After my counter argument to Ed Infinitum’s Bugger Blooker article, I took the liberty to ask Paul Jones, head of the 2007 Blooker Prize judging panel to give his opinion on the discussion. To which he replied:

So I’m wondering what’s wrong with amateur writers. Julie Powell’s book got the kind of New York Times Book Review space that any writer would be delighted with. Cherie Priest’s book isn’t in the dominant genre — Zombie Gothic has its own set of fans. I can’t say much about this year’s Short List since I just got my first shipment on Monday, but I think that we can say that the Blooker celebrates a breaking of genres and of concepts of what good literature is and will become.

I think I shall sum it all up, before this debate carries on for far too long:

The Blooker prize is new, just as blogging and blooking is new. Paul Jones has had his say, so has Ed and I.

And in the end I look back at Paul’s reply: “Julie Powell’s book got the kind of New York Times Book Review space that any writer would be delighted with” and think to myself: is it not good enough that previously unknown writers get their big break through the Blooker?

That’s food for thought for you. To the rest of the authors shortlisted in the 2007 Blooker Prize: God Bless and Good Luck. Us online writers will be watching, with or without the hype.

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I came across a post two days ago in the blogosphere (specifically, posted in Vox and found here), and it started me thinking as well drafting a response in this blog.

Ed-infinitum’s post is an answer to the question: Do you think that ‘blooker’ prize winners would have won the ‘Booker’ prize? If not, why?

His post is a remarkably well thought out affair, with references to the articles that may or may not have sparked off his reasoning. It took me two days before I started writing this reply, because, well, it requires some thinking.

Ed-infinitum’s post is in essence saying: no, Blooker prize winners cannot win the Booker prize, simply because blooks are part of the Blogosphere - an ‘amateur medium‘. So what the Blooker prize does is to award the best of the amateurs, and creates a category of what he calls ‘professional amateurs’ who do not aspire to be ‘intellectuals’.

“Blooks are the new books, a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of both literature and technology,” said Bob Young, founder of self-publishing site Lulu which organised and sponsored the prize.

What Bob Young actually means is that ‘blooks’ are ‘a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of’ non-upper (intellectual) class literature. How, pray tell, can the ‘intimate diary of a prostitute’, or a ‘guide to ’s best greasy spoon cafes’, or ‘misadventures in the kitchen’ be considered to be located on the ‘cutting-edge of literature’? How do they compare with, for instance, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Ngugi wa thiong’o, Rousseau, Marx, J.S. Mill, Marcuse, and so on?

He sums up by saying that the best kind of awards spurs nominees along a ‘vertical development path’, to make them be the best they can possibly be, and to break past the barrier that separates amateurs and professionals.

Now, what he proposes may be elitist in its stance, but I can’t discount the fact that he is right, and he’s not the only one who has made such an observation. In a ZDnet article entitiled Reflections On The First Decade Of Blogging Dan Farber quotes Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur:

…instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys [Internet users]–many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins–are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.

Yes, it may sound offending, especially to you and me, mere mortals on the internet.

But there lies my counter argument against Ed-Infinitum’s post. The blogosphere is new, it is raw, and it can be described as The Madding Crowd. Using it as a medium to publish books (blooks) is still very much experimental.

But who is to say that the next Hemingway or the next Faulkner would not have online origins? The internet is ’social’ and is getting more and more ingrained into our daily lives. I’ll be willing to bet that in a few years most of us will feel like we’ve had a lobotomy the instant we go offline, and that means the most of the next wave of ‘professionals’, no matter how elitist that sounds, will have an online presence of some kind.

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I’m composing this post in Windows Live Writer, a novel experience indeed. Take a look at this post in a screenshot!

If you’re a writer and you deal with blogs, or you’re writing your book in blog format, Windows Live Writer is one tool you shouldn’t live without. I’m completely in love with it. Head over heels. There are absolutely no reasons for you to lose your blog post to a buggy internet connection again. While Wordpress has an autosave feature, there are occasions when your internet connection dies (rare, but very common where i come from) when a good two thirds of my post just dissappears. And of course any good writer knows that the flow of ideas being cut off and interrupted simply puts you off from completing what you’ve started.

Features That Make Me Swoon

Apart from the inherent advantages of composing posts offline, Windows Live Writer has another big thing going for it: Ease Of Use.

The entire software is so straightforward and seamlessly integrated with my Wordpress platform I’m actually finding it hard to believe this was made by Microsoft. Really, the interface and feature set is something we’ve come to expect from Apple (it rocks almost as much as iTunes!) and i’m just about jumping around with how easy it is to post, to insert pictures and maps and links and styling elements, and to actually see how my posts looks like in my blog in real time, since the program pulls my style sheets down and applies it to my words.

There’s even plugin functionality, where you get extended features for specific blog platforms released in a community-like page, (a lot like the Wordpress blogging platform and their plugins). Is this even Microsoft we’re talking about?

Amazing.

Setting It Up

Is a total breeze. You enter the address of your blog, your username and password, and Windows Live Writer handles the rest, pulling your style sheets down, finding out what categories you have, and generally making sure everything you need while posting is available to you within the program.

Note: you do need the .Net framework to run Windows Live Writer, but this shouldn’t be a problem at all.

Possible Problems

I’ve only tried it with (this) Wordpress blog, and my experiences with making work with Blogger differs considerably. I got various errors and i couldn’t post or put up labels. Then again it could be temporary, since i’ve not downloaded plugins that could make this piece of software rub well with Blogger, and i have to remind myself this is still a beta version.

Nevertheless, i’m happy with it. It works well, you get to insert Maps, Pictures from your hard drive, and everything from an easy to understand Word-like environment. It rocks? You betcha.

Download it here.

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It just seems to hit sometimes, doesn’t it? You cannot seem to write anything of worth, and reading your words out loud makes you cringe. Worse still, what seems beautiful to others - your friends and family - is superficial to you. You didn’t mean that! You didn’t write those lines of prose, those lines that lie about your state of being! It’s a mockery. You want to take an eraser and threaten the very existence of those words! But you’re afraid … if you do so you’ll have nothing better to write about.

I came across this light 9rules note (their term for discussion) about Writers Block. John Baker’s reply made me chuckle:

People aren’t commenting on this because they don’t want to be associated with someone who has that particular disease.
So, what you should do is go read a book or walk in the countryside.
Find something as stress-free as possible and keep at it until you’re bored out of your skull.
Next time you sit down to write you’ll be a different person . . .

And on went the rest of the 9rules community helping out poor dook with his writer’s block. They suggested

• screaming at CNN @ McDonald’s
• drinking tea (rather than coffee)
• forget about the task you’re doing
• have a good rest/sleep/nap
• writing all your ideas down in a notebook
• write crap until you strike gold

And, my favourite:

• go off the Internet. Like right now.

Personally I’ll walk my dog, or take a seat in a fairly busy public space and watch time and people pass me by. Or I’ll take a stroll in a park enjoying flowers and the sweet smell of grass. Life is too short to waste time sitting in front of a computer screen, willing words to travel down your neurons to your fingers.

Write clean, write sharp, write right. Go take a walk.

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Since i’ve been following the Harry Potter series religiously since 1999, i thought i might as well post something on the upcoming last book (due to be released on July 21st) which other blogs about books have been ranting about, other than the naked pictures of Danielle Radcliffe circulating around everywhere.

Now, i may be a Potter fan, but probably not as fanatical as the authors of dear Mugglenet. But, since they spend a lot of their time checking the HP world online, it’s a pretty darned good resource for finding out what is fact, fiction, pure speculation and confirmed blurb. Good ‘ol J.K.

Anyways, here’s what i found after a half an hour of secretive snivelling:

Confirmed Information

Character Information

• We will find out something “incredibly important” about Lily Potter
• We will find out who R.A.B. is
• We will discover more about Dumbledore’s past
• We will discover where Snape’s loyalties lie.
• Something will be revealed about Petunia Dursley, although it will not be that she is a Squib
• Viktor Krum will return (World Book Day, 2004 interview)
• We will see a reappearance of Dolores Umbridge - “It’s too much fun to torture her not to have another little bit more before I finish.” (MuggleNet/Leaky Interview)
• JKR has said, “There is a character who does manage, in desperate circumstances, to do magic quite late in life, but that is very rare…”

Plot Information

• Harry will face Voldemort for the final time
• Harry will be attempting to find and destroy Voldemort’s remaining Horcruxes
• Harry will return to the Dursleys’ during the school vacation, but the magical protection Dumbledore arranged will expire on his 17th birthday when he comes of age
• Harry will visit Godric’s Hollow
• There will be a reappearance of the two-way mirror
• We will see the wedding of Fleur and Bill Weasley
• The fact that Harry “has his mother’s eyes” will prove to be an important plot point
• At least one character will die

Other

• The last word is expected to be “scar,” but may change
• We will finally learn the full reason why some people become ghosts when they die and others don’t
• The final chapter, which has already been written, will detail what happens to the characters that survive
• There will be no more Quidditch matches

A few things caught my eye - scar? How does that fit in the overall picture? And i like the one about Harry and his mother’s eyes. So typical of Rowling to twist something she’s been subtly reminding us over and over again for the last 6 books. It’s like Chekhov’s Gun just got reloaded, and is about to go off. With about a decade or so in between.

And the part about Doleres Umbridge returning? Now that should be interesting.

Read the original article here. And if any of you readers out there are Chinese and reading this … Happy Chinese New Year!

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