Technorati Test Post (Ignore)
GE6BP8QM78NA This is for Technorati. I had to redo everything on that site, unfortunately. So, ignore this. It’s not important.
Self-publishing Lies and Myths: Short Fiction and Poetry
Every couple of months I open a search list on my Tweetdeck for “self-publishing” and let it run for a few weeks before cutting it off again. I do this because it’s difficult to stomach the lies, misinformation, and overly optimistic nonsense that tends to flood that channel. I’m in another one of my phases and an article over at the Self Publishing Review grabbed my attention: “Self-publishing For the Short Fiction Writer“ I have a lot of problems with this article, most of which has to do with the author’s lack of information about her experiences with publishing. For example: As a short story author, usually you are paid on a cents-per-word basis and a couple free copies. Unless you sell your story to one of the bigger, well-known publications you won’t make more than 1-5 cents per word. Some pay nothing (and I do have a whole separate rant on non-paying markets; One of several pet peeves.) I’ve made a whopping $20.00 off of my shorter works. WOW! I really got rich doing things “the traditional way” didn’t I? For anyone who knows something about short fiction markets, this raises a lot of red flags. Where was this author submitting to? Why was she rejected if she submitted to major markets? What places did she get published in? Were they low-paying, but prestigious locations, which sometimes bring more to the table than money anyway? We have basically no information about this, and her post, thus, seems like more of a bitter “I could only get published in the lower end stuff because nobody liked me” rant than any sort of legitimate discussion about the short fiction market. Not to mention that there is no mention of how much she has made from the self-published collection of her work, which seems to me to be a very important thing to mention when you’re complaining about the pay rates of traditional venues. How many copies has she sold? No idea. My guess is “not that many.” She says she has made more that way than she ever had going the traditional route, but I have no idea how much that is on either end. Her argument is as devoid of substance as most anything I have seen in this anti-traditional vein. Oddly enough, it doesn’t stop there. She then gets a little uppity about the fact that her work is no longer in print, which, again, raises red flags. There are reprint markets out there. Lots of them. And many of them pay. Why didn’t she attempt to get them reprinted? I don’t know. She doesn’t say. Maybe she didn’t know (which raises another red flag, because anyone who wants to talk about the faults of traditional publishing should at least know how that system works). Perhaps the only grain of truth in the whole post is her very brief discussion of poetry. While there are good paying markets for poetry, it’s not unheard of, nor necessarily a bad idea, for poets to create their own collections and do “well.” By that, I mean that they may sell some copies, may get a little notice, but that might be the end of it. Self-published poetry collections don’t have an influence within the broader academic literary community, as told to me by a friend in the creative writing department at the University of Florida. If you’re wanting notice from academics, you really have to find a traditional publishing or an academic publisher (that’s not universal, but close enough to it). But poetry tends to have a better relationship to self-publishing than other form, and I think that works well enough for that particular literary genre. You won’t get rich either way, but I don’t think anyone becomes a poet to get rich. But where do the myths and the lies come in? Well, first things first, the post is disingenuous. By leaving out contextual information, the post is little more than a “you’re going to get paid like crap so you should do it yourself” myth. Maybe you won’t get paid like crap. Maybe you’ll sell a story to the New Yorker or Subtropics or one of the top genre markets like Clarkesworld or whatever. You don’t know. She doesn’t know either. Nobody knows. Likewise, getting paid $20 for a short story isn’t something to scoff at. That’s money you didn’t have before and now you have a publication under your belt. But the most pressing issue here is the assumption that not getting published by major avenues should act as the catalyst for self-publishing. The author is creating a very skewed and ridiculous picture of reality, one that discourages you from trying by intentionally leaving out seriously valuable information about traditional publishing (i.e. actual pay rates, which are sometimes in the thousands, depending on the market). If you care about your craft and the magazines you’re submitting to, then it should do the exact opposite. You should ALWAYS be working on your craft. Period. A rejection should never stop you. If you truly care about writing and having your work in print, then you should keep working at it, and hard, until you get there. Getting $20 at a smaller market for a work that didn’t cut it at a higher paying place isn’t something to be upset about. Use that as the vehicle to push you forward. Keep trying. And if you still can’t get published, reassess. Maybe your work is good and you’ve come a long way, but it’s not what XYZ publishes. If so, maybe self-publishing is okay, but don’t jump to that path just because you’ve failed or because you’re afraid you won’t get paid well. Get there by working hard and becoming a better writer. Rushing is stupid. The problem I have always had with so many self-publishers is the defeatist attitude: so many of them couldn’t take the rejection, on any level, and decided that somehow they’re too brilliant to not be in
Video Found: The Adjustment Bureau (Trailer)
I didn’t now about this movie until SF Signal posted the trailer. So, I’m posting it here for all of you to see (after the fold): So, am I the only one that really wants to see this?
