![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Feb. 8th, 2010 11:24 amGood morning, blogland! Okay, it was a little closer to "morning" and not "second breakfast" when I wrote this....
Today is a very literary morning. For some reason I've been Followed on Twitter by a pair of literary linkspammers, JustAuthors and TheManuscript, who contrary to Twitter's usual linkspam denizens actually have useful information to share (if you're looking for interesting Twitterers at the intersection of Digital and Literary, Catchn is another good one and a bit less impersonal).
The DIY Book Tour is not about DIY Books (ie, Nameless) as I thought it might be, but rather about DIY tours. It's an article about how for a certain level of writer, it may be more effective or at any rate more emotionally satisfying to do readings outside of the usual bookstore run. It's not something I could do, for any number of totally irrational reasons, but it may be of interest to those who have self-published and are looking to self-market and don't suffer from paralytic shyness.
More directly in the Extribulum line is DIY Publishing (sensing a theme?) which talks about what you should and shouldn't pay for as a self-publisher. Editing/design/marketing packages are Lulu's stock in trade, and it's the one truly annoying thing I have to ignore about the website. I'm lucky, because aside from the investment of time I pay nothing for my editing services (thank you, Cafe) and I'm skilled enough in the visual arts to be able to typeset and cover-create mostly on my own. The article lists some good resources, and also inadvertently informs us of where our skill sets should lie: the successful self-publisher needs to be a bit of a Renaissance Person, capable not only of writing engagingly but of typesetting and graphic design with competence and marketing with dedication. If you cannot be all these things, it helps to find friends who can be one or two....
Aside from all this, I'm finally buckling down and starting the soul-crushing, ego-destroying process of re-reviewing all the crit I got from CG and forming it into a coherent "you suck" report that will help me figure out what needs fixing. (This is a joke, btw. I know nobody thinks I suck, and my soul is not actually crushed. But it is a somewhat painful process and it helps to make light of it via the "Drama Queen" route.)
One of the intriguing things about Charitable Getting is how many people pointed out that it didn't feel like a book -- it felt like a sitcom or a TV show or a film. I didn't write Charitable Getting with a film adaptation in mind; I didn't cast it in my head or really do anything all that different from what I did with Nameless, in terms of methodology -- I stumbled on a story and wrote it. So I wonder if it's not so much the content of CG as the mindset of our culture.
The book is lighthearted. It's a lighthearted book. Nothing truly serious happens in it and I wasn't going for anything truly serious to happen in it; I wanted it to be a good story but I didn't really feel like it had to be a deep one. I think people aren't used to books being lighthearted anymore. Even books that are funny generally have a twist of the knife in store, and the most irreverent of books tend to also be the angriest these days. Books that are funny aren't usually fictional, or if they are it's a much darker funny than the essentially family-friendly kind found in Charitable Getting. This isn't a criticism of anyone or anything, really, just an observation. It seems like we expect that books will somehow have an intangible more, and films and TV will somehow have less.
As with Nameless, Charitable Getting is a bit of a freak. It doesn't fit into a genre without a few gentle whacks. Valet of Anize doesn't really either, and Dead Isle straddles a weird line between Kiplingesque adventure and serious social commmentary. I kind of wish they did slot more neatly. It would make marketing a lot easier.
On the other hand, I love my little mutant children, because they're mine, and secretly because Darwin teaches us that evolution depends on mutation.
And anyway I'm okay with giving you guys a sitcom to read. It's something different, at least, eh?
Today is a very literary morning. For some reason I've been Followed on Twitter by a pair of literary linkspammers, JustAuthors and TheManuscript, who contrary to Twitter's usual linkspam denizens actually have useful information to share (if you're looking for interesting Twitterers at the intersection of Digital and Literary, Catchn is another good one and a bit less impersonal).
The DIY Book Tour is not about DIY Books (ie, Nameless) as I thought it might be, but rather about DIY tours. It's an article about how for a certain level of writer, it may be more effective or at any rate more emotionally satisfying to do readings outside of the usual bookstore run. It's not something I could do, for any number of totally irrational reasons, but it may be of interest to those who have self-published and are looking to self-market and don't suffer from paralytic shyness.
More directly in the Extribulum line is DIY Publishing (sensing a theme?) which talks about what you should and shouldn't pay for as a self-publisher. Editing/design/marketing packages are Lulu's stock in trade, and it's the one truly annoying thing I have to ignore about the website. I'm lucky, because aside from the investment of time I pay nothing for my editing services (thank you, Cafe) and I'm skilled enough in the visual arts to be able to typeset and cover-create mostly on my own. The article lists some good resources, and also inadvertently informs us of where our skill sets should lie: the successful self-publisher needs to be a bit of a Renaissance Person, capable not only of writing engagingly but of typesetting and graphic design with competence and marketing with dedication. If you cannot be all these things, it helps to find friends who can be one or two....
Aside from all this, I'm finally buckling down and starting the soul-crushing, ego-destroying process of re-reviewing all the crit I got from CG and forming it into a coherent "you suck" report that will help me figure out what needs fixing. (This is a joke, btw. I know nobody thinks I suck, and my soul is not actually crushed. But it is a somewhat painful process and it helps to make light of it via the "Drama Queen" route.)
One of the intriguing things about Charitable Getting is how many people pointed out that it didn't feel like a book -- it felt like a sitcom or a TV show or a film. I didn't write Charitable Getting with a film adaptation in mind; I didn't cast it in my head or really do anything all that different from what I did with Nameless, in terms of methodology -- I stumbled on a story and wrote it. So I wonder if it's not so much the content of CG as the mindset of our culture.
The book is lighthearted. It's a lighthearted book. Nothing truly serious happens in it and I wasn't going for anything truly serious to happen in it; I wanted it to be a good story but I didn't really feel like it had to be a deep one. I think people aren't used to books being lighthearted anymore. Even books that are funny generally have a twist of the knife in store, and the most irreverent of books tend to also be the angriest these days. Books that are funny aren't usually fictional, or if they are it's a much darker funny than the essentially family-friendly kind found in Charitable Getting. This isn't a criticism of anyone or anything, really, just an observation. It seems like we expect that books will somehow have an intangible more, and films and TV will somehow have less.
As with Nameless, Charitable Getting is a bit of a freak. It doesn't fit into a genre without a few gentle whacks. Valet of Anize doesn't really either, and Dead Isle straddles a weird line between Kiplingesque adventure and serious social commmentary. I kind of wish they did slot more neatly. It would make marketing a lot easier.
On the other hand, I love my little mutant children, because they're mine, and secretly because Darwin teaches us that evolution depends on mutation.
And anyway I'm okay with giving you guys a sitcom to read. It's something different, at least, eh?
