Seven People in My #Transmedia Neighborhood
While Twitter has only become even more valuable since then as a professional networking tool, I still look to blogs for deeper engagement, and subscribe to feeds of blogs that offer real value.
Guy stuff.
Consolidating My Online Platforms
The plan for 2011, or at least part of it, will likely include continued defragging of my online presence and repositioning this site to once again be Command Central: All Things Guy -- writer, poet, marketer, publisher, optimist, malcontent -- no matter what new interests and passions the new year may bring my way.
Waiting for “Superman” and the Vast Charter School Agenda
The situation is dire, the film warns us. We must act. But what must we do? The message of the film is clear. Public schools are bad, privately managed charter schools are good. Parents clamor to get their children out of the public schools in New York City (despite the claims by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that the city’s schools are better than ever) and into the charters (the mayor also plans to double the number of charters, to help more families escape from the public schools that he controls). If we could fire the bottom 5 to 10 percent of…
Gigs, Gongs and Granules
"There are far more underrepresented communities to serve than there are established publishers interested in doing so."
A Little Help From Our Friends
NOTE: You may not know that my wife is a special ed teacher, and you may not know that special ed teachers in many school districts get even less support than general ed teachers, but both are true. The following is from her annual "Beg-A-Thon" appeal, and any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated by both of us, as well as her students. It's time for me to beg again! As many of you know, mine is a classroom of 12 boys ranging from 4th to 6th grades. Our students are classified as having severe emotional disabilities and…
“Weird and Wonderful”? Me, on the Future of Publishing
The above tweet led to a fun interview over the at the Book View Cafe blog, “Weird and Wonderful: Digital Book World and Guy LeCharles Gonzalez,” with author Sue Lange asking me some interesting questions that really made me think hard to solidify some of my ideas about the “Future of Publishing” and what it means for authors and publishers.
There’s a lot of fluff and blather right now that makes it sound like eBooks are a magic bullet and simply uploading your book to Amazon makes you an independent author.
Most of that fluff and blather is coming from new intermediaries who take a smaller cut than traditional publishers, while putting your eBook on a virtual shelf where no one who doesn’t already know it exists will ever find it. And, of course, some of them will also upsell you on services to help you market your eBook and increase sales, for which they’ll get their cut.
In a lot of ways, it’s basically Vanity Publishing, in a shiny 2.0 coat.
I also explain a few things about Digital Book World, make the argument “that marketing is, first and foremost, a publisher’s responsibility,” and talk a bit about my own writing and how it has evolved over the years.
On Inception, The Passage, and Writing in The Obama Era
The weakness of “It’s all a dream” — why we hate that, why we feel cheated when narratively anything is revealed to be all a dream — is that you’ve just asked me to spend so much time and emotional capital investing in the stakes of this, and you’ve now swept it away with the most anti-narrative structuralism that doesn’t have anything to substitute in its place. It’s laughing at you for even taking it seriously. You don’t want to feel like a victim of the narrative, and I don’t think Christopher Nolan would do that.
Inception’s Dileep Rao Answers All Your Questions About Inception
Nuanced, brainy and thought-provoking, Christopher Nolan’s provocative sci-fi masterpiece (yeah, I said it) isn’t your typical formulaic summer blockbuster. Even its car chases, gun fights, explosions and special effects wizardry exist on a whole ‘nother level, raised by the sheer audacity of Nolan’s demanding that moviegoers sit still, pay close attention and think hard about what they’re seeing for 2.5 hours rather than be spoon-fed the usual red/blue pablum Hollywood spews out like clockwork from their “me, too” factories.
There’s no filler, no empty calories, no short cuts, no opportune pee breaks; Nolan packs something worthwhile into every second of screen time, and you blink at your own risk. It’s an action movie for intelligent adults who are tired of being treated like teenagers, and it will stick with you long after, whether you loved it or not.
It’s also a call-to-action of sorts for writers and publishers. Or could be, if they’re listening.