The Writerly Stuff

I’m inspired to do some writing. I’m polishing and finishing something that I think several of you out there will be interested in (and I know a few people have been waiting for for way too long). Also look for something interesting next week. I’m about to put my money where my mouth is and not just keep telling you guys I’m writer.

Not liking the new design, along the way some posts and specifically their attachments were lost. Tomorrow I’ll be going to a new theme until then, bare with me. Also, keep an eye out next week for a surprise.

I got a Kindle about a month ago and since then I’ve been doing a lot of reading (and not just on the Kindle). In the last week and a half I’ve read two novels and two short stories and started another novel. Now I realize that’s no some amazing number of things to read really, but with as busy as I am I’m impressed with myself. Still things like writing a review of the Kindle and blogging in general have taken a back seat. So, I’m blogging and I’m combining my Kindle review with a review of what I’ve read. First up, the Kindle.

The Kindle

This is the way reading was meant to be done. It’s not much larger than a paperback novel, it’s screen is easily as readable as paper (e-ink rocks, it does however give off no light so a reading light is still required to read in the dark). You can change the font size to make things more readable or fit more words on a page (I go with the smallest size, more words for me baby). The thing that got me a Kindle is textbooks and while this is a great device for reading novels it’s no slouch when it comes to textbooks. This of course depends on the textbook, but assuming it can display nicely on the small screen there are a lot of great features on the Kindle. You can look up words in the dictionary just by moving the cursor (controlled by the directional pad on the right hand side). You can highlight, you can book mark and you can search. Talk about quick reference, no more guessing when you’re taking that open book quiz or writing a paper and looking for a reference.

I’ve read 4 novels and 3 short stories on the Kindle so far and I’ve read them faster than I read most paper books. Something about the Kindle makes things go more smoothly. I never lose my page thanks to my daughter taking out the bookmark. I can carry an entire library around with me and it makes it very easy to switch to another novel I’m finding one hard to get into (I just did this with Qucksilver by Neal Stephenson, just not in the mood for his writing style right now) I can stop mid paragraph, open another book and not have to carry anything else around. I can also go buy a new book straight from the Kindle if I don’t have anything in my library I want to read. The killer part is there are tons of free classics and if you look around they’re always doing free deals on novels that are the first book in a series, I’ve gotten 8 or 9 books that way. In short this is an excellent device.

The Books

First up is the first Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ve always been a fan of the Holmes character but this is the first time I’ve sat down to read an entire novel. I have to say I really liked it. Holmes is much more human in some ways than many of his portrayals have been over the years. I was also surprised to find a well written western narrative in the book. I found myself more interested in those secondary characters than Holmes and Watson in some ways. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes CSI style shows. Holmes has a flare and a gift for forensics and detective work that do not disappoint those who are fans of him in other media.

Next up, Doc Savage and the Fortress of Solitude By Lester Dent (writing under the pen name Kenneth Robeson and no, Fortress of Solitude wasn’t stolen from Siegle and Schuster by Dent, it was stolen from Dent by Siegle and Shuster). This is a story taken directly from pulp magazines. Doc Savage was nearly as big as The Shadow in the 1930′s and Lester Dent quite literally defined the method many authors use when writing novels, especially if they want a pulp feel (the concept of put your characters in the worst place possible then make it even worse is a part of this method). This is not the first Doc Savage story I’ve read, I started reading about the character 20 years ago when my dad bought me a collection of Doc Savage stories. This is the first time I’ve read Fortress of Solitude though. It introduces a villain named John Sunlight that really feels like he can challenge Doc Savage (a very impressive character) on even terms and in fact is the only Doc Savage villain to appear in more than one story (there are 190 Doc Savage adventures). It centers around the mystery of what this Fortress of Solitude is, what John Sunlight is doing with it and what Doc Savage knows about it. Very good read and a lot of fun.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. This is an excellent book. I didn’t get to read this one on the Kindle (it’s not available and Joy read it last semester for school so she already had it). Still, I flew through it in two days, two busy days where I was doing anything but just sitting around and reading. I loved it. It’s a book that, on the surface, is about story telling. But beneath that it has a lot to say about tolerance and diversity. It’s really about showing that the world isn’t just black and white. I could write an entire article just about this book and everything it has to say, maybe I will. I definitely will be reading this book to my daughters when they get older.

