• Most of you have probably heard by now that Amazon’s releasing a new big-screen Kindle for newspapers, and that they’re working closely with a select group of dailies and news organizations. For those of you who haven’t, see: the New York Times, editorsweblog.org.
• Busy week for Amazon: they’ve also acquired the Stanza ebook reader for the iPhone. I find it very interesting that more and more publishers are releasing books in print and for Stanza at the same time. And now Amazon’s got their grubby paws on this small company, which probably means that a) Stanza is going to become huge; b) the Kindle app is going to become huge. Stanza uses the ePub ebook format. Watch that: it may well be the ebook format of the future.
• Locus Novus is a superb multimedia fiction site. I agree with Lee – go read (watch?) Hotel Rot and wait for the message in the last slide … fantastic.
• Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, has a surprisingly good video over at TED on creativity. QFT: ‘to be fair, chemical engineers, as a group, haven’t earned a reputation over the years for being alcoholic manic depressives … and we writers do.’
• Talent is overrated. Practice isn’t.
• Steven Johnson on the Wall Street Journal: how the ebook will change the way we read and write (watch out for the writing for Google section; also, I call bullshit on the Paying Per Chapter section)
• Here’s a handy link to the Economist Style Guide. Pretty useful, regardless of what kind of writing you do.

Last, but not least: see this collection of grown up Calvin and Hobbes. I think the last one was downright depressing.

Other things to look at: 

• John Siracusa explores the past, present and future of ebooks and digital reading in what is probably the definitive op piece on the subject. Almost everything that can be said about ebooks is said in that essay. Read it.
• Here’s a curiosity: a 1983 (!) essay from the Virginia Quaterly Review predicting, amongst other things,  Wikipedia, e-book readers and political blogs. 
• Nicholas Carr writes about the current newspaper industry and makes some startling observations of how newspapers dying and consolidating is a good thing for the publishers. 
• Good writing: Granta’s archives’s got this essay by A.L. Kennedy on her grandfather and the mechanics of boxing, and it’s one of the most beautiful, mint-perfect pieces of fine writing I’ve read in quite a bit. I finished it with a lump in my throat.
• Boing Boing on what software to best use for writing a book.

And I guess I’ll close with this bookstore ad I found through Sharon:Wonder how long they took to do that!

Video on how a book gets made. Fiction apparently takes ’10 to 30 years to finish … many authors will supplement their income with blogging, a far more lucrative field, considered by many to be a higher art form’. One word: Awesome. (via Bibliobibuli)

Also:

• Self Publishing a Book, 25 Things You Need to Know.
• Stephen King fan self-publishes the Jack Torrance novel, from the Shining. Entire text consists of ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ repeated over and over again for 80 pages. On Blurb.
• For those of you considering a redesign of your blook: here are some notes from mid last year, on the design process behind the Monocle website. It’s one post that’ll make anyone crazy about web presentation. (And take heed of the colour choices, and the reasons behind them – the design team separate the mag into white for articles and black for videos, which I found really clever).
• Pride and Prejudice in Facebook format. No kidding.
• Saved this sometime back: book cover competition for the novel The Island At The End Of The World. Some of the user submitted entires are fantastic.
• Jason Santa Maria on using web design for storytelling. FYI Jason’s personal site is a marvel of web design – he manages to port over the concept of magazine layout to the web. And he does it really well.
• Inside the mind of a speed reader. Sarah Weinman read 462 books in 2008. Yes I know. Crazy. (via Book Oven)

And I’ll close on a quote from the great Salman Rushdie: 

There is more well written fiction — creative writingese, bloodless, humourless competence – today than there has ever been at any time in history, and less really great literature. This thanks to an epidemic of writing classes.

Craft is the one thing you can teach.

But you can’t teach eye — what to see/select. You can’t teach ear. Or a vision of the world that is interesting. Or how to develop a profound relationship with language.

In other words, you can’t teach people how to create great literature.

• Ryan contatcted me while I was on hiatus last month to inform me that his publisher Gryphonwood Press is now accepting web fiction subs. Worth a look, and he’s recently announced that they’re taking in submissions for a new anthology. 
• This is probably one of the saddest articles I’ve seen in awhile: Aida Edemariam on sifting through the publishing industry’s slush pile. She writes that the Internet is causing a decrease in the number of unsolicited manuscripts to publishers, though people still submit them, praying that one’ll eventually be picked up and put to press.
  

