Metadata

Experienced authors know all about metadata. I was only vaguely aware of its use and importance. Mostly I grabbed a few keywords out of the jumbled mess that is my brain because the site or service insisted I fill in their metadata section. On Pinterest I discovered this succinct explication.

I will go back and redo my metadata now.

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2014/09/7-tips-for-metadata-magic-for-self-publishers/

Thinking in Pictures

While surfing around Facebook today, reading the American Left bashing the American Right and vice versa, I came across an interesting post.  One person had said something to the effect that language is necessary for thought.  I agreed until I read a response which noted that there are cases of individuals who think in pictures.

This got me to considering my poetry.  My poems are word translations of sensations.  At this very moment I am sitting in my home office on a chair that is ramshackle using a desk that was the cheapest of the cheap in 1992. A breeze and sounds are coming in the window and cooling my back and my mind.

soft sounds floated on breezes cool
caressing his back
a thousand little fingers reached through his shirt
he shivered deliciously at such delight

This little prosy poem is an attempt to translate the sensation into words and share it with others.  But I had no 'thoughts' as I felt this sensation - only the sensation. And only poetry can translate 'thinking in sensations' for others to experience.

The Man who fell from the Sky is a long form translation of sensations using words, photos, colours... whatever I can place in the eBook. This means most of the advice blogs from successful authors on how to write or market or package a book are useless, or nearly so, to me.  I am not a good story teller but I am a good sensation translator. Sigh.  A poet I guess with the impoverished lifestyle that comes with that affliction.

Multimedia eBooks and Traditional Publishing

Traditional publishers are attempting to integrate eBooks into their overall publishing program.

 I read Mike Shatzin's blog regularly where these efforts are frequently detailed. His July 23 post was focussed on Amazon and its costs and benefits to both authors and publishers (meaning mostly the big 5, with a nod to small publishers), but a throwaway comment by him on multimedia eBooks caused me to respond. Here is his summary of multimedia eBooks:

Edward, people have been looking for the multiple-media, transmedia, etc. formula for 30 years! Voyager Expanded Books was doing this in 1990. The consumers don't buy, at least not in any numbers. "Successes" have been isolated one-offs. I have been ridiculing the idea for three decades and haven't been proven wrong yet. Someday I may be, I suppose. But in the meantime I will stick to the notion that the straight reading form is extremely hard to improve upon from a commercial perspective. It is both what people actually want AND vastly cheaper to both produce and distribute (smaller file sizes). Good luck with your experimentation, but I hope you enjoy the process because "success" is very unlikely.

My point was that the attempts at multimedia were always ill-advised.  Multimedia meant for publishers producing a standard text only book, then adding in multimedia here and there to 'enhance' the text.  

My idea is that multimedia has to be integral to the experience. I had at this point in our brief exchange a minor epiphany.  Here is what I said:

Hi Mike :
I agree with you actually. I understand that your business is advising publishers, especially in the difficult world of eBooks and the disruption caused by the digital revolution. All I am saying is that multimedia books (with the exception of college textbooks), are not really 'books' at all. I think the chances of earning money are virtually nil - that multimedia eBooks are more akin to works of art than books to be read. I can imagine a world where the sort of agent who represents a painter also handles multimedia eBooks and you find them in art shows and galleries, not bookstores, electronic or bricks and mortar. The exception of textbooks is where I do not understand what is happening, or rather not happening. I teach History and freshman sophomore textbooks are already and have been for many years print versions of multimedia - photographs, textboxes, text, footnotes, links. Columbia University Press and the American Historical Society teamed up to produce multimedia eBooks, but they were stupidly expensive to produce and to sell, which I do not understand. One of my projects is to produce such a book, using Apple's free software. There you might see me, someday.

His short reply said it all:  Complex media can make complete sense for teaching purposes. They just don't have much mass commercial appeal.  

Mike Shatzkin has been in the book business for many, many years as was his father.  His bread and butter is advising traditional publishers on means to navigate the digitization of text only mass market books.  He and  his industry are blind to anything else. Perhaps he is correct that no decent living can be made from this, but I think he is blind to the future

The Art of Fiction from The Paris Review

Some time ago I began to read articles published in The Paris Review that were posted on Facebook - when I have the money I will subscribe as I have found plenty I wish to read carefully and with some joy.  They have been running a series called The Art of Fiction.  Today I am racing through No. 18, an interview by George Plimpton (one of the journal's founders) of Ernest Hemingway.  It seems that the working style of successful writers has no common factors other than they write every day.

Here is a quote which caught my attention:

“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

This caught my eye. If I spend any time talking about writing technique, that is time I do not spend writing.  I have little enough space in my hectic life as it is and cannot afford to squander what  I can manage. 

Here is the link:

Plimpton interviews Hemingway

Character Study 1

Red hair.  Well, as we all know, red hair is actually orange, but an orange that burns your eyes like red. Red-haired people have always been thought to be choleric - quick to anger, intemperate, dangerous to be around. Or exciting, depending on your predilections. A boy man lives up the street from me.  He has red hair. I have heard him speak. He does have a temper and foul language to match. I grew up with foul language as my Dad had a rich vocabulary of that sort, which I inherited (Damn it all to hell!  I have to grab Strunk & White to see if I should have said ‘which’ not ‘that’).  (Changed it! Not because I grabbed S & W, but because I had ‘that’ just prior and that is a writing speed bump ‘no-no’)

Where was I?  

Oh yes, Master Choleric down the street.  He is handsome, lithe and arrogant. He moves like a red panther. He does not clump along, but insinuates his way along the street and up stairs and into cars. A certain kind of girl will not be able to resist his sensuous danger.  He is a cat man, ready to purr or ready to claw, one never knows which.

Writing History

This is is just a quick post before I get on with what I must. Song time ago, I was in a meeting with a university Dean. The Dean happened to be a professor in the English Department. Somehow the issue of footnotes came up in a passing reference. I don't recall her actual words, but I do remember vividly her snort of contempt for old-fashioned footnotes when modern in-text citations were used by all scholars except historians.  This bubbled around in me for some time. To me, in-text citations are like speed bumps in reading. History in its essential and I would say, proper form, is a story, seething to be read as literature.  Oh, I know, social science with its pseudo and crypto English has infected the published work of historians but this pretence at science does not alter the underlying reality.  Historians always work with incomplete evidence and must fill the gaps with imagination. I admit this is carefully corralled imagination; one must not allow the horses to bolt, but imagination all the same. I hope therefore, that we historians never succumb to this wrong-headed fad in theHumanities  to pretend we are scientists.  Long live the story!

Character Study

Red hair.  Well, as we all know, red hair is actually orange, but an orange that burns your eyes like red. Red-haired people have always been thought to be choleric - quick to anger, intemperate, dangerous to be around. Or exciting, depending on your predilections. A boy man lives up the street from me.  He has red hair. I have heard him speak. He does have a temper and foul language to match. I grew up with foul language as my Dad had a rich vocabulary of that sort, which I inherited (Damn it all to hell!  I have to grab Strunk & White to see if I should have said ‘which’ not ‘that’).  (Changed it! Not because I grabbed S & W, but because I had ‘that’ just prior and that is a writing speed bump ‘no-no’)

Where was I?  

Oh yes, Master Choleric down the street.  He is handsome, lithe and arrogant. He moves like a red panther. He does not clump along, but insinuates his way along the street and up stairs and into cars. A certain kind of girl will not be able to resist his sensuous danger.  He is a cat man, ready to purr or ready to claw, one never knows which.