Filed under: Art, Feedback, General Musings, movies, Promotion, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
I heard back from the person mentioned in this post. What they said:
I’m sorry to report that the person I was hoping would pass along the novel to “hollywood” is too much of an editor and less of a reader. They have been held back by the “roughness” as Kilgore Trout put it. Although they are still hoping/planning to try and read through it I told them that if their heart wasn’t really in it enough to actually finish reading the novel not to pass it along. Networking is only helpful when done with integrity – at least to my mind. I have a couple more “connected” people to try though and will look into them. If you would like I can pass along the editorial comments.
My response:
Oh, that’s fine – as you wish. I concur that networking should only be handled with integrity – the quickest way to ‘burn your cred’ (ruin your credibility) for someone like that is to push something you don’t honestly believe in. I’m certainly willing to hear criticism – my skin is plenty thick, and I will use it as I see fit – but I’m not planning on a major rewrite of the thing anytime soon. If there are small glitches (and certainly if there are typos, et cetera), I’m perfectly happy to fix those.
I honestly think that most of the problem that some people have with the book is that they don’t give it a chance – what may seem at first exposure to be a ‘problem’ is usually an intentional technique on my part to engage the reader to be thinking or reacting to something in a specific way, setting up for either an evolution in thought later or just some kind of outright surprise. Now, since this is “just” science fiction, and I am “just” a first-time novelist, some people do not expect any kind of literary sophistication in the book. So they get partway in, see some things which confuse their expectations, and give up. Whereas if they read it all the way through (perhaps more than once), some of the more subtle things going on may become evident.
*sigh* I’m not claiming to be some kind of literary genius. Everything I did with the novel is fairly standard stuff, applied from my education and decades of reading. It’s just that too often people are not expecting anything more than a surface layer from popular fiction. And when you don’t meet their expectations, if they don’t have some faith in you as an ‘established’ or ‘recognized’ author, they give up. If I’ve failed in anything, it is not in catering to these expectations on the part of some readers to help them get past their initial confusion. I just dislike pandering to people. Certainly, that segment of my audience who have completed the book and found themselves pleased with the whole thing is more rewarding to me than those who do not make it more than a couple of chapters in.
Oh, and thanks for providing me material for the blog. đ
Yeah, I know – makes me sound like I have a pretty inflated opinion of myself and my book. There is an element of that, I will admit. But mostly, it is just a manifestation of my self confidence – a necessary component in dealing with life, and in particular in dealing with being an artist/author. A personal essay I wrote several years ago that touches on this:
Expectations
One birthday, when I was nine or ten, I woke with anticipation of the presents I would receive. Still in my pajamas I rushed into the kitchen where my parents were having coffee, expecting to get the loot which was rightfully mine. My father happily handed over a small, wrapped box. I opened it eagerly, to find a little American flag on a wooden stick. My father said that since my birthday was July 4th, he thought I would appreciate the gift. Horrorstruck first at not getting anything better, then at my own greed, I guiltily told my parents that I thought it was a fine gift. After a moment, of course, my folks brought out my real presents. I can no longer tell you what those presents were, but the lesson in expectations my dad taught me that day always remained with me. My dad had been a Marine, fought in Korea, and was a deeply patriotic cop who was killed while on duty a couple of years after that birthday. I’ve never looked at the American flag without remembering what a fine gift it really is, and have never forgotten not to take some things for granted.
When I was in High School some years later, I learned another lesson in expectations. I had always been a good student (straight A’s, involved in Student Government, various clubs, et cetera), but I was never announced as a member of the National Honor Society. With that earlier lesson about expectations firmly in mind, I watched as my friends were inducted during my Sophomore and Junior years, figuring that there was a reason that I had been passed over, that there was some flaw in my academic record that disqualified me. But I couldn’t figure out what it might be. When, during my Senior year, the NHS list came out and it didn’t have my name on it again, I decided to ask someone about it.
I went to my advisor and asked if he could explain it to me. He had only been my advisor my Senior year, but knew me fairly well, knew my GPA and my involvement level. He looked at me with some surprise and said he thought I was already a member. When I said no, he said he’d look into it. A couple of hours later I was summoned to the Principal’s office. It turned out that my file had been mis-filed years earlier. A purely clerical error. I should have been a member of the Society all along. Everyone was most apologetic, and they retroactively inducted me into the NHS.
