writer, photographer, web person from Washington, DC.
Join me on May 12 at 3 PM for an online chat about my novel Murder in Ocean Hall. My mystery about the murder of the world’s most famous ocean explorer is the first book club selection of the Independent Author Index. This new site is a place where “readers meet authors” and is a good example of how communities are forming online to discuss books.
Looking forward to answering questions on May 12!
“Media That Matters” is the theme of American University Visions 2012, which is a competition for AU students that covers everything from photography to film. I’m one of the judges for the short screenplay competition. I’m an AU grad myself, as well as a screenwriter and judge for DC Shorts, so I was glad to help. It’s interesting reading a bunch of scripts from new writers.
And past winners of the competition have gone on to do great things, like Mary Ratliff. Mary is working on a feature-length documentary on competitive video gaming, a huge subculture in this country that most people don’t know about.
Washington Post, what happened to you? You’re the paper of Woodward and Bernstein, a beloved local institution and a veritable fourth branch of government.
Coming home after a Saturday night carousing, I used to love to see the trucks lined up outside your building on 15th Street. Back then (the 90s), the paper was printed right next to the Post’s HQ. Blue trucks would be double-parked along the street, waiting to deliver the news to the region.
And if I stayed out late enough, I could pick up the fat slab of Sunday’s paper while it was still technically Saturday night. There was a weird thrill to this, getting the news ahead of everyone else. The Sunday paper was an event, something everyone read.
This is all gone now. Where once stories were reported, fact-checked, edited and edited again before the presses rolled, news these days emerges in electronic form, often-rushed and incomplete. This is a good thing. I am for more news, more information, for the great cornucopia of the web. No more gatekeepers, let the public decide what matters.
But the Washington Post is an institution. It is a brand expressing journalistic quality and integrity. When they publish something, I expect it to be true.
I don’t expect the Washington Post to be running a digital sweatshop, where young journalists are expected to churn out regurgitated news items in the mad pursuit of impossible traffic goals.
How does this fit into the great tradition of the Post? The strength of the paper is its ability to really delve into issues. Why are they trying to be like some smarmy blog?
And getting a few hits on your site – what is that really winning you? Traffic rushes in to click on a link and then rushes off to some other site.
At the What’s Next DC conference, I watched Katharine Zaleski, the paper’s digital news director, give a presentation on the strategy. Coming from the Huffington Post, she brought a relentless focus on metrics. News was to be measured. And the measurement was site traffic. She had charts showing how traffic to the site had increased as the Post increased its “buzziness,” with efforts like news aggregation and blogging.
Does the Washington Post really want to emulate The Huffington Post? Do they want to “surf the trend waves on the Internet”? Shouldn’t the paper be making waves rather than trying to catch them?
And are ephemeral bursts of web traffic the right metric to follow? If so, why not just turn your site over to cat videos? But the Post is more than that, isn’t it?
Stay true to your mission – quality journalism. It’s what you do best. Stop trying to be cool. Don’t go for viral. Avoid “buzziness” and all its advocates.
Instead, simplify. Be the Apple of newspapers. Don’t add more web gimmickry to your cluttered and unusable web site. Focus on what you do best.
Don’t measure web hits – look at engagement. How long do people stay on the site? How many stories do they read? Try to duplicate the loyalty readers once felt toward the paper that they lovingly held in their hands. Better to have 100,000 devoted readers than a million casual followers.
No more second-rate social media. It’s beneath you, Washington Post. Simplify, focus on your strengths and pursue engagement with readers to be true to your news-breaking legacy.
There’s a reason why Amazon is such a titan in the e-book world – it delivers income to writers. It does so seamlessly, easily and without authors having to do anything. You don’t have to hound publishers for checks or wait for the results of some sort of mysterious accounting process.
Amazon posts sales results weekly. For me, it’s just beer money, as I watch my two novels sell in dribs and drabs. Still, it’s something. My work is getting out there and I’m making some cash, even if it’s not going to get me more than a six-pack or two.
And the company constantly innovates, like with their Amazon Prime program. Among other benefits, you can borrow select e-books for free. And authors get a share of a pool of money set aside for the program. In March, it was $600,000!
Each time one of my Kindle titles got borrowed last month, I received $2.18, according to the Amazon press release. That’s a nice royalty, considering one of my novels is 99 cents and the other is $2.99.
So if you’re an Amazon Prime member, borrow my books please! You don’t need a Kindle either. There are Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone, Mac and PC.
Murder in Ocean Hall is a great read if you like mysteries set in DC. A reviewer wrote that it will take you behind the scenes of the city and show you how things work – or don’t work. It’s a mystery novel written by someone who actually lives in Washington and knows the neighborhoods beyond the monuments.
Looking for something fast and fun? Then check out Don’t Mess Up My Block, a satire of the self-help biz. Follow the adventures of Laurent Christ as he pursues success across an American landscape littered with greedy consultants, social media frauds and incompetent bureaucrats.
Check them out! And remember, borrowing my books will keep me in beer, an essential element of my creative process 😉
While the Supreme Court heard the Obamacare case, protests against the law were held outside. The media and demonstrators were careful not to get on the steps of the Court, which were under the protection of the Supreme Court Police.
I was there at the beginning.
In 2007, Twitter leapt into geek consciousness at SXSW Interactive. Monitors had been placed in the halls of this tech conference, displaying what people were tweeting about. I thought it was an interesting curiosity, like watching telegrams in real time. Little bursts of text scrolled across the screen, as people shared opinions about the workshops that they were in.
