The day that Steampunk changed my life

I am a huge fan of the internet. There are amazing and wonderful things to find there. LibraryThing is one of them. And one of the many interesting and wonderful things that you can be on LibraryThing is an Early Reviewer. An Early Reviewer is someone who signs up to request a copy of a book that is listed by one publisher or another through LibraryThing with the understanding that upon receipt and reading of that title, you will write a review of it on LibraryThing.

If you do not write reviews, you are less likely to get books. It’s a pretty simple formula, and one that I think works. The system is a good one and benefits the parties involved. At least, I believe that it does for now, as the list of titles grows every month, as does the list of publishers taking advantage of a little painless advertising and the potential for more word-of-web marketing. I’ve now received & reviewed 4 Early Reviewer titles. You’ll notice I don’t say books.

The Shadow Conspiracy II, edited by Phyllis Irene Radford & Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff and published by bookviewcafe.com (more on them later), is the very first eBook that I have ever read, and it was the title that I ‘won’ as an Early Reviewer. (I kind of like that you ‘win’ titles on ER. It is sort of like a game, really – you add your name to the seemingly endless list of names to request one or another or several different titles (you only get one title a month, so requesting a copy of any titles that you find interesting (in other words that you are likely to write on) is a good idea) and then you wait until the end of the month when you find out whether or not one will be sent your way. Fun!)

This collection of short stories in the Steampunk genre was also my first non-Mieville, non-graphic Steampunk reading. I’ve kind of avoided the literature. In the hands of Mieville, steam meets magic and world-building and that is intriguing, whereas a corset and a monocle and a few brass gears is pretty to look at, but not necessarily the stuff of good storytelling. I thought it would be a fun title, and a quick enough read (and, yes, I know, I read quickly as it is) and was happy to read that I’d won it.

Happily, I was completely blown away. I found the adventure and the technology and the social stuff and the storytelling (especially the storytelling) and the characters and the allusions entirely up my alley. The writing was energetic and lively. There is a lot of reference to historical persons and places and ideas (and I do intend to create a list of those allusions in this blog at some point) (Because I think it fun.) which may be off-putting to minds that are not so comfortable without all the facts to hand. I get it. I mean, I don’t experience it, but I comprehend and would then recommend keeping a list of names to check and stopping by here in a few days to read the list of allusions and follow the links to their own happy ends.

I was relieved to read not one romance. Not a single one. Adventure and rescue and flying ships and automata and Voudon and Lord Byron and The Nile, to be sure, but no idiotic seductions, no teenagers in love and not one piece of normalizing romantic advice. That alone would have been enough, but when you read of Galveston and of river travel and of airships and trains, well, you can imagine my delight.

Half of the stories follow male protagonists and half of them follow female protagonists. There is one story told through the words of three different people: a German girl, an English man and an African man raised in England from the age of 8, so that is the anomaly. It is called The Shadow of Kilimanjaro and is a story that left me (me!) absolutely silent for many minutes.

This is good episodic story telling. It is strong and specific and detailed and concise.

Not at all a surprise when you consider that the publisher of both volumes of The Shadow Conspiracy (and yes, the first one is now in my files) is BookViewCafe.com.

From their website:

Book View Café came together in March of 2008 around a group of authors (click here to see our complete author list) with a simple aim: to use the Internet to bring their work directly to their readers. It was already clear that a revolution was coming to the publishing industry and these authors wanted to help shape its course.

Working with a shoe-string budget and volunteer labor, but drawing on a collective century’s worth of experience in the publishing industry, they created the Book View Café website. Rather than just another clearing house for books online, they created a space where readers could browse and discover new authors and titles alongside current favorites. Aware that the Internet demands variety, the authors made sure that fresh fiction appeared on their front page every day, a feat made possible by the extensive list of material available to over twenty professional authors.

The Book View Café site officially launched in November of 2008. Since then the site has experienced a steady growth in readers and in author-members.

Did you read the author list? Did you? I did. More importantly, I read the side-bars and went to the different pages on the site and have now bought an eBook and will likely buy more from them. I am deeply impressed at the thoughtfulness of this site as well as the range of titles and genres available.

Used to be that I was relatively ambivalent about eBooks, feeling that they were useful for ridding libraries of the need to keep 17 copies of anything cluttering up the shelves, and perhaps saving the real paper for Real Literature. Between this experience and learning just how much authors can make selling their own works as eBooks (therefore giving the big finger to middle managers and other RealWorld evils), I am now sold.