  The internet, of course, means that more and more people publish straight on to the web, either as is, or to get peers to comment on it. Ten years ago Hamish Hamilton was getting 20 manuscripts a week rather than four, and Prosser puts this decrease down not just to active discouragement, but also the ways in which writers are learning to circumvent the traditional machine. “I do think there’s been an opening up,” says Swift. “A lot of writers are taking things into their own hands and publishing online.I think sending things in blind now is about the most stupid thing you can do.”

  Watch out for the article’s ending – it made me sigh.

• I’d also like to direct you to Amber Simmon’s web fiction project A Timely Raven. I gave it a 4.5 on Web Fiction Guide, and I really recommend you read it. This is non-linear fiction at its best, and Simmons has also leveraged design to present a truly compelling story.

Mock exams just ended this morning, so I’m popping by to throw some links your way.

• David Foster Wallace committed suicide a couple of days back, and it prompted an outcry of sadness from major swathes of the blogosphere. I spent much of my (already limited) online time reading articles dedicated to his memory, excerpts of his work, and pretty much catching up on his life and times. It felt strange, knowing I should be mourning the loss of a brilliant writer, but I had no idea who he was. McSweeney’s has a long thread of people penning their memories of him, amongst them Zadie Smith:
  

  He was my favourite. I didn’t feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod. In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let’s at least only say true things.

  Ah, the ignorance of youth. I am left with dipping my hands into a stagnant pool of work, never to know how it must have felt like to know Wallace in person.

• Muse’s Success is a new listing site, similar in concept to Pages Unbound (read: crowd powered, no editors). Programmer Chris Clarke says it’s running on WordPress for the time being, but plans are underway to switch to a custom platform. Interested writers submit your work here.
• Lethe Bashar has completed the Las Vegas section of his The Novel Of Life. I’m still reading the first part, though, so I can’t really tell you how it is. Project page has a wonderful summary; check it out here.
• Sol Mann’s blook: Estimated Time of Arrival, is based on his true experiences with travel and drugs (amongst other things) in Costa Rica.
• I wrote about Urbis sometime ago, and it seems that they’ve gotten a literary agency to check out the writers on their site. Their PR blurb says they’ve ‘started with the best’: one LJK Literary Management, under Time Warner Book CEO Larry Kaufman. Opportunity page over here.
• Why people pirate games. Some very interesting insights on why and how piracy works on the Internet.

But here’s the most surprising conclusion from “In Rainbows”; despite an explicit invitation by the band to legally download the album for free, huge numbers chose to do so illegally. Research by Will Page, chief economist of copyright organisation MCPS-PRS Alliance, and Eric Garland, c.e.o. of online media researcher Big Champagne, reported 400,000 such “torrents” in the first day, and 2.3 million over the first 25 days. Yet by any standards the album has been a huge commercial success. Page and Garland conclude that “torrents and legal downloads are complements, not competitors”.

He comes to an interesting close when he talks about the music industry’s attitude towards piracy in the 1980s:

.. the (then) record industry publicly argued that “home taping is killing music”, while recognising that hard-up students who had developed a love of music through illegally copying might become core buyers in later life.

It is worth pointing out here that piracy doesn’t affect the publishing industry as much as it does the music one. I’d be more worried about the lack of offline readers and the lower margins the publishing industry faces today than the possibility of copyright infringement. Though, on the other hand, I admit to downloading a copy of Breaking Dawn recently (ehheh!) after finding out that the Malaysian release was delayed for a week. The difference here being that I’d buy the book the instant it hit local bookstores – owning a paper copy is priceless and forever, and a lot more meaningful to me than a .lit file. (Special thanks to Sharon of Bibliobibuli for highlighting this article)

Other links worth checking out:

• Some of my predictions regarding Pages Unbound’s close have come true: discussions about a replacement/clone site have sprung up in the PU forums. Interested writers contact Rose here.
• The New York Times on why we capitalize our ‘I’s.
• A long transcript answering the question ‘How Is the Internet Changing Literary Style?‘
• Just found out about Yochai Benkler‘s book The Wealth Of Networks. Benkler explores the reality of making money through user generated content, though Nicholas Carr has a wager going on that the only reason volunteers still exist is because there isn’t really any way to make money off them. The book is available for free here.
• Daniel Hall writes in The Economist about how technology is fragmenting the music industry, and – like many others – goes on to throw the gauntlet in the book industry’s direction.