Finally there’s Beyond the Shadows by Brent Weeks. This is the final book in a fantasy series about an assassin. Actually if you call him an assassin he gets pissy, he’s a Wetboy, they’re what Navy Seals are to guys out fishing on a lake, assassins have marks, wetboys have deaders because they’re already dead. By this third book he’s sort of a spirit of retribution. There are epic battles against seemingly unstoppable foes, there’s a love story (more than one really), there’s one on one action and there’s more magic than you can shake a wand at. I really recommend this series, a fun read no doubt about it.

Buy a Kindle and read these books. That pretty much sums it up.

Microsoft is right, music is social. There, I said it. Even if you’re listening to it alone in your room it’s about connecting with someone else. When we listen to music we’re always searching for some sort of connection to the artist. Sometimes we’re looking for someone who has felt the same way we are feeling; sometimes it’s just about a fun sound or a sense of humor. That connection extends beyond just the artist though. There’s a reason we play music at parties and there’s a reason bands are so much more fun to see live. When you’re in a group listening to music you all like, you automatically have something in common, you start with a connection. It doesn’t hurt that there is often alcohol involved either.

Most popular bands and artists understand that music is social, not all of them understand how social is changing. Social networks are starting to become a big part of social interaction and their starting to become a big part of music. MySpace is all about sharing your favorite songs, Facebook lets you become a fan of the band. Just about every band you can think of is on MySpace and Facebook. However, the bands who really want to do something social are on Twitter.

I do not follow my favorite band on Twitter. While Counting Crows does twitter, it’s boring news updates, there’s no real conversation there (and they very rarely update). There are two bands I do follow on Twitter. One of them is Death Cab for Cutie, one of my favorite bands. Death Cab has two twitter feeds, one is pretty mundane, just site updates and such. Recently they started tweeting from their tour. The tweets from the tour tend to be personal and talk about whatever venue they are playing. That’s the one I follow, the one that really seems to be interesting. Their primary feed is pretty much just a news ticker. That tour feed though shows that they are really trying to connect with their fans, it could use some work but they’ve got the right idea.

The other band I follow on twitter is Josh and the Empty Pockets, the band I blogged about a few days ago. What I’ve come to realize over the last week or so is they get it. They don’t just twitter silly news updates, they actually engage in conversations with their fans. They spout off random facts sometimes and they acknowledge people. Those simple things really make that connection to the band stronger. Josh and the Empty Pockets are the little guys right now, but if they keep up this networking and connecting with fans they’re on the right track to building a loyal following and combined with their musical talent (which they’ve got in spades) and a little luck (because it always takes some luck) they won’t stay the little guys for long.

Music is social and as technology and society change bands need to learn to adapt. Right now we’re at the beginning of this social networking revolution but social networks are growing everyday and more and more people are joining. More people are getting their news from these networks and finding recommendations for new things to try. I wouldn’t have even heard of Josh and the Empty Pockets if it weren’t for Facebook. The internet isn’t just changing how we get our music; it’s changing how we talk about it and how we enjoy it.

I love pulp fiction. No not the movie, although I am a fan of it, I’m talking about the stories in old pulp magazines. In the 1930′s and 40′s newsstands were covered, not with magazines like Time and Life, or newspapers, but with pulp magazines. These magazines got their name from the cheap paper they were printed on, paper which was made primarily of cheap wood pulp. Magazines like The Shadow and Doc Savage were the best selling reading materials in the U.S. at that time.

