Gelatinous Houses

On the subject of alien-seeming animals inhabiting our own planet, consider the giant larvacean, undersea "gelatinous invertebrates" that look like "ghostly tadpoles" about the size of breakfast muffins:

Snot Palaces

Although the creature's photo brings to mind a jellyfish, it belongs to a different subphylum, the Tunicata. As far as I can gather from Wikipedia, they're mostly hermaphrodites, an efficient type of reproductive biology because any two members of the same species who happen to meet can produce offspring together. With bodies made mainly of water, larvaceans are filter feeders. They construct "houses" around their bodies by secreting mucus in the desired shape and blowing it up like a balloon. These delicate "snot palaces" (a nickname that belies their fragile beauty) have an inner and an outer house. The outer layer provides protection and filters water. The inner structure collects the food from the water. Since the creature's house gets clogged up quickly, it has to build a new one every couple of days. Despite the small size of the larvacean itself, its house can measure at large as one meter.

Would a larvacean's house be counted as part of its body, even though it gets frequently discarded and replaced? Animals such as snakes, after all, regularly molt their skins. The larvacean's "snot palace" isn't alive, but neither are mollusks' shells or our hair and fingernails, all of which tend to be thought of as body parts.

Could a creature composed mostly of water have a brain or a structure that serves as one? Hmm—neurons communicate by electricity, and water conducts electricity, so why couldn't a gelatinous invertebrate have an electrical network that performs brain functions? And couldn't any brain, if its environment demands higher functions for survival, develop sentience? Suppose a larvacean-like animal extruded a mucus "house" with a structure complex enough to support an intelligent electrical network? Of course, every time it replaced that structure, it would have to transfer over stored memories and skills. . . but if we can imagine a cloud of energy with sentience (as in more than one STAR TREK episode), we can imagine a mind built from water and mucus.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic Part 9 - A Film Worth Watching Again

How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic

Part 9

A Film Worth Watching Again 

Previous parts of this series are indexed here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/03/index-to-how-do-you-know-if-youve.html

We've referenced Helen of Troy many times, and most recently in discussing James Clavell and Charles E. Gannon -- the epic love story from the male point of view where all male protection instincts drive the plot.  Helen of Troy was such a figure, inspiring men to war, to rescue, to heroic deeds.

We think of Helen of Troy as pre-historic, probably a legend even though archeologists have found Troy.

Maybe the story was just a legend, but it became a classic literary legend because it bespeaks an eternal attribute of human nature -- the lengths a Soul Mate will go to in order to reunite with his beloved.

The whole world, and all human history, has pivoted on the Soul Mate relationship many times.

This kind of story made Box Office history even in the B&W film day, and with modern digitization and streaming services, these old films are available  to the young.

Here is a short description of the film, DESIREE,
https://www.amazon.com/Desiree-Marlon-Brando/dp/B002BUELKM
seen long ago, seen again in 2020, compared with all the real and legendary history of the days of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The author, Anne Pinzow, is a reporter, film student, and published fiction author. The perspective is deeply informative for those seeking to replicate the Epic Romance the way Charles E. Gannon has in his Caine Riordan series.

https://www.amazon.com/Charles-E-Gannon/e/B001HO80WS

Here is Anne Pinzow's view of this old, epic film.

---quoting Anne Pinzow--------

I was watching one of my favorite movies which I haven't seen since I watched on my black and white TV at 1 in the morning when I was a kid. Desiree. It's a totally fictionalized, cleaned up and sanitized "true" story in that these characters actually did exist and something, sorta, kinda, if you squint, did happen.

What is true is that both Napoleon Bonaparte and Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who became the King of Sweden were enamored by Desiree Clary, the daughter of a fabric merchant in the post French Revolution years. She was engaged to Bonaparte as he wanted her dowery, but he married Josephine for her political connections. Clary married Bernadotte and became the mostly absent Queen of Sweden and lived in Paris as she just did not fit in to the Swedish royals plus she hated the cold. Napoleon tried to use her to get Bernadotte to comply with his wishes and Bernadotte tried to use her to find out what Napoleon was up to.

Anyway, it's a fun movie, if you're not a fan of Napoleon Bonaparte.

So, I'm not talking about the real people and their characters but the movie people.

