Underground Entertainment

The Simpsons Maul YA Book Mills (And I’m Still Smirking)

November 28, 2011, by TC 5 comments

Depending on who you’re talking to, Writing is either art or commerce (usually a little of both), and it’s the commerce half that gets goosed in the Season 23, Episode 6 of The Simpsons — a beautiful sendup of young adult book mills (you can watch it here on Hulu).

The Simpsons send up YA book mills (click image to view on Hulu)

According to this Tor.com post, the episode was inspired in part by a 2009 New Yorker article covering Alloy — a young adult book/TV in New York. (You’ll need subscriber access to read the whole article… you do subscribe, don’t you? Don’t You?)

The episode highlights author Neil Gaiman (well, his cartoon doppelganger), and features Homer and Bart forming a team to write and package a book series.

Intertwined is a send up of Oceans Eleven and yes, Andy Garcia appears (again, sorta), and this was funny and fast moving and worth a couple minutes of your time — especially if you’re of a sort that likes wax about the sanctity of the published word.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

p.s. — According to this Walter Jon Williams article, the contemporary YA book mill is alive and well, and apparently happy to have you work for $250 a book…

A Story For A Literate Monday: Book Sculptures Dot Scottish Landscape, Nobody Knows Who Made Them…

November 7, 2011, by TC No comments yet

An artist apparently crafted a series of stunning little sculptures out of old books, then anonymously deposited them in Scottish libraries and other literary sites.

For now, the artist leaving book sculptures all over Scotland remains anonymous...

The sculptures were accompanied by notes similar to the first one, which went like this:

“This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas…” said a note, addressed to the Library by its twitter name “@ByLeavesWeLive”. There was no artist signature, no one to thank. The staff, totally nonplussed, asked on their blog if anybody knew who made it. They described the gift as a “poetree” and waited. Nobody claimed authorship.

The list of sculptures continued to grow — as did the mystery surrounding the identity of the sculptor — until a Scottish newspaper suggested they knew who was doing it.

Instead of releasing the name, they held a reader poll, where (apparently) a majority of readers requested the mystery continue.

It’s a lovely little mystery about books and art and words, and on a Monday, I’m glad I dodged all the stories of vacuous politicians and brain-dead celebrities and read it first.

You can read the story here.

Keep writing (and sculpting), Tom Chandler.

Friday’s Fun Marketing Screwup: Moleskine Tries To Crowdsource Its Customers…

October 21, 2011, by TC 9 comments

Nothing’s quite as entertaining as a great big brand marketing furball, where a company steps in a steaming pile of do-do, and seemingly can’t step out without getting it all over their pants.

Moleskine contest responses Iconic notebook brand Moleskin decided to crowdsource the new logo for their Moleskinerie fan blog, so in conjunction with Designboom (an online magazine), they fired up a contest — and almost immediately ran into a post from the Anti-Spec blog (excerpt only):

Let’s break this down. A logo done right will take many solid days to research the company, sketch ideas (possibly in a Moleskine product) before even opening up Illustrator. I’m going to be real conservative here and say 8 hours. Real conservative. 3,500 participating designers who spend 8 hours each equates to over 28,000 hours.

Moleskine will pay the winner €5,000 ($7,000). For this fee Moleskine will receive a staggering amount of artwork to choose from; the equivalent of 3 solid years from a single designer working 24/7. This equates to just €1.40 ($2) per design.

1 designer wins. 3,499 designers lose. Moleskine is the real winner here. If Moleskine redeem themselves by dropping this dreadful spec work competition I will continue to buy their products. Otherwise I’ll boycott. It’s that simple.

A single blog post is unlikely to cause major problems for a brand, but as Richard Nixon learned, it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover up.

Moleskine posted a fairly snipppy response on Facebook — and found themselves buried under an avalanche of negative remarks (and another blog post).

How’s getting hammered to death by t-squares feel?

Contests aimed at making life better for a corporation instead of the contestants have existed pretty much forever, yet when your core market is professional designers and artists, crowdsourcing just might not be the best choice — especially when “crowdsourcing” has become a euphemism for “getting it done cheaply/for free.”

Keep writing (but not for free), Tom Chandler.

