is a blog by Brendan
I have the instinctive habit of never mentioning the goals I set for myself, on the grounds that if I then fail to meet them, I don’t have to be embarrassed. But embarrassment makes for good blog entries! So here’s the setup, even if it takes a long time to pay off, one way or another.
My goals for 2007 are to get my driver’s license and complete a half-marathon.
My goal for 2008 is to teach at the Kentucky Governor’s Scholars Program.
My goal for 2009 is to attend Clarion South.
I think it’s widely accepted that my parents’ generation, or at least quite a lot of them, participated in a sexual and chemical revolution that they enjoyed at the time without foreseeing its consequences–STDs, a wasteful drug war, the embourgeoisment of all their good music, and a lot of boring retrospective movies. Hideous design themes. The backswing of the Eighties. I could go on.
Not that there weren’t benefits, of course, and I’m glad I was born after they became widespread. I think I’m well-suited for my own generation’s information revolution. But is any revolution on this scale without cost? What are we not foreseeing?
The phrase “Christ of the Barricades” popped into my head this evening and won’t leave. I knew I didn’t invent it, but my usual sources for cultural context nearly failed me–Maria hadn’t heard it, nor had Wikipedia, and Google gave me only one result. That result led me to historian Frank Paul Bowman, who wrote a book in French called Le Christ des barricades in 1987. Yes, in French, and no, it doesn’t appear to be available in translation.
Putting the phrase in French and applying it to 1789-1848 (the book’s subtitle) certainly places it in context, but that only makes me want to read more. Unfortunately, I know from painful experience that academic texts with intriguing titles end up being, too often, boring and labored with odd extended rants about Disneyland. Also I don’t know French. So I’ll probably never read Le Christ des barricades.
But that’s what we have participatory media for, I suppose. What does “Christ of the Barricades” mean to you? In 101 words?
OKAY LISA, my first Flickr set is up. Apparently I do not have very steady hands!
I made brownie pie and we ate Spinelli’s. DC and Beth got me a book and a bunch of great Actors Theatre stuff, and Yale got me some stuff he found in his car, and he, Ken, Kyle, Scott, Lisa, Monica, Mom, Ian, Maria’s family and especially Maria got me a present I would never have let myself buy: a real camera.
Thanks, ballers.
I don’t like talking about money, but here goes!
I am considering self-publishing an Anacrusis book: 101 of the best standalone stories from the last two and a half years, plus one (completed!) bad penny story arc. I would purchase one copy for myself, one for Maria, one for my grandmother and one for my mom. That’s all the demand I anticipate, which is why I’d be going with a print-on-demand company (likely Lulu) rather than an offset press with some kind of hideous minimum print run. I am not going to sell a thousand copies.
It would come in two versions: a fancy dust-jacketed hardcover, which I’d limit to 101 copies at $24.95, and a “viral edition” cheap paperback at $9.95. That doesn’t include shipping cost. I’d make a couple bucks off either, which I would put back into web ads, review copies, etc. I probably would not break even in the end, but it would be a relatively cheap way to raise my profile as a writer. Anybody who took the trouble to ship me his or her copy would get it signed and shipped back for free.
The chief goal of this project, though, would be to give people who like reading Anacrusis something tangible to show their friends. You might be one of those people. Do you want something tangible? Which edition would you prefer? Would it interest you more if the book came with exclusive content (eg ten new stories) or would it make you feel jerked around? (Everything would be released under BY-SA, as usual, so anybody who wanted could just repost them somewhere.)
I’ll be reading the LJ comment feed on this entry, of course, or you can spam me any time.
Diane Duane, once one of my favorite YA authors, wants to write a third book in a series that has many fans, but didn’t sell well enough to merit her publisher’s interest. She’s putting out feelers to determine whether that small but fervent audience would pay $20-$25 for a paperback copy; if so, she’ll finish writing it and self-publish. I’ve already seen her plugged by Neil Gaiman, Copyfight and who knows where else. Alan Wexelblat (in the latter) lauded her for “experiments in new business models.”
Except it’s not a new business model at all. Webcomics and indie RPGs, to name just the two that I know of, have built industries out of nothing via self-publishing and print-on-demand. It’s not about vanity anymore–it’s the members of Blank Label putting out their own collections, cheap, with unheard-of profit margins; it’s Dogs in the Vineyard still selling two copies a day after a year and a half, which is more than most big-press authors can say after their first three months. The only thing new about Duane’s idea is that she’s got offline name recognition going into the thing. And, well, it’s new to her.
I wonder if some kind soul is going to inform her of the existence of Lulu?
I’m not sure what Fantine was going to say, but here’s my overanalysis: the central ethos of Harry Potter–that one should trust children to be competent, but shield them from the consequences of failure; that a parent should protect them from harm, but never information–is a highly political one. It’s also already stated in about a jillion other YA books, but when was the last time it was distributed on such a scale? When was the last time it was internalized so widely, so willingly, outside the classroom, by children and adults?
It’s at that question that I start to wonder what the book-burning groups are really out to fight.
Got the first search referral for “thinspiration” today. That story is currently the #113 Google result for it. Think I’ll get any mail?
I’m not sure whether it counts as irony that I only realized this morning that “Me and Mia,” one of my favorite songs ever, is about, um, ana and mia. Ted Leo should enunciate better, and I should listen harder. It’s a vicious song.
This is the entry where I gush about my mp3 player! Pretend it’s 2002.
My messenger bag is considerably lighter now that I’m not carrying my Discman and fifty CDs in it all the time, and I never have to try to hold three things while standing up again. That’s awesome! I sneakily got a refurbished Shuffle directly from Apple, so I got the one-gig version for the 512 price, and it’s still got a year warranty. That is also awesome! I get to carry the Magic Future Perfect* Radio Mix Tape From Heaven around in my pocket and it makes me happy.
It doesn’t introduce me to new music like the radio and mix tapes are supposed to do (remember when the radio introduced you to new music? Ha ha!), but that’s what I have Lisa and Will and Maria and Ken for. Ken, move back already, dammit.
The audio quality on the Shuffle is really excellent–I’ve actually noticed instruments in the midrange I never heard before, and there are none of the audible compression artifacts I used to get with my mp3-CD player. The one thing it doesn’t have is a bass boost, which is crippling. I am a little bit addicted to my bass boost. I am addicted enough that tonight I purchased paraphernalia with which to enjoy my dependency. Having an equalizer the size of a pack of cigarettes really destroys the point of having a music player the size of a stick of gum, but man, I was getting the dee tees. I’ll probably bitch later about how it works out.
Before I knew the Koss equalizer existed, I was actually considering looking for some converters and a battery-operated guitar effects pedal that would let me change the bass, and just carrying that around instead. Then I thought “ah, but that would strip the signal to mono.” Then I thought “and would be completely insane.“
I was annoyed at first that I had to partition the areas for audio storage and file storage separately, but I fit every song I wanted in less than the 800 megs I’d reserved. There is a remedy, as it turns out, but honestly I’m only using it to listen to the second good duet in the history of pop over and over again.
(The first, and previously only, was “Under Pressure.” Bowie and Queen.)
* A grammar joke!