I loved Dirty Dancing. I think I wore out our beta player watching that movie when I was a kid. I didn't understand the whole sex part of it (being only seven when it first came out in theatres), but I knew Jennifer Grey was the luckiest girl in the world cuz Patrick Swayze was hands down the coolest guy in the world.
A cowboy ballroom dancer. A man not afraid to shake his booty and still macho as the day is long. Point Break, Ghost... yeah, he could be a sympathetic action villain and then emote with the best of them, but Dirty Dancing was his movie. And it has become a cultural icon. Yeah, it's campy and I can't hear "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" without snickering like the seven year old I was when I first saw it, but I still love every delicious second of it. The dancing, the music, the melodrama. Love it, love it, love it.
You will be missed, Mr. Swayze.
And just to show that I'm not alone in calling myself a member of the Dirty Dancing generation... a wedding video:
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Admirable Heroines and Positive Reinforcement
Last week while I was out of the country, Tracy Wolff guest blogged over at Damned Scribbling Women and talked all about her strong heroines and what she learns from each of them. Check it out. (Comment over there and you could win a book!)
I just loved this post. I've been thinking a lot lately about whether people who read books with positive reinforcement of positive traits - doing the right thing even when it's hard or taking a chance that pays off - would be more likely to do the right thing in real life. Do you think we are subtly influenced by the stories we read? Can we learn from the fiction around us? Can books actually make us better people?
When I'm reading most books, I'm not actively thinking about how they are affecting my moral compass. Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos was one memorable exception. I remember I felt like seeing Cornelia make what I felt were the right choices made me more likely to make good choices. I admired her. Perhaps that is a unique distinction. There are many heroines I like, respect, relate to, or all of the above, but the number of fictional women I actively admire is a small one. Admiration is a strong motivator. I want to be like Cornelia. And I couldn't care less about the fact that she is a fictional construct of Marisa de los Santos's imagination. She's real to me.
Your thoughts? Can books make us good? Or, conversely, convince us that bad behaviour is acceptable by their example?
I just loved this post. I've been thinking a lot lately about whether people who read books with positive reinforcement of positive traits - doing the right thing even when it's hard or taking a chance that pays off - would be more likely to do the right thing in real life. Do you think we are subtly influenced by the stories we read? Can we learn from the fiction around us? Can books actually make us better people?
When I'm reading most books, I'm not actively thinking about how they are affecting my moral compass. Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos was one memorable exception. I remember I felt like seeing Cornelia make what I felt were the right choices made me more likely to make good choices. I admired her. Perhaps that is a unique distinction. There are many heroines I like, respect, relate to, or all of the above, but the number of fictional women I actively admire is a small one. Admiration is a strong motivator. I want to be like Cornelia. And I couldn't care less about the fact that she is a fictional construct of Marisa de los Santos's imagination. She's real to me.
Your thoughts? Can books make us good? Or, conversely, convince us that bad behaviour is acceptable by their example?
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Business Time, Baby
Dude. Giving serious thought to moving south of the equator. Partially because this is so damn funny.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Best Blog Post Evah.
I have emerged from the wilds of the Canadian Yukon victorious. I will now be basking in Alaska winter awesomeness for the next several months. Woot!
After digging myself out from the mountain of emails I acquired while I was on the Alcan and out of internet range, I began puttering around the internet this morning and I tripped across THIS. Click it. You know you wanna.
What is this, you may ask? Well, friends, this is only a beautifully-written, spot-on blog post by Josh Olson, screenwriter of A History of Violence, about the cruelty of overinflating undeserving egos and many other brilliant nuances. He was asked to read a screenplay synopsis by an acquaintance and... well, you can pretty much guess how the story goes from there, can't you? But seriously read the post. It's so awesome.
