K – Kindle

04/12/2014 9 Comments

KThe Kindle was designed as a game changer. And it has filled the role of being the brand-name replacement for e-reader, like Kleenex for facial tissue, Q-Tip for cotton swab, or Hoover for vacuum (if you’re British).

And they’ve kept updating it over time. Adding the touch screen, having lots of versions available. We got some of the cheaper ones with ads for the lock screen: not intrusive, and some nice savings. Because where there’s money to be made is in the e-books.

I wrote about e-books the other day. And I’m honestly not sure what I was thinking, including e-books with Kindle in the list. Maybe I wanted to talk about e-readers as well as e-books. So while the Kindle itself is neat, let’s talk e-readers in general.

You can search them, adding search to a book. That’s neat and handy with non-fiction, and great for us quotes freaks trying to find a quote in a book. You can adjust the font, so that if you have a vision problem you can match what you are reading with what is comfortable. You can even have it read the words to you.

In fact, you can skip that and get your hands on audio books one your e-reader as well. I’ve only listened to a few, but Wil Wheaton’s reading of Ready Player One is worth the time, I assure you.

Add in the neat functions of e-books, like how many you can fit easily on a device and carry with you (or not fill up your bookshelf), and you have a strong case for saying that this is a game-changer of a device.

Yet here we are, still with books. The newness is still definitely a factor: the business side is all still being figured out. And the rights issues! Do we really own these books? Or if they magically disappear from the Cloud, what can we do about it? I know that subscription-based services are pretty strong business models these days, from Hulu to NetFlix, or even World of Warcraft. And there’s Amazon’s Prime service, giving you access to shows and movies and such as well. Maybe that’s a future business model for their e-books?

Gee, that sounds a lot like a library…

Is that Amazon’s future? After replacing bookstores, will they replace libraries? I guess time will tell! Or you could, in the comments below!

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J – Journalism

04/11/2014 Leave a comment

JI was planning from a pretty young age on pursuing writing as I grew up. Every year through elementary school, I went to what our district called the Writer’s Conference, where you basically just went as a kid and presented something you wrote. In third and fourth grade, I was running a lending library of my books during recess. No one was really checking them out that I remember, but my goal was in creating them more than anything. Around that same time, I also was one of the founding members of my school’s Newspaper, eventually ending up as one of the last two original founders by sixth grade, and doing a news report on the local public broadcasting.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, and I think also reading about and learning about the lives of famous authors, I really thought that Journalism was going to be that thing I did to make money while working on novels. Because it’s what other writers had done. It made sense. You could write. You were a writer. A natural fit. Right?

Right?

Flash forward and I didn’t do much with Journalism in high school, so maybe that’s its own bad sign for it. Who knows. Then by college, I wasn’t really in with the folks doing the paper and all either, actually eventually writing a letter to the editor about their poor editing skills and fact-checking. However, none of this stopped me from looking at writing jobs when I graduated, and finding them all smiling back at me saying, “English Majors or Journalism Majors only.”

So wait. My 40+ page, heavily edited and pared down (it was originally 60+ pages), highly researched History Honors Thesis and associated degree didn’t make me a writer? I had to have those specific degrees?

I guess, like my Fine Arts post the other day, it all comes back to a question of what makes you a writer? Your specific degree? Being trained as a writer? Being a published author? And yes, I need to stop planning so much and do more writing to really call myself a writer. But I do blog quite a bit.

And that’s the closing thought on Journalism I want to go with: increasingly, I feel, the Journalism that we are turning to in our Internet-heavy world is blogging. The Journalists are turning to the blogging format and style. blog news sites are huge – just think of The Huffington Post. While its star is rising, where are the newspapers and other news sources going? Restricting, restructuring, playing with pay-walls and commenting.

So I guess, maybe I’m doing something right.

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I – Internet

04/10/2014 Leave a comment

II think I would like to make the claim that few things have changed the craft of writing as much as the Internet has.

I mean, there are some things. The printing press. The invention of the novel. But really, even something like computers just let us write in a different way: but it was still just writing. Spell check is nice, but in the end, that’s what the editing process was for: now that process is just a background process.

But the Internet lets anyone publish. It lets you talk about obscure things, and be able to point people to information about those obscure things. From another angle, it lets you write about obscure things and be found by people wanting to read those things.

It gets everybody writing. The Internet lets your audience talk back to you, in unprecedented ways and to unprecedented extents. There’s more comments coming back in than can be read for anything that gets big or viral. There’s no way to read this much fan mail!