If it seems that more and more people are seeing the parallels between both industries, then it is because they are. The Internet has disrupted many things for many people and the general situation we’re seeing on the ground now is mass confusion. Which equals opportunity. Exciting times, this.

PS: Alexandra Erin‘s not gotten back to me on the future of Pages Unbound, so I’m in the dark as to what her descicions are. Somebody help, please?

I admit some of the articles here are old, but I’ve been hoarding links for awhile now with never enough time to post them up. The picture above, for instance, is a graphical representation of all the cross references in the Bible. Click the picture for the source, or read on:

• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, by Chris Anderson (the same guy who came up with the Long Tail concept), looks at how and why anything to do with the web eventually becomes free.
• Copyrighting Creativity is J.K.Rowling vs the blogosphere.
• The Greatest Punctuation Mark You Never Use: Interrobang
• Web Offers A Market For Budding Hemingways is a cynical look at blooking. From Reuters.
• [Blook]: Sonja Nitshke. Brilliantly written, structured and presented.
• [Blook]: No Man Is An Island, by Gavin Williams. I’ve snatched sections during my sparse online time, but I’ve to admit I’m frightfully behind on it. I like what I’ve read so far. Bookmarked.

Three online storytelling efforts (read: webcomics) that deserve mention:

• Garfield Minus Garfield is a good look at the Garfield comic strips without the orange cat. It turns the strip into an ‘even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life’.
• Adam’s Apple. Requires an understanding of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the Macbook Air … and God.
• The Life Of Mann is an online graphic novel that features a different artist every chapter. Both The Museum Of Modern Fiction and The Life Of Mann are the projects of Josef Lee, a Singaporean artist and graphic designer.

PS: I’ve got a break coming up, so I will have enough time to post up some articles I’ve been working on. I apologize for my inactivity: exams really are not letting up.

PPS: Novelr has gone through a server change and a minor redesign, and I hope it’s better, faster, and easier to read. Enjoy.

I love Sharon Bakar. Just the other day I found two articles via her blog (Bibliobibuli) entitled ‘The Sharp Rise (And Quick Fall) Of The Blogger’s Books.’ It is the ugly sound of publishers waking up to reality: blogger popularity will not translate to book sales. A particularly telling sentence:

… “built-in” audience or not, it all comes down to content. “A good writer is a good writer,” says Leitch. “Dana Vachon’s book (Mergers & Acquisitions), which was based on his blog – the key to that, it wasn’t about a guy that blogged. He’s a real writer. I don’t think anyone picks up the book and is like, ‘Hey, where are the links?’”

Wonderful stuff.

On a partially related front: does writing really matter? Caleb Crain writes in the New Yorker that reading may very well die out: instead, people will communicate through more visual mediums. The image that hit me was Socrates laughing away in his grave – he believed writing to be inferior to conversation.

A paragraph that made me cringe:

… but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

In which case you and I will be very rare people indeed.

Article 2. ‘I Was Just So Relieved the Zombie Didn’t Keep a Blog‘

Blooks

1. Charlie Baker sent me a contact message just the other day, alerting me to The Fantasy Years. I’ve tried coming up with a description for it, but I think his words are the best:

It’s satire about America inthe 1990s. It’s unabashedly political. I’m a journalist- Charlie Baker is just a pen name – and my writing is very newsy and based in the real world. It’s pretty much completed and I’m just posting it in small pieces. I’d be curious about your comments.

I can’t at the moment, since I’ve only glanced through it – and I apologize, Charlie. But I’ll make it up to you within two weeks.

2. Lee left me a comment and a link back to his blook: Mortal Ghost. It’s YA, and the first page tells you outright where you can read, how you can read, and where to find every chapter. Again, just a quick glance through – but he’s completed it and even prepared podcasts!

Going to close this really short Bookmarked! post with a site that’s incredibly addictive: One Sentence, which works exactly like it says. Postsecret in words.

Whoah.

On with the usual Bookmarked! fare:

Article 1. This is a (relatively) old Time.com article on blooks, posted in the days leading up to the Blooker prize announcement. It’s different because the article’s focus is on Blurb, instead of the usual Lulu exultations.

For creative types, on-demand printing is a cost-effective way to reach an audience, says Jeff Hayes, chief analyst at InfoTrends. Self-publishers have long served this purpose, Hayes adds, but Blurb reaches well beyond frustrated novelists. “It speaks to this long-tail economy,” Hayes says. “If you’re the local painter or you make jewelry, how do reach those who are interested in what you do? The key is to make it easier for the individual publisher and the interested reader to connect.”

