Kirsten Mortensen's blog

In Slate, Jon Katz offers a tribute to Rose, his border collie. Nicely done.

Technorati Tags: border collie

Now there’s a question . . .

I think the answer is “depends.”

Depends on how you do it and what your expectations are.

I stuck my toe in, today, with a little teaser on my bio page. Here it is:

[I] am now querying agents for my latest completed book, WHEN LIBBY MET THE FAIRIES AND HER WHOLE LIFE WENT FEY. It’s about a biologist who’s trying to start an organic vegetable farm, only one evening as she’s crossing one of her fields a two-foot tall man steps out of the shadows and greets her by name.

It’s hard enough for Libby to believe that little folk exist, let alone that they’ll help her farm succeed. Then word of her sightings leaks onto the Internet and pretty soon her property is swarming with strangers who want to see the fairies, too . . .

There’s also a romance. I love books with romances :-)

I wouldn’t want to put anything more out right now. For example, there are some plot twists I hope will be fun for readers. I wouldn’t want to give them away. And how much of a hint is too much? I confess, that’s a question that makes me nervous.

There’s also the matter of my dignity. I am terribly excited about this book. I think it’s good. Hell, some days I think it’s very good. But I thought my last novel was very good, too, until I tried to find an agent for it. Come to find out, it wasn’t nearly the novel I believed it was.

Nothing like real world feedback to open one’s eyes ;-)

So I don’t want to overhype WHEN LIBBY even within the confines of my modest little blog, because even here it’s a long way down from that high horse saddle . . .

Technorati Tags: writing

Via Booksquare comes the news that Penguin has a blog.

Here it is.

Okay. Far be it from me to suggest this is an original thought, although it’s only now I’ve articulated it to myself — I know there’s a whole sub-blogosphere obsessing 24/7 about how to leverage blogs for corporate marcom programs, and no doubt this has already been proposed by someone, somewhere — but here it is, fwiw: it’s kind of embarrassing when a corporation launches a blog.

It’s like watching a person of a certain age ape teenage dress and behavior. You can smell what may be a whiff of fear; you sense you’re being asked to play along, almost as if for pity’s sake, in what is at best an act of uncomfortable self-deception; you know the apparent spontaneity is a sham and that the real motive is a desperate grab for whatever bennies (attention, sex) can be wrung from anyone naive or dull enough to be fooled.

Blogs are too much about personality, and with rare exceptions corporations have to suppress personality in the service of brand. Dave Thomas could have done a blog for Wendy’s, for example. But how many corporations really want their executives to be that closely associated with their public personae?

Not very many.

But oh, what a tempting place the blogosphere is. All that conversation. All those prospective customers . . .

So finally, after chewing its nails for a couple of years, a corporation figures maybe it can have the blog without the personality–it can launch a blog, but just won’t let it be naughty.

Sorry. That’s just co-opting the word “blog” as a cover for launching a different kind of corporate website. A pseudo-informal website.

I do think corporations have to pay attention to blogs. It’s like listening to visitors in your tradeshow booth, or reading letters to the editor in your industry’s trade pubs, or tracking stats in your customer call center.

And maybe someday corporate execs — the generation that is growing up, now, blogging — will be able to blog and have it come across as genuine.

But if some established Fortune 500 corporation were paying me the long dollar to advise them on blogging, I’d say save your money. Use it on other things. There are lots of ways for corporations to reach their customers over the net — chats, podcasts — that convey openness and informality without risking you’ll just look strained & foolish.

(Now, if Penguin’s blog turns out to be readable, it’ll be me that looks the fool. Won’t that be something? LOL)

Technorati Tags: blogs

And utterly humiliated myself. Nine holes, and I think I was on the fairway ONCE the entire time. Unless the tees count. Do the tees count as “being on the fairway”???

I had gotten to the point on the driving range when I could hit fairly long, fairly straight shots, fairly consistently (I took a half hour lesson too, which helped) with my seven iron, at least.

But everything I thought I’d grooved in disappeared when I got out on the course.

*sob*

I hit trees. Several. I hit water (not that that was hard to do that — we got three inches of rain yesterday morning and the course was sopping wet). I scattered the geese grazing in the rough. I chipped over greens, and then chipped back over them the other way. On more than one hole.

I think I’ll stick to the driving range again for awhile . . .

Technorati Tags: golf

POD-DY Mouth sponsored a contest this week: she posted excerpts from 24 novels. Some were from commercially published books; some were from POD books.

The object of the contest was to figure out which was which.

