Be fair to each other: Copyright lessons from John Green

 Topics in Writing  No Responses »
May 032013
 

This is probably one of the best and honest conversations about the mess that is copyright law. Not surprisingly, it’s a John Green video. Someone nominate this guy for president because seriously, he sees the world as it should be and then does something about it. I love you, John Green. There. I said it. My husband already knows and after six years he’s come to terms with it.

As I have said before in a previous post on copyright, “I personally believe one of the foundation tenants of the blogosphere (and to some degree, the internet) is to inspire and share.” We are a society of thinkers and creators and I love that we can be inspired by something and then we go out and create something brand new based on how that first thing made us feel. That does not mean, of course, that I think it’s ok to steal someone else’s work and call it your own. I just believe in inspiration. John Green says it better, of course. So check it out.

From John’s video:

“The most important things is that the internet continue to be vigilant, which don’t worry, it will, that we try to be fair to each other, and that we never let copyright law make us afraid to create.”

 

Friday Ephemera, 7/29/11 Edition

 Friday Ephemera  6 Responses »
Jul 292011
 
Steampunkness
  • Christie’s is auctioning the only known pair of Singing Bird Pistols from 1820. The pistols are gorgeous and would look fantastic on my steampunk costume. Whoops, too bad I don’t have $5 million dollars. Still, they are beautiful.
Books and Writing and Publishing – Oh my!
All Things YA
Social Media
Presents! Contests!
  • Dystopian Divas is giving away a signed copy of Andrew Smith’s The Marbury Lens. Holy horses guys, if you haven’t had the absolute creeptastic pleasure of reading The Marbury Lens, you are so missing out. Go win the book so you can be thoroughly creeped out too!
This Week on Wicked & Tricksy
Geek Stuff

P is for People I Admire

 Awesome Nerd Things, Blogfest, Music, Videos  5 Responses »
Apr 192011
 

There are, of course, a lot of people I admire. From bloggers to writers to people I have known across the years. I can’t list them all here, but I wanted to share a couple with you. I don’t think this list could ever be complete ever because there is so much I admire about everyone I know. These are just people who have recently touched me in some way and because of the nature of a public blog, these are not people I know in real life.

1. John Green

While I have always known I wanted to write, it was actually John Green who convinced me I wanted to write YA. Before I discovered the Vlogbrothers and Nerdfighters, I would never have considered writing YA because I still thought YA was like it was when I was a kid. (It’s so not.) When I saw John Green writing these amazing stories (Looking for Alaska was my first) and empowering young adults and young-adults-at-heart to change their world, I was floored. THIS was what I wanted to do. It was through John Green that I fell in love with social media and knew that I too wanted to help change the world, but more than that, I wanted to help empower young people to change their world too. Thanks John Green, for everything.

I cried a little in the car after I met John Green. I’m so not cool, but I did manage to hold it together when I was talking to him. I am kind of proud of that. If Lydia hadn’t been with me though I would have made a giant fool of myself. He was charming and nervous and very funny :-) The kids in the audience were all fully star-eyed. It was the neatest signing I’ve ever been to.

2. Courtney Summers, Elizabeth Scott, Melina Marchetta, and Margaret Atwood

You would think that these three amazing women wouldn’t have much in common, aside from being authors that is. Maybe you could draw some similarities between Elizabeth and Courtney and maybe Melina, but Margaret Atwood? Well, the thing they have in common is that they write powerful books about powerful women. They, themselves, are inspiring, powerful women. I love picking up books by these four women because they don’t have it in them to write two dimensional characters. They don’t have it in them to not change the color of the world when they write. I am moved and won over and damaged and put back together every time I read one of their books. They are so special in different ways, and yet these four women are my role models in the writing world. I’d give my left arm, and maybe my right one too, to be even a quarter as wonderful as these women. If they joined forces with John Green I think the world would explode.

WITH AWESOME.

