In Common with Humans

personal stuff behind cut to spare f-lists

My Blogcritics review is up!

Movie Review: Beowulf Gives ‘Em That New Razzle-Dazzle, But Not Much More
Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf pushes the CGI envelope with stunning animation effects, but ultimately is just another cinematic fireworks show.

I was just a little nervous about it, because there wasn’t an obvious option for categorizing movie reviews, and they want Amazon links with every article. That was no problem for me. With my Amazon Associates store, Amazon links are my forte–but they want at least one link to something with every article. You post about politics, you’ve got to find something relevant on Amazon.

The really terrifying part? You will find something relevant on Amazon–no matter what you write about!

There were current movie reviews on Blogcritics, however, and my article was approved immediately, so obviously it’s okay! Now…what do I write next?

My newest marketing/branding strategy (of a potentially infinite number of possibilities!): I applied to be a contributing member of Blogcritics.org. I got the idea when Mayra Calvani’s review of Mortal Touch was picked up by Blogcritics and subsequently went all over the ‘Net, including the Boston Globe’s online version, Boston.com. I can post happily away on my own blogs but they’ll never get the kind of exposure I’ll get from Blogcritics. I read over the guidelines and e-mailed the publisher, Eric Olsen–and misspelled his name. Gods, was my face red or what when I realized I’d been that stupid! But he forgave me, because he e-mailed back yesterday saying welcome aboard.

But Blogcritics.org is a serious online “magazine.” Among the many requirements is that I have to post my first article…within 24 hours of receiving Eric’s e-mail. That’s one way to separate the dilettantes from the live ones, I guess! It is acceptable to post a previously published article for the first one, but after that they want everything you submit to be exclusive to Blogcritics or published there first. I chewed over what I might write…and with amazing speed that only a 24-hour deadline could have triggered, I whipped out a 890-word review of the new movie, “Beowulf.” Blogcritics wants substantive content, by the way. They didn’t give me a maximum word count, but they mentioned a minimum: at least 200 words. I also should post at least once per week.

So, I’ve been letting the review “rest” a couple of hours before one last read-through and then it has to go up by 6:00pm. (Ideally, I’d let a piece “rest” for a day or more, but this isn’t writing, it’s journalism *heh*.) After that, I have to add Blogcritics links to my blogrolls and links lists, and join the Blogcritics members’ Yahoo group. Whew. It’s exciting! But…whew. Then, I’m joining the IPNE Board meeting conference call at 6:30pm.

Someone posted to [self-publishing] listserv today bemoaning how much it takes to “build a platform” as an expert (according to one source she was reading, which, she didn’t yet realize, could be fairly assessed using her own judgement, and not treated like a cast-in-steel prescription). Well…it does. I’ve already spent years “building a platform” as a vampire/paranormal expert and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Aaron Shepard (Aiming at Amazon) replied to this poster, saying that there’s really no point in doing all that work (to build a platform and “brand yourself” as an expert) at all unless it’s a subject that you’re so passionate about, you’d do it anyway, whether you stood to make money from it or not. I have to agree with him, and it’s certainly true in my case.

It’s still one HELL of a lot of work. Whew.

I did something unusual tonight–one of those things I so often think I’d like to do, but somehow rarely get myself into gear and actually follow through on. I went over to the local high school, North Middlesex Regional High School and saw their drama department, The North Middlesex Players, put on a full, three-hour-long performance of The Laramie Project. I knew one of the cast members from the church I speak at, and I saw two adult members of the church at the performance, so I had a few personal connections. I love live theatre, and I like student theatre–I’d rather see a small intimate show than some amplified, hyper-produced Broadway spectacular any day of the week, to be quite honest. And you couldn’t beat the ticket price: $5.00, and I sat in the front row.

As most people probably know, The Laramie Project is a sort of docudrama based on more than 200 hours of interviews done in Laramie in 1998-99 by the Tectonic Theatre Project following the fatal beating of gay man Matthew Shepard. I’ve always wanted to see it done onstage (yes, I know HBO did it–I didn’t see their version, and, it’s not the same thing. This story needs to be told breath-to-breath. That’s just how I feel about it). None of it is fictionalized–every word spoken is taken from an interview of a real person, or from court records or news broadcasts. It’s earnest and forthright, but it’s never hyperbolic or melodramatic. The whole play is about how people in Laramie were affected by the event, and how they reacted to it–it’s not really about the crime itself. It’s about the experience of living through the crime, and being changed by it.

