biancadarc.com Blog

Wallpaper Wednesdays

Joyous Solstice
800 x 600 – 1024 x 768 – 1280 x 1024 – 1600 x 1200

Click on the size you want, then right click and “Save as Background” on most systems.

Enjoy!

Wolverine Trailer

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=48169765

Hubba hubba! Can’t wait to see more of Gambit!!!

Of course, I love me some Wolverine too.

Writing Trends: Cell Phone Novels

I recently read an article about the phenomena known as “cellphone novels” in Japan. I think it’s fascinating that a novel could be composed in small segments using only the cramped keypad of a cell phone. Apparently 20-somethings in Japan are doing just that, writing serialized novels on their way to work and uploading them to sites where other cell phone users can download them every day and read the next part.

Eventually, some of these novels are turned into old-fashioned paper books and published. That’s when the author actually starts to make some money for all her hard work. I say “her” because, according to the article in The New York Times, the majority of the people writing these cell phone novels are young women.

According to the article:

“Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels [in Japan], five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”

“Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books.”

I find that second statement fascinating because of the push by some American publishers to spread manga to the States. Personally, I don’t think manga has caught on the way some of those publishers had hoped – partially because of the stigma attached to reading “comic books” here in the States. Like romance, comic books are seen as the domain of a specific group of people. Romance is usually relegated to ”uneducated housewives” (however wrong that idea really is) and comic books are thought to be read only by kids and guys with tape on their glasses who live in their mother’s basement.

There are pretty strong preconceptions in the U.S. about who reads what and what that says about them. As an example, I’ve found that when telling non-literary colleagues that I write “romance” I get a completely different reaction than if I tell them I write “sci fi/fantasy.” The former gets me odd chuckles and a Monty Python-esque nudge, nudge, wink, wink sort of attitude. The latter just garners me strange looks before they remember my first job was as a chemist. They figure once a geek, always a geek. *shrug*

Having been exposed to the music and art of Europe through my family, I’ve often thought that we compartmentalize genres in the U.S. way more than other people do. We have to label everything – popular music, for example can be pop, rock, Southern rock, classic rock, acid rock, etc… and that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceburg. We pigeon-hole things to their most minute level and have definite attitudes about each and every level. One might be cool for a certain age group or social class, while the other is off limits. We are defined by the way marketing people want to label our tastes, stratefied by age, sex, religion, buying habits, etc.

My European relatives have much less pressure on them. They can, for example, listen to instrumental music, Pavarotti’s big hit “Nessun Dorma” and pop music from a number of countries all on the same radio station. There’s less stratification from what I’ve observed and less of a judgemental attitude. If a young person wants to listen to “Nessun Dorma” – which is opera *gasp!* – they wouldn’t be considered a geek. It’s part of the culture and not looked down upon the way it would be here. (Think I’m joking? Just picture Frasier and Niles Crane from the TV show “Fraiser” - that’s a perfect example of the popular opinion of people who listen to opera from a young age.) But I digress…

The article goes on to state:

“Written in the first person, many cellphone novels read like diaries. Almost all the authors are young women delving into affairs of the heart…”

““They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.””

The woman quoted had the #5 selling novel of the year, which was a cell phone novel she wrote on her commute to her part-time job. She was 21 at the time.

I think that’s fantastic! Here’s a young girl, writing something that speaks to her for her own amusement. It obviously spoke to a lot of other people who downloaded the free version as she was writing it and then went out and bought the book after it was published. Good for her!

I don’t know if cell phone novels will catch on here the way they did in Japan, but I am constantly amazed at how 20-somethings will tap away at those little cell phone keypads to send simple messages. It just seems too much trouble to me, but then, I’m a computer kid. I type faster than I write and prefer to communicate via email and IM than by cell phone or even text message. 

It will be interesting to see if this thing spreads to other countries, but I’m still sort of waiting to see how and if manga ever catches on here. I’m not convinced it will because of the judgemental nature of Americans and the stigma attached to comic books and romance. Putting the two together is like a double whammy and could be the kiss of death! LOL. Only time will tell.

What do you think?

Eye Candy

Completely gratuitous… Just because I want to… Here’s a not-so-subtle reminder that a certain new movie is in the works. In fact, the trailer will be hitting the Web on Monday, so in the meantime, here’s some Hugh Jackman/Wolverine eye candy…

Contest Time!

And here’s another cool contest for you, brought to you by the authors of Beyond The Veil, of which I am one. Check out the blog for all the information on how to enter and what you can win at http://paranormalauthors.blogspot.com. Good luck!

Wallpaper Wednesdays

Fighting Fey Pin-Up II
800 x 600 – 1024 x 768 – 1280 x 1024 – 1600 x 1200 

Click on the size you want, then right click and “Save as Background” on most systems.

Enjoy!

Contest Time!

Here’s a great holiday contest I’m involved in – take a look!

Just go to http://bittenbybooks.com/ for all the information and good luck!

Samhellion Holiday Hunt!