My High School days are far behind me, and it has long since ceased to matter to me whether I received any particular recognition or award back then. As I’ve matured, gained life experience, I’ve learned many other lessons about tempering expectations, living with occasional disappointment, accepting that things don’t always work out the way you plan no matter how hard you work or how deserving you are. But those two early lessons in expectations still are the boundaries that I live by: don’t take things for granted, but don’t be afraid to ask why things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. This gives me an appreciation for life, and the strength to really live it, which I think would make both my parents proud.
So yeah, I have some ego. But it comes from realizing that you get nowhere from being afraid to create and assert yourself.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Art, Book Conservation, General Musings, Google, Heinlein Centennial, Peter Diamandis
Yes, I should write about the Google X Prize. I’ve even met Diamandis, at the Heinlein Centennial. But it’s been getting substantial coverage in the media. I do have some thoughts beyond “that’s cool” – but am, I think, understandably preoccupied with other personal matters right now. Perhaps this weekend.
OK, things are still sinking in, vis a vis my post yesterday. To a certain extent I feel like my life has just undergone a paradigm shift, as nothing has really changed and yet I see most things in a different light altogether.
A couple of friends have been a little surprised at my wariness about this change. I guess that I have been so conditioned at having people not do the right thing that I am somewhat stunned that this institution is going the right direction with this collection. And, honestly, I’m not used to the notion that things might be going the right way for me, as well. But I meet with the head librarian next Tuesday to iron out details and get the first installment of books, so it really looks like this is going to happen.
I’ll need to make some actual changes in how I work. Since closing the gallery, I’ve been fairly casual about my work hours and the ‘business end’ of the business. I think that’s understandable, since my primary concern has been caring for my MIL, not being a conservator. So I need to lay in some additional supplies, get a large fireproof safe, sort out my accounting software, streamline some of my work habits, establish standardized tracking procedures for handling this volume of work, et cetera. All stuff I know I can do – I ran an art & framing business which had multiple employees and scores of artists we represented for five years – it’s just a matter of getting all the procedures and software set up properly.
So, while I still feel astonished, and pleased, I’m less frightened. Typical for me: I can face just about anything, so long as I have good information and the freedom to sort it out and come to terms with it.
Jim Downey
A piece by Melik Kaylan titled “The Last Active Art Gallery in Baghdad” really hits home for me. I’ve mentioned before that I owned and operated a gallery of fine art for 8 years (for full info, see here), and something about some of the religious intolerance I had to deal with in that capacity.
But nothing like this:
Among the agonies imposed on Baghdad by tormentors in the guise of self-appointed religious enforcers is the proscription of fun. Novelty, convenience, any kind of post-Quranic ease from hardship infuriates them. Ice cream is an abomination, as is mechanized garbage collection, because such delights didn’t exist in the time of the prophet. A story is told that last year, on a road overtaken by jihadis, a DVD purveyor was ordered to close because DVDs didn’t exist in the time of the prophet. “Neither did the BMW you drove up in,” he responded. “When you come back and tell me again on a camel, then I’ll listen.” They shot him some days later, for his insolence.
Imagine, therefore, the onus of courage on anyone who dares open an art gallery, let alone keeps it running since January 2006 with 26 shows and as many receptions.
I might give the religious here a hard time, for their lack of open-mindedness, or believing in a sky-daddy, or what have you. And they deserve it. But reading something like this column tends to put all that in perspective.
Go read the whole thing, but here’s the closing passage:
A visit to Hasan’s friend Salam, one street over, shows how hard the task is. Salam opened his own gallery in 2004 and closed it in fear, in early 2006, after two employees were killed. It hasn’t reopened since. “I invested everything,” Salam says. The place remains pristine, perfectly curated with sculptures and paintings in several rooms untouched and unshown for eight months. “This street, there’s no embassy; the terrorists run around,” he says. “I am just a private project. I wait every day. The terrorists don’t like art.”
Wow.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted at UTI.)
