Unabashed

There are lessons to be learned over at Whatever. John Scalzi announced the winning entrants (two runners up and one grand prize) for his Zoe’s Tale ARC contest this morning and it occurred to me, as I read the entries (many of which were really good), that it might be better to be published on the Whatever than in a publication dedicated to the exact same type of material. There are a lot of creative types who read Scalzi regularly, so it just makes sense that they’ll write some really good material in response to his request. And this is where it gets kind of interesting: When the contest started out it seemed like it was just a fun little thing; you might even go so far as to call it gimicky. Someone send in something funny, entertain me, and I’ll give you this book. But then I started reading the entries. I saw mostly what I expected to see: nothing you could really call a submission, just little anecdotes and humorous quips people were writing on the fly. But a few of them are good, very good, as you can see by the winners. I began to realize that these weren’t just little humorous quips, these are stories.

As it is, they are published–on Whatever, which is one of the most-read personal blogs on the internet. Not a venue where you’d expect to find good fiction unless the author published something himself, which he rarely does.  What’s interesting to me is that, even though it was a very informal forum, we got to see the whole process unfold right there in the comments section. Every entry (or submission, as it were) is readable by anyone. The three best, as judged by the site owner, got their very own dedicated post right on the front page of the site. There is a curious lack of linkage to their websites, at least for those who provided websites to be linked to. I would have thought a winning entry would get a link on the front page too, but you have to dig back through the comments of the ARC contest post to find out where their websites are (JS must be greedy with his Technorati ratings handouts). (JS advises me this was just an oversight and has been corrected). But even without the link, that’s a lot of great exposure for a writer or blogger.

These entries may not be a fit for SF&F or Strange Horizons, but they’re no less entertaining, and I would come back and read more if I thought more would follow. This is a serious feat that I’m wondering if anyone else will pick up on. It would be interesting to see more contests like this one, basically asking for fiction (I know there have been some of these before, I just haven’t seen many done so well). Most of the time if someone asks for fiction, even if they provide the theme, they’ll get a lot of 3k-word stories that are basically just more of the same. This time, the stories responding to the theme “The evening of August 19, 1994. What can you tell me about it?” were actually interesting (for the most part). And I generally don’t like to read short fiction.

I didn’t write an entry myself, but I did keep checking back to see what was being written. Maybe next time I’ll give it a try. And yes, I’ll go ahead and say that it would be nice to see Whatever do this as a regular feature. I’d do it here if I had half his readership and, you know, some stuff to give away. The results could be looked back upon one day as visionary.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Contest, Fiction, John Scalzi, markets, stories, Zoe's ARC

Joel Johnson over at BoingBoing is camping in the woods for a week–er, four days–in Harriman State Park in New York, with the intention of blogging using only solar power while he’s out. Sounds like fun to me. Keep up with his progress (or lack thereof) at BoingBoing.net as well as his Twitter account. He also has a Flickr account, so maybe he’ll photolog his journey as well.

This is an interesting project to me, and finally gave me reason enough to get a Twitter account of my own, even though I’m not much for texting…we’ll see how it goes. Follow me, or friend me if you like, on Twitter (as with every other social networking service on the internets) I am mattmitchell8. 

I’ve got two headlamps from Coghlan’s, the 0843 and the 0841.

I’ve got my Amazon Kindle with a copy of Walden on it. (Which I’ve never read.)

Got my knife. Got good socks. Have lightweight, silkie thermals for the evening. Have the most beat-up ball cap around. Have sunscreen. Have fire. Have cables, spare batteries, and trash bags just in case I need to cover something up.

Got my tent, the Hubba Solo, again on multiple recommendations from readers. I haven’t set it up yet, which means that it’s a certainty it will be missing parts or that I’ll have to do so in a freak Hudson Valley hurricane. Oh well — it’ll be good comedy, right?

I’ve got my camera and the Gorilla Pod.

I’ve got rhythm.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, boingboing, Joel Johnson, solar power, twitter

Interesting note, today I uploaded the picture of the Aurora Borealis to my Flickr account, and then made a post on the blog about it. As it ends up, that was my 200th picture uploaded into Flickr, and my 200th post on Unabashed, which is kind of freaky. As milestones, the Flickr one is dubious, because I only have a free account, and the free accounts are restricted to 200 pictures. So now my earliest pictures will not be visible unless I go through and delete some (since only the most recent 200 are viewable). Frankly, I didn’t know I was close to 200 pics. But 200 blog posts is significant: It was a goal for me to reach 200 pages of content with this blog. Some of the content is good, some bad, some popular, and some has never even been seen before that I know of. 

Now that I’ve reached my 200-post goal, I’m beginning to think long-term. This isn’t a money-making scheme. I don’t post advertisements and I don’t use Adsense. This is just a repository for things I find interesting, ruminations and a log of my path as a new writer. Links to sites I like, other blogs I read, stories I’ve written and/or other projects I’m working on. The only thing I had in mind when I started it, and that I maintain still today, is that I don’t want to give repetitious posts of content that’s already been covered by Boing Boing. I didn’t want to be a carbon copy of other writers who blog, and I didn’t want to post a lot of personal stuff. In those respects, I feel like I’m still right on target. For the future, I expect I’ll be building on what I’ve already done, but writing more ruminations, some longer articles. I don’t see myself posting any more or less than I do now, but I do see my word count increasing because I’m getting better at looking deeper into an idea that I was when I first started out. And I hope to be writing a lot more success stories in the publishing arena that I have in the past.

