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Writing , as my friend, Paul Mitton, recently wrote is “Catharsis.”
It is a way of temporarily stilling all the infernal internal dialogue that goes on in your head during the waking hours of the day. All those characters from the stories you’re writing, gathered about the water cooler, comparing plots and rehearsing their lines and watching the gang from the props department as they scurry about to set the next scene.
It gets noisy in there sometimes.
The act of writing is like being an omnipotent god-like creator, making flesh and blood of his or her creations. As the fingers type on the keys or the pen touches the paper, everyone settles down and quietly pays attention.
“Let there be light“… from stage left. No, not the bright white. Slap a yellow filter in it, for My sake.
“They shall speak“…. Wait! Hold it! On page 7, Your second entrance… Margaret? Pay attention! Your line is now…
“And on the sixth day,” ….
I sat down and created chapter seven.
… and now, The latest on the Amazon Dot Com debacle
First they said it was their new policy. Then they said it was a glitch.
In this, the latest round of ‘Who’s On first’ at Amazon, they are now blaming a French systems programmer for allegedly sloppy code that caused the SNAFU that caused the “Gay Words” Book Ban on all of their on-line catalogues.
Pardon my Gesundheit.
Every systems programmer, manager, systems engineer and database programmer knows that you do not make changes to a ‘live’ version of a system, database, catalogue, etc… without first thoroughly testing it on a backup copy of the live system.
The keyword here is thorough … testing of all combinations and permutations of possible searches, and the verification thatthe master dataset is in no way corrupted or modified by the implemented change.
So please, do not ask me to believe that they decided to roll in an untested global change over the Easter Weekend .
I own horses that are smarter than that.
Do a Google search for “Amazon Rank” and the following will appear:
amazon rank
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): amazon ranked
1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies).
2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense.
Etymology: from 12 April 2009 removal of sales rank figures from books on Amazon.com containing sexual, erotic, romantic, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer content, rendering them impossible to find through basic search functions at the top of Amazon.com’s website. Titles stripped of their sales rankings include “Bastard Out of Carolina,” “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” prominent romance novels, GLBTQ fiction novels, YA books, and narratives about gay people.
Example of usage: “I tried to do a report on Lady Chatterly’s Lover for English Lit, but my teacher amazon ranked me and I got an F on grounds that it was obscene.”
Alternate usage: “My girlfriend wanted to preserve her virginity, and I was happy to respect that, then she amazon ranked and decided anal sex was okay.”
A not so happy cast iron Easter egg!
Amazon has decided to pull books with gay themes, characters, etc from their rankings.
Amazon admits they are indeed stripping the sales ranking indicators for what ‘they’ [whoever he or she is:] deem to be “adult” material.
http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293….
“The hypocrisy in this action is that there is plenty of “adult” literature out there that is still being ranked – Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, etc… “
They are using they own category system to target (currently gay and lesbian) these books as somehow offensive.”
http://booksquare.com/open-letter-to-ama…
The Twittersphere is also very active on the subject:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23am…
Some people read simply to read. Long afterwards they may remember the ‘gist’ of the story and whether they found the book satisfying, but most often they simply remember whether they either liked it or not.
For myself. reading and writing are, like surgery, both audible and visual experiences. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I love unabridged audio recordings of my favourite books. If I could close my eyes and still write, I would.
For myself. reading and writing are, like surgery, both audible and visual experiences. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I love unabridged audio recordings of my favourite books. If I could close my eyes and still write, I would.
Ingrained as a habit from years of dictating post surgical reports, I often make extensive use of my dictation recorder and the audio capture utilities on my computer when I’m writing so I can return and ’see’ what I’ve created… to find the one dimensional character(s) I’ve overlooked or the scene that has no ‘visual’ representation or the road that dead-ends on the edge of the page instead of going somewhere.
So… what brings me back to re-read books I’ve already read?
It’s a total sum of the piece, but after years of trying to understand what is I am subconsciously drawn to, I’ve decided there is an order to it.
First for me are the worlds that the writers have created; Some worlds are more interesting than others, but having visited them I often find I want to explore them again to see what I missed or to find out what was over the next hill or back the other way around the bend or to try and discover what life in that other part of that worlds map is like.
Worlds have sounds, or at least they should have. The more descriptive and interesting a world is, the easier is is to hear the sounds of the wind in the trees, the water rushing over and around rocks in streams and rivers, or waves crashing on the shores, the ’sound’ of the cities and villages, and the voices of the people who live and work or meet there.
… and their music.
Next are the characters. Some more than others draw me back due to their personalities, their unique little quirks of behaviour or their unique ‘voices’.
Sometimes I find people I know or even characters I’ve created for my own work… and sometimes I find that the ‘person’ I thought a character was during the first read is not the same the second time around.
After that it is the interaction of the characters with others. I am no longer surprised that quite often it is the ‘bit players’ who are just as (and sometimes even more) interesting than some of the main characters.
Not quite last, and certainly not least, are the plots and story lines… and quite often the stories that one can find occurring within the over-all story. Sometimes, those story’s within are the reason to return… to explore them further.
If an author has used the same characters in more the one story or in more than one book, the more complex the composite ‘memory’ of that world and it’s people is, the more interesting it is to me, and therefore the more likely I will go back to visit them.
I suppose the same can be said for the movies I’ve collected so that I can watch them on a whim.
