Canine Editor

Given what I'm writing about, this really made me laugh:

 (Used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com)

The future will be crowdsourced and datamined

My story Fatebook is one step closer to reality

Google Invests in App that Predicts the Future

DRM this!

Hi hate Digital Right Management schemes almost as much as the next guy. Sure, the direction media are moving towards prevents me from doing things I used to do. I can't loan the movie I watched last night in streaming like I could have done with DVDs or, if anyone remembers those, VHS tapes. I cannot loan the book I just finished without handing my precious Kindle as well.

However, I have to admit that I've never been much of a book loaner. In fact, books are pretty much the only things for which I write down every time whom I have loaned to, at least since losing a bunch of them forever in high school. And movies, well, I never liked buying them in the first place.

Even better: for a monthly fraction of what a single DVD would have cost me 10 years ago I can have unlimited streaming of movies directly to any wired or wireless room I enter. And  I can read a Kindle book at lunchtime on a laptop somewhere, come home after work, pick up the Kindle and continue reading exactly where I left on the laptop at work. Could I do this with traditional media? Hardly, not at least without acquiring and carrying everywhere a bunch of bulky physical objects.

Will these help me getting over DRM limitations? I'm definitely thinking about it. After all, why should any of these perks come for free?

Taking a snapshot of the e-publishing debate

The current debate about digital publishing, authors' rights might be informed by a recent NYTimes piece about digital photography:

"[...]the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether." (For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path - NYTimes.com)

 Sounds familiar? Literary magazines are disappearing with University budget cuts. Science Fiction digests are going the way of the Dodo.

Yet, today there are more pictures and stories available and accessible than ever before. And let's not even get started about music.

Are all of them good? Of course not. As always, readers will be seeking the authoritative opinion of aggregating sites ("online magazines?") or simply their peers (think Netflix ratings). That is the next market.

Meanwhile authors fight about crumbles, and few realize that writing one novel every year or two as a profession will soon disappear.

As it turns out, lots of famous writers of the past had day jobs, and they still produced remarkable work:

Another 6 word story

An orphan inherits. The plot Dickens...

6 x 6

(Six word stories, times six = Fun!)

1. She split when  he sawed her
    
2. Ocean washed away remains. He hoped.
    
3. “Mission Accomplished.” hollered far from hostilities.
    
4. Sunset,  skin prickled. Fur growing fast.
    
5. Good versus evil. Sadly I lost.
    
6. Saying no was best. Then again...

Something every YA writer should keep in mind...

(From http://xkcd.com/693/)

The year in writing

Weeks have gone by since I have finished a story, or even seriously worked at one. Here it is, I openly admit it, and in writing too: My name is Paolo and I'm a non-writer. True, I have an increasingly demanding day job (currently a night job to be technically accurate). And in addition to that, the last month or so has been pretty much taken by moving to a new house, starting to fix up the new place, and dreaming of what it could be like some day soon. Still, at some level, these feel like lame excuses. Time is fluid, shapeless, I try to hold it and it percolates through my fingers, evaporates when it touches the ground in twirling silver clouds. And the more time evaporates this way, the more one feels something is "broken," the harder is to restart the good writing habits.

So I'll use this space to warm up my fingertips, and reminisce the past for the customary declaration war on the future so many of us seem to post in the month of January. 2009 was not bad. I finished up the first mystery novel in the Two Dead Guys series, and went through a first round of rewriting. However I did not submit it, and honestly I feel that it's not quite ready for submission yet.

I have also written a short, urban fantasy novel, Randagio (also in Italian) for which I see no possible commercial outlet. It was fun to write, though, I kept plugging away at it, revising pieces that didn't work, rewriting and adding to it, finding assonances and links with the weird interconnected universe in my head.

For what concern the English speaking (or should I say reading?) world, a couple of stories have been around on the web, one placed in the first 10 or so in the Anthology Builder Contest, another was recommended in the Spec the Halls annual Christmas story review, and even translated into Italian. I received some interesting critiques to one of the stories and have been lucky enough to win a free story critique from an author I admire. And finally, I started it, the big project, the novel I had been planning and collecting scraps for years and years. That's the project I got stuck on, and in retrospective, for good reason: it's daunting, I have been collecting materials for years (a sure symptom of World Builder Disease). And I'm still not comfortable with the storyline. I am almost wondering if it wouldn't be better to restart from scratch. And I have been wondering that for too long now.

