Wrestling With Words: Defining Transmedia
Ask 5 people what they think transmedia is and you'll get 10 different answers, all with pretty sound reasoning, most likely based on the industry they work in.
Guy stuff.
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…
Don’t Be a Writer, Be a Creator
And by independence, I mean making a sustainable living, not just self-publishing your book via Amazon or Lulu or Smashwords and declaring yourself an "indie".
Review: Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers My rating: 5 of 5 stars In ZEITOUN, Dave Eggers does an excellent job of weaving Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun's compelling backstories and Katrina experiences together, shaded by post-9/11 xenophobia, and delivers a powerful documentary of what will most likely be looked back upon by history as one of this country's most tragic eras/errors. In its final pages, I was most struck by the proverbial banality of evil and the limited resiliency of the human spirit. When I first heard about this book, I fully expected to be infuriated after reading it, but it simply left…
“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.
Reading Is Fun(damental)
“A man practices the art of adventure when he breaks the chain of routine and renews his life through reading new books, traveling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies and adopting new viewpoints”
Wilfred Peterson (via dhammza)
At the beginning of the year I made several resolutions, one of which I was reasonably sure I’d be able to stick to since it simply involved reading and I’ve always been an avid reader. It was resolution-worthy, though, because I haven’t been reading nearly as much as I used to over the past few years, for a number of reasons, mostly work-related.
My intention was to go both genre- and format-hopping — one print, one eBook — and write reviews for whatever I read, but to-date I’ve only read one eBook, the entertaining steampunk anthology, The Shadow Conspiracy, and despite having downloaded several free eBooks and samples on the iPad’s major ereading apps, I’ve yet to read another.
Despite the inexplicable lure of the $149 WiFi-only Nook, for now, when it comes to long-form reading, I’m still a hardcore print guy.