Today's word of the day is 70s, a ten-year period of polyester and platform shoes, when disco balls ruled the world.
I'm starting this post with a classic television show followed by a segue into a work of modern YA fiction--stick around if you're interested in that and feel free to leave early if you're not. Also, if you're looking for a comprehensive survey of how the spirit of a decade can be reflected in contemporary artifacts as well as nostalgic works with the benefit of distance and context, I can't really help you, since all I've got are two stories from or about the 70s which happened to come at me from two directions at roughly the same time...
First, randomly surfing channels last weekend, my wife and I came across a marathon showing of classic "Three's Company" episodes from the late 1970s. We had to watch a few, in memory of the late John Ritter, who was so funny and full of life on that show.
If you're not familiar with this series, it was adapted from a britcom called "Man About the House" about one single man and two single women sharing a single apartment in an arrangement that was totally innocent, or would have been if not for all the other people assuming it wasn't. In the United States, "Three's Company" milked double entendres and unlikely misunderstandings for eight seasons, which was enough time for a very young me to grow into its sensibilities and then beyond them. But the life lesson of "Three's Company," boiled down to "don't jump to any assumptions based solely on overheard snippets of conversation," remains drilled into my head and has served me well ever since.
Four observations:
1. My wife and I wondered whether Norman "Mr. Roper" Fell was still alive. I didn't think he was but had to had to look it up to be sure. He died in 1998. Cancer. He was 74.
2. What about Mrs. Roper? Was she still alive, and did she ever appear in any other major roles? Audra Lindey died in 1997. Leukemia. She was 79.
Aside from "Three's Company" and her co-starring role in its spinoff, "The Ropers," Lindey's IMDB page reads like a brief history of television. It starts in the 1950s, when shows were named for their corporate sponsors and helpfully included the word "television" in the title because people were still likely to try tuning them in with a radio. If you were looking for Audra Lindey in those days, your viewing options boiled down to whether she was being sponsored by an aluminum producer, an electronics company, or the makers of individually wrapped slices of American cheese.
In the 1960s, Lindey did shows with promising sci-fi or occult-type names like "Another World," "Search for Tomorrow," and "The Edge of Night," all of which, upon further research, turned out to be ordinary daytime soap operas.
In the early 1970s, Lindey was all about the sitcoms. "Chico and the Man," "Maude," "Barnaby Jones..." I'm not sure the last one was a sitcom, but what else could you do with a name like Barnaby other than work as a circus clown? During and after "Three's Company," Lindey made TV movies, guested on shows like "Matlock," "Tales from the Crypt," "Murder, She Wrote," "Friends," and "Cybil," and even had a few theatrical releases. Long story short, she kept very busy!
3. The economics of 1979 were such that a two-bedroom apartment near the beach in Santa Monica cost $300 per month--and every month was a new struggle for three working adults to pay the rent. All right, make that two working adults plus Chrissy. And Jack was attending cooking school, so he had an excuse for being perpetually short on cash. But Janet had a solid job at the flower shop, so no reason for her to complain about beachfront living on $3.50 a day.
4. There's a line in the opening theme song that doesn't sound like English and goes something like "Dominominay voo." I always assumed it was French, back before the Internet made lyric searches so quick and painless, so now... "Down at our rendezvous!" Of course! It's only half-French!
These episodes showcased 70s hair and clothing styles, 70s technology, and 70s moral values. We see the singles' scene before AIDS--without any mention of STDs, really, but specifically without the foreknowledge that a fatal new disease would soon put an end to the Sexual Revolution. We see outrageous stereotypes based around the fascade of presumed homosexuality that Jack Tripper must affect for the sake of his landlord, Mr. Roper, who can apparently accept gays more readily than he can acknowledge the possibility of platonic friendships between members of the opposite sex. And we see some then-controvercial issues of feminism.
Case in point, one episode featured Mrs. Roper taking a cafeteria job because she's fed up by the miserly allowance her husband gives her to maintain the household. Yeah, that's right, a grown woman was receiving an allowance like a child might get and her husband is outraged that she might want to do something with her day other than cooking and cleaning for him. This was an episode from 1979, just a stone's throw from the 80s, so recent and so blatant that I could hardly believe it was thought up by 70s sitcom writers for a 70s show that was broadcast to a 70s audience as just another episode.
