The Google Book Settlement and I

I’ve spent most of this morn­ing read­ing through some doc­u­ment­a­tion sent to me by John Jarrold, my agent, con­cern­ing the Google Book Settlement. Google is in the pro­cess of digit­ising books. It began this, and has con­tin­ued to do so, largely without the per­mis­sion of rights holders.

The issues are com­plex. Even the sum­mary I read con­tained sev­eral state­ments to the effect that we simply won’t how aspects of the agree­ment will be inter­preted until they are tested in a court. Adding to the com­plex­ity is a mish-mash of UK and US jur­is­dic­tional problems.

Overall, I don’t think Google’s actions are legal; opt­ing in to the set­tle­ment will sug­gest I agree with the legit­im­isa­tion of an illegal act, which I don’t. It rep­res­ents a fun­da­mental change to copy­right law that puts the onus on rights hold­ers to defend them­selves against behemothic entities.

If you’d like to know more, here is the Google Book Settlement Page; and here is a sum­mary by Gillian Spraggs.

Is Handwriting on the Way Out?

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.

Ommwriter

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

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.

Guide to Literary Agents — Word Count for Novels and Children’s Books: The Definitive Post

Via @BubbleCow, a site called guidetoliteraryagents.com has a few notes on word counts for nov­els. I don’t know what oth­ers think, but the num­bers tally with my gen­eral impressions.

Word count	Comment
80,000 — 89,999	Totally cool
90,000 — 99,999	Generally safe
70,000 — 79,999	Might be too short; prob­ably all right
100,000 — 109,999	Might be too long; probably all right
Below 70,000	Too short
110,000 or above	Too long

► Guide to Literary Agents — Word Count for Novels and Children’s Books: The Definitive Post

★ How Not to Be a Dick

An art­icle has passed my nose once or twice this week, ten­nis ball stylee. It’s by a man called Josh Olson, a screen­writer whose cred­its include the script for A History of Violence (itself based on the graphic novel of the same name). The art­icle is entitled — and the eas­ily offen­ded might want to cover their eyes at this point — ‘I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script’.

In it, Olson writes enter­tain­ingly about how he is forced to turn down requests by non-professionals to read spec­u­lat­ive film scripts.

Here’s a bit that’s been quoted fre­quently around the web:

​I will not read your fuck­ing script.

That’s simple enough, isn’t it? “I will not read your fuck­ing script.” What’s not clear about that? There’s noth­ing per­sonal about it, noth­ing loaded, noth­ing com­plic­ated. I simply have no interest in read­ing your fuck­ing screen­play. None whatsoever.

He goes on:

[…] If you’re inter­ested in grow­ing as a human being and recog­niz­ing that it is, in fact, you who are the dick in this situ­ation, please read on.

Yes. That’s right. I called you a dick. Because you cre­ated this situ­ation. You put me in this spot where my only option is to acqui­esce to your demands or be the bad guy. That, my friend, is the very defin­i­tion of a dick move.

It is entirely pos­sible that the per­son Olson refers to here is a genu­ine dick. There are some twenty-four carat dicks in the world; I’ve met some myself. However, there are occa­sions when a per­son puts you in a place where the only pos­sible out­comes will present you in a bad light because you can’t cope. It sug­gests to me that some grow­ing might be pos­sible on both sides. However, I didn’t write this art­icle to dis­pense pop psy­cho­logy. I’ve got some swear­ing of my own to do.

It rarely takes more than a page to recog­nize that you’re in the pres­ence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sen­tence to know you’re deal­ing with someone who can’t.

(By the way, here’s a simple way to find out if you’re a writer. If you dis­agree with that state­ment, you’re not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

My response to this is pre­dic­ated on being a teacher first and a writer second. In par­tic­u­lar, I’ve worked with some people who find it dif­fi­cult to express them­selves in writ­ten English. Essentially: Olson, belt up.