It is essentially about Michelle Kaufmann, who used Blurb to publish Prefab Green, a book featuring her architectural firm’s work – ’100 glossy pages of text, color photos and detailed floor plans.’

Article 2. Alright, so this isn’t an article. But I can’t help but share it: The Book Inscriptions Project is a site that posts up (you guessed it) book inscriptions! Or rather the little messages people scribble in the margins of books, especially when the book is a gift. What they do (in their own words):

We collect personal messages written in ink (or pen or marker or crayon or grape jelly) inside books. Pictures count. So do poems. So do notes on paper found in a book. The more heartfelt the better.

It’s a lot like Postsecret, but – thankfully – not as vulgar.

Article 3. How long should your story be? How many words in a novel? A novella? Short story? Read on to see what editors expect.

Blooks

1. In Search Of Adam is something I’d like to get my hands on … it is a blook (I’m pretty sure it is) but since it’s published by The Friday Project I don’t think I can get it in a brick and mortar bookstore over here. I can but hope – you never know if it gets bought over by Bloomsbury or Harper Collins or something. Go check it out here.

2. The City Desk is a really weird fiction blog. No narrative, no story … just an exploration of a (non-existent) city – its businesses and events and streets.

“After browsing for a while, I’m still not sure what it is, but I like it.” – Internet user named “Ickster,” at Metafilter

I think that pretty much sums it up.

3. My friend Ming has started a blook … a day by day journey to find inspiration as an artist. As of press time he’s at Day 6, and boy does he do beautiful pieces.

I’m hoping he acheives what he’s looking for – because a lot of what he writes about inspiration is true for writers too …

Inspiration? I don’t pretend to know what that is. But I think it is breathing in the moment in all it’s richness, with all our senses, filling our beings with love, and beauty, and a silent wisdom.

A picture may well be worth a hundred words, but both are capable of evoking complex emotions in their own right. And come to think of it … a novel would be worth 1100 pictures … both an explosion of colours and thoughts and feelings.

Exhibition, anyone?

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.

Scott also has Rebirth out for sale through Lulu. Admittedly the writing isn’t as polished as something you’d get from a bookstore, but as far as blooks go this isn’t too bad. I just wish I’d more time to read it thoroughly.

At the other end of the spectrum is Wilf’s World. It is cute, bright and chirpy, and I’ve finally figured out where it got its appeal from – its narration! Definitely not new, as far as children’s books go, but very refreshing from all the love stories and thrillers you get on the web. ‘Wilf’ talks about his life and his favourite inventions with such charm I can’t help but smile.

Now if only he’d do something about that bright green background. =)

Article 3. The New York Times asks: Are Book Reviewers Out of Print? A question I haven’t thought about in awhile. We all know that newspapers are facing shrinking subscription numbers, what with the web as a distribution channel that paper can’t fight. So it’s only logical that the public turn to the net for book reviews. And where exactly on the net?

Get this – litblogs.

I’m starting to feel chirpy myself.

Viva le revolution!

I’ll start off with a mention of Mugglenet’s April Fools stunt – apparently each of the members posted up a ‘preview’ of Harry Potters and the Deathly Hallows – and the results were spectacularly hilarious:

“I always had an inkling that there was more to Hermione; her immediate knack with magic, and her irregular mood swings towards supposed ‘friends,’ Harry and Ron. I should have known she’d switch to the Dark side eventually. I just wish she hadn’t killed the whole of Ravenclaw in the process – I suppose it was just her annoyance at not being sorted there initially.” -Ciaran

“I couldn’t believe Snape was the long lost love child of Aberforth and that goat. It explains so much, including Severus’ appearance. And we now know why he told Harry to never call him a ‘cow’-ard, because he was in fact part goat.” -Micah

“I knew it! I knew it! When the Muggles came and totally obliterated everyone at the final battle, I was totally ready for it. Although, I admit killing every major character in the series was going a bit overboard, especially when Neville got hit by that bus after all was said and done. I didn’t know JKR had it in her!” -Tom

Quite a few of my friends actually did believe it, and they were reduced to pale-faced ghastly zombies for a day, wailing “How could they?!”

Those Mugglenet writers better run for cover for at least a full year. Heh.

