1st vs 3rd -- when POV becomes a storytelling issue

When I think about writing and craft, I break it down into sub parts.

There are grammar and punctuation rules -- important, but a low order concern in comparison.

There are style and clarity issues -- things like keeping it all in a consistent point of view and paying attention to the order of words in a sentence so that they are as precise in meaning as possible, often like cutting the fat.

Then there are what I think of as storytelling concerns -- these are the items that would be the same for an oral storyteller as they would for the writer: pacing, voice, use of description, and the awareness of how all of those things make the reader feel at any given moment in the story.

Recently, I've found myself in a situation where the choice between first person and third person point of view is no longer a style choice; it's become a storytelling issue.

I used to write everything in first person when I was a college student because -- duh -- I thought in first person. So writing first person was the moy easy choice. I suppose it helped that in college all of my narrators were spunky, eccentric, feminist, twenty-year-old women with a bit of a cruel streak when it came to sticking it to their ex-boyfriends. I suppose.

These pieces ended up being all about voice: how quirky could I make her voice? how intriguingly awful could I make her thoughts? (Because everyone loves to read about characters thinking the things we all think but are  too polite to say.) And I started to think of writing in the first person as easy because I just settled my writing-self right down in my stream of consciousness and typed away ... ahem, I meant the character's stream of consciousness.

But eventually, I got bored writing that same character and I wanted to branch out. But I still thought first person was the easiest, or at least the quickest means of pounding out a story. So when faced with a looming 8:00AM deadline for a completed short story, and not a word written on the page at 7:30 PM the night before, I wrote in first person because I needed all the speed I could get.

The story's gone through many drafts since, gotten shorter, gotten longer, gotten much longer, outlined it as a novel. I've toyed with what person I want to put it in, first or third, but always came back to first. First person sounded better because it was the way I'd originally written the draft, and you can't argue with original recipe.

Then I did something drastic: I rewrote the opening twice, without looking at the original. Once in third person, then in first.

And a magical thing happened. When I was no longer beholden to my previous draft -- or unduly influenced by it -- brand new bits of story popped up that I hadn't been expecting. Particularly in the third person version. [For purposes of clarification I will mention that this is not merely changing all the pronouns from I to she, but changing the location/distance of the narrator and the narrative techniques.]

This is the situation I mentioned at the beginning of the post where point of view stopped being a style choice and started being a storytelling choice.

The story I'd originally written had a very narrow scope of the things which the character thought or wanted to stop and tell us. I worked hard to excise things she would not think about from her first person narration. The third person story could (even though the narration is still close to the main character) employ many of the narrative techniques of storytelling: I can lightly drop in information and backstory without it feeling like a character spilling her guts to us unprompted. And by moving myself outside of her head, the rest of the world essentially bloomed around me. -- Told ya it was a magical thing that happened.

I challenge anyone to rewrite a story from the beginning without looking at the original (and then tell me what happens!) -- you don't have to change person, although that's helpful to get you out of the previous mindset, but you just can't look at the original. Has anyone else tried this -- what were your results? What tools or tests do you use to figure out what person to write a story in?


Photo credit: dogbomb on flickr

Ad of the Week

(for campaigners stopping by, I like to post what I've deemed the "ad of the week" on weekends. Sometimes funny, usually intriguing, and definitely the best of advertising that I'm privy to. I think ads are an under-appreciated form of storytelling [because they're so often abused by their makers], but they're storytelling nonetheless )

Friday: Link love + life

A quick hello to those of you who've arrived at Speak Coffee to Me via Rachel Harrie's Blog Campaign! If you've not yet joined, you have til the end of the month to do so here.  The rest of this post is relevant writing links, irrelevant links, an a few snips of news from life at large.

