue. it was women and children first in the lifeboats and there were fewer steerage patrons saved simply because there were fewer women and children in steerage and they were much farther away from the deck (which is economics if anything, not snobbery). also, according to eyewitness accounts, people in steerage were much more reluctant to get off the ship and/or leave their belongings.

i found this summary amusing:

those interested in further amusement can check out John Updike's article "It Was Sad," The New Yorker, 10/14/96, p. 94. Mr. Updike rambles on for several pages in an futile attempt to debug what he calls the "myth" of male heroism in the Titanic disaster. Since he has no factual basis for his beliefs, the effect is amazingly bad. Or check out the new movie Titanic, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as one of those heroic third class passengers who were, as we know from the casualty figures, less heroic than the bourgeois passengers in second class.

on top of which: nothing so disheartening as unduly politicizing a disaster over which no one has any control ~ especially 80-some-odd years after the fact.

i hate revisionist history.

: o p