Because I'd so recently watched this "Three's Company" episode, it was hard not to keep it in mind while reading Trapped in the 70s by D.L. Garfinkle, which is set in 1978. In the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Grey are a typical California couple having marital difficulties to which their children, seventeen-year-old Tyler and fifteen-year-old Heather, remain willfully and blissfully blind. Mr. Grey has become absorbed in his work and isolated from his family, while Mrs. Grey is unfulfilled to the point where she cries herself to sleep at night. A crisis point is reached when Mrs. Grey takes a job at, yes, a cafeteria, just like Mrs. Roper. But instead of being prodded to her act of rebellion by a pair of spunky 20-something tenants named Janet and Chrissy, Mrs. Grey finds her encouragement from Shay Saunders, a time-travelling teen from the early 21st Century.
The story of women's lib and marital strife is really just a subplot of Trapped in the 70s, with the main story being a boy-meets-girl drama in which the boy is a native of 1978 and the girl is an unwilling visitor from 2006 who is found naked and unconscious in the family bathtub--which, come to think of it, is similar to how Jack Tripper ended up living with Janet and Chrissy in "Three's Company." The narrative of the book shifts back and forth between Tyler Grey and Shay Saunders, with margin tags and alternate fonts to help readers tell which protagonist is speaking.
As a disclaimer, Debra Garfinkle is a friend, so I am greatly biased in favor of her book. I'm likewise biased in favor of books about time travel, and ones in which beautiful naked girls suddenly appear in random bathtubs on page one.
Four observations:
1. Star Wars was still in the theater at this time of this book, mostly because teens like Tyler and his friend Evie kept going back for multiple viewings. Younger kids like me did as well--I was seven and probably went to at least a dozen showings. Evie especially is shown as being obsessed with the characer-themed collectables. I understand trademark sensitivities when writing a book like Stuck in the 70s, but in real life Tyler would have relentlessly pumped Shay for every tiny detail about the next five movies. Also in the real world, Shay would have called up George Lucas and warned him not to create Jar-Jar Binks.
2. Strange that Tyler doesn't mention (or doesn't realize) that Shay didn't come from the future entirely by herself. She also brought with her a bathtubful of 2006 water, assuming she didn't sploosh naked into a tub of 1978 water that had been left out overnight. If only somebody had thought to save a sample of that water, it could have been analyzed to see if it differed from water that hadn't travelled back 28 years in time. Perhaps it would have been different in some subtle way, maybe on a subatomic level, or maybe it would have shown qualities of quantum entanglement with the 1978 version of its molecules. Great mysteries of the universe might have been solved by even a tiny drop of that water, which would have remained untainted a lot longer than a 2006 girl breathing 1978 air and eating 1978 food.
3. It was interesting that Tyler's and Shay's school, which each of them attended in their respective eras, did not seem to have changed much in 28 years while the local mall underwent a major transformation. Shay instantly masters the politics of popularity in the 1978 cafeteria, but she is nearly crippled by the lack of a Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, or frozen yogurt stand.
I've had a similar experience. The mall my family shopped at when I was a kid has since expanded from two anchor stores to four, added a food court, tacked on a second level, and most recently popped out an entire new wing of upscale trendy shops and restaurants. My old high school, essentially unchanged since it first opened in 1973, is now considered inadequate and obsolete. A new $200 million school is currently under construction to replace it.
4. From the setup--modern teen travels back in time by, more or less, a single human generation within the town of his or her own birth--I expected Stuck in the 70s to be more in the mold of Back to the Future.
One of the things I took for granted was that Shay would run into her mother as a teenager, or the parents of friends from her own time. It's not really a disappointment that this didn't happen, since it might have been a little too much like Marty McFly trying to set his future father up with his future mother, but it seemed to defy the odds that the only future-adult she meets is her future housekeeper who just happened to spend 1978 as a cleaning lady in the diner where Shay takes a part-time job.
I also expected that there would be an explanation for how and why the time travel event had happened, or at least a closing of the circle. Closing circles are almost mandatory in traditional time-travel stories. One way or another, Shay is going back to 2006--either by some sort of time machine, or by the same mysterious force that sent her back in the first place, or by living through those 28 years and aging accordingly. Even if she ends up dying before 2006, she can still close the circle by sending a message to her mother on the day after her disappearance, explaining some of what happened. I maintained the expectation of a closed circle until the very last page because I couldn't help thinking of this book as primarily a time-travel story, but it's not. The essense of the book, when the setup and setting are boiled away, is all about identity and percpetion.