“The Talks” Site Interviews Underground Fave Writer Nick Hornby

October 12, 2011, by TC 4 comments

I’ll cop right here to being a mad Nick Hornby fan (his book High Fidelity became an awfully good John Cusack movie, and it’s possible it helped at least one forty-something writer make a life-altering decision about family and commitment).

And A Long Way Down was that rarest of multi-perspective books (one that made sense to the reader), and I regularly curse myself for not having read Juliet, Naked yet.

Nick Hornby The Talks

The new “The Talks” interview site talks to Hornby about writing and his work, where he makes a potent observation about confidence and writer’s block:

Do you sometimes feel pressure that your next book has to be better than the one you wrote before?

I think that writer’s block is a matter of confidence. I think that the daily struggle of a writer is to keep up one’s confidence, because you lose a sense of perspective, especially if you’re working on a longer project where you cannot show anybody anything for quite some time. It’s only you telling yourself that maybe somebody will want to read this. I haven’t been “blocked” but I certainly understand how it happens and why it happens.

When starting a new copywriting project, I sometimes feel I’m competing with every other ad/blog post/email program extant, which is a good recipe for freezing yourself solid.

Not the best place to start.

Hornby is on my list of Five Writers I’d Really Like to Share a Beer With (that list is a work in progress), and while he might not make yours, you can probably still spare a minute to read the interview.

Who Doesn’t Want An Exclamation Point Hovering Over Their Desk?

October 11, 2011, by TC 4 comments

Sure, punctuation is all handy and cool when you’re writing that novel, but do you really need it staring over your shoulder while you read? (And am I the only one miffed by the lack of an interrobang?)

What, no Interrobang?? (click image to visit Tabisso website)

Video: An Interview With Satirical Novelist Carl Hiassen

September 24, 2011, by TC 2 comments

Carl Hiassen’s satirical novels cut right to the bone, and I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything funnier — or more beautifully targeted (Skin Tight and Double Whammy remains favorites). Enjoy this short interview (I did):

The Ultimate Writer’s Tool Of The Week (So Far): A Typewriter That Mixes Cocktails

September 22, 2011, by TC 4 comments

After performing four weeks of work in the last two weeks, one of these would have been handy; a typewriter that translates words into… cocktails.

Every writer who could use one of these, raise your hand...

The last several weeks have been packed with work, including some painfully comedic (painful for me, comedic for bystanders) interactions with a client so clueless she’s more “The Office” character than real person.

This person singlehandedly generates enough material for a two-posts-a-week “client follies” blog, and the only thing stopping me is that the screwups are so singularly bizarre, my readers wouldn’t believe me. (Really.)

Keep writing (because it’s better than drinking), Tom Chandler.

Amusing PR Screwup of the Day (So Far)

August 25, 2011, by TC No comments yet

I received an email from Igloo about the potential for product reviews on my fly fishing blog, yet when I responded, my email bounced back — the victim of a “User not registered with ContentCatcher” anti-spam filter error.

I’m no PR professional (I haven’t even played one on the Internet), but sending emails to media folks whose replies are going to be blocked seems like a marginal strategy.

(Unless this is this some kind of existentialist PR strategy that forces me to confront the meaninglessness of my online existence, rendering me more amenable when the real contact comes.)

Full Disclosure: I got out of PR decades ago because this is precisely the kind of thing I’d do.

The Intertubes are powerful, but they’re no longer simple. And done right, marketing is still “Death by a Thousands Paper Cuts.”

Suing Your Way To The Top Of The Writing World (or, More From Writing’s Best Spectator Sport)

August 19, 2011, by TC No comments yet

I recently said TV/Hollywood scriptwriting was writing’s most spectator-friendly sport, and recent events suggest I’m dead-bang right about that.

While copywriters bore the writing universe with our hopelessly self-promoting tweets, the world’s scriptwriters are creating world-class writing industry entertainment, this time in the form of a lawsuit brought by one Justin Samuels, who alleges that Hollywood simply locks out non-whites, women, and those who are not wealthy:

Yes, you do indeed need to be in the right social circles to do what you said. You’d need wealthy parents—disproportionately white—or some sort of backing where you basically didn’t have to work in order to schmooze with film people all the time. You seem to have glossed over the part where I lived and worked in Los Angeles. At times, I worked long hours, commuted long hours. It’s why I said the idea where one must meet people basically favors wealthy white people who can live a certain lifestyle.

