Verisimilisomething

Tom Vowler on keep­ing it real in your book.

If the reader doesn’t believe the char­ac­ter would cheat on her hus­band, join a cult, drink drive…at that par­tic­u­lar time, you’ve lost them to implausibility.

Verisimilitude is like — well, it’s like music. You either hear it or you don’t. (Acknowledgment to Harlan Ellison.)

► Verisimilitude: I swear to tell the truth

Mentioning Bladerunner

I just did what I usu­ally do in such situ­ations — wave my hands around and men­tion “Bladerunner” a few times.

Yeah, I do this, too.
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Audio Rights and Wrongs

Paul Aitken, dir­ector of the Author’s Guild isn’t mustard-keen on a fea­ture of the new Amazon Kindle 2.0. If you down­load a book in text form, the Kindle will read it aloud.

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, exec­ut­ive dir­ector of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is deriv­at­ive under copy­right law.”

These are Neil Gaiman’s thoughts:

My point of view: When you buy a book, you’re also buy­ing the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by any­one, read it to your chil­dren on long car trips, record your­self read­ing it and send that to your girl­friend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the abil­ity to do the voices prop­erly, and no-one’s going to con­fuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors’ soci­et­ies or pub­lish­ers who are think­ing of spend­ing money on fight­ing a fun­da­ment­ally point­less legal case would be much bet­ter off tak­ing that money and advert­ising and pro­mot­ing what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.

I agree entirely with Mr Gaiman — as a reader, a listener and an author.

► Neil Gaiman’s Journal: Quick argu­ment summary

Props Daring Fireball and Boing Boing.

Roof Whirl Away by Tom Saunders

Some four years ago, I reviewed the first short story col­lec­tion of m’colleague Tom Saunders over at Spike Magazine. That was plain naughty, because our books were pub­lished by the same house, but I liked the stor­ies so much that I had to write the review. Tom is not the kind of writer you’ll in the pages of a lit­er­ary chat sheet¹ because he devotes his ener­gies full time to his stor­ies. It shows.

I’m happy to report that m’t’other col­league Roger Morris has reviewed Tom’s latest short fic­tion col­lec­tion Roof Whirl Away over at WriteWords.

Overall, what impresses most is the sheer range. Saunders is able to enter into the lives of his diverse char­ac­ters, from a king’s favour­ite dwarf to an alien life form, with great com­pas­sion and commitment.

► Roof Whirl Away by Tom Saunders

Coda: Check out this inter­view with Tom.

The man likes his Mac

We all do, of course. But author Christopher Fowler man­ages to make it sound creepy.

Do you think [your MacBook Air] will be obsol­ete in 10 years’ time?

No, just smal­ler, lighter, with more stor­age and func­tion­al­ity – and even sexier.

► Celebrity squares: Thriller writer Christopher Fowler is mys­ti­fied by PCs | Technology | guardian.co.uk

In the Offing

The Guardian’s Technology column has a few words on the appar­ent reluct­ance of the pub­lic to embrace e-books. They cite this par­al­lel with the nas­cent digital music industry.

The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of down­loads wasn’t because they had a start­ling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by build­ing a clever eco­sys­tem around the iPod (it didn’t launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because cus­tom­ers were choos­ing to pir­ate instead.

I’m not sure I buy this argu­ment. For my part, I was sold on the idea of music on my com­puter (it happened to be a PC in my stu­dent digs) just because it was con­veni­ent. E-books may or may not be a tar­get for pir­ates. I rather think, though, that audiobooks are much the riper for the pick­ing. (Cf. This recent talk by Stephen Fry in which he evan­gel­ises audiobooks.)

Carry on, m’hearties.

Handsomely now.

► Why aren’t ebooks tak­ing off? Not enough pir­ates | Technology | guardian.co.uk

BubbleCow

Gary Smailes over at BubbleCow, an editing/mentoring ser­vice, has inter­viewed your mod­est cor­res­pond­ent on the topic of writ­ing.
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★ Managing a novel

There is a sense in which a novel man­ages you, of course, and any notion of the reverse is a sign of devi­ant thinking.

I want to describe some of the tools I use to cre­ate books. There are word pro­cessors¹; inform­a­tion man­age­ment sys­tems²; spe­cial pens with little anim­als on the end³. But I want to write today about an applic­a­tion (Mac-only) that helps me keep track of those tasks that accrue in the pro­cess of edit­ing a novel.
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Mixing brains and computers

A recent BBC News Scotland story reports:

Researchers have moved closer to mak­ing sil­icon chips which could one day be used to repair dam­aged tis­sue in the human body. Edinburgh University has developed a tech­nique, which allows neur­ons to grow in fine, detailed pat­terns on the sur­face of tiny com­puter chips.

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Roger Morris: On the Page and in your Ears

My read­ing life has been trans­formed by the dis­cov­ery of audiobooks. There’s noth­ing quite like hav­ing a tal­en­ted actor per­form a text. I pleased to announce, then, that Roger Morris’s book A Vengeful Longing¹ is avail­able in audio format.
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