The Internet also helps break down major language barriers, with translation services. It opens up the world so much.

Unfortunately, what all of this means in a lot of ways is that it has also become infinitely harder to find the good stuff. I’m a librarian. We see this problem coming. At some point, we will have generations who have to deal with the fact that anything they search for is going to come back with millions of hits. How do we find what’s good? The point of this post is not to answer this. The point is to say that now, all of a sudden, everyone can write, and so very many of us are writing, and the world has gotten smaller, and yet also bigger, and more full of things.

It’s a brave new world out there. Write on!

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H – Hook

04/09/2014 6 Comments

HFor many of the letters of the A to Z challenge, I had ideas pouring out for what to write about, and I started organizing things to not overlap too much, discuss different topics, to be short, personal and opinionated, and of course writing-related. For a few letters, I was left hunting a bit for words. Just so with H, where I found the essential writing term “Hook.” I had forgotten this term, but it is of course one I know and employ, or even over-employ, in my writing. I know when I first did NaNoWriMo, every chapter started with a hook sentence, In Media Res, and the action caught up with it.

However, that got me thinking of the other sorts of ways the idea of the Hook comes up in our world today. What began its life as a writing technique has become something of a way of life in our information-heavy world.

For instance, in blogging, or other sorts of writing online. They say that for search engines, you really want to have your keywords in the earliest parts of your post. That effectively, the search engines are optimized to consider your hook. Also, in RSS feeds, you generally only see the first bit of the post, and this is the Hook that gets people to click-through and read more of your post. Thus, in blogging, the Hook is an essential tool to get read – without a good Hook, the post is likely dead in the water.

By this standard, I’m pretty sure this post fails!

Thinking about the Hook in terms of blogging got me thinking about it in terms of the rest of the Internet in general. And in particular, some of the ways in which the Internet approaches these things like a Journalist. That is to say, we think about webpages in terms of what is “above the fold” (like with a newspaper) – the content that you can generally see without scrolling down, as this is the most-seen content. And really, the first paragraph being the Hook is a heavily used Journalism approach to writing.

And what about Social Media? Twitter in many ways functions as a giant Hook machine – at least, any tweet with a link or picture or anything else you need to click. It has to be interesting enough that someone clicks! It has to Hook them, and it has to do it in under 140 characters. Less, really, with a link in there too!

So be thinking about what you write and put online. Yes, the first paragraph might be the first that you write. But it also has a pivotal role in whether you get read. So go back and look it over before you publish!

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G – Graphic Novel

04/08/2014 6 Comments

GOkay, comics have been around a long time. Even shows and movies about comic book characters have been around a long time, though they are proliferating and succeeding today like they’re the new thing. However, the graphic novel – a longer story form than just a comic, but definitely more comic-styled than novel-styled – is a newer sort of medium. There is a strong blurring of the two, really; many graphic novels are set in the comic-book worlds, many comic story-arcs have been turned into graphic novel collections; and many graphic novels today are coming out episodically as comics.

However you want to look at it, and whether I am really just talking about comics, trade paperbacks, collected editions, or graphics novels… together they are a growing, and exciting, force and trend. For someone like me, who is a slow reader, the addition of the visual storytelling, and the reduction of the text down to essentials, lets me get through far more content. For someone even more visual than I am, I could see this being even more of an excellent artform.

There are some great storylines being written in what can either be described as graphic novel or indie comic form coming out today, and you should check some out if they interest you. Horror stories like Locke & Key, space operas like Saga, alternate histories like The Manhattan Projects. And then there’s all of those graphic novels that have been adapted for film – Red, 300, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and more.

And there’s part of me, as I enjoy reading these graphic novels so thoroughly, that really thinks that maybe this is the genre and medium I want to write for. That this is how I want to structure and tell my story. At least one. And I have a couple of friends looking over my world and ideas now to consider it.

Because I don’t think this is a fad, and I don’t think graphic novels are going away. A couple of reasons. One is, you now have a bunch of young people who are getting into these and are going to carry this on into adulthood. But that’s always the case with things. The other, however, is that I think that comics and this visual medium have found their perfect delivery method: the tablet. I am on the fence about e-books and e-readers versus their physical counterpart. I am completely sold on digital comics. Whether you use the guided view, that takes you panel-by-panel, or read one page at a time, I think this is the right device for reading comics. My top two activities on my iPad are absolutely blogging, and comics reading. So the future for comics is really only just beginning.

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