Margaret Atwood is my favorite writer of all time. I’ve read a lot of her books (but not all, I’m working on it! She’s written like 13 novels and 30 books of short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry!) and none of them sucked. NONE. And truth is, she is 72 years old and she put out her latest book in 2009, The Year of the Flood, a crazy companion novel to Oryx and Crake. It’s dystopian but it is also so much more than that. I don’t know how to describe it. World changing? Absolutely game changing. And she went on tour. How many authors do you know who are 72 and still kicking everyone else’s ass at game changing fiction?

God, she just blows me away. I want to be on a book tour in my 70s, writing dystopians that scare the shit out of everyone.

“Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.” – Margaret Atwood

My English teacher from 1955, run to ground by some documentary crew trying to explain my life, said that in her class I had showed no particular promise. This was true. Until the descent of the giant thumb, I showed no particular promise. I also showed no particular promise for some time afterwards, but I did not know this. A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. If I had not been ignorant in this particular way, I would not have announced to an assortment of my high school female friends, in the cafeteria one brown-bag lunchtime, that I was going to be a writer. I said “writer,” not “poet;” I did have some common sense. But my announcement was certainly a conversation-stopper. Sticks of celery were suspended in mid-crunch, peanut-butter sandwiches paused halfway between table and mouth; nobody said a word. One of those present reminded me of this incident recently — I had repressed it — and said she had been simply astounded. “Why?,” I said. “Because I wanted to be a writer?” “No,” she said. “Because you had the guts to say it out loud.” _Margaret Atwood

3. Vi Hart

I am a recreational mathemusician currently living on Long Island, NY.I love music that is fun, and I love music that is interesting, but above all I love music that is beautiful. I prefer writing for real, classical instruments, because of the added emotion and interpretation a performer adds to each unique performance.

I like most creative activities that involve making a lot of noise, mess, or both. Aside from composing, I love improvising on various instruments, drawing, sculpting, and other methods of making things. My main hobby is mathematics, with special interests in symmetry, polyhedra, and surreal complexity. This usually manifests as collaborative research in computational geometry and other areas of theoretical computer science, or as mathematical art. I think the human brain is incredible and strange, so I have developed a great interest in dreaming and consciousness. As a result, I am a trained hypnotist and a lucid dreamer. The human body is pretty neat as well, so I enjoy dancing and judo. I always love to learn new things—variety is the food of creativity!

Vi Hart has such an amazing way of looking at life. I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t do math. I can’t! I don’t understand it and have never been able to do more than add and subtract, anything more that than requires an excel spreadsheet where I know how to build formulas and organize ideas.

But I love numbers and the magical properties of math. I like math theories. So when I discovered Vi I was kind of in love, not just with the way she could take math and throw in some snakes on a plane and viola! I’m counting in whole new ways, but because she has this wonderful three-dimensional way of looking at the world, rearranging it, and handing it out in pieces for the rest of us to marvel at. Every time I watch one of her videos I end up saying things like, “I had no idea this was the world I live in.”

3. ADELE

I only discovered ADELE less than 24 hours ago, and already I can’t stop thinking about her. My friend Lydia IMed me last night and told me she’d found my British doppelganger. It’s true, ADELE and I look similar, except that she is glamorous and has a voice so passionate it will rip right through you and leave you bore through and emptied out. Wherever you see people talking about her, especially on YouTube, you will find a near constant raging battle about her weight. She’s gorgeous, and yet she’s very different from your typical pop star body type. There are a lot of comments like, “She’s got a beautiful voice even though she’s fat!” And these are supposed to be compliments. And yet there are so many people coming to the conversation who set things straight – body size has nothing to do with it. She’s beautiful, her voice is beautiful. No autotuning here.

via Rolling Stone: Adele on her weight: “My life is full of drama and I won’t have time to worry about something as petty as what I look like,” she tells Rolling Stone contributing editor Touré. “I don’t like going to the gym. I like eating fine foods and drinking nice wine. Even if I had a really good figure, I don’t think I’d get my tits and ass out for no one.”

But Adele has no beef with other female recording artists who choose to flaunt their bodies. “I love seeing Lady Gaga’s boobs and bum,” she says. “I love seeing Katy Perry’s boobs and bum. Love it. But that’s not what my music is about. I don’t make music for eyes. I make music for ears.”

