Editing Advice

Paperback Writer: Edit 11 9 10

What an awesome article. I'm taking December to read and internalise all that... and guess what I'll be doing, come January?

:D

BTW: 1000 words to go to 50,000 on my as-yet-untitled NaNo novel. WHEEEE!

Edited to add: In the last hour my novel has acquired not only an ending, but also a name. Night Fires is now complete. I guess I start the rewrite now, during which I'm hoping to add about 20,000 words to it.

Thanksgiving

You've caught me in a rare moment of appreciativeness. Y'all know how ranty and generally dissatisfied I am - especially on this blog - but circumstances have forced me to notice the fantastic things in the world. And here, in no particular order, are the things I'm thankful for:

• Seasons, because it's just so dull without them.


• Geeks, who are the new 'cool', and should always have been.


• Canned food. Wrinkle your noses all you want, you pretentious snots - just wait till YOU have to write a novel in a month and see if you feel like chopping vegetables.


• Lindt & Sprüngli.


• The people in my head. I used to think thinking up characters and stories was the hardest thing to do, but they just keep popping into existence these days.


• Mr WtW, because things are so much more fun with him.


• "Aye Udi Udi Udi". What, you don't like the song?


• The innate reasonableness of you, my dear readers. You have no idea how much it would distress me if you guys were into Intelligent Design or tree-hugging or alien abduction conspiracies, to name but three wacko things. I appreciate this so much more now that I am actually, physically, surrounded by people who truly can't tell what's pseudoscience and what's real.


• Harry Potter (doh)


• The way the universe works. In particular, that age and wisdom are not inversely related.

I know I'm forgetting something, damn.

Unproductive

I just want to pig out and watch 10 movies in a row without moving once.

Monday Meme

I probably didn't get into the spirit of this by actually naming names of real people and things, but hey. This is my story and I'm sticking to it.

Monday Meme 26 : 2005-11-14 : Survivor

1. List 5 people you'd want with you if you were stranded on a deserted island:

Tribal person, doctor, experienced camper, my funniest friend, my husband.

2. What 4 cds would you want with you (supposing you had a boom box)?

3 favourites and one "nature sounds" to ward off animals.

3. What 3 survival items would you want to bring?

Sturdy rubber sheeting, bucket, rope.

4. What 2 food/beverage items would you miss the most?

Chocolate, chocolate.

5. What is the 1 thing you'd miss the least?

Work.

I was the 441st person to take this week's Monday Meme!

Know-It-Alls

So here we are, standing in a musty old living room with the main character who is about to meet a Seer, a Yoda, an Oracle, a bald old guy who really Knows everything the future holds. This guy's had his Gift for a long time now, and you'd think he'd have stopped needing to brag about it. But no. Always, always, the first thing this Seer fellow does is put on that deep, slow, draggy voice (which is never used again in the rest of the movie/book) and say:

"I've been expecting you."

If I ever write a fantasy novel (looking more and more likely by the minute), in the name of common sense, my Oracle will say: "Wassup, bitch."

So I Lied: More GP

Sorry. I need information, though.

Is the Author's Guild suing Google for indexing books, or for making their index available online? Because as I see it (common sense, dude) Google could store fifty million books by scanning them in, and that wouldn't be a problem as long as they just sat on their database and made sure it didn't fall into the hands of people who would make it available on EBay or something. Making copies is not the issue here. It's how Google is using their copies: they're making it free for anyone to see it.

This is the same as if Google took copyrighted content on the internet that people have to pay to see and made it free for people to see, e.g. articles from certain magazines, some crackpot's $300 diet plan, etc. See what I'm getting at? Indexing webpages that are free to view anyway on the internet is not the same as indexing these books.

One Final Note On Google Print

Holly Lisle's problems seem to have come to a satisfactory end: Google finally agreed to take her books offline.

But I am finding that I need to explain my position on Google Print over and over again to people emailing me. I posted a while back elaborating on one of the main moral argument against it, but there are good legal reasons as well for standing against Google Print.

My reasons, in short, are these:

1. The Online Content
Google stores the entire books in its database, and allows people to see any 20% of it at a time before it supposedly stops you (apparently, Holly's experience was different... she was able to see over 100 pages of one of her books - about 35%). This is way beyond the "fair use" clause. Enormous revenue is being generated from the Print project (why else would Google do it?), and this revenue comes directly from the content, for which the creators of that content are not compensated. The only answer they seem to have is that "its beneficial to writers and publishers", but shouldn't the decision then be left to the writers and publishers?

2. The Permissions Policy
Google scans entire libraries of books - with the permission of the library. It scans other books with the permission of the publishers. (Supposedly. Holly says that at least two of her publishers had no idea Google was putting their books online. But never mind even that.) The point is: neither of these two entities is the copyright owner of the books; only the author is. So why is Google "asking permission" from the wrong people, people who have nothing to do with the book after it is published? Ignorance of the law is no defence - and of course Google isn't really ignorant. Just big and greedy and well-protected by corporate insulation.