Both Bonaparte and Bernadotte were born to poor families, joined the Army and rose quickly up through the ranks because of their military successes. The difference is that, according to the movie, Bernadotte did not believe that peace and freedom for the rest of Europe could be achieved by war while Bonaparte played at wanting liberty, fraternity and equality but that it only could be achieved by killing everyone who opposed him.

In the end, by putting the asses of the members of his family on the thrones of Europe, including his own, he achieved, if briefly, what he wanted.

Bernadotte, by being merciful and releasing prisoners of war when the war was over or won, was offered the crown of Sweden as the country's royal line was too old, gone crazy, had no heirs.

In the end, because of his character, Napoleon died on Elba, losing everything and his "dynasty," lasted about 11 years, was later re-established by his nephew and lasted about 18 years.

Meanwhile Bernadotte's dynasty has been around for 200 years and the present king of Sweden is his direct descendant.

Their methods were exactly the same but their characters made all the difference.

---------end quote--------


Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Jolly Rogers And False Flags

Let's start with the falsies.

I know, basically, that is Victoria's Secret.... falsies, that is. However, the piratical falsies are sites that promise to give away every book on Amazon or Goodreads, but what they really are after is the DMCA notice, where an author is so upset to find all her books being given away --apparently-- that she fires off a DMCA and gives the false pirates her name, address, email address, telephone number, signature. If they are lucky, she even tries to download a copy of her books for proof.

Such a site is Inamebooks.
It seems not to be legitimate. If you try to download a book, I hear, allegedly, you might instead receive malware and an entertaining image of a lady who encourages you to find her hole to keep you occupied while the malware does its embedding work.

Don't go there.

If you gave them your email address, watch out for emails and phone calls such as from 1-800-561-6189 purporting to be from Apple about a problem with your cloudflare or storage account. It's not. Don't bite.

The existence of sites like this, and others like it, owes much to the loopholes in the DMCA that holds OSPs and ISPs harmless for what they host.

Cloudflare.com, namecheap.com, safenames.net and amazonaws.com ought to be somewhat responsible but appear not to be.

There might be a remedy about to move at glacial pace through Congress. The legal bloggers Matthew Nigriny and John Gary Maynard III for Hunton Andrews Kurth opine on how much the DMCA favors ISPs and OSPs over copyright owners.
https://www.huntonak.com/images/content/6/7/v2/67187/copyright-office-finds-dcma-tilts-away-from-copyright-owners.pdf

Meanwhile, for more on bad behavior by Amazon:
https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/amazons-anticompetitive-history/

A real jolly roger appears to fly over the Internet Archive.  The brilliant and persistent --and real insight-sharing Victoria--Victoria Strauss covers the issue comprehensively.
https://accrispin.blogspot.com/2020/06/four-major-publishers-sue-internet.html

If your books are still being given away on an "Emergency" basis because the world needs free entertainment while authors do not need to eat and pay the rent during the same emergency, tell your Congressional representative or senator.... although, a little bird told me that Rand Paul and Ron Wyden are not sympathetic to ripped-off authors.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/

The Rules of Writing

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores the issue of whether there are any truly unbreakable writing rules:

Rules for Writers

You're probably acquainted with the collection of "rules" he cites, the Turkey City Lexicon, to which he faithfully adhered for many years. It's a list of colorfully labeled errors into which writers can fall, many of them specific to science fiction:

Turkey City Lexicon

The page begins with a long introduction by Bruce Sterling about the origin and background of the Lexicon. The errors and frequently perpetrated SF tropes are divided into categories such as Words and Sentences, Plots, Common Workshop Story Types, etc. Some of the entries now familiar to most speculative fiction writers include: Tom Swifties (although I prefer to think of them as "Tom Swiftlies," in keeping with the adverbial theme), e.g., "I'm not lying," Pinocchio said woodenly. "Said-bookisms," substituting an outlandishly obtrusive dialogue tag for a simple "said," e.g., "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die," Goldfinger gloated. "Call a Rabbit a Smeerp," sticking an exotic name on a mundane animal without changing the creature in any material way. Hand waving, "An attempt to distract the reader with dazzling prose or other verbal fireworks, so as to divert attention from a severe logical flaw."

