#FollowFriday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 09:15@benbarden @orangeinks @fragileheart @badevan @mariuca @kenarmstrong1 @daisycurlycat @joanjoyce @ladyprogrammer @turnipofpower
This Friday, I’m highlighting people that I’ve met through various blogging communities. These communities include BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, EntreCard, CMF Ads, and Adgitize.
These communities can be wonderful places to meet new friends and gain new readers. On the other hand, the dynamics in the communities can become pretty complicated. As an example, EntreCard recently changed the way they handle advertisements and it has created an incredible backlash.
As a matter of fact, many of the folks that I list as friends this week are people that where once on EntreCard and have moved on.
NaNoWriMo Feedback
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 22:10One blog that I’ve been enjoying reading recently is Subjective Soup. It is written by a recently retired teacher and is one of the more thought out and better written blogs I visit. The other day, Patricia wrote a blog post Fellow Writers, Where Do I Go From Here?, about her first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) effort.
I started to write a comment for her blog post, but it turned out to be pretty long, so I’m posting it as a blog post here.
In 2006, my daughter Miranda Hynes, wrote her first novel, Subtle Differences as part of NaNoWriMo. She was thirteen at the time, and the novel was amazingly good. I encourage friends to go out and get a copy and read it. As she wrote it, she pondered what she would do with it after she finished it. I encouraged her to check into various publishing possibilities, and in the end, encouraged her to publish it at Lulu. Lulu is one of the top publish on demand presses and is a favorite of NaNoWriMo writers.
So, my first recommendation, think seriously about self-publishing via Lulu.
Whether you decided to self publish, or revise it for resubmission to the publisher you contacted, you need to look at revision. The three recommendations seem pretty straight forward, but I do have comments on the recommendations.
First, don’t be too quick to reduce your parentheses. Yes, they might slow down the reader, and that might not fit the market that the publisher you contacted is interested in. However, I’m a reader that likes to read slowly. I like complicated sentences with lots of parentheses and sub-clauses. This may be just a stylistic consideration and you need to find the style that works best for you. Before you take the words of a publisher’s review too seriously, read many of the famous author’s rejection letters.
NPR had a great story on this a couple years ago, Famous Authors' Rejection Letters Surface.
The second comment about having shopping telling what is happening, instead of showing it goes back to perhaps the oldest recommendation to creative writers, “Show, don’t tell”. I haven’t read your novel, so I can’t comment on where you are telling instead of showing, but that is a key thing to work on.
Back to my own experience: After my daughter wrote her novel in 2006, I did NaNaWriMo in 2007. I finished my novel and it is sitting, somewhat edited on my hard disk somewhere. I may get around to going back and revising it someday, or it may just stay where it is. However, one thing that I did do was to share it with people that I trusted as I was writing it. I received lots of feedback. Much of it was useful, but I needed to filter out what was useful and what wasn’t.
I’m on a mailing list of group psychotherapists, and several of them read the novel and gave me incredibly helpful feedback. I believe that my characters are much richer because of their feedback. For each character, spend time trying to think about everything about them. Why are they acting a particular way? What happened in their childhood that shaped them to be the way they are? Where is the complexity and ambiguity that they face? Most importantly, and this is perhaps where I have the most problems, how are the experiences in the novel changing them? If you look at any character, can you tell me who they are at the beginning? How they are at the end, and how the story changed them? You don’t need to put the early family history of each character in the novel, but you need to know what it is. If it isn’t clear to you, it won’t be to your readers and the characters will tend to feel more stereotypical.
So, find some people that you really trust. Get them to read your novel and help you grapple with these aspects. Don’t worry about the parentheses so much as about how you show people what is happening and how you show people the complexities of your characters.
I hope this is helpful. I look forward to reading what happens next.
The Future of News and Detroit – The Dying Goat
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 15:41As stories about further cutbacks and closures in the newspaper industry continue, so do discussions about what is wrong with the news industry, and what can be done to fix it. However, many of the discussions seem to be looking at the problem from the wrong end. Too many people are looking at trying to adjust the revenue stream to deal with online distribution, and too few people are talking about the product itself, the news.