Today, December 1st, is Matthew Shepard’s birthday. He would have been 31 years old. The North Middlesex Players is donating 10% of the show’s proceeds from today’s two performances to The Matthew Shepard Foundation. That was probably one of the things that got me booted out the door to go.

The student cast did an absolutely terrific job. They double-cast it, partly because they needed a lot of “extras” for some scenes (such as the parade). What was especially impressive was how well everything was timed and paced. The show has three acts, each of which moves rapidly from one vignette or monologue to the next. There were racks of clothing at the back of the stage and at either side, about a dozen plain white benches, and only three other set pieces. One side of the proscenium had a table, chairs, and small dresser with a phone and lamp on it; the other side had a “bar” with a couple of stools, that was changed to a table and chair near the end. Most of the cast played multiple roles and some of them switched from one role directly to another one. The cast all wore khaki pants and black t-shirts (these were specially printed and were for sale in the lobby, I bought one), and when an actor spoke a role, he or she would put on one or two pieces of costume, and that was how the characters were distinguished. So, at continuous intervals of one to five minutes, the focus of the action changed, and this might involve something as simple as one actor putting on a shirt and walking to the front of the stage, or as complicated as twenty actors moving a dozen benches and other set pieces and changing clothes, all at the same time. Yet this was accomplished so smoothly, there was no time difference between the simple and complicated changes. This play doesn’t showcase any individuals, and you can’t even call it an “ensemble” play. It’s an intricately coordinated performance in which everyone worked together like clockwork for three solid hours. And The North Middlesex Players, cast and crew, were just great.

The acting ranged from competent to outstanding; there was a little problem here and there with projection and enunciation. Good solid speech training would help there–but even big-name movie actors these days seem to eat their lines half the time. However, the entire show is largely a series of monologues–non-stop speeches, mostly non-interactive, in other words. As a trained actor myself, I can testify that this is not easy to do, and the overall quality of the presentation was most impressive. Even the occasional and inevitable glitch (primarily uncooperative costumes) didn’t stop the actors from going right on with their speeches with complete (indeed, admirable) aplomb. There was a well-deserved standing ovation at the curtain call.

There is one more performance, tomorrow (Sunday, December 2nd) afternoon at 2:00pm. If you’re in this area and would like to see The Laramie Project performed live, go. You won’t find a better way to spend $5.00 on a Sunday just before a big snow storm!

I’ve had a productive couple of days, anyway. I sent off eight copies of Mortal Touch to be considered for PMA’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. I’d already submitted an entry for the Independent Publisher Book Awards, but the Ben Franklins involve a bit steeper investment, both for the entry fee and the number of copies they require for the judges. (Not only that, but–I’m not joking, really!–the bunny ate half of the flyer I was sent for the Ben Franklins and I had to download the PDF application form online!) But those just went out. I just registered for two upcoming Boston-area conventions, Arisia in January and Boskone in February. I’m going to see if I can get a reading time at either or both, and I’ve gotten some good tips recently about promotional things I can be doing at the conventions. I’ve joined an organization for women who write fantasy, science-fiction and horror, Broad Universe. My friend and fellow author Morven Westfield, who I ran into at World Fantasy Convention, is a member and spoke highly of them, and I attended the Broad Universe party and group reading. Every dime of this is tax-deductible, btw, which is kind of scary.

Now I need to take a “workout break” and then get BLUM’s accounting books into serious shape. That’s the job I’ve been procrastinating on! But it can’t wait another second, because first, tax time is approaching, and second, I’m about to start production on two more books, and that means everything has to be straightened up. It’s just not very fun, even for an anal budgeter like me.

On a lighter note, gakked from anderyn:

random memage of the day

I’d been reading about Amazon’s new “wireless reading device,” “Kindle” for about a week now. I actually hadn’t realized that it was already on the market. I thought it sounded interesting for a lot of reasons. But last night, quite late, I happened to look at Amazon’s main page, started reading about the Kindle, and saw that it’s already sold out. And, so far, even though Amazon’s catalog includes more than 3,000,000 titles, there are only 91,383 book titles available for the Kindle.