Filed under: Art, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, CNET, Expert systems, Heinlein, Kromofons, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science Fiction, Society, Synesthesia, tech, Writing stuff
A friend sent me a link to a CNET news item from last week about how a new ‘color alphabet’ was going to revolutionize communications. From the article:
Lee Freedman has waited a long time, but he thinks the moment is finally right to spring on the world the color alphabet he invented as a 19-year-old at Mardi Gras in 1972.
For 35 years, between stints as a doctor, a real estate agent and a pizza maker at the Woodstock concert in 1994, Freedman has been working on Kromofons–an innovative alphabet in which the 26 English letters are represented solely by individual colors–waiting for technology to catch up with him.
And now, thanks to the Internet, the ubiquity of color monitors, Microsoft Word plug-ins and his being able to launch a Kromofons-based e-mail system, Freedman thinks he is finally ready.
Well, maybe.
Science fiction authors have used various tricks at evolving language and written communications, one of the most memorable for me being Heinlein’s Speedtalk from the novella Gulf. And working in other senses is a common tactic, up to and including extra-sensory perception (such as telepathy). This is part of the way I use synesthesia in Communion of Dreams: as a method by which the human brain can layer meaning and information in new ways, expanding the potential for understanding the world. It is noteworthy that many synesthetes will associate colors with a given word or even letter – it may be possible that Lee Freedman drew upon such an experience to create his color alphabet.
(An aside – I have experienced mild episodes of synesthesia upon several occasions. Sometimes these episodes have been induced by drugs, sometimes by intense concentration, sometimes of their own accord. I think that this is a latent ability everyone has, but not something which we usually access, because it is poorly understood by the general populace.)
Anyway, while Kromofons or something similar is certainly possible in the context of computer display (of almost any variety, including nano-tech paint) , there are some real limitations that I can see. First off, you wouldn’t want to have to have a full set of color pencils/markers and keep changing them in order to just write something down in the ‘real world’. Printed material of whatever variety would also be subject to degradation from light-fading: some pigments fade more quickly than others, some inks are more frail than others, some colors react to different lighting conditions in different ways. (Those are all problems I’ve experienced as a book & document conservator, as well as owning a gallery of art.) Even in the world of computer display, variations in lighting and equipment could render some colors ‘untrue’. Not to mention problems experienced by people as they age and color perception skews, or from the small but real percentage of the population which suffers from one type or another of color blindness. Sure, a good AI or expert system would be able to ‘translate’ for people who had such limitations, in the context of augmented reality, but that tech isn’t currently available except in its very infancy.
So, while I enjoy a slightly-nutty idea as much as the next person, and can see some ways that Kromofons could be used for fun, I don’t really see the idea going too far.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Architecture, Art, BoingBoing, Book Conservation, Cory Doctorow, Hobbits, movies, Tolkien, Writing stuff
Gotta love this: a collector of J. R. R. Tolkien artifacts needed a small library/museum to house his collection. His architect decided to do the right thing, and go to the source material for inspiration. The result is a wonderful little Hobbit House, straight out of the books:
Asked to design a fitting repository for a clientâs valuable collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts and artifacts, architect Peter Archer went to the sourceâthe fantasy novels that describe the abodes of the diminutive Hobbits.
âI came back my client and said, âIâm not going to make this look like Hollywood,ââ Archer recalled, choosing to focus instead on a finely-crafted structure embodying a sense of history and tradition.
The site was critical tooâand Archer found the perfect one a short walk away from his clientâs main house, where an 18th-century dry-laid wall ran through the property. âI thought, wouldnât it be wonderful to build the structure into the wall?â
Now, my wife is an architect, so I know a little about this profession, and having a client willing to go along with such a design is a real boon. And as a rare book and document conservator, I appreciate an architect who went to the trouble to make sure that the environment was appropriately climate controlled for the archives. And as a craftsman, I really appreciate the attention to detail by the contractor and his crew – this isn’t just a facade, it’s well-crafted workmanship.
Wonderful, all the way around. I can’t help but think that J.R.R. would be pleased.
Jim Downey
Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.