In conclusion, while quantity-wise the work done was not bad, I think I missed the spark, the motivation to go out of my way to produce work to be proud of. Or, sometimes, the will to publish and distribute it. Changing all that should be part of my resolutions for 2010:

• Send my word around the interwebs, submit it to who might like it, publish it, or just read it for fun. Don't let is sit in some virtual drawer.
  
• Revise and rewrite: there might be a destination for the first Two Dead Guys chapter, if I look hard enough for it and if I have something decent to show for my work.
• Write (at least) one new story I'm proud of, submit it for the free critique I won.
• Seriously think about scraping the Big Project and restarting on something I feel I can tackle.

Above all, my number one resolution is to have fun.  Writing will never be my career, but in a way it's so much more. It's a refuge, and  a ticket to live multiple lives and to reflect on the world with unrestrained (and unrestrainable) freedom.

I'll try to remember this every single day.

Scratching my head with an open-sourced robotic arm

Cory Doctorow - Makers

A few things come to mind reading Cory's latest work: optimistic, fascinating, charming, wait am I reading the same novel as last chapter, is he making this up as he goes. Unfortunately makers does not have the tight plot and tension of Little Brother, and if the nerd family saga is fascinating, the novel wanders here and there for a long time before getting somewhere. Still one wonders why some parts of the novel are there at all, or so much attention is given to viewpoint characters that fade then in the background. Cory also needs a new editor, like Little Brother this work is replete with repetitions and even the occasional wrong tense.
And then there's the Sex Scene, or we could perhaps call it the *OMG Nerd Sex Alert* I want to think about this as some sort of in-joke, especially because Usenet is mentioned at some point of the novel. A total break from the tone and vocabulary of the novel which read exactly like those old alt.sex.stories posts. Don't get me wrong, there is lots of good stuff here. Tons of it, in fact. I just wish I got to read the actual novel, and not this first draft that somehow ended up printed.

I'll take mine blended

You know about those B-movies people say "it's so bad it's good"? Well, Avatar is quite the opposite: it's so good it's bad. Thankfully, the 3D version stunning visuals are very enjoyable and the 2.5 hours go by pretty fast. It's a beautifully rendered cartoon, well (albeit predictably) plotted and fast paced. Yet, it's still a cartoon. Cheesy writing, ham-fisted acting, totally condescending voice over. Why spend all this money and have all these artists come up with something so grandiose and well designed (its great once in a while to see spaceships that actually make sense) to then dumb it down so much? It really felt like being in a French restaurant where they cooked this amazing meal, just to toss it all in a Kitchenaid blender so you could suck it all up in a straw. Sure it still tasted great. But it could have been so much better.

My 2009 Reading List

What a reading year it was! Among the great stuff I discovered (or re-discovered): the sprawling Urazawa's graphic novel 20th Century Boys (after viewing the first part of the movie trilogy at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival). Logicomix, another unexpected graphic novel gem. Then a Jim Thompson orgy, the most recent Fred Vargas novels, 2/3rds of the Larsson trilogy, and quite a few remarkable Italian novels ("La solitudine dei numeri primi above all"). More to read in 2010, the more I read, the more they seem to pile up, and now I have the Kindle virtual pile to contend with. Happy New Year!

The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Michael Scott

The Shadow in the North: A Sally Lockhart Mystery, Philip Pullman

The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, Julian Barbour

Twilight , Stephenie Meyer

Winterkill, C. J. Box

Savage Run, C. J. Box

Chaud devant !: Abuli, Bernet

Open Season, C. J. Box

Ni fleurs, ni couronnes: Sanchez Abuli, Jordi Bernet
The Way Some People Die, Ross Macdonald

The Women, T.C. Boyle

The Tin Princess, Philip Pullman

The Criminal, Jim Thompson

Budding Prospects: A Pastoral, T.C. Boyle

Savage Night, Jim Thompson

Cristiani di Allah, Massimo Carlotto

The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, Otto Penzler, Tony Hillerman, eds.