Mrs. Grey is only one of several characters in the book who, through the chain of events begun by Shay's slip through time, come to realize that they are not being true to their inner selves and that they can change for the better. Mrs. Grey develops a life outside the home, Mr. Grey starts to appreciate his family more, Shay develops some much needed self-esteem, Evie learns to express herself, and Tyler gets a new haircut and bitchin' surfer duds.
This is what separates novels like Stuck in the 70s from sitcoms like "Three's Company," in which characters are not allowed to learn and grow from their experiences. At the end of the episode I described above, Mrs. Roper simply quits her job and Mr. Roper gives her a raise in her allowance--enough so that she'll now be able to buy the maple syrup he likes when she does the weekly shopping. The episode ends with the status quo restored, which is the golden rule of 70s sitcoms.
Would I, as a teen in the mid-1980s, have picked Stuck in the 70s off the shelf to read? Actually, I can avoid answering that question because this book, as a time-travel story with teen protagonists that also includes underage drinking, sex, and drug use, would not have existed in the mid-1980s. But if a copy had somehow fallen through a temporal wormhole from 2006 and landed on my desk in 1986, I think I would have been disappointed by not seeing that circle closed at the end. Which is why I'm proposing an alternate ending as my latest episode of Book Review Theater!
<BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER title="Stuck in the 70s">
Exterior, night, outside Jake Robbins's house in 2006. Three adults in their mid-forties sneak up the front walkway and hide in the bushes. They are TYLER, EVIE, and SHAY.
TYLER (whispering to Shay and nodding up at an illuminated window): So you're up there?
SHAY: Yeah.
TYLER: Right now?
SHAY: Yeah.
TYLER: Having sex with...Jack?
SHAY: Jake. And it's not me, technically. You know that. It's my seventeen-year-old former self from the future.
EVIE: Except it's not the future anymore. It's the present.
TYLER: I should go in there and break that up.
SHAY (grabs his arm): You know that's not how it's supposed to happen.
EVIE: We can't afford to mess this up, Tyler. We only get one shot and the entire space-time continuum depends on making things happen the way they're destined to.
SHAY: But I do appreciate your overprotective nature...Dad.
TYLER (blushes): I only had that one-night stand with your mother because the paternity test said I had to. You know Evie's my one true love.
EVIE: Thanks, babe. Hey, here she comes!
MARIEL steps up the walkway and glances into the bushes. Shay flashes her a thumbs-up signal. Mariel nods and begins pressing the doorbell over and over again. A crude dragonfly tatoo can be seen on her wrist.
SHAY (winces): I told her not to get that tatoo.
EVIE: She had to. We've got to make things happen exactly the way you remember. That's why Mariel had to take a job as your family's housekeeper and pretend to only speak broken English. I bet that's been almost as hard for her as it's been for me to get any work done in the particle physics lab without my best research assistant.
TYLER: But you did get the project done, right?
EVIE: You bet! Funded by the enormous fortune we've amassed using Shay's knowledge of stock results and sports scores for the past 28 years, and using my obsessive investigations into quantum mechanics and the secret files Tyler obtained as Albert Einstein's official biographer, I've wired up Jake's Jacuzzi to the world's first and only working time machine. In theory, it should work.
SHAY: In theory?
EVIE: Like I said, we only get one shot. 1.21 gigawatts of electricity doesn't grow on trees.
TYLER (as Mariel is finally let into the house by a towel-wearing Jake Robbins): She's in. Now we just listen in and wait for Mariel to give us the signal.
SHAY (listening to a portable radio receiver): She's reaming teen-me out in Spanish. That really takes me back. I don't know how Mariel ever put up with-- Oh, there's the code word!
EVIE presses a button on a remote control device. The street lights dim, then come back up. The trio anxiously watch the window above them.
MARIEL's voice from Shay's receiver: What you do with her? Where she go? Where you hide her?
JAKE's voice from Shay's receiver: I don't know! I didn't do nothing! Please don't call the cops--I don't want to go to jail!
TYLER, SHAY, and EVIE break down laughing.
SHAY: Mariel's getting her revenge. Poor Jake--I almost feel sorry for him.
TYLER: I'll give her another ten minutes, then Jake's getting a visit from Shay's father.
EVIE: Go get him, babe!
Caption across the screen: AND WITH THAT THE CIRCLE WAS CLOSED, THE END.
Today's word of the day is Lexicon, a compendium of words and meanings taken from a body of source material.
