Ben H. Winters's Blog, page 8
February 14, 2011
Octopuses vs. Priuses
I was honored last year to write a piece for one of my all-time favorite websites, Visual Thesaurus, about my struggle to correctly pluralize the word "octopus." Bottom line: the word does not become octopi, it becomes octopuses, and I will forever feel like an ignoramus (which, b/t/w, does not become ignorami) for thinking otherwise.
The subject of phony-baloney Latinate plurals is in the news because of Toyota's well-publicized search for the correct term to multiply the Prius. Neal Whitman of Literal-Minded runs it down; the bottom line this time is that the technically correct answer would be priora, but the real answer is boring old Priuses.
In other word-nerd news, I was fascinated to learn that Chinese is well-suited to punning because of the limited number of sounds: "There are only 400-some syllables in the first place, which can be intoned in four or five ways each, at a maximum."
Quick postscript to this quick post: Thank you to all the machine-brain spam-robots who responded to my recent post, incisively proving my point about how most commenters on blogs are machine-brain spam-robots.
February 11, 2011
Robot Overlords! I Welcome Your Comments!
Surely the most common source of melancholy among bloggers is the sense that, no matter how much salacious personal information or incisive commentary you roll out, no one is reading. There is good reason for this sense; statistics tell us that many blogs struggle along with only a couple dozen readers.
No need to despair. Your blog, along with this one and all the others, is being read faithfully and carefully, just not by human beings. Your words are being devoured by millions of unthinking web-crawling algorithms. As Jaron Lanier wrote in the preface to You Are Not a Gadget, in the twenty-first century "words will mostly be read by nonpersons…they will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere."
Case in point: I wrote my first blog post a couple weeks ago, and waited eagerly for comments. (Because, like the digital meth-addicts we have all become, my moment-to-moment sense of self-worth depends on how many "likes" my latest status receives, how much clever banter is generated by my witty comment on someone else's.) Sadly, the post earned a grand total of three comments. The first was a supportive and on topic, submitted by someone I know to be an actual human being: namely, my Aunt Ann, a writer who lives in Virginia and loves cats.
The second comment might have been written by a human being, but was clearly posted automatically, in the manner of spam email:
"I love your transitions and clarity. I have been writing for Ghost Writers for a while now, and they pay me well to write blog posts like this, or articles. I clear $100-$200 on a awful day.
Judging by your skill with the english language, you may enjoy doing the same. It wouldnt hurt to check them out.Here are the details"
This could not reek more of scam if it were signed by a Nigerian prince. Indeed, the link leads to a site for a "Work From Home" business, confusingly illustrated by a woman in a business suit and black heels.
The third comment to my post was the most intriguing:
"Sfvpwqlx says:Jesus' unity with God is established by the Incarnation as the divine Logos assumes a human nature. , general contractors in albuquerque nm, [url="http://lm1.generalready.com/general-contractors-in-albuquerque-nm.html"]general contractors in albuquerque nm[/url],http://lm1.generalready.com/general-contractors-in-albuquerque-nm.htmlgeneral contractors in albuquerque nm, bat,"
I have read this post many times, and followed the link to the bizzarre chock-a-block website, and still cannot grasp out the connection between "Jesus' unity with God," "the divine Logos," and "general contractors in albuquerque, nm."
It's got to be spam, right? Sent automatically, by a machine…but what the hell does it mean?
At least with that second comment, I know what the digital web-crawling robot wants: it wants me to go to the website with the business-suit lady and shell out whatever rip-off up-front fee I'm supposed to shell out, so I can make "$100 – $200" a day working at home. (Similarly, the single comment on my second blog entry, which just says "This is a wonderful blog. I love it", redirects to a bootleg movie site.)
But this "comment" from Sfvpwqlx is another thing entirely. This particular digital robot wants something from me: maybe to worship Jesus, maybe to move to New Mexico and become a general contractor, maybe something else entirely. Or maybe the machines just want us confused and disoriented, so when the great robot revolution comes we'll put up less of a fuss.
In the meantime, my friends at Quirk — publishers of my books Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina, and real human beings as far as I can tell — are running a very clever "Art of the Mash-Up" competition with Bridgeman Art. Go ahead and enter — Mr. Sfvpwqlx, I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
February 2, 2011
The Greatest Computer Program in the World
I've been doing a bunch of appearances and author visits lately, to promote my "middle-school punk-rock detective novel", The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman. I spoke to some newly minted graduates of the MFA program at Lesley College (all of whom know more about writing than I do) and I visited to a local elementary school, where I wore a nice sweater and used my thoughtful-listening face.
I bet you a frabillion dollars the question that writers get the most, at these sorts of things, is "Where do you get your ideas?"
There is good answer to this question.
But I do have an answer to the second-most-frequently-asked question: "How do you make yourself get work done?"
