How to Entry
Write 250 words or so on the Death of a Critic (Literary or Art), and what they did to get there.
Send entries to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Visit RevengeLit.Blogspot.com for details
Background
Everybody Hates a Critic. Some people hate them more than others.
Terry Griggs’s new comic-noir biblio-mystery Thought You Were Dead kicks, err, off with a literary critic found under a hedge with a knife in his head, and literary revenge plays an increasingly important role as the novel unfolds. The literary world, and especially the Canadian literary world, can be a small, spiteful – and occasionally murderous – place. Character assassinations abound, books are regularly murdered in the (shrinking) book pages across our fair land, while others are smothered with damningly faint praise. More than a few knives, even if thankfully metaphorical, have been buried hilt deep in authorial backs.
Do you bear the scars of CanLit’s internecine wars? Have you spent a small fortune on postage and only have a drawerful of rejection slips to show for it? Has the world been slow to recognize your evident talent? Then, dear reader, this contest is for you.
To celebrate the launch of Terry Griggs’s Thought You Were Dead, Biblioasis and Seen Reading are teaming up to help you unleash the murder we know is in your heart with our Revenge-Lit contest. Pen a flash fiction of 250 words or so (though, in truth, no one is likely to count them) on the (fictional) literary critic whose body once filled the chalk outline and what he did to get there and send it by June 12th to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
The best of the entries will be published as they are received at RevengeLit.blogspot.com. The winning entry will:
1) Receive a one hundred dollar cash prize
2) Be published in a forthcoming issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries
3) A Biblioasis press catalogue of in-print trade titles (approx. 40 books, retail value approx. $1000.00)
Entries to be judged by Dan Wells, Julie Wilson and Terry Griggs.
sheddie ... a person who enjoys creating a comfortable space within an outbuilding (shed); not only for working on projects but a place to enjoy a pint and some darts as well.
In a sentence: All that sheddie does is drink beer by his woodstove and play darts.
At the beginning of May, James and I ventured over to Bowen Island to visit the Glave family and to stay in their Eco-Shed. (We drank wine instead of beer and, as you’ll see, there were no darts.)
Construction of the Eco-Shed is chronicled in James Glave’s book Almost Green (published in 2008 by Greystone Books). The book is an entertaining examination of the difficulty James went through when designing his eco-friendly, sustainable writing studio.
Having read the book, I knew that I wasn’t going to sleepover in some drafty garden shed, but I had no concept of how lovely the eco-shed really is.
Pretty little stove to heat the place. Kitchenette for toast and jam in the morning.
One of the most comfortable beds on the island.
Little writing nook and view of the mountains.
The fourth wall is all windows and looks out on this lovely garden.
And I’m a sucker for a cute bathroom. Think walk in closet but this one is tiled in green, and like a sailboat bathroom, everything is self-contained (toilet, shower). It’s beautiful.
For more news and notes on the Eco-Shed, visit Jame Glave at Glave.com, go to the official Eco-Shed website at Eco-Shed.ca or check out the photos on the Eco-Shed Flickr Pool.
This past weekend, Toronto Comic Arts Festival came to life at the Toronto Reference Library, and Vepo Studios were there to catch it all for Whazamo!:Ontario Graphic Novel Month on Open Book Toronto.
We wanted to share with you this video of highlights from the day starring such comic and graphic novel luminaries as Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgrim), James Turner (Rex Libris), and Mariko Tamaki (Skim) and a surprise appearance from Cory Doctorow (Little Brother/BoingBoing)!
Whazamo! Ontario Graphic Novel Month is a collaboration between Open Book: Toronto, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and the production company Vepo Studios. Look for daily updates throughout May on the Open Book: Toronto website at: http://www.openbooktoronto.com.
UPDATE: Launch is Thursday night, in my enthusiasm I thought it was tonight.
Biblioasis’s only Vancouver-area launch of 2009 is happening Thursday, May 14! Come to the launch Cynthia Flood’s The English Stories. Publisher Dan Wells says “The English Stories is a quiet marvel of a collection, and certainly one of the highlights of our 2009 list. I’m hoping that you’ll consider coming to the Sylvia Hotel and giving it the launch it deserves.”
Thursday, May 14
7-9 pm
Bistro Bar at the Sylvia Hotel
1154 Gilford St
Vancouver
The Shebeen Club
Monday, April 20, 2009
6:00pm - 9:00pm
What: Old Publishers Have New Think Coming call to arms!
When: Monday, April 20th, 6pm-9
Where: The Shebeen, behind the Irish Heather, 210 Carrall Street.