Ann Vandemeer steps down as editor of Weird Tales, releasing a formal announcement earlier this week.   Vandemeer has edited the magazine for several years now along with multiple anthologies. She's won a Hugo for her editing work and while there's only a handful of powerhouse sf/f editors out there, there's even fewer female editors -- so why is she stepping down?  Because Weird Tales has been bought by someone who wants to edit it himself. Okay, fine I guess. You buy a cool toy you want to play with it. I understand. And hey, if you've got lots of money and you want to run your own magazine, why not buy the longest running speculative magazine in North America? Guess it sure as heck beats starting from scratch. Vandemeer is magnanimous in her open announcement of resignation, but she makes it pretty clear that she didn't want to leave ... makes me wonder if she's feeling terribly magnanimous on the inside. Maybe under the new guy's direction the covers will get less eerie; the Ann Vandemeer covered always skeeved me out.

Best coffee jewelry EVER! 

Recently, while encountering a problem for an e small appliance I found my new favorite for instruction in a long list of don'ts: CAUTION: do not incinerate. Thanks. Because I generally burn all electronic devices I purchase rather than, you know, use them.

I totally want moo.com to hire me. For what, I'm not quite certain. But I would be awesome  as a Moo employee. I love the ethic, I love the product, I love the face which Moo presents to the world. I'm a creative thinker and doer (though I have no design education beyond a bunch of high school art classes and a couple college art classes which I really should have taken pass/fail). I'm a college writing teacher and that means I engage constantly in critical assessment and redrawn definition -- if my audience is confused the first time, I reach outside the box for a wacky-pants means of making understanding. Okay, admittedly, that may not be synonymous with "teacher" to everyone, but it is in my world. Love the visual and tactile and the world of words. People who have no artistic talent look at what I can do and tell me I should be an artist; people who make their livings doing art look at what I can do and pat me on the head: I know my limitations. I have basic web design skills; this means I can't build you a new look from scratch, but I  speak the language of those who could. I'm a good organizer. When I have a task and a deadline, I see it through to the end.

Did I just pitch myself on my blog where no one with a job to offer will ever likely read it? Oh yes, I did.

Newborn mammals are cute no matter what they are: sloths!

I bought the cats "indoor cat food" which differentiates itself from the regular stuff by the same brand as having 10% fewer calories and more hairball-fighting fiber. I mixed it with the remains of their old food, as per food-changing-instructions, and they managed to eat ALL the old food and leave the new stuff. Picky bitches. Actually, I'm more amazed that they could isolate individual kibbles than put out at their eating habits.

On Facebook this week, people realized how many friends they had who lived on the east coast as status messages regarding the earthquake flooded personal news streams.  Meanwhile, Californian's snickered ... but they may have gotten snobby too fast. Because when an earthquake hits the East Coast unexpectedly, it's not the physical destruction that you have to worry about, it's the naked men with knives.

I'm reading Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke for the first time ever -- and I'm loving it! (no spoilers, plz! I still have another 100 pages to go) Clarke has such great, simple prose. As a writer, I'm totally in love with his style! That's not to say his sentences are all short, blunt, and uncomplicated. Not at all. The sentences themselves are often complicated in construction, and the man knew how to use a semicolon. But they stay clean and unadorned with poetic quirks that could trip up the reader, especially as Clarke is describing some mentally complicated situations such as explaining all the different ways of orienting and reorienting one's sense of "down" in a low gravity situation. That sort of imagining and reimagining of space had me thinking that this narrative would make a great film using today's technology and a sense of space and inversion akin to that we saw in Inception. And lo and behold! IMDB.com says there's a Rendezvous with Rama film due out in 2013! ... and apparently Morgan Freeman, of all people, is pushing for the project to happen/finish.

Post Secret is coming out with an APP this September!

I wrote several secrets and sent them in years ago to Post Secret. They didn't make the website or books (as far as I know). I wrote a few more -- real secrets this time not just the "barely a secret" items I had first sent).  But I never sent them.  I kept them in my apartment. And then I moved them. And now, I don't know where they are. I wish I knew. Because I would send them. Their absence both scares and excites me.

Edited to add: oh and if you were following from last weeks' linklove+life post, know that the foot is slowly getting better. I'm still annoyed by it, at times and it lets me know if I stress it out with too much walking, but it is much, much better.

OK GO + MUPPETS

I've waited all week for this video to drop! Love love love it!

