Just a quick note - a few days ago, I posted The Carnival Wolves for the first time in English. It may and probably will be updated later before it appears on my website - the language could use some improving - but it's there!
February 2007 Archives
It's entirely regrettable, sad and awful that a known scam publisher PublishAmerica has decided to pick on people smaller than them. Apparently, one user at Absolute Write was threatened by them. Apparently, things have gone rather awful.
Now, PA is a scammy publisher. I oppose them for various reasons - they're misrepresenting themselves as a publisher rather than a vanity press, if they're trying to be a publisher they're doing a shoddy job at quality control, and, apparently, they snatch more than fair share of author's rights.
Which brings me to this topic - my own small, feeble attempt at annoying PA. However, I'm full well aware this may not work. After all, I'm far out of their jurisdiction, and I'm not exactly famous enough to be seen on radar...
So - my big beef with PA is that they apparently ask the authors to sign away their copyrights. No real publisher does that these days. The authors are supposed to have the copyrights, the publishers just buy the rights to sell the book. Right? Right? I'm a big fan of Creative Commons, free software, Open Source - I'm aware of all these weird little entanglements these copyright issues create.
So I'm hereby criticising PA for their history of trampling on peoples' rights.
But wait, there's more.
Ages ago, when I was still in school, someone (my parents, my teacher, I can't rememeber) apparently sent a writing of mine to a children's magazine called Kipinä that was published in Russian Soviet Karelia. (I can't remember anything at all about the magazine, except it was in Finnish for some reason and was apparently aimed at Karelians and Finns learning Russian. Or something like that.) Apparently, I won some sort of a prize for my little essay on photography, my big hobby at the time. (I can't really remember anything about the essay, except that I was boundlessly embarrassed by the ending: "...especially if the batteries are okay.")
So, hey, what am I?
Am I an acclaimed writer, a known critic of corporate copyright ownership, and at one point backed by repressive anti-American Communist government? Am I now criticising this All-American Company from the safe haven of a socialist country?
...or am I just a random nobody who's raising a valid point to keep up the discussion?
I hope I just shot myself down. I'm obviously not the best person to criticise this company. =)
Earlier today I posted the story Karnevaalisudet to Harhakuva. It appears to me that Aukea.net, the long-established site that I found over year ago and posted two stories to in Finnish, is has went kaboom, and the latest rumour says it will never come back...
Anyway, Karnevaalisudet (The Carnival Wolves) is a rather odd story. I got this weird idea late last month and today, I got the story finished. I actually aimed at 2000 words and it turned out to be around 2500 words. Um... well, at least it's done now.
It's a short, yet equally strange tale! And above all, I hope it's cute.
There's two great new tools I've got now (okay, actually, the latter of them is old): First of all, I have Voikko, so I can actually spellcheck the stories I write in Finnish. Secondly, I tried using Suopuhe to check the story. I have used Festival previously with English, and it was a success. It's amazing how you can spot tons of annoying mistakes when the story is just read to you! Also, the female Finnish voice of Suopuhe (voice_suo_fi_lj_diphone) is extremely clear too, even better than some of the English voices.
Ooo! When I translate this thing to English, I'll get to check this with Festival! Festival wolves... melts with cuteness::
Yet another interesting revelation about my prose:
I've been writing a new story. This one has completely different characters, and that's been challenging. However, I noted some easy similarities with this story and my earlier ones - which is why I need to change this new story to be a little bit less like my earlier ones.
Basically, the problem is this: My characters tend to be rather... how could I put it... typical. Basically, the protagonists are there to carry us from scene to scene. The primary motivation of the lead character is to test out something, which obviously is a good way to get a motivation for the story - hey, many good fantasy stories are all about those spooky old legends and people who work to uncover the real truth behind them. Then there's other characters who tend to be there just to comment dryly on the situation.
Basically, I noticed I was rewriting Bidding for a Good Day. In that story, there's Faira and her tendency to get in her head that a good old-fashioned weirdness has to be unraveled. Then there's Lex, who's just there for fun. And... um, in this new story we had a female lead who didn't tell the male lead that hey, there's this mysterious old tale that has to be figured out at last.
So I needed to start thinking of the motivations a little bit. Oops, I almost ran into the trap of making some carbon-copy characters - or wrote a story that's basically repeat of some other story I wrote, with a little bit different milieu and wayyy different end results. I guess I have to think of a little bit what to put there.
But otherwise, this story was going to be interesting and with these small revelations, I hope it will get really interesting, actually.
