11.19.09
Posted in Books, Good Stuff, Modern Life at 11:39 pm by thomas
Ariana Osborne has some great advice about Print-on-Demand projects over on her blog. I can pretty much only say “What she said!” about that post – read the FAQs for your publishing service, proof read the layout, order a proof copy for yourself first… all of that is important…
…and then there is her previous post, which has the one crucial advice that will make or break your POD project:
DO IT!
No matter how late at night you have stay up to get some quiet time from the kids, no matter how early in the morning you have to get up to write a page/edit a photo/draw a picture before you go to work, just do it. There is nothing worse than unfinished projects – with one exception, and that would be Projects You’ve Never Started.
And this is really not just true for Print-on-Demand, but for any kind of maker projects you’ve been dreaming of. Every day you haven’t started that dream project of yours is a day lost in a corner of the space-time continuum that we can’t access: The Past.
Don’t lose your precious projects to The Past, stop reading the intertubes right now, sit down and make something!
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10.25.09
Posted in Books, Culture, Good Stuff at 9:14 pm by thomas
While I usually pretend to keep abreast of what books are coming out, this one was a surprise purchase, oh, about ten seconds after entering our local Barnes and Noble late last week: “Unseen Academicals” by Terry Pratchett.
For some reason I hadn’t seen any announcements for this one, so dragging the hardcover book to the checkout counter filled me with glee. And it’s good – started reading it and like it a lot.
At the same time, I got my copy of Memories of the Future by Wil Wheaton. I’ve read most of the original posts that make up the base material for this book, and I already know it’s great. So I’m going to try and read it slowly to enjoy all the nuances of the final, edited book.
OK, enough blogging – I have two books to read! 
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08.13.09
Posted in Books, Media, San Francisco History at 11:05 pm by thomas
After my recent post on San Francisco’s original Emanu-El Synagogue I got a link to this photo from Richard over at Sparkletack and in that picture of Sutter Street of just after the earthquake of 1906 there is an advertisement for MJB coffee clearly visible on a wall of one of the destroyed buildings.
That was intriguing, since I actually had written about the MJB coffee ads in San Francisco before here and here, and all the research I had done on the mysterious MJB – WHY? ads pointed at a timeframe of after the earthquake until sometimes in the 1910s for these ads… but here was one done before the earthquake of 1906.
I mentioned this to Richard and he pointed me to a book: “Coffee, Martinis and San Francisco” by Ruth Bransten McDougall, who happens to be the daughter of the founder of MJB Coffee. It’s a spirited and very personal biography of Ruth and her parents Mannie and Renee Brandenstein (later Bransten), which begins with a scene just after the earthquake of 1906 and then moves back to the very beginnings of the MJB brand in the 1880s and on through to the 1930s.
Mannie was a born marketer, and he relished in figuratively and literally painting the town with advertisements for his products, which is why even now, one hundred years after he invented the campaign, one can still find MJB Coffee – WHY? painted on walls in the Bay Area.
Many people in the last hundred years must have passed these ads and wondered… why WHY?
Well… here’s the answer…
At one point, the young Ruth asks her dad: “Why the WHY?” and Mannie’s answer is: “What’s the difference, as long as people ask. That makes sales.”
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05.31.09
Posted in Books, Culture, Media at 9:51 pm by thomas
Bruce Sterling posted a rather rough wakeup call about the state of current literature and publishing at his beyond the beyond blog – Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature.
The recent wave of layoffs in the publishing industry was probably just the beginning in a process that will eventually lead to a new equilibrium far away from the current state of the industry and all eighteen points by Bruce Sterling are worth a thought.
I don’t think any of the existing large publishing houses will survive in their current form since even if these businesses want to change at this point (and that’s a big IF), there is preciously little that can be done.
Ditch paper and go online? Yes, but the ebook market is already carpet-bombed by small startups and behemoths like Sony and Amazon.
Make everything a free download to support paid copies? Yes, but that should have been done long ago. That would have been GREAT advertisement before the Internet started to drown in free content, but now?
Go viral? Yep, like everybody else. Doesn’t help with the revenue, though.
At this point traditional publishing is dead, with the possible exception of coffee table books and niche publishers that will sprout like weeds around the edges of the old system. There will still be book stores and new books from many (many!) more smaller publishers, but the times of million-dollar advances for books and monolothic publishing deals will be over for good.
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05.11.09
Posted in Books, Culture, Japan at 11:41 pm by thomas
Last year I had picked up the first US translation of one of Arimasa Osawa’s books – Shinjuku Shark, and just recently I’ve found a new translation in his series around a cop in Tokyo in our local Japanese bookstore.
The title is The Poison Ape, and where Shinjuku Shark was an in-depth study of Tokyo police procedures, this new book is a hard, cold-edged dive into Tokyo’s brothels and the many illegal immigrants from China and Taiwan that live and work there.
Detective Samejima hasn’t changed much since the last book, but this case is definitely rougher. Samejima stumbles over a case of drug sales in Tokyo’s subways that leads on to illegal immigrants, but there is much more going on as a bloody feud between Taiwanese gangs spreads into Tokyo, rapidly decimating gang members and bystanders alike.
The book is a good read and offers insights into a Japan that a casual traveler to the country would never see, but it is also a very brutal book, probably in many ways a more truthful account of the underbelly of Tokyo’s society than most writers would dare to offer.
