Sharing Policy

It recently occurred to me that I’ve never given a clear, plain explanation of my feelings about sharing or copying the content on this blog. I’ve been remiss. So today I’ll explain the policy I’ll generally hold to. (This will also go up on a Page on the blog soon, so anyone can find it easily without having to dig through the archives.)

First of all, if in doubt, or if you think I might wish to make an exception in your case, ask me.

Second, feel free to link to posts on this blog, share them on social networks, etc. This is highly encouraged, though if you link to me on your blog or elsewhere I’d appreciate a trackback or other notification of the link. I’ll try to avoid breaking any of your links. And please don’t claim any of it as your work; when you link or share please give proper attribution.

Third, I do not object to personal archival copies or to the incidental electronic copies that are necessarily created by reading this blog on its web-page or on Facebook or by receiving it by email or in your blog reader, or in other similar cases that arise in the normal course of reading this blog. However, if you make personal archival copies, please do not distribute those.

But fourth, beyond such cases as those I outline above, please do not copy my work without my prior explicit permission.

If you think any of this is unreasonable, or have any other thoughts, please comment.

Mathoms and Games

When I was growing up, before we got Internet access (i.e. before my junior year of high school or so), my family and I spent a lot of time on Grex, an Ann Arbor-based BBS and free shell provider. At the time, one of the games (written by a founding member of the system, but which has since vanished) was a “mathom” program.

A mathom, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is an item that’s rather like a white elephant—it’s valuable, most likely old, and probably unique, but not by any means useful—at least to you, anymore. (Bilbo’s mithril shirt was a mathom.) It was almost certainly given to you by someone important (or important to you), and likely has a long and distinguished history, so you can’t just get rid of it. And it’d be a shame to pack it away in your attic and forget about it. So, if you can’t set it in a place of honor or put it on display, the only thing to do with a mathom is to give it away to someone else.

And that was the premise of this program (hardly a game, really …): you created mathoms and gave them away. If you received a mathom, you could keep it or, now or eventually, give it away to someone else. Especially for a literate and imaginative middle school student, this was a very diverting pastime, and I remember it fondly. But the system has changed hardware twice since then, and been ported from operating system to operating system, and somewhere along the line the mathom program was lost.

A couple of years ago, soon after Facebook created its applications platform, I thought to myself, “Surely someone’s created a mathom game for Facebook!” After all, this sort of thing is ideal for a social platform, and many of the most popular games include sort-of-similar mechanics. But no, my search came up empty.

So now I’ve added such a program to my list of projects to get to one day. (My initial brainstorming of use-cases was on the pad I mislaid a few weeks ago, the same pad as yesterday’s poem. But I can do more thinking when I get around to it.) I think that before the time comes to turn part of Strategic Primer into a social-network or mobile game, I’ll do this to get my head around the development environment, model, and ecosystem.

But I’d still like your thoughts now. Comments?

Writing and social media

It should be obvious by now from the content of this blog that I’m an aspiring author and more than occasional poet. I’m also a heavy user of social media to reconnect with friends and acquaintances and to find resources relevant to my interests (writing, game development, programming, politics, etc. …). So I’ve been thinking: what “social media” tools are there for writers?

The obvious one for me is WEbook, which I wrote about two years ago. It’s a “social network” for writers, readers, and editors. As a reader, there’s a lot of good writing on the site that I can read for free (unfortunately, Sturgeon’s Law applies), and if my writing got more visibility I’m sure I would get helpful reviews or other criticism. (If or when I get some more time to do reviewing myself, I suspect that will improve.) WEbook also runs the PageToFame contest, which for writers gives your pieces a shot at being published for a reasonable entry fee (and “coupons” for a free entry come up with reasonable frequency), while for readers the writers’ entry fee improves the dreck ratio significantly. (Writers thinking of submitting book-length fiction to PageToFame should be warned that the “page” you’re asked to submit is actually only about 250 words, which is rather annoying, but if you get past the first round you’ll be asked to submit quite a bit more. The limit for “shorts”—now apparently only short stories, but formerly poetry, essays, blog posts, and the like—is much more reasonable.) The main drawback of WEbook for me, other than what I’ve already mentioned, is that I don’t have any friends on the site yet. Social media isn’t much fun without anyone to be sociable with. Since I’m on it already, I recommend it to any of my author (or interested-reader) friends. (If anyone reading this is on the site, look me up.)