3. The Games They Play
What stinks is that when Holly Lisle wrote to tell Google to take her books off their search, she was told that no, her books were there with the permission of the publishers. Leave aside that this wasn't even true about two of the publishing houses. When the copyright owner tells Google to take the books out, Google should take the frickin books out. No questions asked. But to Google, "opt out" seems to mean "tell us you want to opt out, and we’ll decide whether or not we can get someone bigger than you to tell us we don’t have to." Why play ring-around-the-rosy? Only because they know that individual authors don't stand a chance against the Google corporate machine.

The only way that Google Print can legally work is when they purchase reprint rights for all the works that they are putting online. (Why reprint rights? Why not just buy a copy of the book? Because they are using the book such that it can be read by millions of people simultaneously. That's the definition of 'publication'. To republish Holly's books, they should purchase reprint rights.)

A niggly detail, though: Amit says he can't see results when he searches for Holly Lisle's books, while I can. Can people tell me if they can find her books on Google Print? This is really weird.

Joke

Q: How many centaurs does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Light bulbs are dim tonight.

Dunno. Just made me laugh.

Nature is overrated

This resonates very deeply with me.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for nature when it's pretty, like in flowers; picturesque, like in snow-capped mountains and rocky seashores; or mind-blogglingly intriguing, like in, you know, the universe at large. I'll pay good money to go and look at all these things for a couple of hours, even endure several hours on a plane to get me there, if necessary.

No, I'm talking about the whole concept of "being in touch" with nature. Nature Touchers (you gotta call them something) are people whose idea of the good life is living on a farm, scooping cowpad all day. If, by unlucky chance, they live in normal, humanly habitable areas, they will have at least three different species of animals living with them. Their gardens will thrive from the hundreds of wriggly earthworms these Nature Touchers will enthusiastically let loose in the foliage, without even wearing protective gloves while carrying them. (Eeuurrghh. I have grossed myself out.)

I cannot understand Nature Touchers. My idea of a perfect world is one that is similar to Scott Adams's, except I don't mind sunlight as much. It's the bugs I intend to keep out with my Permanent SuperForce Shield of Bug-Death. And while that is being invented, I will insist on strong mesh barriers on all doors and windows wherever I live.

New Face

Old template apparently wasn't showing up right on anything other than IE and Netscape, so I changed to this one instead. Can people see it now?

The "Opt-Out" Myth

A couple of days back when I was looking disbelievingly through the books Google Print makes available online, I noticed that fantasy (and recently, suspense) writer Holly Lisle's books were also searchable. I thought this was weird, given Holly's opposition to the Print Library program; I'd imagined she'd have opted out of it ages ago. Turns out she did.

My agent and publishers are working vigorously to get them taken down. Google’s "opt-out" process doesn’t seem to actually exist, except in Google’s publicity literature.
If the author, the agent, and the publisher have all requested removal of the material, and the material is still there, define "opt-out." You know?

Here's a link to her post detailing her email exchanges with Google.

As for those of you who're still wondering why all the fuss, here's another piece of information that might make you think:

[B]y using [Google Print's] addititional search tool and a bit of thoughtful questioning, I was able to read directly through one [of my] book[s], page by page, by page. I went through more than a hundred pages without a pause or even backing up before I decided that my method gave much more of the book than the Google promotional literature claims, and probably all of it.

Quick Comments Note

Comments on this blog will be moderated from now on. It's a better option than making y'all sign in all the time and type in strings of mad wobbly letters.
And obviously I pledge to put up all legitimate comments regardless of content, yadda yadda yadda. It's just the spam that I'm weeding out.

Worse Than Suspected

So Kr!sh points me to this Forbes article that defends Google's new Print Library Project, through which Google plans to make relevant 'snippets' (actually, FIVE FULL PAGES) of any book freely available to anybody who searches for the right keywords. This snippet (and this is what is commonly known as a snippet) reveals how flawed the entire premise of the article is:

We already permit such uses of snippets for the development of book reviews. Google’s proposed technology is an extension of that. It permits much wider dissemination of relevant snippets of books--in doing so it will whet the appetite of a reading audience that is now global in scale. Authors and publishers stand to benefit greatly.

You heard them right. I thought at first that Google was only going to make one 'snippet' from each book available online, and took issue with it because they wouldn't define what a 'snippet' was. Turns out this whole Print Library thing is much worse than I thought it was.

The project scans entire books and stores them in Google's database. Now anybody who searches for a keyword in a certain book will be shown a complete page containing the search word and allow you to look at two full pages on either side of the original page. This, from anywhere in the book, including multiple snippets if they keyword turns up multiple results, including results from any other books in their database that match the search phrase. FIVE PAGES.

In essence, Google is making entire books searchable and available online.

Wanna see it in action? This is my search for "dissociative fugue" on Google Print. There are 659 results, and the first page, at least, is all good, solid information. I read five pages in 20 books, I'm an expert. I could pass exams without ever paying a single cent for a text book.

