Speakeasy

From the Guardian:

When preparing to tour, most groups arrange a reliable supply of pharmaceuticals, exotic porn, and a month’s worth of underpants (for a fastidious quartet, that’s four pairs.)

Franz Ferdinand, on the other hand, ask their fans what books they should read to while away those boring moments in airports, record company waiting rooms and blank-faced hotel rooms. They received hundreds of recommendations, and put it to a vote. The selected book was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Naturally.

Now, the band members are blogging on their progress, and their fans are apparently joining in, reading the Nobel Prize-winning author’s opus in a gesture of solidarity with the band.

Going back to the Guardian article, several of the article’s commenters point out that Franz Ferdinand are not the first band to encourage literary pursuits among their fans. Duran Duran’s Simon le Bon has apparently maintained a book club for years.

Over at Whatever, John Scalzi has a great little interview-style snippet from Judson Roberts, a historical fiction writer, about the process of writing his viking fiction. Roberts talks about what you need for good historical writing, and the ways events in his life helped him ‘get’ what vikings were all about:

My earliest drafts fell far short of achieving my second goal. I wasn’t bringing the Vikings’ culture to life. I wasn’t succeeding at getting inside the heads of a people who’d lived over a thousand years ago. What I was creating felt comparable to the dreadful 1993 Disney-produced film of The Three Musketeers, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Charlie Sheen, whose characters may have been garbed in costumes appropriate to the period, and placed in authentic looking settings, but as soon as they opened their mouths you heard twentieth century surfer dudes, and every shred of the movie’s credibility went out the window.

Ironically, what led me to my breakthrough big idea was having almost every aspect of my life get blown to hell.

For those of you out there writing for businesses, churning out corporate documents, letters, professional emails and all of that, how much attention do you pay to the language you’re using? Do you find yourself using twenty-five words when ten would do? Have you been using ‘utilise’, ‘elucidate’ and ‘price points’ for so long, you’ve forgotten words like ‘use’, ‘explain’ and ‘cost’ exist? Have you been using ‘action’ as a verb??

This post is for you! I’ve been looking around for resources for professional and technical writers, and I’ve come up with quite a few good links.

First, one of my favourites is weaselwords.com. Spawned by Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Cliches, Cant & Management Jargon, by former political speechwriter Don Watson, this site collects some truly impressive examples of obfuscating, irritatingly waffling language. I can also recommend his book Death Sentence, which is basically a really entertaining rant about the decline of the English language.

Another book to take a look at is The Professional Writing Guide: Writing Well and Knowing Why, by Roslyn Petelin and Marsha Durham. It covers spelling, punctuation, grammar and sentence construction, includes letter templates, guides to writing emails and memos, tips for formatting professional documents, and advice on creating a style guide. Petelin and Durham also advocate plain English over weasel words, and there’s lots of examples to help you work out how to apply their advice.

I found quite a few links via Manage Your Writing, to jargon dictionaries, websites extolling the virtues of plain language, and a whole textbook about technical writing. There’s also The Cluetrain Manifesto, which isn’t a writing guide as such, but more a book about the internet and online marketing. It’s a bit old-school, created in 1999, but the chapter I read was really interesting.

I also came across 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers, which includes links to writing software, online dictionaries and references, and heaps of other useful little tools and bits and pieces. Check out the organisers that can help you track your submissions and who you’re waiting to hear from, the dictionaries you can add to your desktop, and the handful of alternatives to Microsoft Word. They’ve got links to screenplay formatting programs,  organisers for non-fiction citations, and even a program that will help you track storylines in a long piece of writing.

Check out this beautifully simple guide to the basic rules of punctuation. It’s the perfect site for anyone who might like to refresh their memories of high school English lessons; I know I need the reminder every so often.

According to the Telegraph, a lock of Jane Austen’s hair has just sold at auction for £5,640 (on today’s exchange, that’s AU$11,640.73). The hair had supposedly been taken from Austen by her sister, just before they closed Austen’s coffin, and then fashioned into a brooch (they did this a lot, back in the day, to commemorate dead relatives). The Guardian has a picture, and adds that they can’t even confirm the hair was Austen’s.

At the same auction, a first edition of Sense and Sensibility sold for £30,000 (AU$61,951.71).

Steven Carroll has been awarded the prestigious 2008 Miles Franklin Award for his novel Time We Have Taken, published by Harper Collins Australia.

Accepting the award Carroll said ‘It’s an extraordinary thrill and an honour - but it’s also daunting to be joining a long list of authors whom you’ve either studied or admired for years. The Miles Franklin comes with the gravitas of a whole literary tradition, and you feel that weight almost instantly.’

The Judging Panel praised the work as a ‘poised, philosophically profound exploration of the question, a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.’

Source and more information here.

Abebooks.com has put together an interesting article about the things people leave in books they sell or donate to second-hand stores. Items include from 40 $1,000 bills, a Mickey Mantle baseball card, a diamond ring, a tiny book of pornography, and much more.

Making news today (or this week; I think it might have happened yesterday) the Associated Press has recently instituted a Content License Agreement, which supposedly defines how much of their copyrighted work (articles and stuff) bloggers and web users can quote. The Licensing includes a fee for excerpts starting at US12.50 for 5-25 words.

They’re offering a reward for dobbing in people who aren’t sticking to the rules, and one of the terms is that articles and content cannot be used in any way that reflects poorly on Associated Press.

I don’t know all that much about copyright law. The anonymous corporate giant that is Associated Press might be well within their legal rights to try this. But Patrick at Making Light analyses the situation perfectly:

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

And as a society, we need to be able to criticise our press. He also makes the point that this is a private business (Associated Press), that is trying to dictate the legalities of a public issue. A private company, which obviously has a vested interest in who can and cannot circulate news information, is trying to legalise their control of the circulation of news information.

The folks at Making Light have a few more points to make, like the fact that anyone who knows anything about the media, and why it needs watchdogs, won’t sign one of these agreements. Associated Press is trying to intimidate people into paying them, signing off on their demands, and threatening them with lawsuits if they don’t like what they blog about. But if you don’t agree to their terms and conditions, you’re still entitled to fair use under actual copyright law. Not Associated Press’ copyright law, actual law.

Nominations have been announced for the 2008 AWGIE Awards. From the press release:

Multiple AWGIE winners Kym Goldsworthy, Greg Haddrick, Katherine Thomson and Noëlle Janaczewska have again received nominations this year for their writing excellence, with Noëlle nominated in both the Community and Youth Theatre and Radio Adaptation categories.

The scripts of four uniquely Australian films have been nominated in the Original Feature Film category: The Black Balloon by Elissa Down with Jimmy the Exploder; The Tender Hook by Jonathan Ogilvie; Cactus by Jasmine Yuen-Carrucan; and Acolytes by Shayne Armstrong with Jon Hewitt and Shane Krause.

The link has a complete list of the nominees.

Congratulations to the winners of the Australian Book Industry Awards, announced in Melbourne last night. Taking top honours was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks who nabbed both the Australian Book of the Year award and the Literary Fiction Book of the Year award for her latest novel, People of the Book.

Other individual winners include David Malouf, Maggie Beer and Kaz Cooke.

More at The Sydney Morning Herald.