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10.22.08
Posted in Books, Culture, Good Stuff, Media at 11:08 pm by thomas
OMG! It’s almost November… and again, it’s a very busy time with so many things to do – and that is a very bad thing, since I really, really would love to do another NaNoWriMo. It’s been four years now since I’ve been a NaNo Winner, and I’d love to repeat that feat.
In case you haven’t heard of it before, the idea behind NaNoWriMo – or the National Novel Writing Month – is to write a novel in a month. Yep. One Month. Just get it over with, like ripping off a band-aid.
Now you’d be correct in saying that this is insane, and you are probably right, but it’s a very sweet kind of insanity that I can only recommend to everybody to at least try once. All you have to do is think of a rough idea for the opening of your novel, say, on October 31st, and then around midnight you open a new document on your computer and you start to type. Easy.
To “win” NaNoWriMo, you have to write 50,000 words in 30 days, or about 1666 words every night. it’s not as hard as it sounds, and my only recommendations are:
- write daily
- write without editing
- don’t plot ahead for more than one day’s worth of writing
From my experience with several failed attempts after my first win, I can also tell you that plotting ahead and working along a frozen story arc is deadly for NaNo, since there is no time to think. It’s all about having a strong idea for the opening and then let the characters do whatever they want.
So. Are you up for the challenge? Come on! There’s kids taking part in this – it’s not that hard to write 1700 words a day… it’s probably going to take you about two hours every day for a month. Just cut down on TV and instead of wasting time on somebody else’s fantasy, set your imagination free!
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10.11.08
Posted in Books, Culture, Good Stuff, Media at 11:10 pm by thomas
Wow… yesterday I finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson and I have to say, it was quite some work to get through over 900 pages of rather amazing ideas.
The book is a world-building exercise on the level of Tolkien’s best work, with a wide swath of fictional geography, history, local languages and culture fleshed out to the point of ridiculousness. There is certainly a steep learning curve during the early chapters, where a lot of concepts are introduced in short order, but things calm down a bit with long passages were actually not much is going on other than Stephenson cementing the world he has created for this rather extraordinary story to live in.
But even these slow sequences are full of great details and sparkly little ideas that make this a typical Stephenson novel, that often feel like a grand tour through the brain of a genius.
I really enjoyed how much of the early philosophical concepts and historical background become crucial parts of the story as it unfolds in the second half of the book – I found that to be a nice payoff for what early on feels like overindulgence on Stephenson’s part.
The last third of the book takes the reader into a surprising direction, with the pacing picking up quickly and a rather amazing few chapters at the end where the book reminded me a lot of the action sequences in Snow Crash.
All in all I very much enjoyed Anathem and can highly recommend it to all Neal Stephenson fans. If you are new to Stephenson, check out Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon and if you like those, Anathem should be on your must-read list.
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01.11.08
Posted in Books, Culture at 1:03 am by thomas
The Guardian has a long-standing special section with portraits of writer’s rooms. I’m fascinated by this collection and I can’t get enough of the writers describing their own office space and desks.
We all seem to have very different needs to get into a creative zone and to work on something that we have to create in our minds out of nothing. And professional writers are pretty much the endurance champions in creating new things. They spend many hours every day staring at a wall or a bunch of pictures or out the window. They write and read a lot and their desks usually show the traces of this work with piles of books and papers scattered everywhere.
The writer’s rooms collection is an interesting window into the minds of these writers and I can only recommend checking out those messy desks… makes it so much easier to put off cleaning my own desk.
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11.24.07
Posted in Books, Culture, Media at 12:35 am by thomas
I’ve just finished Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years and the book was a revelation in many ways.
First of all, it is quite interesting to read so much about the back story of the Monty Pythons and how the magic worked. Palin describes in quite some detail the creative sessions, the business meetings and the work together on the TV shows, live performances and movies. The reader can see through Michael Palin’s eyes how some of the funniest moments ever to be put on celluloid were conceived and how much hard work it often took to create something that looks quite effortlessly on the screen.
Then there is the person of Michael Palin. I thoroughly enjoy all of his work, and I’ve been a huge fan of the travel shows and books he has created over the last twenty years. His travel books are full of humanity and he is always very observant about his surroundings, and as it turns out, he honed these skills in several decades of quite excellent diary writing.
The diaries are a fun read, and in their format of a few paragraphs to maybe one or two pages per entry they are quite addictive and hard to put down (”Just one more…”). The seventies were clearly an amazing time for the Pythons, and the book does a great job of showing the changed circumstances of the Pythons, from being a unknown local comedy troupe to becoming a global phenomenon when Life of Brian was released.
The book is full of interesting character studies of all the people Palin interacts with and there are many interesting and surprising appearances by a wide cast of celebrities of the times.
One thing that struck me is how the continuous routine of a daily journal had helped Palin to become the clear and warm writer he is today – you can literally see the change in his writing style across the book.
The diaries left me with a warm, nostalgic glow for the seventies and the urge to see all the Python shows and movies again, and also with a certain tug to maybe sit down and try my hands on a daily diary. The effort may look wasted in the short term, but years later this may turn out to be, if nothing else, a much appreciated reminder of one’s life and times.
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