One of the things I’m still learning as a writer is how important it is to start writing so there’s something to react to and refine and revise. I’m not afflicted with perfectionism — at least not the paralyzing kind — and for that I’ll be eternally thankful. At times I do tend to think things through too much, past the point at which I should start implementing or prototyping or laying down a first draft.
In terms of blog fiction and writing a character blog, I had my own conception of what that would be like as a task, and how I could best implement that goal in terms of technique. And so far I can’t say that I’ve been too far off in a material way. What has transpired that I didn’t predict is that from time to time I’ll write something — maybe just a sentence — that suddenly springs to life for me. I can’t predict these moments, I can’t even harness them yet, but I sense them, and that’s making me want to continue the experiment.
If I can say anything useful to other authors it’s that a fiction blog is first and foremost still a fictional work, and there’s no reason not to push that aspect of the work as far as possible. I’m working with a character and a fictional world that relates closely to the real world, and in that there are some constraints. But I can also see now that I’m not pushing hard enough as an author. And that’s something I wouldn’t (and couldn’t) have predicted.
To be clear, I don’t mean that I should be throwing more drama or plot points at my characters or at the reader. I’m not trying to sucker an audience with cliffhanger antics, and I don’t want Neil’s blog to turn into a soap opera. I’m talking about authority and force: the imposition of authorial power on the text itself. I think I should be doing more of that, at least to see if it works or not.
I put a lot of thought into the idea of segregating the site content on NeilRorke.com from myself as author and from intrusive internet conventions. As already noted, the main reason for doing so was to protect the fourth wall in this new medium.
Over the course of many months I drew up and revised a specification for creating a fully fictional site, but as that spec evolved one constant always remained. I needed some way to formally mark the transition for readers as they entered the fictional space.
While I could see how this objective would play out in literal terms — much as it now does when you enter the site — I was completely stumped about what something like that might be called. After many, many days of searching for useful links, and studying examples of pop-up and slide-in ads — most of them referencing sleazy sales techniques and how to defeat pop-up blocking software — I discovered that what I was really looking for is called (variously) a splash screen or interstitial. Read more
Imposing technological solutions for Digital Rights Management (DRM) is, in theory, a viable way to stop the piracy of online content. In theory. In practice DRM presents a host of implementation problems and customer service headaches because legitimate content owners are punished or disadvantaged alongside thieves.
Because of the gap between current theory and practice, proponents and opponents of DRM attempt to dominate the DRM debate with apocalyptic rhetoric, political gamesmanship, and the kind of righteous indignation that is both an intellectual guilt trip and calculated lie at the same time. Neither side is really interested in what is practical or effective, or even in learning how pirated content is actually consumed by the end user.
The reason they are not interested is because they cannot sell the products they want to sell in a calm atmosphere. It takes fear of nuclear annihilation to sell both bomb shelters and bombs, so both sides in the DRM debate stoke the rhetorical fires and present their hard-line solutions as the truth, the light and the only way. All of which I’ve talked about here, here and here.
Still, it seems to me that there is one DRM question worth asking. Here’s how I referenced the issue in one of those previous posts:
Elsewhere in the clip, Mr. Doctorow makes a good point when he says that books will be copied and scanned regardless of the DRM that publishers employ. I agree. But that’s not necessarily saying something important. Scanned versions of books are almost inevitably going to be less clear than licensed e-books or even licensed digital copies. Yet even assuming someone cracks a DRM-protected book and makes it available for free, the book business has a kind of built-in protection against wanton piracy simply by nature of its content.
Music comes in small files. Movies are dumb — you just stare at them. Books, however, are big, and require active engagement over a long period of time in order to be consumed.
Maybe someone somewhere is downloading two hundred cracked e-books at a whack, then reading the first sentence of each in order to find a great read, but I think it’s unlikely. In fact, it’s unlikely that most pirated books are ever completely read, precisely because a book is relatively hard to digest. This means the ratio of thefts by end-users who intend to enjoy the content they steal to thefts by pirates who intend to profit from the content they steal may be lower in the book publishing industry than in any other medium. Which means the book publishing industry has more to gain by going after traffickers and less to gain by going after end-users than any other industry.