On a more serious note, there’s been much talk lately of the recent Eyetrack study conducted by Poynter’s Institute. The findings state – get this – that online readers actually read 77% of an online (news) story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.

News has always been suited for online reading, being that it is short, easy to digest and (usually) doesn’t require much thinking. The fact that the online world is threatening traditional newspapers and magazines isn’t the least bit surprising to me. But what I do find surprising is that readers actually complete more of a story on the internet rather than off it. What about the various distractions? The email and the Myspace pages and the RSS news feeds?

This is one myth that we’ll hear more about, sooner or later.

Blooks

A Story Blook has actually been around for quite some time. The author’s recently gotten back from a hiatus and I’d say this is a perfect time to head over and to check it out – it’s grown to have quite a few short stories, all twisted to some extent.

Yes, it isn’t long form fiction in the truest sense of the word, but the collection of short stories there aren’t so heavy on the eyes – good news for you and me. Each part is bite-sized, well written and finely presented – don’t mind the fact that he’s using a default Blogger template.

The next blook I’ve found is Emotion (Part 1). The thing that attracted me to it was the author’s caveat:

There is a catch: I will not post the next piece of the story until I have received at least one comment preferably with some form of constructive criticism or analysis of the writing.

There are a few problems with it – the text is small and I’m hard pressed to actually read the 1000 words in each chapter, but we’ll see how his experiment goes.

I’ll close this edition of Bookmarked! with a link to Making Light – a blog about the dark side of the publishing industry, amongst other things. The post I’d like to share with you is this one on a publisher called AuthorIdentity:

… out on the west coast, a bookstore called the Seattle Mystery Bookshop took a phone order from someone who wanted a copy of The Shortcut: 20 Stories To Get You From Here To There.

“This began a couple of weeks ago. We often get special orders for books that we don’t stock or haven’t heard about. It is a way we hear about new books from small presses, so we’re open to them but we try to be careful. We don’t want to get stuck with books we don’t want. So we get a credit card from the customer when they place the order.So this guy calls up on a Friday afternoon, asks if we have this short story anthology he’s read about, The Shortcut. I hadn’t heard about it but looked it up at a wholesaler and said we could get it. He said fine, gave me his name, phone number and credit card info. I put the book into the system and went back to other things.

When the book arrived, we called the number – it had been disconnected! We tried the charge card to at least get the money out of the order and it came back with the message ‘bad account number’. So it appeared we would be stuck with the books (I’d gotten one for stock, too.) The best thing I could think of to do was to post a warning on the listserve for the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association and try to keep anyone else from falling for this scam.”

The mystery caller had given his name as Michael Evers.

The owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop started investigating, and discovered that another bookstore owner, in Indiana, had gotten stung by Mike Evers, ordering The Shortcut with a phony credit card and a fake local phone number. Then someone in Colorado had the same story. Another bookstore in Canada…. Mike Evers had been a busy boy.

Be careful who approaches you with a publishing deal. While vanity presses have been around for a very long time, I’ve never fully realized the lengths they go to getting your money. For more up-to-date stories and discussions about publishing scams go to Writer Beware.

PS: If they tell you they don’t require an agent to represent you, alarm bells should start ringing in your head.

PPS: Regarding the Poynter Intitute study: did you get this far in this article?

Blooks

Richard left me a comment a few days ago, alerting me to the application of the tips I’ve suggested to make reading fiction more accessible online. The blook in question? Undead Flowers. Read it! I was down with flu for the last few days, and I couldn’t go through the story there properly, but once I did … whoah! I was completely addicted to the pacing, the characters, the right amount of intrigue and interest and mystery … Richard has really done outstanding work over there. What’s it about? A storekeeper of a flower shop in a town out of the way. His customers? The undead. I say once again: read it.

The next blook is Mind+Body, which starts on a roll (first episode link here) and never lets up. I think I should be able to finish it – roughly 45 episodes to go, but still in progress. Genre? Young adult. From what I got by some random snooping around, the blook is about Chris Baker, who wakes up one day with his father dead and him half a million richer. His father worked in Quantico, doing research – and then Chris find out that he himself was one experiment. Sounds very cliched, but I’m not going to commit myself to any review at the moment – the writing’s good, the story seems sound. I’m already enjoying myself, even though it’s just the first few chapters.