When Orson Scott Card speaks his mind, he's always entertaining even when (or especially when) he mangles facts and logic to reach conclusions diametrically opposed to my own. Most recently he weighed in on the copyright infringement lawsuit between J.K. Rowling and a publisher that is attempting to publish a fan's online lexicon of the Harry Potterverse.
Card is outraged that Rowling would have the audacity to block a derivative work when her own series is so "obviously" derivative of works that have come before--including his own.
I feel like the plot of my novel Ender's Game was stolen by J.K. Rowling.
A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader. He trains other kids in unauthorized extra sessions, which enrages his enemies, who attack him with the intention of killing him; but he is protected by his loyal, brilliant friends and gains strength from the love of some of his family members. He is given special guidance by an older man of legendary accomplishments who previously kept the enemy at bay. He goes on to become the crucial figure in a struggle against an unseen enemy who threatens the whole world.
This paragraph lists only the most prominent similarities between Ender's Game and the Harry Potter series. My book was published in England many years before Rowling began writing about Harry Potter. Rowling was known to be reading widely in speculative fiction during the era after the publication of my book.
Of course there are only four, five, seven, or sixty-four types of stories under the sun, depending on how you count them, including any number of epics about a young hero whose powerful mentor provides special training in an arcane skill, and who picks up friends and allies during a quest to confront and defeat a powerful evil menacing the land, world, galaxy, or universe. Ender Wiggin could be said to be a tragic hero in the tradition of Odysseus, since both are unwittingly or unwillingly manipulated into devising a sneak attack that wipes out an entire civilization (Buggers for Ender and Troy for Odysseus). In case you think Card's story descriptions are so eerily similar that they just have to be true, check out J.L. Bell's similar comparison between Harry Potter and the origin story that turned Dick Grayson into Robin, Boy Wonder.
Card's first bit of intellectual dishonesty comes from equivocating the common and unavoidable use of traditional archtypes with the verbatim lifting of text and descriptions--which is what I understand to be the central issue in the Lexicon lawsuit. Card then goes on for quite a bit about what a greedy, thieving, frivolous hypocrite he believes Rowling to be, what a "pretentious puffed-up coward" she is not to make Dumbledore's sexual orientation explicit in the books, and how she's surely "blown her wad" of creativity and is now incapable of writing any other books in the future. He also calls her insane, pathetic, ungrateful, bullying, and implies that she's being manipulated by a small army of suck-ups.
Card is entitled to his opinions just as I'm entitled to mine--which are that J.K. Rowling displays as much creativity and originality as any author can when writing within a long-established genre, that she has every right to protect her intellectual property, and that Orson Scott Card has just made himself look like a jealous twit with delusions of overinflated importance.
But if I can't deny Card his right to hold an unsubstantiated opinion or two, I also can't let him off the hook for his seemingly deliberate twisting of fact. There's no way an author as long-established and successful as Card could be as ignorant of copyright law as he pretends. As I said above, he starts by conflating things that aren't given copyright protection (basic plots and broad character archtypes) with things that are given copyright protection (the actual words Rowling uses and her exclusive right to control derivative works outside of established fair use exceptions). Card applies a misrepresentation of the facts to his misrepresentation of the law to arrive at a reckless and irresponsible prediction:
I fully expect that the outcome of this lawsuit will be:
1. Publication of Lexicon will go on without any problem or prejudice, because it clearly falls within the copyright law's provision for scholarly work, commentary and review.
2. Rowling will be forced to pay Steven Vander Ark's legal fees, since her suit was utterly without merit from the start.
3. People who hear about this suit will have a sour taste in their mouth about Rowling from now on. Her Cinderella story once charmed us. Her greedy evil-witch behavior now disgusts us. And her next book will be perceived as the work of that evil witch.
Talk about sour grapes! The reality of fact and law is more complex and muddled than Card presents, and the presiding judge has been urging the parties to arrive at a settlement "because there are strong issues in this case and it could come out one way or the other. The fair use doctrine is not clear." It's safe to say that Rowling has at least a few arguable claims in her (and Warner Brothers's) 1,100-page complaint, and that her reputation won't be damaged to nearly the extent that Card is hoping and wishing for.
The Lexicon in question would be a subset of materials taken from an online encyclopedia of the people, places, creatures, spells, and objects of the Harry Potter series. The Lexicon would include descriptions quoted or adapted from the Harry Potter books, stills from the Harry Potter movies, contributions from presumably uncompensated online contributors, and some amount of original commentary and organization.
