Another week flies by, and once again I’m wading through a torrential downpour of blog posts and articles in search of a recognisable trend. It’s a bit like being at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Internet trends are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike publishing trends. Both come out of nowhere and are gone overnight (viz a rueful post from Natalie Whipple), but the sighting of an internet trend depends on which material, out of the whole morass, sticks most determinedly to one’s boots. Ergo, my trends may not be your trends, simply because we lack the filtering medium of a relatively small publishing industry.
Cautionary note over, the www appears to be swimming in sex and death this week. If the internet had a geographical location, I’d say Mars must be in ascendance.
The sex motif began when Jezebel picked up on a survey on modesty among Christian youth and found, unsurprisingly, that the guys call the shots when it comes to determining what is or isn’t female modesty. Cue feminist outrage. The reason these results are unsurprising is that the survey itself invited the girls to ask the questions… I just hope there’s an equivalent follow-up survey where the guys get to ask the girls what puts them off. Down at The Salon, Kim Brittingham managed the unthinkable when she wrote about her move to lesbianism without descending to a rant against the men in her past. This followed by a piece claiming that size darn well does matter, notable chiefly for its encyclopaedic use of synonyms and its endeavours not to belittle the differently endowed. Oh, and it includes the word “embiggen”. I just thought you’d like to know that.
Over to The Guardian for a literary take on sexual matters, with a debate on chick-lit following an investigation, triggered by a comment from Booker judge Andrew Motion, into why sex is disappearing from the British novel. (But not from British chick-lit, one presumes.) Nathan Bransford is not the only one to wonder whether literary fiction is on its way out.
And then there’s death, or at least, the frailty of life. Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair about his cancer diagnosis; Boing Boing picked up on an amusing blog offering medical facts for writers; Mental Floss highlighted the amazing, and ultimately moving, photo-journal of a life; and Jordan Rosenfeld, faced with a devastating family tragedy, re-published online her short story about love and death.
It’s been quite a shock to me to find that the online writing community don’t, on the whole, publish their fiction on their blogs. Writing about writing takes precedence, and even then it’s rare to find original fiction used to illustrate some technical point. Of course this is understandable; nobody wants to throw away material that might otherwise some day be published. Laurie Halse Anderson got around the problem nicely this week when illustrating the “suckitude”of first drafts as part of her Write Fifteen Minutes A Day campaign. She took the early drafts of a novel that’s already out there, and used those. It makes for fascinating reading.
There’s been a lot written about character development during the course of the week, but the one piece that really stuck to my boots is Jason Black on the bystander effect. Your freshly developed character is unlikely to be acting in isolation, but this is the only post I’ve seen that highlights the fact. Come to that, neither are you—so Jodi Cleghorn’s notes about critiquing etiquette probably deserve a mention too.
Scott G F Bailey wrote a nice piece about ways to create suspense in a novel, while Nathan B warned against “the high price of WTF”. And if someone’s going to mention WTF, I just have to link this (seen on Boing Boing).
Some notes from Matt:
Cheryl Ossola has found the first line of her novel—but what is it, Cheryl? I think we should be told.
Just to annoy Steph, Darcy Pattison broke down novels and movies into timelines.
Three non-blog links:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/aug/06/lying-historical-fiction
http://io9.com/5603012/the-key-to-presenting-religion-in-science-fiction
http://io9.com/5604801/how-to-be-a-very-silly-science-fictionfantasy-writer
Some targets are so close to self-parody that they thwart actual parody. In that respect Twilight is the Sarah Palin of the teen vampire world. So I was impressed to come across a parody that actually made me laugh, quoted at Fantasy & SciFi Lovin’ News & Reviews.
Are unmoderated comments the id of the internet?
