I’m busy today, so here’s a linkdump. Lots of e-book and indie publishing links as well as some other stuff:
Everybody is talking about Barry Eisler and Amanda Hocking,now they talk to each other.
Damien Walter briefly touches upon indie publishing and Amanda Hocking and then asks the question “Why do you write?” I still like George Orwell’s answer to that very question.
Nathan Bransford looks at traditional versus indie publishing from a monetary perspective
Dean Wesley Smith continues his great Think Like A Publisher series
His posts always give me lots of stuff to think about.
I’ve just spent an hour or so listing my potentially sellable inventory and found that I have a lot more complete or nearly completed stuff than I thought. Some of it is several years old and may not be salvagable, but I have a lot more I could potentially publish than I thought. And I haven’t even checked every nook and cranny and old Zip drive yet. Though I did find a finished short story whose existence I had completely forgotten. It’s pretty good, too, though I never submitted it anywhere, most likely since my creative writing class didn’t like it.
This review of an essay collection by Geoff Dyer at Bookforum briefly touches on the problems facing the ecclectic writer in a publishing world which prefers writers to always produce variations on the same narrow theme. This is another area where indie publishing might be an answer, particularly for writers not as well known as Geoff Dyer.
At the Book View Café, Deborah J. Ross defends Mary Sue stories as a necessary intermediate stage for developing writers.
The 2011 Rita and Golden Heart finalists have been announced. I have actually read a few of those books, which is rare for me.
Strange maps has a map of Twin Peaks, drawn by David Lynch himself Very interesting, especially if you were a fan of the show. I definitely was, though I often didn’t know what to make of it, since Twin Peaks was different from anything I had ever seen before. Twin Peaks was one of those game changer shows that bust the prevailing programming paradigms and yet are always less remembered than some of those that followed the trail they blazed.
Though I disagree with the statement that Twin Peaks is a sort of Everytown, USA. Because one of the things that struck me most about Twin Peaks was how strongly the show was rooted in its setting. Before Twin Peaks, almost every US show was set in the same generic Californian small town, unless it was set in Los Angeles or New York that was. If the setting was urban, you might get something different, e.g. Hawaii for Magnum PI, Miami for Miami Vice or Dallas for well, Dallas (and most of those shows was shot on Hollywood backlots with some location footage interspliced). But small town settings were always the same generic California town, regardless of where the show was supposedly set. Twin Peaks was different, simply because it had obviously not been shot in California, and the Pacific Northwest scenery was part of the appeal, at least for me. The unusual setting was also one of the many ways in which Twin Peaks was influential for what was to come. Soon we had plenty of quirky small town shows such as Northern Exposure with its Alaska setting, Picket Fences with its Wisconsin setting, American Gothic with its Southern setting, etc… Most of those shows were probably still shot on studio backlots, but at least American TV had discovered that there was more to the US than California and maybe New York.
Finally, I’ve posted another nuclear power news roundup over at the ABC Buhlert site. Meanwhile, the weekend’s state elections have also put a preliminary stop to the controversial Stuttgart 21 railroad project. Democracy, sometimes it works.
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