Am I the only person who sees the glaring problems with this? Right now, information found on the internet is on the internet with the explicit permission of the people who wrote it up, people who have been compensated to their satisfaction for their time and effort. The information that you and I are able to access online is not stolen content, unless it's an illegal download. Now, if I want, I'll legally be able to search for relevant passages in textbooks and technical papers and nonfiction books to look up any specific bit of information that I need. I will be able to print it out. I will never need to buy another nonfiction book again.

All this, without the permission of the creators of the content I am freely accessing, without them being compensated a penny for it.

So don't reassure me that these 'snippets' will be good advertisement, that it will benefit publishers and writers. Let the publishers and writers be the judge of that. Let them opt in to this program if they so wish. Don't force your so-called benefits on them if they don't want it, don't make them go through the trouble of opting out manually if they don't want to be included in your shameless rights-grab.

Google search and Google ads are off this blog in protest. I am exploring other hosting options for the blog. I think it's time for me to move to my own site.

Forced Open Source

I'm all for the Open Source movement. I don't do any kind of software development myself, so it's not my time and effort that's being put out there for free... and as a private individual, I stand to benefit liek OMG!crazy from the developers who put free content out there. In my head, I call these people suckers. I'd never do it.

Why I'd never do it is another matter. The content that I would be able to write is fiction, and perhaps some non-fiction about writing. That's the only thing I know something about, and it's the one thing I would like doing... it wouldn't feel like work.

But at this stage in my career (if you can call it that, hyuk hyuk) I can't afford to do it. I'm still paying my dues in the publishing industry. I work for peanuts, and I desperately need those peanuts as well the the exposure my work is perhaps getting me. I'm not about to set aside a huge chunk of my time to work for less than peanuts, for nothing at all. I figure I'll do that when my career gets big enough for me to earn a decent living on it. That's the time to pay the community back... not now when I can't afford it. Besides, that's when my content will actually reach people and be treated with the respect it deserves if I do put it out there for free: who wants to read a largely unpublished writer's advice to newbies? The reason why Holly Lisle's articles are so popular and well-regarded is not just because they're good... it's because it's proven to work: she's written 25+ novels by following her own advice.

Anyway. Point is: to me, open source projects are free knowledge that I have come to be thankful for. I appreciate it, I take my hats off to those who give their time, even if in my more cynical moments I call them suckers.

But what Google's just decided to do is beyond open source. It's forced open source.

They want to put 'snippets' of writers' content on the internet, without permission or compensation, in the name of making the info accessible to everyone (and, oh, making the quick buck by selling ad space on the pages with content) - that's bullshit. If you didn't create the content yourself, you have no business going about making the information available for free.

Legally speaking, there are provisions for what is called ‘fair use’. Most authors, recording artists and actors know all about this. It permits an organization to use a small piece of copyrighted material without paying the copyright holder. A good example is when a radio program airs a 5 or 10 second clip of sound from a movie during a review. The holder of the movie copyrights do not get paid for it. Not directly. Indirectly they are getting free publicity and that has value.

Yahoo has been doing this kind of thing for years by putting up movie trailers that you can see on your computer. I don’t know if the holder of the movie copyright pays for this publicity or not. Probably not. I expect Yahoo just does it for the ad revenue. Amazon permits you to see inside a book on occasion, not very much, but a few pages. The amount most shoppers at a book store would read before deciding to buy or not buy the book. And Amazon gets permission from the copyright holder to do this.

So, with that in mind (along with the fact that I am no lawyer) it looks like it might be legal. SO LONG as they keep it to a very, very small piece of the book in question. Like the blurb on the back cover and a list of key words such as character names.

On the moral side, I don't think it's right.

If they are basing an entire business around the use of copyrighted material and generating income from the use of that material, my immediate reaction is that the creators should be paid. Sure, if they are very limited on the amount of information that they put online, then it could actually HELP the author by being additional publicity (of a minor sort of course) for his or her works. Kind of like a movie trailer on-line. But only if there is a convenient button or banner to click on if you want to buy the book you are looking at.

But who knows what these guys mean by a 'snippet'? The language they're using seems to indicate they want to put up fairly large chunks of writers' works - possibly a couple of chapters, certainly more than 'fair use' would allow.

Whatever happened to 'Don't Be Evil'?

NaNo Day 1; Wordcount: 1118

Not a bad start, I suppose. I'm getting back to this later in the day to hack at it some more. I don't hate it yet. Actually, I'm raring to go... raring to get started on the business of the real plot. I'm still on the prologue, also known as the Traumatic Event That Will Scar My Young Heroine For Life And Give My Hero A Seriously Messed-Up Head To Put Right Before The Happily Ever After.

In case you were wondering, it will be a happily ever after. Genre requirements. Hello, my name is Nandini and I'm a congenital sell-out.

(Read a snippet)

Meanwhile, can you believe this is real? If you listen closely, you can hear the millions of suspense writers who're working on master-forger characters weep...