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Scalability Bites Back

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One of the first comments posted on this site when it launched a month ago mentioned a book called The Black Swan. So I went to the library and checked out a copy, and I have to say that it’s an interesting read written by an interesting person who’s not shy about letting you know how interesting he is.

I agree with the basic premise: that there’s too much attention paid to meaningless detail, when the really important stuff is usually not indicated by measurable shifts in meaningless detail. Rather, it’s indicated by a one-off event that pretty much everyone seems not to have anticipated at all. (My own take on the heavy use of the bell curve — which the author rightly despises in so many instances — is that the bell curve is a useful indicator of markets and demographics. Since most of our lives and the meaning in and of our lives revolves around money, the bell curve is a useful device for both measuring how much we have and whose reserves we can most easily target.)  [ Read more ]

License to Lie

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I don’t know when I first heard the terms narrative nonfiction and creative nonfiction, but it wasn’t too long ago. Five years at most. I do, however, remember what my reaction was.

You’re kidding.

The joke was on me, however, because it turns out that people really aren’t kidding about these — what to call them? — terms? Genres? Amazing new art forms?

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t really see why these newfangled words are necessary from a functional point of view. (If this is really just about marketing the same old books to a new crop of easily-led readers, that’s something entirely different. It’s still not okay, but it’s entirely different.)

As hard as I try, I can’t really see the difference between what used to be called nonfiction and what is now being dressed up as narrative nonfiction or creative nonfiction. Unless of course these new terms (that’s what I’m going to call them) are really an excuse for allowing nonfiction writers to cross the line into fiction writing.  [ Read more ]

Writing Blogs and M&M’s

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27 Writing blogs vying to make a Top 10 list. To my mind, the list itself is the treasure.

Here’s a favorite found nugget:

Stay away from the peanut M&M’s. You may think they’re harmless, but a handful turns into ten and you’re going to consume just enough calories between September and February to make you hate yourself in March. Remember, you’re spending lots of hours sitting on your ass. Your brain doesn’t burn calories at the same rate as your body. Eat accordingly.

Don’t I know this. You start with the little packet. You move up to the Tear & Share packet — but you don’t share. Then you see the medium-sized bag is on sale at the local market. Then you notice the large bag is also on sale for the same price. Then you’re pushing a wheelbarrow full of lose, custom-printed peanut M&M’s down the purgatory hallway of your dreams, slipping and sliding on the candies that fall out of the barrow until you finally lose your balance and plummet into a swirling cauldron of half-melted pills, only to wake up screaming with the caked-on taste of peanut-flavored chocolate foaming the inside of your mouth like spray-on insulation.

Which is when you finally admit you have a problem and switch to plain.

[Warning: if you are prone to seizures, narcolepsy or zoning out, don’t click here.]

— Mark Barrett

You Get What You (Don’t) Pay For

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In the publishing business writers get paid to write. In Hollywood, writers get paid to write. In the copywriting business, writers get paid. In the theater, playwrights get paid.

In the interactive industry, however, it’s been a very slow process getting the people who make games to see writers as an inherent part of the industry. In fact, ten years ago one of the docs I just added to this site — Storytellers: A Hiring Guide for the Interactive Industry — originally had this title: “Storytellers: Part of the team?”

Well, the good news is that writers are now much more a part of the development process than they were even five years ago. In fact, that’s one of the things that’s changed for the better in the interactive industry: writers are now being thought of as part of the team.  [ Read more ]

The Maltese Falcon, by Robert Polito

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True story.

Maybe a decade ago now I was browsing Amazon.com when I came across a book written by Dashiell Hammett and Somebody Else. Having studied detective fiction in college I knew that the actual credit was Dashiell Hammett and Nobody Else, so I sent a note to the Amazon elves asking for a correction. A day or two later the elves wrote back to say that the other person was actually the editor of the book, but because the work was not an anthology this other person should not have been included as an author. Shortly thereafter the listing was changed, and Hammett was again given sole credit for writing a book that he had written all by himself.

Which brings me to this:

And farther down the page:

Now, I don’t now who Robert Polito is, and I’m sure he is or was a wonderful person. But he didn’t co-write The Maltese Falcon. I’m not even sure what he actually did do to warrant mention (his contribution isn’t specified), but I am confident that none of the books in the title are books that he wrote or co-wrote.  [ Read more ]

Writing in Library Books

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I checked a book out of my local library the other day, and when I went to read it I discovered that someone had been there before me, littering the words and sentences with sharp lines and emphatic scrawls. Not a rare occurrence in my life, to be sure, but one that always makes me think the vandal (or vandals in this case, if the three different colors of emboldened ink are indeed evidence of serial abuse) is revealing something deeply disturbing about themselves in this simple, narcissistic, and completely self-absorbed anti-social act.  [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Novelr

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When I was first making my rounds on the web to get up to speed on the state of online storytelling, it took me very little time to come across Novelr.com. Busy as I was, however, I filed the URL away in my ever-growing list of sites-to-visit, and promptly got lost in other things.

A few days ago Janoda kindly thought to suggest the site to me on Twitter, whereupon I immediately vowed to visit the site before promptly getting lost in other things.

Which brings me to yesterday, when Eli (the person behind Novelr) stopped by and added a comment to one of my posts, innocently punishing me for being such a slacker. Of such self-induced slights are my better motivations born.

The post Eli commented on was called Taking Stock, in which I updated myself and you about my current level of interest in all things digital and storytelling. One of the things I said I’m less interested in now is the broader question of online fiction, in part because it’s just so damn broad. If not unending.

Happily, as my dedicated visit to Novelr revealed, Eli and the Novelr community are very much on top of the subject, and very much probing the further reaches. Which means Eli and Novelr can do the heavy lifting on this subject for all of us. Wink!

Stop by, take a look around, and if you’re new to subject, say hello before Eli finds you first. You’ll be glad you did.

— Mark Barrett

Crisscrossing Chris Crawford

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A couple of days ago I was working my way through a slate of storytelling and publishing links when I found myself on the O’Reilly site. It’s one of those sites chock full of interesting links and notes, so I spent a few minutes just clicking around until I ended up looking at splash screen for Safari Books Online, which included works from Peachpit.

In that instant my current interest in digital and online storytelling suddenly merged with my ongoing interest in interactive storytelling, and I felt as if those divergent worlds had become a single focused image in mind. The cause for this convergence was my work as technical editor on Chris Crawford On Interactive Storytelling, a book written by Chris about his pioneering work in that fascinating and maddening field.  [ Read more ]

Publishing is for Professionals

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Full disclosure: I am by definition not qualified to have the opinions I am about to express. The book in question, Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, is a national bestseller. It says so right on the front cover. I don’t have any bestsellers to my name. The book was also published by Harvard Business Press. I didn’t go to Harvard.

At the library the other day I snagged a copy of a book called Groundswell. I think I grabbed it because of the zany hypo-glasses-like book cover, but I was grabbing a lot of books from the newly-acquired shelf that day, so I can’t be sure.

The authors of Groundswell are both employees of Forrester Research, about which I know almost nothing. I figured maybe it meant something useful in a data-driven way, so a couple of days ago I started reading. Turns out the ‘groundswell’ in the title is the internet + social networking + tech + the inability of the corporations to control their messaging + the author’s desire to identify, brand, trademark and exploit a cultural phenomenon. Not particularly earth-shattering stuff, but okay.  [ Read more ]