Bloggasm

So I was hoping to have a new feature article published by today but unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish it last night. So it looks like it won’t be posted until Monday. In the meantime, here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. Ever wonder what domain names Google has purchased? It’s always interesting to get hold of one of these lists because sometimes it gives you some insight into future plans for an online company. Well, now we have such a list. I shudder to think what kind of product Google Poo will be.

2. Popular science fiction writer John Scalzi posted a short story online about a week ago and based it on a Radiohead-like honor system for payment. At the end of the week, he posted how much money has been donated. It comes out to about 5.9 cents per word, which isn’t a bad rate for short fiction.

3. Media Shift has an interview with a creator of the Smoking Gun. What’s interesting is the site pulls in so many readers with only three staff members and a very simple Web 1.0 mindset. They’re only just now considering adding blogs to the site.

4. Conde Naste, which mainly focuses on magazine publications, is vastly expanding its online presence. They recently acquired some travel blogs and reportedly are poised to buy up more blogs in the future.

An anthology of short fiction can often be an odd specimen.

When the book is put out by a large New York publisher, the anthology editor usually works with a small pool of solicited writers. After pitching an idea and getting the book approved, the editor approaches these writers with the theme and asks them to submit either original or reprint stories inspired by it.

The result is typically a mixed bag. While some of the writers use the theme as a springboard to compose brilliant stories that might not otherwise have been written, others inevitably dig themselves into a rut. The end result is a narrative that seems forced, dragging itself through the entire plot until it lies flat between the book’s covers. Without digressing too far into literary idealism, it’s easy to tell that the author wrote the story because it was solicited, not out of some bout of inspiration. This is partially why book reviewers often select a few gems out of the table of contents and then remark that the anthology is “hit and miss” — a collection of failures and duds, a few mediocre page-turners, and one or two brilliant pieces that will go on to be nominated for awards.

Whether the newly-launched site Anthology Builder is the cure to this trend is hard to say. Launched late last year, it’s the creation of Nancy Fulda, a 30-year-old stay-at-home mom and fiction writer who lives in Germany. With the cost of book production steadily decreasing through Print On Demand, the company allows the customer to compile his or her own table of contents and cover art online and have it shipped in print form.

Fulda, who is also an editor for Baen’s Universe (a short fiction ezine), said that Anthology Builder was born out of her own frustrations as a beginning writer; she wanted to sample stories from multiple publications to get a feel for an editor’s taste, but buying sample copies is expensive. There was no way to pluck out a single story for a quick read without purchasing an entire issue.

“Later, when I started publishing stories, I realized how ephemeral the lifespan of a short story really is,” she told me last month. ” A story would appear in this month’s issue of a magazine, and by next month, everyone had forgotten it. It was old news, and three or four years down the line, there really was no way for someone who liked my writing to track down that story, even if they were willing to go through the effort.”

A few months ago Fulda became frustrated because she had a list of stories she wanted to read but no easy outlet from which to purchase and read them — especially since she lives in Germany. So she wrote and published a post on her blog expressing her desire for a “do-it-yourself anthology website.” Initially, she hoped that someone else would create this site, but after a rush of positive feedback she decided to make it a project of her own.

Anthology Builder’s submission process is designed in such a way so that only reprint short stories are accepted. “We only take stories that have been previously published in a paying market, and even those, I sometimes filter based on whether I think they’ll be a good match for our customer profile,” Fulda said.

Melissa Mead, a 40-year-old writer living in New York, has 11 reprint stories available at Anthology Builder. When I asked her how she originally became involved with the site, she replied, “Actually, I just thought it sounded like fun. I saw some entries about it on LiveJournal, thought it would be a nice way to get some reprints out there being read again, and gave it a try.”

Her marketing of the reprints so far consists of “shamelessly plugging it on my LiveJournal and a few boards kind enough to put up with me.” Like others I spoke to for this article both on the record and on background, she said that she didn’t expect to make much money off the site in the near future. “I think it’s a fascinating idea with great potential that I’d like to help promote,” Mead said, “and because I’d rather have my reprints out being read than gathering metaphorical dust on my hard drive, whether I make money from it or not. I’d love to see it really take off.”

