joliehale

The fact that I haven't updated my blog in a month is an indication to me that I don't need a blog right now. I'm just an aspiring writer with a boring day job, trying to pass the time until I start my MFA with reading, writing, and a healthy social life. I don't have much to say.

Thus, I'm putting joliehale on hiatus for a couple of months. After I move to New York in mid-August, I'll have more to say. As you may recall, I will be joining the MFA Creative Writing program at Queens College, and I am probably also going to start an internship at a literary agency (details to be provided if/when I'm officially hired [and yes, I'll get paid! It's an old-school agency that only accepts snail-mail queries]). Both of these endeavors will be much more interesting to me than anything I'm doing now, and I hope they'll be interesting to you, too. And let's not forget that I will also be a baby New Yorker--I will have LOTS to say about that state of existence, I'm sure.

In the interim I will still be active on Twitter, sharing links and brief thoughts, which are all I have to offer until my real life becomes more varied.

See y'all in August! (aside: What will the native New Yorkers do to me if I say "y'all" in front of them?)

Housekeeping note:

I am finding Twitter much better suited than this blog to my daily social networking needs. I won't retire the blog, but don't expect me to pick up the pace with posting. Twitter is easier and more fun for me to use--and you don't need a Twitter account to read my Twitter feed. You can even add it to an RSS reader if you use one (I personally love Google Reader). Just go to my profile and click the link on the right sidebar to subscribe to a multi-platform RSS feed.

Gem of the Day

from my blog/Twitter reading is this post from Editorial Anonymous. The topic is whether book authors should join in online discussions of their work, since their presence might cause commentators to censor themselves. The answer, basically, is: do what you will on the interwebs, but privately reconcile yourself to the fact that readers will have their own interpretations of your work, and try to think of this as a good thing.

It's important to remember that this is one of the magics of creating art, and one of the heaving frustrations. Ideally, your work will mean something personal to your readers, and that necessarily means it will be something different from what it meant to you.

So try to let go. Be philosophical about it, and remember the author's prayer:

God, grant me the courage to offer myself to others, the wisdom to let my work be what others most need it to be, and the serenity to hope that it irritates the jackasses of the world at least as much as they irritate me.

Hugh Ryan, my newest Twitter acquaintance, recently wrote a lovely, funny essay on his experience working at a GLBT high school and how the students there (especially the transgender ones) taught him a new way to use "the C-bomb."

One day, I found Diamond and a few of the other transgirls gathered around a computer looking at a hardcore-porn site. [...] "Oh," said Natasha, one of the younger girls, as I approached to shut down the computer. "They're so beautiful." She reached out a tentative hand to stroke the image of a clinically-bright close-up on a woman's stretched vag. Natasha was crying. It was the kind of picture that would have been disgusting under most circumstances, but the reverence in her voice made it seem a work of art.

(Aside: I love that about transwomen--that covetous reverence, and I can tell you from personal observation it's unlike anything I've seen in straight men, who have no interest in becoming vagina owners.)

I paused, waiting for some sort of outburst, a look of shock on Diamond's face, the wailing sirens of the second-wave feminism police; something. But nothing happened. I dropped the C-bomb and the world didn't end. [...] I hadn't realized that my students didn't use it for shock value. Well, okay, maybe they did a little. But mostly, to them, it just meant something good. Cunt was the highest compliment they had to bestow, not in a righteous act of reclamation, but through a simple equation: cunts were good, therefore good things were cunty.

Oh, the innocent power of slang without a sociopolitical agenda.

And oh, the power of the cunt!

Maya Reynolds has a helpful list of pros and cons (for everybody other than Google) of the Google Book Settlement. Due to confusion about what the hell is going on, I have not been closely following the news on the settlement and probably won't read up on it until it has all been, well, settled--but Maya's list is so concise and easy to understand, I'm using it as a starting point for figuring this thing out.

And if you're not following the very funny and very British agent Daisy Frost ... you should. She's recently been blogging about the London Book Fair ...

subject: A GRAVE END TO THE BOOKFAIR

Well, thank James Patterson (ie God) THAT week is over and I can finally get back to some real work – The Apprentice on i-player / Britain’s Got Talent on YouTube /Jamie Byng on Twitter/ all of this week’s HEAT magazine. I am ignoring my clients with gay abandon, living life by the full hour instead of having my life flash before my eyes every 30 minutes and not using spasticated phrases like ‘a distinctive new voice’, ‘we have just accepted a pre-empt from Germany’ and ‘this is like Dan Brown for the Twilight generation’. According to the Bookseller, the fair had ‘Fewer People But More Focus’, which sounds like an election promise from the Labour Party, although I did wonder whether maybe we could take that theme and roll it out to other areas of our lives – ‘Fewer Kisses But More Passion’ (too Max Moseley?) ‘Fewer Words But Better Prose’ (too Geri Halliwell? In our dreams) and am already preparing to justify a few duvet days with the phrase, ‘Fewer Days In The Office But More Thinking’. Well, quite.

