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Wylie, IndieProse and colour e-ink movie players
Blog - The Author Business
Written by Sofie
Wednesday, 28 July 2010 21:46
So the publishing industry's wobbled again. This time, with Andrew Wylier and Odyssey Editions. Essentially, an agent publishing his client's backlist titles exclusively with Amazon, and the Big Boys are less than impressed, saying it's against the interests of everyone from the author to the man who makes the coffee down the road - a little hard to fathom, really, given the current deals offered by the Big Six for ebooks, and their habit of sitting on intellectual property that could be making money for both them and the authors, but alright. Mike Shatzkin has an excellent post on the issue over here.
At the same time, we have IndieProse, a site that's claiming to be the gatekeeper for self-publishers. Definitely a wait-and-see, in my book - the authors pay to be listed on the site, and as Henry Baum points out on SelfPublishingReview, with no costs other than bandwidth, and no financial consequences should they back a less-than-stellar title, it's difficult to see how they're resist the temptation to accept that sign-up money from all authors regardless of quality.
Lastly, colour e-ink capable of displaying movies is edging closer, with the development of electro-wetting, a concept that uses coloured oil droplets suspended next to a water layer that move within 10 milliseconds in response to current directed through said water layer. I think I've mentioned this tech before - I've certainly seen it before, but unfortunately there still doesn't seem to be a working demonstration available, for all the claims on liquavista's site.
So agents are turning publisher, new gatekeeping models rear their heads, and the technology marches on. It's going to be a fascinating few years.
Worldbuilding experiment - planetary plans
Blog - World Building
Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 27 July 2010 22:31
I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.
Planetary plans
So our planet is orbiting around our super-hot, super-short-lived, super-deadly blue star once ever 120 years, far enough out that it's largely made of ice. Or it would be, assuming there's water. There doesn't have to be. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
How big is this planet? What's the gravity like? Do we have huge creatures loping gracefully through a moon-like bound, or short, squalid inhabitants hugging the surface? Are there metals? How thick is the atmosphere?
Some of these are going to be decided for us by the fact that we're orbiting a blue star. Blue star radiation isn't just deadly to DNA, it also breaks molecular bonds in a process called photodissociation - blue stars steal your planet's free oxygen from its upper atmosphere. Without free oxygen, there's no life-as-we-know-it, no fire or civilised technology. So we're going to have to do something about that.
"Smart" tech
Blog - The Writer's Life
Written by Sofie
Monday, 26 July 2010 23:38
I've just discovered I have comments! 90% of them were spam about watches (since removed), which, while being spam, is at least inoffensive, so I should be thankful for small mercies. The site was supposed to notify me when people comment, but I think it's been quietly notifying itself and not telling anyone else. Or possibly just eating my emails.
But: yay, comments!
It's been a week for bizarre technology rebellion, though:
Writing Games - Whose line is it anyway?
Blog - Writing Craft
Written by Sofie
Sunday, 25 July 2010 22:44
Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.
Whose line is it anyway?
This is best played with a group of four or five, but it's doable by yourself with a little adjustment. The idea is to write a story, one line each. Except you only get to see the line immediately before yours. So, with a group of four people - A, B, C and D:
- A writes the first line.
- B reads A's line, and writes the second line.
- C read's B's line but can't read A's, and writes the third line.
- D reads C's line, but not B's or A's, and writes the fourth.
- A takes it back, reads D's line, but not he first four, and writes the fifth, etc.
With groups beyond five or six, there are too many different minds and ideas, and you tend to get surrealism - it's fun, but it's not going to make sense at all. It can be fun to have a theme, a central idea, or for each person to have an object they have to work in to their line - there are a lot of variations that I should probably save for another post.
You can do this over email, or in a writing group - I wrote a couple of short stories with a friend over email this way - one sentence each at a time. If it's in a face-to-face group, it's often best to run several at once, so people don't get bored waiting for their turn.
Alternatives:
Same concept, but you're writing the story backwards - A writes the last line, B writes the line before that, etc. Kind of a blend between this and Working Backwards.
If you don't have people to write with, you can play this yourself - write one sentence a day, and only allow yourself to look at the previous sentence. If you're a pen-and-paper person, you can do this by using looseleaf that you fold down as you go to hide the previous lines, if you work on computer, you can write it backwards - open the file, and your most recent line is at the start. Insert a page break, and write today's line. Next day, open it, and yesterday's line's at the top; insert a page break again, and write the next line. You'll have to swap it back around when you're done, though.
Writing software review: yWriter
Blog - The Writer's Life
Written by Sofie
Thursday, 22 July 2010 00:00
I'm a techy-kind of person. I love programs that promise to organise my ideas, or give me fifty new ways to arrange and look at the same collection of concepts. I've tried most of the writing software out there, played with it gleefully for about half an hour until I inevitably realise that while I love all the crazy wacky things it does, that's just not how I work.
yWriter is one of the very few programs I've found I can actually work with - and not only can, I prefer to. Compared to yWriter, word documents are giant marshes of forgotten plot points, misplaced notes and vanishing character arcs. yWriter keeps my stories organised without me having to actually spend time on the organising part.
Worldbuilding experiment - Staring with stars
Blog - World Building
Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 20 July 2010 22:56
I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.
Starting with stars
I like blue stars, they're problematic. They're too hot, too big, too short-lived, and emit so much deadly-to-DNA UV radiation that they make the Australian hole in the ozone layer look like a giant lead umbrella. Problems are good - they force you to be creative with your solutions, give you opportunities for inventiveness and originality. Problems are the antidote to lazy worldbuilding.
Blue stars only live a few billion years - no where near enough time to get an intelligent life form off the ground. Consider that our planet's about four billion years old, and homo sapiens only started appearing, at the earliest, four hundred thousand years ago, it means anything smart enough to think about the sun in their sky isn't going to have the chance to do so for long. Even your longest-lived blue star will be threatening to go nova when your native species have just begun metaphorically crawling. Which means either we'll have a native species with a really big problem, or a some settlers for whom such a star was either ideal, or the best they could get. All three of those sound promising as starting points.