At the cost of $14.95 a book the customer gets to choose 350 pages worth of fiction. For every book sold, the authors get a split of $1.50, the money divided between them based on the word counts of the individual stories. “I had a choice between charging $30 per book and snagging a quick easy profit and charging $15 per book and giving the site a chance to become truly popular, to really become a place where readers come when they want short fiction,” Fulda said. “That’s my dream — to have Anthology Builder become like a mini-Amazon. When people read about a book online and they want to buy it, they go to Amazon, and they find it. I someday want to have enough fiction on the site that when people read about a short story online, the knee-jerk response is to go to Anthology Builder and add it to their next purchase.”

But how realistic is this goal? As I previously documented in a Bloggasm article, short fiction is becoming increasingly hard to market, and few profitable online models have emerged.

Samantha Henderson, a secretary from southern California who has stories available through the company, told me that she didn’t know if the site would become financially viable for authors. “I think it’s a very small niche because the genre is a small niche,” she said. “If they could expand it to other genres — say mystery — as well as mainstream they might sell a lot more product, but I don’t know how difficult it would be or if that is their intent.”

But even Fulda acknowledged that any profitability would come later rather than sooner, and that she has a significant hurdle in marketing the site. “The whole thing is kind of a gamble that way, and we won’t know whether it will pay off for another two or three years,” she said. “But in the meantime, I’m having fun, and I’m providing what I consider to be a truly valuable service to the writing community.”

A few years ago, Jason Sanford became visibly frustrated. It was during a conversation with the editor of a year’s best short fiction anthology. When Sanford asked the editor to consider stories published in his online literary journal, storySouth, the editor responded that he didn’t consider online magazines to be “real” publications.

Sanford, 36, once edited for Meadowbrook Press, a publisher distributed by Simon & Schuster. Five years ago, he launched storySouth to showcase fiction, nonfiction and poetry from what he calls the “new south.” To him, his free online publication was just as legitimate as any print journal. With an average of 1,000 visitors a day and a rigorous editorial process, it reached a wider audience than most university publications. In his frustration,the Million Writers Award for online fiction was born.

“A few years ago I wrote an essay which made the case for why online magazines give more exposure to new and emerging writers than traditional literary journals,” Sanford said. “Basically, most print literary magazines have a total circulation of between 500 and a 1,000 copies. This results in fewer readers than a site like storySouth receives in a single day. When you add in printing costs to this equation, then it’s easy to see why so many literary magazines are either establishing online presences or going totally online.”
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(Jason Sanford, creator of storySouth and the Million Writers Award)
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For the Million Writers Award, readers, editors and a round of judges nominate stories that were published online in that year. Stories published in print journals are considered as long as they also appeared online. At the end of the nomination period, Sanford chooses 10 of those stories as finalists. He then sets up an online poll and the public is encouraged to read and vote on their favorite stories. This year, the winner received a $300 cash prize from the Edit Red Writing Community. The winner for 2007 was Catherynne M. Valente, for her story “Urchins, While Swimming” (originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine).

According to the award’s creator, the nominees gain more notoriety which can boost their careers.

“Winning awards helps any author in his or her career,” Stanford explained. “Due to the internet—where anyone can publish their work—and the increasing numbers of books being published each year, more writers than ever are competing for attention. This makes it hard for deserving authors to find readers. When authors receive awards, that helps them rise above the clutter. An award tells a reader to check an author out; to take a little bit of their valuable time and see if this writer might be worth reading.”

Valente, the winner of the award, agreed with this idea. The author has had her novels and poetry collections published by both small and large publishers for years, but has only recently begun to sell short fiction.

“I hope it will increase the visibility of my short fiction, which often gets overshadowed by the novels,” Valente said. “But awards always help–I think the best thing that the Million Writers Award has done is to drive hundreds of people to read ‘Urchins, While Swimming.’ Most of those people would never have seen it otherwise, and that’s a fantastic result. Time will tell if it will drive my short fiction further.”

For Valente, deciding whether to publish a short story in an online or a print publication often takes deliberation. When considering print publications that don’t pay pro rates, she first considers whether she could reach more people through her blog.

