Art and Money, Also Known as ‘Stick a Shark in Formaldehyde’

I’ve always been curious about the fame and attention the Turner prize attracts (or used to attract) and how some of the winners are catapulted into the money making stratosphere. Which to me, no lover of contemporary art, seems strange. Exactly why would anyone want to pay vast sums of money for an artwork that consists of a dead shark? Especially when the poor shark decayed so much, it had to be replaced. Yes, they had to catch another shark to go into the tank.

Anyway, this video explains how some of the artists who won the prize got to swim laps in pools filled with money. I wish I had thought of something like, “My Bed”.

Harry Potter and the translator’s nightmare

Many years ago I wrote a help guide for a development company. They’d written an online game for a globally recognized company as part of a promotion. The game went online for about a month. Anyone who played the game could earn points and use them to purchase items from the company. The secondary objective of the guide was to help the players understand the dynamics of the game, and how to cash in their points. The actual objective was to reduce the number of calls to the support desk. Support call costs are higher than most companies would like. If you factor in the cost of the person answering the call, the charge by the telco, the length of time to answer a call, and the software licenses, companies are spending anywhere from $3 to $7 a call. (On average.)

Once I’d completed the English version, the guide would be translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

I knew the translator’s job could be tough so I kept my sentences short (fifteen words or less), and to the point. Two weeks later I was relieved when the translators let me know they’d been able to translate the copy without any stress. Even better, the total number of support calls were 310 out of an audience of 30,000. So around 1%.

Which leads me to this interesting video about translating the Harry Potter series and how the translators had to apply some magic of their own.

A Writer and Three Script Editors Walk Into a Bar

 Writing a novel is hard work. It can also be lonely and frustrating work.

Then again, an author has total control over his, or her, characters and plot. Unlike this guy...

When Facebook Doesn’t Like Your Story Title

 Sit down, take a load off and let me tell you the peculiar tale of my disappearing Facebook page. A disappearance that seems to be due to the title of my short story.

A couple of days ago I thought I would try to create a page on Facebook. I was going to try out FB advertising and I got confused and thought I needed to create a page first before advertising. Anyway, I set up the page and all seemed to be going well. Then I decided to add a couple of notes with links to my short story collection (The Sampler) and my short story (Bootleg).

Adding the note about the The Sampler wasn’t hard. It seemed to work. And then... I added a note for Bootleg.

Bootleg is a SF comedy about aliens who spend their time stealing ideas from other civilizations. As soon as I published the note, the page on FB vanished.

At that point I assumed that I had done something wrong. Being the technology trooper that I am, I started again.

Add the page. Check. Add information about The Sampler. Check. Page can still be viewed. Check. Add information about Bootleg. Check. Page no longer exists. Well... f**k.
I did some research and discovered that FB has a specific page to report disappearing pages.

 Only it’s kind of hidden. It appears that the employees of FB have a sense of irony.

Anyway, I sent through my report about three days ago but haven’t heard back. From what I can determine, FB rarely replies to anyone unless they’re rich and/or famous and/or spend a truckload of money on advertising.

At this point, I could test my theory and create a page and not mention The Story Title That Cannot Be Named on FB. But that seems like a pointless exercise since I never wanted a page anyway. Trying again would be like proving I don’t like eating Brussels sprouts by making myself repeatedly eat Brussels sprouts.

So what is the moral of this story?

It seems that there are certain words that FB doesn’t like. Presumably FB thinks that by writing the word, Bootleg, I’m offering this as a service on the page.

I’ll still try and run an ad for The Sampler but I’m not going to have a page because I shouldn’t have to avoid mentioning The Story Title That Cannot be Named on FB.

Aaron Sorkin and Characters

This video is long. Loonnnngggg. But I think the one things that screenwriters (and by extension, playwrights), do better than most novelists is nailing their characters and their characters’ arcs. A screenplay (or play) on average is somewhere between 90 and 180 pages. They don’t have time to mess around. An audience won’t be engaged in a movie or play if they aren’t invested in the character’s quest (even if the character is reprehensible and/or fails). This video tends to be a bit far ranging in topic but there’s some great information in there.

We have very little to gain by removing a novelist’s anonymity

 Yes, yes and yes. I agree with everything in this article. I too wish to remain anonymous. I haven’t tried very hard to cover my tracks, but I do at least want the option to keep my writing and working life separate. This article from Salon argues that a writer of fiction should be able to retain their anonymity if they so desire. There’s nothing wrong with it. Except that in our age of forced connections and rampant extroversion the desire to be anonymous can give the appearance that there’s something wrong with the author. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Are there some things we’re better off not knowing? In the age of calls for political transparency, of the dominance of TMZ and endless celebrity news, of the constant tweeting by celebrities on their most pedestrian thoughts, it’s hard to make a case that anything can or should be kept secret. When we can find just about anything on the internet with just a few keystrokes, it’s hard to argue that we either can or should let mysteries just sit around. As a longtime journalist, I’m steeped in the idea that revealing and reporting the truth is almost always the right way to go, and that readers can figure out how to handle the news.

But the latest revelation — the outing of the likely identity of the enigmatic Italian novelist Elena Ferrante — has a lot of people, me included, a little queasy.

Outting Elena Ferrante: We have very little to gain from removing the Italian novelist's anonymity