Yesterday I saw my first roller derby match. The rules of the game are pretty simple. Two teams of five players skate around a small circuit with one attacking “jammer” from each team trying to score points by lapping opposing defenders. It took me a while to follow the intricacies of the game but as I got a handle on it I started to realise the game had a lot to teach me about writing.

Go hard or go home

I expected the skaters to ease into the match; maybe take a few laps to warm up and find their wheels. No. As soon as the whistle blew the jammers were speeding ahead pushing their way past defenders from the opposing team and scoring points.

And so it should be with your writing. Doesn’t matter what you’re writing, if you wait to grab the reader’s attention, you’re gone. Get in there early and deploy whatever tools you have at your disposal to engage the reader. Early points on the board matter.

Fall down

Speed-skating around a circuit not much bigger than a tennis court with nine other people just waiting to bump into you, means you’re going to fall down. The roller-derby girls know this and practice falling onto their knee guards instead of their hands. They fall to their knees and slide for a little bit as they slow down. It’s kind of poetic after a while.

Safe writing is boring writing. Everyone knows safe writing when they see it. It’s the sort of stuff you see on the social pages of newspapers and in government reports. It might be competent and occasionally, might even border on engaging. But how much did the writer learn along the way? Think about the last time you stretched your writing muscles and aimed a bit too high or went a bit too fast. Even when you were shovelling up the crap left behind, didn’t it feel kinda good going fast then falling down?

Get up again and keep on skating

After sliding on their knee guards for a while the roller derby girls get back up and keep on skating. I even saw one jammer fall to her knees, slide for a bit then get back up and keep scoring points.

Once you’ve monumentally stuffed up a piece of your writing so badly even your cat refuses to have shredded bits of the manuscript in its litter box get back up again. Too often writing suffers from an author’s failure to stretch their skills or their refusal to keep on pushing the boundaries when they stuff up. Push your writing hard, fall down, learn, get up. Repeat.

It’s okay to have nice things

What I wasn’t expecting at the roller derby were the costumes, the almost compulsory fish-net stockings, the mad hair-cuts and the dance routines. The whole evening was full of spectacle. Whether it was Amber “Eva Brawl” Lee tearing up the track, girls in outrageously short shorts or team managers in bright yellow suits, there was no shortage of entertaining things to engage with.

Cultivate some spectacle in your writing. Make it sing for you. Know your writing style and don’t be afraid to show off some of its best elements.

Stay close to your audience

There were about 2500 people watching the two matches with me. The farthest was probably 30m from the circuit but the closest “suicide” seats were right beside the skaters. The skaters sped by lap after lap only metres from the spectators. And after the games finishes they mingled with the audience, chatting and posing for photos. During the game the announcer declared a nearby pub as the official after-game venue for any audience members who wanted to join in the after-derby drinking.

A writer’s job is to be read. More and more, writers need to engage directly with their audience to help achieve that. Whether it’s through blogs or social media writers need to develop a platform to market themselves and their writing and increase their chance of being read and being published. But you’ve got to love the people you’re hanging around with. Authenticity is key.

Top picture: Gomisan

Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy is a great book. Random House not so good on the e-book basics though.

He makes a number of points in the article that are worth looking at one by one.

Incumbents made bad revolutionaries
His argument here seems to be that Apple is more interested in using the great technical features of the iPad to either restrict its use or find a way to make people pay for it.

The example he uses is the Marvel iPad comic app. The argument is the app – and by extension the iPad – is bad because, for example, you can’t lend someone else your comic. Put aside the fact that it’s really an anti-DRM rant (which I mostly agree with) he forgets one simple thing. The device actually makes it extraordinarily easy to lend someone your comic – hand them your iPad. It is in this way exactly as easy to lend someone a comic on your iPad as it is with a physical comic book.

And if Apple gets this right, they’ll help craft – or at least speed up – the development of a whole new computing and media model - tablet computing.

That leads nicely into the next argument…

Infantilizing hardware
Tonight I had leftover pizza for tea. I heated it in the microwave and then put it under the grill for a minute to crisp it up. I punched some buttons on the microwave and it did what it needed to do – help me consume my dinner. I don’t need to be able to take it apart, repait it and install Linux on it. I just need it to work – like my television, my bed and my table.

But Cory’s argument here seems to suggest that if I’m only using a device to consume something I’m somewhat less likely to survive in the brave new world of the 21st century than someone who can take a device apart and put it back  together.

I can enjoy consuming a book even if I don’t know how to pull the spine off, reorder the pages and put it back together again. It  should be okay that not everyone wants to take everything apart all the time.