I’ve saved the biggest for last. The Germaine Truth is not a blook. I can’t even call it a novel in blog form, due to its highly epic nature. What is it, then? I’m not too sure myself. It is a story, but it is spread over a whole plethora of sites, blogs and forums. There’s even a radio for the town, a mock newspaper covering the latest happenings to the characters, and support forums for the fictional products that the fictional companies in the town produce. I’m awed, but am also slightly daunted – I’ve no idea just where to start on such an sprawling work. Go check it out, anyway – it’s a perfect example of the internet allowing fiction to go further than ordinary, paper bound books.

Articles

Okay, enough on blooks. James Van Pelt writes in his blog about what reading his way through the sluch pile has taught him:

What I learned over and over and over again, through weeks of reading slush, is that professional, readable writing is recognizable in the first paragraph. Getting to the second page without running into a single groaner was such a relief that I’d sometimes read the first page of such a story to anyone who was near just so they could hear competent prose.

He also talks about how reading poetry helps with writing prose:

Writing well at the sentence and paragraph level is what I keep pounding into my students and workshop members. That’s why I think studying poetry can be so helpful: poetry is all about sentence level decisions. At any rate, that’s what I learned. My guess is that if you have a chance to read slush or to read for a contest you might learn something different, but, no matter what, do it. It’s a great, educational, professional move.

That being so, it can be extremely frustrating to read batch after batch of horrible stuff – but I’m feeling up to it. Maybe a pop by Urbis on the way out? It’s the first thing that comes to mind when you feed ‘slush’ and ‘web’ to my brain.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the links … because I’ve certainly enjoyed putting them together.

The first is an article called Narrative Expectations from a blog called Tales From The Reading Room. Alright, it may have nothing to do with blooks or writing on the web, but the examples given are so enjoyable it took me a good 3 seconds to stop chuckling.

The next is what John Baker calls essential reading for anyone who seriously wants to write fiction. It’s the full text of an essay by Susan Sontag about our responsibilities as a writer, the nuances of the job, and the place of the novel (and the novelist) in a world of ‘spurious cultural geography’.

On the one hand, we have, through translation and through recycling in the media, the possibility of a greater and greater diffusion of our work. On the other hand, the ideology behind these unprecedented opportunities for diffusion, for translation – the ideology now dominant in what passes for culture in modern societies – is designed to render obsolete the novelist’s prophetic and critical, even subversive, task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate.

Long live the novelist’s task.

Read it here.

Blooks

I’ve discovered 3 blooks this week – the problem is that most of the time they’re not called blooks, but rather ‘blogged novels’ or ‘novel in blog form’. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that there is general antithesis to the word ‘blook’? Hmm. Anyway, here they are:

Death Sucks, a blook completed October last year (mistake corrected, thanks Ray), about a vampire kitty cat. The fonts are too small for comfortable on screen reading, but what got me started was the author’s commentary and excerpt at his blog Flogging The Quill: where he writes that blooking is not for the faint of plot .

Another fantasy novel in blog form: The Legacy of Tsazcuth, nevermind the weird name. Very readable fonts, and the first episode grips you from the get go. I’m planning on finishing it and then posting a review here – the entire blog seems to be receiving good feedback. And I’m eager to see why.

The third blook for this week is Stonyfields, a book Gloria Hildebrandt completed offline but couldn’t get published. She left me a comment alerting me to the possibility of blooking as a way to get completed novels that aren’t being read out there. In return, I’ll read her novel. It’s the least I can do.

I’ll close with an article from Kateblogs. It’s called It’s a Long and Winding Road, and she writes about how blooking isn’t a shortcut to getting published.

Lets face it, rejection hurts. Whether it is personal or professional. No one wants to be turned away, and while initially it may be easy enough to shrug off any feelings of hurt or disappointment, in time it can become frustrating, and disheartening.

A writer and blogger I read regularly is in this very situation. Despite being talented and determined he remains unpublished. I can fully understand why he feels dejected. Not only is he unable to earn a living doing something he loves, there is also the personal aspect. Writing comes from within, we leave part of ourselves on the page intermingled with the words. When those words are rejected, it can feel personal. Added to which is that fact that talent is not necessarily enough. Luck plays a big part, and sadly, so does knowing the right people.

… don’t worry about rejection generally, collect your rejection letters with pride. I know it’s hard to do that, but treat them as a joke, and think that you are one step nearer the day when a letter comes through the door saying YES!

Quite an optimistic look on writing, a shot of which is something we all can do with.