But before I could entirely shake off the Narnia-esque surrealism of the Earls Court-based jollity that we call the LIBF, there was but one final date on my dance card to tick off before the electronic tag was, figuratively speaking, removed from my ankle and I was released back into the wild. ‘But how glamorous, where was it?’ I hear you ask.

Hint 1: the post's subject line. Hint 2: Miss Daisy enjoys puns.

Oh, and the thing I'm too busy to organize my thoughts about? This: I'm Glad I'm a Boy! I'm Glad I'm a Girl! As I said on Moonrat's post about this little piece of horror, "'we've come so far,' my muscular buttocks."

A couple of bloggers have shared some smart ideas lately:

1. Eileen Wiedbrauk blogged about an "editing party" she attended. One of her writer friends hosted a casual party where everyone helped her proofread her manuscript, thus:

She's gotten some interest in [her novel] from the publishing world but was asked to make edits -- which she has been furiously working on for the past month -- and this is where the editing party comes in.

She invited as many of us over as could fit in her apartment, gave us food and two chapters each to proofread. We sat with our diet Coke and our red pens and hunted out the last of the typos hiding out in the pages, flagged confusing phrases, and debated the usage of commas.

[...] We got to socialize, Corey got proofreaders, and we felt like we were helping. I believe Ms. Corey has been very smart about this. Particularly that she's asked lots of people to read very small amounts rather than begging us to read the whole thing from beginning to end. However, there's quite a bit of interest in reading the whole thing beginning to end now that we've gotten a taste of it!

2. Jessica Faust answered a reader question about grammar and style in published books, and in the process came up with a clever idea: create your own style sheet.

One suggestion for those who have specific grammar/style opinions, for example those who write a series or paranormal, don’t be afraid to send along a style sheet of your own. For example, do you have a new species with a specific spelling? A style sheet will help editors know what you intend so they can help keep it consistent throughout, and it will probably save you a lot of stetting later on.

If you haven't heard of a style sheet, it's a common document that publishers develop in order to make sure their books all have a consistent style. It might include things like whether certain words should be capitalized/italicized/etc., special punctuation rules, and anything else that isn't included in the Chicago Manual or other standard guide, or anything from the manual that the publisher disagrees with.

So if you create new words to use in your book, and you want to make sure that they're used/spelled/capitalized/etc. the way you designed them, you can write up a style sheet to help your book's copyeditor keep everything standard.

iPhone vs. laptop reading experience from @bookoven, who argues that supposedly uber-connected smartphones can actually offer a more solitary, focused, "quiet" reading experience than a laptop can:

I think it means that there is much more room for payed content on the iphone, where there isn’t on the web. Attention on the web, don’t forget, is driven by links. If you don’t have links, you don’t get love. And if you’re behind a paywall, you don’t get links.

That all changes on the iphone, where attention is defined by the apps. And content feels like it has real value again.

Breakdown of cost of producing physical books (in an attempt to explain ebook prices), and ways to optimize production in the future:

There are a lot more stages and costs than anyone would imagine. This convoluted process can be optimized in innumerable ways - Mr. Bezos would be hard pressed to find a more ’improvable/kaizenable’ business model.

[...]

Looking at optimization opportunities, a few jumped out immediately -
* Moving away from physical objects - The number of times a physical book is shipped, handled, stored, warehoused, inventoried is ridiculously high.
* Book Successes having to pay for Failures - The Internet allows for crowd intelligence, faster feedback, and a lot of other means to reduce the number and cost of failures.
* Book Returns - Every 4 copies of a book that are sold have to pay for the 1 copy that has to be returned (not to mention the returned book’s shipping, warehousing costs).
* Amount of Manual Labor - There are a TON of people involved in the book creation, distribution, and sales process.
* The fact that a book takes 16-18 months after being acquired to get to stores.

I now refer you to Maya Reynolds, for (among other topics) intelligent discussion of the new ways of thinking about book production that will be required for publishers to move forward with ebook technology.

Why we don't need to reinvent the book for the digital age:

Good books [...] are meant to be finite intellectual products; good books are not supposed to be never-ending and self-updating streams of consciousness. Nor are they supposed to be interrupted by a constant flow of references to other books; if you cannot move to the next page without having to consult a reference work cited in a footnote, the author has probably failed at synthesizing [...] this is is exactly the point of a talented author: to synthesize by compressing millions of links, facts, and opinions into a readable guide to the subject.

I never did understand why people think ebooks should be interactive with hyperlinks and videos and whatnot. That would make for a wearisome reading experience.