I feel like I've been on both sides in a way. I'm no Picasso, but I've been asked to read novels, queries, and synopses, and when I'm asked, I say no. Hate me, I'm okay with that, but I do have logistical reasons - I'm busy with my own writing, I have commitments to my critique partners for their reads, and when I have free time in my writing schedule, I will volunteer to judge a contest for unpublished writers. If you enter a contest, you've shown me that 1) you take your writing seriously enough to slap down an entry fee, even if it's only ten bucks, and 2) you are looking for honest, anonymous feedback from an impartial source. When you ask me in person if I will read your unpublished manuscript and give you a quote to put on your website about how much I loved it... I feel like you don't really want my opinion, you want my rubber stamp of how awesome you are. I don't do rubber stamps.
On the other side, I ask people to read my works-in-progress. I am a bad judge of my own work and I need outside eyes to let me know if I'm going off course. Beta readers. Lots of authors have them. As a supplicant, my frustration is in finding beta readers who will give me honest reactions. They've been broken by the rah-rah society that lies to people about their skills. Singing the praises of something that doesn't deserve praise isn't gonna do me any good. But neither is dissecting and shredding it just to show you can. The art of constructive criticism is highly undervalued. But I can take criticism. I can even take shredding.
As Josh Olson says, "not only is it cruel to encourage the hopeless, but you cannot discourage a writer. If someone can talk you out of being a writer, you're not a writer. If I can talk you out of being a writer, I've done you a favor, because now you'll be free to pursue your real talent, whatever that may be. And, for the record, everybody has one. The lucky ones figure out what that is. The unlucky ones keep on writing shitty screenplays and asking me to read them."
No one could talk me out of being a writer. So could you just be honest with me?
People just wanting rubber stamps is bigger than just the arts. You think this is just about me? Let's look at the trend of "social promotion" in schools. A kid fails a subject or an entire grade but is passed on to the next, and the next, and the next, all because we don't want to permanently damage his self esteem by forcing him to actually learn in order to advance. I realize that different students have different needs. But students with those needs should not get the exact same diploma as the student who worked their butt off and passed every class. It's a disservice to EVERYONE. Let's worry less about self esteem and more about producing functional, productive human beings, shall we?
Could everyone just stop being so damn nice? Please? It's not helping.
After digging myself out from the mountain of emails I acquired while I was on the Alcan and out of internet range, I began puttering around the internet this morning and I tripped across THIS. Click it. You know you wanna.
What is this, you may ask? Well, friends, this is only a beautifully-written, spot-on blog post by Josh Olson, screenwriter of A History of Violence, about the cruelty of overinflating undeserving egos and many other brilliant nuances. He was asked to read a screenplay synopsis by an acquaintance and... well, you can pretty much guess how the story goes from there, can't you? But seriously read the post. It's so awesome.
I feel like I've been on both sides in a way. I'm no Picasso, but I've been asked to read novels, queries, and synopses, and when I'm asked, I say no. Hate me, I'm okay with that, but I do have logistical reasons - I'm busy with my own writing, I have commitments to my critique partners for their reads, and when I have free time in my writing schedule, I will volunteer to judge a contest for unpublished writers. If you enter a contest, you've shown me that 1) you take your writing seriously enough to slap down an entry fee, even if it's only ten bucks, and 2) you are looking for honest, anonymous feedback from an impartial source. When you ask me in person if I will read your unpublished manuscript and give you a quote to put on your website about how much I loved it... I feel like you don't really want my opinion, you want my rubber stamp of how awesome you are. I don't do rubber stamps.
On the other side, I ask people to read my works-in-progress. I am a bad judge of my own work and I need outside eyes to let me know if I'm going off course. Beta readers. Lots of authors have them. As a supplicant, my frustration is in finding beta readers who will give me honest reactions. They've been broken by the rah-rah society that lies to people about their skills. Singing the praises of something that doesn't deserve praise isn't gonna do me any good. But neither is dissecting and shredding it just to show you can. The art of constructive criticism is highly undervalued. But I can take criticism. I can even take shredding.
As Josh Olson says, "not only is it cruel to encourage the hopeless, but you cannot discourage a writer. If someone can talk you out of being a writer, you're not a writer. If I can talk you out of being a writer, I've done you a favor, because now you'll be free to pursue your real talent, whatever that may be. And, for the record, everybody has one. The lucky ones figure out what that is. The unlucky ones keep on writing shitty screenplays and asking me to read them."
