Recently, the most disturbing news I’ve heard in a long time came across my Facebook feed. It was supplied by Matt Bell, a writer and creative writing teacher of my acquaintance who had heard this very troubling thing from the students in one of his classes.
They told Professor Bell that when it comes to tagging dialog in their fiction, “said is dead.” He inquired where they learned this, and they answered, “school.”
"IHE Just Visiting Blog: Said is NOT Dead
Is it just me, or are they rather late with the outrage? I seem to remember being taught this in middle/high school and I graduated high school in 2001! Or maybe my (private) school was just ahead of the game? (Which would be funny for a variety of sad reasons.)
21st February 2013
Written with businesses in mind, but I think these suggestions might also be helpful for libraries and related organizations.
So let’s assume, for a moment, that as the technology marketing writer, you don’t have buy-in from senior leaders to write about controversial issues, negative messaging, or anything that might portray your company in a negative light. Let’s say you’re working in a traditional environment where managers don’t really understand how trust and transparency work on the web. What do you do?
In these situations, you can take another approach to your blog articles. Whereas on my personal blog I like to ask questions and explore problems, on a corporate blog, what works well are more information-driven posts. I break these information-driven posts up into five categories: What’s New Posts, Industry Trends Commentary, Tech How-to Tips, Beta Testing Opportunities, and Instructional Collateral.
Notes: 2
that-sounds-like-a-porno-wade:
I don’t know if anyone has ever done this before but, here ya go… The Different Types of Fanfiction!
I probably left a few out, but these are the most common, compared to their base fiction’s canon plot. Enjoy! XD
The crack fic is enough for a reblog.
These are great! There can be different words used for some of these in fan circles (e.g. gap-fillers are a kind of addition) and I’ve never actually seen a fic called an aberration (some term themselves AUs, actually, since they diverge from canon), but these diagrams are a good way to visualize the various types.
(Source: goodboydummy)
Reblogged From lgretired
YA Highway—Publishing Road Map: Your Guide to Reading, Writing, and Publishing Young Adult Literature
(Source: twitter.com)
The publishing industry’s current overnight sensation, erotica author E.L. James, began writing her best-selling book “Fifty Shades of Grey” as “Twilight” fan fiction. She began posting her X-rated take on Ms. Meyer’s tame paranormal romance online three years ago. Her “Twilight” homage, titled “Master of the Universe,” evolved into a series starring a powerful CEO and a young woman in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship. The books were acquired by Vintage, a Random House imprint, this spring and have sold 15 million copies in less than three months. Now, in a sort of literary infinite feedback loop, fans of the trilogy have begun writing their own takes on “Fifty Shades,” including an inevitable parody that mashes up “Fifty Shades” with “Twilight.”
Oh, geez, a mashup? Can’t say I’m surprised, but it’s not like that will require much effort, given the source material of Fifty Shades. ;)
I’m a little baffled, though, by the fact that the article repeatedly mentioned the site wattpad.com as a source for fanfic when I’ve never even heard of it before (and I’ve been writing fanfic for over a decade now!). And I don’t find it easy to navigate at all.
If you want to find fanfic on something, you’re better off with fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org—their sorting capabilities are pretty good, and it’s easy to narrow things by fandom. After that, where you’ll find stuff depends on the fandom; livejournal.com is a big source of Sherlock Holmes/Sherlock (BBC) fic, for example.
(Source: twitter.com)
- Various Authors: Fanfic has no literary merit!
- Wide Sargasso Sea: Actually . . .
- Peter and The Starcatcher: Actually . . .
- The Wind Done Gone: Actually . . .
- The Aeneid: Actually . . .
- Amadis of Gaul (and its 14 or 15 medieval fan-written sequels): Actually...
- Folklore: the fuck is wrong with you
- Shakespeare: you think I came up with this shit on my own? HA HA HA no.
When you get a group of readers in a room, nearly every one of them will recount how their reading either started at a library or was fostered by a library. One of the slides from Bowker that I saw at BEA was that for individuals who have adopted a tablet, the number one thing that activities on the tablet have replaced is reading. Tablet adoption is on the rise and by 2015, tablet sales will exceed the number of PCs currently sold. Why is this troublesome for the book market? Because the biggest threat to publishing isn’t Amazon. It’s Angry Birds.
Publishing, whether it is traditional publishers, self publishers, digital first publishers, needs to invest in early reading for two reasons. First, early readers become paying adult readers. Second, early readers become adept adult writers. Both readers and writers are needed for a healthy publishing ecosystem and investment in fostering the love of reading and writing is vital. There is no better place to do this than by investing in libraries.
(Source: twitter.com)
![how a book is born [flowchart/infographic]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m42iuy6jXS1qiah05o1_1280.png)
how a book is born [flowchart/infographic]
The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine. We’ve already seen it happen with newspapers and the printer. It is now, or soon, when more people will print the New York Times holding down the “print” button than buy a physical copy.