I’ve run across references to other social networks, etc., for writers. (I had one in particular in mind, but when I restarted my browser sometime last week the tab I had it open in said that Google thought it was a malware-carrying site, so I won’t link to it now.) Do any of you have any recommendations?

I’ve also come across some potentially-useful tools. Most notable there is Wridea, a “social brainstorming” tool. One of these days I’ll get my ideas (as opposed to tasks, which I manage with Pivotal Tracker) into Wridea, and I’ll want some help brainstorming. Any volunteers? And does anyone have any more tools they’d like to share?

I subscribe to a few writers’ blogs, and some blogs about writing. I link to the more individual ones of these in my blogroll (in the right sidebar if you’re reading this on the blog, rather than on Facebook or in a blog reader). Do any of my readers have blogs that I don’t already follow? And are there any writing blogs that I should read, but don’t?

Beyond getting help, another purported benefit of social media is a wider audience. I have this blog’s posts imported into Facebook as Notes, but I don’t know how many read them. Feel free to “share” or otherwise link to posts you think are insightful or otherwise likeable. (Anyone with a blog, it would be a kindness if you linked to me in your blogroll.) I’m trying—with little success—to build an audience, so that when I have something that truly needs promotion (most immediately the book of poetry I’d like to put together, probably, but eventually the novels) I’ll have people that I know are interested.

Thoughts?

“I’m on WordPress, but all of my friends are on Blogspot! What do I do?”

I started this blog in the last days of December 2008. I began by (manually) mass-importing all my Facebook Notes, then blogged only intermittently until around October, 2009, when I started posting on the order of three poems a week. In late December of that year I began the schedule that I’ve more or less kept since.

But what I’d like to talk about today isn’t the blog itself, but rather its platform. After considering various such sites, for various reasons—now almost entirely vanished into the mists of oblivion, which is a fancy way of saying I’ve forgotten them—I picked WordPress. I think that one of my reasons was that I knew one person who I knew had a blog on WordPress, and I didn’t know anyone that I knew had a blog elsewhere. (Other possible reasons were its compatibility with offline blog editors, which I no longer use.)

But over the last few months, I’ve discovered that several of my friends have blogs, and most of them are on Blogspot rather than WordPress. (If you’re reading this on my blog itself rather than Facebook, look near the top of the right-hand column, under “Friends and Teachers”: four of the links end in “.wordpress.com”, and seven in “.blogspot.com”. And there’s a few other friends to whom I don’t link but whom I read in my blog reader.) If I’d known this when I started, I would have picked Blogspot to host my blog.

I’m not going to switch; there’s too much invested in this location. For instance, I still regularly get hits to my reply to the Banner‘s review of Prince Caspian. But, if possible, I’d still like to use Blogger’s social features to increase my readership. Is this possible? Is there any way to connect my “following” on Blogspot/Google Reader/Google Buzz to my WordPress blog and vice versa? If not, I still encourage you to link to my posts or my blog itself, to share them on Facebook, and to use the various “social” or “sharing” features available on WordPress—”like”ing, tweeting, or otherwise sharing my posts.

Contest update: more help, please!

(If you’re tagged in this on Facebook, you’re one of my friends whose advice I particularly desire and trust; please read on.)

