Monthly Archives: December 2009

Is Handwriting on the Way Out?

writing

I do hope so. Can’t bloody stand the stuff, par­tic­u­larly the cursive.

Anne Trubek:

Proclaiming the vir­tu­ous­ness of one way of form­ing a “j” over oth­ers is a trope that occurs through­out handwriting’s his­tory. For instance, early Christians jet­tisoned Roman scripts they deemed dec­ad­ent and pagan. In their scrip­toria, monks developed Uncial to replace Roman scripts. An interne­cine battle ensued when Irish monks developed a vari­ation on Uncial that tra­di­tion­al­ists deemed an upstart, quasi-heretical script.

Via Miller-McCune.

★ Audiobooks and DRM

publishing, , , , ,

For those of you who don’t know — and there’s no reason, per­haps, that you should — DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it is a tech­no­logy by which con­tent dis­trib­ut­ors (record com­pan­ies, for the most part) attempt to con­trol how a cus­tomer exper­i­ences their product.

Now, audiobooks.

The start­ing pis­tol for Internet-distributed audiobooks has been fired and Audible.com is at the ‘b’ of the bang. They have a huge selec­tion of titles read by great act­ors and if you go for one of their monthly plans, like I do, you can enjoy two books per month for very little cash. Top drawer.

The trouble? Audible’s titles are DRM’d. That is, they are locked down tight. Countless are the times I’ve said to a friend of mine, ‘Oh, you’d love this book I’m listen­ing to…’ and then trail off because I know I won’t be able to lend it. The DRM means only a few machines I’ve nom­in­ated can play­back the audio.

Well, this stinks. That much is obvi­ous. But you’d think that Audible are doing this because of the pres­sures put upon them by pub­lish­ers. It turns out that this is not neces­sar­ily the case. In an art­icle for Publisher’s Weekly art­icle, Cory Doctorow (whose book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I review here) relates the saga of try­ing to get (i) his pub­lisher, then (ii) Audible, then (iii) the online Apple iTunes store to offer his new book without DRM. Thus far, he’s only man­aged to con­vince the first two.

Audiobooks are fant­astic. They are unabridged, high-quality record­ings of stor­ies that you can enjoy when you’re out walk­ing, doing the dishes, or work­ing out. If Steve Jobs — and there­fore Apple — is ser­i­ous about his atti­tude towards DRM, he should make sure the online Apple store sup­ports pure, unfiddled-with MP3s for both music and the spoken word.

I’m pretty sure this is what read­ers want. It’s what I want.

As a coda, you can down­load an audiobook of the first edi­tion of Déjà Vu here — for £500.

H’only jok­ing! It is, of course, free as in air.

Ommwriter

writing

There is an emer­ging genre of what might be called the min­im­al­ist word pro­cessor (cf. Scrivener, Write Room). These applic­a­tions are designed to cut away visual dis­trac­tion and leave the screen look­ing some­what like a plain sheet of paper in a type­writer (or, if that’s too far back for you, then look­ing like an old pre-GUI text editor).

Ommwriter — for that is its name of one such — is avail­able as a beta from here. You just need to provide a valid email address to obtain the down­load link.

Text is entered into a small win­dow that floats above a back­ground. By default, this back­ground is a snowy scene with two black trees off to one side. Otherwise you see noth­ing but the blink­ing cursor and the text you type.

That’s about it.

I’m impressed. If there’s any­thing dif­fi­cult about writ­ing on a com­puter — which, let’s face it, makes it easy in a mind-bogglingly large num­ber of ways — it is distraction.

★ Writing Workshops

writing

James Burt, in ref­er­ence to his own post on Literature Network about writ­ing work­shops, says:

At the moment I don’t feel com­fort­able with writ­ing work­shops, but I know my writ­ing has improved in the past through many of the tal­en­ted people I have work­shopped with.

That goes for me, too.

The piece makes sev­eral good points. At the end of the day, I feel that a work­shop full of writers is an unpre­dict­able, chaotic entity that is unusu­ally sus­cept­ible to ini­tial con­di­tions.

As I said, I’ve been lucky with writers’ groups. Here’s what I’ve found over the years:

  • In any group of people, there will be some whose opin­ions are plain wrong. It can be dif­fi­cult to identify those people.
  • A fel­low writer whom you admire per­son­ally can read out some­thing that is abso­lutely awful. This will make for an uncom­fort­able moment when you try to give them hon­est feedback.
  • Without hon­est feed­back, a writ­ing group is a point­less talk­ing shop char­ac­ter­ised by commiseration.
  • There is a bias towards short fic­tion because this involves less work for those in the work­shop than longer pieces. Through a form of cog­nit­ive dis­son­ance, this can bol­ster the idea that short fic­tion is a higher or purer form of fic­tion than the longer variety.
  • It is not the case, as far as I can tell, that other writers can provide you with use­ful feed­back just because they are try­ing to write too.
  • These people do know what it’s like to try and crash.

Random Feedback

science fiction

Reader, it has been a long day. I spent the early part of this morn­ing prep­ping for two hours of sem­inars on mul­tiple regres­sion (if you don’t know what this is, you don’t want to; if you do know what this, you prob­ably still don’t want to), and this after­noon was whittled away prep­ping for four hours of sem­inars start­ing at 9 a.m. tomor­row morning.

In sum­mary, I’m often grumpy on Tuesday afternoons.

And then I received this email:

I just wanted to say thank you for releas­ing your book as an audio book — I’ve thor­oughly enjoyed listen­ing to it!

Hope you release another one soon!

This is, of course, lovely.

Déjà Vu (the first edi­tion) is avail­able as an audiobook here. (Though the improved spe­cial edi­tion is here.)