All those people buying this cool new device for Christmas and only 3% of Amazon’s titles are available for them to put on it. Now that’s what I call getting in on the ground floor.

So, I’ve been getting Mortal Touch kindled. This proved more complicated than you might have thought…or maybe just as complicated as you might have thought, after all, this is Amazon.com we’re talking about. *snark* Let’s leave out the part that at midnight last night, when I was in the middle of trying to figure all the Kindle parameters out, I got a totally unexpected phone call from an ex-girlfriend who I haven’t seen in four years who had just gotten here from the west coast and I was on the phone an hour with her and then spent most of today with her catching up and resolving some old Stuff, shall we? Thank you… Before and after said intervention of Real Life(tm), here’s what uploading involved:

• Amazon “converts” your book file for Kindle, and ideally, they want an html file. I think by this time there are two formats that Mortal Touch is not yet in, smoke signals and html. Kindle will “convert” a PDF file to html, but not perfectly. I uploaded the PDF and I didn’t like the results. In that case, Amazon allows you to download the “converted” html file and edit it manually.
• I downloaded the html file, which of course is humungous. Notepad would edit it, but would not do Replace All on the whole file (I tried, and Notepad went into irreversible catatonia). That meant I had to go through replacing things like end-of-line tags and whatnot by hand. This was, um, time-consuming. To say the least.
• I needed to insert the en-space character entity to indent the paragraphs. I couldn’t remember what it was. I looked at the source code for about 10 websites before I found it, because everyone is using style sheets now. (Kindle uses very basic html.)
• After I’d done about seven chapters, the dormant 99% of my brain cells woke up and I realized I could copy-and-paste a chapter at a time into another Notepad file, use Replace All on that chapter, then copy-and-paste it back into the main file. Duh.
• Along with hand-editing the html file (for a 372-page, 170,000-word book), I needed to input account information with bank routing numbers, required for the digital platform agreement. For some reason, I had to do that about four times before it finally accepted all the information and completed the Save.
• I couldn’t get the edited file to upload, and I finally realized, by going back and reading the directions and actually paying attention this time, that I needed to re-save the edited file into a .zip file, the way I’d downloaded it. At first I wasn’t sure my freebie zip software would add files to an archive as well as extract them, but I found that it would. I tried a third time to upload the edited file, zipped, and this time it uploaded. I also uploaded a cover image.
• I “previewed” the uploaded file and it looks fine. Yay! So, I clicked the “Publish” button. I read over the Digital Platform Publish Agreement legalese, determined that there was nothing in there to give me pause, and clicked the “agree and publish” button at the end. Error message–“sorry, we fucked up, try again later.” (or something to that effect, *heh*) The last time I got that message, it was because of the wrong file format, so I double-checked all my account information, and had to re-enter it a couple of times.
• I tried again to “Publish”–and it worked. Or so it says. Apparently, it will take 12 to 72 hours to completely register in the system and become available for sale. But, assuming there are no further glitches, Mortal Touch will be available for everyone to read on their shiny new Kindles! I priced it at $9.99, because I looked at the best selling Kindle titles so far and that is overwhelmingly the most common price. I make 35% of that per sale.

Some people in the publishing world are fussing about the effect this will have on book publishing and so on. Not me. I want my books read. I don’t care how people read them. If Kindle is the future of reading, I’m going to be right there at the door with the bowl of candy. If it’s not…I’m still publishing books, and I haven’t risked a dime on this experiment. We shall see!

Taking a break from catching up on e-mail and forum posts. Gakked from punjabhappy:

What American accent do you have?

Another review of Mortal Touch!

I discovered it unexpectedly. This website has had the book since early September, but she didn’t seem to update very often. Generally, reviewers drop me an e-mail when they post their review, but in this case, I looked at the website this evening, and boom! There it was!

Review on Vampire Genre

Thank you, Vicky London! Now I’m off to write her a thank-you note and add Vampire Genre to my various links lists and blog-rolls!

Gakked from anderyn:

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Maybe I’m reading too much Deepak Chopra? *wry grin*

mundane holiday stuff