Video Found: Inception (Trailer 3)(a.k.a. Best Movie of 2010)
If you haven’t see anything about Inception yet, then you’re missing out. This will be, without a doubt, the best movie of 2010. Period. End of discussion. It looks amazing, the story is wicked cool, and the cast is fantastic. See for yourself (after the fold):
TV Show Finales: The End, the New TV Narrative, and So On
I just finished my sixth straight re-watch of the entire Battlestar Galactica series (the new one, not the old). Now that the reality of the ending is sinking in, I’ve discovered that I don’t actually like watching the finale. No, it’s not because the finale leaves much to be desired, as so many have pointed out at one time or another. I don’t like watching the finale because it is an enormous, unavoidable reminder that Battlestar Galactica is over and will never come back. The show wasn’t canceled. Nor did it end abruptly. The show ended on its own terms–slightly faulty as they are–and can’t be brought back without screwing up the continuity of the series or ruining the impact of the show as a whole. This reaction is a fairly new development for me. I’ve never had this sort of emotional connection to a show, as ridiculous as that might sound. I did love Sliders and a number of other shows when I was a kid (and older), but none of those shows had a finale that I couldn’t watch. Something tells me that this is not something isolated to myself, and I think I have an idea why. Television has changed dramatically since I was a 90s kid. Almost everything on television in the 90s was anthology-style. Sliders attempted to create a storyline in its second season (one beyond the whole “we’re trying to get home” bit), but ultimately every episode was the same: a group of folks traveling to random alternate Earths where some different social development has occurred and bad things happen. The same can be said of most of the other shows that I watched as a kid–mostly cartoons on Nickelodeon, with X-Men being the only cartoon show that I can remember that broke the anthology mold. There were certain shows that were not anthology-styled, but, looking back, I can’t help feeling like the 90s and early 2000s were remarkably non-storyline. Most episodes were self-contained, perhaps for good reason: maybe we weren’t all that interested in episodic TV stories yet.The 2000s, however, has been a decade of leaps, with more shows striving to develop a narrative style in which episodes are interconnected, and intricately so. Exceptions obviously exist, but so many great shows (and bad ones, even) have appeared which have a clear, connected storyline running through every episode. Shows like Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and so on have been designed to have continuous stories, moving seamlessly from one season to the next, always progressing major and minor plot points to their conclusions (at least, that’s the intention). What does all of this mean for viewers? Well, with storylines progressing from episode to episode, rather than contained within a single episode, that gives ample time for character development. More development means viewers can get attached on a deeper level, since they are invested in the future of that character. The anthology-style can’t really compete with this. Instead, anthology-style narratives had to evolve or divert their attention to cartoons, sitcoms, and other 30-minute-per-episode programs–some of them remain quite popular, with some hour-long shows remaining at the top of the heap (particularly police procedurals like Law & Order, CSI, NCIS, and so on). This explains why shows like South Park, Family Guy, and American Dad have become so popular. We don’t need to grow attached to the characters of these shows–though, undoubtedly, some of us do. Instead, we can watch a 30-minute episode, or skip the episode and wait for the next one without worrying that we’ve missed something vital from before.But, for the bulk of our programming, this isn’t the case. The anthology-style narrative has been supplanted by the continuous storyline and we seem to be better off for it. I certainly don’t watch the majority of the stuff on television–mostly because I find some of the shows that are wildly popular rather irritating–but the reality still stands: television has changed in a way that the movies have not. Kevin Smith, the infamous screenwriter and director, has acknowledged as much in interviews, and I’ve said something to that effect here. Television has taken narrative storytelling to a new height, and it will, perhaps, be a while before the movies can catch up. Coming full circle, then, it shouldn’t be a surprise that fans like myself dislike the finales for the shows we love. It’s not all about what we don’t like in the finale. Stories may end in ways we didn’t expect, or they might leave too many questions unanswered, but what people like me are upset about is that it’s over, that the characters are now gone, never to be seen again in a form other than a re-run.How about you? Have you ever had this kind of experience with the finale of a television show? Do you think television has changed drastically in the last ten years? For good or for bad? Let me know in the comments! P.S: Feel free to correct me if you know more about the history of television in the last twenty years than I do.
Video Found: Billy Mays and the Iron Man Suit
The greatest thing about this video isn’t that the concept is hilarious, but that the actor doing Billy Mays is kind of like what Billy Mays would be like if he had smoked copious amounts of crack. See for yourself (after the fold): On a side note: you should see the bloopers; they’re pretty funny.