(In Hollywood, “important” people usually won’t read your spec script unless you’re repped by an agent, an arrangement Samuels believes is discriminatory.)

I spotted the legal concept in play here, though I’m not clear on the actual legal cite for “They’ve got a trust fund and I don’t.”

Still, you don’t have to be a Harvard Law graduate to see the door opening for a potentially lucrative “They’ve got real talent, the smug bastards” lawsuit — especially if you’ve got a couple points (gross, not net) of the TV rights.

For those with little useful work to do, here’s a link to the John August post on the lawsuit (good background), and here’s the interview from the Working Screenwriter blog.

Unsurprisingly, the comments below both articles are fairly caustic (probably all from that sniveling bunch of trust funders who control Hollywood), and while I’d love to see this one played out with all the fanfare of a Lady Gaga appearance, I’m guessing it will disappear after first exposure to a judge, who — after handing copies of his just-finished spec script to the agency lawyers — will simply smile and go to lunch.

Keep writing (and suing your way to the top), Tom Chandler.

Marketing Fact #11: The Embarrassing Stuff Lives Forever

August 17, 2011, by TC 5 comments

After I left my first ad agency job, I wrote the usual novice copywriter projects (data sheets, brochures, trade ads, press releases, etc) for a lighting controls company.

I got tired of looking at their ugly, essentially hand-drawn logo, so one day I renovated it in what I’ll now call “Early Digital Ugly” style.

It was not a pretty thing.

Just yesterday, the art director who worked on their packaging over two decades ago sent me an email about electricians installing lighting controls in his office — which turned out to be our former client’s.

Amazingly, they still use the exact same data/installation sheet template he designed 25 years ago, and perversely, the boxes and sheets also featured the exact — and still awful — logo I’d created.

I’m proud of a lot of the concepts and copy I’ve written, but copywriters know their work typically lives a pretty short life (a couple years or less).

That the worst piece of crap I ever did — a logo no less — has now endured for decades suggests something unpleasant — like the existence of an ironic god.

Everybody has a few creative/copywriting skeletons in their closet, but I thought this one was buried decades ago.

Any similar projects from my readers’ past ever pop up years after the crime?

Keep writing with the knowledge it might be around forever, Tom Chandler.

Forget “Friends” and “Family” — Here Are The Google Circles You Really Need

July 18, 2011, by TC No comments yet

(Created by HappyPlace.com [plenty more where this came from] and found at OrgTheory.net)

How To Embed Screenplay Snippets In Your Blog Posts

July 7, 2011, by TC No comments yet

As a writer, I love the little writing tools that solve nagging problems. That’s why I write in a programmer’s text editor (Emacs or Komodo Edit). And why I became obsessed with how John August — the screenwriter behind the deeply interesting JohnAugust.com screenwriting blog — posts formatted script snippets on his blog.

The nicely formatted JohnAugust.com screenwriting blog

I don’t need to do this very often (it would have been nice when I blogged about video scripting), but things like this tend to knock around in the back of my brain.

In short, it nagged at me.

I mucked around with code tags and nothing worked — until I discovered August developed a WordPress plug-in that formats the script snippets for you (also available for other CMS installs like Blogger and Drupal).

For infrequent users, there’s also an online converter.

INT. BLOG PAGE

The BLOGGER and READER sit on opposite sides of the screen, staring at each other through the display.

READER

You want to cross a script with a blog post? You’re mad!

BLOGGER twirls mustache, leans forward until nose almost touches screen, pushes key on keyboard. READER’s keyboard flows up, manacles hands, trapping him. READER struggles.

BLOGGER

I’m not mad. I’m a writer.

BLOGGER pushes another key, blog post overlaying screen begins to mutate, snaps off screen to engulf reader’s face.

READER

Aiiiiyeeeee!

BLOGGER

Another satisfied reader.

The screenwriting world is a fascinating arm of the writing galaxy; the stakes are huge, the competition fierce, the failures embarrassingly public and the amount of work done on spec is staggering.

Still, it’s perhaps the most spectator friendly of the writing sports, and while I have zero interest in playing, I am interested for the sheer spectacle of it.

If I find a cool tool along the way…

Keep writing (and uncovering the tools that make it easier), Tom Chandler.