The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

Links of Interest: Lots of romance this week.

Tumperkin’s I Only Kill Bad People explores the genre convention of allowing serial killer heroes (in vampire or other form) as long as they are targeting the right victims.

Writer Jackie Barbosa has had it with being made to feel her writing method is inadequate.

Mandi at Smexy Books has a great post on Author Websites: Good and Bad.

Mandi’s post makes me wonder why people who are trying to sell something design a storefront that repels customers. Is it the fault of web designers who are eager to demonstrate the latest gizmo, and authors who are too busy to really think it through? Authors should really go through the process of interacting with their sites from the readers’ place, or get a friend unfamiliar with the site to do it. Start where a reader would, perhaps by Googling the author’s name. Imagine the reader wants to buy your latest book, find out when the next one is coming out, see the list of a series in order, or just contact you. How easy would it be? how many steps would it take? How many distracting obstacles are in the way?

In case you haven’t seen this: The Female Character Flow Chart (thanks to reader M.). Just read across the top — so true.

Over at Alien Romances, a review and discussion of Draculas (“a novel of terror”) by Blake Crouch, Jack Kilborn, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson. I actually assigned a Wilson short story (“The Wringer”) in a course a couple of years ago (to little student appreciation, IIRC). As the reviewer puts it,

These “Draculas” have the compassion of hornets, the dentition of sharks, the voracious appetites of shrews and no respect for garlic whatsoever. If you can contemplate a rabid, blood thirsty Edward Scissorteeth in a maternity or pediatric ward, using a severed artery as a drinking straw, or lashing out among the blind… go for it, but with your eyes open.

I found this interesting, since Slate announced in 2009 that bloodsucking is so yesterday (don’t read the article. It’s essentially a combination of right wing/quasi-feminist/elitist criticism of women who write vampires).

From Book Making, a blog about self-publishing to which Mrs. Giggles introduced me via one of her blog posts a while back, A Paragraph and A Blog I Never finished Reading. In it, the author makes a judgment about an author based on a misspelling of “you’re”. I confess to deep suspicion of the writing talent of authors who make these kinds of mistakes in their blogs. I wonder if this is unfair. I certainly wouldn’t want readers to make a judgment of my academic abilities based on the writing here (unless it’s a positive one, of course). On the other hand, if I were so worried about that, perhaps I should either write under a pseudonym or do a better job writing under my own identity.

For the second week in a row, Seekerville has a post I can’t help but think about and share. It’s an Interview with Dr. Stanley Williams, The Moral Premise Guy. Williams argues that by focusing on the moral core of their story, writers will both write more engaging books, and find a way to overcome certain kinds of writers block:

Stories will be more powerful and connect with audiences and readers on a profound level when all of your characters’ decisions, actions, and resulting consequences (psychological and physical ) focus on one set of values. By “set of values” I mean two naturally opposing motivations or moral constructs—virtue and a vice—e.g. selflessness vs. selfishness.

Or, take the conflict constructed by bitterness vs. forgiveness, two psychological values that generate physical consequences and thus drama. Characters with goals start off harboring bitterness and striving with each other over the attainment of said goals. As the conflict escalates, hopefully, someone will discover the opposite to bitterness and try forgiveness. Then redeeming consequences result. But understanding that bitterness is in conflict with forgiveness is the moral core of your story.

I admit to being skeptical, but so many writers seem to love his advice, so who am I to say? I wonder if this kind of advice could be useful for genres that don’t require moral heroism and happy endings.

Kenda of Lurv a la Mode is asking whether Negative Reviews are the Blogosphere’s Redheaded Stepchild (the answer is “yes”, in case you weren’t sure). Author Marta Acosta chimes in to suggest that this is a problem in romance both because romance readers are closer to authors, and because we’re mostly all women. I’m sure there’s a lot to that, but after seeing the blowback that The Book Smugglers get for negative reviews of other genre fiction, I am starting to think the main problem is the gender issue, not the genre one. Also, it is much worse when authors perceive your review to have any influence.

Lynne Connelly wrote an interesting post at TGTBTU on the new Mills & Boon titles and covers.

My profession has a new blog, What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? I’m really glad these stories are being told. As a woman who has been in philosophy for over twenty years, they ring very true to me. A teeny, illogical part of me almost wishes we weren’t being so honest about the situation, for fear of dissuading young women from entering the profession. The bigger part of me knows, though, that the profession itself does 99.9% of the dissuading (and outright expelling) all by itself. This one just about killed me:

I was teaching a large introductory class, doing the problem of evil. Hoping to make the problem vivid, I took my example of an apparently gratuitous evil from my own life: a time when my daughter, then 2 yrs old, had to endure a bone biopsy of her shin, a procedure for which there was no effective local anesthetic. After I described the case, I asked the class the stock questions: how could my daughter’s suffering be justified? what greater good was served? what lesson was learned? — at which point a student called out: “Maybe God was trying to tell you that you need to decide whether you want to be a philosophy professor or a mother” Thanks…..