It is a per­sist­ent and toxic myth that the world is divided into those who can write and those who can­not. There was a time when Olson couldn’t write a damn. Me too, and my other writer friends. Like any appren­tice­ship, the road is long. Being labelled a ‘non-writer’ might well mean that your writ­ing is bloody awful — but that is rare. Most adult, nat­ive speak­ers of English who’ve read a good­ish num­ber of books, seen films, and can tell a story over the din­ner table or the pub, have the poten­tial to write some­thing that oth­ers might find com­pel­ling. Therefore, a pro­fes­sional writer can prob­ably come up with some­thing use­ful to tell the appren­tice writer.

Olson’s art­icle reads very much like a polemic writ­ten by a man who is pissed off with his cor­res­pond­ent (who replied to Olson’s dis­missal with a terse ‘Thanks for your opin­ion’) and prefers to share his response — essen­tially a ‘Don’t you know how busy I am?’ — with the world.

The thing is, would-be writers get vir­tu­ally no sup­port from the industry. Your manu­script will prob­ably get no feed­back from pub­lish­ers or agents bey­ond some­thing like ‘Your call is import­ant to us. Please hold and listen to Vivaldi for six months, then we’ll send you a post­card’. As a writer, you are expec­ted to present your­self to the pub­lish­ing industry fully formed. There is no uni­ver­sity for fic­tion (though some might think so). Manuscripts are not con­sidered with any due pro­cess or trans­par­ency. The sup­port net­work for writers com­prises, in effect, indi­vidu­als within the industry who are will­ing to give some of their time for free.

I’ve writ­ten about this before, but when I approached sev­eral estab­lished writers about read­ing my debut novel, I did not receive what I’ll term ‘Olson’s Dick Response’ (i.e. ‘I Will Not Read Your Fucking Book’) from any of them¹. You can see the product of that gen­er­os­ity in the quotes beneath the title of this blog.

I’m no angel myself. Would-be writers con­tact me with some reg­u­lar­ity, and if I have time — there’s not much of it — I’ll agree to per­use a chapter or two. A recent example is Stephen J. Sweeney’s The Honour of the Knights². Stephen sent me a polite email ask­ing if I’d read the book and I said, ‘Sure.’ As it hap­pens, because of work com­mit­ments, I’ve haven’t got fur­ther than a couple of chapters in — but the book is good and I’ve no doubt I’ll get round to fin­ish­ing it. The first scene, in which the main char­ac­ter par­ti­cip­ates in a space dog-fight, is com­pel­ling and character-driven. Now, OK; there are typos and what­not. No big­gie. Stephen is pound­ing pave­ments and get­ting his book into Waterstone’s (I know that pain) and doesn’t need people like me telling him to fuck off. If I like the book, I’ll do the nat­ural thing and review it, maybe bother someone fur­ther up the foodchain.

So, any­way: There are people in the industry who are not like Olson.

Confident or Delusional?

I’m delu­sional and I’m proud.

All writers need to be con­fid­ent. We must believe our work is worthy, that our efforts aren’t in vain.

But what are the dif­fer­ences between con­fid­ence, and its ugly step-sister, delusion?

► A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Confident or Delusional?

★ 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.
Read more →

How to write a book

I find the grind inter­est­ing. The grind of writ­ing. Which tools do writers use? This is the oppos­ite of the high flown, cre­at­ive stuff. This is not inspir­a­tion. This is about the coal face.

Steven Johnson, an American writer, uses DevonTHINK.

Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspir­ing quotes, which makes it seem far less daunt­ing. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

I use DevonTHINK too. And so does Michael Chabon.

► DIY: How to write a book — Boing Boing

What’s the story, Hocking?

It’s been an embar­rass­ingly long time since I updated this blog. The last proper entry was pos­ted on the 17th of March. While there are sev­eral reas­ons for the slow down — a trip to Germany, a ton of stu­dent mark­ing — the chief prob­lem is that this blog is meant to doc­u­ment my writ­ing life and, to put it plainly, I haven’t had much of a writ­ing life recently.
Read more →