I’m participating in a week-long scavenger hunt with my fellow authors from the Samhellion Newsletter. I’m an editor there and have a little article coming out in the next issue which should be out around the 15th.

Click here: http://www.thesamhellion.com/hunt.htm to get the details, but starting today and going until next Friday, myself and a group of 5 other authors’ sites are featured in the hunt. It’s fun and relatively easy because you only have to find 6 graphics and we’ve been ordered to place them within 2 clicks of our home page. You can win free ebooks! So have fun!

Interesting eBook News

Publishers Marketplace had this to report in their daily news mailing yesterday:

Amazon Launches iPhone Shopping App; Stanza Reads 40,000 More Titles

Amazon has launched an iPhone app to let users search and browse the site for products. Their big “twist” is an “experimental feature” using the built-in camera called Amazon Remembers. It’s basically another extension of the idea of using physical stores as a place to browse real products to help people decide what to buy online.

You snap a photo of a product and Amazon “tries to find products similar to the ones in the photos. As soon as the customer receives the results, they can then purchase the item immediately or ‘remember it’ for later in their Amazon account.”

Separately, Lecycle, makers of the popular free iPhone reader app Stanza, has licensed Fictionwise’s eReader format so that Stanza users can now buy and read the 40,000 titles available for eReader. They are also launching a standalone “Stanza by Fictionwise” online store to sell those titles.

Separately, Teleread reports that the licensing terms for eReader “have completely changed and the format is now freely available for use by anyone.” Among other planned changes, “The Blackberry smartphone should get an eReader application sometime in the first quarter of 2009. The Linux platform, which has been waiting for an eReader application since 1998, should get one sometime in the first half of 2009.”

On a personal note, I’ve only recently begun buying a few books on FictionWise that were only available in eReader format. I find it kind of scary to use because your credit card number is your password and if you don’t enter things like your name EXACTLY as you did on the order form, it won’t let you open the book.

This may sound easy, but it’s really not for someone like me who has multiple cards with different ways of showing my name. And the kicker is, it seems to go by the way you enter your name on each order so if you get lazy (like I did) and just enter your first initial instead of your full name, or a shortened version of your name, you have to remember what you put in there or it won’t let you open your book.

So, as has happened to me, I wound up with 4 or 5 books – each with a different combo of name and credit card number. Now, it’s fine on my main computer, where I set them all up, but what happens next year when I upgrade computers? Or how about my laptop?

Personally, for me this is NOT user friendly. I never have this problem with PDFs or HTML files, which is my preferred way to buy books. Of course, as a writer I understand all too well the inherent problems with putting a book out there in a format that can be easily shared.

I hope the standards begin to shake out so we don’t have to go through format changes every year or two. Ebooks have been the Brave New World for a while now, it’s about time the various sellers of ebooks got together on what was going to be “standard.” So I’m taking most of this news as a good sign. I’ll be interested to see what else develops. Thought you cutting edge small press fans might want to know!

Catching Up

Greetings, D’Arc Siders! Time for a little update. There’s lots going on around here. First, I’d like to welcome all the newcomers to The D’Arc Side. Between the various contests I’m participating in this season, I’ve noticed a lot of new faces, so welcome!

Angie’s contest for the Kindles is going smashingly! If you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to take a look. We’re giving away 2 Kindles, loaded with Samhain books! (I’m in group 2.)

In other news, I’ve been writing up a storm and am proud to say that “Inferno” is more than half finished. This is the vampire Dante’s story, whom we first met in “Lords of the Were.” He’s come a long way since then and he’s still traveling with his half-fey friend, Duncan.

If all goes well, I should be hitting about 50,000 words in the next hour on this manuscript, so you can see, it’s moving right along. Utimately, I think it’ll wind up somewhere around 80-90,000 words or so. I’ve had this plot in mind for a long time now, but no time to write it. I picked up the gauntlet in mid-November and the ride to this point has been super smooth and fast, I’m glad to report.

My schedule last year has led me to reevaluate all the traveling I’ve been doing to conferences and such. As a result, I think I’m going to scale back a bit in 2009. Each trip takes a chunk of time out of my writing schedule with preparation, the actual traveling and then recovery time. So a weekend event could end up costing me 2 or 3 weeks worth of concentration. And then the bugs I managed to pick up at the various events lengthened my “recovery” time, adding illness onto the fun (not) that is traveling.

Chances are, I’ll be doing a few less appearances in 2009. Right now I’m planning on going to LunaCon in March, RT in April, then doing a few small signings in the NY metro area in the Spring. After that, we’ll see. Sorry to have to do this, but I’ve been overextending myself and something’s gotta give. So we’ll try it this way and see how it goes. Knowing me, I’ll probably expand the schedule to include a few smaller events as we go along, but I’ll have to play it by ear.

This is all part of my end-of-the-year reappraisal of what I’ve accomplished this year and what I want to accomplish next year. It’s been a good year all in all, but I want to do even better next year! Wish me luck!