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I suspect one of the reasons that Urban Fantasy is quite popular is that it allows the writer the ability to start the story/action quickly as a general rule. This approach lends itself well to the world building as you go type of story telling. I think, as well, that UF has the potential to be more forgiving in the world building department. When set in the modern world, people will naturally fill out their own expectations for things to be as similar and familiar as they know. Which doesn’t excuse poor world building of the real world sort (Cough getting a street wrong in NYC cough) but most people will back fill readily from their own expectations and experiences.
See, I *LIKE* David Lynch’s Dune. But I’m able to separate a movie from the source.
No.
The movies are not the books, and never could be. People have to let go of that notion, or they will never be satisfied. Books are long. They use different techniques from movies. Length alone dictates what’s reasonable and feasible. In the end, you have to judge a movie on it’s own internal merits. Did it tell a good tale? Did the movie work? Was it internally consistent? While it might be fair to say, did the movie get the sentiment of the book right? Be prepared to run across plenty of people where they will disagree. Because no two people read the same book. Oh, we read the same words. But part of reading is what you bring to the tale when you start reading it. Your feelings and experiences, etc. And that colors the experience of reading the book.
Mar pretty much covered the bulk of my thoughts. What ends up happening in these instances, is that big corporations like Amazon turn around and yank the way for people to legitimately aid others in a somewhat misguided attempt to prevent these supposed bad things from occurring.
For example, you used to be able to tag books with relevant meta data. You could do this for books you’ve read, and often for friends books, etc, to help them show up on searches by topic and help with discoverability. People crusaded against the costs of ebooks, etc, and decided to go on a rampage and blast books with “bad tags” like, boycott, or over 9.99 etc. It got authors and publishers upset, and after some level of complaints, Amazon took action, and got rid of the system. Gone went one more way to try to help out authors and potential readers to connect. Was that the most horrifying thing? No. Authors will survive. And I don’t know if there was anything like this formal petition that time around. But it closed off a portal of opportunity.
I’ll give another example, because we’ve got one going on at work. Anonymous surveys. Some situations exist where giving feedback anonymously allows people (employees for example) to share opinions where they feel it’s ok, because they won’t be punished for their views by bosses, etc. Will some take advantage of that and decide to be rude and insulting? Yes. It surely happens. But if you value being in a team, and having your company work productively together, empowering the employees with a voice of feedback without someone being able to hold a grudge is really important. Otherwise, people will hold back on what they are willing to criticize. No one wants negativity brought up on their annual review (especially if that determines your raise. And even if it doesn’t formally, it often will.) So, as Mar said, folks in a position of lesser power often need the opportunity to do things anonymously to make up for the imbalance of power.
I find I’m on Joe’s side here. The harm in anonymity is outweighed by the good, and you can’t have the good without opening up to the possibility of the bad. Further, I think it’s both impractical, and impossible for Amazon to police it. Under those auspices, any attempt to implement such a plan/policy is at best a token gesture, and like DRM, will not stop the “bad” folks. I don’t believe that the primary factor for the poor online behavior is as much to do with anonymity as it is to impersonal words on a screen.
No point letting it agitate for you. But find a way to mine it all for story fodder. Write about thing that frustrates you. Or write a character that gets frustrated by such things. Try to imagine a world where it’s worse? Or better. Or one where the consequences of such are drastic. I find things that irritate me usually turn out to be topics worth exploring a bit with some writing. Doesn’t always turn into a good story. But it’s better than just keyed up for no good reason.
I don’t tend to notice the time when people post up their messages. I’ve no particular clue if their state, pre-caffeine, post caffeine, intoxicated, etc. have a specific effect on posting habits, but I think the assumption that it does is reasonable. Not sure if there’s really a particular place where you can say: this is where it all started. But, sure, anonymity often allows people to be jerks. Of course, it also empowers some people who felt they couldn’t speak up, for fear of direct repercussions. So, as with most things, we get the bad with the good.
I was just talking with a coworker about something new on the market these days, and he said he had one for home. It’s a single COMBO SSD and traditional HDD in one. This is aimed at the laptop market where space and slots are a premium. And they are new, so expect the kinks to get worked out of such deices in the near future. But it’s something along those lines that I plan for my next laptop.
A couple of quick points.
1) It’s free. (This is new, previous years the group has charged for entries. I’m hoping a successful contest this year will convince the group it’s good to keep it free.)
2) It’s one entry only, per contestant. (Also new this year, prior years, we allowed multiple entries.)
3) It’s a blind contest, so no identifying info on the manuscript. If you’re like me, and have it built into your writing template, double check that before you enter, because I believe it could mean disqualification. I’d hate to see that for anyone.Good luck if you choose to try.
(Note, I am not the contest coordinator, and may, or may not be one of the first round judges.)
Go for the best of both worlds. Get a PC with a SSD to run your system, and then buy an external USB disk to store all your backups/longterm data. The SSD will probably be small (compared to size) and will be fast for running your OS and software, then you can save everything out to the USB attached disk which can still be cheap but large. (I’ve seen inexpensive, small 1TB drives out there in the stores.)
I’m trying to think about this. I don’t know that I’ve ever killed off a character unintentionally yet. And no major characters. Yet. I suspect that it might bother me more if I did a bit more of that. Perhaps I’m too nice. I’ll have to hang out with George Martin or something, get a bit of that bloodthirsty approach to rub off or something.
On the other hand, I don’t seem to have a problem beating up characters, making them break limbs, twist ankles, get shot or beat up etc. Wonder what that says about me. I’m nice, but not too nice?
I like to keep the ideas simple. Write more. Blog more. Submit finished stories to markets. Everything else I accomplish will be gravy.
Yes, but if you’re going to start charging everyone for usage, jumping from FREE to $50 is a bit too steep. If they went for $10 a year or $20, they’d get a higher percent of users than 10% that donated. I think it’s not a good idea to assume that the 10% that donated in the past are all going to stick with them and pony up $50 a year. In fact, I’m positive it won’t work out that way. Good luck to them.
I think $50 is way too much. Something like $20 is reasonable to help offset their costs, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see people ditch their services and support and use Ralan or others instead. Heck, a year of LiveJournal, or Flickr, or even my Amazon Cloud drive are all in the $20-$25 a year range, and I’ll get infinitely more use out of them. I think they need to rethink their plan.