Attempting to compose worthwhile blog post for later today. In the meantime, here (thanks to Dennis Cass) are the NYT's monthly lists of summer movie releases: May, June, July, August.

I've jotted down about thirty-five of those that I want to see. #decisionfail

At the prompting of Moonrat, I am going to read George Eliot's Middlemarch along with the fine folks at the Fill In the Gaps project. I'm not doing the project overall, as my sizable TBR list is already enough reading pressure for me. But Middlemarch is on that list, so why not read it as part of a group?

Anybody else going to do this?

I have another review up on The Book Book: MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU by Darin Strauss.

I actually finished this book last summer within the span of a week, but it's taken me so long to review it because I allowed forced a friend to borrow it and was waiting to get it back so I could refer to the text while writing my review. I still haven't gotten the book back from my rather disorganized friend (sorry, Rachel, it's true!), but I figured it was about time. See, Strauss sent me a free copy after following a backlink from his smart Powell's post to my humble blog and seeing that I wanted to read MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU. In return, I promised him I would post a review online when I was done. Thanks again, Darin! I loved the novel.

Okay, what is up with the Better GReader Firefox Add-On? An updated version was released last week, and I installed it when I pulled up Firefox at work this morning. Now I can't use the preview feature on any new blog posts. This feature still works on posts that were downloaded to Google Reader before I installed the Better GReader update, but not on ones downloaded after the update.

Not cool.

Anyone know how to fix this? I'm not a techie by any means, but I learn quickly and can follow directions.

Last night I finished THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins. IT WAS AWESOME. Fastest book I've read in ages. My review is up at The Book Book.

Next up: SERENA by Ron Rash.

Last night I got enough sleep on a weeknight for the first time in ages, and now I'm actually more tired than usual. Clearly I am completing my metamorphosis into a Real Grown-Up.

Although that doesn't explain why I am suddenly craving sugary breakfast cereal ... or does it?

I think I'll go do something useful now, like migrate my Amazon wishlist into Goodreads and LivingSocial.com as part of my continuing effort to become less dependent on the 500-pound gorilla.

Edit: Obviously I need to pare down my To Read list to just the stuff I really really actually do want to read, because I will die before I get through the list as it stands.

You know what else I'm sick of people whingeing about? Communication technology. (Cell phones. The internet. You may have heard of them.)

First you've got your basic whingeing about how prevalent this technology is in our daily lives. I'm sure you've all heard these arguments: it infringes on our quiet time, it makes us ignore the people in our physical vicinity, yadda yadda yadda. Everybody forgets that these complaints can be traced not to the technology itself, but to how we use it--to our own nature and behavior. Technology doesn't make us do a damned thing; we make it do stuff. And if we want a break from it, that's what the off switch is for. By now we should all recognize that communication technology it itself a GOOD THING. It makes our lives easier and safer. When I first got my driver's license and started driving alone, my parents REQUIRED me to have a cell phone because they wanted me to be able to call them and/or 911 if I had an accident. And then they asked me to turn it off during family supper.

But now we've got another incarnation of this anti-progress whingeing: communication technology is TOO useful, and it's fucking with our fiction.

Conspiring with a distant lover? Try texting. Lost in the woods/wilderness/Ionic Sea? Use GPS. Case of mistaken identity? Facebook!

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage. (It’s Odysseus, can someone look up the way to Ithaca? Use the "no Sirens" route.)

[...]

Then I started talking to fellow writers and discovered a brewing antagonism toward today’s communication gadgets.

"We want a world where there’s distance between people; that’s where great storytelling comes from," [emphasis mine] said Kamran Pasha, a writer and producer on "Kings," the NBC drama based on the story of David.

The source of great storytelling is "distance between people"? Really? Because I thought the best source was human nature. Human life. Communication technology is part of our lives now, and I don't see that it's taken away humanity's capacity for drama, or diminished life's capacity to throw us for a loop, no matter how much gadgetry we're toting around. In fact, there are plenty of times when communication technology makes our lives and interactions MORE complicated and dramatic. The word "kerfluffle" comes directly from the internet, people!

And don't forget one of the most important aspects of technology, at least in terms of how we can use it in fiction: occasionally, technology plays merry hell with us and/or punks out on us--sometimes at the moment we need it most. We break it, lose it, use up all its power. It craps out right after the warranty ends. It's vulnerable to viruses and "glitches" (my muscular buttocks) and spilled diet soda and the Patriot Act. Some of us don't know how to use it properly. Some of us are too poor to afford it and get left out of the loop while everyone around us is connected to each other. One day, it might acquire artificial intelligence.

Communication technology is an incredible gift AND a huge liability. Don't pout about it. Don't even write around it. Make it work within your stories. Honestly, has no one heard of sci-fi?

On second thought, perhaps I should start linking to books at their Goodreads pages. Compare the Powell's page for Edinburgh (where I posted a review yesterday) with the Goodreads page for the same book.

For the time being, Goodreads is clearly more useful than Powell's if you want lots of reader feedback that will give you an idea of whether you'd like a book. And unlike the other big book-themed social network LibraryThing, it's not owned in whole or part by Amazon (and Shelfari can kiss my ass, Amazon-owned or not).

I'd still like to see indie bookseller websites gain momentum in this respect, so everybody please join me in posting book reviews on indie sites. I'm tired of hearing people whine about the impending doom of indie booksellers and then not doing anything to stop it. I'm especially sick of people clinging sentimentally to physical bookstores while ignoring the fact that online bookselling is the unstoppable wave of the future. Stores are great, and of course we want to hold on to the good ones, but they are no longer the bread and butter of the industry. If indies are to survive, they have to hop on the wave. And if you want to save indies, help them gain a foothold on the interwebs!

[/soapbox]

I am weaning myself from the five hundred pound gorilla's teat.

In the past I have linked to Amazon book webpages when I blog about books because Amazon's pages pack so much goddamn info. There's almost always at least one pro review (Kirkus, PW, newspapers, etc.) and at least one customer review; I like this because I usually decide whether to buy a book based on reviews. That doesn't mean I require positive reviews to buy something, but reviews can be a good place to find out the book's content/hook, and that often matters more to me than some stranger's opinion. And then Amazon sometimes has author blogs, yadda yadda, fun stuff.

But other sites like Powells.com could become more info-packed if readers make them that way. User-generated content, people! This is why I have created an account at Powells.com and posted a review for Alexander Chee's Edinburgh.

Does anyone know if indiebound.com allows site members to post book reviews? Can you guys recommend any other good indie sites that do or have the potential to rival Amazon's content-richness? I am particularly interested in professional and reader reviews (in case you didn't get that memo already).

Have changed my blog layout. I think this one looks cleaner, more professional, and easier to read/use. Let me know if you disagree.

Note that I have updated the list of links to my favorite blogs. Everything there is still related to writing/publishing/books, except for Greta Christina's blog, which is concerned with (according to the blog subtitle): "Sex, atheism, politics, dreams, and whatever." I just discovered this one on Friday and am really enjoying Greta Christina's thoughtful, grounded writing.

This morning I realized that after this summer, I may never again be able to pet the neighborhood cat. For almost two years, she's been following me up and down the street and waiting with me at bus stops.

These little things are gonna break my heart.

I'm going to the MFA program at Queens College in NYC this fall!

Now I can start agonizing about where the hell I'm going to live. Anybody in New York looking for a roommate (and two sweet cats)?

And then there's the fact that I'll be in the middle of the biggest publishing hub in the US. Anybody want an intern?

( How I came to this decision )

Quick notes ...

1. I have joined Twitter.

2. I want to redo my blog layout, but that's not something I'm really comfortable doing from my office computer.

3. Next post: my trip to NYC last weekend to visit MFA programs (and of course Moonrat).

GOD DAMN IT. I lost my favorite lipstick.

On the bright side of things, I am obviously destined to be a sci-fi geek. I just started reading The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi, the sort-of sequel to Old Man's War, and IT IS SO COOL YOU GUYS.

In MFA news (and on the even brighter side): I am going to NYC this weekend to visit the MFA program at Adelphi University. I've vacillated wildly in my feelings about this school, and now I'm traveling all the way up the coast to check it out. I applied because it's in the NYC area and I was trying to hit most of the bases there, but I didn't know much about it until recently. Adelphi has a very young program (launched in 2006), so there's not a lot of commentary out there about it, and at several points in time I have decided (and then changed my mind) that I wasn't really interested in it because of the lack of outsider opinion that you'll find in abundance for more established programs. In fact, when Speak Coffee asked me last month where I had applied, I left Adelphi off the list.

That was in February. In March, the rejection letters started rolling in.

But not from Adelphi! They want me. I don't know if I had better luck with them because they're young and maybe have a smaller applicant pool than most places, or because I really am a good fit for the program. So I'm going to an information session this weekend to find out. The research I've done since receiving my acceptance has turned up a lot of favorable stuff on Adelphi. My final decision will hinge on 1) whether they give me funding, 2) my impressions during the visit, and 3) the quality of current students' writing, if I can find that out.

Oh, and on my significant relationship here in South Carolina. That's a whole different anxiety attack, there.

And maybe on NYU and Queens-CUNY, who still haven't told me if I'm in at their programs or not. (Update: Got my NYU rejection email minutes after posting this entry. Hurrah.)
Update 2: Queens accepted me a couple of days after I made this post. Yay!

Advice is welcome, btw.