With regard to the upcoming election: What John Scalzi said.
This Is About as Political as I Ever Get
With regard to the upcoming election: What John Scalzi said.
Tag: other people saying interesting things
A Trio of Links
The Folger Library is sending Shakespeare’s First Folio on tour. It’ll be making one stop in each of the fifty states, including Hawaii and Alaska; you can find your state’s Shakespeare stop here.
Also, a reminder for writers who might want to transform lived experience or known history into fiction: Fiction has to be believable, while reality is under no such constraint.
And finally, an interview with one of the many authors over the decades who have been Carolyn Keene, about writing Nancy Drew novels. Full disclosure: I’ve never been Carolyn Keene, but I have been one-half of Victor Appleton. Twice. And I can vouch for the truth of this article.
My only beef is with the interviewer and/or the editor on the Slate end of things, who persist in referring to the author as a “ghostwriter.” She was not – and doesn’t call herself one. A ghostwriter is writing under the name of, and in the persona of, an actual person who is the purported author of the book. Sometimes this is a flagrant pretense, but sometimes it’s for a good reason – if, for example, the “author” has an important or interesting story to tell, but absolutely no writing chops whatsoever.
At any rate, a writer for the Nancy Drew books, or the Tom Swift books, or any of a number of syndicated properties, is not a ghost writer. The proper term for what they’re doing is writing under a house name – so-called because the name “Carolyn Keene” or “Victor Appleton” or whatever is owned by the publishing house, not by the writer of a particular book. Which is how I can have in my personal library a Tom Swift hardcover from the mid-1920’s that used to belong to my father, and a couple of Tom Swift paperbacks from the early 1990’s that were co-authored by me and Jim Macdonald.
And “Victor Appleton” wrote them all.
A Trio of Assorted Links
A guide to semicolon usage, with illustrations. Some people find semicolons intimidating; this is the post for them. Other people love semicolons not necessarily wisely, but too well; I’m not sure if there is any help for us.
An article on Slate, ranting about the overuse of unnecessary synonyms for “said.” I’ll be over here on the sidelines, waving my pompoms in enthusiastic agreement. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, “said” is all you need, assuming you need a dialogue attribution tag at all.
And Great Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council has released a digitized collection of Jane Austen’s manuscripts, including drafts and juvenilia. I love living in the internet age, I really do . . . time was, to see something like this, you’d have had to make a trip (in the case of Jane Austen’s MSS, a number of different trips) to visit the material in person.
My Co-Author is Having Fun Again
The current political circus (although if it’s a circus, it’s rapidly turning into an old-style Roman one) has inspired him to take up the partisan cudgels on behalf of . . . the Whigs. No, not the Modern Whig party, and not the historical British Whig party, either. He’s cheering for the old-style American Whig party of the mid-nineteenth century, some of whose positions became more popular in retrospect than they were at the time, such as favoring Emancipation and opposing Indian Removal.
To that end, he has unearthed from the depths of the internet The National Clay Minstrel, and Frelinghuysen Melodist, for the Presidential Canvass of 1844. Being a collection of all the new popular Whig songs, and is amusing himself with providing annotations.
(Did you know that the symbolic animal for the Whigs was . . . the raccoon? I didn’t, until just now.)
Today’s Random Thought
When a writer for a major urban news and entertainment magazine can couch an entire political column in terms of an extended gaming metaphor, it’s time for the hardcore old-timers (and even harder-core johnny-come-latelies) to give up thinking that they’re still a misunderstood minority.
Face it, folks, gaming is mainstream.
And I say this as somebody who was playing D&D back when there were no pre-fab dungeon adventures available, never mind computers, and it was all done with dice, pencils, graph paper, and the insides of our heads.
Matters of Definition; or, Why Definitions Matter
Let’s talk for a minute about this petition in support of Congressional Resolution 642, and why it’s a good thing. The petition asks for Congress to declare magic – stage magic, that is – an art form. That’s all. (And if dance – which also requires a high level of skill, and takes years of practice to learn, and is performed for the benefit of an audience – is an art form, then stage magic certainly is, too.) The resolution doesn’t ask the government for money, or for special laws; it only asks for a definition.
What difference, one may ask, will an official government definition make? It means protection, for one thing: Everybody who works in a creative or performing field knows that “art” gets more respect, and gets cut more slack, than “entertainment” does if it happens to upset the powerful or well-connected – or just the easily-offended – people of this world. It also means preservation: It’s a lot easier to find sponsorship and funding and archival resources for the history of an art form than for ephemeral entertainment. (We pause here to weep for lost Dr. Who episodes, and early movies where the only surviving film stock was destroyed for the sake of retrieving the silver nitrate, and the countless comic book collections thrown away in the spring-cleaning trash.) And it can mean promotion, especially in the form of funding: If stage magic is an officially-designated art form, then it becomes a lot easier for magicians to apply for grants and similar programs that will allow them to develop and refine their art, and to pass it along to another generation.
Which brings me to another, related matter of definition (or, strictly speaking, orthography). I used to get vaguely irritated by the use of the alternate spelling “magick”, as used by Wiccans and other pagans to refer to an aspect of their spiritual practices, mostly because the sorting-box in my brain kept putting it into the same container as “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” and other faux-forsoothery.
But over time, I’ve come around to an appreciation for the alternate spelling. If its use can keep stage magicians from being denounced as tools of Satan by the sort of people who think that Satan has nothing better to do than seduce people into iniquity with a linking-rings routine, and keep practitioners of Wicca from being asked to pull rabbits out of hats or do card tricks . . . then I say it’s a good distinction, and we should keep it around.
A Public Service Announcement
More Movie Viewing
This time, Jim Macdonald (husband and co-author) reports on a horror movie, over here.
Presented for Your Amusement
A bit of seasonal humor, from the archives of The Toast: The Passive-Aggressive Guide to Book Gifting. As always, read the comments, too; The Toast is one of the few sites on the net where doing so adds value to the experience, rather than making the reader despair of humanity.
Also, a research source: The New York Public Library has put up a collection of digitized theatrical ephemera. That hyperlink goes to an article about the collection; the actual archive is here. They’ve got all sorts of stuff: programs, posters, correspondence, photos.
For Your Amusement and Edification
A handful of links – some older, some brand-new – from around the web:
Slate has put up an interactive, annotated on-line version of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, for those of you who might want to read it. (My own attitude toward “Bartleby” is colored by the fact that I once had to teach it in a freshman English lit class, and the typical response to that story from the inevitable classroom wit is exactly what you think it would be.)
A cabinetmaker and scholar of historical furniture reports on a letter to the future found sealed away inside an 18th-century inlaid cabinet by the journeyman cabinetmaker who built the piece.
While I was trawling for other reasons through the archives of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, I found this post wherein all the Nebula-winning novels from 1965 through 2004 are summarized in haiku.
And, finally, there’s Jim Macdonald having fun again over at his blog.
Dr. Doyle's Blog 