“The advantage of online publications, as I see it, are these: they are not beholden to print costs, and are therefore often more adventurous in the work they will accept,” she said. “They have the potential to be seen by many, many more people than any print magazine or anthology, if the story is widely linked and catches on…also I do feel that the short fiction community is enlivened by the internet, and I love participating in that–to me it is a lot like the old oral tradition, with computers as the campfire around which we gather to tell stories.”

Though it’s impossible to gauge the Million Writer Award’s direct effects, short stories and essays that originally appeared online have begun to be selected for year’s best anthologies. The Best American Short Stories, for instance, recently published a short story by Cory Doctorow that was first printed at Salon.com. I pointed this out to Sanford and asked if his motivation for running the award has changed over the years.

“Yes, that’s why I started the award. However, you are correct that in the last year or two, ‘best of’ anthologies have begun to reprint online fiction,” he replied. “While I praise this change, I’m not sure it’s really that big a deal. What we’re seeing are more traditional print authors publishing their works online; as these authors publish outside the dead-tree-bindings of print publications, the best of anthologies are following them. What I don’t see are these anthologies publishing much work by authors who have published almost exclusively online. While the Million Writers Award honors all online fiction—including stories by established authors—one of our strengths is that we also highlight new and upcoming writers who are only known online. I don’t see the print anthologies doing that. Perhaps they will in the coming years. Until then, I’m simply happy that the Million Writers Award has helped raise the profile of online fiction.”

Every year, an online publication called Story South allows readers to vote on the best short stories that are published for free online. The nominees are out for this year. After you read them, you can vote in this online poll.

The nominees:

* “A Letter from Home” by E. C. Osondu (Agni)
* “Spectral Evidence” by Gemma Files (ChiZine)
* “Urchins, While Swimming” by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesword Magazine)
* “13 Halloweens” by Michael K. White (The Deepening)
* “All the Way to Grangeville” by A. Ray Norsworthy (Eclectica Magazine)
* “Burning Bush” by E.P.Chiew (In Posse Review)
* “Dream Engine” by Tim Pratt (Intergalactic Medicine Show)
* “Vertically Divided, Blue-Red-White” by Mark MacNamara (Southern Gothic Online)
* “Spinning Out” by Jamie Barras (Strange Horizons)
* “The Infinite Monkey Theorem” by Marshall Moore (Word Riot)

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is a Mets fan from the Bronx, and has a beautiful wife and two amazing kids. What seems like a lifetime ago, he won some poetry slams, founded a reading series, and co-authored a book of poetry. He still writes when the mood hits him and he has the time, but of course, there’s never enough time.

In a previous life, after some youthful misdaventures in South Beach, he served in the Army (regular and National Guard), as a HMMWV mechanic (aka HumVee, aka Hummer), a job that qualified him to reenlist or work at Jiffy Lube. He went into publishing instead, and is currently paying some of the bills in sales & marketing for a B-to-B publisher in NYC.

Check him out at his Myspace.

Simon Owens: You’re someone who has dabbled in a lot of different writing mediums–ranging from writing for your high school newspaper, to your own short stories, to your blog criticism. What kind of writing do you like the most? How have the different mediums you’ve written for helped your writing style?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: I most enjoy any writing that I actually finish, which is why I think I took to poetry and blogging so vigorously! Seriously, there’s nothing like a completed piece of writing, whether a poem, short story, article or just a thorough blog post. The sense of accomplishment that comes from it makes the next bit of writing a little easier. I most prefer fiction writing, though, and still hold on to my dream of completing a novel…one of these days.

Having written in different mediums and genres has been extremely helpful in learning my strengths and limitations. For example, I’m pretty good at research and pulling together the various threads of a story, but I’m not so good with the funny. Snark, yes, at times, but any monkey with a Blogger account can do snark. Genuine humor, though, is difficult and I greatly respect those who can pull it off.

Of all the mediums I’ve written in, poetry has probably been the most influential in developing my style. Poetry requires brevity, concision and a knack for describing things without always being literal (aka metaphor), and learning those skills helped strengthen my writing overall.

