What's wrong with me? I'm just the opposite of everyone else:
>you're going to have days (or heck, a whole entire month) where you're going to think that you're writing pure unadulterated grade-A crap.
SharonM: we live just down Coit (and around the corner) from Elliot's. Love the place! If I possibly can, I buy from there. Doesn't hurt that Stamp Asylum (decorative art rubber stamps and art supplies) is practically next door.
Middle-aged women are invisible to lots of people who aren't in the same boat. For whatever reason, "Mom" or "Grandma" clones are considered unimportant, and nobody worries about offending us. They will get pretty huffy if we stand up for ourselves, as though we're supposed to stay in the background and not ask for anything. It's really weird. Very unlike ancient cultures in which age/wisdom were considered to go hand-in-hand, sigh.
I have an invisibility field. It clicked on when I turned forty or thereabouts. And it was a lot worse when I had a broken knee last year. People would just about pole-vault over the wheelchair or detour the long way around to get away. I don't know why they thought a broken bone was contagious.
Why would any corporation limit access to the WWW and the 'net in general? I suspect they're simply terrified that some employee will be "not doing work" while on-the-clock. It doesn't matter if the limitation makes the job tougher, because their major concern is that no one gets away with goofing off (although they do anyway.)
Everywhere I've worked, management has been convinced that everyone sat around all day trying to goof off or figure out more ways to goof off, and this sent them into a micromanaging panic. Even though we had to do daily status reports telling what we had spent the day doing, and we had to meet the milestones set in the schedules (meaning we had to do something on the work every day in order to make the schedule), and they made the rounds to look over your shoulder regularly, they were still suspicious that somebody was Getting Away With Something.
I don't feel that a salaried employee who checks his/her horoscope, the weather, the headlines, or something like that has sinned against the company for spending a few minutes looking at that. Yet I can kind of see how someone surfing the 'net and reading LiveJournal for several hours during the corporate workday would be frowned upon. The problem is that people don't have the sense to know the difference, or they're not taught right from birth and usually think, "What is the right action? Whatever you can get away with." So maybe people at those companies WERE wasting the day looking at flickr sets of people's vacations or borderline porn (!), reading "Overheard In New York," or writing to their friends on Facebook. The companies didn't want the time to be taken away from what the company was paying them for.
After all, many of my cohorts when I worked as a software engineer did netsurf in addition to using the 'net as a resource for finding upgrades, free code, fixes, and so forth. There was some time wasted. I chalked it up to mental health and a feeling that the Man was not breathing down their necks; I also saw the same employees working late and spending extra time whenever they were asked to. It was a trade-off. Nobody went overboard surfing.
But they COULD have. So I can see where management (which is generally concerned that someone is Getting Away With Something Right Under Their Noses, remember) might be paranoid and nanny away too many places. It's simply as case of not trusting reporters and writers to do their jobs instead of goofing off, I guess.
I understand cutting off the access to LJ, Facebook, Amazon, IMDB, the Sudoku site, and the like, because they are too tempting for the employees with little self-control or sense of responsibility. Employees will play, unless you play the nanny, would be the idea.
Or am I missing something?
I watched the video, and--yes--I, too, cried.
All I could think was what a waste it has been that her voice has never been heard--that we have had to listen to the screechings of [insert your love-to-hate pop-tart diva here] instead for twenty-plus years. I reflect back on my years in the theater (high school, college, community theater), when we had actors who were absolutely amazing BUT were also (horrors) "fat," "homely," "old," and other deathwords of casting (even when "fat" meant size fourteen, and "old" meant thirty), and therefore our directors always cast someone who had less talent as "the ingenue" or "the leading man" so that the audience could project its attractiveness-love on that person. The supporting actors often were the ones you remembered at the end of the play, and the ones you imitated, and the ones you said you loved, and the ones everyone quoted . . . those "ugly" ones who almost didn't get put onstage AT ALL because "they're not the body types we need on the stage." But so long as our society dictates that the only PRETTY woman is a skinny, large-breasted (and that's often a contradiction--where do I lose weight FIRST?? So to be BOTH is unusual, or the result of artifice), dewily young skeeter*, then this is going to happen . . . we're going to miss out on amazing talents. I'm very happy that this one has been caught in time!