Well, sometime over the weekend, we finally passed 2,000 downloads of the novel. Things had slowed down some in the last couple of weeks, but that’s still a thousand downloads last month. But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.
I wanted to talk about something else which happened over the weekend, which has happened to me many times. I was contacted by a young artist, who needed some help with the basics of marketing and professional behaviour.
When I was writing my columns for the newspaper on the art scene locally (some collected here), I would regularly be asked for this kind of help. I always try and respond, though sometimes this just consists of pointing someone at another resource they need to tackle first before I can help them, because I felt that it was a matter of ‘paying my dues’ to the art world. It was likewise my attitude about speaking at college classes and whatnot. And sometimes I even got a good column out of it, such as this one.
How does this relate to Communion?  Doesn’t directly. I just feel like how I imagine most agents and publishers feel (the working ones, who still actually work with authors to promote their work, not the ones at the top of the food chain who mostly manage large firms) in terms of helping ‘young’ authors – you want to help, you wish that there were better resources out there for people, you wish that people would available themselves of the resources which are available, and you sometimes feel like you’re the only one paddling. But you do it nonetheless, even when the people who ask you for help (directly or indirectly) don’t seem to value your advice. Because it is either help them or become prematurely cynical and hard-hearted.
Oh, and I wish I was able to transfer the ‘dues paid’ in the art world to the writing world. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Predictions, Promotion, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
Some 14 years ago, a full five or six years before I even thought about writing Communion of Dreams, I made the following “artist’s book”. Full images are hosted on my website. The following essay was bound into the âbookâ, as well as on the floppy disk in the still-functional disk-drive.
Jim Downey
Binary Dreams
A bit of whimsy.
Iâve always loved books, as far back as I can remember. Even though the shock of my parentâs death ended my childhood early, and left me with only fragments and dreams of my pre-teen years, I do remember reading, reading, reading. Books were part of my life, too much so for my parents, who were intelligent but uneducated, and who wondered about my fascination with almost anything written. Often I was told to put down the book and go outside to play, or turn out the light and go to sleep. Even the black & white television given to me at Christmas when I was 8 (the year my sister was born…I suspect my parents splurged to offset my disquiet at having a sibling at last) couldnât take the place of the books I constantly checked out of the library.
I got lost in science fiction as a youth, first as a feast for my imagination, later as an escape from the harsh realities of my world. All through high school, where the demands my teachers made on my time and intellect were modest enough to be met with a few minutes study, and even through college, where I would reward myself with a new book by a favorite author after studying hours and hours of Russian history, economics, or German. Always I would turn to science fiction as a release, maybe even as a guide to how I could bring myself through my own rebirth. It took a very long time.
I even wrote a little, now and then. Starting with a junior high school fiction class, graduating to the novel I wrote while suffering in traction in the hospital in â78. After college I thought I would try and be a writer, with my old diesel-powered IBM Model C. But struggle though I did, I knew that I needed help with my writing that I couldnât get from friends, or from the contradictory text I could find on the subject. A gentle man, an acquaintance I knew through work, was kind enough to read some of my stories and point to the University of Iowa. âThe Writerâs Workshop,â he said, âan old friend of mine from grad school is the head of the program.â
I went to Iowa City, took a few courses. I was rejected for the Workshop by the âold friendâ because he didnât like science fiction, but was stubborn enough to get into the English MA program, where I was allowed to take some Workshop classes on the same basis as those admitted to the program. I learned a lot, and the bitter taste of rejection was replaced by the realization that the Workshop thrived on angst, and that I had had enough of that to fill my life previously and didnât need more.
I gathered together the credit hours needed to complete the degree, though I was in no particular rush to finish. And one day while looking for a signature for a change to my schedule I stumbled into the Windhover Press. Wonderful old presses and bank upon bank of lead type. I spent the next couple of semesters learning how to build a book, letter by letter, page by page, from those little bits of lead. I got a rudimentary course in sewing a book together, in pasting cloth, in terms like âtext blockâ and âsquareâ.