The ratio of these things would be one element determining how strong the case is that the work infringes on rights held by Rowling and Warner Brothers. Another element would be the extent to which the unofficial and unauthorized Lexicon damages the market for an official and authorized version that Rowling is said to be working on.
Pending a final ruling or settlement between the parties, I'll let J.K. Rowling's filing within the lawsuit also serve as an indictment of Orson Scott Card's attempts at character assassination and legal analysis:
"...I am deeply troubled by the portrayal of my efforts to protect and preserve the copyrights I have been granted in the Harry Potter books and feel betrayed by Steven Vander Ark, as a person who calls himself a fan. I am particularly concerned about [publishing company RDR Books's] continued insistance that my acceptance of free, fan-based websites somehow justifies its efforts to publish for profit an unauthorized Harry Potter "lexicon" directly contrary to my stated intention to publish my own definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia. Such a position penalizes copyright owners like me for encouraging and supporting the activities of their respective fan communities....
"RDR's position that fans of the Harry Potter series can simply buy two encyclopedias is both presumptuous and insensitive. RDR's position is presuptuous because it assumes that everyone would want to have two Harry Potter encyclopedias and insensitive in thinking that everyone that would want both could afford to purchase both. Although Harry Potter is now a worldwide success, it had its roots in a time when I was very far from wealthy. While I am extremely fortunate now, having had periods in my life when I worried about having enough money to feed and clothe my daughter, it is obvious to me that many people do not have money to buy every book that appeals to them....
"For seven years, Harry Potter was nothing more than an ever-growing pile of paper and notebooks on which I worked very hard whenever I could make the time. By the time of the publication of the seventh novel, I had been writing about Harry Potter for 17 years. As a result I feel intensely protective, firstly, of the literary world I spent so long creating, and secondly, of the fans who bought my books in such huge numbers. I feel that I have a duty to these readers to ensure, as far as possible, that Harry Potter does not become associated with substandard versions.... I believe that RDR's book constitutes a Harry Potter 'rip-off' of the type I have spent years trying to prevent....
"I am very frustrated that a former fan has tried to co-opt my work for financial gain. The Harry Potter books are full of moral choices and ethical dilemas, and, ironically, Mr. Vander Ark's actions tend to demonstrate that he is woefully unfit to represent himself as either a "fan of" or "expert on" books whose spirit he seems entirely to have missed...."
Today's word of the day is Orphan Works, copyrighted works for which it is difficult or impossible to locate the copyright holder.
Some of you might remember the Orphan Works Bill from a couple years ago during the last wave of copyright reform legislation. The bill included a controversial provision to carve out a copyright exception for "orphan works" whose owners couldn't be reasonably identified. The number of orphan works has been growing annually since 1976, when the United States changed from a limited-term opt-in copyright system to an opt-out system that remains in effect, potentially, for generations (currently the creator's lifetime plus 70 years).
Every story, email, or blog post you write automatically falls under copyright protection. So does every picture you draw and every photograph you take. Since everything you do is brilliant, and since everyone is still entitled to the standard "15 minutes of fame" treatment, it stands to reason that somebody will eventually want to share your words or images with the world, sometime between now and the year 2078 or later. If the work has your name on it, it might be relatively easy for somebody to find you and obtain your permission to reprint or adapt your stuff. If all they have is an excerpt that doesn't include your name, they might find you by doing a search for the work online or in a database of similar material. But after that, the search may become too time-consuming or expensive to be worth their while.
When orphan works go out of print, or if they're not widely distributed in the first place, they may become lost to history. They are less likely to be reprinted for fear that some copyright holder will someday step forward with a fat infringement suit. This mainly concerns big publishers and other corporate interests, but individual book creators like me might also need to obtain rights for a poem, picture, or song lyrics to be included in a larger story--and it's a real hassle if these turn out to be orphans.
Photographers, graphic designers, children's book illustrators, and other visual artists had issues with the Orphan Works Bill because their works are most likely to be circulated without attribution and appropriated under the proposed law without recourse and with only nominal recompense. Authors and musicians would have been affected as well, but to a lesser extent, because text and lyrics can be searched for more easily than pixels.
The original Orphan Works Bill fizzled out in 2006, but now it's back in the form of two similar versions introduced in April 2008 in the House and Senate. Some of the old concerns have been addressed and new ones introduced. There's no telling yet whether the current bill will be defeated, amended, or passed as written, but the potential remains for some big changes to our collective rights and protections.
