Puck

An article on Xark! claims that writing for the Web is a “new form of writing”:

We all learned to write in more or less the same way: Beginning, middle, end; Subject, predicate, object; Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Beyond consisting of three items, each of these approaches shares another common theme: Inclusion…. But when you write for the Web as you’d write for print, you write too long. You waste the reader’s time explaining what she already knows.

In fact, writing for the Web is much like writing an edge column for a newspaper (a dying art form in a dying medium, to be sure) or news shorts for a magazine or gossip columns in any medium. Indeed, good writing never explains what the reader already knows: good writing has hyperlinked itself for a couple generations (at least) by tucking the “see further” into parentheses, footnotes, and other unobtrusive places. So the way we write for the Web isn’t new, it’s just that the technology makes it easier for us to get on with our arguments by putting the burden of research onto the shoulders of our readers. And that’s not (necessarily) good writing–and it certainly isn’t new.

Good writing explains old news and ideas in new ways and sheds new light on prior assumptions. Writing for the Web doesn’t change the way our brains work, and the way we cognitively process language determines what makes writing good. And what Dan o’ Xark has come up with is standard fare in an English 101 class: the five-paragraph essay, complete with beginningm, middle and end. No need to follow any of his links; his piece is complete without them.

We love to think we’re committing revolution at every generation, with every doubling of processor speed. And maybe we are. But, in the long view, the way we communicate via the Web is precisely the same way Plato and Shakespeare communicated.

via Xark!: A new form of writing.

My friend Jayme Jacobson is an amazing artist who has just illustrated a story by Ken O’Donnel. The story involves Eclectons, an invention of Jayme’s – characters made from recycled paper and plastic, stuff you’d normally not give a second thought. In Jayme’s hands, tough, junk gets a second life. Ken and Jayme have entered the story they created, “Birth of a Rebel,” in Slideshare’s “Tell a Story Contest.” Frankly, their work is far and away the best thing there, and it’d be great if they won the contest. But you be the judge. Check out “Birth of a Rebel” for yourself.

WINO magazine, the wine news and review mag published in Seattle, has been running a Higher Learning column written by yours truly since issue one. They’ve recently pulled all my pieces together into a single page on the WINO blog, complete with spiffy new headlines.

Rudy Rucker’s free webzine, FLURB, just came out with issue #7. One of my fav writers, Richard Kadrey, has a great story in this issue, “Trembling Blue Stars”:

You look very handsome for a corpse.”

Rucker collaborated with John Shirley on “All Hangy.” Brian Garrison contributes five poems.  And CharlieAnders gives us “The History of the Internet”:

It started with a girl named Tammy who said she knew where Xaxa and I could score some acid.

And everything is nicely glazed with Rucker’s images. Check it out!

I like Steven A. Smith’s take on the need for a debate among journalists about the future of journalism as newspapers die a (not so) slow and horrible death. Smith is the former editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review (a newspaper I love to hate for its conservative editorial page and lack of attention to agriculture as anything but an end product for restaurant reviews).

As Smith points out, the newspaper industry’s “central debate ought not to be about saving newspapers and, in fact, that hasn’t even been an open question for some time. The American newspaper as we have come to know it in the post-war era is not going to survive.”

Publishers who continue to argue their papers are strong despite massive cuts in newsroom staff, are twisting the truth in order to save their businesses. They talk about the migration to niche products, to smaller, leaner papers and efficient websites. Saving journalism isn’t part of their agenda. To be fair, especially in the current marketplace, they can’t save both. They always will default to the money side, they have no choice. So a niche website devoted to golf may generate revenue for the business. But it will not serve citizens who rely on journalists to reveal civic truths.

As a former indie publisher, I’m intrigued and hopeful that Smith sees a possibility “for a single journalist, operating on her own, to cover a legislature somewhere in a format as crude as a newsletter or pamphlet and generate enough from her efforts to make a modest living.”

Dubious, but hopeful. A model here might be Cockburn and St. Clair’s CounterPunch, which  charges for a print addition of its free web content (and asks for donations to support its web publishing).