Then I met Bill. He led me through the different structures, and was tolerant of my large, clumsy hands. I spent hours just watching him work, watching how he moved with a grace that I could only dimly understand, as he slipped a needle onto thread, through paper, around cord. Trimming leather to fit a corner or a hinge. Working with the hot brass tools on a design that those magic hands formed seemingly without effort. But I didnât spend all the time with him that I could, distracted by other things I thought needed doing. I squandered my time with him, not knowing what gifts I was passing up, what opportunity I allowed to slip from my hands.
But in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, he made an impression, and taught me a lot. Without quite realizing it, my hands became less clumsy, my understanding a bit brighter. I learned a few things, and came to appreciate much, much more. Somewhere in there my need for the refuge for science fiction diminished, though it was never completely left behind. Like a man who has long since recovered from an injury, but who still walks with a cane out of habit, science fiction stayed with me, occasionally coming to the fore in my interpretations of the world, in the ways that I moved from what I was to what I became.
Bill left us, in body at least. Part of his spirit I carry with me, and it surprises me sometimes, in a pleasant way. Now I am at home with paper, cloth, leather, and thread. I make and repair books for friends and clients.
The book is a mutable form, reflecting the needs, materials, and technology of the culture that produces it. Broadly speaking, a âbookâ is any self-contained information delivery system. And any number of âbook artistsâ have taken this broadly-defined term to extremes, some more interesting than others.
For me, the book is a codex, something that you can hold in your hand and read. From the earliest memories of my science fiction saturated youth, I remember books becoming obsolete in the future, replaced by one dream or another of âreadersâ, âscannersâ, or even embedded text files linked directly to the brain. Some say ours is a post-literate culture, with all the books-on-tape, video, and interactive media technology. I think I read somewhere recently that Sony (or Toshiba or Panasonic or someone) had finally come up with a hand-held, book-sized computer screen that can accommodate a large number of books on CD ROM. Maybe the future is here.
Maybe. Lord knows that I would be lost without a computer for all my writing, revisions, and play. The floppy drive that is in this book was taken from my old computer (my first computer) when a friend installed a hard drive. It is, in many ways, part of my history, part of my time at Iowa, and all the changing that I did there.
So, in a bit of whimsy, Iâve decided to add my part to the extremes of âbook artâ. Consider this a transition artifact, a melding of two technologies, for fun. Black & white, yes and no, on and off. The stuff of dreams.
No, not a Holy Grail reference.
For over 8 years I owned an art gallery. I think it was the largest gallery in the state of Missouri, and featured works by a lot of local and regional artists of remarkable talent. At any given time we represented a couple dozen different artists, in a wide variety of styles, and had 200 or more works of art on hand for people to see (and theoretically buy, which they didn’t do enough of, which is why I closed the business three years ago).
That 8 years of selling art taught me a lot of things. Among those things was that everyone has a different sense of taste in what they like in artwork. And that that is OK.
The same is true of writing, of course. I don’t much appreciate poetry, as a general rule, though I know that a lot of really good poetry is out there, that it has a level of sophistication and intelligence about it which appeals to many people. I don’t much go in for mysteries (with a few exceptions), am ignorant of the entire ‘chick-lit’ genre, and wouldn’t touch most techno-thriller stuff unless I was being paid well to review it. And anyone who knows me well will tell you that I am a nut forthe Harry Potter books – I honestly consider JK Rowling to be a top-notch writer. (Yes, yes, I realize that many people consider them unworthy kid’s books, and Rowling nothing but a hack. We can argue about that later.)
Even within a genre, there are writers I like, and others less so. That doesn’t make those writers bad (though some of them are, and that is the reason I don’t care for them). It just means that for some reason or another their work doesn’t resonate with me.
Which brings me around to my point. It’s OK if you don’t like my novel. No, seriously, if it doesn’t do anything for you, that’s fine. It could be that you don’t care for Science Fiction. Or maybe you just don’t like my writing. Sure, I want people to like it (or at least respect it for being well-done), but I long ago learned that tastes differ widely – what I like in art or literature may be completely at odds with what you like. And that’s OK. To argue otherwise is to basically come down to saying “you can’t like blue. Red is the superior color.”
Anyway, don’t be afraid to say you didn’t like the book. I’m a big boy, have survived learning that not everything I do is going to please everyone.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 