The Tiger in the Well (Sally Lockhart Trilogy, Book 3), Philip Pullman

20th Century Boys, Tome 16, Naoki Urasawa

The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers

20th Century Boys, Tome 15, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, Tome 14, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, Tome 13, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, tome 12, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, Tome 11, Naoki Urasawa

Il signor figlio, Alessandro Zaccuri

20th Century Boys, Tome 10, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, Tome 9, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, Tome 8, Naoki Urasawa

Il bravo figlio, Vittorio Bongiorno

20th Century Boys, Tome 7, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, tome 6, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, Tome 5, Naoki Urasawa

Pinocchio, Winshluss

After Dark, My Sweet, Jim Thompson

20th Century Boys, Volume 4, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, Volume 3, Naoki Urasawa

20th Century Boys, Volume 2: The Prophet, Naoki Urasawa

Come Dio comanda, Niccolò Ammaniti

20th Century Boys, Volume 1: The Prophet, Naoki Urasawa

La via dei lupi. Storia di una ribellione nel Medioevo romatico e crudele, Carlo Grande

Tre uomini paradossali, Girolamo De Michele

La modista. Un romanzo con guardia e ladri, Andrea Vitali,

The Getaway, Jim Thompson

Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson

Les Marins perdus, Jean-Claude Izzo

Sans feu ni lieu, Fred Vargas

Coule la Seine, Fred Vargas

Un lieu incertain, Fred Vargas: Livres

Dans les bois éternels, Fred Vargas

Sous les vents de Neptune, Fred Vargas

Le rituel de l'ombre, Eric Giacometti, Jacques Ravenne

Tex. Uomini in guerra, Sergio Bonelli, Gianluigi Bonelli, Aurelio Galleppini

Zanardi. Ediz. critica, Andrea Pazienza

Versus, Chainas Antoine

Le sale tour, Ballester/Walsh

L'élégance du hérisson, Muriel Barbery

H1N1, Christian Gernigon

La solitudine dei numeri primi, Paolo Giordano

Out of Range, C. J. Box

Europa molto amore, Giorgio Scerbanenco

The Land of Curiosities (Book 1): Adventures in Yellowstone, 1871-1872 , Deanna Neil

La danza del gabbiano, Andrea Camilleri

Our Stories Remember: American Indian History, Culture, and Values through Storytelling, Joseph Bruchac

Il giorno prima della felicità, Erri De Luca

Mi fido di te, Francesco Abate, Massimo Carlotto

L'età del dubbio, Andrea Camilleri

Belle et Sébastien, Aubry Cécile, Jean Reschofsky

Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Italo Calvino

Uomini che odiano le donne, Stieg Larsson

Cycler, Lauren McLaughlin

Ariel, Steven R. Boyett

Alinda of the Loch, Oonagh Jane Pope, Julie Ann Brown

Idi di marzo, Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Free Fire, C. J. Box

Savage Season, Joe R. Lansdale

New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2), Stephenie Meyer

A Hell of a Woman, Jim Thompson

99 francs, Frederic Beigbeder

Dopo lunga e penosa malattia, Andrea Vitali

La luna e i falò, Cesare Pavese

Over Sea, Under Stone, Susan Cooper

Boneshaker, Cherie Priest

Liar , Justine Larbalestier

The Somnambulist:, Jonathan Barnes

The Angel Experiment, James Patterson

Indigo Springs, A.M. Dellamonica

The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1), Rick Riordan

Makers, Cory Doctorow

20th Century Boys, Tome 17, Naoki Urasawa,

Pianoforte vendesi, Andrea Vitali

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou

Per nessun motivo, Marco Vichi

The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan

Morte a Firenze. Un'indagine del commissario Bordelli, Marco Vichi

La ragazza che giocava con il fuoco , Stieg Larsson

Blake et Mortimer, tome 10 : L'affaire du collier, Edgar Pierre Jacobs