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Post by RickW on Mar 1, 2021 14:55:16 GMT -5
I grew up in North Vancouver, which was all white and middle class. There was, and still isn’t, much of a black population in Vancouver, but since the 70s, the Asian population has grown, mostly Chinese and South Asian, with a healthy dose of Koreans and Vietnamese thrown in. There are suburbs which are heavily South Asian and Chinese, but everywhere, it’s a mix. When we moved to the burb we’re in now, we were shocked at how few Asian faces we saw. That has now changed considerably. Our current townhouse complex is still heavily white, but there are a number of non white families here as well.
Vancouver is a remarkably relaxed community, as far as ethnicity goes.
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Post by RickW on Feb 28, 2021 14:01:53 GMT -5
It has been interesting listening to the various podcasts of both traditional and indie writers over the last little while. There was so much promotion from all of them that if you just work hard, you can make it. I suppose partly because there is such an industry around providing services for writers. But even Brandon Sanderson came out and said that he felt that he and others had not provided the entire truth; you still have to be able to write a good book, and you may or may not make any money, much less a living, even after listening ot their podcasts, and taking their courses, and buying their books.
It’s a different economic proposition. It’s a long game, with most indie authors making money off their back lists. And there’s certainly drivel out there, because anyone can upload a book to any of the major platforms. But the recommendations now are to get an editor, to get an excellent cover, to understand how to write the marketing material like blurbs, and experiment a lot with the marketing.
And it’s doable, and you have control over it. The chances of getting a traditional publishing contract were always tiny, no matter how good your book was. And even if you did, there was no guarantee the publisher would do squat to promote it. The world is littered with stories of traditionally published writers who said to hell with it, and went indie, so they could write what they wanted, publish when they wanted, and make a lot more money off their books.
But, I don’t need to care about making a living. I just need to cover my expenses, and that would be success to me. We’ll see how it goes.
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Post by RickW on Feb 28, 2021 12:34:20 GMT -5
When I say I tend to think of art more as entertainment, I don’t mean that in a pejorative or cheap way. It’s just that to capture someone’s attention and hold it, whether it’s a book, a song, or a painting, you are indeed entertaining them, pulling them out of their world into yours for whatever brief time they give. If you want an audience, you have to provide it.
You see a lot of people on writing groups saying not to worry about the saleability of your writing. “What is important is what it means to you.” Which is only true up to the point where you try to sell your stuff, and then it becomes a business. One hopes that what you want to do and like is what others want and like. But it’s always good to ask yourself what you want from your art before you dive into a producing a bunch of it.
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Post by RickW on Feb 28, 2021 12:09:56 GMT -5
I dislike this but think it's true. The advertising part is totally on you, and it is very hard to spread the word beyond friends and family without some structured support. It’s actually not that hard. There are well worn paths now. Most authors advertise on Amazon and/or Facebook. Now, whether your ads or your books capture the imagination enough to sell is another thing. But there are legions of books/podcasts/FB groups that have all the ways to do this codified, how to do the selling part. It’s a bunch of experimentation and work. A lot of artists don’t like to do that stuff, to see and manage the business side.
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Post by RickW on Feb 28, 2021 12:03:48 GMT -5
I think it’s like a lot of art. You can get away with anything if you can make it work. Understanding the basics is important. But there’s a flow that’s intuitive, just like any art. It’s just not a performance intuition, like live music, but it should feel like a live performance, in a way, pulling the reader through.
There are writers that are huge, that get ripped all the time for the quality of their writing. Dan Brown is the classic, and Stephanie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series. You can talk all you want about how perhaps they got lucky, they wrote tropes and cheap thrills. But what they most definitely did was write books that captured an audience. They pulled that audience in and entertained the hell out of them, certainly made them feel something. It’s tough to define what made their stuff rise up like magic. It also doesn’t mean that I want to write like either of them. I’d sure be happy with that level of audience engagement.
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Post by RickW on Feb 28, 2021 10:23:20 GMT -5
An interesting article. To me, that personal journey has been long and winding as well, but different. I always knew somewhere inside that any kind of art must come from emotion to affect the emotions, and if you’re not affecting your audiences emotions, you’ve failed, and created meaningless, dull work. But through my study of music, I chased the how endlessly, how to play better, to understand technique and theory, rather than simply putting myself out there. I was afraid to. It wasn’t really until I started jamming again a few years back, just playing and singing simple songs, trying to do so with some feeling and emotion, that it all got home. I’m enjoying music much more.
With writing, I read something last year that was very telling to me. It was in a book on writing. She said, it’s not that you’re trying to make your readers feel what your characters are feeling. It’s that you’re trying to make your readers feel something. This of course is obvious to a musician, a painter, a poet, potter. But whenever I repeat it to a writer, the usual response is, “oh, right.” Perhaps because most books on writing drill into you that you need to bring your characters to life. Which is true, but it’s just part of the bigger picture of what a book needs to do.
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Post by RickW on Feb 28, 2021 9:53:18 GMT -5
Photographers sometimes mention an idea the name for which was coined by Ansel Adams: "previsualization." What Adams meant was that when you're out in the sticks taking a photo, you have to be seeing the finished print in your mind. In his day that meant converting what you saw to a black-and-white, two-dimensional rectangle and then manipulating the tones and contrast, all with the idea of moving the image towards what you visualized in advance. Whatever ideas you may have about "pure" photography, it probably never existed. Adams manipulated the heck out of his images. He had some notion at the outset of where that would take the photo. That preconception can affect what you do at the outset in a variety of ways. I'm no expert on poetry but my own experience suggests that it helps enormously to start with an idea of where the poem will end. Paul Valery spoke of the ligne donnee: One line is given to the poet by and he has to discover the rest of the poem himself. But without an idea of where it all ends, it can be impossible to discover those intervening lines. This is not identical to what this fellow was discussing but I think there's an underlying kinship. I’ve always thought that, you need to look at something, and understand what piece of it you’re trying to capture. I’ve never been good at it. But I do love to try.
