The trout got flushed

One of the first writer blogs I linked on my blogroll was Brown Trout’s Next Book, purportedly kept by an overweight, aging, thrice-divorced academic who had enjoyed a stint of literary success some years ago, but subsequently saw his career tank in part due to his heaving drinking and self-destructiveness.

On August 9, the trout published a post that began like this:

A Disclosure

Hi there. It’s me talking to you. The name’s Dave, and I’m a writer…of sorts.

Same guy as before, but not really. While I do share similar eccentricities and passions to the creature you’ve come to know as The Brown Trout, I am distinct in that I am not a character of fiction. I’m a real guy. Flesh and bone.

Like BT, I’m a writer. I also work for a major university. Unlike BT, I’ve no real publishing history. I’ve also only been married once, not thrice. And if BT and I were to square of in the ring, he’d hold a significant weight advantage. Also, I’ve never had a heart attack.

But I have written a few novels. Two are pretty good. One really sucked. Another is in the works and will be wrapped up in time for Christmas. It’s the best thing I’ve done yet. I’ve also scribbled down at least fifty short stories, of which four have been published. I’ve picked up a few prizes and that notorious MFA degree. Oh, and I also have written a screenplay.

The blog’s now gone.

I supposed it’s a given that writers suffer a compulsion to create fictional worlds. So why should blogs, as a medium, be exempt?

All the same, I like “Dave” far more than I liked his his fictional creation, and I’m glad BT is now folded away someplace, I imagine rather like a balloon deflated & creased the day after the Macy’s parade.

Off to edit my blogroll . . .

(Oh, lest this be lost forever, BT submitted a question, in character, to Miss Snark — and commenters unfamiliar with his blog immediately detected the whiff of fakery. BT responded to their skepticism in the comments: “Despite the insinuations of the previous commenter, I can assure you I am as real as Mr. Frey, and likely more so.”)

From my blogroll: Language Log, again

Had too much fun reading this morning to write a blog post myself.

Over at Pubrants, agent Kristin Nelson has posted a query from one of her writers, Lisa Shearin, along with comments about what it was about the query that worked. Nice contrast to Evil Editor, whose material is drawn from queries that don’t work quite so well.

I’ve also been looking through the archives at Language Log, a blog I added to my blogroll yesterday after my eggcorn post. What a pleasure. I love the ‘net!

UPDATE: Mark Liberman has collaborated with Geoffrey K. Pullum to publish a “best of” Language Log as a book, Far from the Madding Gerund :)

Sorry, but corporations can’t “blog”

Via Booksquare comes the news that Penguin has a blog.

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)

Spam relief!!!!

Although it never gets posted to my blog, because comments are moderated, the comment spam manure-pile has been growing a larger every week.

Several times a day I’ve had to go through my comment queue to manually sort out the spam from the legitimate comments.

That job should be easier now: I just installed the Akismet plug-in. It will automatically divert comments from URLs that have tried to post spam to my blog in the past.

It’s too bad that bloggers have to be plagued by these parasites. I love getting and reading comments, but I can understand why some bloggers don’t allow them . . . who has the time?

How they find me

I have access to a couple different website traffic statistics services through my hosting plan, and every once in awhile I scan the list of search phrases people have used to find this blog.

Some of them match up pretty well with topics I blog on a lot. I’ve had a lot of hits lately about novel length, for instance. Any time I blog about some news item, I get hits afterward for people who want either information about it, or, I suppose, to read someone else’s comments.

Then there are the phrases that . . . well, here’s a sample from June:

true identity miss snark

I get that one, or a variation on it, at least once a month. But sorry, folks, I’m as in the dark on that one as you are. Also, I kind of like not knowing, but that’s a subject for a whole ‘nother post.

skunks in my garage

Is someone checking my blog to see if he’s got skunks in his garage? If so, he’s taking the Information Age waaaaaaaaay too seriously.

opposite of advance

Uh, that would be “retreat.” Glad to help.

smelly viburnum bush pest

Possibly related to the skunks in your garage?

bottled butter

No, thanks.

how to kill ducks in your yard

Try getting them in a row, first.

polar plunge pic rochester

Not here, sorry, but if you find one send me a link and I’ll post it!

The answers are in

Evil Editor has published the answers to his match-the-title-t0-the-synopsis contest.

I picked three right (my picks here). No prize for me! :-)

Here are the fake synopses I contributed:

Little Girl Blue
Will a sex-change operation finally enable a ravishing but desperately insecure house paint heiress to blow her own horn?

The Midnight Diaries
With her carrot supply dwindling, night vision blindness threatens to destroy Angela Fastling’s only defense against clinical depression: journaling in secret after dark.

The Monster Within
Two star-crossed veterinary techs find they have more in common than love when an outbreak of feline tapeworm triggers panic in their once-sleepy town.

Portal to Murder
Desperate for original submissions, a blogging literary agent snaps when her admonitions to “drop the portals, folk” fails to discourage a timeworn sci fi device.

Raise the Buried Dead
Belle Jackson’s photographic memory of local obituaries attracts the attention of Congressional aide Philip Tyler. But why?

EE edited the last one. My version began with the phrase “In this voter fraud thriller.”