August Dump

You would think, living in a college town in a student-heavy neighborhood, that graduation weekend would be the time with the greatest amount of trash being dumped. But it is, by far, August that holds that title around here.

Toward the end of July the apartment complex management starts ordering large dumpsters which are deposited haphazardly around the parking lot.  Every couple of days, for the entire month of August, a trailer comes, drops off a new dumpster and takes away the old one. Usually, these dumpsters catch on fire at least once over the summer. So far that hasn't happened, although it always leaves a peculiar smell of not-quite-wood-smoke lingering in the air when it does burn.

This year, for some reason, the prime location for depositing these dumpsters appears to be below my bedroom window. Occasionally there are even two at once! hanging out down there. I've learned to park my car farther away than normal (1) so that the truck won't back into it during pickup/delivery and (2) so that I do not jump up to check on the condition of my car every time I hear breaking glass.  I hear breaking glass a half-dozen times daily. And a few more nightly.

Then there are the scavengers.

There's always a few homeless guys who hop in and out of the regular sized dumpsters during the year in search of empty pop bottles and beer cans that they can collect deposits on. But August is the true season of the scavenger.  Every time I look out my window, there's another person standing in the long dumpster, pulling things back out.

Some of them are looking for flea market items -- they pull out whole furniture that can obviously be repaired or re-purposed. I saw someone load what looked like an entire Christmas's worth of children's toys out of the dumpster and into a minivan.  All I can say is I hope someone lysols that shit before they give it to a toddler to stick in his mouth.

Some are looking for easy metal to grab and sell back to the scrap yards -- they most often pull up with a pick up truck bed full of metal bed frames and garden fences and once I saw one full of white wire Christmas lawn deer.

Some, like the guy currently making his way through the dumpster below, are some combination of scavenger, scrapper, archaeologist, and handyman.  This guy showed up with his own canvas bag of tools. Tools which appear to be kept clean and orderly. He immediately went for the large television set lying on top of the heap, but didn't take the TV out. He instead, cracked open the back and gutted it, pulling out components and taking what he wanted and putting back in what he didn't. He didn't rip or break, but cut, clipped, and unscrewed, then delicately set down outside the bin the large components he wanted to keep. He's found some other things he wants to keep.  Bits of metal, a bunch of wires, some green computer circuitry which looks broken from here, a plastic drawer from a Sterilite tower, and the base of a guitar stand.  He's spent the past half hour meticulously deconstructing the bed from a sleeper-sofa so that he can pull the bed part from the dumpster, open up the folded bed on the pavement, remove the mattress and toss it back in.  He is, oddly enough, keeping the mattress pad as well as the metal frame.

I feel like I should go out an post a sign when this guy's gone: dumpster has been scavenged in the past 4-10 hours, guaranteed. Try elsewhere.

Rachel Harrie's third writer's platform building campaign

Rachel Harrie's third writer's platform building campaign started this past Monday and runs until October 31. (Formerly known as a "crusade" Harrie has thankfully dropped that word and all its religious connotations which she never meant to invoke.)

The instructions are somewhat long and tangled, but once you've signed up, you take the time to follow all the other campaigners and spend time every week hopping around to the blogs of those in your "group" helping to increase their traffic but more importantly giving them feedback on their posts and ideally finding several writers who you'd like to follow after the campaign is over.

This spring's campaign, which I participated in, was insanely popular. Sign up for this round lasts through the end of August, so better hurry over if you're interested!

Workshop = you - your voice

Agent Kristin Norton has a short and sweet little post up on Pub Rants about voice being workshopped out of students. To which I wholeheartedly agree. When I left college I had a super-quirky but non-functional writer voice. Which the MFA has since beat out of me.

(I should of course admit that the voice I was left with was highly functional -- something I did not have before -- if not terribly interesting.)

I've also since realized that the MFA made me get super distant from my characters (and I used to love love love to be right up in their heads) because I had an instructor or two right at the beginning of my study who loved to dissect the character's neuroses and therefore the author's.  And yeah, okay, so she was normally right on the money with which neuroses my characters held were made up and which were my own.  But that sort of detective work -- and namely, announcing that detective work to my peers -- made me not write characters like me.