Doctorow's article links the topic of writing rules to Sterling's nonfiction book THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, leading into the hacker's task of analyzing "which devices were likeliest to contain a fatal error." Inherent difficulty—proneness to error—according to Doctorow, is what the writing "rules" are really all about. At some point in his career, he received the epiphany that the guidelines he'd revered for so long "weren't rules at all! They're merely things that are hard to do right!" In the hands of a Heinlein or an Asimov, for example, an "expository lump" can be fascinating. The rule against exposition is better understood as a warning that "most exposition isn't good, and bad exposition is terrible."

It's sometimes said that there's only one truly unbreakable rule in writing: "Don't be boring." Excellent advice, although hardly specific enough to put into practice. It's on the level of Heinlein's rules for how to succeed as an author, which go something like this: (1) Write. (2) Finish what you write. (3) Submit it to an editor who might buy it. (4) Keep sending it out until it sells. He also advised, "Never rewrite except to editorial order," by which I can't imagine he meant one should submit rough drafts without revision. He apparently meant a writer shouldn't bother rewriting an unsuccessful piece from scratch but should devote his or her energy to producing a new work. Yet Heinlein didn't consistently follow his own advice on that point, as demonstrated by his recent posthumously released book THE PURSUIT OF THE PANKERA. It comprises the abandoned original version of the novel published as THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST. The first half of the text has some differences in detail, while the second half radically diverges. (Personally, I prefer the original draft, which reads much more like "vintage Heinlein" than the fun but meandering, self-indulgent NUMBER OF THE BEAST.)

In short, no ironclad rules, just wise guidelines.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic Part 8 - What Do Readers Do

How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic

Part 8

What Do Readers Do?

Previous parts of this series are indexed at:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/03/index-to-how-do-you-know-if-youve.html

There are moments in life when a writer is objective about their own work, really the best judge of its value.  Those moments are rare, and some people never experience one so they believe there are none.

But you don't have to attain objectivity to figure out the value of what you've written.  Of course, there's the hurdle of getting published by a publisher who has captured the market you are writing for, but after that there are still many confusing stages.

One way to know if you've hit your readership is the feedback you get from readers -- today, it's Facebook and Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, etc.  There will be a flurry of comments, and then they die down.  You've written a good book, but just one among many that readership enjoys.

Beyond just enjoying, and commenting, what can a reader do?

Well, in the old print-on-paper-snailmail days Star Trek invented the fanzine with fiction content.  Old Science Fiction fandom had lots of fanzines, many with commentary on current and older novels -- but it was essentially a non-fiction medium.

Star Trek, a TV Series, changed that.  The first Star Trek fanzine was published by Devra Langsam, who is still Trekking today.

From there, non-canon respecting Trekzines broke new ground, invented new categories, and even established the hetero-romance category,  I think this may be the first in that category

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/showcase/

This Star Trek Romance series likewise inspired and welcomed writers other than the one who first crested it.

My own fanzine series, Kraith, had 50 creative contributors to its alternate-universe vision of Star Trek.

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/kraith/

Star Trek inspired fans who created alternate universe Star Treks,  like Sahaj Collected, and Jean Lorrah's Night of the Twin Moons, which inspired and welcomed even more writers.

Classics have usually not done that before cheap offset printing and connected groups who hold conventions and sell each other fanzines.

Sherlock Holmes fandom picked up that cue and ran with it, and now we have a multitude of professionally published Holmes novels and spin-off TV Series, too.  It's a wonderful time we live in.

When I was researching for my Bantam paperback STAR TREK LIVES! about why fans like STAR TREK, before anyone but fans knew about Trekzines, I used my own first-published hardcover novel, HOUSE OF ZEOR, ...

 ...to illustrate the point about why people like Spock.

Simultaneously, fans were writing stories in my HOUSE OF ZEOR universe, dubbed the Sime~Gen Universe by Jean Lorrah (who became my collaborator and co-owner of Sime~Gen Inc.), and fanzines were proliferating.  As the internet just barely started to become the fanzine distribution medium, we moved online, and now you can find most of that early fanfic plus a lot of written-for-the-website fiction at

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/fandom.html

Meanwhile, Jean Lorrah sold a series of novels titled SAVAGE EMPIRE, and others have written in

that universe, including one Star Trek fan with his own series about Uhura, titled Captain Uhura.