The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it was a promise to the publisher: “We will design something that appears on a screen, but it will be as inconvenient as if it were a physical object.” This is the promise of the portable document format, where data goes to die, as well.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.
(Source: twitter.com)
Elmore Leonard’s Writing Advice
Oh, look, it’s actually Thursday now! :) It’s also the last day I have this week to really get stuff done—tomorrow I’m only working a half-day and have a ref desk shift and an all-hands meeting, so I won’t have much time to focus.
- Paperwork is first on the agenda: printed expense report in order to be reimbursed for the travel cost of working in the other office yesterday (which required rebooting our massive copy/print/fax machine, which takes FOREVER), tallied up reference question stats for January and collected that sheet and my timesheets to turn in for the month, started new stat sheet for February.
- Email management: skimmed/deleted new messages, did the filing I couldn’t do yesterday. Checked email periodically throughout the day.
- Reference monthly report: evidently I’m the first person to put stuff in for the January report, so I created the file and pasted in my bits under the appropriate headings—this involves checking my calendar for committee/inter-unit work, picking a few ‘interesting’ reference questions to mention, and checking my finished tasks for things like training/prof dev items to include. January was a pretty quiet month, in retrospect.
- First check of my Twitter feed and gmail, but skipped greader for now in favor of getting something done before my 10:30a refdesk shift (it’s easy to skim feeds while on the refdesk).
- Worked on the announcement that I’ve been poking at for two days. Debating whether to present the improvements as bulleted list or group them into like-items and write a short paragraph about each group. Have now written drafts both ways and I don’t know which is preferable. [I’m probably spending way too much time on this, but it’s the first thing like this that I’ve done, so there’s a lot of agonizing time involved. :) ]
- Sent both variants (plus a detail question) to the systems guy who did the improvements for an initial critique to make sure I’ve represented things accurately.
- Two hours on the refdesk. Mostly a quiet shift, but I had one of those exceedingly well-timed interactions where a coworker and I had been discussing who was handling an email about a certain topic (I hadn’t seen it yet, so I skimmed it while we were talking) and right afterward I got a phone reference question on a very closely related topic. So I was able to use some of the information from that email to help the patron. :) Also skimmed Twitter and Tumblr during the shift.
- Did my Twitter stats wrangling for January while on the refdesk.
- Upon returning to my desk, I sent the final drafts (haha, talk about a contradiction in terms!) of that new features announcement to the systems guy and the head guy; after this they’ll send it to the entire team for review/critique.
- Responded to an opinion question about checkboxes within the system’s search results (i.e. when you select a citation, how long should that selection persist? Across pages is obvious, but what if you run a new search? Should they stay or go?).
- Read some of the articles I found on Twitter and Tumblr during my refdesk shift; added a few things to my Tumblr queue.
- Reviewed the funds summary report to see if I’m one of the subjects that is guilty of not having made any selections yet this fiscal year—looks like I’ve ordered a few books, whew, but I should find some more. Added that to my to-do list for Monday to consider when I’m reviewing the weekend notifications of new items in GOBI3. (I primarily select for library and computer science but also get item notifications for biotechnology.)
- Over lunch (which didn’t occur until nearly 2pm, haha, but that’s pretty typical for me) I added notable new Twitter followers to my masterlist. I really ought to convert the list into a database or something rather than the massively messy word doc that it is, but when I started it I don’t think I expected the library account to have so many followers. :)
- Composed and sent the Twitter summary emails; one general summary goes to most of the library staff—and provides the deadline for the next month’s tweets—then more specific summaries are sent to each of the contact people from the areas that contribute content to the account.
- Finally tackled my RSS feeds, checked in on Twitter again.
- Worked a bit on the library tweets for February; scheduled tweets for tues/wed and added a note to my calendar for Monday to check up on the tweets still awaiting approval if I haven’t gotten a response by then (need to have a response in order to go any further with the scheduling). Did as much as I could to work around the missing tweets, including tweaking a few #followfriday posts and adding them to the schedule. Verified links for the tweets I scheduled.
And that’s it for me today.
Today’s soundtrack:
Today I staffed our one-librarian satellite office downtown, so it was pretty much like being on the reference desk all day. With computer problems. It wasn’t even 9 a.m. when I decided the day’s word was probably going to be *headdesk* (or ARGH).
- Computer at the desk didn’t want to let me log in. Tried restarting it, so of course it had to install Windows Updates (of course!). While it did that, I turned on a different staff computer to see if the problem was systemic; I logged into that one just fine.
- Computer was still installing updates, so I turned my attention to the reluctantly-opening door. Fortunately, it was an easy fix: the button to automatically open the door got stuck while pushed in, so I pulled it out again and the door returned to its usual self. (I’ve had this problem before when I’ve been here, though that time the door was stuck all the way open. :) )
- Computer was finally done restarting, and deigned to allow me to log in.
- So, of course, I couldn’t get Outlook to let me in. Used the web access instead while I attempted to troubleshoot the Outlook settings… key word being ‘attempt’.