Katha Pollitt in The Nation on older and younger feminists (Feminist Mothers, Flapper Daughters?). She has her criticisms of the youngsters (“I’m tired of ‘body issues’ getting so much more emphasis than economic and political ones, and the endless fetishizing of ‘choice’ where anything a woman wants to do is sacrosanct, including stripping, prostitution and porn, which are simultaneously obscurely troubling and perfectly OK!”), but the piece is overall balanced, as here:

The fact is, these same young women (some of whom are not even so young anymore—Rebecca Walker, founder of Third Wave Foundation and famous hater of her mother, Alice, is 40!) are doing a lot of activist work. They start abortion funds and scrappy groups like Hollaback!, which protests street harassment; they volunteer at rape crisis centers; they mentor teens; they organize conferences; they write books by the dozen and blogs by the hundreds. Faludi seems to take a dim view of blogging, but the Jezebel blogger Tracie Egan, a k a Slut Machine, who made light of date rape, is hardly representative. Sure, blogging can degenerate into its own little hothouse world—but sites like Jezebel and Feministing and Pandagon and Salon’s Broadsheet have introduced a lot of young women to feminist ideas and activism too. It’s how a lot of people, including me, keep up with the news on women.

Ethical Question of the Day: Should you buy a book from Amazon while you are shopping at Borders or Barnes and Noble?

Amazon’s Bar Code Scanner Takes Impulse Buying to a New Level (CNET)

The latest version of Amazon Mobile, 1.2.8, contains a bar code scanner in its search screen. As with bar code scanners in other mobile apps, Amazon Mobile uses your iPhone‘s camera to take in a product’s zebra-striped bar code. Amazon’s servers then find a match, and after you select the item, you can sign in to your account to purchase the product on the spot.

Since I got my Kindle, I strongly prefer to buy all my books in digital format at Amazon, due to selection, cost and ease (this is not to say Amazon always beats out its competitors on cost, of course). But I do visit my local Borders fairly often.

1. I have shopped at Borders for paper books (gifts, cookbooks, children’s books), wandered into the romance or literature sections, and made a a note of a book to purchase from Amazon later. Is that wrong?

2. Would it be wrong if I went to Borders for the express purpose of finding books to purchase from Amazon?

3. Does it matter how I make the purchase (bar code versus old fashioned search)?

4. Or what format I purchase (digital to be downloaded right now or paper to arrive in the mail in three days)?

5. Would it be ok if I first compared the print price at Borders with Amazon’s print price, and only bought from Amazon if they beat Borders somehow, say, on price or availability?

I have a hard time seeing how the (a) format (bar code versus search box, for example, or paper versus e), (b) or spatio-temporality (buy while in store versus buy in parking lot outside store) matters much, except in how you might feel about doing it. I mean, how much time is the “decent” amount to wait after you have exited the store? How far from the store should you be?

Do any of these practices harm Borders? If I don’t go into Borders at all, Borders makes no sale. If I do go in, there is a chance Borders will make a sale, perhaps not a book, but maybe some coffee or a bookmark or one of the many non-book items on the shelves these days. The Twilight lunch box looks good.

On the other hand, if customers see me making a purchase from another vendor, I may influence them to adopt my ways, causing some harm in lost sales.

It feels like a kind of bad faith or at least dishonesty to walk into a Borders knowing I won’t buy from them. If I am “using” their bricks and mortar, and perhaps their staff, their restrooms, their comfortable seating, etc., without planning to give anything in return, that seems unfair. It’s why I don’t do it. It’s not the “just looking” that’s the problem, it’s that I am not usually “just looking” — I will likely buy a book, and not from Borders.

Could I obviate the bad faith by honestly telling a salesperson or manager: “Dude, I’ve got my Kindle in my purse. I am not buying anything from you guys today.” Would I be asked to leave? I doubt it. Lots of people go into Borders just to be there. Or they go in to comparison shop with other book stores. Do they have to announce their intentions, too? I return to the point that it is better from Borders’ point of view to have me in the store than not.

Perhaps things would be different if I were in a local used book store, and on friendly terms with the proprietor? I know I would feel a hundred times worse. I haven’t even worked up the courage to show my Kindle to my favorite local UBS. But bad feelings don’t necessarily indicate a moral wrong.

Is this a new ethical dilemma technology has brought us? Or more of a manners question? What do you think?

Personal

I’m heading to San Diego Wednesday to give the (only) vampire paper at the national bioethics conference. Interestingly, there are a couple of sessions on fiction and bioethics, but I am in a paper session on death. I wonder what that says? I will post a little on it later this week, I hope. This is a great conference, but it’s extremely expensive (as is anything that gives education credits to physicians), so I can only afford to go about every 3 years. My annual travel budget from the department is $700, up from $600 last year, but only because we lost a faculty member who wasn’t replaced. As you can imagine, that barely covers the flight (er– flights. It will take 3 legs to get to San Diego) to California from Maine.

HAPPY WEEK!