Random Saturday Things

Yesterday my partner read Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight and picked up a bunch of mistakes i’d missed, plus added a few notes about a point where the story offended her knowledge of science. This proved to be fortuitous, as fixing the problem gave me a new line of dialogue with a little more metaphorical punch than the original. 

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Over on RPG.net, Capellan noted that the ending of Winged, with Sharp Teeth worked better the more he processed it, which is one of those reviews that makes me exceptionally happy. The “Lab” part of of the Short Fiction Lab isn’t just a nifty marketing gimmick–these stories are often places where I’m attempting to achieve certain things, and this time around I was deliberately experimenting with what Nick Mamamatas has referred to “leaving the ragged edge at the end” in his essay How To End A Story (via his criminally underrated writing book, Starve Better).

Mamamatas argues against the neat ending, suggesting its a literary convention of another time, serving the political economy of a magazine industry driven by advertising–an industry where disposable product is valued so the physical artefact can be passed around more easily and expose the ads to more people.

In contrast, these days:

…the popular magazines no longer carry fiction and content is all going online. That means that the “pass around” is dead; modern audiences need to be “pulled” toward content, they cannot have it “pushed” at them. Thus, a story has to have such an effect on a reader as to make him or her want to share that experience by sending the story to friends, or by broadcasting it via links on a blog, email, Twitter, etc.

Starve Better, Nick Mamatas. Loc 1087

You should really go read Starve Better. It’s really, truly great stuff if you’re interested in writing.

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You should also go download Winged, With Sharp Teeth from Amazon while it’s still free. The story will go up to its regular price on Sunday, US time (late Monday for those of us in Australia.

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Our lives involve an extraordinary amounts of passwords and logins these days, and I’ve been interested in the logic behind various choices for a while. It appears the current trend requiring mixed capitalisation and special characters may be an act of security theatre. 

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And with that, I must create a to-do list for the day and start moving boxes of books into my car. What are you up to this weekend?