I tried it and got half of them right. Nobody scored more than 80 percent.

But here’s what’s most telling, from her post-contest post:

The statistics are interesting, though–far more on point that I would’ve imagined. Here are the average scores broken down by group:

Average Score, Editors: 63% (19 exams)
Average Score, Agents: 60% (26 exams)
Average Score, Authors: 53% (72 exams)
Average Score, Other: 46% (550 exams +/-)

So it turns out editors and agents have a keener eye than I’d guessed. I suppose it makes sense that unpublished works go from author to agent to editor. Looks like we’re not turning the publishing industry on its ear anytime soon.

Yeah. And if you want someone’s advice on whether your WIP is publishable, you’re better off trusting an agent’s rejection letter than a lay person’s high praise.

But we already knew that, didn’t we ;-)

(Btw, POD-DY Mouth doesn’t support permalinks, so if you’ve come across this post after 7/28/06, you’ll need to scroll down to the entry from the 27th to find the post from which I’ve quoted.)

Technorati Tags: writing, publishing, literary agents

Here’s a review of of The Creating Brain by Nancy C. Andreasen. She was a Renaissance Lit professor who went on to study neuroscience. How’s that for a sweet jump?

The book is about the neuroscience of creativity.

The reviewer, Nigel Leary, offers a caveat to the assertions in Andreasen’s book: while they are backed by studies, much research remains to be done. Nonetheless, it seems likely that creativity is marked by its own, unique neural processes, some sort of momentary disorganization — free association — that while “remarkably similar” to “psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia” yields not misery but scientific and artistic epiphanies.

Technorati Tags: creativity, Nancy C. Andreasen

I have read “Anna Karenina” twice. The first time, however, was under the direction of an undergraduate Russian literature professor, so it might more accurately be characterized as having been taught “Anna Karenina” ;-)

College was a long time ago. I remember only one snippet of one lecture of that course, when the professor drew our attention to the scene early in the book that depicts the nature of Anna’s intimate relations with her husband — or rather, of his intimate relations with her:

Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing table, finishing a letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, freshly washed and combed, with a book under his arm, came in to her.

“It’s time, it’s time,” said he, with a meaning smile, and he went into their bedroom.

She’s already met Vronsky at this point, and Tolstoy uses this scene and that immediately preceeding it to contrast Anna’s spontaneous and powerful physical attraction to her soon-to-be lover with her growing physical revulsion to her husband:

“And what right had he to look at him like that?” thought Anna, recalling Vronsky’s glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch.

Undressing, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of the eagerness which, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away.

It’s a heart-wrenching situation, to be sure; one can’t help agonizing for the woman, and although I can’t say for certain that my professor intended us to interpret the novel as a romantic tragedy (as per the tagline from the 1997 Warner movie: “In a world of power and privilege, one woman dared to obey her heart”) that’s how I, as a college student, did interpret it.

Then I reread it years later, and to my astonishment, discovered a completely different book.

With “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy was not arguing that women must obey their hearts; he was showing that when people let their passions drive them, they may find themselves driven to self-destruction. Granted, social convention is the cause, to some extent, of Anna’s growing unhappiness, but the love affair itself becomes a source of torment at the end. Anna gets what she wants, and it solves nothing.

My discovery was pure pleasure, too. Not that there’s anything wrong with women daring to obey their hearts, but what a pleasure to realize that the book’s themes were more complicated than “defy social convention/get yourself punished.”

It was with similar pleasure that I finished “A Suitable Boy.” Again you have, as a central figure, a woman under pressure to conform to restraining social convention (in this case, the custom of arranged marraige). Again, you have a writer who uses his heroine’s predicament as a lens through which to examine the choices of other individuals connected to her through a network of family and their associated social circles. “A Suitable Boy” is also as rich with details about 1950s India as Anna Karenina is with details about 19th century Russia, its path winding freely into contemporary politics and religious ceremonies, through both urban and rural settings.

But where Anna Karenina’s story ends tragically, Lata Mehra’s does not.

When I finished “Anna Karenina” the second time, I remember thinking that such a novel could not be written today. But Seth has written a novel that is very much in the same league, and which deserves the praise its earned. It’s a big book, but a book that merits, for the most part, its 1400-page length. I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: book review, A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth

While some journalists are busy lamenting the horrors of the Internet economy’s “long tail” effect on the arts, Lee Gomes, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, asked today if Anderson’s data really adds up.

The article is online here (subscription required).

Anderson responds here.