I'll post updates if there are further developments with the bill, but authors and illustrators should keep this issue on their radar screens.
Today's word of the day is Canon Sue, a stereotypically perfect fan-fictionesque character who appears in the official version of a story.
When the odometer clicked around onto the 200th episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit", the producers celebrated with a very special episode starring Robin Williams. I could have said "featuring Robin Williams" or "with a special appearance by Robin Williams" but "starring" really is the most appropriate word. This was "Robin Williams: Special Victims Unit" with a supporting cast of SVU regulars.
Robin portrays Merrit Rook, a brilliant engineer with a tragic past, a disarming sense of humor, and a problem with authority. On trial for an anti-corporate prank that went too far, Rook chooses to defend himself in court. Despite having no legal training or court-appointed advisor, Rook dismantles the A.D.A.'s case, destroys an expert witness on cross-examination, and handily wins over all twelve members of the jury. His anarchist politics and clever mind win him the fawning adoration of the entire city including Sergeant Munch, who attends a Central Park rally in Rook's honor. When necessary, Rook's sympathetic backstory allows him to deflect criticism and monopolize the camera with emotional soliloquies. When a squadron of New York's Finest attempt to arrest Rook on a second charge, while he is unarmed and in a crowded public space, he manages to not only slip away but to disarm and kidnap veteran detective Olivia Benson in the process. After playing psychological mind games with Detective Stabler, Rook dramatically escapes from custody and vanishes, seemingly into thin air.
Something bothered me about this episode, but it wasn't until later that it hit me... Merrit Rook is a Mary Sue, or a Marty Stu, or Gary Gnu, or whatever you want to call the male version of...this:
Mary Sue is perfect. All of her friends are colorful. Or, alternately, they may be the palest of shadows next to the glow of her magnificence. She speaks at least seven languages and can communicate with small woodland creatures. She knows all about quantum physics. She has an excellent singing voice and plays at least one instrument -- probably guitar, violin, or flute, even in worlds where these instruments do not exist. She becomes, without effort, a world-class expert at anything she puts her hand to.
In fanfic she is often better than the canon hero in the hero's field of expertise. She will lecture canon heroes and canon villains on how to overcome their flaws, and can singlehandedly convert an Evil Overlord to the side of light simply by the power of her Goodness.
The problem with Mary Sues of either gender is that they are too good to be true and/or interesting. They overshadow the other characters, they lack emotional depth, and they often represent some idealized version of the author. They are, generally, a bad idea. The writing on "SVU" is strong enough to almost offset these issues but, in addition to not explaining how Rook is able to become a world-class defense attorney overnight, the character's emotional substance comes from a backstory in which he somehow became a world-class obstetrician overnight and correctly diagnosed a problem with his pregnant wife, only to have the actual doctor disagree and end up negligently killing the wife and newborn child.
Before this week, I'd have had a hard time imagining a Mary Sue in the "Law & Order" universe. The "Law & Order" franchise, for a long time, attempted to heighten its realism by using guest actors who weren't recognizable from other roles. When big-name actors appeared, they were used in smaller roles that allowed them to go against their usual casting. The show delves a little into psychology, when the police or district attorney need to get into a criminal's head to put them away, but the main focus has always been on procedure.
But I can understand that when you have an A-list actor willing to do the show--with some arm twisting from his off-stage friend, Richard Belzer, from what I understand--you want to showcase him as much as possible. So they let him impersonate a cop. They had him out-lawyer the lawyers. They had him manipulate the detective. He becomes an explosives expert overnight, and an experimental psychologist, and a social networking expert, and a shepherd, and a voice actor, and a cult celebrity, and as a teenager he drove a violent gang out of his neighborhood by burning down their clubhouse. Suddenly Merrit Rook is a Mary Sue in the canon of the show: a Canon Sue!
There's a writing lesson here, that if tropes that are usually associated with sloppy or amaturish writing can slip into the professional writing machine of "Law & Order", they can slip into anyone's writing at any time.
I did a reading this week at Cornerstone Books in Salem, Massachusetts. The Witch City!
On my way to the bookstore, I passed storefront signs for other readings, mostly involving tarot cards, palmistry, or Kirlian auras. In Salem, those kinds of readings happen a lot more frequently than the author kind. It made me wonder if there might also be a way to use my book to predict the future. Ask a question, turn to a random page, and maybe the third word in the seventh sentence will give you the answer you seek? Let's see...