I got super-distant from my characters. And then I got despondent. I tried, flailed. Thought about focusing solely on nonfiction without the veil of fiction to obscure what I was saying, then hit on the notion of folklore as the lens to focus my fiction writing through. Thus my big break.

While folklore in the MFA workshop was its own sort of uphill battle, no one stopped to suggest that it was a poignant narrative and if you made it up then all the more poignant.

So I dropped the closeness of my narrative voice in favor of the fairy tale voice. I dropped the quirky wondrous sarcastic voice that had been my signature as an undergrad. A voice that would give me my first fiction publication. And after a 2-3 year hiatus, only now am I slowly attempting to regain that voice.  But certainly not in all  of my works.

Voice is something I struggle dearly with. My writing teachers and peers like to tell me that "I think you've found your voice" whenever they see the writing come together for me.

I've been told, so far, that I have "found my voice" on three vastly different projects. Possibly four -- my memory is faulty.

I've also been told that my voice often waffles within a single piece. Little wonder, all things considered.

I've been told my quirky voice was "it"; that my fairy tale voice was "it"; that my contemporary folklore voice waffled too much but my high fantasy voice was spot on, (read: "it").

Is this a matter of an author having a "soft ear" and therefore being able to pick up many voices? Is it a matter of my own fear closing off avenues? Or is it simply workshop workshopping the voice out of individuals in favor of craft? (which if you read the linked post above,  you'll see is no bad thing so long as craft is learned and voice is regained).  I don't know. I really don't know. But I'll keep trying on new voices for as long as I can. Writing voices fascinate me, much like speaking with accents/dialects fascinate me. Please, don't ask those who knew me in middle school about the Irish accent I adopted after watching The Secret of Roan Inish; the accent came easily to me, and I used it to annoy the crap out of everyone around me.

Pepper Confidential

There's always plenty to choose from in August at the farmer's market in Michigan. I walked off with peppers, summer squash, a pound of green beans, celery, tomatoes, more tomatoes, peaches, and blueberries -- I was completely weighed down by the time I left and I think I spent only $17 or $18 on the lot of it.

The table I grabbed the summer squash from was running a pick-3 deal and so I grabbed some adorable tomatoes that looked like baby watermelons and then looked around for something else to get.  My options were, unfortunately, limited.

They had green beans, but I already had a pound of them in my bag. They had okra, which I won't eat unless it's breaded and fried. They had more tomatoes, but I'd already made a collection of red, green, orange and yellow tomatoes and, geez, there's only so many tomatoes a girl can take on even when she likes tomatoes.

So I grabbed a tub of peppers. Peppers are always useful, I thought.

Except I have no idea what kind of peppers I actually grabbed.

At the time, I only saw their tops and stems. And in the past I've purchased these translucent-ish somewhat green almost purple bell peppers at farmer's market. I thought I was getting those. When I got home and pulled them out of the bag and saw their entire shape ... I don't think I got bell peppers.

But what the hell are these things? No two of them are shaped alike. And I'm a little bit nervous to expose their secret peppery identities by just chomping down on one.

Edited to add: I poked around on the internet and found a visual guide to peppers which has led me to believe that these are in fact banana peppers. Great. Now I have to figure out what to do with like seven of them.

Ad of the Week

For the record, I wouldn't mind having all my purchasing decisions vetted by twenty-seven latin lovers.

Friday: Link love + life

This post is exactly what the title implies: I give a bunch of love to links, hopefully make a few witty, scathing, or adoring comments about said links, and drop in a few little anecdotes about my life. You've been warned.

There's a mild bit of buzz in the sf/f community about NPR's list of 100 Top Science Fiction, Fantasy Books. To which I say, meh.  I've not read the entire list but I've read a lot of it and I'll probably read more of it (intentionally) but I'll probably die before I read all of it.  Okay, let's drop the scary mortality-thoughts b/c they totally screw with my twenty-something brain.