Boing Boing is a site supported by ad revenue. I bet there’s a strong correlation between the rates for those adverts and the number of people simply consuming the site – page hits or unique visitors. I hope the number of people actively interacting with the site by adding comments also factors in there but I doubt simple consumers of the site take a back seat when it’s time to crunch the numbers.

Wal-Martization of the software channel
According to Wikipedia there are around 150,000  third-party applications in the App Store. If Apple was the only computer maker in a regulated market I’d be more likely to accept the claim that “the iStore lock-in doesn’t make life better for Apple’s customers or Apple’s developers.”

But again this is an anti-DRM argument, that’s not (or shouldn’t be) restricted to the iPad. Clearly developers and customers aren’t stupid. That’s why more than three billion downloads have been made from the App Store.

The Wal-Mart analogy is a bad one too – at least on one level. The development of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and now the iPad has not seen a massive takeover of an existing market, it’s fostering a massive expansion of a new, previously small market.

Journalism is looking for a daddy figure
It’s not the device’s fault if journalists and bloggers get sucked into the spin from Apple’s marketing team. Indeed, arguing that Rupert Murdoch is silly because he thinks putting up a pay-wall will save his newspaper empire in the long-run should not be confined to discussion about the iPad.

Gadgets come and gadgets go
I’ve got some sympathy for the argument that “the real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.” But that’s the real crux of the whole post. Until he gets to here, Cory seems to be arguing that the iPad can’t won’t and shouldn’t change things. But here, he pretty much gives up the ghost and you almost get the sense that he knows it will.

A quick preview of some of Penguin’s plans for books on the iPad. Shiny!

It’s followed by a less shiny but more interesting talk from Penguin CEO John Makinson about how publishers will become more relevant, not less, and how they’ll be taking a giant leap into a distribution model that lets them play around with pricing and access a lot more consumer data. You can see that video over at PaidContent.org.

The story so far, for those who’ve missed it: The Hugo Awards are coming to Australia courtesy of Aussiecon 4. Here’s our chance to help some of our best authors get their best work recognised by getting them nominated for an award.

It’s a pretty simple idea – get out there and nominate your favourite Aussie, writers, works, editors and fans.

But the numbers remain stacked against us.

As of January 1, there were 352 Australians registered and eligible to nominate for the Hugos. A healthy number, yes. But a very small one when compared to the 856 Americans eligible to nominate. And breaking those numbers down further says a bit more about why it’s important we get out there and nominate. Of those 856 Americans, 388 are “supporting” members – ie people who are unlikely to attend the convention but have paid a fee to get regular updates and to be eligible to vote in the Hugos. On top of that, add all the members of last year’s Worldcon, held in Montreal, who are also eligible to nominate and vote in the awards this year.

It’s perfectly understandable that US readers have less exposure than locals to great Australian speculative fiction. But if you think local works and authors deserve recognition; if you think it’s possible to make a difference and if you think it’s important to try then check out the Aussiecon 4 website for nomination details. And if you’re Facebook inclined, log in and join the conversation here.

My wife and two of our friends have managed to convince me to join them in a TV-free August.

There’s no anti-TV vent behind it – at least not for me. I love TV. Some of it’s great entertainment and some has superb writing. But turning it off for a month will be a good chance for me to regroup after leaving an extraordinarily busy job. I want to settle into a routine that lets me prioritise the things that matter most – writing and reading, and good conversation over dinner. Still deciding what I’ll focus my writing on but I spent some time tonight deciding my reading menu for the month. Here it is: 

Fiction

• Wastelands – John Joseph Adams (ed)
• The City and The City – China Mieville
• The Writing Class – Jincy Willett
• Lavinia – Ursula Le Guin
• World Shaker – Richard Harland

Non fiction

• The Content Makers – Margaret Simons
• The Dumbest Generation – Mark Bauerlein
• Ghosts of Manilla: The Fateful Blood Feud between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier – Mark Kram
• Critical Mass – Philip Ball
• The Craftsman – Richard Sennett
• Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness – Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein
• The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging
• Why I Write – George Orwell
• The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear – Ralph Keyes

Not sure what I’m looking forward to reading most but I’ll report back during August about how I’m progressing and how much dust the TV has gathered.

But I thought it might be worth putting some rigour – ie numbers – around some of the assumptions. So I wheeled out my trusty version of Excel and decided to put its graphing abilities to good use. I wanted to see how rapid the rise (or fall) in page length was over the course of novel series that became suddenly successful.

The four series I chose to graph were:

• Twilight – Stephenie Meyer
• Harry Potter – J. K. Rowling
• the Mars Trilogy – Kim Stanley Robinson
• Lord of the Rings – J. R. R Tolkien

Here’s what the results look like.

