Benjamin has tagged me, and being a good denizen of the web (though I must say I detest memes on bad days), I’ll respond.

The rules of the meme:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their 8 things and post these rules.
3. At the end choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and to read your blog.

Right. On with it:

1. I don’t watch television. I find it an absolute waste of time.
2. I love vanilla ice-cream. It’s the best ice cream flavour ever created. Ever!
3. I try to read books that get me to think. Most of the time I end up with a splitting headache. I only read thrillers once in awhile, for kicks.
4. Favourite book of all time: Lord Of The Flies.
5. I want a Mac. I’ve been wanting a Mac for years now.
6. I listen to John Mayer whenever my hands tire of writing. It helps, and it has helped throughout intense study sessions and revision sprees.
7. I believe seven is God’s number. But come to think of it I can’t yet find any proof to support that claim.
8. I’m very, very scared of bees.

It’s late now, and I can’t think of 8 people to pass this meme on to. So I’ll just close, and update later. Night!

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Chalk up another reason why the screen will never replace books: your nose.

It didn’t really hit me until today when I picked up one of those new Penguin Popular Classics, rejacketed in a lovely green skin. It was made mostly out of recycled paper, and it smelled sweet. As in honey sweet. I stopped every few pages to hold the book up and breathe in its heady scent.

Well, acting against this experience is Bill Gates - who once made a prediction that reading is going to become completely online.

“We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads … are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. Today, for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print. As the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.”

For some reason I imagine a little iPod-like device with holes … from which we get little chemical particles that smell just like a new book. And as the file fades away (or gets corrupted) we smell mildew and dust and (gah!) rot. And soon we’d be all saying to each other: “Gosh! It’s got that new eReader smell!”

I understand that the way things are going books may very well be phased out, a direct result of commercial interests. And I don’t want to speculate. But I dearly, dearly don’t want books to go - if not for the feel of the page, the smell.

Like my copy of Silence Of The Lambs: smokey, old socks.

Want to take a sniff?

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Remember Urbis? This time we find it’s no longer alone. A Techcrunch plug the other day alerted me to the presence of Portrayl … and Ficlets.

Portrayl allows users to write stories chapter by chapter, or collaborate on stories that a user has started. In theory it sounds wonderful, but in reality it resembles Penguin’s group wiki novel experiment … an experiment that ultimately failed. Would anyone really want to browse through a novel with alternate endings, disparate writing styles and inconsistent characterization? I don’t think so.

On the other hand I find Ficlets to be a refreshing take on Internet prose. It allows users to write short stories, and then frees the piece to the community to write prequels and sequels to those stories. Comments and ratings feature heavily throughout the site, as does RSS (used to keep track of all the aforementioned prequels and sequels). See this example for a feel of what the site’s about.

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Alright, and it’s finally out.

Overall Winner (and Non-Fiction winner) - My War: Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell
Fiction Winner - The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky
Comics Winner - Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies

I can see why My War won, judging from the way the Iraq war is presented in the mainstream media these days - the whole idea of a US soldier running away to cyber cafes between shifts and blogging about such an experience is highly magnetic … indeed, almost guaranteed bestselling material.

Colby walks away with $10,000 in cash, and while he may be smiling away Paul Jones is quick to point out that his may be the last ‘open and frank military blog blook.’

I’ve talked about how Blooker prize winners are, in the end, amateurs, but while this year’s selection may not have improved from a literary point of view (don’t expect The God Of Small Things anytime soon) it has certainly presented an … alternative to what we usually get from the mainstream. The Doorbells of Florence are random pictures of doorbells accompanied by fictional stories of the people living behind them, and came about from a Flickr photo set, of all things.

Mom’s Cancer is not unique, certainly (there are loads of worthy web comics out there), but it is the backstory that counts: the author’s mother contracts cancer … and he draws the comic throughout the period. I liked it, and it was a pity it was taken down from the web, due to copyright issues.

But in the end it’ll be Colby’s book that generates the most buzz.

“Buzzell never takes the easy route of painting Iraq in black and white tones. His account gives flesh-and-blood — and anger, scorn, bile, and unexpected humor — to the Iraq debacle. His delightfully profane account loses nothing in the transformation from blog to blook.’ - Arianna Huffington

Oh, and Nick Cohen’s remarks:

“Of all the books in the competition, ‘My War’ is the one most likely to last. If, in 20 years time, people want to know what it was like to fight in Iraq, they can pick up ‘My War’ and find out. It tells what it’s like to be a grunt fighting in the Sunni Triangle – with more power and authority than the best ‘embedded reporter’ could manage. It is something of a triumph for blogs over traditional media.”

Funny, he’s just talked about Colby Buzzell a few days ago.

Last, but not least, Colby’s words on getting published:

“After I tell them, “I don’t know”, I usually tell them to go start a blog. It’s what I did, and if you think about it a blog is the best and most affordable way for an absolute nobody with no formal journalism or writing education to be a published.”

How … simple. I can’t help but smile.

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When I first started out writing it was impressed upon me how important detail was in my narrative.

I want to feel the flowers I want to smell the flowers I want to breath through your pages.

I can’t deny narrative is powerful stuff. Many a novel is saved by the sharp voice of the narrator alone - the whimsical flights of fancy that really has nothing to do with the story being told, but is charming nevertheless. But I cry out whenever I read a story with too much insignificant detail, each action of each character lovingly described until it becomes unbearably stilted.

It’s extremely hard to demonstrate in a post, but let me try my best:

She got up from bed and stared at the unfamiliar room. It was old and grey and smelt of talcum powder. With a rush she realized it reminded her of her childhood.

She decided to go downstairs and make herself a cup of coffee. As she descended the grime on the windows by the staircases caught her eye. I’ll have to clean that up after I complete my paperwork, she told herself, and then she swept into the kitchen.

The kitchen was purple and tiled, and smelt of yesterday’s coffee. She wondered if coffee was all it was ever going to smell of. She flipped a switch and the humming of the coffee maker filled the room, mechanical and annoying.

She wondered how much of this house was of use to her. The cracked purple tile of the kitchen was charming when she first bought the house, but it was now starting to bore her. Her appliances were last decade, but the kitchen was last century. It was mismatched, and not in a good way. She filed away at her fingernails, watching the skin flake away. Must be the detergent I’m using, she thought, I’ll have to switch brands soon.

Okay. I admit there’s nothing wrong about the above extract, but there’s nothing unbelievably great about it either. It doesn’t hook you, it doesn’t give you an insight to how a character works - you can’t possibly tell if ’she’ is the type of woman to kill her husband in cold blood, or leave her boyfriend in a ditch after poisoning him. Scenes like this are unnecessary, not contributing to the plot of a romance or a thriller or a horror novel. In fact, this scene contributes nothing, and I hate it when an author fills up 5 chapters with this kind of dross. In a novel it’d be inane; in a blook unforgiveable.

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