All posts by Paul Raven

Blog

Writing advice from Matthew Cheney

Matthew “The Mumpsimus” Cheney is guest-blogging over at Colleen Lindsay’s site, and he’s decided to do a post entitled “If Only I’d Known: Writing Advice to my Younger Self“. In sharp contrast to the gung-ho you-can-do-it teach-yourself-to-write books, however, he advocates making sure you write for the right reasons:

Publication can be fun, but I don’t think a healthy psyche finds it much more than that. If you haven’t been able to find balance and contentment in your life, publishing won’t help you, and, if anything, it may hurt.

It’s an interesting piece, written with Cheney’s characteristic honesty and heartily recommended for any writerly types in the audience – published or otherwise.

Blog

Yanking on the Long Tail

4 Comments

Ring-tailed lemurChris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail‘ theory of online economics gained traction with great rapidity, but gathered its fair share of detractors along the way. Hence when a group of economists examined some different data and found a different distribution, there was much snarking:

This really isn’t the upbeat fairy tale message Anderson has spent four years selling on the conference circuit. However, as he took his “message” to Davos and beyond, the Long Tail has gradually developed into a ‘Policy Based Evidence Making’.

Ouch. Anderson’s not giving up just yet, though:

Unfortunately, Page didn’t send me the data or reveal its source, so we may not be able to answer these questions. He’s a good economist, so I’m sure his analysis is excellent. But without knowing where the data came from, we really have no way of knowing whether he’s discovered anything about music demand broadly, or has just been reminded once again that some music markets, such as mobile, don’t work very well.

Anderson also points to a post at Hitwise which suggests that – in the business of search, at least – the Long Tail is alive and well.

So, is the future of business in “selling less of more”? Who knows – as with most predictions about the future, those of us who aren’t economists will just have to wait and see. [image by benoutram]

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 7th November

It’s Friday evening here in the UK, which can only mean one thing – namely, that I’ve been sat at the keyboard bashing together your weekly selection of free science fiction to read on the intartoobs. Here we go, fiction-fans…

***

There’s a lone novel at Manybooks.net:

***

There’s some old-school classics at Feedbooks:

***

There’s a new edition of Clarkesworld Magazine, containing (among other good non-fictional stuff):

***

Here’s the usual monthly foursome from Apex Online:

Plus some special Election Horror:

***

This week’s fictional output at Strange Horizons is the first part of “Return” by Eric Vogt.

***

Meanwhile, over at Subterranean Online there’s…

… a brand new story by recent Campbell award-winner, Mary Robinette Kowal. We hope you enjoy “Waiting for Rain” but should also point out that Mary’s posted a different, shorter version of the tale at her website. Read them both — we had trouble deciding which version to buy!

***

From Chris Roberson:

The good people at Pyr have published an original short story of mine, “Ill Met in Elvera,” as part of their “Sample Chapter” program.

***

Via SF Signal:

***

Here’s last week’s late Friday Flash:

And this week we have:

***

And there we have it, folks; should keep you busy for a while. Don’t forget to keep sending in your plugs and tip-offs and blatant self-pimpage; deadline 1800GMT every Friday. Have a great weekend!

Blog

Harvard drops out of Google Booksearch… because it’s not going to be free.

blue booksThe fat lady hasn’t yet sung for Google Booksearch. Just a few days after the announcement that the Big G had settled with the author and publisher associations to pay them a fair price for online access to digitised books, Harvard University is dropping out of the program:

“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries,” Harvard’s university-library director, Robert C. Darnton, wrote in a letter to the library staff.

He noted that “the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”

As TechDirt points out, the settlement looks good at a first glance, and has probably mollified a lot of writers and publishers, but it actually gives Google a tighter hold on the content:

Rather than making the world’s information accessible and findable, this move is an attempt to lock up the world’s information in Google’s proprietary format, so that Google can charge people for it. It sets in place a forced business model that actually diminishes the potential usefulness and value of books, and sets a bad precedent for just about everyone else.

So it would seem that by clamouring for short-term advantage, the publishers and libraries may actually have lost the long game. We’ve not heard the last of this, I’ll wager. [image by Dawn Endico]

Blog

Energy doesn’t grow on trees. Except in Patagonia, maybe.

2 Comments

The natural world still has plenty of surprises waiting for us, it seems. Scientists have discovered a Patagonian rainforest fungus that produces something pretty close to diesel by consuming cellulose:

The fungus, called Gliocladium roseum and discovered growing inside the ulmo tree (Eucryphia cordifolia) in northern Patagonia, produces a range of hydrocarbon molecules that are virtually identical to the fuel-grade compounds in existing fossil fuels.

Of course, burning the stuff is going to do as much environmental harm as the oil-based equivalent, but if they can scale up the process it might be an attractive renewable alternative to making fuels from dwindling oil supplies or otherwise useful food crops.