There was apparently an open voting period which I did not participate in but many of my friends and acquaintances did.  They complained that there was no write-in option for books that did not make the NPR short list for voting. They claimed there were obvious oversights -- Lois Bujold McMaster for one -- and that the list was skewed toward science fiction and away from fantasy (which is always hilarious in my eyes because fantasy now outsells sci-fi but sci-fi is still considered more "classic" and therefore more "literary."  Ah well, that's fine, if I live long enough I'm certain I'll see fantasy move closer toward the accepted canon anyway.  And there I go with more scary mortality-thoughts.

There's much spatting going on in internet circles about who is and isn't on that list. Me? I'm not going to engage in any spats. Perhaps you have to be a cog in machine of academic standardization before you realize that any "canon" is all arbitrary and none of it matters. Perhaps that is the greatest argument for attending grad school. One way or another, it's just a list.  Moving on.

I sprained my foot this past weekend and the resultant injury has colored my life for the past six days.

Yes, sprained my foot not my ankle.  My ankles are surprisingly hearty, having been rolled many times during years of field hockey practice and never injured until trying to catch the bus to the train station for the 2009 AWP Conference. Odd. Anyway.  Missing the last step of the flight has caused a week of sitting, elevating, and wrapping with an Ace bandage.

The cats, btw, love the Ace bandage. They find the wrapping/unwrapping fascinating. And the tiny little metal clips beg to be batted to the floor -- and they have been, repeatedly, even though they've only left my foot for a few hours total over the past week.

Oh, and the cats think that all the pillows i'm placing on the table/desk/etc for my foot are there for them.  Of course.

Stay true.

Margaret Atwood has been announced as the 2012 AWP Conference Keynote Speaker. This makes three out of four years where the keynote speaker has straddled the lines of literary and the Other for an organization where most of the members (if not the official organization) is conflicted in its feeling toward comic books and speculative fiction.  Sure they could say that Art Spiegleman wrote in the exciting new vein of the "graphic novel" and that Michael Chabon was a literary maverick who indulged our interests in the supernatural, but inviting Margaret Atwood to be THE speaker should be a brilliant slap in the face meant to wake up those who do not believe genre can be literary.  Don't believe me? Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale just made number 22 on that top 100 all time science fiction, fantasy list from NPR.

I always find it strange that literary types claim to have "forgotten" that Vonnegut and Orwell and Le Guin and Atwood are science fiction.

I had thought about going to the 2012 AWP conference just because it will be in Chicago, a city which is within easy traveling distance and, thanks to my brief stint living in the windy city, easy for me to navigate.  Even in fucking February.  Burr.  With Atwood as the keynote ... I think I really will have to go. 

On the Odyssey Workshop blog, bestselling author Carrie Vaughn discusses how she knows when a story will be a novel or a short work.

100 Year Star Ship project + conference.  Need I say more?

I helped plan part of a bridal shower this past weekend. And frankly, I fail to see the point.  Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have done it for my friend and really excited to make super cute flower vases, except for the part where I was carrying a giantassbox, missed the last step and fell funny on my foot/ankle resulting in much pain and limited mobility -- but that could have happened for any reason.  But I fail to see the point of bridal showers nowadays.

My friend was astonished and flattered at the gifts she got.  She didn't expect or desire the level of gifting that occurred.  She was afraid that by inviting people to both the shower and the wedding she's making them feel like they should provide two gifts. Of course, there are people who feel like they should celebrate the union of two young people and if that means purchasing Corning Ware and Pyrex sets, then so be it.  But she and her fiance are not nineteen-year-olds who've never moved away from home.  They both have places and kitchens and kitchenware of their own.  Do we need to continue the social practice of giving showers? Particularly I ask, do we really need to gather all our female relatives for three hours of small talk, mediocre food, patronizing games, and gift opening wherein we speculate voraciously over how many ribbons the bride will break thereby determining how many children she will bear in this union?

I find the whole "bridal thing" dubious.  And I am in favor of not having one should I ever find myself in the throes of imminent marriage.  Or at least I'd rather have a co-ed "open house" rather than an all-chick shower.