I hope you’ve been entertained, and I hope I’ll be able to entertain you further as the blog grows. Be seeing you.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Flickr, Matt Mitchell, Unabashed, writer

Cherie Priest is the author of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, and Not Flesh Nor Feathers, all from Tor Books. She has also produced two titles through Subterranean Press — Dreadful Skin and Those Who Went Remain There Still (forthcoming). Her first novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, won the first annual Blooker Prize for fiction.

The intent of this interview was to briefly explore the correlation between the Cherie’s blogging pastime and her career as a novelist. Cherie is a sort of visionary, though she may not grasp that just yet. She’s one of those few authors who are successfully utilizing their blogs as platforms to promote their products, providing at the same time an avenue for their readers to connect with them in a way that has never been possible before. It’s a revolutionary concept that more and more writers are taking advantage of; the thing that makes Cherie unique is that she was first successful as a blogger, and then as an author.

A bit of info about her blog: Heretic Spire has a 200 Technorati ranking and a huge following of faithful readers (including me, resident lurker :-) Her digital shadow spreads much farther than LiveJournal, however. Her official website is at Cherie Priest.com, and she keeps an often-entertaining photoset on flickr.

This interview was composed in a simple set of questions I tapped out in an email to Cherie, who very graciously accepted and took a bit of her time to entertain us with her replies.

Unabashed: When did you start blogging?

Cherie Priest: About a week before 9/11. That’s a rough way to keep score, I know, but that’s how I remember it. A buddy of mine online had been snared by LiveJournal (aka LiveCrack), and he wanted to let me see some of his filtered posts … but he couldn’t do that unless I had an account. So I started one. That was back when there were only about half a million LJ users, and you had to have an invite to get onboard.

U: Was Heretic Spire your first blog?

CP: No, the first one I ever had was an LJ with the handle “fourandtwenty” — but it has long since been deleted. I started fresh with my present blog, though for awhile its handle was “wicked_wish.” I renamed it to “cmpriest” a few months ago. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure why.

U: What were your expectations?

CP: I expected to get hit on by creepy internet people, meet a few otherkin furries, and maybe do a little networking. My expectations were met to a full and wondrous extent!

U: When did you first realize you had a dedicated readership which was interested in your writing?

CP: Well, I’d been writing on the old LJ for a year or so when I finally clicked the “full view” option on my bio page … and realized that I had a hundred or so subscribers who I knew nothing about. It wasn’t much of an audience, but it was still startling. The audience I’m presently blessed to enjoy didn’t happen overnight, though; it grew over a period of about seven years.

U: Would you ever classify yourself as ‘topical’ when you write in your blog, or are your posts just random ruminations?

CP: The last few years in particular I’ve given a lot of space to my writing career. It’s hard not to, since that’s what’s mostly going on in my life. I also do a lot of movie reviews and some industry gossip; but I’m equally likely to post kitty pictures or lame YouTube videos. Sometimes I’m just too busy to bother. (Thumbs up to the kitty posts! -Matt)

U: I’ve read that your book, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, could be classified as a “Blook,” and that it was written based on concepts you wrote about on your blog. Can you expound on that?

CP: When I first started working on it, I would occasionally post in-progress chapters online for the LiveJournal crowd. Come to find out, it was being regularly read by an editor for a small press in Georgia — and before long, they’d signed me to a book deal. It was a micro-affair, and the publisher ended up reverting the rights back to me … at which point they were sold to Tor.

U: Did you do anything in particular to build your readership or did they just find you?

CP: Mostly people just found me. For a long time, most of the people in my online audience were people I knew in real life. And I know a lot of people in real life. Over time, it grew to include friends-of-friends (or “social cousins” as I like to call them), and gradually the friends of those friends. And of course, once the books started coming out, people who’d found me in a bookstore could just as easily track me down online.

U: Did you have the idea for Four and Twenty Blackbirds from the beginning, when you started your blog, or did it develop as you blogged?

CP: I started writing 4&20 as part of a graduate writing project. It was largely uninfluenced by the blog medium itself.

U: How has publishing fame impacted your readership?

CP: I’d like to think that writing professionally and blogging in my spare time have fed each other in some respects. Some of my books are bought by people who don’t ordinarily surf the net much — and my blog readers who don’t ordinarily buy many books might pick up a copy of mine, because they read me all the time anyway. The hobby and the career go hand-in-hand at this point.

In the end I can only surmise that Cherie Priest is a writer of rare talent, whose words are entirely readable and entertaining no matter if she’s writing a novel or a label for a bottle of ketchup (although I don’t believe any condiment labels are in her repertoire. Yet). Her blog has risen in popularity without gimmicks, without advertising, but through a simple, wonderful combination of wit and raw ability. In short, Cherie Priest is a writer destined for greatness, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity to interview her (hey, does this mean I’m a social-cousin now? :-). Buy her books. You won’t be sorry.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Cherie, livejournal, lj, Priest