Simon Owens: I read that you were once a “full-time Jehovah’s Witness.” Can you tell us a little about the religious crisis you went through afterwards and how that changed your theological outlook?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: Long story short, it was just after High School and my grandparents had been Witnesses from the time I was 5 years old or so, and I had been knocking on doors off and on since then. I had passed on a scholarship to SVA (School of Visual Arts) to be a Pioneer — what they call a full-time Witness, basically — and a few months after I’d graduated, I started having second thoughts; not so much about the religion itself but my own involvement with it. I felt like a hypocrite knocking on doors preaching about a god I wasn’t sure I believed in any more.

While housesitting for a family friend one weekend, I ended up watching It’s A Wonderful Life three times and it literally changed the direction of my life. The “happy” ending didn’t sit well with me; instead, I took a more cynical message from it, that George Bailey had been abandoned by his god, and that the best way to live one’s life was to look out for number one. I’ve been an agnostic ever since, with no use for organized religion of any kind. The question of God’s existence is purely a philosophical one for me, and I try to live my life balancing looking out for myself and my loved ones while (mostly) embracing the golden rule, “do unto others…”

Simon Owens: As a poet, what do you think of the contemporary poetry scene? Is it hard these days for a poet to get real recognition?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: The poetry scene is really no different from any other creative scene, for better and worse, except that it’s probably the least lucrative medium one could choose to express themselves in! As a result, though, it’s probably the most accessible and least restrictive, too.

The realm of poetry I came out of, performance/slam, has kind of stagnated, I think; the old “revolution becomes the establishment” cycle. I still check out a reading every now and then and it hasn’t really changed much since I left it behind 3-4 years ago. Some of the faces change, but the styles and subject matter pretty much remains the same. It’s a relatively small pond that the big fish rarely escape from because there’s not really anywhere else to go.

Few people read poetry these days; Def Poetry was a drop in the pop culture bucket; and other than Sarah Jones (who some will argue was always an actress posing as a poet) I can’t think of a single poet who has taken their poetry to the next level and has sustained any notable level of success. I think it’s particularly telling that with all of the American Idol ripofffs that have been done, no one’s touched poetry slams yet. Inventors, yes; poets, no.

Simon Owens: Since you’ve taken acting workshops, do you think this helps you when you’ve performed poetry in front of audiences?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: Immensely! I’m a relatively shy guy in large groups, but the acting workshops I took helped me feel comfortable on stage and, more importantly, in my own skin. Performing your own poetry to a bar full of strangers is one of the most extreme forms of exhibitionism I can think of, and I still get butterflies whenever I get on stage, but being able to hold a crowd’s attention, pulling them into your world and having them come voluntarily, is an exhilirating feeling.

Simon Owens: Being part of a poetry slam probably adds a competitive edge to your poetry-writing. Do you think this improves your work at all?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: Keeping the competitive aspect of a slam in perspective is one of the toughest things to do. It’s very easy to get caught up in the scores, to start tweaking your writing to go for the crowd-pleasing hooks, but in the long run, it’s the wrong road to take. The competition should drive you to constantly improve your writing, to find ways to connect with different audiences while staying true to your own voice.

There’s competition in every kind of writing, though. Every time you submit a piece of work to an editor or publisher, you’re in a competition; every piece of work you have published is competing for readers. Hell, in the earliest stages, you’re usually competing against yourself; fighting your internal editor, or trying to top your last piece of work. Competition is a dirty word for some people, but it’s a simple fact of the writing life, no matter what genre or medium you’re working in.

Simon Owens: How does writing comic book scripts differ from other kinds of writing?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: Comic book scripts have their own unique challenges, especially if you’re not also an artist, akin to writing poetry that someone else will perform. You have to be concise, visually oriented, and able to hit emotional beats on a consistent basis. I’ve only written one script, an unpublished 5-page story, and it was some of the toughest writing I’ve ever done. I imagine, though, that upon seeing it realized by a capable artist, it would also be one of the most fulfilling mediums to work in.

Simon Owens: When you’re writing a comic book review, what aspects do you look for in a good comic book?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: First and foremost, did it hold my attention? Did the story keep pulling me forward, or was I easily distracted or confused? Did I care about what was happening to the characters, and do I want to see what happens next, or was it purely plot-driven with two-dimensional, interchangeable characters and I’m satisfied with reading a spoiler online?