Goat + duct tape + Chuck Wendig.  If that was not enough to entice you (and it should be) consider clicking through to his writing advice as well as the equally crude and wondrous birth and life of a novel.

I've realized that I have to change most of what I do this semester when I go back to teaching composition.  Okay, not most of what I do, but the big projects.  Partly because the textbook was ordered for me and the textbook supports either a gender studies or a cultural studies approach rather than a genre studies with a pop culture studies flavor.  That's okay.  Attempting a gender/cultural bent will make me more marketable. It will also be good for the students. A nice dose of spinach. I'm not entirely sold, eh?   Guess it's time to cultivate multiple talents other than teaching comp.

Ira Glass on what nobody tells beginners:
 
Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Miracle Whip wants to give you $25,000 for your wedding or divorce -- so long it's a Miracle Whip kind of romance.

And lastly, take a look at the night sky tonight.  The moon and Jupiter are teaming up for a particularly bright Jupiter tonight.  Oddly enough, I dreamed last night that I could see Jupiter.  Not Jupiter how it really is, but a nice little graphic of Jupiter with all its rings pasted onto the night sky.

Addendum: The Hugo Awards Ceremony will be streamed live tomorrow (Saturday) starting at 8:00 PM Pacific Time.

The Green Album

I am weak with anticipation. Seriously. Great artists cover muppet songs in their own ... idiom. *love* Besides, who doesn't want to see OK GO + Muppets? Talk about a youtube sensation in the making.

In the meantime, you can sneak a listen to some of the songs, like Andrew Bird doing "It Ain't Easy Bein Green"

Love to hate

Recently, my favorite listserve has been going on something of a bender. I missed the original post/question that sparked the fire, but the resultant damage is wide ranging, and it all has to do with literary vs. genre fiction or, perhaps more accurately, bestsellers being the shit-novels we love -- or, in this case, what we love to hate.

I'm certain you can think of at least one bestselling novel that you think is absolutely abysmally written. For me, I immediately think of ... well, that wouldn't be prudent to name. But needless to say, there are novels which I wouldn't put on my list of "shit novels I love to hate which are bestsellers" which other people proclaim need The Top Spot on said list.

And then somewhere along the line the conversation devolved into people arguing for the need for literary merit within the world of genre, and those arguing that pleasure reading needs no other merit than pleasure itself and ... holy cow, you know what? I stopped paying attention the first time the phrase "literary vs. genre" was thrown around.

When it comes to people debating "literary vs. genre," I will not tell anyone to get the hell over it because it took me a really freaking long time to get the hell over it.  Being a lover of fantasy and sci fi and romance who was actively engaged in an MFA and desperately trying to hide her genre-identity from the community like a gay teen in small town Texas, probably didn't help.

But let me say this: life has completely changed since I've gotten the hell over it.

It's like arriving in nirvana. I know that no matter what I do, someone is going to thumb their nose at me, probably because they're ignorant of the other side of "literary vs. genre." And I really don't give a fuck, a flying fuck, or a flying fuck shot out of a cannon.*

And, if I'm to follow my father's theory of life: If you're not pissing someone off, then you're not doing something right.

The whole debate isn't actually about writing (I say); it's about attitude. If your attitude is that writers have an audience that they need to appease, then you come from one mindset.  And if your attitude is that a writer has peers that should be appeased and impressed, then you come from another mindset.  Realize which you are, and accept that or change it -- either will do so long as your happy with the end results.

I no longer fume when I think of my MFA peers, nor do I brood when I think of how my genre work will be received by them.  Nor do I write "literary realism" and think about its merit vs its financial unsubstantiality. I do what I want because I want to do it. I've also come to realize that the biggest bestest literary markets will publish genre work if you coat it in chocolate, and the same goes for genre markets. If you mash the beets into chocolate cake, no one knows that they're eating vegetables for dessert.

And so I will once again not tell anyone to get the hell over it, I will merely recommend the health benefits, mental and physical, to letting it be and following what you love regardless of opinions. And that in not making your own opinion widely known on the "vs" debate (ahem, attempting to trump other opinions with your own), you save yourself a lot of stress and a lot of wear on your treads.