- Oh, look, the computer wants to install *more* updates. All right, all right, install those updates while Outlook tries and fails to connect.
- Huh, Outlook actually loaded my recent mail. Will this continue? …no, probably not. Attempting to forward a message has frozen it up quite badly.
- Put Outlook out of its misery and resolve to use the web interface for the day. Some of the windows updates failed, too. Today is just not a good day for this computer, I guess.
- Start skimming Google Reader items while all of the above stuff was attempting to process. Finish that and go through Twitter feed and Tumblr dashboard.
- Discovered that the downside to using the work webmail is that most of my email folders aren’t accessible (being in a file on my network drive, not on the email server). Guess I’ll have to let my inbox be a mess today and straighten it out when I’m back at my usual desk tomorrow.
- Spent a few indecisive moments deciding what to do with myself next. Realized that one potential task would be better held off until I’m back at my desk or else I’ll have to spend a lot of time messing with formatting (going back and forth between Office 03 and Office 07 can be a pain). So I did what I could (collected most recent mentions/retweets for the library Twitter account and added them to the working spreadsheet) and moved that task to tomorrow.
- Poked at the announcement I’m supposed to be writing. Still not pleased with it yet.
- Webmail keeps logging me out. Logged back in again… and again… and again…
- Handled several calls about scheduling meetings in the conference room contained within the library’s area (it’s a popular spot). There were four meetings scheduled there for today, but the folks using it didn’t need my assistance.
- Had a few reference question calls throughout the day.
Soundtrack of the day:
- Josh Groban: Illuminations
- Michele McLaughlin: Elysium
- Handel’s Messiah
- Christopher Caouette: Faerielore
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows -Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (yes, I know I listened to it yesterday too…)
Ah, Tuesday… somehow this morning I got confused and fleetingly thought it was Thursday (if only!).
- Arrive, turn on some of the patron computers (I was backup librarian for first shift again)
- Took a few minutes while the email was loading to call the vet and schedule an appointment for my tabby cat
- Throughout the day: sort through the messages in the reference email box; forwarded, answered, or assigned the questions that came in (last day of the month, so I’m almost done with my tour of duty, woo!)
- Throughout the day: sort through my email box and the Twitter account mailbox, responding, deleting, or filing messages as appropriate [oh, look, my morning meeting was cancelled! :) ]
- Briefly chased away from my desk by the vacuum cleaner (it’s easier to get out of the way than stand around awkwardly while my corner is being vacuumed)
- Deal with my Gmail account and cruise through the new listserv messages
- First check of personal Twitter feed
- Library Twitter account: update the working spreadsheet with the new mentions/retweets
- Over popcorn, ponder the request for me to write an announcement of new features we’ve added to the library-designed database search platform and look over past announcements we’ve made and the list of new features to include
- Played around with some searches to make sure I was familiar with all of the new features to be announced; emailed for clarification on a few points
- Dropped in on my Twitter feed while waiting for some things to execute on the system
- Remembered it’s the end of the month; faxed in my timesheet
- Returned to planning the schedule of tweets for February that I couldn’t finish yesterday; there are a few gaps, but I’m also waiting for 7 more to be approved by higher-ups
- Scheduled February 1-6 tweets and verified the shortened links for those tweets lead to the correct pages
- Checked on my Twitter feed and skimmed through the stuff in Google Reader and Tumblr while eating lunch
- Received response to my request for clarification about improvements—a couple will be not be included in the announcement I’m to write; also included a follow-up/opinion question in response to a related-but-not question I asked, so I spent a while longer poking around the system in order to have an informed opinion for my response
- Spent the last few minutes before my ref desk shift going over the Computers in Libraries schedule
- Staffed our reference desk for the last 2 hours of the day, which mostly involved retrieving books from the book lift, transferring phone calls to the proper person, and putting paper in copiers/printers. I also managed to do a preliminary draft of that announcement and helped a pair of regulars track down a couple of call numbers that eluded them.
Tuesday’s soundtrack:
- LSO: Verdi Requiem
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows -Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (some song titles are spoilery if you haven’t seen the movie, just fyi)
- Within Temptation: The Heart of Everything
- [no music while on desk, alas]
This article is a typical example of writers protesting library closures, unsuccessfully in this case. Writers like Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith believe in the importance of libraries. But of all the writers who support libraries, how many publish with corporations that won’t allow library ebook lending? How many even think about that? Or the likelihood that in a few years most books might be ebook only, and probably unavailable to libraries?
Philip Pullman publishes with a subsidiary of Random House, which does allow ebook lending. Zadie Smith with Penguin, which is restricting their lending policy. But others?
Even of the authors who resent libraries and think they steal sales, would they really want a world without libraries? They might not like it that people can borrow their books without paying for them, but would they never want to do the same with other books? Or have we gotten to the point where writers don’t need to read books anymore? It seems like people who write business or self-help books are only semiliterate, but good novelists must still read the works of others.