No one could talk me out of being a writer. So could you just be honest with me?
People just wanting rubber stamps is bigger than just the arts. You think this is just about me? Let's look at the trend of "social promotion" in schools. A kid fails a subject or an entire grade but is passed on to the next, and the next, and the next, all because we don't want to permanently damage his self esteem by forcing him to actually learn in order to advance. I realize that different students have different needs. But students with those needs should not get the exact same diploma as the student who worked their butt off and passed every class. It's a disservice to EVERYONE. Let's worry less about self esteem and more about producing functional, productive human beings, shall we?
Could everyone just stop being so damn nice? Please? It's not helping.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Genetically Predisposed to Wander
My dad is not a great believer in genealogy. The statistical likelihood that you can really trace your ancestors back to Eleanor of Aquitaine or Robert the Bruce... well, the odds aren't so great. Records just weren't kept and, for most of us, tracing our ancestral lineage is a series of dead ends and best guesses. Even if you're relatively sure you're making a good guess, the odds stack against you pretty quickly.
But I'm still fascinated by the possibilities. I'm probably descended from Pilgrims. I'm possibly related to Swedish nobility. On my mother's side there is a dramatic father-died-in-the-Civil-War-while-mother-was-pregnant-with story and my father's side has the tragic father-died-in-railroad-accident-while-mother-was-pregnant-with story. (As well as the story of the distant uncle who got drunk, yelled charge, fell off his horse and was trampled by his own men.) They may just be family legend, but they are fun.
And then there are the things which we can actually prove.
I'm a nomad. The travel bug bit me early and never let go. Could that be a genetic predisposition? In my ancestry are pilgrims and pioneers. A Swedish great-great-grandmother left home at fourteen to travel to America. My ancestors moved to Hawaii, Alaska, & Hong Kong, before it was easy to do so. I am by no means the first in my family to travel to far-flung places. Is it in the blood?
Ah, but see, there's a problem with that. Those pilgrims? They found their way to Ohio and settled there for three hundred years. Those pioneers? They just spent over a hundred years in the same spot in Oregon. For every adventurer in my bloodstream, there seem to be five who stood still so long they took root and became trees.
Is adventure a recessive trait? Or is the idea of a genetic predisposition toward travel just a fanciful fiction? Are we only as bound by the tradition of our ancestors as we wish to be? Picking the genetic precursors that suit us? Or is this itch I get in my feet before I take off a genetic condition?
Either way, I'm driving up the Alaska-Canadian highway right now...
But I'm still fascinated by the possibilities. I'm probably descended from Pilgrims. I'm possibly related to Swedish nobility. On my mother's side there is a dramatic father-died-in-the-Civil-War-while-mother-was-pregnant-with story and my father's side has the tragic father-died-in-railroad-accident-while-mother-was-pregnant-with story. (As well as the story of the distant uncle who got drunk, yelled charge, fell off his horse and was trampled by his own men.) They may just be family legend, but they are fun.
And then there are the things which we can actually prove.
I'm a nomad. The travel bug bit me early and never let go. Could that be a genetic predisposition? In my ancestry are pilgrims and pioneers. A Swedish great-great-grandmother left home at fourteen to travel to America. My ancestors moved to Hawaii, Alaska, & Hong Kong, before it was easy to do so. I am by no means the first in my family to travel to far-flung places. Is it in the blood?
Ah, but see, there's a problem with that. Those pilgrims? They found their way to Ohio and settled there for three hundred years. Those pioneers? They just spent over a hundred years in the same spot in Oregon. For every adventurer in my bloodstream, there seem to be five who stood still so long they took root and became trees.
Is adventure a recessive trait? Or is the idea of a genetic predisposition toward travel just a fanciful fiction? Are we only as bound by the tradition of our ancestors as we wish to be? Picking the genetic precursors that suit us? Or is this itch I get in my feet before I take off a genetic condition?