*Kelly Link story reference = 10 points for making reference, 100 points for identifying Kelly Link story to which "flying fuck shot out of a cannon" refers.  And another 10 points for choosing an author who is championed by both literary types and genre types without the other types actually knowing that she's being championed.  But I'm certain Link knows, and that she's quietly smiling and enjoying a glass of wine while everyone else runs up their blood pressure.
---
Image credit: Skley on flickr

Stupid Computer Tricks

Did you know you can rotate the orientation of your screen by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Arrow Key?  I didn't.  Until my cat rolled across the keyboard.

This fun new way of viewing the world appeared while I was attempting to watch a movie on my computer.  And it was made more awkward by the fact that I was using the touch pad to navigate at the time.  The directionality of the touch pad changed with the orientation.  That is, when I moused left across the touch pad (moving my finger from center to short side), it moved to the left of my super long computer screen ... except that meant that my finger was moving 90 degrees counter clockwise of the path of the cursor.  If you didn't follow that, just know that it took some wonky extra hard thinking to re-learn how to mouse.

Ad of the Week Loser

Reason Number One why the people who made this ad -- no, no, no, the men who made this ad totally lose:  The point of the giant purse is not to carry more books because we want to carry more books.  The point of the giant purse is as a fashion accessory which is on trend.  (read: trendy, stylish, cute in the eyes of other trendy and stylish women)

Reason Number Two why the men who made this ad totally lose: no one, and I mean no one, who doesn't work in the news industry carries two newspapers at once.

Reason Number Three why the men who made this ad totally lose: once you get past the point of the giant purse being it's fashion forwardness, you come to the function of the giant purse.  And no woman carries a giant purse so that she can carry around her library with her.  She does it so she can carry her wallet, phone, keys, makeup, spare brush, a snack for later, pens papers, the memos from work, the thing she has to mail at the post office, umbrella, sweater for when it gets cold, a change of clothes for when she stays over at her boyfriend's -- or if this is a mommy bag, a change of clothes for when the kid inevitably spills something all over himself.

No one, not even a bibliophile like me, carries multiple books, newspapers, and magazines at once.

I like ereaders.  I think they're kinda cool.  But this commercial failed miserably.

Besides, if you're gonna carry all that stuff in your purse anyway, then what's another few ounces to throw in a paperback?

Author Identity

As a follow up to the identity post from last week -- well, it's less a "follow up" and more like "tangentially related content I found recently and thought I would share with you" -- this post from Writer Unboxed on author identity and social media. They ask a couple writers about how they handle their social media presence as authors, and post links to a handful of other writers writing on the same thing.

Plot Device

Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

Your User Name, Handle, SN, @you, or -- gasp! -- real name

I've been thinking a lot lately about user identity and the history of the internet. This started when, on Facebook, I was having a "who the f are you?" moment.

You know the moment I'm talking about.  A tiny square photo pops up in your news stream -- so n so has changed their profile picture -- except the picture is (a) too small (b) a cartoon or (c) of their dog and the name that goes with the picture is no help in figuring out who the f is this person that I friended once upon a time?  Usually, this is when I realize that said "friend" has gotten married and changed her last name.  If said "friend" really was a friend, she'd throw us all a bone and keep her profile as First Name (Maiden Name) Married Name instead of just posting her legal name up there.

But this most recent who the f are you? moment was different.  My friend had not gotten married.  She'd just changed her facebook profile from her first and last name to her first and middle name and changed her picture to a cartoon character.  Now I don't know if you know all of your friends' middle names, but for me, this move pretty much secured her anonymity ... until I poked around in her profile a bit and figured out who she was by pairing what was there with what I legitimately knew of my real life friend.  But I doubt she was hiding from me. But she did manage to remove the ability of a new casual acquaintance to find her easily on facebook.

I'm intrigued by this move to recapture anonymity.