She also has an alter ego she uses to pump herself up, called Sasha Carter – a composite of Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce and June Carter. “I was about to meet Beyoncé,” she says, “and I had a full-blown anxiety attack. Then she popped in looking gorgeous, and said, ‘You’re amazing! When I listen to you I feel like I’m listening to God.’ Can you believe she said that?” Later, “I went out on the balcony crying hysterically, and I said, ‘What would Sasha Fierce do?’ That’s when Sasha Carter was born.”

When I watch this first performance, my arms break out in goosebumps. The way I physically react to her songs is astonishing. I have never been so moved by a performer before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qemWRToNYJY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYEDA3JcQqw

N is for Nerdfighter

 Awesome Nerd Things, Blogfest, Videos  17 Responses »
Apr 162011
 

I am a Nerdfighter.

I am going to tell you about being a Nerdfighter because I am betting that at least 98% of my audience are Nerdfigthers and just don’t know it yet. I think it is one of the most positive and affirming forces of nature in the universe and I love spreading the word of Nerd.

But there is a lot to know about being a Nerdfighter and a lot of history to catch up on. It is a lot like coming in to the third season of LOST and trying to pick up all the nuances, except that you don’t really need a Wikipedia site to get you caught up on Nerdfighteria. You just need me and about 800 words. So whenever you see a word highlighted, that’s a link, probably to a YouTube video because a lot of Nerdfighteria exists on YouTube, but not all are videos.

What is a Nerdfighter? Do you fight nerds?

No! There is no nerd fighting involved! Nerdfighters are actually nerds who fight against World Suck. Nerdfighters are an army of the smartest and most passionate people on the internets. Alone it might seem like we can’t possibly change the world, but 100,000 of us can do amazing things.

What is world suck?

Just what it sounds like. Anything and anyone who creates suck in the world or encourages others to promote world suck.

Who started this crazy movement?

That would be YA author John Green (That would be the Michael L. Printz award winning author, John Green) who you might know from such books as Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, and his equally cool younger brother Hank Green. They have a YouTube channel called Vlogbrothers and they were the ones who first started fighting back against World Suck and the rest of us jumped on board to help. That’s kind of how Nerdfighters came to be. I’m proud to say I’ve been following Vlogbrothers since their first year, though not from the very beginning.

Here is a playlist of videos to get you caught up on Vlogbrothers and Nerdfighters

Can I be a Nerdfighter?

Are you a nerd? Do you want to fight world suck and spread awesome in the world? Then you are a Nerdfighter already.

What is DFTBA?

DFTBA is acronym initialism whatever, that stands for Don’t Forget to be Awesome. This phrase is POWERFUL. In fact, whenever I’m having a very bad day, I write DFTBA on my left wrist in black sharpie and it reminds me that this bad day is just a blip in a world that is awesome and amazing and I don’t have to let any bad or stressful thing bring me down unless I let it. I keep it there so I can glance at it and remind myself. I’ve strongly considered getting it tattooed when I sell my first book. But it’s not just me who uses this phrase to push them forward. You can find it everywhere.

What kinds of things have Nerdfighters done to reduce world suck?

Glad you asked! I also think it is important to remember that while a lot of Nerdfighters are adults like me, a HUGE number of them are actually young adults so a lot of these things that get done? Yeah, it’s young adults pooling their collective power and making the world better. If that doesn’t give you goosebumps, you’re a robot.

    • Project for Awesome 2010
    • The Water.org project for Savann Tabak (going on right now, fyi. My username on water.org is tellgreatstories. Come check out the project.) Hank’s Video on Savann Tabak Here
    • This Star Won’t Go Out – Ready to cry your eyes out? A Nerdfighter teen by the name of Esther passed away this year from cancer. She was a strong presence in Nerdfighteria and even those of us who only knew her from afar were effected by her death. Some other Nerdfighters, for their Project for Awesome project this year, created a foundation with her parents in honor of Esther called This Star Won’t Go Out Foundation to raise money for families dealing with having a child with cancer. It is really, really amazing.
    • The Harry Potter Alliance- an extension of Nerdfighters, I’vedonated to some of their projects in the past, including the Helping Haiti Heal project which ended up with enough money to fill 5 cargo planes ($123,000) to send to Haiti. The planes ended up being named Harry, Ron, Hermione, Dumbledore, and DFTBA. I get goosebumps just TYPING that.

