Daily life: This and that
"When publishing was a matter of standing in front of a large enough audience and telling a story, publishing could be assayed by literally anyone. If a storyteller wanted to tell a story, he did so. If he was good enough at it, he got the accolades and respect of his audience, and perhaps even payment, in the form of food, shelter, etc. The developments of technology, beginning with written languages, continuing through such crude printing technologies as woodblock and hand-cast metal type, and eventually reaching block-long high-speed web-fed printing presses, took this immediate access away from the average storyteller. Now, in order to put his story in the hands of his audience, the storyteller had to do one of two things. He had to acquire a printing press, or he had to go to someone who had one.
"There were, perhaps unfortunately, more storytellers than the printers could handle, and they (like all industries) learned how to say no. The perceived function of the owners of the printing presses as a gatekeeper has its actual origin right there: the printers simply could not hope to publish everything. Nor could they hope to attract all the readers in the world, and in an attempt to differentiate their services from those of their competitors, they began to add what they perceived as value. They added editing. They added color. They added illustrations. And they added snobbery.
"But the question remains unanswered: do we want a gatekeeper to the public square? Do we want a not-so-disinterested third party telling us what we can and cannot read? Remember the fireside? Remember the storyteller who stood there, regaling his audience with the story of how he conquered a saber-tooth? Aren't we capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to spend our time listening to him? I said that if he was good enough, he got respect and accolades. What I didn't say was that if he wasn't good enough, he got ignored. He lost his audience. He either stood by the dying fire alone and spoke on and on to nothing and nobody, or he went home and hoed his potatoes. His publishing career was over. Market forces did him in, not some gatekeepers somewhere, standing with crossed lances, turning him away."
--Levi Montgomery.
"The importance of gatekeepers does not lie in their ability to prevent bad books from being found, but in their ability to make the good ones easier to find."
--Response by Marion Gropen, co-moderator of the Self-Publishing list, followed by a spirited debate at TeleRead.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
How I reply to comments at this blog.
*** 20 September 2009. Writing: If you're seeking software by which to convert e-books into the EPUB format . . .
I can recommend Calibre. I downloaded it because it was the only software I could find that would convert HTML files into EPUB format. (It supports conversion from a number of formats.) It does an excellent job of converting HTML files. (It can't handle en dashes and em dashes from the Windows character map, but that's okay - I just used their coded equivalents.) A pleasant surprise was that Calibre was able to interpret my hyperlinked table of contents and produce an EPUB table of contents out of that.
The process of conversion is so easy and fast - it took me two minutes flat - that I'm tempted to publish my e-books next year in two formats: HTML and EPUB. EPUB is clearly turning into a major format for e-books. (I'm rather proud that I'd heard of it before it became trendy, thanks to the TeleRead blog plugging it.)
As an e-book reader, Calibre (which is open source, by the way) is okay for my purposes. I wanted to be able to read Google Books files on it, since Google is now making some of its public domain e-books available in EPUB format (thank heavens - my eyes just can't cope with PDF files in the wintertime). I tried Mobipocket Reader first - Mobipocket can read EPUB files now - but the results were so bad that I subsequently had a nightmare where I was trying to explain to my father why I couldn't read Google Books's EPUB files on Mobipocket. (It wasn't just me. People at the TeleRead blog are complaining mightily about this.)
Calibre has a few quirks - I can't figure out how to get it to override Google Books's default font, which isn't my preferred font - but the resulting file is readable and can be cranked up to any size font I want. The only mildly irritating thing is that Calibre creates a second copy of each e-book to tuck into its library folder, but I can easily cope with this by deleting the copies after I read them. This might be more of a problem for people with different reading habits from my own; it effectively doubles the amount of e-book storage space you need on your computer, unless you're contented to keep all of your e-books in Calibre's designated folder.
*** 23 September 2009. Mentoring: Quotations from my apprentice .
My apprentice on watching The Wizard of Oz at a movie theater with a friend: "Joe and I sat there and sniffled and tried not to cry, being men and everything. . . . Joe at least had the foresight to get us napkins from the concession stand."
o--o--o
Me, responding to my apprentice's surprise that so many families attended The Wizard of Oz: "What, you think gay men have the monopoly on it?"
My apprentice: "Well, yes - we own Judy Garland, you know, Sir."
*** 23 September 2009. Simplicity: My diet.
First of all, as a reminder, this is my menu from a random day one year ago.
o--o--o
Apple slices and natural peanut butter on whole wheat toast.
Nonfat milk.
Pea soup (split peas, broccoli, zucchini, carrots, and tahini) with whole wheat bread.
Orange juice.
Cooked vegetables on whole wheat couscous with whole-milk mozzarella cheese. (Doug varies the type of vegetables used each week, but green vegetables are usually in there somewhere.)
Mixed fruit juice.
Ground-up carrots and cabbages on whole wheat couscous with spaghetti sauce (with oil) and whole-milk mozzarella cheese.
Mixed fruit juice.
Whole-milk cream cheese and jam on whole wheat toast.
Nonfat milk.
o--o--o
I commented about this diet at the time: "While it appears to be the ideal lacto-vegetarian diet in terms of balancing food groups (other than the virtual absence of legumes), it's far from ideal from the point of weight control. Four of the five meals prominently feature high-fat foods (whole dairy products and peanut butter). All five meals feature simple sugars. (Simple sugars are sugar without accompanying fiber. Lactose in milk, and fructose in fruit juices, are simple sugars - they don't have any accompanying fiber. To put a complex dietary matter simply: Sugar + fiber = good. Sugar without fiber = not so good. I'm more likely to gain weight if I'm eating a lot of simple sugars.) . . .
"At any rate, here's the diet I'm [going to try].
"Whenever I want: Whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and water.
"Once or twice a day (per item): Nonfat dairy products, and a small amount of nuts/seeds within larger dishes.
"Once a day (one item on this list, in rotation): Fruit juices, whole or part-skim cheese, cream cheese and jam, peanut butter, sweets (chocolate, ice cream, etc.).
"On holidays or when eating out with friends or family: Meat, eggs, white bread, and vegetarian foods with added oil (potato chips, etc.)."
o--o--o
So have I been keeping to this plan? Here was my menu today.
o--o--o
Whole wheat spaghetti, spaghetti sauce, and ground roasted flaxseed.
Grapes.
Water.
Chopped broccoli on poppy-seed white bread with whole-milk cheese spread.
Apple.
Water.
"Slaw" (minced carrots and cabbage) and brocolli sprouts on whole wheat toast with reduced-fat cream cheese.
Nectarine.
Water.
Whole wheat toast with pear butter (i.e. jam).
Chamomile tea bag, cocoa, and malt in hot milk. (Yes, I'm weird. This is my version of flavored hot chocolate.)
Mixed beans stew (cranberry beans, green split peas, yellow split peas, cow peas, great northern beans, chickpeas, and blackeye peas), sprinkled with reduced-fat Cheddar cheese.
Orange juice.
o--o--o
Good things:
I'm eating legumes more often (though not daily).
I'm eating lots more fruit. I've stopped drinking juice entirely, except for orange juice. (Which is calcium-fortified, in case you're worrying about my calcium intake.)
Bad things:
I've cut back somewhat on cheese, and am using reduced-fat cheese more often, but I'm still eating too much cheese. I need to seek out alternative sandwich spreads.
Though today's menu doesn't show this, I'm still eating too much peanut butter and jam. I need to stop this.
Uncertain things:
I've added flaxseed to my daily menu for the sake of the Omega-3s, which are supposed to be good for my eyes. Unfortunately, this bounces my daily fat intake way up: three tablespoons of flaxseed has 9 grams of fat. I checked my fat intake in today's menu, and I think that, as long as I stay away from peanut butter, I'll be able to keep my fat intake under 30 grams daily - which is higher than I'd like, but I can't see any way around this problem.
o--o--o
I'll take another look at my dietary situation this winter, but I really am pleased about my successful switchover from juices to fruit and water.
*** 23 September 2009. Writing and Mentoring: The servant problem.
"I'd suggest that you CC any reply [to my e-mail] to my boy . . ."
That's a snippet from an e-mail I sent tonight when submitting an article to the editor of The Leather Times, the newsletter of the Leather Archives & Museum.
It was such a relief to be able to say that in so straightforward a matter. It's not so much the terminology that's at issue; I'd feel equally comfortable referring to my apprentice, protege, research assistant, or personal assistant, for Noakes is all those things to me. So I don't have any problems making references to Noakes in my vanilla correspondence.
The problem is that I'm afraid I come across as high-faluting to my vanilla correspondents when I ask them to correspond with me via my apprentice. The days when Harriet Vane (a middle-class fiction writer in Dorothy Sayers's early-twentieth-century mysteries) could hire a secretary to handle her correspondence are long past. Middle-class fiction writers - especially broke middle-class fiction writers, which is what I am - just don't hire personal assistants.
And of course I didn't hire my apprentice. He's a volunteer. But that's even more difficult to explain.
So it's nice to be able to say casually, "CC the letter to my boy," and to know that the editor (who happens to be a leather slave) will understand.
*** 25 September 2009. Writing: Lambda Literary Awards.
My apprentice and I spent a goodly amount of yesterday discussing the Lambda Literary Foundation's change of rules to its awards. (A lot of that time was spent trying to figure out from the Foundation's highly ambiguous wording what the new rules are.) At one point, I said, "I think the Lambda Literary Foundation is right. They should devote themselves to promoting the writings only of GLBT folk who are writers. Therefore, they should give awards to gay authors who write heterosexual romances."
Seriously, I have no problems with a set of awards being devoted to a particular body of people. The problem I have is that this is not how the Lambda Literary Awards present themselves to the world. They present themselves as being awards for excellence in GLBT literature. Unless they're going to rename themselves as the "Lamba Literary Awards for excellence in GLBT literature by GLBT writers," they're deceiving the general public as to their intent. They cannot expect the average member of the public to visit their Website to read the fine print of their eligibility rules.
*** 25 September 2009. Writing: Final days of my publishing season.
I reached the point two days ago where I realized that I was ready to enter into my writing season, other than taking a final visit online.
Then I looked at my Webtasks list and winced. There was no way I could get all those tasks done in one day - and I wasn't interested in spending fourteen hours online in one day, which is what I did last week.
So I decided to go online early this week and take as many days as was needed. To be safe, I gave myself three days for Web work, but I may be done today, after two days. If so, that will give me the weekend to recover from my Internet hangover.
"There were, perhaps unfortunately, more storytellers than the printers could handle, and they (like all industries) learned how to say no. The perceived function of the owners of the printing presses as a gatekeeper has its actual origin right there: the printers simply could not hope to publish everything. Nor could they hope to attract all the readers in the world, and in an attempt to differentiate their services from those of their competitors, they began to add what they perceived as value. They added editing. They added color. They added illustrations. And they added snobbery.
"But the question remains unanswered: do we want a gatekeeper to the public square? Do we want a not-so-disinterested third party telling us what we can and cannot read? Remember the fireside? Remember the storyteller who stood there, regaling his audience with the story of how he conquered a saber-tooth? Aren't we capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to spend our time listening to him? I said that if he was good enough, he got respect and accolades. What I didn't say was that if he wasn't good enough, he got ignored. He lost his audience. He either stood by the dying fire alone and spoke on and on to nothing and nobody, or he went home and hoed his potatoes. His publishing career was over. Market forces did him in, not some gatekeepers somewhere, standing with crossed lances, turning him away."
--Levi Montgomery.
"The importance of gatekeepers does not lie in their ability to prevent bad books from being found, but in their ability to make the good ones easier to find."
--Response by Marion Gropen, co-moderator of the Self-Publishing list, followed by a spirited debate at TeleRead.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
How I reply to comments at this blog.
*** 20 September 2009. Writing: If you're seeking software by which to convert e-books into the EPUB format . . .
I can recommend Calibre. I downloaded it because it was the only software I could find that would convert HTML files into EPUB format. (It supports conversion from a number of formats.) It does an excellent job of converting HTML files. (It can't handle en dashes and em dashes from the Windows character map, but that's okay - I just used their coded equivalents.) A pleasant surprise was that Calibre was able to interpret my hyperlinked table of contents and produce an EPUB table of contents out of that.
The process of conversion is so easy and fast - it took me two minutes flat - that I'm tempted to publish my e-books next year in two formats: HTML and EPUB. EPUB is clearly turning into a major format for e-books. (I'm rather proud that I'd heard of it before it became trendy, thanks to the TeleRead blog plugging it.)
As an e-book reader, Calibre (which is open source, by the way) is okay for my purposes. I wanted to be able to read Google Books files on it, since Google is now making some of its public domain e-books available in EPUB format (thank heavens - my eyes just can't cope with PDF files in the wintertime). I tried Mobipocket Reader first - Mobipocket can read EPUB files now - but the results were so bad that I subsequently had a nightmare where I was trying to explain to my father why I couldn't read Google Books's EPUB files on Mobipocket. (It wasn't just me. People at the TeleRead blog are complaining mightily about this.)
Calibre has a few quirks - I can't figure out how to get it to override Google Books's default font, which isn't my preferred font - but the resulting file is readable and can be cranked up to any size font I want. The only mildly irritating thing is that Calibre creates a second copy of each e-book to tuck into its library folder, but I can easily cope with this by deleting the copies after I read them. This might be more of a problem for people with different reading habits from my own; it effectively doubles the amount of e-book storage space you need on your computer, unless you're contented to keep all of your e-books in Calibre's designated folder.
*** 23 September 2009. Mentoring: Quotations from my apprentice .
My apprentice on watching The Wizard of Oz at a movie theater with a friend: "Joe and I sat there and sniffled and tried not to cry, being men and everything. . . . Joe at least had the foresight to get us napkins from the concession stand."
Me, responding to my apprentice's surprise that so many families attended The Wizard of Oz: "What, you think gay men have the monopoly on it?"
My apprentice: "Well, yes - we own Judy Garland, you know, Sir."
*** 23 September 2009. Simplicity: My diet.
First of all, as a reminder, this is my menu from a random day one year ago.
Apple slices and natural peanut butter on whole wheat toast.
Nonfat milk.
Pea soup (split peas, broccoli, zucchini, carrots, and tahini) with whole wheat bread.
Orange juice.
Cooked vegetables on whole wheat couscous with whole-milk mozzarella cheese. (Doug varies the type of vegetables used each week, but green vegetables are usually in there somewhere.)
Mixed fruit juice.
Ground-up carrots and cabbages on whole wheat couscous with spaghetti sauce (with oil) and whole-milk mozzarella cheese.
Mixed fruit juice.
Whole-milk cream cheese and jam on whole wheat toast.
Nonfat milk.
I commented about this diet at the time: "While it appears to be the ideal lacto-vegetarian diet in terms of balancing food groups (other than the virtual absence of legumes), it's far from ideal from the point of weight control. Four of the five meals prominently feature high-fat foods (whole dairy products and peanut butter). All five meals feature simple sugars. (Simple sugars are sugar without accompanying fiber. Lactose in milk, and fructose in fruit juices, are simple sugars - they don't have any accompanying fiber. To put a complex dietary matter simply: Sugar + fiber = good. Sugar without fiber = not so good. I'm more likely to gain weight if I'm eating a lot of simple sugars.) . . .
"At any rate, here's the diet I'm [going to try].
"Whenever I want: Whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and water.
"Once or twice a day (per item): Nonfat dairy products, and a small amount of nuts/seeds within larger dishes.
"Once a day (one item on this list, in rotation): Fruit juices, whole or part-skim cheese, cream cheese and jam, peanut butter, sweets (chocolate, ice cream, etc.).
"On holidays or when eating out with friends or family: Meat, eggs, white bread, and vegetarian foods with added oil (potato chips, etc.)."
So have I been keeping to this plan? Here was my menu today.
Whole wheat spaghetti, spaghetti sauce, and ground roasted flaxseed.
Grapes.
Water.
Chopped broccoli on poppy-seed white bread with whole-milk cheese spread.
Apple.
Water.