I find Anderson’s refutations of the column plausible. It will be interesting to see if Gomes takes up the subject again.

My dog in the fight, of course, is the fate of writers who have the chops to please a sizeable readership, but for whatever reason fail to hit a bestseller list. Solid midlisters have done okay, income-wise, in the past. Will that be true in the future?

Hopefully, someday, someone will tackle that issue without succumbing to the “end of the good ol’ days” hand-wringing that has characterized the attempts so far.

Technorati Tags: writing, long tail

Larry Dickens, “novelist and mariner,” has published a memoir about Rochester’s fast ferry.

Dickens served as first mate on the ferry, which former Rochester mayor Bill Johnson claimed would stimulate our economy somehow — I guess by luring rich Canadians across Lake Ontario. And what does the city have to show for it, now? An extra $20 million debt.

But never fear, our politicians have a new plan: a $230 million performing arts center cum underground bus terminal. Think of it as the fast ferry, only lots more expensive and we can’t sell it if it doesn’t work out. Also no rich Canadian angle.

I’ve blogged about my distaste for the Renaissance Square idea several times since I started doing this in February; here’s my most recent post on the subject.

Technorati Tags: Rochester, fast ferry, Renaissance Square

Via Booksquare, Marc Porter Zasada has an article in the LA Times about “extreme copyright.”

In extreme copyright, you try to push the limits of what intellectual property can be owned and controlled — or you try to penalize those who seem to have pushed the envelope a little too far. For example, not long ago, the family of Martin Luther King Jr. took CBS to court when the network used a tape it had made of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in a documentary (the family prevailed). And a government-authorized publisher tried to copyright official court opinions by arguing that it had introduced “original pagination” to the otherwise completely public documents — which must be cited every day by judges and lawyers.

On the trademark side, people try to register phrases such as “fair and balanced” or protect a single word, such as “Spike.” Marvel and DC Comics may sue you if you misuse the word “superhero,” which they — yes — trademarked in 1979.

These days, if you’re a Hollywood filmmaker and you shoot a passionate love scene in an art gallery and pan past a sculptural assemblage of tuna cans, you’d better get the permission of the artist, and probably StarKist (sorry, make that StarKist®) as well. Big studios employ whole teams to make sure such accidents don’t happen.

Meanwhile, journalists hunger to find derived language in the work of budding novelists. Scandal websites expose lifted phrases in the work of journalists. Computers search pop music for recycled phrases. And people who write little-known books sue when their ideas enter the culture in more popular books.

There’s a backlash as well: anti-copyright activitists who believe copyright “is being used less and less to encourage creative work and more and more as a means to discourage it.” [Emphasis Zasada's.]

I dunno. I can’t see an artist thinking, “Let some movie studio do a pan shot of my art? No! That’s too creative. Gotta force them to do shoot something bland instead.”

I think it’s more personal. For an artist or writer, it often comes down to wringing those extra pennies out of your work–and whether the additional exposure you get from someone’s “excerpt” (I use that term loosely here) will generate more pennies than what you’d get if you charge for the excerpt.

Or it may be wanting the pride of public attribution. I know that’s true of me, and my blog posts. I’d be most vexed if someone lifted my posts and reprinted them without attributing their authorship to me. (I also love to give attribution to others — I see the blogosphere as a self-organizing collection of information where attribution is key, like a hypertexted Wiki entry — you have to be able to trace the pieces back to their origin or you erode the integrity of the entire collection.)

Or it comes down to whether you believe people are trying to cheat you, and if so do you want to crusade against it.

For people who want to out plagiarists, it’s also personal: it’s the rush of proving moral superiority by exposing a scoundrel.

But here’s the thing. Our traditional notions of copyright are derived from our notions of ownership of physical property. We’re in the process, now, of figuring out whether we can apply guidelines based on the ownership of physical objects to stuff that isn’t physical at all, like someone’s name.

Digital technology serves to up the tension because digitized stuff shares more attributes with ideas, and fewer with physical property.

And of course the more a created work drifts toward the realm of ideas, the less plausible the notion of copyright. So just because you have an idea for a movie about a pirate ship — even if you’ve documented that idea — doesn’t mean you’ve been ripped off my Disney. OTOH, if a paragraph has been published in a printed book for all to see & touch, it’s obviously someone’s property . . .

Oh, well. Somewhere in this mess there’s a line that, once articulated, would put everyone at ease. But as long as there are lawyers willing to scuff the line away and ask for a new one, we’ll be wasting more time & energy on copyright battles . . .

Technorati Tags: writing, copyright