Meet Colby Buzzell: blogger, author and soldier. He fought the war in Iraq, told a story of pain and bullets and blood. He’s also one of the nominated authors in this years Blooker prize, out on May 14th.

In theory, Buzzell could have kept a diary, gone home and turned it into a book. In practice, he wouldn’t have had the self-confidence. His blog gave him strength because it attracted praise from hundreds of readers in the eight weeks before the authorities stopped him posting from a cyber cafe at the US base in Mosul. Their encouragement made him realise he could make it as an author.

And make it he did.

Shortly before his death Kurt Vonnegut sent him a fan letter. That’s not something anyone can boast about. This was (literally!) a once in a lifetime thing, made only possible with the advent of blogging.

Be proud of Colby. He’s shown us that despite all all the books being churned out every 30 seconds in this world it’s still possible to succeed. Blogging is empowering - who knows how good you are until you actually try?

Link

[Read more →]

It’s been quite awhile since my last Bookmarked! post, and I’m glad to say it’s back with a vengeance.

Article 1. I’m going to start off with an article in Design Observer entitled Bandwidth of Books. In it Alice Twemlow quotes Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, where he tells us that we’re all growing exponentially ignorant, being in a day and time where we produce 1 book every 30 seconds.

“If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read 4,000 others… and his ignorance would grow 4,000 times faster than his knowledge.”

This sets a backdrop to the rest of the article: how the opening up of new media has freed prited publications to explore ‘increasingly idiosyncratic obsessions — the more quirky, obscure and esoteric, the better’.

Article 2. Darren Rowse recently interviewed Tim Ferris, author of The 4 Hour Workweek. Interestingly enough Tim talks about blogs and the unique position bloggers have when it comes to publishing bestsellers. Big question mark right there - but he goes on to explain what he did to build up hype for his book, as well as to dispel a myth or two bloggers seem to have about publishing.

Blooks

Scott McKenzie emailed me two weeks ago to tell me about his blook, Rebirth. I was in the middle of writing the Ultimate Blook Guide on Novelr then, so I couldn’t do a Bookmarked! post, what with all the drafts pinned up in Wordpress and so on so forth. But I’ve taken a look at it and Scott has done a few pretty unique things - for one he’s got a competition running to name a character in the sequel to Rebirth.

… I am not very good at thinking up names for characters. Those of you who knew me pre-Rebirth will recognise some of the character and place names and I’ve been contacted by an ex-colleague who was ‘pleased’ to find out I’d named a stately home after him.

I chuckled as I read that.

[Read more →]

On January 9 1977, Gail Godwin published a fascinating article in the New York Times entitled ‘The Watcher At The Gate‘. It was well written, to the point, and absolutely eye opening for me.

The Watcher at the Gate is your inner critic - the one who speaks up as you start to get an influx of ideas, who forces you to go back and revise what you’ve just written a paragraph ago and make little changes … or even rip the entire page out. I do this all the time, especially when I’ve been rusty and haven’t worked on a manuscript in ages.

Are my characters properly expressed? Are the actions snappy enough? Is the pace too slow? Too fast? What is the name of that Scandivanian flower that is so integral to my plot? I can’t possibly continue writing without first finding that out!

Gail talks about how important it is to silence the Watcher and let the words pour out of the Gate in one messy, convoluted pile. Only then should we unleash our Watchers, picking through the debris and correcting this detail here, that detail there …

Put simply: we should write badly. The correction and polishing should be done only after we’ve spat out that furball of ideas and dialogue and themes, to prevent us from limiting our creativity. Need to verify a fact? Do that after you finish the chapter/section/book.

It’s a lot easier to implement this for manuscripts hidden under stacks of books and bottles of ink, only to be sent off to an agent in a year (or four). But how about blooking? I found myself constantly making corrections as I typed out each chapter of Janus, reading through at least once before hitting the publish button. But I still don’t feel comfortable with the work - most books headed for a traditional publishing house took a year to edit to acheive such a sheen.

So what is the answer?

It depends on the focus of your blook. If you intend to use blooks as a method of writing your next novel it’ll give you the best of both worlds - you silence your Watcher by setting deadlines and posting up chapters in weekly time frames (Shut up, you! There’s no time left!). Editing only comes when you’re about to submit to an agent, which is really wonderful - even if it takes you up to a year to be positively happy with it.

However, if you’re intending to publish a high quality blook for readers to savour things might start to get a tad tricky. You’ll need a buffer of a few chapters in order to do proper editing, and this can be a tough balancing act.

It’ll be interesting, though. A real adventure. Who knows what ’sunspots’ will pop up in your prose? What weird directions your blook will float into?

And that is, to me, the beauty of this medium.

[Read more →]

Writing the Ultimate Blook Guide has been exhaustive for me, to say the least. Parts of the series, such as the post involving copyright had me up late making sure I got the facts right about Creative Commons and the GNU documentation licenses.

I’m going to conclude this series with a few words on blooking.

Blooking is very, very new. Whether or not we make an impact on the publishing industry is entirely up to us and the works we put up on the web. What blooking as a whole needs is a definitive work - something bold and breathtaking, of an acceptable literary quality, yet fun enough for the average eyeball to absorb. The Blooker Prize is definitely a step in the right direction; all we need to do is to shake off that taint of amatuerism that appears in even the most ambitious of online writing projects.

I won’t say that there aren’t problems with blooking: there are quite a few, actually. Amogst those are the flaws with reading text on a screen, garnering a sizeable following in a society used to splintered content, and getting discovered and published from the web.

Different people write blooks for different reasons: some want to get a book finished in front of readers, others want to hone their craft. Whatever it is just keep writing. You can’t go wrong with persistence.

Godspeed.

This post is part of the Ultimate Blook Guide series. If you enjoyed this post you may subscribe to Novelr’s RSS feed.

[Read more →]

Sharon Bakar has posted up a fascinating piece she wrote for Chrome magazine in January 2006, which struck me not because of its truth (the publishing industry is well aware of the stigma surrounding female authors) but the quotes from some of her readers.

For the uninitiated, her article is about how men prefer to read male authors, opting out of reading prose written by the fairer sex. Listen to this:

… (a) blogger, Amir, felt that “prose written by a lot of female authors tends to be, how do you say it? Delicate? Detailed? Ditzy?”.

“I don’t think women can write like Marquez, Nabokov or Gunther Grass,” wrote one blogger known as Greenbottle, “to me these guys write as though with p*nis instead of pen, full of masculine animal energy.” He felt that many women writers, on the other hand, tended to produce “saccharine, wimpy or effeminate writing”.

If that was the case I would’ve never read The Age Of Innocence - one of my absolute favourites. Nothing like heart rending, heart stopping dialogue as a warmup.

[Read more →]