Where can I get involved?

You can get involved just by spreading awesome and reducing world suck. Most of you are bloggers so you have this platform to reach other people just like you. Any time you spread good news and encourage people to get involved, or convince people to read, you are becoming a leader within Nerdfighteria. You are raising your own army to fight world suck. Every time you care about an issue or a cause and you donate or volunteer or spread the word, you are getting involved. It doesn’t take much and it doesn’t necessarily take money. It just takes a moment to care about something enough to do something about it. But you can join up with the ranks of Nerdfighters at these places on the internet (this list is not comprehensive) :

Can you tell me a story?

My hometown, Omaha Nebraska, isn’t the middle of nowhere. It is actually a very big city, it’s just surrounded by the middle of nowhere so we get kind of overlooked. We have our issues though, and to say that it isn’t exactly supportive of nerds or anything that is “weird” would be an understatement. Bless the hearts of midwesterners because they can be some of the kindest in the world, but they are a little behind the times and they like it that way. So I kind of thought I was probably one of the few Nerdfighters in my city until one day I was at Borders (on 72nd and Dodge if you live here) and picked up a YA book I was interested in buying. I opened the cover and found something extraordinary. I found this card:

I bought the book, brought the note home, and have kept it close to my desk (and my heart) ever since. I am so proud to tell you about Nerdfighters and Vlogbrothers and I have loved all the projects over the last few years. Can’t wait to see what we can accomplish next year!

Awesome Videos by Nerdfighters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ae8mCVje0M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN4oC6Sv5G0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0isZdFf2-nc

Are you a Nerdfighter? If you weren’t before, are you one now?

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A is for Anxiety

 Blogfest  23 Responses »
Apr 012011
 

The year I turned 21 I packed up all of my worldly possessions and my cats and hightailed it out of the Midwest for Boston Mass where I was sure all of my dreams would come true.

Some did.

When I arrived, I moved into an old New England house broken into three apartments. The third apartment was the top two floors and it was here that I lived with several other roommates, all boys.

They were great for the most part, but they were still boys of dubious maturity levels and every April Fool’s Day I lived in abject terror of what might happen to my stuff at the hands of their nefarious imaginations.

For three years I either took April 1st off work or called in sick in order to protect my bedroom from pranks.

My anxiety level was so powerful during those years that it is a miracle I wasn’t medicated. And we’re not talking about plastic bugs hidden under pillows or fake vomit in the fridge. No way. Nothing so pedestrian.

The first year one of my three roommates left town for the weekend over April 1st. Poor fool. I watched as my other two roommates glued every item in his bedroom to the ceiling exactly above where it had been left in the room. Don’t think they didn’t try to figure out a way to put the bed and dresser up there too. And then they used packing tape and duct tape to seal the door.

It took him over an hour to cut his way inside and I promptly left the house when he walked into his brand new Alice in Wonderland bedroom theme.

One year the girl in the basement apartment discovered cherry jello powder loaded into her shower head.

One year a roommate discovered plastic wrap over the toilet bowl. After, of course.

I still wonder about the 8 foot long Burger King Pokemon banner I discovered decorating the stairwell one year.

I stood vigilant for the entire 24 hours each year, bribing my roommates out of the house or distracting them with food and pretty things. But I’m not kidding when I say I lived April 1st for three years as if psychopaths were stalking my every move.

I don’t get anxiety about writing anymore. You’d think that would be my main source, but generally I live anxiety free from day-to-day. I think back to to those three years and the guerrilla warfare and the rest of my worries pale in comparison.