* [Same kind of mess applies to men. But they do get more of a pass on being "fat" and "old," you must admit. A little bit.]
But I do mourn for the twenty years that we could have been listening to her alongside Streisand, Garland, Midler, and the other great voices.
If only we didn't have the problem that "they need to be attractive MOST OF ALL," this wouldn't be happening. Or if we had wider standards for "nice looking" (which some of us do!)
I think the comparison to finding a great manuscript is nice, but there's more to writing a great book than there is to singing someone else's great song well, IMHO. When you're singing Jerome Kern or Cole Porter, using an arrangement and orchestra that is well proven, all you have to do is have the great voice, the breath control, the wonderful phrasing (which, as noted above, you might be getting somewhat from recordings you've heard). Now, that's tough! Yes! But when you sit down to write a book, that level of talent/craft (if you will) is not enough. You also have to have thought of an idea that will capture the imagination and that hasn't been done better before too many times. (You have to have written the song. You are making up your own phrasing. You have to play all the instruments yourself. Ouch, the metaphor yelps as it stretches.) I've often been told that I "have what we can't teach," that my writing "is eloquent" or that it "flows and holds the attention," and so forth. A kind editor at Dorchester told me that he laughed out loud and re-read several of my sentences in the opening of a novel because they were so funny. *But* none of that has given me a published novel, because there was always a "but. . . " attached to the effect that they didn't love the book enough, that it didn't do A but did B, that it wasn't quiiiite right, or something like that. (Usually no one can put a finger on exactly what the turnoff was, and perhaps they don't know. It's ineffable. It's like the reason you either love Rod Stewart or can't stand him--it can't be articulated.)
So I believe it's even tougher to write a book that happens to strum the strings of a person who has the authority to buy your book than it is to get up on stage and charm an audience with a wonderful performance of someone else's great song (as rare as THAT is). Other than that, I like your comparison. *grin*
*preparing to be slapped*
Teresa NH: Thank you for offering to fix that crazy comment of mine. The system hiccuped after the first occurrence of my quotation and pasted the opening in again. It started over at "Here's something heartening":
"It's distastefully arrogant for you to assume that because it is not a big deal to you it therefore ought not be a big deal to anyone else.Here's something heartening."
. . . and that's where the whole post so far repeated itself. Apparently that happened because the system freaked out when I typed the less-than sign to indicate the end of the quoted material (which is what I usually do on LiveJournal.) Oops!
We need to delete from there all the way down to the next occurrence of that same line--
>It's distastefully arrogant for you to assume that because it is not a big deal to you it therefore ought not be a big deal to anyone else.--
The rest of the comment follows correctly.
Or you may just want to zap the comment, as I'm obviously outnumbered in counseling non-panic. *grin* I feel for the database personnel who have to go in to fix this by hand.
Yesterday John Scalzi chimed in on his blog, saying a remarkably similar thing to what I had said, so maybe I'm not the only one who counseled a bit of perspective on the situation. I do know it would be upsetting if they torpedoed all books about and for and by fat people (a set of which I am a member), so I can see why it did upset people--I just couldn't fathom why the depth of anger over what really looks like a software problem. I worked in software test for twenty years at E-Systems, Rockwell, and DSC Communications (now Alcatel Lucent--I also did software quality metrics there), and I can tell you that when somebody puts in a small patch to a system, it can balloon into a mess like this very easily. Most corporations don't think testing is very important until the entire Eastern seaboard long distance goes down over a failed patch, as it did in response to an error by a DSC contractor sometime in 1983 (I think it was). Ouch!
I must be among the few people who never uses a search for keywords when looking for books! I am typically looking for a book using its title or the author's name. I can't remember ever searching by keywords. Is it really that common? I could still find these books using the author's name, couldn't I? Or did that go away when they were de-ranked? *That* would affect profits, so Amazon is likely to repair it quickly.