Either way, I'm driving up the Alaska-Canadian highway right now...
Friday, September 4, 2009
Google Competing for Most Punkass Mega-Corp
So the other day, I'm listening to NPR as I drive through North Dakota and a segment comes on about the Google Books Settlement. What's that, you ask? Well, here's the sitch. A while back (2004, I think) Google decided to take a bunch of copyrighted material, scan it, and make it digitally available for the world to see... without notifying the rightsholders that they were doing this, asking permission or offering remuneration in the form of, oh, I dunno, maybe royalties? Bonus.
It's like Napster. If Napster were a MegaCorp who ought to freaking know better. This isn't some random college kid sharing files. This is Google. They have a freaking legal department. Where were all the lawyers? Out to lunch? Taking a cruise to the Bahamas together in some kind of high rent teambuilding exercise?
The Author's Guild and American Association of Publishers (two organizations composed of said rightsholders) exclaimed en masse, "WTF, yo!" and sued their sorry asses. Google was all, "Whoops! Were those your books?" and offered a settlement. Authors are automatically covered under this settlement whether they are members of the Author's Guild or not - unless they opt out (which must be done by TODAY, so you if you're an author feeling opty now's the time, boys and girls).
Anyway, the thing that cracked me up was a comment by the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin. Let's call him Sergey. So NPR chick asks Sergey the NPR equivalent of "Did it not occur to you to wait until you had permission to scan and distribute all this copyrighted material, you idiot?" And Sergey was all, "The library at Alexandria burned to the ground, dude! We must have backups and we must have them now!" (By the way, all "quotes" are not actually "quotes". I am enthusiastically "paraphrasing". If you want to read the "real story", you should GO HERE. But he really did throw out the library at Alexandria as an excuse. Classic.)
So yeah, Sergey is burning down the library at Alexandria. Therefore all knowledge must be digital knowledge! At this point, I would like to take Sergey aside and explain two very important concepts to him. We'll forget about copyright law for the moment, since he's more concerned about the good of humanity(authors not being members of humanity, har har).
Concept #1: The Printing Press. I know, I know, this is a new fangled technology and new technologies can be intimidating. We're all used to books being hand-written on scrolls and stored in one location, but the times, they are a'changing, boys and girls. That wacky Guttenburg. What the heck was he thinking? You mean now we can actually make more than one copy of a book? There might be a large "print run". Oooooh. Aaaaah. And those multiple copies will be stored in several different places... like libraries and bookstores across the country, nay, the world! In such a wide variety of locations, in fact, that should all of those texts burn up in a fire, we will have much bigger problems (APOCALYPSE!!!) and I'm betting the internet will be down too. No offense, Sergey, but how is your search engine going to function when we have no electricity because the zombies have demolished our technological infrastructure? Huh?
Concept #2: The Library of Congress. Nifty place. They do this thing where they keep a copy of every book. Ever. Seriously. How cool is that? So... oddly enough, all this information is stored in one place. And you're right, Sergey, that it isn't a digital place, but The Library of Congress is also not being sued by a buttload of really pissed off people whose rights they violated in a massive way.
I don't have a problem with the digitization of information. I actually think it's a pretty great goal. A lot of academic writers would just as soon see their books reach an internet audience. Books that are out of copyright? By all means, digitize those puppies. It's the fact that no effort was made to even locate the rightsholders of books that are currently still in copyright to establish whether they would like them to be available for free on Google. That bugs me.
There's this nifty thing. It's a copyright page. Right in the front of the book you're illegally scanning. It tells you who the copyright holder is. Track that person down, send them an email, find out if it's okay with them. You can't find them? Huh. That's odd. The publishers pretty much all have web sites. And the authors? Most of them do too. Maybe you should try Googling them. It's your fricking search engine.
It's like Napster. If Napster were a MegaCorp who ought to freaking know better. This isn't some random college kid sharing files. This is Google. They have a freaking legal department. Where were all the lawyers? Out to lunch? Taking a cruise to the Bahamas together in some kind of high rent teambuilding exercise?