Okay, I don't believe anonymity is possible on the internet anymore. If someone really wants to find you and puts resources into it (time, money, McGee from NCIS), they will find you.  Yes, I "lock" my facebook profile, but really I feel like that's much the same as locking my car door; it's a deterrent, but if someone wants to get inside, they'll find a way. I do not rage about this or against this, I just see it as the way it is.  Speaking of which, I should be getting a background check any day now for the new job I'm starting -- hello, background check company!  (Because really, if they don't end up here, then they haven't even Googled me.)

But all that aside, I'm amused and intrigued. There's been a movement over the past five years to identify yourself truthfully on the internet, particularly if you're attempting to reach out and contact people or do business with those people. There's plenty of harping on authors who think they can build a platform using a handle and publishing under a different name -- no one will be able to put the two together!

When I started this blog in 2006, I did so under the name "SpeakCoffee" because that's what you did. The internet was still a scary place where smart people did not give out their real name. Now we give out our real names all the time and we call it branding.

When I first got in the internet in 1998, no one and I mean no one, logged in using their real name.  No one set up an email address using their real name (unless work assigned you one).  Everyone out there was joecool19987 or missgiggles3789 or shopgirl or NY152.  Then there was a push toward "having a professional email address" which I guess moved over into having a "professional" online persona.  Then began the slow realization that one should behave on the internet as one behaves in real life.

Actually, no, that realization is still arriving.  Before the "behave as you do in real life" notion started (and it's almost, but not quite taken hold yet), there was the notion that you should be PC, polite, and therefore not yourself on the internet. Which I believe is an extremist reaction to the kind of cruelty and stupidity that was born from people thinking they were completely anonymous.  There's a reason why hangmen and Klan members wear masks: anonymity makes us think it's okay to do things that are not okay.

Today, I'm less afraid of cyber stalkers (the great 90s fear) and more afraid of offending someone online -- because while real life conversational gaffs can be forgotten, the internet is forever.

That's a phrase I first heard on the Taleist, and it stuck with me because it really sums it all up:  "The internet is forever."  Not that long ago, the net was an capricious thing.  Now you see it, now it's gone.  Websites could come and go with the click of a mouse.  Links and content, gone.  Now Big Brother is watching.  *ahem, Google*  There are archival bots and crawlers, most benign some not, trolling the internet and archiving all the data they find.  Just because you take it down, doesn't mean it's gone.  And if it's still out there, then it's harder to be forgotten.

Sure, you can "lock" things, but the truth is that if you don't know how to pick locks, how can you trust your own security?

So the advice is to consider everything you publish online to be delivered to every living soul (and a few dead ones).

Coincidentally, Allison posted something recently on this topic while I was starting to think about the history of how we view our online identity.  (And for the record, I started writing this post because I wanted to marvel at the fact that in less than 15 years, we'd gone from wanting to be totally anonymous to wanting to be totally personal on the net. And on occasion, too personal.)

Allison got into the notion of being real vs. being a "professional." The lists of dos and don'ts Allison refers to are arbitrary, and she calls the list makers out on that. I'm going to hold with the idea that the uber-PC, be super-polite, be a professional attitude is still an extremist response to the major jerkyness of many individuals who thought they could use the "anonymity" of the internet to be mean, cruel, stupid, and vicious. Of course, being "unprofessional" reflects badly on the jerks in their real lives because the "anonymity of the internet" has become less like the hangman's mask, and more like a tulle veil.

Earlier in this post, I brought up the notion of behaving on the internet as you would in real life -- and I think that is the place we need to move toward. Not a list of sanitized rules, and not a Lord of the Flies free-for-all. Just a simple question: Would you do this in real life? Would you say these things in real life? Would you pose for everyone the way you're posing in that photo?

If the answer is yes, then rock on.

If not, then there's a bigger psychological question that needs to be asked: Why do you feel the need to adopt multiple personas/personalities? and can you find a safer way of doing so if that's what you need?

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The photo at the top of the post is not mine.  (Photo credit: abooth202 from flickr.)  Apparently you can get a mug printed with all of your twitter friends icons on it.  Seems kinda sweet.  And kind of pointless in real life as icons keep changing, but on a coffee blog with a post about internet identity it totally rocks!