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Post by RickW on Feb 28, 2021 9:49:48 GMT -5
In many ways, that’s what has happened and is happening. There other platforms need to get bigger, to provide a foil. Right now Amazon could easily change their rates and process, and become the new gatekeeper, paying poor wages.
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Post by RickW on Feb 27, 2021 20:57:38 GMT -5
Wonderful. It’s funny, I struggled for years to complete compositions. I’d get a part, and then get stuck on where to go. So now I often write a part, then write it down, then put the guitar down and start to imagine where I want the piece to go, and see if I can hear it. I sometimes have to pick the instrument back up, but it frees me from the mechanical side, of doing things as I’ve always done. As I write it out in notation in software, I can play it and hear it. It works very well for me.
His level, of hearing chords, nah, that’s another level. Not going to get there entirely in this life.
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Post by RickW on Feb 27, 2021 20:47:42 GMT -5
We’re pretty much done. Unlikely to be anymore real shit days. Crocuses and Snowdrops have been up for a couple of weeks. The heather is blooming.
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Post by RickW on Feb 27, 2021 20:27:57 GMT -5
Further to a discussion from earlier, regarding the state of independent publishing, that is, those authors who publish on their own, without a major publishing house. I was looking at Amazon’s information on the services they provide. For 2019, over 1,000 independent authors made more than $100,000, and thousands made above 50k. Considering that when I was writing in the 90s, the belief was that much less than 100 people were even making a living from writing, that’s pretty incredible. The publishing world is being turned on its head. Amazon controls 80 percent of the market, but Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Google and Apple also all do independents as well
55 percent of Amazon’s book sales are independent now.
I’ve been submitting to agencies since the start of the year, and I have my doubts my book will get picked up. They get inundated with manuscripts, and the big guys only publish sho many books a year. So I’m assuming that if I want to publish, I’ll have to do it myself. Be an adventure, we’ll see how it goes.
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Post by RickW on Feb 26, 2021 14:09:09 GMT -5
You mean an original like this? I’ll take that any time over the covers. It’s a good song, and they’re playing it live.
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Post by RickW on Feb 26, 2021 10:55:12 GMT -5
It’s a lovely video, but.... The appeal comes from: The fact that yes, it’s a good song we all know. They’re indeed very cute. The video production is very nice, It’s probably synched, as in, they recorded all the audio, then played and sang along. They did absolutely nothing new with the song. YouTube is full of videos like this, pretty and glossy. It’s entertaining, not nearly as good as the people doing original stuff, or taking something and doing something new. That’s my grumpy old man take for Friday morning.
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Post by RickW on Feb 25, 2021 23:50:19 GMT -5
Everything is open here, with reduced seating. We order in a lot, go out occasionally. Certainly have been a lot of places closed.
Driving home late in the afternoon last Friday, which is usually a zoo scene, was not crowded at all. Still a ways to go.
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Post by RickW on Feb 23, 2021 10:12:57 GMT -5
As well you should be. Lovely song. Very lovely video. 141k views. I doubt that covers the cost of making the video. Time for new glasses, Marshall. It’s just under 15 million views.
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Post by RickW on Feb 21, 2021 14:34:10 GMT -5
Does this mean mud season is nearly here? Flood season comes before mud season. My wife talked about dog shit season in Montreal, when all the snow melts, and the turds left by various pets, at various layers, all suddenly appear in their glory. Have my fiction writing critique group today. Working on a new song as well. It’s wet here, and a new pineapple express is on its way. So it’s going to get wetter and windier.
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Post by RickW on Feb 21, 2021 14:28:14 GMT -5
The company I worked for, for which I was doing my bit of consulting, got bought last May. They convinced me to stay on for this tax season, and I also didn’t want to leave them in the lurch. They are now driving me crazy; the new company’s regular firm who does this work is quite fiddly about how they do the reports, and didn’t tell me their requirements until after I had finished. I have another meeting on Monday. We are supposed to be wrapped up by the end of February. I certainly hope so.
It’s not a lot of time. It’s just aggravation at this point.
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Post by RickW on Feb 21, 2021 14:19:05 GMT -5
He can sing as well. And seems to be able to play complicated stuff, and sing over top of it. We hates him, we does.
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Post by RickW on Feb 20, 2021 13:44:11 GMT -5
It’s a social media/streaming platform, that lots of folks are using for live shows.
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Post by RickW on Feb 20, 2021 13:38:11 GMT -5
PS - about an hour later the dinner shot right through Sue, (if you know what I mean.) She has a sensitive digestive track and fast food does not often agree with her. So, we won't go back as a couple. Reminded me of when we used to scuba dive. BC Ferries used to be famous for bad food, but we were taking a ferry to the dive site, so I had the “Sunshine Bacon and Eggs.” Got to the dive site, zipped into the dry suit with all accompanying stuff. Got in the water. Were down at about 60 feet, when “It started to go right through me.” I gave my buddy a panicked up signal, went to the surface as fast we could, threw off tanks, weight belt, fins, mask, managed to get my dry suit open, (this is a treat, as the zipper runs over your shoulders,) and just made it. Life lessons: do not eat greasy, bad food before going scuba diving. Especially in a dry suit. At least in a wet suit, it’ll wash out.
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