The Author's Guild and American Association of Publishers (two organizations composed of said rightsholders) exclaimed en masse, "WTF, yo!" and sued their sorry asses. Google was all, "Whoops! Were those your books?" and offered a settlement. Authors are automatically covered under this settlement whether they are members of the Author's Guild or not - unless they opt out (which must be done by TODAY, so you if you're an author feeling opty now's the time, boys and girls).
Anyway, the thing that cracked me up was a comment by the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin. Let's call him Sergey. So NPR chick asks Sergey the NPR equivalent of "Did it not occur to you to wait until you had permission to scan and distribute all this copyrighted material, you idiot?" And Sergey was all, "The library at Alexandria burned to the ground, dude! We must have backups and we must have them now!" (By the way, all "quotes" are not actually "quotes". I am enthusiastically "paraphrasing". If you want to read the "real story", you should GO HERE. But he really did throw out the library at Alexandria as an excuse. Classic.)
So yeah, Sergey is burning down the library at Alexandria. Therefore all knowledge must be digital knowledge! At this point, I would like to take Sergey aside and explain two very important concepts to him. We'll forget about copyright law for the moment, since he's more concerned about the good of humanity(authors not being members of humanity, har har).
Concept #1: The Printing Press. I know, I know, this is a new fangled technology and new technologies can be intimidating. We're all used to books being hand-written on scrolls and stored in one location, but the times, they are a'changing, boys and girls. That wacky Guttenburg. What the heck was he thinking? You mean now we can actually make more than one copy of a book? There might be a large "print run". Oooooh. Aaaaah. And those multiple copies will be stored in several different places... like libraries and bookstores across the country, nay, the world! In such a wide variety of locations, in fact, that should all of those texts burn up in a fire, we will have much bigger problems (APOCALYPSE!!!) and I'm betting the internet will be down too. No offense, Sergey, but how is your search engine going to function when we have no electricity because the zombies have demolished our technological infrastructure? Huh?
Concept #2: The Library of Congress. Nifty place. They do this thing where they keep a copy of every book. Ever. Seriously. How cool is that? So... oddly enough, all this information is stored in one place. And you're right, Sergey, that it isn't a digital place, but The Library of Congress is also not being sued by a buttload of really pissed off people whose rights they violated in a massive way.
I don't have a problem with the digitization of information. I actually think it's a pretty great goal. A lot of academic writers would just as soon see their books reach an internet audience. Books that are out of copyright? By all means, digitize those puppies. It's the fact that no effort was made to even locate the rightsholders of books that are currently still in copyright to establish whether they would like them to be available for free on Google. That bugs me.
There's this nifty thing. It's a copyright page. Right in the front of the book you're illegally scanning. It tells you who the copyright holder is. Track that person down, send them an email, find out if it's okay with them. You can't find them? Huh. That's odd. The publishers pretty much all have web sites. And the authors? Most of them do too. Maybe you should try Googling them. It's your fricking search engine.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
A Great Day for Contests!
You know those days when everything just seems to be going perfectly? This is one of those. :) 1. Katie Graykowski & Jamie Michelle, fellow Golden Heart Finalists, are finalist in my local chapter's contest, the Emerald City Opener, and the Reveal Your Inner Vixen contest, respectively.
2. Kinsey Holley, fellow Shifting Dreams anthology author and scribe of the brilliant Kiss & Kin (if you haven't read it, what are you waiting for?) is a finalist in the Reveal Your Inner Vixen contest!
3. Kate Diamond, fellow Damned Scribbling Woman, is a double finalist in the Emerald City Opener!!
It's a good day to be a contest finalist, ladies! Congratulations and may your final round judges fall in love with your writing and offer you beaucoup bucks and multi-book deals!
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Nervous Nelly
Hello, darlings. I'm over at the Damned Scribbling Women blog today, talking about my latest nervous breakdown. http://www.dscribwomen.blogspot.com/ Please swing on by if you have a cure for the mid-manuscript doldrums or just want to commiserate over my neurotic loss of confidence.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