The Premise
A month ago I engaged in an interesting conversation with Luke Bergeron on his blog, mispeled.net, about copyright law. My interest was prompted in large part by Luke’s incisive generational examination of the question of piracy.
Here’s how Luke initially framed the issue:
The real issue goes beyond digital piracy to copyright itself. Now, I don’t believe that digital file sharing, even of copyrighted materials, is theft. That’s probably a generational thing, but we’re gonna do our best to suss out as much meaning as possible. Keep in mind, this entry is a fluid conversation, so comment if you wanna participate.
So, theft seems to me like it is inherently defined by the taking of something from someone else, depriving them of it. Theft is a physical concept, based on a starvation economy, that there is a finite amount of resources to go around, and possessing resources means someone else will not possess them.
Last week I read a post on The Millions called Confessions of a Book Pirate. On the subject of piracy the confessor had this to say:
In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers.
Two days ago I read a post from Marian Schembari on Digital Book World, called
A Gen Y Reaction to Macmillan’s Piracy Plan. In her comprehensive rant, Marian had this to say about piracy:
I’m not condoning piracy (sort of), but if major publishers are only going to look at the “legal” side of things and spend precious time and money fighting the inevitable, they are going to crash and burn.
I’m poor, I understand technology, and I guarantee I can find any book online, for free, in 10 minutes or less. You can delete and sue all you want, but at the end of the day the internet is a wide and limitless place, meaning it’s a waste of time, money and energy to fight it.
In response to Marian’s post, Debbie Stier of HarperStudio/HarperCollins wrote a post on her company blog, congratulating Marian for stating her overall case regarding Macmillan, and for giving insight into the Gen Y perspective.
Here’s the bottom line for me — whether you agree or not with Marian Schembari’s views on piracy, she has given us a glimpse into the psyche of a Gen Y reader. I appreciate her honesty. I believe this is a gift. I think we should listen.
I agree with Debbie. We should listen. But then we should reply. Read more
The following post is part of an ongoing series about how sex is used to attract and hold customer interest in authored works of all kinds, and particularly in stories. Previous posts include Sex Tells and The Sex Question.
The Question of Sex
Think for a moment about any type of authored end product: movies, songs, books, web sites, stage plays or musicals, fan fiction or zines, newspaper columns, magazine articles, graffiti, paintings, tweets, doodles, t-shirts, sculpture or anything else that someone creates in order to communicate ideas or feelings. If I asked you to come up with a sexual example from any of those product categories, or from any category I failed to mention, it would probably take you less than ten seconds to recall one from memory or locate one via internet search, and less than a second to imagine one.
Sex is everywhere because sex is part of who we are. It’s not all that we are, of course, though if you get your life experiences from television or other advertising-driven mediums you may find that hard to believe. Still, apart from business motives sex is found in the art and ritual of cultures around the world, from phallic symbols to fertility rites to images and descriptions of sexual acts and relationships. Despite the advent of the internet and world-wide, on-demand, in-home pornography, when it comes to sex there is, truly, nothing new under the sun.
It may seem absurd, then, to wonder about the motives for including sex in authored works, but that’s just what I’m about to do. If sex is a known ingredient in authored products — and I have stipulated that it is — then we are as justified in asking whether that ingredient is being used effectively in the authored works we consume as we are in asking whether a chef’s ingredients have been used effectively in the food we are eating.
The question is not: What is this ingredient? The question is: Why is this known ingredient being used? Read more
You know all there is to know about the disintegration of music publishing, in part because you’ve lived it, and in part because you’ve done your homework. You know the newspaper-publishing business is getting killed because you can hear Rupert Murdoch squealing. You know the movie business is hurting. And of course you know the book-publishing industry is coming apart at the spine.
But even as all this is happening in concert, and even as the internet looms large in every instance, there are still people explaining how what’s happening in one industry has nothing to do with what’s happening in another industry. Or how it’s the recession that’s causing these problems. (It’s not.)
To this litany of carnage now add the computer gaming industry. On Monday Electronic Arts (EA), one of the the largest developers and publishers of interactive titles, announced that it was cutting 1,500 jobs. If that was the end of the story we could chalk up the layoffs to the recession, but that’s not the end of the story. Read more
