Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail for 05/14/13

“A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously. “– Albert Camus

Tuesday at B&N . . .

Amber shared chapter thirteen of Noble with the group. Lisa took notes. Judith liked the chapter and was interested to see where it would lead concerning the main character’s training. Lisa thought the chapter ended on a good note. Pat had a couple of questions about entering the woods and things going quiet. She also has a question about bow anatomy. Andy didn’t think the chapter had a enough zing and suggested putting it on a shelf and coming back to it later.

Mike shared a poem with the group. He doesn’t have copies so we all listened. Betsy and Andy liked the last line. Pat liked the rhythm but one of the lines didn’t resonate with her. She says she needs to read a poem a couple of times before she gets it. Pat and Lisa found a lot of power in the words and expect that Mike would channel a Maori warrior when he reads it. Mike says he felt that way when he read it. The second poem Mike shares with the group is a letter to a person who had a lot of influence on him as he was growing up. Betsy and Pat think it could be turned into a prose poem format and suggest editing it down. Lisa knows the music Mike is referring to and is in favor of polishing it up and sending it to them.

Lisa shared part of chapter one of Tebow Family Secret. Andy thought it was an effective opening but that there was a lot of info dropped on the reader. Pat thought a lot of what she read could be cut and instead sprinkled in with her visit to the therapist. Pat thinks a therapist wouldn’t ask a lot of yes or no questions, but more leading, open-ended questions. Andy liked the ending but Pat thought she could have left it in a cliffhanger. The group looks up and briefly discusses what a chiasma is in literature.

Judith shared part of chapter one of My Mother, Savior of Men. Lisa says she knows she knows mothers like the one in the story. Pat liked the word choice. Andy didn’t believe a woman of ninety-five wouldn’t sleep that much. Also he thought there was an info dump at the end though Pat liked the narrative at the end because it made a good story. Lisa wanted more of one character and agreed with Andy about the end.

Side note, Betsy doesn’t want her worked discussed outside of the group because only people in the group have access to the sight.

Millie read from chapter forty-four of Life on Hold. Pat struggles with the story surrounding the biopsy and mastectomy and suggests moving a conversation ahead of surgery. Andy was confused by a line about chemo. Pat suggests replacing it with the word treatment.

Andy read from his short piece, The Mindbender. Andy explains the work to the group. Amber didn’t like it; it felt like reading a checklist. Pat liked it but thought it needed work. Andy says it should make less and less sense as the piece goes on. Pat thought the title should be changed to something more realistic. Judith said it felt like the beginning of a movie, something that might play over the opening credits. Betsy, just listening to it, thought there were going to aliens, but it was just a person in a costume. The piece reminds Pat of the Hitchcock film, “The Rope.”

Who’s up next . . .

May 28: Carol Hornung (scene, Ghost of Heffron College), Ray Woodruff (short story), and Ruth Imhoff, The Motto of the Houund. Room for three more – contact Carol.

June 4: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Betsy Draine (chapter), Bob Kralapp (???), Michelle Nightoak (chapter, memoir), Alicia Connolly Lohr (novella, chapters 7-8, Lincoln’s Other War), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 11-12, The Last Good Man).

Next Fifth Tuesday . . .

Put it on your calendar now. Our next Fifth Tuesday is July 30. First-and-third group hosts. The place is not yet set, but the writing challenge is . . . Fortune cookie fortunes. You select a fortune from a list we will provide you on or about July 1, then write a story, poem, or essay in which you use the fortune in some way. Length? Our ever popular 250 words or less.

How Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia Harnessed the Web as a Force for Good                                             

By Ted Greenwald    03.19.13

Encyclopaedia Britannica finally threw in the towel. In March 2012, after 244 years, the staple reference source of libraries and households ceased publishing its 32 dusty volumes. (It survives in digital form.) Who humbled the mighty Britannica? Jimmy Wales and his crowdsourced compendium of all the world’s knowledge.

Wikipedia began as a side project of Wales’ dotcom-bubble-era entrepreneurship (he launched a search engine, among other things), but it soon took on a life of its own. Far surpassing its paper predecessors in sheer size and scope, it became the go-to source for answers to a vast variety of questions and the best evidence for the proposition that information really does want to be free. And though everyone who has ever added an obscure data nugget or deleted a spurious fact can claim a little of the credit, the global, free-of-charge, not-for-profit, real-time encyclopedia is very much Wales’ baby.

Founding Wikipedia in 2001 (along with Larry Sanger, by most accounts other than Wales’), Wales understood the web’s egalitarian underpinning and the open source method’s ability to spur productivity on a grand scale. What separated him from many first-wave net entrepreneurs, though, was his idealism: He harnessed those forces in the store of knowledge to anyone, anywhere, at no cost, and he made it his job to get it done.

Wales’ work has been criticized by observers either misinformed about the mechanics by which Wikipedia improves itself or nostalgic for a time before the illusion of a singular, authoritative perspective was irrevocably shattered. And the man himself has come under fire as having overstepped the line between do-gooder and dictator. Yet Wikipedia rolls on, delivering more than 24 million articles in 285 languages by 85,000 regular contributors to nearly 500 million readers monthly. It is one of the foundations of contemporary life. Tomorrow it will be even better.

Wired: Your mother ran a two-room schoolhouse in Huntsville, Alabama, where you began your education. How did that influence your career?

Jimmy Wales: The school was very open-ended. We had a lot of time available for reading and independent study. That impacted my later work and the way I think about things today. Also, my uncle owned a computer store, so I learned to program reasonably early on. We had a TRS-80 from RadioShack at home. We got a Commodore later on.

Wired: When did you first encounter the Internet?

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/jimmy-wales-wikipedia/

The Economics of Printing (who knew?)

While many of us do all of our editing and critiques online, you still need to print some items. To be economical, many of us print on the back side of previous submissions.  Did you know there have been studies done to determine the most economical font?

Using the default Arial font as a baseline, Printer.com changed to different fonts as it put the printers through their paces. The winner: Century Gothic, which delivered a 31 percent savings in printing costs over Arial.

On a dollar basis, the company projected that the average person printing around 25 pages a week would save $20 a year by using Century Gothic for all documents. A business or heavy-duty user printing 250 pages per week would save around $80 for the year. And large companies with multiple printers could potentially save hundreds of dollars a year.

You can read the entire post here http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20001913-93.html

Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Contest

The 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest finalists have been announced! Read the finalists’ work & vote for your favorite at <http://amzn.to/jtgZsT now through 5/29>.