I'm working on my module for the Seton Hill winter residency. It's called Funtion, Framework and Formula: the Infrastructure of Story. Basically, it's Dwight Swain's greatest hits. I'm taking the four elements of his book, TECHNIQUES OF THE SELLING WRITER and focusing a three hour module on them.
I've never taught a class before. I'm counting on my stage presence and my passion for the material to carry the day. That and I have exercises. And, by suggestion from Steven Harper-Piziks, there will be chocolate.
So, in order to organize my thoughts and get a handle on what I want to say on the subject, I'm writing out everything I can think of that I want to cover. Every facet of every nugget of every rich vein of writerly wisdom Swain presents in his awesome book. Oy. It's a lot, you know? Obviously, I'm not going to read what I've written by rote to the class, how boring! My hope is that once I blat it all out on the page, I can then isolate the key elements, and give myself an outline with discussion points, that I can follow when I'm lecturing.
And I have a chest cold. Bleh.
And what is up with Amazon.com not loading? I wanted to link to Swain's book, but no dice. Xmas rush, maybe? Okay, it's working now. And that reminds me. I have something to say about all this kindle, e-reader business. People keep saying, oh, electronic publishing will really take off when they finally come out with the right electronic reader. I say, balls. We don't need another e-reader. We've already got blackberries and pdas and cell-phones. There's no reason why those can't be used as e-readers, and they already exist and you don't have to fork over lots of money for a specialized gadget. The other problem with e-readers is that they still don't satisfy the wants and needs of people who prefer books. They're fine for those who don't mind reading from the screen, but then so is a laptop, pda, etc, etc. Those of us who want to read from the printed page are not going to like an e-reader, (no matter how nice the screen), any better than any of those other devices. You can't take it into the bathtub with you. You can't throw it across the room when it pisses you off.
No. E-reader is the answer to the wrong question. I"m going to do something very uncharacteristic here, and go out on a limb and give my own opinion -- about the future of publishing. E-publishers have a beautiful business model. No inventory, little overhead, purchaser anonymity. Three powerful things backing them up. (And I might add, the good ones offer great terms to their writers.) And what's in their way? Old fogies like me who'd much rather read on the page than the screen. And they already have the answer to that. Most of them offer their best-selling titles in Print on Demand editions which are expensive only in comparison to their downloads, but are comparable to trade paberbacks in the bookstore.
There's a machine that can create a perfect bound book and that machine costs about $5000 right now.
So here's my prediction: As time goes on, more and more people will be comfortable with the idea of reading on the screen and those people will download their books to their laptops, pdas, etc and be very happy and that will be the end of it for them. Those who prefer print, will a) have a binding machine in their home (because the retail price for the machine will drop below $500.) or they will go to Kinko's, and use their binding machine to print out the file they've downloaded from the e-bookseller, or, e-publishers will offer print editions at a much more nominal cost increase than they currently do. People's libraries will be electronic, we'll all have more storage space in our homes and print books, being inexpensive and easily obtained, and by nature, of less significance in and of themselves, will get tossed around like cheap whores -- lent, thrown out when no longer needed, etc. Which is exactly what we want if we care about distributing ideas far and wide.
So.
What do you think?