I included the last two as controls (and because, you know, they were close to hand). I considered including Asimov’s Foundation books as another (of which there are seven, not including his expanded Empire and Robot series and novels written by other authors). But for the record, Foundation, first published in 1951 in book form totalled 255 pages. The last in the series was Forward the Foundation, which was published 42 years later and came in at 464 pages.

All comparisons are between consistent editions.

For the record:

• the first Twilight book was 434 pages and the last was 736
• the first Harry Potter book was 223 pages and the last was 607 (book five peaked at 766 pages
• the first Mars book was 519 pages and the last was 609.
• the first Lord of the Rings book was 427 pages and the last 416

But here’s where it gets tricky – and probably why the post is titled the Meyer Imperative rather than the Potter Principle. Rowling pulled back on the length of books six and seven. So to adequatelty compare we need to plot all series as if they went to seven books. Enter Excel.

At seven books apiece the last Harry Potter book was 2.7 times the length of the first one. But if the Twilight series had continued in the same pattern, a seventh book in the series would have come in at whopping 1306 pages. And that length would have made in a smidgen over 3 times the lenth of the first book.  A seventh Mars book (Muave Mars, anyone?) would have only clocked in at 828 pages.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

But what’s it all mean, I hear you ask. Who knows? I suspect that publishers who find they’ve got a massive hit on their hands let writers have a freer hand – not necessarily to keep them happy but more likely I suspect to get the product to market faster.

And it isn’t by definition a comment on quality – and certainly I haven’t read the Twilight books – but it will be interesting to see what happens with the next series from Rowling and Meyer, whether they’re a success or not quite so much. And what that means for lengthas the series progress.

I suspect we’ll see a few more year’s bests pop up in its place but they’ll be from smaller publishers making for an even more fragmented market.

Life Achievement
Leo & Diane Dillon
Patricia McKillip

Novel
Ysabel Guy Gavriel Kay [Viking Canada/Penguin Roc]

Novella
Illyria Elizabeth Hand [PS Publishing]

Short Story
“Singing of Mount Abora” Theodora Goss [Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra]

Anthology
Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural Ellen Datlow, Editor [Tor]

Collection
Tiny Deaths Robert Shearman [Comma Press]

Artist
Edward Miller

Special Award-Professional
Peter Crowther for PS Publishing

Special Award-Non-professional
Midori Snyder and Terri Windling for Endicott Studios Website

I would have done them sooner but I literally just got back from a post-awards judge’s panel, drinks then dinner; then more drinks. More on the con later but I’m also very pleased to let people know that we’ll continue to have some Aussie representation on the judging panel with Jenny Blackford being named a judge (along with Peter Heck, Ellen Klages, Chris Roberson and Delia Sherman – a great panel).

Last month I headed to Bribie Island for an extended weekend of writing, relaxing, chatting with friends and a few drinks. I took three print books with me and loaded a few files onto my first generation iPod touch to test it out as an e-book reader.

I was using the excellent stanza reader and had downloaded George Orwell’s “Why I Write”, War of the Worlds, Cory Doctorow’s “Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future” and a few other bits and pieces.

Stanza is deceptively easy to use. Put the iPod on its side and you get a landscape reading screen. To “turn” the page you simply tap the right or left side of the screen, depending on whether you want to go forward or back. To change the font size you put two fingers on the screen and pinch or push apart your fingers depending on whether you want it bigger or smaller. Unlike the iPod’s photo interface this was a bit buggy but it wasn’t too much of an annoyance given it’s something you really only have to do once and then forget (adjusted for declining eyesight over the years, of course).

I read a bit of the Orwell book and then got stuck into the Doctorow essays. These were a great choice – engaging and relatively short. Coming in at 115 grams, my iPod weighs about a third of a standard paperback (350 grams or 12 ounces), so holding it is no problem. You can turn the brightness right up if you’re outdoors or turn it down, which was my preference, indoors. That saved on battery power and made reading the screen pretty easy on the eye.

The verdict? As an e-book reader, the iPod touch mostly works. It’s light and puts very little strain on the eye thanks to its good brightness control and the crispness of the text. I think it was lucky I was reading non fiction that had no dialogue and infrequent paragraph breaks. The page in the photo has 109 words on it but a dialogue heavy page of Lee Battersby’s“Alchymical Romance” has just over 80 words. To put it in context – that’s about three paragraphs of a well written newspaper article and I think I’d get annoyed having to tap the screen every 10 seconds or so. But maybe that’s me.

Unlike some people I’m not ready to declare the iPod (or any smart phone) theconvergence device. I think we’ll end up converging on two types of devices that share similar functions but mych different sizes. But more on that another time. As an ultraportable e-book reader, it works.