Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Writing and Depression

That's economic depression, but I'd guess one tends to lead to the other--writers thinking this isn't the time to be a writer, sales down, big book chains skipping more books, lower advances.  All the bad stuff we're hearing.

I have close to an hour to think about things on the way into work, and this morning I spent most of it on the recent round of publishing industry doom articles.  Then crossing all of that with failures in every industry.  You know, everything's going to hell--you've read them all, heard about it, watched it, income reduction, high fuel prices, high food prices, couples putting off marriage, rethinking plans to have children, home foreclosures, what the Fed's doing, what the candidates are going to do about it, depression anyone?

I have no idea if there's a connection, just wondering…

The 1930s, the decade in the center of the Great Depression, also happened to be when our favorite genres really jumped into high gear.  It's the decade of the science fiction magazine.  Many started out before the 30s, but that's where they really started taking off--Amazing, Astounding, Weird Tales, Wonder.  Did lower cost, shorter forms--short stories and novellas--have an impact?   

It's also prime time for the big editors and influencers John W. Campbell, Hugo Gernsback, and others.  Before the end of the decade we have all those names…so many of them starting out in the 1930s, several continuing to be successful, names like Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. Van Vogt, E. E. Smith, Robert Bloch, H.P. Lovecraft, Henry Kuttner, C. M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, James Blish, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Clifford Simak, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, C. L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis.  All of them continued working, and most started out--sold first stories--in the 1930s.

We have Batman launching his career fighting crime.  We have the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1939. 

So what the hell happened in the 1930s--what was it about the '30s?  We have our favorite genres--SF, fantasy, horror, weird--taking cultural hold like never before.  A growing fanbase reading more--and convening in NYC. Was it building quietly, exploring, taking root since Jules Verne, or before, and we simply reached critical mass in the 1930s?  What about the new formats, all the magazines launched at the end of the 20s and all through the 30s?  Lower cost paperbacks, novellas becoming popular?  Were any of these authors making a decent living off their writing then?   Who could afford to buy books and magazines when people were standing in line for bread?  Who were these SF readers?   

Any connection to the explosive growth in SF and a sliding economy? We have new delivery forms--ebooks, rss feeds, free books, more content online, more shelf space for graphic novels.  Will we look back on this decade or the next and say it was another 1930s for SF and fantasy?

Just wondering...

In case you're thinking I had all of this in my head...nope.  Just the general idea, knowing that the 1930s was a special era for SF.  I Googled around and I would have left off half the names if I hadn't found this:
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1940.html

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Hugo the visual artist

Victor Hugo is one of my all time favorite authors.  I will read Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs every couple years for...ever--at least while I can draw a breath and focus my sight. 

But did you know he painted and drew--almost 4,000 drawings in his lifetime?  Alive today, Hugo would be into graphic novels, you know it.

Love this one of an octopus, ca. 1866--a character study for Les Travailleurs de la Mer, no doubt.

What's hanging off your cellphone for the Twilight premier?

Saw this on Popgadget, blood drip cell phone straps, in major blood types. Crazy.

Link:
Twilight Movie

MemeCreep

You tell me this isn't the creepiest thing you've seen in a while.  I'll set it up a little, and then I'll let you see for yourself. 

Okay, I'm writing, in the middle of a short story about a chef who...never mind.  It's not important.  I type two words, "body bags," and I stop to wonder about that, thinking CSI, TV crime shows, Law & Order, etc.  And then I decide to Google those two words.

You try it now:
http://www.google.com/search?q=body+bags

Screenshot:

I'm looking at the ads, the highlighted group across the top, reading stuff like "our products are made in the u.s.a. for human and animal remains..." and "The best heavy-duty body bags, Leakproof & sturdy. Fast shipping" and "Custom Cadaver Pouch Manufacturing. Popular models in-stock for order!"  Yes, there's an exclamation point after "in-stock for order"

Custom f*%king cadaver pouches?  WHAT THE HELL'S GOING ON HERE?

It is October...hmmmm.   Some sort of Google Halloween meme?

So, now I'm wondering... Can I play?

You, too.  What other creepy Google searches can you think up?  And can you beat body bags?

Your turn, Skott, Con, Julia, Pam, and Tobias because I thought you kicked ass with Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin, but now that I'm halfway through Sly Mongoose, I've found there is far more ass to be kicked--far more than I ever dreamed!

Copyright is a funny thing

Funny as in tricky and interesting to think about.  It's also something I think all of us should be thinking about more.  A friend of mine sent me a link to the cnet article about Carl Malamud's monumental effort to put laws, municipal codes, public records, all kinds of city, state, federal government documents online for public consumption.