Pulp fiction is escapist fiction. The stories are often larger than life and cover a wide variety of story types. From noir mysteries to romances, horror to spy thrillers, pulp fiction was there to help people escape their mundane and often depressing world. The 30′s and 40′s were besieged with crisis after crisis for not just the American people but the world. People needed a place to hide. Many people chose pulp magazines as their hiding place. Pulps often managed to take the readers further from the real world than a lot of other reading. Characters like The Shadow were mystical in nature and while they lived in a recognizable world, the world they occupied was fantastic in many ways. Quickly science fiction and supernatural pulps moved to the forefront of the industry. Pulps were providing exactly what people needed and they were doing it cheap. Cheap was important during the depression and World War II, there wasn’t a lot of money to throw around on entertainment and pulps were about as cheap as entertainment came.

The key for pulps was low cost. The paper was the cheapest, the pay for the writers just starting out was anywhere from 1 to 2.5 cents a word, the experienced writers would get 5 cents a word. The most prolific of these authors were turning out over 8,000 words a day under multiple pen names for multiple publishers. Pulp writing was often looked down on by novelists and journalists because of what I like to call its popcorn nature; it’s tasty but not very filling. Let’s face it, pulp fiction isn’t usually serious fiction, it tends to be the action movies of the literary world, while not always true it was definitely the stigma attached to pulp writing. The thing was, while the writers weren’t making a lot they were making the money as soon as they handed the story over, instead of when the story was published. Other avenues of publishing didn’t pay until a story was published and that could be months or in extreme cases even years. With money tight anyone who thought they had a talent for telling a story would show up at the pulp publishers and hope to sell their story.

Men like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, L. Ron Hubbard and H.P. Lovecraft all wrote for pulp magazines at one point or another and many of them got their start in the pulps. Sinclair Lewis, the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature was once an editor for Adventure magazine. The world of pulp fiction let many young authors be discovered and for some it was a majority of their career. Several of these men moved on to other mediums, but either way many of them became famous.

H.P. Lovecraft was never very popular in his time, as pulps went horror tales (known simply as weird tales at the time) were low on the popularity list. A vast majority of Lovecraft’s fiction was published through pulps, however, a lot of Lovecraft’s recognition in his time actually came from letter writing. By some accounts Lovecraft wrote as many as 100,000 letters (more conservative estimates place it closer to 85,000) many of these to contemporary authors a group which became known as the Lovecraft Circle. Today Lovecraft’s name is synonymous with horror. The writers he corresponded with through the Lovecraft Circle freely modeled some of their writing after him even during his life and many present day horror writers were inspired by Lovecraft.

Isaac Asimov is known as one of the most prolific authors of all time, he wrote or edited more than 500 books and wrote over 9,000 letters. Asimov is published in 9 of the 10 major categories of the Dewey Decimal System, the exception being 100, philosophy and psychology. Asimov has many well known works, one of the best known is his Foundation series. The entire series was originally published as a series of 8 short stories in Astounding Magazine (the magazine is still around today as Analog) starting in 1942 and ending in 1950. Asimov is known as one of the most influential sci-fi authors in history and his fictional work is only a fraction of his overall work.

L. Ron Hubbard is best known as the founder of Scientology, secondly he’s known as a science fiction writer. Much of Hubbard’s prolific career was spent writing for pulp magazines. Hubbard was afforded a chance to hone his writing skills while writing for pulp magazines. While there can be many arguments about his skill as a writer, there can be little question as to his skill as a social engineer. Through Scientology Hubbard has left behind a legacy and many people live their lives by the philosophies he sets out in his book.

That’s just three examples of great writers who were discovered and allowed to flourish through pulp magazines. Sadly there really is no breeding ground for writers in today’s publishing world. There are a handful of magazines still publishing short stories but cost is far more prohibitive and they’re far less likely to take the kind of chances pulp magazines could take. The only real hope for a proving ground like pulp magazines in the present day is the internet, e-books and websites.