How could I possibly stress about deadlines or bills when I no longer have to worry about climbing our neighbor’s tree to retrieve my bras decorating its branches like party streamers or prying my alarm clock off the ceiling with a letter opener?

 Sometimes we just need a little perspective.


 

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  • Ananda bliss Blog – Gorgeous photos from Europe and a wonderful travel tale to go along with. I was particularly taken by all the food photos and that of the Topkapi Palace. I loved the photos from Istanbul. (It also immediately prompted me to play some They Might Be Giants.)
  • Everything Emerald- A photographers blog! I love photography and these are very nice.
  • Rapturous Randomicity- A writer with great ideas! Also, my eye immediately found on her blog roll that she reads Nathan Bransford. For the win!

Storytelling: Thoughts from Places

 Storytelling, Videos  9 Responses »
Mar 172011
 

If you’re only recently joining Tell Great Stories, you should know that I’m a HUGE John Green fan. Huge. I’ve only met him once in person, but he is really that cool in real life (and also kind of shy and nervous.) John Green, and by extension the entire Nerdfighter community, is one of the most powerful on the internet and we are all better for it. If you’ve not had the pleasure of becoming a Nerdfighter, now is a very good time to Google it. They are a force of nature to be reckoned with and is the birthplace for the acronym DFTBA which I regularly Sharpie onto my left wrist when I’m having particularly bad/stressed out days.

DFTBA

Don’t Forget To Be Awesome

John Green and his brother Hank Green run a YouTube channel called VlogBrothers that I have faithfully followed for like, three years now. John does a regular segment called Thoughts from Places which are these miniaturized stories that take you to a place you’ve never been but speak directly to something inside you and they are beautiful, thought provoking, and timely. They are only soundbite sized stories, but powerful in their own way.

Also, John is a great author. My faovirte of his books is Looking for Alaska, but he has won much love with Paper Towns and Will Grayson, Will Grayson which he cowrote with David Levithan.

And although it is not a Thoughts from Places story, Hank Green (the science side of this insanely cool duo) just posted a great video explaining what is happening to the nuclear power plant in Japan, and I thought it was important to share.

NaNoWriMo Cookies: Day 3 and John Green

 NaNoWriMo 2010, Videos, Writing  No Responses »
Nov 032010
 

Day 3.

John Green has been a great supporter of NaNoWriMo for the past couple of years. Here is last year’s great video by him about it:

2009:

I hear John is also doing some inspiration for NaNo. I’ll post more when I find out more. :-) I’m so helpful, aren’t I?

Congrats on making it to day 3 and still feeling good, right? Yay go you!

Mary Sue’s Weird Little Cousin – The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

 Theme Week, Topics in Writing  4 Responses »
Jul 132010
 

Yesterday’s post got a bit rambly, sorry about that. I didn’t mean to go all academic girl power on everyone. I just think it is interesting to dissect these things that I take for granted: I will never write a Mary Sue because everyone hates her. You don’t invite the girl everyone hates to the party.

That being said, there is one crazy stereotype girl that ALWAYS gets invited to the party. Even though she is just as ridiculous as Mary, there is something about her that every boy wants to date and every girl wants to emulate.

Let me introduce you to Mary Sue’s weird little cousin, The Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The true Manic Pixie Dream Girl is never the protagonist and there’s a very important reason for this: she is the Manic Pixie BECAUSE of how another character sees her, not despite it, and because of this she is almost universally a flat, somewhat ambiguous character. She’s quirky, shuns social norms, and is a bit of an Indigo Child. She’s girlish but crazy, eccentric and careless. She’s always the love interest of a broody, sensitive male protagonist who secretly longs to see the world just like she does. Nathan Rabin originally coined the Manic Pixie as a “bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Perfect.

Hurricane Pixie also knows how to break into cemeteries, is friends with all the bouncers, and has made out with the band. She’s a tree climber, a doodle artist, an impatient Here-and-Now, breaking-and-entering crime committing wild thing that refuses to believe in gravity if she doesn’t feel like believing in it.