I think people, just in general, find it so hard to get any work done, that they can't imagine how a person with no set structure manages to produce anything–even if it means writing dopey speculative fiction about 19th century Russian robots.
To this question I have an answer, and that answer is The Greatest Computer Program in the World.
That program is called, simply, Freedom, it was made up by a guy named Fred, and it costs ten dollars. And all it does is turn off the internet connection on your computer. you decide how long to turn it off, between a minute and eight hours. Once you've activated Freedom, the only way to deactivate it and get online is turn off your computer and restart—a sufficient psychological barrier, hopefully, to keep most of us from cheating.
The internet's effectiveness as a time-wasting device is exhaustively documented. If you're a writer—especially if you're a writer, like most of us, with a million non-writing-related responsibilities—and you've got to squeeze in your writing time, an hour here, three hours there…you have got to get this computer program. If you have any questions about it, you can email Fred; he's super nice.
One way to think of the writer's career is as an endless battle between the elevated, responsible part of your character, that wants to get work done, create something beautiful, and entertain or educate the world–and, on the other hand, the lazy, distracted part of your character, that wants to send emails, write status updates, and find out who got eliminated on Top Chef last night.
I'm telling you, this computer program is the greatest ally that your Elevated, Responsible Guy will ever find against the Slacker Guy.
That's the best advice I've got. If you want to know where to find ideas, you're on your own.
January 25, 2011
Mystery solved: It's a mystery
It's good timing, I guess, that I'm able to write my first real blog post about being nominated for an Edgar Award for my middle-grade novel, The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman.
This is terrific news, all the more so because it was completely unlooked for. The truth is, I never thought of the book as a mystery, which seems odd in retrospect. Secret Life is about a girl named Bethesda Fielding, who is assigned by her obnoxious social studies teacher to pick a mystery and solve it. And she does pick a mystery — what's the deal with the boring music teacher, Ida Finkleman? — and she does solve it, or she thinks she does, but the solution only leads to more trouble for Bethesda, plus a whole new mystery to solve.
So, um, yeah, it's totally a mystery story. But I guess, when I wrote it, I thought of Secret Life as being about the relationship between students and their teachers; and the relationship between kids and their friends; and the relationship between kids and rock and roll music.
What's funny is that I once taught a three-week unit to a bunch of fifth graders about mystery writing. (By the way, if you ever teach a unit to fifth graders about mystery writing, give them very specific instructions about what kinds of mysteries they're allowed to write. Otherwise you get two stories about missing unicorns, and twenty-eight extremely gruesome murders). And the whole idea of the unit was to show them that when you get right down to it, all books are mysteries. Even when there's no crime and no detective, no snooping for clues, the writer's job is to present the reader with tantalizing questions.
Will Cinderella get the prince, or won't she?
Will crazy Ahab catch his whale?
Will Huck and Jim make it to freedom?
A really good whodunit has both things going on: the reader is wondering who killed the victim or stole the jewels, but also wondering how the events of the story will shape the various characters, and how the world will have changed by the final chapter.
P.D. James, my second-favorite all-time mystery writer (my favorite is G.K. Chesterton, and his enchanting Father Brown mysteries), has a great book called Talking About Detective Fiction, where she says Jane Austen (with whom I have kind of a special relationship) was a masterful mystery writer, in her way:
In Austen's "brilliantly structured Emma," James writes, "the secret which is the mainspring of the action is the unrecognized relationships between the limited number of characters…at the end, when all becomes plain and the characters are at last united with their right partners, we wonder how we could have been so deceived."
All good books have secrets waiting to be discovered; good "mysteries" are just more explicit about it. But if the Edgar nominating committee thinks The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman is a good anything, I'm the happiest mystery writer in town.
January 13, 2011
The H stands for blog
My name is Ben H. Winters and I'm a writer! Now that the blog teeters on the edge of obsolescence, thanks to more cutting-edge technologies, I thought it was time that I start one. I'm going to attempt, if my limited tech skills allow it, to sync this blog with those I theoretically maintain on Amazon.com's "author central," Goodreads.com, and my HarperCollons "author page," all of which have been lying fallow.
Once I get it all figured out, I will periodically post updates on what's going on with my work, and, for those who are interested, thoughts on writing and the writing life.
October 4, 2010
great PW review
September 21, 2010
The "Secret" is out...
"Just your average middle-school punk rock detective novel! A plucky seventh grader named Bethesda is determined to find out the hidden truth about her boring Music Fundamentals teacher. Soon the whole school is in a rock and roll frenzy, with Bethesda, Ms. Finkleman, and a pop-music obsessive named Tenny Boyer leading the charge."
If there's a young reader in your life, I hope you'll grab a copy!
July 14, 2010
discussion beginning this week...
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/3...
May 10, 2010
hello
Nothing to say at present; just getting started with this format. I will probably end up making the occasional independent post, as well as reposting things I write elsewhere, and linking to articles by/about me. If you're interested in my work, by all means check back!
Thanks.
