What's a Book?

This blog entry is inspired by the webcomic Least I Could Do.

And I quote:

"What's a book?"

"It's like a downloadable PDF file that's printed on paper and bound together."

I like books. I have a decent collection of them, and read them a lot. I like being able to read them whether or not there's power, whether or not the batteries are charged, and so on. And yet, it seems like the technology for electronic books is constantly improving. Will there ever be a time when they'll rival my hankering for the paperbacks?

I already read some books on my cellphone PDA, usually books I've already read and like to keep handy. I can't read them in public, for fear of attracting cellphone snatchers or driving down the ever-so-precious battery life. It's cool to be able to search for passages, neat to annotate and create multiple bookmarks on it, and so on. It's nice to have an electronic back-up on my laptop just in case the cellphone gets wiped or stolen.

But still, there's something terrifying about losing the use of your cellphone because your penchant for reading.

Who's a Palanca Winner?

Kate (my dear wife) won the 3rd Prize for the Palanca's Short Story for Children in English!

"The Mapangaraps and the Dream Trees" won!

Woohoo!

Pulp or Neo-Pulp | Tags instead of Genres

I know I'm not the only one who has difficulty classifying stories and novels along genre lines. Many authors seem to be dismissive of genre labels, while many critics and reviewers are fond of the phrase "transcends the genre" to indicate writing of quality.

That being said, I began to think of the Pulp genre of stories as something more of a meta-genre. After all, there are several well-known genres that are covered by the Pulp label: Pulp Crime, Pulp Crimefighters, Pulp Science Fiction, Pulp Westerns, etc.

How to define the Pulp feel? Well, RPGs have actually done so. And many anthologies of old and new pulp stories are available at better bookstores.

Here's a link of interest: http://labyrinth.net.au/~adamford/pages/stuff/ManiFesto.html - the Neo-Pulp Manifesto!

I'll admit I skipped over most of the definition text to get at the examples. Here are a few I'm familiar with:

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (novel)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (comic)
Planetary (comic)
Firefly (TV show) / Serenity (movie)
Heat Vision and Jack (TV show - pilot only)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show)
Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness (movie)

Well, that's interesting. Certainly an area I'd like to play around in writing-wise.

I wonder if we can include Trese by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldissimo as Neo-Pulp? Seems to embody the spirit quite well. I'd tag my own short story "The Death and Rebirth of Nathaniel Alan Sempio" as Neo-Pulp as well. I use the term "tag" because it could arguably belong to other genres.

Perhaps that's an approach we should take a look at? Accepting that fiction often jumps around various genres and meta-genres, taking stuff here and there, and mixing them together into stories that work. Tag them books and stories authors!

Why not just do away with tags and genres, you say? Well, they'll creep back in somehow. I mean, it's like looking for a restaurant - sometimes I don't care what I want to eat, but sometimes I want to eat Italian, or Japanese, or Filipino food and ask recommendations accordingly. The restaurant I end up at may not be that great or it might just be fantastic, but I won't know that unless I've eaten there before, right?

Then again, I have friends who decide they want to go to McDonald's and only order chicken anyway, so maybe the analogy is just plain flawed.

Shelfari

Oh-ho. This Shelfari Widget is pretty cool! Check it out!

Creative Non-Fiction and Herodotus

I was perusing the comic strips of Kate Beaton when I came across the strip to the left concerning Herodotus.

It triggered many questions about the nature of Creative Non-Fiction, and its distinction from plain ol' vanilla Non-Fiction, Journalism, and History.

Now, more than ever, authorial intent becomes important in distinguishing between the different types of writing.

Then again, the nature of the writing and the interpretation of the text could lead to other classifications. As in the case of the comic strip, the inclusion of "giant ants" makes us suspect the text's nature. Was it journalism (Herodotus claimed that he only wrote down what people told him) given that it was relatively recent to his time period, or more of creative non-fiction (since we don't really know if he found at least two independent sources for these ants), or just history (coz it's too far in the past, man).

Literary Critiques and Writing

Is literary critique useful to writing?

We (the LitCritters) believe so.

Critiquing works (your own as well as others) allows you to sharpen your writer’s eye for story and your writer’s ear for discourse. You can learn from the successful and unsuccessful techniques used by many authors. You become familiar with story tropes and the best practices for discourse.

Of course, newbies to the Open Sessions can sometimes be overwhelmed by the deluge of official and decidedly informal critique-terminology that we use. Now, we don’t mean to twist the meanings of existing terms, but since one of the reasons the LitCritters read and critique stories is to study and learn from the various writing techniques (from SpecFic and other genres of fiction), we try to appropriate terminology from literary criticism, adapt them to our purposes, and along the way create our own as well. The resulting mix of formal, modified, and informal terms can be jarring to new members and seasoned critics but once you grok what we’re doing, you’ll be able to sling slang with the best of us.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we alone hold the keys to the kingdom. We encourage everyone to read the source texts with a critical eye and, if you can find them, the critiques of these texts by ‘professional’ critics. You may not understand or agree with everything in there, but these literary critics – steeped in the knowledge of literature – can often point out reasons why some things work (and why some things don’t work) in a manner that is understandable beyond the frustrating and often confusing “it just works” analysis.

Books on Sale! (P50)

Yep, getting rid of my novels. Message me if you're interested!

From my Crime Fiction collection:
Cracker: One Day a Lemming Will Fly
Cracker: The Madwoman in the Attic
James Ellroy: Killer on the Road
The Beekeeper's Apprentice

From my Fantasy collection:
Amber Chronicles - Nine Princes in Amber
Amber Chronicles - The Courts of Chaos
Forgotten Realms - Star of Cusrah
Forgotten Realms (Sembia) - Halls of Stormweather
Forgotten Realms (Sembia) - Heirs of Prophecy
Forgotten Realms (Sembia) - Lord of Stormweather
Forgotten Realms (Sembia) - Sands of the Soul
Forgotten Realms (Sembia) - Shadow's Witness
Forgotten Realms (Sembia) - The Shattered Mask
Forgotten Realms (The Archwizards III) - The Sorcerer
Lord of the Isles
The Golden Compass

From my Fantasy Gamebook collection:
Lone Wolf - The Dungeon of Torgar
Lone Wolf - The Jungle of Horrors
Lone Wolf - The Kingdoms of Terror

From my Non-Fiction:
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit
Unholy Alliance

From my ScienceFiction collection:
Babylon 5 - Book #1: Voices
Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human
Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom
Collection of Six H.G. Wells Novels
Fairyland
Uplift: Brightness Reef by David Brin
FutureNet (anthology)
The Man-Kzin Wars by Larry Niven
Demon Download

More to come!