$15 cash at the door includes dinner and a drink.
And yes, it’s okay to show up without RSVPing first.
Gutenberg was an early adopter. Very few people know that.
Call to action from Monique: I’m going to organize a panel in Vancouver. We’re going to create a model for publishing and marketing books. We’re going to move forward as an industry. Leaders will be identified. Roles will be assigned. If you’re not open to totally change everything you’re doing, then you are not ready for this revolution. Don’t come.
Who’s in?
Monique Trottier is the owner of Boxcar Marketing, an internet marketing company in Vancouver, BC. As the former internet marketing manager of Raincoast Books, she spearheaded major online marketing campaigns, including online promotion of Harry Potter and the creation of the first Canadian-publisher podcast and blog. Her thoughts on marketing and technology can be followed on Twitter at “somisguided” or on her blogs at http://www.boxcarmarketing.com/blog and http://www.SoMisguided.com.
From Farm to Table: A six-part Food and Culture series on sustainable food systems hosted by Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks and Farmfed
I’m helping Anthony Nicalo and Natalie Jensen of Farmfed, a non-profit organization dedicated to building transparent, sustainable food systems, promote their six-part food and culture series entitled Provenance: You are what you eat.
If you want to help, grab the widget in the sidebar or pull some info from below. Or just come to the events! Hope to see you there.
From Farm to Table. Provenance: meaning source or origin. You Are What You Eat
Over the course of the series, experts will join host Anthony Nicalo for classes directed at understanding the origins and sources of the meat, seafood, wine, and produce that appear on our kitchen tables and restaurant tables.
Location
* Part 1-5: Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks in Vancouver at 1740 West 2nd Ave.
* Part 6: UBC Farm at UBC
Tickets
$65 for individual tickets or $360 for all 6.
Call Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks at 604.688.6755.
Tuesday, April 21
Join Anthony Nicalo for the official book launch of Provenance: a blueprint for the modern eater. Guests will learn to assess the sources for food they eat and will learn practical tips for buying clean, healthy food.
Monday, April 27
Special guests include Mike McDermid, Program Manager of Ocean Wise, and Chef Robert Clark of [C] Restaurant discussing the importance of understanding seafood’s impacts on our oceans. Guests will enjoy sustainable seafood hors d’oeuvres prepared by Chef Robert Clark and fish-friendly wines.
Tuesday May 5
Jason Pleym, founder of Two Rivers Specialty Meats will shed light on what is really going on in grocers and butcher shops, while guests taste naturally raised meats.
Wednesday May 20
Mark Bomford, the Program Coordinator for the Centre of Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm will share tips for buying and growing sustainable produce.
Tuesday May 26
Farmstead Wines founder Anthony Nicalo lifts the veil on wine marketing and connects guests to authentic wine and artisan farmers.
Saturday June 6 at UBC Farm
This special fundraiser features international food expert and author of In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan. Pollan will share his manifesto for eating. Guests who participate in the full series will receive a gourmet picnic lunch at UBC Farm.
“Having these experts share their knowledge with us is very empowering”, remarked Anthony Nicalo. “Because the food we eat has clear implications for everything from clean water and climate change to hunger and obesity, the power to change the world is right in front of us, on our plates.”
Ada Lovelace Day is when we celebrate women in technology who inspire us. I am in awe that I made Kate’s list because Kate is truly inspirational to me.
My shout out, since I’ve been negative about the publishing industry, needs to go to Julie Wilson of SeenReading.com who continues to come up with phenomenal ways to capture the attention of book readers.
Bruce Sterling Session
Monday, March 16th at 05:00 PM
PRESENTERS
* Bruce Sterling - Wired.com
DESCRIPTION
His state-of-the-cybersphere analyses are always a highlight of SXSW Interactive. Don’t miss what the veteran science fiction writer and industry pundit has to say about the wired world this year.
MONIQUE’S NOTES
Let’s talk about our relationship. Yours and mine.
I’m an author. I’m a journalist.
There’s my business card.
With a phone and fax number.
Look. These artifacts are called books. I know you’re not used to seeing them.
Let me explain how they work.
I write a lot of words in a row. A whole lot of words. Not even character count. Then I go back and carefully restructure them and move them until they have a coherent storyline. Then I send them to my agent who sends them to a publisher who sends it to an editor and eventually it goes to a distributor who handled cult activities like author tours. And it goes to retailers who sell it to people and then return unsold copies.
This whole business has hit the skids.