WEbook, a social networking site for writers (and readers), is running an ongoing writing contest called PageToFame. It now has two parts: one for longer works, and one for shorter pieces. For longer works, for each entry the contestant submits the first page of the piece and a paragraph plot summary; if enough readers judge it highly enough they’ll ask for the first chapter, and so on for four stages. For works under 1,000 words the contestant submits the entire piece. At present the entry fee is the same for short and long works: just under $5. The fee for long works will double at the end of March, and the fee for short works will do the same sometime later.

I think that my poetry has a better chance of passing muster in this contest than my fiction, but there is comparatively little reward offered for the poetry: they plan to come up with some way of distributing and selling short works electronically and would give me royalties whenever one of my poems sold. The reward for a novel’s passing all four stages of the other half of the contest, in contrast, is a book contract.

Therefore, I plan to enter both halves of the contest with at least a few pieces. But I am a notoriously bad critic of my own work, and so I solicited your advice on what to select and how to revise or polish the pieces before entering them. I would like to sincerely thank Nate, Hannah, Libby, and Amanda for the excellent criticism and advice I received; it’s been very helpful. But I still haven’t succeeded in narrowing my choices down quite enough.

I have eliminated one of my six novels-in-progress (Castle Commander), and twenty-five of the forty-three poems I’ve posted so far, from my consideration. But that’s about as far as I can get, so I’m again turning to you, my readers, in hope of good advice.

Which novels-in-progress (first pages) should I submit? Which poems? Which should I cut? How can I improve my novel plot summaries? What can I title those poems still identified by their first lines? And what bits of a novel first page or a poem are weak and could be improved? (Conversely, what bits are particularly good, so I can try to use a similar technique elsewhere?)

The (now five) first pages of novels-in-progress, and corresponding plot summaries, are in word processor files linked from here. The eighteen poems I’m still considering are linked below. (See this page for a list of all the poetry I’ve posted, with my attempts at one-sentence blurbs. If there’s a poem there that you particularly like that I’ve already cut from this list, or if you think I should include one of my essays, speak up!) I’ll try to keep this post up-to-date with any changes I’m persuaded to make, and I’ll also mention any changes in the comments on Facebook.

To reduce my expense, I would like to enter my prose before the March 31 price increase, so other things being equal please consider the novel first pages first. But I’ll take what feedback I can get.

The remaining poems:

• “A Love Unknown”
• “Commence with Honor”
• Untitled Metaphor #6
• “To dance the night away”
• “Nunc dimittis”
• “Hold! Fleeting instant”
• “If you’re not she”
• “Your first kind word”
• Untitled Metaphor #5
• “All creation shines”
• Untitled Metaphor #8
• “Ah! for the olden days”
• Untitled Metaphor #7
• Song for O’Carolan
• “Taliesin to a Critic”
• “What if the trumpet?”
• “How long ago is it”
• “Caveat Lector”

Please review! And thank you.

On the 3K Limit

[Administrivia: This was originally posted on Monday, February 12 at 10:14 PM as a Note on Facebook. I apologize for the duplication for my readers on that platform.]

I am becoming increasingly annoyed with the 3000-character limit on Profile sections — that’s nowhere near enough to bring to my readers half the quotations that define me perfectly, let alone all that have any relevance. It can’t be hardware limitations, since they allow unlimited photos, and no photo is under a K in size. (For the argument from economics, I’m sure that you can find just as big a market for quotes — often inside jokes — on T-shirts as you can for posters and T-shirts from photos which people already had, and had more convenient ways of converting to tactile form if desired.) The only reason I can think of is to try to prevent copyright infringement. While I have some things to say on that subject too, the status-quo-ante solution to that is the same as with photos and profile photos — make a mandatory checkbox saying “I certify that this material is either owned by me or reproduced here by me under the Fair Use Exception to the copyright laws” RIAA, MPAA, and DMCA notwithstanding, posting quotations is most certainly within fair use (though I am no lawyer), and were my work published I would be much more gratified than angry at such use. (C.f. Eric Flint’s ramblings on the subjects — anything that will get a book READ is more likely to get it BOUGHT.)