Imagine, prior to this epochal event of just five years ago, we had no easy way of getting real-time information from our friends, unless of course we talked to them. And when we went to events, we were fully present, listening to speakers without constantly checking our electronic devices. We paid attention, more or less. Or nodded off. Or wandered away, in search of something more interesting, guided only by instinct. Continue reading “I Wish I Had Tweeted More: Confessions of a Social Media Skeptic”
It’s no April Fool’s joke. Get my novel Don’t Mess Up My Block for free on the Kindle.
This offer is just for April 1 so act quickly.
Don’t Mess Up My Block is a parody of self-help books. This funny and cynical tale follows the adventures of Laurent Christ, a man who pursues self-improvement to its logical conclusion – he reinvents himself with a brand-new name and history. He drops a hundred pounds, shaves his head and goes on the road as a management consultant. Everywhere he goes, comic disaster follows as companies follow his glib counsel.
It’s a fast and funny read so download it today!
Harry Crews is one of those authors I wish I read more of.
His New York Times obituary describes his books as being filled with freakish, swaggering, outsized personalities. Born poor, and raised rough, he’s the type of writer that you rarely see these days, with a voice that hasn’t been sanded down by MFA programs or the need to be politically correct.
I read Body by Crews. It’s a twisted book about a female bodybuilder that brutally satirizes the South. He handles issues of race, sexuality and the American pursuit of success with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Seeing him violently deconstruct the hand-wringing concerns of today is liberating, making you want to be more honest in your life and writing.
As Crews said about writing:
If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.
The iPhone is more than a phone and much more than just a camera. It can do things that are impossible to do on a “real” camera, like effortlessly stitch together panoramas and instantly share pictures worldwide.
These creative possibilities were explored by Jack Davis in “iPhoneography: The New Frontier of Creative Photography,” a free seminar at Photoshop World in Washington, DC. Davis is an award-winning photographer and the author of the Photoshop Wow books. In an hour-long free talk, he shared the dizzying number of iPhone apps he uses. Here are his favorites:
Snapseed – Give your photos a grunge look, put them in interesting frames and make them look like old film. The iPad version of this app is gorgeous.
ProHDR – There are enough adjustment tools in this app to produce HDR that doesn’t look totally fake.
Photo fx (Tiffen) – For $2.99 you get a lot of the tools and adjustments of the desktop Tiffen program which costs hundreds of dollars.
PhotoSync – Wirelessly transfer photos between your computer, iPhone and iPad.
Photo Sender – This app allows more flexibility in sending images from your iPhone to your computer, email and social media, including the ability to send lots of images all at once.
FastCamera – Indulge your inner sports photographer and shoot hundreds of images a minute.
360 Panorama – I remember the old days (just a couple years ago) when shooting panoramas required a DSLR, a tripod and an expert knowledge of Photoshop. Instead, let this 99-cent app do it for you!
You Gotta See This! – Cheesy, but fun, this app lets you create a collage of images, as if you scattered a stack of Polaroids on a table and took a picture. Again, another complicated Photoshop task now done with a click.
King Camera – This app bills itself as a replacement for your big camera. We’ll see.
Big Lens – Another camera replacement, this app does nice depth of field shots.
SlowShutter – I love this app and have written about it before. It’s great for photos that show movement.
Instagram – You can’t talk about iPhone photo apps without mentioning this social media app.
Olloclip 3-in-1 Lens – This is actually a piece of hardware, a little lens to get fisheye, wide angle and macro shots.
This is just a sample of what Jack Davis uses. His iPhone and iPad were crowded with dozens of more apps. All these great and easy ways to create beautiful imagery demonstrate the fun of iPhoneography.
My favorite books are short ones.
The Great Gatsby is a slim 180 pages. That’s all it takes for Fitzgerald to recreate the Roaring 20s and give us the quintessential American striver.
Ernest Hemingway is a master of economy, using just 251 pages to tell the tragedy of The Sun Also Rises.
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh is another brilliant little book from the interwar period. It traces the fall of the British aristocracy in just 264 pages.
And my own novels are short ones, clocking in at under 300 pages.
Yet, most contemporary books sprawl unfettered, as if editors have just given up on their duties. Authors ramble, they discourse, narratives go off into tangents and down weird little cul-de-sacs.
For example, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. It clocks in at a wearying 416 pages.
The novel starts off incredibly strong, giving us the colorful portrait of the Bigtree family, famed alligator wrestlers of the Everglades. Being from Florida myself, I’ve felt that the comic potential of the state has been underutilized. From exiles plotting revolution to greedy condo flippers, if any state could produce The Great American Novel, it’s this one.
The collapse of the Bigtree family mirrors what’s going on in “mainland” society. Their struggles are shared by many in more prosaic circumstances – they lose it all and the family falls apart.
The section of the novel where the Bigtrees adapt to normal life is fascinating. I loved Russell’s depiction of The World of Darkness, a hell-themed amusement park on the mainland. It’s like a Disney World created by sadists.
But then the book rambles, in an endless journey through the swamp as 12-year-old Ava Bigtree goes in search of her older sister. Lush descriptions of flora and fauna are piled one upon another, creating a mangrove thicket of prose that nearly stops the reader cold.
It’s one of those books where you find yourself peeking ahead a few pages. When is the story getting back to the World of Darkness?
The odyssey in the Everglades takes so long that the ending feels rushed, unresolved, leaving dramatic threads hanging.
Swamplandia! is a good hundred pages too long.
Despite growing up reading books, even I turn away from novels that resemble doorstops. Reamde is a book that I desperately want to read. Yet, at more than a thousand pages, I don’t even want to start it. The novel represents too much of a time commitment in our distracted age.
It’s ironic. The Internet and our ever-present electronic devices have collapsed attention spans. Yet, our books keep getting longer and longer.
Our lives are crowded with information. In order to break through the electronic din, a novel has to be concise and powerful, a book that looks more like The Great Gatsby than Swamplandia!