As a writer, these are the things that jump out at me first. It could feature some of the best art I’ve ever seen, but if the story doesn’t grab me, I couldn’t care less. Comic books are a hybrid form, but it’s still a storytelling medium and I’m a lot more forgiving of average art than I am average writing. Bad art, though, can ruin a good story for me, too.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: Focused Totality: Mark Fossen is one of the smartest comics bloggers out there, writing about comics because he enjoys them, not because he has some axe to grind or because it’s part of his master plan to break into comics. He also clearly has a life beyond reading comics, which is not always a given in the comics blogiverse.

2 Guys Buying Comics: Like Fossen, these guys write intelligently (and often, quite humorously) about the comics they’re reading. They’re fans, but they’re not fanatics.

Zilla and the Comics Junkies: Like Fossen and 2 Guys, Zilla and company blog about the comics they enjoy; they do it well and are refreshingly agenda-free.

Comics Worth Reading: Johanna Draper Carlson is an elder stateswoman in the comics world, and one of the few whose opinions I genuinely respect, even when I don’t necessarily agree. She’s consistent, prolific, and fair-minded, and if I could only read one comics blog, it’d likely be hers or…

Glyphs Online: Rich Watson provides an invaluable service with his blog, shining the spotlight on black creators and characters in comics, with links to news, interviews and previews of a ton of projects I would have missed out on otherwise.

Heather Lindsley’s short story Mayfly is one of those stories that stems from a concept–that women can be born and live their entire lives in the span of a week–and then branches off into the many sociological implications of such a life. The character literally has the life-span of a mayfly, only in this case, the memories of her ancestors are implanted in her brain before she’s ever born. This allows Lindsley to skip past the question of how a character can have so much self-inflection after only being alive for a week.

This condition only exists within her family tree, so the reader watches how the world reacts to someone of her kind, how she and her ancestors are forced to kind of blend in, and because they grow and mature so quickly, nobody really notices that something isn’t right. In order for their lineage to go on, each woman must find a mate to impregnate her after only a few days of life–usually on the third or fourth day.

Like most stories of this kind, the backdrop allows for a deep characterization that is quickly realized. The character must struggle against the notion that her life is so short and must find some sense of worth within the span of a week. There’s a scene where she briefly considers picking up and reading a Tolstoy novel to add a cultural inheritance to future generations, but at the same time realizes that the book is too long to justify reading it. Instead, she goes to see Hitchcock marathons and visits art museums. All so future generations can call themselves cultured.

The presiding theme here is selflessness. On the one hand, she realizes that her life is so short and that she wants to do the most with it, but on the other hand she knows her time is very limitted and she has to prepare for future generations. This creates an internal conflict that works well with Lindsley’s writing style.

This really is a wonderful story. I highly recommend it.

Related posts: The solution to the Harlan Ellison problem, Interview with Chandrahas Choudhury from The Middle Stage, A really good short story I read today

SCREENWRITER by CHARLES D’AMBROSIO:

How was I supposed to know that any mention of suicide to the phalanx of doctors making Friday rounds would warrant the loss of not only weekend-pass privileges but also the liberty to take a leak in private? My first suicidal ideations occurred to me when I was ten, eleven, twelve, something like that, and by now I was habituated to them and dreams of hurting myself (in the parlance of those places) formed a kind of lullaby I often used to rock myself to bed at night. I got into trouble when I told my p-doc I couldn’t fall asleep until I’d made myself comfortable by drawing the blankets over my head and imagining I was closing the lid of my coffin. In confessing to him, I was only trying to be honest and accurate, a good patient, deserving. But no dice: the head p-doc put me on Maximum Observation and immediately I was being trailed around by a sober ex-athlete who, introducing himself, put a fatherly hand on my shoulder and squeezed and told me not to worry, he was a screenwriter, too—not as successful or rich as me, sure, but a screenwriter nonetheless. He said that his name was Bob and he let it be known that he’d only taken this position on the mental ward to gather material for his next script. Half the reason I was in the ward was to get away from the movies, but my whole time with Bob I kept wondering, Is this, or that, or this or that, or this, or this, or this going to be in a movie? Everywhere I went, he went, creeping along a few sedate paces back in soft-soled shoes, a shadow that gave off a disturbing susurrus like the maddening sibilance settling dust must make to the ears of ants.

Related posts: Interview with A.R.Yngve, Interview with Benjamin Rosenbaum