SPN beta sought, and nonfiction reviews

[rivkat]

mahaliem, I am actively working on your SV story! But in the meantime, anyone available to beta a 70-page het (Sam/Dean subtext friendly, if by friendly you mean drunkenly hanging all over the story and mumbling "I love you, man") story with a lot of mythology in it?

Cory Doctorow, (c)ontent: Only about 1/3 about digital copyright, but definitely about digital life generally, including the appropriate models for feeding artists in the new world order. His basic message: very few people were ever going to make a “stephenkingload” of money in the first place, so your best bet as an online artist is making your audience into friends who are happy to pay you. My favorite piece was the first, a talk given to Microsoft about why digital rights management technology is a bad idea. Talk about the belly of the beast. Best phrase, which he borrowed from someone else: trying to make bits less copyable is like trying to make water less wet. The full book is available as a free download at his site.

Steve Cone, Powerlines: Words that Sell Brands, Grip Fans, & Sometimes Change History: I think this was a free LibraryThing review book. Not a very good one: a bunch of observations about famous taglines, from poems to presidential slogans, with a chapter about state slogans and how bad they tend to be. Other than the basic principles that music is good to go along with your tagline and that your tagline should be prominent and repeated, there’s little here but anecdote. Cone talks a lot about making specific and truthful promises, but his own analysis can undermine that: he criticizes “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, and Fremont” as too long (which it is) and suggests “Free Speech, Free Men, Fremont” without a moment’s consideration of whether those were the three key terms there. I’m sure this makes an engaging two-hour presentation, but it’s not a useful marketing book.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit: A Princeton philosopher defines bullshit in 67 tiny (3x5) pages, which may lead you to think that the production of this book fits into the definition. His argument is that bullshit is a special kind of statement, one fundamentally unconcerned with truth value, and thus in many ways more destructive to public discourse than lies, which at least respect the idea that there is a truth. I think he captures something of importance, but it’s not a book.

Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss: This is a memoir of the author’s childhood—raised by a love-withholding mother and rigid grandparents—and her affair, in her early twenties, with her father, who she’d only seen twice before she was twenty. As you might guess, the fact that the sex was “consensual” doesn’t do much to keep it from being horrifying and devastating to her, though it’s also clear that the incest mapped onto her existing problems. The writing is metaphor-dense and language-rich, the kind of writing that makes people praise the writing, and while I’m not as sure as the blurbers that this raises it above a tawdry true story, it did have the appropriately Southern gothic feel to it.

Comments

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

I swear I'm going to get you comments today or tomorrow!!

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

No big! I've imposed too much on M. though and I'm trying to get a couple more eyes.

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I read it through once and loved it to pieces - made me cry, plotting was wonderful. But it was more of a skim - in part because I wanted to know what happened next!!! - and now I'm going back over it for a more careful read :-).

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I know you love your Stella Dallas!Dean, and god knows I do as well. But I like it even better as the Gift of the Magi, or Stella Dallas all around.

[redfirecracker.livejournal.com]

*raises hand shyly*

I like beta work, although I'm probably better at catching grammar and spelling errors than stylistic ones. I can probably pick up continuity and canon problems as well, though I would need the weekend to finish it.

Let me know what you think. :)

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Sure! I'm most interested in character issues: are they making sense, where do you want to know more about what's in their heads--but because it's myth-heavy, continuity and canon are also quite helpful. What email address should I use?

[redfirecracker.livejournal.com]

Cool! You can send it to redheaded_firecracker01@yahoo.com . . . that's a zero in there, BTW. * grin *

What mythos are you using? I have a pretty good background in Greco-Roman, but other than that, I'm a little weak. And are you most interested in keeping them in character as we see on screen, or as the versions of the characters you create? ( That's always tricky for me, and usually where I bog down. )

[meret.livejournal.com]

I feel like I'm getting a migraine at the moment, so it might be tomorrow before I can look it, but I'll be happy to beta if you're still looking for one.
meret118@yahoo.com

ETA - I took something and am feeling better if you're still looking for a beta.

[mahaliem.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for letting me know.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I am borrowing from DC Comics to create a wedding ritual. The DC writers: they smoke crack so you don't have to!

The Kiss

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Weird and kind of poisonous and kind of relevant to my ideas about incest, power difference, and consensuality. And also dealing with the same topic, in sometimes the very same words, as her first novel, Thicker Than Water. I wish she'd talked a bit about the fictionalization, about what that does to the reliability of memory and how it may be necessary to get up courage to speak.

I think her second novel Exposure (which I like a lot and highly recommend) actually manages to feel much more raw and more emotionally truthful than Thicker Than Water about similar emotional territory, and strongly suspect that it's because it's a more successful fiction -- that being able to talk about a different experience happening to someone else made her able to speak more truly. With more emotional truth.

I'm not expressing this well. But The Kiss strikes me as really powerful in the exploration of the victim's complicity with violation, but also as ... evasive and dishonest in a few places, because they were still too painful to address?

I don't know. Murky topics, and it's been a while since I read them, so.