The Velvet Podcast 009

Episode 9: Does This Novel Make Me Look Fat?, part of The Velvet Podcast series, is now live, featuring discussion about self/vanity publishing. We debate its legitimacy, logistics, and financial aspects, as well as insights from their own experiences in this oft-scorned segment of the industry. I’m joined by authors/panelists Brandon Tietz and Caleb J Ross.

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Womb with a View

I recently renovated Womb With a View, my home studio, after acquiring a large new desk/console. I used this opportunity to reconfigure and simplify, including wiring up a patch bay for maximum flexibility of its components. This also means that I hopefully will no longer be doing my writing on the same workstation as audio and video. Photo gallery here.

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The Velvet Podcast 006

Episode 6: Jennifer’s Lost Overboard Body: Cinemuck Boogaloo, part of The Velvet Podcast series is now live for your enjoyment. I handle the hosting duties, featuring panelists Stephen Graham Jones, Logan Rapp, and Jesse Lawrence in a conversation about the big and small screens, both as consumers and creators, cinners and cineastes wading through the Cinemuck.

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The Velvet Podcast 001

The premiere episode of The Velvet Podcast is now live. We plan to produce these at least once a month, with a revolving roundtable of writers and readers from all over the world discussing such matters, as well as film, music, and related topics of taste as discussed on the forums at welcometothevelvet.com, where I’m an admin.


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Online writing communities can seem, to outsiders, as a self-felicitating, collection of self-proclaimed capital-W “Writers,” appearing more cliquish than communal. To insiders, the writing community is a necessity. In this episode, three The Velvet members who have been on both the inside and the outside discuss the benefits and unfortunate hindrances of the writing community.

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TV By the Numbers

The Hawthorne effect suggests that a subject that’s aware it’s being observed will alter its behavior accordingly, that the act of study itself can taint results. When I was contacted by Nielsen to participate in an eight-day study of television viewing habits for sweeps week, my mind immediately fantasized of staging a coup upon all the crap television that tops the weekly ratings and replacing it with the quality programming I watch — that my viewership could single-handedly inject a much-needed shot of taste into the American (Idol) public’s palate.

I keep an occasional eye on the weekly ratings, discouraged that none of the shows I watch, be they broadcast or cable, are even in the top 20 (except for NFL when in season). If you limit this to the 18-45 demographic, I watch two or three at the ass end of the top 20, and several of the most-popular DVRed shows on cable (to me, this implies intelligent viewership). Half of this is explained by my oft-documented disdain for reality television. Still, as this resident of the #32 market counted his five crisp one-dollar bills as payola and began logging the paper diary (not the cool set-top box that some households get), I learned a few things about myself.

I’m a commercial-skipping DVR fiend (you must document both the watched and original times). Over 90% of my time spent in front of the tube is done commercial-free. If I’m unbusy when an HBO series is on, I’ll often watch it at its original broadcast time, recording it anyway, just in case. (I subscribe to HBO strictly for their excellent original series, as nearly any movie I care about has already been Netflixed well before then.) But network and cable programming, even if I want to watch it the same night, I always time-shift it a little. I wait until at least seven minutes past its airtime to “play” a sitcom, or quarter-after for an hourlong drama, which means by the time I catch up with real-time, I’ve been able to FF through the commercials. NFL Sundays, I’ll skip the first hour of a game to get some other tasks done, then restart and power through it in two hours. (I recently read that an average football game contains 11 minutes of snap-to-whistle action; wow.) And not one single minute of local or national news/weather programming was logged.

While I take pride in this efficiency of tube-time, I still watched 18 hours this week. That’s more than I thought, and doesn’t count the two Blu-Rays I rented. And it seemed a fairly typical balance of shows that are in and out of season. As predicted, there were only a few instances of “channel surfing,” though I perhaps did even less than usual because I found myself not wanting to have to log them.

In the end, I doubt my eyeball lobbying for Caprica, Community, Archer, or Big Love will give them even a sniff at the top 20. But you know what they say: if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.

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Planing in the Workshop


This is a guest post from Caleb J Ross, author of the chapbook Charactered Pieces: stories, as part of his ridiculously-named Blog Orgy Tour. Visit his Web site for a full list of blog stops. Charactered Pieces: stories is currently available from OW Press (or Amazon.com). Visit him at http://www.calebjross.com.

…generally just presenting something semi-publicly is a big thing. And it might, for me, help whatever piece I’m working on if I get some feedback in-progress…as much as this idea [of a workshop] excites me, it also scares me senseless.

Revealing your work for the first time to people (especially friends) can be emotionally debilitating. I’ve been in many critique/workshopping groups over the years, so let me offer some tips that may help alleviate the stress. If these fail, drink.

• You are not your story

Detach yourself from your work. Remember that criticisms are aimed at your writing, not you. Even if the writing is about a personal experience, the criticisms are about how well that experience comes through on the page, not about the validity of the experience. I’ve even had college professors who disallowed participants from engaging directly with the writer and instead insisted on addressing the piece-at-hand. Saying “the story doesn’t work here,” as opposed to “you didn’t do this correctly, here.” This level of structured detachment worked quite well.

• Temper your skin

I always like to stay silent for at least a few minutes at the beginning of my story’s discussion, allowing the other workshoppers to converse before I voice any opinion. One thing that always breeds unnecessary conflict is the writer/artist’s defense of a work. Don’t defend your work, unless you are asked directly to by one of your peers. The workshop is about discovering how well you communicate an idea, not about what you intended to do with the idea. If the workshoppers are confused, be open to the possibility that your story may be unnecessarily confusing.