"Slaw" (minced carrots and cabbage) and brocolli sprouts on whole wheat toast with reduced-fat cream cheese.
Nectarine.
Water.
Whole wheat toast with pear butter (i.e. jam).
Chamomile tea bag, cocoa, and malt in hot milk. (Yes, I'm weird. This is my version of flavored hot chocolate.)
Mixed beans stew (cranberry beans, green split peas, yellow split peas, cow peas, great northern beans, chickpeas, and blackeye peas), sprinkled with reduced-fat Cheddar cheese.
Orange juice.
Good things:
I'm eating legumes more often (though not daily).
I'm eating lots more fruit. I've stopped drinking juice entirely, except for orange juice. (Which is calcium-fortified, in case you're worrying about my calcium intake.)
Bad things:
I've cut back somewhat on cheese, and am using reduced-fat cheese more often, but I'm still eating too much cheese. I need to seek out alternative sandwich spreads.
Though today's menu doesn't show this, I'm still eating too much peanut butter and jam. I need to stop this.
Uncertain things:
I've added flaxseed to my daily menu for the sake of the Omega-3s, which are supposed to be good for my eyes. Unfortunately, this bounces my daily fat intake way up: three tablespoons of flaxseed has 9 grams of fat. I checked my fat intake in today's menu, and I think that, as long as I stay away from peanut butter, I'll be able to keep my fat intake under 30 grams daily - which is higher than I'd like, but I can't see any way around this problem.
I'll take another look at my dietary situation this winter, but I really am pleased about my successful switchover from juices to fruit and water.
*** 23 September 2009. Writing and Mentoring: The servant problem.
"I'd suggest that you CC any reply [to my e-mail] to my boy . . ."
That's a snippet from an e-mail I sent tonight when submitting an article to the editor of The Leather Times, the newsletter of the Leather Archives & Museum.
It was such a relief to be able to say that in so straightforward a matter. It's not so much the terminology that's at issue; I'd feel equally comfortable referring to my apprentice, protege, research assistant, or personal assistant, for Noakes is all those things to me. So I don't have any problems making references to Noakes in my vanilla correspondence.
The problem is that I'm afraid I come across as high-faluting to my vanilla correspondents when I ask them to correspond with me via my apprentice. The days when Harriet Vane (a middle-class fiction writer in Dorothy Sayers's early-twentieth-century mysteries) could hire a secretary to handle her correspondence are long past. Middle-class fiction writers - especially broke middle-class fiction writers, which is what I am - just don't hire personal assistants.
And of course I didn't hire my apprentice. He's a volunteer. But that's even more difficult to explain.
So it's nice to be able to say casually, "CC the letter to my boy," and to know that the editor (who happens to be a leather slave) will understand.
*** 25 September 2009. Writing: Lambda Literary Awards.
My apprentice and I spent a goodly amount of yesterday discussing the Lambda Literary Foundation's change of rules to its awards. (A lot of that time was spent trying to figure out from the Foundation's highly ambiguous wording what the new rules are.) At one point, I said, "I think the Lambda Literary Foundation is right. They should devote themselves to promoting the writings only of GLBT folk who are writers. Therefore, they should give awards to gay authors who write heterosexual romances."
Seriously, I have no problems with a set of awards being devoted to a particular body of people. The problem I have is that this is not how the Lambda Literary Awards present themselves to the world. They present themselves as being awards for excellence in GLBT literature. Unless they're going to rename themselves as the "Lamba Literary Awards for excellence in GLBT literature by GLBT writers," they're deceiving the general public as to their intent. They cannot expect the average member of the public to visit their Website to read the fine print of their eligibility rules.
*** 25 September 2009. Writing: Final days of my publishing season.
I reached the point two days ago where I realized that I was ready to enter into my writing season, other than taking a final visit online.
Then I looked at my Webtasks list and winced. There was no way I could get all those tasks done in one day - and I wasn't interested in spending fourteen hours online in one day, which is what I did last week.
So I decided to go online early this week and take as many days as was needed. To be safe, I gave myself three days for Web work, but I may be done today, after two days. If so, that will give me the weekend to recover from my Internet hangover.
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