Even though the term originated from a film critic, she’s all over the YA literary-verse, most notably in pretty much all of John Green’s books. Unlike Mary, the Manic Pixie is EVERYWHERE.

She’s a mostly flat character because she’s eccentric and beautiful and sees the world with a unique heart, and yet we never know (or care) WHY she became this way, or how she feels about never fitting in or how she feels about being lusted after by depressed, soul-gazing boys who write poetry and songs about her and inevitably stalk her outside her bedroom window at some point in the book. It’s also probable that she’s really nothing like the Pixie we are led to believe she is because we always see her through the brooding boy’s eyes who is currently idolizing her to death. She never feels real because she’s missing half her personality.

The irony is that in real life, a girl like this would love a boy like that powerfully but briefly before burning out and breaking his heart into a million billion little unfixable pieces that will bring baggage and bitterness to every relationship he ever enters in again for the rest of his natural life.

But I digress.

In literature, the Pixie blows into the protagonist’s life and sweeps him up into a series of adventures where he is irrevocably changed as a person for the climactic better. And if he should win her affections, it will always be brief and steamy before she blows out of town again because her purpose in life is to change him, never stay with him.

The fact that the Pixie is talented and clever, beautiful and doesn’t care what other people think of her SHOULD make her a Strong Female Character, but because she’s missing half of her personality we never quite buy into her so when she inevitably blows out of the story it’s really just as well.

While we girls (who either hate or want to be the Pixie) recognize her as unbelievable, we’re struck with this weird idea that she is the sensitive boy’s idealized version of us. But she’s not complete! What about all her flaws and bad music tastes and family baggage? Maybe she doesn’t like being stalked, not that anyone has ever bothered to ask her.

So we have these two extremes, one girl is well rounded but too good at everything and everyone hates that, the other is girlish and unique but ultimately empty of personality and is the idealized version of the perfect artistic girl and boys love her and girls want to be her. Where’s the middle ground? How can a real girl be strong and clever and wise and tough and beautiful and unique and eccentric ever be believed?

A little bit of everything

 Book News  No Responses »
Jun 302010
 

Can you believe that this weekend is the 4th of July? Summer is half over and I’m not even sure what I’ve done so far. Nothing? I don’t know. I spend most of my time at my grown up job or writing or reading and everything else is on the back burner. I’m more aware of summer this year though now that The Professor (AKA The Husband) is a full time high school teacher and he has most of the summer off to sit around and do nothing chores.

I had originally planned to make myself a summer reading list so I could get through some books I’ve wanted to read but have been putting off for whatever reason. Clearly that went well considering it is now only a few days away from July and said list has not even been started (although I’m a girl of responsibility- I’ve read many books without the help of a list. Hmph). But hey, now is as good as any time right? And officially summer has only been around for like a week.

So beginning with July 1st, I’ll start pouring through the following books, some of which aren’t released until August or September so they will have to wait until those dates before I finally get to them.

Keep an eye on the right sidebar for an update of the list as I go through it. ->

1. Edith Wharton – “Ethan Frome”

2. Jane Austen – “Sense and Sensibility”

3. Cassandra Clare – “Clockwork Angel”

4. Suzanne Collins – “Mockingjay”

5. Jim Butcher – “Dead Beat”

6. Elizabeth Scott – “Love you, Hate you, Miss you”

7. Charlotte Bronte – “Jane Eyre”

8.  Jandy Nelson – “The Sky is Everywhere”

9. S.A. Bodeen – “The Gardener”

10. Holly Black – “White Cat”

11. Saundra Mitchell – “Shadowed Summer”

12. Frank Beddor  – “Seeing Red”

13. Cory Doctorow – “Little Brother” (Since I’m going to be meeting him this fall at a convention YAY!)

14. John Green and David Levithan – “Will Grayson, Will Grayson”

15. The Watchmen

So what’s on your summer reading list? Got any suggestions for books I may have missed that should definitely get added to my list?

ARGH, there I go with my Seussical rhyming writing. This drove my husband CRAZY when he was editing my first draft.

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