"Can I actually predict the future with The Penguins of Doom?"
Page 86 says... "mother's"
It's open to interpretation, but there's got to be something there.
My reading took place on a gorgeous day in the middle of Massachusetts public school Spring Vacation Week, so I wasn't really expecting many kids to show up. "You spent your spring break where? The bookstore?" There actually were a couple kids who came in, but they just wanted to grab a quick book and be on their way. One grabbed my book as well as the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and is not the first person to tell me that the two are complementary titles, so I will have to look into that further.
The audience members who stayed were children's and YA authors with questions about the publishing process, so that's what we talked about. It wasn't what I'd planned, but I had a really great time and sold a few books in the process.
I can also say that Cornerstone Books is a great place to find a book, and to linger with it and have a great cup of coffee or tea.
WOTD: Workshop
Current mood: awake
Category: Web, HTML, Tech
Today's word of the day is: Workshop
I'm back from Nashua, where the New England SCBWI conference was a huge success and my four-hour workshop on web design and blogging was well-attended and well-received. The grand finale was a live update of my website to include news about the presentation itself, thanks to a kind volunteer photographer in the audience.
That's my new website design in the background, and see how exhausted I looked by that point? Since I was presenting for both sessions on Sunday, I didn't get to attend the equally well-received workshops going on at the same time:
Toni Buzzeo on self-promotion;
Brian Lies and Lita Judge on illustration;
Sarah Aronson on point of view;
Harold Underdown on an overview of the basics;
Debra Garfinkle on humor writing;
Emily Herman and Anne Sibley O'Brien on writing tools;
Sarah Shumway on pitches; or
The Write Sisters (Janet Buell, Kathy Deady, Muriel Dubois, Diane Mayr, Andrea Murphy, Barbara Turner, and Sally Wilkins) on critique groups and collaboration
In fact, with all of those other workshops going on, I was amazed that anyone wanted to come to mine at all. We really did have a great group of authors and illustrators who peppered me with enough questions to last the entire time--and we probably could have gone for another four hours if I hadn't lost my voice by then. Thanks, everybody!
Another chunk of my workshop is going to be on the topic of social networking and the use of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. In addition to those are author/illustrator networks like JacketFlap and DeviantART, and general book networks like Library Thing, GoodReads, and Shelfari.
Here are my questions for you...
If you are an author or illustrator, my questions for you are...
Which social networking sites do you belong to?
If you don’t use social networking sites, what have been your primary deterrents?
Do you prefer different sites for different purposes?
What are your "rules" for requesting, accepting, or rejecting potential "friends"?
How do you use the sites to promote or raise awareness of your writing?
How do you use the sites to keep track of what other authors/illustrators are up to?
How much time do you spend on social networking sites, and does it interfere with your writing/illustrating time?
What would be helpful for you to know at a workshop about social networking?
If you are a bookseller, librarian, teacher, or reader, my questions are:
Does having an author or illustrator’s in your friend list influence your reading decisions?
Does an author or illustrator on a social networking site seem more approachable?
Have you corresponded with authors or illustrators through social networking that you would not have contacted otherwise?
You can email me in private, leave a comment here, or link to an elaboration on your own blog and I’ll compile the best suggestions for everyone’s benefit. Thanks for your help!
I got some great feedback on author/illustrator websites for my workshop -- what people have done, what they look for in other sites, and what can often be improved. I was worried that I might get too technical and nitpicky so this was a good reality check and it’s a lot of common sense.
A site should be unique, personal, and convey the personality of its owner who, in the case of an author or illustrator, is expected to be creative, expressive, and professional.
A site doesn’t have to be professionally designed and developed but many that aren’t look amateurish or unfinished. Do-it-yourselfers should look into using professional templates. I like to browse Open Source Web Design for ideas.
Contact information should be easy to find, and methods should be used to limit the harvesting of email addresses by spambots.
Sites should be clean and uncluttered, easy to navigate, and consistent from page to page.
Some author only update their sites sporadically, once or twice a year at most, in a process that requires the intervention of a web developer. With the web options available in 2008, many of which require no technical skill or HTML knowledge, this is simply unacceptable.
I’ve used this workshop as an excuse to redesign my website from scratch, using a blogging software called WordPress as a content management system. Still in beta right now, but it should be presentable by the conference.
awake
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