In any case, we can’t let publishers ruin the business and calling of journalism: “take back the page!” is Smith’s rallying cry: journalists “ought not to be allowed to kill the vital public-service journalism that serves citizens. It’s time to stop debating the obvious. It’s time for journalists to take back the debate and save themselves.”

See also: Newspaper Death Watch.

I just read a great piece by Mandy Brown about reading. While most designers, PR and marketing people and others are pushing site design toward those who scan and search, Brown is thinking about how to make space for readers.

As a reader, I love that. As a designer and PR person pushing pixels around in favor of scanners and searchers, I’m given pause and something to think about.

Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.

Puck says, check it out here. And check out Mandy Brown’s site, this is a working library, too.

On Joanna Russ, a new book of essays on the great lesbian-feminist science fiction writer and to which I am a contributor, has just received a great review in The Village Voice:

Mendlesohn brings 17 writers (including eight men) to her critical enterprise, which picks up where Jeanne Cortiel’s 1999 Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction leaves off. The essayists all believe that Russ’s career trajectory has much to teach next-generation feminists. And all approach Russ’s seven novels, three nonfiction collections, and three short-story collections impressed by how each book bristles with epistemological invention. Her fiction twists the most shopworn genre conventions—like time travel, sword-and-sorcery, or all-female planets—into scenarios that intentionally subvert stereotypical expectations. Comparing these texts against copious amounts of analytical opinion from her various interviews, letters, book reviews, and pedagogic essays, Mendlesohn’s team constructs a fascinating picture of this pioneering “scholar/practitioner” as visionary cultural critic.

Daphne Gray-Grant has a great piece on Ragan, a site for professional communicators (read: PR hacks), about the kinds of things writers do to get the job done. I especially like #6, as procrastination is the hurdle I’ve had to deal with most often as a writing instructor and coach:

Write in small bursts. Creative work doesn’t require oodles of time. That first draft you need to write? It’s best done in dribs and drabs, a little bit at a time. Instead of procrastinating, effective writers persuade themselves to write a little each day, no matter how frazzled and frantic they feel. (Editing, on the other hand, usually needs space, time and quiet.)

About a dozen years ago, when I was writing a novel amidst three more-or-less full time jobs (including a technical writing gig for Broderbund software that bored me to tears), I adopted the motto “a sentence a day, even if it kills me.” The novel–and the software manuals–got done.

She also suggests separating writing from editing (great advice that I have a hard time following, a bad habit I freely admit slows me down), doing research before writing (again, great advice, though I’ve seen this abusued, as doing research sometimes becomes the excuse for not writing), and “dissecting” great writing “like a scientist” to see how it’s done.

Sometime in 2002, I responded with a proposal to a call for papers on Joanna Russ from British science fiction scholar Farah Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn accepted the proposal on the condition that I not write about The Female Man, Russ’s most famous novel – and pretty much the only thing of Russ’s anyone reads anymore.That was fine with me, and I proceeded to write a paper that touches on pretty much everything but The Female Man.

It was a long road, full of switch backs and revisions, but On Joanna Russ has finally been published Wesleyen University Press. Edited by Mendelsohn, contributors include Samuel R. Delaney (it’s too bad he and Russ never conceived a child), Tess Williams, Gary Wolfe, myself and a host of others.

My essay, the last one in the book, is called “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ.” In a nutshell, I try to show that narrative is a space of gendered topology; in other words, that fiction is a landscape of cocks and cunts. Russ certainly resisted that landscape. Her writing is a macrophage ravaging the immune system of mainstream science fiction. I tried to take a snapshot of the action (a highly academic one) to capture the lesions, superations and oozings of consciousness through space that I found in her work.

Thank goddess I had Delaney’s great essay to guide me. After the book is available, I’ll post the essay.

When Nisi read at Book People in Moscow, Idaho recently, a young woman interning as a reporter for Yin Radio (based at KRFP FM in Moscow) recorded her reading. You can now hear that reading via an MP3 on Yin Radio’s site. Nisi read all of “Bird Day” and part of “Wallamelon.” The 53-minute program also includes Kim Barnes reading from her new novel, A Place Called Home, as well as a piece on Coco Umiker, a food science grad student at WSU (one of my public relations interns wrote about her major professor here) who is a partner in a winery down the hill in Lewiston, Idaho.