Just my luck--my novel goes forward in the Amazon contest, but Amazon disgraces itself the weekend before and everyone swears never to buy there again. I am definitely a Jonah!
*sigh* I swear that post looked fine when I previewed it. The first half got duplicated somehow.
But anyway, now the Seattle blog says:
~~Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as "adult," the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from 'false' to 'true.')
~~"It's no big policy change, just some field that's been around forever filled out incorrectly," the source said.
This is plausible to me. What a mess to have to clean up--manually!
Here's something heartening.
"4:36 p.m. A new Twitter hash tag has arisen. It is #SorryAmazon."--from the SeattlePI blog
This is a good sign. Now perhaps Amazon will post some kind of notice on its front page to let authors know it's dealing with the problem.
Could it be that this issue got blown out of proportion? Many people leapt to conclusions and started campaigning in a hard-line sense right away. But the same result could most likely have been had without "googlebombing" and with far less panic. It's the size of the outcry as compared to the actual importance of the issue that prompted me to say "it's not that big a deal."
Because, really, it isn't--it's ONE bookstore changing something in its search terms. The site never said that it would stop *carrying* "adult" or GLBT or feminist books. It's another argument in favor of supporting your neighborhood booksellers, especially independents (if there are any left). But it's not A BIG DEAL in the larger sense. It's not a bad medical diagnosis for you or a loved one/family friend; it's not the loss of a home by fire; it's not the washing away of an entire community by a flood or the destruction of an entire small town by a tornado; it's not a declaration of war between countries. What I would like to see is people keeping this in perspective. When I say it's not that big a deal and can be reversed, I am thinking of things that are more important, like people's lives. A few books that may not turn up on searches for a couple of days or weeks aren't as important as these other larger issues. I'd love to see such an outcry on the 'net over something really important, such as poverty . . . war . . . natural disaster relief . . . stuff like that. (*Of course, those things are not so easily fixed, are they?*)
HH: I asked, "But is it really THAT BIG A DEAL?" And you replied, "If it were not, would so many people be taking such quick action?"
Yes. I don't judge how serious a situation is by how many people online you can get to post, "Put this link in your blog," or whatever. We need to keep a sense of perspective. It appears that Amazon is taking steps right now--and who can say whether they would have done that already, even without the uproar? All we had to do was notify them politely that this shouldn't be happening, and then wait.
>It's distastefully arrogant for you to assume that because it is not a big deal to you it therefore ought not be a big deal to anyone else.Here's something heartening.
"4:36 p.m. A new Twitter hash tag has arisen. It is #SorryAmazon."--from the SeattlePI blog
This is a good sign. Now perhaps Amazon will post some kind of notice on its front page to let authors know it's dealing with the problem.
Could it be that this issue got blown out of proportion? Many people leapt to conclusions and started campaigning in a hard-line sense right away. But the same result could most likely have been had without "googlebombing" and with far less panic. It's the size of the outcry as compared to the actual importance of the issue that prompted me to say "it's not that big a deal."
Because, really, it isn't--it's ONE bookstore changing something in its search terms. The site never said that it would stop *carrying* "adult" or GLBT or feminist books. It's another argument in favor of supporting your neighborhood booksellers, especially independents (if there are any left). But it's not A BIG DEAL in the larger sense. It's not a bad medical diagnosis for you or a loved one/family friend; it's not the loss of a home by fire; it's not the washing away of an entire community by a flood or the destruction of an entire small town by a tornado; it's not a declaration of war between countries. What I would like to see is people keeping this in perspective. When I say it's not that big a deal and can be reversed, I am thinking of things that are more important, like people's lives. A few books that may not turn up on searches for a couple of days or weeks aren't as important as these other larger issues. I'd love to see such an outcry on the 'net over something really important, such as poverty . . . war . . . natural disaster relief . . . stuff like that. (*Of course, those things are not so easily fixed, are they?*)
HH: I asked, "But is it really THAT BIG A DEAL?" And you replied, "If it were not, would so many people be taking such quick action?"
Yes. I don't judge how serious a situation is by how many people online you can get to post, "Put this link in your blog," or whatever. We need to keep a sense of perspective. It appears that Amazon is taking steps right now--and who can say whether they would have done that already, even without the uproar? All we had to do was notify them politely that this shouldn't be happening, and then wait.
>It's distastefully arrogant for you to assume that because it is not a big deal to you it therefore ought not be a big deal to anyone else.<<br />
Well . . . I suppose that if you've never had any serious medical diagnosis, house fires, or the like, then a software issue on ONE bookstore's website might seem to loom large. Most people have experienced something that IS a really big deal, though, and they keep this sort of thing in perspective. This was something that it was appropriate to ask the company to change, and to call their attention to in a reasonable way (though not by GoogleBombing), but certainly is not a crisis. We can always quit buying from them, as I keep pointing out, if it bugs us.
What I conclude from this is: we need to support a variety of book selling businesses, especially independents. We can vote with our patronage. We don't have to patronize a store that does things we don't like. We should give someone or someplace a chance to fix something before we condemn them wholesale.
That's all I meant.
Jacob @153/135--you're right in your various analyses, and you're apparently one of the few who can keep his head and think logically about this. It's been sort of scary how fast the firestorm rose, IMHO.
The furor going on is more like what I would expect if someone had fired a shot across the bow of a ship, rather than just ONE business changing something about the way THEIR bookstore (not ALL bookstores, even) handles particular books. Sure, it's a problem for those whose books are affected, but it's not a life-or-death issue, and it's something that can be fixed. It may not have been intentional, even.
I posted on my LJ about this last night, theorizing that it is probably the result of a software/database patch that some middle manager thought up and that went terribly wrong, and saying that we should wait to see what happens. But it seems nobody wants to do that--everyone wants to get up in Amazon's face and yell, perhaps to show the power of The Masses. Well . . . it's good to let the merchant know that you will/won't be buying from them again. But is it really THAT BIG A DEAL? Let's wait to see if they fix it. And, hey, if it turns out that you don't like what they do, don't buy from them. They took over a huge market share because people liked what they did--and if people stop liking what they do, they'll disappear. You could always order a book through a local bookstore, you know, instead.
I advocated cool heads last night, and I still do. But people don't like to use logic. They like to use their emotions. And if they feel they're right and they've been wronged, Katy bar the door! *wow* Bloggers have really gone wild on this, advocating "Google-bombing" and other techniques to inconvenience Amazon, out of some sense of revenge or I don't know WHAT . . . when all those things are not necessarily appropriate. We can be grownups about this and communicate with the corporation about our wishes. But if they choose to do business in a way that we don't like, we can't MAKE THEM STOP--all we can do is take our business elsewhere, once we know for sure that's what they're doing on purpose. Until then, I counsel some restraint and waiting. It's just the prudent course of action.
Baby names? Who's having a baby? Mazel tov!
Names, huh.
I was the first Shalanna I'd ever heard of. We thought we'd be the only one--that we'd invented the name. But now there are several grown-up Shalanna/Shalana women out there--Google them. One is a lawyer, one is a singer. They're around 25 years old or so. Interestingly enough, I got on CompuServe with the screen name "Shalanna" around 1984, and ran a FidoNet BBS as sysop-ette from 1986-1991. So perhaps they came up with the name independently, or maybe. . . . *grin*
However, it IS a pain to hafta spell it for everyone, and tell people that it rhymes with "Madonna" and "I wanna" instead of sounding like "Sha-na-na."
#94 ::: Fragano *and* #79 ::: Serge:
Chantal? I have a cousin named Chantal. She pronounces it "shaun-tall." That's probably the French way, n'est-ce pas? My aunt named her after Sandra Dee's character in the Bobby Darin/Sandra Dee film _If A Man Answers_, based on a book by Winifred Wolfe that you can't find anywhere. (We used to have the book in our local library, but now they sell off any books that are not checked out during the previous year to make room for the 23 copies of current best-sellers.)
Chantal has always had to spell her name for people. It's a flamin' pain. But anyhow, it does mean that you are usually the only Shalanna or Chantal in the class or on that floor of the building. *GRIN*
Teaching public school enables one to hear all manner of unusual names. Don't even get me started on Oranjello and his twin Lemonjello. *aack* I hope that is a teachers' urban legend, but I fear it is rooted in truth, as so many teachers swear they've met these guys.
I discovered that Rhapsody was charging my credit card for that $12.99 (up from 9.99) a month, and the credit card was going overlimit. So I told the card not to accept charges from them. This didn't work. I called Wells Fargo Bank Customer Service and they suggested canceling that card and opening a new one (pretty drastic, but that's the solution they suggested.) I did that. Next month here came the charge from Rhapsody again. I called Wells Fargo. "Ma'am, that's the standard thing--those places that were charging regularly to your card can contact us and legally we have to give them your new card info." I was pretty steamed, as it had been a hassle. "I want these people gone," I said. The customer service rep put me on a three-way call to Rhapsody. Rhapsody has a special number for banks to call, so they answered shortly. The bank heard me tell them I wanted out, no matter what. The bank told them they could no longer charge. They asked whether I wanted to no longer be a member. I shouted assent. It still took them several questions more. The bank rep finally told them to undo my subscription. I watched carefully for the next month's statement: at last, no more Rhapsody.
The transaction should not have taken THAT kind of muscle. Rhapsody is evil.
(WF transferred my card balance . . . and then charged me ANOTHER MEMBER FEE FOR THIS YEAR because the card is "new." *aaarghh* Everything is evil.)
I'm sorry to hear this. It's always depressing to hear that someone so valiant lost the fight. Also . . . "Any man's death diminishes me, for I am part of mankind." Condolences and prayers to his family and close friends.
Teresa, Patrick, Janni, and anyone else who is a pro and is interested in knowing why these things might seem legit to us--I have an observation.
One reason that we the striving unpublished turn to such events as the Pitch Session conference is that we see "pitch" emphasized so much by agents who are trying to help us online. At least that's what the trend is lately. Miss Snark has the CrapOMeter and Rachel Vater (lj ID rvater31) has the pitch analysis posts. They take people's "pitches" (the one/two paragraph blurbs meant to go in the query letter) and analyze them as to whether they'd request a partial. They turn down stuff entirely on pitch. This makes us feel that "pitching" is now the way that queries are weeded out. If we can't get in the door via a query, we're out of luck, after all.
That's why writers are studying those pitch/query paragraphs so closely these days, I think.
Some of us might feel that perhaps novelists are now just like screenwriters in that the product is not the ONLY thing any more, because first we must sell the idea of sending the manuscript in at all. Screenwriters rely on charm and a pitch. That has started to sound plausible to novelists.
The reason I think novelists like to have pitch sessions with agents (usually no such thing happens with editors, unless you win a contest) is that you have a chance of being allowed to write "SOLICITED SUBMISSION" on the front of the envelope. That seems like a quantum leap to some of us, because we are so far away from everything. When you're on a raft in the middle of the ocean, any boat looks pretty good.
I don't think that people expect their stuff to be bought on the pitch. I think they just want to have the chance to send the partial in. It's really tough to get agents to even let me send a partial any more, because the market has tightened up. (Or they've found out about me, which is a distinct possibility.) A year ago I would get six requests for a partial when I sent out twelve queries. Now I'm just getting the "didn't love it enough" or "it didn't engage me the way I hoped it would" rejections. And this is the same query letter as last year. That's why we grasp at straws.
Is there any merit in going to a writers' conference at all, other than getting pepped up by hearing all the panel discussions? I can't really tell you. I write things other than just SF/fantasy, so I think the general writers' conferences are inspirational. And some agents will say, "Because you were here at my panel discussion, you may send me a partial and write on the outside DINGBATS CONVENTION ATTENDEE, which will get you out of the slushpile." This can be a big motivator, because many agents now say they are not even taking queries.
And we tend to lose hope when a book as good as S. K. S. Perry’s novel _Darkside_ doesn't sell and goes out on the 'net as a free download, even for Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Week. *sigh*
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