For my birthday, I would like a used Nook Color, please. Thank you.

Next time: Allusions in The Shadow Conspiracy-s

How to start reading webcomics

As happens with every personally familiar train of thought, I blithely assume that everyone I know has experience with the same set of stories, comics, formats, media, etc., albeit under individually defined circumstances.

As happens with relative frequency about this sort of thing, I am wrong. I feel it important to acknowledge that I am friends with a wonderful woman who also suffers from this forgetfulness when it comes to other people not living with the same set of references. We call each other on it frequently and I’m glad to say that I rely on her to keep my sense of perspective fairly sharp.

(It should be here noted that I am almost always right about everything else in life, although my right-ness does not ever stand on the presumption of someone else’s wrong-ness.)

It always stalls me to realize that other people do not read webcomics every day. That there are people who have been quite happy in their lives without needing to consider the differences in the visual formats of film and paper, even when a film is made to mimic a particular graphic style (à la Sin City and Lord of the Rings). I find myself stammering the names of the same three or four webcomics in no particular order or relevance with the persistence of a Star Wars nerd protesting someone else’s ignorance of The Force: “But Yoda, I mean, Obi-Wan – how could Luke have succeeded at all without it?” Empty words to people with a different context.

Also, I’ve been thinking it would be fun to revisit some of titles I started reading wa-ay back in the summer of 2002, when the world changed forever, and I discovered Sinfest and Scary-go-Round.

I started reading Sinfest and Scary-go-Round in September of 2002 on the advice of a young woman with whom I’d made friends the previous spring. We’d been in an American poetry class together (which was brilliant fun – it was good to be in a place where I could call Whitman a pompous ass and share differently voiced readings of Dickinson and swim in the images of Wallace Stevens without feeling like I’d missed something and be okay with not understanding Howl – it was a class of learning, one of those that set a foundation for future comprehension) and she and her husband were gamers who had found an online source for games that were essentially rules with a set of cards that you bought and played with pieces that came from your own board games. They were good at the cultural possibilities of the Internet, and we were, as yet, not.

One of my biggest struggles at the time was remembering that Sinfest was with a .net, and Scary-go-Round was with a .com. The world before I discovered the purpose of Bookmarks. (Oddly – I’ve still not made good friends with delicious, even though it is so exactly up my alley.)

I have played a computer video game maybe all of 20 times in my life, or, to be more specific: in the 27 years since my mother first brought computer games into the house, I have played something requiring more skill than luck and also pushing more than maybe two buttons less than once a year. And yet, I read Ctrl-Alt-Del, Penny Arcade and Little Gamers like they were the very people who spoke to my soul.

Boy On A Stick And Slither became regular reading about this time, as well.

Finding one comic from another is a piece of cake in web-world, you just follow links that look good, and in 2002 and 2003, archives were just not that long as most of the titles started in the ‘90s. Do You Know How Much That Is Now???? It’s like a month of deliberate reading! Of the same title! Every Day! Madness, I tell you. I read Girl Genius from the beginning just last month, and I thought it would take forever and do you know that it isn’t even close to being done yet and there are Complications! ahead yet! Madness! Madness! That said, I have no idea how I found these pages anymore. None.

My memory tells me that it was about spring or summer of 2003 that I started reading Goats, which kept me happy for a good long time. My generally accepted pattern is to find a new title and then read ALL of it until I’m caught up. In 2003, that meant quite a few happy weeks with Goats. And then somehow there was Something Positive and then Queen of Wands.

Friendly Hostility I found sort of on a whim, I think, and then it was Sam and Fuzzy and MacHall (which, as it happens, makes me smile just to look at (and also distracts me to this day seeing as how I keep flipping over to read more of the archives of Threepanelsoul) (GAH)).

I had time during that time to build quite a reading list, including: Achewood, Diesel Sweeties, Cat and Girl, and Ph.D.

I know that I haven’t talked at all about what makes these fun for me to read, or how they’ve contributed to my sense of culture, art, language, community and story-telling. That’s a whole other set of blogs. And I’m just getting started talking about the titles that got me hooked; y’all don’t even know the rest yet.

I’ll get around to it.

Because I can talk. Really.