The story of the demise of newspapers follows a familiar line. Something has come along to challenge the hegemony of the industry. For the newspapers, it is the Internet. Classifieds have moved to Craigslist. Subscribers are getting their news online. It reminds me an awful lot of the auto industry years ago. For them, it was Japan. Everyone was buying Japanese cars. They blamed the labor unions. They blamed heathcare costs and retirement costs. What no one was willing to talk about was the big issue, they stopped making a product that people cared about. Sounds a lot like the newspapers today.
Sure, they managed to buy some time making SUVs which people liked for a while, until gas prices went up again. Likewise, the news industry managed to buy sometime by providing entertainment in the guise of news, by focusing on personalities like O’Reilly or Olberman and not on information people needed.
When I spoke with one old newspaper man, he talked about the day when newspapers were run by local companies. They were part of the community and were something that people cared about. There was a high return on investment. So, the big investors came in and tried to run the papers. They tried to squeeze even more return out of the papers.
It was sort of like the story of the farmer and his goat. He figured that he could make more money off of his goat if he cut her food with sawdust. Slowly, he started replacing more and more of her food with sawdust. The goat’s milk production went down a little, but the farmer made up for the lost milk revenue with the savings he was getting on grain. Kept doing that until finally the goat starved to death.
That, I believe, is the real issue with both the car industry and the news industry. People have been busy saving money by delivering sawdust and calling it news. Now that the readers are leaving, people are wondering if maybe they can do something different to get readers again. The answer is simple, start producing news again.
Write about things that you care about and that your community cares about, and you’ll find readers. Until then, the discussions about revenue models are a bit like discussions of whether you try to milk your dying goat before or after you feed it more sawdust.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 07:35
Ted Turner and Ned Lamont at #ccsu
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/07/2009 - 19:05
New Britain – Tuesday afternoon, as a stop on Ted Turner’s whirlwind speaking tour of Connecticut, Ted, as he insists on being called, together with Ned Lamont spoke to a large group of students and guests at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU).
In a rapid fire chat, Ned, who was introduced as a distinguished professor of political science, started off by introducing Ted, asking a few preliminary questions, and turning it over to a long question and answer question with the crowd.
One of the first questions was what students who are about to graduate from CCSU should consider for their careers. Mr. Turner, who made a fortune off of television, starting with a small UHF channel, and ultimately launching CNN, TBS and owning the Atlanta Braves, suggested staying away from television. There are 200 channels out there already, he said. No, Ted suggested, replacing Mr. McGuire’s line “Plastics” from The Graduate: “Clean Renewable Energy”. He spoke about his own investments in solar and his plans to expand his investments in other forms of clean renewable energy.
Concerning politics, Ted recounted when he met Fidel Castro. He asked Castro why Cuba was operating in Central America, and Castro asked Turner why the United States was operating in Central America. It provided an important underlying theme for his talk. Don’t expect other countries not to do things that the United States is doing.
He returned to this theme later when he spoke about nuclear proliferation. If we want countries to not have nuclear weapons, we need to lead by example. He talked about the 1968 non-proliferation treaty, and read part of it about countries seeking to decrease the number of nuclear weapons and suggested that the United States was doing about as good on that treaty as it had on treaties with Native Americans.
Early on, he spoke about endangered species. When he spoke about ‘godless commies’, a line that received a laugh, he suggested that communists are perhaps more of an endanger species that various animals on the endangered species list.
On the media, he spoke about the importance of news organizations focusing on delivering news, and not on presenting personalities. When asked about media consolidation, he quipped that he only approved of it if he was the one in charge of consolidated media. It was part of a long rambling set of questions that also talked about profits in media, to which Ted asked what profits had to do with media consolidation.
He suggested that it was the Internet that was the demise of newspapers. In a discussion after the main event, he went on to say that the problem is that newspapers haven’t adjusted their business model to deal with the instantaneous and less expensive delivery of news that the Internet provides.
He had a quick witty response to just about every question that was thrown at him, until the final question. He was asked what one thing that he learned over his seventy years did he wish he had learned earlier.
He did not come up with a specific thing that he had learned, but he noted that his greatest regret was that he had three failed marriages. He spoke about having remained on friendly terms with his ex’s and even did a plug for ’33 Variations’ which is now on Broadway starring his ex-wife Jane Fonda.
Always on the run, he spoke briefly with alumni and guests at a special reception before running off to his next event. This nonstop energy has led to many of his greatest successes, but also probably contributed to the demise of his marriages.
