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Randomness for 7/24

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1) Can you spot the endangered species in this photo?

2) Want your kid to do well in college? Take them out of school! via Jen Busiek.

3) A book marketing idea I’m going to steal. For Child of Fire, I’m thinking flame-proof kiddie pajamas. For Game of Cages, I’m not sure. Doggie sweaters?

4) Slate discovers BBB is worthless. The rest of America says “DUH!”

5) Last time I linked to a funny post by Josh Freidman. This time I’m linking to a post that is just as true and wrenched tears out of me. Incredibly powerful writing. Jesus.

6) And, to move from the sublime to the ridiculous: How to pay for a Death Star.

7) Science fiction writer profiled in NY Times. I hope it gets him new readers.

Quote of the day

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I feel like the last week has radicalized me in the worst possible way.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Context. Context continued.

This is important, folks.

Randomness for 7/21

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1) The Creative Process, in graphic/maze form.

2) This is pretty exciting: BLU has a new stop motion video out!

3) I’m sure many of you know that there’s a new storyline in the Superman comics where he walks across America to reacquaint himself with regular people. Well, now The Mighty Thor is doing it too!

4) Baby eats his way out of a watermelon. This one isn’t very interesting, but it is awfully cute.

5) Parkour from 1930.

6) Serial book thief gets three and a half years.

7) When Josh Friedman posts to his blog, we read. It’s long, but it’s amazing. He combines development notes, TV trends, and true crime, coming out the other end with belly laughs.

Talent and craft

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Jay Lake talks about the value of talent and craft right here. It seems to me that this is a misguided post, mainly because it never really defines the difference between “talent” and “craft.” If I’m reading him correctly, he’s asserting that there are a set number of skills a writer needs, and the writer’s talent is made up of the skills they have without practice, while craft is made up of the skills acquired with practice.

I think this is misguided. Let me go further. “Talent” is not some inborn trait. Maybe some people have biological, social, and cultural tendencies that make certain parts of writing easier to learn, but once the skills are there, how do you tell them apart from “craft?”

You can’t. Not really.

Personally, I believe every writing skill is learned. I’m teaching a couple of them to my son right now (not to make him a fiction writer–god forbid) and he’s practicing them whenever he tells a story. The best thing to do is to learn as many of those skills as possible as a child, when learning is a little easier than it is for adults. And if practice can be made fun, so it never feels like practice, so much the better.

I define talent as accuracy. A writer who can accurately predict the effect of a specific sentence, a particular character, a certain sequence of plot turns, is considered talented. The more subtle or sublime the effect, and the more original the construction, the more talented the writer is perceived to be. A writer who can’t predict the effects of their sentences or plot twists is not considered talented at all.

Writers who acquire these skills early are called talented. Writers who acquire them late call it craft. In truth, talent and exceptional craft are pretty much indistinguishable–if you pick up a wonderful book by someone you’ve never heard of before, how much of that wonderful came from some nebulous, inborn “gift?” How much was learned?

Talent is teachable. It can be hard or easy to teach, depending on the person, but it’s something most anyone can learn.

What holds writers back is not lack of talent, it’s lack of critical self-examination, qualified instruction, and willingness to be original.

Okay, procrastination over. I’m going back to work on today’s pages.

A link for myself

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I’m posting this here so I can find it later and follow some of the links. I’m leaving it public in case you guys are interested, too.

NY Times on book trailers.

Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams advised to polish his resume

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He needed to respond to the NAACP’s request that Tea Partiers “to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.” Hey, the guy is the national spokesman, right? I’m sure he handled this with dignity and tact.

Quote:

“You’re dealing with people who are professional race-baiters, who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history.”

Emphasis added by me.

I wonder how much longer people in the mainstream media will criticize the NAACP?

Randomness for 7/16

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1) Letters written to fictional characters by actual people. I like this one, this one, this one and this one. And now I can’t help but wonder what letter I would write.

2) Proving there’s a niche blog for everything (until someone creates a niche blog you never even thought of before): Handsome Men Who Are Now Dead.

3) Prank rollercoaster photos. Maybe not entirely safe for work, but not too bad.

4) via Steve Barr: Ferris Beuller is Tyler Durdin!. And now in video form (which I can’t watch at work.)

5) If movie titles were honest. The funny ones make up for the dumb ones.

6) The 100 Best places to appreciate art online.

7) How to ask Thomas Pynchon for an author blurb.

Randomness for 7/15

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1) Every _____ Comic in three panels, by Marvel editor Nathan Crosby.
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2) Mainstream journalism throws more pop-science against the shoals of cultural prejudice.
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3) “Have you read all these books? When do you watch TV?” A husband works in his wife’s bookstore while she’s sick, and records the conversations he has with customers.
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4) How “non-lethal” weapons are too often used by police.
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5) The history of the term “slush pile.”
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6) The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design. Twelve of the Worst Book Titles Ever (NSFW) according to some dude at Huffpo.
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7) Bookscan: how accurate is it?

Kabuki actors think sf/f readers must be sick of doing the same old things all the time

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Thesis.

Antithesis.

… Non-sequitur?

::scratches head::

I don’t want to talk about the dividing line between sf and f. I don’t care about it, don’t want to see the genres split apart on the book shelves and consider it a dull topic. I’m especially embarrassed by the contempt some people show for genres they don’t read and by the resentment other people show when their genre is disparaged.

But to go from “We should split the genres!” to “They’re complementary and will save the world!” in one conversation? Come on. It’s bad enough that Borders is hosting the Same Old Conversations, but waving one SOC around to distract from the holes in the other makes me feel like I’ve had popcorn for dinner.

Child of Fire reviews, part 15

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I’m only going to link to one this time: Compelling Women Who Kick Ass: Child of Fire by Harry Connolly written by Casey Lybrand.

I really enjoyed reading that review (and not just because it’s positive). It hits on a number of things I tried to do in the book, and also on ways that I know the book falls short. It’s also interesting in the way that a reader’s completely reasonable perception of a character can be so different from what I intended. There are still a lot of lessons to learn.

I’m also unsure if I should respond, and if so, how. I don’t want to be defensive, because the book has to stand for itself. I don’t want to talk about “Dumbledores” because if the author is the only one who knows a particular character is gay then does that even count[1]?

I don’t even know.

But this review touches on something that I’ve been trying to focus on: it’s easy to populate books with tv/movie types–good-looking folks who are pleasant to look at. I know why they cast roles that way, and I don’t blame them. I like looking at pretty people the same as anyone else.

There’s no reason to do that in a book, though. In books, you can “cast” a fat person in that dignified role as easily as a model, and you can include older folks, or whatever. You can show a truer representation of the world, because you’re working with words instead of faces.

But I’m not really sure how to talk about that.

[1] Toward a more accurate representation of the world, I mean.