Publishing has never been such a parless states. If you were an author in this system, you go 4-8% in a not really accurate royalty system. But that was ok because you, as an author, were likely to go screwy anyway.
As an author and journalist, I feel much more sorrow for the state of editors.
Editors/Publishers model is not working out. Now you have the cliched perfect storm of troubles.
Sterling on the book
I have them. I thought about spamming the audience with them. Or hiding them and geo-locating them ...
No this belongs to someone who is young. Under 20?
There is not a teen in the room? So much for this being a teenagers. Think. Just break times’ hourglass. Just take them away young people. I don’t expect you to read them. You txt.
How do we face this problem?
Twitter feed: media is dying
Print media spent 20 years making fun of a paperless society.
Could I put it on Kindle? Oh it’s there. Am I happy about that? No. Will anyone be reading a Kindle when one of them is my age? No. It’s like an atari.
Traditionally authors burn all their love letters on their death bed. Now we issue them under creative commons.
WIRED Italia. Look at the size of the ads in this baby.
[ ... monique distracted ... ]
What concerns me is the death of the audience. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. I’m better off than most authors I know, most journalists I know. There was a period of greater prosperity. I wonder why, why do I have a relationship to you. Why do you have a relationship to you?
My twitter group is bigger than you, more widely spread than you. They are probably a better audience than you. They can put up with more than you. They’ll RT me. I know some of you are gathering together in the back conspiring ... drifting ... you’re the people formerly known as the audience. And you’re forfeiting the benefits of the audience. Paying attention to the point of being able to discuss it.
[Bruce opens a drink. I used to have a great parties. It was my house. We were there to enjoy ourselves. Opens chips. You thought you were getting chips, but I was in control of the chips. The servers. They were in my corner.]
MT: Best laugh out loud.
Old social media (parties) were bring who you trusted.
The party audience was replace by social media influencers. Their capacities were built up. It was impossible to open up to this audience because they’d tweet their buddy list. It’s a technologically transformed situation and the loss is a social loss.
There’s a loss.
How do we restore those days? They aren’t coming back. Why do I keep up author appearances? Why do I have to keep up a level of respect? You’re not my friends. I’m not your host.
[cookie eating now]
Even if you’re broke, you will still be densely connected.
Connectivity is a symbol of poverty.
I might become boring enough that no one comes by anymore. You can lose your fame to the point that no one shows up.
I can’t throw a party and sit around and talk about vinyl and books. I feel the loss keenly. Playing lost vinyl for your friends. This has vanished.
I have little parties in those places with which I have similar relationships to this one. Lift Conference is getting bigger every year. Reboot in Denmark, great conference again. Amsterdam is on top of their game.
USA could be like Canada. We’re afraid of French, Germans. We’re liking Canadians: cute, cuddly. They’re afraid of being us.
Let me read this silly stuff to explain what’s happening:
“Melt down money-quake yuppy flu end of the world as we know it the long emergency bush’s legacy the great reset the inflection un-real estate communism 2.0 ... the long doom.”
This is what I think books will look like in the future. Austin is a bookish town. Book culture will mutate on the way down.
Austin bookstore I saw on the way into town. HP Lovecraft: greatest, most creative ... and when he wasn’t getting commercial work he basically started blogging. Here are his miscellaneous writings. A small fraction of his discourse and it’s bigger than his collective works. This non-fiction, community organization was more time than his stories.
Within his community, he was trusted. The American Amateur Press Association was his blog network. A lot of writers came out of this association. Robert Block. The Lovecraft circle who grew up from a B.
He perished.
What does the future look like?
Go to Brave New Books in Austin. Right-wing nutty.
This is a harbinger of something interesting. The tactics are more important here.
[ ... more to come ... 15 minutes of battery left ... ]
New Think for Old Publishers panel at SXSW drew a lot of frustration from the crowd of book lovers and supporters.
The official description of the session was:
This is not a discussion of whether ebooks are killing treebooks, or whether it’s possible to get cozy with an Amazon Kindle. It’s about how participatory culture and the online world interact with good olde book publishing.Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, Deborah Schultz, and fellow panelists will share with the audience a variety of perspectives on what’s going right and what’s going wrong in publishing, assess success of recent forays into marketing digitally, digital publishing, and what books and blogs have to gain from one another. Penguin Group (USA), which houses some 40 plus imprints and publishes an extremely broad variety of physical and digital products everything from William Gibson’s first ebook in the 90’s to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food to Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (the source for HBO’s True Blood) is deeply involved in exploring ways that old and new media might better collaborate. Audience members are invited to speak up about what they think book publishers could/should be doing to better provide relevant information and content to blogs, websites, and online communities. Come tell old media what you want and how you want it.
Clay Shirky ITP
John Fagan Mktg Dir, Penguin Group (USA)
Deborah Schultz Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com
Peter Miller Dir of Publicity, Bloomsbury USA
Ivan Held Pres GP Putnam’s Sons, Penguin Group (USA)
They certainly told publishers what they think. The summation was “you suck at this is the biggest way possible.”
I think it’s unfair to attack the folks on that panel but as representatives of the industry they do have to go back to their houses and understand that they need to convey, not that bloggers are an unruly bunch, but that publishers need to get off their asses and get involved with social media. Enough is enough.
BookSquare says
If you’re going to hold a session called “New Think for Old Publishers”, you gotta come with some new thinking. Either that or tell the audience that it’s a research session…and the audience is supposed to bring the new thinking. Good idea, needed better execution. Nobody read the panel description to mean “we want the audience to tell us what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix it”.
...
The publishing people on stage said, essentially, tell us what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix it. You have 300 people who give up an hour of their lives to hear the cool things the traditional publishing business is doing…and you can ask them to consult on your business?
Monique’s summary
What went wrong is this:
* Publishers have not listened to the crowd for a long time.
* The crowd is restless.
* Publishers wring their hands about the web.
* The crowd offers options publishers don’t like.
* Publishers weep into their hands.
* The crowd wants to help and offers other suggestions.
* Publishers act like deer in headlights.
* The crowd plows down publishers and reinvents the industry without them.
What this panel really came down to is that the wisdom of the crowds is not being tapped. The crowd is now sick and tired of trying to help people who won’t help themselves.
Hold me to this: I’m going to organize a panel in Vancouver. We’re going to create a model for publishing and marketing books. We’re going to move forward as an industry. Leaders will be identified. Roles will be assigned. If you’re not open to totally change everything you’re doing, then you are not ready for this revolution. Don’t come.
Who’s in?
UPDATES
Peter Miller Glibness. “Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Tips from a panelist who barely survived” in Publishers Weekly. Read the article.
Michael Tamblyn of BookNet Canada on 6 Things That Revolutionize Publishing
* Jenny Benevento - Bento Artisanal Metadata
* Tom Conrad - Pandora Media Inc
* Abby Blachly - Librarything
DESCRIPTION
Web 2.0 is all about tagging, right? Many content types are not findable with user-generated metadata. More web projects are using controlled & expert created metadata to complement user tagging to enhance user experience, findability, social networking, & site popularity. We’ll show you how & why it can help you.
MONIQUE’S NOTES
Why you should/could use normalized metadata?
Users want to get shit done.
LibraryThing started because I guy wanted to share his book list and pulled the info from the US Library of Congress. That became social as more people wanted to do this. The Dewey number, bisac, etc. are fields of metadata that are pulled into the site in order to take marked records and to make it into an understandable, searchable archive.
Tagging is also present on the site so there’s a good mix of user-generated metadata along with normalized metadata. In addition, users are able to add controlled metadata for things like series titles.
Apparently the bangers and mash really hit the fan in Christopher Moore’s new novel Fool.
Published by Harper Canada
Travis introduced me to Christopher Moore a while ago. I read his copy of Fluke. If I had more than 2 minutes to myself in the next month, I’d be getting my hands on a copy.
Aside from that I’m reading Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (distributed by Raincoast Books).
Tiny Art Director is one of those projects that gets me giggling like a school girl. Tiny Art Director is an illustrator in collaboration with his 4-year-old daughter, who he claims is actually a sweet kid but by the look on her face has a lot of spunk with which her first teacher is going to have to contend.
I love that this is a blog and a book project.
Help support the Tiny Art Director’s college fund (She’ll be going to RISD in 2023), and get a great present for the beleaguered parent on your list - or anyone else who loves a three year old.
The creative briefs on the site and the critiques of each illustration are close to real, adult conversations I’ve been a part of doing web design. I also appreciate this whole parent-daughter process because my mom used to draw me colouring books as a kid. “Mom, draw me a giraffe. No not like that!” I have to say the follow-up conversation on her side was less congenial. “Do it yourself then.”
How book are made ... from the digital marketing team at McMillan, forwarded to me from the digital marketing team at Raincoast Books. Hooray for the interwebs.
Biblioasis and SeenReading have launched the Kill a Critic: A Revenge-Lit contest, to celebrate the Launch of Terry Griggs’s Thought You Were Dead.