• Less is usually more

Above all, remember that every participant is workshopping to help get a better product out of you. The criticisms might hurt, especially when you think a particular passage or line is perfect, but sometimes you have to “kill your darlings,” as William Faulkner said. He was referring to murdering children, I believe, but the advice translates well enough. I can count a handful of lines that I stripped out of Charactered Pieces before it printed. The positive spin, though, is knowing that I’ll be able to give those lines to a more fitting story somewhere in the future; if they truly are good, then they won’t die.

• You need some alone time

It is easy to get intimate with a project. And perhaps, the more homely (re: room for improvement) the easier it is to drink into a courthouse wedding and hole up in the nearest trailer. This to say, the writer is with his project for a long time. Often, perhaps always, this intimacy promotes a skewed perspective on the work. The writer unwittingly learns to overlook flaws and convince himself that obvious faults are “creative” or his “style.” Fresh eyes, even if they disagree with what you may perceive, are often the best way to reset your own eyes. Trust the criticisms, even if they hurt.

• Sometimes it’s not you, it’s them

Finally—but take this piece of advice sparingly—it’s okay to disagree with the workshoppers. I say use this advice in moderation, because my experience tells me that the crowd is usually right. Or if not right, they touch on things that need to be addressed in some way. Sometimes the particular individuals in your group may be wrong. But not usually.

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G here. On 11/21/09, I sat down with Caleb at The Newsroom in Kansas City, MO to sink a few pints and pick his brain about Charactered Pieces: stories. Lucky for you, I had my trusty point-n-shoot in pocket and now share that interview below.

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Beer und Questions Asks

I’m honored to be the first in a series of author interviews called [Blank] und Questions Asks… wherein author Caleb J. Ross sits down with me at a local bar to discuss my novel, Major Inversions, fueled by the social lubricant/truth serum of its namesake.

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Join me on GoodReads

I’ve finally joined this social networking site for book nerds, with a reader profile and a book listing. Come add me as a friend, check out my collection, and/or follow my reviews. It works with Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms. And if you’ve read Major Inversions, please give it a star rating, a short review, or simply add it to your “to-read shelf” until later.

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Major Inversions now available!

My first novel, Major Inversions, is now available for online ordering through Amazon and CreateSpace in paperback, as well as a Kindle edition. FYI, though the cover price is the same, CreateSpace pays me a much higher royalty, so help support your independent author! Since it’s listed with most of the largest book distributors, it’s also available through most e-tailers, plus you should now be able to walk into nearly any bookstore and custom-order it, though you may have to pay up front.

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Your roommate says you should date more, that all those spandex nights on stage paying tribute to hair metal and banging faceless groupies only amplify your Jekyll/Hyde syndrome. That this quicksand town of floozies, fiends, and filmmakers will survive without your commercial jingles. And your narcotics. That you should turn in your daytime security-guard badge and settle down.

He’s got the perfect girl, a cinnamon-scented innocent who will bring that elusive substance to your life despite the familial forces that conspire against your union.

Always lurking in the periphery, the roommate remains buried in his Master’s thesis, the parasitic puppeteer behind your reinvention, the search for your birth parents, and your all-too-brief film scoring career. A supporting cast of lecherous directors, deluded bandmates, federal agents, and nostalgic exes enable and obstruct your path to closure and ironic revenge as you wash the blood from your hands to complete the story yourself.
______________________________

Yes, this is self-published. No, it’s not through a “vanity press.” Of course that doesn’t make it any less vain or narcissistic to think one’s work is worthy of readership. It’s indeed true that I first ran this book through the publishing machinery for two years in the hopes of securing an agent and/or reputable publishing house to distribute and market it. Every writer wants that external validation that comes with a publisher saying he’s “good enough” to join their stable. I’ve never lacked for that confidence, nor been rebuked on merit, it was just never the right fit or the right time.

We all know the economy’s in the shitter. The publishing biz is far from immune, especially with the increasing focus on tentpole/franchises and celebrity nonfiction. I have nothing against publishers – I appreciate their role as stoic gatekeepers of quality control (and I’ll be jumping through their traditional hoops once again when my next book, Flashover, births) – but they must embrace new media to remain relevant, and find a way to turn profit in today’s market by featuring more voices each earning a smaller audience share.

Believe me, I get it: as a video professional, I’m often annoyed with YouTube culture’s amateur influence on broadcasting, just as I don’t care for much electronic music. But content is king. A great song is a great song, whether it was tracked at Abbey Road or my bathroom. So goes it with storytelling. For the purposes of this twisted little metafictional tale I’m labeling a “revisionist character study,” it was more important to me that the book be available to the public while the story’s still relevant than it was to feel the warm embrace of industry love.

So think of me as the unsigned band hawking discs out of his trunk. Maybe I’ll sign with a major label someday, but for now you get the raw1, snarling2, punk3 energy of those early years. And you’ll always be able to say with nostalgia that you knew me back when. So tell a friend, please, and happy reading.

1 eh, it’s actually pretty polished, I think
2 let’s say
cynical and irreverent instead
3 more like hair-metal

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Featurette at IMDB

Sure, it’s nearly four years old now, but due to the modest success of my short film, Featurette, I’ve finally been invited into the online pantheon of . . . official existence, with an IMDb entry. Better yet, you can now watch the entire thing at pretty high quality right there as well. Congrats to the cast and crew on their own entries, too. So kick back and have a few cinematic laughs for nostalgia’s sake.

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