Tech activist takes on governments over 'copyrighted' laws
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10050687-38.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

This month, he's busy liberating California government codes, including San Francisco's building code, electrical code, fire code, and zoning code. That means purchasing printed copies for as little as $40 or as much as thousands of dollars, digitizing them, and posting them as PDF files without copy protection...One hitch is that San Francisco is one of those municipalities that claims its building code is copyrighted. (The notice says: "All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed by any means or stored in a database or retrieval system without prior written permission of the City and County of San Francisco.")

This all sounds good to me, commendable.  As far as I'm aware almost all government documents (outside of security, defense, etc.) are public domain in the U.S.  However, that doesn't mean they're accessible--which really is Malamud's point.

Here's what I find interesting.  The tone of the article appears to me to make too big a deal of the various copyright notices on some of these city government (SF) and content aggregator (LexisNexis) works.

I know a bit about copyright law.  I think we all know enough to be dangerous...which I'm sure is a good thing.  And copyright law is tricky.  It covers works and the arrangement of those works in a “fixed form.” 

I don't need to register a work with the copyright office for it to be copyrighted.  Under current U.S. law, I just need to put the work into fixed form, an RTF doc on a harddrive, a landscape on watercolor paper, my notes in my journal...all copyrighted.  An idea cannot be copyrighted.  You have to make it real, write it down, paint it, arrange it, record it, etc.  (Registration with the copyright office is required, I believe, if you intend to sue infringers for damages).

I can post Aristotle’s public domain books on my web site—or anyone's PD books, pamphlets, poetry, and put a "Copyright © 2008..." at the bottom, and my intent might be to keep all the rights for the format of the web page, the layout, page structure, images, etc., and may have nothing to do with the actual content.  And there’s no law to stop you from scraping my web site or feeding all the text through RSS and presenting it in its entirety—without my layout, designs, any specific designs I may hold the rights to.  Perfectly legal. 

So Carl Malamud is scanning print copies of these regs, probably OCRing them, and posting them on the web  (Check this out: http://public.resource.org Lot's of stuff here).  As far as I know--not a lot, I admit--that may be legal.  It sounds like SF doesn’t really care.  Their attorney said, “The San Francisco Municipal Code is a public record under our state and local public records laws,” and this is probably a case of confusing the scope of rights.  Very easy to do.  This is definitely the case with the paragraph--in the article--on Sonoma’s code in LexisNexis.  LN is about presenting everything, being comprehensive, being able to search and find just about any document you're looking for.   And the quoted LN copyright notice?  I'm sure that's standard terms of use and covers their document formatting, linking, brand, etc.  They actually don’t have rights--beyond presenting it to their customers--to much of their content, or are very limited in what they can convey and to who they present their aggregated content by their terms with the publishers--the actual rightsholders of the works. 

As far as charging for copies of the regulations, that just sounds like the state covering their printing and handling costs--bound to be pricey. 

This is interesting stuff anyway.

BTW, that copyright symbol up top is PD, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Gmail, you creep me out sometimes

Ad link across the top of my Gmail screen:

Do I look like I need another hammer?
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42Blips.com

I saw this on Tobias' blog, and just signed up.  42Blips.com is Digg for science fiction.  It's in beta, it's an interesting idea.  Go check it out.

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Fake trees

I took a couple shots of one of those fake tree cell towers, this one south of Gilroy, California along 101.  Click the pics for the larger view:

Deadbeat author

I've been busy.  Alice and the kids told me last week that Seaborn was on the "New Fantasy / SF" shelf at Barnes & Noble  (It's on the regular shelves, too, next to Madeline Howard and Robert E. Howard).  I just haven't had time to run up there to see it with my own eyes.  All changed last night.  And..?  It's crazy, pointing, taking pictures in the store, thinking, "Hey, that's my damned book...right there next to Sandworms!"  But I only mentally got down on my knees and pawed at the bookshelves. 

Shifting gears

Do you write each story in sequential order?  For me it's always been pretty clear which book to tackle next, but I've been writing the whole Seaborn thing for a while--the last five years, and I have put cool and interesting ideas on hold.  Now, they're simmering, urging me to write them.

This is a weird place for me, three competing story ideas for the next novel length thing I'm going to write.  I'm at chapter 3 or 4 on each of them, I have very loose outlines, and a pretty good idea of the endings for two of them.  One is another Seaborn book, except the story takes place a couple hundred years before the events in Seaborn--and has very little connection to Seaborn or Sea Throne.

The other two are completely different.  One's a contemporary YA fantasy.  The other's stranger still--in two words: near-future fantasy.  I'm less inclined to continue the Seaborn stuff, partly because it's become easy for me.   I want to branch out, try new things, so I'm probably not going to jump on that one.  The other two are a toss up.  I'm excited about both, they're completely different kinds of story and storytelling.

I'm thinking of putting the question to my crit partners, let them read chapter one of each story and vote on which one they'd rather continue reading.

What do you think?  Crazy idea?