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Empire-Book-ebook/dp/B004NSVPO0/


And many years later, many of those early Sime~Gen fanfic writers had turned professional but were still thinking and creating Sime~Gen.  So the current publisher, Wildside Press, asked for an anthology of their stories set in the Sime~Gen Universe.  It is Volume 13

So, it seems to me the signature of a "Classic" is how it inspires other creative people to create, what they create inspires more people (who might not actually know the original source material) to create and capture the imaginations of yet another generation.

In other words, a Classic propagates.

In Part 5 of this series of posts, we noted the Classic Caine Riordan Novel, Marque of Caine,

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TMN61Z9/
written by a writing student of mine, nominated for the Nebula Award in 2020.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written_25.html

The Caine Riordan series passes this "inspire readers to write" test by having inspired professional writers to create stories set in the Caine Riordan universe, carefully moderated by dedicated fans keeping all the details close to canon.

The first anthology by those writers is on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Signals-Charles-Gannon-ebook/dp/B07RHPYXF2/

So you know if you've written a classic by how your readers react -- often over decades as they grow up and become professional writers (in various fields).  If they create in your world, you experience a thrill of recognition you couldn't duplicate in any other way.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

You Think?

Cue the fanfare for the common creator of copyrighted works of music, art, and literature.
The Copyright Office has concluded that Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the Safe Harbor section) is unbalanced.

Over the last twenty years, the scales seem to have become weighted in favor of the tech giants OSPs, and in disfavor of rightsholders. It may come as no surprise that the biggest issues with Safe Harbor arise from a lack of clarity and legal agreement about what the criteria are for when an OSP has "red flag knowledge", and how many times and to what degree an infringer can infringe before he or she qualifies as a "repeat infringer".

This author has been complaining about those issues since 2005!

Legal bloggers Jason P. Bloom, Joseph Lawlor,  Lee F. Johnston,  and Wesley Lewis, representing the law firm Haynes and Boone LLP pen a very nice summary of the Copyright Office's 200 page report and major recommendations.

Original link:
https://www.haynesboone.com/alerts/copyright-office-finds-aspects-of-the-dmca-unbalanced

Lexology link:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=baab0441-e073-4c15-b736-44429fad801f

One can only hope that EBay and Twitter will take note. You think they will?

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday  

PS. This gofundme link has nothing to do with copyright, or big tech. Sharing it anyway.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/demolished-small-business-in-minneapolis-riot

Spooky Tutti Frutti

I'm delighted to announce the release of my lighthearted ghost story, "Spooky Tutti Frutti," from the Wild Rose Press.

Spooky Tutti Frutti

It's part of their summer reading e-book series, "One Scoop or Two." With ice cream as the unifying element, these stories range from 7500 words to novella length and had to include the following features: ice cream central to the plot; a setting in a waterfront tourist area during the summer; an ice cream flavor in the title. It can be fun to write a story in response to a highly specific call for submissions. At the bottom of my e-book's product page, you can see a row of other releases to date in the "One Scoop or Two" series and appreciate the clever titles other authors have come up with. My story takes place mostly in a 1950s-themed ice cream parlor, and I think the bright, perky cover captures the ambiance quite well.

I knew I wanted to contribute a ghost story, since all of my fiction is supernatural or paranormal in some way. Waterfront resort area? Annapolis, where I live, is one of the sailboat capitals of the East Coast. I got the editor's assurance that this location fits the criteria, even though it's on a river rather than an ocean beach. The idea of using a sailboat race as the basis for the heroine's problem came naturally, since boat races are a common summer event in this kind of locale. Preparing to set up a stall at the dockside celebration on race day, the heroine wants to create an original flavor. A friendly but slightly odd girl she hires as a temp comes up with the perfect flavor, but why is the new employee, although brilliant on the subject of ice cream, clueless about many details of everyday life?

I wanted my piece to be light and mildly humorous, so I gave the heroine a problem that's serious for her but not dire or life-threatening. Between the title and the strange girl's behavior, I assume the reader will guess soon enough that she's a ghost. I hope readers will have fun waiting for the heroine to figure out the truth and decide what to do about it.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt